Sermons

We invite you to enjoy these sermons of our rector, The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz and others.  Browse her latest sermons below, or look for a specific sermon by title in reverse chronological order and listed by year in the right-hand column.  Above the years is a word cloud of clickable tags for these sermons.  Also listen to her dynamic preaching about 20 minutes into our live-streamed services on our YouTube Channel.

Our Obligation and Opportunity to Shine

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Presentation in the Temple
February 2, 2020 – Annual Meeting

Malachi 3:1-4 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.

This year, Emmanuel’s 160th Annual Meeting falls on the fortieth day after Christmas, 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 the return to purity of his mother. This is a little bit odd because there actually is no known requirement or even custom of presenting an infant in the temple, but there was a rite of purification for a mother after delivering a baby.

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Networking

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Epiphany 3A
January 26, 2020

Isaiah 9:1-4 The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.
1 Corinthians 1:10-18 I appeal to you…that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you.
Matthew 4:12-23 Follow me, and I will make you fish for people….Immediately they left.

Merciful and generous 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.

I want to begin by acknowledging that our lesson from Isaiah this morning sounds like it is teeing up the Gospel lesson. It sounds like Isaiah was anticipating Jesus. But Isaiah wasn’t anticipating Jesus any more than Isaiah or Jesus were anticipating what George Frederic Handel might do with this beautiful poetry. Actually, it is exactly the other way around. Matthew was living and growing in the stories of Jesus, at least two generations after Jesus’ death. Matthew was retelling those stories toward the end of the first century of the common era and thinking, “these stories sound so much like the stories that Isaiah told eight hundred years ago!” Isaiah was delivering an oracle of hope to the people of Judah who were in deep distress, danger, and despair.

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Lambs of God

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Epiphany 2A
January 19, 2020

Isaiah 49:1-7 I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.
1 Corinthians 1:1-9 God is faithful.
John 1:29-41 Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

O God,manifest in us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

Since the beginning of Advent, our Sunday Gospel readings have been from Matthew, and we will return to Matthew next week. But this morning it is as if the lectionary announces, “we interrupt our serial reading of the Gospel of Matthew to bring you this Good News from the Gospel of John. Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. John the Baptist has testified to it.” Our lectionary has decided to call witnesses!

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Just Mercy

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The Baptism of our Lord (A)
January 12, 2020

Isaiah 42:1-9 I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand.
Acts 10:34-43 Anyone who…does what is right is acceptable to [God].
Matthew 3:13-17 The Beloved.

O God, manifest in 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 is the day in the church liturgical calendar called “The Baptism of our Lord.” In the early church, the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord was far more important a celebration than the Feast of the Birth of Our Lord (which we call Christmas). Traditionally, Christians celebrated three feasts of light: Epiphany, which was the story of people wise enough to seek after and find Jesus and then go home by another way; The Baptism of Our Lord by the incredulous John at the River Jordan; and the Wedding Feast at Cana where the story goes that Jesus brightened up a very gloomy situation by changing water into some really good wine. These feasts of light were understood to illuminate the nature of God. They were manifestations or revelations initiated by God and noticed by people. These three feasts demonstrated to Christians who observed them, not only what God is like, but also Who (God) wishes us to be in community – in relationship to one another.

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Narrative Theology

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First Sunday after Christmas
December 29, 2019

Isaiah 61:10-62:3 For the sake of Zion I will not be silent. For the sake of Jerusalem I will not rest.
Galatians 3:23-25, 4:4-7 So you are…a child then also an heir, through God.
John 1:1-18 and the Word became flesh and lived among us

O God of our story, 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.

If you were in church here on Christmas Eve or anywhere else on Christmas morning, you heard the prologue from the Gospel of John, verses 1-14 of it anyway. Our deacon Bob and I chanted it by candlelight. So it’s curious that the lectionary assigns it again for the First Sunday of Christmas with four more verses. Curious, but I kind of like it because there are just some places a preacher shouldn’t go in a Christmas Eve sermon in an overly full service in the sanctuary. But today, in Lindsey Chapel, we can go there. Today we can review some Biblical Greek. Not many people want to review Biblical Greek on Christmas Eve. This morning we’ve got a little elbow room and I’m going to take full advantage. 

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Claim the scandalous holiness of God!

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Fourth Sunday of Advent (A)
December 22, 2019

Isaiah 7:10-16 The Lord will give you a sign.
Romans 1:1-7 [You] yourselves are called to belong to Jesus Christ.
Matthew 1:18-25 Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place this way.

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.
Many of you have heard me say I love the way that each of our four Gospels tells a different story about the beginning of Jesus’ ministry – of how and when Jesus the Christ, Love incarnate, came into our world. The Gospel of Mark notes the beginning with John the Baptist preparing the way in the wilderness. Jesus came into the world, according to Mark, at his baptism. For Matthew, the preparation began with Abraham and he came into the world at his birth. Luke says, yes, he came into the world at his birth, but the preparation went all the way back to Adam. And for John – he was before the world even existed. Today the Gospel account belongs to Matthew, who writes, “Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah [or the Christ] took place in this way.” If, as I think, Matthew’s Gospel was written a few years before Luke, then this is the earliest extant birth narrative for Jesus.

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Rejoice!

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Third Sunday of Advent (A), December 15, 2019.  The Rev. Pamela L. Wermtz

Isaiah 35:1-10.  A highway shall appear there, which shall be called the Holy Way.
James 5:7-10. Beloved, do not grumble against one another.
Matthew 11:2-11. Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?

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.

Today is the Sunday in Advent called Gaudete Sunday. (Gaudete means rejoice.) Our liturgical color for the third Sunday is rose; that’s why we have a rose-colored candle in our Advent wreath and rose in our vestments. It is a Sunday set aside to fill our imaginations with joyful anticipation of what God might be up to in creating new heavens and a new earth. It is a Sunday to pick our heads up and rejoice in the faithfulness of God, in the midst of everything that grieves us, in the midst of oppression and violence, in the midst of hunger and illness and imprisonment, even in the midst of destruction and death. I’ve spent considerable time this week wondering how to rejoice always in spite of wide-spread violence and hate crimes, the rise of fascism, and the wanton disregard for the well-being of our planet. It’s a hard choice, I think, not to give in to despair; it’s hard, even scandalous, to choose to rejoice. Rejoicing, however, is not the same as “holiday frolicking”, as William Stringfellow once wrote; and rejoicing certainly doesn’t mean letting up on our non-violent resistance and our actions to end oppression of all kinds.

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Repent as a group!

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Second Sunday of Advent (A)
December 8, 2019

Isaiah 11:1-10 and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. (that’s some powerful bad breath!)
Romans 15:4-13 …on behalf of the truth of God.
Matthew 3:1-12 He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.

O God of hope 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.

Last week at Emmanuel Church, the musical through line of our worship service was Wachet Auf (or wake up). In our musical through line today we are calling on the Savior of the nations (or a little more rudely, Savior of the heathens) to come now! Do any of you worry about calling on the Divine so boldly? Do any of you think of Annie Dillard’s famous warning about how we should be wearing crash helmets when we blithely invoke the power of God,. She adds that church “ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense; or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.” It can and does happen.
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Bear the light as a group!

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First Sunday of Advent (A)
November 30, 2019

Isaiah 2:1-5 [When God judges] they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.
Romans 13:11-14 [love is the fulfilling of the law] let us live honorably.
Matthew 24:37-44 Therefore you also must be ready

O God of our new year, 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 our new church (or liturgical) year begins. Happy New Year! What did you all do for the Church’s New Year’s Eve last night? Did you stay awake celebrating past midnight? (Probably most of you did not, or you wouldn’t be here now!) That’s okay – staying up past midnight is overrated. Have you made any churchy new year’s resolutions about spiritual or religious diet and exercise to get ready for the Feast of the Nativity? I saw a meme the other day that said, “It’s almost time to switch from your regular anxiety to your fancy Christmas anxiety!” Isn’t that what Advent is for? What is Advent for?

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A Garden in Paradise

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Last Sunday after Pentecost (29C)
November 24, 2019

Jeremiah 23:1-6 Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!
Colossians 1:11-20 In him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.
Luke 23:33-43 Paradise.

Merciful and generous 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.

Today is the Feast of the Reign of Christ (a liturgical observance not yet 100 years old) that has been placed on the last Sunday in the church year – the completion of our lectionary cycle of Bible readings. Although we don’t read our Gospel portions in order, today is the last time we will hear from the Gospel of Luke except for Christmas-time nativity stories until Advent of 2022.
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