Author Archives: Elizabeth Richardson

Opening up

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Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year C, April 24, 2016; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

Acts 11:1-18 Who was I that I could hinder God?
Revelation 21:1-6 See, I am making all things new.
John 13:31-35 I give you a new commandment, [in order that] that you love one another.

O God of love, 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.

Now we’re five weeks into Eastertide, and our lectionary takes us back to the Gospel of John’s story of the night that Jesus was arrested. It’s like the Church is saying, “okay, it’s been a few weeks since Holy Week. Let’s review.” The scene of this last supper, according to John, is not a Passover meal, but a meal the day before the festival of Passover, the Feast of Freedom, was about to start. During supper, Jesus has washed the feet of his followers and commanded them to wash one another’s feet. Then, while Jesus and his followers were reclining Jesus revealed that Judas would betray him, by giving Judas a piece of bread. The story goes that “after Judas received the piece of bread, Satan entered into him,” and “Jesus said to him, ‘Do quickly what you are going to do.’” You might remember that Satan means Adversary – the constant accuser of God (Who is Love) and of humans (who are made by and for Love). Immediately after that Judas went out into the night, and then Jesus said the words we just heard Susanne read. Just after our passage, Jesus told Peter that Peter would deny even knowing him three times before the rooster signaled the rising sun. Continue reading →

Bulldozers Needed (with audio)

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Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year C, April 17, 2016; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

Acts 9:36-43 He gave her his hand and helped her up.
Revelation 7:9-17 He will guide them to springs of the water of life.
John 10:22-30 It was winter.

O God of eternal life, 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.

We are in the weeds now on our way through the Great Fifty Days of Easter. When we have three readings like these, I think of what our resident Rabbi Howard Berman usually asks me when he preaches to us: “why do I always get the hard lessons?” My response to him is that the lessons are always hard. They are either hard to believe, or easy to believe and hard to stomach. Encountering Biblical texts, for me, is something like an archaeological dig: it’s difficult to get through layers upon layers of heavy hard stuff piled on top of a mysterious and beautiful mosaic floor that has tiles missing when you finally get down to it; or like mining for valuable gems that you may or may not find! We are digging for evidence and mining for meaning when we search for beauty under the rubble in our sacred literature, and the question to ask about any scriptural artifact is not, “how and where is this still happening?” Continue reading →

Universal, Mystical, Behavioral

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Third Sunday of Easter, Year C, April 10, 2016; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

Acts 9:1-6(7-20) Go, for he is an instrument whom I have chosen.
Revelation 5:11-14 And the four living creatures said, ‘Amen!
John 21:1-19 Come and have breakfast.

O God of resurrection, 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.

We are well on our way into the Great Fifty Days of Easter, the extended Feast of the Resurrection. I’m always grateful that the Church calendar gives 40 days for Lent, but 50 days for Easter. Lent is easier for many of us – we can believe in the need for increased focus on penitence, discipline, prayer, study, and almsgiving. Many of you tell me that Lent is your favorite church season. A season of increased focus on resurrection – on rising from the dead – is what trips people up. So the Church gives us extra time – an extension – to observe, to celebrate new life for what has died, ended, been forgotten or lost! (Some of you might be thinking that ten days is not long enough. That’s okay – this is a group project, not an individual assignment, just stick with us.) This morning I want to offer you an understanding of resurrection that is scripturally based. Our readings for today illuminate an understanding of resurrection for us. Thanks to my colleague, Bruce Epperly, who points out that, according to our lessons, resurrection is universal, mystical, and behavioral.[1] Continue reading →

Goodbyes

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In my group-therapy class, we just started to talk about dealing with the ending phase of a group, when the individuals that comprise a particular group inevitably shift or disperse.  The groups that I am part of through Emmanuel will continue on without me when I leave this internship, but that doesn’t mean that the groups will remain the same; in fact, they will have changed because my co-intern and I will be gone.  Continue reading →

Let’s live fully!

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Second Sunday of Easter, Year C, April 3, 2016; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

Acts 5:27-32 Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree.
Revelation 1:4-8 To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood.
John 20:19-31 Peace to you…peace to you…peace to you.

O God of life, 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 morning we have a trifecta of truly terrible theological ideas: the first in The Acts of the Apostles, a charge against high priests that they were the ones who had Jesus killed. Second, we have the idea of Jesus’ death as a blood atonement from John the Divine in Revelation. And to top it off, we have the story of “Doubting Thomas” from John the Evangelist (somehow bad to doubt?), which will be retold in a beautiful musical form later in Cantata 42. No doubt it will sound better than what I just read, but oy! You know, sometimes our lectionary gives choices – but not today. This Gospel reading is the only portion of all our four Gospels that gets read every single year on the Sunday after Easter, without rotation or options. That’s awfully heavy-handed, in my opinion. Perhaps the only good news about that is that many people take the Sunday after Easter off from attending church! But we’re here, so what are we to do?
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The proof is all around you.

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Easter Sunday (C), March 27, 2016; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

Isaiah 65:17-25 Be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating.
1 Corinthians 15:19-26 The last enemy to be destroyed is death.
Luke 24:1-12 Amazed at what had happened.

O God of life, 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 I prepare a sermon, I begin with the questions that I have about the assigned reading. In our Gospel lesson, some of my first questions are: Why was the stone moved? To let Jesus out, or to let “Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James and the other women with them” in? Why did the men think the women were telling them an idle tale? Did men not believe reports of the experiences of groups of women back in the olden days? Why were Jesus’ burial clothes left behind? What is the Risen Lord wearing? I imagine you have questions also. Continue reading →

Costly Discipleship

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Fifth Sunday in Lent (C), March 13, 2016; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

Isaiah 43:16-21 I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
Philippians 3:4b-14 Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.
John 12:1-8 You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.

O God of our heavenly calling, 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.

Many of you know how endlessly fascinated I am by our assigned lectionary readings and by the narrative differences across our four canonical gospels. This being Lectionary Year C, we have been going along just fine, hearing about Jesus’ journey toward Jerusalem according to the Gospel of Luke. Suddenly our assigned Gospel reading lurched off into the Gospel of John for this story of Mary of Bethany anointing Jesus’ feet, set in the very few weeks between when Lazarus and Jesus were raised from the dead. It’s a fine story, and I guess Luke thought so too, but he used it in an entirely different way: different woman, different place and a different time. The differences between the stories of a particular woman wiping feet with her hair are not reconcilable in my opinion, and the variations and diversity of Gospel “truth” give us all kinds of elbow room, which is something for which I am always looking — for all of our sake.
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Tactfulness vs Empathy

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In my conversations with people this week, an issue keeps coming up again and again: what is the best way to balance tactfulness and empathy?  At first, this may sound like a strange question.  Tactfulness and empathy may be like comparing apples and oranges to some and then considered essentially intertwined by others. However, in all of my conversations, individuals expressed concern that their desire to be tactful would somehow be at the expense of empathy. Continue reading →