May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be always with you! I was just saying to someone yesterday that I am enjoying a "proper" winter this year! (Yes, despite needing to shovel again yesterday for the umpteenth time since November!)  This winter - it feels like more so than in previous years - I find my breath taken away by the beauty of the world around us, trees heavy with snow and sunlight sparkling on ice crystals. F

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be always with you! It was a year ago today that Bishop Mariann Budde, Episcopal Bishop of Washington, preached a prophetic sermon the day after the US inauguration. It isn't very often that a sermon makes the international news! (If you missed that sermon, or want to re-visit it, you can watch it by clicking here .) After that sermon and all of the buzz that it created, Bishop Budde

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be always with you! There is so much heaviness in the world these days.  Any time you turn on the media (TV, radio, social media), it feels like we are bombarded with stories of tragedy, big or small, on the other side of the world or right next door.  It feels impossible to escape, and I don't know about you, but if I spend too much time with the media, I find that the tragedy is al

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be always with you! It feels like a long time since I sat down to write one of these Mid-Week Messages. (So long that I forgot, yesterday afternoon, that this should be on my agenda for the day!)  I hope that all of you had a blessed celebration of Christmas and Epiphany. I don't know about you, but it has felt like a heart-heavy beginning to the new year, with "wars and rumours of w

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be always with you! One week today is Christmas Eve!  (I just said that to Elaine in the next office, and her response was "Don't remind me - I still have 11 million things to do!") 'Tis the season of hustle and bustle, for sure! I've talked about it before, but this season of Advent that we are in is a season of preparation, but the preparation is deeper than the hustle and bustle t

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be always with you! The countdown to Christmas is on - two weeks today is Christmas Eve!  If Mary and Joseph were traveling from Nazareth to Bethlehem by foot, they would probably be getting ready to set out in the next couple of days.  (My best guess is that they likely walked for 10-ish days on that journey.)  The shepherds are out in their fields, watching their flocks, unaware th

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be always with you! It is a beautiful, snowy, winter wonderland as I look out my window this morning! I had a doctor's appointment earlier today, and they were playing Christmas music in their office and one of the songs I heard was "It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas..." Indeed! But here in the church, we are still in the season of Advent, the season of anticipation, the se

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be always with you! Today, Wednesday, is the middle of the week between the last Sunday of the old church year, and the first Sunday of the new church year.  Advent begins this coming Sunday! This morning at bible study, we spent a lot of our time talking about hope.  The passage we were reading was one of the ones we usually hear at Christmas - Isaiah 9:2-7  - though we were reading

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be always with you! I think that a lot of my neighbours took advantage of the nice weather on Saturday to put up their Christmas lights - when I was driving home on Saturday night, there were many more displays of light driving up the old highway than there had been the night before! The seasons are turning, both according to the weather and according to the calendar, and these colou

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be always with you! Tuesday was Remembrance Day, and I suspect that most of us attended services either in-person or on TV/Radio as we honoured the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month that marks the anniversary of the end of the First World War. We name it as the First World War, but at the time and in the years following, it was called The Great War, or sometimes The War to

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be always with you! This past August, the General Council of the United Church of Canada elected our new Moderator, the spiritual head of the denomination - the Rt. Rev. Kimberly Heath. (There was a funny story in Calgary the night after the voting process concluded - she and a friend were taking an Uber, and they were chatting with the driver about why they were in Calgary, and her

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be always with you! My apologies for getting this email sent out a day later than usual. I was in Sackville for two days of meetings on Monday/Tuesday this week, which has thrown off the rhythm of the rest of my week. Right now, we are on the threshold of a number of holy days in many different traditions; and in so many traditions, it seems as though the curtain that separates this

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be always with you! I woke up this morning with an earworm - if you haven't heard that term before, it refers to a song or a tune that feels like it has burrowed into your ear and got stuck there. Most days, I wake up with one - some days they are beautiful, some days they are ridiculous (Raffi singing "We fish you a hairy Christmas" anyone???); sometimes I know why the song is there

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be always with you! I don't know about you,...

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be always with you! Last weekend, I spent a...

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be always with you! (If this mid-week...

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be always with you! It's hard to believe...

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be always with you! By now, most of you...

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be always with you! This is the first week...

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be always with you! I'm sending out this...