The service for this week is being delivered to us in the vehicle of prose. Rev. Carol Carlson’s sermon is attached here in PDF format: EASTER 221 – Sermon. She encourages us to receive the peace and assurance that Christ offers, and then be mobilized to share this great treasure with others.
Feel free to gather with your ‘pod’ or household to pray and worship together using the service bulletin for this week: easter 221 –
…All Saints’ Day is the anniversary of my coming to you, 14 years ago now, and the reflections appropriate to this day are so crucial for our life as a parish, that I want to focus just on that for now and say a few words about the state of the parish later on. My text for this homily is found in the song we sang a few weeks ago and will sing again this morning as our anthem at the breaking of the bread in the eucharist.
…We know about things being written on people’s hearts in everyday experience. If I have to host a dinner for 20 people, I can do that – I was trained by a mother whose vocation in life was hospitality, and she thought that this kind of thing was something everyone ought to be able to do. So I’ll do it, and it will probably be OK – and it will be an enormous struggle, and I’ll come out of it completely wasted.
…He loves Israel; but it won’t love him in return, at least not for long. So it’s going to be destroyed, and God won’t save it – but he grieves over it anyway. We’re being brought in on a conflict in the very heart of God. The children of Hosea and the prostitute are named after Israel’s terrible fate – Jezreel, after the place where Israel’s defeat will happen, and Not-pitied, for the inevitability of her downfall,
…This does not make much sense to me. I’m not saying that just because I’m such a Martha, and in the midst of a congregation full of Martha’s. It’s especially hard to believe in the context of Luke’s Gospel, the only one that tells this story, and the one of the four that emphasises hospitality above almost all the other demands of the Kingdom of God. Luke’s Jesus-story is the one that begins with a newborn baby finding no room in an inn,
…‘O Lord, mercifully receive the prayers of your people … and grant that they may know and understand what things they ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them.’ That’s the question from the lawyer in the story of the Good Samaritan. The story is so familiar that we probably think we know all about it. Can there be anything more to say about this story – even one so central to the message of Jesus?
…Elisha jumps up eagerly and asks for a double share of Elijah’s rabble-rousing spirit – and I would give my eye-teeth not to ever have to face any conflict at all. Jesus points out to his would-be followers that he has no home at all – and I have two, and can barely cope with either of them. But I’ll do the best I can…. We start with an ending, the death of Elijah. He has fought the good fight against the enemies of the Lord,
The Gospel lesson that we just heard is such a familiar one that you might have let it go right past you thinking that it’s one you understand completely, and miss the shocks that it has for all of us. As a description of what we used to call the ‘corporal works of mercy’, it’s especially appropriate to the ordaining of deacons, of course, those works being traditionally deacons’ work. And it’s especially appropriate to ordaining this deacon,
…The Bible is very likely to tell you a powerful word on that subject, and then tell you (equally powerfully) another word on the same subject, with a meaning possibly altogether different, possibly even opposite to your first understanding. That’s something like the situation in our lessons today.
The first one – the first in a series of wonderful stories we are going to hear this summer about Elijah the man of God,
…I was left in the dust after about two sentences. I always feel a little bit that way on Trinity Sunday. At least this year I’m not facing the group that appeared 2 or 3 years ago for this occasion. It was when Mike was just new in the parish, so I was looking out at a philosophy professor, who was, moreover, fresh from the Orthodox tradition. Joining us that day also was Charlie’s daughter Becky,
…These people start out to build a tower that will reach up to heaven, so they can ‘make a name’ for themselves, so that it will scare people away and they won’t be, as they say, ‘scattered’. In its most primitive form, the story was probably about the Babylonian ziggurats, trying to enable people to climb up to heaven, where the gods are, and become gods themselves. But the Biblical author, the one we call ‘J’,
…That insight seems to me to have a lot to do with the crisis in our world today about how we are going to take care of that world. The story is the same one we hear in the other 3 Gospels in a very different form. You may remember it: there’s a man lying on a pallet being carried in by his friends to see Jesus. The crowd is so great that the friends have to lower the guy down through the roof to where Jesus is.
10:30 AM Sunday Worship Service
(All current CDC covid-19 safety guidelines are required)
Monday
8:00pm: AA Meeting
7:30pm: AA Meeting
Craft Group meets on a date to be determined. Check the calendar for more information.