Saturday after Ash Wednesday, March 8, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Come and take it
Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth. Hearken to my prayer, and attend to the sound of my pleading.
After watching the IMAX documentary “Cities of the Future” we took Miles and Jasper to watch “A Star is Rising.” On three screens, narrated by a reconstituted Sam Houston, the film showed us as much of early Texas history as fifteen minutes would hold. After the Alamo the Texian army fought battles at Refugio, Coleto, Goliad and finally San Jacinto, all in March of 1836. At San Jacinto Houston led his small army against the larger Mexican army and defeated the Mexicans in a 12 minute surprise attack. Victory, and independence, was theirs!
We had watched a Daytripper episode on this revolutionary month in Texas a few days earlier, and Jasper and Miles loved it. This was even better, because after the show we found two spots in the museum where Daytripper host Chet Garner had talked with the museum director on screen, and the boys stood in the same spot Chet stood. They were so proud.
Nearby we found a replica of the famous cannon used in those 19th century battles, a cannon which had been given to the Texians by Santa Anna and the Mexican Army in 1831 to defend against Indian tribes, especially the Comanches.
By 1835 revolution was in the air and the Mexicans demanded their cannon back. At the town of Gonzales the Texians refused, waving a white flag with the words “Come and Take It!” They also arrested the Mexican soldiers who came to retrieve the cannon. Then they buried the cannon in a peach orchard for a couple of weeks, until the Mexicans sent 100 soldiers to “make a more serious request for the gun.”
Now the cannon was unearthed, mounted on a cotton wagon and fired twice in the Battle of Gonzales, the first battle in the Texas Revolution. Later it was used during the battle of the Alamo and then commandeered by the victorious Mexicans, who buried it again, where it stayed for seventeen eventful years, during which Texas won its war with Santa Anna, become an independent republic, then a state of the United States. The Lone Star State.
If you move oppression from your midst and satisfy the afflicted, then light shall rise for you in the darkness. The ancient ruins shall be rebuilt for your sake, and you shall raise up the foundations from ages past. You shall be called “repairer of the breach!” They shall call you “restorer of ruined homesteads.”
At the Bullock State Historical Museum in Austin, where we spent the day, the cannon on display is, as I said, a replica. The original was unearthed on the Alamo grounds by Samuel Maverick in 1852 and sent to New York by his widow, where it was recast into a bell that now hangs in the belfry of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in San Antonio.
Hearken O Lord, to my prayer and attend to the sound of my pleading. I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked man, says the Lord, but rather in his conversion, that he may live.
Mrs. Maverick turned the sword into a plowshare, so to speak. Bells do not kill. Although it’s exciting for the boys in their days of doing battle any way they can, the bell rings true and the bell rings loud in the Episcopalian call to worship. And the old cannon remade will not be part of any war, any more.
(Isaiah 58, Psalm 86, Ezekiel 33, Luke 5)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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