Sermons from St. Martin-in-the-Fields

Listen in to the sermon from Ms. Anne Alexis Harra for The Third Sunday after Pentecost, June 26, 2022. Support the worship and ministry of St. Martin's by giving online: stmartinec.org/give Today's readings are: 1 Kings 19:15-16,19-21 Psalm 16 Galatians 5:1,13-25 Luke 9:51-62Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/ Sermon text: It is a remarkable honor to meditate on the Words of Life with you this morning, which admittedly feels rather heavy. I originally was on the schedule to preach next week - on Wednesday afternoon, Pastor Jim asked if I might switch to this week. Little did I know. Shaping these words to you, my Beloved St. Martin's, a community in transition and one that is feeling a tremendous weight, is an outstanding gift. I am honored. A great injustice was done on Friday, the exact type against which Paul warns in the passage from Galatians. The freedoms of powerful people were used as an opportunity for self-indulgence, to abuse the name of religious freedom and to strip away the dignity and bodily autonomy of women. After the news broke on Friday I found myself in the midst of a crisis of faith. Finding the words to say to myself, let alone to a congregation already shouldering so much, was almost impossible. Around 7:30 last night with tears in my eyes I angrily said to my far-too-patient partner, "I have no words. This pain is too much. I don't know where God is, and I don't know what the future will bring." My sweet Cole said to me, "Preach what's on your heart. You'll find the words." I feel like I resonate most with the words of the Psalmist this morning, who opened the psalm with a plea to God for protection during turbulence in Israel. The Psalmist reiterates that it is God who is her only good; with God's presence near her, she will not fall. Let us take those words with us this week to hopefully lighten our burdens. I fear we are staring down a long road of anguish and factionizing. St. Paul had this same concern for the Church in Galatia, a portion of whose Letter we read this morning. Despite having brought the Good News of God in Christ to Galatia, Paul was concerned about its factionizing. The Galatians were factionizing and dividing amongst themselves over the interpretation of the law. The Judaic faction of Galatia was adamant that Christian converts should practice Mosaic law, even going so far as to demand that these converts receive circumcision. Paul does not mince words when he warns the Galatians not to trade one form of subjugation for another. Subjugation of any body based on former law infringes on everybody's freedom. It drives us apart, and it pulls us away from God. This passage from Galatians today reminds us that our freedom does not come from us, but from the Love of God in Christ, the same Christ who willingly set out on a journey from Galilee to Jerusalem to meet his fate on the cross. True religious freedom comes from Christ and begets the Fruits of the Spirit: joy, patience, gentleness, faithfulness. It does not harm another for righteousness' sake. Instead, we are coming face to face with profoundly gross misinterpretations of religious freedom, the kind which keep us stuck in the past and unable to move forward in our journey towards the Dominion of God. In the gospel, Luke illustrates a strange encounter with Jesus, but highlights a harsh truth: The freedom that comes from following Christ involves sacrificing what we once thought was best. At the end of the gospel, we hear a peculiar dialogue between Jesus and one potential follower. The man wants to follow Jesus but asks to offer his family farewell, first. Jesus does not hold back: "No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God." These words would have been bizarre to anyone in ancient times because the "plowing norm" involved the person operating the plow looking backwards routinely to ensure that the rows were straight. In his response to the man, Jesus lets us know that constantly looking backwards is not the way to live into the Dominion of God. The old ways must make way for the new. I stand before you this morning as a young woman, a hopeful future priest, and a child of God who has grave concerns that a few people with an excess of power are distorting the Scriptures, are appropriating Christian images for political gain, and are taking us backwards - away from the Dominion of God. The Dominion of God is one filled with dignity, mercy, justice, compassion, and its goodness knows no bounds. We can achieve this state, but we must look forward in order to do so. We are called to protect the vulnerable. We are called to life in the Spirit. We are called to freedom in Christ. We are called to fulfill the New Commandment: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Moving into the coming days and weeks, I pray that we journey forward with the same bravery and conviction for justice that our Savior demonstrated for us. Despite the agony in my heart, I have hope in the ancient words of the Psalmist: "I have set God always before me; because God is at my right hand I shall not fall. My heart, therefore, is glad, and my spirit rejoices; my body also shall rest in hope. For God will not abandon me to the grave, nor let God's holy ones see the Pit." Friends, God will not let God's holy ones see the Pit. God dwells among us. God is sustaining us right now and beckoning us forward. In this time of profound pain and confusion, we have an opportunity to set God before us, and heed Christ's call to move forward into freedom. For freedom in Christ has - and will continue to - set us free. We will stand firm. And we will not again submit to a yoke of slavery. Amen. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Hear from the Rev. Dr. Nora Johnson preaching for our Pride Evensong service. Today's readings are: Psalm 150 Romans 12:9-18 Matthew 5:1-12 From the Gospel of Matthew this evening we have been given the beatitudes from the great Sermon on the Mount. I love the Sermon on the Mount. Everybody loves the Sermon on the Mount. In fact, if we aren't careful, many of us have heard the Sermon so many times that it can almost sound like an abstract checklist to us: blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are the meek, blessed are the persecuted. It can sound like we are hearing a set of policy statements by Jesus, or a set of ideas, or worse yet hearing a politician's list of talking points. Sometimes, to escape that deadening familiarity, I like to try to imagine what it must have felt like for Jesus to look out at those who were listening to him speak, and what it must have felt like for them to listen to him and meet his eye. Catching the eye of Jesus as he says "Blessed are those who mourn" is just a fundamentally different experience than hearing Jesus's abstract ideas about mourning or about seeking righteousness. To be in that group around Jesus listening, with the disciples or with the crowd from which he has just come, is to have, I think, a deep experience of one's own blessedness. And I have to believe that Jesus spoke these words not to make an impression on his disciples, not to teach someone a lesson, but because he was moved by the grace and the beauty of those people he loved. In their awkwardness and in their folly and in their hunger, he loved them. He spoke from his heart. He didn't so much explain to them that they were blessed. He blessed them deeply in that moment. It seems possible to me, too, that Jesus was moved to narrate his own experience here as one who was himself outcast and downtrodden. I think he saw himself in the eyes of the poor and the lowly. He told us that if we were looking for him, that's where we would find him. So we could think of the beatitudes as a kind of homecoming for Jesus, a moment in which he himself is resting in love, at rest right in the place where he belongs. You are blessed, he says to them, and in that moment he is one with them just as he is one with God. I can almost imagine that this moment of homecoming and belonging gave him a vast sense of patience. His vision of us from high on that mountain is maybe part of what allows him to let us be who we are, let us take our time coming to him. He sees the blessedness we can't begin yet to express ourselves. It's a paradox, but probably not an accident, that the ways of being that Jesus describes in this sermon on the mount can be ways of getting cut off from other people. Poverty of spirit, like physical poverty, can make you excluded from systems of justice, isolated in grief, everyone around you speaking evil of you and persecuting you for no reason. Or you are forgotten: too meek to push your way to the front of the line, looking to make peace where all is war and destruction and peace is just a laughable afterthought, dismissed from the beginning as a peacemaker. Trying to practice mercy in a merciless environment. What friends do you have? Jesus recognizes himself I think in this awful isolation. that threatens us at every moment. There he is, the very love of God incarnate, one day to be executed like a criminal and abandoned by his friends. Jesus knows about isolation and exile, and he knows that there is a particular beauty, a particular healing, in looking into the eyes of the poor and the meek and those who long for justice, and being one with them. Knowing that in his gaze they are one with God, that he is the meeting place between human frailty and divine life. The awful isolation to which we willingly subject an outsider is just swept away in his loving gaze. The doors open and the walls come tumbling down. Now that loving gaze that we feel coming from Jesus is also the gaze of the church if we are really being the church. That knowing look of union is the church's work. It's one way to describe what the sacraments and the word of God and the life of the church are all doing: they are teaching the world its blessedness in the eyes of God. The church is gazing on all who suffer, on all who are cast out, with the eyes of Jesus, teaching all of us our blessedness, our beauty, our pride. That's the work of the church. Sadly, there are at least two things we know about this work of the church, we in the LGBTQ+ community. One: we know that the church is shockingly broken, shockingly unable to show us our beauty. Yes, the Episcopal Church has, after a lengthy controversy, and with some wonderful leadership, come around to a place of witness, and we can be grateful for that and for the good work of other denominations. It feels so good to gather like this. But it has to be said that as a whole church, as Christians, as the body of Christ throughout the world, as the historical bearers of the word and the sacraments, we are still much more apt to trample on a queer or transgender kid than we are to mirror their great beauty. We still represent a faith that doesn't want to see itself in that particular form of lowliness. It would be so much easier for the average Christian to imagine that a young transgender person doesn't exist than to look and see ourselves in them. And a certain number of Christians will go to great lengthas to make it clear that transgender kids need not exist. Christians are still refusing that vision. Or worse, Christians are deliberately and often cynically targeting the queer and trans communities for persecution. So that's the first thing we know in our communities: how the Church is broken. The second thing we know is that as queer, non-binary, bisexual, transgender, lesbian, gay, and allied people we are and have long been a powerful force that calls the Church simply to become itself. We are here, we have argued, we are queer, we are fabulous. We are much more than a subgroup or the latest in a long line of "issues" to be faced. We are not a theological dispute. We are a mirror in which Jesus sees himself reflected. Who needs to be more beautiful than that? Jesus sees himself in our vulnerability, in our growing fear of isolation and persecution. Whenever we are targeted Jesus sees himself. When we mourn, when we thirst for justice. When jobs and relationships and wedding cakes and safe housing and acknowledgement in the classroom and basic human respect are unavailable to us because we are just too queer. In those times--and yes, those times are now--in those times we are bright reflections of the blessed face of Jesus. And if the church wants to know Jesus, the church needs to know us. Never forget it: if the church wants to be the church it must know you. Of course the sorrow of missing out on that wonderful exchange of blessing doesn't stop with just us and Jesus. We know that it's not just us. We know that there are injuries from wealth and poverty and colonialism, harm done by categories of race and ability, forms of brutal discrimination all around and also everywhere within our own communities--intersecting and overlapping and sometimes competing ways that we just refuse to see Jesus where he sees himself. And yes, we know about the violence in our streets and the rot in our government and the constant dread about the future. But on a day like this, when we can gather in pride and love, when we can hear ourselves described as blessed and we can believe it for a moment, when St. Martin's throws its doors open and declares that you and I belong here--that's when we know that we have a powerful gift to share with the church and with the world. That look of love that Jesus casts on us, knowing that look, is something we have to offer to other Christians. To come here today to celebrate our pride by praising God with prayer and music and community is to start some very good work in the world. We are here together this evening learning how to do the work of the church, how to turn to the world like Jesus does, how to catch the eye of the one who needs to be seen, how to recognize Jesus in that one, and how to say it over and over in a loving exchange: Blessed are you. Blessed are you. Blessed are you. Amen. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Listen in to the sermon from the Rev. James H. Littrell for the Day of Pentecost, June 5, 2022. Support the worship and ministry of St. Martin's by giving online: stmartinec.org/give Today's readings are: Acts 2:1-21 Romans 8:14-17 John 14:8-17, (25-27) Psalm 104:25-35, 37Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/ Once upon a time, there was an old (ish) retired (sort of) gay (totally) Episcopal priest who arrived, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, at a lovely--idyllic even--Episcopal church sitting in a lovely swath of greenery almost at the apex of the tallest hill in a great and ancient city (ancient by American standards anyway) in a part of the world, relatively temperate and plentifully watered, not too far but far enough from a great ocean, for millennia populated by a great variety of more or less indigenous people, most recently people who called themselves Lenape, and more recently (in human time) settled by a strange group of humans who had crossed that self-same ocean, at some risk to life and limb and, in some cases, fortune. In varying degrees, these new people had left their homes far away in search of, variously, better lives, fuller liberty, greater opportunity and perhaps fortune. Sailing up a great river from the ocean, they eventually landed and began to settle in, made rough homes, dug rough passages from pathways, and then rough streets and roads from these passages, traversed a tributary of the great river, crossed the peninsula created by the two rivers. Therein they made plans for and executed a city of sorts, a city of square parks, interlaced by parallel and perpendicular streets named for lovely green trees. Many of these people were members of a new religious society, a people who styled themselves Friends and who claimed to come in peace, seeking harmony with all God's holy creation and all God's creatures. Indeed, right behind me in that window back there, as many of you know, is one notion of the leader of that first settling society. William Penn his name was, and up there he is smoking a pipe of peace with his new Lenape neighbors, a pipe, he and his Society said, was of peace and brotherly love. That, in fact, is what he named the city: Philadelphia. Like most human aspirations to perfection, the city fairly quickly fell short of its own expressed values. Faith and commerce held hands, and, yes, Indian wrestled, until Friend's quest for a city based in and living out the loving values it espoused, collapsed under the sheer power of the vast commercial enterprises that inevitably unfolded in the land. So rich was it in abundance and resource that the urge to commerce and the concomitant necessity of ordinance to safeguard the engines of that commerce, and the power necessary to maintain order and law, all combined and simply vanquished the initial impulse to be a city of mutual love, based in the God of love and the love of God. Time passed. The great city grew and grew and grew. The indigenous people, mutual friends though Friends may have wanted them to be, withered and perished under the onslaught of commerce and trade. There arrived others, too, non-Friends, seizing the handles of burgeoning wealth and opportunity with very little aspiration to brotherly or sisterly love as foundational in their actual lives. Some of the early Friends and then, in greater numbers, the people who arrived a little later, came to the growing city with other dark-hued humans from Africa, humans who were nonetheless numbered and registered right along with sheep and goats and cows and horses as property and as chattel. They too were harnessed, quite literally, to the great engines of commerce. The city grew yet larger. A great war came with the great king across the ocean who thought the land and commerce and a portion of all its proceeds belonged to him. The war was fought in the name of many things, most often liberty and freedom from foreign oppression. Some said, though, that it was a war mainly about who benefited from the great abundance of the new country and from its growing wealth. The new city and country won the war, but freedom did not come to many, and certainly not to the enslaved humans of the city, who continued to help empower the great civic enterprise for yet quite a long time, even, in one way or another, right up to right now. One of them, or someone's idea of one of them, a kneeling child, is also pictured in that window behind me, and if you haven't looked, you perhaps should. I was shown it yesterday, and it quite literally took my breath away. Thank God for the Holy Spirit and its flames of fire! But back to the city. The city, fueled by a continuing and abundant and growing supply of raw materials and resources arriving from every corner of the known world, continued to grow apace, and a marvelous thing happened: a steam powered engine was invented and before long there arrived in the newly uniting states (though not united until after yet another ferocious war) a thing called a railroad, vast engines and great carrier trolleys ran on steel tracks, enormous and efficient, and the spokes of this vast new thing drove out from every city in the new country into the places around and far beyond them, harvesting ever more of the abundance, and eviscerating almost every single indigenous person who stood in the way of these mighty wheels and the freight they carried. Philadelphia was no exception. In fact, as many of you may know, the greatest railroad and the largest corporation in the world in its time was born and sustained right here, for almost a century. At the same time, some of those visionary and creative Philadelphians imagined whole new communities linked to the heart of the great city by rail, places where the makers and beneficiaries of commerce could once again have their homes and enjoy their leisure in green and pleasant environs, up in the forested hills and across the rivers' tributaries, high above but convenient to the business of the now thriving but also very very dirty city. Churches were built in these new communities, indeed purposefully built, because churches, and especially Episcopal churches--and in the case of this particular community--not one but two Episcopal churches--churches were deemed essential in the making and preservation of an ordered and peaceful, green and pleasant and prosperous community. And thus was made the still very green and pleasant community and the church embedded in it, into which the old (ish) priest, sort of retired priest, very gay priest, unexpectedly arrived one day in May in the year 2022, 330 years after William Penn, of the Society of Friends (whom the Episcopalians and others called jeeringly Quakers because of their spirit-filled quaking manner of fervid religious speech while they gathered for worship in their Meeting houses) founded the city of Philadelphia. 330 years later. The priest was happy, he found, to be called so suddenly out of his pandemic induced retirement (for there had indeed been, indeed still was, a terrible global pandemic, in which millions and millions of humans had and were still dying). He felt relatively safe, being shot full of a new miraculous vaccine and tucked mostly safe behind a good mask, and he was delighted - delighted - to be amongst the people of the community, whom he found to be, in his early days with them, generous of spirit, moderately adventurous, deeply concerned for the fabric and program and spiritual enterprise of their community, and mostly confident in its future. And so this old priest, who had arrived in this idyllic place quite soon after not one, not two, but three resident priests, all of long standing, had moved on to other callings, one after another, the latest departure having been the senior priest, began to try together to gather themselves up in the bonds of God's love in these early days. And the old priest and the community of God's love at St. Martin's, after a minute or two of mutual sizing one another up, began gingerly and, at least in the priest's case, tenderly, to try to discern together a path into the future to which they were together called. And for the old(ish) priest, the enterprise was experienced almost completely as joy, even though in those early days were full of tragedy in the community and in the nation. He was so glad to be again among loving and caring and completely imperfect human beings again. He rejoiced to himself and to his beloved Louis, his companion for lo the last 43 years, who pronounced to the priest that he seemed happy again, which made him, Louis, happy too. And the newly arrived old(ish) priest, whose name was Jim and who people mostly called Fr. Jim began to have many wonderfully enriching and enlightening conversations, some of them delving deep into his new parishioner's lives, some hinting at riches yet to come, one conversant even going so far as to thank him for his own imperfections, or, as that person styled them, for his slight bumbling, which they said gave them and the whole community permission to be a little less than perfect too. And that, in this community where so much perfection was often expected and even demanded, and which perhaps too often had little tolerance for the bumble, it seemed, was a little bit of grace. The old(ish) priest, anyway, had long since given up most of his aspirations to perfection and was working hard at just being an honest and helpful and competent priest and pastor as much as he could be in this slightly fraught time. So he thought a little bumbling was fine, and even if it wasn't fine, it was, as they say, what it was; and he was who he was. And then there came a day, it was the day before the great Feast of Pentecost: Pentecost, when all the people of God in Christ in all the whole world were to celebrate in thousands of ways and hundreds of tongues, the day long ago when, in a rush as of a violent wind and with tongues as of fire, the Divine Spirit was made manifest and palpable in the human community. The Day of Pentecost, when people of every language and across every single diverse shape and manifestation of humankind, came to know that all things could become new, and ancient hurts dissolved, and resolved, and visions for the future seen and then made real, and dreams dreamed into life, when united in God's powerful love and filled with God's mighty Breath, and lit up by the Fire of Christ's love, when faithful but a little bit bewildered people became drunk on the sheer magnificence of God's glory, and began to learn again the truth of Jesus' promised Peace and the urgency of Jesus' call to do the actual work of Love. And in the doing, to find God's Peace, the Peace, the Blessed Assurance, that every now and then, abolishes the troubled heart and the fearful soul. So it was that day, on the eve of Pentecost, when the old (ish) priest sat out there beside the columbarium on a bench surrounded by sage and boxwood for a conversation with another parishioner. And as they delved deeper into the talking, and as they did, the old priest's companion on the bench, rather suddenly reached toward the priest's neck, surprising the old man a little, and then asked if he could take something off the priest's collar. "I think it might be a tick," he said, and Father Jim said in response, "Definitely! Have at it!" And it was a tick indeed, and then shortly there appeared another on Father's neck just above the collar, and then another on his sleeve, and then he felt a little creepy crawl up the back of his neck--another tick! And his companion said, "Yep, ticks in the boxwood. Ticks like it in the boxwood." "Is that so," said the old priest, rejoicing - rejoicing - that he had yet again learned a new thing, and suggesting they move quickly away from the boxwood, which is what they did. So this is a parable. In seminary school they teach you that parables have just one main point. At the risk of insulting your considerable intelligences, let me suggest to you that you think as I did about the history of that boxwood, and of this green and pleasant place, and its ancient boxwood smell, the smell, for me, of old coastal towns in the south, the smell of English gardens, the smell of all that history that brings us to this day, which is in fact Pentecost. And then remember, as all that history, often wondrous and often terrible and frequently painful and, here in this place especially, seeming almost idyllic in its outcomes, all that history unfolds in your minds, to call to mind the ticks that lurk in the boxwood, happily awaiting your company. Pentecost calls us toward unity of spirit, toward living more fully into God's compassion, toward being honest and reconciling and forgiving people, toward fuller and more open hearts and lives, and yes, pocketbooks, and most of all, into the activity which is God's love, not as children unaware, but as fully forming humans, never forgetting that there be ticks in the boxwood, that imperfection is our most perfect state, and that bumbling but fiery Love is the best love of all. Amen. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Listen in to the sermon from the Rev. David Potter for the Last Sunday of Easter, May 29, 2022.Support the worship and ministry of St. Martin's by giving online: stmartinec.org/giveToday's readings are:Acts 16:16-34Revelation 22:12-14,16-17,20-21John 17:20-26Psalm 97Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/Where do we go from here? The Rev. David Potter May 29, 2022 On this Ascension Sunday, we commemorate the earthly departure of Jesus with these words. And through them, the Church is called to unity. This prayer Jesus offers anticipates and responds to a question which will no doubt later surface for Jesus' followers: "Where do we go from here?" Throughout this past week, this same question has continually rumbled around in my own thoughts and prayers. And after completing seminary just last weekend, it is especially relevant. For myself and any others in this graduation season, what comes next is often a question posed to us--just as much as it is a question and discern we ask of ourselves. And surely this same wondering is present here in this community at St. Martin-in the-Fields. Uncertainty is inherent in any search process for new clergy, to say the least. But, still even more widely, in light of over two years of pandemic concerns and restrictions, especially now as they begin to ease, this question seemingly lingers everywhere. Where do we go from here? We are in transition. A world lies behind us which is no more--and the world before us remains unknown. Now, living through these times of change like these is far from easy. At times it may even feel like simply too much. The tension between what has been and what will be can feel like chaos. And in this place, I often find myself searching for some reassurance of stability--for some anchor to hold on. So, for those carrying burdens here in this place this morning, receive this as permission to come as you are. In these brief moments, may we all know and may we remind ourselves that we hold these burdens with and for one another. "That they all may be one." In a moment of tremendous transition, Jesus prays these words. In the remaining instruction of his earthly ministry, his desire for the disciples, for his followers, becomes abundantly clear: that they know they are loved, that they love one another, and that through them the world might come to know love. Soon the disciples will no longer have Jesus with them--and they will face many challenges and much unknown. And it is in this context with great obstacles to loving one another, that Jesus admonishes his followers toward unity. This kind of unity is a discipline to which he knows they will need to return over and over again--because apart from a resilient commitment to one another, the heavy burdens they carry will simply be too much to bear. This kind of unity is no simple feel-good-warm-and-fuzzy feeling. And neither is it a demand for uniformity within the disciples. Rather, what Jesus calls them to, and calls the church to, is something essential to both their individual and their common wellbeing. Now, I admit, in these polarizing times, my initial impulse is not always toward becoming "completely one" with those I disagree with. Perhaps this is something you can relate to. Because cultivating unity across the broad chasms of ideological and political difference can often seem futile and quite naive. And when great potential for harm exists by remaining in relationship with others, especially with others who may not affirm our right to exist, appealing to unity can be quite dangerous. In this past week, yet another mass shooting has claimed the lives of innocent children. This time at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas--merely weeks after the deadly and racist shootings in Detroit and Buffalo. But in the numbing wake of senseless death and overwhelming grief, there are simply no adequate words... Where do we go from here? Unity is risky business. There is much at stake in all that divides us, and there is certainly no lack of issues that divide our society. As this all-too-common occurrence of gun violence becomes ever more increasingly politicized--it seems a deep groaning in my spirit is about all I can muster. A phrase from the poet Nayyirah Waheed reminds me though that it is important to "keep the rage tender." Stay tender in the sorrow, grief, and anger--because when God's image in persons is destroyed, becoming desensitized is spiritual death. The human tenderness required for unity is no easy task--and it would seem there are always obstacles and reasons to turn away from one another. But as James Baldwin writes, "One cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own." We need one another. In these greatly divided times uplifting the value of remaining in right-relationship with one another is neither easy nor is it very popular. And yet... the Gospel of Jesus Christ invites all persons into common kinship. We must remain tender, somehow or some way... We don't take on this task alone, though. While remaining in community with one another, walking hand in hand, we walk also with those who have gone before us. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. engages our present predicament in his seminal work entitled: Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Two options are present before us. As we midwife this new world and new ways of being, we can either 1) become community or we can 2) descend into chaos. Dr. King offered this still-relevant diagnosis and prescription of our situation in 1967. Either we learn to love one another with shared dignity and belonging, or we will unravel in competitive attempts to preserve an ever-increasing scarcity of individual privileges and liberties. This same wisdom is shared by artists and prophets, visionaries and activists alike--along with anyone who has labored toward a vision of collective flourishing. And we know something in our tradition too: week after week in our liturgy we pray "Bless all whose lives are closely linked with ours..." All of human life is interwoven in a web of mutuality. The ability to know and have life in abundance ourselves is interdependent on each and every person's ability. If healing, wholeness, and joy are to be made complete in our lives, we must recognize it is inseparable from that of our neighbors. So, in this rising tide of polarization--of social transition and civic tension--where do we go from here? "Righteous Father," Jesus prays, "the world does not know you, but I know you... I made your name known to them, and I will make it known..." Guided by the upside-down logic of our common faith, we hold these claims: that enemies cannot be destroyed--but only transformed by love... that liberty preserved at the end of a gun's barrel is a false freedom... that salvation comes not by instruments of death--but through their subversion... When Jesus admonishes his followers toward common belonging like that love that is shared within the Trinity, he holds no illusions of calm, ideal circumstances. Rather, it is within the midst of many obstacles--and his appeal to unity is made on a foundation of a radical ethic of love - love for one's self, for one's neighbor, for God. Because it is only through deep abiding love that we can remain in relationship and become community. As we grasp for stability, it is this common faith in the Gospel of Jesus Christ which is and will be our anchor. So Beloveds, when we inevitably fail to dwell together in unity; when the yoke of faith feels anything but easy and light; when we are wearied and heavy laden: Know that we do not walk alone. Even in our weakness the Spirit of God, with sighs too deep for words, intercedes on our behalf, leading us into the way of salvation. So then, that we might become "completely one:" may our shared mourning and action and prayer through the Spirit empower us to become beloved community, and participate in the healing and salvation of this nation. Amen. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Listen in to the sermon from the Rev. James H. Littrell for the Memorial of William Newbold, May 28, 2022. Today's readings are: Lamentations 3:22-26,31-33 Romans 8:14-19,34-35,37-39 John 14:1-6 New Every Morning Fr. Jim Littrell May 28, 2022 The writer of the Book of Lamentations, a little bit of which we just heard, says to us: "The steadfast love of God never ceases. God's mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning. Great is thy faithfulness!" And then Paul, writing to the first Christians in Rome, that great imperial capital, from jail, from his cell facing a terrible death, writes that nothing in all creation will be able to separate all those early Christians and himself from that same steadfast love of God. And John, in that Gospel I just read, assures us that God's domain, God's dominion, the space of God, is more spacious and open and welcoming than any of us can begin to imagine. Using the metaphor of a house, he speaks to us of its endless, endless capacity to take us in. It's endless capaciousness. The steadfast love of God is as vast and nurturing and loving and hugging and warm and safe as anything any of us can imagine, and then so much more than that. So I am here to tell you this terrible morning, when every heart in this room is fractured, is in so much pain, that your son, your brother, your grandson, your cousin, your nephew, your friend William Connor Newbold is right now, in this very heartbroken time, saying to us, with Jesus, "do not let your hearts be troubled. I am fine. God is holding me close. And you would not believe how wonderful that is." But, he begs us with God, "please do believe it!" Heartbreak is a real thing, Leslie mused to me in one of our conversations this week. It's a real thing. It actually hurts. And she's right. Hearts break, and hearts in this holy place this morning are broken. And I believe that into that fracture, that brokenness, God's steadfast love and God's infinite Light is pouring right now. I want to tell you two things about that. First, heartbreak is like any other human fracture. It hurts. And it will heal, in time, and especially - and this is really important - especially if it is nurtured by your love and care for one another in the days and months and years ahead. And second, also like a broken bone, your broken hearts will heal, but they will never be the same. There will always be a space in them where William was. What I want you to believe with me is that he is, right now, right here, in this room, working with God to mend your hearts. He and God want you to laugh again. They want you to play again. They want you to see the colors of the world bright again. And they want you to love and care for one another in this moment and in the time ahead. And, also, they know you will weep. And weep. And weep. They know how sad you are, and will be. And they love you and all your tears so much. And they say, God and William, that even your pain cannot separate you from God's endless love. God loves you always and in every condition, and God will wipe away the tears from your eyes. "And how do I know that?" William says to us. How do we know that William is now held in God's love? "Well, here's how," William says to you: "I know because all my tears and my sadness and my pain are gone. Gone. All my pain is gone." The steadfast love of God never ceases. God's mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning! They are new this morning. There is a hymn I like a lot and I want to share a little bit of it with you. It's by a composer of contemporary hymns named Brian Wren. It's a prayer hymn, of sorts, inviting us to bring the many names of God into our hearts: he invokes in the hymn the God of all the stories we tell,the parables we tell of our God, the God who is a mother to us, nurturing, ordering, and piloting and caring, the God who is a loving father to us, hugging every child, a God he calls (and I resonate with this a lot!), "old aching God, gray with endless care, glad of good surprises, wiser than despair." And then Wren names this God, who I think he means to be Jesus, but which brings me back to William: "Young, growing God, eager, on the move, saying no to falsehood and unkindness,...giving all you have." The hymn ends with a kind of summary of God's names: "Great loving God," Wren writes, "never fully known, joyful darkness far beyond our seeing, closer yet than breathing, everlasting home." And that is exactly where William is: far beyond our seeing, closer yet than breathing, he is right there in the everlasting home which is God's steadfast love, from which nothing, nothing in all creation can separate us. Nothing at all, not now, not ever. Now how do I know that all those names, that William's very self, is wrapped up in all the names of God, in God's compassionate arms? Well, I guess my 79 years have taught me that. But, also, as Leslie likes to say, and as I heard this morning, there are signs. I am, theologically, most of all a Christian mystic. And so yesterday, as I was getting ready to come up here to the church and meet with Leslie and Will, I was listening, as I often do, to the BBC's afternoon concert, which in the morning when I'm getting ready for the day is happening in the evening there, which is morning our time. And there I am brushing my teeth when I hear coming out of the speaker the most beautiful music I've heard in a really, really long time. It was so amazing it made me stop brushing my teeth and just stop and listen to this music. It's some kind of organ music. I listen and I think, "What is this?" I think I hear in it a little Bach, but then the music moves into this kind of deep, powerful minor key, a kind of lament. It sounds to me like a kind of cry, almost. The chord just deepens and deepens in this minor key and then, gradually, that cry resolves in music that I can only describe as pure splendor. "What is this???" The music ends. I listen and an announcer tells me that what I have just heard is a transcription and augmentation for organ of a chorale, sure enough, by Bach, from his Easter Cantata. And this chorale, and this piece, is called: "Weigen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen," which means pretty much, Weeping, Lament, Worry, Fear. And this glorious music in which all of that is contained, all of what we are in the middle of right now, all of our Wagen and our Klagen and our Sorgen and our Zagen, all our weeping and all our lamenting and all our worrying and all our fear - all of that music was composed by Franz Lizst in 1862 right after the tragic death of his daughter. And that music is about the deepest sorrow a human being can experience, your sorrow, and it's based on and set smack in the middle of an Easter chorale, a cantada about the Resurrection. Well. I did this thing, I stood there, struck, with a toothbrush in my hand. And then I took my finger and put it on the little red dot to push the stream back, and then I listened to this music all over again, and I thought this: that music came to me directly from the great God who lifts us out of death back into life, over and over and over and over again until we are healed, and who at the last, takes us into God's endless life and light. And that amazing music arrived in my life, kindness of a courier, a heavenly courier whose name is William Connor Newbold. I am certain of it. He is joined with God's merciful love. He knows our weeping and lamentation and our worry and our fear in exactly the same way as God does, because they are joined together. And together, because they are joined, they are with Jesus, who is all compassion, and they say together to us, "The steadfast love of God never ceases. God's mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning. Great is thy faithfulness!" Amen. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Listen in to the sermon from the Rev. James H. Littrell for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, May 22, 2022. Support the worship and ministry of St. Martin's by giving online: stmartinec.org/give Today's readings are: Acts 16:9-15 Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5 John 5:1-9 Psalm 67 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/ River Fr. Jim Littrell May 22, 2022 Listen again and pray with me God's Word to and for us this morning: On the sabbath day, we went outside the gate by the river, where we supposed there a was a place of prayer. And women were there, talking and praying....And Lydia said, Come home and stay with us. And they said, No.no. We would not trouble you. But Lydia insisted, and so they went with her, to her home. Then the angel of God showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city...where there will be no more night; no need for light of lamp or sun, where God will be their light forever and ever. Now in Jerusalem by the Gate of the Sheep, there is a pool, called Bethesda, which means place of healing, which has five porticoes or entrances. In these lay many invalids: blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man, we are told, had been there for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he went over to him and said, "Do you want to be made well?" The sick man answered him, "Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am crawling to the water, someone else gets ahead of me, and I just never get to the pool." Jesus said, "Come. Stand up. Take up your mat and walk." At once, we are told, the man was made well, took up his mat, and, haltingly we must imagine, began to walk. Now that day was the sabbath. I come to you this morning in the name of almighty God, whose insistent love wills us into being in every moment of our lives and in our deaths: in our endings, in our heartbreak and mourning, in our grief and sorrow, and, when the morning comes again for us, in our joy and in our gladness. May it be so. Amen. Good morning, friends. I am, as most of you know by now, Jim Littrell. I am a priest in the Episcopal church and I am really glad to be with St. Martin's this morning, to have been with you this last week, and, God and my new friend and boss and your Rector's Warden, Barbara Thomson willing, glad to be with you for the next few weeks, eight, to be exact. We're not quite sure what title I might have. "Supply priest" always sounds to me like something you order from Amazon to replenish the broom closet or restock the plates and cups in the kitchen. So I thought, no, that's not it. I thought I might call myself a bridge priest, albeit the very first bridge after a bridge goes out, a one-way, very temporary bridge where the light takes forever to change. And then after a while they lay down a second sturdier two-way temporary bridge and that bridge suffices for the time it takes for the parish to build a lasting bridge, and that bridge is built and it's a good solid bridge and it lasts for a long time. That doesn't quite do the naming job, but what I am titled is not very important, to me or to you. What's important is what I will try to be and do while I am with you in this limited time that really matters. And I think a large part of my job is to spend time with you as we are nurtured in the river of Light, as we gather and pray by the river of Life, and when either necessary or just desirable, to take a dip in the healing waters of the Bethesda pool. I love a good clean country river. I do. My partner, Louis and I seek them out. We have hiked for miles to get to a great swimming hole. And when I get to those swimming pools, I just plunge in and feel every single time like I've been washed in the blood of the everlasting Lamb that John the Visioner tells us about in the Book of Revelation, flowing from the place that Jarrett preached about last week, the new Jerusalem, the City of God--Alpha and Omega, beginning and end, and end and beginning, and beginning and end, and end and beginning. And, friends, it is exactly there, in that cool refreshing river, that all of us are gathered and held by God's love, made manifest in our love - our love for one another and our love for our community - held in place, John tells us, by the healing currents of the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. Right down St. Martin's Lane all the way to Broad Street. And there will be no more night. They--that is to say we, if do well the job of loving one another and the city of humanity through which that river flows, if we do that, then, John says, we will find ourselves all together, swimming in the water of life bright as crystal, where we need no light of lamp or sun, where God is and will be our light, forever and ever, Amen. What a vision! And especially what a vision in a hard human time, in a time in which endings are everywhere and often soul harrowing, in a world, as always, torn asunder by our amazing ability as humans to squander our capacity, our enormous capacity, to flow God's river, to flow God's light, to flow God's love into the world. We squander that gift--and sometimes suddenly, but more often, little by little, drip by drip--we turn our lives to those things that captivate us and that steal our souls, until all that's left us is a dry riverbed, a dead pool, and at the last, a dusty death. In times of uncertainty, in times of trauma, in times of flux, that danger lurks, like some medieval Satan waiting to light on our shoulder, whisper sweet nothings in our ear, and lead us, the beloved community, right smack into some kind of temptation. So today, the Word of God, the Love of God, the Light of God, does something else, says something else to all the creatures of darkness and despair and death, of confusion and uncertainty (and just as surely to our overconfidence and our subtle arrogance that we cannot be tempted because, after all, we know the way)--to all that, the Light of God says... well, says a couple of things I think. Says, I am in the midst of you, and that right early, and that right late, and that in all the time and space of all creation and all eternity: I, the God who am Light and Love, am in the midst of you. I AM. I have got you! Says, let's go down, let's go down to the river, to pray, and to frolic, and to be washed over and over again in crystal water, to have our tears and our sorrow and our grieving, and our broken hearts accepted as the gifts they are and taken into the great river of God's Love and Light. God says, Come on in! The water's fine! Says, take all the time you need, but stay with me, for in me is Time beyond Time, Light beyond Light, Life beyond Life. Stay with me. And I, you may be sure, will stay with you, always. Says, there will come a time, and even now may be, probably is for some of you, that time, when washed in my Light and held in my Love, you gather yourself, lie a while in this brilliant sun, dry off, and return to the paths that lead to the river and the pool. And there, there you will see, as Jesus, who is God, who is I AM, sees: the benighted, the poor, and the suffering, the halt, the lame, the invalids, the invalid, the don't matters, the never matters, they that live with despair in their hearts, and they that struggle through fields of all kinds of war and terror, bearing their children in their arms and their paralyzed ancients on their backs. And seeing them, you will speak my powerful word of Love and do my powerful work of Love, and with your hands and your hearts, and with all that you have, reach out to one trampled human being, and give them your hand, and space in your capacious heart, and you will raise them up, and carry their mat, and as they lean on you, you will lead them, at first haltingly and then ever more surely, and bear them with you back into the healing pool, into the crystal river of Light, into Being Well. For that, says God, I have called you to be my disciples. Now, I think, is the time, for a time, for all of us to go down to the river, to plunge ourselves, as individuals and perhaps more important, as a community beloved of God, to plunge ourselves into its healing pools, to pray and wash and wash and pray, and play and heal. And then, in God's infinite patient Time, embraced and held by God's passionate Love, and bathed in the crystal water of Life, then to say to just one other, for that is sufficient, to say with Lydia, come home, come stay with me. To say with Jesus, be well. Let me help you to the water of Life, the river of Light that flows through the middle of the city. And all will be well. Amen. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Listen in to the sermon from the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the Fifth Sunday of Easter, May 15, 2022. Support the worship and ministry of St. Martin's by giving online: stmartinec.org/give Today's readings are: Acts 11:1-18 Revelation 21:1-6 John 13:31-35 Psalm 148Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/ Alpha and Omega The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel May 15, 2022 Please join me in the spirit of prayer. Ever loving, ever faithful God, our alpha and omega, I give you thanks that in you we always have a new beginning, whatever our endings may be, that you are with us as we come and as we go. Lord God, continue to feed our souls from the wellspring of life so that we may serve you in courageous witness to the new Jerusalem to come. In Christ's name we pray. Amen. We gather around an ending today and my favorite story about endings concerns my own father. The last flight of my father (my father, as some of you know, was an airline pilot) - the last flight of a pilot is a very big deal. Dad worked, speaking of endings, for Trans World Airlines for 30 years and even as it crumbled beneath him his last flight was a celebration. In the airline industry this last flight is called a fini-flight and the capstone of it is the final landing. Pilots take great pride in landing (as opposed to the opposite). They take great pride in what they call painting a landing: getting just perfect that delicate balance of momentum, trajectory and gravity, to get that heavy plane to slide onto that runway. That shows the art and skill of a pilot. So, dad's last flight went from San Diego to St. Louis, then to New York LaGuardia. Air traffic control, under the influence of my sister who is an air traffic controller, gave him the best approach possible into LaGuardia right up the Hudson River. The night was cloudless, the dome of the sky was full of stars reflected in the inky dark of the Hudson River. Yes, the big 757 took a graceful left turn and there was the statue of liberty on the left and lower Manhattan on the right, the World Trade Center, then the Chrysler building, then the empire state building and the tartan plaid of white headlights and red taillights on the grid of the city. Then, riverside church on the right and then a big graceful right turn over the Bronx, and there was Yankee stadium, beautiful glowing under the lights straight ahead and beyond that the welcoming runway of LaGuardia all lined up, cockpit focused and quiet as they hummed through their procedures, dad in command in the left seat, the gear going down with that familiar foot, the runway fills the windshield right over the threshold onto the landing and BAM. Bam. Bounce. Bam. Waddle. Bam Shake. Luckily the masks didn't come down in front of us. And there I heard come from my dad's mouth the name of our Lord. The name of God came to his lips not as a prayer but as a swear, characteristic of him but then knowing him as well he chuckled, sighed deeply, and said "oh well." I hope I can land this last sermon. I hope I can land this fini-sermon with God on my lips as a prayer and not a swear. We gather around an ending today and in God's grace we know that God is as present in endings as God is in beginnings. God is just as present in endings as beginnings. God is alpha and omega, the beginning and the end. St. John the divine teaches us endings with God are full of promise, generativity, creativity, grace redemption, new life. As it was in the beginning, so shall it be in the end. Genesis begins our sacred story and Revelation ends it, not with a hard stop but with a new beginning. The New Jerusalem coming down from heaven, joining heaven and earth, finally healing that gap we've created with God, and oddly enough affirming human life in its most complex, diverse, battle-scarred, corruptible, historically burdened location in a city, and not just any city. Jerusalem. The city that kills the prophets all the day long, the city where Jesus was condemned and died, the great wounded city of God's heart, for me reappearing here much like Jesus appears with his wounds intact in the resurrection. God's project continues not in a new garden of innocence, naivete and childlikeness, but in an old battle-scarred city burdened with history. That is where God chooses to meld heaven and earth at the end. Now, St. John the divine was a pastor, and I resonate with him as a pastor. I connect with him as someone who loves and pastors a flock, we both live the commitment of loving our people every step of the way, through better, for worse, richer, for poor, and sickness and health. John's people are facing unexpected endings. They are facing martyrdom. They're facing persecution, punishment for their intolerable non-conformity to the world as it is. John himself writes from prison. His faith is uncertain. What does he offer his suffering flock? What John offers is that God is alpha and omega, that God is as present in endings as in beginnings and God is present in the form of the lamb upon the throne, the lamb upon the throne, the one who knows all of our suffering having met his end in the same way as the martyrs. And having passed through that ending to new life he has made a way for us through all of our endings to new life. The lamb on the throne is the paschal mystery of resurrection revealed as God's nature at endings. John's people and our people here are not beyond the intimacy and promise of God, In our losses, in our endings instead we are in the paschal heart of God's presence. John is just giving good pastoral care to his persecuted people. He is encouraging them to faithfulness, to witness to courageous non-conformity in a hostile world, and if I may be allowed to say so, we need such pastoral guidance in this moment and we need Christians formed this way. Our world is desperate and despairing, in need of witnesses to another way of life. Our world is in need of followers of Jesus who bring hope and healing and creativity to the unredeemed world, despair, futility, and vanity. Our world needs us, intolerably non-conforming Christians whose lives point to the lamb upon the throne, non-violently, lovingly, liberating the good in life in all and pointing only to him, to no other Lord, no other idol, no other end of this life. We are here and wherever we are to be found - the depository of God's promise for this world - every time we moan about the direction of our country or the world we need to ask ourselves, "how am I moving into that space as a representative of Christ? Do I have the gospel on my lips? Do I have the name of Jesus and his good news to share? Am I a pathway to new life and hope for the despairing world around me that cannot make it on its own? So many have come this morning to say goodbye and I am so grateful we are here together to share an ending and I am grateful. What is equally important to me however is that just as many people show up here next Sunday, that just as many or more people show up here at St. Martin's next Sunday for each other, to live the new commandment and love each other in this place as I know you love to do. That is the heart of this place - not rectors who come and go. Show up next week with love for one another, with love for the mission you share, with love for this community and most of all with love of the God who sustained you, for today may be an omega but next week God will be your alpha. A new beginning of love and life and mission for you, and that is my prayer for you. That is the prayer I want to end on, and not a swear. In fact, I have two prayers: One I wrote, and one that's better than that. My prayer for you is just this: thank you God for the people of St. Martin's. Thank you God for the body of Jesus Christ in this place. By your holy spirit make them strong witnesses full of hope, promise and Godliness, living for the end of the world as it is and for the coming of the new Jerusalem where all may live the new commandment to love one another in complexity and diversity, and we pray it all in the name of the lamb on the throne. Amen. And the second prayer, better than my own: Christ be with you, Christ within you, Christ behind you, Christ before you, Christ beside you, Christ to win you, Christ to comfort and restore you, Christ beneath you, Christ above you, Christ in quiet, Christ in danger, Christ in hearts of all who love you, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger. Amen. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Listen in to the sermon from the Rev. Carol Duncan for the Fourth Sunday of Easter, May 8, 2022. Support the worship and ministry of St. Martin's by giving online: stmartinec.org/give Today's readings are: Acts 9:36-43 Revelation 7:9-17 John 10:22-30 Psalm 23 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/ The Good Shepherd The Rev. Carol Duncan May 8, 2022 Jesus Good Shepherd, as you call us each by name, open our minds, hearts, souls and inner being to respond to you in all your guises, visible and invisible. I make this prayer in your holy name of love. Amen. Dear flock, please be seated in this fruitful pasture. Today is Good Shepherd Sunday and you are all in the pasture. It is also the next to last Sunday we will have Jarrett with us. I want to consider what it means to be Jesus' flock, Jesus' people, at St Martin's when we are about to be without an appointed shepherd for quite a while. I find it a challenging and a bracing prospect. And I want to pay tribute to a faithful shepherd who has guided us for 11 years, very much by Jesus' compass leading him. Today's readings are meant to give us a sense of the rod and staff of our heritage. Four different settings, four versions of shepherd and flock. How do we find ourselves in these passages? I love the first scene of shepherding from Acts. A group of women disciples doing good works and acts of charity. So much like us: Tabitha and her friends would surely recognize Blessed Baking, Women Connecting, Stephen Ministry, Biblical Study groups and all the rest. We have been in their shoes, doing what we can to ease the suffering of our loved ones. When one of us is sick or dies, we call our pastor, our shepherd, just as the women of Joppa did. And we have known that Jarrett will be there instantly. I am not crediting him with raising the dead. But Jarrett does the next best thing. He conducts the most deeply moving funerals, consistently, of any priest I have ever known. The work of a good shepherd is to comfort, to discern and convey the deep abiding meaning of our lives. We honor and embrace this work. We are a church that values and practices being community in pain and in joy. Even when it is difficult. We have learned that. We follow the pattern set in Joppa. I think we can count on ourselves for that. The second scene of shepherdship: the 23rd Psalm - so moving and so comforting, it follows us all our lives. Its water and oil are redolent of baptism. Jarrett was so thrilled when he got to baptize a teenager by full immersion. He figured out the logistics of how to do it by obtaining a moveable trough big enough to submerge a sizeable body. We did it on the front patio. A space, by the way, that Jarrett envisioned as a way to enlarge our worship space so we could share the surrounding community with our worship. St. Martin's more typical baptisms are celebrated inside the church at the beginning of a Sunday service so the whole congregation can welcome and incorporate the newly baptized. After the baptism, Jarrett processes up the aisle joyfully, extravagantly sprinkling us all with baptismal water. The freshly baptized settle down with their families to bask in the newly recognized holiness of their members. The rest of us recall again that the Baptismal Covenant as Jarrett has come to help us understand is the source and root of all we are about at St. Martin's. Everything that we do. Everything. Now the hard example of how shepherds work, from Revelation. This is perhaps most Jarrettlike and most us. We do not take the easy just-go-to-church-on-Sunday version of Christianity. Under Jarrett's leadership, we have some sense of who it is who comes first in God's care. Those who hunger and thirst, who are kept from learning and thriving, who are refugees. These are the ones who come out of the great ordeal of our present world. We have learned to hear them guided by Jarrett through the work of POWER, of Beloved Community, of Supper, through St. James School, through Beyond Borders. We have changed how we respond. Now, rather than donating money toward scattered programs, we invest major funds and our energy to respond covenantally to the suffering we've learned to see in our world. We are learning to listen, rather than to assume we know how to fix the problem. When someone asks us "Who are these and where do they come from?" We say "Please tell us. We are listening." The church in these increasingly secular years needs a shepherd like those of the early church. We can't take faith for granted. We live in a world that engenders martyrs. We will need a shepherd like Jarrett who considers and acts to counter systemic injustice in the name of Jesus. The fourth scene of shepherding from the Gospel reminds me very much of Jarrett and how he has led us over these eleven years. In today's Gospel, Jesus answered his antagonists, "I have told you and you do not believe." So many times, most often in Community Engagement meetings, but other times too, Jarrett will say "I have said it, I have told you." Finally, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh year, Jarrett marshaled us to collect some of his shepherding guidance in a handbook. We wrote it down. The Community Engagement Committee has worked for years on the ideas and structure of this handbook. Community Engagement is the coordinating body of all the various outreach ministries of St. Martin's. The vision statement of the handbook says that we "engage as agents of Christ's love in the world by developing mutual relationships at the local, regional, national, and international levels that advance the mission and values of St. Martin's as we discern God's will as a Church, together.' This vision of doing Christ's loving work in the world together will serve us as a firm foundation from which to grow and thrive and we will thank Jarrett for it for years. Find it on our website in the Community Engagement tab. You should read it. There's beautiful writing in it. When you read it, you will recognize our voices in it, and Jesus' shepherding voice behind ours, long into the future. I know I speak for many when I say we are grateful. Amen. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Listen in to the sermon from the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the Third Sunday of Easter, May 1, 2022. Support the worship and ministry of St. Martin's by giving online: stmartinec.org/give Today's readings are: Acts 9:1-20 Revelation 5:11-14 John 21:1-19 Psalm 30Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/ Please join me in the spirit of prayer. Have you ever given your whole heart? Have you ever given your whole heart to someone and had your love rejected? Have you ever given your whole love to someone you adored or to a cause you cared about deeply or an institution that was beloved to you and had your love unreciprocated, had your love rejected, had your love attacked, even disdained? Do you have in your body that memory of the pain that comes from unrequited love, from entering that space of vulnerability where we risk so much and are available for so much damage to be loving and not to be loved in? Return if like me you can feel that in your body, you can know you're not alone. You can know that this is an experience that God shares with us, for Jesus was and is the whole heart of God. Jesus was and is the whole heart of God shared with the world to include us in God's unbreakable love. And we know how the story goes that God took this risk, God made the ultimate offering to us of God's whole heart and Jesus was rejected, was disdained, was attacked and was killed, so God knows what it's like to offer love and have it refused, have it rejected. And thanks be to God we know that the story doesn't end with that painful horrifying rejection but the story goes on. In fact God will not let this story end, God continues the story of love by raising Jesus from the dead. By raising Jesus from the dead God says, "this love is always on offer to you. My offer of love is alive forever for those who respond to it. My offer is there for you. Enter into this incredible transformation that is offered when you are loved this much." And so we respond to that love and we grow in that love. Sometimes we reject it, sometimes we balk, sometimes we walk the other way. And whenever this love is rejected or attacked we know the cross is among us, but we also know that the resurrection is among us and that we can turn back to this new life that is alive for us and always on offer for the redemption of our souls. We see the power of this paschal mystery in these stories we are offered today in the gospel and in the acts of the apostles. We see it in this story of a fisherman turned into a shepherd - a fisherman turned into a shepherd and someone who ran away in fear turned into someone willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. We see this good news story playing out in all of its power today in the story of Paul as well, a persecutor of the church who becomes one with the persecuted. The persecutor of the church who becomes one with those that he had persecuted, one who had breathed threats and murder who now breathes good news and new life. This is the transforming power of the Risen Christ still at work, and we know it so powerfully because it's the same Jesus we knew in his ministry doing all the same things. It's the in the continuity that we know there is in Christ, the one who healed, the one who loved, the one who included, the one who preached peace, the one who reconciled us to God and our enemies, is still adding in his risen life with Peter and with Paul and with all of us here today. The offering of new life is always alive for us, thanks be to God. Let's start with Peter. My beloved, beloved, beloved Peter, how I love you. Peter, I want to be as bumbly and beloved as you are. Peter is met by the Risen Christ on the beach in John in a situation of nurture. There is Jesus feeding his disciples, also instructing his disciples, he tells them where to find the fish, but this nurturing setting of breakfast on the beach is so much what Jesus taught his disciples to expect in his resurrected life, they will know he is there because he is nurturing them, he is feeding them. And more than that, Jesus is restoring Peter, restoring him to his purpose. Jesus wants Peter back. Jesus wants Peter restored so Peter can live out his purpose in the kingdom of God to spread the good news. Jesus needs to recover Peter from his betrayal. There Peter is dripping wet on the beach in his clothes and Jesus has this dialogue with Peter, this uncomfortable dialogue with Peter where he is holding him accountable and pushing him deeper. Jesus wants Peter back and this is not going to be a forgiving or reconciliation that includes forgetting, this will not be forgiving and forgetting this will be remembering and forgiving. Jesus leads Peter through those three questions, those tender painful difficult questions: Peter do you love me? Peter do you love me? Peter do you love me? And we know that these questions, they recapitulate the three betrayals when Peter said, "I don't know this man" and betrayed his Lord three times. These three questions are shepherding Peter back into this relationship and ministering to him by drawing him back into that essential love of his Lord that is core to his life. "Do you love me?" It's painful. It is painful. We hear it right in the passage. It hurts Peter's feelings to be questioned this way but we know with Jesus in his ministry he is always drawing us deeper into this love that we have for him. And why is Jesus drawing Peter deeper? Why? Because he has a mission for Peter, he has a purpose for Peter, a ministry for Peter. Like in his ministry Jesus is always looking for partners to send out to share the good news and he knows if Peter is going to do that to his full potential he must be fundamentally grounded in his love for Jesus. He must grow in his courage to love Jesus if he's going to become a good shepherd. A good shepherd who lays his life down for the sheep, a good shepherd who will pay the ultimate price for faithfulness and devotion when Peter is crucified for being an apostle. This is Jesus doing tough love. This is Jesus caring for his friend and preparing him to have that depth of love he will need to give his life away for his friends. Do you love me? Feed my sheep. A life is restored, a vocation is restored. The church finds an advocate. This is the Risen Christ at work. We have Paul as well. We have Paul in a slightly different story, Paul breathing threats and murder. Paul the persecutor of the earlier followers of Jesus. He is knocked down. The context is not breakfast on the beach. The context is a slap down on the road to Damascus. Notice there's no horse, by the way, every picture you've seen of Paul getting knocked off a horse - there's no horse in the story. I would love to know how many people saw a horse when we read the story. Paul, being intense and zealous and hard-headed, is one of those folks a little bit like me who needs a good knock from God to get it together. God has multiple approaches. Paul knocked down is enfeebled, he's blinded, he's made dependent. He is humbled in every way and made to depend on exactly the same people he was persecuting. He is taken in by Judas, he is prayed for by Ananias, all under the direction of the Risen Christ. He is turned over into the hands of those he called enemies and those early followers of Jesus were challenged to live up to the teaching - love your enemies. Love the guy who's breathing threats and murder. Love the guy who stood by when Stephen was stoned to death. Love this deadly enemy and bring him in. And here in Paul we have another testimony of how the Risen Christ works to change a life, to transform a life from threats and murder to good news and new life, rom persecutor to persecuted, in a way that would teach us all how to accept transformation, to be humbled, to be blinded, which is to say to no longer be so sure about what we thought we knew. To be dependent on others, on community, to pray for us and to lead us into what love means. Paul is transformed by this power of the Risen Christ that was available to him and is equally available to us. If we risk it, if we so dare, this Risen Christ offers us transformation of life. How will we be changed from fisherman to shepherd? How will we be changed from persecutor to persecuted? How will we make ourselves available to the Risen Christ who is working in us to change us forever? I really sincerely believe that people are right to be wary of this relationship with Christ because deep inside we know it will change us. For those of us who have faith in this process and know that Christ leads us only deeper into love, we must be escorts on this journey. We must be people who remind our brothers and sisters, our siblings in christ, that this is a journey deeper into love from death into life, from despair into hope, from fear into courage, and most of all that it's a journey that enlists us to be part of the healing of the world, the healing of the world we know in Jesus Christ. Amen. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Listen in to the sermon from Anne Alexis Harra for the Second Sunday in Easter, April 24, 2022. Support the worship and ministry of St. Martin's by giving online: stmartinec.org/give Today's readings are: Acts 5:27-32 Revelation 1:4-8 John 20:19-31 Psalm 150Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/ Community Anne Alexis Harra April 24, 2022 Let everything that has breath praise you, O God of Salvation. Please be seated. Today is a day to be joyful in the Lord, and in the Resurrection indeed. Spring seems spring-ier than ever. My house smells like hyacinths and I couldn't be happier. It seems that nature itself is rejoicing in the Good News this morning. We welcomed a new beloved child of God into the Body of Christ as we are gathered to bask in the beautiful forgiveness and glow of the Easter Season. Alleluia! When, friends, has the Resurrected Christ appeared to you? When has Jesus dwelt among you and said "Peace be with you." Were you alone in prayer? Or perhaps, were you accomplishing a major life moment? Were you supported and raised up in a community? For me, life in this community continues to shape my faith and inform my questions. Only in community have I grown so profoundly in faith and received the courage to say, "The Lord is risen indeed, and I see that Resurrection everywhere around me and within me." Friends, life in the Resurrection is beautiful. Luckily for us, the promise of the Resurrection is the very essence of our passage from the Book of Acts today. Luke tells us in Acts that the disciples were publicly teaching in Jerusalem, which was a risky feat for them, and perhaps more importantly, they were doing so because they said, "we are witnesses to the events of the Resurrection." These are the same disciples who we encountered as bereaved, doubtful and full of fear in the Gospel of John- until they encountered Jesus. Life in the Holy Spirit and the peace of the Risen Christ triggered a death to fear and a Resurrection to joy in the Lord in the disciples and in all of us. That same joy was what enabled the disciples to respond to the jealousy and criticism of the high priest and council with nothing but love and devotion to God. Our Lessons today emphasized the importance of community in recognizing the Risen Christ. Community is fundamentally at the heart of ministry, and it is foundational to our lives as followers of Christ. I have found that we are far more likely to encounter the Resurrection when we are around people who love us, who hold us and who uplift us. I consider myself deeply blessed to be in a community of people who lovingly sow the seeds of ministry, together, who open the door for me to ask questions. So as I prepared for this sermon, I couldn't help but give thanks for the community of St. Martin's. As I look at my most beloved St. Martin's, I see a community full of disciples with the same zealous energy of the Holy Spirit and love of Christ that I do in the apostles from our passage in Acts this morning. It is this same community that just moments ago witnessed baby Kai's baptism into the Body of Christ, that assured Kai's family in our faithful support of Kai's faith journey, and that boldly proclaimed that we will seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves. We first meet the Risen Christ in Baptism, which is entry into the community of faith, and this underscores the need for community as we grow in faith and questions. Community is essential in helping us recognize the Resurrected Christ. We cannot do it on our own. And God doesn't want us to do it on our own. It is not lost on me that Thomas recognizes the Risen Christ while amongst his friends, the fact the disciples are in their formation together when Christ appears to them the first and second time, is significant. Thomas has his moment of vulnerability and of faith when he is amongst friends, the people he loves and the people who love him. Similarly, Luke emphasizes our need for community in the passage from Acts. The apostles are brought together as a group to the Temple council and the high priest. It is Peter and the apostles who spoke to the high priest and declared that they answer not to man, but to God. They proclaimed Jesus' death and resurrection. And, they inform the high priest that they were witnesses to these things. It is brave of the apostles to be so audacious before the high priest, but that is the strength of the community, especially one that has witnessed and experienced the Risen Christ in our midst. When we are in a community that uplifts us and empowers us to recognize and embrace the power of the Risen Christ, we are given a beautiful opportunity to grow in faithfulness, like the apostles. When we are in a community that allows us to ask questions and think critically, we encounter the Christ in new ways which only serves to strengthen our relationship with him. How deeply reassuring it is to know that when we are in community, we do not need to have all the answers. How freeing that is. I believe that Thomas and Jesus' encounter this morning functioned as a catalyst to vital questions of faith and what the resurrection means for us, as Christ's disciples in 2022. Thomas sadly has received a bad rap over the years but the truth is, his skepticism opened a door to fruitful discussions of faith, theology, and Christology. It is important that he expressed both his doubt and his faith in a community where he felt safe and comfortable enough to do so. It's also significant that we see Thomas proclaim one of the essential Christological statements - "My Lord and My God" - while he is in his community. I would much rather see a disciple like Thomas, who earnestly is grasping with huge questions, but doing so faithfully, than one who simply parrots messages in the hopes of gaining more glory. Friends, this week and beyond I encourage you to consider your communities, both in and out of St. Martin's. Your communities of families, of friends, of St. Martin's, of Women Connecting, or wherever you find yourself. What about your community draws you nearer to Christ? How do you see yourself fulfilling the Baptismal Covenant which connects us to the entire Christian community? How do you serve your community to the Glory of God, and how does your community help you encounter the Risen Christ? The strength of the community here is something that inspires me and anchors my belief in the Resurrection. Many people in my family can tell you I was not the same person before I came to St. Martin's and it is amazing what joy and life in the Holy Spirit does to a very weary soul. As we look toward the future and the inevitable transition that will come with it, we have opportunities to grow, to learn, to ask questions, and to be bold. We will be in the presence of the Almighty God, who was and who is and who is to come. We will be in the presence of the Risen Christ who before all else offers us peace. We will grow in faith and rejoice in the promise of salvation. We will continue to grow members into the Body of Christ. And, friends, we will boldly proclaim the resurrection with the same zest and convictions that the apostles had. Alleluia, the Lord is Risen! Amen. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Listen to this week's sermon from LIFT Worship from Anne Alexis Harra for Palm Sunday, April 10, 2022 Learn more about LIFT, Living in Faith Together, at stmartinec.org/lift Today's Readings: Joshua 5:9-12 2 Corinthians 5:16-21 Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32 Psalm 32Readings were taken from God's Word, My Voice: A Children's Lectionary - - - - - Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org Who here likes to ride rollercoasters? I used to be really afraid of rollercoasters. I didn't like that I wasn't in control. When we ride rollercoasters, the experience is almost always entirely out of our control: how fast we're going in the car, if we're going up or down or even upside down, how many hills there are. I don't feel so afraid of them anymore, though. Riding a rollercoaster usually means we have to be brave enough to let go of control for just a few moments so we can come off the ride feeling exhilarated, free, and maybe a little nauseous. :) Holy Week is a special kind of rollercoaster: it is an emotional rollercoaster. In these days leading up to Jesus' death and glorious resurrection, we will feel all the emotions. We will not be in a whole lot of control. We will truly feel like we're on a rollercoaster! Today is the first part of this ride: today is Palm Sunday. Today we are climbing up the big hill in the rollercoaster car. We are excited today because Jesus has made a triumphant entry into the big city of Jerusalem. We are excited with the disciples and the people who wave their palms to welcome Jesus. We feel Jesus with us. Jesus' entry into Jerusalem was crucial to completing God's work for Jesus. Can someone refresh my memory - what kind of animal did Jesus ride into Jerusalem? A donkey, that's right! Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey fulfilled a prophecy in the Hebrew Bible (Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion! Shout, Daughter Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey, Zech. 9:9.). The people of Israel were excited to welcome Jesus! But sadly, that excitement didn't last forever. Jesus knew that he was going to Jerusalem to die for our sins, and then God would raise him to new life. Now friends, I don't want to be the bearer of bad news, but I need to be honest with you: we are climbing up the hill. We eventually will begin to descend, or come down, the hill, quite fast. We will feel sad when our friend Jesus dies on Good Friday. We will feel unsettled on Holy Saturday, as we wait with the disciples. We will feel safe, exhilarated, free, full of joy on Easter Sunday, when we come to the conclusion of our ride. If you're like me, and you need some reassurance before we really get going on our adventure, I have some good news. Throughout our Holy Week rollercoaster, we will always be safe and loved by God. We can bring all our feelings and prayers to our friend, Jesus. And lastly, nobody is ever alone on one of these rides. We have one another, and we have God. And we will remember that Jesus is our eternal king of peace. Thank you for joining me on our Holy Week ride, friends. Hosanna in the highest. Amen.

Tune into the sermon from The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for Palm Sunday, April 10, 2022. Learn more about Easter at St. Martin's: stmartinec.org/easter Today's readings are: Mark 11:1-11 Isaiah 50:4-9a Psalm 31:9-16 Philippians 2:5-11 Luke 23:1-49Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/ Talking About the Passion The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel April 10, 2022 Please join me in a spirit of prayer. Lord God, we stand in awe and wonder before your cross. Help us know that your cross is the medicine of the world, the healing of the world, the return of the world to life in you. We give you thanks that you have taken on the consequences of our sin in the body of your love and that you have defeated those powers so we may have our lives in you. In Christ's name we pray. Amen. A brief meditation today as we head into Holy Week: Every year as we approach Holy Week I ask myself, what shall I pray for this year? What shall I pray for as I give my prayerful attention to the passion of my savior Jesus Christ? How shall I open my heart to the gifts he is giving me and all of us through his passion, death and resurrection? And I encourage you all to set an intention this week. Set for yourself an intention. What will you pray for? What will you ask for? What gifts do you hope to receive when you give your full worshipful attention to these events we celebrate this week? For me it's going to be a focus on spiritual freedom, especially spiritual freedom available to us even when we feel powerless, even when we feel overpowered. How can I in some small way take on the freedom of Jesus Christ who is the ultimate example of spiritual freedom? I see that spiritual freedom in Jesus throughout the passion - it's ironically in Luke in the fact that Pilate and Herod become friends. Jesus creates a reconciliation between his enemies in the course of his passion, showing us what his life is all about, even while he's under the power of the state. The freedom of Jesus for me is so beautifully present in Maundy Thursday, in the giving of the supper in his name the night before he dies. The night before he dies a death under torture he gives his disciples a way to understand what's about to happen. He has the spiritual freedom of love and grace in a moment of absolute terror to nurture and feed and love his friends and support them through the loss and terror they're about to experience. That is simply awe-inspiring freedom. We heard it in the story of the cross just now, forgiving and loving while being tortured. Forgiving and loving while dying. That is that awe-inspiring spiritual freedom which to me says this Jesus Christ is so far beyond me, so far beyond me and living out harmony with God. In what might seem like total powerlessness he lives the power of love. Now, crucifixion and torture are meant to destroy community. That's what torture does in a police state. It tears people apart from one another, it causes people to betray each other, it creates suspicion and fear. It's meant to terrorize the population, and maybe worst of all torture is meant at its worst to cause us to betray ourselves, to betray our highest values, our highest commitments for the sake of relief. And here we have Jesus in love under torture resisting all of those things, creating community, including people, forgiving enemies, bringing people together. Once again: wonder, awe, praise. This Jesus Christ is beyond me in his spiritual freedom, yet this is the spiritual freedom my life depends on and it is the ultimate gift Christ gives us - the ability in our constraints, in our limitations, in our frustrations, in our powerlessness to have a source of integrity, to have a source of gentle loving presence in ourselves through Christ as the one who set us free by his cross to have that freedom. This is my prayer during Holy Week: to grow in spiritual freedom, especially when I feel constrained or powerless, especially when there are greater powers acting than I can affect, to hang on to Christ who is with me, setting me free in each moment because he's defeated the powers so we may live with him. Amen. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Tune into the sermon from The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the Fifth Sunday in Lent, April 3, 2022. Support St. Martin's mission and ministry by giving online: stmartinec.org/give Today's readings are: Isaiah 43:16-21 Philippians 3:4b-14 John 12:1-8 Psalm 126Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/ Please join me in a spirit of prayer. Lord God by your grace help us join Mary in our worship today. Help us join her in her extravagant adoration and her loving sorrow, her profound awareness of the cost you will pay and the cost of following you. Lord God help all of us who go out weeping and come back rejoicing in song. In Christ's name we pray. Amen. Back in elementary school I liked math. Math was fun. Each year began with fresh new workbooks fragrant with new paper and printer's glue. The teacher passed out wonderful blue on white dittos. We pressed them up to our faces, inhaling that inky, oily, mimeograph musk. We learned fun mathematics like roman numerals. Who knew how helpful that was going to be? I can tell you what page I am on in a preface. My favorite unit each year was "greater than, lesser than, and equals to". I love those neat little rows of numbers and the horizontal carrot we would have to draw to indicate that 101 was greater than 99 and so on down the page. In future years the teacher would add greater than or equal to, lesser than or equal to, adding a straight line under that horizontal carrot. What rich concepts they were giving us. Concepts that enchanted my mind and stayed with me: greater than and including, greater than and affirming what came before, greater than and surpassing all, in one simple sign. That greater than sign, although not intended in my very secular public school, became for me a favorite symbol for God. I scribble it on notepads. I hold it in my imagination when I need to remember who my God is, a greater love than I could ever imagine. A greater healing than I could ever hope for. A greater goodness than I could ever generate on my own. A greater faithfulness, a greater steadfastness, a greater mercy, a greater hope, a greater creativity than my cramped heart and mind could ever approach under my own steam. God's ways are greater than my ways and so I praise God, so I give thanks to God, so I place my trust in God. This greater than of God inspires extravagant praise, super abundant, repsonic, excessive, gushing love. It is the order of the day in both Paul to the Philippians and Mary in the gospel. In fair warning if you were raised to be repressed, reticent, reserved, such overflowing might trigger hot shame in your face, some embarrassment or at least some discomfort, but let us let Paul and Mary pull ourselves into adoration, pull ourselves into infatuation. These faithful souls were not afraid to pour out their souls and love of Jesus. I want to start by re-reading Paul's letter to the Philippians as enraptured and repsonic rhetoric. We know from his letter to the Romans that he affirms the goodness of the Torah and holds it as precious and not less than the new covenant in Christ. It's just that for Paul, Christ is equal to and more than. He has finally found full participation in the eternal life and goodness of God through his new life in Christ, and for him this affirms while surpassing his former righteousness under the Torah. And this is important for me to spell out because we're being offered the same gift as Paul. We're invited into the same rapturous life with God. It's also important to spell out because too many have read St. Paul through a northern European anti-semitic lens that reads Paul as in either/or between law and gospel. What I recall is much more subtle on the topic and I need to affirm this because too often I hear folks mistakenly compare, quote, the "God of the old testament" and the "God of Jesus." Same God. The Torah, the law, is affirmed in the gospel. We must watch our tendency to demean it. The Torah is a good gift from God, the God given instructions and obligations to a priestly people set apart to live in covenant with a holy God. The Torah marked and continues to mark to this day the ultimate allegiance of Israel to God, so marked Israel represents God among hostile nations that create peril and cause to themselves then and now. Torah fidelity is risky. It's courageous identification with God and I so appreciate the risks it calls out by naming the sacred for what it is. We need to bring a subtle reading to the Gospel of John as well. This is my day for subtle reasoning. The author of John likes to set up these either/or situations that heighten the drama through conflict. Do we follow Mary or do we follow Judas? I think John's not subtle about that one - he has an ax to grind, an agenda, and he shares this critical fault with social media algorithms that juice up conflict and polarization to maximize attention regardless of the terrible effects on our common life. And I could, even as I read the story of Jesus, Mary and Judas, see the memes, see the social media treatment of the passage oozing the snark about virtue signaling on both sides. Oh isn't Mary so pious? Oh isn't Judas so righteous? All used to throw confusion, antagonism and agitation around. Sadly enough John would probably be on social media. It's his style too, so permit me to reframe the scene not as a meme but as an icon, an icon that includes Jesus, Judas and Mary as an image of God's loving work. Let's start with Mary. Here's Mary, her admiration at the feet of Jesus says love the Lord your God with all your soul, all your heart, all your mind, and all your strength. This is the first commandment. She embodies the first commandment. Mary is, in this icon, the first commandment, and the second is like unto it, love your neighbor as herself. Judas plays the part of the second and co-equal commandment. Love of God and love of neighbor. Mary and Judas go together. In Christ, those forms of caritas, both forms of charity and love coexist and support each other. They cannot have their full power without each other. Adore God, serve God in nature, serve God and neighbor, adore God. It's all one piece. They are not in opposition. They're not opposed to each other. But that extravagant adoration of merit, anointing Jesus with perfume worth a year's worth of wages, takes us deeper into the greater than of this icon that I'm imagining. Mary is preparing Jesus for his death. This icon is not only an illustration of our highest callings, this icon is a prelude to the final showdown, the final battle where Jesus confronts and defeats the powers that prevent our faithfulness. Mary is preparing Jesus for that final conflict that will make faithfulness possible. In her loving sorrow, in her mourning, she's loving him. She knows what comes next for a prophet. She knows that he is marked for death. The authorities have already met and he must die. Why? Because he raised her brother Lazarus from the dead. Why? Because challenging the power of death rattles the empire to its core. If we cannot terrorize the masses with death how will we control them? How will we retain domination? And so in following Mary, what is revealed is that death in general is not the ultimate source of our fear and anxiety. It's when death is used to erode the faith and courage we need to resist the forces that manipulate death, that is when death is an enemy needing to be overcome. Death can be a friend to suffer, a gentle release at the end of life, and in all my experience with dying people very rarely are they afraid. Rather they are mourning, saying goodbye to people they love, and they're mostly concerned with causing them distress. Jesus will overcome the tool of death. Death as execution. And this is the greater than. This is the greater love we cannot give ourselves but it must be done for us by God in Christ. This is the greater than that opens a greater life to us, greater than we can even begin to imagine, a peace greater than we can understand. God is greater than us so I praise God. In Christ God means to be greater than and equal to us so we may surpass our former lives and be found in Christ. Amen. - - - - - Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Listen to this week's sermon from LIFT Worship from Anne Alexis Harra for the Fifth Sunday in Lent, April 3, 2022 Learn more about LIFT, Living in Faith Together, at stmartinec.org/lift Today's Readings: Joshua 5:9-12 2 Corinthians 5:16-21 Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32 Psalm 32Readings were taken from God's Word, My Voice: A Children's Lectionary Good morning, my friends. Today, we heard about a dinner party. Who has ever been to a dinner party? Or a big family dinner? Raise your hand. Wonderful. What are some things you experience at a dinner party? What happens there? That's right. You can usually expect lots of food. Sometimes the tables are set really nicely with flowers or something fancy in the middle. You usually talk to a lot of people - sometimes you're catching up with people you haven't seen in a while. On the count of three, I want all of you to share your favorite dinner party food with me, okay? *count* I'll remember ALL of those! I promise! So now that we've established the "norms" of a dinner party, let's think about the dinner party that our good friend John told us about, shall we? In fact, just for a few moments, let's pretend we're at a dinner party with Jesus. Here are some things you all should know about this dinner party we are attending. ONE. It is occurring six days before Passover. Does anyone know what Passover is? (It's a Jewish holiday that celebrates God freeing God's people out of slavery in Egypt and into freedom.) Passover is a big deal for Jesus and his friends. TWO. Mary, Martha, and Lazarus are siblings who live in a big house. THREE. This is when we learn about Judas Iscariot, one of Jesus' disciples who would later betray him. There is a lot going on just this one evening, folks! This is a great story because it highlights hospitality: welcoming people into your home was a sign of deep respect and friendship in the ancient world. By throwing this dinner party, we know that Mary, Martha, and Lazarus have fond feelings for Jesus, and vice versa. We know that Martha will serve the food tonight. What do you think she'll serve for dinner? Martha will probably serve a lovely dinner of fish, bread, figs, and wine, if I had to guess. Those are pretty much the staple foods of the ancient world. Now, here's where I need some help from you guys. We talked about the norms of a dinner party, right? But can you tell me what happens after you're done eating at a dinner party? The evening is still young, you're hanging out, right? What else? You probably help clean up, some people do the dishes, there might be dessert. Right. Okay, something we may not expect to see is someone wiping perfume on someone else's feet, right? Especially not with her hair. I wouldn't call that a dinner party norm, would you? So, our sweet friend Mary has just wiped very expensive perfume with her hair onto Jesus' feet. Does anyone want to guess how expensive the perfume was? It says it was worth a whole year's salary, which is around $50,000 in today's dollars. It was worth a lot of money! Mary, our sweet, faithful Mary, did not view this interaction between Jesus and her as a transaction. The perfume suddenly lost its monetary value because Jesus' love and ministry was worth everything. Mary knew and experienced how important Jesus is - remember, he raised her brother, Lazarus, from the dead. So even though Judas tried to reprimand Mary, she did the right thing. Jesus knew how much he meant to Mary. Jesus truly valued the people in his life. His love and respect of all of us - you and me and your mom and dad - is worth everything, just like Mary taught us. Friends, thank you for coming to this dinner party with Jesus. It's been lovely being with you. Amen. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Tune into the sermon from Bonnie Hoffman-Adams for the Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 27, 2022. Support St. Martin's mission and ministry by giving online: stmartinec.org/give Today's readings are: Joshua 5:9-12 2 Corinthians 5:16-21 Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32 Psalm 32Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/ + The Sermon + Divine Reconciliation Bonnie Hoffman-Adams March 27, 2022 I came across a study about shopping. This study claimed that whenever we make a purchase, our brain releases endorphins and dopamine. We literally get high when we purchase something, when we open up that package and we find something new in our closets or elsewhere in our house, this thing - this new thing - literally gives us a buzz. Newness is appealing. But I think that the newness of our hearts is a lot more complicated. Do any of you remember what you did for New Years? Do you remember anything about perhaps making some goals? (And if you didn't, that's just fine.) I always feel terribly anxious at that time of year. It's momentous, it's artificial, I feel bullied into thinking about how I should change my life, and when I do make those goals, I feel kind of depressed knowing by mid January I have forgotten them. And yet, when I hear these first lines from our second lesson today my heart quickens with possibility. Listen again to the first two sentences of our second reading. From now on , therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ there is a new creation; Everything old has passed away See everything has become new! So what is the newness that you seek? I think it is really common among us. We all kind of really want the same things: We want our regrets to be banished. We want our bad habits to disappear. We want our memories to be transformed. We want our sin to be forgiven and forgotten. We want a spring time of the heart. I think that is why we're in church. Paul tells us we are to regard no one from a human point of view. I think this is kind of funny - what are our options? We are human after all. What other point of view do we have? Where is it? How do we obtain this? We are told by Paul, All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation. That is in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself not counting their trespasses against them and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. Reconciliation is at the heart of this new point of view and it is also our mission. In Greek as well as in English the word "reconcile" has two ways that it can go. It can describe money, it can describe relationships. The older use of the Greek word is in fact money changer, and what did they work with? They worked with balances. They would put foreign currency on one side to figure out what local cash would be given in exchange. The balance had to be equal. We still use this word of balance with our money. We balance books, we reconcile checkbooks. We still have that sense of fairness, but it is more often used in our relationships. The ground between the two parties has been made uneven, is smoothed over by apologies and possibly even a gift. We say someone owes me an apology. It evens out that balance. Even our legal system has those words in it. Someone pays a debt to society by going to prison. We also can note that the Hebrew word for sin means debt, so it's not very far from keeping that balance right that you put a tooth on one side and a tooth on the other. This is all a search for justice. We all know it falls short. It's not perfect. It's the best we've got for the moment. But what I have described to you right now is a human point of view. This is not what "being in Christ " is or having his perspective as ours is. This is not at all about a new creation. This is the same old system. Divine reconciliation is not transactional. When God brings about balance or healing and makes things right again is not a quid pro quo arrangement. It is not a this for a that. I think sometimes we would prefer if it was that way. We would like to believe that what we've done - those good deeds - would be on one side of the balance, and then the love of God would surely follow on the other side. But as soon as we start thinking about that balance, we're back into that human point of view. There is no better parable than the Prodigal son to begin to see something different about reconciliation. We've had at least three stories before this story today that talk about loss. We heard last week about the tree of the lost cause, we've heard about the lost sheep and the lost coin, so today is the lost son. But I think this story goes a step further than describing that amazing search that God has for those on the edge. All of these stories tell us of God's determined love of seeking us out but by this time we get to today's parable we are ready to hear the next part. There was a man who had two sons. The younger of them said to his father - Give me the share of the property that will belong to me. So he divided the property. This is a terrible story, and we can't forget it. This is more than being rude. He is telling his father to think of his death. He is reminding his father that the things that his father has worked on are more important than he is. And his father does it. He splits his property. That is plan A. This son is a man of plans. He gets the cash, he leaves, he spends it, it's all gone, and then he discovers he has no means to feed himself. "Ah", he says, "I will hire myself out!" But he discovers plan B is not so good either. There is no living wage to be available. So as he is sitting in that pigsty he gets Plan C. He comes to himself and says, "Okay. I've messed up. I will offer an apology to my father. I will offer to work for him as a hired servant." So far at this point we have a great picture of human reconciliation, in both money and giving an apology. I am going to give you an alternative parable at this point. These are my words, this is not scripture, but I want you to give it some thought. So he set off and went to his father. He knocked on his old house door. His father answered. The son offered his apology and his plans of working . His father welcomes him back and takes up his offer for labor and then says your brother will be your manager. They join later for dinner. So this is it: Is this story unjust? What's wrong with this story? Or maybe I should ask you, would you want this story to be the parable that Jesus tells? You welcome your child home after apologies were offered and apologies accepted. But there is something more going on in this story. This is not the story of forgiveness that is told to us by Jesus. So let us hurry back to scripture: But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion. He ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. This astonishing parent sees his child far off which means he has been looking out at the horizon. always waiting for his return. He runs, embraces him, kisses and totally ignores plan C. A good feast is to be had, the best clothes, shoes, everything to welcome back this lost child. It is now at this point that the son receives his real inheritance. It's not the stuff. It is being in the arms of such undeserved and unconditional Love. In years past I used to think that this conversion started in the pig pen. But no, that is still a transactional understanding of love. You behave and I'll love you. Apologize and I will forgive you. For this his son realizes that his riches are still there for him. He now knows something of that profound depth of love that his father has for him. Now, we cannot ignore the older brother. He feels ignored. We're not going to ignore him. He is a sympathetic character in many ways. He has been working hard. He's been good. He has not spent his money on questionable activities. And he is upset. He's not going to join the party. His father -not a servant- comes out and pleads directly with him. But he responds in this way When this son of yours (not "my brother") has come back and devoured your property (he mentions the prostitutes) property, what do you do Dad? You kill a fatted calf. Now from the human point of view he is rightly upset. He's no different though than the younger brother, before he returned home. He just had a different plan . He is just as interested and focused on assets and not his father. For all these years I have been working like a slave for you. I have been good. Yes, he has been working like a slave, but that's self-designating, that's his understanding, he's missed the profound love right next to him. Transactional relationships make us slaves and not children of God. They make us miss the Love. You are always with me and all that is mine is yours. This is the divine point of view. Jesus came to change how we look at things. Jesus loves us so much that he lived a life forgiving people even when they did not ask for it. In his tortured death he did not abandoned those who abandoned him. He didn't replace his love with a balance. He wants us to know none of our actions, of abandonment, or misappropriated affections, none of them - not even death - could separate us from him or his love. This love is not a love that waits at the top of the hill looking at the horizon, but it's a love that descended to live among us and even sit with us in our suffering, in our sickness, in our misery, so he can tell us he is with us. You are always with me and all that is mine is yours. Treasure the presence of God that is merciful and loving beyond our imaginations. Let us pray. Lord, help us become ambassadors of this absurd and abundant love that you give us. Help us to forgive others with every breath we take, even when they don't ask us. Lord, strengthen us so that we reflect your grace and glory in all that we do. Never let us forget that you are always with us. Amen. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Listen to this week's sermon from LIFT Worship from Anne Alexis Harra for the Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 27, 2022 Learn more about LIFT, Living in Faith Together, at stmartinec.org/lift Today's Readings: Joshua 5:9-12 2 Corinthians 5:16-21 Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32 Psalm 32Today I wanted to share a story with you and this is going to be a lot of story talk because we heard a really cool story from Jesus and I have a story for you so just bear with me. Anne Alexis's story - this story - takes place in January 2020. Life was a little different back then I was working my very first church gig at Emmanuel Highlands Episcopal Church in Wilmington, Delaware and on the day of these events in history we heard the parable of the Prodigal Son which is the same special story that Jesus taught us today. So friends, picture the scene with me, this was life before the pandemic. My young friends gathered on the carpet in a big circle with me and we told this story. When it was time for the craft we made these (holds up craft) Now they're a little hard to see but I'll explain what they are. They are crafts that my students decorated and they said "welcome home" because our stories today are all about coming home.So things were great. We were hanging out doing the craft and then one of my youngest friends, we'll call him Diego, Diego came up to me and he kind of tugged on me and he said, "Ann Alexis can I write 'welcome home sister' on this? Jesus talks a lot about brothers but I have a sister" and I said, "Well sure Diego of course you can, but can you tell me a little bit about why?" So he kind of looked at me and he made a face and he sighed and then he said, "well my sister Eva ran away from home a couple of months ago . She was gone for a really long time and we didn't know where she was but she came home. My sister is home now and I want to give her this because I'm so happy she's home." Then he paused and he looked at me and he said "Ann Alexis, do you think that god is mad at Eva for running away?" That's a tough one even for me, so I spoke from my heart. I said, "well Diego I can't speak for God and I'm not gonna try to, but I have a feeling God is so happy that Eva is home now. God loves her and God forgives her." And Diego said, "is that what Jesus wants us to know?" Yep, it sure is my friend, that is what Jesus wants us to know Now I don't know exactly how I managed to hold back tears while this conversation was occurring. As I was writing this memory down I was crying all over again. I realized Diego had been on such an emotional roller coaster and sometimes I think we all get on these emotional roller coasters, but our stories today - both Jesus's and Diego's and mine - are so deeply connected to one another. Even though Jesus told the story of the prodigal son over 2000 years ago it's still relevant in our lives, and some bible stories really work their way into our hearts the way that this one did for Diego.What Jesus wants us to know even in 2022 is that God loves us unconditionally and God forgives us unconditionally the way that the father in the prodigal son loved his two sons. And what Diego wanted to know was that he loved his sister unconditionally. He was angry that she ran away but his love was so much stronger, and that's how God's love is. Diego taught me so much about love and what it means to be faithful to Jesus's message to us in the gospels. God loves us without question and all God asks of us in return is to love without question. We are so blessed to have such grace, forgiveness, joy and unadulterated love from God even in a season of Lent when we're a little bit more penitential, a little bit more apologetic, and we have to think a lot about how we live our lives. God is so happy to be with us as we journey our own paths and that is some good news for this chilly beautiful fourth Sunday of Lent. Amen. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Tune into the sermon from The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the Third Sunday in Lent, March 20, 2022. Support St. Martin's mission and ministry by giving online: stmartinec.org/give Today's readings are: Exodus 3:1-15 1 Corinthians 10:1-13 Luke 13:1-9 Psalm 63:1-8Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/I'm preaching from a gospel this morning which was the first gospel I preached on as a priest. Talk about God's sense of humor. 27 years ago I was at St. Matthew's Episcopal Church in Sunbury, Central PA, on the banks of the Susquehanna River, my first posting. St. Matthews was a high church, Anglo-Catholic parish, bells and spells. and as such the Gospel was not just spoken it was chanted. My first Sunday was the third Sunday in Lent and the Gospel we heard this morning was the Gospel for that day and it was my job to chant it. Which is to say that my first ever chanted Gospel included me intoning "Spread Manure On It," and a young priest in his young twenties had to keep a straight face. "Spread Manure On It." We will get back to the manure later in the sermon. Hopefully it will not be a synonym for this sermon. We'll get back to it because Jesus was not coprophobic and neither should we be. The manure I will propose is his mercy, his merciful answer his answer to the intense questions that begin this passage. And oh, what a passage it is. So many people come up to me on this one and say, "What?" or "Huh?" or "Do we have to read this?" And indeed it has caused more than one preacher to preach a sermon directly contrary to what Jesus is suggesting in the passage. All over the nation this morning there will be theocracy sermons, trying to explain why a good God lets evil happen, which is exactly what Jesus is suggesting we not get into. The disasters mentioned - the slaughter at the altar by Pilate and the mass death when the tower fell - it is very clear to Jesus that these are not the will of God - this is not God's doing. These are the kinds of destruction and suffering caused by the malevolence and neglect of empire and domination. This is what happens under corrupt and oppressive power. Asking abstract theological questions about the slaughter and the collapse is dangerously beside the point - in fact - it distracts from the real work at hand and even worse - this faulty theology causes the people to look at themselves for blame instead of looking hard at the reality of occupation that surrounds them. Jesus is clear. The sins of the victims did not cause their deaths. The evil of an occupying power did. Pilate murdered the Galileans. Remember that Jesus is Galilean. Remember Pilate's role to come in the gospel of Luke. There is a foreshadowing here. Herod's neglect of municipal maintenance caused the tower to fall while Herod meanwhile was building himself lavish palaces and monuments to his pride. Violence and neglect kill the people while the rulers benefit. So when Jesus says "REPENT!" he is saying, "Wake Up! Change Your Thinking! Change your way of thinking! Adjust your perspective! Dump distracting, abstract theology and face the way things are." The frightful problems you name are not theological problems, they are problems of imperial domination. Innocent lives were lost to the powers that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God. Jesus is setting his listeners free from a faulty theology that cannot tell the difference between the ways of God and the ways of occupation. Jesus wants his listeners to look with fresh eyes at their dilemma. After all, how convenient for the empire have a theology that causes people to blame themselves and blame blame the victims for their own persecution and murder. To repent, as Jesus is using it - to be transformed, to have our minds changed - changes how we look at ourselves and the world. It pushes us to ask questions much more challenging than the ones Jesus offers rhetorically. A writer in the Atlantic Magazine this week recounted a phone conversation with his sister-in-law. The sister-in-law and her husband were avid anti-vaxxers and COVID deniers. They had their own version of reality and all attempts at correction had been fruitless, frustrating and had ended in tears. Now on this day of this phone call, this sister-in-law and her husband had gotten COVID and so had she, and the cases were bad. The husband had to be intubated and she was very distressed.. On the phone the sister-in-law was distraught and agitated and was asking the big questions; "How could God let this happen to us? How could this be happening?" The writer knew better than to challenge these questions in the moment. She needed comfort, not correction. But he goes on to reflect that these big questions, these abstract questions really had obvious answers. In fact these questions were a way of avoiding the obvious answers, because to really answer these questions would be to take a hard look at the choices made and the world-view adopted, the loyalties developed, the allegiances formed, the world that had got them into this predicament, the authorities they had listened to. Sometimes the big questions lead us astray and away from the harder questions where we could make progress. And Jesus responds to distracting, abstract questions by inviting his listeners to change their point of view and then giving them a powerful alternative image of who God is and how God works. His intervention is brilliant as always. His intervention is this image of a fig tree that is not bearing fruit, this pastoral image. And I want us to approach this fig tree the same way we approach the parable of the lost sheep. Remember the parable where 99 sheep are saved with the shepherd and one is lost, and the shepherd runs out for that sheep. And that parable is meant to teach us how absurdly loving our God is. To leave the 99 for the sake of the one would be nonsensical in the ancient world, and I would like to suggest it is the same with this tree. In an orchard full of fig trees, why pay attention to the one? It's an illustration of God's abundant forbearance and mercy even when we fall short, and we do. How does God respond to the fig tree? With mercy and mature and loving attention. Spread manure on it. God is faithful. God is good. God has a purpose for the fig tree and God invests in that purpose with love and nurture. Where empire brings deadly virus and neglect, Jesus counters with life-giving mercy and nurture towards a fruitful, flourishing existence. Spread manure. Too many people I talk to in pastoral care are struggling, struggling in life, because they were taught destructive ideas about who God is. Too many mistake God for an emperor, one who meets out violence and judgment and provokes obedience through fear. We who know Jesus need to share with the world another knowledge of God, the knowledge of God who tends to the orchard - who feeds and nurtures, who goes out of the way to the barren tree to bring it back to life, to give it a second chance. I believe this pastoral image is so good for us in this moment. For two year and more we have been on high alert - our cortisol levels elevated from a constant experience of threat and elevated fear. I am deeply concerned that this cortisol flood in our brain has changed us - made us overly reactive, overly defensive, often quick to aggression, and even seeking out more drama for our fix of cortisol. Cortisol changes our brain. It affects our soul, our position in the world. But Jesus teaches us well. Move away - detach - from the big dramatic stories of slaughter and mayhem. Turn instead to this pastoral image of nurture and mercy. And In that turning - in that repenting - we can give good loving care to our brains and detox from stress hormones and reach a more peaceful loving place that will feed our souls and feed our world with peace and faithfulness. We know - it's been shown - that prayer, meditation, worship, singing, scripture study - are good for the mind and the soul. They create new pathways for grace in us. They change our brain, change our perspective, decrease stress pathways and build up flexibility and grace. So my proposal deep into Lent is this: let us declare a fast from cortisol. Let us wean ourselves from drama. Let us give loving kindness to ourselves and others so that God may spread some manure on our roots that will give us life and return us to flourishing. Amen. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Tune into the sermon from Eugenie Dieck for the Second Sunday in Lent, March 13, 2022. Support St. Martin's mission and ministry by giving online: stmartinec.org/give Today's readings are: Genesis 15:1-12,17-18 Philippians 3:17-4:1 Luke 13:31-35 Psalm 27Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/ May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my strength and my Redeemer. Amen. Let's go for a walk. Let's go for a walk with Jesus. Jesus walks throughout the Gospels. Lent is the period of the Gospels when Jesus shares his ministry; as the story goes, Jesus walked for three years. Today, let us reflect on how we walk with Jesus. What does it mean to Walk? We all know how to walk... or so we think. There are different ways we walk...we walk towards, we walk away, we walk in circles. Our spiritual lives and Lent have all these manners of walking. We walk towards Easter, we know the path and the ending of Jesus's story. During Lent, I sense we try to rush ahead to Easter and not stay in the story. Yet the walk towards Easter is slow and deliberate. We come to know Jesus's ministry and, through each pause in the journey, to understand more deeply the person and power of Jesus. We walk away by sinning and ignoring Jesus. Have you ever tripped when you were walking? I have tripped many times, one fall resulted in a concussion. I was not in the walk, I was somewhere else, I crashed. In our spiritual life, when we are distracted or pay attention elsewhere, we sin, and sometimes we crash. Like having a concussion, our souls' awareness and the orientation of our soul are jumbled. We are not looking into our soul and so we trip into sins of both omission and commission. We walk in circles when we act as if we know where we are going in our spiritual lives and are honestly lost. Walking in our spiritual lives is like walking in the woods, a place of wonder and worry because we can see only so far ahead. In our spiritual walk in the woods, are we entering a dark place that fills us with worry or a light space that sparks our wonder? Sometimes we find ourselves overtaken by wonder or by worry. The wonder occurs when we are surprised by delight and the worry when unexpected concerns surface. This wonder/worry tension is also the reality of our spiritual life. When we focus on ourselves we are worried, when we focus on Jesus we feel awe and wonder. How are we With Jesus? Being with someone can ease the wonder/worry dilemma. We can share the wonder and lessen the worry. We are not alone. "With" can have many meanings - I want to focus on two - the act of accompaniment, and the difference between empathy and sympathy. As some of you may know, I work at Georgetown University, which is a Catholic and Jesuit institution. The Jesuit expression of charism or purpose has evocative language about being in relationship with God. The word "accompaniment" is often used. It means to be alongside someone in their journey, not to change the journey but to accept the journey. True accompaniment also means to not be in control. When we accompany someone, we give over to the experience - we do not use active verbs - direct, determine, guide, define. But how do we give over to accompaniment? We can understand accompaniment by the contrast between empathy and sympathy. Is our connection by knowing of the other person's circumstance? When we have empathy, we understand the circumstance of the other...but with some degree of distance and disengagement. Or is our connection by feeling the reality of the other person? When we have sympathy, we experience another's world. We identify with the person. Lent calls us into sympathy. We move in response to Jesus. Jesus breathes in, we breathe in... Jesus breathes out, we breathe out. We mirror Jesus's experience. We are not setting the path of the journey, no matter how many Lents we observe, no matter how often we read the Gospels. We are following in Jesus's steps. How do we come to know Jesus? Jesus is revealed to us as we walk with him through Lent. And we are revealed to him in turn by how we engage. We do not have a speaking part in the Gospels, yet we have a significant role in bringing the Gospels into this world. Jesus is both the path and the destination of Lent. As the path of Lent, Jesus's walk and encounters and lessons are demanding. Lent is not a stroll, it is a real honest journey. And as the destination, Jesus brings us to Christ, who gives us salvation. How do we encounter Jesus in the words of the Gospels, and in the actual lived Gospels of our lives? Every day, we Walk with Jesus...we encounter Jesus in the strangers we meet and particularly in the people we know most deeply. I will close with a story about accompaniment. In these weeks of Lent, I am mindful of accompanying both my 92-year-old mother-in-law and a work colleague. Each is dealing with physical diminishment, one from old age and one from a degenerative disease. Both are people who are "doers". If they could, each would be very active walkers, with a purpose, a quick pace, a destination, and a planned arrival time. Now they are moving slowly towards death. Jesus is walking with them. And I am accompanying them. My mother-in-law resents the help she needs, she is polite but very saddened. She was always the helper. My colleague is dealing with being rather than with doing. His work identity, and thus much of his own sense of self, has been anchored in getting things done and marking time by accomplishments. Now he says, he just "is". Both my mother-in-law and my colleague are sanctified people. They are in sympathy with Jesus. Their breaths of yearning and of sorrow mirror Jesus's breaths through Lent. I am honored to accompany them, to walk with them, to walk with Jesus. As we continue with the rigors of Lent, with the temptations, with the times of lonely solitude, with the moments of feeling misunderstood and slighted...all which Jesus experienced...know we are walking with Jesus and Jesus is walking with each of us. Step by step, stumble by stumble, blessing by blessing...we are walking towards salvation. My beloved friends, keep walking with Jesus, keep walking. Amen. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Listen to this week's sermon from LIFT Worship from Ms. Anne Alexis Harra for the Second Sunday in Lent, March 13, 2022 Learn more about LIFT, Living in Faith Together, at stmartinec.org/lift Today's Readings: Genesis 15:1-12,17-18 Philippians 3:17-4:1 Luke 13:31-35 Psalm 27Readings were taken from God's Word, My Voice: A Children's Lectionary Good morning. It is so good to see everyone! My friends I haven't seen in awhile, my friends I see all the time. It's just great to be here. This morning, let's get ourselves into a prayerful, quieter space. I invite you to close your eyes and feel your feet firmly on he ground with the earth beneath you holding you up, and just take a deep breath. The Lord be with you. Gracious God thank you for this gorgeous, gorgeous day on the second Sunday of Lent. It is chilly outside but that cool air reminds us that you are with us wherever. Oh friends, the world is heavy right now. I don't know about you, but I am feeling that loss of sleep from last night on top of what feels like a very turbulent world. Things in Ukraine don't seem to be getting better. Innocent people are losing their lives really senselessly. We are not yet out of the Covid woods. Raise your hand if you feel just a little bit tired or weary today. I share in your weariness. My message today is going to be a reflection on the Psalm. The Psalmist in Psalm 27 (and psalmist is just a fancy word for someone who writes a song) so the author, who is probably King David, is clearly distressed in this psalm. However, Kind David tells God that he trusts God. David trusts in God's plan and God's salvation and in God's love for us. And I really love that he asks God to guide him, to teach him and to be kind to him. These are all things that we can ask God for, especially when we're overwhelmed. Sometimes it feels like there's too much, and we can say, "God, please guide me, just walk with me." And that's really cool! My favorite part of this psalm, though, are the final two verses (page 3 of our leaflet) The final two verses, why don't we read these together: "I truly believe I will live to see the Lord's Goodness. Wait for the Lord's help. Be strong and brave and wait for the Lord's help." "I truly believe that I will to see the Lord's Goodness." Isn't so powerful? It's such a powerful, prayerful, hopeful statement. There's soo much assurance and love in just that one statement, let alone the entire psalm. Kind David believed he would see the Goodness of God, and he did. And if you remember a few Sunday's ago when we talked about Jesus' presentation in the temple and we met our friend Simeon in the temple, Simeon believed he would live to see the Lord's Goodness, and he did. When it feels like everything around us is starting to crumble or crack (and it may actually be cracking, who knows? ) we can turn to the words of the psalms for immense comfort and inspiration. Sometimes if I'm having a frustrated day I find someone who is frustrated in the psalms. And those were written thousands of years ago, and yet I can still go back to those words and remind myself that what I am feeling is shared by others. The psalms are such a human experience because they were written by people just like you and me, and to know that we have a shared experience of human feeling and human connection through God is remarkable. Reading the psalms helps us remember that we are not alone in our experiences of suffering or pain, nor are we alone in experiences of joy and excitement and love. God is at the center of the psalms just like God is at the center of each one of you. This week, I invite you to pray one of the psalms together as a family. You can choose the one that's appointed for the day, or you can do Bible roulette where you just open to a page and there's the psalm - that one's fun - but see how much that effects your prayer and attitude for the better in the subsequent days, enjoying that shared experience, feeling the feelings of the psalms, reading that beautiful poetry. Soak up every moment of that poetry and that love with God. We will get through this with God's help. We will be strong and brave and we will wait for the Lord's help. And if you don't believe, ask Kind David, or Simeon, or John the Baptist, or Mary, or so many other people, but we will get through it. Amen.Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Tune into the sermon from the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the First Sunday in Lent, March 6, 2022. Support St. Martin's mission and ministry by giving online: stmartinec.org/give Today's readings are: Deuteronomy 26:1-11 Romans 10:8b-13 Luke 4:1-13 Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/ Please join me in a spirit of prayer. Lord God, we give you thanks that your word is very near us even on our lips and in our hearts and we thank you that that word is about its work of saving us, saving us from our collective human madness and for all the ways we afflict ourselves. In Christ's name we pray. Amen. The ashes of Ash Wednesday this week mingled with the ashes of warfare in my mind. When Putin put his nuclear weapons on high alert, my soul went on high alert and these ashes, these ashes of Ash Wednesday mingled with the dread of being reduced to ash by nuclear war. A felt, vivid fear that I remember all too clearly from childhood. A horror that had gone dormant since the Cold War ended. Dormant even though the weapons were all still there. A horror, a fear, a dread shared by every kid I knew growing up. We would compare notes about the dreams we would have about mushroom clouds in our neighborhood. Towering, glowing, fearsome explosions seeming to come for us. Ash Wednesday, those ashes remind us every year of our humble origins in the dust of the earth. The ashes on our foreheads remind us that we are held in life only by God's creative goodness and grace. And yet knowing that, knowing the gift of life, knowing the gift of this world, we humans who wear those humble ashes are still so misguided, so arrogant, so sinful and distorted, that once again we've maneuvered ourselves into the possibility of mass incineration, mass genocide, global extinction. To not react with horror, to not react with painful, moral horror is simply to be spiritually dead. And who can read these temptations today without thinking about the war in Ukraine? The temptation to rule by domination and force. The temptation to build an empire of control to be despotic, tyrannical. It is not alien to the human soul at any time. While we are absolutely right to condemn Russia's aggression. We need to avoid the risk of self righteousness, forgetting our own history of invasions and the consequences of those aggressions we still live with. While I still fully support Ukraine, in their self defense, I must remember and I hope we all remember that war in the teaching of the church is always a product of sinfulness and only ever rises to the status of necessary evil. Meaning, it's always to be mourned and lamented. It's always something we must work to prevent. And we must name its evil so we can mourn it and give loving care to all who are affected by it. Praying for Ukrainian and Russian alike. Turning to scripture, which has so much to teach us today, oddly enough, I find myself agreeing with the devil. The devil knows scripture. And the devil is quoting Psalm 91 and Psalm 91 which we heard beautifully sung by the choir is very comforting for me right at this moment. This is the Psalm the devil pulls from when Jesus is on the pinnacle of the temple and when I am frightened, I need to remember that Psalm in its comforting words which say "God is my shelter, my refuge, my stronghold, the one I can trust." That beautiful line that we can imagine is addressed to us. "Because the righteous one is bonded to me in love, I will deliver him." I need to hear that assurance addressed to me because I need comfort. And just as a small aside because you're probably shocked that I'm agreeing with the devil from the pulpit. It's okay to agree with the devil because in the Bible, the devil is a literary figure with a specific task and his task assigned by God is to test the righteous. Think of the story of Job. Jesus who is the very embodied righteousness of God is being tested so to clarify his person and his mission so that he may be more clearly revealed for who he is for us. And the devil in his desire to test always gets things wrong and he got something wrong this time too. And his mistake is simply this, trusting God is not an opiate. Trusting God is not a painkiller. The life of faithfulness is full of struggle and threat and discomfort. As a friend said to me this week, Jesus shows us that the way of faithfulness, the way that he embodies is both hard and good. Hard and good live together. If we want the easy way out, we have the wrong Lord. And this is what Jesus is proving to us in the wilderness and maybe proving to himself he shows that he is ready to live within his limits. What kind of son of God will Jesus be? One who suffers, one who struggles, one who is thrust into a world that has power over him, and this son of God will be fully faithful to God within the constraints of human life which is why we can hope, which is why we in our limits have hope. He does not accept that comfort of Psalm 91. He turns it away quoting scripture back to the devil because he knows the way of redemption confronts the powers, confronts the principalities and powers, confronts the deadly dominating power of empire. Not through cheap tricks and feats of daring by leaping off of temples but through the cross. Jesus will be lifted up. He'll be lifted up on a high place. But it won't be an easy out. It will be the cross, and on the way to that cross, and the reason he gets to that cross is he's confronting every evil, every toxic effect of sin that corrupts and destroys our humanity along his way, and in that cross, he extinguishes all that opposes God in that unmatched act of faithful, loving resistance. Jesus knows the way will be hard. And that the way is good. And we know this because we've been listening. in Eucharistic Prayer C which we'll pray today and we use during Lent we say these very important words, "deliver us from the presumption of coming to this table for solace only and not for strength, for pardon only and not for renewal" even in the moment of our greatest comfort and solace we are challenged into faithfulness. When Jesus is arguing with the devil, the devil is quoting the Psalms and Jesus is quoting Deuteronomy. And one of the characteristic preoccupations of Deuteronomy is this fear that in prosperity, Israel will forget what God has done for them and who God is for them. Just like Deuteronomy 26 today. But Israel when they enter the promised land and become prosperous and secure, when the text says they inhabit other people's houses and take over other people's orchards and fields -it's right there in the text, they're taking over someone else's occupied land - Will they remember God and what God has done for them? Will they remember their God with their first fruits? Will they recognize the gift of all they have? Will they acknowledge the sacred or trample the sacred and worship the work of their own hands? It's this forgetfulness about who God is and what God has done for us and how we are God's people that the prosperous are especially at risk of forgetting according to the Bible. Indeed, the prosperous mind often turns God into an abstraction. God becomes vague, impotent, a notion, an idea, not a force that can push us, pull us, move us, change us, surround us, comfort us. And once again, Jesus is our comparison. He remembers who he is. He remembers who God the father is and doing so he resists the temptation to be something more than he is. Something more than he is. He's not going to be a Superman. He's not going to display the will to power. He will not be a Charlatan, a trickster. He will not offer cheap, dishonest grace. He's not a manipulator. He won't present himself as invulnerable or impermeable. He will not be a tyrant. He is tempted like we are in every way and yet he is faithful. Jesus knows that the way is hard and the way is good. For that hard way, Jesus gives us some help today. He teaches us frankly and honestly and he shows us a practice I want to commend to you. When we struggle with whatever bedevils us, and we are bedeviled people, let's face it. How about we try on the practice of quoting scripture to ourselves? I do it. I hope you will do it. When I'm triggered by my compulsions, when I'm triggered by my fears, when I'm triggered by my neurotic inner life, I simply interrupt the cycle and I insert a verse from a Psalm like Psalm 91 "God, you are my refuge and my stronghold." God, you are my refuge and my stronghold and those words of comfort can center me for the faith I try to follow even when I'm afraid. Or I say to myself, "you are bound to me in love. Deliver me." You are bound to me in love. Deliver me. And my fear can Go away in part and I can function again in my limits and my faithfulness. My cravings can retreat. My compulsions subside because Jesus has gently reminded me that he is my Lord and he does this for me. Maybe it sounds too easy. Maybe I could be accused of being cheap, but here's what I believe and here is my experience. That I am joining a struggle that has already been won. The powers that bedevil us inside and out have been defeated. Ultimately defeated by the death and resurrection of Jesus so that we can be saved, saved even from ourselves. Amen. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Tune into the sermon from the Rev. Barbara Ballenger for the Last Sunday After the Epiphany, February 27, 2022. Support St. Martin's mission and ministry by giving online: stmartinec.org/give Today's readings are: Exodus 34:29-35 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2 Luke 9:28-36, [37-43a] Psalm 99Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/ Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Listen to this week's sermon from LIFT Worship from the Rev. Carol Duncan for the Last Sunday after the Epiphany, February 27, 2022 Learn more about LIFT, Living in Faith Together, at stmartinec.org/lift Today's Readings: Exodus 34:29-35 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2 Luke 9:28-36, [37-43a] Psalm 99Readings were taken from God's Word, My Voice: A Children's Lectionary Transcript: You all just heard the Gospel as I read it. Now let me tell you how our story rises out of the biblical story. You are in this story. I hope you will put your body into the story to make the story your own. So, here's how we're gonna do it. We are going up a mountain with Jesus, Peter, James, and John. I invite you to step out into the aisle to discover for yourself and to show others how it feels to climb this mountain. Take big steps in place as though you are climbing up a steep mountain. Take some deep breaths because you get out of breath as you climb. We get to the top. The climb has made us sleepy. Find a place to sit down and close your eyes, because you are so sleepy. Now with your eyes closed, try to see what is happening in our story. Suddenly the air around us changes. We are inside a glowing light. In a sort of dream we see that Jesus' clothes have become dazzling white. Now two other people come to stand next to Jesus. And somehow in your dream you know who these people are. One is Moses who led God's people for 40 years through the wilderness to the promised land. The other is Elijah who led God's people when a wicked king and queen worshiped idols instead of worshiping God. Moses and Elijah each put an arm around Jesus because they tell him his life on earth is coming to an end. Jesus is going to come and live with them in the realm of everlasting love. As you see this happen, a great love for Jesus swells up in your own heart. Can you feel that love and awe there on the mountain? And so you want to do something for Jesus because now you know he will be leaving you in this life. You want to keep Jesus with you. Maybe we could put the LIFT tent back up for Jesus. But now a cloud comes and covers you so you are afraid. Breathe in the cold dampness of the cloud with the light shining through it. A great voice like thunder surrounds you in the cloud. "This is my Son. He is the One I have chosen. Obey him." The voice fades but the echoes ring in your ears up on that mountain. And now you sort of wake up and you are back in your seat, or come and sit back if you have left it. And if you're very very much asleep you can just listen. So we are back on level ground at St. Martin's, here's where our story comes into the biblical story. You know that our priest Rev. Barb Ballenger has been with us for most of your lives, certainly for the whole time of LIFT. Now she is leaving us to go be a priest at St. Peter's in Glenside. I am as sad about this as Peter and James and John were sad to learn that Jesus was leaving them. But I am also as glad as they were to know that great person Barb and that great person Jesus. She has taught me to know more about Jesus. I wish she could be with us longer, forever. But I know that my life has changed and grown because of her. I will keep faithful to LIFT and to loving Jesus as she taught me. I hope you know what a light has shown on us because of Barb. You may come to know it more and more in your continuing life at St. Martin's. We have been blessed for sure. And that is the good news for today. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Tune into the sermon from the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the Seventh Sunday After the Epiphany, February 20, 2022. Support St. Martin's mission and ministry by giving online: stmartinec.org/give Today's readings are: Genesis 45:3-11, 15 1 Corinthians 15:35-38,42-50 Luke 6:27-38 Psalm 37:1-12, 41-42Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/ Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Don't Be a Stump The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel February 20, 2022 Please join me in the spirit of prayer. I grew up in a home where there were mixed messages about love. I might not be alone in that. My mother taught me at least two versions of love. One: love turns you into a stump. The second one she also taught me was: love causes you to take a stand. Now, the stump lesson came through a children's book she used to like to read to us all: The Giving Tree. Now, in that story there is a boy and there is a tree and the tree is a she. The she-ness is important here, because as the story goes the little boy loved the tree and the tree loved the little boy and they delighted in each other and played and frolicked and slowly the boy took things from the tree, and she gave them out of her delight. He wanted the apples, he got the apples. He wanted the leaves, he got the leaves. He wanted the branches, he got the branches. He wanted her trunk, he got her trunk. Until she was a stump. Love evidently means giving your whole life away until you're a stump. My mom stopped reading us that story as her feminism grew, and as she made progress in Al-Anon. My sisters and I like to joke that she was of the fundamentalist branch of Al-Anon. Boy, could she detach with love. It's a problematic story. I'm not the only one to say this. This notion that love is so sacrificial that you make yourself disappear. She taught me the "take a stand" lesson about love at church. During the late 70's, during liturgical reform and prayer book reform, my mom was the first person at Christ Church in Brunswick, New Jersey to stand up after the Sanctus. Remember, back in the day after the Sanctus was sung, everybody hit their knees. My mom called this "mowing them down." And there I was as a small child in our colonial box pew and there was mom standing. The only one. And I wanted to hide in a weird mix of embarrassment and pride. Then Communion came. We gathered around the altar rail and she was still standing. The only one to stand to receive Communion. It caught on eventually. But what she was teaching me with courage and grace and a deep faith was that our human dignity has been restored and recognized by God so that in God's presence we can stand in our dignity. We don't need to kneel. God has restored us and recognized us as God's image here on earth, and so she stood with dignity and I learned that to love is to stand up. Now, if you are one of the people who has been sticking with Jesus's sermon on the plain in Luke, are you still listening? That's how our passage begins today. "Are you still listening?" This is challenging stuff, these beatitudes and woes and challenging instructions for those of us who might be disciples, and you might wonder with this lesson about loving enemies and praying for those who abuse you, whether Jesus is calling us to be a stump for the sake of love or to take a stand for the sake of love. For me, it is the second and by now, you know me, I will explain why. For fidelity to the text and pastoral reasons, I believe we are called by Jesus to stand as we love our enemies. Remember that Jesus is preaching to his disciples. He has done the Beatitudes and the Woes. He has told us very clearly that if we follow him we can expect to be reviled and he said also, "Woe to those who are admired." Right before the current passage, Jesus says, "Woe to you when all speak well of you. For so our ancestors did to the false prophets." Jesus is telling us that if we choose to be disciples we are called to be truth-telling prophets, and as truth-telling prophets we should expect to have mixed reviews, if not full out enemies. So this teaching about enemies, this teaching about loving your enemies, comes from the fact that we're gonna have some, and then what do you do? And Jesus is really clear. He said twice in this passage, "Love your enemies." Now, if you thought the Trinity was hard, or the Incarnation or the Resurrection, I think "Love your enemies" is right up there on the Christian Challenges. And Jesus knew we would struggle. He knew his people would struggle, so he teaches them a new thing. You might know the German philosopher Hannah Arendt for her Banality of Evil: Trial of Eichmann. She also has a book called The Roots of Totalitarianism where she points out that it's very easy to form community when you identify an enemy. If you have an enemy to react against you can create internal cohesion and identity against that enemy. And she is of course talking about Germany in the 30's and 40s. Jesus is not going to give disciples that option. They cannot be a community that gains its identity by having enemies. They will have enemies, but they cannot get a cheap internal sense of fellowship by having those enemies, because they must love those enemies. Now we might think, well we are Episcopalians, we don't do that. We like to say other people do that. But we do that all the time! Every time one of our members says, "Oh those Evangelicals! Oh those Fundamentalists!" we're doing it. We're defining ourselves against somebody else. Jesus doesn't let us do that. We are to love our enemies which simply means that our identity is in that love not in its opposition. Our identity is in the love not in the opposition and because of our life in God we have through Christ, we have the spiritual freedom granted to us to exchange good for ill, to regard the good of the other, which is to love them. Jesus then gives some amazingly striking (literally) examples. And these are tough love examples and they come from knowing our human dignity is from God, restored and recognized and delighted in by God. How do we love the enemy? He gives some examples: the slap example, the strip example. In Matthew the extra mile example, and back in Luke the lending example. And what I want to say, coming out of wonderful theology done by Walker Wink in the context of South Africa during Apartheid, there is a very different reading of these examples. These examples have too often been used to rationalize abuse, to justify oppression, to create a passivity among Christians in this face of the intolerable. Wink found in South Africa a different reading. So for example, the slap - in the ancient world, a backhanded slap is a slap of disrespect. A superior slaps an inferior this way. To turn your cheek is an act of resistance. Forcing that person to slap you the other way, like an equal. This is resistance from knowing your dignity and insisting on their dignity. You are regarding their good by holding them accountable in asking them to recognize what's real and true. You are equals. Stripping - same thing. In the ancient world, it was legal to take your cloak. That was a legal way to get a debt repaid. And this whole little bit hinges on how many pieces of clothing people had in the ancient world. Any guesses? A cloak and a shirt and what else? Nope, two. You had two pieces of clothing so if you took the cloak and then took the shirt, you were naked. This nakedness was another form of resistance. If you are gonna treat me as less than human, I'm gonna call you on it by embarrassing you in this public space by getting naked and showing your exploitation. Once again, resistance. Non-violent resistance claiming integrity, claiming dignity on an equal basis. Same with the extra mile in matthew. A roman soldier could impress you in his service for one mile. Well, if you take on two that's you asserting your agency. That's you asserting your identity based in the generosity of god. That's you asserting your dignity which your oppressor wants nothing to do with. And on and on and on. You see where I'm going. If you read these examples the wrong way, we teach submission to oppression. If we teach them the way I think Jesus was teaching them, we learn transformational resistance. Transformational resistance that recognizes the necessity of dignity in all parties. Jesus is promoting the agency and spiritual freedom of his followers. Your identity is not as a victim. Your identity is not conferred on you by the would-be enemy. Your identity and agencies come from you from your life in Christ and your life in the Christian community. Remember you are a child of God. That little bit in this passage gets missed, doesn't it. "Remember you are a child of God." All things stem from that identity. So why is this so crucial? Why am I so wound up about this? Well, I am the son of a fundamentalist Al-Anon member, and it rubbed off on me, I know. I was raised on feminism all the way and I'm proud of that. I'm passionate about this because these stories are used to teach an unhealthy form of love. A sick form of love that gives away way too much and asks us to deface our dignity, destroy our health, ruin our self-regard to adapt to a dominating power however that comes. Pastorally, I've seen too much of this and I will not be a false prophet about it. I will be a truth-telling prophet about it. In my ministries with women in so many cases, I see women who have been taught to sacrifice everything just like that Giving Tree, to disregard themselves to the point of self-destruction. Giving up their safety, giving up their physical health, giving up the regard that is their right for the sake of abusers, narcissists, hateful, neglectful people, cautioned too often by pastors who say "Oh just put up with it. Love your enemy. " At the 8 o'clock service one person reminded me about his grandmother who was married to an abusive alcoholic and she went to her priest here in Philadelphia and the priest said, "oh just go home and be meek and mild." Because that's how Christians are, aren't we? Well, he said the good news is she divorced him, and she still went to Communion. She took a stand for love. I am passionate, I admit. I say no to that teaching that turns people into doormats for the sake of Christ. I say yes to standing up in love for the dignity God has so restored in us, because love, real love, is between people who respect and recognize the full dignity of the people engaging in that love. Love recognizes and respects the dignity of all involved. Love elevates the disregarded and it brings down the overly regarded, the haughty. There is no place for domination in love. Love resists mistreatment. It resists mistreatment so to reestablish and repair right relationship in the joy of God-given love which includes all parties in God's dignity. "Love your enemies" is not a request for warm, sentimental, gushy feelings towards our oppressors, tormentors and violators. Love is simply the desire for the good for each person who would be our enemy. For our own safety, and sanity and well-being we can love in a detached way. We can love from a distance. We can wish a person well in an openhearted way while keeping our limited boundaries in tact. This is the way of dignity and integrity. We can release a person from our life in love, handing them over to God for God's care where we no longer can do it. In short, I guess I sum up my sermon as I sum up advice to many people I work with pastorally: Don't be a stump. Stand up for love - God's love. The love that God gave everything for to restore our dignity. God gave everything in God's commitment to restore God's good creation in us and renew us in our risen image of Christ. So, my friends, let us be faithful to what God has done for us without trying to repeat God's work, letting God be God and letting ourselves be the humans that God made us to be in our dignity, our limits and our grace. Amen. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Tune into the sermon from the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the Sixth Sunday After the Epiphany, February 13, 2022. Support St. Martin's mission and ministry by giving online: stmartinec.org/give Today's readings are: Jeremiah 17:5-10 1 Corinthians 15:12-20 Luke 6:17-26 Psalm 1Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Epiphany/CEpi...A Teachable Moment The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel February 13, 2022 Please join me in the spirit of prayer. Lord God, we give you thanks that you have planted us by streams of clean water, that our souls like a root within us reach out to your refreshing good news that feeds our souls and brings us back to life. Save us from withering and make our leaves green and our fruit full of goodness in this life. In Christ's Name we pray. Amen. Jesus looked up at his disciples. Little detail in the gospel: Jesus looked up at his disciples. He'd just come down from a hilltop to a level place, yet he looks up. Why? Why does Luke include this little detail? Since his declaration in the synagogue in Nazareth Jesus has created one teachable moment after another for those who might follow him. Last week we had the miraculous catch of fish where Jesus the Lord of sea and sky, the one from the beginning of time whose creation this is, reveals himself as the messiah and gives the message that it was time to follow, for the end time had come. Revealing and teaching- theophany and instruction -go together in each teachable moment. So, looking up at his disciples Jesus is once again engineering his next teachable moment for those who are beginning to follow him. When I was last the rector at Saint Mary's church in Park Ridge, Illinois, Jane sat in the front row. Jane was blind and developmentally disabled. My children Tim and Martha sat with her every Sunday along with the wife of my deacon. During sermons Jane had a favorite comment to make when I told a story about Jesus. She would exclaim so the whole church could hear, "it's a teachable moment." And I would reply, "Yes Jane, it is a teachable moment." Jesus' position below his disciples, looking up at his disciples, sets up his teaching. It is the set up for the beatitudes and the woes, which he delivers to them from this position. In my imagination, I see Jesus down on the group with the sick, the unclean, the wretched, the troubled, looking up at the disciples and apostles, who are standing above the scrum. Maybe the disciples and apostles have not come all the way down from the hill. Maybe they're still hanging on to the special high of a private prayer session with Jesus on the hilltop. How wonderful that would be. Maybe the freshly minted apostles are still high on their new status as teachers of the way. Maybe they're standing aloof. Maybe they're spectators observing Jesus at his ministry in the trenches, not sure if they want to get their hands dirty yet. Jesus looks up at his teammates and begins to teach them from below: Blessed are the poor, blessed are the hungry, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the excluded, defamed and ridiculed. These powerful beatitudes are for these disciples in that moment. They're not random observations or generalizations about life. Jesus is teaching the disciples what they will experience if they continue to follow him. Part invitation, part fair warning. Jesus is saying that, "my way is a way of voluntary poverty and solidarity with the poor and the oppressed, the neglected, and the outcast." What can they expect if they continue to follow Jesus in his way of life with God? Blessed poverty, blessed hunger, blessed weakness, blessed exclusion, defamation and ridicule. Jesus is challenging us, Jesus is challenging all of us, to come down to his level, to hear his teaching from below, to meet him on a level place with the poor. And on any given Sunday some of us are spectators. Some of us are skeptics waiting to be convinced, some of us are aloof and more than a little embarrassed by the wildness of Jesus and the gospel. Some of us are just on the edge of departing into a life of discipleship and wherever you are you are more than welcome to hear this good news. This good news is challenging to all of us, challenging to the church, and for centuries the church responded by sending out monastics and hermits and missionaries who took on the way of voluntary poverty that Jesus lived and taught. However, today, what does it mean if the church is not inspiring such lives of sacrifice, such lives of beatitude, relinquishment and departure, for the sake of living the way of Jesus? Well Jesus addresses the obstacles. What's in our way from this departure? He addresses the aloof apostles as, of all things, the rich (We might say the relatively rich, which I prefer because most people like to claim we're not, when from a worldwide perspective we are.) We know some of those disciples owned boats and nets and ran family businesses and enjoyed the respect of their neighbors. Some of them left behind everything they owned just last week in the lectionary, so to these relatively rich disciples again Jesus says, "woe to the rich, woe to the full, woe to the entertained, woe to the admired. In other words it is because of your attachments that you have obstacles between you and God." What is the teachable moment for us? We who are among the relatively rich are being called from below to meet our Lord on a level place which is a place of blessing. It is a place of blessing because God is there in solidarity with the poor. Woe to us who are so attached to other endeavors and other things that we miss the opportunity of blessed life with our Lord. Woe to us who stand back as spectators, observers, critics, skeptics, so attached to our comfort and position that we do not enter the scrum with Jesus among all who need hope, healing sustenance and companionship. Jesus is telling us that by having less, we will have so much more, and that when we follow him, our lives will display these characteristics of a blessed life. And this is how I understand the characteristics of a blessed life that Jesus spells out: Poverty: it means following Jesus, means we'll have less wealth than we may have. We will be marked by generosity with our time, our talent and our treasure, and that generosity will flow towards those most in need. We could have been materially richer if it weren't for following Jesus. And that is my hope, that the Christian is someone with less because they are helping so many more. Hunger: following Jesus will mean that we consume less, that we exploit less, that we will use fewer resources to live more gently and generously on this planet and with our neighbors. We will endure hunger to renounce consumerism. Mourning: following Jesus will mean loving more people of all sorts and conditions, welcoming strangers and aliens and caring about the vulnerable, no matter where they may be. And so we will weep more, our hearts will break more often, our generous empathy will come with the cost and the gift of weeping. Finally, Rejection: following Jesus will mean taking up uncomfortable and unpopular causes, making solidarity with the despised, becoming identified with the outcast, and so we who choose to follow will also know rejection and ridicule. It will be a characteristic of following him. This is Jesus as his most challenging, my friends, but not so radical. The wonderful evangelist Tony Campolo, who no one would accuse of being a radical, once said based on this scripture, "God doesn't care if you make a million dollars. God only cares if you keep it." We are challenged. We are challenged to enter this way of life and our inspiration and our hope only comes from Jesus our Lord who is the only one who fulfilled this way of life, who vindicated this way of life in the resurrection, who showed us that this is what life harmonized with God looks like. The way of life harmonized with God is truly blessed, and so we only enter it on that faith and in that hope that we will be blessed, even if it's counterintuitive. We can do it because Jesus made that way for us and to that we say thanks be to God. Amen. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Tune into the sermon from the Rev. Barbara Ballenger for the Fifth Sunday After the Epiphany, February 6, 2022. Support St. Martin's mission and ministry by giving online: stmartinec.org/give Today's readings are: Isaiah 6:1-8, [9-13] 1 Corinthians 15:1-11 Luke 5:1-11 Psalm 138Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Epiphany/CEpi... Super Mommy Strength Rev. Barbara Ballenger Feb. 6, 2022 When my daughter Hannah was 3 years old, she attended a Montessori preschool at the end of our street. Even though it was in walking distance from our house, it was at the top of a very long hill, and every day I'd walk with her up that hill to take her there. And you know how 3 years old are. We'd get slower and slower as the hill got steeper and steeper. We'd get about halfway there and things would kind of grind to a halt. "Carry me, Mommy." The thought of walking another step up that hill seemed impossible to her. The thought of carrying her the rest of the way seemed impossible to me. And so I would take her hand in mine and I would say, "Hannah, what you need is some Super Mommy Strength." And I would squeeze her hand, and we would start walking really fast, and kind of power walk to the next stop sign. Then she'd slow down again, and I'd squeeze her hand again, and we'd power walk all the way up the hill together. It got to where she'd ask for it along the way. "Can I have some Super Mommy Strength?" And often it worked often enough. I've often thought that grace works like that. I'd do pretty well on my own steam, living my life of faith. And then a hill would get particularly steep, and I would slow down to a halt. And the thought of walking another step would feel impossible. And I would cry out to God - often to carry me. And more often than not there would arrive some extra energy, or assistance or aid, and I'd make it up that hill. Amazing grace. But today's Scriptures are inviting me to think about grace a little differently, as I hear Paul say "By the grace of God I am what I am." Not, "By the grace of God I get the rest of the job done." Or "By the grace of God, I go where I need to go." And thankfully not, "There but for the grace of God go I." (don't get me started on that one.) But by the grace of God, I am what I am. Our three Scriptures today give us three people of faith who become who they are because of a particular encounter with grace - Isaiah the prophet, Paul the apostle, Peter the disciple. The grace that they encountered was more than a dose of divine strength to kind of top off their tanks. Each one of these men experienced a direct encounter with God--a theophany. And it wouldn't be the last. These encounters reveal a God who stays near, whose relationship with them makes it possible for them to become the people that God needs them to be so they can do the things God needs them to do. Consider Isaiah. The passage is often referred to as the call of Isaiah; but actually, he's been at it awhile. This story is about a profound transformation that he undergoes so that he can enter the next leg of a difficult journey in the life of a prophet. He has this powerful vision of visiting the Court of God. And much like a dream where you look down and you realize you are not dressed for the occasion, or you realize perhaps you're not dressed at all, Isaiah remembers that no human can look upon God and live. "Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!" he cries. Then there's this image that has always given me the willies - a winged seraph touches Isaiah's lips with a burning coal held in tongs lifted from a fire. And the angel says, "Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed, and your sin is blotted out." And with his unworthiness out of the way, Isaiah is available to go where God is sending him next, carrying a different message than he carried before. Something similar happens to Paul when he encounters the risen Christ. The first thing that he has to face - after Jesus -- is his own sinfulness, his own short-sightedness. Despite his best intentions he had persecuted the Church of Christ. It takes Paul a while to see in the way that God desires him to see. But when he does, and those prejudices are out of the way, Paul is available to go where God is sending him next, with a different agenda than he carried before. Which brings us to Peter. In the Gospel of Luke, this call story is not the first encounter that Peter has with Jesus. He has already witnessed Jesus' healing and his preaching. You might recall that Peter hosted Jesus in his own house and that Jesus healed his mother-in-law. Perhaps it's because of that hospitality that Jesus chooses Peter's boat to get into when Jesus wants an off-shore platform from which to preach. Perhaps that's why Peter accommodates Jesus' request to take him fishing after a long and fruitless night at that very task. Maybe Peter was just being hospitable. And then fish after fish fill the nets. So many that they need other boats to help them haul them in. So many that the entire fleet is starting to go down under their weight. Unlike the others who are simply amazed, Peter knows a theophany when he sees one. "Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man," he cries out at Jesus' feet. "Don't be afraid," Jesus says. And with his fear out of the way, Peter is available to go where God is sending him next, doing a different kind of fishing than he did before. Of all of them Paul describes it best: "By the grace of God, I am what I am." In each instance God stands with God's chosen face to face. And in the blazing truth of that encounter, an old life falls away and a new life begins. A new person emerges. And the walk with God continues anew. Edward Campbell, writing in the Oxford Companion to the Bible, says that in the New Testament it's difficult to differentiate grace from the Holy Spirit, the presence of God. It will take 350 years or so for grace to be considered to be a thing, what Campbell calls "a kind of impersonal entity or quasi-physical force or power which lights upon those predestined to absorb it." I like New Testament grace better. I think we can find ourselves in its presence, with perhaps a little less cinematography. By the grace of God, we are who we are. Because in some way we have found ourselves face to face with God or at least in the presence of God, and the truth of that relationship transforms us. We understand that we have not only been given a gift we didn't earn, we have been changed by it. And that gift is the presence of God, the ongoing relationship God chooses to have with us, God's constant walk with us. And this is not just a gift for the individual, not the individual prophet or the apostle or the person in the pew. This is a gift that shapes the Church, that shapes the whole body of Christ. By the grace of God, we are who we are. And so maybe on second thought, grace is a tiny bit like what happened when Hannah and I would walk up that long hill to preschool. It probably wasn't the Super Mommy Strength that did it. But rather the feeling of my hand in hers, the fact that we could stop to rest if need be, and the realization that she was no longer a baby who needed to be carried - but that she had become a girl who could make it up that hill on the power of her own two legs -as long as we were both going there together. Amen. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Listen to this week's sermon from LIFT Worship from Ms. Anne Alexis Harra for the Fifth Sunday of Epiphany, February 6, 2022. Learn more about LIFT, Living in Faith Together, at stmartinec.org/lift Today's Readings: Hebrews 2:14-18 Luke 2:22-38 Psalm 24:7-10Readings were taken from God's Word, My Voice: A Children's Lectionary Today, we are celebrating The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, or Candlemas. We celebrate this day to remember the beautiful ancient traditions that Mary and Joseph followed. One of those traditions is Jesus' actual presentation in the Temple. In ancient times, babies had to be presented in the Temple as a way of formally introducing them to the world. And this happened 40 days after a baby was born. So, 40 days after he was born, Mary and Joseph took him to the Temple for his presentation! This story is so rich with tradition that I began to think about the different traditions we have. Traditions we have here at St. Martin's, traditions we have as people who live in Philadelphia (Go birds!), traditions we have in our own families. Because this day had such a beautiful story full of tradition and history, I'd like to share one of our family traditions with you. Every year on Christmas Eve, everyone in my dad's family piles into my Aunt Linda & Uncle Rob's home. The little ones wear red and green Christmas outfits, there's always a ham in the oven when you first walk in so it always smells really good, and my Aunt Linda has a biiiiiig bowl of her Christmas punch ready to share. Throughout the years, our party got bigger as our family got bigger. My aunt and uncle moved to a new home, and so did the party! Before my aunt and uncle took it over, my grandparents and their friends would have a Christmas Eve gathering! This party has been a tradition for our family for over 40 years. I love this tradition of gathering at Christmas because it makes me feel really connected to people in my family, even when I haven't seen them for a while. I am afforded opportunities to connect with my grandparents, even if they aren't here anymore, through our shared experience of this tradition. That is a really special thing to me. So when we look at our story again, we see traditions. We see Mary & Joseph connecting with their ancestors through these traditions, like I connect with my grandparents. But, they are also connecting to God through this sacred routine. And when we connect with God, we connect with people all over the world in different times and places. God provides us connection through things like traditions, or storytelling joyful people like Simeon the Prophet in the Temple. So I wonder, what traditions do you have? They don't have to be exclusively Christmas, but they can be. If you are a caregiver, think back to your own childhood. What traditions did you love? What traditions have you had to let go of over the years? If you are a child or a younger person, I wonder what traditions make you feel close to others? I wonder where you find those special connections, or special relationships, with people. And to everybody watching, virtually or in person, I wonder what traditions you can initiate or begin as a way to invite God's Light into your lives? Friends, thank you for letting me share one of my most beloved traditions with all of you. It has been a joy and I hope you'll think a lot about tradition and how you can connect to God in that special place this week. Amen Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Listen to this week's sermon from LIFT Worship from the Rev. Barbara Ballenger for the Fourth Sunday of Epiphany, January 30, 2022 Learn more about LIFT, Living in Faith Together, at stmartinec.org/lift Today's Readings: 1 Corinthians 13:1-13 Psalm 71:1-6 Luke 4:21-30Readings were taken from God's Word, My Voice: A Children's Lectionary Oh my goodness, if you are tuning in from home find a comfy spot on the couch or a chair and let's just reflect and think about what we heard today in our in scripture. Now, when I was a child I learned to pray from the people all around me. They taught me things like the Our Father, and they took me to church on Sunday, especially my mom and dad and my two sisters Anna and Jennifer. They taught me the songs that we sung at church and they taught me to pray at night, and when I was really little I would kneel down next to my bed and they would listen to my prayers. "Now I lay me down to sleep I pray the Lord my Soul to keep. Bless mom and dad and Anna Jennifer and our cat." When I got a little order and learned to read we would talk about Bible stories and when I had questions, my sisters especially would help me ask and answer those questions about God because they had had some of the very same questions and had gotten there just a little bit ahead of me. When I was a child I learned to hope and dream from people who had hopes and dreams for me. They would ask me things like, "What do you want to be when you grow up? What do you want for your birthday? What do you want for dinner?" They would ask me things like, "Tell me about the pictures you just drew. Tell me about the poem you write." They were interested in my hopes and dreams. When I was a child I learned to love from the people who loved me: my mom and my dad and my sisters. And I loved them, and my pets and my friends who sometimes weren't so easy to like and, I loved walking in the woods and looking for rocks with my dad. I loved making things, I loved writing poems, I loved playing the guitar which I learned when I was in 5th grade. And I loved singing songs. When I was a child I prayed like a child and I hoped like a child and I loved like a child. And I still do all those things, but not quite the way I did then, as a child. And so I learned to pray for more things, and recognize God in even deeper ways. My faith grew with me and in me. And I learned to love more and more people and more and more deeply and my love grew with me. And I learned to hope and to dream of more and more things and some dreams came true and others did not. I think my family would say that as I learned in faith and hope and love, their faith and hope and love grew from mine, so we helped one another grow in God's love and that's why truth and all of those things endure - faith and hope and love. So if you're a young person tuning in right now, I wonder if that's true for you. I wonder who has taught you how to pray, or what to hope for, or how to love, And I wonder what you pray for, and I wonder what your dreams are, and I wonder who and what you live. And if you are an adult tuning in and listening now, I wonder if you can remember those early times and who taught you to pray, who helped you to dream, who did you love, who taught you about love? And I wonder now, all grown up, what you pray for, what you hope for, who you love, because these things endure. They stay with us and they grow with us because they are the proof that God is with us. And so maybe a little later today you ought to talk about these things at home or with those you know or those that you're with. What are you praying for? What are you hoping for? What and who do you love and where is God in all of these things? God is there for all that lasts, and will take us on and on together because God is the source of our faith and our hope and our love. And that, my friends, is pretty good news. Amen. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Sermon from the Rev. Carol Duncan for the Fourth Sunday After the Epiphany, January 30, 2022. Today's readings are: Jeremiah 1:4-10 1 Corinthians 13:1-13 Luke 4:21-30 Psalm 71:1-6 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Epiphany/CEpi... A Love Story The Rev. Carol Duncan January 30, 2022 Holy One, be with our hearts today so your words of infinite love break through this mortal tongue. Amen. I knew I should base today's sermon on today's exquisite Corinthians love passage when I saw love at work last weekend. This is a love story. My family gathered at my nephew's house in Lancaster for our Christmas celebration. We do a secret Santa exchange, so each of the 11 of us is assigned one gift recipient. My granddaughter Moxie drew the name of my daughter Kate's partner Bobb. Got it? Granddaughter Moxie, daughter Kate, partner Bobb. Bobb had a pretty rough time this past year. Both his dogs, Tucker and Gracie, succumbed to old age and died within months of each other. This is a love story about dogs. Long ago when Bobb was single, Tucker and Gracie showed up consecutively as strays in Bobb's working-class neighborhood in Pittsburg. He advertised, but no one claimed either of the scruffy dogs. Neither dog had any of the accepted gifts of dog beauty or capacity. Both just so obviously needed attention, care, and love. They became a huge part of Bobb's life. They took him for multiple daily walks, camped together with him, greeted him at the door going out and coming in, required nursing from various doggy mishaps. They were always at his side. For her part, Moxie is in her senior year at the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Living so close to Bobb and Kate, she got to know those dogs pretty well. She has honed her innate talent and is becoming a real artist. She presented Bobb with his Christmas gift, a true to life portrait of Tucker and Gracie. In the painting, they look up at Bobb in eager expectation as they always did in life. Moxie accurately captured the love in those dogs eyes. I was sitting next to Bobb on the sofa, and I felt him quiver. He didn't speak. He couldn't. Tears were clogging his throat. Bobb's love for his dogs and the joy at their appearing in this painting nearly overpowered him. He tried to thank Moxie, but words were beyond him. He sort of strangle-whispered "I was hoping, I was hoping". This relationship of Bobb with his dogs seemed like a way to approach the amazing gift of love. A dog's love is so clear and simple. A dog is patient. Even if the dog wants to go out now, the love is patient. Dogs' love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude, unless you count barking as rude. It bears all things that its human clumsily imposes, hopes for all things delicious or exciting, endures all things it doesn't quite understand. Its love never ends because it doesn't get entangled with the concept of time. The self-involved limitations of human loving are invisible to dogs. I can't truly describe how a faithful dog loves its human, or how humans love their dogs. Words just get in the way. I ask you to consult your own gut level awareness for the constrictive, throat catching trembling impact that may envelop you when you are reunited after an absence with a dog, or a beloved pet, or child, or one who is more important to you than your own self. All of this is a prequel to talk about the even more indescribable love that is God. Indescribable, which is why Paul's words to the Corinthians are so compelling. Many, maybe most, of us live so heedlessly within God's love that we remain unaware of it. God dwells in the pull of gravity that holds us on the ground. The flow of blood in our veins and the breath in our lungs are God alive in us. Our Epiphany liturgy from the Anglican Church of Canada captures very simply what God does for us. In it we say "We give you thanks and praise, almighty God, for the gift of a world full of wonder, and for our life which comes from you. By your power you sustain the universe. You created us to love you with all our heart and to love each other as ourselves." This is still a love story. God not only created the universe, but God sustains it. I believe that the universe and all created beings are manifestations of God's love, indwelt by divine vitality. God's love is the energy that inhabits and drives everything that is and ever was, seen and unseen. We truly cannot imagine God's love except in little ways, like love stories about dogs and people and saints. I think this love story we have today is a call to us to lay down our fears of what's happening in the world, of Ukraine, of the pandemic, of a stock market correction. Fear stifles our willingness to live in love. There is terrible evil in the world. But there is also love. I'm inviting us to meditate on love as an antidote to the fear in the world. We can practice this right here, right now. The first practice (I have three) is to look around you and see that we are acting in love for each other by wearing N95 masks to protect us from Omicron. Even though distanced, we are together as members of St. Martin's here in this sanctuary and connected in the air by live stream. Feel with your eyes the love of the body of Christ surrounding you. Feel with your eyes the love of the body of Christ surrounding you. The second practice is meditative breathing. We can apprehend the Spirit through our breath, feeling the air fill our lungs while our hearts pump blood through our bodies. In becoming aware that each breath is God sustaining us, each breath then becomes a prayer. The third practice is to feel the gravity that is holding you in your seat. God imposes the gravity that holds you here and holds the earth in its circumnavigation of the sun, and the planets in their courses. Now take a leap of imagination beyond the sun and even beyond the Milky Way Galaxy. More than gravity sustains the unimaginable expanse of the cosmos. That more-than is God, in whom time and space conjoin. The infinite and the instant have equal regard to God. So take faith that you are held by God, have hope that you can live out God's will for you, and be assured that God's love for you is now and will be forever. Amen. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Listen to this week's story from LIFT Worship from Ms. Anne Alexis Harra, Minister for Children and Youth. Learn more about LIFT, Living in Faith Together, at stmartinec.org/lift Today's readings are: 1 Corinthians 12:12-20, 27 Psalm 19 Luke 4: 14-21 Readings were taken from God's Word, My Voice: A Children's Lectionary Being In the Body Ms. Anne Alexis Harra January 23, 2022 Good morning friends. I'm so excited to be with you all today. This morning, we heard from our good friend the apostle Paul. And we've been hearing a lot from him lately, which makes sense because he wrote 13 letters after the Gospels. He had a lot to say. He wrote them to different churches and different people. And the passage we read this morning is from his first letter to the Church in Corinth, which is a place in Greece. This particular letter is really special because it talks so much about how we can and should love one another. Paul talks a lot about baptism, and that's also really important, because we are given God's love through baptism. And Paul also talks a lot about the different gifts, or different personality traits, that we are given through the Holy Spirit. Last week, Paul referenced the different gifts that we all have: some have the gift of teaching, or healing, or preaching, or a number of other gifts. But all of those gifts, even though they're different and they're different in each person, they all come from the Holy Spirit. This week, Paul tries to explain it to us in another way. He talks about the body. And I don't know if you're learning in school about the different bones and muscles of the body, but they're all really important. He actually mentions parts of the body: our feet, our ears, our eyes. He talks about these body parts as a way of describing us. An eye does not make up the whole body, but it's really important because it helps us see things. One person does not make up the whole body of Christ, but he or she or they is an important part! All of us are part of this interesting, beautiful, unique whole body through Jesus. That is a beautiful gift. This week, I invite you to think about being part of the Body of Christ. If you want, you can think about it like Paul did, and think about different body parts. Are you the hands of Jesus? Or, are you the neck, supporting the people around you? Are you the feet, walking with people? Or maybe you are the heart which can give and receive so much love to everyone around you. No matter which body part you are, though, remember that God loves you because you are important and you are part of the Body of Christ. That's my good news for the week. Amen. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Revisit the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel's sermon for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany, January 23, 2022.Today's readings are: Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a Luke 4:14-21 Psalm 19Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Epiphany/CEpi... Please join me in the spirit of prayer. Jesus sets a very high bar for preachers this morning. His whole sermon on Isaiah 61 was nine words long. No wonder he was a popular preacher in Galilee. I apologize. I can't do that. So my question to Jesus' reading of Isaiah 61 in the Luke passage is, where did the vengeance go? Where did the heartbreak go? These are the questions that my Saturday Bible Study asked of the text when we looked at Luke 4 and then flipped back to Isaiah 61 and read the original. In the original text, where it says "the acceptable year of our Lord", it follows immediately with "and the day of vengeance of our God. So, "I'm here to proclaim the acceptable year of our Lord and the day of vengeance of our God". Jesus leaves that out. Earlier in the passage where it says "I've come to bring Good News to the Poor" the next phrase is "and bind up the broken hearted." Also, strangely, missing. Maybe Jesus got a faulty scroll, who knows, but one of the class members made this observation: the sorrow is missing, the broken hearted is missing, the vengeance is missing. All the times in Isaiah 61 where grieving and mourning are, are missing. Why is that? And this Bible Study member reached into scripture and said "well when the bridegroom is present, we don't mourn. " When the bridegroom is with us we do not mourn. The whole passage points to Jesus. "This has been fulfilled today in your hearing. All eyes are fixed on him." He is the fulfillment, the consummation of Israel's hopes. He is the promise of Israel's relationship with God come true. He is the healing of the Nations. He is the joining of humanity to God in their synagogue. The bridegroom is present so we celebrate even when we have cause to sorrow. We celebrate even when we have cause to mourn. "All eyes were fixed on him. Today this has been fulfilled in your hearing." I know for myself that I have learned through much painful experience to fix my eyes on him, to fix my eyes on Jesus. When my boat is rocking and swamping and being overwhelmed by the storm of life, when I am full of fear and despair and horror and hurt, I have learned to look up, to stand up in my rocky fragile boat and fix my eyes on Him who renews me. Who rejoices in my heart. Who fills me with the spirit again. And when I fill my eyes with my loving savior moving towards me, I become resilient again. I become revived again. In my mourning, in my sorrow, in my fear, I can celebrate as well. Sorrow and celebration - these go together. We can be dragged down by one and lifted by the other and the gift of our life and faith is that that lifting factor comes from outside of ourselves. Let's see how this sorrow and celebrating plays out in Nehemiah and in Corinth. We see it on display in the Nehemiah passage (We get to hear Nehemiah once a year, so let's do this). Nehemiah is describing the same group of people who are addressed by Isaiah 61, the people who've been returned from Exile back to Jerusalem. The first thing they've done is build a wall. They've rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem to secure themselves, to find that security these traumatized people desperately need. The next thing they're doing is gathering with all eyes fixed on the Torah, on the teachings of God, to renew their relationship with their Lord in this great public gathering of men and women and all who can understand. Now, things are brewing for these people. These traumatized people are in conflict with each other. They're debating the place of foreigners among them. Can people who do not speak the language stay, or shall we cast them out? For all those who married foreign women, do we cast out the foreign women and their children? They're a community in conflict and they're turning to the Word. We don't know which Word was read to them. Was it Leviticus? Was it Deuteronomy? We do know it took a really long time and they were standing out there for a long time, but whatever was read, this covenant with God was read and renewed among them. It caused them sorrow and weeping and mourning, and this is the sorrow and weeping and mourning of moral failure. We all know that when we let ourselves down, when we do not live up to our ideals, when we fall short of our standards, we grieve. We mourn. We sorrow for the harm we've done to ourselves and others. This is the moral weeping of a people hearing how they have failed God as a special people set apart. As a special people set apart they know their story. By failing their obligations to God they have fallen into this state of despair. But they're not left there. That's not the final word. The sorrow and despair causes them to humble themselves, to bend down and press their foreheads to the ground in that beautiful posture of supplication that we know so well from the mosque, if you've ever attended. And they're devastated by God's word to them, which also includes really stern words about welcoming the stranger, which they're falling short of at that moment. They are then invited from sorrow into celebration. Don't mourn but celebrate. "The joy of the Lord is your strength." And if I want you to take home any word of scripture with you today, it's that. "The joy of the Lord is your strength." God's desire to connect with you through Torah, through instruction, through this beautiful law, revives your soul in this moment and gives you that next chance to live in relationship with God. So, in your sorrow, I will speak a word of celebration and it will literally raise you off your knees to become God's renewed, revived community. Now let's go to Corinth. Corinth, once again, sorrow and celebration. Corinth is this very sophisticated, very cosmopolitan city on this isthmus between Athens and Sparta. It's a rich mercantile city and a great trade route location, and it's one of the most argumentative and petty churches that Paul founded. And their big issue is that they cannot figure out how to be the body of Christ together when there are aristocratic elites and the poor all at the same table. They don't know how to do this. So, when the passage starts off with that great Good News, "In Christ there's neither Jew nor Greek", the whole room can celebrate because they're all gentiles. "Oh my God, we're brought into the covenant, who would ever have thought this possible, thanks be to God." But the next line kicks into sorrow - "neither the slave nor free." Wait, what? This is the rub for the Corinthians. How do you sit as an equal in Christ with somebody you don't even honor as a person? In the ancient world only the aristocratic elite were persons. They were the only ones who had that status. The slaves and the plebes were non-persons. They were often referred to as bodies. Cleverly St. Paul takes this figure from the Greek world and turns it back on the community. This sophisticated group would have known how Plato and Aesop and Livy had used the image of a body to explain the State. Aesop had a great fable about this where the mouth and the hands and the teeth go on strike against the stomach. They all get fed up with feeding the stomach because the stomach gets all the food while they do all the work. But in Plato and Aesop, the moral is get back to work and serve the stomach. Get back to work and serve the higher authority. In Paul it's quite different. In Paul he's using this common analogy to say, "no, we are all equals. You might think you're the head. You might think you're the more honorable part of the body, but you're on par with the less honorable." (And he's being euphemistic about genitals here. We're an adult service, I can say this) "You are as dependent on them as they are dependent on you. In the spirit of God, in the church, in this community made by Christ we are equals". And this is a cause of sorrow and mourning and loss to those of high status, and a cause of celebration of low and dishonored status. But they are One in the spirit, so they celebrate and they sorrow together. The sorrow and the celebrating overcome the antagonism of rivalry, of being opposed to each other. We are called to be a community that remembers that we sorrow and we celebrate together. And in our celebration we remember all that God has accomplished for us that cannot be taken away from us. And in that knowledge of what God has done for us we find our resilience, our hope, our courage, our ability to support our brothers, our sisters, our siblings who sorrow and are destroyed. I'll never forget my great hospital chaplain supervisor Mark Grace (so well named) saying to me once in Supervision, "Jarrett, it doesn't help the patient if you are as depressed as they are. Remember who is with you. You bring the risen Christ into that room and in that rising you both shall rise, sorrowing and celebrating in God's eternal life." Amen. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Revisit the Rev. Barbara Ballenger's sermon for the Second Sunday after Epiphany, January 16, 2022.Today's readings are: Exodus 3:7-12 Psalm 77:11-20 Galatians 3:23-29 Luke 6:27-36Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/LesserFF/Apr/King.h... The Circle of Mercy The Rev. Barbara Ballenger January 16th, 2022 Let us pray. Lord God, who showed your servant Martin Luther King the way of agape love, guide us in that way as we listen for your word today. On November 17, 1957, The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. walked to the pulpit of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He was sick. The doctor told him to stay home and rest, but he insisted he had to preach that day, so they reached a compromise. King would not go into the pulpit until it was time to preach, and after that he would go directly home and get in bed. And that's what he did, I imagine. But in the half hour or so that he stood at that pulpit, he preached on the call to love our enemies. He used the text from Matthew chapter 5 which parallels the one that we had from Luke today, but the ideas are the same. Dr. King told the congregation that this was a topic that they had heard him address before, because he made it a point of preaching on it at least once a year, adding to it as he developed his thinking. It was at the core of his transformative work. His vision of the Beloved Community requires the transformation that happens to enemies when they are loved and forgiven. He preached, "The words of this text glitter in our eyes with a new urgency. Far from being the pious injunction of a utopian dreamer, this command is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilization. Yes, it is love that will save our world and our civilization, love even for enemies." And that is hard, he said. Very hard. But Jesus wasn't playing, he said. And neither was Martin. That's likely why dragged himself out of his sickbed to preach on the importance of loving our enemies. Because Dr. King poured out his love, and his health and his very life in a 24/7 commitment to creating a world not only where the enemies of justice would no longer had the upper hand, but where they might become people who no longer despised, oppressed, exploited, or lynched others. This is what he meant by the Beloved Community. This image of Martin Luther King Jr., struggling with the challenge of illness and the call to preach, made me wonder what he might make of our COVID-soaked world today on the weekend of his 93rd birthday. What would he make of our fights over whether to vaccinate or wear masks to slow the spread of a killer virus? What would he make of the fact that racial injustice remains as deadly a problem as ever, or that it's one of the reasons why our democracy hangs in the balance? What would he make of the lives that are threatened over our polarizations? What would he preach? I think he would send us back to these words of Jesus: Love your enemies. And he'd remind us what Jesus meant by this: Do good to those who hate you, Bless those who curse you, Pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt....If anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. Seventy years ago Martin Luther King offered the people of Dexter Ave Baptist, and us, some very practical suggestions for loving those enemies. We must start by looking at ourselves, he said, at our own participation in the creation of enemies, our own tendency to harm and to alienate. He said, "Somehow the 'isness' of our present nature is out of harmony with the eternal 'oughtness' that forever confronts us. And this simply means this: That within the best of us, there is some evil, and within the worst of us, there is some good. When we come to see this, we take a different attitude toward individuals." That helps us to see our enemy as a mixed bag - just like us. He said, "When you come to the point that you look in the face of every man and see deep down within him what religion calls "the image of God," you begin to love him in spite of. No matter what he does, you see God's image there. There is an element of goodness that he can never sluff off. Discover the element of good in your enemy. And as you seek to hate him, find the center of goodness and place your attention there and you will take a new attitude." Now remember that this was coming from someone who endured racial slurs, and violent attacks, fire hoses, death threats, jailing, a stabbing and a bombing of his home over his demands for civil rights for black people. Martin Luther King Jr. had enemies. And I'm not talking about where he stood on peace. Another way to love your enemy, he told the congregation at Dexter Avenue Baptist church, is that, "when the opportunity presents itself for you to defeat your enemy, that is the time which you must not do it." When you have that moment to get even, when faced with the choice to harm or keep someone from moving ahead in life, he said, that's when you choose not to do it. "That," Dr King said, "is the meaning of love. ... Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all... It is the refusal to defeat any individual. When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power", he said, "you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system." And that is what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lived and died doing - working to defeat those sinful systems that caught up people within them and made it so very difficult for them to love or to be loved. As I considered the preaching of Dr. King this week, alongside the words of Luke's gospel, the ideas of Bishop Desmond Tutu also surfaced for me. Because another word for the love of enemy is forgiveness - and there is no one who has witnessed more fully, painfully and effectively to the power of forgiveness than Bishop Desmond Tutu, who died three weeks ago today. In The Book of Forgiving, which Desmond Tutu wrote with his daughter, the Rev. Mpho Tutu, the bishop wrote: "Without forgiveness, we remain tethered to the person who harmed us. We are bound with chains of bitterness, tied together, trapped. Until we can forgive the person who harmed us, that person will hold the keys to our happiness; that person will be our jailor. I recommend this book. It is powerful and practical, and honest. I recommend it to anyone who is either seeking to forgive someone or to be forgiven. The Book of Forgiving. And I have to say that of late, I'm not sure that I have it in me to rise to the level of Martin Luther King's agape love or of Desmond Tutu's forgiveness. I'm not sure I'm up to the task of loving those that I find myself diametrically opposed to, in fierce social and political combat with, in heart-breaking alienation from. I'm not a saint like Martin Luther King or Desmond Tutu. I can't, as the Gospel of Matthew suggests, Be perfect as my father is perfect. But I may be able to do what Luke suggests: To Be merciful as my father is merciful. I think, with God's help and with your help, I can create a space where I can grow and develop that ability to love and to forgive, a patient space to live inside of and to live out of. I can create a circle of mercy. Now Divine mercy is at the very core of God's relationship with Israel. It is what makes an undeserving and sinful people into a chosen people - mercy is the patient and gracious time and space that God gives people to repent, to live into the covenant, to grow in love. It is not a time of empty waiting on God's part, but an active time of calling, chastising, teaching, prophesying, lamenting and intervening. Mercy makes a space and opportunity for the undeserving to enter a place of loving relationship with God. "For he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked," says Luke. Having been both of those things in my life, I appreciate that about God. What if I were to create a circle of mercy out of which I might be able to love my enemy and forgive those who have hurt me? What do Martin Luther King, and Desmond Tutu and the author of Luke suggest I fill that circle of mercy with? I can start by filling it with prayer for my enemies, a desire at least for healed relationship. I can fill it with blessing for those I am in conflict with - that force of imagination that sees both me and my enemies as a mix of good and evil, all beloved of God despite our failings. I can make choices in my circle of mercy - the kind act, the held tongue, the stayed hand, the suppressed schadenfreude. In the Book of Forgiving, Desmond and Mpho Tutu suggest four practices that lead to the love of enemies that we call forgiveness. These include telling the story of the harm they have inflicted outloud to another; and naming the hurts that resulted; and granting forgiveness in its time, and ultimately deciding whether to renew the relationship or release it. Which is to say, that the patiently held space within the circle of mercy can be pretty full of things to do while we wait. It does not demand that we declare the love of our enemy before we actually have it, or forgive before we've named the harmed, or force a peace before there is peace. But it is a space where we ask God and one another to prepare for it, welcome the possibility of it. Perhaps we can honor the life, and the death and the resurrection of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by committing to make within ourselves and our faith community such circles of mercy, to pray the "Prayer before the Prayer" as Desmond Tutu calls the prayer before one is able to forgive. So I'll leave us with the last stanza of his prayer by that name: "Is there a place where we can meet You and me? The place in the middle The no man's land Where we straddle the lines Where you are right, And I am right too, And both of us are wrong and wronged. Can we meet there? And look for the place where the path begins, The path that ends when we forgive?" Amen. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Revisit the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel's sermon for the First Sunday after Epiphany, January 9, 2022.Today's readings are: Isaiah 43:1-7 Acts 8:14-17 Luke 3:15-17, 21-22 Psalm 29 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Epiphany/CEpi... Please join me in the spirit of prayer. Lord God, we give you thanks that through your word you address our hearts and our souls and you remind us that we are precious to you, honored and loved. By your Holy Spirit help us receive your word to us and let that word open our hearts that we may live in love with you in each day ahead. In Christ's name we pray. Amen. When my mom would take my sisters and I to go see her sister Thala in Clovis, New Mexico, the troops had a certain ritual. We would fly from New Jersey to Amarillo, Texas. My Uncle Bill would pick us up in his big sedan that smelled like the cattle feedlots where he worked. He would immediately drive us to the best barbecue restaurant on Route 40. It was not much to look at but we would zip in get our barbecue and our Dr. Pepper in a tall glass bottle. At that time in New Jersey you could still not get good barbecue or even Dr. Pepper not to mention Mexican food, which is another story. Then we would start the long trip across the panhandle through the small towns and the cotton fields that went on forever until we arrived in Clovis with our Dr. Peppers empty. And all the bottles all went into one of those wonderful old wood soda boxes, with the cokes and the seven ups. We'd rattle them into the case and I found this all utterly fascinating because in New Jersey we could not redeem buzz and I did not understand the whole idea of redemption. I still don't, but the notion is that the bottle has value. They call it deposit value. It is still an object of value that through a process of redemption can have a new or second life of fruitful use again. Now for me as a New Jersiate I just thought this was a useless object on the verge of the landfill. This was junk. But in New Mexico this had value because of redemption. This is actually how I understand redemption. Redemption is God reminding us that we have value. Redemption is God reminding us that we have value and restoring us to the relationship that gives us that value in the first place, and it is how God loves us into freedom. This redemption story of God's love for us is all over that Isaiah passage which is a glorious, glorious passage. Our deposit value if you will is illustrated by how the passage is book ended by the prophet Isaiah referring to our creation - "you were created o Jacob, you were formed of Israel". The verbs "creation" and "formed" repeat at the beginning and the end and they are the verbs from the book of Genesis that refer to the creation of the world itself from chaos and the creation of the first human Adam. God formed and created us. We are precious to God as God's creation. Wrapped up in that creation story is the story of redemption. There is also imagery of Exodus and return from exile. Water, fire, these are images of the people of Israel fleeing from Egypt into the promised land and the story even proposes a whole geopolitical notion of redemption where God has caused the defeat of some nations - the traditional oppressors of Israel - so Israel could be set free once again in the promised land. Our God is a creating God and a redeeming God because God never loses sight of our value even if we do. And then this redeeming story goes even a little heavier because in ancient Israel the redeemer was a family member who had the job of setting you free if you became enslaved due to debt. So if you became so indebted to someone in your village that that person could literally enslave you, take your freedom, own you, you had a family member whose job it was to redeem you. In other words, ransom you, set you free. Someone whose job it was to remember your value and restore your right relationship, and Israel applied this notion to what God did. God ransoms us at a price and sets us free and this language of redemption is all the way that God says to us how precious we are. How valued we are. How essential we are to what God is doing. Hear that incredibly intimate language Isaiah: "you are precious to me, you are honored by me, I love you." God loves you. The "you" is second person singular. "God loves you" was an unprecedented statement in ancient literature, an incredible gift and affirmation of our value to God. The story is a beautiful background for what happens in Luke where all the same elements are at play. We have the reminders of creation. We have water and the Holy Spirit with Christ in the middle. It's an ancient image of creation. The logos, God the father, the creator, the holy spirit that moved over the waters of creation, all are present reminding us that this is a new creation coming into being right in front of us. John is present telling us about the renewal of the covenant. His baptism was a reminder of the passage of the waters through Exodus into the promised land. It was a covenant renewal ceremony where Israel was remade, reformed - those same verbs again - into the people God intended them to be. And as a renewal it was a redemption. So we see the baptism of Christ himself as a next stage in God's redemptive outreach to us. God will send. God will be our relative. God will be our relative whose sins help someone to redeem us from all that enslaves us. From all the depths and relationships that we've entered into that bind us and draw us away from God. God will pay that price and indicate how valuable we are to God by sending a son. Redemption reminds us of our value. Redemption restores us to the relationships that give us value, and one of the great gifts of this baptism story and there's so many, is that when God addresses Jesus (and in Luke it's private if you'll notice, it's an intimate address) when he comes up from the water and prays, God says "you are my beloved" and we hear the echoes of Isaiah: "I love you." But because Jesus has taken on our humanity and because Jesus has started the new creation of our humanity in incarnation and baptism we can hear those words directed to ourselves. Those words are for Jesus first and foremost but they're also God's words to the humanity he desires to restore. "You are my beloved with whom I am well pleased." So my prayer for you and for each one of us is to sit in those words today and let those words address you, each one of you, where you are the person addressed. Hear God's voice to you: "You are my beloved. You are precious to me." Let those words open your heart and set you free, and let those words guide you, because all those other voices that invade us about how lousy we are, rotten we are, those aren't from God. The voice of God is "I love you. You are my beloved." Amen. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Revisit the Rev. Barbara Ballenger's sermon for the Second Sunday after Christmas, January 2, 2022.Today's readings are: Jeremiah 31:7-14 Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a Matthew 2:13-15,19-23 Psalm 84 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearABC/Christmas/C...Transcript coming soon.Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Sermon from The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel from the Nativity of Our Lord, Christmas Day, 10:00 a.m. Holy Eucharist, December 25, 2021 Today's readings are: Isaiah 61:10-62:3 Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7 John 1:1-18 Psalm 147 or 147:13-21Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearABC/Christmas/Chris...Transcript coming soon.Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Sermon from The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel from the Nativity of Our Lord, Christmas Day, 10:00 a.m. Holy Eucharist, December 25, 2021 Today's readings are: Isaiah 52:7-10 Hebrews 1:1-4,(5-12) John 1:1-14 Psalm 98Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearABC_RCL/Christmas/ChrsDay3_RCL.html#Nt1 Transcript coming soon. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Sermon from The Rev. Barbara Ballenger from the Nativity of Our Lord, Christmas Eve, 7:00 p.m. Choral Eucharist, December 24, 2021 Today's readings are: Isaiah 9:2-7 Titus 2:11-14 Luke 2:1-14(15-20) Psalm 96Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearABC_RCL/Christm... Transcript coming soon. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Sermon from Ms. Anne Alexis Harra for the Nativity of Our Lord, Christmas Eve, 5:00 p.m. Youth-led Eucharist, 2021. Today's readings are: Isaiah 9:2-7 Titus 2:11-14 Luke 2:1-14(15-20) Psalm 96Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearABC_RCL/Christm... Transcript coming soon. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Sermon from the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the Fourth Sunday of Advent. Today's readings are: Micah 5:2-5a Hebrews 10:5-10 Luke 1:39-45, (46-55) Canticle 15Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Advent/CAdv4_... Mary's Victory Song The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel The Final Sunday of Advent, December 19, 2021 Please join me in the spirit of prayer. Gracious God, you inspired Mary to give us your word and the Magnificat. Bless us whichever way our journey is going, whether we are being cast down or raised up, emptied out or filled up, help us know that it is a blessing to arrive with our neighbor in that place called enough. In Christ's name we pray. Thank you. My wife and I love every sort of music. If you know my wife Allison Bowden, she can sing large parts of Britten's Ceremony of Carols by heart and she's a big fan of Parliament Funkadelic, so that's how our family rolls. In fact we have a game we play with music which we call "Next line please." I will sing a line to her and she'll sing it back, like the next line in the song, so an easy one - and you can join in if you want, I will not sing, we will just recite -"Shake it up baby now" (The congregation responds: "Twist and shout.") "Ain't no mountain high enough." (The congregation responds "Ain't no mountain low enough.") "Jojo was a man who thought he was a loner." (The congregation responds: "but he knew it wouldn't last." and so on...) Now finally, "my soul magnifies the Lord" (The congregation responds: "the spirit rejoices in God, my savior." In a world without exclamation points - that is, the ancient world - you repeated things to make your point. If you wanted to explain and exalt and emphasize, you said it twice in a row. So Mary is saying essentially, "rejoice again, I say rejoice in our faithful God." She is singing a song, a prophecy of exaltation, of joy, of fulfillment and I want to spend time with it this morning. We've had it twice already. We might say, "that's a lot, Jared." We had it in the psalm position and we had it as part of the Gospel which was optional, but I wanted to do it as many times as we could. I wanted that because the song of Mary is something I would like us to have by heart and I believe it's also something that's extremely good for our hearts, because in it Mary is teaching us. Mary the apostle, Mary the prophet, Mary the theotokos, the bearer of God's teachings, is telling us how to recognize what our God is doing and who our God is. In fact she is teaching us who our God is by telling us what God does so we can discern the movements of God in our own lives in our own world. She is teaching us that our God is faithful and true and comes through on God 's promises so we can have confidence, we can have hope and we can be humble in our service with our Lord. Now, the song of Mary is a victory song. She is singing a victory song in a long tradition of woman prophets in Israel. She's in the heritage of Miriam who sings a wonderful victory song after the deliverance at the red sea. She's in the tradition of Deborah from Judges who sings a victory song. She's in the tradition of Hannah who sings a victory song after she is miraculously able to be pregnant, probably the closest to Mary's song. Mary has sung a victory song for what God has already achieved, what God has already accomplished, and it's an odd way she does it. It involves a special grammar. Now I grew up in the 70s when schools did not believe in grammar. They thought it was oppressive to our cool little souls, so they didn't teach it to us, so I had to do a lot of research this week, but the Magnificat is written in a verb tense that we don't have in English. It's written in a Greek verb tense called aorist a-o-r-i-s-t. We translate it into past perfect which doesn't quite do the job, but the past perfect is all those verbs in there: "has shown the strength of his arm, has scattered the crowd in the conceit of their hearts." I like that translation better. " has cast down the mighty from their thrones, has lifted up the lowly, has filled the hungry with good things, has sent the rich away empty." In the Greek what all this verbiage means is that this has been accomplished and continues. This has been done, the victory won, and the work continues. God 's work is ongoing and secured by God 's action. That's what makes it a victory song because otherwise we're asking Mary for the footnotes. "When has God done that, when has God done that, when has God done that?" God has done it in the incarnation itself. In the conception of this child, God has acted decisively to change the history and path of the world. God has acted decisively to reunite God with humanity, to do God 's eternal purpose which was to harmonize humanity with God. This is accomplished in this incarnation and we talk so much about the cross and the resurrection of how God does God 's word but the incarnation is the first stitch. It's the essential beginning of how God makes peace with humanity, how God makes shalom, and I use that word intentionally because it's so much richer than peace. God makes peace with humanity, overcomes our hostility. I want to pause on that for a minute because this is essential to what the Bible teaches. The history of the Bible is a history of God offering and humanity rejecting, of humanity living in opposition and hostility to God, and we might think to ourselves, "well I'm not hostile to God, I have good intentions, I have a high regard for my own innocence." But the story we live in is a story of rejection of God 's good authority, the rejection of God 's just and loving authority and when you reject God 's Godliness that is hostility. Ask any parent of a teenager. And it's that hostility, that resistance and reluctance and rejection that we bring to this relationship that God overcomes through God 's power by knitting us together forever in his life through the incarnation. This is the first stitch and that is the glorious good news of this story. I want to underline it in a certain way by a practice I have of every year looking out for where do I see the Magnificat? Where do I see how God has shown the strength of God 's arm, where do I see how God has scattered the powerful in their conceit, how has God cast down the mighty, how has God lifted up the lowly and filled them with good things, how has God sent the rich empty away both in the world and in my self? Well staying on the theme of music one of my favorite recording artists gave me something that looked like the Magnificat this year. He's a wonderful singer-songwriter, if you don't know him, named Jason Isbell. He has a great song called 24 frames which I just adore. I will once again resist singing it to you but the lyric is amazing theologically. He says, "you thought God was an architect now you know he's more like a pipe bomb ready to blow. All you've built was just for show. All gone in 24 frames." He is a brilliant songwriter but in the country music world which tries to claim him, he is what we might call a burr in the saddle. He has done amazing work challenging the sexism and racism of the country music establishment. So right now he recently had a seven night residency at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. Now this is the holy temple of country music. A seven night residency with Amanda Shires, his wife, and what did he do? Every night he picked out an African-American country recording artist who was a woman to open for him. He raised up the lowly, but he doesn't look at it that way. He says each one of these women should be a headline. Each one deserves to be a headliner except for the resistance of racism and country music which we recall was created by segregationist producers who wanted white root's music to sell opposed to black root's music. Using his influence Isbell has facilitated a raising up and he has challenged those in power to be cast down. He goes even farther. A famous country singer Morgan Wallin famously this year was caught on tape using the worst racial slurs you could think of, and this caused rightly a huge scandal and a major pause in his career as it should have. A leader in this was Jason Isbell making sure there were consequences and making sure this was an opportunity for country music to confront its racist history and present, and here's what Jason Isbell said. He is a wonderful guy. He's been through recovery and he really doesn't suffer fools and he just said, "look, we are not persecuting Morgan Wallin. He is not being harmed. He is still a multi-millionaire. We are taking him off a pedestal and we are bringing him down to the sidewalk where the rest of us live, where the rest of us learn hard lessons and repent and return to the Lord." Bring the mighty from their thrones, send the rich away empty, concrete vision of what God is doing as Mary teaches us in the Magnificat, we are invited to join in. We are invited to be a people who facilitate this leveling action of the Magnificat where the rich are sent away empty, the mighty come down from their thrones and the poor are elevated to meet them in this level place called enough. We are called to be part of that gracious action, that prophetic action and we are called with confidence, with hope and humility that our world desperately needs from us. We are called with confidence because it is accomplished in the coming of Christ. We are called with hope because God is true to God 's promises as Mary tells us. We are called with humility because anything that is done well is only done in God 's power and with God 's help. Amen. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Sermon from the Rev. Barbara Ballenger for the Third Sunday of Advent. Today's readings are: Zephaniah 3:14-20 Philippians 4:4-7 Luke 3:7-18 Canticle 9 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Advent/CAdv3_... Let us pray. Lord Christ, help us to endure the sting of forgiveness, that we may become for you your brain in the world. Jarrett and I are part of a Zoom-based lectionary bible study for diocesan priests. We're on it each week and a group of us read the Sunday lections and talk about what we might preach about. So if you wonder where my sermons come from, I get them from other people. Or at least, they can really focus me on what I need to pay attention to in these readings, and so this week, I want to give credit where credit is due. Because I've been thinking a lot about a story that one of the clergy, Robin, told about forgiveness. When her daughter was young, Robin shared, she attended a home daycare that taught the children that when someone apologized to them - as preschoolers are routinely made to do - they were not to say, "it's ok." They were encouraged to say "I forgive you." Because when someone harms another person it's not ok, and their apology doesn't make what they did ok, and sometimes the feelings that you're feeling are still not ok. So if you want to accept their apology, they children were taught, say "I forgive you." Now, for things like cutting in line or hoarding the best markers, that can be a pretty quick process. For the bigger things we grow into, getting to I forgive you can take a little longer. As they say, little kid little problems, big kids big problems. But that's a different sermon. One day, Robin said, she apologized to her daughter for something she did, like you do when you're a parent, and her three year old said "I forgive you." That comment startled her. And Robin said it made her a little angry. Who was this preschooler to say if Robin was forgiven or not? Who was she to forgive me? And here was revealed to Robin the power that is contained in the I of I forgive you. Because it acknowledges that there's a relationship involved there, and the one who was hurt has some agency in determining what happens next, whether things are really, indeed, ok. Robin's story made me realize that I'm like this. Very often when I apologize, I want the person I'm addressing to tell me that what I did didn't hurt, it wasn't a big deal, it wasn't my fault, it's ok. Often that means what I really want is to be released from my feelings of imperfection, to get rid of the gnaw of guilt, rather than really wanting the person I've hurt to be healed. So it stings to hear "I forgive you." It stings to hear "Yes you hurt me, and I appreciate that you are taking responsibility for it, and I accept that, and I want to stay in relationship with you." "I forgive you" is a little more truthful than "it's ok." It's judgement without condemnation. Judgement that's graceful and merciful. And that sting just might prompt me to wonder what the path is to things really being okay. And now we're in the territory of the gospel, though at first glance it seems a bit harsh. I think it's the brood of vipers language that gives it away. That is the tell that this isn't a healing ritual. Because John has stepped into the waters of the old time prophet, of one called by God to help Israel face the truth of who it is and to get ready for what's coming next. Because it's going to demand the full strength of their covenant with God. John's baptism didn't make the impure clean, it didn't remove sin. It ritually acknowledged that the life had already been cleaned up, that the change had been made, the heart re-turned to God. So unless you've done that work, don't get in John's baptism line. So what then does John's baptism with water do, and what does Jesus's baptism with fire do? John's baptism invites Israel to return to right relationship with God; it proclaims that Israel has repented and is ready for the life that God will initiate through Jesus. "What are we to do, John, to show that we are ready for your baptism?," ask the crowd and the tax collectors and the soldiers? "Stop sinning", says John. "Stop invoking your privilege, and hoarding resources, and keeping aid back from those who need it. Stop misusing your power, and extorting people." "I'm a prophet," John would have said, "don't tell me this is the first time you're hearing this. Stop sinning. Get your covenant with God firmly in place. Because when Jesus comes baptizing, look out." "He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire," John says of Jesus. "His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire." Luke calls that "good news." Threshings, pitchforks, unquenchable fire - that sounds like judgement to me. And I think this is where we often go in our imagination of what God's judgement of us is. It sounds like brutal, terrifying condemnation. But what if that threshing, and chaff removal and sifting is actually what an encounter with God's love looks like? What if that's the refining process that happens when God says "I forgive you?" "From our perspective it looks like judgment. From God's perspective it looks like love." Jarrett observed in our lectionary group. That is because God tells us the truth about ourselves. Sure it stings. Because truth stings. What if God's judgement invites us to see ourselves as God sees us, as we truly are. What if that involves freeing the core of us that God rejoices in and delights in? What if on the other side of God's judgement, we see ourselves as beloved as God saw us from the beginning, and still sees us? Consider how John the Baptist describes the baptism offered by Jesus. The threshing floor, the winnowing fork, the fire that burns the chaff -- these are all means of removing the extraneous material from that valuable, useful grain. If we are talking about people who have already repented and emerged from John's baptismal water, then it looks to me like Jesus is processing the grain for its actual use. This is the process of God's love in us - removing that which is not love, which is not necessary, which is perhaps not true about us and carefully gathering up and preserving what is true, beloved, essential to us and to God. You can call this process judgement. You can call it love. To those of us who do not want to let go of any of it, it sounds terrifying. Because I'd rather things be ok, than to admit that I need to be forgiven of all that does not flow from love. I think sometimes I'd rather bring all my sins to God with a little apology for packing so much, coming with so much baggage and just have God say, "it's ok, it's fine, come as you are." But real reconciliation with God means bringing all the stuff we can't manage to put down and allowing God to remove it for us. When God says "I forgive you," I think it means, "I see your sin, I acknowledge that you have done harm to yourself and others and me, and I remove its power over you and your attachment to it, and we are in relationship". That includes things like our shame, our fear, our perfectionism, our tendency to dominate, our inability to forgive ourselves and be merciful to others. And God calls upon the wind of God's spirit to drive it away from us and the fire of the spirit to consume it entirely. In stories of God's judgement I think we forget what remains, that there is something in us that is also wonderful, beautiful, useful, effective, necessary to the work of God. The grain of wheat in us that is seed and food remains. That is what God's truthful gaze, God's fiery love, frees in us. Consider that when you say amen to the communion bread today. You are not just consuming the wheat, you are becoming the wheat. And that act of threshing and winnowing and sifting is the powerful work of our transformation into Christ's body. This puts a new shine on the rose candle of Gaudete Sunday, in this third week of Advent, on this day where we are waiting to make special room to rejoice. It is a lovely light in a darkened room. But put your finger in that flame, and it burns. Because it's fire. "The Lord is near," says the heat of that flame. "Do not worry about anything, it says. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." And that as Luke says, is indeed good news. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Sermon from the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the Second Sunday of Advent. Today's readings are: Malachi 3:1-4 Philippians 1:3-11 Luke 3:1-6 Canticle 16 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/HolyDays/... Please join me in the spirit of prayer. So early on in my quarantine when I was suffering from Covid these last two weeks (I've had a negative test and I'm completely safe) I decided to turn my quarantine and convalescence into a spiritual retreat. Covid is definitely a Wilderness moment. What does one do with that? Well, one turns it into a retreat where I could take the solitute and the isolation and the loneliness and the misery and use it as a refining fire, as it says in Malachi, to put my soul before God and let God do God's work. That's what a retreat is after all. We get rid of all the distractions and routines and buzzings in our head and the attachments in our hearts so that we can simply put ourselves before God and say, "Work this out in me." It's an act of surrender in some ways. And that turned out to be a very good use of Covid actually. I could simply say, "God, here I am in my struggles and my frustrations and my failures, and my fallings short, my sins and my confusions and my contradictions." I could put it out there without excuse. "And before you are a merciful God, I can do that." It starts with this gratitude, that we know we can approach God in our full contradictions and find a companion and someone to help sort us out. So I had a quarantine retreat. I was quarantined into the bedroom and bathroom, with no company and dinner and lunch on a tray. And what came to me as an image was this cheap toy I found once in a science museum. I've always loved the gift shops of science museums and this was a plexiglass box - a rectangle - and it was filled with iron filings, and the kit came with a number of magnets and the fun you had, such as it was, was applying the magnet to the filings. And of course when you apply the magnet to the filings they go from a disorganized mass into a wonderful organized set that follows the magnetic field of the magnet. So from this jungle you get this wonderful pattern of the iron filings following the magnetic field of the magnet you apply. This image came to me as a gift, because I realized that left to myself, I'm a pretty chaotic pile of filings. I'm going off in every different direction. I'm going off in contradictory directions at the same time. I cause myself suffering and angst and anxiety and worry. I fall short and I sin. It's that same pile that I bring into God's magnetic field of love and care and mercy, and then in God's magnetic field of love and care and mercy, my life finds enlightenment, and finds a pattern that is healthy. A pattern that is humble. A pattern that is connected to God most of all. And as we enter into Advent, I want to recommend to you, however you can do it - hopefully without the Covid part - to have some Wilderness time and put your chaotic pile of filings in front of God and let the love of God and the care of God and God's mercy sort them out and help you find your shape again. Today on the second Sunday of Advent I am very very grateful for the example of Zechariah and Elizabeth and John and Mary and Joseph. These humble, humble people who are so far off to the side of history, the underside of history compared to Tiberius and Pilate and Annas and Caiaphas. All these key names that Luke spreads across the story are all known in the Mediterranean world and then off in this little corner is where the real action is happening. The Empire might spread good news of sorts, but the good news of God is happening in these humble folks, who give us the clues about how to live in the love and the care and the mercy of God that ushers the presence of Christ into the world. When we look at the Song of Zechariah or the Song of Mary, we look at these humble folk who ushered in our Lord. They were prepared to know God and to welcome God and to receive God because they were immersed in the story of God. We look at the Song of Mary and this incredible Song of Zechariah, and we see people who knew the promises, who held onto the promises of God, who knew that God was a God of liberation, a God of mercy, a God of forgiveness, a God whose tender mercy at the dawn breaks from on high on those who sit in darkness. A God who doesn't forget God's people. A God who is available for us to bring our whole lives to. They were people who lived in the magnetic field of God's grace. And so we immerse ourselves in the worship and the study of the scripture and prayer to be like them: people receptive, people prepared, people ready to see our God return. We see St. Paul at his most pastoral in the letter to the Philippians where he's just gushing with love for his community, and I so relate to him, because when I read that passage I think of you. I just love being with you in prayer. I just want you to know the completion of grace. He's like a good pastor, wanting his people to be ready for the day of the Lord, the day the Lord returns. Every day is that day. That's the secret. As we live everyday in the day of the Lord, God is always completely present. God is never present in part. God is only ever fully present - we are absent. We are distracted. We are missing what God is doing. But we are called to this wonderful reckoning where we can be in God's presence fully. Fully, complete, whole, actualized as the people god has called us to be, because we've been prepared. Because like those magnetic fields, we've been aligned with God. And this is our hope, this is our proclamation, this is what we live for in the season is to know that we can live our lives before God, live our lives in the presence of God on that day when God is fully present with us, which is every day in every moment. Thanks be to God. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Sermon from the Rev. Barbara Ballenger for the First Sunday of Advent. Today's readings are: Jeremiah 33:14-16 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13 Luke 21:25-36 Psalm 25:1-9 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Advent/CA... Let us pray. In our family, we are the relatives that travel home. We have always tended to live several hours away from the family core, and so rather than being the ones that host Thanksgiving or Christmas, we're the ones that drive - in our case to all the way to Northeastern Ohio. Now, when we lived in Rochester, New York, we made the arduous trek through Erie, PA every December - for which we should get a special family medal. When we lived in Baltimore MD, the six hour trip home could sometimes become 12 hours because of the curse of The Pennsylvania Turnpike. And as any of you know when you are traveling with young children on such journeys that are long and boring year after year you search for those signs that will help them to know that the journey is nearly over. Are we there yet? "No, but look, it's the Sapp Brothers Coffee Pot. That means we're near Clearfield, we only have an hour to go." And there it would be rising up out of the mountains of Central Pennsylvania , as a sign that we were almost done with that trip home from Cleveland back to State College where we lived at the time. Now apparently that coffee pot is a landmark from Omaha to Pennsylvania and it will lead you if you follow it to a truck stop. I appreciated it more as a sign that better coffee lay ahead if we were only patient. Regardless, it was a sign of hope on a long car trip home. Signs are essential to the upkeep of hope - especially in the long journey that we're on with God. That's because a big part of the life of faith is waiting - waiting for delivery from exile, waiting for an end to oppression and injustice, waiting for the Messiah to arrive, the Kingdom to Come, waiting for Christ to return. Today's Scriptures are a good example - they acknowledge that longing of God's people. "The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah," promises Jeremiah. "Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you face to face and restore whatever is lacking in your faith," writes Paul to the dear community of the Thessalonians; the first community he founded. "Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near," Luke's Gospel quotes Jesus as saying, after he enumerates the various things that will happen before God's glory is fully revealed. Advent is a season that relishes waiting - waiting for a coming Christmas that we know has already arrived. Waiting for a second coming of which we know not the time or the place. To help us through, God sends signs that acknowledge our longing. Burning Bushes and 12 plagues. Oil that does not run out. Transfigurations. The Scriptures also offer us prophetic performances and veiled apocalyptic imagery like we have in today's Gospel. And people of faith are notorious for misreading them. God's signs are characteristically inexplicit in their timing, and when made into predictions, they invariably let us down. There is an art to reading God's signs. Now, when my husband Jess and I met in college and began to spend lots of time together, we often found ourselves looking for someplace to eat. We'd leave a class wondering which of the half dozen dining establishments in Kent, Ohio, would we choose that day. Let's follow the signs, Jess would say. A fallen branch on the sidewalk would suggest we go left. A crumpled piece of notebook paper sent us forward. A shadow pointing a certain way would steer us in another direction. Inevitably we'd end up at Wendy's. I would not say that this was God's will. Divine signs don't work like that. Now the Apostle Paul, on the other hand, was very good at reading God's signs. I think he saw them everywhere, especially in the communities of faith that he helped to found. Listen to his delight in the Thessalonian community that he is separated from and longing for: "How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy that we feel before our God because of you?" he writes to them. They are the sign that Paul turns to in order to endure the long slog of his work as an apostle. They give him hope as the Body of Christ in action in real time. The Thessalonians are not perfect - he knows that their faith is lacking in places. But that doesn't limit his joy. They are enough for him, because they speak to the presence of Christ among the faithful, even as they await Jesus' coming in glory. Here is the true power of God's signs; of Christ's promises. They answer some of our most persistent questions, though not the one we usually find ourselves asking. More often than not, we cry out with the psalmist, "How long O Lord?" And we think what we want is a day and a time. But the questions that God answers are: Are you still with us, Lord? Will everything be OK? And to those questions God answers: "stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near." The Kingdom of God is at hand. Redemption is drawing near. God is with us. This is what God's signs reveal as we journey from the now of God's will to the not yet of God's promises. Because God knows that it hardly helps us to know how much time it will be exactly before our longing ends, when it's the present moment that feels like an eternity and seems so hard to endure. Often when things are very near their completion, time seems to slow down and stand still. I remember this from when I was in labor with my kids, and in that last week before they were born, everything just stopped and the inevitable seemed like it was never going to happen. Waiting for news - good or bad - can feel like this. Keeping vigil at a death can feel like this. And then in an instant everything changes, and the end begins. So we can't really trust our sense of time, and the impatience we find ourselves in because of it, but we can acknowledge our longing for the fullness of God's love to be revealed, for the return of Christ in glory, for the new world coming. And at the same time, we can relish the evidence of it along the way. And very often it is not in the earthquakes or the roaring of the seas that God's presence is signified, as much as it's in communities of faith, like Paul's dear Thessalonians or our faith community here. God's signs abound here. Quotidian maybe, but astonishing to me all the same - the compassionate listening, the waiting by the bedside, the checking in on one another, the sharing at morning prayer, the ability to forgive or to try something new. These too are God's signs. They answer the questions: Are you still with us, Lord? Will everything be OK? And in these signs God answers:" I am here. I am with you. And all will be well." Amen. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Sermon from the Rev. Carol Duncan for the Last Sunday After Pentecost, Christ the King Day. Today's readings are: Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14 Psalm 93 Revelation 1:4b-8 John 18:33-37 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/HolyDays/AllSaints_B_RCL.html Intimations of Christ's Kingdom The Rev. Carol Duncan The Last Sunday after Pentecost, November 21, 2021 Happy New Year's Eve of the Church Year! Today is Christ the King, the last Sunday before we go to Advent and Year C in the lectionary. In anticipation, please be seated. You may be wondering, what is the kingdom that we celebrate on Christ the King Sunday? I expect you all know it is not a political entity or human territory at all. The Letter to the Romans says the kingdom of God is righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. The Gospel of Mark says disciples were given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for us outside, everything comes only in parables. In today's Gospel reading, Jesus says the kingdom is Truth. I want to convey the truth and the dream of kingdom using imagination rather than analytical reasoning, because Christ's kingdom is not actually graspable by logic. I had a powerful experience of this otherworldly realm in my freshman year in college. This was in 1963, before Hippies, barely beyond Beatniks. I lived in a residence that was a converted manor type house, up a hill away from the main campus. The group of women who lived there that year were inching toward the new age. We wore black tights. We let our hair grow long. One night in the late fall I was feeling unusually exhilarated after reading from Genesis for my Western Civ course. I needed to do something expressive. I climbed out the second-floor window onto the forbidden fire escape. It was cold, but I had a coat. From where I was no house lights showed. I lay back and gazed up at the darkness. The stars were bright. Suddenly I was falling upward into those stars. The jolt took my breath away. I heard no words, but I entered a sort of meeting, a great presence. It was a night vision and a conversion. I had dropped into the holy. My imagination was kindled that night in my 19th year, and it glimmers to this day. You all get the benefit of it now. The kingdom of God is laid out before us today in three marvelous lessons. The vision in Daniel is like a psychedelic panorama of a celestial throne room, a fantasia of rippling color and splendor. To enter this kingdom space, it may help to close your eyes and breathe it in. The throne is fiery flames, and its wheels are burning fire. A stream of fire issues and flows out from the Ancient One's presence. A thousand thousands serve him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stand attending him. You can hear the music if you let your imagination go, as if Tyrone and the choir were giving their ultimate fanfare. This must be a real place because Ezekial saw it too, and maybe also Paul when he visited the third heaven, whether in body or out of body he couldn't tell. Into this throne room, coming with the clouds of heaven, enters one like a human being. Daniel couldn't have known, but we know this is Jesus. A human being like us blazes into the everlasting dominion that shall not pass away. Eternity doesn't pass away because it has no beginning and no end, no boundaries. It inhabits, surrounds, contains and interpenetrates our cosmic time and space. Sometimes on a deep blue-sky fall day, the blazing leaves can give us a feel for it. In the Revelation passage, we are ushered into that same throne room. Jesus enters it with the clouds of heaven just like in Daniel's vision. Jesus is now reverently known as the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth. And Jesus is the one who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood. In this throne room Jesus has made us to be his kingdom. He knows we can be priests to serve his God and Father. To Jesus in this throne room belong the glory and dominion forever. And in this throne room every eye will see him, no matter what their life has been. All who have pierced Jesus by denying that we have seen him hungry or thirsty or naked or in prison, and seeing, did not attempt to relieve his suffering. We will see him and wail. Then we fall into the divine loving arms of redemption. Yes, this will be. This is happening in God's time, which is all time. Time which is and was and is to come, without boundary or limits, eternal. In John's Gospel we arrive with a bump. You can open your eyes. This is a factual throne room with a factual king, Pilate. Into this throne room Jesus walks escorted by Roman guards clanking their spears. Jesus is on trial for his life. Are you the king of the Judeans, Pilate asks. The damning question is about Kingship, not about nationality. It is about earthly power. Finite power, although Pilate is incapable of grasping his own finitude. Instead of cowering before this earthly king, Jesus the ever empathic one wonders what Pilate is really thinking. Is he asking someone else's question or his own? If it is his own, Jesus is interested and wants to know more. But Pilate considers himself superior to a subject people. He says, I'm not a conquered Judean, am I? The authorities of your conquered nation want me to take care of their problem. What makes them think you are so important? Jesus replied that indeed Pilate is correct, his followers are not fighting to keep him from dying. His kingdom is not from this world. Pilate bears down on factual information. Are you a king? Jesus replies that he is in this world only to witness to the greater realm of truth. He gives Pilate a chance to catch a glimpse of Truth - everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice. Do you hear me Pilate? Do you hear me World? I am the way, the truth, and the life. Come to me. We must look now at our own lives and imagine what Jesus will ask us. May we seek the kingdom in this mortal life in which all have access to good schools, nourishing food, secure homes, satisfying work with adequate wages. Where when we come face to face with every other human, we convey dignity and respect as though we have just arisen from our baptismal immersion. And if we are fortunate, in our piece of the kingdom we will have music of the choir's greatest fanfares to rejoice us. Happy Christ the King Sunday, the threshold of a new year and an intimation of God's eternal realm. Amen. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Sermon from the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the St. Martin's Day, the Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 28. Today's readings are: Isaiah 58:6-12 Psalm 15 James 1:22-27 Matthew 25:31-40 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/LesserFF/Nov/Martin... Please join me in the spirit of prayer. Lord God, we give you thanks for the gift of our patron saint Martin, for all the ways he has formed the soul of this parish and all the ways he has reflected the image of Christ into the world, challenging us ever deeper into the full meaning of your love for this world. In Christ's Name we pray. Amen. Happy St. Martin's Day. What does one say on St. Martin's Day? After all, there's Merry Christmas, all right, Happy Easter, Happy St. Martin's Day, it's all the same. So every year I study up for St. Martin's Day by going deeper into the saint, and this year's big revelation, coming from his biographer, is that St. Martin had bad hair. His biographer goes out of his way actually to call it ugly hair, so bookmark that. We're getting back to it later. In the meantime I want to start in a place of gratitude. I am so thankful for a series of talks that have been given the last month here in worship by lay leaders in our parish, starting with Al Good about a month ago and then Greg Cowhey did it at the eight o'clock service and Laura Sibson and Barbara Thomson and then Eugenie Dieck capped it off last week. These wonderful reflections on the meaning of St. Martins were a real gift to the community and to me because I could hear in them all the ways that God has gifted this community, and these talks were full of gratitude and they weren't ever boastful, they were never selling anything, they were never flattering us, they were just without ego and pure in their reflection of the goodness that God has given this parish. And I was grateful and thought, yes this is true, this parish is centered on the love of God we know in Jesus Christ. And this parish is deeply prayerful. This is a praying community that knows the language of prayer both communally and individually and holds each other in prayer, and the world as well. There's a gift of prayerfulness here. And this community is worshipful, this community knows how to gather around the presence of the living Christ in sacrament and word and celebrate that gift of risen life. And this community is so eager to serve in loving care for each other and loving care for this community. This community understands the call to serve in the name of God, and so with gratitude I lift all those things up. We are a gifted community, gifted by God, and we say thanks be to God for it, and I want to say thanks be to God for Martin, our patron, who I truly believe has formed this community to have the character and soul that we have. If you talk to a St. Martin's member they will be able to tell you the story of St. Martin so beautifully depicted in the window in the back of the church. If you talk to a St. Martin's member they will probably do a pretty good job repeating Matthew 25 for you because we hear it at least once a year, and I believe these stories have deeply woven themselves into the character of the community. What's always interesting about a story that becomes well known is we can fall into the risk of it becoming commonplace; a moral platitude. We could take Matthew 25 that we read today and just turn it into a summary, "Jesus said be nice to the poor," when there is so much more revealed in that story; when there are so many more layers of what God is doing with us and for us in that story. It opened our eyes. Indeed at bible study this week one of our members opened my eyes to something I had never noticed about Matthew 25. I got to enjoy that surprise of God's address which is even in the story, right? People are shocked that they were serving Christ the whole time. And what surprised me, and this was Steve Barr, a member of the parish, he pointed out: "Jarrett, there are three groups of people in this passage. There are three groups of people." And I was kind of fixated on two, because the goats and the sheep get my attention and they're meant to be anxiety producing, right? Am I a sheep? Am I a goat? Am I something in between? So I thought of just two groups in this passage but no, there's three groups in this passage, and one is the group that is already members of God's family. In that last line, "the members of God's family." Who are the members of God's family? Who forms the third group? They are the thirsty, the hungry, the sick, the prisoner, the stranger. They are already God's people. They are already part of God's family, and now knowing this we see a deeper challenge in the story, the challenge not just to serve but to recognize the thirsty, the hungry, the naked, the stranger, the prisoner as part of God's family, as our sisters and brothers in Christ. They are kin-folk to us. They are our kin and this to me is part of the incredible scandal of this passage in the ancient world and now, because in the ancient world as now we really do walk through life, and I can name myself in this comment, thinking that our family is our primary unit of obligation and believing that our biological natal family is our primary obligation. We shape our resources and our world around that idea and it can become a way to rationalize accumulation beyond what we need, because we always say we're doing it for our families. And it can rationalize misappropriation of resources socially and structurally because we can invest vast sums of money in the education of our children while ignoring to the point of desperation the education of other children. And underneath that is some notion that they are not part of our family, that we have a different set of obligations to them, and when we read this passage from Jesus we're challenged. We owe to our family what is owed to all families and we are together in the family of God. It's so challenging and stressful to read this passage about sheep and goats. Who is in my family? And Jesus even raises the ante a little bit because it's not just Christians or Jews who've been called together, it's the nations. There's this notion in this passage that even the nations who haven't the benefit of a covenant with God or Isaiah, who don't know this tradition, they know you take care of the poor. And the implication is if they know this, you should know even more because you have the gospel and you have the covenants and you have the prophets. So this story is pretty stress-inducing. It's a challenge, and when I feel challenged like that by scripture I know the story is telling me, "you have more conversion to do. Jarrett, you have more conversion of heart, mind, strength and spirit to do, because someday you will love God with all of your heart and all of your soul and all of your mind and all of your strength but you're not there yet." More conversion. And let's bring St. Martin in again here (and we're about to get to the haircut...I'm almost there.) We bring St. Martin in again because that cutting of his cloak that we all know so well (he cuts his cloak in half and he gives it to the beggar and the beggar appears to him as Christ) is a story of charity and it is also a story of conversion and it's just the first cut that Martin makes. It is just the first sacrifice that he makes. Everything else for Martin, including his hair, is going away. His toga, his uniform, the rest of his cloak, his horse, his sword, his armor, his social status are all going to be left behind and relinquished as he grows into his vocation in Christ. Now, Romans were very sartorially inclined. They liked a good robe, they liked a good haircut, they liked to smell nice. Martin did none of those things. And I'm maybe sensitive to this part of the story because I am in a line of military officers in my family. If you know anything about the military you know there's haircuts, and so generations of Kerbel men never had hair that touched their ears, never had hair that touched their neck, never had hair that was over about an inch long, because that's part of military discipline. And remember that Martin grew up in a military family. His dad was also a Roman soldier, so this cutting off of his hair, and I know this from personal experience, was political, was an assertion of a worldview, was symbolic of more than hair. Believe me, growing up in the 70s where my mom wanted to take me to the hair salon to have a nice long hair thing going, I know that hair is political. Martin had ugly hair on purpose. Martin wore a goatskin tunic with a rough rope around it and no shoes, no big wide leather Roman belt, because he was setting himself apart for a life of conversion; a lifelong journey into conversion by identifying himself with the family of God, with the members of God's family. On the margin, in the rough, in the vulnerability he would struggle mightily and slowly, spiritually, experience the conversion that allowed God's light to shine through him without obstacle. He gained spiritual transparency through the discipline of a hermit living in isolation and struggle and boredom. He lived in a way that allowed space for his demons to come up. His ego, his malformed imagination, his passions and appetites, all the stuff that great spiritual masters like Anthony of Egypt struggled with in their hermitages, he too struggled. I want to bring out for us today this part of the story a little more because I think Martin is offering us something we need to know. I think in this age of great social turmoil and unrest and discomfort we need to know about this gift of going inside. We need to know about this gift of spiritual struggle that clarifies the soul and that brings us into transparency with God, not just for ourselves but ultimately for the world. Because this is kind of part of the miracle of St. Martin, he's one of these people who goes off as a hermit and keeps getting dragged back into public life because he was a leader. But his transformation in the wilderness set him up to be a very different person in the world. His transformation in the wilderness set him up to speak a different language to a really rancorous, troubled world. Remember the time he was living in: the 4th century. What a time of social unrest. We have immigration and invasion, we have political regimes rising and falling. First we have Constantine who makes Orthodox Christianity the religion of the empire, then we have his son who inserts Aryanism in that place, then we have Julian the apostate who takes it back to polytheism. It's a roller coaster. It's lurching. But in that space was Martin who did something remarkable. Coming out of his hermitage he was able to welcome the heretics, advocate for them, bring them back into the fold and preach mercy, all while sharing the good news. He wasn't a persecuting person. At the same time he still reached out to the polytheists and welcomed them into the fold and shared with them the good news with gentleness. He walked across Europe to convert his mother. Martin gives us this example of a soul that is so soaked in Jesus Christ that he finds the space of peace and compassion and mercy in a world gone rancorous and cantankerous. And so for me I hear Martin calling us not just to brave acts of sacrifice and charity but to brave acts of inner spiritual struggle, so that we continue as a church to become a different sort of people in the world, reflecting and mirroring this great patron saint of ours who shines so brightly with Jesus Christ. Amen. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Sermon from the Rev. Barbara Ballenger for the All Saints Sunday, the Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 27. Today's readings are: Isaiah 25:6-9 Psalm 24 Revelation 21:1-6a John 11:32-44 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net:https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/HolyDays/...Heaven All the Way to Heaven The Rev. Barbara Ballenger The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost, November 7 2021 The first things have passed away, Lord God. Help us to walk into the new thing that you are doing, as your saints. Amen. Happy All Saints Day. It feels strange to have All Saints Day today when last Sunday was the eve of All Saints Day, on Halloween. There was this long stretchy middle because All Saints Day landed on a Monday and it gets moved to the following Sunday so that we can celebrate the feast of the church. So here we are. As some of you know, last weekend I was away at a funeral in Ohio. My husband's nephew died suddenly, tragically, at the age of 38. I'd known him since he was 5. The family is still trying to find its footing again, after what feels like an earthquake. We got back last Sunday night as trick or treaters were making their way down our street. So for me it has felt like the Feast of All Saints all week long, as I've walked with the raw questions that fill the space left by a loss like this. So today's a good day to face them head on. On All Saints Day we as Church honor all the holy women and men of God who have died, the saints both known and unknown, especially those who led devout lives or were of heroic faith, and whom we count on being with God. Because I was raised a Catholic, I know this crowd pretty well. When I was a little girl I loved to read the lives of the saints. On library day at St. Hilary School I would rush to the section of the library where they had the easy-reader books on the martyrs. I recall at least one tugging match with another kid over one of those books. Interesting that my behavior was far less than saintly when it came to getting my hands on those stories. And oh what stories. I still remember the story of the first century martyr, this little boy who smuggled communion bread under his tunic to deliver it to Christians hiding in catacombs only to be discovered by his unbelieving friends and martyred right there on the street. And that resonated with me because that was not unlike the playground at St. Hilary's School. There were also the gory pictures and the statuary, like St. Sebastian's Church which was just down the street and they had a statue filled with arrows. And then there were those beautiful stories of the miracles, like the rose petals that fell from the sky at the death of young Therese of Lisieux, the little flower, the child of Jesus. I'm not sure so much that it was the lives of the saints that really appealed to me as it was the deaths of the saints actually, when I think about it, because images of martyrdom were a very big part of my second-grade imagination of the saints, as were monastic tonsures and the habits of nuns. I can still see very vividly those water-colored portraits with the eyes sort of pointing towards heaven that were in my Picture Book of Saints, circa 1972. Perhaps some of you had one of those. It was yellow. But All Saints Day isn't just for the heroes. We roll in on this day as well All Souls Day, the Feast of the faithfully departed. We recall friends and loved ones who have died "in the faith." Our nephew David will be in today's necrology. And this is where the celebration of the Feast of All Saints gets a bit tricker because the faith of our loved ones can be a very private thing, largely hidden from us, while the questions and doubts they had might actually walk with us, just as we walk with our own questions and our own doubts. We do not know what our beloved ones encounter at death, just as we don't know what our death will bring. And so for me, the Feast of All Saints tends to be more about what I hope for or have faith in rather than what I'm absolutely certain of. And that makes it a good day for me to be in Church. Because our worship reminds us of all we do know about God's love as we have experienced it, its patience, its forbearance, its forgiveness and its welcome, its power to restore dignity and to fill people with life. We cry out to a God who is that love, and we want that love for those who have gone before us. This is my leap of hope and faith and imagination when it comes to the Feast of All Saints and its questions - I believe that at death God makes the offer of eternal life abundantly clear, and that our choice to enter that life is no longer clouded by our moral failings, or our traumas, or our misunderstandings, or our limited human imagination. All those things are wiped away. But the choice remains, like a new covenant or a renewed vow. Here's the unspoken challenge then of the Feast of All Saints: why make the choice now? Why live as though we know what comes next, when we don't fully, or we can't really? To answer this question we, as church, turn again to what we know of God's love as we've experienced it: its patience, its forbearance, its forgiveness and welcome, its power to restore dignity and its ability to fill people with life. We turn to a God who is that love, and we want that love in this life, for this world. And so we commit to living it as best we can, imperfectly, earnestly, in faith. I think that is what the life of a saint looks like. Saints believe anyway - despite their doubts. They love anyway - despite the evil that tears things apart, that often tears them apart. And they reach for God anyway - despite all the limitations that make it hard to see God clearly. And God reaches back into that life with the will to be found. "See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; and they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away." This from the author of Revelation, who is paraphrasing the prophets of old. The story of the Raising of Lazarus that we heard today from John's Gospel is a story of the passing of those first things. In the Gospel of John it's the sign that the old way of death is gone. There is no waiting until the end of time when the dead shall be raised, which was a common idea in Israel. The time is now. The way is at hand. And it's interesting to me that Jesus stands on the threshold of this new age when death will be no more, and mourning and crying will be no more, when every tear will be wiped away, that Jesus stands on the edge of that new edge and he weeps for Lazarus who has died. I think this was the great consequence of God making the divine home among us - that God would feel what we feel: the loss, the catastrophe, the bewilderment experienced in the sluggish slowness of our time, even as God's promise is poised to come rushing in in God's time. God does not dismiss our misery because God knows how the story ends. Jesus stands in the now and the not yet with Mary and Martha and their mourning friends, and he suffers with them in the loss of their brother. Because it is not really a comfort to say that eternal life is on the way - until it actually arrives. Meanwhile, Jesus lives the long moment of loss with them. He lives it with us. He is living it with my husband's family in Ohio right now. And there is real comfort in that. But John's Gospel doesn't stay there, it actually pauses there only briefly and then Jesus calls Lazarus from the tomb and Lazarus comes forth. Alleluia! My favorite part of the story is when he emerges from the tomb all wrapped up in his burial clothes, and Jesus says to the shocked crowd of witnesses, "unbind him and let him go." Because that's God's call to us every-day saints - to unbind people from the stinking stuff that clings and inhibits and trips them up, to help them step into the new life that's right at hand, like beautiful new clothes. Which makes the story sound a bit like Baptism, with its new garment, its cleansing waters and scented oil, its candle to light the way out of the tomb into light. And that's why All Saints Day is traditionally a day for baptism. Not simply a day to recall those who have died, but to welcome new life as well. It is an Alpha and Omega sort of day. The promise of the Feast of All Saints is that we need not wait for an old life to end and a new one to begin, even in the chaos of this current time. It's Heaven all the way to Heaven, writes Dorothy Day, my hero, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, who I'm sure is in Heaven. She was paraphrasing Saint Catherine of Sienna, who reportedly said "All the way to Heaven is Heaven because Jesus is the way." And for now, on the Feast of All Saints, I will take their word for it. Amen. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Sermon from the Rev. Carol Duncan for the Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 26. Today's readings are: Deuteronomy 6:1-9 Psalm 119:1-8 Hebrews 9:11-14 Mark 12:28-34 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BProp26_RCL.htmlTranscript Coming Soon.Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Sermon from the Rev. Barbara Ballenger for the Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 25. Today's readings are: Jeremiah 31:7-9 Psalm 126 Hebrews 7:23-28 Mark 10:46-52 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost...Let us pray. The Book of Jeremiah was written for Israel in exile. And much of the prophet Jeremiah's work is getting Israel to understand how failure to uphold the covenant with God got them into the mess they were in, and how that same covenant would get them out. A commentary I was reading the other day described the Book of Jeremiah as “a river of accusation, destruction, and weeping,” but for the exile, also “a book of life.” And tucked right in the middle of the Book of Jeremiah is what's called the Little Book of Consolation. That's what today's first reading is, a page of the Little Book of Consolation. In the middle of the story and the experience of captivity there is this promise, this vision of restoration. Imagine how that impossible, crazy vision would have sounded to someone who had been forced from their home and impressed into servitude elsewhere or scattered in diaspora. “See, I am going to bring them from the land of the north, and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth, among them the blind and the lame, those with child and those with labor, together; a great company, they shall return here. With weeping they shall come, and with consolations I will lead them. I will let them walk by brooks of water, in a straight path in which they shall not stumble.” The Little Book of Consolation is a description of profound hope. Future generations will make it home one day, much the way that God led Israel out of Egypt and into the Promised Land. But it's more than saying that everything's going to go back to the way it was, or that God will help us out like God helped us out before. It provides a glimpse not of Israel's vision for itself, but of God's vision, of God's hope for the covenant relationship in full blossom. To be consoled by these words is to be consoled by a loyalty to God's agenda. To be in covenant with God is to partner with God in the divine vision. I think it that this was the vision that Bartimaeus, begging, blind along the road in Jericho was longing for in Mark's gospel. But how could he know exactly the shape that healing would take when he told Jesus “I want to see again”? He was no man born blind. And there he was in the messy middle, somewhere between I saw once and I see now. And he cried out for consolation “Son of David, have pity on me.” How did he know it was the Son of David, the messiah walking by when people told him that Jesus was near? Bartimaeus knew because Bartimaeus could see very clearly through his eyes of faith. Some commentators call this story an “acted parable” because with the healing of the man's blindness, Jesus was acting out a lesson on faith and discipleship that he had been teaching his followers for a few chapters now. In fact Mark begins this long lesson on discipleship, which we've been studying for several weeks now, with the healing of another blind man. That man is brought to Jesus, and it takes a couple tries for Jesus to get the healing to take. Then he sends that man home to keep the secret. It's not unlike the learning process that the followers of Jesus experience as Jesus tries to get his disciples to see through his eyes, to live into his vision of what discipleship should be. They must love fully, they must walk empty, they must include the lowly, their faith must be child-like, they must be lower than least, they must serve, even lay down their lives. And woven through these lessons is the hardest one of all: that the son of man must be betrayed and suffer and die, and that in order for God's eternal life to be made manifest, Jesus' followers must first follow him to that cross. And throughout these lessons, the disciples strain to see. Their faith is not ready for public display. The faith of the people that Jesus introduces them to along the way far surpasses the faith of his disciples. Over and over again Jesus is reading to them from the Little Book of Consolation and they don't recognize it. But Bartimaeus, one of the little ones, one of the blind and the lame does. He asks to see again, but Jesus does not restore him to whatever status he had before he lost his sight and was reduced to begging along the hillside. Upon his healing, Bartimaeus becomes a follower of Jesus, and he follows Jesus into the last week of Jesus' life. This is what Bartimaeus will see with his new eyes: he will see the triumphal entry into Jerusalem. He will see Jesus mystify the crowds and offend the local authorities. He will see Jesus betrayed and tortured and executed. And if he can stand all of that, he will see Jesus risen. His sight is not restored to behold the old things as they were, but to see the new things as they are revealed. And some of that is not pretty to look at. As a faith community, our own moment, our messy middle, has some small similarity to our scriptures today. The pandemic scattered us. It isolated us. It kept us away, and the return has been slow and hard going and ongoing. It's not done yet. We are not as we were 18 months ago. Some are arriving with babies in arms, where there were no babies before. Families have appeared under the 9 a.m. worship tent, where there was no tent before. Some people have beards now. Some of us are silver now. It is still difficult to recognize one another under the masks from the nose up. And there are new faces that we are welcoming – faces we have yet to see all of. It is a thrill to see the seats filled again. It is a heartbreak to know that there are some who will not fill their seats again. And I think all of us are straining to see what will happen next, what will become of us, what is God's vision for this time. There is a book of consolation here. There is an acted parable at play in the messy middle that we occupy. It has to do with what God sees in us and what God is making happen in us right now: God's vision, God's big picture. And we can't see it distinctly, but can glimpse it in the longing of our hearts. We can recognize it in the inklings of compassion and mercy that we witness. We can even detect it working at the edges of the ugliness that we are witnessing right now – making visible injustices that have always been there, but that many of us are seeing for the first time or with a new resolve to not look away. The little book of consolation before us is a story about making a way where there was no way. Our invitation is to live into that way. How will we assist God in helping people negotiate that way and their arrival? Who is on the road with us? How far are we willing to go to find them, to invite them, to tell them of the love of Jesus that we have witnessed? What kind of place are we preparing for them? The acted parable before us is a lived story about being made to see what God is doing, and to trust in what we can't see of God's plan. What are we seeing for the first time as we open our eyes again? Who is crying out for God's mercy, and who is trying to hush them up? And what are we to do about it? Sunday after Sunday we are invited to see ourselves in the stories of faith that we hear proclaimed, and the rest of the week we are asked to make those stories visible to the wider world. We are asked to make our lives a page in someone's little book of consolation. We are asked to allow Jesus to use our vulnerable selves as an acted parable to show others the way to the kingdom. We are asked to be ready when the message comes: Take Heart. Get up. He is calling you! Amen. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Sermon from the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 24. Today's readings are: Isaiah 53:4-12 Psalm 91:9-16 Hebrews 5:1-10 Mark 10:35-45 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost... The Corrections The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel, October 17, 2021 Please join me in the spirit of prayer. Lord God, we give you thanks that through your son Jesus Christ you've removed all the obstacles that separate us from your love and your redeeming life. Lord God help us to receive that gift and live with our hearts toward you in all we do. In Christ's name we pray. Amen. So I've had some feedback that I might be a little hard to hear during my sermon because of the mask in the microphone, so I don't know how you all feel about me doing this a little bit (lowers mask). Is that better? Thank you for taking this risk with me. It's interesting to take the mask off at the beginning of the sermon because that's where I want to begin. This has been my trusty mask for 19 months now and I think I'll feel a little naked when I don't have it. I will feel grateful for it but I probably won't miss it. It's been a learning experience during Covid. I've never lived through a time in my life where I was part of so much interpersonal policing. Interpersonal policing just between people in the community here at the church, out at the Acme, at the 7-eleven... Never have I been on such high alert constantly and for so long, keeping one eye peeled for the person whose mask was under their nose or under their chin or not there at all and making sure I was really being careful about my six feet of distance. I'm sure I've been scolded in public. You may have been scolded in public for behavior: “put that mask on”, “put it on right”, “stand a little farther away please”. Never before have I lived in this atmosphere of so much mutual correction - let's put it that way - and I really am very curious what it's going to mean for us long term, And not just the masks and the good hygiene, I really appreciate all that mutual correction. For me it's a sign of good community. There's also another extension of that that's also good, which is we are living through a time of such incredible and rapid change and shifting among social norms. I can't keep up with the language half the time. I just turned 55 and it feels epical for me. I feel old. My staff is so much younger and they speak a different language and it's wonderful and I love it and it's very sensitive and thoughtful, but I'm tripping over myself. I don't know the right words, you know, gender, sexuality, identity, race, these things are evolving rapidly, and when things shift rapidly, it's once again this atmosphere of mutual correction. Mutual policing. And there's a good in that because it grows us if we have trust and love with each other. It can also be somewhat embarrassing, so this morning using our texts I want to look at how our Lord Jesus Christ practiced what Thomas Aquinas would have referred to as “Fraternal Correction.” You could also call it Sororal Correction. (There you go, see, I'm learning. I'm not that old, you know!) I had some experiences of this at our golf outing on Tuesday, where I played with two older guys and at the end one of them turned to me and said, “you could really benefit from some golf lessons.” He was not wrong. The other said to me, “and maybe invest in some new clubs.” Cocktails started immediately so that was lovely. Fraternal Correction: the loving practice of helping people with obstacles in their lives. When Thomas Aquinas talked about it as a virtue, as an obligation, as something we owe one another - a good we owe one another, an excellence - he meant it as a way of communities helping each other grow toward their ultimate goal, which is reunion with God. What are the obstacles that you notice in another person's lives and they might notice in your life, to help free up this path towards reunion with God? And how does one do that with love and trust and intentional relationships so the person is moved in a constructive path, because we know that that correction could also be destructive. Well, we saw Jesus at work in this regard last week with the rich young man, and Barb did a fabulous sermon on that (if you didn't hear it please look it up online). Jesus delivers some really hard correction to this rich young man, but the text begins with this lovely phrase: “Jesus looked upon him and loved him.” Jesus looked upon him and loved him: a wonderful phrase to close your eyes and feel Jesus saying that to you, or feel Jesus looking upon you that way. So Jesus knew that to deliver powerful correction you must love. Surround that person with the secure knowledge that they are loved, that they are of infinite value to you, that you will not let them go. And then he did deliver the tough love, the harder news where he said, “you have an obstacle in your life and your path back to God, and that obstacle is your great wealth and your attachment to it. Not just an attachment to things, but an attachment of identity: this wealth is who you are, this is how you think you are favored by God. This wealth, this is how you prove your worth, your value, your deserving. So that whole complex of attachment is holding you back on this progress you do yearn for.” We don't know what happens next but we know that Jesus found the key obstacle and left the person to wrestle it as they may. Even more than that - and I think this is key - because remember that that passage ends with that phrase “nothing is impossible with God.” I think what Jesus does in alerting the rich young man to this obstacle is brings that young man to the place that is impossible for him, and when we go to that place and that obstacle that's impossible for us, we have only one move: surrender. Surrender to God, to let God do the work that we can't do by our own willpower, to let God work in us what we cannot work in ourselves by whatever system or plan or good self-help book we might read. Take the person to that place that's impossible and we can surrender to God's help. I see another version of that again in our gospel for today with good old James and John, another wonderfully misguided pair of disciples who give hope to all of us. Up they go to Jesus, and it's really funny, in the Gospel of Matthew they send their mother to ask the same question, so you know they're ashamed on some level. But what's going on here? They're misguided. They're still misunderstanding Jesus even though he's told them otherwise twice already. They're misunderstanding that Jesus is going to be a messianic king, he's going to sit on a throne and rule a restored Israel, so they want to be at his right and his left positions of authority. Part of the team. You know, interpreting it generously, they wanted to be helpful. Interpreting it less so they were maybe a little arrogant, climbing, achieving. And they're mistaken. So how is Jesus going to take this moment that could be very awkward and destructive and turn it into peer-to-peer correction? Jesus does this fascinating thing where they have asked to be with him in his glory and Jesus knows that his glory is going to be a cross. He knows as we know that James and John aren't going to make it to his right and left hand in that glory. We know he'll be flanked by thieves. So Jesus knows and we know that they're asking something that they're not able to do even though they say they are. They're at their impossible point, they're at their limit. And so Jesus subtly refrains the discussion, the dialogue. Notice how he switches from kingly language to the language of worship, to the language of liturgy, the language of baptism and communion. So he is able in this reframing to tell them that yes, they will be able to join him in the remembrance of his glory, in the community baptized by the Holy Spirit and the community joined in Christ around the eucharistic table, after Jesus does the work that's unique to him; the death and resurrection that takes away all the obstacles and by grace makes us able to do what was formerly impossible for us. So Jesus finds a way to coach them into a future of inclusion that they can't even begin to imagine, and I kind of personally imagine James and John at the gathering of the early church going, “oh yeah, now I get it. Thank you. Thank you for this.” This is the Jesus we have who reframes and reaches us and finds ways to get past our obstacles like our ambition and our shame and our guilt and our fear by reframing and loving and telling the truth. I for one have been so grateful in my life for all those mentors who told me the truth. I hated it at the time but they helped me grow, and how lucky are we to celebrate with the author of Hebrews that we have this great high priest. We have this great intercessor who is available to us who we can bring our burdens and blockages to and say, “clear a way for us.” That's what a high priest does. When we're stuck with our obstacles, when we're stuck with our blockages in our impossible places, those parts of our souls, those besetting sins and habitual vices and patterns of behavior that we have worked for decades to overcome and to get ourselves free of and we just cannot, that's when you go to your great high priest and say, “I need help. I need your help to get past what is impossible for me. I need your grace as one who deals gently,” as Hebrews says, “who knows our weakness” as Hebrews says, “who has suffered with us and for us,” as Hebrews says. “I need your great embrace of my humanity to set me free from what plagues me, because that is what you do as my great high priest. With love and truth and reframing and inclusion you work out a salvation for me that is impossible by my own hands.” And so we celebrate and are grateful. Amen. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Sermon by the Rev. Barbara Ballenger on the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 23. Today's readings are: Amos 5:6-7,10-15 Psalm 90:12-17 Hebrews 4:12-16 Mark 10:17-31 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost... The Grace To Be Last The Rev. Barbara Ballenger, October 10, 2021 Let us Pray. Lord God it is impossible on our own. It is possible with you. Help us to tell the difference. Amen. (Sung) So low can't get under it, so high can't get over it, so wide can't get around it, gotta get through that door. I've done a good deal of church-based work trips in my day. You know the kind where you move the lawns of the elderly or fix the houses that have been destroyed in disasters. How many of you have been on that kind of a work trip, maybe many times? And how many of you when you've been on those work trips have heard somebody, maybe a fellow helper somewhere along the way, say, “that trip made me realize how much I truly have. I'm so grateful for what I have as a result of that trip.” Does that sound familiar? I've heard it every time, every single time. And sometimes it's me that's saying it or thinking it. The shorthand, or maybe the paraphrase of that sentence, is “There for the Grace of God go I.” And that's not to say that that feeling of gratitude isn't real or that that thanksgiving isn't an actual prayer, it's just to say that those things might not be blessings. They might not be rewards. This is the harsh truth that our young man learns today in the Gospel of Mark. It's a harsh truth for all of us who can identify with that young man – who have wealth and privilege and opportunity. In short, it's the harsh truth of all who are formed to be first. The rest of this sermon is directed at those of us who have been formed to be first, as this young man was. If you do not find yourself in that category, you are still free to listen in. Now this young man was not a bad person. He's not the villain of the story. He's actually kind of sweet, although maybe a little naïve. He's devout. He is keeping those commandments and that is no small thing. He is righteous. His heart is in the right place. He knows that inheriting everlasting life, what Jesus called the Kingdom of God, is a good thing to want. If we were describing him today, we might say he was a good person who believed in God and wanted to go to Heaven. But he didn't take it for granted. He threw himself at the feet of Jesus, and asked this teacher who seemed to know a lot about it, if there was anything else he should do in order to be assured that he would be guaranteed God's favor forever, eternal life. I don't think he quite realized who he was talking to. I don't think he quite realized what he was asking. Because he was working under the assumptions that he had been formed in about what it means to be good in the eyes of God. Good fortune and wealth was a sign that you were doing things right by God. He had checked the boxes and he had the evidence. And that's not a habit that is limited to First Century Christianity. Still, for some reason this man wanted more assurance. I wonder if what Jesus had been teaching about the Kingdom of God had made this man feel just a little uneasy about his assumptions? The idea that God is King, and there being a future time when God would reign over all, was part of Israel's understanding. That's not new. The promise that the righteous would inherit God's life was not new. But Jesus seemed to tell the story in a different way, as though the Kingdom of God was something that was unfolding right under people's feet, as though it was something you had to seek, as though the way in might be different than what this man had assumed - as though maybe anybody could get in. And so there he is kneeling in the dirt in front of Jesus, and Jesus looks at him, and he loves him. I've got to wonder if that divine gaze, that doubled-edged sword of love, wasn't Jesus' predominant answer to the man's question. Before you do, you must be. You must be loved by God. You must let God love you. But the love of God is not passive. It behaves just like the Word of God that we heard about in that passage from Hebrews today. Indeed I think they are one and same: “Living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before God no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare in the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.” When Jesus is done looking at that man with love, Jesus knows exactly what this man is holding on to and exactly what he lacks. And he lacks nothing, meaning he lacks emptiness. He lacks spaciousness, room for the kingdom to enter in. What he has is keeping him from what God has for him. I wonder if this isn't Mark's kind of wonky version of the beatitudes. You know, “blessed are the meek, blessed are those who mourn.” Mark doesn't have that list of the Blessed the way Matthew does, and Luke, in those gospels. But I think there are those ingredients there. This young man see himself as richly blessed. He has many possessions. He uses the phrase, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” which is like saying, “what must I do to have the Kingdom of God? And who in those lists of the Blessed, who gets the Kingdom of God?” In the Gospel of Luke it's the poor who receive the Kingdom of God, and in the Gospel of Mathew it's is the poor in spirit who receive the Kingdom of God. In the Beatitudes the rich aren't listed as being blessed. The first aren't mentioned either. So this passage from Mark should make us squirm right along with the rich young man – if we have many possessions, or if we are used to being among the first. Now a good test of whether you fit in this category is to just imagine Jesus talking to you in this way. Jesus looks at you with love and says “you lack one thing. Take everything you have and sell it and give your money to the poor and follow me.” Now just pay attention right now to the anxiety level you might be feeling at this moment. That's the indicator. “That can't be the requirement, can it, to get into the Kingdom of God?” If we were poor, we wouldn't have it to give away. If we were poor in spirit we wouldn't blink if it were demanded of us. Jesus is working a real reversal here on this man's assumptions, and our assumptions, about what everlasting life entails, and what it means to be blessed, and what God's love for us might cost us. I think for faithful people who have been formed to be among the first, eternal life feels sort of like what comes after a long and prosperous life. It's our reward. Another possession to look forward to. Sort of like retirement. But here Jesus makes a very cutting point that that is not what it's about. It's not the possessions that get in the way. It's not the wealth. It's the love of it. It's the hold it has. It's the way that wealth forms a habit of being first. The one thing the young man lacks, and that I know I lack – is the will to put that down, and to follow Jesus empty into the Kingdom of God. This man of privilege can't buy his way in, he can't enter on his own merit or his own righteousness, he can't use his blessings to pry open the door. With God all things are possible, because that's who lets us into the Kingdom. I don't think the man realized he was kneeling right at the doorway of eternal life, right at the entrance of the Kingdom of God. “Why do you call me good”, asks Jesus, “if you don't really know who and what I am?” Over and over the message of the scriptures is that the righteous practices, the faithful acts, the following of the commandments are all activities that are meant to express the covenant of love with God, they are meant to shape our hearts into ones that deeply love God and neighbor more than ourselves. And if they don't do that, they won't help us enter the kingdom of God. And the offer of eternal life with such a God will shock us and disturb us and send us sad away. But I don't think the man's sadness is the end of the story. I think we assume that this man rejected Jesus' offer, and we assume that he didn't make into the Kingdom. But I think because his heart so was troubled, and because Jesus' word was working in him like a two-edged sword, I want to believe that he gave some thought to what it would take to give up all those things. I think it would have been very hard for him. But not impossible. And that's my hope for us. What must we do to inherit eternal life? We must die. We must die to an old way and start living into a new one, because right now the world we've made under the old way is not working. And somehow, those of us that have been formed to be first have got to figure out how to step to the back of the line. I see this in our racial repair work, in our economic justice work, in our work in transforming oppressive systems – those of us who have been formed to be first have long dominated the conversation on what the solutions should be, without really seeing ourselves as part of the problem. This Gospel says we've got to set that down. We've got to give that up. And frankly, I'm not sure how we do that. I'm not sure how we do that exactly in a system that has been so profoundly and thoroughly stacked to our advantage. The reversal of power, privilege and resources required to truly right all that has been wronged over so long a time seems impossible. My prayer lately has sounded a bit like, “Well then who can be saved?” And I find myself clinging to Jesus' answer. “For mortals like you Barb, it is impossible. But not for God.” Which puts us in the realm not of miracles, but of grace. That God-given, spirit driven power to do God's will when all indications are that it's not gonna work, that's what we should be praying for. That's what we should be asking for: the grace to be last. That may be the one thing we lack – a firm grip on God's grace. But we're going to have to empty our hands in order to pick it up. And we're going to have to clear a space if we're going to have someone to keep it. In the end it may be the only possession we need, as we take our place at the back of the line that is following Jesus into the Kingdom of God. (Sung) So low can't get under it, so high can't get over it, so wide can't get around it, gotta get through that door. Amen. Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Reed Carlson for October Evensong on the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 22. Today's readings are:Genesis 2:18-24 Psalm 8 Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12 Mark 10:2-16 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost... It's Not Good That We Should Read Alone The Rev. Dr. Reed Carlson, October 3, 2021 In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen. Please be seated. In my freshman year of college I was randomly assigned to share a dorm room with three other guys and one of them, I'll be honest, when I first met him I wasn't sure whether he and I would get along. I'll call him Jesse to protect his privacy even though his real name was Jack. When I first met Jesse it was clear to me that he and I had different interests. Jesse wore a lot of black clothes, the music he preferred was the type where people screamed a lot, and worst of all he was kind of ambivalent towards my Xbox. I mean, how can you trust someone who doesn't like to play Xbox, am I right? So as the weeks went on it turned out that I was right in part, it was true Jesse and I did not spend, you know, a lot of our free time together, but he and I did share something very important in common. We liked our dorm room to be clean. Not spotless necessarily, you know, but livable. In this Jesse and I were unlikely allies because as it turns out our other two roommates were not human beings but filthy trash monsters. The trash monsters' names were Nick and Brian and I'm not going to protect their privacy. You see, Brian would throw his dirty clothes everywhere when he was done with them and he didn't do laundry until midterms. And Nick would leave his dirty dishes in my bed because that was where he ate all of his meals because he said it had the best view of the TV. After a few weeks of this thankfully Jesse had an idea. It was called building a fire. Once per week at some point while the trash monsters were away Jesse and I would walk around the room and take everything that we considered to be out of place and put it in a big pile in the entryway and it was understood that our roommates would then have 24 hours to clean up the pile before we burned it. Was this extreme? Absolutely. Were we serious? You know, probably not, but it did kind of work. Things did improve although not really enough and after that first semester, Jesse and I we ditched the trash monsters and we got a different room together, and so even though Jesse never played Xbox with me and I never went in for the screamo music he ended up being the best roommate that I ever had. Okay so why am I telling you this story? Because my sermon this evening is about unlikely allies and the perspectives that they can bring. You see, I think churches are a bit like freshman college dorm rooms. Often they smell a bit funny and we don't always get to choose who is there even, so we do need to learn to live together and we need to learn how to solve problems together. Some of our roommates do and say things that can make our shared space unlivable while others can do just the opposite, and it's not always the roommates that you expect. Two of the texts that we read this evening, Genesis 2 and Mark 10, are texts that maybe many of you have heard before in addition to them being read regularly in kind of the church calendar. Portions of them show up in various liturgies, especially wedding liturgies. For centuries they've been used to form a kind of theological framework for understanding love and partnership especially in the home. However, many of us probably also know that some of our roommates in the church have used these texts in profoundly oppressive ways, especially the story of the Garden of Eden that we find in Genesis 2 and 3. That's my focus for this evening. This text has been used to prescribe restrictive normative notions of gender and sexuality which have resulted in systematic inequality and violence, especially towards women and queer people, and as a result, for many people both in and outside of the church, these stories are sources of trauma, not of hope. Thankfully in the church we have other roommates as well and they know how to build a fire. I teach at the seminary in Mount Airy about a mile away from here on Germantown Avenue and I offer most of the Old Testament classes there. This is the part of the Bible that was written before Jesus came along and one of the skills that I teach my students (most of them are preparing for ministry), is how to separate out what the Bible says from what people say the Bible says. One of the ways we do this is we read texts together. We read them in class, they read them at home and then they post about it in our class forum. They also read or listen to the interpretations of scholars and other ministers who have unique perspectives on scripture, and in cultivating these different readings of scripture not only do we notice the things we've missed, we also become more aware of our own particularities and intersecting identities. Now, I teach the Hebrew language too and ancient Near Eastern cultural facts and that sort of thing, but the most important skill that we practice in my classes is learning to read scripture together within the Body of Christ. And it is here where we hear the Holy Spirit speaking to us of liberation and hope and love in the Bible. So let me give you just a few examples from our genesis reading this this evening. Okay, so you may have heard that this is a story about how women are to blame for sinning and wrecking God's perfect creation for the rest of us, but when you read this story together with the Body of Christ you might see that both the man and the woman are present during that whole exchange with the snake, it's just that the woman does all of the talking while the man is silent. You see, whenever that snake speaks he addresses them in the second person plural form - that is, he's saying “y'all” (but you know, like, in Hebrew), so I believe that whatever the nature of that disobedience is with the fruits and the Tree, whatever its consequences, both the man and the woman are equally responsible. For centuries the predominantly male interpreters of the Bible have been all too ready to believe the man at his word when he tells God in chapter 3, “Hey, she made me do it. It's not my fault.” But thankfully not everybody who reads the Bible is a man. You may have heard that this story teaches that women must submit to their husbands but when you read this story together with the Body of Christ you might see that this is not how God intended to create the world. Now it's true that there is a verse in chapter three where God says to the woman, “Your husband shall rule over you.” That's in there, but what too many fail to acknowledge is that this speech from God happens after the snake and the tree and the fruits and all that stuff, thus God is not prescribing the way things ought to be, God is describing the tragic consequences of what has resulted from that first sin. Women submitting to men was not an order that God imposed on creation, it's a sign that things are going wrong. Now, that may seem like a kind of minor rhetorical distinction but consider this: in the same speech God also tells the man that the ground itself is now cursed and that it will be difficult and back-breaking work to farm food. So does that mean it's wrong to, I don't know, buy a tractor? Is it going against the very nature of Creation to spread a little weed killer or to find some other way to ameliorate this curse that is on the ground? Just because gender inequality was a consequence of sin, that does not mean we have to live our lives maintaining it, thankfully. Thankfully not everybody who reads the Bible is willing to believe that God baked gender inequality into creation. You may have heard that because this story depicts a man and a woman in a committed sexual relationship that it thereby forbids any other kind of sexual contact between human beings. But when you read this story together with the Body of Christ you might see that God's imperative to those first human beings is to create and raise children, and that is not at all the same thing as a prohibition against other expressions of love and generosity and commitments, including those that develop between same-sex partners. The fact is, the very first problem, before the tree, the very first problem that we see in the Garden of Eden is that the very first human being is lonely. That's what's in our reading this evening. The very first verse, this is what God says: “It is not good that man should be alone.” Companionship and partnership is what God creates in this story and it's what God intends for all of us, however and with whomever we might find it. Thankfully not everybody who reads the Bible has such a narrow understanding of human relationships. Let's do one more. You may have heard that this story teaches that every human being is naturally one of two genders but when you read this story together with the Body of Christ you might notice that God originally created just one person, and within that single person are the substances that will eventually become the first man and woman. The first human being is called Adam, which is the Hebrew word for mortal. It's also the root of the name that we use today, Adam. The word Adam is actually a pun because God forms Adam from the adama - that is, from the ground. As one Bible scholar puts it, God takes some of the ground and creates a groundling. The words man and woman -that is, ish and isha in Hebrew - do not even appear in the narrative until there are two people split apart from that original mortal Adam. What could it possibly mean to be male or female when you are literally the only member of your species? What does it mean that the very first human being that God created was sexually ambiguous? Thankfully there are people in the Body of Christ asking these important questions because I'll be honest, as interesting and as necessary as they are, I would have never thought of them. And I'm a Bible scholar right? So let me close with one more thought. There's this idea out there that I sometimes encounter in progressive, inclusive churches that the Bible and especially the Old Testament, is not really on our side. “Yeah there are some nice bits here and there but overall the Bible is old, it's outdated and it's non-essential for a kind of modern, you know, progressive Christian faith.” I think when folks say this most of the time I think they mean well. They might be thinking of passages like the Garden of Eden and how some branches of the church have used this text to control and to injure and to violate, but when we bracket off the Bible so uncritically I don't think we realize that we are making the same mistake that those other Christian branches are making. Neither of us is reading scripture with the church. Today, we're reading it only with the church of the past. It's just that some of us like those past interpretations and some of us reject them, but both perspectives are impoverished, both are short-sighted and both are exclusive. Reading scripture together is one of the most important ways that we as the Body of Christ hear what God is speaking to us today, and in those settings the voice of the Holy Spirit comes as much from the people around us as it does from our own individual readings or hearings of the text. It is not good that we should read alone. Therefore let us cling to the Body of Christ, our community of interpreters, and become one flesh. Amen. Access a recording of this and other sermons at StMartinEC.org/podcasts/sermons/ Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Sermon by the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 22. Today's readings are:Genesis 2:18-24 Psalm 8 Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12 Mark 10:2-16 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost... It's Complicated The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel, October 3, 2021 Please join me in the spirit of prayer. Creator God, we give you humble thanks and we express our amazement that you are mindful of us and that you care for each of us. Such extraordinary love points only to your greatness. Lord God keep us in your grace so that we may grow into your love and learn to live in that space just below the angels. In Christ's Name we pray. Amen. So my mother always describes “that day” as the worst day of her life. “That day” was the day that my mother's mother moved back in with my mother's father and took her home. My mother had been enjoying life with just her mother. I understand why, because her mother, whose actual name I don't know, was always called by the grandchildren “Other Mama” and that's her name as far as I'm concerned. Other Mama, one of the most nurturing, kind, generous, loving people I've ever met, was taking care of my mom as a solo child in a small bungalow in Amarillo, Texas while Other Mama taught school, and mom enjoyed the undivided attention of her mother. But then she got taken back to her dad. Now her dad, known to me as Daddy D (known to people more locally as Dr. D. Foster) was a legend in the small town in the Texas Panhandle called Hale Center. He was the town doctor. The one town doctor. Every baby that was born, he delivered. Every bone that broke, he set. Every surgery, he did it. Everyone passing on, he walked them through. He did house calls. He got paid in chickens by broke farmers. He was a legendary small town country god. Now, this public appearance was in contradiction with his domestic life because at home he was retired, he was cruel, he was a drinker, a smoker, and a serial philanderer in a Southern Baptist town. My grandmother, Other Mama, stood six foot two in flat shoes. She could look Daddy D right in the eyes, but Daddy D had the gift of making her feel small and making her feel bad about herself and he made it a miserable house to live in. So that was the worst day of my mom's life, and even when I was a young child and we visited that little ranch house in Hale Center, Texas, I could feel my beloved grandmother's misery - the heaviness of her hurt on her broad shoulders - vividly, as I worked with her in the kitchen to make breakfast or dinner. So this is all a way to say that I have some problems with our gospel today, and I'm going to trouble this story a little bit, and it's going to trouble me, and we're going to get someplace with it, and it's going to be complicated so I ask to bear with me. It's really my observation (and I think it's a valid one) that the Episcopal Church has come to a place today where we are able to embrace divorce in a way that Jesus did not. We can see that when a marriage covenant breaks down so severely that against all efforts, it can't be recovered, we can see that the loving response may be the end of that marriage bond in divorce, that that might be the right loving care of everyone concerned. And so pastorally we wrap couples up in care as they make that journey. We don't judge them, we assist them. This is where we are pastorally today in relationship to divorce. We can see that it demands respect. We can see that it is often a blessing that displays God's liberating and life-giving love in a way that perhaps Jesus could not see according to this passage. Now, this passage has been worked with by a lot of people and I spent a lot of time evolving arguments this week, and I can teach an adult forum about an hour long on all the ways to worm around what this passage says. There's a whole school that tries to make Jesus a first century feminist who somehow was making men and women equal in this story even though under Roman law they were already such. I don't really buy all these work-arounds. I think we have to face it head on. Jesus is approached with the question of the legality of divorce and with the Mosaic law he does not contest it, he just says it's given to you for your wholeness and heart. Then he changes the frame in a very Rabbinical argument move and says well that's the Mosaic covenant about the covenant of Creation, and according to Jesus and the covenant of Creation, we're meant for lifelong marriage or bonding together. And then he goes into the adultery discussion in private with the disciples where yes, men and women are treated equally, but the results aren't so good because if you remarry you're an adulterer. So this leads us to the very uncomfortable passage, and as someone once said (the great preacher David Gloss) a woman who had been divorced, well, every time she heard this passage she felt like a garbage can had been dumped on her at church. She came all ready to be renewed and revived and to worship and here comes this gospel like a bunch of garbage to make her feel ashamed and bad about herself. That's why I feel like we have to depart from it to some degree, and be the pastors who recognize that divorce demands respect and blessing and care and may be the right way to go for someone's flourishing and for the health of the whole family. Now, saying that, -and this is where it gets a little more complicated - I also want to, as I respect divorce, also celebrate life in a union. Now, I trust that this congregation can do complex things in your hearts and your minds so stick with it. While we respect that some marriages are better ended, we still can alongside that celebrate God's intention that we have companionship in the long term, and that's the whole move that Jesus makes back to the Genesis story. The only time in the Genesis story that God says something is not good, it's not good that the first human is alone. So that's how profoundly God believes that we need companionship. We need someone to express that delight and love in us, that is part and parcel of God's delight and love with us. And another bit of trouble I'm going to throw out in this passage is that that same Genesis passage has been used oppressively to exclude gay and lesbian and transgender people from the benefits of married life and lifelong companionship blessed by the church. Once again I think we're in a new place in the Episcopal Church where those unions are as blessed as heterosexual unions. Whether it's male and male, female and female, or female and male we can see God's love in these relationships and celebrate them and wish them the same flourishing over time. Really, indeed when I sit down and do premarital counseling of any couple whatsoever I always move from the assumption that they are heading towards lifelong union. I don't do premarital counseling with an escape clause. You know, saying “these values are from God but you can bail out anytime” is not what I teach. I try to hold out to them the promise of this long-term commitment of time. These people in their 20s being married right now - actuarially, they might be married for 60 or 70 years. They've got a really good chance at that, so i say to them “think about how your mind, body and spirit will change in 70 years.” And I don't do that lightly. I'm trying to get them to reflect on this gift of love that they share. Does it have the oomph, does it have the depth to stay devoted, stay adoring, stay committed through all of those ups and downs, the for better, the for worse, the richer, the poorer, the sickness, the health? Are your wedding vows very realistic? Do you have the gift of love that's going to see you through that journey? Because for me this whole “to death do us part” thing is not a legal trap, which is how it's sometimes used, that you've got to stick together no matter how miserable and bitter you are, how hateful and hurtful a marriage is, you've got to stick together til death do you part. That's the legal reading. For me, the spiritual reading is, do you have the love in your relationship to contemplate on your happiest day the worst thing you can imagine? Can you imagine losing your beloved, and having the love to go through that horrible experience. That's taking a spiritual sounding. That's looking at the spiritual promise of love, not the legalism of marriage. And marriages can and do do that. They can do that so beautifully. They can express the faithfulness of God for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, for sickness and health till death do us part, and be that gift of a loving presence that we all are so yearning for. My greatest example of this has been my own parents. They always taught me and my sisters “Jarrett, Dallas, Kelly: marriage is hard work. You've got to work at everything.” And boy they did, and they've been married 60 years and I celebrate that. At the present time my mom is drifting away with dementia and she's staying in a nursing home room and my dad is staying in their old apartment, but every day my dad at 7:30 am is in her room, and he is in her room until 7:30 p.m. He is supervising her care. He is holding elaborate conversations that are pretty much one-sided. He is showing her pictures of their life together. He is planning the music that she loves. He's defending her against bad medical care. He is loving her in the worst time. This could be the final and the worst time, but this is the time that she's being loved so faithfully, so generously, so sacrificially, that all I can see is God's presence. So let us hold out that love as a promising gift that God offers us in so many states of life: through friendship, through companionship, through partnership, through community, and yes, through marriage as well. That is how deeply we are loved and I fundamentally believe that God believes that we deserve that level of love and need that level of love to flower into the human beings God created us to be. Amen. Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org

Sermon by the Rev. Barbara Ballenger for the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 21. Today's readings are:Numbers 11:4-6,10-16,24-29 Psalm 19:7-14 James 5:13-20 Mark 9:38-50 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BProp21_RCL.html Stay Salty The Rev. Barbara Ballenger, September 26, 2021 Let us Pray. When my kids, who are in their 20s, are annoyed with something or disappointed or are feeling a little bitter they say they are feeling salty. If they know there's something that's upsetting me they say, “Mom, you're a little salty today aren't you?” I'm a little salty. It's a pretty good word to use with today's Gospel, which will ultimately bring us around to the topic of salt. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Everybody is a little salty in today's Gospel. They're also a little salty in the book of Numbers, but in today's gospel, Jarrett was calling it “Harsh Mark”. I think we'll call it “Salty Mark.” For Jesus it started last Sunday on that walk to Capernaum with his followers, and Jesus had to listen to his 12 right-hand men arguing over which of them would be first in the Kingdom of God – as though he can't hear them, as though he can't hear everything. And when he asks them about it, they go all silent, like disciples do. And that makes Jesus a little salty. So as you might remember from last Sunday, he gathered the 12 together in the house where they were staying and said, “if you want to be first, you must be last of all and servant of all.” Then He placed a child among them and said “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me… whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” He introduced the child not because they are particularly insightful or humble, but because in the socio-familial relationships of the Roman empire, children were dead last. If they were born with deformities they could be left out to die by exposure. So if you're going to serve the least ones, like this child in Jesus arms, you've got to be willing to be less than least. This week, that child is still in Jesus' lap and the 12 Apostles are still struggling with what Jesus is telling them. You know, so much has been made about the 12 apostles, about how they were the church's first leaders, the representatives of the 12 tribes of Israel, the predecessors of bishops and priests. I just wonder if Jesus wanted 12 handy examples of what not to do to get into the kingdom of God. “You'll do. Let's have John today, it's John's turn.” So today John steps up. ”Hey speaking of doing things in your name, Jesus, there was this guy casting out demons in your name, but he wasn't following us, so we tried to stop him.” That was John. I wonder if he was feeling a little salty about the competition coming from outside the group. It's as though John is saying, “well if I can't cut out the least ones, who can I cut out? How about him?” If Jesus wasn't salty before, he is now. And he not so gently turns the apostles' attention away from the finger pointing they were sighting down and to the three pointing back at them. They need a lesson on how to be “least of all, and servant of all.” “You want to know what to cut out? I'll tell you what to cut out”, says Jesus. “If you are looking to be first in line by excluding, judging or because you're jealous of what they've got, cut it out.” “If you are causing someone who is struggling with their faith to stumble and fall because of what you say or do around them, cut it out.” “And if you have things in your life that are causing you to put yourself in solidarity with anyone or anything other than God, cut them out.” Then Jesus goes on this big exaggerated litany of all the body parts they should be willing to lose, if they are causing his followers to sin. And at first I thought he was going back to the lesson he taught in Mark 7, where he told his followers that evil doesn't come from the outside, but from the inside with things like greed, wickedness, deceit, arrogance, and foolishness. That would apply pretty well here. So of course your eye and your hand and your foot aren't making you sin, but the much deeper agendas are. But then I remembered that this particular list that Jesus refers to with a good measure of hyperbole had a particular meaning in Jesus' day. These were the ways that prisoners of conquest were maimed by Rome so they wouldn't escape their servitude. So prisoners were sometimes blinded and then given manual labor to do that they could never find their way free of. Or their hands or feet were cut off so they couldn't run away. And that's how Rome built its great empire. That's one of the things that came to mind when people talked about the blind and the lame. So Jesus may also be saying to the arrogant 12 – “how willing are you really to be the kind of servant that God has called you to be? Are you willing to sacrifice your body to keep yourself bound to your service to me? Because that's what it means to be first in the kingdom.” Like I said – Jesus is salty. But it's important that his followers, especially those chosen to spread the gospel, get this right. Because as soon as church membership and discipleship becomes a contest, as soon as some are considered more important than others by their proximity to Jesus, or their status, or their gifts or their apparent blessings, then the fragile unity of the Jesus movement will stumble and fall. There is no room for factions or triumphalism in it. It hurt the church then and it harms it now. So what does that mean for us today, in this assembly? I think it means that if we find ourselves continually pointing to others as the source of blame for our dissatisfaction, we might need to examine who the rest of our fingers are pointing. We might need to look at whether we are the disciples that God requires for God's work. When we're feeling like blaming, it might be an invitation to self-reflection. So we might ask: what do we do that causes others to stumble in their faith, or in their belief? What do we do as members of the Jesus movement that impedes its work, the growth of others? I could turn it around and make it nicer and ask “what do we do to help people to grow?” But sometimes we have to look at what we do that causes people to wilt, to walk away, to visit and not come back, or to wonder if Christians truly believe what we say we do. So I'll just talk about me. Here are some things that I have been guilty of in my life as a Christian: Failing to welcome,failing to include, or appreciate and offer hospitality. Maybe making sure that I have my spot in a new group and being oblivious that others want to come in too. In times of church strife, stirring up dissension and inhibiting healing by gossiping, by undermining, holding grudges, or carefully tending my personal agendas. Expressing my disappointment in tones that would make it very difficult to engage with me on the issue at hand because I so fanned the flames around me, Acting out of my prejudices and privileges before I even know they're out of the box– of race, class, and age – as soon as my power gets challenged. I could go on of course. These are the fingers that tend to point back at me. How about for you? “Whoever is not against us is for us,” Jesus says of the unnamed exorcist that John has in his crosshairs. But the question for John and for us, instead is, how are you “for God.” In what ways are you that servant, that offering to God, that sacrifice that Jesus calls his followers to be? This is where salt enters the story in a slightly different way than I‘ve been using it. “For everyone will be salted with fire,” Jesus says. Sacrifices to God in Jesus' day were purified with salt and with fire. An animal sacrifice, in the experience of Israel, was an act of prayer and worship, and praise, humility and intercession to God. You prepared a sacrifice carefully. How have we prepared ourselves to be “for God?” How are we fashioning our lives so that they serve God, and God's love, and God's will? What are we salting our lives with, so that they build up rather than tear down, so they are fit for the work that God Is doing in the world? Here I want to give a brief shout out today's reading from James, who encourages us to salt our lives with prayer. In all things. We are not to just use God as some divine help desk; but rather, to fully season our lives in joy and pain, in illness and soul-sickness and wellness and whole-heartedness with the kind of prayer that fully surrenders to God in our lives. If we see people who have fallen, we are to help them to rise. If we see people who have wandered, we help them to return. That's what you do when your life is fully seasoned with prayer and relationship with God. Dorothy Day called it making it easier for people to be good. We make it easier for people to be good. We make the church community a place people can come home to; where people can find peace. “Salt is good,” Jesus reminds his followers. “But if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.” Be at peace with one another. This is what Jesus was getting at in the first place, even before he set that child on his lap. Be at peace with one another. Jesus implores us to set aside our arguing, and our egos, and our arrogance, and our blame, and walk together in love. In other words, Jesus might say, “Stay Salty.” Amen. Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187. All rights reserved. Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org