So, a parishioner of mine in Knoxville was in intensive care. His condition was precarious, and the family was understandably worried about him. I was hovering with his family outside his room. He was sleeping, however, and we did not want to disturb him. Since there was no waiting room near by, we walked down the hall and went into the Surgical Waiting Room to sit and visit and rest and wait.

So, I have been reading Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coats. It is written as a letter to the author's teenage son about the feelings, symbolism, and realities associated with being a black man in the United States.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a scientist. Now I'm sure I didn't now what that meant given that that's such a broad word, but that's what I wanted to be. I was born when President Kennedy was alive, and I was fully on board with every thing “moon landing.” So, science was cool.

So, I need to make a confession. Yesterday morning, early, around 6:15, I stopped in the Price Chopper in Hamilton while it was still Senior Hour. That is my confession. My punishment was this: Nobody noticed me. I fit right in.

If you ever have a chance to do a church tour around England, make your way to Norfolk. The motto of the village of Walsingham, in a reference to it's pre-Norman Conquest roots, is “Welcoming Visitors Since 1061,” and it is home to the Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. And it is there, in the Chapel of the Ascension, that you will find it. Typically English, and typically weird.

So, I've been rethinking my relationship with the Apostle Paul. I think it's so easy, in our day and age, to give poor Paul a bad rap. The letters of his that we read are often cumbersome with sentences that seem to be going one direction then suddenly veer off in another.

Most of you know that I love Sewanee. I was there this weekend to see the new crop of seminarians get pushed out into the world. But even I have to admit that once the ceremonies and the liturgies and the homework are done, the day-to-day life living in a seminary community on top of a mountain, far away from a city's hustle and bustle, can be fairly mundane, one day blending into the next.

So, I've said this often, and if you were at our post-Morning Prayer discussion on Zoom, you heard Fr. Brooks and I talk about it. And it's this: I always thought Thomas got a bad rap.

So, in the back of my front closet in my house in Chattanooga, are some green photo albums that my Grandma put together so long ago. They have heavy black pages, and in them are these black and white photographs held in place by little triangle tabs that you would lick to glue in place. And while one of the pictures would occasionally break free from the tabs, remarkably, most of them are still held in place. Memories that are stuck in a certain kind of order, a way of remembering things that always were that way, even though they may not really have been that way at all.

So, say what you will, even with all it's translation errors and arcane language, I still love the King James Bible.

So, I am a son of the South and a son of the Mountains. And this means many wonderful things to me. But it also means this: if EVER a weatherman announces some once-in-a-lifetime celestial event, like a full-on lunar eclipse eclipse or a dozen comets about to pass by so close we can almost touch them, on that day it will surely rain.

So, this mountain rises up from the lush Jericho Valley, a harsh, vertical desert of rough rocks, harsh edges, and slippery goat paths. It is Mount Quaratania, also known as the Mount of Temptation. After Jesus was baptized, he left the Jordan River and headed here, making his way up the mountain, for his encounter with what was ahead.

"Don't just stand there; do something!" That's what my brain says every time I get a new toy or tool or piece of equipment. I rip open the box, dump everything on whatever surface is handy, and immediately start doing things...whether they are the right things or not.

So, Moses is giving his farewell speech today. He has led this wild, complaining, endearing, loving, rough group of people for 40 years. It has, indeed, been an adventure. Escape from slavery. Miraculous interventions. Meeting God, hearing God, listening to God. Getting on the wrong side of God. Getting back in God's good graces. All while driving a car with thousands of unruly kids in the backseat.

So, generally I shy away from political themes in sermons. I tend to think they don't do much good, and in this current environment, you can be guaranteed that you'll make half your people angry, and the non-angry half will probably miss the point completely and so you've wasted your time, accomplishing nothing.

“I could just drift, he thought, and sleep and put a bight of line around my toe to wake me. But today is eighty-five days and I should fish the day well. 

Just then, watching his lines, he saw one of the projecting green sticks dip sharply.” And just like that, after 85 days, the old man in Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea has caught a fish.

So when I was in high school, a group of friends and I used to love going to watch professional wrestling. Now this was before it got really, REALLY popular. This was before Randy Savage was the Macho Man, or Dusty Rhodes was the American Dream, or Jerry Lawler was the King. This was even before Ric Flair was the Nature Boy.

So I've mentioned a few times that Brooks and I went to Israel for a two week pilgrimage back in our seminary days. Now, Brooks and I, well, most of y’all have seen us. You know we’re gonna make our way as faithfully as we can, but we’ll also sneak away or crack up in the back row. We’re not disruptive, we’re just differently attentive. But we are attentive. And, with God’s help, we try to stay open.

So, in high school, I had this friend named Kevin. Kevin was what we would call that big, silent type. Linebacker, a fairly good student, worked part-time at the local garage. He lived down the street from me in a nice split-level house with nice parents, a nice dog, and a nice cat. When he got his driver's license his dad bought him a used Alfa Romeo Spider that didn't run, but Dad was a mechanic and showed Kevin all he needed to know to get that car up and running.

So, this is a weird time of the year for me. It always has been. As a kid, I was coming up during the time when the commercialism of the holidays was really taking off. Holidays would start when “It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” came on TV, leading to Halloween.