Tag Archives: prophets

Labyrinth

Posted on by

Proper 8C, June 29, 2025.  The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

  • 2 Kings 2: 1-2,6-14. Please let me inherit a double share of your spirit.
  • Galatians 5:1,13-25. You were called to freedom…do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence.
  • Luke 9: 51-62. Follow me.

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.

All three of our scripture readings today speak about the costs of seeking after truth – of following great teachers, of listening to prophets, of listening for God’s very Self-disclosure, and the cost of discipleship, which, as the late Walter Brueggemann used to say, is no picnic!
Continue reading →

Resist!

Posted on by

Presentation in the Temple. 2 February 2025. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

Malachi 3:1-4. He is like a refiner’s fire….Who can stand when he appears? (Anna can.)
Hebrews 2:14-18. Free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.
Luke 2:22-40. There was also a prophet, Anna.

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.

In the last few weeks our Gospel lessons have told the stories of the pre-adolescent Jesus getting separated from his parents, his baptism as an adult at the Jordan River, the wedding at Cana, and his spirit-filled preaching to the synagogue in Nazareth. Now we are back in the temple in Jerusalem with a story about the infant Jesus. Someone at our Tuesday-morning Bible study compared this haphazard storytelling to what happens at reunions, when stories tumble around without much concern about chronology or other logical order among people who have known one another for a long time. That kind of storytelling is much less about exact facts and much more about meaning making, right? Such stories are told to weave and strengthen the fabric of the community. Even when they’re fantastical and told out of order, we take them seriously. Indeed, Episcopalians take the scriptures too seriously to take them literally. May I just take a moment to remind us all that none of our Holy Scriptures were written by or about white people?

If this fourth Sunday after the Epiphany were not occurring on February 2, we would hear about how, after Jesus’ amazing preaching in Nazareth he declared God’s mercy on foreigners, which made so many people angry that they wanted to throw him off a cliff; but he slipped away. (I am not making this up.) But because February 2 is the fortieth day after Christmas, the Church observes the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, which the Gospel of Luke tells us occurred, as required, when Mary and Joseph took their infant into the Temple in Jerusalem to dedicate him to God and to celebrate his mother’s return to purity. There actually is no known requirement or even custom of presenting an infant in the temple. There was a rite of purification for a mother after delivering a baby, marking what my former seminary professor Andrew McGowan calls the return from the liminal space, the border between life and death. Giving birth has always been one of the most dangerous things a woman does; that was true then and it’s still true now.

Luke tells a beautiful story of Mary and Joseph presenting their infant son to God and the responses of Simeon and Anna, who have been looking for, praying for the consolation of Israel, in other words, the restoration of dignity and peace to God’s people.

Our lancet windows of Simeon & Anna by Harry Eldridge Goodhue were given in 1905 by Alice Robeson Van Rensselaer. Photo by JG Bullitt.

The Gospel of Luke provides us one of the most beloved hymn texts in Christian history, the Nunc Dimittis or the Song of Simeon. It has been sung as part of daily evening-prayer services since at least the 4th century. The Song of Simeon has its grounding in the words of consolation and comfort in the book of Isaiah, written many centuries before,  when restoration and redemption were also sorely needed. Simeon sings a song of praise to God and then a song of blessing upon the young family. It’s a curious blessing, though, not one that I would want for my baby. It’s a blessing that predicts that the child is destined to create conflict and violence. If I had my baby in my arms and someone offered that blessing, I think I might turn away.

That’s when Anna the Prophet takes over. Luke makes sure that we know that she is a prophet before we know her marital status or her advanced age. Like Miriam of the Exodus in the wilderness, Deborah of Ephraim, Hulda of Jerusalem, or Mariann of Washington, D.C., Anna of the Temple was divinely inspired to see and bravely speak truth about both what is, and what is possible. Anna is the only woman in the New Testament who is named a prophet. The name Anna means grace or favor. (It’s the Greek version of the Hebrew name Hannah.) Luke’s emphasis is on her character and devotion. Unlike Simeon, her words aren’t recorded, but are described as praising the Holy One and speaking about Jesus to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem, a city that was sorely oppressed by the brutality of the Roman Empire.

Anna was from the Tribe of Asher. That makes her “the only Jewish character in the New Testament who is said to belong not to one of the southern tribes of Judah or Benjamin, or the priestly tribe of Levi, but to one of the northern tribes of Israel.” [1] Asher was the eighth son of Jacob, and Asher means lucky, bearer of good fortune or salvation. Why did Luke include those details? Surely Anna was long gone by the time Luke was writing his Gospel three generations after the death of Jesus. Why were these details important to Luke’s audience at the end of the first century? Why do we need to know that Anna believed that Jesus would be the redemption of Jerusalem? Could we not just take Simeon’s word for it? Luke apparently did not think the presentation story was complete with just Simeon. It’s possible that Simeon represented the inhabitants of Judah and Anna, the Tribe of Asher, who represented exiles in the diaspora and hoped for return, reunion. [2] Luke’s first-century community of Jesus followers was in the diaspora in the north,  probably Syria or Turkey.

With both Simeon and Anna, the story includes male and female, inhabitants of the land and the exiled, the northern and the southern tribes of Israel, who are being restored in Jesus to be a light to all of the nations, which is another way of saying a light to the Gentiles. You might not know that “Judaism generally taught that salvation was for all people, not only for Jews.” [3] There’s another thing that Anna represents, in contrast to Simeon. Upon seeing the infant Jesus, Simeon’s song announced his dismissal in peace. Anna’s response is that she began to praise God and spread the word about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem, which means city of peace. Not only was Anna a prophet; she was the earliest New Testament evangelist. Her spreading the word of Jesus at the beginning of Luke’s Gospel is one bookend, and the other is the evangelism of Mary Magdalene and the other women who witnessed the empty tomb at the end of the Gospel. 

So Simeon saw the infant Jesus and retired, but Anna got back to work. She might have been old in age, but she was young in hope. [4] Apparently she didn’t waste any time on folks who were not looking for restoration or redemption. She spread the word to those who were looking. The good news about her words not being recorded is that it leaves room for our imagination about what she said. That kind of holy imagination used to read between the lines in the Bible is called midrash.

If you were going to use your holy imagination to read between the lines in this story, what do you think Anna said? What would you say if you were Anna? What would you say about Jesus to people who seem to be searching for restoration or redemption, looking for respect for the dignity of every human being, for liberation from oppression? What words of hope do you have for people looking for relief and reconciliation, for a city of peace, for a world of peace? Could you point them, even bring them, to a place where their dignity would be respected? If you were a person searching for restoration or redemption, what would you hope someone like Anna would say to you about Jesus? What words or signs would give you hope for peace in this city, or in this world, or even in your heart? Richard Rohr wrote, “People who sincerely search will touch upon the same truth in every age and culture. The direction is always toward more love and union – in ever widening circles.” [5]

You know, restoration and redemption were not just needed in the time of the prophet Anna; they are sorely needed now. The dignity of every human being is not yet universally respected. By including the story of Anna the Prophet, hearers of Luke’s Gospels learn that it is never too late see a sign of hope, nor to start spreading the word of hope. None of us is too old to be young in hope,  too far gone to be reunited with the Love of God, nor too old to shine the light of Christ in dim places.

Rabbi Shire and I were talking with folks from the parish and the synagogue about building up our moral courage in the year ahead to resist whatever is unjust, untruthful, or unloving. I mentioned our individual and shared resources of attention, prayer, time, money, and being in community with one another. When I finished that list, Rabbi Shire added that observing Sabbath is a form of resistance, not only about refraining from productivity, but experiencing refreshment and delight. Oh, we are so fortunate to have Rabbi Shire as our Rabbi-in-Residence. And I’m reminded of a poem by author and illustrator Loryn Brantz, which my daughter Sarah shared with me. 

In a time of hate
Love is an act of resistance.
In a time of fear
Faith is an act of resistance.
In a time of misinformation
Education is an act of resistance.
In a time of poor leadership
Community is an act of resistance.
In a time like this
Joy is an act of resistance.
Resist. Resist. Resist. 

  1. Richard Bauckham, Gospel Women: Studies of the Named Women in the Gospels, (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing,  2002), p. 77.
  2. Ibid., pp. 77-107.
  3. A.J. Levine’s note in the Jewish Annotated New Testament (New York: Oxford Press, 2011), p. 102-3.
  4. Thanks to Edith Dean for this phrase in All of the Women of the Bible (HarperSanFrancisco, 1955), p. 174
  5. https://cac.org/daily-meditations/widening-circles-2018-08-12/

 

[8]

Our souls tell out.

Posted on by

Advent 4C, 22 December 2024. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

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.

I have always loved Mary, the mother of Jesus, the Godbearer, more than it seems a good Protestant girl should. It is Mary who draws me to the catholicity of the Episcopal Church. I’ve never understood her to be meek or mild, and I don’t know how anyone who reads Biblical accounts of her could understand her that way either. I don’t know how anyone who hears the words of the Magnificat, which are taken from the Song of Hannah in the Book of Samuel, could hear anything but a religious and political manifesto sung to overthrow tyrants and systems of oppression. Some years ago, the Rev. Nancy Rockwell, wrote an essay entitled, “No More Lying about Mary,” which captured what I have always believed about Mary: she was brave, and she was strong.

Rockwell writes, “God chose a spunky woman” to be the mother of Jesus. She points out that nothing in the text indicates Mary’s age or sexual status, just just that she is not married and has not previously delivered a child. Here’s her description: [1] 

Mary is unmarried when the angel comes. The angel’s invitation and her independent decision tell us Mary does not need permission of clergy –or her parents-– to become pregnant. Mary, wanted by God, according to the angel, for her bold, independent, adventuresome spirit, decides to bear a holy child – for a bold agenda: to bring the mighty down from their thrones; to scatter the proud in the imagination of their hearts, to fill the hungry with good things and send the rich empty away. This is Mary: well-spoken, wise, gritty. Traveling alone, like every prophet before her, she sets out on her …journey, to [her kinswoman] Elizabeth’s house, to declare her agenda. There will be more journeys: to Bethlehem; to Egypt and back [according to Matthew], to Jerusalem [at least several time until Jesus was]…crucified.

After Jesus’ death, according to Christian history, Mary traveled northwest to Ephesus, where she lived out the rest of her days, in a city well-known for the professional leadership of women.

 It seems to me that Mary’s courage doesn’t imply an absence of fear. I imagine that she left Nazareth and headed for the hills driven first by a desire to get out of town and to check in with Elizabeth, whom the angel Gabriel had said was also unexpectedly pregnant. Perhaps this was before Mary was convinced that any of the news she had was good. Perhaps she wasn’t sure any of her news was good until she was greeted with joy and declared blessed by Elizabeth: “Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.” Notice the circularity of the manifesto:  the poor will become rich, and the rich will become poor. “Where is the good news in that?” the rich might wonder. Well, as soon as one becomes poor, the blessings start to flow again. The description is not of a particular cataclysmic event or end, but of the circle of life. I’ve experienced this firsthand. Perhaps you have too.

This most fantastic story is of the only two pregnant prophets to have a scene in the whole Bible, and with uninterrupted dialogue! Joseph wasn’t there, and Zechariah had lost his ability to speak. Reflecting on the scene this past week as I worked on this sermon, I felt stirred to retell a story from my young adulthood.

Back in the early 1990’s, I was beginning the difficult and frightening process of coming out of the closet…as a church lady who felt called to the priesthood. Coming out as a Lesbian, even in the hostile territory south of the Mason-Dixon line, was much easier than coming out as someone imagining ordination in the Episcopal Church. Most of my straight church friends and queer unchurched friends thought I was insane. Looking back on that struggle, however, all of it seems easier than coming out of the closet as someone who has had mystical experiences, sleeping and waking.  I have never wanted people to think of me as the religious nut that I probably (okay, actually) am. Perhaps some of you have suspected it all along, but I am always reluctant to offer evidence from the pulpit.

My journey from Vice President of Human Resources for a large corporation based in Virginia to seminarian at Episcopal Divinity School in Massachusetts included some real danger and sizable emotional and financial cost. I risked everything, although I’m glad to say that I didn’t lose everything, I did lose a lot. I’m still paying for it; and I’m still benefiting from it. The love and support of other people made it possible, but what really propelled me forward during those early years was a series of vivid dreams. They were so compelling that I wrote them down; I studied them, analyzed them in therapy, and prayed with them. That’s not really the religious nut part. The things I had dreamed, however, started appearing in my waking life. Scenes and activities in my dreams that I had understood as symbolic, metaphorical but not real, started actually happening in the months and few years that followed.  I kept that mostly to myself. As I settled into life in Massachusetts, the memories of the dreams stayed with me.

In one of the dreams, I had returned to St. John the Baptist Roman Catholic parish school run by Franciscans in Joliet, Illinois, which my brother and I had attended for four years of elementary education. Back then, it wasn’t just my status as a Protestant that kept me from having a turn serving at the altar at daily Mass; Catholic girls were not allowed either. But in my dream, a guide encouraged me to journey into the sacristy and then to the altar. The invitation was thrilling, and I accepted with great joy. Then I was told that the whole improbable journey to being permitted to stand at the altar was powered by the surprise discovery of a spring of living water, a source of energy deep within, underneath the structure (the building); and I was invited to walk downstairs to see that wellspring. I awoke with a renewed sense of wonder and courage, well-being and thanksgiving.

Almost fifteen years after I had that dream, in 2007, when I had been a priest for just a few years, I traveled to Palestine and Israel with a group from Parish of the Epiphany in Winchester. Part of the pilgrimage included a stop at The Church of the Visitation at Ein Karem, in the Judean hill country. There in the courtyard is a stunning sculpture of Elizabeth greeting Mary, arms outstretched, with their pregnant bellies nearly touching. Behind the statue is a wall covered with ceramic plaques painted with the opening words of the Magnificat: “My soul magnifies the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior”, in more than thirty languages, which makes it abundantly clear that this song applies and belongs to everyone, to the whole world.

The Church of the Visitation stands on the site traditionally identified as the location of the home of Elizabeth and Zechariah. There are Byzantine ruins of a chapel there and subsequent buildings, which have crumbled through the centuries. In 1937 the Franciscans built on top of the ruins in order to preserve the remains of previous chapels found there. When I walked into the chapel, a guide invited me to walk down several flights of stairs to see an ancient wellspring. It was the very wellspring I had seen in my dream so many years earlier. I really don’t have words to describe my shock at seeing it. I was overwhelmed and thrilled by the holy mystery of the fulfillment of what had been shown to me in a dream.

In Luke’s story of this pair of pregnant prophets, I have always heard a story of allowing God’s blessing in difficult situations, of claiming “the privilege of doing hard things,” as one vestry member has called it. I have experienced this Gospel story as giving us an example of how we might be inspired, filled with a spirit of holiness, and how our souls might enlarge or magnify the view of God in the blessed and the stressed situations of our own lives. In this story, each of us is given words to say, “Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord,” and in our own languages to repeat whenever we receive an untimely blessing: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”  I also hear this as a story of coming out, as acknowledging having received inspiration and  blessing, not only bearing it, but sharing it: telling it out loud. It occurs to me even more deeply that in gestating and giving birth to inspiration, we are called to more than a private experience. We are called also to a form of coming out.

One of the things I’ve learned, as I reflect back on the movement for LGBTQ rights and recognition over the last decades, is that what has made all of the difference is individuals telling their stories: coming out. I believe the Episcopal Church, indeed Emmanuel Church, each one of you (whether you are here for the first time or the umpteenth time) could grow stronger and strengthen others by coming out as who and Whose you are, more and more. The song of Mary applies and belongs to everyone. And as anyone who has come out about anything knows, coming out isn’t ever a one-and-done. Once you come out, staying out becomes a lifetime practice of coming out over and over and over again.

Perhaps you remember the beautiful words of the 13th-century prophet and mystic Meister Eckhart, who wrote this:

What good is it to me
if this eternal birth of the divine Son
takes place unceasingly
but does not take place within myself?

And,
what good is it to me
if Mary is full of grace
and if I am not also full of grace?
What good is it to me
for the Creator to give birth to [a] Son
if I do not also give birth to him
in my time and my culture?

This, then, is the fullness of time:
When the Son of God
is begotten in us. 

I want to add, ‘This, then, is the fullness of time: when our souls tell out the greatness of the Lord.”

  1. The Rev. Nancy Rockwell, “No More Lying about Mary:,  http://www.patheos.com/blogs/biteintheapple/no-more-lying-about-mary.

 

With the Depths of Our Hearts

Posted on by

Advent 2C, 8 December 2024. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

Baruch 5:1-9. Put on the robe of righteousness that comes from God.
Philippians 1:1-11. And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best.
Luke 3:1-6. Prepare the way of the Lord.

O disturbing 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.

This Advent, like most every Advent, I find myself wishing for some pre-holiday quiet;  but John the Baptist is always loud. It’s hard to get a sense of just what kind of loud he is from the first six verses of Luke, Chapter 3, when, in many of our heads, the prophet Isaiah’s words are accompanied by beautiful music from Handel’s Messiah. But in verse seven, which we will hear next week, John the Baptist shouts to folks who have come out to be baptized by him (mind you, they have come to receive the very baptism of repentance that he was calling for), and he yells at them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits worthy of repentance. If you don’t, you are like a tree that is cut down and thrown into the fire.” John the Baptist is loud, and he’s in a very bad mood. He’s wild-eyed and hopping mad. H is not the patron saint of sitting quietly sipping cocoa through a peppermint stick for a straw, dreaming of a white Christmas.

And so, liturgically, we are deliberately setting the context for our celebration of the Nativity in two weeks and two days, not with quiet reflection, but with disturbing visions from the Gospel of Luke. We began last week looking through Luke’s lens at the brink of the Passion. This week and next week we look back a little further at John the Baptist. Luke draws a picture of him as a cousin to Jesus. Perhaps they were blood relatives, but none of the other Gospels mention it; and I don’t think Luke is trying to portray a familial connection. I think, for Luke, John’s and Jesus’ work were closely related, their purposes were so akin to one another, that it was as if they had known one another since before they were even born. 

Luke’s audience would have immediately recognized John the Baptist as a prophet who was using words from Isaiah. And Luke’s audience would have immediately recognized him as a prophet just like Jeremiah. Both consecrated before birth, they predicted judgment at the end of the age, proclaimed God’s saving grace, and announced that God’s new covenant was available to everyone who repented. The books of Isaiah and Jeremiah are set in the contexts of specific points in history with references to the reigns of particular kings. So Luke dates the moment of this story of John the Baptist: It was in the fifteenth year of the domination of Emperor Tiberius, when the notoriously cruel Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea,  treasonous and insecure Herod ruled Galilee, Herod’s rival and brother Philip ruled Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruled Abilene. If that’s not enough, Luke adds to the context the corrupt and complicit high priesthood of the retired Annas and his son-in-law Caiaphas. Into this period of deepest despair a word of God came to John, son of Zechariah.

A word of God came to John in the wilderness (not the word; there’s no definite article here). Notably, a word of God didn’t come to anyone on the Who’s Who list of rulers of government or temple, but to John, out in the middle of nowhere in the year 26 or 27 CE . Isaiah heard a word of God in something like 738 BCE, which the compiler of the book of Isaiah put on a scroll more than a century after that, a word that Luke recorded two generations after John’s ministry, a word coming to us nearly two millennia later! Here is a word of God for all people for all time.

John was in a particular middle of nowhere at the mighty Jordan River; and he was in every place that is wilderness. Wilderness is the place of formation for God’s people, a place of disorganization and dispute, of loss and grief, of surprising beauty and even intermittent joy, of vulnerability and dependence on God (in other words, a long spiritual journey). Here is a word of God for our particular place on our particular spiritual journey. Here is a word of God for all people for all time in all places, all kinds of nobodies in all kinds of nowheres,  all flesh.

Rather than being a claim in the literal meaning of the term, that all flesh will see the salvation of God, this word of hope is echoed in a voice in every situation of despair. Commentator Mark Davis writes, “Its meaning may lie not so much in how it is fulfilled in any given moment in time, but in how true it is in every moment in time.”[1] A word of hope, a word of love is always and eternally being spoken by the Holy One. A word of hope, a word of love, is without limits to those who can hear.

It seems to me that being able to hear a word of hope, a word of love, has to do with immersing ourselves in repentance. Baptism is about immersion. The words baptize and immerse are synonymous in the New Testament. What does it mean to immerse ourselves in repentance, to bathe in repentance? It means to change. Repentance is not about being sincerely sorry, regretful or ashamed. Repentance is about changing thinking, direction, and action:  returning to God, returning from alienation to reintegration, from estrangement to reconciliation with God, remembering our citizenship in the realm of God. What does it mean to immerse ourselves in repentance for the forgiveness of sin? Forgiveness of sin here literally means to divorce sin, to send sin away. It means to give ourselves and others a future. It means freeing ourselves and freeing others to move forward in a new direction toward God, which is the direction of Love. It’s not easy, and we need help (a lot of help), but the cost of not doing it is so much greater than the cost of immersing ourselves in repentance, and turning again toward Love. 

If you’ve heard me preach before, you know I’m drawn to the practice of weaving together strands of theology, scripture, liturgy, and parish ministry in ways that provoke and motivate us to live out our mission in the world. I recently read about Gus Speth, an environmental lawyer who co-founded the Natural Resources Defense Council. Speth has said he used to think the most pressing environmental problems were the loss of biodiversity, the collapse of ecosystems, and climate change. He thought 30 years of good science could address and even solve those problems. Now he believes the most pressing environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy; and to deal with those, he says, we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. Scientific methods don’t know how to address that, but people of faith do. Our scriptures and ethical teachings know about cultivating community where people learn to practice loving others, even complete strangers, to give with an open hand rather than grasp with a clenched fist, and to cultivate empathic and compassionate actions. 

A few weeks ago I mentioned novelist and essayist Cara Hoffman. Her latest piece in the New York Times yesterday responds to the voices of people who want to flee this country rather than live under the coming administration. She cautions that she knows from her own experience that it’s nearly impossible to live somewhere in the world where the US doesn’t have influence, positive or negative. Also, the far right is on the rise in many parts of the world. Hoffman’s advice is, “Don’t let the politics of fear displace you. It’s much more important to find your compatriots and to create a life worth living, no matter where that is…imagining what it is [you] want instead of reacting to what [you] fear.” That is the message of the whole Gospel. That is what we are doing here this morning, imagining what it is we want instead of reacting to what we fear, and not just imagining, but enacting. We are building a beloved community right now.

In light of our scripture, this compels me to ask, what repentance, what particular change, are we being called to on this December morning? What repentance for forgiveness of sin might we be immersed in today? What direct ways or level paths are we being called to prepare? What needs to be cleared or smoothed out so that all flesh will see the salvation of God? What joy can be a quiet subversion in the face of despair? This Advent, let us once again immerse ourselves in repentance, change our direction, and head again towards Love. Let us immerse ourselves because we have work to do. We have work to do to bear fruits worthy of repentance. Once again, the final chorale of today’s cantata sums it up beautifully, so I’m paraphrasing: we will succeed if (and whenever) we believe (and behave) in Love from and with the depths of our hearts.

  1.  D. Mark Davis, “All Flesh Shall See the Salvation of God,”  Left Behind and Loving It, 1 Dec. 2024.

A Beautiful, Terrible Day

Posted on by

Epiphany 4B, 28 January 2024. The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

  • Deuteronomy 18:15-20. This is what you requested.
  • 1 Corinthians 8:1-13. Love builds up.
  • Mark 1:21-28. A new teaching – with authority!

O God of compassion, 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.

This past week an angel of the Lord sent me a book about how to live in these terrible days and, at the same time, how to live in these beautiful days. The book is by theologian Kate Bowler:  Have a Beautiful Terrible Day: Daily Meditations for the Ups, Downs, & In-Betweens. She writes about living with an apocalyptic (that is, revelatory) awareness of the catastrophic — globally, nationally, communally, and personally. Many of us are living, she says, with a heightened sense of precarity, a state of dangerous uncertainty. Insisting that we can be both faithful and afraid at the same time, she maintains, “There is tremendous opportunity here, now, for us to develop language and foster community around empathy, courage, and hope in the midst of this fear of our own vulnerability.” [1] Continue reading →

Resurrection is art and protest.

Posted on by

Easter 4A, 30 April 2023. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

  • Acts 2:42-47.  Awe came upon everyone.
  • 1 Peter 2:19-25. So that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness.
  • John 10:1-10.  I came that they…

O God of abundant life, 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.

We are nearly halfway through the fifty days of Easter. Have you been looking for the art of resurrection? Have you seen any signs? I think of Ralph Ellison, who wrote, “I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest.” [1] Looking for the art of resurrection seems like a form of protest to me. The art of figuring out how to turn sorrow into joy seems like a form of peaceful protest! That is the work that speaks to Jesus’ primary teaching, which was about answering the question, “Is there life before death?” If the answer to that question is, “Yes,” how do we access its abundance? Abundant life for all is Jesus’ stated mission in the Gospel of John, in the portion we have before us, which reminds us that in the shadow of the cross, a most painful and humiliating death, we are not to forget the promise of God with us: Emmanuel. Continue reading →

Unbounded Mercy

Posted on by

Proper 10C.  10 July 2022, The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz.

Amos 7:7-17. The Lord said to me, “Go prophesy to my people Israel.”
Colossians 1:1-14. Grace to you and peace from God.
Luke 10:25-37. But wanting to justify himself…

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.

This parable called The Good Samaritan, found only in Luke, might be the most famous parable of them all. One doesn’t have to be a church goer to have heard of it and understand something about it. Hospitals, emergency services, counseling services, laws about liability limits, and award programs, all get called Good Samaritan. With its fame comes the enormous, sometimes crushing, weight of Protestant moral theology and Sunday-school lessons, both with a hefty dose of Christian anti-Jewish bias. The preaching challenge for me seems formidable because of what we all think we already know about this story and the guilt that has been wired into most of us about seeing people who have been beaten and robbed, lying in life’s various ditches, and not doing enough, or anything at all, to help. In my time as a priest, this story has provoked more confessions and more attempts at self-justification than any other I know. It reminds me of something bell hooks said, which feels like the essence of my vocation: [1]

I am often struck by the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to individual self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community.

Continue reading →

Living in Love

Posted on by

Epiphany 6C, 13 February 2022.  The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

Jeremiah 17:5-10. In the year of the drought it is not anxious and it does not cease to bear fruit.
1 Corinthians 15:12-20. The first fruits of those who have died.
Luke 6:17-26. Blessed…blessed…blessed…blessed….Woe…woe…woe…woe.

O God of the Sabbath, 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 call your attention to some powerful connections between our readings from Jeremiah and Luke, but I think I’ll leave the brain-scrambling passage in 1 Corinthians about resurrection and the dreadful cantata text for another sermon! The prophet Jeremiah is addressing his nation with judgment and lamentation for abandoning its covenant relationship with the Holy One. He says the ways in which the nation has missed the mark of Love are engraved on the hearts of the people because their obstinate behaviors go so deep; they are marred to the core (heart). Jeremiah uses the metaphor of a dried-up shrub to describe the nation that has turned toward its own strength and away from the Holy One. Jeremiah says the nation is so compromised it will not even see when relief comes, when good comes. It’s an ancient way of saying, “They wouldn’t know a good thing if it knocked them in the head.” Continue reading →

Abundance

Posted on by

Epiphany 5C, 6 February 2022.  The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

Isaiah 6:1-8[9-13]. Keep listening but do not comprehend.
1 Corinthians 15:1-11. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.
Luke 5:1-11. Put out into the deep water.

O God of the Deep, 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.

Whenever our lectionary assigns optional verses, like (the bracketed verses 9-13 in) today’s reading from Isaiah 6, I exercise the option. In this case, including those verses helps keep us from getting too sentimental about Isaiah’s famous call. The verses that follow explain just exactly what Isaiah is being called to do: say to the people, “Listen but don’t comprehend, look but don’t understand,” so they will not turn and be healed. “How long [do I have to do that], O Lord?” Isaiah asks. “Until the desolation is complete,” says the Holy One. “Until there’s nothing left.” Yikes! If Isaiah agrees to be sent, this is what he can expect if he does his job: God’s Word will not be comprehended; people will not repent. I hear echoes of this story in Luke and in our own time. Is this prescriptive or descriptive? I don’t know, but I find it true. Continue reading →

Letting Our Hearts Speak

Posted on by

Advent 4C.  19 December 2021. The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

Micah 5:2-5a He shall be the one of peace.
Hebrews 10:5-10. I have come to do your will, O God.
Luke 1:39-56 From generation to generation.

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.

Our Gospel reading this morning depicts an amazing scene, rare in its proclamation in the church but much celebrated in art and music. It’s an extended dialogue between two loving women in the Biblical narrative (only Ruth and Naomi have similar prominence). Here is a story of two pregnant prophets, one a crone and one a maiden, whose lives have been turned upside-down, and who sensed that the children they carried were prophets also and would someday and forever turn other lives right-side up. Here are two pregnant prophets pronouncing blessing and singing a version of an old song, Hannah’s song from 1 Samuel, about the glorious impossibility of how God works and what God has done. Continue reading →