An Episcopal Parish in the Diocese of Eastern North Carolina
The Rev. Cortney Dale's final sermon at Christ Church. She begins as Priest-in-Charge at St. Patrick's Episcopal Church, Lebanon, OH, in September.
Trinity Sunday, 2021 http://lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BTrinity_RCL.html
If God can roll away the stone, then we can dream God-sized dreams for the Kingdom of God and believe that God will work through us to make those dreams a reality.
Sacred Sound and Space Campaign Re-launch Feb. 7, 2021 I am here today to announce the re-launch of Christ Church’s Sacred Sound and Space Capital Campaign. Active fund-raising for the Campaign was paused almost a year ago due to the Covid-19 pandemic so let me refresh your memory about the campaign. It has as its objective the renewal of our worship space, The Nave. More specifically, after involving the parish in a Feasibility Study we identified six projects that had broad parish support. The replacement of our failing organ and some work in the balcony to accommodate and support the new one. Improving the acoustics of The Nave by Removing the old, worn carpet and restoring the 150 year old heart pine floors covered by the carpet. Stiffening the ceiling Taking care of deferred maintenance needs such as Replacing the broken lighting control system. Refurbishing and refinishing our pews. I believe that all the good things at Christ Church start in the Nave. In the Nave together we sing hymns and we pray and affirm our faith as we say the creeds. Perhaps it is silent prayer and contemplation that speaks to you. Our worship in The Nave is what motivates us to go out and do good in the world and the Sacred Sound and Space Campaign aims to renew that worship space. As I said earlier, we paused find raising early last year and at that time almost 200 parishioners had pledged just under $1,200,000.00. We need another $300,000.00. So what have we been doing since we paused the Campaign? Our original plan was to do the non-organ related projects later this year. That would have required shutting The Nave down for worship for a number of months. As it turned out the pandemic beat us to it so we took advantage of our inability to worship in The Nave and moved a number of projects up by a year. We have removed the old carpet and restored our 150-year-old heart pine floor. We removed all the pews and had them refurbished and refinished. They should be installed within a few weeks. They will have new kneelers, cushions, and book racks. We replaced the broken lighting control system and relocated the controls from the balcony to the Narthex. We cleaned the ceiling – believe me, it needed it. We re-affixed loose ceiling boards, patched numerous large gaps (with the attic lights on and The Nave lights out you could see lots of light coming from the attic). We also reinforced and stiffened the ceiling from above which will enhance the acoustics of The Nave. And for the first time in 150 years there will be insulation above the ceiling which will reduce energy usage. While all this work was going on, using funds from other sources and generous gifts from individual parishioners we Significantly increased the brightness of the lighting. Painted the wainscoting and white walls Made significant improvements in the way light comes through the altar window, something we have struggled with ever since we built the Chapel. So we have done everything included in the Campaign except the new organ which will be installed in 2023. We have done these things on time and on budget and have utilized many local workers to do it at a time when the local economy was struggling. I look forward to worshipping in The Nave again. I look forward to being able to see the hymnal and Prayer Book. I look forward to hearing music, sermons, the scriptures, the prayers and the creeds reflected back by our floor and ceiling rather than being absorbed by them. I look forward to 2023 when a glorious new organ built specifically for our Nave will be installed, not an organ that will last forty or fifty years but one that will last for many generations of worshippers. And I look forward to experiencing all these things with you. We only have three things left to do. Some adjustments to the balcony to accommodate the new organ. The installation of the new organ. And finishing the fund-raising. We need at least $300,000.00 in additional pledges. We are resuming solicitation of pledges today and hope to conclude by June. If you have not pledged please consider doing so. No pledge is too large and no pledge is too small. Every member counts. You know, we are fortunate. We have a beautiful and inspiring place to worship. Not long after the Civil War it was faithfully re-built following a fire. It was provided to us by those who came before us. This is our chance to renew it and provide for those who will come after us. Please help us reach the finish line.
The message we need or the message we want? A sermon by the Rev. H. Paul Canady III Rector of Christ Church, New Bern, NC, on January 31, 2021 If there is ever a universal feeling among people, it’s the one that arises in us when we hear someone say, “Well, I have good news and bad news. Which do you want first?” We have to make a decision about where to start. Your car is totally repairable, but it will be far from cheap. The bird that got in the house is now out, but, I’d rather you not look at what’s left of the china that was on the dining room table… I think we all know what it is like to be on the delivery end of those good news/bad news scenarios, too. The season of Epiphany is all about how Jesus is revealed and received by the people around him, and in today’s lessons, we see Jesus in light of the prophets that came before him. By their very calling, prophets were messengers of God who told the people of God what they needed to hear, and what they needed to hear was often far from what people wanted to hear. The messages of prophets were seen as only doom and gloom, but so often there is a message of hope and healing and reconciliation between God and God’s people. And it is a message of reconciliation that God is most interested in. God tries to get the people’s attention with the doom and gloom, the promise of invading armies and years of famine, but also the promise to avoid all that by being faithful to the one who was always faithful to them. That’s why John the Baptizer called certain religious leaders a “brood of vipers” but also pointed to the promise of Jesus to bring healing and wholeness. We saw last week in the story of Jonah that when the people actually listened to God’s call to repentance, God actually spared them the doom and gloom. Go figure… It is not the utter destruction of towns and villages that God wants; it’s to be reconciled with the people God lovingly created. Our first lesson today is Moses laying the groundwork for when he is no longer among the people whom he worked to free from enslavement in Egypt. He knows he won’t live forever. He was not a young man when they crossed through the Red Sea and now he’s a couple of decades past that epic moment. There’s not really an indication that the people are worried about his death, his not being their leader anymore, but he feels compelled to offer them this message anyway. I do not believe that this was a prediction of Jesus or of the Word of God in human form. I don’t think the people of Moses’ time could have processed that any more than Henry VIII could have envisioned an airplane. There were many, many prophets that God would raise up between Moses and Jesus, and all would offer a reflection of the ills of the behavior of God’s people and consequences of not returning to the Lord their God. And they would offer the message of hope and healing for those who turned their hearts and lives back towards God. A prophet has a twofold role: They are the moral and ethical agents who summons the people to repentance, and the prophet anticipates what God will do in the covenant relationship between God and God’s people. Through the prophets, God accommodates us in our weaknesses. What we may hear from a prophet may be painful but it is for our well-being. Sometimes taking the thorn out of our foot really hurts, but we will eventually walk a whole lot better when it is gone. Prophets are members of the community, both locally and globally. It’s important for the prophet to be a presence among the community before their calling to announce the Word of God that creates justice, brings hope, and brings a promise to fruition. It’s important for us to remember that God acts through the prophets to tell us and show us what we need to hear and do, not merely to bring a word of comfort. Comfort breeds lazy and lazy leaves people of God behind. That was so much of the message of Isaiah and Jeremiah and Amos and Micah in the Hebrew Scriptures. The prophets also remind us that God isn’t going to pick the big and powerful to be representatives of God. Remember when Samuel went to select a King from among the sons of Jesse, it was the smallest son, the youngest, the one working in the fields whom God told Samuel to anoint as king. It was not the more strapping, more handsome ones. So here we are in the fourth week of this season in which our scriptures call us to look at how Jesus is revealed to those around him and how Jesus is revealed to us. We have a healing story, yes. Mark loves some healing stories! Of the 18 miracles in Mark’s Gospel, 13 of them are healing stories, and four of those 13 are exorcisms like we have today. But what else do we have in this scene from the synagogue in Capernaum? We have Jesus teaching. And not just teaching, not just healing, teaching and healing with authority. He wasn’t a scribe who could recite the ancient texts, and he wasn’t acting like the other Pharisees in upholding his own interpretation of the Laws of Moses. He was teaching and casting out demons like one with authority. Authority just like the prophets had when they spoke truth to power. Authority just like Jonah had in last week’s lesson to go to Nineveh and tell them to repent. Authority just like Moses had when he led the people out of Egypt and around the wilderness for 40 years. Authority just like the prophet Elisha in the book of Second Kings, where Elisha was called a Holy Man of God by the Shunammite woman before she learned more about him. While we know Jesus as the Messiah, the son of God, the Word of God made flesh, he is seen by this crowd as a prophet and a teacher and only later will be understood as those other parts. But in this moment, he not only teaches as one with authority but also heals with authority. So it’s not just a new teaching, not just a new preaching, it’s a transformation. I think part of the reason Mark shares so many healing stories in such a short Gospel book is because he sees that in Jesus’ words the eyes of the blind can be opened and people find a way to get up off their mat when they couldn’t before. Not just literally, but emotionally and spiritually, too. The authority of Jesus and his teachings cause things to happen. And we must never believe that God is done speaking, that God’s authority to speak through prophets ended with Jesus or even the early New Testament writers. If prophets are called by God to share both the good news and the bad news, then it doesn’t take much to see prophets in our midst today. People who continue the teachings of Jesus to bring hope to all of us and whose words cause things to happen both for the better both in our hearts and in the world. Whether it is Rachael Held Evans or Michael Curry or Rob Bell or Amanda Gorman, we continue to hear messages not of building up power but of building up relationships, calls to care more for the ecosystem than a financial system, and invitations for honest conversation not sweeping things under the rug. I hope this week, this season of Epiphany, you will see and hear the voice of a prophet of God, someone who shares in the teachings of Jesus and whose words cause things to happen that show us the fulfillment of the Kingdom of God. And I hope and pray that if it is you who get to share those words and teachings, they will fall on willing and eager ears. ###
Music at the end is an arrangement by Valerie Floeter of "I want to walk as a child of the light."
Humility. Accountability. Love. A sermon by the Rev. H. Paul Canady III Rector of Christ Church, New Bern, NC, on January 10, 2021 Wouldn’t it be amazing to live in some sort of “precedented” times? I don’t think “precedented” is even a word. I ended up typing this sermon instead of hand-writing it and the spell-checker kept asking if I meant something else. But wouldn’t it feel better to not wake up each day and wonder what is going to happen next? I think in some ways, we have all reached a bit of numbness to whatever happens. Oh, sure, there are things that will outrage a segment of the population, events that will bring joy to one group and make another group aghast, but there’s so much happening so fast that it feels like we have been drinking from a firehose for, well, more than 10 months to be sure. I mean, back in the spring of last year, defence agencies from multiple nations confirmed video evidence of alien activity in our skies and most of humanity was like, “Ok. Cool.” I think about all that we are living through as I pondered and reflected about what it must have been like when Jesus showed up to be Baptized by his cousin John. I’d say it’s pretty hard to wrap our head around what life was like during Jesus’ time on earth. His nation was occupied by a foreign army, had a puppet ruler, a different kind of economy, society, religious structure… all that. But what we do know, or can at least infer, is that Jesus disrupted the status quo to bring in those on the margins, the ones whom societal, economic, and religious structures pushed to the outside, the ones for whom all those structures saw as expendable or whom they could exploit to build up their own power base. But Jesus came and turned all of that over. The ripple effect of his life and work has lasted for nearly two thousand years, and we’ve certainly gotten it wrong on more than one occasion (including in all of our lifetimes). But we’ve gotten it right in a lot of places, too. Ritual purification had been a part of Judaism for hundreds of years by the time John and Jesus came along. The act of having water poured over you or being fully immersed as a sign of being cleansed of sin was nothing really new. What made John’s work different was that he was calling people to change their whole lives and ways of living. There was a feeling that people were more than fine doing things that they knew were outside the expectations of their faith because they could simply “get washed up” and be seen as acceptable in the eyes of God, or at least in the eyes of the religious leadership. But John, and then Jesus, had a different idea. Repent. Turn. Change. Don’t do the same thing over and over and expect the same results. John had his approach to this change. Jesus had his approach. John called the religious leaders of his time a brood of vipers. Jesus touched the unclean. John publicly called out Herod for his dirty ways. Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners. John called people fruitless trees who should be tossed in the fire. Jesus went down into the muddy waters of the Jordan River to be baptized. The season of Epiphany is about seeing, celebrating, and sharing all the ways we see Christ in the world. Most importantly, it’s about the unexpected ways we see Jesus being revealed to the world around us. In some ways, it is the pinnacle of Jesus’ identity as Immanuel, God with us. The Magi represent our understanding that Jesus is and was for all people, not just his own people. They were not of the same faith or ethnic lineage as Jesus, and yet they came to honor him, to bestow royal gifts, and as some legends tell us, be some of the first to tell of this one who was born king of the Jews. Years later, Jesus would be called God’s son as he is coming up out of those dirty waters. Jesus’ Baptism is reported in all four Gospels, and all four tellings have a different angle. In Mark’s version, the one we hear today, tells us that as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart. At the end of Mark’s Gospel, we read that as Jesus breathed his last, the curtain in the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom (Mark 15:27-38). Neither moment should be mistaken for a gentle rip or a slight opening. It’s an incarnational moment where heaven and earth are brought in closer proximity than we saw Saturn and Jupiter a few weeks ago. Jesus’ Baptism should serve as a reminder to us about how God chooses to be in the world, that God chose humility, accountability, and love. And if we are truly to be followers of Jesus, it is a reminder of how we should choose to be in the world, that we are to choose humility, accountability, and love. Can you imagine what this world would look like if we not only we all exhibited a little more humility, but also, we didn’t tolerate a lack of humility in others? And I don’t mean, not tooting your own horn or sharing an accomplishment. I mean listening to the experiences of others, especially those on the margins, the same ones Jesus brought in, the same people Jesus touched when no one else would. It means listening to understand, not to respond. It means reading Scripture through the lens of love to help us better know how to live this life God gave us. It means not tolerating or excusing those who intend or achieve harm, either through their words or actions. If you know me at all then this next statement will not surprise you. Humility, accountability, and love were most definitely not on display on Wednesday by the mob who besieged the Capitol building. Despite some who carried so-called Christian flags and signs, there was nothing Christ-like about the evil behavior we saw unfolding, and there is nothing Christ-like about the plans and intentions we continue to learn about as more investigations happen. It showed the very worst of what America can be, and I’m heartbroken that Christian symbolism was in anyway associated with it. Humility, accountability, and love are the core of what one might call Christian citizenship. It’s about standing up for what is right, advocating and working for justice, equality, systemic change, and the common good (not just what is good for a few). There is nothing about following Jesus, let alone anything else in life, that is a spectator sport. It requires our active engagement, a daily expression of our desire to be a part of this Jesus movement. Being a follower of Jesus, now more than ever, requires an intentional choice to embrace the loving, liberating, live-giving God, and all the ways God empowers us to be light of Christ in a world that so, so desperately needs it. In a few minutes, we will renew our Baptismal Covenant. The words are in the bulletin that is available in the comments section of our YouTube feed and on our Website or if you have a Book of Common Prayer available, it’s on page 292. It is for us, as Epicopal followers of Jesus, the core statement of our beliefs and our faith in action. There are five questions about how we live out our faith with God and among our neighbors. Questions about serving Christ by serving others. An invitation to live as though we might be the only example of Jesus someone might ever see. As we get to those questions about how we will live out that faith, I encourage you to pause and ponder before you say, “I will with God’s help,” to think about what that means for you, for those in your life, and what it might mean for the world. ###
Second Sunday of Advent with a nod to Ted Lasso.
Sermon by the Rev. Paul Canady, Rector of Christ Church, on the First Sunday of Advent.
For more about the Way of Love, visit https://episcopalchurch.org/way-of-love.
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