July 31, 2016 (full size gallery)
This week on July 27 we held the last luncheon for the Village Harvest partipants. We had about 16, a combination of parishioners and our guests. Cookie’s zucchini bread was a hit! Needs developed include possible cooking classes to help the younger members cook or to provide an atmosphere where those who can cook teach others. Also there is no place in Port Royal for seniors simply to gather for fellowship and conversation. These are all possibilities for extending our Village Harvest ministry.
This week the top pediment of the Church belfry was painted. The same painter also began on the Parish house – scraping and sanding before the job begins. Another contractor will be fixing some rotton spots on the river side of the Parish House.
Sunday was relatively mild after a rainfall on Saturday. It began foggy and cleared through the morning and as the clouds lifted became warm by the end of the service.. We had both 9am Holy Eucharist Rite I and 11am Morning Prayer. 9am only had 7 but we had 32 at 11am.
Today’s service added the 28th Chapter of Genesis to the lectionary – Jacob’s Ladder. You could see it all around the church. We had a ladder in the church though we didn’t have angels going up and down. We continued our series on St. Peter’s Sings which had information about the spiritual, "St. Peter’s Sings.". This was part 13. The children sang it at announcements. The horizontal beam of the cross was linked to Jesus resurrection. Catherine had the congregation practice it – she said it made everyone feel better.
We celebrated Millie and Howard’s anniversary at 9am. At 11am, Catherine invited the children up to sing "Jacob’s Ladder". The hymn came up at Bible School but didn’t have time to sing it.
The 11th Sunday after Pentecost featureed the first of two related stewardship type readings around wealth. Today’s readings encourage us to discover true riches in order to live a happy life. In Ecclesiastes (Track 2), a Jewish wisdom teacher ponders the vanity of human life. The psalmist invites us to bow in worship and praise before God our Maker. The second reading encourages followers of Christ to focus on the things that are above. In the gospel, Jesus tells the parable of the rich fool.
The sermon was about vision – not carrying around a limited vision but an expansive one.
The sermon reached back to Genesis to bring the vision that is a part of the Jacob’s ladder story. "No longer is he just the younger son who has tricked his older brother out of his father’s blessing, a single man alone on a journey to seek his fortune far from the wrath of his brother, but he now knows that God plans to bless him with many descendants, who in turn will be a blessing to all the families of the earth.
The song "Jacob’s ladder" is a spiritual that goes back to slavery. "But they had a vision—the vision of the ladder reaching up into heaven, their passageway to freedom in God, and a way for God to come and be with them. Even as slaves, they could be free in their love and service to God—the last verse of the spiritual goes, “If you love him, why not serve him?”
"Today’s lectionary readings give us the stories of two more slaves, but these people are slaves not because of some human institution, but slaves because of their own limited visions for their lives.
"The first is the teacher in Ecclesiastes. In this passage, the teacher has become a slave to the idea that to live is ultimately an act of sheer absurdity.
"In the story that Jesus told in today’s gospel, a rich man has just had the blessing of an abundant harvest. But he, being a slave to himself and his own desires, can think of nothing but how to save up these unexpected resources in order to relax, eat, drink and be merry for years to come. He is a slave to “me, myself, and I” and his vision is limited only to himself.
"In today’s epistle, Paul tells the Colossians that their visions of life are also too limited. They have limited their own lives by worrying too much about their own pleasure at the expense of others, and going to any lengths to get what they wanted.
"In addition, when we give power to people who have chosen to shape themselves by these things that incur God’s wrath, when we turn a blind eye to these things and accept things like greed and anger and malice and slander and abusive language as the status quo—then we too are being disobedient to God and our visions are being shaped and limited by the things that God despises
"Some limits, like being a slave in the United States before slavery ended, are imposed on some people by others. Some limits we impose on ourselves. As we age, our bodies impose physical limits on us. Sometimes the simplest thing to do is to accept the limits, decide life is absurd, get depressed, get anxious, and then die in a state of disappointment and misery
"This ladder reminds us that in the great void between heaven and earth, God has stretched a ladder and that God wants us to get on it and climb it. Jesus came to be with us, to live with a vision just as susceptible as we are to greed and to anger and wrath and malice and abusive language and all of the other things that tempt us every day—the things that separate us from God and from one another.
"But we know, as Christians who have been raised in Christ through baptism, that the horizontal beam of the cross that lifted Jesus high above the earth, was the ladder that stretched high into heaven, that the vertical beam to which his hands were nailed was the life he had lived, a life free from hatred, and anger and greed, the life that he had lived in witness for God’s vision for him, to bless the earth and all in it for God’s glory—the life that through his death and resurrection he set us free to live."