Tag Archives: suffering

Repentance, Repair & Reconciliation

Posted on by

Advent 1B, November 29, 2020.  The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

Isaiah 64:1-9. O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.…We are your people.
1 Corinthians 1:1-9 So that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Mark 13:24-37 Keep awake.

O God of Repentance, 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 marks the beginning of a new Church year with the first Sunday in Advent. The Christian new year doesn’t begin with festivities or celebrations, but with lamentation in Isaiah, with a letter from Paul written in response to reports of in-fighting – of quarrelling in the church in Corinth, and with the Gospel of Mark’s “apocalypse” – Jesus’ prediction of the end of life as his disciples know it. The end, according to Mark, will be a very good thing because of the enormity of suffering, because of the desolation being experienced. I get this at a deeper level than I ever have before because of the revelations and devastations of this past year.
Continue reading →

A sign is not the thing.

Posted on by

Lent 5A
March 29, 2020

 

Ezekiel 37:1-14 O my people.
Psalms 130 Out of the depths have I called to you.
Romans 8:6-11 To set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.
John 11:1-45 Jesus began to weep…. he cried with a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out!’….Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’

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.

 

The past two weeks I have wrestled with whether to livestream a service of Holy Eucharist, keeping as much of our customary service in tact as possible, or move to leading a service of Morning Prayer, wholly unfamiliar as a Sunday worship service at Emmanuel Church, although many Emmanuelites pray Morning Prayer as a daily practice, and have practiced Morning Prayer in other places. Continuing with the rite of Holy Eucharist is both comforting for some and painful for others, but for many of us, it is both comforting and painful at the same time: comforting to recognize the rhythm and the shape of the service, and painful to face what we are missing by not being able to be physically present with one another and with the elements of our sacrament. But then I think Eucharist means thanksgiving, and while bread and wine are signs of our thanks, they are not our thanks. While physical presence is a sign of being Church, it is not the Church.
Continue reading →

The Place

Posted on by

Lent 3A
March 15, 2020

Exodus 17:1-7 The people thirsted there.
Romans 5:1-11 God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.
John 4:5-42 Give me a drink.

Good morning. I hope that our attempt to live-stream our service this morning is adding to your sense of connectedness with a community that loves you and is not adding to your sense of isolation and frustration. Technology can and does work both ways. Please know that, wherever you are on your spiritual journey, the power of prayer transcends walls and web connectivity. I am grateful for your prayers and I am keeping you in mine.

Continue reading →

Being Played

Posted on by

Proper 22C
October 6, 2019

Lamentations 1:1-6 Her priests groan, her young girls grieve, and her lot is bitter…nobody goes to church any more.
2 Timothy 1:1-11 Recalling your tears…I am reminded of…a faith that first lived in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice…rekindle the gift of God that is within you.
Luke 17:5-10 The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!”

O God of our weary years and silent tears, 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 first reading this morning was taken from the book of Lamentations, and I want to linger there a moment because we rarely hear anything from this book of the Bible in church, although I wish we did. It’s a collection of five dirges: poems of deep pain and suffering, of outrage and grief, of complaint and protest, in response to political calamity, social and economic devastation, and utter theological collapse. It’s a direct challenge to the notion that religious life should somehow not be political. The Bible’s response to that is “nonsense!”

Continue reading →

Love the one who shows mercy!

Posted on by

Proper 10C
July 15 2019

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.

Following my sermon last week about Galatians, I thought I might do some teaching about the letter to the Colossians, but I just couldn’t let the story called “The Good Samaritan” go unaddressed. It’s such an iconic story that one doesn’t have to be a church goer to know it. You don’t have to be a Christian to have heard of it or understand something about it. Hospitals, emergency services, counseling services, rules of law about limits of liability, award programs, all get called Good Samaritan. This parable called “The Good Samaritan,” found only in Luke, might be the most famous parable of them all. And with its fame comes the enormous and crushing weight of Protestant Moral Theology, Sunday School lessons, and 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 in life’s various ditches and not doing enough or not doing anything at all to help. In my time as a priest, this bible story has provoked more confessions and more defensive attempts at self-justification than any other I know.

Continue reading →

Subversive Alleluias

Posted on by

Last Sunday after the Epiphany,
March 3, 2019

Exodus 34:29-35. Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone.
2 Corinthians 3:12-4:12. Since it is by God’s mercy that we are engaged in this ministry we do not lose heart.
Luke 9:28-43a. And all were astounded by the greatness of God.

O God of glory, 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 have heard me preach before will know that my desire to preach against the ways that the Christian Church has promoted supersessionist theology (that is, the idea that Christianity supercedes Judaism) gets stronger every year. Supersessionism is very much like racism – it’s systemic, it’s oppressive, it’s insidious, it’s often internalized, unexamined, and always wrong. It distorts our vision and injures our souls.
Continue reading →

Always a Catch

Posted on by

Fifth Sunday After the Epiphany (C)
February 10, 2019

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.

 

This morning we heard a part of Isaiah that I bet most of you are not familiar with. The verses that follow the famous call story of Isaiah, 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, O Lord?” Isaiah asks. Until the desolation is complete, says the Holy One. Until there’s nothing left. 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 →

From Solitude to Community to Ministry

Posted on by

Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany (C)    

February 3, 2019

Jeremiah 1:4-10   Ah, Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a ….
1 Corinthians 14:12b-20  Brothers and sisters, do not be children in your thinking; rather, be infants in evil, but in thinking be adults.
Luke 4:21-30  They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff.

O God of healing, 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, we heard the first part of the inauguration of Jesus’ ministry, according to Luke. Jesus, filled with a spirit of holiness, announced that, like the prophet Isaiah, his ministry was about setting people free – free from hunger, illness, disability, poverty, prison, debt, and from all kinds of oppression. Luke’s reports Jesus asserting that God’s promise in Isaiah was true in the distant past of the Babylonian exile, perhaps true in some unforeseeable future, but most importantly, true in the hearing of those listening (and that includes us). In this second half of the story, things take a sudden turn from amazing good to amazing bad, as my daughter Grace once said in despair.

Continue reading →

Make the choice to let Love in!

Posted on by

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.
Continue reading →

Let Love become us!

Posted on by

Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year B, April 29, 2018; The Rev. Pamela L.Werntz

Acts 8:26-40 (This is a wilderness road.)
1 John 4:7-21 God is love.
John 15:1-8 Abide in me.

O God of the wilderness roads, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it.

During the Great Fifty Days of Easter, our schedule of scripture readings, called “The Revised Common Lectionary,” eschews readings from the First Testament of our Bible in favor of stories from the Book of Acts, which is the sequel or companion volume to the Gospel of Luke. Many of you know that I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I appreciate that readings from Hebrew Scripture are not explicitly being employed to prop up resurrection narratives (the way I think they get used to prop up Jesus’ birth narratives during Advent). And I love the portions of the fantastic stories from the Book of Acts of people who were completely carried away by the inspiration of spreading the Good News that even the most horrific death had not destroyed the mighty Love of Jesus in God. However, without reading the wisdom of the Tanakh – that is, the Torah or the Prophets or the Writings of Hebrew scripture – we risk not understanding the content and context of this Good News.
Continue reading →