Sermons from St. Martin-in-the-Fields

Acts 2:14a 22-32 The Rev. Laura Palmer


1 Peter 1:3-9 St. Martin-the-Fields

John 20: 19-31 April 16th, 2023

Psalm 16 Year A


Ants in the Pants of Faith

May the words of my mouth and the mediation of my heart be acceptable to thee, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer, AMEN.

As if on cue, the magnolias are gone. The explosion of pink I watched unfold from my kitchen window, as bold as the Easter trumpets that heralded the resurrection only a week ago have disappeared; exited stage left.


The great sugar highs of Easter, both actual and spiritual, have crashed. Green leaves are on the magnolia tree, its blossoms brown on the ground as we begin the 50

Imagine that you’re a contestant on Jeopardy and say, “Let’s try Biblical History for forty.” “Which of Jesus’ disciples was famous for his doubt?’

Thomas. Bing, Bing, Bing! Exactly right. And therein the problem lies. Because Thomas has become a cliché and something not to be—an admonishment-- Don’t be a doubting Thomas.

Clichés make great shortstops. When we assume we know, we stop thinking, probing and imagining, cheating only ourselves.

Thomas needed a second source on the resurrection. In the aftermath of something impossible and unimaginable, he needs proof that it really happened because he wasn’t with the disciples when Jesus first appeared to them. Why should he take their word for somethings so staggeringly unbelievable? As a former journalist, I get it. No editor of I ever had would have run the story.

Like Thomas, Job is often reduced to a cliché by his “patience.” But Job wasn’t patient at all. He was furious and persistent. God ultimately answered Job’s furor and rage by responding directly to him.


Thomas’ “doubt” could only be answered by answered by a direct encounter with the risen Christ and he gets it. John tells us he waited a week. But I’m getting ahead of the story.

Upgrading Thomas to “curious” instead of “doubting” is fairer and more relatable. As someone who’s always curious, I’ve thought a lot about it. Now I no longer say, “I was just curious” when asked to explain something I’ve done – like go to Saigon two months after graduating from college-- because I realize now that in my life, the Holy Spirit has acted through my curiosity. Curiosity has often been the tap on the shoulder that’s steered me to places I never intended to go but recognized the moment I arrived.

Thomas has had a bad rap over the millennium for his doubt. Plenty of priests, more than you might imagine, have doubts and questions about their faith. Curiosity and doubt keep faith alive. Thankfully, we are a church that embraces both.

As author and theologian Frederick Buechner wrote:

Whether your faith is that there is god or that there is not a god, if you don’t have any doubts, you are either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it moving and awake. ( Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, A Theological ABC, Harper San Francisco,, January 1st, 1993)

I am grateful to Thomas and admire his courage in speaking his very inconvenient truth. He had no guilt or shame about resisting someone else’s reality and going along with a majority view he could not with integrity, accept.

Living into the resurrection is different from the great standing ovation we give Jesus every Easter. Living into the resurrection is work and Thomas has something to teach.

Call it doubt or curiosity, it’s what led Thomas to the wounded flesh of Jesus. He wants to put his fingers into his wounds, his flesh, although we never know if he actually did.

Jesus is unfazed by Thomas’ need to know. How easy it would have been to be dismissive. But Jesus meets Thomas where he is, without criticism or judgment. Just as he welcomes all of you and me. We have nothing to hide, but how often we do because of our shame, sin, guilt, or sin. But that’s on us, not Jesus.

Remember what the disciples did immediately after the crucifixion? They locked themselves into a room, prisoners of their fear. How often are we immobilized or imprisoned by our fears that shut life out?

Author and pastor, Nadia Bolz-Weber writes:

The doors were locked that Easter night for fear of what might get in, but the biggest danger came from inside the room, not out…So it is here, sitting amidst fear and locked doors, amidst blame and justifications that the disciples encounter the risen Christ. He crashes their pity party and messes everything up in a way that only an incarnated, crucified and resurrected God can. He took them as they were. Full of fear and I suspect more than a little shame. Because it takes more than locked doors and low self-esteem to keep Jesus out. ( Nadia Bolz-Weber, “Take Me as I Am.” The Corners by Nadia Bolz-Weber, April 19, 2022)

There was nothing weak in Thomas’ faith. It was, in the end, quite robust. Inspired by the Good News of the Risen Christ, he became a missionary to India. Thomas, transformed in his life and work, reminds us that Jesus’ wounds have everything to teach us.

Writes Father Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest:

God uses the very thing that would normally destroy us—the tragic, the sorrowful, the painful, the unjust deaths that leads us all to the bottom of our lives—to transform us. There it is, in one sentence. Are we prepared to trust that? ( Richard Rohr Daily Meditation: 4/21/22)

A Christ with us in our wounds and brokenness. That’s the Jesus I need; the one who promises us that we do not suffer alone and that death is not the end.

On Easter I preached that Mary Magdalene encountered Christ in the darkness of the tomb because she stayed with where her pain was; her deepest wound.

Thomas teaches us that to know Jesus is to know his wounds. Go ahead, Jesus says in effect, “put your hands into my wounds and you will know who I am.” It is what’s perhaps most essential about him.

Think for a moment how you would describe Jesus to someone if you couldn’t use words? Reach out a hand? Share a hug? Hard isn’t it? But it’s a problem American sign language had to solve and here’s how it did:

Place the middle figure of your dominant hand in the palm of the other. And then do the same with the middle figure of your non-dominant hand.

Put your hands into my wounds and you will know who I am. And that will change everything. AMEN

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View PDF - The Reverend Laura Palmer

St. Martin in the Fields

Easter Sunday Year A

April 9th, 2023

A Tale of Two Marys

View PDF - Sunday April 2nd, 2023

View PDF - "Not so Fast"

View PDF - The Rev. Bill Bixby

View PDF - Cassie Houtz
March 19, 2023
Seeing God/Knowing God
Sermon on John 9:1-41

View PDF - March 12, 2023
Sermon on Sin

Eugenie Dieck

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• Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7
• Romans 5:12-19
• Matthew 4:1-11
• Psalm 32

View PDF - The Reverend Laura Palmer
St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields
February 19th, 2023
Year A
Transfiguration

Exodus 24: 12-18
Psalm 2
2 Peter 1: 16-21
Matthew 17: 1-9

View PDF - May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to thee, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer. AMEN.
“If I know Ovid, may I keep my children?” a young slave in Massachusetts wrote who was enslaved at the same time as Absalom Jones, the saint we’re honoring today, Blessed Absalom.
There was no way their paths could have crossed. She was sold or kidnapped in West Africa, brought across an ocean a ship name Phillis and sold for “a trifle” because she was sickly and the ship’s captain thought she’d die. Because she was missing her front teeth, her age was listed as “7” Her new owner named her after the transport ship—Phillis—
Absalom Jones was about 14. He was born into slavery in Delaware.
While their lives were never entwined, their legacies are. We honor and praise Absalom Jones because he was the first African-American Episcopal priest, a prominent abolitionist, and powerful preacher.
Phyliss Wheatley is the first African-American woman to publish a book of poetry. “Her name was a household word among literate colonists,” according to the Poetry Foundation, “and her achievements, a catalyst for the fledgling antislavery movement.”[1] She drew on the Bible for much of her imagery.
Admired by George Washington her work was mocked and dismissed by none other than Thomas Jefferson. We know that he had slaves, had children with one of his slaves, Sally Hemmings, but there’s still a biting cruelty reading his actual words.
Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Wheatley but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.[2]
“If I know Ovid may I keep my children?” Wheatley asked in a letter never sent.
That question reveals the fear burning within her despite a life with a prominent Boston family who educated her – she spoke Latin and Greek—and helped her publish a book of poetry at 21 that was celebrated here and England.
The Wheatleys freed her after her book was published then died a year later. She married briefly and unhappily, lived in poverty and never published a second book of poems, for which she’d written more than 100.Even knowing Ovid, she was unable to keep her three children, who died in infancy. She and her third baby were buried in the same unmarked grave.
Phyliss Wheatley came into public consciousness for many through the extraordinary 1619 Project, a tour de force Pulitzer Prize winning book that’s taken me nearly a year to read because it’s overwhelming in scope and in pain. It depicts the totality of what his country was built on beyond the noble ideas of liberty and equality—the systemic exploitation of African-Americans, a gruesome and evil history, hiding in plain sight—like the glorious stained-glass window behind us which contains a panel with a dark-skinned boy with sitting at the feet of a white colonist.
Absalom Jones was more fortunate – if that’s the right word-- than his contemporary Phillis Wheatley. He taught himself to read in part by studying the New Testament. Jones might have been quite familiar with today’s Gospel passage – simple words with a profound message--“Love one another as I have loved you.”He’d certainly live the out its truth in the decades to come.
Jones’ mother and six siblings were sold when he was 16. Jones’ master brought him to Philadelphia and where he worked during the day and was allowed to attend a Quaker school at night. He married Mary King while still enslaved in 1770 and would later buy his wife’s freedom before his own because the mother’s enslaved status determined that of the children’s.
The year Phillis Wheatley died at 31—1784—was the year Absalom Jones was freed and his life began to take off. He was 38 and had become licensed to preach-- with his friend Richard Allen at St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia an integrated parish. Their evangelism was contagious. The black congregation grew rapidly. The rest of the church felt uncomfortable and the blacks were asked to sit in the balcony which they did, briefly. After the first prayer when they walked out.
The two men then diverged theologically but remained friends. Richard Allen became the first African-American to be ordained in the Methodist Church.Blessed Absalom, created The African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas in Philadelphia in 1794, and in 1802, became the first African American Episcopal priest.
Presiding Bishop Michael Curry is preaching there this morning. In anticipation of that he said:
Absalom Jones did much of his work during the time of the Yellow Fever, a pandemic that hit this country and caused sickness, hardship, and death. In that time of pandemic, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, drove ambulances, took care of the sick, didn’t flee the city but stayed in the city to be instruments of God’s healing. They did that to heal the body, their work to make the church, the church for all people, all of God’s children are welcomed cherished and empowered and sent forth to bear witness to God’s love, the way of love as Jesus taught us.[3]
“As I have loved you,” is the way of love Jesus taught us. It is a fierce and fearless love, unconditional and costly.How often do we miss, or choose to ignore, the stakes of this love?
Jesus was not giving us a tip to live our “best lives” in Oprah-speak. He gave us a commandment. There is no greater love than the willingness to lay down’s one life for a friend as Jones and Allen and so many other African Americans were willing to do during the Yellow Fever pandemic—it’s estimated 20 times more Blacks worked to save victims than whites, many of whom fled the cities.PPE, vaccines, masks, antibiotics were still hundreds of years away.
This is loving as I have loved you. Jesus promises us that if we do this, we will be his friends we will know him, as he is known by God.
The shining light of Absalom Jones reflects the light of Christ that so clearly burned in him. As it did, no doubt, in Phillis Wheatley, who died, as one of the very least of these.
The horror in her question, “If I know Ovid, may I keep my children?” can’t be contained or explained, but it can stir inside us, as it does me, as a reminder of all the work that still needs to be done and that saints like Absalom Jones and saviors like Jesus Christ, can’t do it alone.

AMEN

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