This past May, my husband Robbie and I were blessed to take a two week trip to Paris, and in the middle of our time there, we took a train to Amsterdam and stayed there for 3 days.  The main reason that I wanted to go to Amsterdam was to visit the Van Gogh Museum.  It was something of a pilgrimage for me, not in the same way as making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to walk the steps that Jesus walked, of course, but it was a sacred experience, because through many of Van Gogh’s works, I experience God at work in me.  

Abraham said, You shall not take a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites, in whose land I live; but you shall go to my father’s house, to my kindred, and get a wife for my son.’   Genesis 24 : 38

God said to Abraham: “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”

Let’s just pause for a moment to take in the gravity of these words we have heard. The words we have just proclaimed “Thanks be to God” after hearing. God – the God of love; the God who granted Abraham and Sarah a miraculous son, Isaac, in their old age; the God who promised to make a great nation of Abraham, whose children will be “as numerous as the stars in heaven,” has now commanded Abraham to commit filicide, to kill his promised son.

This past week I had the real joy of spending time with four remarkable young men from our parish, JS Wilson, Nicholas Lowe, Sam Arny, and Nick West – and two multitalented chaperone-extraordinaires, Parks Gilbert and Matt West, on a service trip to Appalachia in a tiny mountain town that was incidentally called Appalachia located the westernmost part of Virginia, but not West Virginia. We were in the mountains. Each day we rose early in the morning and shared a brief devotion with our fellow service trippers before setting off for a shady holler where we spent the day rebuilding a rotted out floor for an incredibly hospitable older couple who had lived nearly their entire lives beneath the coal mine above us where the husband had once worked.

Saint George’s is on the move, out and about in a major way during the month of June.  And that is happening in at least three different ways. 

Good morning St. George’s! I am so overjoyed to be with you this morning as your new associate rector and I can’t express how grateful I am that you called me. It’s really a tremendous gift to be called to a community that is as vibrant, faithful, and downright fun as this one is, and to be honest it makes me feel a little spoiled, especially after hearing some of the call narratives in today’s lections, which I’ll touch on later. But first, I wanted to give you an update on something remarkable that happened in my life since I last saw you, and that of course is getting ordained as a deacon at the Cathedral in Boston last week. In this ordination ceremony I entered the church as a lay person, the bishop laid hands on me and called down the Holy Spirit, and I left the church, ordained as a deacon. So what exactly does that mean, being a deacon?