ANGLOCAT ON The Prowl: A Deacon's Miscellany

The answer, of course, is that God doesn’t need to be glorified by his creation, and Jesus, who is no longer in the world, as he puts it, also does not himself need to be glorified—in fact, at this point in John’s Gospel, Jesus is about to be arrested, tried, and crucified, an experience that…

Lord Jesus, stay with us, for evening is at hand, and the day is past; be our companion on the way, kindle our hearts, and awaken hope, that we may know you as you are revealed in Scripture and the breaking of bread.  Grant this for the sake of your love. Amen. This collect for the…

Delivered at St. Bartholomew’s Church, NYCFebruary 12, 2023 In the 1974 film The Three Musketeers, our heroes find themselves surrounded by the Cardinal’s Guards, a body of soldiers as lauded as the musketeers themselves, as loyal to Cardinal Richelieu as Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and D’Artagnan are to the King.  The two rival forces break out into a…

  A Sermon on Matthew 11:2-11 Delivered at St. Bartholomew’s Church, NYC December 11, 2022 It’s easy for us to lose track of this, over two thousand years of Christianity, but John the Baptist casts a longer shadow in his own right than most of us know. The Sabian or Mandaen gnostic sect, which is…

A Sermon on Luke 2: 33-43 Delivered at St. Bartholomew’s Church, NYC, November 20, 2022 In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: In the Name of the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. The Church year is dying today, right before our eyes, a little liturgical lesson, reminding us that everything comes to an…

A Sermon on John 5:24-27 This evening we are commemorating All Souls Day (which technically alls on November 2) , all Hallow’s Eve, which we all know is on October 31, and, I suppose, because they are so closely linked, we might as well throw in All Saints Day, which technically is November 1, or,…

(First edition of Flashman in the Great Game, referred to below) To be clear, this *is* a sermon, but not a current one; it’s one I wrote for Good Friday 2018, and, as I was researching what I have previously said on All Saints Day, stumbled on this sermon, which I think deserves to be…

To call the Reverend Montague Summers “a clerical cracksman” is not exactly accurate. At a minimum, were know that he was ordained as a deacon in the Church of England in 1908. For the rest of his life, he held himself out as “the Reverend Montague Summers,” a style which his C of E diaconal…

Delivered at St. Bartholomew’s Church NYC, September 25, 2022. If there’s anything harder to wrestle with than a parable, it’s a parable that involves the afterlife.  And that’s what we have this evening, in the story of a rich man, traditionally known as Dives (Dee-Vays) and the beggar Lazarus, who lay at his gate, longing to…

“Dear Dad” The first in a series, if only we knew. Hawkeye has at last got a lull, after 70 hours of “meatball surgery” and he’s writing his well-beloved father. It’s a Christmas episode, and one in which Hawkeye gets to give us his perspective one all the denizens of the 4077th–Henry Blake is a…