J.R.R Tolkien begins the Hobbit by telling us that Bilbo was a hobbit who lived in a hole in the ground, though not a muddy or dirty hole but a very homely and welcoming one for “It was a hobbit hole and that means comfort.” I’ve spent the weekend in airports across the country, in the ICU, in a beach condo in Destin Florida, and will return home shortly to Honolulu. That is to say, I’ve seen a lot of things that fly under the banner of “comfort” all while praying the daily office and reading The Lord of the Rings (which I read every four years during he election cycle). All of this has given ..read more

On Thursday night my family dropped me off at the airport on our way home the west-side priory group. I flew through the night to Seattle, WA for the wedding of Todd (a good friend of several of us AllSaintsees) and Dhayoung. Arriving early in the morning I grabbed a coffee at a little-known mom-and-pop-shop Seattle coffeehouse called “Starbucks” and began working on my essay contribution to the current Theopolis Conversation on church-planting, answering emails, and drafting sermon notes for this past Sunday. After an hour Fr. Joe McCulley picked me up ..read more

I will travel to Maui in the morning to preach and celebrate Holy Communion at Kingsfield Anglican Church —a sister church of ours on Maui. The church-planter there, Fr. Jason, will be going on vacation at the end of this week and so Fr. Chris and I are both taking a Sunday for the next two weeks to cover for him. After the service I will be catching the 1:40 PM flight back to Oahu where I will preach and celebrate at All Saints ..read more

In film or television we often caricature “wisdom” by associating it with mystics, wizards; with wisened old crones who trace pentagrams with their fingers pointed to the stars, or scholars hovering over their libraries while beakers of glowing liquid boil in the background. And while I love most of the stories that contain these figures, these depictions do not quite capture the biblical idea. For “wisdom” or “a discerning heart” means more than mere fact-gathering, or esoteric knowledge —though it may appear like that at some moments ..read more

Sunday 7/14/24 I depart Olivet Baptist Church during the chanting of the Creed (what a way to go out! I’m putting that in my notes for a good death: I’d like the Creed to be chanted over me as I lay dying) and head to the airport ..read more

p/c ANIRUDH via unsplash There is, first, a kind of naivete —a not knowing innocence. Looking back on moments of naivete we often lend to them a happiness they did not actually possess, charged with nostalgia and sentimentality: “oh those were the good ole days when things were good” we say. And when we say this we imply a moment when things stopped being happy. The “when things were good” is followed by a “before [insert event] happened.” We suffer and we see things in a new way. Our eyes are opened. I find increasingly that for us moderns this opening of eyes is attended to with a kind of d ..read more

Thursday [long, sorry] Thursday morning started with a bilingual eucharist led by the Rt. Rev. Tito Zavala, an Anglican bishop in Chile (and, as a fun fact, his son spent a season at CtF a few years back). It was English/Spanish. I could not stop thinking and praying for our own Kassandra Dempsey’s story and my wife’s history in the Dominican.  I also prayed, silently in the back, for the day in which an ACNA Provincial Assembly includes ‘Olelo Hawai’i led by a bishop who is a native son of the islands. When that happens, friends, you can close my eyes as I sing the Nunc Dimittis one fina ..read more

Dcn. Chris encouraged me to send two “missives” out to the parish during my travel this week. But first, we must inquire, “What is this ‘missive’ of which Dcn. Chris speaks?” Good question. It’s a fancy term for an official report or communication. Want a living example of a missive? Good news, I just wrote one –to you! Keep reading… Sunday On Sunday night I left church and came home and packed my bags and caught the red-eye out of Honolulu to Los Angeles, and from there to Dallas and, finally, to Pittsburgh. During that travel I prayed, read the bible, and finished reading both a collection o ..read more

Wooden carving of Bishop holding Gospel Book, Public Domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons There’s gonna be a new archbishop of the ACNA? How does that happen? Can they re-elect the current one? Who elects? Who’s eligible? Is this like the selection of the pope? All good questions. This is a quick orientation —far more like a sketch made on a napkin in crayon than a detailed account in clean typeset. I. A general framework When Jesus ascended into heaven, he set eleven apostles as “overseers” of his church (see Acts 1:1-14). This was not merely a general managerial move, it was significant. C ..read more

p/c Tim Wildsmith via unsplash This summer we’re preaching through the Psalter. At the outset of the series, I sent our preaching team a brief set of notes laying-out some general rules for how to preach the Psalms. The problem is this, ours is not a widely poetically literate culture. Poetry has become, in the past century, so abstract and so experimental that it has left us with very little in the way of ability to follow things like rhythm, meter, poetic structure, etc. The irony is that these are not at all hard or complex things to follow —they are actually very simply and, as Dana Gioia ..read more