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Play Video Grace Episcopal Church Sheboygan, Wisconsin The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 13 B2] Exodus 16.2-4, 9-15 Psalm 78.23-29 Ephesians 4.1-16 John 6.24-35 May the Lord be in my mind, on my lips, and in my heart, that I may rightly and truly proclaim His holy Gospel.   “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?” That’s the question the people ask Jesus when they track Him down, after He has withdrawn following the feeding of 5,000 with five loaves and two fish. They’ve been looking for Him. Jesus knows this, and says, “... you seek me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of loaves ...,” and so the people ask Him, in effect, “What are we supposed to do?” And what answer does Jesus give them, and us? “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” Hey, that sounds easy! All I need to do is believe in Jesus? I do! But wait, I still want to know what I’m supposed to do, because if faith doesn’t change who I am, is it real? What I find when I look, when I listen, when I pay attention to God, is that the answer to what I am supposed to do is expressed in who He calls me to be; and who I am in Christ is expressed–is lived–in how I manifest the risen Lord to others, in other words in what I do. The work of God–believing in Jesus Christ–is incomplete if we do not manifest Jesus Christ to the world. In the words of sports advertising, Jesus is saying something like “Just do it!” Believing without doing is a mental construct only. Believing and doing is to incarnate God in and to the world. We are called to manifest Jesus Christ by being His Body. What does it look like, to be Jesus’ Body? We can, perhaps, throw up our hands, and in the words of a Supreme Court justice say something like “We’ll know it when we see it,” but we really don’t need to speculate and squint. We can look at examples in Scripture and examples in our own lives. In Scripture we can point to all that is revealed in our lesson from Ephesians, that we are to lead a life (note, not “lives” but one life together) worthy of the calling to which we have been called. The “you” addressed here is “y’all”—it’s plural, and we are supposed to note the contrast between the plural form of the address and the fact that we are called to one life, not many lives. That’s why in the following sentence we get a litany centered on the word “one”: one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all. In other words, to be Jesus’ Body each of us has to get out of his or her head the question which hovers ...

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Play Video Grace Episcopal Church Sheboygan, Wisconsin The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 10 B] Amos 7.7-15 Psalm 85.8-13 Ephesians 1.3-14 Mark 6.14-29 May the Lord be in my mind, on my lips, and in my heart, that I may rightly and truly proclaim His holy Gospel.   Who do you listen to? Who do you pay attention to? I’ll state right up front, that I listen to my wife! But let’s consider the question again. We listen to our spouses unless our relationship is broken. We listen to those whom we love, because love involves mutuality in relationship. We listen to our boss or co-worker. We listen to our investors and our customers. We listen at work and in business because we have to, because if we don’t listen we’ll lose our job or lose a promotion, or lose a customer, or lose a livelihood. In other words, we listen because the option of not listening is disastrous; listening is not optional. And the same is true with God. In the psalm today we pray, “I will listen to what the Lord God is saying, for He is speaking to His faithful people and to those who turn their hearts to Him” (Ps. 85.8). The necessary corollary is that listening is not optional. Either we are faithful, and hear, or we are estranged from God, but turn our hearts to Him, and so hear him. The next time a scoffer or skeptic asks you if God has ever spoken to you, say “Yes”. Most people at this point will probably smile and back away, but that’s because they are not listening to God. God is somehow optional to them. They know that if they don’t listen to a spouse the relationship will suffer, and they can see and feel this. But then they don’t “connect the dots” in the same equation, to realize that whatever is wrong in their life can be tied directly to the brokenness of their relationship with God–with One who knows them better than any spouse ever can. So the question is not whether to listen, but how to. How do we listen? Last week I spoke about how we testify to God; that we can only do so from the foot of the cross. I said that unless we live the reality that we are before God, and that in loving Him we are to obey His commandments (the “plumb line” referred to in our lesson from Amos, today), we cannot reach out to others to bring them the Good News. But to bring the Good News, we need to hear it and live it. We need to be open to the Holy Spirit. How do we do this? God speaks, still. “He is speaking to His faithful people and to those who turn their hearts to Him ...” So the question becomes, how do we practice our faithfulness, or how do we turn our hearts? What barriers are there to God being a ...

Play Video Grace Episcopal Church Sheboygan, Wisconsin The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 9 B] Ezekiel 2.1-5 Psalm 123  2 Corinthians 12.2-10 Mark 6.1-13   May the Lord be in my mind, on my lips, and in my heart, that I may rightly and truly proclaim His holy Gospel.   In his short story The Remarkable Rocket, Oscar Wilde tells the tale of a fireworks rocket.  The Rocket thinks so highly of himself that he looks down upon all of the other fireworks, telling them repeatedly both of his superiority and of his superior destiny, i.e., that he is to soar above them.  As you might imagine in an Oscar Wilde story, the dialogue between the Rocket and the other fireworks is filled with satire.  When the Rocket is finally fired off–gleeful that he is soaring–he exults in his destiny to continue to rise, only to find that he quickly burns out.  The story ends with a goose commenting on a how a burnt stick has fallen to the ground. Oscar Wilde’s satire is a useful reminder that when we think of destiny only in terms of how we think of ourselves, we’re in trouble.  No matter how gifted and unique we may think ourselves to be (and how gifted and unique we may, indeed, be), we are dependent on God, and if we ever forget this, to fall as a burnt stick will become the destiny of creatures in fact intended to continue to soar.  To remind ourselves of this reality, I want to focus on what we say in prayer. In the collect appointed for today we pray, “Oh God, you have taught us to keep all of your commandments by loving you and our neighbor ....”  If you remember one thing about what I say today, remember this:  What we say in prayer is a statement of what we believe.  All of the words we use in our prayer book, throughout the service today and at every service, are not just words offered up to God to express worship, but are expressions of what we believe.  Our prayers express who we believe in, and what we believe His will is for us.  So, let’s consider more closely what we say we believe. We say, in the collect, that God teaches us; in other words, that our life as the Church is not something we devise or figure out on our own, but is to be conformed to what God reveals His will to be.  We say that God is not here just to empower us, but that we are here to obey God’s commandments.  We are called not to be “spiritual,” but to be filled with God’s Spirit, that we might obey Him.  We echo our Lord’s summation of the Law when we say that we keep God’s commandments in how we love Him and in how we love our neighbor.  In other words, we cannot be in right relationship with each other if we are not ...

Play Video Grace Episcopal Church Sheboygan, Wisconsin The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 8 B] Wisdom of Solomon 1.13-15, 2.23-24 Psalm 30 2 Cor. 8.7-15 Mark 5.21-43   May the Lord be in my mind, on my lips, and in my heart, that I may rightly and truly proclaim His holy Gospel. “She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, for she said, ‘If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well’” (Mark 5.27). Psychologists define magical thinking as nonscientific causal reasoning, such as the idea that we can influence the physical world by how we think, or how we might mistake correlation for causation. Magical thinking is common in people subject to extreme stress, such as those in combat, who are known to regularly have a “good luck piece” (the most prized of all being a bullet that has missed you), or a ritual, such as that common among members of Bomber Command in the Royal Air Force in World War II, who were known to say “rabbits” or “white rabbits” as the first words to be spoken on the day of a mission. (Before you scoff, imagine the stress level of the typical bomber crew in World War II, members of which knew that the probability of their survival was near zero.) So much for magical thinking. It’s common for cynics to point to a story such as Mark’s of the woman with the hemorrhage, and to start speaking about magical thinking. But there’s a problem in this reasoning. The problem is that the belief, “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well” worked. “But,” you say, “magical thinking includes mistaking correlation for causation.” Fair point, so let’s look into the problem presented by the woman’s healing; the problem presented in this scientific worldview by Jesus’ words, “Daughter, your faith has made you well” (Mark 5.34), and His admonition to Jairus when told the synagogue leader’s daughter is dead, “Do not fear, only believe” (Mark 5.36). 2 Unless we dismiss Mark’s account as a fabrication (in which case, why are we speaking about faith at all?), we are faced with the problem that miraculous healing just doesn’t fit into a cause-and-effect scientific model. This does not mean that faith is unscientific; it means that science cannot explain faith and cannot explain miracles using any testable hypothesis, the essence of the scientific method. But that’s the essence of a miracle. Something happens which cannot be explained by the laws of nature, or–and here’s the rub–something happens and we can describe the mechanism of causation but not the reason of causation. We can say that the Theory of Natural Selection (what we call evolution) is a pretty good model to explain the development of life forms, but we can’t say why life arose other than to point to a First Cause, to the Creator. Let me give you an example from my own experience. In England ...

Play Video Grace Episcopal Church Sheboygan, Wisconsin The Sixth Sunday of Easter Day (Year B) Acts 10.44-48                                    Psalm 98                               1 John 5.1-6                   John 15.9-17 Alleluia.  Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed.  Alleluia. What do you think of when you encounter the word “commandment”?  I remember once watching the movie An Officer and a Gentleman with a date.  In the movie the protagonist has played fast-and-loose with the rules, and has been caught.  His drill instructor has told him to drop from the program, and he has refused, whereupon the sergeant orders him “Get into your fatigues.  By the end of this weekend, you’ll quit.”  You can imagine what comes next, in terms of punitive exercise and the aptly-named form of military punishment known as “fatigue duty”.  At one point the protagonist is on his hands and knees, cleaning the skid strip on a stairway with a toothbrush.  During this scene my date leaned over to me and said, “That’s ridiculous.  They wouldn’t do that.”  I stared back, eyes right, with the whispered reply, “Oh yes they would.  I did that once.”  She asked, “Why would the sergeant do that?”  I answered, “A:  because the guy really messed up.  B:  Because the drill instructor can.” My date’s reaction to a depiction of fatigue drill was that it was no more than an arbitrary exercise in power–which is not really true.  But too many people in this world, and in the Church, have some image of arbitrary power in mind when they think of “commandment”.  It’s all about “thou shalt not(s)”.  Is it?  In the epistle St. John writes that “... the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments” (1 Jn. 5.3), and Jesus says to His disciples, “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love ...” (Jn. 15.10).  But when Jesus says this, He says it as part of a longer revelation:  “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.”  In other words, when we pay attention to what God reveals to us as His will we don’t ignore Him, and it is then–when our relationship with God is a living relationship in both directions–that we abide in, live in, God’s love.  And then?  Even a commandment which may well say something like “thou shalt not” becomes a means to an end, an end which Jesus says is His joy within us, that our joy may be complete. When Jesus says that he has come in order to fulfill the Law (Mtt. 5.17), He makes it clear that commandments which set limits don’t go away.  But when Jesus speaks of how we fulfill God’s will He first says that this is in our complete love of God, and love of neighbor, and then that we are to “love one another as I have loved you” (Jn. 15.12). In one sense it would be interesting, ...

Play Video Grace Episcopal Church Sheboygan, Wisconsin   The Second Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 4 B) Deut. 5.12—15                       Psalm 81.1—10                      2 Cor. 4.5—12                       Mark 2.23—3.6   Deuteronomy 5.12—15   Deuteronomy is the fifth and last book of the Pentateuch or Torah (the Law).  The title comes from the Greek version of the Old Testament (the Septuagint or LXX).  Deuteronomion means “second law,” and derives both from the book reflecting later (6th C. B.C.) editing of earlier writings and the book’s restatement of the Law as superseding the “covenant code” of Exodus 20.23-23.19.                                                   i.      In Jewish tradition, the book is referred to as děbārím (“words”), from the opening verse. Deuteronomy is the first book which speaks, consistently, not of “laws” but of “the Law”. Deuteronomy is first and foremost a law book.  It is concerned with the regulation of life by law, and the adaptation of ancient practice to changing circumstances. The Law’s purpose is to outline a level of moral performance compatible with the self-revelation of the Lord to Israel, and with Israel’s high calling as the people of God.                                                   i.      This high calling includes a focus on the poor and disadvantaged. In ch. 5 the Ten Commandments (which were first encountered in Exodus 20) are restated.  The Decalogue is the foundation of all of the Law. This foundation is extended at 6.5, the “Great Commandment” recited by Jesus at Mtt. 22.37-40; Mk. 12.28-34; Lk. 10.25-28). In the Exodus account of the Ten Commandments, the commandment to hallow the sabbath (Exod. 20.8—11)is tied to the Creation account.  In Deuteronomy, the observance of sabbath is tied to humanitarian purposes, to the rest of servants.   Psalm 81.1—10   81:  A prophetic liturgy (cf. Ps. 50) probably associated with the feast of Tabernacles.  Noteworthy is the presence of an oracle uttered by a cultic official (cf. Pss. 2.7; 12.5; 32.9-10). The people are summoned to praise the Lord at the times God has established for celebration. The celebration is associated with the deliverance from slavery in Egypt.                                                   i.      In light of this deliverance, God demands absolute allegiance.                                                ii.      It is because of God’s action that believers must pay the closest attention to God’s Word.   The first half of the psalm recites the need to offer praise, because of what God has done.  The second half then comprises and oracle of deliverance, with this being conditioned upon obeying God.       2 Corinthians 4.5—12   The bulk of chs. 2 through 6 is focused on Paul’s discussion of what is true apostleship. What is the apostolate?  Theory and practice:  2.14-3.6. What is ministry?  Old and new models:  3.7-4.6. Ministry and life:                                                   i.      Manifesting Jesus Christ:  4.7-15.                                                ii.      Facing the fear of death:  4.16-5.10. New creation and reconciliation:  5.11-6.10. In reflecting on his own ministry, Paul is responding to attacks ...

Play Video Grace Episcopal Church Sheboygan, Wisconsin   Trinity Sunday (The First Sunday after Pentecost) Isaiah 6.1-8                           Psalm 29                                Romans 8.12-17                         John 3.1-17   The Lectionary for Trinity Sunday includes the description of a theophany (a manifestation of God), described from a human perspective; the psalm’s description of God’s power; and Jesus’ reference to the Spirit.  The word “Trinity” does not itself appear in Scripture, being first used in the late second/early third centuries by Church fathers.   Isaiah 6.1-8   Isaiah’s call narrative begins not at the beginning of the book, but at the beginning of the section in his book which comprises his memoirs (6.1-8.18). The function of a call narrative is to justify to hostile contemporaries that the prophet speaks for the Lord.   Uzziah died in 742 B.C. Here the Lord is represented as king ( v. 5), but not as a nationalistic deity.  His rule extends over all creation. The reference to “seraphim” comes from the Hebrew for “fiery”.  The six-winged angels have a fiery appearance. The reference to the angels covering their “feet” is a euphemism for sexual organs. The reason why spiritual beings would have sexual organs is not elaborated, but any appearance of the holy to humans is mediated in forms that humans can recognize.   The cry “Holy, holy, holy ...” reflects the liturgy in the Jerusalem Temple. The prophet’s reference to being “lost” indicates that he is unable to proclaim the greatness he has seen.   The cleansing of Isaiah’s “lips” is emblematic that all of him has been cleansed by the Lord, and he is thus qualified to speak for the Lord. “Whom shall I send ...” (v. 8) presupposes that the heavenly council has just met, and that a messenger is needed to proclaim the decision. Isaiah responds to this call. This response immediately precedes Isaiah being commissioned to speak for the Lord. This reading is the Old Testament selection at ordinations to Holy Orders.   Psalm 29   A powerful expression of God’s supremacy and universal rule.   “[Y]ou gods” (v.1): Explicit monotheism dates in Israel to ca. the sixth century, B.C., after this psalm. However, taken together with the references in Isaiah to a heavenly “council” (and references elsewhere to such, e.g., at Ps. 82 and in Job), “gods’ may be understood to refer to heavenly powers/beings, such as the orders of angels described by St. Paul. “The voice of the Lord ...” is repeated seven times, beginning at v. 3. The effect in Hebrew of this repetition of the expression “qol Yahweh” is onomatopoeic for the sound of thunder. However, in subsequent centuries, the Name of the Lord is not to be pronounced. A Jew in reading ...