Listen to it all or there is more there if you so desire.

Today's pick: Rogier van der Weyden: John the Baptist https://t.co/T2J2vnlzAk pic.twitter.com/9lPjzGIAUd

— Art and the Bible (@artbible) December 6, 2021

Listen to it all and there is more there.

'Ezra in prayer', Book of Ezra 9:6. Engraving by Gustave Doré pic.twitter.com/xjovJG5igr

— Y💖Philippians2:10-11📖Romans12:2✨#Anti-idolatry🔥 (@doorzienigheid) December 30, 2020

Listen to it all and there is more there.

Join us this Sunday, November 14, 2021, as we, in The Anglican Diocese of South Carolina, pray for the work and ministry of Holy Cross, Sullivan's Island & Daniel Island and their clergy. View the full prayer calendar here: https://t.co/ivAZ8qcpfR #CycleOfPrayer #ADOSC pic.twitter.com/1fJhTgL3lC

— Anglican Diocese of SC (@anglican_sc) November 12, 2021

Listen to it all there or there are other options here.

A Church attuned to the Spirit of surprise:

In human terms, Philip took the wrong road – and there he was met by the Spirit of God, who showed him why he was in the middle of the desert. And he found himself speaking to someone who was the wrong person, in human eyes. It was the wrong recipient of God’s message; Luke always points us to the Gospel for the excluded. The Ethiopian was a foreigner so could not enter the temple, a eunuch so wrongly considered by the people of his time to be outside God’s purpose. He was doubly outside

Luke’s stories in Gospel and Acts are of refugees, the poor, those of no honour. Seen in hospitals, schools, prisons, rubbish dumps and food centres. Seen here in the past and now.

Yet in God’s eyes there was nothing wrong. This was the right time, right road, right scripture, right person, right opportunity for baptism.

The Bible tells us to be where the Spirit sends us, not by human wisdom, and the Gospel reading shows us the foundation of what Philip was doing.

Read it all.

Great joy to celebrate the new Anglican Province of Alexandria at All Saints’ Cathedral in Cairo this evening. May it draw on the history of the saints and their inspiration; and may it proclaim the Gospel afresh in this generation! pic.twitter.com/vV9b6eQQOH

— Archbishop of Canterbury (@JustinWelby) October 8, 2021

Sacrifice of Isaac – Caravaggio, c. 1603. (Uffizi Gallery, Florence). #art pic.twitter.com/r46nfBEQLD

— EUROPEAN ART 💭 (@EuropeanArtHIST) November 8, 2020

On [a] Monday [in September 2003], the last of the 343 firefighters who died on September 11th was buried. Because no remains of Michael Ragusa, age 29, of Engine Company 279, were found and identified, his family placed in his coffin a very small vial of his blood, donated years ago to a bone-marrow clinic. At the funeral service Michael’s mother Dee read an excerpt from her son’s diary on the occasion of the death of a colleague. “It is always sad and tragic when a fellow firefighter dies,” Michael Ragusa wrote, “especially when he is young and had everything to live for.” Indeed. And what a sobering reminder of how many died and the awful circumstances in which they perished that it took until this week to bury the last one.

So here is to the clergy, the ministers, rabbis, imams and others, who have done all these burials and sought to help all these grieving families. And here is to the families who lost loved ones and had to cope with burials in which sometimes they didn’t even have remains of the one who died. And here, too, is to the remarkable ministry of the Emerald Society Pipes and Drums, who played every single service for all 343 firefighters who lost their lives. The Society chose not to end any service at which they played with an up-tempo march until the last firefighter was buried.

On Monday, in Bergen Beach, Brooklyn, the Society therefore played “Garry Owen” and “Atholl Highlander,” for the first time since 9/11 as the last firefighter killed on that day was laid in the earth. On the two year anniversary here is to New York, wounded and more sober, but ever hopeful and still marching.

–First published on this blog September 11, 2003

We will never forget. 🕊 #neverforget #911 pic.twitter.com/E1xu8T4JFr

— NAPF (@the_napf) September 10, 2021

Almighty God and Father who wills that people may flourish and have abundance of life, be with us especially on this day when we remember such destruction, darkness, devastation, death and terror; help us to honor the memory of those whose lives were utterly cut short, and to believe that you can make all things new, even the most horrible things. Redeem and heal, O Holy Spirit, grant us perspective, humility, light, trust and grace, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

A powerful tribute on this evening before 9/11 in New York City. #Remember911 pic.twitter.com/ZGagYKCqbm

— Chris Ramirez (@KOBChrisRamirez) September 10, 2021

Give us some time…..

Glasgow : Looks like a missile hitting with an explosion.
Gotta love the Scottish sunrise
🤣😎👍#Apocalypse #glasgow #Scotland #warsbegun #lookslike #wft #war #uk #noway #NFTcomunity #nftcollector pic.twitter.com/Q3rIKBdwLm

— Sacred Joyometry (@SacredJoyometry) September 7, 2021

I have been at this blog since the first part of 2003, and it is time to step back. As I am constantly insisting to my friends, none of us is indispensable, and this is a way of living that out by yours truly.Some longtime blog readers may remember how I have mentioned that I am the type of person who goes to bed every night just a little sad–only a little–about how much I don’t know (and still wish to find out). So moving away from the information addiction for me will not necessarily be easy–but it is important.

Posts will be catch as catch can until I let you know–KSH.

Absolutely Gorgeous Golden Sunset Adorns Beautiful Lake Champlain in Burlington Vermont… 🌅 ⛵️ 🌲😍 pic.twitter.com/mX4O9V9UKi

— Gary (@DJGARYNH) July 26, 2021

Rutledge repeats a cycle of sober assessment and hope — a hope that is expressly found in Christ. Readers of The Crucifixion will observe that her magnum opus really was the result of a lifelong, cruciform ministry. She reiterates Paul’s exhortation that all are unrighteous and that we must be saved by a power outside of ourselves.

[Jesus] is willing to die even for such poor specimens as you and me, covering our unrighteousness with his righteousness, offering his life to save us from death, victorious over the old Adam, the Judge judged in our place. He has compensated for our too-short list of good deeds by his one great deed.

The sermons are varied and based upon an array of scripture readings, yet more often than not Rutledge sets our gaze on the crucified and resurrected Christ. As I read through Means of Grace, I realized why I am drawn to the writings of Fleming Rutledge: she can’t stop talking about the core event that changed the history of the cosmos. My soul needs to hear the story of Christ’s death, resurrection, and future coming over and over again. I’m not sure that another self-help sermon will change my life. I am not convinced that a preacher will provide five steps to resolve my anxiety, improve my self-esteem, etc. But the problems I face, and perhaps the problems you face, seem far less daunting when nestled within God’s bigger story.

Read it all.

"…I realized why I am drawn to the writings of Fleming Rutledge: she can’t stop talking about the core event that changed the history of the cosmos. My soul needs to hear the story of Christ’s death, resurrection, and future coming over and over again."https://t.co/L1koGyNAes

— Rosdahl (@rosevalley52) July 14, 2021

Audio only:

I appreciate your prayers. The parish website is there.

To God the Father beyond us, creator of the cosmos and the vast reaches of interstellar space as well as this lovely earth, our home,

To God the Son alongside us, who shed his blood for the redemption of the world and all mankind,

and to God the Holy Spirit within us, who graciously gives us daily the power to live the good life which has been prepared beforehand for us to walk in,

be all glory, majesty, honor and praise, Holy Trinity one God, this day and forevermore, Amen.

Holy Trinity fresco by Luca Rossetti. pic.twitter.com/3oKrbL35Le

— Digby Dyke (@DigbyDyke) May 22, 2016

The sermon starts about 30 minutes in.

How shall we understand freedom? Perhaps because I am in a state, South Carolina, where candidates….[not long ago] were running around saying “you are free so vote for me!” this has been much in mind.

There is a lot of sloppy thinking about freedom these days. For too many it only means the ability to choose a candidate or a product. Or it is understood to be the removal of external constraints, as in I need the government out of my—then fill in the blank: my business, my body, and on and on.

Christian thinking about freedom is a totally different animal.

For one thing, in the Scriptures, freedom has an interesting relationship to time. Freedom is something which was present in creation, and which will be fully present again at the end of history when God brings it to its conclusion. But what about the present? The people Jesus spends time with—say, for example, the woman at the well (John 4), or Zaccheus (Luke 19) are not free but constrained, imprisoned, and encased. When Jesus rescues them, freedom begins, but even then it is lived out in the tension between the already of new life in Christ and the not yet of the fullness of the eschaton.

So apart from Christ people who think they are free need to hear the bad news that their perceived freedom is an illusion. One would like to hear more from preachers these days on this score, since they are addressing parishioners who are workaholics or poweraholics or sexaholics and/or addicts to heaven knows what else. Why is it that a group like AA seems to know more about real freedom than so many churches? Because they begin with the premise which says their members are enslaved—that is the first of the twelve steps.

And there is so much more to freedom then even this. In the Bible, real freedom moves in not one or two but three directions.

Freedom from is one piece of the puzzle—freedom from sin, from the demands of the law, from the tyranny of the urgent, from whatever constricts us from being the people God intended us to be.

Equally important, however, is freedom for, freedom for Christ, for service, for God’s justice, for ministry. Paul wonderfully describes himself as a bondservant of Christ Jesus, and the Prayer Book has it right when it says God’s service is “perfect freedom.”

Freedom with should not be missed, however. For Paul in Galatians Christian freedom is not the Christian by herself changed by the gospel. This has too much in common with the individual shopper in Walmart deciding exactly what kind of popcorn or yogurt she wants. No, real freedom is to be liberated to live for Christ with the new pilgrim people of God who reflect back a little of heaven’s light on earth. A real church is one where people enjoy koinonia, fellowship, the richness of God’s life shared into them which they then share out in Christ’s name by the power of the Holy Spirit to the world.

Paul says it wonderfully in Galatians: “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” Do not settle for anything less than this real freedom, freedom from bondage, freedom with our fellow pilgrims, and freedom for the God who made the heavens and the earth.

He is Risen! Michelangelo's magisterial vision of the Resurrected Christ bursting from the tomb into the dazzling light, c.1532. Happy Easter! https://t.co/94kCw2wJgy pic.twitter.com/wK8qPIqCXP

— Rosie Razzall (@RosieRrazz) April 21, 2019

–The Rev. Canon Dr. Kendall Harmon is the convenor of this blog

The sermon starts about 30:10 in.

Listen carefully for an illustration from Donald Grey Barnhouse (1895-1960), pastor of the Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia from 1927 to 1960.