May 25, 2026
Memorial Day Address – Big Canoe Chapel – Mark S. Winward
Introduction
In preparing for this morning’s Memorial Day reflection, I went back through my files to see what I had said in the past. I found that I first shared such a reflection in my own church in Saco, Maine, in 2000. I told my congregation then that “it had been 25 years since America had lost large numbers of her men and women to battle. Long periods of peace and easy victories make us much more likely to trivialize war,” I concluded, “and reduce Memorial Day to nothing more than a bank holiday.”
Wow, what a different world we live in today!
The world became a very different place for most of us after the 9/11 attacks. Immediately following the attacks, I was recalled to Washington as a reserve chaplain. There, amidst recovery efforts at a still-smoking Pentagon, the Bishop of the Armed Forces took me aside and said, “Mark, I know you’ve been struggling with whether or not to come back on active duty. You bring a unique background to the Chaplain Corps as a former officer. Our nation is now at war, and we have a critical shortage of chaplains. If your decision was ever clear, I would think it would be now.”
How could I argue with that? My gut told me this whole affair would be messy. As a wartime chaplain, I knew servicemen and women would be called to serve in dark,
May 24, 2026
The Day of Pentecost – Mark S. Winward
The Significance of Pentecost
Although many Christians don’t recognize it, Pentecost is perhaps the most important Christian feast day for our corporate lives together as God’s people. If Christmas recalls the incarnation, Good Friday Christ’s sacrifice for our sins, Easter his victory over sin and death, and Ascension Day the commissioning of his representatives to share the Good News; then Pentecost frames the meaning of it all to us as God’s people. I want to suggest to you that Pentecost represents three revolutionary ideas.
The Universalization of the Covenant
First, Pentecost represents the universalization of the covenant. In other words, Pentecost opened the way of the God of Israel to all people. Most people don’t realize that the Gospel is, for the most part, a story about Jews. Jesus, all his disciples, and most of the major players in the unfolding of the gospel are Jews. When non-Jews are mentioned in the gospels, they are clearly presented as outsiders; that’s because until the day of Pentecost, non-Jews are outsiders. When Jesus’ followers gathered together in Jerusalem in the second chapter of Acts on the Day of Pentecost, they were actually celebrating a Jewish holy day. Pentecost is another name for Shavuot, or “the Feast of Weeks.” Shavuot celebrates the day God gave the Torah, or law, to the nation of Israel gathered at Mt. Sinai. While on Passover, the people of Israel were freed from the tyranny of Egyptian slavery,
May 20, 2026
Alcuin of York – Mark S. Winward
Every Sunday morning, at the very beginning of our celebration of the Holy Eucharist, we pray a prayer so familiar that we could probably recite it in our sleep. We call it the Collect for Purity: “Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy Name…”
This is one of the masterpieces of liturgical English, translated for us by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer in the sixteenth century. But Cranmer did not write it. To find who did, we have to go back twelve hundred years to a deacon from Northumbria, England named Alcuin of York.
Today, we celebrate the feast of Alcuin—a scholar, an abbot, a teacher, and a diplomat who died on May 19 in the year 804. Alcuin lived in the Early Middle Ages –what historians used to call the “Dark Ages” – and certainly was dark to those living through it. Western Europe was fractured patchwork of warring kingdoms. The Roman Empire had long since collapsed. Education had broken down; libraries were non-existent or neglected; and even the clergy were often illiterate, unable to read the scriptures they preached or understand the sacraments they administered. Ignorance, superstition, and political instability threatened to swallow the Christendom.
Born around 730 near York,
May 17, 2026
The Seventh Sunday of Easter – Mark S. Winward
The Strength of the In-Between
Jesus said, “…you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” – Acts 1:8
“But, but…and there goes.” Now what?
If you have ever been in an ongoing crisis or known the struggle of a terminal disease, you’re all too familiar with that “in-between” place. It is the space that lies between our current reality and the uncertainty of the future. During those times, the small things we used to worry about suddenly seem petty, and life takes on a whole new meaning. I want to suggest to you that character is generally not made in the heat of crisis; rather, it is in those in-between places that character is grown.
The Forge of the Mundane
We are often inspired by those who face crises with clarity, grace, or courage. We admire the person who bears a devastating illness with poise, the advocate who stands resolute against injustice, or the hero who risks their life for another. But before any of these individuals faced the moments that would define them, their character was forged in the mundane moments of life—the quiet hours spent waiting for a time of testing.
Alfred Hitchcock famously said that movies are “life with the dull bits cut out.” We tend to view our own lives like films,