Tag Archives: presence

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 →

Revealing the Love of God

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Ninth Sunday after Pentecost (11B), July 22, 2018

2 Samuel 7:1-14a Are you the one to build me a house to live in?
Ephesians 2:11-22 You are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.
Mark 6:30-34, 53-56 He had compassion for them because they were like sheep without a shepherd.

O God of compassion, 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 you were in any other church service where the Revised Common Lectionary is used for the appointed Bible readings today, you would have heard a short Gospel lesson about Jesus’ lovely invitation to his disciples to have a little R&R in a deserted place, and the compassion that Jesus had on the crowds that messed up their retreat plans. Then, skipping almost twenty verses, you would have heard that people from all over brought friends and family who were sick to Jesus, hoping to have them touch even the fringe of his cloak because all who came in contact with it were healed. Usually when verses are skipped like that, I mention something about them in my sermon, but this week I really wanted you to hear the whole story for yourselves because the skipped verses are about Jesus’ disciples. When those verses get taken out, the story becomes solely about the power and popularity of Jesus. Of course that matters, but Mark’s Gospel is not so much about how magical Jesus was. What matters much more is that Jesus’ followers fully engage, fully participate in the Rule of Love, which is another name for the Reign of God. [1]
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Getting Our Own Paragraph Right

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The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 10B, July 12, 2015; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19 Michal…despised him in her heart.
Ephesians 1:3-14This is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God’s own people, to the praise of [God’s] glory.
Mark 6:14-29 What should I ask for?

O God of our future, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

This is one of those Sundays when “Praise to you, Lord Christ,” just doesn’t seem like the right response after a Gospel reading. Actually, all three of our readings this morning get my dander up. In 2nd Samuel, what gets me is almost a throw-away line about David’s wife Michal, the party-pooper of the story, who saw him leaping and dancing and despised him in her heart. What’s Michal’s problem, you might wonder (if you noticed her at all). Well, Michal has been used and abused by her father King Saul and his successor King David, but according to tradition, she loved David and did not think he should be recklessly prancing around, scantily clad, before the throne of the Holy One. (I’m with her.) Continue reading →

Witnessing

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One of the greatest challenges that I have faced at my internship this year at Emmanuel is of an interpersonal nature and relates to a challenge that I am working with outside of the internship realm. It has to do with my tendency toward leadership, my need for being seen, and my addiction to creating intended results. I am someone who likes to enter a space and influence an outcome that I can imagine being positive in nature. I am a change agent and have been identified as someone who possesses leadership abilities for as far back as I can remember. (My first dream when I was a child was to be the president.) At Emmanuel this year one of the main things that I have gotten to practice is putting my tendency toward leadership on the shelf and, instead, showing up as just another member of the group or simply as a witness to what is happening to those around me. It has been through these experiences that I have been able to practice the dance of therapeutic presence. Continue reading →