Innerdriving

Pentecost 23, Proper 25B Mark 10:46 – 52 October 28, 2018 St. Matthias There is a man who comes to The Abbey.  He is different from me.  We are about the same height, weight, and age.  We both like coffee.  Sometimes I see him walking near our house.  He is homeless.  Sometimes he talks to himself.  He always smiles and says hello when he sees me at The Abbey.  I don’t know his name.            I go to The Abbey a couple of days a week.  I am the volunteer bookkeeper and I sit and count the week’s receipts and make bank deposits.  When I walk in, the regulars all call me “The Money Man.”  It is a place where you meet a lot of different people.  Some are old, some are young.  They are black, white, Hispanic, and at least one person I met there is from Romania.  I have come to know Episcopalians, Baptists, Methodists, and a number of people from the ...

928 Amendments  and Counting! November 6 is quickly approaching and I've been thinking about how I am going to vote.  Plus, I'm voting absentee since I will be in Illinois on Election Day.  I've pretty much made up my mind on who I'm voting for when it comes to the major races.  I'm still deciding on the local elections.   There are sample ballots for every Alabama county on the Alabama Secretary of State website at this link:   SAMPLE BALLOTS .  We live in Jefferson County, so I clicked on the link and was amazed to find that are 350 pages of sample ballots just for our county!!!  At 2 pages per ballot - you do the math! And YES there are proposed amendments to our famous state constitution on the ballot.  I searched Google for all of 30 seconds and it looks to me like there are currently 928 Amendments to our state constitution which is 44 times longer than the U.S. Constitution.  Some of those Amendme...

Pentecost 21, Proper 24B Mark 10:35-45 October 21, 2018 St. Matthias Where do you like to sit?  In Church, I’m going to the left side, midway toward the front, on the side aisle.  At the movies, I head for the center seat in the center row, but I want the front row when we go to see plays.   Give me the window seat on the airplane, the center of the restaurant facing the door, and in the very back at Diocesan Convention.  Our niece and nephew always want to sit next to their Aunt Phyllis at the dinner table and our granddaughter, Lydia, wants Phyllis next to her no matter where she sits.  I’ve never thought about where I’d want to sit in Heaven.  I wonder if there is a back row – or since its Heaven is every seat on the back row.  In our Gospel lesson this morning, James and John not only want to be up front, they come to Jesus asking if they can sit at his right and left hand as disciples in the new Kingdom.  They’d hear...

Pentecost 19, Proper 21B James 5:13-20 St. Matthias September 30, 2018 Correction.  There is an error in the audio recording.  I make reference to a shorter version of the Lord's Prayer found in the Gospel of Mark.  I meant to say the Gospel of Luke.  It is correct in the text below, I just messed it up while preaching.  My apologies to St. Mark, St. Luke, and to you!           The next time you are in Russia – go South and in between the Black and Caspian Seas – you will find the country of GEORGIA.  In Central Georgia, there is a place called the Valley of the Monks and the Katskhi Pillar – a limestone column rising over 130 feet in the air.  And on top of the Katskhi Pillar lives a monk – Father Maxim.  He lives there alone because there is only enough room for 1 person.  Father Maxim in a Stylite monk – a rather unusual tradition of hermits.  The first, Saint Simeon, lived...