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The 1942 film, Flying Tigers, provided a slogan that would inspire Americans for the war effort in World War II. A pilot whose plane lost a wing, exclaims that he has landed “on a wing and a prayer.”

So often when we think about impossible situations we are facing—child custody battles, failing organs, cognitive decline, loneliness, like the pilot in the movie, we express a longing for good luck to get us through. Chance is seen as the operative force, as the expression—”a wing and a prayer” is applied.

As people who come from one of the three Abrahamic faiths, Christians do not lean on chance. Promise is the category we and our Jewish and Muslim siblings draw on. In this Sunday’s lesson, we will hear once again about Abram who leaves his family and place to journey to a land that God would show him. The promise is that God will make of him a great nation and God will bless him and make him a blessing (Genesis 12:1-4). Abram chooses to build his life on a promise. God is faithful.

As we fast forward to today, promise is distorted by a lust for power, control, and certitude. Israel teeters on the edge of a third intifada and democracy hangs in the balance. Ukraine longs for total victory, as does Russia, both claiming God to be on their sides. Closer to home, St. Stephen’s runs the risk of defining promise as profit alone, failing to imagine the calling of mission.

Each Lent we are called to re-orient ourselves individually and collectively to the faithfulness of God’s promise to bless. We can count on more than a wing and a prayer.

-The Reverend Lisa Hunt, Rector

There are moments when you can feel the Holy Spirit. In my experience they don’t happen often, but regularly enough.

This month I have had the blessing of feeling that sacred zephyr twice. Once in a toney Westlake Episcopal church and again in a simply beautiful school chapel in Honduras.

Josh Kulak and Lizzie Robbins made vows to serve God and the Church as priests. We sang “Veni Creator Spiritus” (come Holy Spirit), and the bishops and priests laid hands upon them while the congregation held a blanket of prayer over them. They were holy moments.

Although such occasions may be rare when we KNOW the Spirit is present, they are not once in a lifetime. The Holy tingle can be decerned if we are sensitive and attuned. We can feel it.

Reverend Lisa Hunt, Rector

One of the old wives’ tales is that death always comes in threes. I am not a big believer in superstitions or folk wisdom, necessarily, but there are times when it seems true. This winter has seen the deaths of many saints at St. Stephen’s: Carvel Glenn, Evelyn Franklin, Dave Knoll. Their deaths remind me of the complexity of human life and its fragility. 

Death and resurrection are the truths of our common life. As the Prayer Book reminds us in the burial of the dead rite, ‘in the midst of life we are in death.’ Both are real. Life is inherently ambiguous.

There are times when I would love clarity. Death or life. Resurrection or crucifixion. I don’t like this mix and match nature of our humanity. But then I contemplate how sterile our world would be without ambiguity. As Paul says, ” For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of Go.(I Corinthians 1:18). Our faith is is rooted in paradox.

Reverend Lisa Hunt, Rector

BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!…

Recently I was attending chapel at our School with the youngest children, ages 15 mos-3 year olds. There was a child who was crying inconsolably, as one is wont to do at that age. I told the children that at such times “the world is too much with us.” I mistakenly attributed the line to Emily Dickinson, but this week as the world felt too much with me, I looked up the poem.

To my surprise it was not Dickinson, but my old Romantic friend, William Wordsworth, who wrote the poem. The ‘world’ he was referring too was not emotional turbulence, rather the estrangement of people in the industrialized age to the wonder of nature. The exchange of capitalism –getting and spending, came at a spiritual cost—we had ‘given away our hearts.’ 

This week there is much press about ChatGPT, the new development in artificial intelligence created by Open Source. ChatGPT empowers users to ask questions, write essays, make poems on wild topics in the manner of all sorts of writers. Its makers hope to revolutionize our world. Students are already using it to write their essays. Lawyers may soon be out of work, folks posit. I wonder what we are losing and gaining with these developments.

Like Wordsworth standing on the shore looking at the ocean and pondering his world, I look at the faces in my world this week streaked with tears and contemplate how ChatGPT will affect us all.

Reverend Lisa Hunt, Rector

Well, we know where we’re going

But we don’t know where we’ve been

And we know what we’re knowing

But we can’t say what we’ve seen

David Byrne, “Road to Nowhere,” 1985

As a people, we leave the Baptism of our Lord feast and move into the season after the Epiphany.  January 6 in the liturgical calendar is not about insurrection, but Epiphany.  The three kings come from the East drawn by a star to see the newborn baby Jesus and warned in a dream, they leave by another way.  Where do they go?  How did what they witness change their lives?  What does it mean for us to be living in a season after the Epiphany?

I am reminded of the Talking Heads’ song, “ Road to Nowhere.”  (I know this dates me!)  Like the Magi in their journey, we can know where we’re going, but we can’t say what we’ve seen.  We have a point on the horizon that we are moving toward which gives us direction and perspective, but not clarity, necessarily.

Western art was revolutionized in the Renaissance with the discovery of perspective.  By utilizing mathematical and architectural principles, visual artists were able to depict three dimensions in two.  According to Cristina Motta, “to properly use the linear perspective a painter has to imagine the canvas as an “open window” through which he sees the subject of the painting. In this open window it is necessary to draw straight lines to represent the horizon, divide the painting with different horizontal lines and fix the vanishing point. The vanishing point is usually located near the centre of the horizon. From this point it is necessary to draw the so-called “visual rays” that connect the viewer’s eye with the point in the distance” (https://useum.org/Renaissance/Perspective)..  The development of perspective unleashed phenomenal creativity—Leonardo, Raphael and those who followed them, drew from this technique.  It strikes me that in the life of Christian discipleship in the 21^st century we are engaged in a similar creative process—we are drawing visual rays toward God’s horizon, the reign of God which Jesus points to on the horizon.  It can also appear to be vanishing.

Next Sunday we will gather for our Annual Parish Meeting in the nave, following the 10:30 Eucharist.  As I am preparing for it and considering where we’ve been as a parish and where we’re going, I appreciate the truth of the ambiguity of this season after the Epiphany; it feels like a road to nowhere and also a moment of perspective where we are together, led by the Spirit, called to the center of the horizon and invited to draw in a new way.  I hope to see you there.

Reverend Lisa Hunt, Rector

Today is Epiphany. The twelfth day of Christmas, Epiphany commemorates the arrival of the wise men to visit the infant Jesus. Theologically, Epiphany conveys the revelation of Christ to the whole world–from the ends of the earth the presence of God in Christ is revealed.

In common parlance we refer to epiphanies as “aha” moments. Suddenly we come to know a new reality through no effort of our own. We see. We know.

On Christmas Eve my husband fell on his elbow in a street near our house and broke it in several places. After surgery he was given narcotic painkillers to numb the ache. His reaction to the medication was alarming to me. He became someone I did not recognize.

This experience made me viscerally aware of the millions of Americans who are addicted to opiods and the pain they and their families endure on a regular basis. Intellectually I knew this, but my personal experience for 48 hours of the chaos was an epiphany to me. Spiritually the epiphany was the need for and presence of God’s sustaining grace in the midst of the crisis.

The season after the Epiphany is a time of looking for signs of the presence of Christ–those both longed for and unexpected. Revelation is delightful and filled with awe.

Reverend Lisa Hunt, Rector

As Houston is encompassed by cold, I stand snug in my kitchen baking stollen, a German Christmas bread. The wind howls and my nostrils are filled with the warm smell of yeast.

My mind goes to my neighbors under the overpasses in my ward. I picture the people huddled in dark apartments in Ukraine. I conjure the smell of desperation at our southern border. I am experiencing this cold for two nights. How must it feel to live in it day after day?

Our School marked the end of the semester with a celebration of Las Posadas (the Inns). It is a custom of Mexican origin which spread throughout Central America and the Carribean. Pilgrims spend nine days going from house to house with Mary and Joseph, only to be turned away. Finally they come to the stable and are received with joy. It was a wonderful celebration and a poignant one.

We are daily confronted with the choice of opening or closing the doors. We choose to give the cold shoulder or welcome. How will we receive Jesus?

Reverend Lisa Hunt, Rector

“When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.'” (Matthew 1:13-19)

Every fourth Sunday of Advent we prepare for the coming of Christ by asking God to purify our conscience so that Christ might find in us a mansion prepared for himself. I find it somewhat ironic that in this year when we are spending time with the gospel of Matthew this prayer is tied to the story of Joseph’s decision to abandon Mary.

Pregnancy puts women in vulnerable positions. Physically, emotionally, economically, socially, pregnant women are exposed to the fears and expectations of others, while often at the same time they are the objects of hypocrisy and control. Mary is not the only pregnant woman whose status and future depends on men doing the right thing…ask any person in Texas who is unexpectedly with child today.

The collect for the fourth Sunday is right to direct our petitions to God to purify our consciences, our moral sense. God awakens Joseph’s conscience through his dream. Fear does not need to drive his decision making; he can risk standing with Mary.

Pregnant women in Texas today are vulnerable in this climate where healthcare is not accessible, Medicaid has not been expanded, where maternal death rates are some of the highest in the nation, and needed abortions are unavailable. Purify our conscience, O Lord, and come among us.

Reverend Lisa Hunt, Rector

My sabbatical month away was refreshing and stimulating and I appreciate your generosity in providing it for me. Bruce and I spent the month traveling to England and visiting family. In a Holy Spirit sort of way, the theme of space and time surfaced wherever I went.

Our journey was an intersection of Church and Empire. We worshiped at Yorkminster, St. Paul’s and Westminster over All Saints’ and Remembrance Day. Bruce had interest in all things nautical and so we visited Portsmouth harbor and toured Lord Nelson’s ship, the Victory. We followed that up with a visit to Greenwich, exploring the Royal Maritime Museum and the Royal Observatory where the prime meridian is marked. I learned more about the British Navy than I never thought I would!

The Church’s calendar and worship, our architecture and music, led me to contemplate the reality of eternity’s presence in the moment. Every moment of our lives, we are in the stream of all that was, is and shall become. From our study of British naval navigation, I learned that the ability or inability to tell time at sea drove the astronomers to develop charts of places on the globe. This was driven by the needs of Empire for business and war.

Advent is a season when we engage time uniquely. We remember the first coming of our Lord as we await the ever effusive arrival at the Second. In the meantime, in our flesh we mark and enliven our time.

Reverend Lisa Hunt, Rector

When do you have time to dream? When was the last time you had a vision for yourself or your community?

This weekend we will be dipping into the writings of the prophet Joel whose greatest hit includes:

I will pour out my spirit on all flesh;

your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,

your old men shall dream dreams,

and your young men shall see visions.

Even on the male and female slaves,

in those days, I will pour out my spirit. (Joel 2:28-29)

God promises this insight only after a time of desolation and shame. When things are going swimmingly, we have no need of dreams and visions—the now is just fine.

One of the functions of sabbath is to give us time to dream and play. Visions are only possible when our conscious state is relaxed. A vision is different from a plan.

Sabbaticals are designed to give folks an opportunity to recharge and to dream. My sabbatical was truncated by the pandemic and the ice storm. The Vestry encouraged me to take two months at that time and to save the rest for when travel was once again possible. I am taking the month of November as part of my remaining two months of sabbatical to go on a journey and to dream. Bruce and I will be visiting England and Florida. It will be a time of reflection and refreshment. 

As a parish, we will also be using the remainder of the year to refine our vision of life together, post-COVID. This will include the possibility of development of our land.  The Mission Real Estate Team will be leading an effort to validate our dream and to adjust it for our new season. Dwight Wolf and I will be sharing an outline of the process with the parish on October 30, 2022, at 9:30 in the Havens Center. I hope you will engage in reflection as part of your sabbath that Sunday.

While I am away Ashley Dellagiacoma, our associate rector will be leading our program and pastoral work. Susan Raine will be leading the vestry. You will be in capable hands.

In the meantime, I hope you will allow yourself time and space to dream and see.

Reverend Lisa Hunt, Rector