¨New life comes in many forms, even in seasons that seem fairly wintry...¨ The Most Revd Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop and Primate, The Episcopal Church

A New Day with New Life at The Foot of the Volcano

¨...In this Easter season I would encourage you to look at where you are finding new life and resurrection, where life abundant and love incarnate are springing up in your lives and the lives of your communities. There is indeed greenness, whatever the season. Give thanks for Easter. Give thanks for Resurrection. Give thanks for the presence of God incarnate in our midst.¨  please read it all,   HERE

·  Thanks to The Most Revd Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop and Primate, The Episcopal Church
·  Thanks to Anglican Communion News Service, sidebar
·  Thanks to Thinking Anglicans, sidebar
·  Thanks to Simon Sarmiento
·  Thanks to Joan Fuetsch, photo

Alleluia! Christ is Risen! The Lord is Risen indeed! Alleluia!

This sermon was given at Hagia Sophia, the great cathedral of Constantinople at the Easter Vigil in the year 400.  (and by Padre Mickey in Northern California in español tonight)

¨Is there anyone who is a devout lover of God?
Let them enjoy this beautiful bright festival!
Is there anyone who is a grateful servant?
Let them rejoice and enter into the joy of their Lord!

Are there any weary with fasting?
Let them now receive their wages!
If any have toiled from the first hour,
let them receive their due reward;
If any have come after the third hour,
let him with gratitude join in the Feast!
And he that arrived after the sixth hour,
let him not doubt; for he too shall sustain no loss.
And if any delayed until the ninth hour,
let him not hesitate; but let him come too.
And he who arrived only at the eleventh hour,
let him not be afraid by reason of his delay.

For the Lord is gracious and receives the last even as the first.
He gives rest to him that comes at the eleventh hour,
as well as to him that toiled from the first.
To this one He gives, and upon another He bestows.
He accepts the works as He greets the endeavor.
The deed He honors and the intention He commends.

Let us all enter into the joy of the Lord!
First and last alike receive your reward;
rich and poor, rejoice together!
Sober and slothful, celebrate the day!

You that have kept the fast, and you that have not,
rejoice today for the Table is richly laden!
Feast royally on it, the calf is a fatted one.
Let no one go away hungry. Partake, all, of the cup of faith.
Enjoy all the riches of His goodness!

Let no one grieve at his poverty,
for the universal kingdom has been revealed.
Let no one mourn that he has fallen again and again;
for forgiveness has risen from the grave.
Let no one fear death, for the Death of our Savior has set us free.
He has destroyed it by enduring it.
He destroyed Hades when He descended into it.
He put it into an uproar even as it tasted of His flesh.
Isaiah foretold this when he said,
"You, O Hell, have been troubled by encountering Him below."

Hell was in an uproar because it was done away with.
It was in an uproar because it is mocked.
It was in an uproar, for it is destroyed.
It is in an uproar, for it is annihilated.
It is in an uproar, for it is now made captive.
Hell took a body, and discovered God.
It took earth, and encountered Heaven.
It took what it saw, and was overcome by what it did not see.
O death, where is thy sting?
O Hades, where is thy victory?

Christ is Risen, and you, O death, are annihilated!
Christ is Risen, and the evil ones are cast down!
Christ is Risen, and the angels rejoice!
Christ is Risen, and life is liberated!
Christ is Risen, and the tomb is emptied of its dead;
for Christ having risen from the dead,
is become the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep.
To Him be Glory and Power forever and ever.

Amen!

 St. John Chrysostom, the Patriarch or Arch-bishop of Constantinople in the fifth century
HERE

·   Thanks to Padre Mickey´s Dance Party, sidebar
·   Thanks to St. John Chrysostom

THE EASTER VIGIL 2012: ¨Tonight is not a recitation of doctrine or dogmas. It is a time to know the holiness into which we have been called¨

The Easter Vigil

¨This service is one of the oldest services in Christendom. The Easter Vigil was so important to the 3rd and 4th century Church because it was THE service of baptism. Baptisms were only performed by the bishop in those days and only at Easter.

A person seeking admittance to the mysteries of the Church became a catechumen on Ash Wed and spent the whole of Lent preparing to be admitted to Holy Eucharist. In those days, if you were not baptized, you were dismissed from the church before the time of Holy Communion. So full admittance to the Eucharist was an important experience for all of the Church.

In Christian communities all over, on Maundy Thursday all fires, not just the altar lights were extinguished. Hearth fires and all lights were extinguished for all of Good Friday and Holy Saturday. And until the building of the New Fire on Holy Saturday, people not only lived in darkness, they lived and slept in the cold. As soon as the new fire was lit, runners took torches to peoples’ homes, and the light and warmth of Christ’s light spread through the communities, hearth to hearth and heart to heart. Then the community gathered in their churches and the candidates for baptism returned from their retreat.

The candidates for baptism would prepare for this night with fasting and prayer and then be brought into the church in darkness following the Pascal candle. The Exultet is one of the few ancient chants that we preserve in our tradition along with the litany and the sursum corda. The Pascal candle signifies the Pillar of Fire by night that led the Children of Israel through the desert... HERE

·  Thanks to Stone of Witness, sidebar
·  Thanks to  Muthah+

THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO (still): ¨ Kill Gays Bill¨ promoters alive and spiritually/emotionally unwell in Uganda

Uganda Pastors Accuse U.S. Of Spreading ‘Gayism,’ Imposing ‘An Agenda For Homosexuals’

¨PBS’s Newshour featured a segment on Uganda’s ongoing struggle for LGBT equality Thursday, and the nation’s hostility to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s historical call to treat gay rights as human rights. Polls still show that 95 percent of Ugandans favor criminalizing homosexuality — and many back the infamous “kill gays bill,” which would impose harsh penalties on homosexual behavior.

The piece includes Pastor Joseph Serwadda, who heads an association of Pentecostal and evangelical churches, accusing the West of spreading “gayism” and imposing “an agenda for homosexuals in Uganda.” He claims that “Nobody has gone to jail; nobody has been harassed; nobody has been ostracized because of their sexual orientation” and says that he has never met a gay person. Watch it: HERE

·  Thanks to PBS, Newshour
·  Thanks to Igor Volsky
·  Thanks to Think Progress, sidebar
·  Thanks to U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton
·  Thanks to U.S. President, Barack Obama

END LIFE REALITY: LGBT Elders See More Poverty, Isolation and Bias

“Disparities and Resilience among Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Older Adults.”

¨Researchers at the University of Washington School of Social Work, in Seattle, found in the first nationwide LGBT study on aging and health. It shows that LGBT seniors experience higher rates of disability, physical and mental anguish, as well lack of access to services than the non-LGBT population in the United States.¨   HERE

¨Ricardo Urrieta, 61, claims to face discrimination times four: "I am old, I'm Latino, I'm gay and I have HIV," he declared. "This is the end for many people.”

Urrieta 's life has not been easy in recent months. And his struggles reflect findings or a recent national study of older lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) seniors, including significant samples of ethnic elders.

"I was a nurse, but one day I could not continue working. I fell down all the time in the hospital because a disk in my back protruded. The doctor told me I could no longer work," he recalled.

Disabled and Homeless

While Urrieta waited for his disability-insurance checks to start arriving, everything became complicated. With no income and no family, he had to leave his apartment in Los Angeles.

"I spent a week in my car, I became homeless on Skid Row. I had to join the queue for a ticket to get me a sandwich and a soda."

Eventually he got a room in a hotel for homeless people. "It did not even have windows," he said... HERE

·  Thanks to New America Media, Elders, HERE
·  Thanks to New America Media/La Opinion ,
·  Thanks to Araceli Martinez Ortega

THREE YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF GAY MARRIAGE IN IOWA: Varnum v. Brien decision brought marriage equality to the Midwest/U.S.A.

¨Gay marriage celebrated its third anniversary in Iowa on Tuesday.


In was on April 3, 2009 that the Iowa Supreme Court handed down its unanimous Varnum v. Brien decision which brought marriage equality to the Midwest.

The following year, angry social conservatives successfully campaigned to oust three judges off the bench. The Republican-led House last year approved a constitutional amendment which would define marriage as a heterosexual union, but Democrats have blocked the measure in the Senate.

For Erin and Rachel Dobb-McConnell, who are raising two children, the ruling has changed their lives.

“It's very fulfilling.” Erin told Des Moines ABC affiliate WOI. “We're very proud of our family and our children. We can go to school and they have a married couple as their parents.”

The couple, who fell in love 12 years ago, married one month after the ruling was handed down.

“My marriage hasn't changed their lives at all but it sure has changed mine,” Erin said of marriage equality opponents.

“Absolutely,” Rachel added. HERE

Massachusetts will celebrate eight years of marriage equality next month.

·  Thanks to On Top Magazine, sidebar

Christianity in Crisis: ¨Christianity has been destroyed by politics, priests, and get-rich evangelists...Ignore them, writes Andrew Sullivan, and embrace Him.¨



¨If you go to the second floor of the National Museum of American History inWashington, D.C., you’ll find a small room containing an 18th-century Bible whose pages are full of holes. They are carefully razor-cut empty spaces, so this was not an act of vandalism. It was, rather, a project begun by Thomas Jefferson when he was a mere 27 years old. Painstakingly removing those passages he thought reflected the actual teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, Jefferson literally cut and pasted them into a slimmer, different New Testament, and left behind the remnants (all on display until July 15). What did he edit out? He told us: “We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus.” He removed what he felt were the “misconceptions” of Jesus’ followers, “expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves.” And it wasn’t hard for him. He described the difference between the real Jesus and the evangelists’ embellishments as “diamonds” in a “dunghill,” glittering as “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.” Yes, he was calling vast parts of the Bible religious manure. Andrew Sullivan

 Organized Religion in Decline

¨....Meanwhile, organized religion itself is in trouble. The Catholic Church’s hierarchy lost much of its authority over the American flock with the unilateral prohibition of the pill in 1968 by Pope Paul VI. But in the last decade, whatever shred of moral authority that remained has evaporated. The hierarchy was exposed as enabling, and then covering up, an international conspiracy to abuse and rape countless youths and children. I don’t know what greater indictment of a church’s authority there can be—except the refusal, even now, of the entire leadership to face their responsibility and resign. Instead, they obsess about others’ sex lives, about who is entitled to civil marriage, and about who pays for birth control in health insurance. Inequality, poverty, even the torture institutionalized by the government after 9/11: these issues attract far less of their public attention.

For their part, the mainline Protestant churches, which long promoted religious moderation, have rapidly declined in the past 50 years. Evangelical Protestantism has stepped into the vacuum, but it has serious defects of its own. As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat explores in his unsparing new book,Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, many suburban evangelicals embrace a gospel of prosperity, which teaches that living a Christian life will make you successful and rich. Others defend a rigid biblical literalism, adamantly wishing away a century and a half of scholarship that has clearly shown that the canonized Gospels were written decades after Jesus’ ministry, and are copies of copies of stories told by those with fallible memory. Still others insist that the earth is merely 6,000 years old—something we now know by the light of reason and science is simply untrue. And what group of Americans have pollsters found to be most supportive of torturing terror suspects? Evangelical Christians. Something has gone very wrong. These are impulses born of panic in the face of modernity, and fear before an amorphous “other.” This version of Christianity could not contrast more strongly with Jesus’ constant refrain: “Be not afraid.” It would make Jefferson shudder.

It would also, one imagines, baffle Jesus of Nazareth. The issues that Christianity obsesses over today simply do not appear in either Jefferson’s or the original New Testament. Jesus never spoke of homosexuality or abortion, and his only remarks on marriage were a condemnation of divorce (now commonplace among American Christians) and forgiveness for adultery. The family? He disowned his parents in public as a teen, and told his followers to abandon theirs if they wanted to follow him. Sex? He was a celibate who, along with his followers, anticipated an imminent End of the World where reproduction was completely irrelevant...¨ there is much more, HERE

·  Thanks to Frank Schaeffer, sidebar
·  Thanks to Andrew Sullivan (The Daily Beast)  HERE

SEMANA SANTA/HOLY WEEK: ¨It’s a difficult week for people who take this seriously. It ends well, but getting to the end is hard work¨

¨This is a lot nearer than we think; it happened yesterday, it's happening now¨

Holy Week:  Cling to Hope
By Josh Thomas

¨For most Christians this is Holy Week, the Week of Christ’s Passion, encompassing four of the most important events in the life of Jesus: his triumphant entry into Jerusalem (Palm Sunday) a few days before Passover; his last supper, the seder of Passover, which he transformed into the Sacrament of His Body and Blood (Maundy Thursday, including washing his disciples’ dirty feet); his execution nailed to a cross (Good Friday); and his returning to life, the Feast of the Resurrection, or Easter Day...¨ please, read it all,   HERE

·  Thanks to Gay Spirit Diary, sidebar
·  Thanks to Josh Thomas

¨We must fight for equal rights for LGBT people, just as we must fight for the rights of the poor...¨

"We're enveloped in a national debate about insurance mandates and the political leanings of nine Supreme Court Justices. That's all well and good, but entirely beside the point. A nation that does not care for its sick and infirm is a nation that does not deserve to exist. A nation that actively profits from the pain and suffering of those sick and infirm deserves to burn in Hell. A nation that throws those sick and infirm to the wolves is so far beneath contempt as to beggar description."

William Rivers Pitt, Journalist, Truthout

¨I'm in full agreement with Pitt's assessment of our country which is the only developed country where people are afraid of their medical bills; many of whom can't even afford to get needed medical care. Only a country that believes in the Darwinian concept of "Survival of the Fittest," and views others as mere inconveniences or wastes, can embrace and extol wealth as the major, if not sole, criterion of being worthy of having a full life and enjoying the fruits of equality granted to all citizens in the Constitution.

It is not a great leap to see that our contempt for the poor is equivalent for many people's contempt for LGBT people! Both groups are minorities, both groups are devalued, both groups are denied basic human rights, and both groups are assaulted and murdered by people who disparage and/or hate those whom they perceive as "weak."

We must fight for equal rights for LGBT people, just as we must fight for the rights of the poor, for to do anything less is to be in league with those who "deserve to burn in Hell."  The Reverend Doctor Jerry Maneker, A Christian Voice for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Rights   HERE

DOMINGO de RAMOS: La Merced Church, Antigua, Guatemala, 2012



La Merced, Domingo de Ramos, 2012, Antigua, Guatemala

 Salmo 24

Del Señor es la tierra y su plenitud, *
el mundo y los que en él habitan;
Porque él la fundó sobre los mares, *
y la afirmó sobre los ríos del abismo.
"¿Quién subirá al monte del Señor? *
Y ¿quién estará en su santo lugar?"
"El limpio de manos, y puro de corazón, *
el que no ha elevado su mente a un ídolo,
ni jurado por dios falso.
Recibirá bendición del Señor, *
y recompensa merecida del Dios de su salvación".
Tal es la generación de los que le buscan, *
de los que buscan tu rostro, oh Dios de Jacob.
Alcen, oh puertas, sus cabezas;
álcense, oh puertas del Eterno; *
y entrará el Rey de gloria.
"¿Quién es este Rey de gloria?" *
"El Señor, fuerte y valiente,
el Señor, poderoso en batalla".
Alcen, oh puertas, sus cabezas;
álcense, oh puertas del Eterno; *
y entrará el Rey de gloria.
"¿Quién es él, el Rey de gloria?" *
"El Señor de las huestes,él es el Rey de gloria"

Salmo 29

Den al Señor, oh seres celestiales, *
den al Señor la gloria y la fortaleza.
Den al Señor la gloria debida a su Nombre; *
adoren al Señor en la hermosura de su santidad.
La voz del Señor sobre las aguas;
truena el Dios de gloria; *
el Señor sobre las grandes aguas.
La voz del Señor es voz potente; *
la voz del Señor es voz gloriosa.
La voz del Señor quebranta los cedros; *
el Señor quebranta los cedros del Líbano.
Hace saltar al Líbano como becerro, *
al Hermón como hijuelo de búfalo.
La voz del Señor divide las llamas de fuego;
la voz del Señor hace temblar el desierto; *
hace temblar el Señor el desierto de Cades.
La voz del Señor tuerce las encinas, *
y desnuda los bosques.
Mientras, en el templo del Señor *
todo proclama su gloria.
El Señor se sienta por encima del diluvio; *
el Señor se sienta como Rey por siempre jamas.
El Señor dará fortaleza a su pueblo; *
el Señor bendecirá a su pueblo con la paz.
Gloria al Padre, y al Hijo y al Espíritu Santo: *
como era en el principio, ahora y siempre,
por los siglos de los siglos. Amén.

Oración Matutina Diaria

Si decimos que no tenemos pecado, nos engañamos a nosotros mismos, y la verdad no está en nosotros. Si confesamos nuestros pecados, él es fiel y justo para perdonar nuestros pecados, y limpiarnos de toda maldad. 1 San Juan 1:8, 9 TODO, AQUI

·  Thanks to Luis Hernandez, photo
·  Thanks to Oficio Diario del Libro, sidebar