Tag Archives: history

Blessed Pauli Murray

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Feast of Pauli Murray.  9 July. 2023. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

  • Sirach 15:1-6. They will lean on her and not fall.
  • Galatians 3:23-29. There is no longer Jew or Greek…slave or free…male and female.
  • Mark 12:1-12.  The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone [or keystone]; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing.

O God of reconciling 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.

Today is a long-anticipated, special day at Emmanuel Church because we are celebrating the Feast Day of The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray with the unveiling of a statue of her, beautifully rendered by our Artist-in-Residence Ted Southwick. The statue is installed on the sanctuary pulpit, from which Dr. Murray preached. We are thrilled and honored to welcome her niece Rosita Stevens-Holsey, who will speak with us after the service. While Dr. Murray’s feast day is July 1, the day that she completed her earthly mission, today is the 112th anniversary of her baptism at St. James’ Episcopal Church in Baltimore. Just prior to being ordained, she had described herself as: woman, Christian, seminarian, poet, lawyer, person of color, and senior citizen. Last week in Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion in the bigoted-website case, she recalled Murray’s pioneering work with regard to public accommodations.[1] I want to assure you that Pauli Murray is still speaking to us all. Continue reading →

Learn, Unlearn, and Relearn

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February is the national Black History Month in the United States. This is a way of remembering important people and events in the history of the African diaspora. I understand so many hurt souls have been mistreated for a long time. As it is never too late to have a space for discussion of social justice, this week in common art we started a group-based art project focused on it. Using a black marker to draw a line, each person connected to the line of the next person. After creating a group image of a line, we created art to express our intention toward a social issue we cared about. ( I want to thank my professor for bringing our class the idea of the structure for this exercise.)

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Do not be afraid.

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9th Sunday after Pentecost, 7 August 2022,  The Rev. Dr. John D. Golenski

Genesis 15:1. Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
Hebrews 11:1.  Do not be afraid, little flock.
Luke 12:32.

On the island of Torcello in the northern reaches of the Venetian lagoon, stands a Romanesque basilica built by the Veneti people over several centuries. They had left their cities on the mainland to seek refuge from the ravages of the Huns. There they worshipped with their bishops until malaria drove them to the group of islands we know now as the city of Venice. The basilica remains on the almost-deserted island, a relic of earlier Christian worship.

Directly in front of the central doors of this basilica, which is really a museum, are the
ruins of an octagonal building which was pillaged for marble and bricks for constructions in Venice. It served as the baptistry, a separate building which opened into the basilica’s narthex. Looking into the eight-sided ruin, which had been topped by a dome, one quickly realizes that the structure focuses on the exact center where a large stone basin would have been placed. We know a good deal about the practices of the first centuries of the Church through the writings of hierarchs and scholars of the time, but also from the structure of buildings, many in ruins like Torcello’s baptistry, built around the liturgies of baptism and the Eucharist. Continue reading →

Entering the Gates of Holy Week

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Palm Sunday C, 10 April 2022.  The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

Isaiah 50:4-9a. It is the Lord God who helps me.
Philippians 2:5-11. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.
Luke 23:1-49. Watching these things.

1.  They had been enemies.  
You know, each of our four canonical Gospels tells its own story of the Good News of Jesus as the Christ. Each has its own voice, its own intended audience, its own character. I believe that we hear and understand best when we hear the distinctive voices telling different stories, when we do not try to make a puree by blending all of the ingredients of the four Gospels, seasoned with church traditions. Continue reading →

The Harvest of Righteousness

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Advent 2C.  19 December 2021. The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

Baruch 5:1-9 Take off the garment of sorrow and affliction and put on the robe of righteousness.
Phillipians 1:31-11. And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God
Luke 3:1-6 All flesh shall see the salvation of God.

God all merciful and all compassionate, 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.

As I said last week, Advent is a season for communal and institutional reflection and repentance, for collective atonement and reparations. Our readings for this second Sunday in Advent are so full and big with calls for repentance and reparations; it is almost as if they are pregnant with possibility. The prophet Baruch and the evangelist Luke are both reminding their hearers about the words of the prophet Isaiah. And Luke draws a picture of John the Baptist that is just like the prophet Jeremiah, consecrated before he was born, and just like Elijah by the Jordan in the wilderness. Luke also has already explained that John’s work was so closely related to Jesus’s work, their purposes were so akin to one another, that it was as if they must have known one another before they were even born. Continue reading →

The Widow’s Mite

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Lately I’ve been thinking about some of the contrasts that chase us through life at Emmanuel. They start on Sunday when I walk over the small round disk embossed BOSTON GROUNDWATER TRUST, which is set into the sidewalk in front of the church. It’s one of 800 wells monitoring the groundwater that still covers the 200,000 Maine spruce-tree trunks that were steam-pile driven-in 160 years ago to keep our feet out of the soup below. Sure, I know that part of the motivation for filling the Back Bay was to keep prosperous white Protestants from decamping to the suburbs, and my Irish great-grandfather south of the tracks. But still, there’s no way to get into Emmanuel without at least an unthinking pilgrimage over that magical, invisible, upside-down forest.

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Pickled

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The Baptism of Our Lord, January 10, 2021, The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz.

Genesis 1:1-5. God saw that light was good.
Acts 19:1-7. No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.
Mark 1:4-11. People from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem…[and] Jesus came from Nazareth

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.

What a week. I’ve been reflecting more than usual on the history of Emmanuel Church, organized by a group of religious progressives, abolitionists whose wealth had come largely from the economics of enslaving people, though they were not slaveholders themselves. They formed Emmanuel in the spring of 1860, just eight months before states seceded from the United States, one year before the Civil War began. Our cornerstone was laid at the same time as the Battle of Bull Run in July 1861. Many in the North thought the conflict would be resolved quickly. They were so wrong; yet, their hope for the future represented by their church planting has produced so much good fruit, and it’s still producing today.

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Finding my groove?

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Boston Warm Collage

Collaborative collage created by BostonWarm participants to commemorate the program’s five-year anniversary

It was tough for me to figure out what to write about for this week. It’s not that nothing happened, that’s for sure—there’s always plenty going on at BostonWarm and common art—rather, there was no singular topic or moment I could think to focus on. I was starting to ask fewer questions of my (incredibly patient) supervisors and starting to learn better how to initiate things on my own. Was it possible that I was starting to find my “groove” here at my internship?
Of course, now I realize that I did indeed have a noteworthy moment at BostonWarm—I led my first art project!

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A Remembrance & a Legacy

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In Commemoration of the Centennial of the Armistice of World War I
Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost, November 11, 2018; Rabbi Howard A. Berman

Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17
Hebrews 9:24-28
Mark 12:38-44
One of the major themes of my teaching to our people at Central Reform Temple, and to all of you here at Emmanuel Church, is the importance of history as a source of spiritual truth and guidance. History, its chronicle and commemoration, and its enduring meaning and message, is a fundamental dimension of both Judaism and Christianity. The Hebrew Biblical foundation that both of our faiths share, teaches that God works through human history. The primary focus of our Scriptures is historical narrative. The events, progress, and personalities that shape history–whether global, national, communal, and even our own personal experiences–are clear revelations of God’s presence and will in the world and in our lives. We believe that the good and noble people and events in human experience have been instruments of God’s blessing, love and mercy. And yet, we also know that the evils of history, the sufferings and injustice we have inflicted upon each other, have also been signs of our failure to heed God’s will – not of Divine responsibility for suffering, but rather our human culpability for the tragedies of our past. We have been given both a clear set of moral and ethical imperatives in Torah and Gospel, as well as the innate free will to make our choices, collectively and individually, to either follow God’s law of love and justice and peace by choosing good and life or by choosing evil and death, and bringing upon ourselves, our world, and our children, the consequences of pain and suffering that have, sadly, largely marked the chronicle of human experience.

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The Great Emergence

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Twenty First Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 25A, 500th Anniversary of Protestant Reformation, October 29, 2017; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

Deuteronomy 34:1-12 I have let you see it with your eyes.1 Thessalonians 2:1-8 Entrusted with the message of the Gospel.

Matthew 22:34-46 No one was able to give him an answer…nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.

O God of our Holy Scripture, 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.

About a month ago, toward the end of my sermon, I said something that made the head of one of our beloved young children snap to attention. It’s not what I intended – I did want that response from the rest of you. So I’m going to start today with what I said last month, and if you’re near a young child, cover their ears, but the rest of you, listen up. “The truth is that the world is ending,” We can see that in the deterioration of the Church, social and economic systems stressed beyond the breaking point, financial corruption and abuses of power increasing the already yawning gap between rich and poor, widespread dissatisfaction and discontent resulting in violence. Nationalism on the rise; war and health crises threaten the well-being of the people. Improvements in communication and access to information just amplify and accelerate the process of disintegration because it’s impossible to control messages and figure out what is true.
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