Merciful God, who sent your messengers the prophets to preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation. In Hebrew דֶּרֶךְ, the “way” or “the path” is very, very common in scripture. There is the sense that to follow God is to walk a particular path, a particular way—one that involves repentance. I received an email from Advent Word this past Wednesday with musings around the word “path”. The message read: “In this pilgrim life, we are called to an ongoing journey, with God and toward God. And yet there is this amazing sense that, the more we travel the path away from what we know, the more familiar the landscape will become. My journey does not actually lead me away from myself, but toward it. You are called by Jesus to become more and more authentically who God created you to be.” 
This quote is from Jim Woodrum, a…

First Sunday of Advent. It marks the church’s new year; but rather than what sort of promises of self-improvement we are going to make to ourselves, as some of us do with New Year’s Day of the secular calendar (ironically the Gregorian calendar), the church’s new year instead marks a humble turn in community to what classically gets termed “waiting.” “Waiting,” it sounds sweet, almost cute, like children in an animated cartoon special waiting for Santa Claus. It is true that Advent means “waiting.” This waiting is soooo not that waiting. You see the thing with Advent is the FOLLOWING, and the HOPE – hope not in presents, but in God. Advent waiting looks like following, and it looks like hope. We all know that we are waiting for the coming of Christ, for God with us, Emmanuel. “O come, o come Emmanuel.” Then we get to the readings for…

Church of the Holy Spirit, Vashon November 21, 2021 The Rev. Jeffrey Gill Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14 Psalm 93 Revelation 1:4b-8 John 18:33-37 Happy Feast of Christ the King! On this final Sunday of the church’s liturgical year we celebrate the consummation of all things and the ultimate goal of human history and experience, which is to live in the world we pray for each time we pray, “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Now, I’ll be the first to admit that it can be a bit of a stretch from our modern perspective to see through the patriarchal and monarchial and somewhat triumphal imagery of Christ the King to imagine what kind of a world it is that this day points us toward. But context is everything – both the ancient context in which the image of Christ the King first comes…

To begin with I want to spend a little time with the Collect. The collect for this Sunday is one of my favorite collects. If you want to know where to find the Collects (Sunday Collects and others), they are located between 159 and 210 in the prayer book for the Traditional Collects and between 211 and 261 for the Contemporary collects. The line that gets me is “Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.” There is something about digestion. It’s so physical, and not only is it physical/ bodily, but let’s pause and think about what it actually means to digest something. To digest is to break something down into small pieces, take it into the body, and then use that as building blocks for health. So, let’s digest some scripture…break it down, and take it in to build up our health. A…

This past Monday was All Saints’ Day and as you know, we transferred the celebration to today. As you probably know All Saint’s Day is the principal feast day that the church sets aside to remember the saints who have died before.  On Monday we had Scott Carpenter’s funeral. Often a family has preferences for scripture passages for a funeral, but this time, even though the son is an Episcopal priest, they did not, other than adding a passage from Ecclesiastes. I can say that it is interesting that the scripture lessons for All Saints’ Day are also choices in the Episcopal Burial Rite for the Dead, or in the case for the Gospel, it is a passage very nearby. Suffice it to say that I have been stewing on these passages for a while now. The overlapping of the readings is not accidental. The reading from Isaiah and the…

There are moments that I despair of humanity. As an example of something that warrants my despair, the other day someone was railing on-line about how there were homeless people pitching tents in the Vashon cemetery, and that this was just an awful occurrence. I was so verklempt and somewhat akin to livid that I was stunned into silence, which doesn’t happen often. I mean, I understand all about respecting graves and some people do get rather particular about how gravesites are kept. However, maybe, some gravesites are never visited except by this group of homeless people. It is unlikely that the homeless people are actually disturbing anyone at the cemetery. If the entire island is full of NIMBY (not in my backyard) people, then a homeless encampment at the cemetery seems the least problematic. And while we know that as Christians that there is a loving, caring way to…