Embodying Mercy, Embodying Justice, Embodying Christ : Sermon for the 3rd Sunday after Epiphany (and Annual Meeting) January 25, 2025

   

This last year, for comfort, I began rereading a book of essays by the poet Mary Oliver entitled Upstream. Her insights into the creative process are delightful. But within the first thirty pages, I was stopped in my tracks by this sentence:

Attention is the beginning of devotion.(1)

I’ve been turning that small sentence over and over in my head the way your turn a smooth river rock over and over in your hand or in your pocket, tucked away. The more I thought about it, the more the words rang true.

When we were children, the thing we yearned for most was attention from those we admired: our parents, or older cousins, neighbors and as we just saw, from our clergy and the adults in our parish. When we became the big kids, we noticed the little kids wanting the same from us. Hopefully we kindly have obliged as much as we had been obliged when we ourselves were small.

Likewise, when we were small, many of us fastened upon often the most ordinary things that completely fascinated us. Chin propped on hands, watching the orderly dotted line of ants moving in and out of an anthill. Searching through the day for a four-leaf clover, and along the way noticing the variations in the edges, tones, and patterns on all the rejected clover-leaves. Watching the industrious uncoiling of the tongues of what were then common butterflies like sulphurs, Monarchs, or blues as they competed with the bees for the clover or drank from the fallen, exploded sandplums under the trees. Learning how to tamp down your natural reaction when a bee landed on you until you could allow one to crawl across your hand with no fear because you know how not to startle it.

I remember thinking how amazing it was that this bee crawling over my arm would have visited this flower, and I would never have known it were I not here to see and notice it right at that moment—and that all around the world, there were millions of bees contemplating millions of clover flowers that I would never get to see. I became aware of how many hundreds of bees would visit this patch of clover in my backyard every day, whether I was there to observe them or not. Later I was given a piece of wild honeycomb by my Dad’s mother, whom we called One Granny, and saw where the bees’ destination as they flew away from me was. We marveled at how they could help create such sweetness from flowers that weren’t particularly pretty or sweet. I learned that bees made honey, but butterflies did not, nor did they make butter. Weird.

I learned to start paying attention. And certainly that started me on the path of devotion to creation in most of creation’s quadrillions of living creatures (not so fond of cockroaches or grubs or water snakes, all of which gave me the heebie-jeebies, to be honest). But I learned something else: the path to devotion ran straight through a way-station called amazement. I was young, and therefore brave enough to be openly amazed and filled with wonder. I didn’t care if that amazement could be mocked by others as being naïve—I was lucky enough not to even know that lots of people sought to be above amazement, thinking it made them look knowledgeable and worldly.

As I listened to Bible stories read to me by my mother, I began to notice when in the Bible it stated that a character was amazed, such as is implied this Sunday, when Jesus reads from Isaiah’s scroll in the synagogue. Those who heard him were amazed. And so the adventure of Christ’s ministry begins.

Today, in our gospel we hear the good news—that’s literally what “gospel” means. We hear Jesus at the beginning of his public ministry, and the framers of the lectionary have chosen for us to hear the very best news of God’s dream for God’s people as they live in community. What we are hearing is the SOCIAL good news—what God imagined for people in order to live their lives together.

Offstage—and because we Episcopalians hear other versions of the start of Jesus’s public ministry—it is hoped we remember that this inspirational start of Jesus’s teaching ministry, which he has been preparing for from infancy and youth in Luke’s full telling—comes after his baptism, which is followed by 40 days in the wilderness, fasting and being tested by the worst impulses of humanity.

First comes the temptation of greed, for gluttony, and taking shortcuts to get what we want rather than coming by it honestly. Then, the greed for power that only comes from selling one’s soul to the devil, as the saying goes. Then doing dangerous, harmful things and then expecting God to swoop in and save us from our recklessness—and of course, if God doesn’t act like Santa Claus, we are led further away from God by believing that God doesn’t exist at all. All of these temptations that Jesus faced in the wilderness were also about extolling the individual with no consideration for how one’s action would affect others. In other words, all of these temptations we don’t hear, but that hang there just offstage, are basically from the narcissist’s handbook.

Jesus is tempted to do what he wants for himself—but the tempter forgets that Jesus had already rejected all that when he chose to be born to a brown-skinned teenage mother in an occupied territory. He was born to a family that had to flee for their lives and live as refugees simply because those in power suspected that families like his could upend the framework of oppression, cruelty, and division that kept them in power. In all these temptations, Jesus points out that signs of God’s wonder, love, grace, and mercy are all around us, no magic tricks or putting God to the test required. Being willing to be led by faith and the imaginative spark of God’s love made visible through us as individuals and as St. Martin’s parish.

Our faith and fidelity to the good news of Jesus calls us to celebrate the abiding love, grace, and mercy of our God and share those gifts with the world.

Perceiving the signs of God’s wonder all round us could even be said to start with our ability to see at all, given the complexity of the eye gathering light, the retina focusing that light, the optic nerve conducting that data accurately, and the brain receiving, interpreting, and filtering that data to turn it into something meaningful. This is a metaphor for both physical sight and imaginative sight. It is this sight I call on us to employ in our spiritual journeys and as we meet today to consider our past, celebrate the gifts this parish has and gives, and plan for a future of discipleship.

The life of faith is absolutely centered on developing and strengthening that imaginative sight, that allows everyone from scientists and poets and architects and artists and engineers and leaders and teachers and chefs and doctors and nurses and especially people of faith to see not just what is, not just what can be, but helps them inductively forge a path between where we have been, where we are now and where we could be. It is that life we are called to embody here at St. Martin’s.

It is this willingness to imaginatively engage the gospel in our lives today—the very thing that God used to create all that is-- that is the very gift that God implanted in us that most marks us as being made in God’s own image and likeness. It is this ability to give attention to the beauty potentially all around us that commits people to a life of faith. It is a life that sees God’s call to us not as a burden, but as a gift and honor, providing purpose to live a life that really matters, one that seeks to unite rather than divide. There is beauty in each and every heart and face here, and there is just as much beauty and worth in those outside these doors. And that beauty gives hope to a world that desperately needs it.

And so our readings today invite us to set our imaginations free, metaphorically and literally, for the sake of the world. Psalm 19 starts at the cosmic level of God speaking creation into existence, and creation answering back a resounding song of praise, all the way down to the words we lowly humans speak. Everything in creation is speaking—except for one might think, God. But God speaks THROUGH creation here.

Creation itself attests to the truth and beauty of God’s love for us! The Law of the Lord is perfect and revives the soul—as Jesus reads from Isaiah. This is all that is needed for enlightenment- to have God’s judgments, God’s love, and God’s mercy to be revealed to us and in us. We then enact our faithfulness to act on that enlightenment in keeping God’s Law of Love, Grace, and Mercy. Our attention to the prophetic Word is the guide to living a life of worth, rather than depending upon one’s own judgment (presumption). Temptation and sin will capture your heart at times, but God’s loving plan for us laid out in God’s commandments can reset our focus and our commitment to living a life centered in community.

Paul’s brilliant metaphor of unity in Christ by being unified with each other is a call to imaginatively understand the purpose of the gospel of Christ: it wasn’t just to save us after we die. It was to save us from living lives disconnected from anything but our own selfish needs and wants. Paul invites the church in Corinth, which was being divided by the narcissistic culture that surrounded them, by class and wealth considerations. Paul urged his audience to instead understand that everyone is part of Christ’s body and therefore worthy of respect, dignity, and most importantly, LOVE in action. We are more powerful when we care for each other and respect each other than we stand silent in the face of cruelty and dehumanization.

Paul reminds us that everyone in Christ’s body are imaginatively and in reality the only visible bearers and enactors of Christ’s presence and work in the world—and that the world around them was literally starving for that presence, for that making visible of God’s love through how believers in Christ live their lives for the sake of God and for the sake of others. Paul, who had never seen Jesus in real life, nonetheless joined himself to the same Body of Christ through his sudden awareness of Christ’s love reaching out to him even as he persecuted Christians in his earlier life.

And then we conclude with Jesus, fresh out of being tempted, proclaiming how his ministry will be the fulfillment of prophecy. He does this not just by reading from Isaiah’s scroll, but imaginatively engaging with it. Jesus announces that he is here to do five things in our common life together:

1 to bring good news to the poor,
2 to announce freedom to captives,
3 to restore sight to those who cannot see, perception to those immune to wonder,
4 to free people from oppression (which can also be linked to the first task), and
5 to proclaim the year of God’s favor, a Jubilee year, a year of community and rejoicing and giving thanks for the many ways we are cared for by God so that we can care for one another.

Jesus then closes the prophet’s scroll and announces that today those prophetic words have been fulfilled within his audience’s hearing. This is Jesus’s work for the sake of the world. And as Christ’s Body, each of us commit to taking up our own parts in embodying that jubilee message for a world mired in scarcity, suspicion, and, too often, cruelty. As individuals, and as St. Martin’s. We work together to strengthen each other for this holy witness and discipleship.

What would it mean for the Scriptures to be fulfilled in your hearing?

How would that happen?

Would we expect God just to wave a magic wand, and poof! everything would be perfect?

Or would it mean, as witnesses to Christ and the Body of Christ in this place, at a time such as this, for us to perceive our world holistically, the good and the bad, and commit to expanding the good by our conscious participation in it, by truly acting together in fellowship to all creation and all people as true children of God? Would it mean realizing the amazing witness we are and can be even more emphatically by taking seriously the joy and blessing of being God’s children and Christ’s body here at St. Martin’s? We have each of us received God’s love, grace, and mercy. We have promised to give that same love, grace and mercy to others.

We live in a world that runs on dividing those who should declare their common cause with one another and dividing them, often by giving them scapegoats and othering those already marginalized. We live in a world where we are told that all are equal as long as, in George Orwell’s warning words in his book Animal Farm, as long as some are more equal than others. As long as some have more liberty than others. As long as some can oppress others by denying their membership in the human family.

No.

God calls us to proclaim a world where we are ALL sustained by God’s grace, but somehow preaching and urging mercy gets derided as “hateful.” A world in which those who preach God’s grace and who urge us to remember our essential unity; our potential to imagine a better, more faithful world for all through commitment to all, results in death threats.

Which is exactly what happened to Jesus after his glorious proclamation of the kernel of his gospel for the sake of living in a Godly community. Seriously. Look it up. Oppressive empires have always acted thus.

Beloveds, 2025 is the 60th year of this parish’s existence. We are now charged and responsible to prepare a firm foundation for the next 60 years and beyond.

We are called to look with the heart, with the soul, with the imagination, and with gratitude for the blessings God has given, is giving, and will give us in our lives together as Christ’s body. We are called to attention to God and each other—and attention is the beginning of our devotion to God and to each other as the people of God and the people of Christ’s Body known as St. Martin’s through the help and mercy of God that we embody. Our devotion begins with our attention—and our brave witness to God’s love, grace and mercy.

Amen.

Preached at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Ellisville, MO on January 26, 2025.

Readings:

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10

Psalm 19

1 Corinthians 12:12-31a

Luke 4:14-21

Citations:

1) Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays, p. 8.

A Case for Love: Sermon for the 4th Sunday after Epiphany (Annual Meeting)

This last Tuesday, some of us throughout the diocese and all around the country attended the theatrical premiere of a documentary entitled A Case for Love(1), which examined the teachings of our own Presiding Bishop Michael Curry on the Christian call to live lives centered on what he calls “The Way of Love.”

The documentary included a handful of vignettes of ordinary people who have been transformed by the power of love—both of receiving it from others, and offering it to those they have encountered in the course of their lives. Stories included people who have fostered and adopted traumatized children; women who have been supported in leaving lives of crime and violence on the streets through the work of Thistle Farms around the country; soldiers and Marines dealing with trauma and healing it in the lives of so many; a family who had their eyes opened to racism and its effects after adopting—and later losing to cancer—a child with a different ethnicity, and more.

One story in particular which filled the heart was from Bishop Curry’s own childhood, as he grew up himself the child of an Episcopal priest. He introduced us to a pivotal figure from his own life named Josie Robbins. Ms. Robbins wasn’t even a member of the Curry family’s parish; she dropped off one of her neighbor’s children there on her way to her own Baptist church. But she heard of the pastor struggling to take care of two small children with his wife fighting cancer in a hospital miles from their home, and asked what she could do. 

Overwhelmed, he asked if she could iron a room full of clothes—they covered two twin beds in a spare room-- that he had been able to launder but not finish while juggling all his duties as priest, father, and husband. The children we told to leave her alone and remain upstairs while she lovingly worked on this task.

Then one day, Bishop Curry’s father was running late and asked if she could make the children lunch, to which she graciously agreed. She later remarked that after that lunch, young Michael pulled up a chair in the doorway and started talking to her until the moment she left for the day, and for every day afterward.

Josie Robbins was there for the Curry family when Michael’s mother later succumbed to cancer. Josie Robbins soon was taking the children to the drug store to see the parakeets and hamsters, just as they Mommy had done. She attended every recital, every graduation, every celebration. Here was a stranger who saw two children under the age of 8 and a devoted young husband who were losing their mother and their wife to a terrible disease. 

“Josie Robins is what love looks like,” Bishop Curry later recounted in his book Love Is The Way: Holding on to Hope in Troubling Times. Through Josie Robins, love embodied in action arrived to help iron the laundry of a family in crisis, and stepped into Bishop Curry’s life as a mother figure for the rest of his life, and she remains so even to this very day (2).

In the trailer for the movie, Presiding Bishop Curry’s prophetic voice comes to us, saying: “We were made for each other, and I believe we were also made for the God who made us. And that’s the ultimate community: all of us together and the God who made us.”

In our reading from 1st Corinthians this Sunday, we have the question of whether it is lawful for Christians to eat food that has been sacrificed to idols. What’s interesting is the way that Paul frames this discussion. In vv. 1-3, which we do not get to hear in our reading, Paul starts with a discussion of which is greater: knowledge or love. 

It reminds me of a question I used to ask my middle schoolers: If you could only be one thing, would you rather be the smartest kid in school, or the kindest? It was always an interesting discussion, and often the first time they had had a discussion about values. And basically, Paul comes down with something that many of my students stated: being truly loving can have more of an impact than self-serving knowledge. The question comes down to being inwardly or outwardly focused.

The Corinthians lay out a logical argument about why, since the Greek gods do not really exist, it is permissible to eat meat from Greek temples. But Paul asks them to consider the greater good: what happens to those who SEE Christians openly eating meat sacrificed to idols? Might this lead people astray by appearing to still engage in the ways of the pagan world around them. Christian are, after all, called to live a life different, a life that even in commonplace things demonstrates their allegiance to God, not the world around them.

Paul points out that knowledge is rooted too often in the self, while love only exists in community, and love must be in a community to build it up. But love always comes first, both in time and as a priority in our relationships with God and with each other. Paul argues that even if what we do is legal, if it causes another to be led astray, the demand of love must take precedence. Could it be that the Corinthians—many of them former pagans by default cultural practice—might be unwilling to really change their lives that much even while claiming to follow Christ?

But that is a question for us as well: how much are we really willing to change in order to live out the values of Jesus in our everyday lives? And yet, by calling ourselves Christians, how we live and love—or not—is a profound testimony to the rest of the world.

We live in a world that does NOT prioritize real, self-giving love.
Yet that is exactly the main ethical demand God calls us to live by as Christians.

To live not in fear, or by vengeance, or by indifference to the suffering of others—but to live by love. Jesus calls us into community—parish, diocese, denomination, or as the universal Body of Christ, to remind us that love always comes first—from God to us, and from us to the hurting world in which we live.

A Case for Love aligns perfectly with Paul’s argument, which was Jesus’s as well, that sometimes love calls us to a higher standard than knowledge and logic alone. Knowledge may be good, but LOVE as an act of the will and freedom in the world is most important. 

As we open our parish annual meeting for this year, I invite you to consider all the ways that St. Martin’s exists not just as a community for its members—but as a sign of Christ’s love in the world. There is much to celebrate here—and everything that we do in love is ONLY possible through each and every person here. How do we all make a case for love—the love of God and love of each other—in our own lives each and every moment? And how can we continue to grow that in the days and months and years ahead?

At the end of watching A Case for Love, each viewer was challenged to engage in a thirty day challenge. We were directed to a companion website, where there are supplemental materials for deepening our engagement from being merely spectators watching a documentary to following in the footsteps of those ordinary people who were featured in the film. There is a journal for engaging for thirty days in doing one selfless act of love and recording it and reflecting upon it each day. 

I hope you will join me in starting this challenge as part of your Lenten devotion starting on Ash Wednesday--- even if you didn’t see the documentary. We will discuss this in a later adult forum. But for now, let us consider the way St. Martin’s parish, through YOUR actions and support, makes a case for love in the world every single day.

Amen.

Preached at the 9:00 Holy Eucharist and Annual Meeting 2024 for St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.

Readings:

Deuteronomy 18:15-20

Psalm 111

1 Corinthians 8:1-13

Mark 1:21-28

Citations:

1) A Case for Love, documentary film by Grace Based Films, 2024.

2) Michael Bruce Curry, Love Is The Way: Holding on to Hope in Troubling Times, 13.

Taken, Broken, Blessed: Sermon for 4th Sunday After Epiphany A and Annual Meeting

Sometimes it seems that we live—and die—by numbers. Especially when it comes to our health or our status.

For instance, health: think about it. For the last three years, we have watched what the infection and hospitalization rates were from COVID, the flu, and RSV, and proceeded accordingly.

But then there’s the more prosaic numbers. How old are you? How much do you weigh? What’s your resting heart rate? What’s your cholesterol count? What’s your A1C? What’s your BMI? And the dreaded, soul-crushing, fun-sucker of all questions: how many calories are in that?

Then there’s status: How many degrees do you have? How much money do you make? How much in your 401K or Roth? How many bedrooms—or more importantly, bathrooms-- in your house or apartment? How many cars do you have, if any? How many shares of stock do you have? What iPhone model do you have? What’s your zip code? And if you think that one doesn’t matter, let me try an experiment. What numbers come after this? Beverly Hills… (90210).

And what’s worse, all the numbers in that second set can have an impact on those numbers in the first set. In fact, here in the US, depending on what zip code you are born and then live in, your life expectancy can differ from those in other neighborhoods by as much as 22 years in St. Louis County alone.

You will forgive me if numbers have been on my mind a lot lately, and on the minds of a lot of us here at St. Martin’s whether you’re a staff member or lay leader or member. It’s annual meeting time, after all, and then comes parochial report to the diocese and the Episcopal Church time, and once again that seems to be all numbers, numbers, numbers.

But I am snapped out of this obsession by our gospel today. Today, Jesus gives us nine statements of blessing—and hopefully that’s the last number I use for a while as we ponder this pivotal and yet in some ways puzzling teaching. Because for Jesus, numbers have nothing to do with belovedness or with ranking.

Instead, Jesus lists categories of people whom he names as being blessed, right now. And what’s intriguing is that the categories Jesus names are NOT categories many of us would normally associate with being in a state of favor or blessing. Especially the first four. In the first four, he singles these out: the poor in spirit, those who mourn, those who are meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

In all four of these categories, people are not there because they want to be. They are there because of trying circumstances in their lives. According to Psalm 51, the “poor in spirit” are the broken-hearted; those on the verge of giving up, or those who are oppressed. The Message translation of the Bible, which uses modern idioms, translates this verse as those who are “at the end of their rope.”

Likewise, we hear “meekness” in our macho-obsessed culture as “powerlessness” or “wimpiness” even though that was not the case in Jesus’s day—in fact, it was one of the adjectives used to describe both Jesus and Mary his mother, and neither one of them were in any way weak. Instead, their meekness was their willingness to yield to God’s will, as we pray in the Lord’s prayer every time we pray for God’s kingdom to come.

Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness and justice are those who see the brokenness in our world and cry out for resolution and correction. They are those who allow themselves to see and name the sorrows and injustices that surround us, and call on us to stand against the forces of hatred, division, and inhumanity. And as we have seen especially in the last few weeks with the death of Tyre Nichols and the release of the video evidence of his brutal murder at the hands of those who dehumanized him even though sworn to serve and protect, we also know that these categories can overlap. Those who thirst for justice are also those who mourn, and those who are at the end of their rope.

Jesus calls us to recognize ourselves within these four categories. We need to be honest and think of those times we have been in one or more of those categories, either through our own circumstances or by empathy for the circumstances of those around us. Jesus reminds us that those who are poor in spirit, those who mourn, those who protest against oppression should be as dear to us as ourselves, that we are all bound together in mutuality and love. What one suffers, we all suffer. We see that in the next three categories Jesus names as blessed: the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers.

The merciful receive mercy and it grows and grows until the violence and exploitation our society is absolutely drenched in is cut off at its knees, because the merciful will never support the merciless, no matter how much it may profit them in the short-term. The pure in heart will see God, because they will see the image of God everywhere, as they view creation with wonder and each person in it as being in the image of God Godself, as precious to us as our own breath. 

And the peacemakers—oh, the peacemakers. Here Jesus uses the term you might hear elsewhere translated as shalom, which is more than just the absence of conflict. It is working for wholeness, wellness, the common good, repairing what is broken and strengthening what is good. Peacemakers work to align humanity with God’s dream for us, vertically as it were, as well as recognizing our neighbors as just that—our neighbors, our kindred, regardless of differences—peace spreading out horizontally until it covers all the Earth.

Jesus finishes up by acknowledging the cost of living in this state of blessedness. Those last two statements of blessing may be the most paradoxical of them all. And Jesus is blunt. First, he makes a general statement: blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of working for Jesus’s gospel. Because it is certain that the forces of this world will fight tooth and nail against being overturned. But then, Jesus turns and looks at each of us and makes it clear: he means you and me. Blessed are YOU, he says. The first time he uses that word in his sermon. Blessed are YOU when you are mocked and resisted as you work to help bring my kingdom into being. He is looking right at what we now call the Church, here. We are called to stand at the nexus of each other and God and, with our fallible yet faithfully striving hands and hearts, and promote blessing instead of curses, healing instead of injury, engagement instead of apathy, care instead of disdain.

And there our gospel portion ends. If that was all we got, surely we would be left at best scratching our heads, or at worst, scoffing and declaring this precious message, this encapsulation of all of Jesus’s teaching, to be impossible and simply walk away. But we are blessed for another reason: we know the entire story of Jesus’s saving life and example among us. And when we gather in worship, we do so not for what it gives us, but for how it empowers us to give to the world.

There is a story from Hasidic Judaism. A teacher and his students in schul were studying the story in Deuteronomy when Moses gives the Ten Commandments to the people, and God commands them to place the words on their hearts. One of the disciples asks the rebbe, or teacher, “Why does Torah tell us to ‘place these words upon our hearts’? Why does it not tell us to place them in our hearts?” The rebbe answers, “It is because as we are, our hearts are closed, and we cannot place the holy words in our hearts. So we place them on top of our hearts. And there they stay until, one day, the heart breaks and the words fall in.”(1)

And we know something about blessing being possible through brokenness, don’t we? Every single time we gather around this altar, God’s altar, here at St. Martin’s, we take, break, bless, and eat. We share communion only through breaking and blessing the offerings we bring forward—not just bread and wine, or our money, but our very selves—and sharing them with each other. That’s why we ask you to rise as the offerings are brought forward. We rise because what we are truly called to offer to each other is ourselves. That’s what makes this parish a blessing in the world—the breaking open and the blessing and the consecrating of ourselves to God’s service, out of love and faith and hopefulness. Breaking open the hard muscle and fortresses of our hearts so that the words can get in, especially the most important word of all—the Word of God, Jesus.

Come, Lord Jesus. Come to us who are poor in spirit, who mourn, who seek your will, who cry out for justice and righteousness. Come to us as we embody your call to be merciful, to be pure in heart, to hammer our swords into plowshares and our hearts into worthy vessels for your love in the name of peace. Come, break us open that your Word may find a home within our hearts, and make us a blessing for the world in truth and love.

Amen.

Preached at the 9 am single service and annual meeting at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO on January 29, 2023.

Readings:

Micah 6:1-8

Psalm 15

1 Corinthians 1:18-31

Matthew 5:1-12

Citations:

1) Christopher K. Germer, The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion: Freeing Yourself from Destructive Thoughts and Emotions, pp. 142-143; cited in J. Marshall Jenkins, Blessed at the Broken Places: Reclaiming Faith and Purpose with the Beatitudes, loc. 756/3579, kindle edition.

Simple Gifts: Sermon and Rector's Report for Annual Meeting, January 30, 2022

For the last three Sundays, we have been exploring the question of spiritual gifts, as discussed in 1 Corinthians chapters 12 and now 13. The overall theme has been unity of the Church. Paul warns that petty jealousies and hierarchies destroy the unity of the body of Christ. Apparently, some in Corinth had been claiming that their spiritual gifts ennobled them at the expense of others with what were looked down on as “lesser gifts.”

Putting this into context, in the reading before this one last week, Paul talks about spiritual gifts, and then promises to show us a “more excellent way:” the way of love in action. He first lists seven things that are lesser gifts than love: speaking in tongues, prophecy, wisdom, knowledge, faith (!), self-sacrifice through poverty, even self-sacrifice through martyrdom. Looking at Paul’s list, we see that is true in our own lives: prophecies are ignored, knowledge can be outlawed and lies become celebrated, wisdom can be drowned out by fear, faith can be misplaced in those unworthy, self-sacrifice can be an object of mockery. All these gifts, without love, turn to ashes. Love is both the truest expression of the gospel, but also requires the most dedication.

As we take stock of the year past, both in the world around us and in the life of this parish, it is good for us to reflect upon all of our gifts, and to remember all the gifts that being in this community at this time and place gives to each of us. It is also a perfect time, as we face this new year as a blank slate, for us to look for ways to offer new gifts in new ways, to the neighbors we are called to serve.

WORSHIP
Thanks to the miracles of modern medicine, we were finally restored to the gift of physical presence. We got to come out of COVID lockdown beginning in Lent, and made it to the end of the year before we had to take a pause out of love for each other in January. We continue to pray for all those affected by this ongoing pandemic, from medical staff to teachers to those isolated out of fear of this contagion. We pray—and we do our part to keep ourselves and others safe. That, too, is a gift of love.

We saw ministries related to worship come into their own. A Regathering Committee to deliberate about how to gather safely once it was possible— and each one of our committee members—Tom Allen, whom we do NOT appreciate enough, Chelsea Brewer, Chris Marsh, and Laura Limbaugh—all brought their expertise and then stepped up in leadership of the policies we have crafted. They deserve our deepest gratitude. God bless you, Tom, Chelsea, Chris, and Laura!

A revitalized Altar Guild led by Ruth Minster and handed over the Barb Hankemeyer. Usher training to involve COVID protocols thanks to Tom Allen’s organizational skills and Mary Jane Drake lending her vast experience. A corps of vaccinated readers who were willing to come and read as we inched toward regathering. New volunteers for the Broadcast team, and ever better broadcasts as we gained more fluency in this technology. The use of an FM transmitter to be able to gather in our cars.

We were finally able to gather for parts of Holy Week services, for the first time since 2019, and to create hybrid services. At Easter, we celebrated out first baptism in over a year; this spring we celebrated our first two weddings in a LONG time; this fall we had our first confirmation and reception in over a year; and throughout the year we held nine funerals bidding farewell to treasured members of our parish. We hosted the ordination of our incoming assistant rector, the Rev. Shug Goodlow, and finally had our Celebration of New Ministry. The return of the choir and bell choir under the brilliant leadership of Denise Marsh continued to create beautiful music.

FORMATION
Sherrie Algren continued her one-woman campaign to keep the youngest members of our parish engaged in learning about God despite being unable to attend in person due to a lack of vaccination for anyone under age 12, and finally 5. Sherrie creates and distributes packets of fun activities to our little ones each and every month, God bless her. The Rev. Shug began putting together a fascinating mix of adult formation opportunities, and even COVID could not stop the discussion as we pivoted to ZOOM when necessary. We also formed a discernment committee in the parish to help our beloved Loretta Go discern a possible call to Holy Orders which concluded with sending her on for further training.

OUTREACH
The big gift here was the start of a Laundry Love ministry passionately here in West County, spearheaded by Anne and Jim Fischer, despite 18 months of delays. This program is as much a gift to those who staff it as to those who avail themselves of the chance to do their laundry. Thank you for your embrace of this ministry-- so many of you who donate quarters, volunteer hours, or laundry detergent. We saw transition in leadership from Larry Cornelius to Mike Kelly for the Peace Meal project that we take turns in staffing at St. John’s Tower Grove. We had another bumper crop in the garden, thanks to John Lange and Scott Pattengill, that was used to feed the hungry. Jeanne King led another spiritually rewarding United Thank Offering campaign. And all this in the midst of a pandemic!

PASTORAL CARE and SPIRITUALITY
So many of you devote enormous energy and effort in caring for each other here at St. Martin’s—calling, sending cards, praying for each other with our three vibrant prayer ministries continuing on through the leadership of Linda Huheey, The Rev. Virginia Noel, and Daryl Norman. We hope to get to a place in this pandemic where we can safely send out our teams of Eucharistic visitors once again very soon. We also have lost both of the people who were doing our broadcasts of online compline twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays: Loretta Go and Gina Slobodzian, who has taken a new position that takes her out of state. I hope we all can wish these two amazing disciples well, and that some of you might feel called to step up to replace them in this beautiful ministry of prayer as night descends.

BUILDING and GROUNDS
Lincoln Drake continued his care of the physical plant, and he and Steve and Maggi Brunkhorst walked through the building when it was unoccupied to make sure that all was well. The capital campaign has saved us untold anxiety just by being there, available for use rather than having to pull money from our investment fund for capital goods, and that is a gift that we gave ourselves that keeps giving back to us.

STAFFING
We added an assistant rector, the Rev. Shug Goodlow, with great joy, in late August, at long last. Janet Theiss continues to give her all to St. Martin’s in ways that too often fly under the radar, and she is a godsend. Kenny Harper continues to keep our building clean with attention to detail. Denise brings out the best in all the musicians who work with her. Volunteer staff include the Broadcast Team of Bill Scoopmire, Becky McCoy Brewer, Jim Fischer, Chris Marsh, and Scott Scoopmire, who is also our webmaster. They put in 15 or more man-hours of work for every broadcast. Scott has also just agreed to be our communications director, for which we are very grateful. Becky McCoy Brewer and Debra Mathews have worked hard to take large chunks of producing the Beacon off my hands, and it has been such a relief. Your staff have been stalwarts throughout this pandemic, and they deserve all the love and support we can give them.

FINANCIAL
St. Martin’s has had nearly a full year of being able to use our capital campaign funds for capital goods, and that helped keep us from running into red ink in our budgeting this year. The Legacy Endowment Fund continues to fund new ministry initiatives in the parish under the leadership of Greg Andersen and the promotion of the tireless Lincoln Drake. Page Andersen has performed her magic with the budget for the second straight year, and due to a second PPP loan and other happy circumstances, we managed to actually not pull any money from St. Martin’s Investment Fund. I am grateful to Mike Kelly for taking on chairmanship of the Annual Giving Campaign with all the complications of running such an endeavor in this time of uncertainty and flux.

However, our annual giving campaign remains half completed for the second year in a row at this point in the financial and calendar year. That just is not healthy nor realistic, not only from a financial standpoint but from a spiritual standpoint. It may be financially prudent to try to pay the least amount that you can for a car or a house, but it is absolutely no way to run a parish or a ministry.

I know we are all exhausted, and we are all distracted. But we absolutely need a bold commitment from each one of you who are able, so that we can anticipate the coming deficit. Because make no mistake, our financial commitments so far are half what our needed revenue must be with expenses cut to below the bone. Even if you have set up automatic payments—and thank you!—we need to have a card from you knowing that we can count on that level of funding throughout the year. As we move to making stewardship a year-round spiritual practice rather than a seasonal “chore,” I encourage each and every one of us to honestly enumerate how much having this community of faith means to each of us, and each of us doing our part to not only squeak by, but to have the funds to flourish as a witness to the abundant love of God in our communities.

It is at this point that I will repeat what I said last year: There is no deficit of fellowship here. There is no deficit of spirituality and faith here. There must be no deficit in our willingness to not just balance our budget but enable it to grow in discipleship areas that have been previously pruned back too far. We are called to do more things with fewer resources, and in a prolonged time of pandemic that takes an emotional and physical toll on all of us. Further, our constant financial constraints handcuff us from being Christ’s bold witness in the world around us.

What we spend money on in our lives is what we most value. It’s that simple, and that stark. Our giving to St. Martin’s —yours and mine—is a statement of the depth of our faith and our acknowledgement of our gratitude and our love. It is meant to be a gift, not a means of division. Our giving must NOT be about using money as a way to settle grievances, or expressing our displeasure or pleasure, a kind of carrot and stick contraption to get our own way. It’s not based on a profit-and loss calculation, on a measurement of how much we first get, a kind of “tip jar” philanthropy. Boldly, we must seek to embody the greatest gift of all—love—in ways that enable our witness to Christ to become ever more visible in a world thirsting for God’s presence made manifest through us.

We can do this. We just have to decide to let love lead us. Love, the greatest of all gifts.

As always, I remain deeply grateful for those of you who work tirelessly to keep this parish engaged in the world. Untold hundreds of hours go into making our worship and ministry possible in this time of COVID. I am so grateful to my husband, Bill Scoopmire, for all he does behind the scenes, programming our broadcasts, making the urns used by those who are interred in our columbarium, and being my pillar of strength who never thinks of sleeping in on a Sunday morning. He supports the long hours I put in by putting in many hours of his own-- and watching bloody action movies while I am hunched over a desk. He has the strength of ten men, due, no doubt, to his pure heart and strong coffee.

It always comes down to love, doesn’t it? Yes—always. Because if love is not the foundation of all we do, we are just a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

The ancient Greek philosophers held that only perfect things are eternal. And of the spiritual gifts, only love never ends; therefore, it is the greatest of the spiritual gifts. The most excellent way, then, is to put others first and to truly love them. This is how we love Jesus, by loving each other. This is how we are Christians. Anything else is mere fandom and empty show.

Love is God-made-visible for a world that cannot see God. Love pries open the cynical, selfish, stubbornly-squeezed-shut eyes of the world and makes God manifest. People are willing to do things in the name of love that they are far too self-conscious or terrified to do in the name of God—although that is exactly the same thing. 1 John 4:8 reminds us that God IS love. And thus- wham! That’s how God gets us; even as we try to hide from God or deny God, God sneaks in as love anyway.

As we look with hope toward the year that lies so freshly before us, we remember what we discussed last week. The time to act is always NOW, with each new breath is a new opportunity to do one small thing to change the world. I look forward to our best year yet—because we are joined together in faith, in hope, in charity—but the greatest of these is love.

Readings:

January 1:4-10

Psalm 71:1-6

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

Luke 4:21-30

Reawakening to Amazement: Sermon for the 4th Sunday After Epiphany B and Rector's Report for 2020

Even though it is annual meeting season, and like many of us, I am busier than a moth in a mitten, I also realized at the end of December that I was absolutely being worn out by the stresses and strains of the COVID pandemic. I needed some little thing for me.

So I promised myself that I would read for pleasure every day for at least 20 minutes. There were plenty of books piled around the house, but many of them were more for my vocation than just for fun or for savoring. So I decided to start reading a book of essays by the poet Mary Oliver entitled Upstream, because I have started writing poetry again—haltingly. Her insights into the creative process are delightful. But within the first thirty pages, I was stopped in my tracks by this sentence:

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

I’ve been turning that small sentence over and over in my head the way your turn a smooth river rock over and over in your hand or in your pocket, tucked away. The more I thought about it, the more the words rang true.

When we were children, the thing we yearned for most was attention from those we admired: our parents, or older cousins or neighbors. When we became the big kids, we noticed little kids wanting the same from us. Hopefully we kindly obliged as much as we had been obliged when we ourselves were small.

Likewise, when we were small, many of us fastened upon often the most ordinary things that completely fascinated us. Chin propped on hands, watching the orderly dotted line of ants moving in and out of an anthill.

Searching through the day for a four-leaf clover, and along the way noticing the variations in the edges, tones, and patterns on all the rejected clover-leafs. Watching the industrious uncoiling of the tongues of sulphurs, Monarchs, or blues as they competed with the bees for the clover or drank from the fallen, exploded sandplums under the trees. Learning how to tamp down your natural reaction when a bee landed on you until you could allow one to crawl across your hand with no fear because you know how not to startle it.

I remember thinking how amazing it was that this bee would have visited this flower, and I would never have known it were I not here to see and notice it right at that moment—and that all around the world, there were millions of bees contemplating millions of clover flower that I would never get to see. I became aware of how many hundreds of bees would visit this patch of clover in my backyard every day, whether I was there to observe them or not. Then later I was given a piece of wild honeycomb by my Dad’s mother, whom we called One Granny, and saw where the bees’ destination as they flew away from me was, and marveled at how they could help create such sweetness from flowers that weren’t particularly pretty or sweet. I learned that bees made honey, but butterflies did not, nor did they make butter.

I learned to start paying attention. And certainly that started me on the path of devotion to creation in to the majority of all its quadrillions of living creatures (not so fond of cockroaches or grubs or water snakes, all of which gave me the heebie-jeebies, to be honest). But I learned something else: the path to devotion ran straight through a way-station called amazement.

I was young, and therefore brave enough to be openly amazed and filled with wonder. I didn’t care if that amazement could be mocked by others as being naïve—I was lucky enough not to even know that some people sought to be above amazement, thinking it made them look knowledgeable and worldly.

And as I listened to Bible stories read to me by my mother, I began to notice when in the Bible it stated that a character was amazed, such as this Sunday, when we hear still in chapter 1 of Mark’s gospel how Jesus’s teaching and healing amazed those in the synagogue who witnessed them.

I like to think of the joy they felt—Mark’s gospel doesn’t have Jesus’s hometown crew them turning on him with a “Just who do you have the nerve to think you are” fury. Instead, the crowds seem genuinely open to the possibility of something new coming from the most unlikely of people. I imagine them going back to their homes and telling the story over and over again to their family, and watching their kindred’s eyes fill with wonder as they themselves open to the possibility of seeing something new. Something they might not have noticed was new had they not been paying attention.

That attention is the beginning of all Epiphany stories, in fact, and it is steeped in the willingness to surrender to wonder and amazement, no matter how foolish it might seem to indulge in hope in a society that seeks to crush our imaginations and dull our senses. And I imagine that was why some were willing to abandon their shovels and their lathes and their nets, and follow Jesus out into a world that needed to be shaken to attention. To be brought back to amazement. And led to devotion.

~~~~~~~~~~

In 2020 we have endured terrible losses, beloved members who have passed away, the fear of pandemic hounding our every step if we are wise. We are fortunate indeed that we have an understanding of faith which is grounded on the words “Love thy neighbor” as much as “Do not put the Lord your God to the test,” so we have made willing sacrifices of our fellowship so that there WILL be a fellowship awaiting our return on the other side of this pandemic. Infection rates and the weather allowed us only a couple of outdoor Eucharists in the fall—but we know there will be more chances.

Every time I speak into a red dot in a tiny black box, I think about how much I miss you all. I miss the choir. I miss the altar guild. I miss Eucharist. But love calls us to place others’ welfare ahead of our own preferences.

While we long to return safely to worship in person, we have adapted as we can to continue offering worship, albeit online. I offer my extreme thanks to those who had the foresight to support this parish in planning for an eventual lockdown—we were not caught flat footed when it came. One of the unintended benefits of this technology has been to expand our evangelism to the outside world.

Just as with our Ashes to Go offering for the last two years, we have been able to worship with people who never might have through the doors into an actual church. We actually have new families joining the parish who have never worshiped inside our doors. We are now reaching out even all over the US who join us in worship, continuing the kind of reaching out to people where they are that Jesus demonstrated in the last few weeks’ gospels.

We offer some sort of programming every day of the week, circumstances permitting, except for Mondays and Thursdays, with Compline and Story Time being broadcast live twice during the week. I am indebted to Loretta Go and Gina Slobodzian for their willingness and their radiant presence as they serve as leaders of Compline.

We have managed to do this in an extremely frugal manner with the support of the diocese and the vestry—and Bill Scoopmire basically clipping coupons. If you pay attention, you can see new features every week, and those features are truly amazing. Where we have had to compromise, we thank you for understanding why that compromise was necessary. We can now broadcast live on Facebook, on St. Martin’s YouTube channel, and on our website, all at once.

I thank each one of you who have shared your appreciation with me or with the broadcast team for the time, study, and effort that goes into our broadcasts every week. Because our system is one that pulls from a lot of services and software packages, I am grateful for those who encourage us each week and whose comments lift us up—the Drakes who are still ushering, Kim Montgomery who is always seeking to help people when they have questions. I especially thank the broadcast team of Bill Scoopmire, Chris Marsh, Jim Fischer, and Scott Scoopmire, who handle so much with grace and a generous application of their time and talent. I am awed by the creativity and innovation of Denise Marsh, and all our parish musicians, who have found safe ways to continue to offer beautiful music for our worship.

In autumn, Bishop Johnson required each parish to form a Regathering Committee, and ours has met every other week and been a great support as we have continually adapted our plans to ever-changing circumstances—I think we might now be on version 9 of our COVID worship plan. My thanks to Tom Allen, Chelsea Brewer, Laura Limbaugh, and Chris Marsh for your dedication to this committee.

Thanks to the Committee and favorable conditions, we were able to have our first pilgrimage experience on Christmas Eve afternoon, in which small groups of parishioners could come, meditate while listening to fabulous Christmas music, and be anointed and receive communion from the reserved sacrament. We even had a gorgeous Christmas tree, thanks to Mary Pomeroy and Judi Batch. We hope to be able to continue with this offering as possible.

I thank Kirt Beckman for helping us obtain a disinfecting mister, and to Lincoln Drake and Tom Warrington especially for tending to the daily checking, disinfecting, and maintenance of the physical plant. Lincoln Drake’s devotion and leadership has saved this parish countless headaches and thousands of dollars—and we owe him all a huge debt of gratitude.

In October we lost a staff member with the resignation of Wendy Sain, and I thank Page, Denise, and Janet for working to help carry the load, especially in bulletins and communications. We are understaffed, but blessed with the talents and energy of these amazing women. When we finally managed to launch our new website, we received immediate benefits in its flexibility and ability to integrate with video—down to making this meeting much more possible than we ever could have experienced before. My thanks go out to Hope Jernigan for her design and redesign of the website once COVID struck, and to my son, our webmaster, Scott Scoopmire, who set up the members-only section and the ability to stream our services on the website.

We began the year with plans to ordain a new bishop with a wonderful diocese-wide celebration: COVID had other plans. Nonetheless, Bishop Smith was able to retire a few weeks after his planned date, and Bishop Johnson was finally formally ordained a bishop in the summer. More cause for amazement, and we had our first episcopal visit in October.

October was also supposed to be celebration of new ministry after I was formally called as St. Martin’s fourth rector, but a need for Bill and I to quarantine postponed that. I am your rector, and I have asked the bishop’s office if we can wait to formally celebrate that until we are able to meet again in person, perhaps this coming fall.

I am also grateful for the creativity and initiative you all have shown in maintaining our presence in the community in a time of lockdown. I am grateful to the Hankemeyers, the Drakes, and other members of the Lunch Bunch for delivering meals to hospital staff all around our parish when COVID first bit, and I am grateful for the outreach committee still attempting to maintain our holiday drives for Circle of Concern and Episcopal City Mission. I am grateful to John Lange and the Garden Committee for their steadfast planning and devotion in still eliciting a bountiful harvest from our garden for the assistance of those in need.

The guiding light who continues to make sure our children are engaged in formation is Sherrie Algren, who has made packets each month for the littlest members of our parish, for which our kids are truly grateful. I am also thankful for those who have met for our Lectionary Bible Study on Tuesdays. And I would like to see much more adult formation become a priority in this parish.

One financial picture starts with an amazing thing indeed: under some incredibly devoted leadership of Steve Brunkhorst, Page Andersen, Bob Ecker, Robin Ragsdale, John Lange, the late Wayne Peters, Bob Pomeroy, Barb Hankemeyer, Lincoln Drake, we completed our first capital campaign in 22 years as part of placing ourselves on a more secure financial footing. And we did this is a time of pandemic. Many thanks go out to each of you who have committed to this campaign—and to those who have already sent in contribution. I remind you that this is a three year campaign. So if you have yet to make or add to a pledge, it is NEVER too late.

Our stewardship campaign was completely conducted via email and mail due to the pandemic, under the oversight of myself with vestry support. The challenges of nor meting every week have meant that the stewardship campaign is still awaiting pledges from a sizeable number of households. Bob Ecker has done an outstanding job as our treasurer these last two years, and Page Andersen has turned over every federal rock she could find to secure PPP loans to help cushion the sustained economic shock of the COVID crisis that we endured. We have ended with a deficit smaller than we anticipated purely through their creativity and through the engagement already of capital campaign funds for capital improvements.

But the only good deficit is NO deficit. There is no deficit of fellowship here. There is no deficit of spirituality and faith here. There must be no deficit in our willingness to not just balance our budget but enable it to grow in discipleship areas that have been previously pruned back too far.

This has reminded us that stewardship is not an unpleasant task to be confined to a brief season, but is instead a year-round attitude of thankfulness, generosity, and courage that calls us to a frank assessment of how much St. Martin’s means in our lives throughout the year. Financially, we still labor under a deficit. And this simply must end. It is in our power to increase our revenue—there is no more cutting to be made. We are understaffed, overworked, and the deficit prevents us from being as nimble as we need to be, as this time of crisis has driven home.

In the last six years, this parish has gone from having four part- and full-time clergy to one. Janet Theiss is both a parish administrator, book-keeper, and woman of all trades, and we would be truly lost without her. Denise Marsh is so talented I believe she could make stones sing and woodpeckers play percussion. They both deserve our thanks—and our financial support to be able to do their jobs right.

There are so many things we should be able to do—send mailed Beacons once a month to parishioners who are technologically challenged, for instance-- but we simply lack the hands and hours to do these things. We can do this. And we must.

Too many people have been forecasting the death of the big-C Church for years in this country and throughout the West. As we hear in our gospel today, Jesus brings a new message of love and healing—and the people who witness it are astonished. Here was some good news they had never heard before.

The world right now is as hungry for this gospel as those townspeople in Capernaum were on that day 2000 years ago. And Jesus has placed this beautiful life-giving work into our hands. How can we NOT take it up with joy and gladness? We start by paying attention to the signs of beauty, wonder, healing, and rebirth all around us. We continue by being brave enough to be amazed, and overflow with that amazement so that we share this treasure with all those around us. It is then that devotion begins.

In her poem, “Mysteries, Yes,” Mary Oliver writes,

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds will
never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,

and bow their heads.



We are called to love. To love boldly, profoundly, holding nothing back. This is the action Jesus sets apart as the sign of discipleship in his teachings. When we love each other, we truly live as God commands us to live, fully and radically alive. And they—the world— will know we are Christians by our love. And that love is our strength, the glue that holds our union together, despite this time of isolation, political unrest, and uncertainty. It is that love that makes us a people equipped for a time such as this. Attentive, amazed, and devoted to God’s ministry with all that we have.

Amen.

Preached at the 9:00 am online worship service at St. Martin's Episcopal Church before the 2021 Annual Meeting.

Readings:

• Deuteronomy 18:15-20
• 1 Corinthians 8:1-13
• Mark 1:21-28
• Psalm 111

Being Here, Being Light: Sermon for the 3rd Sunday after Epiphany, and annual meeting

The passage from Matthew’s gospel that we heard today lends itself to a lot of possibilities in this season of annual meetings. It’s also a happy coincidence that the intersection of our Martin Luther King holiday coincides with preparing for our Annual Meeting, especially in terms of embracing a concept of the Beloved Community that was so espoused by Dr. King, and that grew out of his deep relationship with God and with scripture. His description of the Beloved Community is what we at St. Martin’s aspire to be: a light to all, a place where peace and justice are taken seriously and where ministering to each other and our neighbors is the highest ideal.

We are a parish rooted in this time and this place, facing the hoped for building of the kingdom of heaven, as Matthew puts it. But when Matthew talks about the “kingdom of heaven,” he is talking about a society right here, right now—not off in the afterlife. Jesus’s hometown was Nazareth, a landlocked village in the center of northern Israel—today, it is predominately Arab. Here we see Jesus move his home base to Capernaum, a fishing village along the northern coast of the Sea of Galilee, in the ancestral lands of Zebulon and Naphtali.

Capernaum, as an outpost on the frontier with Syria, was tightly under the control of Rome, and the synagogue there was built through a gift of a centurion who was a God-fearer. So where we just read about a church in Corinth being challenged by diversity, in our gospel we see Jesus in a town of ancient Jewish heritage under Roman rule. This area was called “Galilee of the Gentiles”—in our reading from Isaiah 9:1, above, it was called “Galilee of the nations” to reflect the diversity of peoples who lived there, either as conqueror or as the conquered. Thus, continuing our Epiphany message of the universality of Jesus’s mission, we have Jesus choosing to start his ministry in a diverse community, one that had known nothing but oppression and the destruction that is the result of that, first from the Assyrians, and then from Rome. 

It is in this improbable place that Jesus begins his public ministry, and where Jesus calls his first disciples. I am convinced it is a vital thing to point out, because it leads us to consider this vital question: how does our location in this place shape our understanding of our witness to Christ and ministry to our neighbors here at St. Martin’s? I ask you to ponder that as we review the previous year.

I want you all to consider that this is holy ground that we stand on. This building is the center of our spiritual and worship lives. It is where we learn together, and study scripture. It is where we grow hundreds of pounds of produce each year to feed the hungry. It is where we offer hospitality to the community. It is where our neighbors vote. It is where we celebrate the lives of our beloved friends and family who have died, and it is where many of our loved ones have their final resting places.

This is sacred ground, holy ground, hallowed with the prayers and praises and laments of thousands of voices and hearts over the decades. This building has been entrusted to us by the diocese, and more importantly by the generations before us who were instrumental in moving this community from borrowed space in an elementary school to the beautiful worship and meeting space we now care for. It is the home base for pastoral care and for our amazing team of lay Eucharistic visitors who help care for the spiritual needs of those in our parish who cannot attend worship. In short, it is where, just like in our reading from Matthew’s gospel today, we engage in the same holy work that Jesus engaged in: teaching, proclaiming the kingdom of God coming near, and healing those who are in pain, sorrow, or distress. I am particularly indebted to Lincoln Drake, Tom Warrington, and Kirt Beckman fort their incredible work taking care of this facility and her aging systems.

In the last year, this parish has made some important changes. We are in the process of replacing the roof, thanks to an insurance settlement, and the work is ongoing due to that same lovely St. Louis weather that vacillates between freezes and roasting. have begun to put in place a series of measures to make the building more secure. We moved our 10:15 service to 10:30, which has been a relief for your priest. Our music program has benefitted from being fully funded in the budget: our choir has grown, and Denise’s network of guest musicians from both within and outside the parish have worked together to create some outstanding moments in our worship life, especially at Easter and Christmas. Our incredible altar guild, led by Ruth Minster, continues to make sure our worship is beautiful and reverent, and they tend to the worship needs of this parish with incredible devotion. 

Over the course of 2019, St. Martin’s held over 200 services from gatherings here at church or at the Fountains to taking communion to people in their homes or in the hospital, stopped only by that pernicious weather. We have offered communion almost 6500 times. We celebrated the lives of beloved parishioners and friends at 7 funerals. We baptized 2 babies and 2 adults. We celebrated a marriage. At our rescheduled Bishop’s visitation, we confirmed or received 11 members of St. Martin’s, six youth and five adults. We already have a new confirmation class starting up, with at least six people interested in formally joining the Episcopal church through this beloved community. We’ve had three book studies led by Pastor Sally, who has shared her gifts with us with beautiful spirit and generosity.

As the great Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple noted, “The Church is the only institution that exists primarily for the benefit of thoise who are not its members.” We finally got outreach funds to both Cuba and Puerto Rico after months of effort. We have provided aid and comfort to our neighbors who have benefited from the priest’s discretionary fund, and I give thanks to the wonderful women who helped put on the Christmas Bazaar and Bake Sale to help replenish and strengthen this fund.

Last winter, we offered our first ever Ashes to Go station out on Clayton Road, and over 50 cars stopped to pray with me during the course of Ash Wednesday in between services. One woman stopped, and later came back with her entire family, including her daughter, who had never had the imposition of ashes before. Several people shared that this was the first religious action that they had participated in years due to previous painful experiences with organized religion. It was a wonderful witness to our community, and a wonderful way to start Lent with those who might otherwise have not been invited to participate in this solemn ritual.

We have maintained a nursery to be inviting and welcoming to young families, and Sherrie Algren continues to oversee children’s ministries with a dedicated an varied cohort of volunteers, hosting Breakfast with the Bunny near Easter, a vibrant Vacation Bible School in July filled with crafts, music and stories, as well as Breakfast with St. Nicholas. We have a vibrant soft space for worship in the nave, and a new soothing space for people of all age to be able to sit, pray, play, and read out in the narthex. We had a fantastic Trunk or Treat and Garden Harvest Festival just before Halloween, organized by Chelsea Raiche and other garden committee members.

In late spring, a core group of parishioners attended training in the Invite, Welcome, Connect ministry, and several training sessions were held to disseminate the principles behind this ministry as widely as possible. 

Under the leadership of Ruby Downs and Laura Limbaugh, we sold St. Martin’s shirts and used an investment from the budget to host a wonderful Homecoming Celebration in September. It is my hope that all of us will take responsibility for inviting friends and neighbors to St. Martin’s and commit to the ongoing support of this ministry, not just for the sake of this parish, but for the sake of the gospel, which calls us to make disciples for the life of the world.

Just as our gospel passage today depicts Jesus going to people where they are, so too we are called to not sit back and wait for folks to come to us, but to share the good news of God’s love with those around us, and invite them to “Come and see” what the Way of Jesusis all about as a force for change in the world, as we talked about last Sunday.

Our facility continues to be a central location for diocesan events, and that is part of what makes our physical plant a blessing. We host Standing Committee each month, and during the bishop’s search we hosted Search Committee and Transition Committee events, as well as an all-diocesan clergy meeting in March. We also hosted joint social justice meetings with our neighbors at St. Timothy’s as well as an outstanding Syrian dinner. We share our space with AA groups and the River Blenders, and as we get ready to restart the capital campaign that this parish family put aside in late 2017, we look to making our spaces more inviting in order to be able to serve this congregation, this diocese, and the community in an even greater capacity.

We continue to face budget shortfalls, which is an ongoing source of concern for all of us. Our capital campaign and our new roof will help alleviate some of the uncertainty in our budget, by providing funds to replace systems that we live in fear of failing—and when they have done so in the last 20 years, that replacement has had to come out of our investment fund. Your treasurer, Bob Ecker, your steadfast and faithful vestry, your stewardship leadership led by Steve Brunkhorst and Ralph Trieschmann and all the trail bosses have done an outstanding job in seeking to connect with every member of St. Martin’s and encourage the sharing of information and goals to move us toward better stewardship and sharing of our resources for the good of the overall community.

In the late summer, our communications director, Jill Gould, left us for full time employment in the business world, and we miss her very much and are so grateful for her gifts to us. But since then, we have revamped the Beacon to make it more user-friendly and comprehensive, and we are currently working on a revamped parish website which will be more nimble and easier to navigate and update. I continue to be indebted to both Janet Theiss and Wendy Sain for supporting this parish in its day to day needs and in helping me in my ministry to you all in ways both great and small.

These are only a few snapshots of the wonderful things going on here at St. Martin’s. We are here in this place for a reason. Jesus locates his ministry in a specific place at the start of it—where there are ordinary people living ordinary lives, working as fishermen there along the shore, wresting a hard living from a small lake.

St. Martin’s, too, just like Capernaum, is a place where God is fulfilling God’s promises, as our passage from Isaiah relates. Jesus doesn’t just call the perfect, but he does call everyday people to follow him and place his teachings of justice and healing at the core of their identities. Jesus continues to call us to use our gifts for the glory of God, and to be willing to meet people where they are and invite them into the fellowship of faith.

As we look to the coming year, I want to challenge us all to wonder at the steadfast faithfulness of God beside us throughout our joys as well as our pains. May we consider how we understand the call that each of us receives from Jesus today. How do we understand following Jesus as a core part of our identity?

More specifically, how do we grow into deeper faithfulness and mindfulness with the three core parts of Jesus’s mission as laid out in today’s gospel? 

• How do we bring light to those in darkness?
• How do we announce the coming of the reign of God and call ourselves and the world to turn our minds toward God’s reign in our own lives, what is called “repentance?”
• How do we follow Jesus in his example as a human perfectly aligned with God’s dream for creation as disciples, and call others to discipleship?

I am convinced that each and every person sitting in a pew is there because God’s call to all humanity is working within them in some way. Jesus is still calling his followers to share in the work that makes the kingdom of heaven visible and real in the eyes of the world. Let us join together and stand together in faith as we seek to make St. Martin’s ever stronger in its witness and ministry in the year ahead.

Amen.

Preached at the 9:00 am Eucharist at the start of the 2020 annual meeting, St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.

Readings:
Isaiah 9:1-4
Psalm 27:1, 5-13
1 Corinthians 1:10-18
Matthew 4:12-23