St. Mark's Episcopal Church

This last week as I was driving to Rochester, I kept flipping the radio stations looking for something to listen to. It’s amazing how many stations there are there and how few we have in our area. As I was flipping I hit a station where someone was talking. I paused and realized that it was a religious station and that the person was preaching. Out of curiosity I paused a few more seconds to ascertain that he was preaching on the Trinity. “Well,” I said to myself. “I’ll just

A number of years ago I was attending the Vestry Retreat for my church in Tucson, Arizona. We were at a nice resort in a town called Rio Rico, just north of Nogales and the Mexican Border. We had been discussing some contentious issue, the nature of which I must admit I cannot recall. The conversation had gone on for some time when suddenly, almost unexpectedly agreement was reached. At that moment one of the two doors into the room from the outside blew open and a gust of wi

The seventeenth chapter of the Gospel of John falls between the Passover meal that Jesus had with his disciples, where he washed their feet, and the beginning of the Passion narrative. Since in John’s Gospel there is no institution of the Last Supper as in the other three Gospels, this chapter, which is known as the High Priestly Prayer serves the function of connecting Jesus life and ministry with his crucifixion and resurrection. If we are being honest we must admit that so

You might be thinking to yourself, “that Gospel reading doesn’t make sense.” And based on what the designers of the Revised Common Lectionary have given us in this snippet of a reading, you may be correct. We do know that Jesus is in Jerusalem. In John he travels four times to Jerusalem two during Passover, one at Hanukah and the one from our story for a festival, which is not named. We know that Jesus is coming from Galilee, Capernaum to be exact. While there, he healed the