If you’re following our humble blog, God bless you! This post is specifically for our youth candidates for confirmation. All are welcome to read it, of course, but this is specifically for them.
This Sunday we’re reviewing what we know about the Bible. Here’s how you can come prepared. [Read more…]
The salutation, collect, readings and sermon from Holy Eucharist, Rite II at Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Bristol, VA.
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The 2nd Sunday after Easter! The choir and congregation sing “Crown Him With Many Crowns,” and at the 28:30 mark, after a particularly poignant part of the sermon, the spirit moves and a lightbulb blows! Hilarity ensues.
Enjoy!
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Welcome listeners to the third podcast of the Big Red Doors of Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Bristol, VA. Last week we had the Rev. Roger Bowen of the Haiti Collaborative, and just yesterday we uploaded the Liturgy of the Word from Palm Sunday.
We have a gift from our audio archives for you this week. From Holy Eucharist, Rite II on July 15th, 2015, Rebecca Catalano cantors a portion of Psalm 89 with the Emmanuel Choir. Rebecca Catalano and Ryan Gray are performing here at Emmanuel Friday April 1st at 7pm. They’ll present an enchanting repertoire of memorable songs from Broadway’s golden age and beyond, including classic and contemporary favorites, as well as some Disney magic along the way. Reception to follow. The event is free and donations are accepted.
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Children, acolytes, and choir gather at the labyrinth to wave our branches around Emmanuel and Bristol!
Listen to our Palm Sunday service inside the Oped Red Doors of Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Bristol, Va. The podcast begins with our choir chanting Psalm 118 as the Processional Hymn. Then, the liturgy of the word, including a chanted gospel and brief sermon and announcements by Rev. Dr. Joe Dunagan. The chanted gospel begins at 08:41, and the sermon at 19:32.
Hosanna in the Highest!
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The Rev. Dr. Roger Bowen, of the Haiti Collaborative in the Diocese of Southwestern Virginia, preaches at the 10:30 a.m. service at Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Bristol, VA.
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On the 3rd Sunday after Pentecost, former parishioner Br. Jim Woodrum delivered the following sermon to the members of Emmanuel. Br. Jim is a member of the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Cambridge, MA.
When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is Spiritual. †
It’s all about relationships, who we know and the nature of our interactions. When I was in high school, for example, my family used a particular service station. When I pulled up to the pumps one of two brothers who worked there would come out when the bell dinged and speak to me as he starting the pump. He would clean the windshield and check under the hood, usually finishing up just as the pump clicked indicated the tank was full. Then he would skillfully top it off with enough additional gas to make the sale come to an even amount before saying thank you and “come back to see us.” I took all that for granted until I went away to college and started dating a city girl from Jacksonville, Florida. When she came home with me one weekend and I was showing her around, we stopped to get gas. When the tank was full, Mr. Roy said it was good to have me home and I thanked him and drove off. My girlfriend said, “Wait, you forgot to pay!” I just smiled and kept driving. I explained that they would send Daddy the bill.
It would be easy to feel nostalgic about all that and miss the point. Think about the relationships involved in this interaction. There was trust on the part of the adults involved. The owner of the service station trusted my parents to pay for the gas and my parents trusted him to keep accurate records of how much we owed him. I, on the other hand, took all this for granted. Send Daddy the bill. I was just showing off.
Paul said when we cry Abba (which is the familiar word in Aramaic for father, like daddy or maybe pop) it is a spiritual event. Crying Abba is quite different than flippantly saying Abba will take care of whatever we need. “Send Daddy the bill.”
Before I was old enough to drive a car, when I was still a very little boy, one of my earliest memories is playing in our family car. I was not supposed to be playing in the car but I got in and must have been pretending to drive. I don’t remember any of that. What I remember is that apparently I had managed to take the car out of gear and it started rolling. Where I grew up is flat as a pancake. The car wasn’t going far or rolling fast but it scared me. What I remember was opening the door and trying to stop a 1955 Chevrolet with my bare foot like Fred Flintstone and, when I realized that wasn’t working, calling Daddy. I was crying Abba.
In both instances I invoked my father’s name. As a college freshman showing off for my girlfriend it was presumptive but as a child in danger it was an honest and urgent cry for one I loved, trusted and, though that wasn’t my first thought, feared.
“Presumptive prayer can be regarded as the seedbed for idolatry.” 1
When our prayers invoke the name of the One who creates, redeems and sustains us, that invocation is honest and urgent. Those prayers are occasions when we look deep within ourselves and humbly confess our utter dependency.
Isaiah’s prayer is such a prayer. In the year King Uzziah died the prophet tells us that he found himself in the presence of God. The description of the event is incredible. Uzziah died circa 742 BC coinciding with the end of a time of relative independence for Judah. Now the king is dead and the Assyrian Empire is a growing threat which will continue until 701 when Sennacherib invaded Jerusalem. This is significant because in a time of civil threat and political uncertainty, Isaiah sees God enthroned. He describes the presence of God as in the court of a monarch. His vision of God enthroned stands in stark contrast to the relative weakness of the most powerful mortal king.
It’s all about relationships, right? This vision of the One who is truly sovereign, the One we have come to know as Christ the King, the One who is and was and is to come, was the backdrop for Isaiah’s call to be a prophet. His prayer wasn’t a pedestrian list of nice things he wanted from God. It was a stunning moment of self-awareness characterized by unworthiness: Woe is me. We join the heavenly court singing Holy, Holy, Holy and occasionally fill the sanctuary around the Altar with holy smoke but how often do we cry out in distress and come before God with no more bravado than a frightened little child screaming to a parent for help?
We get it backwards. We try to learn about God before we experience the reality of God. We don’t learn to pray so much as we wait for the moment when we find ourselves in the present of God at a complete loss of words. In that moment when we can’t imagine what to say, the Spirit intercedes and we overhear our own voices saying with Christians through the centuries, Our Father in heaven, your name is holy! Really!
A friend of mine in Georgia put a picture of her son on Facebook last week. He is wearing what seems to be a choir costume, the sort of thing we put children in when we try to bring to mind Isaiah’s cherub choir. He has a big smile on his face. The performance for which he has been practicing is over. All those rehearsals he now realizes were for this. It is the first time the children’s voices have been their offering to a room filled with adults who are listening, really listening, to the children sing. Imagine how powerful that experience is for a five year old. He looks at his mother, both are beaming. “That was the real time,” said Micah after his first recital.
So it is after we pray, really pray. That was real. Then, and only then, does it make sense to speak of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Jesus looked up and prayed, “I have made your name known.” †
When I was stationed at Camp Lejeune I had a good friend, a Baptist chaplain, who, when something happened that was particularly good would say, “Well, if you believed in God…” The suggestion was that it should be obvious this good thing was a gift from God in whom we do believe. On the other hand, someone actually wrote a book about the problem of and for clergy who do not believe in God. 1 It’s no wonder we can find so many blogs and Facebook postings fretting over the demise of Christianity, not to mention the plethora of books on creative ways to prevent it. The problem with all these is that it is not up to us. I’m not talking about any ‘ism or any narrowly defined and manageable religion. Rather, the community of faith for whom Jesus offered this prayer are those who hear and believe, who seek something beyond themselves and a language about which to speak of it, who want lives that are more than a geometric straight line segment from point birth to point death with limited length and no breadth.
Jesus looked up and prayed. It is important to remember this is a prayer. It is not Jesus’ instructions to the church. It is about what God was doing, is doing and will do. This is the day of the Lord, his time had come, which is to say that time collapsed in that moment. We sometimes say that time stood still but this was and is more than that. It is the confluence of memory, reality and hope in a sacramental moment. This prayer was in the context of the meal Jesus ate with his disciples, the so-called Last Supper (it was only the last supper before the resurrection). It is in the midst of a series of events that together tell us of the triumph of Christ—ministry, suffering, death, resurrection, ascension and return.
We overhear Jesus praying. He looked up and prayed. 2 His prayer was conversational, I and you. It is a conversation between Father and Son, language that suggests an intimacy that too often exceeds that in our families but which may be the best metaphor we have. Jesus, you remember from last week’s reading, called his disciples friends when his hour came. If we think of those rare and wonderful friendships that sustain and renew us, that last and grow, maybe that is an even better metaphor that a familial one. But, in either case, when Jesus said, “I have made your name known,” he was not speaking of an introduction (“May I present God? God this is Joe.”) Here when Jesus speaks of making God’s name known, he is clearly speaking of making God known, God’s character and fullness. Jesus has included his disciples in the intimate relationship that he has with the one he calls Father.
So, again, Jesus did not entrust the future of the Church to us but to God. We merely overhear the conversation. It has been suggested the church might consider as its starting point, “We are a community for whom Jesus prays.” 3 We overhear the intimacy of Jesus’ relationship with God. Our conversion comes from our listening in on their conversation and our sanctification comes when we are ultimately allowed to enter that conversation. John describes how God has given, sent, and loved Jesus. Now Jesus prays that we would be kept, sanctified, and unified (made one).
It is important to remember this prayer was overheard on the eve of the crucifixion. The world for John is the residence of the evil one. We are in the world to do ministry as was Jesus. The intimate and ultimate relationship into which we are invited is, like all relationships, likely to call for sacrifices. Ironically, the thing we need to sacrifice most urgently is the assumption that we can save ourselves, pride.
When we overhear this conversation between Jesus and the One he calls Father we are given a glimpse of the life with God that transcends our senses of limitation and expectation. When the Church is overcome by moroseness we have clearly forgotten the Providence of God.
There is another poll out saying that Christianity is declining. Something has changed but it is cultural, not theological. What has changed is the expectation that almost everyone will be in church—some church—every Sunday morning. That was always a cultural phenomenon rather than evidence of spirituality. Besides the cultural expectation, there wasn’t much else to do! The stores were closed on Sunday. So were the movie theaters. The good news is that if being here is culturally optional, the people who are in church are the ones looking for spiritual nourishment. That’s not a bad thing.
You’ve heard about the Carter family coming to Bristol almost a hundred years ago to record some of their music. Kathy and I were listening to one of their songs:
Golden Bells
There’s a land beyond the river
That they call the sweet forever
And we only reach that shore by faith’s decree
One by one we’ll gain the portals
There to dwell with the immortals
When they ring the golden bells for you and me
Don’t you hear the bells now ringing
Don’t you hear the angels singing
‘Tis the glory hallelujah Jubilee
In that far off sweet forever,
Just beyond the shining river
When they ring the golden bells for you and me
We shall know no sin or sorrow
In that heaven of tomorrow
When our hearts shall sail beyond the silvery sea
We shall only know the blessing
Of our Father’s sweet caressing
When they ring the golden bells for you and me
Don’t you hear the bells now ringing
Don’t you hear the angels singing
‘Tis the glory hallelujah Jubilee
In that far off sweet forever
Just beyond the shining river
When they ring the golden bells for you and me
When our days shall know their number
When in death we sweetly slumber
When the King commands the spirit to be free
Nevermore with anguish laden
We shall reach that lovely Eden
When they ring the golden bells for you and me
When they ring the golden bells for you and me
This hymn describes poetically the collapse of time: “Don’t you hear the bells now ringing; Don’t you hear the angels singing; ‘Tis the glory hallelujah Jubilee; In that far off sweet forever.” It speaks of the intimacy of Jesus’ own prayer: “We shall only know the blessing of our Father’s sweet caressing.”
When they recorded that hymn they grasped something we have a difficult time appreciating. In a word it is hope. Their lives were hard. Their lives and the lives of their families depended on their ability to grow a crop and find work. Life was short and things like food, clothing and shelter were appreciated. They didn’t need to spend a night in a shelter to experience poverty. They would have laughed at the idea that we would use the word experience for one voluntary night in a shelter when they were thankful to have a shelter every night.
If you believe in God…my friend would say.
God is saving us and sometimes we are part of that mission. Too often we are just in the way. God is redeeming all creation and sometimes we are part of God’s mission. Let’s be certain we are of the way, not in the way; that we are overhearing the sacred conversation rather our own voices; that we’re not just talking to ourselves about ourselves.
When candidates for the diaconate are in the discernment process they are required to write Ember Day letters (every three months or so) to the bishop telling him what was happening in one’s process. I recall that during the third year of the process while doing my church internship I wrote the bishop that I was preaching once a month. In his reply to the letter he said to be sure that “I was preaching with a deacon’s voice”.
Today’s lesson from Acts involves one of the seven “original deacons” Phillip and his encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch. We have been reading Luke’s account of Acts during the Easter season and will continue through the Day of Pentecost. Our reading of the book is not chronologically sequenced, for it will be in three weeks that we will read from chapter two when the Holy Spirit enters the lives of the people. The book is about the life of the early church before popes, bishops, cathedrals, stained glass, and even creeds. It is exactly what it proclaims, the acts of the apostles during the very early days after the resurrection of Christ, a time when the early Christians are building a community of folks attempting to discern the spirit of God. That term is used quite liberally in the book. In John’s epistle today we read that the Spirit of God is given to us and abides in us.
If we were to back up two chapters in Acts to the sixth chapter we see the origin of the deacons. The twelve disciples were apparently too busy in prayer and serving the word that the widows were being neglected, therefore the disciples called together the early converts and said choose “seven men of good standing, full of the Spirit and of wisdom” who will “wait on tables.” And so Stephen and Phillip and five others were chosen to “wait on tables” while the
apostles continued in their work of prayer and the scripture says “the word of God continued to spread.”
While this was the primary duty of the seven, the lines of responsibility soon became blurred. Stephen preached in the synagogue of the Freedmen and was brought to trial where he delivered his famous Jewish history lesson in Chapter 7 concluding that the Jewish leaders were forever opposing the Holy Spirit. When he gazed to the heaven and pronounced that Jesus was standing at the right hand of God, he was taken out of the city and killed, stoned to death an event witnessed by Saul of Tarsus, later to become the disciple Paul.
We then come to Philip who is preaching to the Samaritans and is told by an angel of the Lord to get up and go south on a wilderness road, apparently not to wait on tables, for he meets a eunuch from Ethiopia, a God fearer perhaps, maybe a proselyte, who is seated in his chariot studying writings from the prophet Isiah, a scripture foretelling the execution of Jesus. The Spirit tells Philip to join him and he does spending what was probably a good amount of time explaining the scripture and the good news about Jesus.
It is important that this man is Ethiopian both geographically and racially, for this is the first New Testament connection with sub-Saharan Africa. Luke, however, appears to feel it more important to make the distinction of his physical abnormality by identifying him as an Ethiopian eunuch at the beginning of the passage, but then referencing him as the eunuch four times as he tells the story. Eunuchs were not considered whole people, they were crippled to use the old terminology of the day, handicapped or disabled to use that jargon. Even if this man was a converted Jew, a proselyte, he would not have been able to approach the altar at the temple. Under the old way he was not seen as fully human.
Forty-three summers ago as a rising 19 year old junior at The Citadel, I began working at what was then called the South Carolina Crippled Children’s Camp-Camp Burnt Gin, in Sumter County South Carolina.
The camp was poor, even in disrepair those first few years I worked. A slimy, warm alligator infested lake served for boating and swimming. A 6 X 8 foot shed served for arts and crafts. The cabins were dark, dank places tht broiled in the summer heat…..It was the most wonderful place I have ever spent time. The kids, so many of them never having been in school were a varied bunch; many equipped with crutches, wheelchairs or other appliances. Some were deaf or had an extremity amputated. There were youngsters afflicted with muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy, and other anomalies. Those nine summers I worked as a counselor and later program director impacted me more than any time in my life.
The majority of the children were black, most of them lived in poverty (inability to pay for services was a criteria to being eligible for Crippled Children’s services including camp), and many were denied access to public school. It wasn’t until Public Law 94-142 passed in 1975 that schools had to provide services for all children regardless of handicap. Seems amazing now that children were excluded from school due to a handicapping condition. It also seems amazing that the S.C. Crippled Children’s Camps had been two camps, segregated by color from its founding in 1946 until 1966. But times changed, color became less of an issue, our language and approach to children went from crippled to handicapped to those with special needs.
But at Burnt Gin I experienced a truly inclusive community of all God’s children. We as staff did not see the summers as ways to serve others, (although it may have begun that way), but rather the summers became ways to enter into community with others. So many of those kids became staff members during my nine years, until by 1980 at least 25% of the staff were former campers. Two of those campers, now grandparents, came from South Carolina to my ordination two years ago. The famous Billy Jett, the triple amputee whose feat was his ability to swim across the lake, was one of my presenters.
The story of the deacon being sent out to the Ethiopian eunuch is a story of inclusion. The early church, the followers of Jesus were not limited those of the Jewish faith, those of the Mediterranean World, those who had previously been thought of as somehow less than whole. My sisters and brothers, the tent is large and big enough for all kinds of people. The Acts of the Apostles shows how these first generation Christians lived. According to the story today, Philip spent time with this stranger explaining scripture, sharing the good news of incarnate and risen Jesus Christ. The impact was such that the eunuch asked to Philip to baptize him. Phillip went down into the water with the eunuch and baptized him. The sacrament of baptism represents our acknowledgment of God’s spirit which abides in us and we in him. Whereas the Spirit snatched Philip up, the eunuch went on his way rejoicing, the Spirit of the Lord having filled his heart with joy.
It seems to me that continues to be our call to share the Spirit of God that John has written abides in each of us. With this love we can move closer to what our prayer states that “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
So to answer Bishop Powell’s request that I preach with a deacons voice, I say is there any other way?