Today's Sermon "faith, without works, is dead"

Listen to today's sermon on SoundCloud, HERE, or click the image below.

Today's Sermon "faith, without works, is dead"

Listen to today's sermon on SoundCloud, HERE, or click the image below.

Reflections on scarcity, abundance and faith

Bishop Mark Beckwith of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark has a nice reflection on abundance and scarcity...words we need to hear ...

Scarcity, Abundance, and Faith
The scarcity is real. But so is the abundance. You just have to dig down a bit harder to find it; and a bit further to trust it. Jesus was no stranger to scarcity. In the economic system of his day, Jesus and his fellow Jews were no more than sharecroppers to Roman overlords. They had few rights, and fewer freedoms. Talk about scarcity. 

And yet Jesus preached abundance. Over and over again. About mustard seeds, pearls of great price and demonstrating how a few table scraps can feed 5,000 people. He was not a first century Pollyanna, nor was he offering some sort of economic panacea. He was pointing people to another, more abundant reality than the scarce circumstances that surrounded them. It required -- and requires, faith to see the abundance. 

Read more HERE 

Faithfulness, a two-way street

Jubilate

Be joyful in the Lord, all you lands;
serve the Lord with gladness
and come before his presence with a song.
Know this: The Lord himself is God;
he himself has made us, and we are his;
we are his people and the sheep of his pasture.
Enter his gates with thanksgiving;
go into his courts with praise;
give thanks to him and call upon his Name.
For the Lord is good;
his mercy is everlasting;
and his faithfulness endures from age to age.

It wasn't until rather recently that I became aware of the way that faith (and faithfulness) works like a two-way street.  I had really always thought that faith was something that "we had" in God, or in something else.  For example, we have faith (or trust, really) that the earth will continue to rotate causing us to see "the sun come up" each day.  We, in the church, make claims all the time about having faith in God and the benefits when we "have" this attribute.

The other lane of this two-way street is what is mentioned in the Jubilate, which is a prayer/hymn that we often say during Morning Prayer.  In it, we pray and we affirm that "the Lord is good, his mercy is everlasting, and his faithfulness endures from age to age."  Here, it is God's faithfulness that endures.  Here is it God's faithfulness that gives us hope and joy.  "Be joyful in the Lord, all you lands."  This is a recognition of the active and dynamic way that the scriptures describe God, God is not merely a figure sitting on some holy throne far away, rather, God is being faithful.  God is being faithful to us, to God's own promises, to God's love for the world and all her peoples.  In John's gospel, we learn that God is love, and one could say that God's faithfulness to His love for us is central and is a bedrock of our own faith as well.

We should find great comfort in the fact that the God in whom we put our trust, the God in whom we have faith, also is faithful to us, and is faithful to us to the end.  "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff they comfort me."  God is ever faithful to us.  Now, that is something that can rouse me from my spiritual slumber on this rainy Fall day!

"the Lord is good, his mercy is everlasting, and his faithfulness endures from age to age."

~The Rev. Peter M. Carey

I will tell you a mystery,1 Corinthians 15:51-58

1 Corinthians 15:51-58 (NRSV)


51 Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, 52 in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. 53 For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality. 54 When this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled:
"Death has been swallowed up in victory."
55 "Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?"
56 The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. 57 But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
58 Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.


A central hope of the Christian Faith is the hope of the resurrection, and here Paul lays out the promise of the life eternal. These lines are embedded in my own memory within Handel's Messiah, and perhaps hearing them sung is a marvelous way to let them become one with us. It can be difficult to hear words of hope in the style of an argument, but can richer set to to the musical creation of a genius such as Handel. Here in these hopeful and beautiful words, Paul is making the audacious and hopeful claim that the goodness of God, and the richness of the life eternal will blot out any sting that death may have for us. 


 The life eternal is a life that is lived within the Kingdom of God, enlivened by the Spirit of Faith and Hope and Love. The life eternal does include what happens "after" death, but in the life of God this life eternal is already (and has been already) breaking into the world, in ways large and small and to do God's work is to hasten the Kingdom now in our lives today in this moment and in this place. In the reading from today's Morning Prayer, Paul ends his song of hope in the resurrection with a plea that people continue to do the good work to which God has called us. Our work today can be concordant and resonant with the great symphony that God has created, and is continuing to direct, today, tomorrow, and forever.

"...thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.  Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, 

because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain."

~The Rev. Peter M. Carey

April is Poetry Month - "Faith" is a fine invention, Emily Dickinson

"Faith" is a fine invention...

"Faith" is a fine invention
When Gentleman can see—
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency.

by Emily Dickinson, public domain

Need a word of calm in the Storms of our Financial Crisis? : Luke 8:16-25

Need a word of calm in the Storms of our Financial Crisis? : Luke 8:16-25

Jesus said his mother and brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it and then encounters his disciples fearful, afraid, and generally freaking out about the waves and the sea. They plead with him in their moment of anxiety and distress and he calms the waves, and the sea, and then he asks them, "Where is your faith?" It occurs to me that anxiety, fear, stress, and distress feed on themselves, and that we may need to, in the words of that Gospel hymn, "Have a little talk with Jesus." I was wholly uninspired by the words of our so-called commander in chief in these last days, perhaps we should turn to Jesus, the great High Priest, second person of the Holy Trinity, Prince of Peace, our Savior and Redeemer. Perhaps a few moments in contemplation would yield just a bit less reactive behavior which seems to be spreading like a storm.

~The Rev. Peter M. Carey


From today's Daily Office:

Gospel

Luke 8:16-25 (NRSV)

16'No one after lighting a lamp hides it under a jar, or puts it under a bed, but puts it on a lampstand, so that those who enter may see the light. 17For nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed, nor is anything secret that will not become known and come to light. 18Then pay attention to how you listen; for to those who have, more will be given; and from those who do not have, even what they seem to have will be taken away.' 19Then his mother and his brothers came to him, but they could not reach him because of the crowd. 20And he was told, 'Your mother and your brothers are standing outside, wanting to see you.' 21But he said to them, 'My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.'

22 One day he got into a boat with his disciples, and he said to them, 'Let us go across to the other side of the lake.' So they put out, 23and while they were sailing he fell asleep. A windstorm swept down on the lake, and the boat was filling with water, and they were in danger. 24They went to him and woke him up, shouting, 'Master, Master, we are perishing!' And he woke up and rebuked the wind and the raging waves; they ceased, and there was a calm. 25He said to them, 'Where is your faith?' They were afraid and amazed, and said to one another, 'Who then is this, that he commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him?'

"Master, Master, we are perishing!"

Where is your faith?

John Polkinghorne on the place where science and religion meet...

From the London Times:

September 19, 2008 Shining a light where science and theology meet

Why literal creationists are abusing and misinterpreting scripture

John Polkinghorne

An irritating feature of modern life is the way in which useful words get hijacked and used for different, and often unacceptable, purposes. An example is “creationist”. As a Christian believer I am, of course, a creationist in the proper sense of the term, for I believe that the mind and the purpose of a divine Creator lie behind the fruitful history and remarkable order of the universe which science explores. But I am certainly not a creationist in that curious North American sense, which implies interpreting Genesis 1 in a flat-footed literal way and supposing that evolution is wrong.

The irony of this notion of creationism is that it not only involves many scientific errors, but is also the result of a bad theological mistake. When we read any kind of deep literature, if we are to give it the respect that it deserves we must make sure we understand the genre of what is written. Mistaking poetry for prose can lead to false conclusions. When Robert Burns tell us his love “is like a red, red rose”, we know that we are not meant to think that his girlfriend has green leaves and prickles. Reading Genesis 1 as if it were a divinely dictated scientific text, intended to save us the trouble of actually doing science, is to make a similar kind of error. We miss the point of the chapter if we do not see that it is actually a piece of deep theological writing whose purpose, through the eight-times reiterated phrase “And God said, ‘Let there be . . .”, is to assert that everything that exists does so because of the will of the Creator. Thus literal creationists actually abuse scripture by the mistaken interpretation that they impose upon it.

Read it all HERE.

Shining a light where science and religion meet...