Tag Archives: God’s love

Godsend

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Pentecost C, June 8, 2025.  The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

  • Genesis 11:1-9. And from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.
  • Acts 2:1-21. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.
  • John 14:8-17. This is the Spirit of truth…[who] will be among you.

O God of our glorious diversity, 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.

A couple of Friday evenings ago, I had the honor and delight to preach at Central Reform Temple’s Shabbat service. I preached about how the Jewish and Christian liturgical calendars are so similar (like cousins) when it comes to the observances of Passover and Easter and the 50th day after each, which is the celebration of Pentecost (or in Hebrew, Shavuot). After the service I was having a conversation with one of the members of the Temple, who was asking me about the Christian story of Pentecost. I said that the traditional teaching for Christians is that the story in Act 2 is understood to be a reversal of what happened at the Tower of Babel. We heard the two stories a few minutes ago, about how the Holy One confused (or mixed or mingled) the language of the ancient Hebrew people, but on the 50th day after the resurrection brought people of all languages together to unite them. Continue reading →

Feast of Love

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Lent 4C, March 30, 2025.  The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

Joshua 5:9-12. The Lord said to Joshua, ‘Today I have rolled away from you the disgrace of Egypt.”
2 Corinthians 5:16-21. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his [sic] appeal through us.
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32. Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling.

O God of mercy, 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’m not going to ask for a show of hands, but I wonder how many of you ever complained about someone else’s bad behavior? (I have, too.)  I wonder when you complained, did you want an answer? (I have, too.) I think it’s important to know that Jesus tells this story of the man who had two sons in response to the complaint that Jesus welcomes sinners. The story is part of Jesus’ answer to others complaining about his habit (or practice) of hanging out with people who behave badly. The complainers, according to Luke, were some of Jesus’ colleagues. And the complaint was that Jesus welcomed sinners, people who were dangerously out of step with the well-being of the community, people who were unclean, unethical, unlawful, just plain gross.  Not only did Jesus welcome them, he even ate with them. Simply put, the complaint was, that’s foolish, that’s not right, and, for those who were jealous, that’s not fair. Continue reading →

Fruit That Will Last

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Easter 6B, 5 May 2024. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

  • Acts 10:44-48.  Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?
  • 1 John 5:1-6.  The Spirit is the truth.
  • John 15:9-17. I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last.

O God of grace, 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.

You know, it’s still Easter, in the Church’s 50-day season for praising God and reveling in God’s grace so abundantly given, which transforms the horror of the crucifixion into the power of the Risen Lord. We’re still in that Great Fifty Days of celebration. I don’t know about you, but apart from worship at Emmanuel, often the details of my life and the details of the world weigh me down. I feel weighed-down by what looks like too much to do and not enough time, too much need and not enough resources being directed to the right places, news of people at war and of militaristic aggression at home and abroad, layer upon layers of damage done by white supremacy, corruption and famine, climate change, all kinds of oppression, and on and on. It all seems to conspire to keep me from reveling in the abiding love of God for more than a few hours on a Sunday. Today’s Gospel makes it clear to me that abiding in love and bearing fruit are part of the same thing: of reveling in God’s unearned and abundant grace. How can we celebrate Good News when we get so weighed down by bad news? Continue reading →

Say I love you, too.

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Epiphany 1B, 7 January 2024. The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

  • Genesis 1:1-5. Beginning.
  • Acts 19:1-7. We have not even heard that there is a holy spirit.
  • Mark 1:4-11. He will baptize you with the [sic] holy spirit.

O God of beginning again, 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.

Today is the day that the Church celebrates the Baptism of Our Lord. Jesus’ baptism is considered the beginning of his ministry; and so we have three scripture readings before us today that speak of new beginnings. “In the beginning,” goes our first reading from the first book of the Bible. “In the beginning God created” are the first words of Genesis, the first words of the Torah.  Actually in Hebrew they say something more like, “When God began shaping.” There is no completed action. Rather, there is a strong sense of ongoing, incomplete shaping. Continue reading →

Embracing the Teachings of Jesus

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Proper 11A, 30 July 2023. The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

  • Genesis 29:15-28. When morning came, it was Leah!
  • Romans 8:26-39.  We do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.
  • Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52. Have you understood all this? They answered, “Yes.”

O God of mercy, 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.

Whenever the story of Jacob’s procurement of Leah and Rachel gets told in our appointed lessons, I’m tempted to preach about the biblical model of marriage illustrated in the book of Genesis, just so we’re all clear what “Biblical marriage” is. It’s especially true this year in the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in the bigoted-website case. Instead, I’m going to trust that the Spirit is interceding with sighs too deep for words. Continue reading →

Eternal Life

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Easter 7A, 21 May 2023. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

  • Acts 1:6-14. All of these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women.
  • 1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11 [but what about 4:16?]. If any of you suffers as a Christian, do not consider it a disgrace, but glorify God because you bear this name.
  • John 17:1-11. Protect them in your name that you have given me…so that they may be one as we are one.

O God our protector, 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.

Today in our Church calendar we mark the time between the Feast of the Ascension and the Feast of Pentecost. It’s a liturgical acknowledgement of a sort of limbo, in which Jesus has triumphed over death and but has yet to go to his heavenly reward; the comfort and the inspiration, the clarifying flame of the Holy Spirit, which he had promised to send, has not yet arrived. It’s a little bit like the in-between time at Emmanuel between the end of our cantata season and the beginning of chapel camp. Continue reading →

Our Only Way

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Easter 5A, 7 May 2023. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

  • Acts 7:55-60. But they covered their ears.
  • 1 Peter 2:2-10. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
  • John 14:1-14.  Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

O God of our redemption, 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.

When I was in seminary, I took a class called “Teaching and Preaching Texts of Terror.” The idea behind the title was that there are passages in scripture that scare the daylights out of people; and this was a course designed for us to face our terrors with some companions. We each had to pick our top-two-most-terrifying Biblical texts. (Picking only two was the hardest part!) Our Gospel lesson for today was one of the two that I picked because of Jesus’ claim that no one comes to the Father except through him. I do love Jesus, but I’m terrorized by the idea of Jesus as the only way: Jesus, the gatekeeper, rather than the gate; Jesus holding all the tickets; Jesus, the anti-Jewish Jew; Jesus on the shields of the Crusaders; Jesus, the champion of the Doctrine of Discovery; Jesus, who became definitively white in Warner Sallman’s ubiquitous depiction in 1940 of “The Head of Christ” with blond-hair and blue-eyes; Jesus on the minds of those who commit all kinds of hate crimes and enact hateful legislation; Jesus in the prayers of the “in groups” as they justify the exclusion of others. Isn’t it ironic, then, that this passage begins with “Let not your hearts be troubled.” Do not give in to your distress. Continue reading →

It’s Love that will never abandon.

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Epiphany 3A, 22 Jan. 2023. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

  • Isaiah 9:1-4. For the yoke of their burden…you have broken.
  • 1 Corinthians 1:10-18.  Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else. [To me, this is one of the funniest lines in all of scripture.]
  • Matthew 4:12-23.  He saw [them] … and he called them

O God of darkness 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.

We’ve returned to the Gospel of Matthew; and so again, our lesson from Isaiah sounds as if it were teeing up the Gospel lesson. To Christian ears, it may even sound as if Isaiah was anticipating Jesus. But, as I said two Sundays ago, Isaiah wasn’t anticipating Jesus any more than Isaiah was anticipating George Frederic Handel. Isaiah wasn’t anticipating Emmanuel Church either, but here we are again! It’s is exactly the other way around. Probably in Antioch of Syria at least two generations after Jesus’ death, Matthew was living and growing in the teachings and stories of Jesus. Matthew’s audience was living with the political, economic, legal, religious, and cultural consequences of Roman imperialism, just as we are living with the consequences of American imperialism. [1] Retelling those teachings and stories about Jesus in a written Gospel toward the end of the first century of the Common Era, Matthew was thinking, “These stories sound so much like the stories that Isaiah told eight-hundred years ago!” Matthew wanted to make sure that his community heard and understood the connections. I want to make sure that my community hears and understands the connections, too. 
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Take a deep breath!

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Christmas Day, 25 Dec. 2022.  The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

Isaiah 62:6-7, 10-12. You shall be called ‘Sought Out, a City Not Forsaken’.
Titus 3:4-7. We might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.
Luke 2:1-20. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen.

Merry Christmas everyone!  Take a deep breath. Pay attention to what you smell. If you are missing your sense of smell, use your memories.  What are the smells you associate with Christmas? The smell of church, of greens and candles burning, of wood? Maybe more domestic smells like cinnamon and nutmeg? Baked treats? Evergreen trees? The smell of Christmas dinner? The smell of wood-burning stoves or fireplaces? Maybe Christmas smells that you remember from childhood? I remember the smell of my grandmother’s house, of antique furniture mingled with her perfume. The smell of snow, of winter air? Rudyard Kipling once said, “Smells are surer than sights and sounds to make your heart-strings crack.” [1]  Continue reading →

Do the works of Love!

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Proper 7C, 19 June 2022, The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz.

1 Kings 19:1-15a. What are you doing here Elijah?
Psalm 42.  Deep calls to deep,
Galatians 3:23-29.  For all of you are one.
Luke 8:26-39. Return to your home and declare how much God has done for you.

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

I grew up with the expectation that, as theologian Karl Barth taught, preachers should “preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.” My dad always did that. It’s my intention too, but some days my hands are just not big enough and, though I have two, I don’t have as many as I need. Today is one of those days. On one hand, we have the story of Elijah on the run, of the deep calling to deep that we are to put our hope in God and give thanks to God who is our ever-present help in the Psalms. Then there’s Paul’s brilliant teaching in his letter to the Galatians that when we clothe ourselves in Christ Jesus, there is no Jew or Gentile, enslaved person or freed person; there is no male and female. And then the story of the Geresene demoniac – I could work on the study of that story for all the Sundays left in 2022. Continue reading →