Bryan's Blog

Thanksgiving Day, 2018 St. Paul’s, Kansas City Joel 2:21-27 Matthew 6:25-33 Thanksgiving has come around once again; a holiday for gathering with distant loved ones and rediscovering all the reasons for not seeing them more often.   We gorge ourselves on turkeys and all the products of a bountiful harvest, and then settle in for the real reason for the celebration, football. Football on Thanksgiving Day has been around almost as long as the sport itself.   The first intercollegiate championship game took place on Thanksgiving Day 1876, and by the 1890s more than 5,000 club, college, and high school football games were taking place on Thanksgiving.   Major games, such Yale vs. Princeton, could draw crowds of 40,000.   The NFL took up the tradition in 1934, when the Detroit Lions took on the Chicago Bears.   They are recreating that game today, but I personally recommend Washington at Dallas, followed by Atlanta at New Orleans this evening. Curiously, today’

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church 17-18 November 2018 Mark 13:1-8 Have you ever seen the “Planet of the Apes?” I’m not talking about any of the recent reboots, with Andy Serkis jumping around in a suit that would let CGI magic convert him into a super smart chimpanzee. I’m talking about the original, with Charlton Heston playing an astronaut that crashes on a world where apes are the predominate species, and humans are mute beasts which are hunted as vermin. I first saw it in the summer of 1968, when I was in the last stages of flight school in Savannah, Georgia, before going to Vietnam, after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Yes, I’m that old. At the end of the movie, Charlton and his mute girlfriend rode up on the remnants of the Statue of Liberty. Charlton realizes that he is actually on Earth, an Earth wherein everything he has known has been reduced to rubble by the actions of the previous predominant species.   And he goes ape.   Pardo