Proper 19C; September 15, 2013; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

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.

Our Gospel reading from Luke contains two well-known stories as a preamble to the granddaddy of all parables – the prodigal son.  But we won’t hear the prodigal son story next week – it will get skipped because it got read in church this past Lent.  I’d bet most of you know it, though.  These stories of the lost sheep and the lost coin build up to the story of the lost son.  For those of us who attended ChurchSchool as little children, they are among the first stories that we learned.  I was thinking about this the other day and remembered how when I was a child, getting lost was a clear and present danger for me.  So these stories were very reassuring.

One of my earliest memories is leaving my backyard at the age of two, to go toward a woman I thought was my mother, far off in the distance.  But as I got closer to her, like a mirage, she turned out not to be my mother and so I kept looking, wandering further away, across a busy street, more and more confused and distraught.  As I reflected on this, from my middle-aged vantage point, I realized that I was both the lost one and the seeker.  But mostly now I am the self-righteous one who grumbles, what on earth was my mother doing that she left me unsupervised in the back yard in the first place? Continue reading →

Proper 18C, September 8, 2013; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

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.

So how about those readings? We have a vision of God as an evil potter, angry and manipulative; a story of a runaway slave being sent back to his owner; and an admonition about being fit to follow Jesus only if one hates family and life itself and is willing to give up all one’s possessions. I’m just going to focus just on the Gospel because it’s more than enough!

I will start with two confessions. The first confession is that part of me hears our Gospel reading and thinks, “great, we are all off the hook – let’s end church early today and go out and enjoy this beautiful morning because none of us can be Jesus’ disciples!” And then I recall the late Archibald Epps, one time dean of students at Harvard College and stalwart member of Christ Church, Cambridge, shaking his finger at me and scolding me for making fun of Holy Scripture (that really happened). And next, I remember that it is an enormous honor to stand in this pulpit and I’d better do my best to live up to it. That leads to the second confession: the more difficult the reading, the more likely I am to go to the ancient Hebrew and Greek to see if a different translation will provide illumination. I should do both every single week, but I don’t. It takes a lot of time because I’m not a fast translator, and translation exercises are best done in conversation with other translators. Continue reading →

Proper 17C, September 1, 2013; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of our help, 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.

Once upon a time, in the olden days, according to the prophet Jeremiah, the people of God found fault with God and started following worthless idols. Once upon a time, a long time ago, people forgot how beloved and beautiful they were. In other words, they lost their sense of identity as people made in the image of Love, and they forgot their mandates to love. They started following everything but love. (For anyone who has never heard me preach, I want to start by telling you that one of the best Biblical names for God is Love, and I always appreciate the opportunity to substitute the word Love for the word God.) When the people lost the way of Love, they lost their sense of worth, their sense of glory. When they stopped remembering that they were beloved, they stopped behaving as if they were beloved. There’s a word play in the Hebrew that gets lost in translation: Ba-al means worthless or no profit, and Ya-al means benefit or value or worth. Continue reading →

Proper 12C, July 28, 2013; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of everyone, 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.

In our Hebrew Scripture lesson for this morning, Hosea – a prophet of Israel – is crying out against the people of Israel for breaking the covenant by not listening to God alone – a covenant that requires full-bodied attentiveness to the Holy One of Israel. Idolatry and whoredom, in ancient Hebrew, are the same word – the same thing. Fidelity to the Holy One of Israel is expected, and the people have been seeing other gods. They have been engaged in lewd living, moral defection, improper intercourse with other deities. The lesson begins with, “When the Lord first spoke within Hosea, Hosea heard, ‘find a wife who is seeing other gods – because you’ll not be able to find one who is not seeing other gods – everyone in the land is doing it.’” Continue reading →