Easter, April 5, 2015; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of life, 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.

While the younger kids are engaged in the Lindsey Chapel with the Small Wonders program, I want to tell you a little story. About fifteen years ago, my wife Joy came home from a walk through Mount Auburn Cemetery with our then four-year-old daughter, Grace. They had been enjoying a beautiful summer day, looking at statues and gravestones and flowers. After being quiet for a while, Grace looked up and said, “Mom, what happened to that guy who died in church?” Joy repeated the phrase to give herself time to think, “the guy who died in church.” Her mind raced. Had there been a recent medical emergency during worship? Had there been prayers for a loved one who had died? Had Grace heard something in the news? She hadn’t been to any funerals yet. Grace repeated, “you know. The guy. Who died. In church.” All of the sudden, Joy knew who she meant. “Jesus?” “Yes!” said Grace, “Jesus! What happened to him?” As Joy was relating this conversation to me, before I could learn what she said next to Grace, I interrupted with, “did you tell her he died from listening to sermons that were too long, or from singing every verse to all the hymns?” Continue reading →

Palm Sunday, B; March 29, 2015; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

Fourth Sunday in Lent, B; March 15, 2015; The Rev Pamela L. Werntz

O God of grace, may we have the wisdom, the strength, and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth – come when it may and cost what it will.

I’ve spent most of this last week without a voice – a terrible malady for a singer or a preacher! Imagining that I would need to be prudent with my speaking today, last week I asked Clark if he would preside. He offered to preach as well, which was generous and great, but I already had a head of steam building about the readings, about some of the translations, and about punctuation and so I was too greedy to talk, to explore these heavily freighted scripture passages that some Christians cling to and some want to get as far from as possible. Emmanuelites are often in that latter group of saints! To many here, the passage from John seems like one more description of a divine sorting mechanism to decide who is in and who is out of God’s realm. One esteemed member of our community has called our Gospel reading a shakedown. Continue reading →

Second Sunday in Lent, B; March 1, 2015; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

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

A few weeks ago at our Annual meeting, we engaged in an exercise of writing words that we relate to prayers for Emmanuel for help, of thanksgiving, and of awe. We saw a graphic representation of the words in our Annual Report document, a picture called a word cloud, which shows the words in font sizes that increase the more times a word appears in a document. Joy Howard took the words of our prayers and made word clouds at the meeting. The word clouds are now on Emmanuel’s web page in the section about the Annual Meeting. Mike Scanlon is in the process of transferring the images onto a banner for the lobby – so look for that in the next few weeks. Continue reading →