Tag Archives: resentment

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 →

Mystery, Meaning, Risk & Relationship

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Third Sunday of Easter, Year B, April 19, 2015; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

Acts 3:12-19. You Israelites
1 John 3:1-7. We should be called children of God and that is what we are.
Luke 24:36b-48.  And the psalms must be fulfilled.

O God of Hope, 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 probably know that the Gospel of John, for all of its beautiful love poetry and prose, is notoriously anti-Jewish or anti-Judean in its rhetoric about the death and resurrection of Jesus, written as if it were Jews and not Romans who were the threat to Jesus. In the Gospel of John is codified one side of a late first century argument about ways to move forward socially, politically and theologically in the precarious time after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. The writer of John places anti-Jewish words anachronistically in the mouths of Jesus and his friends who were, of course, all Jewish. Continue reading →