Mark Whittall

Why is everyone so angry? We had a trucker convoy drive into Ottawa yesterday, thousands of trucks from all across the country. And many of those trucks were driven by anger. There were a lot of angry people, and the anger seemed to grow as the convoy crossed the country. Anger about vaccine mandates, anger about pandemic restrictions, anger that seems unrelated to all that but attaches itself to the convoy as a way of venting. In our gospel reading today there is a lot of

Today’s gospel from Luke picks up on the text that we read two weeks ago, Luke’s account of Jesus’ baptism. You’ll recall that after Jesus was baptized, the heavens were opened and a voice came from heaven and said “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” I like to think of this as a moment when heaven and earth meet, a place where we humans experience the divine. Borrowing from the Celtic tradition, we might call this a thin place, a place where the veil

What does “God with us” look like? We’ve been building towards this. During Advent we sang O Come O Come Emmanuel, a song of longing for God to come, a song that anticipates God with us. Then at Christmas, we proclaimed that God was with us, that “the Word became flesh and lived among us.” Now it’s Epiphany, and we want to know what it looks like. We look for God’s glory to be revealed, for the word become flesh to show us that God is with us, to show us God’s presence in

What does it mean to be baptized? Seems like a good question for today as we gather to celebrate the baptism of Wendy, something we’re looking forward to in just a few minutes. What does your baptism mean to you? It’s a bit of a tricky question, isn’t it? Most of us were baptized as infants, so we don’t even remember our baptisms! And baptism has more than one meaning, in fact it is overflowing with layers of meaning, as is fitting for one of the most important sacraments o