Bryan's Blog

The Last Sunday of Epiphany 2-3 March 2019 Exodus 34:29-35 Psalm 99 2 Corinthians 3:12—4:2 Luke 9:28-36 Welcome to the last Sunday of Epiphany.   Yes, as incredible as it may seem, as cold as it is today, Lent is already upon us. And if Lent is upon us, can Easter be far behind?   And with Easter, the promise of spring.   Believe me, those who have heard me whine about the weather and lack of sunlight for the past several months are yearning for the advent of spring with every fiber of their being. But before we get too far in our anticipation of spring and Easter, I need to pull us back into Epiphany one last time, because we have a long, dry forty days of Lent between us today and the joy of Easter.   To set the stage for Ash Wednesday, at the end of the service today we will symbolically bury the word alleluia, which we don't say during Lent, until Easter, when you will hear the alleluias again.   Our readings today also set the ...

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 evenin...

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. ...

30 September 2018 St. Paul’s, Kansas City Esther 7:1–6, 9–10; 9:20–22 Psalm 124 James 5:13-23 Mark 9:38-50 The book of Esther recounts how the Jewish exiles in Babylon were saved from extermination by the happy coincidence that one of them was married to King Ahasuerus. The remembrance of this deliverance makes up the Jewish festival of Purim , which is usually celebrated in February or March due to the Jewish Lunar calendar, so, accordingly, the Revised Common Lectionary puts it in the Fall. Tradition holds that during the reading of Esther in the Synagogue, every time the name of the bad guy, Haman, is mentioned the congregation makes noise, traditionally with a device like this, called a gragger. As we all know kids love the opportunity to make noise during church, so Purim is especially boisterous in Synagogues. However, for today’s reflections I was drawn to our Gospel reading. The disciples approach Jesus and tell him that someone was casting out...

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church April 21-22, 2018 Acts 4:5-12 1 John 3:16-24 John 10:11-18 Psalm 23 In 1999, fourteen members of my extended family went to the United Kingdom for two weeks to visit further extended family and take the grand tour of southern England. One of the highlights of the trip was an excursion from London to Bath in a huge motor bus more often used for transporting fans to soccer games around Europe, but this time chartered for our little group.    Part of the trip was along roads that dated to the Roman occupation of Britain, which tend to run along the ridge lines, with picturesque dales dropping off on either side.   In one of those valleys, I spotted an idyllic manor house, sitting beside a stream, with pastures leading up the slope of the hill to our road, separated from the next pasture by a hedge-row leading down to the stream.   I grabbed my trusty camera and prepared to take the perfect picture of rural Englan...

Christ the King Sunday 20 November 2016 St. Paul’s, Kansas City Jeremiah 23:1-6 Canticle 16 Colossians 1:11-20 Luke 23:33-43 Today is Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday of the seemingly never-ending season of Pentecost, and the Sunday before we switch from “Ordinary Time” green, with frequent use of Pentecostal red to commemorate martyrs to our nation’s gun culture, to a sedate Advent blue, with hopefully no reasons to switch to red. The lessons for today present three very different visions of Christ the King. Three different crowns, if you will. But that’s not the way we humans work. We like to allow Christ to be King over some parts of our lives, but not others. My suggestion to you is that we cannot pick and choose which vision we will follow; we must follow all three. In Paul's Letter to the Colossians, his picture of Christ’s kingship is a spiritual one. He is “the image of the invisible God,” Paul writes, “the firstborn of all creation.” H...