Easter Peace be With You
Readings for Easter II, Year C Sermon Audio Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen. Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” There are many sermons that could be preached from today’s readings. St. John’s account of Jesus' appearance to the disciples and his interactions with Thomas gives us pause to reflect on the many times and ways our faith in Christ has fallen short. Read more...
Stone: Downfall of the Wicked (Luke 20:9-19)
Luke 20:9-19 — Sermon Audio Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen. Days after cleansing the temple, the “chief priests and the scribes with the elders” approach Jesus to question him. In the last several days, especially, Jesus has made a direct and very public critique of how the temple is run. Read more...
God's Time: Lewis Bell's Funeral
Unexpected death is difficult to process. This time last week, Lewis was responding to a picture of my daughter’s birthday with an animated gif of Cinderella. Now, I stand here. I know I am not alone in this room. We share in the suddenness of it all. In the grand scheme of the world nothing has changed. And yet, in our little corner of things much has changed. For Charlotte, Vickie, Bettie and those closest to Lewis, everything has changed. Read more...
The Magic Variable 'count'
So, I happened to be looking back through some old files and I found an early programming assignment from my first computer science course back in college. In the middle of the code I found this wonderful line: while (cownt<years) { cout<<cownt+1; //"cownt" = "count", but when I entered it spelt correctly it gave me errors.// As it turns out early on in the code I declared int cownt=0;. I either couldn’t find this typo in debugging my mere 61 lines of code or — what I think was actually going on — I thought count was a reserved magical variable that made loops work — not something I had to declare. Read more...
XML::Compile with an Extension Namespace
Starting this May, mortgage folk are going to be required to send Freddie and Fannie data including additional data points in ULDD phase 3 extension. At face value, adding these additional data points shouldn’t be a big deal at all. However, the legacy code I’m maintaining used XML::Compile to generate code. For various and sondry reasons — which I will not go into here — XML::Compile in the code I’m maintaining was in a place where it was extremely difficult to add XML elements that weren’t included in the original base Mismo 3. Read more...
Jesus Revealing Himself in our Midst
Sermon Audio “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O Lord, our rock and our redeemer.” The season of Epiphany has been all about God revealing himself to his people. In Advent we await the coming King. At Christmastide we stand awestruck as God enters our filth. In Epiphany we see the perfect revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Read more...
Cron in Docker with Debian Slim
Recently, I needed to get cron working inside a Docker container running Debian Slim. It’s not difficult once you figure it out, but it did take a bit of research and learning to get everything to work. First off, Debian Slim is real slim. There’s no cron nor is there a syslog when you want to debug things. Add apt-get install cron and rsyslog in your Dockerfile before you start anything else. Read more...
Automated Weekly Sermon Podcast
Each Sunday at Church of the Epiphany we record our sermon using someone’s mobile phone. We started doing this back in September and, for the last three months, editing and uploading these sermons to our website has been a fairly manual process. Starting this month, however, with a combination of JustCast, Dropbox, Hazel, Squarespace, and Auphonic I’ve been able to mosty automate the process. 1. Download & Rename Each week shortly after worship, Fr. Read more...
Seeking a Charitable Orthodoxy
Knowing and owning one’s theological lens is a good thing in pastoral ministry. Theological lenses, however, become problematic in chaplaincy and other ecumenical contexts. In my time as a chaplain at a nursing home and now in a jail, I have personally struggled with how to minister to those with differing theologies from mine while maintaining and affirming my own Anglican commitments. How can I “conform to the Doctrine, Discipline and Worship of Christ as this Church has received them” as the ordinal directs while also ministering within a non-Anglican context? Read more...
Word to Markdown Conversion with Footnotes
Many of the essays on this site start their life in Microsoft Word or Scrivener. Early on, I would have to convert essays to Markdown for posting manually. This generally worked okay, but I lost my footnotes. I tried Word to Markdown for a brief while, but it didn’t work entirely as I’d like it to. Enter Pandoc. I’ve been using Pandoc to convert all of my Word documents — including footnotes — for the last two years. Read more...
Practical Guidance for Anglicans in Ecumenical Eucharistic Worship
This is part four of a four part project. The final project is here. The genesis of this project starts with my confusion and unease communing at a Disciples of Christ led ecumenical Eucharist service inside a jail each week. Starting with the Chicago statement of Protestant Episcopal Church in 1886 and culminating with the great ecumenical work Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry coming out of Lima in 1984, much academic and theological work has been done within and outside the Anglican Christianity on the path towards visible unity in the Church. Read more...
Plene Esse, the Holy Spirit, & Intercommunion
This is part three of a four part project. The final project is here. “For a long time the Conference on Faith and Order shied away from and avoided directly addressing this problem [ecumenical Eucharist]. It was the type of issue so loaded with emotional dynamite, that we feared it might with the first little thrust set off a spark that would explode our entire movement into pieces.” Dr. Leonard Hodgson. Read more...
Charitable Apostolicity
This is part two of a four part project. The final project is here. As a chaplain, I find myself worshiping and serving during the week more often in contexts outside of my own tradition than I do within. Weekly I face the question of whether a non-catholic1 minister’s orders and, thus, the sacraments she or he presides over are valid — partially or otherwise. At the onset of this project, I described my main concern as finding a path towards a generous orthodoxy. Read more...
Seeking a Charitable Orthodoxy (Definition)
This is part one of a four part project. The final project is here. My journey through Vanderbilt Divinity School (VDS) has been a difficult one. Deep within the inner workings of progressive Christian theology and politics, I quickly learned that traditional liberal values of tolerance, free speech, free thought, and civil debate were more easily affirmed — if even affirmed — than lived. In the words and deeds of many of those around me, it was made clear that there was little space for certain theological questions or viewpoints. Read more...
Why Worship with a Book of Common Prayer?
The English Church, her descendants, and her colonial heirs worship with a common book of prayer for a few historical and theological reasons. It might come as a surprise to many North American Christians, but liturgical worship is by far the norm in contemporary Christianity and, prior to the Reformation, was the universal form of worship in the Church. Before the upheaval of the Reformation, East, West, Ethiopian, Syriac, and more all worshiped God using liturgies attributed to the saints and apostles. Read more...
