I continue to be impressed with the values and insights of Mother Teresa. Her heart was so pure and so desirous of helping the poor that she rarely took care of herself. She sought to bring peace, love, and joy to the most needy of India; by caring for them, she brought peace and love to all of us. She believed that poor people die of hunger because the world is not generous enough to take care of them. By…..
I watched the Ash Wednesday service for the Washington National Cathedral this afternoon, and I found my heart and mind, once again, reaching out for a reason as to why the world is in the grip of COVID-19. In listening to the Reverend Canon Dana Colley Corsello, I liked her analogy that every man has two pockets in his pants: one on the right is what we look for as humans…”the for my sake” or hubris and one on the…..
Ash Wednesday is the Christian holy day of prayer and fasting. It derives its name from the placing of ashes on the foreheads of church parishioners as they promise to repent of their sins and believe in the Gospel. It also signifies that we are dust and to dust we will return at the end of our days. As Christians show repentance and mourning for their sins, they acknowledge that Christ died for the forgiveness of those sins. So like…..
As a tribute to Valentine’s Day, I would like to nominate Mother Teresa for doing beautiful things for God. She did small things with great love, that in turn, became great sources of joy for everyone she encountered. She found God in the silence of nature, and in so doing, she was able to touch the souls of a darkened world. She understood that peace and war begin at home. To find peace for ourselves, we need to love one…..
How many of you are familiar with the names “Fat Man” and “Little Boy?” How about the dates of August 6, 1945 and August 9, 1945? What about the names of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? If you still are drawing a blank on these historical things, it’s the end of WWII and General Groves and J. Robert Oppenheimer coordinated their efforts to build the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico. We now know that at least 200,000 people lost…..
It’s the fifth Sunday after Epiphany, and the words of Psalm 147: 1-7 (KJV) come to mind. “Praise ye the Lord: for it is good to sing praise unto our God; for it is pleasant and praise is comely. He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds. He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names. Great is our Lord, and of great power: his understanding is infinite. The Lord lifteth up…..
In search of motivating and inspiring sermons, I went on You Tube once again and found one by the Reverend Canon Jan Naylor Cope of the Washington National Cathedral. She spoke of Christ’s first days as God’s messenger of the Word…His baptism, how the Holy Spirit entered Him, His days in the Wilderness, His recruitment of His first four disciples, how His authority as God’s Son set Him apart from all others in the synagogue, and His first healing miracle……
Integrity, courage, and faith are very powerful character traits for any politician to have; sadly, very few elected officials seem to have these traits, at the local, state, or federal levels. There is one man who has insisted that his appointees have these traits; his name is President Joseph Biden. He maintains that all of his appointees present their ideas from the standpoint of “gut to heart to brain.” If their ideas are formed in this way and they have…..
What do you see when you look at the beautiful night sky…the stars, the moon in different shapes, the vast darkness? Although the vastness of the dark sky and the different shapes of the moon pique my interest, the most beautiful things I see are the stars…so many, so far away, and yet, still shining for all of us. We paint with brushes; God paints with all of the stars of the universe. Just as He knows everyone of those…..
If you were a German citizen visiting America in September, 1939, how would you feel about returning to Germany, where Adolf Hitler had just attacked Poland and had just begun his destruction of Europe’s Jewish populations in concentration camps? Reverend Dietrich Bonhoeffer was such a person, and he was deeply troubled by being away from his native country as WWII began. After a fellow pastor asked him why he was so upset, he replied, “I must go home. If I…..