Sermons from St. Martin-in-the-Fields
Feb 27, 2022 |
Shining Like the Sun
| The Rev. Barbara Ballenger
Shining Like the Sun
Tune into the sermon from the Rev. Barbara Ballenger for the Last Sunday After the Epiphany, February 27, 2022.
Support St. Martin’s mission and ministry by giving online: stmartinec.org/give
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Support St. Martin’s mission and ministry by giving online: stmartinec.org/give
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Feb 27, 2022 |
Our Transfiguration Story
| The Rev. Carol Duncan
Our Transfiguration Story
Listen to this week’s sermon from LIFT Worship from the Rev. Carol Duncan for the Last Sunday after the Epiphany, February 27, 2022
Learn more about LIFT, Living in Faith Together, at stmartinec.org/lift
Today’s Readings:
Readings were taken from God’s Word, My Voice: A Children’s Lectionary
Transcript:
You all just heard the Gospel as I read it. Now let me tell you how our story rises out of the biblical story. You are in this story. I hope you will put your body into the story to make the story your own.
So, here’s how we’re gonna do it. We are going up a mountain with Jesus, Peter, James, and John.
I invite you to step out into the aisle to discover for yourself and to show others how it feels to climb this mountain. Take big steps in place as though you are climbing up a steep mountain. Take some deep breaths because you get out of breath as you climb.
We get to the top. The climb has made us sleepy. Find a place to sit down and close your eyes, because you are so sleepy. Now with your eyes closed, try to see what is happening in our story. Suddenly the air around us changes. We are inside a glowing light. In a sort of dream we see that Jesus’ clothes have become dazzling white. Now two other people come to stand next to Jesus. And somehow in your dream you know who these people are. One is Moses who led God’s people for 40 years through the wilderness to the promised land. The other is Elijah who led God’s people when a wicked king and queen worshiped idols instead of worshiping God. Moses and Elijah each put an arm around Jesus because they tell him his life on earth is coming to an end. Jesus is going to come and live with them in the realm of everlasting love.
As you see this happen, a great love for Jesus swells up in your own heart. Can you feel that love and awe there on the mountain? And so you want to do something for Jesus because now you know he will be leaving you in this life. You want to keep Jesus with you. Maybe we could put the LIFT tent back up for Jesus.
But now a cloud comes and covers you so you are afraid. Breathe in the cold dampness of the cloud with the light shining through it. A great voice like thunder surrounds you in the cloud. “This is my Son. He is the One I have chosen. Obey him.” The voice fades but the echoes ring in your ears up on that mountain.
And now you sort of wake up and you are back in your seat, or come and sit back if you have left it. And if you’re very very much asleep you can just listen.
So we are back on level ground at St. Martin’s, here’s where our story comes into the biblical story. You know that our priest Rev. Barb Ballenger has been with us for most of your lives, certainly for the whole time of LIFT. Now she is leaving us to go be a priest at St. Peter’s in Glenside. I am as sad about this as Peter and James and John were sad to learn that Jesus was leaving them. But I am also as glad as they were to know that great person Barb and that great person Jesus. She has taught me to know more about Jesus. I wish she could be with us longer, forever. But I know that my life has changed and grown because of her. I will keep faithful to LIFT and to loving Jesus as she taught me. I hope you know what a light has shown on us because of Barb. You may come to know it more and more in your continuing life at St. Martin’s. We have been blessed for sure. And that is the good news for today.
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Learn more about LIFT, Living in Faith Together, at stmartinec.org/lift
Today’s Readings:
Readings were taken from God’s Word, My Voice: A Children’s Lectionary
Transcript:
You all just heard the Gospel as I read it. Now let me tell you how our story rises out of the biblical story. You are in this story. I hope you will put your body into the story to make the story your own.
So, here’s how we’re gonna do it. We are going up a mountain with Jesus, Peter, James, and John.
I invite you to step out into the aisle to discover for yourself and to show others how it feels to climb this mountain. Take big steps in place as though you are climbing up a steep mountain. Take some deep breaths because you get out of breath as you climb.
We get to the top. The climb has made us sleepy. Find a place to sit down and close your eyes, because you are so sleepy. Now with your eyes closed, try to see what is happening in our story. Suddenly the air around us changes. We are inside a glowing light. In a sort of dream we see that Jesus’ clothes have become dazzling white. Now two other people come to stand next to Jesus. And somehow in your dream you know who these people are. One is Moses who led God’s people for 40 years through the wilderness to the promised land. The other is Elijah who led God’s people when a wicked king and queen worshiped idols instead of worshiping God. Moses and Elijah each put an arm around Jesus because they tell him his life on earth is coming to an end. Jesus is going to come and live with them in the realm of everlasting love.
As you see this happen, a great love for Jesus swells up in your own heart. Can you feel that love and awe there on the mountain? And so you want to do something for Jesus because now you know he will be leaving you in this life. You want to keep Jesus with you. Maybe we could put the LIFT tent back up for Jesus.
But now a cloud comes and covers you so you are afraid. Breathe in the cold dampness of the cloud with the light shining through it. A great voice like thunder surrounds you in the cloud. “This is my Son. He is the One I have chosen. Obey him.” The voice fades but the echoes ring in your ears up on that mountain.
And now you sort of wake up and you are back in your seat, or come and sit back if you have left it. And if you’re very very much asleep you can just listen.
So we are back on level ground at St. Martin’s, here’s where our story comes into the biblical story. You know that our priest Rev. Barb Ballenger has been with us for most of your lives, certainly for the whole time of LIFT. Now she is leaving us to go be a priest at St. Peter’s in Glenside. I am as sad about this as Peter and James and John were sad to learn that Jesus was leaving them. But I am also as glad as they were to know that great person Barb and that great person Jesus. She has taught me to know more about Jesus. I wish she could be with us longer, forever. But I know that my life has changed and grown because of her. I will keep faithful to LIFT and to loving Jesus as she taught me. I hope you know what a light has shown on us because of Barb. You may come to know it more and more in your continuing life at St. Martin’s. We have been blessed for sure. And that is the good news for today.
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Feb 20, 2022 |
Don't Be A Stump
| The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
Don't Be A Stump
Tune into the sermon from the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the Seventh Sunday After the Epiphany, February 20, 2022.
Support St. Martin’s mission and ministry by giving online: stmartinec.org/give
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Don’t Be a Stump
The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
February 20, 2022
Please join me in the spirit of prayer.
I grew up in a home where there were mixed messages about love. I might not be alone in that. My mother taught me at least two versions of love. One: love turns you into a stump. The second one she also taught me was: love causes you to take a stand.
Now, the stump lesson came through a children’s book she used to like to read to us all: The Giving Tree. Now, in that story there is a boy and there is a tree and the tree is a she. The she-ness is important here, because as the story goes the little boy loved the tree and the tree loved the little boy and they delighted in each other and played and frolicked and slowly the boy took things from the tree, and she gave them out of her delight. He wanted the apples, he got the apples. He wanted the leaves, he got the leaves. He wanted the branches, he got the branches. He wanted her trunk, he got her trunk. Until she was a stump.
Love evidently means giving your whole life away until you’re a stump. My mom stopped reading us that story as her feminism grew, and as she made progress in Al-Anon. My sisters and I like to joke that she was of the fundamentalist branch of Al-Anon. Boy, could she detach with love. It’s a problematic story. I’m not the only one to say this. This notion that love is so sacrificial that you make yourself disappear.
She taught me the “take a stand” lesson about love at church. During the late 70’s, during liturgical reform and prayer book reform, my mom was the first person at Christ Church in Brunswick, New Jersey to stand up after the Sanctus. Remember, back in the day after the Sanctus was sung, everybody hit their knees. My mom called this “mowing them down.” And there I was as a small child in our colonial box pew and there was mom standing. The only one. And I wanted to hide in a weird mix of embarrassment and pride.
Then Communion came. We gathered around the altar rail and she was still standing. The only one to stand to receive Communion. It caught on eventually. But what she was teaching me with courage and grace and a deep faith was that our human dignity has been restored and recognized by God so that in God’s presence we can stand in our dignity. We don’t need to kneel. God has restored us and recognized us as God’s image here on earth, and so she stood with dignity and I learned that to love is to stand up.
Now, if you are one of the people who has been sticking with Jesus’s sermon on the plain in Luke, are you still listening? That’s how our passage begins today. “Are you still listening?” This is challenging stuff, these beatitudes and woes and challenging instructions for those of us who might be disciples, and you might wonder with this lesson about loving enemies and praying for those who abuse you, whether Jesus is calling us to be a stump for the sake of love or to take a stand for the sake of love.
For me, it is the second and by now, you know me, I will explain why. For fidelity to the text and pastoral reasons, I believe we are called by Jesus to stand as we love our enemies. Remember that Jesus is preaching to his disciples. He has done the Beatitudes and the Woes. He has told us very clearly that if we follow him we can expect to be reviled and he said also, “Woe to those who are admired.” Right before the current passage, Jesus says, “Woe to you when all speak well of you. For so our ancestors did to the false prophets.” Jesus is telling us that if we choose to be disciples we are called to be truth-telling prophets, and as truth-telling prophets we should expect to have mixed reviews, if not full out enemies.
So this teaching about enemies, this teaching about loving your enemies, comes from the fact that we’re gonna have some, and then what do you do? And Jesus is really clear. He said twice in this passage, “Love your enemies.”
Now, if you thought the Trinity was hard, or the Incarnation or the Resurrection, I think “Love your enemies” is right up there on the Christian Challenges. And Jesus knew we would struggle. He knew his people would struggle, so he teaches them a new thing.
You might know the German philosopher Hannah Arendt for her Banality of Evil: Trial of Eichmann. She also has a book called The Roots of Totalitarianism where she points out that it’s very easy to form community when you identify an enemy. If you have an enemy to react against you can create internal cohesion and identity against that enemy. And she is of course talking about Germany in the 30’s and 40s.
Jesus is not going to give disciples that option. They cannot be a community that gains its identity by having enemies. They will have enemies, but they cannot get a cheap internal sense of fellowship by having those enemies, because they must love those enemies.
Now we might think, well we are Episcopalians, we don’t do that. We like to say other people do that. But we do that all the time! Every time one of our members says, “Oh those Evangelicals! Oh those Fundamentalists!” we’re doing it. We’re defining ourselves against somebody else. Jesus doesn’t let us do that. We are to love our enemies which simply means that our identity is in that love not in its opposition.
Our identity is in the love not in the opposition and because of our life in God we have through Christ, we have the spiritual freedom granted to us to exchange good for ill, to regard the good of the other, which is to love them.
Jesus then gives some amazingly striking (literally) examples. And these are tough love examples and they come from knowing our human dignity is from God, restored and recognized and delighted in by God. How do we love the enemy? He gives some examples: the slap example, the strip example. In Matthew the extra mile example, and back in Luke the lending example.
And what I want to say, coming out of wonderful theology done by Walker Wink in the context of South Africa during Apartheid, there is a very different reading of these examples. These examples have too often been used to rationalize abuse, to justify oppression, to create a passivity among Christians in this face of the intolerable. Wink found in South Africa a different reading.
So for example, the slap - in the ancient world, a backhanded slap is a slap of disrespect. A superior slaps an inferior this way. To turn your cheek is an act of resistance. Forcing that person to slap you the other way, like an equal. This is resistance from knowing your dignity and insisting on their dignity. You are regarding their good by holding them accountable in asking them to recognize what’s real and true. You are equals.
Stripping - same thing. In the ancient world, it was legal to take your cloak. That was a legal way to get a debt repaid. And this whole little bit hinges on how many pieces of clothing people had in the ancient world. Any guesses? A cloak and a shirt and what else? Nope, two. You had two pieces of clothing so if you took the cloak and then took the shirt, you were naked. This nakedness was another form of resistance. If you are gonna treat me as less than human, I’m gonna call you on it by embarrassing you in this public space by getting naked and showing your exploitation. Once again, resistance. Non-violent resistance claiming integrity, claiming dignity on an equal basis.
Same with the extra mile in matthew. A roman soldier could impress you in his service for one mile. Well, if you take on two that’s you asserting your agency. That’s you asserting your identity based in the generosity of god. That’s you asserting your dignity which your oppressor wants nothing to do with.
And on and on and on. You see where I’m going. If you read these examples the wrong way, we teach submission to oppression. If we teach them the way I think Jesus was teaching them, we learn transformational resistance. Transformational resistance that recognizes the necessity of dignity in all parties. Jesus is promoting the agency and spiritual freedom of his followers. Your identity is not as a victim. Your identity is not conferred on you by the would-be enemy. Your identity and agencies come from you from your life in Christ and your life in the Christian community. Remember you are a child of God. That little bit in this passage gets missed, doesn’t it. “Remember you are a child of God.” All things stem from that identity.
So why is this so crucial? Why am I so wound up about this? Well, I am the son of a fundamentalist Al-Anon member, and it rubbed off on me, I know. I was raised on feminism all the way and I’m proud of that. I’m passionate about this because these stories are used to teach an unhealthy form of love. A sick form of love that gives away way too much and asks us to deface our dignity, destroy our health, ruin our self-regard to adapt to a dominating power however that comes.
Pastorally, I’ve seen too much of this and I will not be a false prophet about it. I will be a truth-telling prophet about it. In my ministries with women in so many cases, I see women who have been taught to sacrifice everything just like that Giving Tree, to disregard themselves to the point of self-destruction. Giving up their safety, giving up their physical health, giving up the regard that is their right for the sake of abusers, narcissists, hateful, neglectful people, cautioned too often by pastors who say “Oh just put up with it. Love your enemy. “
At the 8 o’clock service one person reminded me about his grandmother who was married to an abusive alcoholic and she went to her priest here in Philadelphia and the priest said, “oh just go home and be meek and mild.” Because that’s how Christians are, aren’t we? Well, he said the good news is she divorced him, and she still went to Communion. She took a stand for love.
I am passionate, I admit. I say no to that teaching that turns people into doormats for the sake of Christ. I say yes to standing up in love for the dignity God has so restored in us, because love, real love, is between people who respect and recognize the full dignity of the people engaging in that love. Love recognizes and respects the dignity of all involved. Love elevates the disregarded and it brings down the overly regarded, the haughty.
There is no place for domination in love. Love resists mistreatment. It resists mistreatment so to reestablish and repair right relationship in the joy of God-given love which includes all parties in God’s dignity.
“Love your enemies” is not a request for warm, sentimental, gushy feelings towards our oppressors, tormentors and violators. Love is simply the desire for the good for each person who would be our enemy. For our own safety, and sanity and well-being we can love in a detached way. We can love from a distance. We can wish a person well in an openhearted way while keeping our limited boundaries in tact. This is the way of dignity and integrity. We can release a person from our life in love, handing them over to God for God’s care where we no longer can do it.
In short, I guess I sum up my sermon as I sum up advice to many people I work with pastorally: Don’t be a stump. Stand up for love - God’s love. The love that God gave everything for to restore our dignity. God gave everything in God’s commitment to restore God’s good creation in us and renew us in our risen image of Christ. So, my friends, let us be faithful to what God has done for us without trying to repeat God’s work, letting God be God and letting ourselves be the humans that God made us to be in our dignity, our limits and our grace.
Amen.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Support St. Martin’s mission and ministry by giving online: stmartinec.org/give
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Don’t Be a Stump
The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
February 20, 2022
Please join me in the spirit of prayer.
I grew up in a home where there were mixed messages about love. I might not be alone in that. My mother taught me at least two versions of love. One: love turns you into a stump. The second one she also taught me was: love causes you to take a stand.
Now, the stump lesson came through a children’s book she used to like to read to us all: The Giving Tree. Now, in that story there is a boy and there is a tree and the tree is a she. The she-ness is important here, because as the story goes the little boy loved the tree and the tree loved the little boy and they delighted in each other and played and frolicked and slowly the boy took things from the tree, and she gave them out of her delight. He wanted the apples, he got the apples. He wanted the leaves, he got the leaves. He wanted the branches, he got the branches. He wanted her trunk, he got her trunk. Until she was a stump.
Love evidently means giving your whole life away until you’re a stump. My mom stopped reading us that story as her feminism grew, and as she made progress in Al-Anon. My sisters and I like to joke that she was of the fundamentalist branch of Al-Anon. Boy, could she detach with love. It’s a problematic story. I’m not the only one to say this. This notion that love is so sacrificial that you make yourself disappear.
She taught me the “take a stand” lesson about love at church. During the late 70’s, during liturgical reform and prayer book reform, my mom was the first person at Christ Church in Brunswick, New Jersey to stand up after the Sanctus. Remember, back in the day after the Sanctus was sung, everybody hit their knees. My mom called this “mowing them down.” And there I was as a small child in our colonial box pew and there was mom standing. The only one. And I wanted to hide in a weird mix of embarrassment and pride.
Then Communion came. We gathered around the altar rail and she was still standing. The only one to stand to receive Communion. It caught on eventually. But what she was teaching me with courage and grace and a deep faith was that our human dignity has been restored and recognized by God so that in God’s presence we can stand in our dignity. We don’t need to kneel. God has restored us and recognized us as God’s image here on earth, and so she stood with dignity and I learned that to love is to stand up.
Now, if you are one of the people who has been sticking with Jesus’s sermon on the plain in Luke, are you still listening? That’s how our passage begins today. “Are you still listening?” This is challenging stuff, these beatitudes and woes and challenging instructions for those of us who might be disciples, and you might wonder with this lesson about loving enemies and praying for those who abuse you, whether Jesus is calling us to be a stump for the sake of love or to take a stand for the sake of love.
For me, it is the second and by now, you know me, I will explain why. For fidelity to the text and pastoral reasons, I believe we are called by Jesus to stand as we love our enemies. Remember that Jesus is preaching to his disciples. He has done the Beatitudes and the Woes. He has told us very clearly that if we follow him we can expect to be reviled and he said also, “Woe to those who are admired.” Right before the current passage, Jesus says, “Woe to you when all speak well of you. For so our ancestors did to the false prophets.” Jesus is telling us that if we choose to be disciples we are called to be truth-telling prophets, and as truth-telling prophets we should expect to have mixed reviews, if not full out enemies.
So this teaching about enemies, this teaching about loving your enemies, comes from the fact that we’re gonna have some, and then what do you do? And Jesus is really clear. He said twice in this passage, “Love your enemies.”
Now, if you thought the Trinity was hard, or the Incarnation or the Resurrection, I think “Love your enemies” is right up there on the Christian Challenges. And Jesus knew we would struggle. He knew his people would struggle, so he teaches them a new thing.
You might know the German philosopher Hannah Arendt for her Banality of Evil: Trial of Eichmann. She also has a book called The Roots of Totalitarianism where she points out that it’s very easy to form community when you identify an enemy. If you have an enemy to react against you can create internal cohesion and identity against that enemy. And she is of course talking about Germany in the 30’s and 40s.
Jesus is not going to give disciples that option. They cannot be a community that gains its identity by having enemies. They will have enemies, but they cannot get a cheap internal sense of fellowship by having those enemies, because they must love those enemies.
Now we might think, well we are Episcopalians, we don’t do that. We like to say other people do that. But we do that all the time! Every time one of our members says, “Oh those Evangelicals! Oh those Fundamentalists!” we’re doing it. We’re defining ourselves against somebody else. Jesus doesn’t let us do that. We are to love our enemies which simply means that our identity is in that love not in its opposition.
Our identity is in the love not in the opposition and because of our life in God we have through Christ, we have the spiritual freedom granted to us to exchange good for ill, to regard the good of the other, which is to love them.
Jesus then gives some amazingly striking (literally) examples. And these are tough love examples and they come from knowing our human dignity is from God, restored and recognized and delighted in by God. How do we love the enemy? He gives some examples: the slap example, the strip example. In Matthew the extra mile example, and back in Luke the lending example.
And what I want to say, coming out of wonderful theology done by Walker Wink in the context of South Africa during Apartheid, there is a very different reading of these examples. These examples have too often been used to rationalize abuse, to justify oppression, to create a passivity among Christians in this face of the intolerable. Wink found in South Africa a different reading.
So for example, the slap - in the ancient world, a backhanded slap is a slap of disrespect. A superior slaps an inferior this way. To turn your cheek is an act of resistance. Forcing that person to slap you the other way, like an equal. This is resistance from knowing your dignity and insisting on their dignity. You are regarding their good by holding them accountable in asking them to recognize what’s real and true. You are equals.
Stripping - same thing. In the ancient world, it was legal to take your cloak. That was a legal way to get a debt repaid. And this whole little bit hinges on how many pieces of clothing people had in the ancient world. Any guesses? A cloak and a shirt and what else? Nope, two. You had two pieces of clothing so if you took the cloak and then took the shirt, you were naked. This nakedness was another form of resistance. If you are gonna treat me as less than human, I’m gonna call you on it by embarrassing you in this public space by getting naked and showing your exploitation. Once again, resistance. Non-violent resistance claiming integrity, claiming dignity on an equal basis.
Same with the extra mile in matthew. A roman soldier could impress you in his service for one mile. Well, if you take on two that’s you asserting your agency. That’s you asserting your identity based in the generosity of god. That’s you asserting your dignity which your oppressor wants nothing to do with.
And on and on and on. You see where I’m going. If you read these examples the wrong way, we teach submission to oppression. If we teach them the way I think Jesus was teaching them, we learn transformational resistance. Transformational resistance that recognizes the necessity of dignity in all parties. Jesus is promoting the agency and spiritual freedom of his followers. Your identity is not as a victim. Your identity is not conferred on you by the would-be enemy. Your identity and agencies come from you from your life in Christ and your life in the Christian community. Remember you are a child of God. That little bit in this passage gets missed, doesn’t it. “Remember you are a child of God.” All things stem from that identity.
So why is this so crucial? Why am I so wound up about this? Well, I am the son of a fundamentalist Al-Anon member, and it rubbed off on me, I know. I was raised on feminism all the way and I’m proud of that. I’m passionate about this because these stories are used to teach an unhealthy form of love. A sick form of love that gives away way too much and asks us to deface our dignity, destroy our health, ruin our self-regard to adapt to a dominating power however that comes.
Pastorally, I’ve seen too much of this and I will not be a false prophet about it. I will be a truth-telling prophet about it. In my ministries with women in so many cases, I see women who have been taught to sacrifice everything just like that Giving Tree, to disregard themselves to the point of self-destruction. Giving up their safety, giving up their physical health, giving up the regard that is their right for the sake of abusers, narcissists, hateful, neglectful people, cautioned too often by pastors who say “Oh just put up with it. Love your enemy. “
At the 8 o’clock service one person reminded me about his grandmother who was married to an abusive alcoholic and she went to her priest here in Philadelphia and the priest said, “oh just go home and be meek and mild.” Because that’s how Christians are, aren’t we? Well, he said the good news is she divorced him, and she still went to Communion. She took a stand for love.
I am passionate, I admit. I say no to that teaching that turns people into doormats for the sake of Christ. I say yes to standing up in love for the dignity God has so restored in us, because love, real love, is between people who respect and recognize the full dignity of the people engaging in that love. Love recognizes and respects the dignity of all involved. Love elevates the disregarded and it brings down the overly regarded, the haughty.
There is no place for domination in love. Love resists mistreatment. It resists mistreatment so to reestablish and repair right relationship in the joy of God-given love which includes all parties in God’s dignity.
“Love your enemies” is not a request for warm, sentimental, gushy feelings towards our oppressors, tormentors and violators. Love is simply the desire for the good for each person who would be our enemy. For our own safety, and sanity and well-being we can love in a detached way. We can love from a distance. We can wish a person well in an openhearted way while keeping our limited boundaries in tact. This is the way of dignity and integrity. We can release a person from our life in love, handing them over to God for God’s care where we no longer can do it.
In short, I guess I sum up my sermon as I sum up advice to many people I work with pastorally: Don’t be a stump. Stand up for love - God’s love. The love that God gave everything for to restore our dignity. God gave everything in God’s commitment to restore God’s good creation in us and renew us in our risen image of Christ. So, my friends, let us be faithful to what God has done for us without trying to repeat God’s work, letting God be God and letting ourselves be the humans that God made us to be in our dignity, our limits and our grace.
Amen.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Feb 20, 2022 |
Three Little Wolves
| The Rev. Barbara Ballenger
Three Little Wolves
Oh my goodness, I love that gospel reading. Let's all have a seat.
Oh let's see, I want to show you this now: one of my favorite peacemakers. She's kind of a shero - that's like a woman who's a hero and her name, oh my gosh here we go, her name is Dorothy Day. Who here's ever heard of Dorothy Day? Oh my gosh, Dorothy Day was a wonderful peacemaker. Oh my gosh she's my favorite, and Dorothy Day would love this gospel because she wanted the world to be peaceful and she knew that the way to be peaceful was to love people who were difficult to love.
In fact she had this saying - this is how she lived her life: she said we need to make it easy for people to be good. How can we make it easier for people to be good? That's another way of saying, "well how can I love people who hurt me? How can I love my enemies? How can I do that? And she said, well we just try to make it easier for people to be good. That doesn't mean that it's okay for them to hit you on one side of your face or the other or that it's okay for them to use bad words or okay for them to treat you badly That's not okay. That's not peace. But we can make it easier for those people who hurt us to be good by the way we treat them.
So, I have a story, because sometimes it's hard to imagine how to do that and so we need to tell maybe a whole different story of how to be in the world and this story is called the Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig. If you'd like to take a look at this you can come up afterwards. I'm not going to read from it but this is where it comes from. This story I'm going to tell is based on this book by Eugene Trevizas.
Sometimes you have to tell a whole different kind of story. Once upon a time there were three little wolves. They were soft and they were cuddly and they were sweet and they were kind and their mother called them together one day and said, "little wolves it's time for you to go out into the world, time for you to build you a house." And they said, "okay mom we can do that" and she said, "but one caution: beware of the big bad pig. "No problem mom" they said, and off they went.
And as they were making their way they saw a kangaroo who had a wheelbarrow full of bricks. "Oh dear kangaroo" they said, "could you lend us some of those bricks? We would like to make us a house." And the kangaroo said, "well of course, because I have far too many bricks than I can use." And so they took those bricks and they built themselves a very solid, very sturdy brick house and when it was done they were out in the backyard playing croquet when down the road came the big bad pig. He knocked on the door, "little wolves, little wolves, let me come in." "Not by the hairs of our chinny chin chin and not for all the tea in our china teapot" they said. "Then I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house in."
But you can't blow down a house made of bricks with just your breath even if it was big bad piggy breath and so the big bad pig - they didn't call him big and bad for nothing - he went down and he came back and he had a sledge jammer and he sledged hammered that house all the way down till it was nothing but rubble. Those poor little wolves got away with with barely their tea in their teapot.
Well, they thought, "perhaps, perhaps we just need to build a stronger house." And so it happened over and over again the three little wolves would build an even stronger house and the big bad pig would come down, try to blow it down with his big bad piggy breath, figure out he couldn't do that, would go back get something, knock it down. So they built the house out of poured concrete and the big bad pig came and knocked it down with a jackhammer and they built another house out of iron bars and barbed wire and reinforced steel and the big bad big came back and blew it up with dynamite.
"Well" said three little wolves, "perhaps we're going about this all wrong. Perhaps it's our building material. Perhaps we need to think about this a whole new way." And just then down the road came a flamingo with a wheelbarrow full of flowers. "Ah" said the three little wolves, "perhaps this is our answer and so they said, "dear flamingo, could you please lend us some of your flowers? We would like to build a house." And the flamingo said, "sure, I have far more flowers than I can use." And the three little wolves built themselves a lovely house of flowers. There were daffodils on one wall and cherry blossoms on the other. There were roses on another wall there were blue bonnets, and the floor was dandelions and it swayed in the breeze and was very fragile. Well, they were in the back playing hopscotch when down the road came the big bad pig, who rang the blue bell on the door. "Little wolves, little wolves, let me come in." "No not by the hair by chitty chin chins or all the tea leaves in our china teapot." "Then I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house in."
Oh and the big bad pig breathed in the smell of those beautiful flowers and something in the big bad pig changed with that lovely scent, and right then and there the big bad pig decided that he was going to be a big good pig. And he began to dance the tarantella because he was just so happy inside and the little wolves looked out and they were a little worried at first, because sometimes people can trick you up, but after a while the pig was so happy and dancing about and being such a different sort of pig that they opened the door and they invited the pig inside, and they all had tea from their china teapot and once they realized that that big bad pig was now really a big good pig and they could trust him they said, "You know what pig, you can stay here as long as you like." And the pig did and they all lived happily and peacefully ever after, and that's the story of the Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig. Those three little wolves who made it easier for that big pig to be a good pig and to change what the future looked like because they loved that pig as they love themselves, and that's good news. To that we can say Amen! Amen.
Feb 13, 2022 |
Absalom Jones
| The Rev. Carol Duncan
Absalom Jones
Due to technical issues with our live-stream, we are unable to provide a video recording of this week's LIFT sermon. Please find a transcript of the sermon below.
Absalom Jones
The Rev. Carol Duncan
February 13, 2022
Today we remember Absalom Jones. For Absalom, loving God and his neighbors changed his very hard life into a blessing for all of us. Let me tell you a bit about his life.
Absalom was born enslaved on a farm not more than two hours from here. He was born in 1746, before our country had its name. As a very little boy he had to work in the farm fields. When he was eight years old, his master who owned him brought Absalom into the big house to serve the family. Is anyone here eight years old? At eight, Absalom was already working full time. Visitors to that house would give him pennies because he was helpful and polite. With the pennies, he was able to buy a speller and then a New Testament. He asked anyone who knew how to teach him to read. He said he believed books saved his life because they kept him out of trouble and taught him about God. Absalom dearly loved God and books.
When he grew up, Absalom continued to work so hard that he was able to buy his own freedom. When he got the paper that said he owned himself, he changed his name. Instead of having the last name of the man who owned him, he took the name Jones, because he said it was the most American sounding name he knew.
Absalom wanted to help other people to succeed as he had succeeded. He helped found the Free Africa Society to help freed slaves get food and places to live.
In 1793 a terrible disease called Yellow Fever struck Philadelphia. Absalom organized the Free Africa Society to serve as nurses and attendants. He said it gave them a feeling of freedom to help.
These are his words that he wrote: “It was very uncommon, at this time, to find anyone that would go near, much more handle, a sick or dead person. This has been no small satisfaction to us; for, we think, that when a doctor was not attainable, we have been the instruments, in the hand of God, for saving the lives of some hundreds of our suffering fellow mortals.”
They turned their Free Africa Society into a church, the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas. It was the first Episcopal Church for Black worshippers. Absalom became the first Black Episcopal priest in the world. Absalom is one of my favorite saints because he shows me how to love God even in the hardest times. Absalom shows me how to keep loving God and all my neighbors.
Absalom Jones
The Rev. Carol Duncan
February 13, 2022
Today we remember Absalom Jones. For Absalom, loving God and his neighbors changed his very hard life into a blessing for all of us. Let me tell you a bit about his life.
Absalom was born enslaved on a farm not more than two hours from here. He was born in 1746, before our country had its name. As a very little boy he had to work in the farm fields. When he was eight years old, his master who owned him brought Absalom into the big house to serve the family. Is anyone here eight years old? At eight, Absalom was already working full time. Visitors to that house would give him pennies because he was helpful and polite. With the pennies, he was able to buy a speller and then a New Testament. He asked anyone who knew how to teach him to read. He said he believed books saved his life because they kept him out of trouble and taught him about God. Absalom dearly loved God and books.
When he grew up, Absalom continued to work so hard that he was able to buy his own freedom. When he got the paper that said he owned himself, he changed his name. Instead of having the last name of the man who owned him, he took the name Jones, because he said it was the most American sounding name he knew.
Absalom wanted to help other people to succeed as he had succeeded. He helped found the Free Africa Society to help freed slaves get food and places to live.
In 1793 a terrible disease called Yellow Fever struck Philadelphia. Absalom organized the Free Africa Society to serve as nurses and attendants. He said it gave them a feeling of freedom to help.
These are his words that he wrote: “It was very uncommon, at this time, to find anyone that would go near, much more handle, a sick or dead person. This has been no small satisfaction to us; for, we think, that when a doctor was not attainable, we have been the instruments, in the hand of God, for saving the lives of some hundreds of our suffering fellow mortals.”
They turned their Free Africa Society into a church, the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas. It was the first Episcopal Church for Black worshippers. Absalom became the first Black Episcopal priest in the world. Absalom is one of my favorite saints because he shows me how to love God even in the hardest times. Absalom shows me how to keep loving God and all my neighbors.
Feb 13, 2022 |
A Teachable Moment
| The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
A Teachable Moment
Tune into the sermon from the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the Sixth Sunday After the Epiphany, February 13, 2022.
Support St. Martin’s mission and ministry by giving online: stmartinec.org/give
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Epiphany/CEpi...
A Teachable Moment
The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
February 13, 2022
Please join me in the spirit of prayer.
Lord God, we give you thanks that you have planted us by streams of clean water, that our souls like a root within us reach out to your refreshing good news that feeds our souls and brings us back to life. Save us from withering and make our leaves green and our fruit full of goodness in this life. In Christ's Name we pray. Amen.
Jesus looked up at his disciples. Little detail in the gospel: Jesus looked up at his disciples. He'd just come down from a hilltop to a level place, yet he looks up. Why? Why does Luke include this little detail? Since his declaration in the synagogue in Nazareth Jesus has created one teachable moment after another for those who might follow him. Last week we had the miraculous catch of fish where Jesus the Lord of sea and sky, the one from the beginning of time whose creation this is, reveals himself as the messiah and gives the message that it was time to follow, for the end time had come. Revealing and teaching- theophany and instruction -go together in each teachable moment.
So, looking up at his disciples Jesus is once again engineering his next teachable moment for those who are beginning to follow him. When I was last the rector at Saint Mary's church in Park Ridge, Illinois, Jane sat in the front row. Jane was blind and developmentally disabled. My children Tim and Martha sat with her every Sunday along with the wife of my deacon. During sermons Jane had a favorite comment to make when I told a story about Jesus. She would exclaim so the whole church could hear, “it's a teachable moment.” And I would reply, “Yes Jane, it is a teachable moment.”
Jesus’ position below his disciples, looking up at his disciples, sets up his teaching. It is the set up for the beatitudes and the woes, which he delivers to them from this position. In my imagination, I see Jesus down on the group with the sick, the unclean, the wretched, the troubled, looking up at the disciples and apostles, who are standing above the scrum. Maybe the disciples and apostles have not come all the way down from the hill. Maybe they’re still hanging on to the special high of a private prayer session with Jesus on the hilltop. How wonderful that would be. Maybe the freshly minted apostles are still high on their new status as teachers of the way. Maybe they're standing aloof. Maybe they're spectators observing Jesus at his ministry in the trenches, not sure if they want to get their hands dirty yet.
Jesus looks up at his teammates and begins to teach them from below: Blessed are the poor, blessed are the hungry, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the excluded, defamed and ridiculed. These powerful beatitudes are for these disciples in that moment. They’re not random observations or generalizations about life. Jesus is teaching the disciples what they will experience if they continue to follow him. Part invitation, part fair warning. Jesus is saying that, “my way is a way of voluntary poverty and solidarity with the poor and the oppressed, the neglected, and the outcast.” What can they expect if they continue to follow Jesus in his way of life with God? Blessed poverty, blessed hunger, blessed weakness, blessed exclusion, defamation and ridicule. Jesus is challenging us, Jesus is challenging all of us, to come down to his level, to hear his teaching from below, to meet him on a level place with the poor.
And on any given Sunday some of us are spectators. Some of us are skeptics waiting to be convinced, some of us are aloof and more than a little embarrassed by the wildness of Jesus and the gospel. Some of us are just on the edge of departing into a life of discipleship and wherever you are you are more than welcome to hear this good news. This good news is challenging to all of us, challenging to the church, and for centuries the church responded by sending out monastics and hermits and missionaries who took on the way of voluntary poverty that Jesus lived and taught. However, today, what does it mean if the church is not inspiring such lives of sacrifice, such lives of beatitude, relinquishment and departure, for the sake of living the way of Jesus?
Well Jesus addresses the obstacles. What's in our way from this departure? He addresses the aloof apostles as, of all things, the rich (We might say the relatively rich, which I prefer because most people like to claim we're not, when from a worldwide perspective we are.)
We know some of those disciples owned boats and nets and ran family businesses and enjoyed the respect of their neighbors. Some of them left behind everything they owned just last week in the lectionary, so to these relatively rich disciples again Jesus says, “woe to the rich, woe to the full, woe to the entertained, woe to the admired. In other words it is because of your attachments that you have obstacles between you and God.”
What is the teachable moment for us? We who are among the relatively rich are being called from below to meet our Lord on a level place which is a place of blessing. It is a place of blessing because God is there in solidarity with the poor. Woe to us who are so attached to other endeavors and other things that we miss the opportunity of blessed life with our Lord. Woe to us who stand back as spectators, observers, critics, skeptics, so attached to our comfort and position that we do not enter the scrum with Jesus among all who need hope, healing sustenance and companionship. Jesus is telling us that by having less, we will have so much more, and that when we follow him, our lives will display these characteristics of a blessed life.
And this is how I understand the characteristics of a blessed life that Jesus spells out:
Poverty: it means following Jesus, means we'll have less wealth than we may have. We will be marked by generosity with our time, our talent and our treasure, and that generosity will flow towards those most in need. We could have been materially richer if it weren't for following Jesus. And that is my hope, that the Christian is someone with less because they are helping so many more.
Hunger: following Jesus will mean that we consume less, that we exploit less, that we will use fewer resources to live more gently and generously on this planet and with our neighbors. We will endure hunger to renounce consumerism.
Mourning: following Jesus will mean loving more people of all sorts and conditions, welcoming strangers and aliens and caring about the vulnerable, no matter where they may be. And so we will weep more, our hearts will break more often, our generous empathy will come with the cost and the gift of weeping.
Finally, Rejection: following Jesus will mean taking up uncomfortable and unpopular causes, making solidarity with the despised, becoming identified with the outcast, and so we who choose to follow will also know rejection and ridicule. It will be a characteristic of following him.
This is Jesus as his most challenging, my friends, but not so radical. The wonderful evangelist Tony Campolo, who no one would accuse of being a radical, once said based on this scripture, “God doesn't care if you make a million dollars. God only cares if you keep it.”
We are challenged. We are challenged to enter this way of life and our inspiration and our hope only comes from Jesus our Lord who is the only one who fulfilled this way of life, who vindicated this way of life in the resurrection, who showed us that this is what life harmonized with God looks like.
The way of life harmonized with God is truly blessed, and so we only enter it on that faith and in that hope that we will be blessed, even if it's counterintuitive. We can do it because Jesus made that way for us and to that we say thanks be to God. Amen.
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Support St. Martin’s mission and ministry by giving online: stmartinec.org/give
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Epiphany/CEpi...
A Teachable Moment
The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
February 13, 2022
Please join me in the spirit of prayer.
Lord God, we give you thanks that you have planted us by streams of clean water, that our souls like a root within us reach out to your refreshing good news that feeds our souls and brings us back to life. Save us from withering and make our leaves green and our fruit full of goodness in this life. In Christ's Name we pray. Amen.
Jesus looked up at his disciples. Little detail in the gospel: Jesus looked up at his disciples. He'd just come down from a hilltop to a level place, yet he looks up. Why? Why does Luke include this little detail? Since his declaration in the synagogue in Nazareth Jesus has created one teachable moment after another for those who might follow him. Last week we had the miraculous catch of fish where Jesus the Lord of sea and sky, the one from the beginning of time whose creation this is, reveals himself as the messiah and gives the message that it was time to follow, for the end time had come. Revealing and teaching- theophany and instruction -go together in each teachable moment.
So, looking up at his disciples Jesus is once again engineering his next teachable moment for those who are beginning to follow him. When I was last the rector at Saint Mary's church in Park Ridge, Illinois, Jane sat in the front row. Jane was blind and developmentally disabled. My children Tim and Martha sat with her every Sunday along with the wife of my deacon. During sermons Jane had a favorite comment to make when I told a story about Jesus. She would exclaim so the whole church could hear, “it's a teachable moment.” And I would reply, “Yes Jane, it is a teachable moment.”
Jesus’ position below his disciples, looking up at his disciples, sets up his teaching. It is the set up for the beatitudes and the woes, which he delivers to them from this position. In my imagination, I see Jesus down on the group with the sick, the unclean, the wretched, the troubled, looking up at the disciples and apostles, who are standing above the scrum. Maybe the disciples and apostles have not come all the way down from the hill. Maybe they’re still hanging on to the special high of a private prayer session with Jesus on the hilltop. How wonderful that would be. Maybe the freshly minted apostles are still high on their new status as teachers of the way. Maybe they're standing aloof. Maybe they're spectators observing Jesus at his ministry in the trenches, not sure if they want to get their hands dirty yet.
Jesus looks up at his teammates and begins to teach them from below: Blessed are the poor, blessed are the hungry, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the excluded, defamed and ridiculed. These powerful beatitudes are for these disciples in that moment. They’re not random observations or generalizations about life. Jesus is teaching the disciples what they will experience if they continue to follow him. Part invitation, part fair warning. Jesus is saying that, “my way is a way of voluntary poverty and solidarity with the poor and the oppressed, the neglected, and the outcast.” What can they expect if they continue to follow Jesus in his way of life with God? Blessed poverty, blessed hunger, blessed weakness, blessed exclusion, defamation and ridicule. Jesus is challenging us, Jesus is challenging all of us, to come down to his level, to hear his teaching from below, to meet him on a level place with the poor.
And on any given Sunday some of us are spectators. Some of us are skeptics waiting to be convinced, some of us are aloof and more than a little embarrassed by the wildness of Jesus and the gospel. Some of us are just on the edge of departing into a life of discipleship and wherever you are you are more than welcome to hear this good news. This good news is challenging to all of us, challenging to the church, and for centuries the church responded by sending out monastics and hermits and missionaries who took on the way of voluntary poverty that Jesus lived and taught. However, today, what does it mean if the church is not inspiring such lives of sacrifice, such lives of beatitude, relinquishment and departure, for the sake of living the way of Jesus?
Well Jesus addresses the obstacles. What's in our way from this departure? He addresses the aloof apostles as, of all things, the rich (We might say the relatively rich, which I prefer because most people like to claim we're not, when from a worldwide perspective we are.)
We know some of those disciples owned boats and nets and ran family businesses and enjoyed the respect of their neighbors. Some of them left behind everything they owned just last week in the lectionary, so to these relatively rich disciples again Jesus says, “woe to the rich, woe to the full, woe to the entertained, woe to the admired. In other words it is because of your attachments that you have obstacles between you and God.”
What is the teachable moment for us? We who are among the relatively rich are being called from below to meet our Lord on a level place which is a place of blessing. It is a place of blessing because God is there in solidarity with the poor. Woe to us who are so attached to other endeavors and other things that we miss the opportunity of blessed life with our Lord. Woe to us who stand back as spectators, observers, critics, skeptics, so attached to our comfort and position that we do not enter the scrum with Jesus among all who need hope, healing sustenance and companionship. Jesus is telling us that by having less, we will have so much more, and that when we follow him, our lives will display these characteristics of a blessed life.
And this is how I understand the characteristics of a blessed life that Jesus spells out:
Poverty: it means following Jesus, means we'll have less wealth than we may have. We will be marked by generosity with our time, our talent and our treasure, and that generosity will flow towards those most in need. We could have been materially richer if it weren't for following Jesus. And that is my hope, that the Christian is someone with less because they are helping so many more.
Hunger: following Jesus will mean that we consume less, that we exploit less, that we will use fewer resources to live more gently and generously on this planet and with our neighbors. We will endure hunger to renounce consumerism.
Mourning: following Jesus will mean loving more people of all sorts and conditions, welcoming strangers and aliens and caring about the vulnerable, no matter where they may be. And so we will weep more, our hearts will break more often, our generous empathy will come with the cost and the gift of weeping.
Finally, Rejection: following Jesus will mean taking up uncomfortable and unpopular causes, making solidarity with the despised, becoming identified with the outcast, and so we who choose to follow will also know rejection and ridicule. It will be a characteristic of following him.
This is Jesus as his most challenging, my friends, but not so radical. The wonderful evangelist Tony Campolo, who no one would accuse of being a radical, once said based on this scripture, “God doesn't care if you make a million dollars. God only cares if you keep it.”
We are challenged. We are challenged to enter this way of life and our inspiration and our hope only comes from Jesus our Lord who is the only one who fulfilled this way of life, who vindicated this way of life in the resurrection, who showed us that this is what life harmonized with God looks like.
The way of life harmonized with God is truly blessed, and so we only enter it on that faith and in that hope that we will be blessed, even if it's counterintuitive. We can do it because Jesus made that way for us and to that we say thanks be to God. Amen.
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Feb 06, 2022 |
Super Mommy Strength
| The Rev. Barbara Ballenger
Super Mommy Strength
Tune into the sermon from the Rev. Barbara Ballenger for the Fifth Sunday After the Epiphany, February 6, 2022.
Support St. Martin’s mission and ministry by giving online: stmartinec.org/give
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Epiphany/CEpi...
Super Mommy Strength
Rev. Barbara Ballenger
Feb. 6, 2022
When my daughter Hannah was 3 years old, she attended a Montessori preschool at the end of our street. Even though it was in walking distance from our house, it was at the top of a very long hill, and every day I’d walk with her up that hill to take her there.
And you know how 3 years old are. We’d get slower and slower as the hill got steeper and steeper. We’d get about halfway there and things would kind of grind to a halt. “Carry me, Mommy.”
The thought of walking another step up that hill seemed impossible to her. The thought of carrying her the rest of the way seemed impossible to me.
And so I would take her hand in mine and I would say, “Hannah, what you need is some Super Mommy Strength.” And I would squeeze her hand, and we would start walking really fast, and kind of power walk to the next stop sign. Then she’d slow down again, and I’d squeeze her hand again, and we’d power walk all the way up the hill together.
It got to where she’d ask for it along the way. “Can I have some Super Mommy Strength?” And often it worked often enough.
I’ve often thought that grace works like that. I’d do pretty well on my own steam, living my life of faith. And then a hill would get particularly steep, and I would slow down to a halt. And the thought of walking another step would feel impossible. And I would cry out to God – often to carry me. And more often than not there would arrive some extra energy, or assistance or aid, and I’d make it up that hill. Amazing grace.
But today’s Scriptures are inviting me to think about grace a little differently, as I hear Paul say “By the grace of God I am what I am.”
Not, “By the grace of God I get the rest of the job done.” Or “By the grace of God, I go where I need to go.” And thankfully not, “There but for the grace of God go I.” (don’t get me started on that one.)
But by the grace of God, I am what I am.
Our three Scriptures today give us three people of faith who become who they are because of a particular encounter with grace – Isaiah the prophet, Paul the apostle, Peter the disciple.
The grace that they encountered was more than a dose of divine strength to kind of top off their tanks. Each one of these men experienced a direct encounter with God—a theophany. And it wouldn’t be the last. These encounters reveal a God who stays near, whose relationship with them makes it possible for them to become the people that God needs them to be so they can do the things God needs them to do.
Consider Isaiah. The passage is often referred to as the call of Isaiah; but actually, he’s been at it awhile. This story is about a profound transformation that he undergoes so that he can enter the next leg of a difficult journey in the life of a prophet. He has this powerful vision of visiting the Court of God. And much like a dream where you look down and you realize you are not dressed for the occasion, or you realize perhaps you’re not dressed at all, Isaiah remembers that no human can look upon God and live.
"Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!" he cries.
Then there’s this image that has always given me the willies – a winged seraph touches Isaiah’s lips with a burning coal held in tongs lifted from a fire. And the angel says, "Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed, and your sin is blotted out.”
And with his unworthiness out of the way, Isaiah is available to go where God is sending him next, carrying a different message than he carried before.
Something similar happens to Paul when he encounters the risen Christ. The first thing that he has to face – after Jesus -- is his own sinfulness, his own short-sightedness. Despite his best intentions he had persecuted the Church of Christ. It takes Paul a while to see in the way that God desires him to see. But when he does, and those prejudices are out of the way, Paul is available to go where God is sending him next, with a different agenda than he carried before.
Which brings us to Peter. In the Gospel of Luke, this call story is not the first encounter that Peter has with Jesus. He has already witnessed Jesus’ healing and his preaching. You might recall that Peter hosted Jesus in his own house and that Jesus healed his mother-in-law. Perhaps it’s because of that hospitality that Jesus chooses Peter’s boat to get into when Jesus wants an off-shore platform from which to preach. Perhaps that’s why Peter accommodates Jesus’ request to take him fishing after a long and fruitless night at that very task. Maybe Peter was just being hospitable.
And then fish after fish fill the nets. So many that they need other boats to help them haul them in. So many that the entire fleet is starting to go down under their weight.
Unlike the others who are simply amazed, Peter knows a theophany when he sees one. “Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man,” he cries out at Jesus’ feet.
“Don’t be afraid,” Jesus says. And with his fear out of the way, Peter is available to go where God is sending him next, doing a different kind of fishing than he did before.
Of all of them Paul describes it best: “By the grace of God, I am what I am.” In each instance God stands with God’s chosen face to face. And in the blazing truth of that encounter, an old life falls away and a new life begins. A new person emerges. And the walk with God continues anew.
Edward Campbell, writing in the Oxford Companion to the Bible, says that in the New Testament it’s difficult to differentiate grace from the Holy Spirit, the presence of God. It will take 350 years or so for grace to be considered to be a thing, what Campbell calls “a kind of impersonal entity or quasi-physical force or power which lights upon those predestined to absorb it.”
I like New Testament grace better. I think we can find ourselves in its presence, with perhaps a little less cinematography. By the grace of God, we are who we are. Because in some way we have found ourselves face to face with God or at least in the presence of God, and the truth of that relationship transforms us. We understand that we have not only been given a gift we didn’t earn, we have been changed by it. And that gift is the presence of God, the ongoing relationship God chooses to have with us, God’s constant walk with us.
And this is not just a gift for the individual, not the individual prophet or the apostle or the person in the pew. This is a gift that shapes the Church, that shapes the whole body of Christ. By the grace of God, we are who we are.
And so maybe on second thought, grace is a tiny bit like what happened when Hannah and I would walk up that long hill to preschool. It probably wasn’t the Super Mommy Strength that did it. But rather the feeling of my hand in hers, the fact that we could stop to rest if need be, and the realization that she was no longer a baby who needed to be carried – but that she had become a girl who could make it up that hill on the power of her own two legs –as long as we were both going there together.
Amen.
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Support St. Martin’s mission and ministry by giving online: stmartinec.org/give
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Epiphany/CEpi...
Super Mommy Strength
Rev. Barbara Ballenger
Feb. 6, 2022
When my daughter Hannah was 3 years old, she attended a Montessori preschool at the end of our street. Even though it was in walking distance from our house, it was at the top of a very long hill, and every day I’d walk with her up that hill to take her there.
And you know how 3 years old are. We’d get slower and slower as the hill got steeper and steeper. We’d get about halfway there and things would kind of grind to a halt. “Carry me, Mommy.”
The thought of walking another step up that hill seemed impossible to her. The thought of carrying her the rest of the way seemed impossible to me.
And so I would take her hand in mine and I would say, “Hannah, what you need is some Super Mommy Strength.” And I would squeeze her hand, and we would start walking really fast, and kind of power walk to the next stop sign. Then she’d slow down again, and I’d squeeze her hand again, and we’d power walk all the way up the hill together.
It got to where she’d ask for it along the way. “Can I have some Super Mommy Strength?” And often it worked often enough.
I’ve often thought that grace works like that. I’d do pretty well on my own steam, living my life of faith. And then a hill would get particularly steep, and I would slow down to a halt. And the thought of walking another step would feel impossible. And I would cry out to God – often to carry me. And more often than not there would arrive some extra energy, or assistance or aid, and I’d make it up that hill. Amazing grace.
But today’s Scriptures are inviting me to think about grace a little differently, as I hear Paul say “By the grace of God I am what I am.”
Not, “By the grace of God I get the rest of the job done.” Or “By the grace of God, I go where I need to go.” And thankfully not, “There but for the grace of God go I.” (don’t get me started on that one.)
But by the grace of God, I am what I am.
Our three Scriptures today give us three people of faith who become who they are because of a particular encounter with grace – Isaiah the prophet, Paul the apostle, Peter the disciple.
The grace that they encountered was more than a dose of divine strength to kind of top off their tanks. Each one of these men experienced a direct encounter with God—a theophany. And it wouldn’t be the last. These encounters reveal a God who stays near, whose relationship with them makes it possible for them to become the people that God needs them to be so they can do the things God needs them to do.
Consider Isaiah. The passage is often referred to as the call of Isaiah; but actually, he’s been at it awhile. This story is about a profound transformation that he undergoes so that he can enter the next leg of a difficult journey in the life of a prophet. He has this powerful vision of visiting the Court of God. And much like a dream where you look down and you realize you are not dressed for the occasion, or you realize perhaps you’re not dressed at all, Isaiah remembers that no human can look upon God and live.
"Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!" he cries.
Then there’s this image that has always given me the willies – a winged seraph touches Isaiah’s lips with a burning coal held in tongs lifted from a fire. And the angel says, "Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed, and your sin is blotted out.”
And with his unworthiness out of the way, Isaiah is available to go where God is sending him next, carrying a different message than he carried before.
Something similar happens to Paul when he encounters the risen Christ. The first thing that he has to face – after Jesus -- is his own sinfulness, his own short-sightedness. Despite his best intentions he had persecuted the Church of Christ. It takes Paul a while to see in the way that God desires him to see. But when he does, and those prejudices are out of the way, Paul is available to go where God is sending him next, with a different agenda than he carried before.
Which brings us to Peter. In the Gospel of Luke, this call story is not the first encounter that Peter has with Jesus. He has already witnessed Jesus’ healing and his preaching. You might recall that Peter hosted Jesus in his own house and that Jesus healed his mother-in-law. Perhaps it’s because of that hospitality that Jesus chooses Peter’s boat to get into when Jesus wants an off-shore platform from which to preach. Perhaps that’s why Peter accommodates Jesus’ request to take him fishing after a long and fruitless night at that very task. Maybe Peter was just being hospitable.
And then fish after fish fill the nets. So many that they need other boats to help them haul them in. So many that the entire fleet is starting to go down under their weight.
Unlike the others who are simply amazed, Peter knows a theophany when he sees one. “Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man,” he cries out at Jesus’ feet.
“Don’t be afraid,” Jesus says. And with his fear out of the way, Peter is available to go where God is sending him next, doing a different kind of fishing than he did before.
Of all of them Paul describes it best: “By the grace of God, I am what I am.” In each instance God stands with God’s chosen face to face. And in the blazing truth of that encounter, an old life falls away and a new life begins. A new person emerges. And the walk with God continues anew.
Edward Campbell, writing in the Oxford Companion to the Bible, says that in the New Testament it’s difficult to differentiate grace from the Holy Spirit, the presence of God. It will take 350 years or so for grace to be considered to be a thing, what Campbell calls “a kind of impersonal entity or quasi-physical force or power which lights upon those predestined to absorb it.”
I like New Testament grace better. I think we can find ourselves in its presence, with perhaps a little less cinematography. By the grace of God, we are who we are. Because in some way we have found ourselves face to face with God or at least in the presence of God, and the truth of that relationship transforms us. We understand that we have not only been given a gift we didn’t earn, we have been changed by it. And that gift is the presence of God, the ongoing relationship God chooses to have with us, God’s constant walk with us.
And this is not just a gift for the individual, not the individual prophet or the apostle or the person in the pew. This is a gift that shapes the Church, that shapes the whole body of Christ. By the grace of God, we are who we are.
And so maybe on second thought, grace is a tiny bit like what happened when Hannah and I would walk up that long hill to preschool. It probably wasn’t the Super Mommy Strength that did it. But rather the feeling of my hand in hers, the fact that we could stop to rest if need be, and the realization that she was no longer a baby who needed to be carried – but that she had become a girl who could make it up that hill on the power of her own two legs –as long as we were both going there together.
Amen.
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Feb 06, 2022 |
Connecting Through Tradition
| Anne Alexis Harra
Connecting Through Tradition
Listen to this week’s sermon from LIFT Worship from Ms. Anne Alexis Harra for the Fifth Sunday of Epiphany, February 6, 2022.
Learn more about LIFT, Living in Faith Together, at stmartinec.org/lift
Today’s Readings:
Readings were taken from God’s Word, My Voice: A Children’s Lectionary
Today, we are celebrating The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, or Candlemas. We celebrate this day to remember the beautiful ancient traditions that Mary and Joseph followed. One of those traditions is Jesus’ actual presentation in the Temple. In ancient times, babies had to be presented in the Temple as a way of formally introducing them to the world. And this happened 40 days after a baby was born. So, 40 days after he was born, Mary and Joseph took him to the Temple for his presentation!
This story is so rich with tradition that I began to think about the different traditions we have. Traditions we have here at St. Martin’s, traditions we have as people who live in Philadelphia (Go birds!), traditions we have in our own families. Because this day had such a beautiful story full of tradition and history, I’d like to share one of our family traditions with you.
Every year on Christmas Eve, everyone in my dad’s family piles into my Aunt Linda & Uncle Rob’s home. The little ones wear red and green Christmas outfits, there’s always a ham in the oven when you first walk in so it always smells really good, and my Aunt Linda has a biiiiiig bowl of her Christmas punch ready to share. Throughout the years, our party got bigger as our family got bigger. My aunt and uncle moved to a new home, and so did the party! Before my aunt and uncle took it over, my grandparents and their friends would have a Christmas Eve gathering! This party has been a tradition for our family for over 40 years.
I love this tradition of gathering at Christmas because it makes me feel really connected to people in my family, even when I haven’t seen them for a while. I am afforded opportunities to connect with my grandparents, even if they aren’t here anymore, through our shared experience of this tradition. That is a really special thing to me.
So when we look at our story again, we see traditions. We see Mary & Joseph connecting with their ancestors through these traditions, like I connect with my grandparents. But, they are also connecting to God through this sacred routine. And when we connect with God, we connect with people all over the world in different times and places. God provides us connection through things like traditions, or storytelling joyful people like Simeon the Prophet in the Temple.
So I wonder, what traditions do you have? They don’t have to be exclusively Christmas, but they can be. If you are a caregiver, think back to your own childhood. What traditions did you love? What traditions have you had to let go of over the years? If you are a child or a younger person, I wonder what traditions make you feel close to others? I wonder where you find those special connections, or special relationships, with people. And to everybody watching, virtually or in person, I wonder what traditions you can initiate or begin as a way to invite God’s Light into your lives?
Friends, thank you for letting me share one of my most beloved traditions with all of you. It has been a joy and I hope you’ll think a lot about tradition and how you can connect to God in that special place this week. Amen
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Learn more about LIFT, Living in Faith Together, at stmartinec.org/lift
Today’s Readings:
Readings were taken from God’s Word, My Voice: A Children’s Lectionary
Today, we are celebrating The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, or Candlemas. We celebrate this day to remember the beautiful ancient traditions that Mary and Joseph followed. One of those traditions is Jesus’ actual presentation in the Temple. In ancient times, babies had to be presented in the Temple as a way of formally introducing them to the world. And this happened 40 days after a baby was born. So, 40 days after he was born, Mary and Joseph took him to the Temple for his presentation!
This story is so rich with tradition that I began to think about the different traditions we have. Traditions we have here at St. Martin’s, traditions we have as people who live in Philadelphia (Go birds!), traditions we have in our own families. Because this day had such a beautiful story full of tradition and history, I’d like to share one of our family traditions with you.
Every year on Christmas Eve, everyone in my dad’s family piles into my Aunt Linda & Uncle Rob’s home. The little ones wear red and green Christmas outfits, there’s always a ham in the oven when you first walk in so it always smells really good, and my Aunt Linda has a biiiiiig bowl of her Christmas punch ready to share. Throughout the years, our party got bigger as our family got bigger. My aunt and uncle moved to a new home, and so did the party! Before my aunt and uncle took it over, my grandparents and their friends would have a Christmas Eve gathering! This party has been a tradition for our family for over 40 years.
I love this tradition of gathering at Christmas because it makes me feel really connected to people in my family, even when I haven’t seen them for a while. I am afforded opportunities to connect with my grandparents, even if they aren’t here anymore, through our shared experience of this tradition. That is a really special thing to me.
So when we look at our story again, we see traditions. We see Mary & Joseph connecting with their ancestors through these traditions, like I connect with my grandparents. But, they are also connecting to God through this sacred routine. And when we connect with God, we connect with people all over the world in different times and places. God provides us connection through things like traditions, or storytelling joyful people like Simeon the Prophet in the Temple.
So I wonder, what traditions do you have? They don’t have to be exclusively Christmas, but they can be. If you are a caregiver, think back to your own childhood. What traditions did you love? What traditions have you had to let go of over the years? If you are a child or a younger person, I wonder what traditions make you feel close to others? I wonder where you find those special connections, or special relationships, with people. And to everybody watching, virtually or in person, I wonder what traditions you can initiate or begin as a way to invite God’s Light into your lives?
Friends, thank you for letting me share one of my most beloved traditions with all of you. It has been a joy and I hope you’ll think a lot about tradition and how you can connect to God in that special place this week. Amen
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Jan 30, 2022 |
When I Was a Child
| The Rev. Barbara Ballenger
When I Was a Child
Listen to this week’s sermon from LIFT Worship from the Rev. Barbara Ballenger for the Fourth Sunday of Epiphany, January 30, 2022
Learn more about LIFT, Living in Faith Together, at stmartinec.org/lift
Today’s Readings:
Readings were taken from God’s Word, My Voice: A Children’s Lectionary
Oh my goodness, if you are tuning in from home find a comfy spot on the couch or a chair and let's just reflect and think about what we heard today in our in scripture. Now, when I was a child I learned to pray from the people all around me. They taught me things like the Our Father, and they took me to church on Sunday, especially my mom and dad and my two sisters Anna and Jennifer. They taught me the songs that we sung at church and they taught me to pray at night, and when I was really little I would kneel down next to my bed and they would listen to my prayers. "Now I lay me down to sleep I pray the Lord my Soul to keep. Bless mom and dad and Anna Jennifer and our cat." When I got a little order and learned to read we would talk about Bible stories and when I had questions, my sisters especially would help me ask and answer those questions about God because they had had some of the very same questions and had gotten there just a little bit ahead of me.
When I was a child I learned to hope and dream from people who had hopes and dreams for me. They would ask me things like, "What do you want to be when you grow up? What do you want for your birthday? What do you want for dinner?" They would ask me things like, "Tell me about the pictures you just drew. Tell me about the poem you write." They were interested in my hopes and dreams.
When I was a child I learned to love from the people who loved me: my mom and my dad and my sisters. And I loved them, and my pets and my friends who sometimes weren't so easy to like and, I loved walking in the woods and looking for rocks with my dad. I loved making things, I loved writing poems, I loved playing the guitar which I learned when I was in 5th grade. And I loved singing songs.
When I was a child I prayed like a child and I hoped like a child and I loved like a child. And I still do all those things, but not quite the way I did then, as a child. And so I learned to pray for more things, and recognize God in even deeper ways. My faith grew with me and in me. And I learned to love more and more people and more and more deeply and my love grew with me. And I learned to hope and to dream of more and more things and some dreams came true and others did not.
I think my family would say that as I learned in faith and hope and love, their faith and hope and love grew from mine, so we helped one another grow in God's love and that's why truth and all of those things endure - faith and hope and love. So if you're a young person tuning in right now, I wonder if that's true for you. I wonder who has taught you how to pray, or what to hope for, or how to love, And I wonder what you pray for, and I wonder what your dreams are, and I wonder who and what you live. And if you are an adult tuning in and listening now, I wonder if you can remember those early times and who taught you to pray, who helped you to dream, who did you love, who taught you about love? And I wonder now, all grown up, what you pray for, what you hope for, who you love, because these things endure. They stay with us and they grow with us because they are the proof that God is with us.
And so maybe a little later today you ought to talk about these things at home or with those you know or those that you're with. What are you praying for? What are you hoping for? What and who do you love and where is God in all of these things? God is there for all that lasts, and will take us on and on together because God is the source of our faith and our hope and our love. And that, my friends, is pretty good news. Amen.
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Learn more about LIFT, Living in Faith Together, at stmartinec.org/lift
Today’s Readings:
Readings were taken from God’s Word, My Voice: A Children’s Lectionary
Oh my goodness, if you are tuning in from home find a comfy spot on the couch or a chair and let's just reflect and think about what we heard today in our in scripture. Now, when I was a child I learned to pray from the people all around me. They taught me things like the Our Father, and they took me to church on Sunday, especially my mom and dad and my two sisters Anna and Jennifer. They taught me the songs that we sung at church and they taught me to pray at night, and when I was really little I would kneel down next to my bed and they would listen to my prayers. "Now I lay me down to sleep I pray the Lord my Soul to keep. Bless mom and dad and Anna Jennifer and our cat." When I got a little order and learned to read we would talk about Bible stories and when I had questions, my sisters especially would help me ask and answer those questions about God because they had had some of the very same questions and had gotten there just a little bit ahead of me.
When I was a child I learned to hope and dream from people who had hopes and dreams for me. They would ask me things like, "What do you want to be when you grow up? What do you want for your birthday? What do you want for dinner?" They would ask me things like, "Tell me about the pictures you just drew. Tell me about the poem you write." They were interested in my hopes and dreams.
When I was a child I learned to love from the people who loved me: my mom and my dad and my sisters. And I loved them, and my pets and my friends who sometimes weren't so easy to like and, I loved walking in the woods and looking for rocks with my dad. I loved making things, I loved writing poems, I loved playing the guitar which I learned when I was in 5th grade. And I loved singing songs.
When I was a child I prayed like a child and I hoped like a child and I loved like a child. And I still do all those things, but not quite the way I did then, as a child. And so I learned to pray for more things, and recognize God in even deeper ways. My faith grew with me and in me. And I learned to love more and more people and more and more deeply and my love grew with me. And I learned to hope and to dream of more and more things and some dreams came true and others did not.
I think my family would say that as I learned in faith and hope and love, their faith and hope and love grew from mine, so we helped one another grow in God's love and that's why truth and all of those things endure - faith and hope and love. So if you're a young person tuning in right now, I wonder if that's true for you. I wonder who has taught you how to pray, or what to hope for, or how to love, And I wonder what you pray for, and I wonder what your dreams are, and I wonder who and what you live. And if you are an adult tuning in and listening now, I wonder if you can remember those early times and who taught you to pray, who helped you to dream, who did you love, who taught you about love? And I wonder now, all grown up, what you pray for, what you hope for, who you love, because these things endure. They stay with us and they grow with us because they are the proof that God is with us.
And so maybe a little later today you ought to talk about these things at home or with those you know or those that you're with. What are you praying for? What are you hoping for? What and who do you love and where is God in all of these things? God is there for all that lasts, and will take us on and on together because God is the source of our faith and our hope and our love. And that, my friends, is pretty good news. Amen.
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Jan 30, 2022 |
A Love Story
| The Rev. Carol Duncan
A Love Story
Sermon from the Rev. Carol Duncan for the Fourth Sunday After the Epiphany, January 30, 2022.
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Epiphany/CEpi...
A Love Story
The Rev. Carol Duncan
January 30, 2022
Holy One, be with our hearts today so your words of infinite love break through this mortal tongue. Amen.
I knew I should base today’s sermon on today’s exquisite Corinthians love passage when I saw love at work last weekend. This is a love story.
My family gathered at my nephew’s house in Lancaster for our Christmas celebration. We do a secret Santa exchange, so each of the 11 of us is assigned one gift recipient. My granddaughter Moxie drew the name of my daughter Kate’s partner Bobb. Got it? Granddaughter Moxie, daughter Kate, partner Bobb.
Bobb had a pretty rough time this past year. Both his dogs, Tucker and Gracie, succumbed to old age and died within months of each other. This is a love story about dogs.
Long ago when Bobb was single, Tucker and Gracie showed up consecutively as strays in Bobb’s working-class neighborhood in Pittsburg. He advertised, but no one claimed either of the scruffy dogs. Neither dog had any of the accepted gifts of dog beauty or capacity. Both just so obviously needed attention, care, and love. They became a huge part of Bobb’s life. They took him for multiple daily walks, camped together with him, greeted him at the door going out and coming in, required nursing from various doggy mishaps. They were always at his side.
For her part, Moxie is in her senior year at the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Living so close to Bobb and Kate, she got to know those dogs pretty well. She has honed her innate talent and is becoming a real artist. She presented Bobb with his Christmas gift, a true to life portrait of Tucker and Gracie. In the painting, they look up at Bobb in eager expectation as they always did in life. Moxie accurately captured the love in those dogs eyes.
I was sitting next to Bobb on the sofa, and I felt him quiver. He didn’t speak. He couldn’t. Tears were clogging his throat. Bobb’s love for his dogs and the joy at their appearing in this painting nearly overpowered him. He tried to thank Moxie, but words were beyond him. He sort of strangle-whispered “I was hoping, I was hoping”.
This relationship of Bobb with his dogs seemed like a way to approach the amazing gift of love. A dog’s love is so clear and simple. A dog is patient. Even if the dog wants to go out now, the love is patient. Dogs’ love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude, unless you count barking as rude. It bears all things that its human clumsily imposes, hopes for all things delicious or exciting, endures all things it doesn’t quite understand. Its love never ends because it doesn’t get entangled with the concept of time. The self-involved limitations of human loving are invisible to dogs.
I can’t truly describe how a faithful dog loves its human, or how humans love their dogs. Words just get in the way. I ask you to consult your own gut level awareness for the constrictive, throat catching trembling impact that may envelop you when you are reunited after an absence with a dog, or a beloved pet, or child, or one who is more important to you than your own self.
All of this is a prequel to talk about the even more indescribable love that is God. Indescribable, which is why Paul’s words to the Corinthians are so compelling. Many, maybe most, of us live so heedlessly within God’s love that we remain unaware of it. God dwells in the pull of gravity that holds us on the ground. The flow of blood in our veins and the breath in our lungs are God alive in us.
Our Epiphany liturgy from the Anglican Church of Canada captures very simply what God does for us. In it we say “We give you thanks and praise, almighty God, for the gift of a world full of wonder, and for our life which comes from you. By your power you sustain the universe. You created us to love you with all our heart and to love each other as ourselves.” This is still a love story.
God not only created the universe, but God sustains it. I believe that the universe and all created beings are manifestations of God’s love, indwelt by divine vitality. God’s love is the energy that inhabits and drives everything that is and ever was, seen and unseen. We truly cannot imagine God’s love except in little ways, like love stories about dogs and people and saints.
I think this love story we have today is a call to us to lay down our fears of what’s happening in the world, of Ukraine, of the pandemic, of a stock market correction. Fear stifles our willingness to live in love. There is terrible evil in the world. But there is also love.
I’m inviting us to meditate on love as an antidote to the fear in the world. We can practice this right here, right now.
The first practice (I have three) is to look around you and see that we are acting in love for each other by wearing N95 masks to protect us from Omicron. Even though distanced, we are together as members of St. Martin’s here in this sanctuary and connected in the air by live stream. Feel with your eyes the love of the body of Christ surrounding you. Feel with your eyes the love of the body of Christ surrounding you.
The second practice is meditative breathing. We can apprehend the Spirit through our breath, feeling the air fill our lungs while our hearts pump blood through our bodies. In becoming aware that each breath is God sustaining us, each breath then becomes a prayer.
The third practice is to feel the gravity that is holding you in your seat. God imposes the gravity that holds you here and holds the earth in its circumnavigation of the sun, and the planets in their courses. Now take a leap of imagination beyond the sun and even beyond the Milky Way Galaxy. More than gravity sustains the unimaginable expanse of the cosmos. That more-than is God, in whom time and space conjoin. The infinite and the instant have equal regard to God.
So take faith that you are held by God, have hope that you can live out God’s will for you, and be assured that God’s love for you is now and will be forever. Amen.
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Epiphany/CEpi...
A Love Story
The Rev. Carol Duncan
January 30, 2022
Holy One, be with our hearts today so your words of infinite love break through this mortal tongue. Amen.
I knew I should base today’s sermon on today’s exquisite Corinthians love passage when I saw love at work last weekend. This is a love story.
My family gathered at my nephew’s house in Lancaster for our Christmas celebration. We do a secret Santa exchange, so each of the 11 of us is assigned one gift recipient. My granddaughter Moxie drew the name of my daughter Kate’s partner Bobb. Got it? Granddaughter Moxie, daughter Kate, partner Bobb.
Bobb had a pretty rough time this past year. Both his dogs, Tucker and Gracie, succumbed to old age and died within months of each other. This is a love story about dogs.
Long ago when Bobb was single, Tucker and Gracie showed up consecutively as strays in Bobb’s working-class neighborhood in Pittsburg. He advertised, but no one claimed either of the scruffy dogs. Neither dog had any of the accepted gifts of dog beauty or capacity. Both just so obviously needed attention, care, and love. They became a huge part of Bobb’s life. They took him for multiple daily walks, camped together with him, greeted him at the door going out and coming in, required nursing from various doggy mishaps. They were always at his side.
For her part, Moxie is in her senior year at the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Living so close to Bobb and Kate, she got to know those dogs pretty well. She has honed her innate talent and is becoming a real artist. She presented Bobb with his Christmas gift, a true to life portrait of Tucker and Gracie. In the painting, they look up at Bobb in eager expectation as they always did in life. Moxie accurately captured the love in those dogs eyes.
I was sitting next to Bobb on the sofa, and I felt him quiver. He didn’t speak. He couldn’t. Tears were clogging his throat. Bobb’s love for his dogs and the joy at their appearing in this painting nearly overpowered him. He tried to thank Moxie, but words were beyond him. He sort of strangle-whispered “I was hoping, I was hoping”.
This relationship of Bobb with his dogs seemed like a way to approach the amazing gift of love. A dog’s love is so clear and simple. A dog is patient. Even if the dog wants to go out now, the love is patient. Dogs’ love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude, unless you count barking as rude. It bears all things that its human clumsily imposes, hopes for all things delicious or exciting, endures all things it doesn’t quite understand. Its love never ends because it doesn’t get entangled with the concept of time. The self-involved limitations of human loving are invisible to dogs.
I can’t truly describe how a faithful dog loves its human, or how humans love their dogs. Words just get in the way. I ask you to consult your own gut level awareness for the constrictive, throat catching trembling impact that may envelop you when you are reunited after an absence with a dog, or a beloved pet, or child, or one who is more important to you than your own self.
All of this is a prequel to talk about the even more indescribable love that is God. Indescribable, which is why Paul’s words to the Corinthians are so compelling. Many, maybe most, of us live so heedlessly within God’s love that we remain unaware of it. God dwells in the pull of gravity that holds us on the ground. The flow of blood in our veins and the breath in our lungs are God alive in us.
Our Epiphany liturgy from the Anglican Church of Canada captures very simply what God does for us. In it we say “We give you thanks and praise, almighty God, for the gift of a world full of wonder, and for our life which comes from you. By your power you sustain the universe. You created us to love you with all our heart and to love each other as ourselves.” This is still a love story.
God not only created the universe, but God sustains it. I believe that the universe and all created beings are manifestations of God’s love, indwelt by divine vitality. God’s love is the energy that inhabits and drives everything that is and ever was, seen and unseen. We truly cannot imagine God’s love except in little ways, like love stories about dogs and people and saints.
I think this love story we have today is a call to us to lay down our fears of what’s happening in the world, of Ukraine, of the pandemic, of a stock market correction. Fear stifles our willingness to live in love. There is terrible evil in the world. But there is also love.
I’m inviting us to meditate on love as an antidote to the fear in the world. We can practice this right here, right now.
The first practice (I have three) is to look around you and see that we are acting in love for each other by wearing N95 masks to protect us from Omicron. Even though distanced, we are together as members of St. Martin’s here in this sanctuary and connected in the air by live stream. Feel with your eyes the love of the body of Christ surrounding you. Feel with your eyes the love of the body of Christ surrounding you.
The second practice is meditative breathing. We can apprehend the Spirit through our breath, feeling the air fill our lungs while our hearts pump blood through our bodies. In becoming aware that each breath is God sustaining us, each breath then becomes a prayer.
The third practice is to feel the gravity that is holding you in your seat. God imposes the gravity that holds you here and holds the earth in its circumnavigation of the sun, and the planets in their courses. Now take a leap of imagination beyond the sun and even beyond the Milky Way Galaxy. More than gravity sustains the unimaginable expanse of the cosmos. That more-than is God, in whom time and space conjoin. The infinite and the instant have equal regard to God.
So take faith that you are held by God, have hope that you can live out God’s will for you, and be assured that God’s love for you is now and will be forever. Amen.
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Jan 23, 2022 |
Being in the Body
| Anne Alexis Harra
Being in the Body
Listen to this week’s story from LIFT Worship from Ms. Anne Alexis Harra, Minister for Children and Youth.
Learn more about LIFT, Living in Faith Together, at stmartinec.org/lift
Today’s readings are:
1 Corinthians 12:12–20, 27
Psalm 19
Luke 4: 14-21
Readings were taken from God’s Word, My Voice: A Children’s Lectionary
Being In the Body
Ms. Anne Alexis Harra
January 23, 2022
Good morning friends. I'm so excited to be with you all today.
This morning, we heard from our good friend the apostle Paul. And we’ve been hearing a lot from him lately, which makes sense because he wrote 13 letters after the Gospels. He had a lot to say. He wrote them to different churches and different people. And the passage we read this morning is from his first letter to the Church in Corinth, which is a place in Greece.
This particular letter is really special because it talks so much about how we can and should love one another. Paul talks a lot about baptism, and that's also really important, because we are given God’s love through baptism. And Paul also talks a lot about the different gifts, or different personality traits, that we are given through the Holy Spirit. Last week, Paul referenced the different gifts that we all have: some have the gift of teaching, or healing, or preaching, or a number of other gifts. But all of those gifts, even though they're different and they're different in each person, they all come from the Holy Spirit.
This week, Paul tries to explain it to us in another way. He talks about the body. And I don't know if you're learning in school about the different bones and muscles of the body, but they're all really important. He actually mentions parts of the body: our feet, our ears, our eyes. He talks about these body parts as a way of describing us. An eye does not make up the whole body, but it's really important because it helps us see things. One person does not make up the whole body of Christ, but he or she or they is an important part! All of us are part of this interesting, beautiful, unique whole body through Jesus. That is a beautiful gift.
This week, I invite you to think about being part of the Body of Christ. If you want, you can think about it like Paul did, and think about different body parts. Are you the hands of Jesus? Or, are you the neck, supporting the people around you? Are you the feet, walking with people? Or maybe you are the heart which can give and receive so much love to everyone around you. No matter which body part you are, though, remember that God loves you because you are important and you are part of the Body of Christ.
That's my good news for the week.
Amen.
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Learn more about LIFT, Living in Faith Together, at stmartinec.org/lift
Today’s readings are:
1 Corinthians 12:12–20, 27
Psalm 19
Luke 4: 14-21
Readings were taken from God’s Word, My Voice: A Children’s Lectionary
Being In the Body
Ms. Anne Alexis Harra
January 23, 2022
Good morning friends. I'm so excited to be with you all today.
This morning, we heard from our good friend the apostle Paul. And we’ve been hearing a lot from him lately, which makes sense because he wrote 13 letters after the Gospels. He had a lot to say. He wrote them to different churches and different people. And the passage we read this morning is from his first letter to the Church in Corinth, which is a place in Greece.
This particular letter is really special because it talks so much about how we can and should love one another. Paul talks a lot about baptism, and that's also really important, because we are given God’s love through baptism. And Paul also talks a lot about the different gifts, or different personality traits, that we are given through the Holy Spirit. Last week, Paul referenced the different gifts that we all have: some have the gift of teaching, or healing, or preaching, or a number of other gifts. But all of those gifts, even though they're different and they're different in each person, they all come from the Holy Spirit.
This week, Paul tries to explain it to us in another way. He talks about the body. And I don't know if you're learning in school about the different bones and muscles of the body, but they're all really important. He actually mentions parts of the body: our feet, our ears, our eyes. He talks about these body parts as a way of describing us. An eye does not make up the whole body, but it's really important because it helps us see things. One person does not make up the whole body of Christ, but he or she or they is an important part! All of us are part of this interesting, beautiful, unique whole body through Jesus. That is a beautiful gift.
This week, I invite you to think about being part of the Body of Christ. If you want, you can think about it like Paul did, and think about different body parts. Are you the hands of Jesus? Or, are you the neck, supporting the people around you? Are you the feet, walking with people? Or maybe you are the heart which can give and receive so much love to everyone around you. No matter which body part you are, though, remember that God loves you because you are important and you are part of the Body of Christ.
That's my good news for the week.
Amen.
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Jan 23, 2022 |
Joy is our Strength
| The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
Joy is our Strength
Revisit the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel's sermon for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany, January 23, 2022.
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Epiphany/CEpi...
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Epiphany/CEpi...
Please join me in the spirit of prayer.
Jesus sets a very high bar for preachers this morning. His whole sermon on Isaiah 61 was nine words long. No wonder he was a popular preacher in Galilee. I apologize. I can’t do that.
So my question to Jesus’ reading of Isaiah 61 in the Luke passage is, where did the vengeance go? Where did the heartbreak go? These are the questions that my Saturday Bible Study asked of the text when we looked at Luke 4 and then flipped back to Isaiah 61 and read the original. In the original text, where it says “the acceptable year of our Lord”, it follows immediately with “and the day of vengeance of our God.
So, “I’m here to proclaim the acceptable year of our Lord and the day of vengeance of our God”. Jesus leaves that out. Earlier in the passage where it says “I’ve come to bring Good News to the Poor” the next phrase is “and bind up the broken hearted.” Also, strangely, missing.
Maybe Jesus got a faulty scroll, who knows, but one of the class members made this observation: the sorrow is missing, the broken hearted is missing, the vengeance is missing. All the times in Isaiah 61 where grieving and mourning are, are missing. Why is that? And this Bible Study member reached into scripture and said “well when the bridegroom is present, we don’t mourn. “ When the bridegroom is with us we do not mourn.
The whole passage points to Jesus. “This has been fulfilled today in your hearing. All eyes are fixed on him.” He is the fulfillment, the consummation of Israel’s hopes. He is the promise of Israel's relationship with God come true. He is the healing of the Nations. He is the joining of humanity to God in their synagogue. The bridegroom is present so we celebrate even when we have cause to sorrow. We celebrate even when we have cause to mourn. “All eyes were fixed on him. Today this has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
I know for myself that I have learned through much painful experience to fix my eyes on him, to fix my eyes on Jesus. When my boat is rocking and swamping and being overwhelmed by the storm of life, when I am full of fear and despair and horror and hurt, I have learned to look up, to stand up in my rocky fragile boat and fix my eyes on Him who renews me. Who rejoices in my heart. Who fills me with the spirit again.
And when I fill my eyes with my loving savior moving towards me, I become resilient again. I become revived again. In my mourning, in my sorrow, in my fear, I can celebrate as well. Sorrow and celebration - these go together. We can be dragged down by one and lifted by the other and the gift of our life and faith is that that lifting factor comes from outside of ourselves.
Let’s see how this sorrow and celebrating plays out in Nehemiah and in Corinth. We see it on display in the Nehemiah passage (We get to hear Nehemiah once a year, so let’s do this). Nehemiah is describing the same group of people who are addressed by Isaiah 61, the people who’ve been returned from Exile back to Jerusalem. The first thing they’ve done is build a wall. They’ve rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem to secure themselves, to find that security these traumatized people desperately need. The next thing they're doing is gathering with all eyes fixed on the Torah, on the teachings of God, to renew their relationship with their Lord in this great public gathering of men and women and all who can understand.
Now, things are brewing for these people. These traumatized people are in conflict with each other. They’re debating the place of foreigners among them. Can people who do not speak the language stay, or shall we cast them out? For all those who married foreign women, do we cast out the foreign women and their children? They’re a community in conflict and they’re turning to the Word.
We don’t know which Word was read to them. Was it Leviticus? Was it Deuteronomy? We do know it took a really long time and they were standing out there for a long time, but whatever was read, this covenant with God was read and renewed among them. It caused them sorrow and weeping and mourning, and this is the sorrow and weeping and mourning of moral failure.
We all know that when we let ourselves down, when we do not live up to our ideals, when we fall short of our standards, we grieve. We mourn. We sorrow for the harm we’ve done to ourselves and others. This is the moral weeping of a people hearing how they have failed God as a special people set apart. As a special people set apart they know their story. By failing their obligations to God they have fallen into this state of despair.
But they’re not left there. That’s not the final word. The sorrow and despair causes them to humble themselves, to bend down and press their foreheads to the ground in that beautiful posture of supplication that we know so well from the mosque, if you’ve ever attended. And they’re devastated by God’s word to them, which also includes really stern words about welcoming the stranger, which they’re falling short of at that moment. They are then invited from sorrow into celebration. Don’t mourn but celebrate. “The joy of the Lord is your strength.”
And if I want you to take home any word of scripture with you today, it’s that. “The joy of the Lord is your strength.” God’s desire to connect with you through Torah, through instruction, through this beautiful law, revives your soul in this moment and gives you that next chance to live in relationship with God. So, in your sorrow, I will speak a word of celebration and it will literally raise you off your knees to become God’s renewed, revived community.
Now let's go to Corinth. Corinth, once again, sorrow and celebration. Corinth is this very sophisticated, very cosmopolitan city on this isthmus between Athens and Sparta. It’s a rich mercantile city and a great trade route location, and it’s one of the most argumentative and petty churches that Paul founded. And their big issue is that they cannot figure out how to be the body of Christ together when there are aristocratic elites and the poor all at the same table. They don’t know how to do this.
So, when the passage starts off with that great Good News, “In Christ there’s neither Jew nor Greek”, the whole room can celebrate because they’re all gentiles. “Oh my God, we’re brought into the covenant, who would ever have thought this possible, thanks be to God.” But the next line kicks into sorrow - “neither the slave nor free.” Wait, what? This is the rub for the Corinthians. How do you sit as an equal in Christ with somebody you don’t even honor as a person? In the ancient world only the aristocratic elite were persons. They were the only ones who had that status. The slaves and the plebes were non-persons. They were often referred to as bodies.
Cleverly St. Paul takes this figure from the Greek world and turns it back on the community. This sophisticated group would have known how Plato and Aesop and Livy had used the image of a body to explain the State. Aesop had a great fable about this where the mouth and the hands and the teeth go on strike against the stomach. They all get fed up with feeding the stomach because the stomach gets all the food while they do all the work.
But in Plato and Aesop, the moral is get back to work and serve the stomach. Get back to work and serve the higher authority. In Paul it’s quite different. In Paul he’s using this common analogy to say, “no, we are all equals. You might think you’re the head. You might think you're the more honorable part of the body, but you’re on par with the less honorable.” (And he’s being euphemistic about genitals here. We’re an adult service, I can say this) “You are as dependent on them as they are dependent on you. In the spirit of God, in the church, in this community made by Christ we are equals”.
And this is a cause of sorrow and mourning and loss to those of high status, and a cause of celebration of low and dishonored status. But they are One in the spirit, so they celebrate and they sorrow together. The sorrow and the celebrating overcome the antagonism of rivalry, of being opposed to each other. We are called to be a community that remembers that we sorrow and we celebrate together. And in our celebration we remember all that God has accomplished for us that cannot be taken away from us. And in that knowledge of what God has done for us we find our resilience, our hope, our courage, our ability to support our brothers, our sisters, our siblings who sorrow and are destroyed.
I’ll never forget my great hospital chaplain supervisor Mark Grace (so well named) saying to me once in Supervision, “Jarrett, it doesn’t help the patient if you are as depressed as they are. Remember who is with you. You bring the risen Christ into that room and in that rising you both shall rise, sorrowing and celebrating in God’s eternal life.”
Amen.
Jesus sets a very high bar for preachers this morning. His whole sermon on Isaiah 61 was nine words long. No wonder he was a popular preacher in Galilee. I apologize. I can’t do that.
So my question to Jesus’ reading of Isaiah 61 in the Luke passage is, where did the vengeance go? Where did the heartbreak go? These are the questions that my Saturday Bible Study asked of the text when we looked at Luke 4 and then flipped back to Isaiah 61 and read the original. In the original text, where it says “the acceptable year of our Lord”, it follows immediately with “and the day of vengeance of our God.
So, “I’m here to proclaim the acceptable year of our Lord and the day of vengeance of our God”. Jesus leaves that out. Earlier in the passage where it says “I’ve come to bring Good News to the Poor” the next phrase is “and bind up the broken hearted.” Also, strangely, missing.
Maybe Jesus got a faulty scroll, who knows, but one of the class members made this observation: the sorrow is missing, the broken hearted is missing, the vengeance is missing. All the times in Isaiah 61 where grieving and mourning are, are missing. Why is that? And this Bible Study member reached into scripture and said “well when the bridegroom is present, we don’t mourn. “ When the bridegroom is with us we do not mourn.
The whole passage points to Jesus. “This has been fulfilled today in your hearing. All eyes are fixed on him.” He is the fulfillment, the consummation of Israel’s hopes. He is the promise of Israel's relationship with God come true. He is the healing of the Nations. He is the joining of humanity to God in their synagogue. The bridegroom is present so we celebrate even when we have cause to sorrow. We celebrate even when we have cause to mourn. “All eyes were fixed on him. Today this has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
I know for myself that I have learned through much painful experience to fix my eyes on him, to fix my eyes on Jesus. When my boat is rocking and swamping and being overwhelmed by the storm of life, when I am full of fear and despair and horror and hurt, I have learned to look up, to stand up in my rocky fragile boat and fix my eyes on Him who renews me. Who rejoices in my heart. Who fills me with the spirit again.
And when I fill my eyes with my loving savior moving towards me, I become resilient again. I become revived again. In my mourning, in my sorrow, in my fear, I can celebrate as well. Sorrow and celebration - these go together. We can be dragged down by one and lifted by the other and the gift of our life and faith is that that lifting factor comes from outside of ourselves.
Let’s see how this sorrow and celebrating plays out in Nehemiah and in Corinth. We see it on display in the Nehemiah passage (We get to hear Nehemiah once a year, so let’s do this). Nehemiah is describing the same group of people who are addressed by Isaiah 61, the people who’ve been returned from Exile back to Jerusalem. The first thing they’ve done is build a wall. They’ve rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem to secure themselves, to find that security these traumatized people desperately need. The next thing they're doing is gathering with all eyes fixed on the Torah, on the teachings of God, to renew their relationship with their Lord in this great public gathering of men and women and all who can understand.
Now, things are brewing for these people. These traumatized people are in conflict with each other. They’re debating the place of foreigners among them. Can people who do not speak the language stay, or shall we cast them out? For all those who married foreign women, do we cast out the foreign women and their children? They’re a community in conflict and they’re turning to the Word.
We don’t know which Word was read to them. Was it Leviticus? Was it Deuteronomy? We do know it took a really long time and they were standing out there for a long time, but whatever was read, this covenant with God was read and renewed among them. It caused them sorrow and weeping and mourning, and this is the sorrow and weeping and mourning of moral failure.
We all know that when we let ourselves down, when we do not live up to our ideals, when we fall short of our standards, we grieve. We mourn. We sorrow for the harm we’ve done to ourselves and others. This is the moral weeping of a people hearing how they have failed God as a special people set apart. As a special people set apart they know their story. By failing their obligations to God they have fallen into this state of despair.
But they’re not left there. That’s not the final word. The sorrow and despair causes them to humble themselves, to bend down and press their foreheads to the ground in that beautiful posture of supplication that we know so well from the mosque, if you’ve ever attended. And they’re devastated by God’s word to them, which also includes really stern words about welcoming the stranger, which they’re falling short of at that moment. They are then invited from sorrow into celebration. Don’t mourn but celebrate. “The joy of the Lord is your strength.”
And if I want you to take home any word of scripture with you today, it’s that. “The joy of the Lord is your strength.” God’s desire to connect with you through Torah, through instruction, through this beautiful law, revives your soul in this moment and gives you that next chance to live in relationship with God. So, in your sorrow, I will speak a word of celebration and it will literally raise you off your knees to become God’s renewed, revived community.
Now let's go to Corinth. Corinth, once again, sorrow and celebration. Corinth is this very sophisticated, very cosmopolitan city on this isthmus between Athens and Sparta. It’s a rich mercantile city and a great trade route location, and it’s one of the most argumentative and petty churches that Paul founded. And their big issue is that they cannot figure out how to be the body of Christ together when there are aristocratic elites and the poor all at the same table. They don’t know how to do this.
So, when the passage starts off with that great Good News, “In Christ there’s neither Jew nor Greek”, the whole room can celebrate because they’re all gentiles. “Oh my God, we’re brought into the covenant, who would ever have thought this possible, thanks be to God.” But the next line kicks into sorrow - “neither the slave nor free.” Wait, what? This is the rub for the Corinthians. How do you sit as an equal in Christ with somebody you don’t even honor as a person? In the ancient world only the aristocratic elite were persons. They were the only ones who had that status. The slaves and the plebes were non-persons. They were often referred to as bodies.
Cleverly St. Paul takes this figure from the Greek world and turns it back on the community. This sophisticated group would have known how Plato and Aesop and Livy had used the image of a body to explain the State. Aesop had a great fable about this where the mouth and the hands and the teeth go on strike against the stomach. They all get fed up with feeding the stomach because the stomach gets all the food while they do all the work.
But in Plato and Aesop, the moral is get back to work and serve the stomach. Get back to work and serve the higher authority. In Paul it’s quite different. In Paul he’s using this common analogy to say, “no, we are all equals. You might think you’re the head. You might think you're the more honorable part of the body, but you’re on par with the less honorable.” (And he’s being euphemistic about genitals here. We’re an adult service, I can say this) “You are as dependent on them as they are dependent on you. In the spirit of God, in the church, in this community made by Christ we are equals”.
And this is a cause of sorrow and mourning and loss to those of high status, and a cause of celebration of low and dishonored status. But they are One in the spirit, so they celebrate and they sorrow together. The sorrow and the celebrating overcome the antagonism of rivalry, of being opposed to each other. We are called to be a community that remembers that we sorrow and we celebrate together. And in our celebration we remember all that God has accomplished for us that cannot be taken away from us. And in that knowledge of what God has done for us we find our resilience, our hope, our courage, our ability to support our brothers, our sisters, our siblings who sorrow and are destroyed.
I’ll never forget my great hospital chaplain supervisor Mark Grace (so well named) saying to me once in Supervision, “Jarrett, it doesn’t help the patient if you are as depressed as they are. Remember who is with you. You bring the risen Christ into that room and in that rising you both shall rise, sorrowing and celebrating in God’s eternal life.”
Amen.
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Jan 16, 2022 |
The Circle of Mercy
| The Rev. Barbara Ballenger
The Circle of Mercy
Revisit the Rev. Barbara Ballenger's sermon for the Second Sunday after Epiphany, January 16, 2022.
Today's readings are:
- Exodus 3:7–12
- Psalm 77:11–20
- Galatians 3:23-29
- Luke 6:27–36
The Circle of Mercy
The Rev. Barbara Ballenger
January 16th, 2022
Let us pray. Lord God, who showed your servant Martin Luther King the way of agape love, guide us in that way as we listen for your word today.
On November 17, 1957, The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. walked to the pulpit of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He was sick. The doctor told him to stay home and rest, but he insisted he had to preach that day, so they reached a compromise. King would not go into the pulpit until it was time to preach, and after that he would go directly home and get in bed.
And that’s what he did, I imagine. But in the half hour or so that he stood at that pulpit, he preached on the call to love our enemies. He used the text from Matthew chapter 5 which parallels the one that we had from Luke today, but the ideas are the same.
Dr. King told the congregation that this was a topic that they had heard him address before, because he made it a point of preaching on it at least once a year, adding to it as he developed his thinking. It was at the core of his transformative work. His vision of the Beloved Community requires the transformation that happens to enemies when they are loved and forgiven.
He preached, “The words of this text glitter in our eyes with a new urgency. Far from being the pious injunction of a utopian dreamer, this command is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilization. Yes, it is love that will save our world and our civilization, love even for enemies.”
And that is hard, he said. Very hard. But Jesus wasn’t playing, he said. And neither was Martin. That’s likely why dragged himself out of his sickbed to preach on the importance of loving our enemies. Because Dr. King poured out his love, and his health and his very life in a 24/7 commitment to creating a world not only where the enemies of justice would no longer had the upper hand, but where they might become people who no longer despised, oppressed, exploited, or lynched others. This is what he meant by the Beloved Community.
This image of Martin Luther King Jr., struggling with the challenge of illness and the call to preach, made me wonder what he might make of our COVID-soaked world today on the weekend of his 93rd birthday. What would he make of our fights over whether to vaccinate or wear masks to slow the spread of a killer virus? What would he make of the fact that racial injustice remains as deadly a problem as ever, or that it’s one of the reasons why our democracy hangs in the balance? What would he make of the lives that are threatened over our polarizations? What would he preach?
I think he would send us back to these words of Jesus: Love your enemies.
And he’d remind us what Jesus meant by this:
Do good to those who hate you, Bless those who curse you, Pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt.…If anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.
Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
Seventy years ago Martin Luther King offered the people of Dexter Ave Baptist, and us, some very practical suggestions for loving those enemies. We must start by looking at ourselves, he said, at our own participation in the creation of enemies, our own tendency to harm and to alienate.
He said, “Somehow the ‘isness’ of our present nature is out of harmony with the eternal ‘oughtness’ that forever confronts us. And this simply means this: That within the best of us, there is some evil, and within the worst of us, there is some good. When we come to see this, we take a different attitude toward individuals.”
That helps us to see our enemy as a mixed bag – just like us.
He said, “When you come to the point that you look in the face of every man and see deep down within him what religion calls "the image of God," you begin to love him in spite of. No matter what he does, you see God’s image there. There is an element of goodness that he can never sluff off. Discover the element of good in your enemy. And as you seek to hate him, find the center of goodness and place your attention there and you will take a new attitude.”
Now remember that this was coming from someone who endured racial slurs, and violent attacks, fire hoses, death threats, jailing, a stabbing and a bombing of his home over his demands for civil rights for black people. Martin Luther King Jr. had enemies. And I'm not talking about where he stood on peace.
Another way to love your enemy, he told the congregation at Dexter Avenue Baptist church, is that, “when the opportunity presents itself for you to defeat your enemy, that is the time which you must not do it.” When you have that moment to get even, when faced with the choice to harm or keep someone from moving ahead in life, he said, that’s when you choose not to do it.
“That,” Dr King said, “is the meaning of love. … Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all... It is the refusal to defeat any individual. When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power”, he said, “you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system.”
And that is what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lived and died doing – working to defeat those sinful systems that caught up people within them and made it so very difficult for them to love or to be loved.
As I considered the preaching of Dr. King this week, alongside the words of Luke’s gospel, the ideas of Bishop Desmond Tutu also surfaced for me. Because another word for the love of enemy is forgiveness – and there is no one who has witnessed more fully, painfully and effectively to the power of forgiveness than Bishop Desmond Tutu, who died three weeks ago today.
In The Book of Forgiving, which Desmond Tutu wrote with his daughter, the Rev. Mpho Tutu, the bishop wrote: “Without forgiveness, we remain tethered to the person who harmed us. We are bound with chains of bitterness, tied together, trapped. Until we can forgive the person who harmed us, that person will hold the keys to our happiness; that person will be our jailor.
I recommend this book. It is powerful and practical, and honest. I recommend it to anyone who is either seeking to forgive someone or to be forgiven. The Book of Forgiving.
And I have to say that of late, I’m not sure that I have it in me to rise to the level of Martin Luther King’s agape love or of Desmond Tutu’s forgiveness. I’m not sure I’m up to the task of loving those that I find myself diametrically opposed to, in fierce social and political combat with, in heart-breaking alienation from. I’m not a saint like Martin Luther King or Desmond Tutu.
I can’t, as the Gospel of Matthew suggests, Be perfect as my father is perfect.
But I may be able to do what Luke suggests: To Be merciful as my father is merciful.
I think, with God’s help and with your help, I can create a space where I can grow and develop that ability to love and to forgive, a patient space to live inside of and to live out of. I can create a circle of mercy.
Now Divine mercy is at the very core of God’s relationship with Israel. It is what makes an undeserving and sinful people into a chosen people – mercy is the patient and gracious time and space that God gives people to repent, to live into the covenant, to grow in love. It is not a time of empty waiting on God’s part, but an active time of calling, chastising, teaching, prophesying, lamenting and intervening. Mercy makes a space and opportunity for the undeserving to enter a place of loving relationship with God. “For he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked,” says Luke.
Having been both of those things in my life, I appreciate that about God.
What if I were to create a circle of mercy out of which I might be able to love my enemy and forgive those who have hurt me? What do Martin Luther King, and Desmond Tutu and the author of Luke suggest I fill that circle of mercy with?
I can start by filling it with prayer for my enemies, a desire at least for healed relationship. I can fill it with blessing for those I am in conflict with – that force of imagination that sees both me and my enemies as a mix of good and evil, all beloved of God despite our failings. I can make choices in my circle of mercy – the kind act, the held tongue, the stayed hand, the suppressed schadenfreude.
In the Book of Forgiving, Desmond and Mpho Tutu suggest four practices that lead to the love of enemies that we call forgiveness. These include telling the story of the harm they have inflicted outloud to another; and naming the hurts that resulted; and granting forgiveness in its time, and ultimately deciding whether to renew the relationship or release it.
Which is to say, that the patiently held space within the circle of mercy can be pretty full of things to do while we wait. It does not demand that we declare the love of our enemy before we actually have it, or forgive before we’ve named the harmed, or force a peace before there is peace. But it is a space where we ask God and one another to prepare for it, welcome the possibility of it.
Perhaps we can honor the life, and the death and the resurrection of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by committing to make within ourselves and our faith community such circles of mercy, to pray the “Prayer before the Prayer” as Desmond Tutu calls the prayer before one is able to forgive.
So I’ll leave us with the last stanza of his prayer by that name:
“Is there a place where we can meet
You and me?
The place in the middle
The no man’s land
Where we straddle the lines
Where you are right,
And I am right too,
And both of us are wrong and wronged.
Can we meet there?
And look for the place where the path begins,
The path that ends when we forgive?”
Amen.
The Rev. Barbara Ballenger
January 16th, 2022
Let us pray. Lord God, who showed your servant Martin Luther King the way of agape love, guide us in that way as we listen for your word today.
On November 17, 1957, The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. walked to the pulpit of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He was sick. The doctor told him to stay home and rest, but he insisted he had to preach that day, so they reached a compromise. King would not go into the pulpit until it was time to preach, and after that he would go directly home and get in bed.
And that’s what he did, I imagine. But in the half hour or so that he stood at that pulpit, he preached on the call to love our enemies. He used the text from Matthew chapter 5 which parallels the one that we had from Luke today, but the ideas are the same.
Dr. King told the congregation that this was a topic that they had heard him address before, because he made it a point of preaching on it at least once a year, adding to it as he developed his thinking. It was at the core of his transformative work. His vision of the Beloved Community requires the transformation that happens to enemies when they are loved and forgiven.
He preached, “The words of this text glitter in our eyes with a new urgency. Far from being the pious injunction of a utopian dreamer, this command is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilization. Yes, it is love that will save our world and our civilization, love even for enemies.”
And that is hard, he said. Very hard. But Jesus wasn’t playing, he said. And neither was Martin. That’s likely why dragged himself out of his sickbed to preach on the importance of loving our enemies. Because Dr. King poured out his love, and his health and his very life in a 24/7 commitment to creating a world not only where the enemies of justice would no longer had the upper hand, but where they might become people who no longer despised, oppressed, exploited, or lynched others. This is what he meant by the Beloved Community.
This image of Martin Luther King Jr., struggling with the challenge of illness and the call to preach, made me wonder what he might make of our COVID-soaked world today on the weekend of his 93rd birthday. What would he make of our fights over whether to vaccinate or wear masks to slow the spread of a killer virus? What would he make of the fact that racial injustice remains as deadly a problem as ever, or that it’s one of the reasons why our democracy hangs in the balance? What would he make of the lives that are threatened over our polarizations? What would he preach?
I think he would send us back to these words of Jesus: Love your enemies.
And he’d remind us what Jesus meant by this:
Do good to those who hate you, Bless those who curse you, Pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt.…If anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.
Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
Seventy years ago Martin Luther King offered the people of Dexter Ave Baptist, and us, some very practical suggestions for loving those enemies. We must start by looking at ourselves, he said, at our own participation in the creation of enemies, our own tendency to harm and to alienate.
He said, “Somehow the ‘isness’ of our present nature is out of harmony with the eternal ‘oughtness’ that forever confronts us. And this simply means this: That within the best of us, there is some evil, and within the worst of us, there is some good. When we come to see this, we take a different attitude toward individuals.”
That helps us to see our enemy as a mixed bag – just like us.
He said, “When you come to the point that you look in the face of every man and see deep down within him what religion calls "the image of God," you begin to love him in spite of. No matter what he does, you see God’s image there. There is an element of goodness that he can never sluff off. Discover the element of good in your enemy. And as you seek to hate him, find the center of goodness and place your attention there and you will take a new attitude.”
Now remember that this was coming from someone who endured racial slurs, and violent attacks, fire hoses, death threats, jailing, a stabbing and a bombing of his home over his demands for civil rights for black people. Martin Luther King Jr. had enemies. And I'm not talking about where he stood on peace.
Another way to love your enemy, he told the congregation at Dexter Avenue Baptist church, is that, “when the opportunity presents itself for you to defeat your enemy, that is the time which you must not do it.” When you have that moment to get even, when faced with the choice to harm or keep someone from moving ahead in life, he said, that’s when you choose not to do it.
“That,” Dr King said, “is the meaning of love. … Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all... It is the refusal to defeat any individual. When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power”, he said, “you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system.”
And that is what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lived and died doing – working to defeat those sinful systems that caught up people within them and made it so very difficult for them to love or to be loved.
As I considered the preaching of Dr. King this week, alongside the words of Luke’s gospel, the ideas of Bishop Desmond Tutu also surfaced for me. Because another word for the love of enemy is forgiveness – and there is no one who has witnessed more fully, painfully and effectively to the power of forgiveness than Bishop Desmond Tutu, who died three weeks ago today.
In The Book of Forgiving, which Desmond Tutu wrote with his daughter, the Rev. Mpho Tutu, the bishop wrote: “Without forgiveness, we remain tethered to the person who harmed us. We are bound with chains of bitterness, tied together, trapped. Until we can forgive the person who harmed us, that person will hold the keys to our happiness; that person will be our jailor.
I recommend this book. It is powerful and practical, and honest. I recommend it to anyone who is either seeking to forgive someone or to be forgiven. The Book of Forgiving.
And I have to say that of late, I’m not sure that I have it in me to rise to the level of Martin Luther King’s agape love or of Desmond Tutu’s forgiveness. I’m not sure I’m up to the task of loving those that I find myself diametrically opposed to, in fierce social and political combat with, in heart-breaking alienation from. I’m not a saint like Martin Luther King or Desmond Tutu.
I can’t, as the Gospel of Matthew suggests, Be perfect as my father is perfect.
But I may be able to do what Luke suggests: To Be merciful as my father is merciful.
I think, with God’s help and with your help, I can create a space where I can grow and develop that ability to love and to forgive, a patient space to live inside of and to live out of. I can create a circle of mercy.
Now Divine mercy is at the very core of God’s relationship with Israel. It is what makes an undeserving and sinful people into a chosen people – mercy is the patient and gracious time and space that God gives people to repent, to live into the covenant, to grow in love. It is not a time of empty waiting on God’s part, but an active time of calling, chastising, teaching, prophesying, lamenting and intervening. Mercy makes a space and opportunity for the undeserving to enter a place of loving relationship with God. “For he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked,” says Luke.
Having been both of those things in my life, I appreciate that about God.
What if I were to create a circle of mercy out of which I might be able to love my enemy and forgive those who have hurt me? What do Martin Luther King, and Desmond Tutu and the author of Luke suggest I fill that circle of mercy with?
I can start by filling it with prayer for my enemies, a desire at least for healed relationship. I can fill it with blessing for those I am in conflict with – that force of imagination that sees both me and my enemies as a mix of good and evil, all beloved of God despite our failings. I can make choices in my circle of mercy – the kind act, the held tongue, the stayed hand, the suppressed schadenfreude.
In the Book of Forgiving, Desmond and Mpho Tutu suggest four practices that lead to the love of enemies that we call forgiveness. These include telling the story of the harm they have inflicted outloud to another; and naming the hurts that resulted; and granting forgiveness in its time, and ultimately deciding whether to renew the relationship or release it.
Which is to say, that the patiently held space within the circle of mercy can be pretty full of things to do while we wait. It does not demand that we declare the love of our enemy before we actually have it, or forgive before we’ve named the harmed, or force a peace before there is peace. But it is a space where we ask God and one another to prepare for it, welcome the possibility of it.
Perhaps we can honor the life, and the death and the resurrection of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by committing to make within ourselves and our faith community such circles of mercy, to pray the “Prayer before the Prayer” as Desmond Tutu calls the prayer before one is able to forgive.
So I’ll leave us with the last stanza of his prayer by that name:
“Is there a place where we can meet
You and me?
The place in the middle
The no man’s land
Where we straddle the lines
Where you are right,
And I am right too,
And both of us are wrong and wronged.
Can we meet there?
And look for the place where the path begins,
The path that ends when we forgive?”
Amen.
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Jan 09, 2022 |
Dr. Pepper and Redemption
| The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
Dr. Pepper and Redemption
Revisit the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel's sermon for the First Sunday after Epiphany, January 9, 2022.
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Epiphany/CEpi...
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Epiphany/CEpi...
Please join me in the spirit of prayer.
Lord God, we give you thanks that through your word you address our hearts and our souls and you remind us that we are precious to you, honored and loved. By your Holy Spirit help us receive your word to us and let that word open our hearts that we may live in love with you in each day ahead. In Christ’s name we pray. Amen.
When my mom would take my sisters and I to go see her sister Thala in Clovis, New Mexico, the troops had a certain ritual. We would fly from New Jersey to Amarillo, Texas. My Uncle Bill would pick us up in his big sedan that smelled like the cattle feedlots where he worked. He would immediately drive us to the best barbecue restaurant on Route 40. It was not much to look at but we would zip in get our barbecue and our Dr. Pepper in a tall glass bottle. At that time in New Jersey you could still not get good barbecue or even Dr. Pepper not to mention Mexican food, which is another story. Then we would start the long trip across the panhandle through the small towns and the cotton fields that went on forever until we arrived in Clovis with our Dr. Peppers empty. And all the bottles all went into one of those wonderful old wood soda boxes, with the cokes and the seven ups. We’d rattle them into the case and I found this all utterly fascinating because in New Jersey we could not redeem buzz and I did not understand the whole idea of redemption.
I still don't, but the notion is that the bottle has value. They call it deposit value. It is still an object of value that through a process of redemption can have a new or second life of fruitful use again.
Now for me as a New Jersiate I just thought this was a useless object on the verge of the landfill. This was junk. But in New Mexico this had value because of redemption.
This is actually how I understand redemption.
Redemption is God reminding us that we have value. Redemption is God reminding us that we have value and restoring us to the relationship that gives us that value in the first place, and it is how God loves us into freedom. This redemption story of God's love for us is all over that Isaiah passage which is a glorious, glorious passage. Our deposit value if you will is illustrated by how the passage is book ended by the prophet Isaiah referring to our creation - “you were created o Jacob, you were formed of Israel”. The verbs “creation” and “formed” repeat at the beginning and the end and they are the verbs from the book of Genesis that refer to the creation of the world itself from chaos and the creation of the first human Adam. God formed and created us. We are precious to God as God's creation.
Wrapped up in that creation story is the story of redemption. There is also imagery of Exodus and return from exile. Water, fire, these are images of the people of Israel fleeing from Egypt into the promised land and the story even proposes a whole geopolitical notion of redemption where God has caused the defeat of some nations - the traditional oppressors of Israel - so Israel could be set free once again in the promised land. Our God is a creating God and a redeeming God because God never loses sight of our value even if we do. And then this redeeming story goes even a little heavier because in ancient Israel the redeemer was a family member who had the job of setting you free if you became enslaved due to debt.
So if you became so indebted to someone in your village that that person could literally enslave you, take your freedom, own you, you had a family member whose job it was to redeem you. In other words, ransom you, set you free. Someone whose job it was to remember your value and restore your right relationship, and Israel applied this notion to what God did. God ransoms us at a price and sets us free and this language of redemption is all the way that God says to us how precious we are. How valued we are. How essential we are to what God is doing. Hear that incredibly intimate language Isaiah: “you are precious to me, you are honored by me, I love you.” God loves you.
The “you” is second person singular. “God loves you” was an unprecedented statement in ancient literature, an incredible gift and affirmation of our value to God.
The story is a beautiful background for what happens in Luke where all the same elements are at play. We have the reminders of creation. We have water and the Holy Spirit with Christ in the middle. It's an ancient image of creation. The logos, God the father, the creator, the holy spirit that moved over the waters of creation, all are present reminding us that this is a new creation coming into being right in front of us. John is present telling us about the renewal of the covenant. His baptism was a reminder of the passage of the waters through Exodus into the promised land. It was a covenant renewal ceremony where Israel was remade, reformed - those same verbs again - into the people God intended them to be. And as a renewal it was a redemption. So we see the baptism of Christ himself as a next stage in God's redemptive outreach to us. God will send. God will be our relative. God will be our relative whose sins help someone to redeem us from all that enslaves us. From all the depths and relationships that we've entered into that bind us and draw us away from God. God will pay that price and indicate how valuable we are to God by sending a son. Redemption reminds us of our value.
Redemption restores us to the relationships that give us value, and one of the great gifts of this baptism story and there's so many, is that when God addresses Jesus (and in Luke it's private if you'll notice, it's an intimate address) when he comes up from the water and prays, God says “you are my beloved” and we hear the echoes of Isaiah: “I love you.” But because Jesus has taken on our humanity and because Jesus has started the new creation of our humanity in incarnation and baptism we can hear those words directed to ourselves.
Those words are for Jesus first and foremost but they're also God's words to the humanity he desires to restore. “You are my beloved with whom I am well pleased.” So my prayer for you and for each one of us is to sit in those words today and let those words address you, each one of you, where you are the person addressed.
Hear God's voice to you: “You are my beloved. You are precious to me.”
Let those words open your heart and set you free, and let those words guide you, because all those other voices that invade us about how lousy we are, rotten we are, those aren't from God. The voice of God is “I love you. You are my beloved.”
Amen.
Lord God, we give you thanks that through your word you address our hearts and our souls and you remind us that we are precious to you, honored and loved. By your Holy Spirit help us receive your word to us and let that word open our hearts that we may live in love with you in each day ahead. In Christ’s name we pray. Amen.
When my mom would take my sisters and I to go see her sister Thala in Clovis, New Mexico, the troops had a certain ritual. We would fly from New Jersey to Amarillo, Texas. My Uncle Bill would pick us up in his big sedan that smelled like the cattle feedlots where he worked. He would immediately drive us to the best barbecue restaurant on Route 40. It was not much to look at but we would zip in get our barbecue and our Dr. Pepper in a tall glass bottle. At that time in New Jersey you could still not get good barbecue or even Dr. Pepper not to mention Mexican food, which is another story. Then we would start the long trip across the panhandle through the small towns and the cotton fields that went on forever until we arrived in Clovis with our Dr. Peppers empty. And all the bottles all went into one of those wonderful old wood soda boxes, with the cokes and the seven ups. We’d rattle them into the case and I found this all utterly fascinating because in New Jersey we could not redeem buzz and I did not understand the whole idea of redemption.
I still don't, but the notion is that the bottle has value. They call it deposit value. It is still an object of value that through a process of redemption can have a new or second life of fruitful use again.
Now for me as a New Jersiate I just thought this was a useless object on the verge of the landfill. This was junk. But in New Mexico this had value because of redemption.
This is actually how I understand redemption.
Redemption is God reminding us that we have value. Redemption is God reminding us that we have value and restoring us to the relationship that gives us that value in the first place, and it is how God loves us into freedom. This redemption story of God's love for us is all over that Isaiah passage which is a glorious, glorious passage. Our deposit value if you will is illustrated by how the passage is book ended by the prophet Isaiah referring to our creation - “you were created o Jacob, you were formed of Israel”. The verbs “creation” and “formed” repeat at the beginning and the end and they are the verbs from the book of Genesis that refer to the creation of the world itself from chaos and the creation of the first human Adam. God formed and created us. We are precious to God as God's creation.
Wrapped up in that creation story is the story of redemption. There is also imagery of Exodus and return from exile. Water, fire, these are images of the people of Israel fleeing from Egypt into the promised land and the story even proposes a whole geopolitical notion of redemption where God has caused the defeat of some nations - the traditional oppressors of Israel - so Israel could be set free once again in the promised land. Our God is a creating God and a redeeming God because God never loses sight of our value even if we do. And then this redeeming story goes even a little heavier because in ancient Israel the redeemer was a family member who had the job of setting you free if you became enslaved due to debt.
So if you became so indebted to someone in your village that that person could literally enslave you, take your freedom, own you, you had a family member whose job it was to redeem you. In other words, ransom you, set you free. Someone whose job it was to remember your value and restore your right relationship, and Israel applied this notion to what God did. God ransoms us at a price and sets us free and this language of redemption is all the way that God says to us how precious we are. How valued we are. How essential we are to what God is doing. Hear that incredibly intimate language Isaiah: “you are precious to me, you are honored by me, I love you.” God loves you.
The “you” is second person singular. “God loves you” was an unprecedented statement in ancient literature, an incredible gift and affirmation of our value to God.
The story is a beautiful background for what happens in Luke where all the same elements are at play. We have the reminders of creation. We have water and the Holy Spirit with Christ in the middle. It's an ancient image of creation. The logos, God the father, the creator, the holy spirit that moved over the waters of creation, all are present reminding us that this is a new creation coming into being right in front of us. John is present telling us about the renewal of the covenant. His baptism was a reminder of the passage of the waters through Exodus into the promised land. It was a covenant renewal ceremony where Israel was remade, reformed - those same verbs again - into the people God intended them to be. And as a renewal it was a redemption. So we see the baptism of Christ himself as a next stage in God's redemptive outreach to us. God will send. God will be our relative. God will be our relative whose sins help someone to redeem us from all that enslaves us. From all the depths and relationships that we've entered into that bind us and draw us away from God. God will pay that price and indicate how valuable we are to God by sending a son. Redemption reminds us of our value.
Redemption restores us to the relationships that give us value, and one of the great gifts of this baptism story and there's so many, is that when God addresses Jesus (and in Luke it's private if you'll notice, it's an intimate address) when he comes up from the water and prays, God says “you are my beloved” and we hear the echoes of Isaiah: “I love you.” But because Jesus has taken on our humanity and because Jesus has started the new creation of our humanity in incarnation and baptism we can hear those words directed to ourselves.
Those words are for Jesus first and foremost but they're also God's words to the humanity he desires to restore. “You are my beloved with whom I am well pleased.” So my prayer for you and for each one of us is to sit in those words today and let those words address you, each one of you, where you are the person addressed.
Hear God's voice to you: “You are my beloved. You are precious to me.”
Let those words open your heart and set you free, and let those words guide you, because all those other voices that invade us about how lousy we are, rotten we are, those aren't from God. The voice of God is “I love you. You are my beloved.”
Amen.
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Jan 02, 2022 |
St. Joseph, Pray for Us
| The Rev. Barbara Ballenger
St. Joseph, Pray for Us
Revisit the Rev. Barbara Ballenger's sermon for the Second Sunday after Christmas, January 2, 2022.
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearABC/Christmas/C...
St. Joseph, Pray for Us
Barbara Ballenger, Jan. 2, 2022
Let us pray. Lord God, you spoke to Joseph in dreams. Speak to us so we may hear and follow.
St. Joseph, the spouse of Mary, has been listed as the patron saint of many things including:
Accountants, barristers, carpenters, dying people. exiles. families. grave diggers. house hunters, immigrants, married people, orphans, pregnant women, social justice, travelers, the Universal Church, and workers.
He is to be invoked if you are doubting or hesitant. And if you want to sell your house you might consider buying a statue of him and burying it in the backyard. I believe my sister did this. Her house did sell, now that I think about it.
For someone whose own back story is a bit vague, a lot has been put on Joseph's saintly plate.
But if it were up to me, if I got to make that list based just what we heard in today’s passage from Matthew’s gospel, I would count Joseph as patron of:
Those who lay down their privilege.
Those in non-traditional families.
Those who obey their dreams.
And maybe all men who listen to directions.
Joseph, who plays a starring role in today’s Gospel, gets a rare moment to shine. In Matthew’s nativity story, Joseph -- rather than Mary -- gets the angelic messages, though he’s asleep for all of them, and he gets no good lines and no songs to sing. Still, today is a great opportunity to reflect on this quiet, obedient soul, who delivers the Christ child. It’s a good day to ask: how are we to follow his example, and for what might we ask his intercession?
The first two chapters of Matthew’s gospel gives us nearly all we know about Joseph.
We learn that:
Joseph’s family was descended from David through Solomon -- Jesus would inherit that distinction.
Joseph is upright and righteous, which means he keeps the Law of Moses faithfully.
And because of that righteousness, he would have divorced Mary when she was found to be with child, had not the angel told him to do otherwise.
That’s because Joseph obeys divine messengers when they speak to him in dreams.
In that regard he bears a resemblance to the Joseph of Genesis, who listened to his own set of dreams, ended up in Egypt and secured safety for his family there, setting the stage for Moses to one day deliver Israel from empire and captivity. Matthew’s nativity story looks a lot like the story of Moses, that seminal story of deliverance for Israel. There is an evil king to flee, magicians give counsel, the death of the innocents, and entry and exit from Egypt. Matthew’s diverse community of Jews and gentiles would get the connection. They would see how it tells the same story of deliverance as Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection does.
But I think that Joseph, the husband of Mary, is more than an allegorical figure. He had no technicolor dream coat, no grand soliloquies, though he brought an earnest resolve to his role.
Joseph delivered.
Not the way a savior does, but the way a midwife does -- protecting, facilitating, accompanying, assisting in the birth. If it were up to me I’d make Joseph the patron saint of midwives rather than house hunters.
One of the things I love best about Joseph is his ability to lay down his power and his privilege -- the rights that mosaic law and social order gave him over his betrothed. He had the ability to have Mary stoned to death for being pregnant with a child not his own, and if not publicly executed, then quietly divorced. He could well have obeyed the law rather than the angel. The law would have protected his dominance, upheld the toxic masculinity that has shaped cultural norms both ancient and modern.
But he chose not to. And that wasn’t disobedience to God’s law. It was a higher level of obedience to it -- an openness to the Word of God that transcended what Joseph understood up to that point. He is much like Mary in that way. They make a very good couple.
This kind of obedience made him socially and culturally vulnerable -- to ridicule, attack, arrest, death. Joseph’s vulnerability in laying down his power, looks much like the vulnerability that God took on in becoming human. The seminary word for that is kenosis: self emptying as an act of love. This was Joseph’s charism, his particular divine gift. He put down the power that society had given him and he picked up the grace that God gave him. This is an essential charism in our time, as well.
To follow the example of Joseph, then, is to practice a form of kenosis, laying down power and picking up grace. It is to obey the call to deliver Jesus into the world, so that Christ may do the work of saving it.
This is humble work, and it’s also whiley work, as we see in today’s Gospel. God subverts evil, slips through the fingers of empire, hides the divine self among vulnerable people, crosses borders and carries out the divine mission according to God’s dream. This is the source of my own hope in these uncertain times, as I consider what will subvert and thwart the powers that plague us.
It helps to tell stories of this ability to be humble and whiley and cooperative in God’s dream, as Joseph was. So another story comes to mind for me, one collected by the brothers Grimm and translated by D.L. Ashliman.
When King Conrad III defeated the Duke of Welf (in the year 1140) and placed Weinsberg under siege, the wives of the besieged castle negotiated a surrender which granted them the right to leave with whatever they could carry on their shoulders. The king allowed them that much. Leaving everything else aside, each woman took her own husband on her shoulders and carried him out. When the king's people saw what was happening, many of them said that that was not what had been meant and wanted to put a stop to it. But the king laughed and accepted the women's clever trick.
Other versions of the story invite the women to take what is most precious to them, and they leave carrying the village children under their arms and the men upon their backs. You can tell it’s a fairytale because of the happy ending, a king relents and stands by his word, unlike Herod or Pharaoh.
But I think what is most important about these stories -- whether it’s the flight into Egypt or the faithful wives of Weinsberg -- is not whether they happened but whether they are true. And the truth I see is this, the act of setting down privilege and picking up God’s grace yields a humble and whiley strength, which is required for the work of God.
The author of the letter to the Ephesians says it this way:
I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe.
If we would have St Joseph intercede with God for anything on our behalf, perhaps it should be this.
Amen.
Barbara Ballenger, Jan. 2, 2022
Let us pray. Lord God, you spoke to Joseph in dreams. Speak to us so we may hear and follow.
St. Joseph, the spouse of Mary, has been listed as the patron saint of many things including:
Accountants, barristers, carpenters, dying people. exiles. families. grave diggers. house hunters, immigrants, married people, orphans, pregnant women, social justice, travelers, the Universal Church, and workers.
He is to be invoked if you are doubting or hesitant. And if you want to sell your house you might consider buying a statue of him and burying it in the backyard. I believe my sister did this. Her house did sell, now that I think about it.
For someone whose own back story is a bit vague, a lot has been put on Joseph's saintly plate.
But if it were up to me, if I got to make that list based just what we heard in today’s passage from Matthew’s gospel, I would count Joseph as patron of:
Those who lay down their privilege.
Those in non-traditional families.
Those who obey their dreams.
And maybe all men who listen to directions.
Joseph, who plays a starring role in today’s Gospel, gets a rare moment to shine. In Matthew’s nativity story, Joseph -- rather than Mary -- gets the angelic messages, though he’s asleep for all of them, and he gets no good lines and no songs to sing. Still, today is a great opportunity to reflect on this quiet, obedient soul, who delivers the Christ child. It’s a good day to ask: how are we to follow his example, and for what might we ask his intercession?
The first two chapters of Matthew’s gospel gives us nearly all we know about Joseph.
We learn that:
Joseph’s family was descended from David through Solomon -- Jesus would inherit that distinction.
Joseph is upright and righteous, which means he keeps the Law of Moses faithfully.
And because of that righteousness, he would have divorced Mary when she was found to be with child, had not the angel told him to do otherwise.
That’s because Joseph obeys divine messengers when they speak to him in dreams.
In that regard he bears a resemblance to the Joseph of Genesis, who listened to his own set of dreams, ended up in Egypt and secured safety for his family there, setting the stage for Moses to one day deliver Israel from empire and captivity. Matthew’s nativity story looks a lot like the story of Moses, that seminal story of deliverance for Israel. There is an evil king to flee, magicians give counsel, the death of the innocents, and entry and exit from Egypt. Matthew’s diverse community of Jews and gentiles would get the connection. They would see how it tells the same story of deliverance as Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection does.
But I think that Joseph, the husband of Mary, is more than an allegorical figure. He had no technicolor dream coat, no grand soliloquies, though he brought an earnest resolve to his role.
Joseph delivered.
Not the way a savior does, but the way a midwife does -- protecting, facilitating, accompanying, assisting in the birth. If it were up to me I’d make Joseph the patron saint of midwives rather than house hunters.
One of the things I love best about Joseph is his ability to lay down his power and his privilege -- the rights that mosaic law and social order gave him over his betrothed. He had the ability to have Mary stoned to death for being pregnant with a child not his own, and if not publicly executed, then quietly divorced. He could well have obeyed the law rather than the angel. The law would have protected his dominance, upheld the toxic masculinity that has shaped cultural norms both ancient and modern.
But he chose not to. And that wasn’t disobedience to God’s law. It was a higher level of obedience to it -- an openness to the Word of God that transcended what Joseph understood up to that point. He is much like Mary in that way. They make a very good couple.
This kind of obedience made him socially and culturally vulnerable -- to ridicule, attack, arrest, death. Joseph’s vulnerability in laying down his power, looks much like the vulnerability that God took on in becoming human. The seminary word for that is kenosis: self emptying as an act of love. This was Joseph’s charism, his particular divine gift. He put down the power that society had given him and he picked up the grace that God gave him. This is an essential charism in our time, as well.
To follow the example of Joseph, then, is to practice a form of kenosis, laying down power and picking up grace. It is to obey the call to deliver Jesus into the world, so that Christ may do the work of saving it.
This is humble work, and it’s also whiley work, as we see in today’s Gospel. God subverts evil, slips through the fingers of empire, hides the divine self among vulnerable people, crosses borders and carries out the divine mission according to God’s dream. This is the source of my own hope in these uncertain times, as I consider what will subvert and thwart the powers that plague us.
It helps to tell stories of this ability to be humble and whiley and cooperative in God’s dream, as Joseph was. So another story comes to mind for me, one collected by the brothers Grimm and translated by D.L. Ashliman.
When King Conrad III defeated the Duke of Welf (in the year 1140) and placed Weinsberg under siege, the wives of the besieged castle negotiated a surrender which granted them the right to leave with whatever they could carry on their shoulders. The king allowed them that much. Leaving everything else aside, each woman took her own husband on her shoulders and carried him out. When the king's people saw what was happening, many of them said that that was not what had been meant and wanted to put a stop to it. But the king laughed and accepted the women's clever trick.
Other versions of the story invite the women to take what is most precious to them, and they leave carrying the village children under their arms and the men upon their backs. You can tell it’s a fairytale because of the happy ending, a king relents and stands by his word, unlike Herod or Pharaoh.
But I think what is most important about these stories -- whether it’s the flight into Egypt or the faithful wives of Weinsberg -- is not whether they happened but whether they are true. And the truth I see is this, the act of setting down privilege and picking up God’s grace yields a humble and whiley strength, which is required for the work of God.
The author of the letter to the Ephesians says it this way:
I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe.
If we would have St Joseph intercede with God for anything on our behalf, perhaps it should be this.
Amen.
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Dec 26, 2021 |
A Tribute to Desmond Tutu
| The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
A Tribute to Desmond Tutu
Sermon from The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel from the Nativity of Our Lord, Christmas Day, 10:00 a.m. Holy Eucharist, December 25, 2021
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearABC/Christmas/Chris...
Transcript coming soon.
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearABC/Christmas/Chris...
Transcript coming soon.
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Dec 25, 2021 |
Logos and the Space Telescope
| The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
Logos and the Space Telescope
Sermon from The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel from the Nativity of Our Lord, Christmas Day, 10:00 a.m. Holy Eucharist, December 25, 2021
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearABC_RCL/Christmas/ChrsDay3_RCL.html#Nt1
Transcript coming soon.
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearABC_RCL/Christmas/ChrsDay3_RCL.html#Nt1
Transcript coming soon.
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Dec 24, 2021 |
Strings Attached
| The Rev. Barbara Ballenger
Strings Attached
Sermon from The Rev. Barbara Ballenger from the Nativity of Our Lord, Christmas Eve, 7:00 p.m. Choral Eucharist, December 24, 2021
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearABC_RCL/Christm...
Transcript coming soon.
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearABC_RCL/Christm...
Transcript coming soon.
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Dec 24, 2021 |
Wise Words
| Anne Alexis Harra
Wise Words
Sermon from Ms. Anne Alexis Harra for the Nativity of Our Lord, Christmas Eve, 5:00 p.m. Youth-led Eucharist, 2021.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearABC_RCL/Christm...
Transcript coming soon.
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearABC_RCL/Christm...
Transcript coming soon.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Dec 19, 2021 |
Mary's Victory Song
| The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
Mary's Victory Song
Sermon from the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the Fourth Sunday of Advent.
Today's readings are:
Mary’s Victory Song
The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
The Final Sunday of Advent, December 19, 2021
Please join me in the spirit of prayer.
Gracious God, you inspired Mary to give us your word and the Magnificat. Bless us whichever way our journey is going, whether we are being cast down or raised up, emptied out or filled up, help us know that it is a blessing to arrive with our neighbor in that place called enough.
In Christ's name we pray. Thank you.
My wife and I love every sort of music. If you know my wife Allison Bowden, she can sing large parts of Britten's Ceremony of Carols by heart and she's a big fan of Parliament Funkadelic, so that's how our family rolls. In fact we have a game we play with music which we call “Next line please.” I will sing a line to her and she'll sing it back, like the next line in the song, so an easy one - and you can join in if you want, I will not sing, we will just recite -”Shake it up baby now” (The congregation responds: “Twist and shout.”) “Ain’t no mountain high enough.” (The congregation responds “Ain’t no mountain low enough.”) “Jojo was a man who thought he was a loner.” (The congregation responds: “but he knew it wouldn't last.” and so on…)
Now finally, “my soul magnifies the Lord” (The congregation responds: “the spirit rejoices in God, my savior.”
In a world without exclamation points - that is, the ancient world - you repeated things to make your point. If you wanted to explain and exalt and emphasize, you said it twice in a row. So Mary is saying essentially, “rejoice again, I say rejoice in our faithful God.” She is singing a song, a prophecy of exaltation, of joy, of fulfillment and I want to spend time with it this morning. We've had it twice already. We might say, “that's a lot, Jared.” We had it in the psalm position and we had it as part of the Gospel which was optional, but I wanted to do it as many times as we could.
I wanted that because the song of Mary is something I would like us to have by heart and I believe it's also something that's extremely good for our hearts, because in it Mary is teaching us. Mary the apostle, Mary the prophet, Mary the theotokos, the bearer of God's teachings, is telling us how to recognize what our God is doing and who our God is. In fact she is teaching us who our God is by telling us what God does so we can discern the movements of God in our own lives in our own world. She is teaching us that our God is faithful and true and comes through on God 's promises so we can have confidence, we can have hope and we can be humble in our service with our Lord.
Now, the song of Mary is a victory song. She is singing a victory song in a long tradition of woman prophets in Israel. She's in the heritage of Miriam who sings a wonderful victory song after the deliverance at the red sea. She's in the tradition of Deborah from Judges who sings a victory song. She's in the tradition of Hannah who sings a victory song after she is miraculously able to be pregnant, probably the closest to Mary's song. Mary has sung a victory song for what God has already achieved, what God has already accomplished, and it's an odd way she does it.
It involves a special grammar. Now I grew up in the 70s when schools did not believe in grammar. They thought it was oppressive to our cool little souls, so they didn't teach it to us, so I had to do a lot of research this week, but the Magnificat is written in a verb tense that we don't have in English. It’s written in a Greek verb tense called aorist a-o-r-i-s-t. We translate it into past perfect which doesn't quite do the job, but the past perfect is all those verbs in there: “has shown the strength of his arm, has scattered the crowd in the conceit of their hearts.” I like that translation better. “ has cast down the mighty from their thrones, has lifted up the lowly, has filled the hungry with good things, has sent the rich away empty.”
In the Greek what all this verbiage means is that this has been accomplished and continues. This has been done, the victory won, and the work continues. God 's work is ongoing and secured by God 's action. That's what makes it a victory song because otherwise we're asking Mary for the footnotes. “When has God done that, when has God done that, when has God done that?” God has done it in the incarnation itself.
In the conception of this child, God has acted decisively to change the history and path of the world. God has acted decisively to reunite God with humanity, to do God 's eternal purpose which was to harmonize humanity with God. This is accomplished in this incarnation and we talk so much about the cross and the resurrection of how God does God 's word but the incarnation is the first stitch. It's the essential beginning of how God makes peace with humanity, how God makes shalom, and I use that word intentionally because it's so much richer than peace. God makes peace with humanity, overcomes our hostility.
I want to pause on that for a minute because this is essential to what the Bible teaches. The history of the Bible is a history of God offering and humanity rejecting, of humanity living in opposition and hostility to God, and we might think to ourselves, “well I’m not hostile to God, I have good intentions, I have a high regard for my own innocence.” But the story we live in is a story of rejection of God 's good authority, the rejection of God 's just and loving authority and when you reject God 's Godliness that is hostility. Ask any parent of a teenager. And it's that hostility, that resistance and reluctance and rejection that we bring to this relationship that God overcomes through God 's power by knitting us together forever in his life through the incarnation. This is the first stitch and that is the glorious good news of this story. I want to underline it in a certain way by a practice I have of every year looking out for where do I see the Magnificat? Where do I see how God has shown the strength of God 's arm, where do I see how God has scattered the powerful in their conceit, how has God cast down the mighty, how has God lifted up the lowly and filled them with good things, how has God sent the rich empty away both in the world and in my self?
Well staying on the theme of music one of my favorite recording artists gave me something that looked like the Magnificat this year. He’s a wonderful singer-songwriter, if you don't know him, named Jason Isbell. He has a great song called 24 frames which I just adore. I will once again resist singing it to you but the lyric is amazing theologically. He says, “you thought God was an architect now you know he’s more like a pipe bomb ready to blow. All you've built was just for show. All gone in 24 frames.”
He is a brilliant songwriter but in the country music world which tries to claim him, he is what we might call a burr in the saddle. He has done amazing work challenging the sexism and racism of the country music establishment. So right now he recently had a seven night residency at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. Now this is the holy temple of country music. A seven night residency with Amanda Shires, his wife, and what did he do? Every night he picked out an African-American country recording artist who was a woman to open for him. He raised up the lowly, but he doesn’t look at it that way. He says each one of these women should be a headline. Each one deserves to be a headliner except for the resistance of racism and country music which we recall was created by segregationist producers who wanted white root’s music to sell opposed to black root’s music.
Using his influence Isbell has facilitated a raising up and he has challenged those in power to be cast down. He goes even farther. A famous country singer Morgan Wallin famously this year was caught on tape using the worst racial slurs you could think of, and this caused rightly a huge scandal and a major pause in his career as it should have. A leader in this was Jason Isbell making sure there were consequences and making sure this was an opportunity for country music to confront its racist history and present, and here's what Jason Isbell said.
He is a wonderful guy. He's been through recovery and he really doesn't suffer fools and he just said, “look, we are not persecuting Morgan Wallin. He is not being harmed. He is still a multi-millionaire. We are taking him off a pedestal and we are bringing him down to the sidewalk where the rest of us live, where the rest of us learn hard lessons and repent and return to the Lord.”
Bring the mighty from their thrones, send the rich away empty, concrete vision of what God is doing as Mary teaches us in the Magnificat, we are invited to join in. We are invited to be a people who facilitate this leveling action of the Magnificat where the rich are sent away empty, the mighty come down from their thrones and the poor are elevated to meet them in this level place called enough.
We are called to be part of that gracious action, that prophetic action and we are called with confidence, with hope and humility that our world desperately needs from us. We are called with confidence because it is accomplished in the coming of Christ. We are called with hope because God is true to God 's promises as Mary tells us. We are called with humility because anything that is done well is only done in God 's power and with God 's help.
Amen.
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Today's readings are:
- Micah 5:2-5a
- Hebrews 10:5-10
- Luke 1:39-45, (46-55)
- Canticle 15
Mary’s Victory Song
The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
The Final Sunday of Advent, December 19, 2021
Please join me in the spirit of prayer.
Gracious God, you inspired Mary to give us your word and the Magnificat. Bless us whichever way our journey is going, whether we are being cast down or raised up, emptied out or filled up, help us know that it is a blessing to arrive with our neighbor in that place called enough.
In Christ's name we pray. Thank you.
My wife and I love every sort of music. If you know my wife Allison Bowden, she can sing large parts of Britten's Ceremony of Carols by heart and she's a big fan of Parliament Funkadelic, so that's how our family rolls. In fact we have a game we play with music which we call “Next line please.” I will sing a line to her and she'll sing it back, like the next line in the song, so an easy one - and you can join in if you want, I will not sing, we will just recite -”Shake it up baby now” (The congregation responds: “Twist and shout.”) “Ain’t no mountain high enough.” (The congregation responds “Ain’t no mountain low enough.”) “Jojo was a man who thought he was a loner.” (The congregation responds: “but he knew it wouldn't last.” and so on…)
Now finally, “my soul magnifies the Lord” (The congregation responds: “the spirit rejoices in God, my savior.”
In a world without exclamation points - that is, the ancient world - you repeated things to make your point. If you wanted to explain and exalt and emphasize, you said it twice in a row. So Mary is saying essentially, “rejoice again, I say rejoice in our faithful God.” She is singing a song, a prophecy of exaltation, of joy, of fulfillment and I want to spend time with it this morning. We've had it twice already. We might say, “that's a lot, Jared.” We had it in the psalm position and we had it as part of the Gospel which was optional, but I wanted to do it as many times as we could.
I wanted that because the song of Mary is something I would like us to have by heart and I believe it's also something that's extremely good for our hearts, because in it Mary is teaching us. Mary the apostle, Mary the prophet, Mary the theotokos, the bearer of God's teachings, is telling us how to recognize what our God is doing and who our God is. In fact she is teaching us who our God is by telling us what God does so we can discern the movements of God in our own lives in our own world. She is teaching us that our God is faithful and true and comes through on God 's promises so we can have confidence, we can have hope and we can be humble in our service with our Lord.
Now, the song of Mary is a victory song. She is singing a victory song in a long tradition of woman prophets in Israel. She's in the heritage of Miriam who sings a wonderful victory song after the deliverance at the red sea. She's in the tradition of Deborah from Judges who sings a victory song. She's in the tradition of Hannah who sings a victory song after she is miraculously able to be pregnant, probably the closest to Mary's song. Mary has sung a victory song for what God has already achieved, what God has already accomplished, and it's an odd way she does it.
It involves a special grammar. Now I grew up in the 70s when schools did not believe in grammar. They thought it was oppressive to our cool little souls, so they didn't teach it to us, so I had to do a lot of research this week, but the Magnificat is written in a verb tense that we don't have in English. It’s written in a Greek verb tense called aorist a-o-r-i-s-t. We translate it into past perfect which doesn't quite do the job, but the past perfect is all those verbs in there: “has shown the strength of his arm, has scattered the crowd in the conceit of their hearts.” I like that translation better. “ has cast down the mighty from their thrones, has lifted up the lowly, has filled the hungry with good things, has sent the rich away empty.”
In the Greek what all this verbiage means is that this has been accomplished and continues. This has been done, the victory won, and the work continues. God 's work is ongoing and secured by God 's action. That's what makes it a victory song because otherwise we're asking Mary for the footnotes. “When has God done that, when has God done that, when has God done that?” God has done it in the incarnation itself.
In the conception of this child, God has acted decisively to change the history and path of the world. God has acted decisively to reunite God with humanity, to do God 's eternal purpose which was to harmonize humanity with God. This is accomplished in this incarnation and we talk so much about the cross and the resurrection of how God does God 's word but the incarnation is the first stitch. It's the essential beginning of how God makes peace with humanity, how God makes shalom, and I use that word intentionally because it's so much richer than peace. God makes peace with humanity, overcomes our hostility.
I want to pause on that for a minute because this is essential to what the Bible teaches. The history of the Bible is a history of God offering and humanity rejecting, of humanity living in opposition and hostility to God, and we might think to ourselves, “well I’m not hostile to God, I have good intentions, I have a high regard for my own innocence.” But the story we live in is a story of rejection of God 's good authority, the rejection of God 's just and loving authority and when you reject God 's Godliness that is hostility. Ask any parent of a teenager. And it's that hostility, that resistance and reluctance and rejection that we bring to this relationship that God overcomes through God 's power by knitting us together forever in his life through the incarnation. This is the first stitch and that is the glorious good news of this story. I want to underline it in a certain way by a practice I have of every year looking out for where do I see the Magnificat? Where do I see how God has shown the strength of God 's arm, where do I see how God has scattered the powerful in their conceit, how has God cast down the mighty, how has God lifted up the lowly and filled them with good things, how has God sent the rich empty away both in the world and in my self?
Well staying on the theme of music one of my favorite recording artists gave me something that looked like the Magnificat this year. He’s a wonderful singer-songwriter, if you don't know him, named Jason Isbell. He has a great song called 24 frames which I just adore. I will once again resist singing it to you but the lyric is amazing theologically. He says, “you thought God was an architect now you know he’s more like a pipe bomb ready to blow. All you've built was just for show. All gone in 24 frames.”
He is a brilliant songwriter but in the country music world which tries to claim him, he is what we might call a burr in the saddle. He has done amazing work challenging the sexism and racism of the country music establishment. So right now he recently had a seven night residency at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. Now this is the holy temple of country music. A seven night residency with Amanda Shires, his wife, and what did he do? Every night he picked out an African-American country recording artist who was a woman to open for him. He raised up the lowly, but he doesn’t look at it that way. He says each one of these women should be a headline. Each one deserves to be a headliner except for the resistance of racism and country music which we recall was created by segregationist producers who wanted white root’s music to sell opposed to black root’s music.
Using his influence Isbell has facilitated a raising up and he has challenged those in power to be cast down. He goes even farther. A famous country singer Morgan Wallin famously this year was caught on tape using the worst racial slurs you could think of, and this caused rightly a huge scandal and a major pause in his career as it should have. A leader in this was Jason Isbell making sure there were consequences and making sure this was an opportunity for country music to confront its racist history and present, and here's what Jason Isbell said.
He is a wonderful guy. He's been through recovery and he really doesn't suffer fools and he just said, “look, we are not persecuting Morgan Wallin. He is not being harmed. He is still a multi-millionaire. We are taking him off a pedestal and we are bringing him down to the sidewalk where the rest of us live, where the rest of us learn hard lessons and repent and return to the Lord.”
Bring the mighty from their thrones, send the rich away empty, concrete vision of what God is doing as Mary teaches us in the Magnificat, we are invited to join in. We are invited to be a people who facilitate this leveling action of the Magnificat where the rich are sent away empty, the mighty come down from their thrones and the poor are elevated to meet them in this level place called enough.
We are called to be part of that gracious action, that prophetic action and we are called with confidence, with hope and humility that our world desperately needs from us. We are called with confidence because it is accomplished in the coming of Christ. We are called with hope because God is true to God 's promises as Mary tells us. We are called with humility because anything that is done well is only done in God 's power and with God 's help.
Amen.
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
