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There is some intentional thematic parity between Shrove Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, and Palm Sunday. It is not without purpose that we save last year’s palm branches, hang them, watch them dry, and then burn them on Shrove Tuesday. It is also not without purpose that it is from those smoldering remains that we get the ashes for Ash Wednesday. The three are tied together.
Read moreOur Gospel lesson from Sunday, Mark 1:21-28, is a great example of a chiasm. It is also a great example of how a chiasm, other than being a nifty piece of literary trivia, can help us understand and teach the Bible —can help us ask of a given part of scripture “what’s this mean?” and “what is the main point?”
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When Elwin Ransom finds himself alone on the strange world of ‘Malacandra’ in C.S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet, he is running from wicked men, from monstrous beasts in the water, and from elongated ogrish creatures called ‘sorns’.
Amid all the fear, the nervous running, the panting breaths, something marvelous unfolds: a renewed affection, a love lost long ago, for his own body. He begins to feel “a strange affection towards himself” so much so that he has to check “himself on the point of saying, ‘We’ll stick to one another’” (49).
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Jusepe Ribera’s Saint Bartholomew Holding a Knife
In preaching this week on the calling of St. Nathanael, I had to trim some thoughts out of my sermon. Here are what I found to be some interesting notes in the short passage of John 1:43-51 that didn’t make this Sunday’s cut.
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When the Ghost of Christmas-Yet-To-Come shows Scrooge the Cratchit mourning Cratchit household, Bob Cratchit —the Father— is absent. He is late returning from selecting a grave-plot for Tiny Tim who has passed away and lays in state until that coming Sunday when they will burry him. Bob is not late because of the errand, he is late because “he has walked a little slower than he used, these few last evenings…” (Christmas Carol, Stave 4) explains Peter, the eldest Cratchit boy.
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…On this night we gather with memorial portions of our Christmas greens (Christmas Trees, wreaths, kadomatsu, boughs of holly falalalala-lala-lala, etc.) and make of them a bonfire. We pray the evening service, share a feast, sing psalms and spiritual songs, and make merry (Eph. 5:19). It is the twelfth and last day of Christmas on which we celebrate all the gifts our True Love has given to us (Rom. 12:6-8)…
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p/c: Luigi Boccardo via Unsplash
We’ve been preaching through the ‘5 Senses’ at St. Benedict Hall with Wednesday’s eucharist homily culminating in a biblical theology of one of the senses and the way in which it leads us to Jesus. Our bodies were made for the Lord, “and the Lord for the body” (1 Cor. 6:13).
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A commentary on the 2019 Book of Common Prayer’s service for the “Reconciliation of Penitents”.
First, you enter. You have been waited upon. You are welcome in this space, have a seat.
Idly do people talk about “leaving the world at the door.” That is not true here. Bring the world with you —your cares, problems, stresses, sins, failures, collapsing dreams, the smell of where you just were, the thoughts which occupied you from your car to this little room, the screaming of children (yours or someone else’s), and the million things you need to do when you leave here —all of that bring with you. Leave none of it out.
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I recently saw the new commercial for Google Pixel 8 which highlights the device’s AI-enhanced “best-take” application feature. You can watch it here […] My first response was to laugh, modestly but not quite quietly. There is an Office episode (season 2, episode 21) in which Michael Scott does the same thing with photoshop. The result (which is the featured image above) is less than impressive.
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p/c: kieran white
A personal history.
Movement 1.
I did not grow-up with Advent as a season of waiting. Like many people in contemporary society I grew up with a strange season that came to span all the days from Thanksgiving to the Day-after-Christmas as a kind of elongated Holiday season… “elongated” is maybe too generous… “distended to the point of rupture” is probably a better description. Sometimes it started as early as the Day-after-Halloween.
