Pentecost 15, September 6, 2015 (full size gallery)
Catherine returned from a two week vacation with her family. It was a Labor Day weekend with moderate temperatures for the end of summer. Unfortunately it remains dry
Ten thank yous this week from a well attended service:-
1. Dave and Gibby brought two buckets of tomatoes to distribute to the congregation.
2. Cherry and Woody and Roger and Eunice made major contributions to the upcoming Village Harvest distributions. There may have been others.
3. Valerie from Church of the Good Shepherd Richmond is visiting Episcopal Churches in Virginia. Her husband runs a marina in Colonial Beach. We gave her a tour of the church and graveyard and she stayed for Coffee hour.
4. Thanks to the Dukes and Davis’ for bringing their children to church. Letting the children serve in various functions is important and they don’t hesitate to do so. We have one of the youngest ushers!
5. Thanks to Cookie, Dave and Cheryl and Becky for the wonderful coffee hour. 4 different soups – carrot (my favorite), turkey, lentil and one other, sandwiches, salad, pizza as well as two dessert areas – one with pineapple and watermelon (the healthy one) and the other one with several types of cookies. Tucker cooked his fabulous bread also.
6. Thanks to Mike for grabbing about 60 brochures of the Flamenco Concert to distribute.
7. Thanks to Cookie for continuing her beautiful flower arrangements and for Holly for adding sunflowers to the mix. Holly told us all about it at the announcments!
8. Thanks to Brad and choir for enthusiastic singing with a small group.
9. Thanks to the Gayles – we remembered their wedding anniversary
10.. Thanks to all who attended.
Next Sunday is a big one – a new Christian Ed class "Weaving God’s Promises" (grade 3 and up), a baptism of BJ and Jim’s grandchild, the Eucharist at 11am and Gospel on the River at 4pm.
We had 51 at the service including 10+ children. Amazing considering the holiday! Catherine was able to do a children’s sermon based on the theme of compassion with the sermon
The lectionary readings celebrate God’s power to heal and restore. Isaiah looks ahead to when God will bring healing to God’s people and to the land. Proverbs reminds us that God rewards just behavior. James speaks of God’s gift of inner, spiritual wholeness, a wholeness that results in outward acts of purity and kindness. In the gospel, away from the clamor of the crowd, Jesus transforms a man’s silent world by healing his deafness and a speech impediment.
The sermon spoke of the theme of compassion which began with a story of a bird which had hit the glass of their cottage at the beach and was rescued. In the Old Testament readings "God comes with vengeance to save us by healing and restoring us…And God’s compassion incorporates justice… Then in the Epistle "at the heart of the two great commandments, to love God, and to love our neighbors as ourselves lies compassion, active, lifegiving, God filled compassion."
"And Jesus, in Mark’s gospel, after some thought, has compassion even on a Gentile woman’s daughter, in spite of the fact that because she is a Gentile, she is not an Israelite, one of God’s chosen people. This particular vignette has great relevance for us as we watch people around the world flee from war, political and religious persecution hoping to find safety and better lives for themselves and their families."
She brought in the European migration crisis and US debate on immigraton. The European migrant crisis arose through the rising number of migrant arrivals in 2015 – a combination of economic migrants and refugees – to the European Union (EU) coming across the Mediterranean Sea and Southeast Europe from areas such as Africa, and the Middle East.The term has been used since April 2015, when at least five boats carrying almost two thousand migrants to Europe sank in the Mediterranean Sea, with a combined death toll estimated at more than 1,200 people.
"What does scripture have to say about this issue? The ultimate response of Jesus to the Canaanite woman is rooted and grounded in the compassion that God orders his people to have for the immigrant—people not like them or from their tribe– way back in Leviticus.
In Leviticus, God lays out the commandments that he expects the people to keep and elaborates on them, and you can find these commandments in chapter 19. In verses 33 and 34, God says this to the people.
“When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you, you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”
"The response of Jesus to the Canaanite woman challenges us to take a good long look at those who are suffering, and to listen to their cries, and to consider how we might have compassion for those in the world, those who are not us, who seek better lives and risk suffering and death in the process, including the immigrants who are here in our own country.
"The kind of mighty compassion that God has for each one of us and for those unlike us, those we choose to set aside because they are not one of us—God’s love and compassion, spelled out in scripture over and over, compels us to consider our compassion, or lack of it, for those who are not like us.
"So what are we, as individuals, and as a congregation, supposed to do, based on these scriptures? Before we have compassion for others, we must have compassion for ourselves.
Think about what in your life makes you angry, or frustrates you, or hurts you. Maybe immigration and other thorny political issues make you angry.
"These are the things, whatever they are in your life, that I challenge you to pick up today, and to take a good long look at them, to try to hold them with compassion, to grieve for them, and then to offer them up to God by giving them a place of healing sanctuary–To look with honesty at your life and to face head on what brings you anger and suffering, and to offer those things up to God’s compassion and healing.
"Being able to do this for ourselves gives us then the possibility of having the strength and the power to take on the suffering around us and the audacity to enter in to it, to pick it up, to hold it and to make that space for God’s healing compassion and power to happen, not only in our own lives, but in the life of the world around us.
"Ask God to cast out your demons, the demons of anger, or self-pity, distain for others, or whatever your demons happen to be. Be willing, like the deaf man, whose hearing Jesus restored, to be led to God and to have your ears opened, so that you can hear the crying that’s all around you.
…"Pray for the faith to love God and love your neighbor as yourself, not just on your own, but held in God’s almighty strength and power, with God’s tender and healing compassion."
Lectionary Commentary by Canon Lance Ousley, Diocese of Olympia, Washington
Last week the texts focused around the identity of Israel and our identity as Christians and the Church as the Body of Christ. This week we get a clearer picture of what that looks like. We also get a vision of how we can be stewards of the faith we proclaim as Christians by responding to the needs of those around us, regardless of who they are, where they come from, or what they believe. Ultimately, it is our churches’ ministries that people pledge to support with their financial resources, their time and their God-given abilities. Good stewardship of our faith begets good stewardship of our resources!
Both Proverbs and Isaiah speak of God’s preference for the poor, downcast and weak. Isaiah 35 paints the vision of the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven, establishing justice for all people especially for those who are burdened by physical, social or economic circumstances. James charges us with making this a reality in our midst as proof of our faith. Our ministry in many ways is to bring about the reversal of fortune for the unfortunate!
A couple weeks ago I spoke of a former Theology and Ethics professor of mine at Sewanee. His name is Joe Monti and his voice is echoing in my mind again this week. Joe said sometimes you just have to preach against the grain of a text in scripture. This week Mark 7:24-30 demands this of us. There are several cultural issues at work here that make this a very complex preaching text. In our contemporary culture we can’t preach around the fact that Jesus refuses at first to meet the needs of the Syrophoenician woman and that he likens her to a "dog." This is harsh even if it is a cultural reference to Gentiles in the 1st Century.
However, we can preach through this text using it as a prompt to examine our own actions and preach against this reflexive action within us, pointing to Jesus’ grace in ultimately healing the woman’s daughter. Mark’s Gospel account here points to the universality of God’s grace – all are included, not just those who are like us! We do well to be responsive to the overarching message here and to not get lost in the initial reflexive refusal. It also is interesting to note that this Gentile woman is the only person in Mark who refers to Jesus as "Lord." And it is her persistence in pursuing healing and freedom for her daughter that mirrors God’s persistence in pursuing wholeness and freedom for all people.
So, James urges us not to just speak about our faith, but also to act upon it. Just as Jesus reached out to touch and heal the deaf and mute man from the Decapolis, we too, are to reach out and enflesh the Kingdom of God in our midst. As stewards of our faith we are called to act in the reversal of fortune of the unfortunate with the same perseverance that the Syrophoenician mother had for her daughter and with the universal grace God pours out upon the whole world through Jesus welcoming all people to God’s table.
So whom will you welcome at God’s table in your congregation? How will you enflesh the Kingdom of God on earth with your acts of faith?
Remember, good stewardship begets good stewardship.