Monthly Archives: January 2025

More so Among us

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Epiphany 3C, 26 January 2025. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10. Do not be grieved; the joy of the Lord is your strength.
1 Corinthians 12:12-31a. We were all made to drink of one spirit.
Luke 4:14-21. Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.

O God of love, 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.

It’s been a week, hasn’t it? I’ll remind you of what we do when times are terrible, frightening, angering, sorrowful: we stick together and we stay close to the scriptures. They were written in times of deep distress, and they are our guiding lights. I’m talking about the actual scriptures, the first and second testaments of our Bible, which testify to loving our neighbors as ourselves.

Today we hear Luke’s story of the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. The four Gospel writers were very careful about how they began their accounts of the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. They all agreed that Jesus’ public ministry began after John the Baptist was arrested by Herod. Like siblings, each Gospel writer’s account about where and how Jesus’ public ministry began is different.  Mark tells of Jesus exorcising an unclean spirit in the synagogue in Capernaum. Matthew’s first story of Jesus’ ministry is about a large body of teaching, which he addressed to the crowds on a mountain. John’s story of his ministry begins with the water-to-wine extravaganza at the wedding in Cana. And Luke tells about Jesus’ visit to his home synagogue in Nazareth.

Jesus, Luke says, was filled with a spirit of holiness, the same spirit of holiness that would fill his followers after his death. Luke says that it was Jesus’ custom to attend synagogue on the Sabbath. When the scriptures were handed to him, he read Isaiah’s proclamation of freedom: freedom from hunger, illness and disability, poverty, prison, debt, freedom and all kinds of oppression. It’s more of a mash-up than a direct quote from Isaiah, but certainly the spirit of Isaiah is as Jesus reports. Isaiah was proclaiming the end of the Babylonian exile. According to Luke, Jesus was proclaiming that his ministry, too, was going to be about liberation, about freedom. At the core of his ministry was (and still is) a powerful ethic of love, of compassion and mercy, forgiveness and reconciliation, nonviolence and well-being, shalom. It is the same ethic that is at the heart of the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. I usually don’t think of myself as a conspiracy theorist, but I do believe that all good things come from Love, which is another name for God. My conspiracy theory is that Love is the Way, the only Way.

It’s interesting to me to think about this in light of Nehemiah’s story of the return of the Hebrew people from exile and slavery in Babylon. Having returned to Jerusalem, they have gathered at the eastern gate of the city, where the water flowed from a spring. Nehemiah says they wept when they heard the word of the Holy One. They wept, the water flowed from the springs in their eyes, perhaps because they realized how far from free they had been in Babylon. Perhaps they realized how far from free they still were even though they were back in familiar territory. Perhaps they wept for all that had been lost. And the religious leaders – Ezra, Nehemiah, and the Levites – respond to their mourning with an instruction to celebrate!

Don’t mourn, celebrate, because rejoicing in the Holy One is the source of your strength. This day is sacred. You are God’s sacred people. Don’t mourn over the past. (You know, stop hoping for a better past.) Go eat and drink, and share what you have with whoever has nothing prepared.

Now, you might have noticed that verses 4 and 7 are missing from our reading from Nehemiah this morning. Maybe you even guessed that I would tell you, because I usually do! Those two verses contain long lists of names. Perhaps they’re left out in deference to lesson readers everywhere, but I wish they hadn’t been omitted. Verse 4 lists the names of the people who stood with Ezra as he read the sacred text. Nehemiah says that Ezra was standing with eleven others on a wooden platform, which had been made for the purpose. He was standing with his leadership team.  [1] And then in verse 7 is a list of thirteen additional people who were there to help the congregation to understand the sacred text, because it was hard to understand.  [2] Let’s not miss the idea that the scripture has always been challenging to understand and that Ezra had a very large leadership team helping to proclaim freedom from oppression!

It’s interesting to me to think about freedom in light of Paul’s teaching about the body of Christ. As members of the body, he says, Christians are not free to disregard the value of another part of Christ’s body, or member, even if that member is weak or seems less important. Every part is important, Paul says. The eye must not say to the hand, “I have no need of you.” The ear must not say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body.” 

The reason that Paul was writing about this to the people in the church in Corinth was that they were arguing with each other about who was most important. We know that in the olden days, sometimes people in churches didn’t like each other, didn’t respect one another’s opinions or sufficiently regard one another’s dignity. In the olden days, sometimes people who were a part of the church behaved very badly toward one another. (Can you imagine?) In the early church, some people thought that other people shouldn’t be members of the church, or sometimes people felt that they themselves didn’t belong or didn’t really fit in! Paul was trying to teach them that everyone is important, and everyone belongs, even members who are weaker, less honored, or less respected than others. Paul was giving a pep talk about what it means to be a part of a team:  one body with many members with a variety of gifts, who have great need of one another, despite ideas to the contrary.

Paul was using the metaphor of a body to say that some parts are more noticeable or may seem more important than others, but every part is important. Every part deserves compassion and respect. Think for a moment about what compassion and respect mean. Now think for a moment about what you would say if I went around the room and asked each one of you what you think of as the strongest part of your body, and what the weakest part or the least-likable part of your body is. Think for a moment about what you might do differently if you started treating the weakest or least-likable part of your body with more compassion and respect. Maybe it’s your hair, belly, upper body, legs, nose, teeth, hands, or feet? I feel certain that each one of us has at least one body part that could use more compassion and respect.

 Now think of Emmanuel Church as a body with lots of parts. Think for a moment about what you would say if I went around the room and asked each one of you who you think are the most honored, popular, or influential Emmanuelites and who are the least honored, popular, or influential? Think for a moment about how much stronger our body at Emmanuel would be if we treated the least honored, popular, or influential members with greater respect. Maybe when you thought about it, you thought to yourself, “Actually I think I’m one of the least honored, popular, or influential Emmanuelites.” Maybe you thought, “I’m not sure I’m even considered an Emmanuelite.”  (Well I can tell you that you are today by virtue of your presence with us this morning, whether you are here physically or virtually, because that’s how it is around here.) Think for a moment about how much stronger our body at Emmanuel Church would be if you treated yourself and everyone else with greater compassion and respect, and if everyone else treated you with greater compassion and respect. 

I think starting with yourself and your parish community is what is called practicing religion. Emmanuel Church is where we practice greater self- and communal compassion and respect so we can do it out there. Even if you are already a very compassionate and respectful person, I guarantee that you can do something today that is even more compassionate and respectful than usual. Even if, and maybe especially if, you’re feeling a little cranky, less than comfortable, or nervous, you too can do something that is compassionate and respectful. Maybe it’s toward someone in your immediate family, someone who you don’t usually think about or try to avoid, someone you love but don’t agree with or understand, or someone you don’t even know and may never see again. So what does that have to do with freedom? Well, if a body is at odds with itself, it is not free. If a stomach is grumbling, for example, or an ear is aching, the whole body suffers. If people in the church are grumbling or aching, the whole community suffers. When we’re suffering, we’re not free to pay attention to the needs of others, to help get other people free.

I want to interject something about focus because when the news is as overwhelming as it has been lately, it’s tempting to give into despair or to just tune out and shut down. One antidote is to pick one issue to focus on and to act on it; take a step in the direction of advocacy and support. If the first step is too hard, break it down into smaller steps.

Helping get other people free is our job as Christians, because Christians are the body of Christ. If, as Luke says, Jesus Christ was filled with a spirit of holiness to fulfill the scriptures, to set people free, then, as the body of Christ filled with the same spirit, we Christians have inherited the same responsibility. We have the same call, invitation, and challenge to express the compassion and respectfulness that are manifestations of true holiness. Today we have opened the scriptures that proclaim freedom: freedom from hunger, illness, disability, poverty, prison, debt, harassment, and all kinds of oppression. Today we are called to rejoice in the source of our strength and share what we have with those who have no provisions for a celebration. Today let’s do what we can to make sure that this scripture is fulfilled in our hearing. Not just in the distant past and not in some unforeseeable future. Today, let’s see how it could be more so among us.

  1.  Mattithiah, Shema, Anaiah, Uriah, Hilkiah, and Maaseiah on his right hand; and Pedaiah, Mishael, Malchijah, Hashum, Hash-baddanah, Zechariah, and Meshullam on his left hand
  2.  Jeshua, Bani, Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodiah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan, and Pelaiah

 

Talkback after “Fix the Damned Sidewalk”

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Last week was my first week back with common art and Boston Warm; and it felt great to be back. Everyone was still buzzing over our production of Richard Berman’s play, “Fix the Damn Sidewalk”, which was a huge success. I was immensely proud of the cast and crew for putting it all together. We got lots of laughs! At the end of the play, I led a talkback/interview session with the performers to give them the space to share something about their experience. Continue reading →

Small World(s): Emmanuel & Church of the Holy Spirit, Mattapan

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January 7, 2025

Last Juneteenth some Emmanuelites attended the celebration at the Church of the Holy Spirit (CHS), Mattapan. Since that time, we discovered an essential connection between our church and CHS. In 1886, a generous gift of Annie Lawrence Lamb (1857-1950) enabled the founding of CHS which was dedicated to her father, Benjamin Smith Rotch (1817-1882). Benjamin Rotch was co-founder of the New Bedford Cordage Company and one of our church’s founding proprietors. He was a member of Emmanuel’s first vestry, one of the first convention delegates, and warden from 1880-1882. Appointed to the committee to obtain subscriptions for the building of the church in the 1860s, Rotch also served on the committee considering the enlargement of the church during the same period. Our Emmanuel website has wonderful descriptions of the family’s gifts, in particular, the Rotch reredos and communion table. Continue reading →

Ponder these words in your heart!

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Christmas 2C. 5 January 2025. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

Jeremiah 31:7-14 “their life shall become like a watered garden”
Ephesians 1:3-6, 15-19a “I do not cease to give thanks for you as I remember you in my prayers.”
Luke 2:41-52 “I must be in that belonging to my Father.”

O God with us, 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 are lingering in Christmastide for one more day. Epiphany is coming, but not quite yet! The Gospel of Luke contains the only story of the boyhood of Jesus in the Bible, and it baffles Biblical scholars. We know that ancient biographies commonly told stories of heroes in their youth to demonstrate that there were signs of greatness early on. There are some fantastic stories about Jesus’ magical powers as a young boy that didn’t make the cut when the scriptural canon was being negotiated. None of the other three Gospels, which did make it into the Bible, have any stories from Jesus’ youth; and Luke’s intention is not clear.

Is Luke demonstrating that Jesus was just like other heroes, fulfilling a divine promise that was clear to others in his boyhood? Or was Luke demonstrating that Jesus was NOT like the others because he didn’t start out knowing everything? Is this a story that demonstrates Jesus’ human-ness early on? Was he a child prodigy, learning from and asking questions of the teachers in the temple? Or was the young Jesus an ordinary adolescent, not telling his parents where he was, doing something quite dangerous, getting separated from his family, worrying them sick for the better part of a week? The answer to any of these questions could be, “Yes.”

Luke seems to be using a literary convention that matters to him and to his cosmopolitan audience to conclude his two-chapter prologue. In this little passage, however, he works in three important ideas that he wants the hearer to understand about Jesus, which found in  his Gospel.

First, in the verses just before today’s portion, Luke goes to great lengths to describe the preparation for the ceremony of Jesus’ circumcision, his dedication in the temple, the devout and righteous blessing of Simeon, and the praise of God for Jesus from the prophet Anna. We’ll hear that story on February 2 for the Feast of the Presentation. The passage ends with, “When they had finished everything required by the law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth.” Then Luke says that every year Jesus’ family went up to Jerusalem for the festival of Passover. We know that Jews living within about fifteen miles of Jerusalem were expected to go to the temple three times a year: for Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread; for Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks (we call it Pentecost); and for Succot, the Feast of Booths. But Nazareth was more than four times that distance away. The image presented of the temple in Jerusalem by Luke is very positive, and Jesus’ parents are presented as very devout. 

Second, Jesus’ parents search and find him sitting among the rabbis, learning from them, asking questions, and demonstrating his own understanding of scripture. Here is a thoroughly Jewish Jesus, well-educated and well-grounded in his religious tradition. When Jesus asks his mother why she was searching for him, his question, literally translated, reads, “Did you not know that I must be in that belonging to my father?” This is the dramatic center of the story and these are the first words that Jesus speaks in the Gospel of Luke. The Greek words do not include the word house as in, “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” (NRSV), nor do they include the word business as in, “Did you know that I must be about my Father’s business?” Nor does the Greek include any indication of a proper noun (no reason to capitalize the word father). Much is made about the tension between Joseph as father and God as father, and that can be there, but not necessarily. The word father is the same, so there’s no reason to believe that what Jesus is doing doesn’t belong to Joseph as well. That Jesus must be ‘in that belonging’ to his father can mean in that Jewish tradition, or in that educational Jewish dialogue. Amy-Jill Levine points out that Father’s House is a common term in the Torah, but not used to describe the temple in Jerusalem. According to Luke, the point is that Jesus was really devoutly Jewish.

A third thing to think about in this passage is a theme Luke takes up again and again: the theme of losing, searching, and finding within an expansive idea of family. Here is a story of Jesus not being in close enough contact with his parents to know that they were leaving or to let them know that he was staying; we don’t really know which. All we know is that Mary and Joseph assumed that he was with their departing caravan, and they didn’t realize he wasn’t until they were a whole day’s journey away. If this sounds implausible to you, it’s either because you don’t come from a large, extended, chaotic family, or your family has a much better grip than most. In my family of origin, I think each one of us four children got lost or left behind at least once on a family trip. Each adult thought that a particular child was with another adult or being watched by older kids. It’s a wonder we all made it out of childhood alive!

The theme of losing, searching and finding gets reprised in Luke (in stories that only appear in Luke) in the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin and of the prodigal son. Later in this Gospel Jesus rejoices about a rich man named Zacchaeus promising to give half of his possessions to the poor and pay back four times the amount if he has defrauded anyone of anything. Jesus says in response to Zacchaeus, that the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost. The theme of family gets defined and redefined in stories about leaving home, or not being welcome at home. It is in Luke that Jesus’ disciples let him know that his mother and brothers are searching for him and he famously replies, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.” This is hugely comforting to people who have left or been rejected by their families of origin because of their understanding or misunderstanding of who (and Whose) they are. 

Jesus’ wider definition of belonging is Good News to any who need, or long, to be welcomed into a more expansive, a more inclusive household of God. In Luke, Jesus employs an ever-larger definition of family, a definition of belonging and beloving that doesn’t depend on biology or inheritance, but on adoption by grace of those who listen deeply and behave lovingly toward one another. In Luke it’s clear that love makes a family. Maybe getting a glimpse of the idea that we belong and are beloved in the household of God is gift enough for this twelfth day of Christmas; or maybe it’s more than we could have thought to ask for.

At Emmanuel, I often think of the cantata as our fourth reading as well as our musical sermon. Today’s cantata text picks up the themes of losing, finding, and belonging to Jesus; or maybe it’s more about Jesus belonging to us, promising not to leave us bereft and panicked. Here we are all invited to identify with Mary searching for her dearest Jesus, her desire and joy. Here Jesus responds that he can and will always be found in the Love of God, in the love that is God. One of my colleagues, Steve Garnaas-Holmes wrote this in his poetry blog, Unfolding Light.[1] While it’s called, “Losing Jesus,” it’s more about finding Jesus.

Sometimes it feels like we’ve lost him.
Even so soon after Christmas
the magic is gone.

But we find him eventually
in the true temple:
not some place of special power or mystique,
but that sacred place within.
Where is the temple
but in that silence in the holy of holies
in you?

When you can’t find the Holy One
you may be looking too far afield.

Treasure these words and ponder them in your heart.

  1. www.unfoldinglight.net