The Houghton Missioner

Who are you beneath the mask? The person whom nobody else knows.                         Perhaps not even your spouse. Who are you beneath the mask?             That person whom only God has seen.                         In that Secret Place. In that place where the thoughts of our hearts are laid bare before the Living God of all Creation. In Culturally Christian (and particularly Catholic) countries throughout the World, the season between the Feast of the Epiphany (January 6 th ) and Shrove Tuesday (the last day before Lent) was historically a festival period of Carnivale - time of celebration and, for many, of wild abandon. Normal social conventions were often...

Trinity Episcopal Church (Christmas Sermon 2019) In the beginning was the Word. For when all things began the Word already was. That Word dwelt with God. And What God was, the Word was. That Divine Word, then, was with God at the beginning, and through him all things came to be. No single thing was created without him. All that came to be, was alive with his Life - And that life was the light of humankind. The Light shines on in the dark, and the darkness has never quenched it. [1] There was a time when everything (and everyone) we have ever seen – everything we’ve ever touched, tasted, smelled, or heard - was not. When reality, the cosmos, the atoms and energy that make up our universe (our bodies) simply were not (did not exist). Whether one subscribes to the idea of the Big Bang (proposed by Catholic Priest George Lemaitre), or Stephen Hawkings’ idea that the substance of the universe just kind of emerged out of no-space and no-time, or any of the va...

Trinity Episcopal Church (Advent I – Year A) Sunday, December 1 st   AD 2019 “You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep.”   (Romans 13:11)   I remember my mom waking me up in the dead of night on one late-December Evening when I was about four years old. “Shane.” She whispered, as if she were afraid she might be overheard. “I heard a clatter on the roof.” Clatter, I had recently learned from a Christmas movie featuring Tim Allen, was a word that meant big noise. And suddenly, there arose such a clatter. I suddenly became wide-awake with anticipation, and my mom said that she thought she heard someone on the roof of the house. So we crawled over to my bedroom window to see if we could see anything outside. Now our house was shaped a bit like the letter “L.” The bedroom where I was sleeping was on one end of the L with a window facing inward (so one could see the other end of the house where my mom and dad’s ...

Trinity Episcopal Church Sunday, November 10 th AD 2019   In today’s second Reading, we hear the following from our elder brother, Paul:   “As to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we beg you, brothers and sisters, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by spirit or by word or by letter…        to the effect that the day of the Lord is already here.”   What he is essentially saying to the Church in Thessalonica is that they really need to calm down. The Second Coming of Christ   (when he shall again appear with all the Glory of God about him) has not yet occurred. The world we experience is not the fullness of God's Kingdom.   Those who have died are not doomed and gone forever (for the Final Resurrection has yet to take place), and those who are alive and have been baptized into the life of Christ have no right to sit back and rest on their laurels in bliss just yet...

Trinity Episcopal Church – All Saints 2019 (Year C) Sunday, November 3 rd AD 2019 Today we celebrate the Ancient Feast of All Saints: A day when the Church commemorates all of the Saints who have gone before us as well as our continued fellowship with them. Not as one might associate with a ghost, or the restless dead (for Halloween has passed), but a fellowship that exists between living souls, all co-existing in perfect unity before our God. Now how can one say that we exist in a living fellowship with those who appear to be dead? The ghosties and Ghoulies of Halloween have already been banished, snow has begun to cover the ground, and we’re all ready for Christmas . (Brace yourselves, the season of retail holiday-themed music has begun.) But even so, this (rather premature) desire for the coziness, warmth, friendship, and love of the holiday season speaks to who we are as human beings. We were built for community and intercommunion with each other...