Seventh Sunday of Easter, Year B, May 17, 2015; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of holiness, 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.

If I asked you to think of an important holiday that always falls on a Thursday, what would you say? (Maybe you would think first of Thanksgiving.) What if I asked you to name two important holidays that always fall on Thursdays? (Thanksgiving and since we’re in church, maybe someone would think of Maundy Thursday in Holy Week.) Do you know where I’m going with this? I wonder how many of you would have thought of Ascension Day — always a Thursday forty days after Easter Sunday. Did any of you take the day off this past Thursday to observe Ascension Day with your friends and family?
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Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year B, May 3, 2015; 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.

This morning I want to preach about everything – the humanitarian crisis in Nepal; Baltimore and the widespread damaging effects of racism in the United States; my discoveries sifting through family archives when I was in Denver for my aunt’s funeral last week; the huge number of people who go hungry in Massachusetts, where the poverty rate is at its highest since 1960 (the year I was born); the pending jury decision about the sentence for Johar Tsarnaev; and the 100^th anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania, and that’s just for starters. Bishops and scholarly theologians in the Anglican Reformation had a remedy for this kind of challenge: they wrote approved homilies to be read at sermon time. Article 35 in the 39 Articles of Religion, pages 874 and 875 in the Book of Common Prayer (the red prayer book in your pews), states that homilies from an authorized book are “to be read in Churches by the Ministers, diligently and distinctly, that they may be understanded of the people.” But then in 1801 as the Episcopal Church was being organized in the post-Revolutionary War era, the requirement was suspended “until a revision of them may be conveniently made, for the clearing of them, as well from obsolete words and phrases, as from the local references.” We are still living in that suspension! Continue reading →

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 →