Proper 12B, July 29, 2012; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

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.

Today we hear the two stories that were left out of last week’s Gospel lesson from Mark. For some reason, the lectionary assigns the Gospel reading for today from John’s version. Your homework assignment this week is to read all six feeding stories side by side! Given how very different the four Gospels are, the versions of these stories are remarkably similar. Mark’s version is characteristically a little rougher, John’s is more polished. Mark’s Jesus is in the thick of conflict and confusion all along; for John, Jesus’ feet never really touched the ground. The story of Jesus feeding a huge hungry crowd is one of the most significant stories about Jesus. It’s rare that a miracle story appears in all four Gospels. I still think that the lectionary should have stuck with Mark this week, though, because it’s tricky to mix and match Gospel stories. It means shifting gears rather wildly from one literary world to another, each with different assumptions, purposes, and strategies. [1] Some may wonder whether the repetition and similarities of the feeding stories make them more likely memory and less likely metaphor. I don’t know. For me, the stories are equally powerful either as memory or metaphor. Continue reading →

Proper 11B, July 22, 2012

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.

I know it’s summertime, but I’ve got homework for you both this week and next. This week’s assignment is to take the Mark 6:30-56 sheet, which you got with your bulletin and announcement sheet this morning and study the middle part when you get home. Read it out loud. See what jumps out at you. Listen to what speaks to you. Wonder what difference it might make.

Our lectionary selection for the Gospel this morning is Mark 6:30-34 and 53-36. There’s a big chunk taken out of the middle that seems pretty critical to me. We’re reading through the Gospel of Mark, fairly sequentially, so you might think maybe this missing part was read last week or maybe it will be read next week. But no. Next week there will be a feeding story, but it will be the version told in the Gospel of John. That’s completely baffling to me because Mark has not one but two perfectly good stories about huge hungry crowds being fed by Jesus’ disciples at his direction – one in Jewish territory and one in Gentile territory. But more about the loaves and fishes next week. Continue reading →

Proper 10B, July 15, 2012

O God of our dreaming, 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 summer lectionary has handed us some truly terrible readings for us this morning. First, the story of how the ark of the covenant came to reside in Jerusalem, which is not a nice story. Although the lectionary calls for the most troubling parts of the story to be removed, I elected to leave them in rather than to tell you about them. Then we have the story of the beheading of John the Baptist with a passage from Ephesians in the middle insisting that somehow everything is going to be alright.

It seems to me that scenes like the one from Samuel or the one from the Gospel of Mark are harder to relate to than your average Bible story for polite folks in an Episcopal Church on a midsummer day. What might they have to say to us? I mean, I’d be very surprised if, when Susanne read the Gospel just now, any of you thought to yourself, “oh yeah, that reminds me of a dinner party I went to one time when a guy got beheaded.” Continue reading →

Proper 9B, July 8, 2012

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.

A few Sundays ago a parishioner asked about the Hebrew Bible lesson for the day from Samuel and wondered what it had had to do with the Gospel (or anything else in the service that day). It’s a great question that comes from experiencing a lifetime of Episcopal Church lectionary selections that used to fit together, of what we used to call the Old Testament being co-opted in service to the Christian testament or New Testament. That has changed with the Episcopal Church’s use of the Revised Common Lectionary. Continue reading →

Proper 8B, July 1, 2012

O God of healing and restoration, 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.

You know I always begin my sermon reflections with that prayer, amended from a prayer attributed to Phillips Brooks, once Bishop of Massachusetts. It helps me find my preacher voice, as my daughter Laura calls it. Praying it is a way to locate myself in this position of privilege which you grant to me, and to give myself permission to say things from time to time that might be challenging – hard for me to say or hard for you to hear or both. And it’s a frequent reminder that truth is not predictably or reliably found, and that the seeking is what I am about. What I’m afraid doesn’t come through in this prayer is the idea that, while truth is costly, it always sets us free. That’s how we know it is truth. So the seeking for truth is not at all about fact-finding, it’s about experiencing freedom and joy. Continue reading →