August 4, 2019

Pentecost 8, Proper 13, Year C
Fr. Bob Wagenseil

Way back in the 1990s, I was appointed by my Bishop, the Bishop of Long Island, to serve as Archdeacon of Queens; and part of that job description took me on a pastoral visit to Liberia West Africa. I spent ten days in that beautiful nation during a lull in the civil war which had taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children. I celebrated the Eucharist in a number of parishes and met with hundreds of people who had suffered through years of terror and privation. During that visit, I spent many days traveling with the Bishop of Liberia. We met with the interim president of Liberia, with parish vestries and priests, with medical teams from Medicines sans Frontiers (doctors without borders) with orphaned and homeless children living on the streets of Monrovia, and tribal people living in remote parts of the countryside.

Those ten days touched my life in more ways than time permits me to recount this morning, but in terms of today’s readings from the Sacred Scriptures, my time in Liberia left me with a renewed sense of gratitude for the many things I had once taken for granted…

Read the full sermon transcript HERE.