Monthly Archives: February 2020

A Light You Have Carried

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Last Sunday After the Epiphany (A)
February 23, 2020

Exodus 24:12-18 Come up to me on the mountain.
2 Peter 1:16-21 You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place …until the morning star rises in your hearts.
Matthew 17:1-9 Jesus came and touched them, saying “Get up and do not be afraid.

O God of majesty, mercy and mystery,[1] grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

We have come to the last Sunday after the Epiphany – the Sunday we tell the story of the Transfiguration, the story of Jesus and his friends and their mystical and mystifying mountaintop experience. But if you heard the Gospel lesson last week, you, like me, might still be stuck in the weeds of a different mountain, pondering Jesus’ hard teachings, even after our Deacon Bob’s marvelous sermon. Last week, we heard Jesus teaching things like – it’s not only murder that violates God’s law, it’s being angry with another, or insulting another, that will make one liable to the flaming trash heap called Gehenna, also known as hell. It’s not only adultery that violates God’s law, it’s looking at another person with lust in one’s heart. It’s not just swearing falsely, it’s swearing at all. And, though we didn’t hear it last week, what follows is the instruction of turning the other cheek, giving away one’s cloak, going the second mile, giving to everyone who begs from us, and loving our enemies.  These are all rendered as examples of Jesus’ assertion to his followers that he did not come to abolish the law or the prophets, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter. Just for the record, I don’t think he was kidding, and I don’t know any translation tricks that offer wiggle room. It’s a wonder that Jesus had any followers left by the time he got to the mountain with Peter and James and John.  

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Worth Our Salt and Light

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Epiphany 5A
February 9, 2020

Isaiah 58:1-12 You will be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.
1 Corinthians 2:1-16 So that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.
Matthew 5:13-20 You are the salt…you are the light.”

O God of mercy and salt and light, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

I don’t know about you, but from time to time someone tells me that they don’t believe in or that they don’t like “organized religion.” My knee-jerk response is to shake my head and say, “yes, church is often completely unbelievable and we’re really not that organized.” But if I can keep quiet a minute and ask what it is the person doesn’t believe in or doesn’t like, it’s usually hypocrisy, and I can eagerly affirm that I share the feelings of disgust for hypocrisy. And then, if the person is willing to continue the conversation, I muse out loud that much of the Bible – both testaments – is devoted to calling religious people to account for hypocrisy. The Bible may have been written by and for the people who need the most help. (I believe I am one of them.)

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And we’re back!

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There’s something especially difficult about shaking the cobwebs from my brain and returning to second semester. It feels like all the momentum I built up last semester has collapsed in a heap of hot cocoa and sleeping in, made all that much worse by my two cats, who plop themselves down on my lap just as it’s time to be productive again. I felt an odd sort of anxiousness going back into my first day at BostonWarm after break, a sort of dread that asked, “What if this internship isn’t like it was before?”

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Our Obligation and Opportunity to Shine

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Presentation in the Temple
February 2, 2020 – Annual Meeting

Malachi 3:1-4 Who can stand when he appears? (Anna can.)
Hebrews 2:14-18 Free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.
Luke 2:22-40 There was also a prophet, Anna.

O God of the prophets, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

This year, Emmanuel’s 160th Annual Meeting falls on the fortieth day after Christmas, the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, which the Gospel of Luke tells us occurred, as required, when Mary and Joseph took their infant into the Temple in Jerusalem to dedicate him to God and to celebrate the return to purity of his mother. This is a little bit odd because there actually is no known requirement or even custom of presenting an infant in the temple, but there was a rite of purification for a mother after delivering a baby.

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