Last Sunday (Pentecost 15, Year A, September 21, 2014)
September 28 – 9:00am, Morning Prayer, Rite I, Pentecost 16
September 28 – 10:00am, Godly Play
September 28 – 11:00am, Holy Eucharist, Rite II, Pentecost 16
This Sunday at St. Peter’s – Servers, Readings
Shall We Gather ! "Gospel on the River, 2014"
A photo gallery by Barbara Wisdom. A wonderful late afternoon of hospitality, conversation, music and the singing of traditional hymns along the beautiful Rappahannock River, Sept 21, 2014.
Lectionary, September 28, 2014, Pentecost 16 – "Parable of the Two Sons"
I.Theme – Ultimately, we make our own choice how to live our life that is not dependent on the choices our ancestors made. We have free will to turn our lives around.
"Two Sons" – Nelly Bube
The lectionary readings are here or individually:
Old Testament – Ezekiel 18:1-4,25-32
Psalm – Psalm 25:1-8 Page 614, BCP
Epistle –Philippians 2:1-13
Gospel – Matthew 21:23-32
This week is about choice and responsibility. Questions of authority swirl around the readings.
Ezekiel emphasizes responsibility and with that freedom to refute this old saying – "The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge" (Ezekiel 18:1). In earlier days Israel had barely recognized a distinction between a person and the community. The overall picture was one of communal solidarity, with emphasis upon the corporate consequences of individual guilt. However, Ezekiel is here to provide correction in emphasis. A person is free at any time to turn from wickedness to righteousness and vice versa. It’s not what your ancestors did. In each case, that person will be judged by the new life to which he or she has turned, not by his or her previous life. They are called to a renewal of covenant with the Lord and a new life. Only God’s purposes define true fairness.
This psalm is an individual lament. We are dependent and humbled before God. The teaching and learning of them are salvation.
Paul in Philippians suggests that incorporation into the body of Christ demands humility and obedience of the type demonstrated by Jesus. Only in this way will his followers have the "mind" of Christ. This humility is not humiliation; nor is the obedience blind. Rather, they are expressions of faith and trust in the gracious and loving character of God.
In Matthew’s Gospel it is probably Monday of Holy Week. Jesus went into the Temple courts, overturned the tables and seats of those who exchanged money and those who sold doves.
The first part of the Gospel is about authority. The chief priests and the elders ask who has given him the power and authority to do all that he has done in his ministry. But he will only answer them if they first answer his question (v. 25), one which will show whether they have the requisite faith to understand his answer. “Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?”
If they answer that John the Baptist was divinely inspired, then they open themselves to the charge of ignoring God’s will and of being unrepentant. They would undermine the Temple system they serve. If they say that John’s authority was from human beings, then they risk offending the crowd that believed John was a prophet. Either way, they are condemned. And so they plead ignorance.
For the church, then and now, everything depends upon the source of Jesus’ authority. If it is ultimately "from humans" then Jesus is really no different than another charismatic leader and the church will be forced to define itself only as a human institution among other human institutions.
The second part of the Gospel, the Parable of the Two Sons, suggests that faith and trust are found more often among the "tax collectors and prostitutes" who hear the good news and believe than among the self-righteous guardians of religious order.
In the Parable of the Two Sons, the father asks the sons to go work in the family vineyard. One says "I won’t" but changed his mind and will. The other says he will and doesn’t. Jesus suggests that faith and trust are found more often among the “tax collectors and prostitutes “ in the first camp who hear the good news and believe than among the self-righteous guardians of religious order in the second group . The chief priests and elders feigned acceptance but refused to accept John as a messenger from God. They gave an honorable word, but that is not enough.
Read more about the Lectionary…
Reflection on the Two sons.
"Both sons in the parable insult their father. Both sons clearly need a change of mind and heart. But the one that acted, however reluctantly and late, proves to be the righteous one after all. Like the prostitutes and tax collectors who finally repent, the first son shows up and does the work and the will of his father.
"Pharisees, in the way we use the word is used in this parable as hypocritical, self-righteous provocateurs, come in all forms and presences (meditation one). The masks must come off to find the true self and liberation (meditation two). That liberation, however, creates a necessary conflict, in the soul and in the world. "
Ever avoidingly,
-Suzanne Guthrie from the "Edge of Enclosure"
"The Two Sons" in Video
1. Action speak louder than words. Father James Kubicki provides his interpretation.
2. A Modern version. Chris and Jake act it out and talk about it
"Friendly Persuasion"- a variation of the Parable of the Two sons– Ed McNulty
This is a 1956 movie Starring Gary Cooper as Quaker farmer Jess Birdwell.
"It is 1862, and in the little Quaker community Jess Birdwell’s wife Eliza (Dorothy McGuire) is a principle leader of the small congregation. Jess himself is less pious. He looks forward to driving the family to church each Sunday, not just to attend the quite service, but so he can race his buggy against that of Methodist neighbor Sam Jordan (Robert Middleton), much to the consternation of Eliza. The Birdwells have three children, Josh (Anthony Perkins), Mattie (Phyllis Love), and little Jess (Richard Eyer). The family also has a goose named Samantha that seems to have it in for little Jess, thus providing several moments of humor. Early on we see a Union officer come to the Quaker meetinghouse and plead with the men to join the Union Army in its fight against slavery. Teenaged Josh is torn between his pacifist upbringing and his desire to do what he now sees his duty. Eliza is disturbed at the thought that their son might become a soldier. When she urges Jess to do something, he replies, “I’m just his father, Eliza, not his conscience. A man’s life ain’t worth a hill of beans except he lives up to his own conscience.” Thus another important theme is brought in, that of integrity, of following one’s conscience. The title captures well the Quaker ethic that is opposed to coercion of any kind—and as we see in the film, even to coercing one’s child to accept the ethic of “friendly persuasion.”
"Another scene reminds me of Jesus’ Parable of the Obedient and Disobedient Sons Instead of two sons in the parable, one who refuses his father’s request, but then does it, and the other who says yes, but does not do his father’s bidding, it is two church members, Jess and a church elder named Purdy. When news of Southern troops reaches the community, the Quakers’ ethic of “friendly persuasion” is heatedly discussed and debated right in church. Eliza adheres to Jesus’ “turn the other cheek” belief. Purdy boldly proclaims that he also will stand by the tenants of their beliefs. Jess has remained silent during the discussion, so when he is asked what he would do if the Confederate raiders threaten their farms, Jess admits that he does not know for sure. Purdy is so upset by this that he condemns Jess for his lack of commitment. Later, when a nearby settlement is torched by the Southern raiders, son Josh does join with a party in pursuit of the raiders. So does Purdy, upset by his enemies’ ruthless tactics. He now apparently has forgotten all about his loud affirmation of nonviolence and his condemnation of Jess and others who do not live by it. Jess also takes up his hunting rifle, upset when his best friend Sam is shot by a Rebel. It is quite a tense moment when Jess catches up with and struggles with the shooter. " See this scene.
Life in the Shadows: dealing with fame
The Gospel lesson depicts the father dealing with two sons in one episode. What happens when a famous father has to deal with two sons over their lifetimes? Michael Jordan’s sons are learning firsthand a brutal truth that MJ himself warned them about.
This story appears in ESPN The Magazine’s Aug. 20 College Football Preview.
"THERE ARE NO faultless fathers. Some are better than others, but it’s just not a job that allows any of us to be perfect. It’s too hard, too ever-changing. It requires too many different skills, from tenderness to absolute resolve. And even if there were such a thing as a perfect father, our children would still slip out of our careful reach, because that’s the natural order of things: One day we won’t be their fathers anymore. Even if by some miracle our lives go exactly as planned, one day we will leave them.
"Luckily for us, most of our mistakes will be private and forgotten; only our kids and their therapists will ever know what happened. That’s not true for famous fathers, and it’s definitely not true for their children, famous by default. Hotel parking lots in Omaha are rarely the sources of national news, for instance — unless Michael Jordan’s son happens to get handcuffed in one. In early July, Marcus, Jordan’s 21-year-old second son, allegedly had a drunken argument with two women and then made it difficult for the cops who broke it up. He was booked for resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and obstructing, but Marcus still looked surprisingly upbeat in his mug shot. If nothing else, his father must have given him a share of his swagger.
Read more about Michael Jordan’s sons…
Jesus Working on the Elite
by Matthew L. Skinner from OnScripture
"In Matthew 21:23-32, Jesus confronts some of the highest-ranking, most powerful, and more widely influential authorities within the Judaism of his time and place. These chief priests and elders, members of a “scribal elite” class, played important and visible roles regarding religious practices, rituals and symbols, the interpretation of sacred texts, and Roman governance over the region. Jesus has not directly engaged people like this before, except for a brief encounter in Matthew 21:15-16, and the tension is high.
"Jesus implicitly criticizes them for not recognizing John the Baptizer and his ministry as authorized “from heaven,” that is, as expressions of God’s own intentions or as means by which someone might glimpse God and God’s priorities for the world. By extension, Jesus insinuates that these religious authorities also fail to recognize the same in him and in the teaching and work he does.
"Jesus tells his parable after that exchange, after he has exposed these particular leaders as unable or unwilling to grasp how God might be knowable — or even at work — in other places or in other ways.
"Because if God is active or discoverable in the efforts of someone like John, a wild-eyed long-toiling prophet who sets up camp in the wilderness calling for a new world to come into being, a world marked by justice, changed lives, and a recognition that God intends for more than just the continuation of an ongoing and corrosive status quo…
"…then perhaps people who care about religious language, symbols, practices, and truth claims should be curious people, bent on keeping their eyes open for ways in which God might be made known, or ways in which the purposes of God might be expressed.
"In other words, saying “Yes” to God should lead a person to say “Yes” to looking for God and “Yes” to getting engaged in God’s business — the business of seeing to the flourishing of justice, peace, reconciliation, security, restoration, and forgiveness.
"That’s why Jesus, in his parable and in his words immediately after it, praises “tax collectors and prostitutes” — people who by most appearances have not claimed to say “Yes” to God but have nevertheless responded to or found their place within God’s activity.
Vineyards in the Bible
The Gospel lessons for Sept. 21, Sept. 28 and Oct 5. are set in Vineyards plus the Old Testament reading from Isaiah on Oct. 5. What explains this use of this metaphor ? Jan Richardson explains in her website "Painted Prayerbook"
"In Jesus’ time, the vineyard held a place in the culture that was not only real, being so prevalent in the landscape in that part of the world, but also mythic; it tapped into the people’s collective imagination with a constellation of meanings and associations.
"In the Bible, vines and vineyards stand for the people of Israel, as in Psalm 80, where the psalmist writes of how God brought a vine out of Egypt, and Isaiah 5, where, in a passage called “The Song of the Unfruitful Vineyard,” the prophet laments, “For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting; he expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry!” Vineyards can be a place of danger; Judges 21 offers the chilling story of how men of the tribe of Benjamin hide themselves in the vineyards of Shiloh, emerging to capture the young women who have come out to dance, and carrying them off as wives. And vineyards are a place of delight, which is nowhere as evident as in the Song of Songs: “Come, my beloved,” the bride sings in chapter 7, “…let us go out early to the vineyards, and see whether the vines have budded….”
"The vineyard offers elemental metaphors of fertility and fruitfulness. It is, at times, a profoundly feminine image, as in the Song of Songs, where it becomes identified with the bride’s own body. The vineyard is a place where both labor and love take place. Though it may be a place of harm, as we will see with particular clarity in next week’s gospel lection, it is a space where right relation becomes possible, as evidenced between the lovers in the Song, between God and the people of Israel, and, as we will see in John’s gospel, between Jesus and his followers (“I am the vine, you are the branches”).
"For Jesus’ hearers, the vineyard grew not only in the landscape of their daily lives but also in a mythic landscape that stretched back for generations: the book of Genesis tells us that Noah was the first to plant a vineyard. Its tendrils also twined forward into a future where redemption would take place: “I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel,” God says in Amos 9.14; “…they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine….”
"In setting this trio of parables in vineyards, Jesus subtly conjures all these associations. Though his hearers likely would not have consciously thought of each of these layers of meaning as he told these stories, the fact that the image of the vineyard was deeply embedded in their personal and collective memory would have shaped their reception of these parables.
"All this has me wondering about how we hear the parables of Jesus in a context where so many of us live so distant from the settings that grounded his stories. I’ve spent little time in vineyards, save for the small bower of muscadine and scuppernong grapes that grew in my grandparents’ yard. Having grown up among the groves, however, I can appreciate how a landscape roots itself in one’s imagination, how it intertwines with personal and shared history, how it can be so easily evoked decades later, how it helps me enter into certain stories.
Read more from Jan Richardson…
Which Vineyard Will I Choose?
by Matthew L. Skinner from OnScripture
"Where might we encounter God now? Where might we participate in giving expression to God’s intentions for our world? Are there wilderness places you see, circumstances that appear hostile to human flourishing?
"The problem is, there are so many places. And they can become easy to forget when the sirens stop and the video cameras and reporters leave town.
"We don’t need many words to evoke the vineyards — places, issues, causes — where we might have been called to labor over the last few months. Consider, for starters:
- Domestic violence, provoked by NFL scandals
- Racial injustice and profiling, provoked by Ferguson
- Immigrants and immigration reform, provoked by children detained in Texas and politically-motivated delays
- Religious persecution and violence, provoked by ISIL
- Capital punishment reform or abolishment, provoked by the deaths of Troy Davis and Joseph R. Wood III
- Sensible gun-control legislation, provoked by the Sandy Hook shootings
"Your list may be different, larger, more personal, or more urgent.
"People of faith may not agree about exactly how to go about our work to address these and other issues, but we usually share a sense of outrage, pain, or dismay. Those feelings could very well be our summons to go into the vineyard.
"It is easy to make pledges when an issue erupts. It can be easy to write a check or to resolve to put our faith into action into particular ways. Following through by working for long-term change is more difficult.
"Working in a vineyard implies patient, hard work. Progress does not occur unless people come back and resume their work day after day. Usually in groups.
"If we fail to do so, it does not necessarily mean we are evil or worthless people. The religious authorities Jesus criticizes in the Gospels were not, either. But Jesus insists their vision had become too limited. They weren’t able to see what Jesus saw. Their imaginations were too puny. Perhaps Jesus thought their view of what was possible had withered.
"Because God might be there, out among the vines. God might be waiting for me to transform my good intentions into actions, not merely to keep me busy, but because of an eagernessr for me to recognize places where God can be encountered and God’s intentions actualized."
Two churches
"It is very easy to be servants of the word without disturbing the world: a very spiritualized word, a word without any commitment to history, a word that can sound in any part of the world because it belongs to no part of the world. A word like that creates no problems, starts no conflicts. What starts conflicts and persecutions, what marks the genuine Church, is the word that, burning like the word of the prophets, proclaims and accuses: proclaims to the people God’s wonders to be believed and venerated, and accuses of sin those who oppose God’s reign, so that they may tear that sin out of their hearts, out of their societies, out of their laws – out of the structures that oppress, that imprison, that violate the rights of God and of humanity."
– Oscar Romero (1917-1880) from The Violence of Love. This is a book of simple meditations by the former archibishop of El Salvador who was tragically assassinated.
Rev. Douglas Leonard on ISIS, Religious Violence and What Faith Leaders Can Do
Rev. Douglas Leonard, a professor of the Al Amana Centre in Oman, argues that the recent violence in northern Africa and the Middle East is not rooted in Islam.
"If you take three factors: anger at a colonial history, a terrible economy and political unrest and comine them anywhere in the world – regardless of what the major faith is in the region – you’d see the very same things happening that you see in the Middle East right now."
"In Compassion and Sympathy: A Christian Response to Religious Violence – Philippians 2:1-13 "
-Jacob D. Myers
“If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.” Phil. 2:1-2
"I write this essay on the eve of a US led air campaign that marks “the biggest direct military intervention in Syria since the crisis began more than three years ago.” There is no denying that ISIS/ISIL has captured the attention of the world through its religiously inspired acts of violence. The atrocities committed in recent months by ISIS/ISIL have left countless people of faith—including many devout Muslim leaders across the world—speechless.
"Yet, one of the central aspects of religiously inspired violence is that it rails against silence. Whether it is Christian violence in Nigeria and Uganda, Hindu violence in Western India, Jewish violence in Gaza, or Islamic violence in Indonesia and Syria, acts of terror demand denunciation. The ubiquity of religiously inspired violence across cultures and religious traditions lends credibility to the belief of some that religion itself is the problem. My own Christian tradition treats our inclination to harm and even kill one another as symptomatic of our fallen natures; it is a mark of our propensity to evil. This is what makes religious violence so pernicious: it twists our one remedy so that it exacerbates the disease.
"Violence—whether it arises out of a Quentin Tarantino film or a YouTube video of decapitation—captures our attention. Even as we are repulsed by the scope of human depravity, such acts of violence consume our attention. Scenes of violence are like a mirror into the darkest parts of our soul: we cannot bear the images we see, but neither can we turn away.
"Christ-followers are given another angle of vision, another mirror into our souls, in the person of Jesus Christ. No passage of Scripture points more acutely to this image than one of this week’s lectionary texts: Philippians 2:1-13. The Apostle Paul invokes the Christ hymn as a means of reminding us who we are called to be. He urges his readers to “be of the same mind” and to “have the same love” as the one who’s image they bear. Put simply, Jesus-followers are called to participate in a selfless, humbling, even self-emptying mode of being in the world.
St. Francis Animal Treats, Sat. , Oct. 4, Charter Day
Unfortunately, due to calendar conflits, we will not be having the Blessing of the Animals service on Oct. 4, the day we remember St. Francis. Catherine will be handing out treats and information on St. Francis during Charter Day from 11am-1pm at the St. Peter’s table. We still want to remember past services.
Event Links:
The 2013 event
The 2012 event
The 2011 event
The 2010 event
The service in 2013
The prayer of St. Francis
Pictures
2013 Gallery
2012 Gallery
2011 Gallery
2010 Gallery
Here’s is a link 2013’s animal kingdom.
Charter Day, Oct. 4 – Get your ECW Christmas gifts
The ECW will be selling their gifts from 2011-2013 during Charter Day.
The Cookbooks are $10, the mug $8 and the ornament for your tree, $15. Each ornament has a gold cord for hanging and individual 3.5" X 3.5" X 1" white cotton filled "Treasured Scenes" box.