Sermons from St. Martin-in-the-Fields

Listen to this week’s sermon from LIFT Worship from Anne Alexis Harra for the Fifth Sunday in Lent, April 3, 2022

Learn more about LIFT, Living in Faith Together, at stmartinec.org/lift

Today’s Readings:

• Joshua 5:9-12
• 2 Corinthians 5:16-21
• Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
• Psalm 32

Readings were taken from God’s Word, My Voice: A Children’s Lectionary

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Good morning, my friends. Today, we heard about a dinner party. Who has ever been to a dinner party? Or a big family dinner? Raise your hand. Wonderful. What are some things you experience at a dinner party? What happens there?

That’s right. You can usually expect lots of food. Sometimes the tables are set really nicely with flowers or something fancy in the middle. You usually talk to a lot of people – sometimes you’re catching up with people you haven't seen in a while. On the count of three, I want all of you to share your favorite dinner party food with me, okay? *count* I’ll remember ALL of those! I promise!

So now that we’ve established the “norms” of a dinner party, let’s think about the dinner party that our good friend John told us about, shall we? In fact, just for a few moments, let’s pretend we’re at a dinner party with Jesus. Here are some things you all should know about this dinner party we are attending. ONE. It is occurring six days before Passover. Does anyone know what Passover is? (It’s a Jewish holiday that celebrates God freeing God’s people out of slavery in Egypt and into freedom.) Passover is a big deal for Jesus and his friends. TWO. Mary, Martha, and Lazarus are siblings who live in a big house. THREE. This is when we learn about Judas Iscariot, one of Jesus’ disciples who would later betray him. There is a lot going on just this one evening, folks!

This is a great story because it highlights hospitality: welcoming people into your home was a sign of deep respect and friendship in the ancient world. By throwing this dinner party, we know that Mary, Martha, and Lazarus have fond feelings for Jesus, and vice versa. We know that Martha will serve the food tonight. What do you think she’ll serve for dinner? Martha will probably serve a lovely dinner of fish, bread, figs, and wine, if I had to guess. Those are pretty much the staple foods of the ancient world.

Now, here’s where I need some help from you guys. We talked about the norms of a dinner party, right? But can you tell me what happens after you’re done eating at a dinner party? The evening is still young, you’re hanging out, right? What else? You probably help clean up, some people do the dishes, there might be dessert. Right. Okay, something we may not expect to see is someone wiping perfume on someone else’s feet, right? Especially not with her hair. I wouldn’t call that a dinner party norm, would you?

So, our sweet friend Mary has just wiped very expensive perfume with her hair onto Jesus’ feet. Does anyone want to guess how expensive the perfume was? It says it was worth a whole year’s salary, which is around $50,000 in today's dollars. It was worth a lot of money! Mary, our sweet, faithful Mary, did not view this interaction between Jesus and her as a transaction. The perfume suddenly lost its monetary value because Jesus’ love and ministry was worth everything. Mary knew and experienced how important Jesus is – remember, he raised her brother, Lazarus, from the dead. So even though Judas tried to reprimand Mary, she did the right thing. Jesus knew how much he meant to Mary. Jesus truly valued the people in his life. His love and respect of all of us – you and me and your mom and dad – is worth everything, just like Mary taught us.

Friends, thank you for coming to this dinner party with Jesus. It’s been lovely being with you. Amen.

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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

Tune into the sermon from Bonnie Hoffman-Adams for the Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 27, 2022.

Support St. Martin’s mission and ministry by giving online: stmartinec.org/give

Today's readings are:

• Joshua 5:9-12
• 2 Corinthians 5:16-21
• Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
• Psalm 32

Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/

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+ The Sermon +


Divine Reconciliation

Bonnie Hoffman-Adams

March 27, 2022

I came across a study about shopping. This study claimed that whenever we make a purchase, our brain releases endorphins and dopamine. We literally get high when we purchase something, when we open up that package and we find something new in our closets or elsewhere in our house, this thing - this new thing - literally gives us a buzz.

Newness is appealing. But I think that the newness of our hearts is a lot more complicated.

Do any of you remember what you did for New Years? Do you remember anything about perhaps making some goals? (And if you didn’t, that’s just fine.) I always feel terribly anxious at that time of year. It’s momentous, it’s artificial, I feel bullied into thinking about how I should change my life, and when I do make those goals, I feel kind of depressed knowing by mid January I have forgotten them. And yet, when I hear these first lines from our second lesson today my heart quickens with possibility.

Listen again to the first two sentences of our second reading.

From now on , therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ there is a new creation;

Everything old has passed away See everything has become new!

So what is the newness that you seek? I think it is really common among us. We all kind of really want the same things:

We want our regrets to be banished. We want our bad habits to disappear. We want our memories to be transformed. We want our sin to be forgiven and forgotten. We want a spring time of the heart.
I think that is why we’re in church.

Paul tells us we are to regard no one from a human point of view. I think this is kind of funny - what are our options? We are human after all. What other point of view do we have? Where is it? How do we obtain this?

We are told by Paul,

All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation. That is in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself not counting their trespasses against them and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.

Reconciliation is at the heart of this new point of view and it is also our mission.

In Greek as well as in English the word “reconcile” has two ways that it can go. It can describe money, it can describe relationships. The older use of the Greek word is in fact money changer, and what did they work with? They worked with balances. They would put foreign currency on one side to figure out what local cash would be given in exchange. The balance had to be equal.

We still use this word of balance with our money. We balance books, we reconcile checkbooks. We still have that sense of fairness, but it is more often used in our relationships.

The ground between the two parties has been made uneven, is smoothed over by apologies and possibly even a gift. We say someone owes me an apology. It evens out that balance. Even our legal system has those words in it. Someone pays a debt to society by going to prison. We also can note that the Hebrew word for sin means debt, so it’s not very far from keeping that balance right that you put a tooth on one side and a tooth on the other.

This is all a search for justice. We all know it falls short. It’s not perfect. It’s the best we’ve got for the moment. But what I have described to you right now is a human point of view. This is not what “being in Christ “ is or having his perspective as ours is. This is not at all about a new creation. This is the same old system.

Divine reconciliation is not transactional.

When God brings about balance or healing and makes things right again is not a quid pro quo arrangement. It is not a this for a that.

I think sometimes we would prefer if it was that way. We would like to believe that what we’ve done - those good deeds - would be on one side of the balance, and then the love of God would surely follow on the other side. But as soon as we start thinking about that balance, we’re back into that human point of view.

There is no better parable than the Prodigal son to begin to see something different about reconciliation. We’ve had at least three stories before this story today that talk about loss. We heard last week about the tree of the lost cause, we’ve heard about the lost sheep and the lost coin, so today is the lost son. But I think this story goes a step further than describing that amazing search that God has for those on the edge. All of these stories tell us of God’s determined love of seeking us out but by this time we get to today's parable we are ready to hear the next part.

There was a man who had two sons. The younger of them said to his father - Give me the share of the property that will belong to me. So he divided the property.

This is a terrible story, and we can’t forget it. This is more than being rude. He is telling his father to think of his death. He is reminding his father that the things that his father has worked on are more important than he is. And his father does it. He splits his property. That is plan A. This son is a man of plans.

He gets the cash, he leaves, he spends it, it’s all gone, and then he discovers he has no means to feed himself. “Ah”, he says, “I will hire myself out!” But he discovers plan B is not so good either. There is no living wage to be available.

So as he is sitting in that pigsty he gets Plan C. He comes to himself and says, “Okay. I’ve messed up. I will offer an apology to my father. I will offer to work for him as a hired servant.”

So far at this point we have a great picture of human reconciliation, in both money and giving an apology.

I am going to give you an alternative parable at this point. These are my words, this is not scripture, but I want you to give it some thought.

So he set off and went to his father. He knocked on his old house door. His father answered. The son offered his apology and his plans of working . His father welcomes him back and takes up his offer for labor and then says your brother will be your manager. They join later for dinner.

So this is it: Is this story unjust? What’s wrong with this story? Or maybe I should ask you, would you want this story to be the parable that Jesus tells?

You welcome your child home after apologies were offered and apologies accepted. But there is something more going on in this story. This is not the story of forgiveness that is told to us by Jesus. So let us hurry back to scripture:

But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion. He ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.

This astonishing parent sees his child far off which means he has been looking out at the horizon. always waiting for his return. He runs, embraces him, kisses and totally ignores plan C. A good feast is to be had, the best clothes, shoes, everything to welcome back this lost child.

It is now at this point that the son receives his real inheritance. It’s not the stuff. It is being in the arms of such undeserved and unconditional Love.

In years past I used to think that this conversion started in the pig pen. But no, that is still a transactional understanding of love. You behave and I’ll love you. Apologize and I will forgive you. For this his son realizes that his riches are still there for him. He now knows something of that profound depth of love that his father has for him.

Now, we cannot ignore the older brother. He feels ignored. We’re not going to ignore him. He is a sympathetic character in many ways. He has been working hard. He’s been good. He has not spent his money on questionable activities. And he is upset. He’s not going to join the party. His father -not a servant- comes out and pleads directly with him. But he responds in this way

When this son of yours (not “my brother”) has come back and devoured your property (he mentions the prostitutes) property, what do you do Dad? You kill a fatted calf.

Now from the human point of view he is rightly upset. He’s no different though than the younger brother, before he returned home. He just had a different plan . He is just as interested and focused on assets and not his father.

For all these years I have been working like a slave for you. I have been good.

Yes, he has been working like a slave, but that’s self-designating, that’s his understanding, he’s missed the profound love right next to him.

Transactional relationships make us slaves and not children of God. They make us miss the Love.

You are always with me and all that is mine is yours.

This is the divine point of view. Jesus came to change how we look at things. Jesus loves us so much that he lived a life forgiving people even when they did not ask for it. In his tortured death he did not abandoned those who abandoned him. He didn’t replace his love with a balance. He wants us to know none of our actions, of abandonment, or misappropriated affections, none of them - not even death - could separate us from him or his love.

This love is not a love that waits at the top of the hill looking at the horizon, but it’s a love that descended to live among us and even sit with us in our suffering, in our sickness, in our misery, so he can tell us he is with us.

You are always with me and all that is mine is yours.

Treasure the presence of God that is merciful and loving beyond our imaginations.

Let us pray. Lord, help us become ambassadors of this absurd and abundant love that you give us. Help us to forgive others with every breath we take, even when they don’t ask us. Lord, strengthen us so that we reflect your grace and glory in all that we do. Never let us forget that you are always with us. Amen.

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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

Listen to this week’s sermon from LIFT Worship from Anne Alexis Harra for the Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 27, 2022

Learn more about LIFT, Living in Faith Together, at stmartinec.org/lift

Today’s Readings:

• Joshua 5:9-12
• 2 Corinthians 5:16-21
• Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
• Psalm 32

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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

Tune into the sermon from The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the Third Sunday in Lent, March 20, 2022.

Support St. Martin’s mission and ministry by giving online: stmartinec.org/give

Today's readings are:

• Exodus 3:1-15
• 1 Corinthians 10:1-13
• Luke 13:1-9
• Psalm 63:1-8

Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/

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I’m preaching from a gospel this morning which was the first gospel I preached on as a priest. Talk about God’s sense of humor. 27 years ago I was at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Sunbury, Central PA, on the banks of the Susquehanna River, my first posting. St. Matthews was a high church, Anglo-Catholic parish, bells and spells. and as such the Gospel was not just spoken it was chanted. My first Sunday was the third Sunday in Lent and the Gospel we heard this morning was the Gospel for that day and it was my job to chant it. Which is to say that my first ever chanted Gospel included me intoning “Spread Manure On It,” and a young priest in his young twenties had to keep a straight face.

“Spread Manure On It.” We will get back to the manure later in the sermon. Hopefully it will not be a synonym for this sermon. We’ll get back to it because Jesus was not coprophobic and neither should we be. The manure I will propose is his mercy, his merciful answer his answer to the intense questions that begin this passage.

And oh, what a passage it is. So many people come up to me on this one and say, “What?” or “Huh?” or “Do we have to read this?” And indeed it has caused more than one preacher to preach a sermon directly contrary to what Jesus is suggesting in the passage. All over the nation this morning there will be theocracy sermons, trying to explain why a good God lets evil happen, which is exactly what Jesus is suggesting we not get into.

The disasters mentioned - the slaughter at the altar by Pilate and the mass death when the tower fell - it is very clear to Jesus that these are not the will of God - this is not God’s doing. These are the kinds of destruction and suffering caused by the malevolence and neglect of empire and domination. This is what happens under corrupt and oppressive power. Asking abstract theological questions about the slaughter and the collapse is dangerously beside the point - in fact - it distracts from the real work at hand and even worse - this faulty theology causes the people to look at themselves for blame instead of looking hard at the reality of occupation that surrounds them.

Jesus is clear. The sins of the victims did not cause their deaths. The evil of an occupying power did. Pilate murdered the Galileans. Remember that Jesus is Galilean. Remember Pilate’s role to come in the gospel of Luke. There is a foreshadowing here. Herod’s neglect of municipal maintenance caused the tower to fall while Herod meanwhile was building himself lavish palaces and monuments to his pride. Violence and neglect kill the people while the rulers benefit.

So when Jesus says “REPENT!” he is saying, “Wake Up! Change Your Thinking! Change your way of thinking! Adjust your perspective! Dump distracting, abstract theology and face the way things are.”

The frightful problems you name are not theological problems, they are problems of imperial domination. Innocent lives were lost to the powers that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.

Jesus is setting his listeners free from a faulty theology that cannot tell the difference between the ways of God and the ways of occupation. Jesus wants his listeners to look with fresh eyes at their dilemma. After all, how convenient for the empire have a theology that causes people to blame themselves and blame blame the victims for their own persecution and murder.

To repent, as Jesus is using it - to be transformed, to have our minds changed - changes how we look at ourselves and the world. It pushes us to ask questions much more challenging than the ones Jesus offers rhetorically.

A writer in the Atlantic Magazine this week recounted a phone conversation with his sister-in-law. The sister-in-law and her husband were avid anti-vaxxers and COVID deniers. They had their own version of reality and all attempts at correction had been fruitless, frustrating and had ended in tears. Now on this day of this phone call, this sister-in-law and her husband had gotten COVID and so had she, and the cases were bad. The husband had to be intubated and she was very distressed.. On the phone the sister-in-law was distraught and agitated and was asking the big questions; “How could God let this happen to us? How could this be happening?” The writer knew better than to challenge these questions in the moment. She needed comfort, not correction. But he goes on to reflect that these big questions, these abstract questions really had obvious answers. In fact these questions were a way of avoiding the obvious answers, because to really answer these questions would be to take a hard look at the choices made and the world-view adopted, the loyalties developed, the allegiances formed, the world that had got them into this predicament, the authorities they had listened to. Sometimes the big questions lead us astray and away from the harder questions where we could make progress.

And Jesus responds to distracting, abstract questions by inviting his listeners to change their point of view and then giving them a powerful alternative image of who God is and how God works. His intervention is brilliant as always. His intervention is this image of a fig tree that is not bearing fruit, this pastoral image. And I want us to approach this fig tree the same way we approach the parable of the lost sheep. Remember the parable where 99 sheep are saved with the shepherd and one is lost, and the shepherd runs out for that sheep. And that parable is meant to teach us how absurdly loving our God is. To leave the 99 for the sake of the one would be nonsensical in the ancient world, and I would like to suggest it is the same with this tree.

In an orchard full of fig trees, why pay attention to the one? It’s an illustration of God’s abundant forbearance and mercy even when we fall short, and we do. How does God respond to the fig tree? With mercy and mature and loving attention. Spread manure on it. God is faithful. God is good. God has a purpose for the fig tree and God invests in that purpose with love and nurture. Where empire brings deadly virus and neglect, Jesus counters with life-giving mercy and nurture towards a fruitful, flourishing existence. Spread manure.

Too many people I talk to in pastoral care are struggling, struggling in life, because they were taught destructive ideas about who God is. Too many mistake God for an emperor, one who meets out violence and judgment and provokes obedience through fear. We who know Jesus need to share with the world another knowledge of God, the knowledge of God who tends to the orchard - who feeds and nurtures, who goes out of the way to the barren tree to bring it back to life, to give it a second chance.

I believe this pastoral image is so good for us in this moment. For two year and more we have been on high alert - our cortisol levels elevated from a constant experience of threat and elevated fear. I am deeply concerned that this cortisol flood in our brain has changed us - made us overly reactive, overly defensive, often quick to aggression, and even seeking out more drama for our fix of cortisol. Cortisol changes our brain. It affects our soul, our position in the world.

But Jesus teaches us well. Move away - detach - from the big dramatic stories of slaughter and mayhem. Turn instead to this pastoral image of nurture and mercy. And In that turning - in that repenting - we can give good loving care to our brains and detox from stress hormones and reach a more peaceful loving place that will feed our souls and feed our world with peace and faithfulness. We know - it’s been shown - that prayer, meditation, worship, singing, scripture study - are good for the mind and the soul. They create new pathways for grace in us. They change our brain, change our perspective, decrease stress pathways and build up flexibility and grace. So my proposal deep into Lent is this: let us declare a fast from cortisol. Let us wean ourselves from drama. Let us give loving kindness to ourselves and others so that God may spread some manure on our roots that will give us life and return us to flourishing. Amen.

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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

Tune into the sermon from Eugenie Dieck for the Second Sunday in Lent, March 13, 2022.

Support St. Martin’s mission and ministry by giving online: stmartinec.org/give

Today's readings are:

• Genesis 15:1-12,17-18
• Philippians 3:17-4:1
• Luke 13:31-35
• Psalm 27

Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/

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May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my strength and my Redeemer. Amen.

Let’s go for a walk. Let’s go for a walk with Jesus.

Jesus walks throughout the Gospels. Lent is the period of the Gospels when Jesus shares his ministry; as the story goes, Jesus walked for three years. Today, let us reflect on how we walk with Jesus.

What does it mean to Walk?

We all know how to walk… or so we think. There are different ways we walk…we walk towards, we walk away, we walk in circles. Our spiritual lives and Lent have all these manners of walking.

We walk towards Easter, we know the path and the ending of Jesus’s story. During Lent, I sense we try to rush ahead to Easter and not stay in the story. Yet the walk towards Easter is slow and deliberate. We come to know Jesus’s ministry and, through each pause in the journey, to understand more deeply the person and power of Jesus.

We walk away by sinning and ignoring Jesus. Have you ever tripped when you were walking? I have tripped many times, one fall resulted in a concussion. I was not in the walk, I was somewhere else, I crashed. In our spiritual life, when we are distracted or pay attention elsewhere, we sin, and sometimes we crash. Like having a concussion, our souls’ awareness and the orientation of our soul are jumbled. We are not looking into our soul and so we trip into sins of both omission and commission.

We walk in circles when we act as if we know where we are going in our spiritual lives and are honestly lost. Walking in our spiritual lives is like walking in the woods, a place of wonder and worry because we can see only so far ahead. In our spiritual walk in the woods, are we entering a dark place that fills us with worry or a light space that sparks our wonder?

Sometimes we find ourselves overtaken by wonder or by worry. The wonder occurs when we are surprised by delight and the worry when unexpected concerns surface. This wonder/worry tension is also the reality of our spiritual life. When we focus on ourselves we are worried, when we focus on Jesus we feel awe and wonder.

How are we With Jesus?

Being with someone can ease the wonder/worry dilemma. We can share the wonder and lessen the worry. We are not alone. “With” can have many meanings – I want to focus on two – the act of accompaniment, and the difference between empathy and sympathy.

As some of you may know, I work at Georgetown University, which is a Catholic and Jesuit institution. The Jesuit expression of charism or purpose has evocative language about being in relationship with God. The word “accompaniment” is often used. It means to be alongside someone in their journey, not to change the journey but to accept the journey.

True accompaniment also means to not be in control. When we accompany someone, we give over to the experience – we do not use active verbs – direct, determine, guide, define. But how do we give over to accompaniment? We can understand accompaniment by the contrast between empathy and sympathy.

Is our connection by knowing of the other person’s circumstance? When we have empathy, we understand the circumstance of the other…but with some degree of distance and disengagement. Or is our connection by feeling the reality of the other person? When we have sympathy, we experience another’s world. We identify with the person.

Lent calls us into sympathy. We move in response to Jesus. Jesus breathes in, we breathe in... Jesus breathes out, we breathe out. We mirror Jesus’s experience.

We are not setting the path of the journey, no matter how many Lents we observe, no matter how often we read the Gospels. We are following in Jesus’s steps.

How do we come to know Jesus?

Jesus is revealed to us as we walk with him through Lent. And we are revealed to him in turn by how we engage. We do not have a speaking part in the Gospels, yet we have a significant role in bringing the Gospels into this world.

Jesus is both the path and the destination of Lent. As the path of Lent, Jesus’s walk and encounters and lessons are demanding. Lent is not a stroll, it is a real honest journey. And as the destination, Jesus brings us to Christ, who gives us salvation.

How do we encounter Jesus in the words of the Gospels, and in the actual lived Gospels of our lives? Every day, we Walk with Jesus…we encounter Jesus in the strangers we meet and particularly in the people we know most deeply.

I will close with a story about accompaniment. In these weeks of Lent, I am mindful of accompanying both my 92-year-old mother-in-law and a work colleague. Each is dealing with physical diminishment, one from old age and one from a degenerative disease.

Both are people who are “doers”. If they could, each would be very active walkers, with a purpose, a quick pace, a destination, and a planned arrival time. Now they are moving slowly towards death. Jesus is walking with them. And I am accompanying them.

My mother-in-law resents the help she needs, she is polite but very saddened. She was always the helper.

My colleague is dealing with being rather than with doing. His work identity, and thus much of his own sense of self, has been anchored in getting things done and marking time by accomplishments. Now he says, he just “is”.

Both my mother-in-law and my colleague are sanctified people. They are in sympathy with Jesus. Their breaths of yearning and of sorrow mirror Jesus’s breaths through Lent.

I am honored to accompany them, to walk with them, to walk with Jesus.

As we continue with the rigors of Lent, with the temptations, with the times of lonely solitude, with the moments of feeling misunderstood and slighted…all which Jesus experienced…know we are walking with Jesus and Jesus is walking with each of us. Step by step, stumble by stumble, blessing by blessing…we are walking towards salvation.

My beloved friends, keep walking with Jesus, keep walking. Amen.

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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

Listen to this week’s sermon from LIFT Worship from Ms. Anne Alexis Harra for the Second Sunday in Lent, March 13, 2022

Learn more about LIFT, Living in Faith Together, at stmartinec.org/lift

Today’s Readings:

• Genesis 15:1-12,17-18
• Philippians 3:17-4:1
• Luke 13:31-35
• Psalm 27

Readings were taken from God’s Word, My Voice: A Children’s Lectionary

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Good morning. It is so good to see everyone! My friends I haven't seen in awhile, my friends I see all the time. It's just great to be here. This morning, let's get ourselves into a prayerful, quieter space. I invite you to close your eyes and feel your feet firmly on he ground with the earth beneath you holding you up, and just take a deep breath. The Lord be with you.
Gracious God thank you for this gorgeous, gorgeous day on the second Sunday of Lent. It is chilly outside but that cool air reminds us that you are with us wherever.
Oh friends, the world is heavy right now. I don't know about you, but I am feeling that loss of sleep from last night on top of what feels like a very turbulent world. Things in Ukraine don't seem to be getting better. Innocent people are losing their lives really senselessly. We are not yet out of the Covid woods.
Raise your hand if you feel just a little bit tired or weary today. I share in your weariness.
My message today is going to be a reflection on the Psalm. The Psalmist in Psalm 27 (and psalmist is just a fancy word for someone who writes a song) so the author, who is probably King David, is clearly distressed in this psalm. However, Kind David tells God that he trusts God. David trusts in God's plan and God's salvation and in God's love for us. And I really love that he asks God to guide him, to teach him and to be kind to him.
These are all things that we can ask God for, especially when we're overwhelmed. Sometimes it feels like there's too much, and we can say, "God, please guide me, just walk with me." And that's really cool!
My favorite part of this psalm, though, are the final two verses (page 3 of our leaflet) The final two verses, why don't we read these together:

"I truly believe I will live to see the Lord's Goodness. Wait for the Lord's help. Be strong and brave and wait for the Lord's help."

"I truly believe that I will to see the Lord's Goodness." Isn't so powerful? It's such a powerful, prayerful, hopeful statement. There's soo much assurance and love in just that one statement, let alone the entire psalm. Kind David believed he would see the Goodness of God, and he did. And if you remember a few Sunday's ago when we talked about Jesus' presentation in the temple and we met our friend Simeon in the temple, Simeon believed he would live to see the Lord's Goodness, and he did.

When it feels like everything around us is starting to crumble or crack (and it may actually be cracking, who knows? ) we can turn to the words of the psalms for immense comfort and inspiration. Sometimes if I'm having a frustrated day I find someone who is frustrated in the psalms. And those were written thousands of years ago, and yet I can still go back to those words and remind myself that what I am feeling is shared by others. The psalms are such a human experience because they were written by people just like you and me, and to know that we have a shared experience of human feeling and human connection through God is remarkable.

Reading the psalms helps us remember that we are not alone in our experiences of suffering or pain, nor are we alone in experiences of joy and excitement and love. God is at the center of the psalms just like God is at the center of each one of you.

This week, I invite you to pray one of the psalms together as a family. You can choose the one that's appointed for the day, or you can do Bible roulette where you just open to a page and there's the psalm - that one's fun - but see how much that effects your prayer and attitude for the better in the subsequent days, enjoying that shared experience, feeling the feelings of the psalms, reading that beautiful poetry. Soak up every moment of that poetry and that love with God.

We will get through this with God's help. We will be strong and brave and we will wait for the Lord's help. And if you don't believe, ask Kind David, or Simeon, or John the Baptist, or Mary, or so many other people, but we will get through it. Amen.

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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

Tune into the sermon from the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the First Sunday in Lent, March 6, 2022.

Support St. Martin’s mission and ministry by giving online: stmartinec.org/give

Today's readings are:

• Deuteronomy 26:1-11
• Romans 10:8b-13
• Luke 4:1-13
• Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16

Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/

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Please join me in a spirit of prayer.

Lord God, we give you thanks that your word is very near us even on our lips and in our hearts and we thank you that that word is about its work of saving us, saving us from our collective human madness and for all the ways we afflict ourselves. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.

The ashes of Ash Wednesday this week mingled with the ashes of warfare in my mind. When Putin put his nuclear weapons on high alert, my soul went on high alert and these ashes, these ashes of Ash Wednesday mingled with the dread of being reduced to ash by nuclear war.

A felt, vivid fear that I remember all too clearly from childhood. A horror that had gone dormant since the Cold War ended. Dormant even though the weapons were all still there. A horror, a fear, a dread shared by every kid I knew growing up. We would compare notes about the dreams we would have about mushroom clouds in our neighborhood. Towering, glowing, fearsome explosions seeming to come for us.

Ash Wednesday, those ashes remind us every year of our humble origins in the dust of the earth. The ashes on our foreheads remind us that we are held in life only by God's creative goodness and grace. And yet knowing that, knowing the gift of life, knowing the gift of this world, we humans who wear those humble ashes are still so misguided, so arrogant, so sinful and distorted, that once again we've maneuvered ourselves into the possibility of mass incineration, mass genocide, global extinction.

To not react with horror, to not react with painful, moral horror is simply to be spiritually dead. And who can read these temptations today without thinking about the war in Ukraine? The temptation to rule by domination and force. The temptation to build an empire of control to be despotic, tyrannical. It is not alien to the human soul at any time.

While we are absolutely right to condemn Russia's aggression. We need to avoid the risk of self righteousness, forgetting our own history of invasions and the consequences of those aggressions we still live with. While I still fully support Ukraine, in their self defense, I must remember and I hope we all remember that war in the teaching of the church is always a product of sinfulness and only ever rises to the status of necessary evil.

Meaning, it's always to be mourned and lamented. It's always something we must work to prevent. And we must name its evil so we can mourn it and give loving care to all who are affected by it. Praying for Ukrainian and Russian alike.

Turning to scripture, which has so much to teach us today, oddly enough, I find myself agreeing with the devil. The devil knows scripture. And the devil is quoting Psalm 91 and Psalm 91 which we heard beautifully sung by the choir is very comforting for me right at this moment. This is the Psalm the devil pulls from when Jesus is on the pinnacle of the temple and when I am frightened, I need to remember that Psalm in its comforting words which say “God is my shelter, my refuge, my stronghold, the one I can trust.” That beautiful line that we can imagine is addressed to us. “Because the righteous one is bonded to me in love, I will deliver him.” I need to hear that assurance addressed to me because I need comfort.

And just as a small aside because you're probably shocked that I'm agreeing with the devil from the pulpit. It's okay to agree with the devil because in the Bible, the devil is a literary figure with a specific task and his task assigned by God is to test the righteous.

Think of the story of Job. Jesus who is the very embodied righteousness of God is being tested so to clarify his person and his mission so that he may be more clearly revealed for who he is for us. And the devil in his desire to test always gets things wrong and he got something wrong this time too. And his mistake is simply this, trusting God is not an opiate.

Trusting God is not a painkiller. The life of faithfulness is full of struggle and threat and discomfort. As a friend said to me this week, Jesus shows us that the way of faithfulness, the way that he embodies is both hard and good. Hard and good live together. If we want the easy way out, we have the wrong Lord.

And this is what Jesus is proving to us in the wilderness and maybe proving to himself he shows that he is ready to live within his limits. What kind of son of God will Jesus be? One who suffers, one who struggles, one who is thrust into a world that has power over him, and this son of God will be fully faithful to God within the constraints of human life which is why we can hope, which is why we in our limits have hope.

He does not accept that comfort of Psalm 91. He turns it away quoting scripture back to the devil because he knows the way of redemption confronts the powers, confronts the principalities and powers, confronts the deadly dominating power of empire. Not through cheap tricks and feats of daring by leaping off of temples but through the cross.

Jesus will be lifted up. He'll be lifted up on a high place. But it won't be an easy out. It will be the cross, and on the way to that cross, and the reason he gets to that cross is he's confronting every evil, every toxic effect of sin that corrupts and destroys our humanity along his way, and in that cross, he extinguishes all that opposes God in that unmatched act of faithful, loving resistance.

Jesus knows the way will be hard. And that the way is good.

And we know this because we've been listening. in Eucharistic Prayer C which we'll pray today and we use during Lent we say these very important words, “deliver us from the presumption of coming to this table for solace only and not for strength, for pardon only and not for renewal” even in the moment of our greatest comfort and solace we are challenged into faithfulness.

When Jesus is arguing with the devil, the devil is quoting the Psalms and Jesus is quoting Deuteronomy. And one of the characteristic preoccupations of Deuteronomy is this fear that in prosperity, Israel will forget what God has done for them and who God is for them. Just like Deuteronomy 26 today.

But Israel when they enter the promised land and become prosperous and secure, when the text says they inhabit other people's houses and take over other people's orchards and fields -it's right there in the text, they're taking over someone else's occupied land - Will they remember God and what God has done for them? Will they remember their God with their first fruits? Will they recognize the gift of all they have? Will they acknowledge the sacred or trample the sacred and worship the work of their own hands? It's this forgetfulness about who God is and what God has done for us and how we are God's people that the prosperous are especially at risk of forgetting according to the Bible.

Indeed, the prosperous mind often turns God into an abstraction. God becomes vague, impotent, a notion, an idea, not a force that can push us, pull us, move us, change us, surround us, comfort us. And once again, Jesus is our comparison. He remembers who he is. He remembers who God the father is and doing so he resists the temptation to be something more than he is. Something more than he is.

He's not going to be a Superman. He's not going to display the will to power. He will not be a Charlatan, a trickster. He will not offer cheap, dishonest grace. He's not a manipulator. He won't present himself as invulnerable or impermeable. He will not be a tyrant. He is tempted like we are in every way and yet he is faithful. Jesus knows that the way is hard and the way is good.

For that hard way, Jesus gives us some help today. He teaches us frankly and honestly and he shows us a practice I want to commend to you. When we struggle with whatever bedevils us, and we are bedeviled people, let's face it. How about we try on the practice of quoting scripture to ourselves? I do it. I hope you will do it. When I'm triggered by my compulsions, when I'm triggered by my fears, when I'm triggered by my neurotic inner life, I simply interrupt the cycle and I insert a verse from a Psalm like Psalm 91 “God, you are my refuge and my stronghold.”

God, you are my refuge and my stronghold and those words of comfort can center me for the faith I try to follow even when I'm afraid. Or I say to myself, “you are bound to me in love. Deliver me.”

You are bound to me in love. Deliver me. And my fear can Go away in part and I can function again in my limits and my faithfulness. My cravings can retreat. My compulsions subside because Jesus has gently reminded me that he is my Lord and he does this for me.

Maybe it sounds too easy. Maybe I could be accused of being cheap, but here's what I believe and here is my experience. That I am joining a struggle that has already been won. The powers that bedevil us inside and out have been defeated. Ultimately defeated by the death and resurrection of Jesus so that we can be saved, saved even from ourselves.

Amen.

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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

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:

• Exodus 34:29-35
• 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2
• Luke 9:28-36, [37-43a]
• Psalm 99

Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/

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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

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:

• Exodus 34:29-35
• 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2
• Luke 9:28-36, [37-43a]
• Psalm 99

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.

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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

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:

• Genesis 45:3-11, 15
• 1 Corinthians 15:35-38,42-50
• Luke 6:27-38
• Psalm 37:1-12, 41-42

Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/

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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.

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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

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.

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:

• Jeremiah 17:5-10
• 1 Corinthians 15:12-20
• Luke 6:17-26
• Psalm 1

Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Epiphany/CEpi...

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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.

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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

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:

• Isaiah 6:1-8, [9-13]
• 1 Corinthians 15:1-11
• Luke 5:1-11
• Psalm 138

Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Epiphany/CEpi...

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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.

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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

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:

• Hebrews 2:14-18
• Luke 2:22-38
• Psalm 24:7-10

Readings were taken from God’s Word, My Voice: A Children’s Lectionary

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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

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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

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:

• 1 Corinthians 13:1-13
• Psalm 71:1-6
• Luke 4:21-30

Readings were taken from God’s Word, My Voice: A Children’s Lectionary

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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.

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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

Sermon from the Rev. Carol Duncan for the Fourth Sunday After the Epiphany, January 30, 2022.

Today's readings are:

• Jeremiah 1:4-10
• 1 Corinthians 13:1-13
• Luke 4:21-30
• Psalm 71:1-6

Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Epiphany/CEpi...

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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.

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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

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

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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.

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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.