Tag Archives: kindness

Extravagantly Kind

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Proper 10A, 16 July 2023. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

  • Genesis 25:19-34. If it is going to be this way, why do I live?
  • Romans 8:1-11. You are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you.
  • Matthew 13:1-9 [10-17] 18-23. Hear then the parable of the sower.

O God of grace, 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.

There is an old Jewish wisdom teaching that God created humans because God loves stories. Two of our three readings this morning are stories. We have the story of Rebekah bearing twins, Esau and Jacob, and of the most expensive bowl of red-lentil soup there ever was in the history of the world. Our Gospel portion includes a memorable story, parable. I often think that the Apostle Paul’s letters might have been more comprehensible and less objectionable, if they focused more on stories than high rhetoric, elegant as it is. Continue reading →

Thirst

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Proper 8A
June 28, 2020

Genesis 22:1-14 Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him.
Romans 6:12-23 Present your members to God as instruments of righteousness…the stipend of sin is death.
Matthew 10:40-42 And whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple—truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.

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.

Our lesson from Genesis about Abraham’s binding of Isaac is such a troubling story to me – it is, as theologian Phyllis Trible says, a text of terror. And the interpretation of this story also horrifies me. It so often gets taught as a theological yardstick story that sizes up Abraham’s obedience to what he understands to be the voice of the Holy One telling him to sacrifice his son. It gets paired with the story of Jesus’ death on the cross. I haven’t heard nearly enough criticism in religious settings about the kind of father who would be willing to kill his own son; or the kind of god that would devise such a horrendous test of faith. I wonder why anyone would want to worship such a god. 

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No Ordinary Time

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Proper 6A
June 14, 2020

Genesis 18:1-15 (21:1-7) Sarah laughed to herself.
Romans 5:1-8 And hope will not disappoint us.
Matthew 9:35-10:8 (9-23) When he saw the crowds he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless…the harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few.

O most faithful and patient 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 taking stock of the journey we’ve been on as a community of faith since early March, when the COVID-19 pandemic started to become real in the Boston area. We have endured great uncertainty and tremendous loss, concern for the safety of others and for ourselves, a lot of fear, grief, and more than a little shame. I hear see and hear these things in our phone conversations, on your faces via video conferencing, in your emails, and I feel them too. In our worship, we have navigated (with significant technological turbulence) the second half of Lent, Holy Week, Eastertide, the feasts of the Ascension, Pentecost and Trinity Sunday. And now we have entered the long stretch of what the Church calls Ordinary Time. 
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Only Kindness

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Seventh Sunday in Easter, Year A
May 24, 2020

Acts 1:6-14 Constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women…
1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11 (but what about 4:16?) If any of you suffers as a Christian, do not consider it a disgrace, but glorify God because you bear this name.
John 17:1-11 Protect them in your name that you have given me..so that they may be one as we are one.

O sovereign 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.

This is the day, in our church calendar, when we mark the time between the Feast of the Ascension and the Feast of Pentecost – a sort of liturgical limbo. It lines up well with the limbo we are experiencing in the Church, between pre-isolation and post-isolation due to the covid-19 pandemic. There’s a lot of buzz about opening the churches, and I want to say that Emmanuel hasn’t closed. The Emmanuel Church building has stayed open to serve those who desperately need shelter and food and other necessities, like loving-kindness, and to allow other essential activities to take place. It never closed. Is Emmanuel Church open for worship? Well the physical pews are not full of people, the chancel is not full with a choir and orchestra, but we have not stopped worshiping together as a community. Nevertheless, we are in a sort of limbo, having left what we have held dear, not knowing when and how a new normal will be. I think it’s safe to say that many of us are feeling bereft and disillusioned, mixed with varying amounts of anxiety, anger, and despair. We are warned that we are still in the early days.

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Standing with Pelagius

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Lent 1A, March 1, 2020. The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7. They knew that they were naked.
Romans 5:12-21. As sin came into the world through one man.
Matthew 4:1-11. And suddenly angels came and waited on him.

O God of Forgiveness, 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 season of Lent has begun in the Church, a period of 40 days, not including Sundays, set aside for Christians to examine our personal, individual estrangement from the love and mercy of the Holy One, and to return to right relationship with one another. Although each person is doing their own Lenten practice, as a congregation we come together for mutual support and encouragement as we go through a this period of intensified self-examination with a call to increased generosity in almsgiving, praying, fasting, and studying the Bible.

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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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A Sacrifice of Thanksgiving

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Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany, February 17, 2019
Jeremiah 17:5-10 In the year of the drought it is not anxious and it does not cease to bear fruit.
1 Corinthians 15:12-20 The first fruits of those who have died.
Luke 6:17-26 Blessed…blessed…blessed….blessed….woe….woe…woe…woe.

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.

With the beautiful Brahms motet and the brain-scrambling passage in 1 Corinthians about resurrection, I don’t know if you could hear the connections between Jeremiah and Luke, but I want to call them to your attention. This is a lectionary pairing that is striking to me – possibly because we haven’t heard it read in church for a dozen years. (Having a sixth Sunday in Epiphany in our lectionary year C turns out to be rare because of church calendar idiosyncrasies.) The prophet Jeremiah is addressing his nation with judgment and lamentation for its apostasy – its abandonment of its covenant relationship with the Holy One. He says the ways in which the nation has missed the mark (of Love) are engraved on the hearts of the people because their obstinate and cowardly behaviors go so deep, they are marred to the core. Jeremiah employs the metaphor of a dried-up shrub to describe the nation that has turned toward its own strength and away from the Holy One. The nation is so compromised that it will not even see when relief comes – when good comes. It’s an ancient way of saying, “they wouldn’t know a good thing if it knocked them in the head.”

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Baptism of Our Lord: Unquenchable Fire

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The Baptism of our Lord (C)
January 13, 2019

Isaiah 43:1-7 I will.
Acts 8:14-17 They received the Holy Spirit.
Luke 3:15-17; 21-22  You are my…beloved; with you I am well pleased.

O God of unquenchable fire, 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 Baptism of our Lord, so this morning we heard the Gospel of Luke’s account of what happened when Jesus was baptized. Actually, we heard a little more than the Gospel verses that were appointed for today. Maybe you noticed the brackets around verses 18-20. That’s my way of indicating that I added verses that weren’t assigned. I don’t know why the three verses get left out – they’re not very long. I guess they seem like an interruption to the flow of the story. But for Luke, at least as it was handed down to us, they’re essential. They are very much a part of the story. They are the verses that end up with John the Baptist going to prison. They read: “So with many other exhortations, he [that is, John] proclaimed the good news to the people. But Herod the ruler, who had been rebuked by him because of Herodias, his brother’s wife, and because of all the evil things that Herod had done, added to them all by shutting up John in prison.”

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Make the choice to let Love in!

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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.
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My liberation is bound with yours.

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Last Sunday after Pentecost, Christ the King, Proper 29A, November 26, 2017; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24 I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will [safeguard].
Ephesians 1:15-23 So that with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you.
Matthew 25:31-46 Just as you did it to the least of these…you did it to me.

O God of endings and new beginnings, 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 we mark the end of the liturgical calendar year for Christians. This is our New Year’s Eve day – a time for reflection and review, for celebration, and for renewed hope for the future.  Our year end coincides this year with Thanksgiving weekend, and I hope you’ve all found reasons to be thankful. But if this week has been particularly hard, and you haven’t found a reason yet, I hope you will find it this morning in this place!  I am so thankful that you are here.
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