When I was 11 my family began attending a fundamentalist church.  In many ways it was a great experience, and I learned a lot.  One thing I learned quickly was that you attended Church three times a week, no matter what - Sunday morning (dress pants required), Sunday night (jeans allowed) for night church, and Wednesday night for Bible study.  One Sunday night the sky threatened hail, and the weather man on TV said we were in a tornado watch.  We loaded up and went to church for the full hour.

As the Episcopal Church, we need to live in the now and to live towards the future: continuing down the road we are traveling of radical inclusivity and hospitality, of welcoming those who need the home we can provide them; not turning back the clock to a non-existent nostalgic past where things are remembered as being perfect....That kind of sentimentality which leads to lack of action is not the continuous action Luke is calling us to. This Gospel is taking us by the shoulders and shaking us, demanding that we live into the Kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed on that day in Nazareth.

My name is Dustin Cole and I am the coordinator of Sacred Grounds. For the past year Sacred Grounds has created a space for people in their 20's and 30's to come together in worship and to socialize with people from around the diocese. It has helped to build-up relationships among young adults from different parishes which have given us a greater sense of community in the Episcopal Church.

We live in an age of violence. Even before on 9/11 terrorism reared its ugly head, Americans were on our way to being a society defined by violence - whether the ritualized murder of fictional terminator movies, or the equally ritualized but less benign reality TV shows giving us live feeds of very the real flesh and blood violence of police beatings and crimes in progress, all in the name of entertainment.