Twelfth Night Eve

Another great thing about being Episcopal: Christmas doesn't end until January 6!

St. Alban's is hosting a Twelfth Night Epiphany Eve King Cake Potluck & Party, Sunday, January 5, 6 - 8 p.m. So if you're back in town, come on over. It'll be a great kick-off to the spring semester.

St. Alban's is at 2816 Deborah Dr. If anyone needs a ride from campus to St. Alban's, let me know.
  

A Central Point!

 

After Death A Voice, by Bette J. Kauffman

Why does the Bible, and why does Jesus, tell us to care for the poor and the outsider? It is because we all need to stand in that position for our own conversion. We each need to stand under the mercy of God, the forgiveness of God, and the grace of God—to understand the very nature of reality. When we are too smug and content, then grace and mercy have no meaning—and God has no meaning. Forgiveness is not even desired. When we have pulled ourselves up by our own bootstraps, religion is always corrupted because it doesn’t understand the mystery of how divine life is transferred, how people change, and how life flows. It has been said by others that religion is largely filled with people who are afraid of hell, and spirituality is for people who have gone through hell.

Jesus is always on the side of the crucified ones. He is not loyal to one religion, or this or that group, or the “worthy” ones—Jesus is loyal to suffering itself, wherever it is. He is just as loyal to the suffering of Iraqis or Afghanis as he is to the suffering of Americans. He is just as loyal to an oppressed gay man as he is to an oppressed married woman. We do not like that! He grabs all of our self-created boundaries away from us, and suddenly all we have is a free fall into the arms of God, who is our only and solid security. This seems to be God’s very surprising agenda, if I am to believe the Bible.

--Fr. Richard Rohr

           

       

For Nelson Mandela

July 18, 1918 to December 5, 2013

Requiscat en pace.

Bishop Jake on God's Great Story

The Inconspicuous God 

Life makes sense.  Sometimes.  But if we’re really honest, we have to admit that there are plenty of times that we’re just holding our breath and trusting that something will come of this mess, or we feel so much joy that we worry that it has to end sometime, or things are coming at us so quickly that they’re kind of a blur.

Zhang Xiaogang's "Writing"

When my parents were getting a nasty divorce, when I married Joy, when our baby girl was facing open heart surgery, when I got my mom out of the morgue, when I was consecrated fourth Bishop of Western Louisiana, life had lots of loose ends needing to be tied up.

The funny thing about life is that we live it looking for a happy ending that we will never get to read.  Life as we live it is always an unfinished story.  To keep turning the next page in that story, we have to have some reason to believe that the story really will come together.  Really will make sense.  Our lives will have meant something.

Some voices in the world tell us to believe in ourselves.  They insist that we are the author of our lives.  Jesus tells us something different.  God believes in us.  God is writing us into his story even now.   (more)