St Paul Episcopal Church

St Paul Episcopal Church St Paul is faith community of the people of Winn Parish, Louisiana, since 1938.

05/31/2026

HOMILY for Trinity Sunday, May 31, 2026
St Paul’s, Winnfield
Frank Fuller
Genesis 1:1-2:4a, 2 Corinthians 13:11-13, Matthew 28:16-20, Canticle 13 (or Canticle 2)

Today begins the long, green season: the Sundays after Pentecost. This moring, we start by thinking about God. Never a bad way to begin any season – or any day, for that matter. Since this is Trinity Sunday, we think about God in the mystery that is the Trinity, God in Three Persons.

Mysteries, in theological terms, are, by definition, incomprehensible. Certainly The Trinity is no exception. If you open the Book of Common Prayer in front of you, and turn to page 864, to the sixth-century creed of St. Athanasius, you will find the official word: “The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible.”

Or, as Dorothy Sayers wrote, “the father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the whole thing incomprehensible.”

Some biblical references speak of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but the Trinity does not come explicitly from scripture. It is a great irony — and grace — that the doctrine emerged out of attempts, in the early centuries of the current era, to know the nature and relationship of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. They could go only so far in figuring this out, so what we have is a mystery. But that’s just what you get when you think about God.

You have heard me say before, if someone tells you that he knows all about God, only two things are possible: he’s not telling the truth, or it isn’t God he’s talking about. The full nature of God cannot be grasped by human mind. Still, we try, and by trying, we learn more about God and about ourseves.

It is in the Trinity that we think about God as a family. There is a whole theology of how the persons of the Trinity relate to each other. It’s called “Perichoresis.” Never fear, I’m not going even to try.

Nonetheless, in addition to what the doctrine of the Trinity says about the way persons of God relate to each other, it tells a great deal about the way God relates to each of us. There is something in the Trinity that opens the multiple ways in which God makes God’s own self known.

It is in the Trinity that we internalize our concept of God, experience God, and integrate that experience with our own experience and values. The way to seek to know God as Trinity becomes the same way to seek to know another person, by full engagement. By entering into relationship. By being part of the family,

No one can know God without entering into relationship, in all that that means in human terms and more. Entering into relationship means opening hearts, making oneself vulnerable. The Trinitarian God is relational. And so are we all.

That is how the three persons of the Trinity relate to us, to you and me individually, to us as a community, and to creation as a whole.

This is the relation of the Trinitarian deity, even though it remains a mystery. There’s more that we don’t know; there will always be more.

What we do know is that we are invited into this mystery of Trinitarian relatedness. In Christ, in baptism, we are invited into this relationship with a god whom we understand as being always and irreducibly in relationship. The Trinitarian God is love made visible, and we in turn, are filled with this love.

05/27/2026

Church News for the Winn Parish Enterprise, Mat 27, Edition

The people of St Paul’s, like all congregations of the Anglican Communion, find study and worship formed by the Church calendar, both in the Daily and Sunday Lessons and in events marked on specific days. Of course, that is true of most Christians. Some Calendar days, like Christmas and Easter, are shared among all of the world. Some days commemorate people we call Holy Woman and Holy Men. Saint Patrick’s Day, for example, is broadly celebrated; others, less so.

Only one day of the calendar marks a theological concept. This Sunday will be Trinity Sunday.

As we all know, The Trinity – The Father, The Son, The Holy Spirit – is one way most Christians understand God. Trinitarian references in Biblical text extend as early as Genesis, explicitly in the Gospels and Epistles. Nevertheless, the early church roiled in debate about the relative natures of each Person of the Trinity. In the year 325, The First Council of Nicaea convened to produce a concise solution to these concerns. The Council ended with the Nicaean Creed, which we embrace in a somewhat modified form through these 1700 years to this day,.

People quip that the principal minister in any congregation will find a reason to be away on Trinity Sunday, thereby avoiding the expectation of preaching on a theological concept. That’s more joke than fact. Certainly, at St Paul’s we shall be together, priest and people alike, to study and worship God in Trinitarian Glory, this Sunday just as every other.

St Paul’s Episcopal is an inclusive faith community worshipping in the Anglican liturgical tradition. Church news abd service times available from {318)5220675. [email protected] or Facebook at StPaulsWinnfield. All are welcome.

05/24/2026

HOMILY for Pentecost, May 24, 2026
St Paul’s, Winnfield
Frank Fuller
Acts 2:1-21, 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13, John 7:37-39, Psalm 104:25-35, 37

pCrowds gathered in Jerusalem for a great celebration, the Sabbath seven weeks after the Passover. Pentecost is Greek for Fifty Days.

People came from every community of Jews in the entire world. Well, the world as they knew it, for we have a list of all their countries and languages, which Diane read heroically just a moment ago. As the international crowd gathered at the Temple in familiar celebration: fire and rushing wind. We aren’t told how they reacted, but it must have seemed like the end of the world … but it wasn’t. It was creation all over again, with wind and fire, and something new bursting forth.

Then the Disciples began to preach and proclaim in ecstatic ways. Are they drunk? No, assured Peter. See the miracle taking place. Everyone understood what they were saying. The Holy Spirit worked the miracle in the heart and hearing and understanding of each person, gathered there together.

Some were skeptical. This was a morning that some people wanted to explain away or contain with cynical speculation: No wonder some hoped that they were just drunk.

God was speaking! Differently from the day when God proclaimed “This is my son: to the crowd at the Baptism. Not the way Jesus preached to the crowd on the Mount. No … this was God’s voice coming from the people … God’s voice, understo0d by the oeiople: everyone! : Jews and Gentiles and all those foreigners from the places mentioned in the lesson. Everyone participated.

In this case, at this moment, "all flesh," Jew and foreigner, male and female, old and young, gay and straight, slave and free, invited and included, and expected to prophesy and to dream!

And just to make sure that they know they're included, the obstacle of language is overcome by a sweeping wind, an uplifting Spirit that drove those disciples out. beyond their walls.

It wasn’t what they were expecting, and it was almost certainly not what they wanted. The disciples there at the morning of the Pentecost were faithful Jews looking for a Jewish messiah, looking for the completion of God’s Covenant with their ancestors.

When the Spirit came they became instead ambassadors of a universal experience of God. Their understanding of what it was to be a follower of Jesus was replaced by a renewed covenant that allowed them to speak with God’s own authority to all humankind.

Even though some scoffed, the crowd was hungry for the word brought by the Spirit-filled disciples. Reading a little further into the Book of Acts reveals that the church expanded from just over one hundred to three thousand in one day.

Their charge is our charge today.

The message of Pentecost is still the charge today, always and everywhere, to proclaim the love of God in Christ to everyone. No matter what language they speak. No matter where they are.

05/20/2026

Church News for he Winn Parish Enterprisem May 20, Edition
&pOn Sunday, St Paul’s and other churches will sport festive red! There will be banners and tongues of fire; though the fire will be symbolic; However, the festive feeling is real, for Sunday is the great Feast of Pentecost. It’s the eighth Sunday after Easter; the occasion on which all Christianity celebrates the establishment of the church. The name comes from the Greek for fiftieth, for it concludes the Great Fifty Days of Eastertide.
&pPentecost commemorates the morning, described in Acts 2, when the skies opened amid a large gathering at a harvest festival in Jerusalem. A great wind and lames appeared, and the Disciples began speaking excitedly in many different languages. There were people there from many countries, speaking many languages, and they understood everything that was being said.
&pThere are many ways to think about Pentecost. It is an undoing of the confusion of new languages at the Tower of Babel; it is a charge for the new church to go to all the lands and tongues of the earth to spread the Good News. And it’s the joyous conclusion to the Great Fifty Days of Eastertide. St
&pSt Paul’s Episcopal is an inclusive faith community worshipping in the Anglican liturgical tradition. Call for service times and church news: {318)5220675. [email protected] or Facebook at StPaulsWinnfield. 206 Pecan St. All are welcome.
&p

05/17/2026

A meditation within the Morning Office, John 17:1-11

What were they to do? Their great teacher, who had been ripped from their company by crucifixion, then wonderfully restored to them in the Resurrection, was to leave thjem again … this time in Glory.

What are they to do now?

Jesus had prepared them for the time, on that Maundy Thursday night. “Don’t worry,” he seemed to say. “God brought us together … with God, not instead of God. When I’m gone, continue to do the works. Continue to follow the path I have set forth, and you’ll be following the way.”

Then Jesus continued. He challenged them to follow The Way, no matter how difficult. “The one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do even greater works than these.”

A new command, he said, and then reassured them that he would not leave them orphans. The conversation is dear and familiar to us: “Live one another as I cave loved you”; “I go to prepare a place.”

Then, in the reading we have this morning, Jesus turned from the Disciples and prayed for them.

He spoke to his Father for himself and for those gathered with him: “those you have given me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me….” This is the prayer of The High Priest in the Temple, , speaking to God about and for the people in The Priest’s care.

This High Priestly Prayer is, by any measure, an especially precious passage in scripture, both as poetry and as theology. Jesus prayed, not just for the people gathered around him, as precious as they are.

When Jesus said, “I am asking you on their behalf,” he asks on behalf of everyone who followed him. He asks on behalf of everyone who follows him. He asks on behalf of The Disciples, the company of believers, the crowd that will be transformed at Pentecost. On behalf of Peter and James and John … and you and me.

Jesus’s victory over even the cross brings us here this morning in this little time between Ascension and Pentecost. We are God’s beloved, speaking to God’s beloved.. We are the people who Jesus assured his Father will carry on the holy promise, that we all may be one.

All the world sees and knows God’s love through us … by the love we have for each other. By the love we have for every one of God’s children in this imperfect, often unloving world. Here, in that moment between the Ascension and Pentecost, we have Jesus’s prayer and promise to The Father that we shall love.

05/13/2026

Church News:from the Winn Parish Enterprise, May 13

We believe that Jesu rose from the dead, appeared to his friends and a large number pf others, and ascended into heaven, forty days after the resurrection (Acts 1:31). Counting forward from Easter Day, tomorrow is that fortieth day. St Augustine wrote that the Apostles observed It is among the most ancient of feast days: Ascension Day.

The Calendar guides us through the Great Fifty Days of Eastertide, concluding with the Day of Pentecost, Hence, Ascension always falls on Thursday. At St Paul’s, along with many other traditions, we observe Ascension Sunday three days afterward.

The last ten of the Great Fifty Days draw us into contemplation of the Advocate that Jesus sent to humankind:0 The Holy Spirit. The following Sunday, the Day of Pentecost, honors the presence of The Spirit among a large group at the establishment of The Church. And thus will conclude The Great Fifty Days of Eastertide.

St Paul’s Episcopal is an inclusive faith community worshipping in the Anglican liturgical tradition. Please call for church news and service times: {318)5220675. [email protected] or Facebook at StPaulsWinnfield. All are welcome.

Address

206 Pecan Street
Winnfield, LA
71483

Telephone

+13186238376

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