Tag Archives: Holy One

What Is Being Revealed

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Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year A
May 10, 2020

Acts 7:55-60 Filled with a holy spirit.
1 Peter 2:2-10 If indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.
John 14:1-14 Do not let your hearts be troubled.

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.

“Do not let your heart be troubled,” Jesus says at the opening of our Gospel lesson for this morning. And then Jesus says some things that have been troubling the heart of folks ever since! Troubles with this text notwithstanding, the beginning of John 14 is often read at funerals and memorial services for solace. The promise that God has plenty of rooms prepared for us is so beautiful and comforting. Whenever possible, I leave off the second half of verse 6, because it seems to me that a burial service homily is not such a good time to be reading something that sounds so exclusionary. A burial service homily is also not such a good time to be explaining about translating and re-punctuating ancient Greek. I also have to say that the experience of countless “zoom” meetings in the last two months has helped me to see more clearly some of the many rooms where the divine makes a home with you all. 
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Claim the scandalous holiness of God!

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Fourth Sunday of Advent (A)
December 22, 2019

Isaiah 7:10-16 The Lord will give you a sign.
Romans 1:1-7 [You] yourselves are called to belong to Jesus Christ.
Matthew 1:18-25 Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place this way.

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.
Many of you have heard me say I love the way that each of our four Gospels tells a different story about the beginning of Jesus’ ministry – of how and when Jesus the Christ, Love incarnate, came into our world. The Gospel of Mark notes the beginning with John the Baptist preparing the way in the wilderness. Jesus came into the world, according to Mark, at his baptism. For Matthew, the preparation began with Abraham and he came into the world at his birth. Luke says, yes, he came into the world at his birth, but the preparation went all the way back to Adam. And for John – he was before the world even existed. Today the Gospel account belongs to Matthew, who writes, “Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah [or the Christ] took place in this way.” If, as I think, Matthew’s Gospel was written a few years before Luke, then this is the earliest extant birth narrative for Jesus.

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Repent as a group!

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Second Sunday of Advent (A)
December 8, 2019

Isaiah 11:1-10 and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. (that’s some powerful bad breath!)
Romans 15:4-13 …on behalf of the truth of God.
Matthew 3:1-12 He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.

O God of hope of the prophets, 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.

Last week at Emmanuel Church, the musical through line of our worship service was Wachet Auf (or wake up). In our musical through line today we are calling on the Savior of the nations (or a little more rudely, Savior of the heathens) to come now! Do any of you worry about calling on the Divine so boldly? Do any of you think of Annie Dillard’s famous warning about how we should be wearing crash helmets when we blithely invoke the power of God,. She adds that church “ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense; or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.” It can and does happen.
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A Garden in Paradise

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Last Sunday after Pentecost (29C)
November 24, 2019

Jeremiah 23:1-6 Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!
Colossians 1:11-20 In him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.
Luke 23:33-43 Paradise.

Merciful and generous God, 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.

Today is the Feast of the Reign of Christ (a liturgical observance not yet 100 years old) that has been placed on the last Sunday in the church year – the completion of our lectionary cycle of Bible readings. Although we don’t read our Gospel portions in order, today is the last time we will hear from the Gospel of Luke except for Christmas-time nativity stories until Advent of 2022.
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Come to the party!

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Proper 19C
September 15, 2019

Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28 Skilled in doing evil but do not know how to do good.
1 Timothy 1:12-17 But I received mercy.
Luke 15:1-10 This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.

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.

Oh I have so much I want to say to you this morning about the ancient scriptures we’ve heard just now: Jeremiah, Psalm 14, 1 Timothy, the Gospel of Luke, and we haven’t even heard Psalm 42 yet – that will come after communion. Our oldest reading today is about 3000 years old, and the newest is about 1900 years old, give or take. Old. They tell us that in ancient times there were foolish people who said in their hearts, “There is no God.” By the way, this is not a critique of individual philosophical or theoretical atheism; this is an ethical critique of a people who did not think it mattered how the most vulnerable in society were treated: widows, orphans, and aliens. In ancient times people thought that prosperity and power and security and status were all that mattered; they were corrupt and committed abominable acts. In ancient times, there were people who profaned what was sacred, who pursued others in order to oppress them, who engaged in violence, who cheated and mistreated people, who were serving wealth instead of fidelity to love. In ancient times, people who believed that doing justice and loving kindness and walking with humility were not the ones in power very often. Maybe not ever. The staying power that these ancient texts have, the wisdom that they contain, is staggering to me.

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Baptism of Our Lord: Unquenchable Fire

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The Baptism of our Lord (C)
January 13, 2019

Isaiah 43:1-7 I will.
Acts 8:14-17 They received the Holy Spirit.
Luke 3:15-17; 21-22  You are my…beloved; with you I am well pleased.

O God of unquenchable fire, 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.

Today is the Feast of the Baptism of our Lord, so this morning we heard the Gospel of Luke’s account of what happened when Jesus was baptized. Actually, we heard a little more than the Gospel verses that were appointed for today. Maybe you noticed the brackets around verses 18-20. That’s my way of indicating that I added verses that weren’t assigned. I don’t know why the three verses get left out – they’re not very long. I guess they seem like an interruption to the flow of the story. But for Luke, at least as it was handed down to us, they’re essential. They are very much a part of the story. They are the verses that end up with John the Baptist going to prison. They read: “So with many other exhortations, he [that is, John] proclaimed the good news to the people. But Herod the ruler, who had been rebuked by him because of Herodias, his brother’s wife, and because of all the evil things that Herod had done, added to them all by shutting up John in prison.”

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Make the choice to let Love in!

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Fourth Sunday of Advent (C)
December 23, 2018

Micah 5:2-5a And he shall be the one of peace.
Hebrews 10:5-10 In burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure.
Luke 1:39-56 Blessed is she who believed.

O God of “she who believed,” 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 noisy week for me around here: the newly manufactured elevator doors have been getting installed, the roofers have been walking back and forth outside my office window. At home, it’s been the gutter cleaners and leaf blowers. Aside from sawing rocks, I don’t think there’s any machine noise that I dislike more. And really, those things are quite trivial compared with the domestic and international news that just keeps going from bad to worse. While the timing might not seem so good, the noise really fits very well with where we are in our Christian calendar. Our readings have wisdom for us to hear through the din.
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Prepare for the Peasant of Peasants!

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Third Sunday of Advent (C), December 16, 2018.  The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

Zephaniah 3:14-20. I will change their shame into praise.
Philippians 4:4-7. Let your gentleness be known to everyone.
Luke 3:7-18.   What then should we do?
O God of the Prophets, 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 the third Sunday of Advent; we are barreling toward Christmas, and we haven’t really heard any biblical readings about peaceful preparation for the birth of the Christ child. It’s been more about bulldozing and less about receiving blankets. Our ancient narratives describe nations at war, raging seas, devastation and disaster, with plenty of blame to go around. The people are anxious and afraid; they are struggling. And just to be clear, we are talking about 28 centuries of struggle. The people Zephaniah was addressing were struggling in about 625 BCE. The people Paul and Luke were addressing were struggling in the latter half of the first century of the common era. And the people I’m addressing are struggling in the early years of the 21st century.
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Gather up the fragments!

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Tenth Sunday after Pentecost (12B), July 29, 2018

2 Samuel 11:1-15 In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle…David [stayed home].
Ephesians 3:14-21 The power to comprehend…what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ.
John 6:1-21 ’Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.’ So the gathered them up.

O God of wondrous 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.

Those of you who know me will imagine that I have a head of steam built up about the story of King David’s misuse of power when it came to Bathsheba and Uriah. That might be why it is so hot in this chapel. But I’m not going to preach about that today. Rather, I want to focus on our Gospel lesson. Last week I extended our Gospel reading to include Mark’s first story of the disciples feeding the multitudes with five loaves and two fish, and of a frightening storm on the sea of Galilee. This week we hear the Gospel of John’s version, which is quite different. It’s very hard not to conflate the various versions of these famous stories, but, as usual, I want to discourage the summer gazpacho soup treatment that blends distinct ingredients. The early church embraced many incompatible narratives and meanings about the life and ministry of Jesus, and I think we should too! Different versions of the same event, making differing meanings, gives us all more theological elbow room.
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The Next Right Thing

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Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 22A, October 8, 2017; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

Exodus 20:1-4,7-9, 12-20 Then God spoke all these words.
Philippians 2:1-13 I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call in Christ Jesus.
Matthew 21:33-46 Listen to another parable.

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.

Today is the Sunday that we formally begin our annual pledge stewardship campaign for 2018. This year, our theme is “Generosity on the Journey.” Letters have been sent from Nancy Coppelman and Liz Levin, asking you to begin to plan your financial commitment to this parish’s mission next year. While the amount that you pledge for next year is a very individual and personal decision, the fact of your pledge is a much-needed promise to support this community’s work for justice and peace, for healing and renewal. Your pledge is an indication that the ministry of this community matters greatly and that Emmanuel Church is worthy of your generous support. Pledge cards will be mailed to you in a few weeks. If you are not currently on our mailing list and would like to be, please fill out a pew card and put it in the offering plate or speak with me after the service. Pledge fulfillment provides nearly 100% of the cost of staff and programs at Emmanuel Church.
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