Podcast appearances and mentions of jarrett kerbel

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. 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

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

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 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. 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

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. 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

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Jarrett Kerbel for the seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 20. Today's readings are:Jeremiah 11:18-20 Psalm 54 James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a Mark 9:30-37 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost... Please join me in the spirit of prayer. Lord God, draw near to us as we draw near to you. Lord God, grant us the gift of your saving wisdom once again, so that we may know the gentleness and kindness of your word in our hearts. In Christ's Name we pray, Amen. Please be seated. We have been in a stretch of the Gospel of Mark that's raw and hard. Two weeks ago we had the Syrophoenician woman and the horrible words Jesus exchanged with her, and her subtle words that cracked open the good news for all gentiles. Last week we had the ferocious exchange between Jesus and Peter. Jesus revealed who he was: the messiah who would suffer, die, and rise, and there was all that rebuking back and forth in the community, which helps us understand why we are scared to ask questions. This week we have this next raw passage where the disciples, the founding generation of our faith, are caught out looking embarrassed, looking and actually missing the point. And I always ask myself when I'm in this raw section of work “what's going on?” One thing that's going on is the cross has been revealed, and when the cross is revealed, the tension goes up. The story becomes unsettling: this is life and death now. The other thing that's so interesting to me is where's the editor? You would think that someone would edit this story. What movement leaves in these kinds of stories about the founding generation? You would think there would be an editor with a public relations point of view. There is none, and all the embarrassing stuff stay in. The embarrassing stories stay in. The struggle stays in the story. And we can imagine that in all these decades when the stories were passed around in the budding community of the early church, the subjects of those stories were there. Peter, John and Andrew got to hear these stories about themselves, and their relatives and friends got to hear them. “Oh, there's Uncle Peter being dense again.” “There goes Cousin Andrew, boy did he get that wrong.” I think in this lies the hint in why these stories are included. Remember in the beginning of the gospel Jesus is only teaching his disciples. He's only in a community with his disciples when he teaches. What does that tell you? It tells you that this embarrassing story was passed on by the disciples. They told this story among themselves, and that fact is crucial. That means that these disciples understood finally what Jesus was teaching at some point, because they were able to accept the sacrifice of embarrassment, the sacrifice of a little humility, for the good of the community, who needed to hear these stories. Because the struggle of the early church is the same struggle of our discipleship now. The struggle to understand what is hard to understand. The struggle to enter this way of Jesus that's hard to understand in the actual practice of our lives. So the disciples gave us a gift in their sacrifice. “Yes, tell these embarrassing stories about me, because it will help the community. It's going to help the community that's learning to sacrifice and learning to struggle.” We continue down that path of struggle and sacrifice, learning how to live this path that Jesus has offered us as the path of life, and we see both points in this gospel. They didn't ask Jesus after his second revelation of his death and resurrection because they were scared to bring up their ignorance. And then, as if proving that they aren't getting what Jesus is teaching by arguing on the way about who will be greatest, and who is going to be the top of the heap in the new kingdom, Jesus very gently calls them out and corrects them. He calls them to lives of service first. – “where the first be the last and the last be the first” - and then pushes them even further by picking up a child, and showing the child as a lesson to them about how to be in the community. See, the disciples are struggling to take an order, fully knowing that that's the mystery from death to life: that there is a demotion involved here; that we are called to lives out of glory of service; not of status but of dependence. And I want to be clear with this point that for Jesus, service is not servility. Service is not servility, and sacrifice is not self-hatred. These are common misconceptions promoted oftentimes by the church, but service is not servility and sacrifice is not self-hate. Quite the opposite: both are participation in the goodness of Christ. Both are participation in the way of Jesus and they bring out the good in us that is good for others, and the awareness that what's good for others is what's good for us. It's only when we drop our ego-centric notion of ourselves as the center and begin to live for others that we fully understand that what is good is shared; what is good for me is what is good for you. And so in that understanding servility and self-hatred are not part of the story, rather a liberation is part of the story. A liberation into the story of Christ himself, who gives all in service, to reveal the goodness in the love of God for us. I believe this teaching is utterly crucial to us. The simple act of asking people to sacrifice by putting on a mask, the simple act of asking people to sacrifice to take the vaccine, has proven so challenging to so many people that we are living with Covid long past when perhaps we should have, and many tens of thousands of people have died, because of a deep unwillingness to sacrifice and to serve the other. This is a humbling and sobering moment in our National life where many of us are standing back and saying “what is missing, that we can't take such simple measures for the common good?” Just as an aside I want to say that I'm so proud of St. Martin because our community has shown that willingness to make those small sacrifices for the common good, and that inspired me as a Christ-like work by everyone here during the last 18 months, and you need to be given thanks for that. But the larger issue still remains. Why can't we understand sacrifice? Why have we lost that virtue? And it haunts me even more because more sacrifice is to be required. It is the calling of communities like us to witness and lead and teach that sacrifice, because the world will need more. When we think about climate change, we can think and hope that technology will bail us out. There's one scenario where if we have enough Teslas, we can take the superhighways and we'll all be happy. I would love that to be true. I really hope that's how it goes. But all indications are to me that we will need some level of sacrifice to save the planet and save humanity, and our communities have a special role to tell that story, because that story that Jesus told about being betrayed, handed over, killed and risen is not just an alternative story. It's not just another way of thinking. It's not just a counter-narrative. It is the event that changed reality itself, and set us free to be a different kind of person, to be a different kind of community, that can make startling choices to serve and to sacrifice and to struggle together because we know through faith that we are part of this new world that Christ is creating, and that that world serves the good of all. 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. Jarrett Kerbel for the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 19.Today's readings are:Wisdom 7:26-8:1 Psalm 116:1-8 James 3:1-12 Mark 8:27-38 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BProp19_RCL.htmlTranscript: Transcript: Please join me in the spirit of prayer. Gracious God, I turn to you in gratitude and thanksgiving, knowing that when the cords of death entangle us, when grief and sorrow are on us, that you are there, that any forsaken place you will find us, any place of being lost and alone, you have been there. I give you thanks that your grace surrounds such pain with hope in new life. In Christ's name, Amen. I feel like with everything Tyrone taught us, I should sing my sermon this morning. Of course, nobody wants that. I want to recommend a book to you all…a book called The Body Keeps Score. It's a wonderful book that explores how post-traumatic stress gets lodged in our bodies, that all those terrible events of our lives that were painful and raw and hurtful actually persist in us long past when we may have cognitively remembered them, and that they're prone to emerge later in reactions we can't quite understand or depression from trying to keep those feelings at bay. I strongly recommend this book: The Body Keeps Score. I can give a very quick real-life example of this phenomenon of traumatic stress rearing up when you didn't expect it. Some of you know that in the last two years of high school and the first two years of college my son Tim gave my wife and I a run for our money. Lots of crises. Crisis after crisis concerning his addictions, and they were stressful and hard and difficult times. We've had two peaceful years of recovery and we thought we were past it. Then on one very kind of rainy wet day this summer, with the flood warnings in effect and the stream really high, my son set off to fish. Later that day we got a call from my daughter Martha. “Hey, Tim was supposed to pick me up from work. Where is he?” Allison and I went into full alert. (Allison is my wife if you don't know.) We are on both of our cell phones at the same time, texting, calling, calling friends, emailing, pacing up and down our house with our hands on our head, our pulse racing, our breath short, and we're being curt and tense with each other. Luckily he emerged some hours later and was safe and sound. Allison and I took a deep breath and we looked at each other and said “Where did that come from? We must not be over this yet.” We had a good look at how the trauma was still in us, the anxiety and stress just ready to pop at the next occasion that seemed like a crisis from the past. I tell you this story about how the body keeps score because for me it indicates the level of work Jesus is announcing in the gospel. The level of work Jesus is announcing of the gospel isn't just notional or cognitive, it's on the deepest level of our human experiences, the places where we often times do not want to go. Jesus's Messiahship will not be as expected, will not be full of power and success and parades and palaces and princesses. It won't be the glory of military victory. It will be ignominious defeat on a cross, because Jesus has to go to that place to surround with God's love and compassion and attention. All of the most alienated parts of our humanity, God has to go to those places we wish not to go, to overcome them with the hope of the Resurrection. That's the good news I want to cling to. It is the good news I cling to daily, but with the 20th anniversary of September 11th being yesterday, I believe it's a good news we need to hear for our own savior, for the sake of those we love, because I am sure some of you and some of the people you love are carrying in their bodies the score of that day, the horror, the fear, the panic, the worry, the anger, the powerlessness, the shame. Some of us had friends in lower Manhattan. Some of us had family there. Some of us had friends in the towers, or acquaintances, or knew people flying that day, knew people in the Pentagon. And if we take a deep breath we can feel those feelings under the surface of that day. Our spiritual work is to wrap that pain in the compassion and love of Christ, who knows all of it, and lives in that place eternally in love and hope and healing. For me, Jesus is the ultimate body who keeps the score. In this Messiahship he describes in the gospel, he's describing how he has to take on the suffering of humanity - all humanity from day one to the end of time - in his body. All the alienation, the anger, the hostility, the rage, the shame, the rejection, he takes on for us so that he can overcome it with love and hope and new life. And that is what we cling to when we enter these painful spaces. This truth about Jesus is not just an individual truth. It's not just the pastoral need of us who suffer an anniversary or the needs of our families and friends suffering with us. It's also a larger corporate need because Jesus is not just an individual human on the cross, he is corporate humanity in the biggest sense. Plural humanity. I heard a story that reminded me of this fact, a story of healing a new life that to me is the epitome of what I'm saying. The Diocese of Pennsylvania is involved in a ministry at the Veterans Affairs Hospital here in Philadelphia, and the ministry is a ministry to soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan who are suffering from what's called moral injury. We know that in warfare we can suffer psychic injury, we can suffer physical injury and now we know we can suffer moral injury. If only I had this language I would have understood my uncles who went to World War 2, Korea and Vietnam. But here at the V.A, we work with soldiers who are working through this pain, this oppressive pain that they carry. Part of what they do is they present their story to an assembly of friends and fellow veterans and church people and they tell us what happened, and I've heard the story of one particular person I'll call Andy. Andy was a young man at the time of 9/11 and to honor his grandfather who served in World War 2, he joined the military soon after that day, and he was deployed to Iraq. On one of his patrols, his patrol took fire from a building. They hunkered down and called in an air strike and moments later the building was reduced to rubble. His unit moved into the rubble to search and discovered there was no gunman. There were no guns; no gunmen; no ammunition; no weapons. There was a family. Multi-generations of a family now dead. This was Andy's moral injury, something he could not erase from his conscience. Something that worked against all of his commitments. Something that broke his heart. Something he struggled with mightily to find relief and forgiveness for years after his service. He told this story to the assembly with great emotion and then the assembled gathered around Andy and recited some words written for the occasion. The group said “Andy, we (Key word: We) are sorry. It is because of our choices that you were put in that impossible situation. It was because of our choices you are morally injured this way, and we take responsibility and beg your forgiveness.” It was a healing moment, a healing moment of corporate responsibility. Joint shared responsibilities finally acknowledging that the shame this man felt was something we all shared and put on. I see the story of our Christ, our messiah, in this story, where the body of Christ finally is taking this pain into itself, not denying it, not ignoring it, not putting it away, but turning into it with love and compassion that leads to life renewed. Connection renewed. Souls saved and restored. This to me is the mission of the body of Christ, formed by Christ when we live out this mission. I have one final challenging place to go with you all this morning, because there's a bigger picture here. We've looked at compassion to the individual who suffers, we've looked at the community rallying around someone who suffers. We need to look at the global presence of the messiah who suffers. One of the most striking and difficult things for me as we have observed the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and 20 years of warfare is the death toll. 929,000 people have died in the last 20 years in Afghanistan; in Iraq and Syria and Yemen. That number is almost too big to grasp. Humans notoriously have a hard time relating emotionally to large numbers, but I have to ask myself “How do I live with this death toll as I try to live a life before God? How do I live with this? What do I do with it as I live with my suffering messiah?” The first thing I can say that causes me some gratitude in the midst of the entangled grief is that thank God, that God can love that many people, because I know I cannot. But I know that God's love treats each one of those people as a child of God, and the vast majority of them were civilians: women and children and non-combatants. This was a slaughter bigger than the American Civil War and I need to know that my suffering messiah can teach my heart, hardened by nationalism, hardened by parochialism, by all the limitations of my place and time. Our suffering messiah can teach me that God's love extends to all those people; that they are human beings that are infinitely valuable to God, and arriving at that deep inner knowledge, that wisdom, I can only believe that we need to find another way. That living before God we cannot endorse such slaughter. That living unashamed of our association with Jesus, we cannot endorse such massive killing. We must at least sit in the pain and ask ourselves what can be done differently for the sake of the one we follow. 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. Jarrett Kerbel for the fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 18.Today's readings are:Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23 Psalm 146 James 2:1-10, [11-13], 14-17 Mark 7:24-37 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.nethttps://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BProp18_RCL.htmlTranscript: Gracious God, we give you thanks for the example of the syrophoenician woman who cracked open the covenant to include all gentiles thereafter. We thank you for her persistence and her faith that in your abundance there was enough for all. In Christ's name we pray. Amen. Please be seated. So, in the early 1990s I was just starting out as a priest as a youth minister. What do you do with a priest in his twenties? Youth Minister. Luckily I loved it and had a lot of fun with it. This is also the time when in youth ministry there was this great outburst of bracelets: friendship bracelets and cross bracelets, and one of the most popular ones with my group was the one that said “WWJD?” “What Would Jesus Do?” And I wore one to go along with the group, and it was a lot of fun, but when I read the story of the syrophoenician woman I wanted a second bracelet to put on top of it, and that one would say “DDWJJD.” “Don't Do What Jesus Just Did.” Because here we have in this wonderful Gospel of Mark, a very uncomfortable reading. Very uncomfortable for anyone who loves Jesus to see him acting as crabby and nasty and bigoted as can be. I could apply other words but we're in church. It's a very upsetting passage. He refers to the syrophoenician woman as a small female dog. We know there's another translation for that in English. That's how shocking this is. What is going on with this reading and how do we approach it? Well, I approach it in two ways. One, I celebrate the syrophoenician woman. That's my focus. Her wonderful persistence, her wonderful insistence that there was room enough at the table for her and her daughter, to me is the voice of prayer and faith in the story. She's the example of what faith is, and I believe she is the gate opening moment for all gentiles who come into the covenant. She breaks open the covenant by agitating Jesus. She agitates Jesus in the most clever and subtle of ways, which to me feels like she had heard about this feeding of the five thousand, which had happened in chapter six in the Gospel of Mark (we're now in chapter seven) and she took that message to heart, that in the abundance of God's mercy there was room for her to be fed and healed as well. The second thing I do with the story is I read it from the perspective of the gentile outsider. I read it from the perspective of the gentile outsider, which I am a gentile outsider. And from that perspective it opens up in a different way because Jesus's behavior to me looks like a gentile's fears of how the God of Israel would behave. It feels to me there's a message here to the new gentiles in the church, who are trying to understand how accessible God is, and this story gives them hope. So for example, it's a very strange story. Jesus goes all the way outside of Israel to Tyre and the first thing he does is goes into a house and tries not to be disturbed. I picture him going in, shutting the door, and seeking privacy. Jesus, as the story goes on, as I said, is crabby, judgmental, aloof, inaccessible, and favoring one group of people over another, showing favoritism, partiality - and these are all the things that the gentile audience feared were true. But the gentile audience gets the syrophoenician woman who challenges Jesus. Really challenges him and holds him accountable to his true character and nature, and she pushes him to do this other thing that the God of Israel does. This other thing that is characteristic of the God of Israel. Jesus repents. Jesus repents from drawing his line too harshly, and allows for the healing, and allows ultimately for the extension of the promise of life in God, past the original covenant, with room enough for all. So first let's give thanks to the syrophoenician woman. She persisted and she opened up the covenant that includes us now. I speak as a gentile in that sense. And what we have after this revelation in the Gospel is its application in the letter of James. Now take a step back, use your imagination. Remember that these letters to early church communities were read out loud to the community. These are not private correspondence. This letter was read out loud to that community. Imagine a gathering of the poor and the rich - the oppressed and the oppressor - who heard the letter of James together. That is a shocking confrontation. The struggle going on in their midst is named. They are acting like the unredeemed world when they gather in their assembly for worship. When they gather around the table of Christ they're bringing in the practices of the world to this place where they don't apply anymore. The wealthy are being treated with more regard and being allowed to treat the poor with disregard. “Sit at my feet”...the kind of things you can't say at the Lord's table. And James is confronting them with this very difficult but true word, that in the Kingdom of God all the citizens of that kingdom are equal. And this is a shocking word just said right out there in the open, because for those with more status that's going to feel like a demotion, and for people in the unredeemed world with less status that's going to feel like a promotion. So they can meet as equals in Christ. How does that play out? What is that spiritual struggle like? To sit in that early community and hear those words, depending on what side of the spectrum you're on, it's a wonderful gift of liberation no matter which side of the spectrum you're on. I know this conundrum firsthand and practically speaking. When I worked in Chicago I did trainings with the Industrial Areas Foundation where we trained leaders from all over Chicagoland (South, North, West, Eastside) to do delegations to meet with elected leaders to advocate on the basis of our faith for certain changes like universal health care, for example, or school funding, and one of our big training agendas was always helping our members not to give away their power. Not to give away their power. They had been trained over the years that when they met with an elected official they should defer and just be grateful to be in the powerful person's presence. They should be indirect and careful and meek. And I saw it happen over again and over again, and I participated. I'm from a military family - “yes sir,” “ no sir,” “yes ma'am,” “no ma'am.” I can defer with the best of them. And we had to work together on this notion taught in James that we are equals in the citizenship we have in the Kingdom of Christ, and in that dignity we can speak the truth we need to speak to the powerful. It only took a few times when we got shunted off to the congressional aide who just got out of college, while we watched the pharma executive or the big donor go into the senator's office, for my people to get the message and sit down and say, “We'll wait for the senator, thank you very much.” This is the strange world of the Gospel where we are called into this equal dignity in Christ and depending on where we find ourselves in the status hierarchies of the world around us, this may induce a journey either of humility and humbling, or a journey of growth and claiming dignity, so we can meet together in that equality of children of God. 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. Jarrett Kerbel for the eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 14. Today's readings are: 1 Kings 19:4-8 Psalm 34:1-8 Ephesians 4:25-5:2 John 6:35, 41-51 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BProp14_RCL.html Transcript coming soon. 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 sixth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 9. Today's readings are: Ezekiel 2:1-5 Psalm 123 2 Corinthians 12:2-10 Mark 6:1-13 Readings may be found at https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BProp9_RCL.html Transcript: Please join me in a spirit of prayer. Oh God, we thank you for that amazing grace that brings us home. We give you thanks that your grace makes us whole, and finds us when we most need to be found. In Christ's name we pray. Amen. Please be seated. Good morning! Later in the service we're going to sing the hymn “America the Beautiful.” I know, not everyone is comfortable with singing a national hymn in church. I respect that discomfort. I have felt it myself. But this hymn was actually written in an Episcopal church. In fact, the church where Tyrone used to work in Newark, New Jersey, Grace Church Newark. Was it the music director who wrote it? [Director of Music, Tyrone Whiting]: Correct. [The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel]: All right, so Tyrone should know this hymn well. And a close look at the words may address some concerns. The whole hymn is a plea for God's grace to be bestowed on our nation, and we know that the grace is God's free gift to us, and it's unearned undeserved, and not something we're entitled to by special exceptional status or achievement. And then in verse 2, we sing this really moving line that I'm not sure everybody knows is in the hymn “America, America.” “God mend thine every flaw.” This really sells the hymn to me, “God mend thine every flaw.” The hymn is confessional. It contains a confession. It contains an awareness of our own imperfections. I don't know about you, but I can feel safe and I can feel more comfortable in a world of ideas, or a system that contains the seeds of its own self-correction and repentance, that has confession as part of its method, a tradition that contains the resources for its own accountability and critique. Our scripture, in fact the whole history of Israel leading up to and including Jesus, contains its own system of self-correction, as evidenced in Ezekiel, the Gospel, and Paul this morning, and it's one reason I trust our faith tradition. To balance out “America the Beautiful” at the end of the service, we're also going to sing one of my favorite hymns from the UCC hymnal, and I thank my wife for this. I'm pointing up. She's alive, don't worry, she's in Maine. That means she's in Maine. Um, this great hymn by Sibelius, “this is my song, O God of all the nations, this is my song, O God of all the nations.” And it reminds us of how people everywhere love their country just like we love ours. They love the blue sky of their countries just as much as we love the blue sky like we have today in ours. And that's how I see this day for me. Our love of country is simply an extension of Jesus's command to love all of our neighbors near and far. It's just when we love a country, it's loving our neighbors in the collective or in the aggregate sense. The question of singing a national hymn or not, balancing it with another hymn or not, reveals a telling ambivalence that we struggle with on this day. I know some won't use the language of love in reference to our country. By these lights, it seems to me our country, as it is and has been, is not seen as worthy of love. Some others are eager to profess love of country, and believe that no nation is worthy of love because it is without spot or blemish. You might think of the phrase, “America, love it or leave it,” or some such. Both, however, in my opinion, share a common and dangerous assumption: to be worthy of love, we must be perfect. To be worthy of love, we must be perfect. And for that reason, I think both sides need a dose of Jesus and Saint Paul, and we have just the right dosage in the scripture that happens to fall on this Fourth of July, we have on display in the Gospel a weak, rejected Jesus, and in the Epistle we have Paul reminding us that power is perfected in weakness. Why is a story of failure and weakness and rejection included in a book meant to nurture our trust in Jesus as our Lord and God? Why did the editors leave this in? Because Jesus lives to display God's grace, that is to say God's unconditional love that embraces the flawed and imperfect and the rejected in all of us. Remember what I said about a self-correcting tradition? The Gospel makes sure we are not tempted into a Jesus of power and glory, understood in the world's terms, but subtly reminds us that this is the Jesus of the cross, the Jesus of defeat, the Jesus of rejection and humiliation. He's even humiliated in the story. Notice that his neighbors never mentioned their father. They are noticing he's illegitimate God is not looking for perfect servants. Rather, God delights in servants who, by doing God's work and telling God's story, in our weakness and despite our weakness, are made able by grace to glorify God through God working in us. Kierkegaard, to drop a Danish philosopher on you. As you may know, he was a clumsy and lame man, also very grumpy, who was a great fan of the ballet. When he talked about this leap of faith, the ballet was in mind. He was gesturing at something he could not ever hope to achieve on his own with his own abilities in his own merits, but could only do if God's grace worked with his weakness to create a state of gracefulness in him. Believe it or not, I mentioned the Danish philosopher because I had a conversation about him this week with a young man who works at a local climbing gym.This young man is also finishing a Masters in Theology at Villanova. The young climbing instructor talked about how people often achieve a high when they climb the climbing walls. When they're being successful and powerful and graceful and creative, they get this high feeling, an elated, hyper-focused, heightened experience that many call spiritual. We might think of this climbing experience as related to what St. Paul experienced up there in the third heaven. The young man and I agreed that these were great experiences to have, really fun ones, but also spiritually ambiguous in our achievement and in our sense of powerfulness. We might center on ourselves and center on the experience in itself, and leave no room for relationship, for gratitude, for a community who helped you get to this place, for a sense of blessing from beyond our abilities and our self. The climbing instructor reflected to me that it is when we fall, it's when we falter and reach the limits of our power, that we open ourselves to our need for help from beyond. It is in that relational moment that God's power interacts with our weakness, as Jesus and Paul teach us in the readings today. We don't have to be perfect to serve God. We don't have to be perfect to serve God and proclaim God's Goodness. God is not waiting for us to get perfect before God loves us. In fact, it's simply the opposite. It's God's love of us as we are that slowly improves us over time and never gives up on us. We don't have to be perfect to be loved by God and by each other. And we may examine ourselves to ask how that desire for perfection in ourselves and others is an obstacle to our loving. Perhaps a system we use to perfect ourselves, protect ourselves from the vulnerability of loving, our collective life as a nation, does not need to be perfect to be loved. And in fact, in that shared weakness, we may know more clearly how much we need to be redeemed and loved into our better angels. I do believe that acknowledging our flaws and failures in admitting our weakness, “God mend our every flaw,” when that comes from a place of love and acceptance, it brings the healing presence of God's grace in tow, and opens us up to the healing we so desperately need and we push away when we constantly come from a place of negativity. We need to proceed from this love we are given if healing is our goal. 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

God provides abundant life - more than we expect, and more than we could hope for - if only we'll acknowledge and water the seed already planted within us. The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel's sermon for the Third Sunday after Pentecost, June 13, 2021. Today's readings are: Ezekiel 17:22-24 Psalm 92:1-4,11-14 2 Corinthians 5:6-10,14-17 Mark 4:26-34 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net for Proper 6, Year B. Transcript: Please join me in a spirit of prayer. Gracious God, we give you thanks that you have begun in us a new creation. Help us by your grace to grow, continually leaving behind what must be left behind, and growing into that newness of life that you promise. In Christ's name we pray. Amen. In my perennial garden there's a thriving strawberry patch that I did not plant. For years, as we sampled lovely wild strawberries, my wife and I, we wondered where did this unexpected gift come from? Over time, I observed that above the volunteer strawberries, there is a patch of coneflowers. And on the coneflowers sit birds, feeding on the seeds of the flowers, and it seems over the years, some of these birds had feasted in strawberry patches before visiting my garden. And while on the flowers, they made deposits. We shall call them deposits. And in those deposits were undigested strawberry seeds. Voila! A thriving, unwanted, accidental, and delicious patch of strawberries. Life's abundance is absolutely awe-inspiring. We're having a cicada outbreak in New Jersey, and it is intense to say the least. Today in scripture we have metaphors of propagation, metaphors from nature, meant to turn our hearts to God's surprising, persistent, prevailing, life-giving project. Barb Ballenger preached a great sermon on this mustard seed stuff a few years ago, look it up and do see a big footnote in the next section here. Jesus is at his bizarre and ironic best in the mustard seed parable. He depicts God's tree of life as a mustard shrub. Mustard was an invasive, unwelcome by farmers, and devilish to uproot. Yet Jesus chose this tiny seed and lowly plant to teach us something about the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is like a mustard shrub, even imagined here as the tree of life itself, where all the birds have room to roost. So what does that mean about the Kingdom of God, what is it like? Well it's like an intrusive, hard to detect, unwanted weed tree, that disrupts the well-planned garden and makes room for birds who will add their own...deposits...to the mess. The Kingdom of God will disrupt the established order, the well-planned garden, and make room for the unwelcomed. A mission to give hope is in this Gospel, and a mission to give hope to the oppressed is shared by the Gospel and by Ezekiel. The Gospel, in the face of the Roman Empire, and Ezekiel in the face of the Babylonian exile. God's abundant life prevails in surprising ways, in both situations, like grass finding its way through a crack in a cement sidewalk. In the case of Ezekiel, the prophet gives us a good description of how to propagate a cedar tree. You can actually do what he says in the prophecy and get a new cedar tree, so go home, climb a cedar tree, cut a young bough, and bring it down and plant it, and you will have, if you want, a new cedar tree. The prophet offers this image as a word of hope, to the Jews held in exile in Babylon, at the time of the telling, 17 years in exile, long enough for the first children to be adults with no memory of independence, no memory of a cohesive culture, and no memory of the holy city of Jerusalem. This generation is growing up in a hostile culture, surrounded daily by a set of stories and practices and habits guaranteed to horrify and offend and undermine everything the Jews hold dear. And in fact, the Babylonians had their own story about cedar trees. In their story, their mythic hero Gilgamesh kills the steward who looked after all the cedar trees, and then Gilgamesh chops down every tree in the forest. The cedar was considered the tallest and most majestic tree in the ancient world, and nothing could be greater than Gilgamesh, so they had to go. The mythic hero prevails by marking and despoiling the earth in service of his grandeur. Ezekiel, a captive in Babylon, tells a different story about cedar trees, a subversive counter-narrative of the God who gives life, who plants and who propagates, the God of a good creation, the God of abundance in the midst of myths about despoiling, exploiting, and extracting. Two quotes I heard this week led me off in this direction with these texts. Both were in a movie we screened here at the church, 8 Billion Angels, a movie about the climate crisis. One quote in the movie came from Mahatma Gandhi, who said, “the world is able to support our need, but not our greed.” The world is able to support our need, but not our greed. And the second from someone interviewed in the movie, who said, “We have an economy premised on the notion that growth is continual in a world of finite resources.” We have an economy premised on continuous growth in a world of finite resources. How does that make sense? We are called, like Ezekiel, to tell a story of life, and to live a life in balance with creation, under a tree of abundance rooted in trust in God's goodness, rooted in God's providence, working to rebalance and restore the harmony God intended in God's good world. I take my personal inspiration from the oak tree. In Maine last summer, I was daydreaming in my hiking hammock down by the bay. I was pretending to read some weighty book or the other while gawking at the trees. The tide was out, and only the trickle of a stream from the salt marsh snaked through the wide mud flat. From the corner of my eye, I caught a movement, and there to my surprise was a doe, a deer…[muttering] a female deer, yeah. [To the crowd] I heard you start it. Well now you're singing, great, yeah. Is this church after COVID? This is really it? Yeah. So the female deer is walking gingerly in the mud by the far shore. I see her stop under a tree with low-hanging branches and I see her stay there for 30 minutes or so with her nose up in the leaves. This made me so curious to see a deer on a mudflat, that the next day, I put on my boots, and walked to the tree through the mud. It was a lovely red oak, a natural tree in that region, that leaned out over the saltwater bay. And there were animal footprints of every type under the tree, a scattering of paws and claws roaming around in the mud under the tree, coming for acorns and caterpillars and other bugs, and all the abundance held in that gorgeous tree. I learned later that an oak tree can host 897 caterpillar species, so go home and plant an oak. It can spread three million acorns in its lifetime, a great source of protein. And a mature tree can drop seven hundred thousand leaves per year. The oak tree is a tree of life. It's beneficent, it is life-giving, it is an anchor rooting the whole ecosystem it inhabits, giving balance and life well beyond the stretch of its branches, from worm, to slug, to caterpillar, to blue jay, to deer, to human, life is given, life is sustained, life is propagated. God has made this world abundant, and I feel like my message is very simple, but one I want to reaffirm because we are challenged by its simplicity. God has made this world abundant, not so we can abuse it, not so we can exploit it, or despoil it, but so we can live in balance with it, and join in the life-supporting, life-giving ways of our God, who loves us, and who loves all God has created in equal measure. God made the goodness of this world finite, just like us. And to me, it's as if God is saying to us, “in your finitude, my humans, try walking humbly. Try walking humbly on the earth, and you might discover a joy I have hidden there for you, a joy of living within enough.” You might discover another joy I've hidden there for you, this notion that limits, finitude itself, enhances the preciousness, the goodness, of all finite things. And you might even discover through the gift of grace, the sweet spot where your needs are met, and there is no need for greed at all. 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

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel's sermon for Trinity Sunday. Today's readings are: Isaiah 6:1-8 Romans 8:12-17 John 3:1-17 Psalm 29 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net for Trinity Sunday, Year B. Transcript A Child of God Sermon by the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel Trinity Sunday, May 30, 2021 [Introductory music] [The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel] Please join me in a spirit of prayer. Gracious God, we give you thanks that we are born from above in our baptism and that your Holy Spirit continues to move in us and through us leading us into new life. May your holy wind blow us where it will, and may we be, by your grace, receptive to your movements within us. In Christ's name we pray, Amen. Please be seated. “Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me, Christ beside me, Christ to win me, Christ to comfort and restore me.” I find Saint Patrick's Breastplate, these lines in particular, to be one of the most comforting hymns for me. I find in them the heartfelt center of Trinity Sunday, and a reminder that doctrines like the Trinity are faithful guides to where the healing and the love is. This is why we insist on them, because our souls need guides to find our source, to find our salvation and to find our strength. When I sing those lines, “Christ be with me, Christ within me,” it's almost impossible for me to refrain from crying. So if you've been around me for a while, you know I sing them as loudly as I possibly can, some may say obnoxiously so. Yet this is just my grateful heart coming out, because I am and you are embraced, surrounded, saturated, adopted and possessed by God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The overwhelming Good News of the Trinity is that we are children of God, adopted heirs of the eternal, loving inner life shared by the triune God. Saint Paul writes in the eighth chapter of Romans, we heard it earlier, it's worth hearing again, “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God, for you did not receive a spirit of enslavement to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry “Abba, father!” it is that very spirit bearing witness with our Spirit that we are children of God, and if children then heirs, heirs of God, and joint heirs with Christ. My first observation is the obvious one: we are adopted children of God. We know who we, are more importantly, we know who we belong to, and what we will inherit from our divine parent. We are invited to cry out to God, and to use the most intimate terms, the term that Jesus used himself. “Abba, daddy!” Daddy, an intimate word, a vulnerable word, one we might feel childish and silly to use, but it's offered here in the Aramaic, and not in Greek, because the author wanted to preserve a word that belonged to Jesus to signify that we are invited into the same relationship that Jesus has with God, who Jesus calls Abba, daddy. When I think of “daddy” I think of all the times I skinned my knee or fell off my bike or had a nightmare late at night and yelled for my daddy. That's how deep our cry to God is, and it's an invitation to ask what is crying out in you, what is afraid, what feels small and threatened or vulnerable, what is neglected or beaten down or walled off by shame or embarrassment. Listen closely, and let that part of you cry out, and let that crying out be your prayer, and let that crying out find the loving parent, the source, the savior, our strength, the strength of our souls, the creating father, the saving son, the emboldening Holy Spirit that adopts and possesses our souls, and understand and see how all of that comes in three. The trinity is the grammar of our Christian faith, it's how we know we are speaking the language of Christ. We speak in the grammar of the Trinity. We are children of God. In Jesus and the Disinherited, Howard Thurman relates how his grandmother taught him this great truth, that he was a child of God. She told the story of listening when she was a child to an enslaved preacher preaching to an enslaved congregation. He recounts his experience of listening to his grandmother like this. He says how “Everything in me quivered with the pulsing tremor of raw energy, when in her secret recital, she would come to the triumphant climax of the minister.” Quoting the minister, he continues, “You, you my congregation, are not the horrible slurs the master slings at you. You are not slaves. You are God's children.” This, Thurman writes, established for them the ground of personal dignity, so that a profound sense of personal worth could absorb the fear reaction that threatened to consume them. And Thurman goes on in this wonderful book, Jesus and the Disinherited, about how the psychological effect on the individual of the conviction that he or she is a child of God, stabilizes the ego and gives a note of integrity to whatever he does. Indeed, Thurman finds in this notion of being a child of God everything we need to resist everything that would overwhelm us. My second observation is more challenging than the first, but intimately related, not only are we adopted, we are possessed. This is very difficult for the modern mind to accept. We do not possess God. God possesses us. God is in us, not as our possession, but as a beachhead in a relationship that swirls us up into the Trinity like Dorothy and Toto into the tornado. Once again, in Romans 8, Saint Paul writes, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now, and not only the creation, but we ourselves who have the first fruits of the Spirit.” We groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. Likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. Here we hear it. God and God's creation groan in us. The Holy Spirit intercedes within us with sighs too deep for words the Holy Spirit is the mind and the will of God moving through us, moving us and returning us to God. We are permeable to God's inner life, God's inner life poured out in us and through us, which is just another way of saying “possessed.” The modern mind shuts the door on God because we deify autonomy and seek our salvation in solipsism, unremitting focus on ourself as if our salvation is something to figure out, while we abhor at the same time interdependence and mutuality as a result. We modern people are desperately lonely behind the tightly locked doors of identity, afraid that connection might change us, move us, convict us, convert us, and indeed it will. We are accurately afraid the Holy Spirit will move us, will convict us, will convert us, will change us. That's what the Holy Spirit does as it loops us into the inner loving life of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and leads us into our salvation. And, my friends, although we avoid this word here at Saint Martin's, we do need some saving. Read the world around us. Suicide, despair, premature death, chronic anxiety, apathy, emptiness, addiction, authoritarianism, are the modern soul crying out, groaning, sighing for a source of life and love beyond self. What we long for is soul, that place in us where God has bound God's life to us forever and made us children of God. Now, in conclusion, I want you to close your eyes and rest easy in your pew, and say to yourself God's message to you: “I am a child of God. I am a child of God.” Now in your imagination, as you keep your eyes closed and sit securely, say to someone you love in your imagination “you, you are a child of God. You are a child of God.” You have given them the greatest gift. Now trust me on this, but I learned it at the feet of the Reverend Doctor Otis Moss Jr. I'm going to invite you to turn to someone near you and say, “you are a beloved child of God.” And here's the example, here I go, “Barbara, you are a beloved child of God.” [The Rev. Barbara Ballenger] “Thank you, Jarrett. You are a beloved child of God.” Your turn, turn to someone. You might know them or not. “You are a beloved child of God. Well done, oh I love you guys so much, thank you for trusting and going with that. What a good group we have. Oh I love this church! Well this might be a tradition that we keep here at Saint Martins, this is good. And when the Reverend Dr. Otis Moss does it, he says “my neighbor, my neighbor you are a child of God.” Well, that's next time. You have given each other the greatest gift of grace. You are a child of God, we are adopted children of God in God's cherished possession 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

In his sermon for the Seventh Sunday of Easter, the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel likens the gap between the Ascension and the arrival of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost to a committee meeting. Without their beloved leader and protector to guide them, they turn to control and tidy order. Is this what God wants for us? Or is there something more on the way? Today's readings are: Acts 1:15-17, 21-26 Psalm 1 John 17:6-19 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net for the Seventh Sunday of Easter Transcript: [Introductory music] [The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel] Please join me in a spirit of prayer. Lord God, you have opened our minds and hearts to many new revelations in this past year. But chiefly have we learned how much we need you to sustain a life that we might even begin to call Godly. Lord God, in our exhaustion, in our knowledge of our limits, and our humility we know that we need you and we need your Holy Spirit. Lord God, plant us by streams of living water so that we may live in glory to your name. Amen. Please be seated. My wife had a very pious and devout secretary when she worked at Bucknell University. Her name was Ruth Craven, God rest her soul, and she loved to repeat the following joke. It's a church joke. So, Ruth would say again and again to my wife, “A pastor got into the pulpit and said I've had a long and difficult week with many challenges that prevented me from preparing my sermon as I usually do. So today I will be trusting in the Holy Spirit. Next week, continues the pastor, I promise I will do better.” These unnamed 11 days, this odd season of the church, this anxious, uncertain interim 11 days after Ascension Day and before Pentecost, are here to remind us how much we need the Holy Spirit if we are to take on the mission of Jesus Christ in a hostile world. The gathering of the Jesus people after the Ascension and before the Holy Spirit is portrayed in our reading from Acts of the Apostles and many commentators see a warning in it - this is what the church without the Holy Spirit looks like. It looks like a committee meeting. The Acts of the Apostles reading reads like the minutes of the first church meeting. Behold the banal birth of the bureaucratic organization soon to be known, after it is born again from above by the Holy Spirit, as The Church. A technical problem is identified, we have 120 members and only 11 leaders and 12 would be much more orderly. 10 per liter, and the 12 tribes of Israel, and such so, we need one more leader and all will be tidy. There's a three-step process: nominations based on qualifications, prayer, and the good old Torah practice of casting lots. Even the nominees are lackluster. One has three names listed, as if in retrospect the author is not sure who he was, and Matthias never appears in scripture again. However, all is in order. All is tidy. That is, after all, what God wants, isn't it? No, it's not. This is not what Jesus has been prepping the disciples for over 40 days from Easter to Pentecost. He wasn't teaching them Robert's Rules. “Be my witnesses to all nations,” says Jesus. “I send you out into the world,” says Jesus. “Why are you standing there looking into heaven?” says the man dressed in white on Ascension. We are not leaving the world with Jesus. We are not an other-worldly faith. We are not avoiding the hostile world and living lives of faith in an easier place. We are sent back into the same empire that crucified Jesus to live the life that got him crucified, and that is why we need the Holy Spirit. We will need the life of God in us. We will need to be so wrapped up in the inner life and the mutual love shared between the Creator and the Son if we have any chance of living lives of witness and mission. Lives of healing and peacemaking. Lives of loving and restoring in Jesus' name. The name of that shared inner life, that mutual, loving relationship. The name of what flows in the life of God is the Holy Spirit and we need it. Jesus knows what we will need if we are to do what he charges us to do. We hear it in his great prayer in the Gospel of John today. Three times Jesus mentions protection; two times in petition for his community and once referring to himself as the protector, the guard. This is a prayer for the ears of an anxious community. An anxious community in transition, feeling threatened, feeling loss, feeling vulnerable, feeling edgy. Abandonment is one of our most primal hard-wired fears. In the 11 days the disciples face that fear head-on. Are we being abandoned by the One who loves us and protects us? Who provides our basic need for security and safety, they wonder with nerves on edge. But not only are they confronting the most basic fear we all share, there's more. They know they are to be sent out into that same hostile world that murdered their leader. So they are also afraid of opposition. They are afraid of hostility. They are afraid of vulnerability in the service of mission. They are wondering to themselves, "so are we now abandoned and exposed to a threatening empire alone and without recourse?" This crucial moment begs the question, can we do this on our own? The answer is a resounding, no. Followed quickly by, we need the Holy Spirit. We cannot sustain ourselves, we cannot sustain our community, we cannot sustain our mission and witness and faith in a hostile world without the gift of the Holy Spirit. See you next week. 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

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel's sermon for Eastertide Evensong brings together preteen questions about the Seven Deadly Sins, ancient Greek philosophy, Emmanuel Kant, the arts, and a very powerful set of very good friends. All to remind us who we are, whose we are, and how we live into it. This evening's readings are: Wisdom of Solomon 7:22-8:1 Matthew 7:7-14 Readings may be found on Mission of St. Clare Officiant: The Rev. Barbara Ballenger Preacher: The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel Crucifer: Riley Prell Director of Music: Tyrone Whiting St. Martin's Vocal Ensemble: Krystiane Cooper, Alyson Harvey, Ross Druker, John Wentz, Martha Crowell, Jean McConnell, David Cybulski, Ralph West Lectors: Leni Windle and Harry Gould Liturgical Support: Cathy and Gary Glazer Tech Director: Daniel Cooper Altar Guild: Tina Bell In the Same Breath Sermon by the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for Eastertide Evensong Sunday, May 2, 2021 Using readings from the Daily Office [Introductory Music] [The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel] Please join me in a spirit of prayer. Blessed Creator God, we give you thanks for the gift of your Sophia, your wisdom that pervades all you have made with your love and your goodness. She reflects your eternal light. She is a spotless mayor of your workings. She passes into holy souls and makes us friends of God and prophets, for God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with wisdom. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Well, welcome back to Evensong! Isn't this great? Except for the 16 layers of clothes I'm wearing, it's fantastic. So, at our church, there is a junior high student who loves to engage me in theological and ethical discussions. I relish his engagement. Nothing quite tests a seminary education like a preteen. His favorite recent topic - drum roll please - is the seven deadly sins. Today he asked me the profound question, “Jarrett can you rank them in order from the worst to the least bad”, certainly not the best. “Which deadly sins are more serious than the others?” he asked. “That is hard to answer,” I replied, “After all, they are all deadly. It's hard to get worse than that.” So I asked him, “Which ones are you concerned about?” He replied, “Pride and sloth. Pride is just being proud of yourself,” he said, “what is wrong with that?” “Well,” I said, “Yes, that's very good. Here's how I think it works: healthy pride is in the middle. That is, when we mirror God's delight in us and our delight in ourselves much like Sophia, on the one end there is too much pride and on the other too little pride. It's on the edges where sin comes into play,” I said. “Same with sloth. That's a fun word to use. Healthy leisure is in the middle that God delights in, on one side is too much indolence and on the other side of the spectrum we're overworking and addicted to our work.” He accepted this answer with a thoughtful look and I spared him the footnotes. You get the footnotes. What I taught him, and this is crucial to my sermon, comes from Thomas Aquinas. And before Thomas Aquinas it came from the great Greek philosopher Aristotle. Healthy Christianity has this long, healthy, happy history of productive relations with reason, philosophy, science, logic, and all the liberal arts and I want to celebrate that. I want to celebrate that connection at this evensong where we have a glorious passage from the Wisdom of Solomon and we have the Golden Rule from the Gospel according to Matthew. Let's take that Golden Rule and the categorical imperative as a place to start. “Act as you would want all other people to act towards all other people,” says Immanuel Kant. “In everything, do to others as you would have them do to you, for this is the law and the prophets,” says Jesus. “Using pure reason alone, the great philosopher arrives at the same truth as Jesus speaks from tradition and revelation. And I'm not the first one to point out that Kant setting out to strip away all tradition and revelation still manages to discover 18th century Protestant theology in the process. For the attentive reader of the Bible, this should be no surprise at all. We know that God speaks the lean language of reason. God speaks the logos. God speaks the Sophia. God speaks in tradition, in story, revelation, science, poetry, and all the arts in the same breath. The name of that breath is Sophia, and she is celebrated as an emanation, an outpouring of God's inner life, in this gorgeous passage from the Wisdom of Solomon. Using the language of middle Platonism, the unknown Egyptian author who is masquerading in this book as King Solomon, lays out the gift of wisdom for an imaginary audience of all the world's leaders. So, not only does God's wisdom exist in everything, it's available to all people. Wisdom is God's voice speaking through all of God's creation, showing us order, purpose, meaning, and process. Ultimately showing us a loving God who delights in all that God has made. The whole world communicates. The world is intelligible to us. The world is impregnated with God's loving presence and we are part of God's communicating abundance as learners, listeners, explorers, thinkers, singers, worshipers, scientists, on and on. I love this so much because we have an image here of wholeness. An image that brings all parts of humanity together. Reason and knowledge are not merely for dismantling, they're not merely for disintegrating. Stuck in the terms of stale 19th-century reductive rationalism, we can be caught thinking that when we take a car apart we prove there was no car in the first place, just a lot of parts. Stuck in a stale 19th-century debate we think science and religion are incompatible. We react to a reductive science with an equally reductive fundamentalist religion and we go nowhere. Stuck in 20th-century scientism we think knowledge is the sole province of the scientific method and while it is so abundant in truth, there's a more-than. There is room for more and there is this wonderful web of liberating, loving, communal wisdom we hear praised in the Wisdom of Solomon and gorgeous poetry. Every spring I start flowers from seed under a grow light in my mudroom. Nothing fancy. My favorite flower is the morning glory. First, two leaves spring up and then two more come after that. By this week we have a vine growing at a rapid pace, two or three inches a day, that finds the nearest vertical structure and starts climbing it, at least in my mudroom, in a counterclockwise direction. I want to know if in Argentina it goes the other way. But that's the curiosity we're talking about here, right? The world is wonderful! What if it does go clockwise in Argentina? That is God's whimsy, I would say, and gravity and something else. It's all good, see? It all works together. Without eyes, this plant has no eyes, it finds this vertical support, searches out, grabs it and climbs it while reproducing cells at an astounding rate. I would love to hear the complete biological account of this plant behavior. I really do want to learn that and, and this is an and, I want to delight in it. I want to take joy in it and wonder from observing it and I want to thank God for it, all in the same breath. All in the same breath, the breath of Sophia, where all knowing comes together as God's mystery, spoken so we can receive it. Now, you'll excuse me but we're going back to Kant. And I love Kant. He's hard to argue with, God forbid I would try. Yet he almost got it right. Almost. There's a more. You see, if you start off with a false dichotomy you end up with half of an answer, or less. When you split tradition and reason you lose something, something is lost. It is absolutely true that we owe to others what is owed to us. In our humanity, however we resist it, and we do, however we violate it constantly, reserving it for family and friends, reserving it for people we like and people like us, reserving it for local people and not people far away, and on and on and on, but here's what Kant misses: God owes us nothing. God gives us everything without owing us one thing at all. This is grace. We are not entitled to God's freely-given forgiveness, or God's freely-given love, or God's freely-given son. Only through what God graciously gives us are we restored to live the grace of the Golden Rule. To live the grace of the categorical imperative. That is God's dream of wholeness that God breathes into us. God's dream of humanity reharmonized with creation and reason and every other way of human perception and discovery. God breathes God's reconciliation through it all. And her name is grace. And she is a very good friend of Sophia. 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

On Good Shepherd Sunday, the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel challenges our illusions of safety and security and invites us to consider who are the sheep and who are the wolves in our society today. The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel's sermon for the fourth Sunday of Easter. Today's readings are: 1 John 3:16-24 Psalm 23 John 10:11-18 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net for Easter 4, Year B. Transcript: [Introductory Music] [The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel] Abiding God, we give you thanks that you are greater than our hearts. Dispel in our hearts all self-torment and self-judgment and negativity that hold us back from the boldness we are called to in the power of your love. Lord God, make us bold that we may follow your Good Shepherd who is our model of a life lived for the most vulnerable. In Christ's name we pray, Amen. Please be seated. While at the altar at the 8 o'clock service, and having meditated on the Good Shepherd this whole week, what came up in my heart most strongly was my most inspiring models of the Good Shepherd in ministry that I know. And so if you're at home you can open up a tab on your computer, or on your phone in the pew actually, and Google Father Stanley Rother, a priest martyred in Guatemala in Santiago Atitlán. I think I've talked about him before, but he is my great example of what a Good Shepherd is. So please take that as a little homework to go deeper into the Good Shepherd story with Stanley Rother. And also the martyrs of Quiché, who were just beatified yesterday, three priests and seven lay catechists, including a 12 year old boy, who were martyred by the Guatemalan military. Look them up if you want to go deeper into the boldness of the Good Shepherd. That's a bit of an improv there at the beginning, but I wanted to assign homework early. My sermon is called “Naming the Wolf.” We need to be careful about how we name the wolf. We also need to be careful how we name the shepherd, need to be careful about our assumptions about the sheep. I could preach a sermon about wolves in general, and shepherds in general. I could use pastoral stories about sweet sheep and scary wolves. I could talk about sheep as an undifferentiated mass of docile creatures standing in for people as the metaphor invites. Likewise, I could preach about the wolf as a generalized existential fear we all share, and boy have we shared it this past year. And we could talk about sheep representing a general human need for protection, once again something we have all felt this year. However, the murder of George Floyd, the uprising that followed, the trial, and now the verdict on this past Tuesday remind us of the importance of naming who is threatened by who. Naming who are the wolves, and who we assume to be wolves, and who we may or may not think of as a Good Shepherd, because it seems it is often the protector who is threatening, and the one falsely perceived as threatening who needs protection The story of the Good Shepherd, when taken seriously and in the context of scripture, convicts us, and it convicts the way we order our world and prophetically offers a new world, ordered justly. In our society, the most powerful claim to be the most fearful, and that fear is manipulated and then manufactured politically to create systems of public safety and incarceration that inflict massive damage and violation on the most vulnerable. The protectors protect the most secure, and inflict threat and fear and violence on the most insecure. I have a friend who lives way out in the Northwest suburbs, way up the extension, and she lives in a gated community. And I love to ask her “gated against whom?” She lives in a house with an elaborate alarm system and I love to ask “Why?” She is behind a blue wall of well-funded police and private security, not to mention a full gun cabinet in the house. This friend is fully wrapped up in this idolatrous atmosphere of manufactured fear. This person is constantly alarmed, constantly on edge by how much time I spend in Philadelphia, in Germantown, in North Philadelphia, and the people I interact with there. She's constantly worrying about my trips to Guatemala and Haiti and the danger I must be in there yet. She has it exactly upside down. She has the exact reverse from inside this manufactured bubble of fear. She does not see the protection granted me by my whiteness, by my maleness, by my social class, and when out of the country, by my American citizenship. She sees threat where her run-of-the-mill American racism has taught her to see threat, in Blackness, in brownness, in foreignness, in poverty, in “urban” areas. So we must be careful how we name the wolf, and how we name the shepherd, and how we understand the sheep. The Israelite audience that Jesus would address would know all this already. For them, the Good Shepherd is obviously a political image. This is the Good Shepherd who is the righteous ruler of God's people. We, in the centuries since, have made it a pietistic, personal, and sentimental image, and taken away its root meaning. If we were deeply steeped in the Hebrew prophets like the original audience, we would hear the Good Shepherd as political, communal, and divine. We would hear it in the light of Ezekiel Chapter 34, where God claims the title of shepherd as a divine name, a name for God, and where God names his servant David, an actual shepherd, as shepherd of his flock. In this passage, in Ezekiel 34 (which I recommend as more homework—you didn't know that you're going to get so much homework this morning), the Good Shepherd is the leader who is set apart to “feed his sheep with justice.” Feed his sheep with justice. The Ezekiel text gives the following examples of what that looks like. The Good Shepherd is to put the sheep into the right order, to protect the leaner, weaker sheep against the fatter, stronger sheep. On the face of it, that is a political instruction, putting our common life in right order. The shepherd is to stop the fatter, stronger sheep from trampling the grass in the pasture left over for the weaker, leaner sheep after the fatter, sheep are done feasting. The Good Shepherd is to stop the fatter, stronger sheep from budding the leaner, weaker sheep with flank and shoulder away from the good pasture. The Good Shepherd is to stop those same fatter, stronger sheep from fouling the clean water with their feet so the leaner, weaker sheep who come after them may have pure water to drink. And someday, I will do an Earth Day sermon on this exact same text. The sheep, it seems, are wolfish. The wolf, in fact, is already in the flock. It is in the sheep, in the rapacious, predatory, ravenous, greed and bullying of the strong dominating the weak. God's predicament is this: how do you get a wolf out when it is already inside? And not just inside the sheepfold running amok, but inside the sheep themselves running amok in their behavior. God's response is to send a very particular and very strange Good Shepherd, one who lays his life down for the sheep. Meaning one who takes the place of the weak against the strong. A Good Shepherd who protects without creating new victims. A Good Shepherd who gives new life without taking life. A Good Shepherd who defeats our wolfishness from the inside-out. A Good Shepherd who lays down his life without sacrificing us. The laying down of the life of this shepherd is a reference to the cross of Jesus. It's how the author of John talks about the cross. And the author of the Gospel of John sees the cross in a very unique way, through the lens of victory, not the lens of victimhood. Jesus lays down his life under his own power. He repeats that. Jesus lays down his life under his own power as an act of loving intervention, putting his body between the threatening power of empire and those oppressed, damaged, and violated by that power. We all know that the oppressor always claims to be the protector, always claims the mantle of Good Shepherd. So God does something utterly startling, something that is not to be found in Ezekiel or in Psalm 23. The Good Shepherd shows the true power of love by absorbing all the oppositional power the world has to offer in the most loving act imaginable: giving one's whole life for the weak. So this past week, I received some “fan mail” in my email inbox. The writer recommended, in no uncertain terms, that I stick to saving souls and not worry so much about racism. After much thought and prayer, I replied “I would love to engage you in a conversation about this, and in the meantime let me say this: At St. Martin's this is really not an either/or between saving souls and fighting racism. In fact, saved souls love their neighbors. Saved souls love their neighbors and seek to protect them from the powerful, uncaring forces that violate them.” Those of us who are saved by the Good Shepherd, saved by his laying down his life for us, are saved to a very particular life, in the model of the Good Shepherd. When George Floyd's life was taken from him, when he was laid down against his will and murdered, those who understand the message of the Good Shepherd stood up, and we put ourselves between the murdering power of state violence and those most exposed to that violence. We followed the leadership of those who are really most threatened, so to intervene and disrupt a world designed to make more and more victims. Peacefully, we stood up. Boldly, we stood up, in the power of the one who laid himself down, to say “no” to more victimizing and say “yes” to the victory of the one who has defeated every victimizing and every wolfish power in ourselves and in the world. 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

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel's sermon for the Second Sunday of Easter. Today's readings are: Acts 4:32-35 Psalm 133 John 20:19-31 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net Transcript: Please join me in a spirit of prayer. Lord Christ, in your risen, wounded body, in your Holy Spirit, you give us all that we need to follow in your way. We thank you for this gift and we pray your grace, that we may follow. In Christ's name we pray, Amen. Please be seated. I want to begin with a word of thanks to our quartet who are operating without our Director of Music, Tyrone Whiting who's under the weather. So love to you, thank you. We are grateful as always. Boy, so good that music. Here we are, one week later, and the disciples are still in the house. The Beloved Disciple and Peter brought a report of an empty tomb. Mary of Magdala met the Risen Christ and brought the good news to the disciples. The Risen Christ himself appears. One week ago, in the house where the disciples huddle, Jesus shows himself, displays his wounds, grants them the gift of peace, breathes the Holy Spirit on them and gives them a command to go forth. One week later, they're still in the house. Like the cat in the song and the postman who rings twice, the Risen Christ keeps coming back. The one who said keep knocking on God's door until God pays attention, knocks on our door persistently and repeatedly until we begin to respond. What God has done, God has finished. Jesus is risen from the dead. Peace is secure between humanity and God the stone is rolled away, the gate is open, Alleluia Alleluia. Now, the ongoing drama is in the souls of the disciples, the students of Jesus, and the ongoing drama is in our souls, as students of Jesus. As we slowly wake up to what is now possible for us, as we slowly wake up to what risen life means for us. In relation to this good news of risen life that I struggle to take in, I sometimes see my soul as a big chunk of ice thrown onto the embers of a winter fire. On one side, I'm melting, I'm warm, I'm starting to steam a little, and on the other, I'm still hard and cold. The human soul has a density a defensiveness well learned and sometimes necessary, so it seems that it takes repeated exposures and reassurances from God for most of us to melt into His life. So Jesus persists each time he appears, he speaks peace to the frightened disciples in the house “peace be with you.” He says it three times in this chapter of John. He is ministering to them. They are not at peace. He is bringing them a gift that they need, and we can easily imagine why. This room they're in is swirling with feelings: guilt, shame, fear, trauma. These souls are full of conflicting feelings, keenly aware of their shortcomings, their betrayal, cowardice, and the guilt and shame that go with it, agitated to their core in their fear of the Roman Authorities, the temple authorities, and not to mention their fear of God. How will they stand before God when he appears? What will that encounter be like when the one who vacated the tomb comes to visit? Agitated as well by the tension between disbelief, and perhaps even more dangerously, belief. If I believe in this Risen One, what are the wild implications for my life? Their world is topsy-turvy. They are spiritually seasick. They need love and reassurance to rebalance, find their keel, find themselves in this new life they've been given. They need time to process. Our human minds and souls are narrow and short-sighted. This is a lot to take in. If anyone could judge them for their failures, it would be Jesus, or could be Jesus. Jesus does not. Jesus raises no word of judgment. Instead, Jesus ministers to the guilt and the shame and the fear and the nausea by saying “peace.” Like he calmed the storm on the Sea of Galilee, he is calming the storm of fretful souls in his community. “Peace be with you.” “Peace be with you,” which is to say we are not at war, we are not in conflict, you are okay with me, we are working together and we're on the same side. “Peace be with you,” which is to say you will need this peace, this peace that passes all understanding, because I'm giving you everything you need to leave this house of fear and confront the same forces that crucified me. He shows his wounds. He allows the wounds to be inspected. Those marks are his calling card, and what holds the disciples in fear is represented by the wounds. He is showing them the marks of what they fear, and he is showing that he has defeated what they fear. Those terrifying marks of God rejecting violence are now surrounded by the living body of their gentle loving Lord. He is victorious, he is vindicated, he is teaching them once again by saying “peace be with you, I am your passport across the border of fear and guilt and shame that keeps you stuck in this house.” How are we stuck? How are you stuck? How were you stuck and are not stuck anymore, and are rejoicing for it? What fears are confining us to a smaller life, huddled and timid when God is calling us to so much more? Why are we holding on to turmoil, agitation, and guilt when God has made peace with us? The drama going forward is in our souls. God has made peace with us and accepting that gift is our spiritual life. Accepting that gift comes with the next gift: purpose, mission, for each one of us, a mission to go out, to serve in Christ's name and Christ's love, confronting all the forces that marked his body with torture and death. Going out in service, going forth in faith that his risen life has already overcome and overwhelmed everything that opposes God. Thanks be to God. Just for a moment—you thought i was done, psych! You wish I was done. Just for a moment (maybe I should be done), just for a moment, take that room where the disciples are huddled and hold it in tension with the reading from the Acts of the Apostles: how they go from that place stuck in fear to this beloved community of sharing all goods in common. Referencing our own souls, think about all that had to be overcome to get from there to here. Referencing our own souls, what transformation was made possible by this resurrection, to go from stuck in fear to selling everything for the good of your fellow community member. And you get a sense of the power of the gift that's been given to us, what it can do in our lives. The Risen One comes back again and again, persistent and repeatedly, equipping us, resourcing us encouraging us, showing us that the way he calls us to, the way he sends us out to live is the way of life, abundant life, a way of life fully animated by the Holy Spirit, to confront all crucifying forces with courage, faithfulness and peace. Thanks be to God. 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

Sermon by the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for Easter Day, the Feast of the Resurrection of Our Lord. Today's readings are: Isaiah 25:6-9 Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24 1 Corinthians 15:19-26 John 20:1-18 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net Transcript: [Introductory music, played by brass instruments: Jesus Christ is Risen Today] [The Rev. Barbara Ballenger] Alleluia, Christ is risen! [Crowd] The Lord is Risen indeed, Alleluia! [The Rev. Barbara Ballenger] Alleluia, Christ is risen! [Crowd] The Lord is Risen indeed, Alleluia! [The Rev. Barbara Ballenger] Alleluia, Christ is risen! [Crowd] The Lord is Risen indeed, Alleluia! [The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel] Please join me in a spirit of prayer. Gracious God, how can we thank you for this gorgeous Easter Day, under the sun, on a football field, worshiping you? Lord God, we thank you that your risen life fills our lives with goodness and that your love is undying and unbreakable and shines upon our hearts and invites us into an open-hearted life of grace and hope and courage. Following in the way of your Son, growing into his stature, living his life as a body in his name in your world. How can we thank you, Lord for the grace of this day where death is defeated and your life is affirmed. May we live each day in the light of your resurrection, open-hearted and living in response to your Risen One. Amen. Please be seated. (Struggling with a loose cloth mask, it flies off, another surgical mask is underneath) Okay, whatever. Happy Easter, y'all! Christ is risen! Here we are on the home field of the Devils. Celebrating Easter. So much for home field advantage. There is no better place to celebrate Easter than on this field. We did consider using the scoreboard and I really wish where it says Home it said Devils because we could say Devils zero, Jesus one. Or in better respect to our gracious hosts, SCH (Springside Chestnut Hill) Academy we could say, Jesus one, Death zero. Let me give heartfelt thanks to the Blue Devils of SCH for helping us gather as the Risen Body of Christ this Easter morning, coming back to life. And, I promise, no more football jokes. In our Easter Gospel we have a foot race. We have a laundry list. We have a lot of weeping and a case of mistaken identity. Through it all, the abundant Good News of risen life in Christ pours out to us as God's invitation, “Come back to life”. In the one story, we have two contrasting sections: the first with Peter and the Beloved Disciple, and the second with Mary of Magdala and Jesus. Two ways of responding to God's abundant invitation. Now I think of the Peter and the Beloved Disciple part as slapstick. Like boys do, and very much in character for Peter, the two disciples compete in a foot race to get to the tomb of Jesus after Mary Magdala, serving as the first apostle by the way, gives them the news of an empty grave. How many times had Jesus taught them “the first will be last and the last will be first”? Yet here they are, still caught up in a competitive spirit, sprinting to be the first man….[responding to a vocalization in the crowd] He gets it...The first man on the scene. Me first, me first, me first, me first, sprinting to outdo one another. And I find myself wondering, worrying even, identifying just a little bit, will their competition and haste cause them to miss what has been done for them? Indeed Peter, very much in character, walks away from the miracle of an empty tomb with a laundry list, a precise accounting of the linens that has been passed down to us through the Gospel. Perhaps a subtle warning by the Gospel writer for us to avoid crass literalism on Easter morning. Yet whatever their bumblings and whatever my bumblings and our bumblings, we walk away with our first gift of this Gospel story. The Gospel writer says the Beloved went into the empty tomb, saw and believed, for as yet they did not understand. Not understanding and believing. Believing and not understanding. Two great tastes that go great together, side by side. This is the first gift for us today because I know many of us are in just that place or we remember that place on our journey into faith in Christ. What a gift we can believe and know that we don't know all. At the same time, for all who are on the edge of that journey into believing, this is a gentle, generous invitation: even a mustard seed of curiosity gets us started. And oh, my friends, the understanding will come. The understanding will come with abundant rejuvenating gifts which stretch our conventional imagination, our narrow intellect, our cramped souls, and our pinched hearts into the fullness of Christ's love. So my friends, if you're sitting with confusion know that it is a gift. Our thinking does not save us. God's coming back to life saves us. So after the slapstick of the Beloved and Peter, Mary of Magdala is left in her weeping and her confusion outside the tomb. She is the one who is first to meet the Risen Christ. First the angels ask her - and always know that angels are just the front line of God, so God is talking, they're the messengers - the angels say, “Woman why are you weeping?” and then Jesus asks, “Woman why are you weeping?” And we know it's hard to see with eyes brimming and swollen with tears, so maybe this is why Mary mistakes Jesus for the gardener. And a gardener is a giver of life, so she's close. Woman, why are you weeping? Jesus asks. The question is asked twice. There must be something important in the weeping. How does Mary answer Jesus here is how I hear her answering. I hear her in the full-throated voice of lament and mourning. I hear Mary of Magdala saying, “Why? Why? Because the one who loved me was murdered. Why? Because the one I loved with all my heart was tortured to death, buried, and then stolen away from me. Why? Because all that I cherished as good in the world has been crushed and destroyed. Why am I weeping? The one who loved me into freedom is gone. Because everything I hoped for, everything I believed in, all that I held as good has been lost!” Mary mourns and weeps and through her tears she is the first to see the Risen One. Through her tears the Risen One appears to her, comes into focus. Mary, the faithful mourner, who knows what was lost on the cross. Mary, the one who weeps, is the one who sees. Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted. Blessed are those who are pure in heart for they shall see God. Blessed are those who thirst for righteousness for theirs is the kingdom of God. Mary of Magdala is the first person to live the life of beatitude. The life of beatitude that Jesus taught us, that Jesus offers us, that Jesus lives in us. Now, over the past few years we have collectively experienced the fragility of the good. The fragility of the good, and the vulnerability of all that we cherish. We have experienced the danger to the goods we have in common. Years of mourning, loss, anger, and fear and I want to suggest that it is through our tears, through our sorrow, through our heartbreak at the loss of what is good, what is best, that we will see the Risen One come into focus in our lives. It's through that lens of mourning the good and aching for the good. It's through that that we will see Jesus rise again in our lives and bring us back to life. The goodness of God's creation, the goodness of God's community, the goodness of God's way in Jesus have overcome all that opposes it, and they are victorious. God's vulnerable goodness. God's gentle, loving goodness. God's fragile, breakable, embodied life. Affirming and human-crafting goodness. God's simple, aching desire to love us no matter what. All these are victorious in the Risen One and we are invited to live in that same open-hearted space with Christ. Alleluia! The Risen life of Christ is stronger than death. Alleluia! Stronger than empire. Alleluia! Stronger than hate. Alleluia! Stronger than anything that would separate us from the love of God. Alleluia! So my friends, I pray you and I will accept this invitation of new life in Christ, and together we will come back to life. Amen. Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187. All rights reserved. Photographs, video, 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 Thanks to: Producer/Audio: Daniel Cooper Video: Jason Fifield Live Tech: Elton Cannon, Cole Appelman Full Service In-Video Editing/Captioning: Daniel Cooper Editor: Natalee Hill

The Palm Sunday Passion readings are stark in the silence of Jesus throughout them. Jesus does not have much to say, because he knows who he is and what must happen next. The question and the invitation that the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel shares with us is this: What is our role in the silence? Sermon from Palm Sunday by the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel. Today's readings are: Philippians 2:5-11 Psalm 31:9-16 Mark 1:1-11 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net for Palm Sunday, Year B. 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 Transcript: Please join me in a spirit of prayer. Lord God, grant us grace to open our hearts so that we may enter deeply into the holy mysteries of your passion and death. Grant us grace to bring our heartbreak our grief and our pain to your cross so we may know that you share our pain. Grant us grace to hear in your silence to hear in your silence the deadly wheels of sin, violence, and domination grinding to a halt. In Christ's name we pray. Amen. Please be seated. Silence is what I will talk about today. Our Quaker neighbors have a lovely saying when they ask, "Are your words an improvement on the silence?" In my case, most certainly not. Especially since the silence I'll be talking about is the silence of Jesus. His silence is a sign of something much deeper that is in play. When the clergy were practicing the passion gospel that we read together at the 8 a.m. service today, Barb took the part of Jesus and then she immediately noted how little Jesus had to say. He is operating at a level deeper than words. Jesus is throwing his whole self, holding nothing back, giving his whole body into the deep programming of human sin. Jesus is throwing his body into the gears, the gears of violence domination, and corruption that have been building momentum for millennia. Jesus, who is so strangely silent through the trial and crucifixion, is operating as the Word of God challenging the corrupt God-rejecting programming of sin with the deeper world-creating program of love. Authorities: religious, political, military, and the mob itself, which we will play later, play an unwitting game of mistaken identity throughout the passion. They mock and torture Jesus hailing him as the "King of the Jews" and "the Messiah", tempting him to save himself. Repeating the pattern from the wilderness temptation of the adversary, where the adversary tempted Jesus to serve himself and not the world. As if Jesus's life is for himself. As if Jesus's life is for his own pleasure, his own self-aggrandizement, and not for the world, for the healing of the world. This cruel, stinging, hateful, taunting which we can feel in our bodies is ironic on a deeper level than the mockers know. They are calling him a fake king when in actuality Jesus is the sovereign authority sent by God. Jesus is the sovereign authority sent by God, a king in other words. Jesus is the Messiah, the one anointed by God, a king in other words. He is simply displaying his authority in his silence. Because he knows that only the sacrifice of the cross will fundamentally and permanently override the deep programming, the systemic infection of sin and domination, playing out around him and upon him. And if you minimize the role of sin in the world, this is not the sermon for you. We live in different worlds. I'll have to say the work at hand does not call for a lot of words. It's a preacher's nightmare. This is the work of the embodied Word of God who is written into the very molecules of creation itself. The word that was spoken at the beginning of time itself, and abides at the deepest level of God's beloved creation, is at work. This is the logos of God confronting the corrupt logic of sin and domination, to replace it with the foundational programming that runs through the heart of creation. God's program of love. What is our role in the silence? Our role is to bring our sorrows. We, too, have been caught up in the crushing wheels and cogs of human viciousness. We, too, have contributed to the crushing force of sin through action or inaction; through good intention or malicious intent; through indifference, ignorance, or silent consent. We bring the heartbreak and sorrow of all that infects our common life: patriarchy, misogyny, homophobia, racism, rampant, unchecked greed normalized as a law of nature, corruption, nationalism. In the silence, you may add yours. Even the Philadelphia Inquirer front page this morning is a testament to this deeply entwined world of greed and cruelty. From the story of hundreds of horses dying for the sake of greed on the race tracks across our state, subsidized by our tax money, to the story of Kensington and the unchecked opioid epidemic that we have not rallied as a people to address with anything close to compassion or effectiveness. Read the paper in sorrow. Read the paper and grieve. Read the paper and follow Jesus into the silence. We bring the pain inflicted on us. We bring the pain of our own moral failures. We bring the pain we have inflicted on others, the pain we have ignored or trivialized or silenced in neighbors near and far. We bring all of our sorrows, our grief, our loss, our hurts to the cross of Jesus and Jesus reveals to us the cost of rejecting God. Yet even more and most miraculously that our sorrow is shared by God. The grief that is in us is the grief that is in God. The heartbreak that is in us is God's heartbreak. The moral pain that is in us is the sorrow worn by the Man of Sorrows. This is our loss, this is the pain, the pain in our loving, and the cost of our unloving, embodied, embraced, and surrounded by the love of God in Jesus on the cross. The beginning of the unraveling of all that rebels against God. My invitation to you, to the whole parish here and online for this Holy Week is this: bring your broken hearts to Holy Week. I'm not going to say why or spell it out anymore. I'm not going to explain. I'm going to invite. I'm going to invite you to enter the experience of our Lord, the experience invited by his silence. Simply trusting that the deepest grace is at work in this sacrifice, beyond our feeble naming. Follow your grief, abandon yourself to the mysteries of the passion and cross, and let Jesus, the Word of God, dismantle and transform the deep programming of sin we carry in us and between us. For this is what saves us. This is what sets us free. This is what relieves us from our burdens and grants us everything we need to be Christ's body, mourning, grieving, and celebrating in this world. Amen.

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel's sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent reminds us beware building castles of the self. Today's readings are: Exodus 20:1-17 Psalm 19 John 2:13-22 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net 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

In his sermon for the First Sunday in Lent, the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel wonders why we focus so strongly on stories like that of "the good squirrel and the naughty squirrel" that he grew up with. What do they really have to tell us about the God of love? He contends that they don't help us at all. Rather, we should focus on the promises that God makes to us over and over. Promises that we are beloved, that God will not destroy us, and that God will give everything, even Christ's life on the cross, to be in loving relationship with us. Today's readings are: Genesis 9:8-17 Mark 1:9-15 Psalm 25:1-9 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net for the First Sunday in Lent, Year B. 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

On Sunday, January 31, 2021 six parishioners shared reflections on the past ten years of ministry at St. Martin's with the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel as rector. This recording includes the combined reflections offered at both the 8:00 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. worship services. Reflections in order of audio are from: (8:00) Pam Hill, Alan Windle, Barbara Thomson, (10:30) Gary Glazer, Barbara Dundon, and Nikki Wood. Readings for this morning were: Deuteronomy 18:15-20 Mark 1:21-28 Psalm 111 You may find the readings on LectionaryPage.net for the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany.

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel recounts the story of an experience in an Air Force flight simulator to illustrate our relationship with God. Are we trying to be the pilot in areas of our lives where we should be the passenger? What allows us, like Jonah, to let go and let God lead us? Sermon from the Third Sunday after the Epiphany. Today's readings are: Jonah 3:1-5, 10 Psalm 62:6-14 Mark 1:14-20 Readings found on LectionaryPage.net

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel's sermon for The Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord, on Sunday, January 10, 2021.

God came into the world to save us, to take on full humanity that we, too may embrace our full humanity. In his Christmas sermon, The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel invites us to leave behind the many furies of our world and accept this gift. Today's readings are: Isaiah 62:6-12 Psalm 96 Luke 2:1-7, 8-20 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net for Christmas. Photographs, video, music, 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

December 20, 2020 In his sermon for the fourth Sunday of Advent, the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel asks, "Who says Annunciations don't happen anymore?" Like Mary, it is our immersion in the story of God with us that teaches us to hear God's word in our lives. Today's readings are: 2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16 Psalm 89:1-4, 19-26 Luke 1:26-38 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year B.

In his sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent, the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel talks about the ways in which the wilderness just outside our door is something we have helped to create. There is hope because something good is on the way. If we heed the call to repentance as offered by John the Baptist, we may find ways to heal our country, one another, and ourselves. Today's readings are: 2 Peter 3:8-15a Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13 Mark 1:1-8 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net for the Second Sunday of Advent, Year B.

When will the light break upon us like dawn? When the hungry are fed, the grieving comforted, the prisoners set free… The Rev. Kerbel notes that today’s passage from Isaiah is the same background for both today’s passage in Luke 10 as the Beatitudes in Matthew 25. You will find Christ, and Christ’s disciples there where people need to be set free. He notes that sometimes we make a big deal about God’s will being mysterious, but sometimes God is really clear. If you follow Christ you will find yourself in works of justice and mercy. Today's readings are: Isaiah 58:6-12 Psalm 15 Matthew 25:31-40 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net for the Feast of St. Martin of Tours.

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel's sermon for Sunday, October 25, 2020. Readings for the 21st Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 25: Psalm 1, 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8, Matthew 22:34-46 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net for Proper 25, Year A.

In his sermon from Sunday, October 11, the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel reminds us that God is good all the time. We're "supported by His goodness that transcends our circumstances." Rev. Kerbel illustrates what it means to believe in this goodness, despite threat and discord around us, with two stories of joyful resilience from the end of last week in Germantown. Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net for Proper 23, Year A. Psalm 23, Philippians 4:1-9, Matthew 22:1-14

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel wonders, would we really want to have an argument with Jesus? Sermon from Sunday, September 27, Ordinary Time, Proper 21. Readings: Psalm 25:1-8 Philippians 2:1-13 Matthew 21:23-32 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net for Proper 21, Year A. Recorded live in Zoom.us

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel reflects on a time when forgiveness opened up new possibility for relationship in his life. He offers to us the idea that the Gospel asks us to forgive over and over, as God does for us, so that we can repair what is broken - in ourselves and with others - and return to Christ's way of love. Readings: Psalm 103:(1-7), 8-13, Romans 14:1-12, Matthew 18:21-35 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net for Proper 19, Year A. Recorded live in Zoom.us

Our story from the Gospel today has Peter, the rock upon which the church would be founded, a man who often has much to learn on his discipleship journey, finally getting something right. The Rev. Kerbel goes on to speak more deeply about the concept behind, "whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven." Using a story from a recent podcast, he illustrates what this binding and loosing may look like for us today. The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel preaches on the texts for Proper 16, Year A. Romans 12:1-8 and Matthew 16:13-20. Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net for Proper 16, Year A. Recorded live in Zoom.us The podcast that the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel uses an example from today can be heard below. Ezra Klein Show with Bryan Stevenson - July 20, 2020 Read a portion of the interview on Vox here.

Sermon by the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for Sunday, July 12, the sixth Sunday after the Pentecost, Proper 10. The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel makes a note that this week's Gospel is an invitation to fully understand the gift of God's self to us. The parable shows God throwing seed everywhere - even on what seem to be the worst places for growth - a tactic no rational farmer would use. But that isn't the point - God's gift of Godself to us is full. "There is no partial gift of God. God extends God's whole self to us. Our part is to receive and not to earn. It is our part to be open and inviting and not to achieve." Hear how he then interprets the second half of today's Gospel through the lens of grace. Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net for Proper 10, Year A. Recorded live in Zoom.us.

Sermon by by the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for Sunday, June 28, the fourth Sunday after the Pentecost, Proper 8. The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel begins by talking about the spiritual refreshment offered by receiving a freely-given gift from another. He reminds us that this is the way that Christ asked his followers to give, and that it is learned from our God of generosity. During the current pandemic, we are sacrificing much, but we sacrifice in the hope of something greater. "These sacrifices that we endure are inspired and in the spirit of the one who gave his life for us, whose life is a gift for us... We must share our story of loving sacrifice for the other as a counter example that will save the most vulnerable during this painful time. ...This is our core life as followers of the teaching of Jesus Christ - to endure and accept sacrifice, to testify to a life bigger than our own. In the name of Christ." Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net for Proper 8, Year A. Recorded live in Zoom.us Opening bell chiming by the Philadelphia Guild of Change Ringers. Used with permission Photographs and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields.

Sermon by the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the Sunday, June 14, the second Sunday after the Pentecost, Proper 6. In this morning's sermon, the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel talks about Jesus's compassion for the sheep in this stories of the day, and how he is calling the disciples to care for the sheep by going out in vulnerability among them. He relates this to how many are feeling today, "harassed and helpless, scattered, lost without a shepherd", and asks us to consider our place dealing with the pandemics we face. "I've heard many speakers at the marches I've been on talk about the pandemic in this country, and what they mean by 'the pandemic' is the pandemic of racism." He insists that the Kingdom of God, a time of full rights and just society is near saying, "It is near, but it is not here. And we've got work to do until it is here."

Sermon by the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for Sunday, May 24, the Seventh Sunday of Easter, Year A. The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel loves to garden, especially pulling weeds. One of his favorite plants in his garden is the ostrich fern, a plant that grows profusely, loves a shady spot, and catches the light in a way that makes them glow. He holds this image as he prays, trying to shine with God's light, glow with God's glory, the way the ferns do. It's important to realize that in the scriptures, the glory of God is where we see God most fully revealed. In John's Gospel that is on the cross. God transforms the cross - thought to be a place of shame and dishonor - into God's glory, the humble glory of self-sacrifice for others. In this time of being stripped away from work, school, church, and community, where can we seek the glory of God instead of the glory of man? Acts 1:6-14 1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11 John 17:1-11 Psalm 68:1-10, 33-36Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net for Easter 7, Year A.

Sermon by the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for Sunday, May 3, the Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year A. The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel shares one of his favorite hymns, reminding us of our own belovedness in God. He invites us to share the gift of the Gospel with others, without interpreting it or explaining it, just sharing it and letting God be present in it to do the work. Acts 2:42-47 1 Peter 2:19-25 John 10:1-10 Psalm 23 Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net for Easter 4, Year A.

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel tells the story of a man, "Jim", as he pastored Jim through his final days. Rev. Kerbel talks about how this man showed grace and gratitude through trusting in the promises of God, even in the midst of suffering and death. From the Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields's joyous celebration of the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. Holy Eucharist with music including familiar Easter hymns; a song by parishioner, Scott Robinson, recorded by Mandala; and St. Martin's Treble Choir. Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Philadelphia, PA.

A joyous celebration of the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. Holy Eucharist with music including familiar Easter hymns; a song by parishioner, Scott Robinson, recorded by Mandala; and St. Martin's Treble Choir. The Rev. Anne Thatcher, Celebrant The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel, Preacher The Rev. Carol Duncan, Deacon Readers: Michael Blakeney and Michelle Williams. Psalm 118 sung by Carolyn Green. Intercessor: Marsha Blake. Krystiane Cooper, Adenike Webb, John Wentz, musicians. Jesus Christ Is Risen Today - EASTER HYMN. Words and Music - © OCP Alleluia No. 1 descant and harmonization - Betty Carr Pulkingham, Music - ©1979 Celebration. Sung by Molly Kanevsky. Everlasting Love by Mandala Interfaith Kirtan. Words from the Book of Isaiah. Music by Scott Robinson. From the CD Deep Mystery, available at CDBaby.com and iTunes. Used with permission. Joy is come! - Andrew Carter, Words and Music - ©1998 Oxford University Press. Sung by St. Martin’s Treble Choir. The Day of Resurrection - ELLACOMBE, Words and Music - © OCP Contributing videography by William Previdi. Contributing audio work and video for music by David Loewi. Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187. All rights reserved. Photographs and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields.

A brief welcome to Easter with a message by the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel and music. The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel, Officiant David Dieck, guitar Contributing videography by William Previdi. Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187. All rights reserved. Photographs and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields.

The Great Vigil begins in darkness outside the church on the terrace. Each person is given a candle, lit from the Paschal Candle, as we listen to the lessons recounting God’s saving acts of creation, preservation, and redemption under the Old Covenant. In them are powerful symbols of water and fire; of death and rebirth; of Passover that was, is, and is yet to come. We hear the Word, let it possess us, and actively respond in song and prayer. Please bring your own candles and bells to worship in your home. The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel, officiant Readers: James Fairburn, Anne Swoyer, Barbara Dundon, Court vanRooten, and Lydia Ogden. Thanks to bell ringers: The Rev. Barbara Ballenger, The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel, Lyn Loewi, Mary Button, Barbara Dundon, John Needles, and Richard and Constance Haggard. Contributing videography by William Previdi. Exsultet sung by Krystianne Cooper. Public domain. Collects cantored by the Rev. Anne Thatcher. Alleluia No. 1 descant and harmonization - Betty Carr Pulkingham, Music - ©1979 Celebration. Sung by Molly Kanevsky. Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187. All rights reserved. Photographs and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields.

For Palm Sunday, April 5, 2020, our worship service begins with Palm Sunday's entry into Jerusalem and continues to the passion with the Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross - spoken reflections on each word and Haydn's composition of the same name for string quartet. The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel, Officiant Reflections, in order, by Harry Gould, Daniel Cooper, Tanya Regli, Krystiane Cooper, Andrea Fine, Scott Robinson, Barbara Thomson. Prayers from the Book of Common Prayer available from Church Publishing, Inc. All Glory Laud and Honor (Valet will ich dir geben) The Hymnal 1982 #154 sung by Alyson Harvey. Words: Theodulph of Orleans, Tr. by John Mason Neale. Music: Melchior Treschner. The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross by Joseph Haydn. Played by the Fairmount String Quartet, Rachel Segal and Leah Kim, violins; Beth Dzwil, viola; Mimi Morris Kim, cello, as performed at Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields on Friday, April 19, 2019. Used with permission. Find them on Facebook or YouTube. https://fairmountstrings.com https://www.facebook.com/fairmountstr... https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHHA... Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187. All rights reserved. Thanks to Daniel Cooper for audio editing assistance.

March 29, 2020. For the fifth Sunday in Lent, the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel talks about the lifelong impact of the story of the dry bones from Ezekiel. Readings from Lent 5, Year A.

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel has some very specific reasons for extending our Gospel reading this second Sunday in Lent, from John chapter 3.

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel gives us some modern saints from this past week to look to for guidance as we consider the Transfiguration readings for the Last Sunday after Epiphany and our entry into Lent.

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel offers the sermon on the Feast of the Presentation, focusing on the Gospel from Luke 2:22-40.

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel's sermon from Christmas Eve at 10:00 p.m. based on the Lectionary readings of the day for Christmas I, including Luke 2:1-20.

Sermon by the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel for the Second Sunday of Advent. Text in image: "Paul writes a verse that I think is a good one to memorize, "Welcome each other as you were welcomed by Christ." Meaning, we were welcomed without regard to status or achievement...we were welcomed as we are...out of unconditional love. And so, our welcome needs to be the same as Christ's welcome to us... We strive to be part of someone's journey into their new beginning, just like someone was there for us on our new beginning."

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel remembers his safety training as a lifeguard in his youth. Something that today's Gospel reading seems to counter, in the amazing way that only Jesus can. Sermon based on the Gospel reading for the Last Sunday after Pentecost, Christ the King, Luke 23:33-43.

"St. Martin is our model of gaining and loosing, on our way into a deeper walk with Christ as the one who supplies, Christ the one we depend on, Christ the one who finds us the way. Let us be blessed that the relinquishing and the adding, the gaining and the loosing, the dying and the rising: they are our story, by grace." "At that time, and at this time, there was a fair amount of people who interpreted scripture to say if you are prosperous and wealthy, you are especially favored by God...the prosperity Gospel is this thing. I think Jesus is working against it saying, God is blessing us both in our gains and our losses, in the up and the down, in the consolation and the desolation. God is surrounding us with God's love and blessing through all the rhythms of life...God's abundance surrounds poor and rich alike. He's trying to release the rich man, the crowd of people, and the disciples from a toxic story." Sermon for St. Martin's Feast Day on the Gospel from Luke 18:18-30.

There are those people in our lives who showed us the faith. The Eunices and Loises and Pauls to us when we are an uncertain Timothy. The people who show us what faith is, what it means to be a person of faith, how to carry on when times get rough and we get a little doubtful or ashamed. The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel tells us about a few of those people in his life. Who is that person in your life? Sermon based on 2 Timothy, the Epistle reading for the week, found at www.lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Pen…_RCL.html#nt1 Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost. Gospel: Luke 17:5-10

There are those people in our lives who showed us the faith. The Eunices and Loises and Pauls to us when we are an uncertain Timothy. The people who show us what faith is, what it means to be a person of faith, how to carry on when times get rough and we get a little doubtful or ashamed. The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel tells us about a few of those people in his life. Who is that person in your life? Sermon based on 2 Timothy, the Epistle reading for the week, found at https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Pentecost/CProp22_RCL.html#nt1

God, again and again, chooses mercy and invites everyone to the party. Are we also willing to put aside our own ideas of who we are and how we define ourselves to accept the invitation to God's radical mercy party? Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost. Gospel: Luke 15:1-10 https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Pentecost...

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel reads the message of Jeremiah as one of hope for our times. We together are clay that God breaks down and molds into something new. God does not leave us to remake ourselves. This message is one that needs to be shared with our world today - a plan for how to rebuild the confusion of our time, a message of hope for the future, a clear vision of where life is going, for all of us.

Can you imagine sharing your faith with another? In a world full of people desperate for the freedom from voices of hate - both external and internal - can you imagine sharing the voice of God's love? The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel's sermon from July 7 is a call to engage in the evangelism - sharing the words of freedom, peace, and love that the people right next to us need to hear.

On the 5th Sunday of Lent, Rev. Jarrett Kerbel discusses the extravagance of Mary's gift to Jesus, as she anointed his feet with perfume using her hair and what Jesus is trying to teach Judas in his response to Judas' objection to this extravagance.

This week, the fifth Sunday of Lent, John 12:1-8 For each week of Lent we will listen for the Good News in the gospel reading for the upcoming Sunday. Each podcast includes a reading of the Gospel lesson and the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel’s reflections. Join Rev. Kerbel as you explore how God is loving God’s people into freedom through the word this week.

This week, the fourth Sunday of Lent, Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32 For each week of Lent we will listen for the Good News in the gospel reading for the upcoming Sunday. Each podcast includes a reading of the Gospel lesson and the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel’s reflections. Join Rev. Kerbel as you explore how God is loving God’s people into freedom through the word this week.

Rev. Jarrett Kerbel believes that the Gospel text for this morning -- Luke 13:1-9 -- is not about sin and punishment, but rather it is about mercy, forgiveness, and tending our souls.

This week, the third Sunday of Lent, Luke 13:1-9 For each week of Lent we will listen for the Good News in the gospel reading for the upcoming Sunday. Each podcast includes a reading of the Gospel lesson and the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel’s reflections. Join Rev. Kerbel as you explore how God is loving God’s people into freedom through the word this week.

This week, the first Sunday of Lent, Luke 4:1-13 For each week of Lent we will listen for the Good News in the gospel reading for the upcoming Sunday. Each podcast includes a reading of the Gospel lesson and the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel’s reflections. Join Rev. Kerbel as you explore how God is loving God’s people into freedom through the word this week.

This week, the second Sunday of Lent, Luke 13:31-35 For each week of Lent we will listen for the Good News in the gospel reading for the upcoming Sunday. Each podcast includes a reading of the Gospel lesson and the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel’s reflections. Join Rev. Kerbel as you explore how God is loving God’s people into freedom through the word this week.

On the first Sunday of Lent, Rev. Jarrett Kerbel tackles the story of Jesus tempted in the desert for 40 days. What temptations do you need to free yourself from in order to exist in love?

While giving props to the person who first held up the "John 3:16" sign behind the goal posts of a televised football game in the 1970's, the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel suggests that we begin also learning exactly what Luke 4:14 is all about.

Sermon by Rev. Jarrett Kerbel from 10 p.m. on Christmas Eve.

Full service at 10 p.m. on Christmas Eve, with sermon by Rev. Jarrett Kerbel.

How do we move in time with the metronome of life in Christ, harmonized with God? The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel asks us to reflect on this and tune ourselves to God's song.

Who is this Christ the King? What freedom and truth do we find under his reign? The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel reveals how Pilate doesn't "get it" and hopes that we will listen to Jesus, see who he is, and understand his truth. Correction: The album and song by Wayne Shorter referenced in the sermon is "Speak No Evil" not "Say No Evil."

Happy St. Martin's Day! We are so blessed to have Martin of Tours as our patron saint. Martin has much to teach us about giving up what we hold on to in order to follow Christ. Especially on this, the 100th anniversary of the Armistice of World War I. Listen to Rev. Jarrett Kerbel as he shares how to celebrate St. Martin the soldier and St. Martin the bishop. This track includes the lectionary readings for St. Martin's Day as well as the hymn of St. Martin as written by the Rt. Rev. Frank Griswold.

On Saturday evening, a startling revelation from his wife over dinner stopped the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel in his tracks. This compelled him to rewrite his sermon for this morning. In his first sermon upon returning from sabbatical, Rev. Kerbel offers a pastoral and yet challenging message about who and how we need to be in this moment.

This Sunday we welcome our Interim Rector, the Rev. Phyllis Taylor, to the pulpit for her first sermon during Rev. Jarrett Kerbel's sabbatical.

What does it mean that our God is a Trinity? The theology can be complicated, but the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel breaks it down into one simple lesson.

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel recently spent some time in Haiti with Beyond Borders and returned with a message about delight - the delight of God in us, and the delight of us in God.

What is preventing me from being baptized? From entering into loving relationship with God in Christ? Rev. Jarrett Kerbel breaks down the exclusion and shame that keep us and others from fully living in the liberating love we proclaim.

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel's sermon from Easter Day. We are left in the new life given to us by Christ, in a state of blessed confusion.

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel describes the prayer of surrender, including a guided meditation. This is the final episode in our 2018 Lenten series.

What do you do when you're afraid? The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel shares a lesson on prayer he learned one Sunday from elementary school-aged children in Children's Chapel at St. Martin's.

In our fourth episode, the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel explores St. Paul's passage in Romans about prayer as the Holy Spirit praying in us.

For our third episode, the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel offers an alternative way to approach the Lord's Prayer, one most think of as a prayer of petition.

In this second episode of "Prayer, Actually", a Lenten podcast, The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel describes the basic assumptions of prayer.

Welcome to the first episode of Prayer, Actually. The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel opens this Lenten podcast series on prayer and meditation with a description of the prayer of examen offered on Ash Wednesday.