A message from Father Mark
PRIEST’S MESSAGE – SUNDAY November 10, 2024
In our Gospel on Sunday, Jesus presents us with characters of two types. He warns us against the corrupt scribes for their selfishness and crime. The scribes are concerned with gaining power over other people in order to enrich themselves.
The widow seeks no power over anyone in order to better her situation. By her gift, small as it is, she seeks to serve God. And though its cash value is slight, the gift is enormous, everything she’s got. She’s not looking to fill the emptiness in herself by stealing from others. She’s looking to fill that emptiness by opening herself to God. She wants no power over others to gain consolation prizes. Instead, with the toss of those coins, she surrenders power over herself in order that God may work through her. She’s a person of radical faith.
There are two choices: misuse power over others in order to enrich yourself, or surrender power over yourself so that you may truly serve God. Only one of those paths leads to eternal life.
Question of the Week: How have you been inspired by small, barely noticeable acts of kindness, generosity, or compassion to others?
PRIEST’S MESSAGE – SUNDAY November 3, 2024
On Sunday, we observed All Saint’s Day. We often talk about the saints as if they are somehow morally or spiritually superior to us; as if they had it all together and did everything right. But what if that’s a misunderstanding of what a saint is? What if saints are simply the ones who do the work that they are called to do? In the words of our reading from Revelation, they are the people who entrust themselves to being made new and participate in God’s making things new in the lives of those around them.
That’s what I’ve seen and experienced with the saints in my life. I remember them with love and gratitude. I saw them working out God’s newness in each of their lives and I experienced and was challenged by them bringing newness to my life. I still am. The saints still speak to and show up in our lives. That’s why we call out their names on this day. It’s a way they are present to us and we to them. Together, we and they are being made new.
Question of the Week: When has another brought about newness in your life? That is, who are the saints in your life?
Peace,
Mark+
PRIEST’S MESSAGE – SUNDAY october 27, 2024
Our Gospel lesson from this past Sunday recounted the story of Jesus’ interaction with blind Bartimaeus. We used this lesson as an occasion to consider the experience of being “invisible” in the sense of not really being seen in one’s full humanity. Bartimaeus spends his days living on the fringe of his community, begging at the city gate. Alone at the bottom of the social ladder, he is invisible to his community. Others see him, but only in a narrow sense. He survives on whatever people give him.
When Bartimaeus cries out to Jesus, the people around him tell him to shut up– which is to say, they seek to keep him invisible. These people want Bartimaeus to remain at the bottom of that ladder. Out of sight and out of mind. The Gospel account provides a specific and common experience of being rendered invisible by people who find themselves living on the margins whether as a result of poverty or some other quality that makes them unwelcome in mainstream society.
Following Jesus involves seeking to interact with people in such a way that they experience themselves as truly being seen. It means acknowledging that the people with whom we live closest possess a soul – that there is more to them than we know – maybe even than they know. It means asking who they are in themselves as opposed to who our anxious ego needs them to be.
It also means looking at strangers – for instance people we encounter in roles they fill – the immigrant in our midst, minorities like the transgender, and those with physical and emotional challenges that Dr. Dupree talked about last week — and recognizing that there is vastly more to them than caricatures we have made of them – that they too have souls and, like all of us made in the image of our Creator, are deserving of respect and love.
Question of the Week: Who are the people in Madison whom we see but don’t acknowledge and how do we go about seeing them in the fullness of their humanity?
Peace,
Mark+
PRIEST’S MESSAGE – SUNDAY october 20, 2024
Due to the sermon being given this week by Rev. Dr. Mary Grace DuPree, Father Mark’s message will reappear October 29.
PRIEST’S MESSAGE – SUNDAY october 13, 2024
Our Gospel text from this past Sunday says that the disciples were astonished when Jesus said, “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!”
Like much of what Jesus says, these words go against the conventional wisdom. In Jesus’ day, wealth was seen as a definitive sign of blessing. Wealth was seen as a symbol of a person’s worth in the eyes of God and society. It’s no different today in a lot of ways. Jesus challenges the unexamined views of his disciples – past or present – who accept this narrative about wealth at face value.
It is a myth that the wealthy have a certain quality that those who are poor do not. What the wealthy have that the poor don’t have is money. It’s not drive, not ambition, not work ethic. The single parent working three jobs has a drive and a work ethic. Many people work back-breaking jobs at long hours their entire lives and leave this world with no material wealth to show for it. And there’s a dark side to this myth about wealth: If wealthy people got where they are on their own merits, then it stands to reason that poor people lack those merits – and are thus undeserving of support.
Jesus’ words compel us to consider how we have bought into myth that unjustly equates poverty with moral failure. Jesus’ words invite us to work towards a society that sees poverty as society’s problem and then enact solutions and promote opportunities at a systemic level to address the needs of the poor among us.
Question of the Week: Can you think of an example of someone or some event in your life that, though it may have seemed insignificant at the time, turned out to be an opportunity that radically altered the course of your life?
Peace,
Mark+
PRIEST’S MESSAGE – SUNDAY october 6, 2024
The texts from this passage were challenging. Between the horrible suffering of Job and Jesus’ teaching on divorce, it can be hard to find a way in. As I prepared for Sunday, I eventually came across a commentator who encouraged the reader to think of these passages as about relationships.
Some relationships are transactional. They’re about what each party can get out of them. Both Job and our Gospel reading challenge this idea. Job’s faithfulness is quite extraordinary. It is only matched by God’s faithfulness. Their relationship is not based on keeping score of every display of generosity or righteousness. It’s based on relentless grace and love.
In our Gospel lesson, Jesus utters one of his most famous lines: “Therefore what God has joined together let no one separate.” The Pharisees interpreted the law to allow a man to divorce his wife for like one discards a piece of trash, which Jesus dismisses. But this lesson is about more than marriage and divorce. This is a lesson about relationships. They aren’t about keeping score. To the contrary, one of the many blessings of a relationship is experiencing the love and faithfulness of a spouse, a partner, a family member, or a friend even in times when we receive more grace than we offer or receive more grace than we give.
Both of these passages point to the important lesson that holy relationships – whether with God or our fellow human beings – aren’t transactional. They endure, not because of what we get out of them, but because they are characterized by life-giving grace and love.
Question of the Week: What qualities define the most significant relationships you have (or have had) in your life?
Peace,
Mark+
PRIEST’S MESSAGE – SUNDAY september 29, 2024
Our reading this morning from James is largely about prayer. “The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective,” we hear in verse 16. Prayer is a subject we hear a lot about in the church, especially a church in the Anglican tradition in which common prayer is one of the central features of our worship and life as a community. But, for much of my life, I didn’t really know how to pray. And I was so self-conscious about it. Shouldn’t a believer automatically know how to pray? And yet, I lived in complete fear that someone would call on me to pray at church or Thanksgiving dinner.
What is this all about? What is at the root of this insecurity about praying that many of us seem to have? For me, I think it comes down to a misunderstanding about what makes prayer effective. The Book of Common Prayer tells us what prayer is: “Prayer is responding to God, by thought, and by deeds, without or without words.” Prayer is really not about the words; it’s about your openness to God. We pray when we purposefully make ourselves available and attentive to God.
We need to abandon this idea that, for God to hear our prayers, for our prayers to be worthy, we have to say them in a certain way or with our heads or hands in such and such a position. That’s just not so. There is no such thing as inadequate prayer. It is our intention that makes our prayers, not the words.
Question of the Week: What approach to prayer do you find most meaningful? In other words, what do you do to make yourself open and attentive to God?
Peace,
Mark+
PRIEST’S MESSAGE – SUNDAY september 22, 2024
The Gospel text from this past Sunday has Jesus uttering among his most famous teachings: “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and a servant of all.” This passage highlights for us the qualities of a leader.
Our contemporary model of leadership bears little resemblance to this teaching. There are notable exceptions of course. But our “leaders” these days tend to be those who talk the loudest, have the largest Instagram followings, or have the most money to spread around. Not coincidentally, their “leadership” tends to focus on improving their positions and those of people like them. The notion of a “servant leader,” which Jesus both exemplified and about which he taught, is not a common mode of leadership by today’s standards. Its focus is on leading by example, specifically how we treat others. Jesus’ leadership was not about what it could do for him, but an example of how to serve the needs of other people. It is the only leadership model the gospel endorses and one we should strive to put at the heart of our walks of faith.
Question of the Week: In your life, who has shown you the path of servant leadership and how can you pass that model on to others?
Peace,
Mark+
PRIEST’S MESSAGE – SUNDAY september 15, 2024
In our Gospel lesson from Mark today, Jesus asks his disciples an interesting question: “But who do you say that I am?” He isn’t just asking their opinion for the sake of it. I think he is assessing whether his disciples know who he truly is, which I think, in turn, highlights an important question for us: “Do we know who Jesus really is?”
If we want to know who Jesus is, who he really is, we need to spend time with him. Knowing who Jesus is requires dedication and devotion. It won’t happen automatically by walking through the doors of a church or saying the creed a thousand times. To know him, we need to study how Jesus led his earthly life. How did he treat people? To really know Jesus, we need to know what his values are. What he was willing to fight for during his earthly life.
Did the disciples understand what discipleship required, not just repeating what was taught, but helping the poor, welcoming the stranger, tending the sick, and loving people nobody else would love? I think that Jesus is still asking that question of us as his modern-day disciples. We honor who Jesus is by displaying in our lives the values – the humility, the generosity, the hospitality, and – above all the love – for which he lived, died, and rose again. May we never stop looking for opportunities to show by our example that we get who Jesus really is.
Question of the Week: Who do you say that Jesus is, not in the abstract, but in the way(s) he informs your notions of self and how you interact with others?
Peace,
Mark+
PRIEST’S MESSAGE – SUNDAY september 8, 2024
In our Gospel reading from Sunday, Jesus performs two healings. The first, of the daughter of a Syrophoenician woman, has Jesus initially responding rudely, only to be moved and his mind changed by the woman’s persistence in faith. In the second, the healing of a deaf man, Jesus says the word, “Ephphatha,” which means “be opened.” In these healings, he reminds all of us to be open to essential truth—a truth we still have not mastered. A truth that can never be repeated enough: God’s love has no limits.
God’s call is a call to everyone. We don’t exist as a community merely for ourselves or for those who are similar to us. Being open is the foundation of discipleship, but it can also be unnerving. It means being open to God’s will wherever it may lead us. It means being open to acknowledging that God’s ways are not our ways. We have a human inclination to limit and create barriers—and we are really good at doing that, even in the Church. In doing this, we diminish God and close our hearts.
God calls us to be open. Be open, even if it goes against everything we’re told about who is in and who is out. God asks us to be open. May we hear and respond.
Question of the Week: To what experience, people, or new ministry is God calling you to be open?
Peace,
Mark+
PRIEST’S MESSAGE – SUNDAY september 1, 2024
In our Gospel passage from this past Sunday, Jesus is at it again with Pharisees about the importance of tradition. It’s easy to look at passages like the one from the Gospel of Mark and think that the Pharisees must be bad folks. Jesus is very critical of them, to be sure. But remember Jesus is a Jewish teacher criticizing Jewish teachers. It’s like an intra-family squabble. The Pharisees are trying to protect the religious traditions of Israel. These traditions separated those of the Jewish faith from everyone else around them.
Jesus had a different perspective. He thought the Pharisees’ emphasis on external expressions of faith was misplaced. Jesus taught that what’s going on inside a person is ultimately more meaningful than ritual. It’s not that ritual had (or has) no place; it’s that ritual has no meaning apart from an internal experience of faith. For Jesus, true religious faith is something that’s on the inside, something that comes out of us. So, to be clear, it has an outward manifestation. But true religious faith comes from the heart and is made real in our actions.
True religious faith is about our priorities. It’s about how our actions are informed by what is in our hearts. And what should be in our hearts is the law of love.
Question of the Week: What does your participation in religious rituals important to you reflect on your belief in God and God’s values?
Peace,
Mark+
PRIEST’S MESSAGE – SUNDAY august 25, 2024
In our Epistle lesson on Sunday, we considered the imagery of the armor of God. Many people who grew up in other traditions will remember the “armor of God” being deployed in a militant way, one that was well suited to a selective teaching of Scripture as ammunition for the conversion of sinners. However, the phrase “armor of God” cannot be understood to condone violence or coercive forms of evangelism.
Early Christians were pacifists in the Roman Empire. They sought (and sometimes received) exemptions from compulsory military service. They refused to fight, and some died because of it. Instead, these early Christians followed the example of Jesus, who told his followers to put away their swords during his arrest, who spoke of turning the other cheek, who laid down his life to indict a culture of violence, and who stretched his arms on the cross willingly. It is from this culture that Paul, or more likely one of his students, was writing to the community at Ephesus.
The armor of God is a metaphor. And one that is not concerned with death at all because we believe that eternal life swallows up death in the power of the resurrection. No, the armor of God is concerned with life – a life of truth, righteousness, faith, and peace. It’s what we put on so that we can follow the path of love laid out for us by Jesus.
Question of the Week: Which article of the armor of faith – the belt of truth, the helmet of salvation, the breastplate of righteousness, or the shoes of peace – do you find yourself most frequently calling on in your faith journey?
Faithfully,
Mark+
PRIEST’S MESSAGE – SUNDAY august 18, 2024
We’ve been considering the passage in The Gospel of John known as “The Bread of Life Discourse” for a few weeks. To us, it’s a familiar text. But just think: if you weren’t familiar with our tradition of eucharistic worship, unfamiliar with the Sacrament of Bread and Wine, reading this text about eating a man’s flesh and drinking his blood would sound, at best, odd and, more likely, grisly.
I think that’s exactly what Jesus intended. Even as a metaphor, the notion of eating human flesh and drinking human blood would have drawn an unmistakably clear line between the old way and Jesus’ way. Eating anything with blood in it was a serious offense under the Mosaic law.
But separately from a shocking bit of rhetoric, Jesus imparts an important substantive lesson. A lesson about the incarnation: Jesus is God enfleshed. God loves human beings so much that God became a human. Not only that, God became a human so that God could teach and people could experience in human form the wisdom of God.
By using the metaphor of consuming Jesus’ flesh and drinking his blood, Jesus is conveying the truth that the key to accessing the wisdom of God, to aligning our lives with God’s will, is to integrate Jesus, his teaching, and the values for which he lived, died, and was resurrected, at a core level. In the same way that the nutrition we consume becomes part of us and drives the most basic and the most complex of our physiological functions, we have to consume Jesus to put the wisdom and values he represents at the heart of who we are.
Question of the Week: Is there a particular lesson that Jesus taught that you have not yet fully integrated into who you are? [Hint: This is true for most of us.]
PRIEST’S MESSAGE – SUNDAY august 11, 2024
In our passage from Ephesians, Paul challenges us to “be imitators of God.” How do we do that? The text suggests five specific ways.
- Acting with kindness is the most fundamental way we can imitate God. Our God is defined by kindness.
- We must put away all falsehood and imitate God by speaking the truth. God always tells the truth. We, too, are always to tell the truth. In a kind way. In a loving way. But also in an honest way.
- Maybe surprisingly, Paul says it’s ok to get angry, but don’t get carried away. Don’t carry grudges. Don’t internalize anger where it turns into rage and resentment.
- We are to work honestly, i.e. by not stealing. Obvious, right? But the twist is why we do it. It’s not to hoard wealth for ourselves, but so that we have something to share with others.
- Finally, we are to shun “evil talk.” What kind of talk is that? The text tells us: Words that don’t build others up. The words we use should make people feel loved and inspire them to love others in return.
All of this can be summed up in another phrase that Paul uses here: “Live in love.” We imitate God best by living in love.
Question of the Week: Given our lesson from Ephesians, what’s one way you can imitate God better in the coming week?
Peace,
Mark+
PRIEST’S MESSAGE – SUNDAY august 4, 2024
This last Sunday, we heard the first verses of what is called the Bread of Life Discourse. Jesus says, “I am the bread of life.” But we know Jesus isn’t describing physical nourishment. He’s speaking about a spiritual sustenance that goes to the very core of our being. Clarifying further, he says that we receive this spiritual sustenance when believe in him; that is, when we align ourselves with him, commit ourselves to him, and allow our lives to be shaped by his life. Belief is our work.
This bread costs something. It requires us to set aside our selfishness and be retrained according to God’s values as embodied in Jesus. It means living our lives through and for him. Lives of compassion, mercy, humility, and service: in short, we are to emulate as best we can his life of all-embracing, everyone-encompassing love. It means giving ourselves over to the deep and sometimes painful work of transformation that will make us more like Jesus. And, of course, not just for the sake of making us nicer people; it’s so we can be the ones Jesus sends into the world to carry on the work he came to do and has charged us with continuing.
Jesus is the bread of life because he embodies God’s will for our lives. Jesus provides both the example and the fuel we need allow ourselves to be changed into what God intends each of us to be. Jesus is the bread of life because eternal life is to be found – not just in the hereafter – but in the living the way that Jesus lived.
Question of the Week: When you come to the altar rail on Sunday to receive the sacrament of bread, how do you experience it? Does it sustain you? Does it prompt change? Or something else?
Peace,
Mark+
PRIEST’S MESSAGE – SUNDAY July 28, 2024
In our Gospel lesson from this past Sunday (John 6:1-21), we get two famous miracles. Jesus feeds the 5000 and then walks on water. I have a pretty traditional take on Jesus feeding the five thousand. Jesus asks Philip, “Where are we going to get bread for all of these people?” What kind of response does he get? Human realism. But God isn’t bound by human realism. At the end of human knowledge and expectation is Jesus. God can do a lot with very little.
My take on John’s account of Jesus walking on water is somewhat less orthodox. I think the disciples, worn out from the day’s work or distracted by the work ahead, forgot Jesus. They left him on that mountain where he’d gone to pray. Some people on that boat, Peter among them, looked around at some point and said, “Oh, my God. We forgot Jesus.” And imagine you were a disciple and you had forgotten Jesus and then you looked up and saw him coming through the dark mist and walking on the water? “Terrified” wouldn’t begin to cover it.
Each of these stories has something instructive for us. In our recent discussion of the Congregational Assessment Tool (or CAT), one of the things that really stood out to me was the drive that members of the parish have to understand how the church can have a positive impact on Madison, Morgan County, and the world beyond.
Against this backdrop, our Gospel lessons remind us of a couple of important ideas. One, the story of Jesus feeding the 5000 reminds us that small things matter, too. Sure, the church can and should think about specific initiatives and specific programs. It should contemplate and strive to meet specific needs, particularly of the most vulnerable in our communities. But the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000 thousand reminds us that God can do a whole lot with very little. So, by all means, let’s do the big things while not neglecting the smaller ones.
The other point emerges out of my fanciful reading of John’s Gospel account. Whatever this community undertakes as a means of reaching the broader community, however well-intentioned, it can’t do so by leaving Jesus behind. We don’t do things just because they’re good or kind or compassionate. We do them out of gratitude for the grace shown to us and the love that God has placed within each of us simply because of who we are. Can a person do good in the world without the church? Yes. But Advent is a church and this church has a mission: to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ, by praying and worshipping, proclaiming the Gospel, and promoting justice, peace, and love.” And you can’t do any of that by leaving Jesus behind.
Question of the Week: What small act of love or compassion can you perform today that God can take and magnify to reach more and more people?
Peace,
Mark+
PRIEST’S MESSAGE – SUNDAY July 21, 2024
The appointed Gospel reading for this week skips over a bunch of stuff. In the “missing” 19 verses are the feeding of the 5000 and Jesus walking on water. Those stories come back next week. At first, I wondered why the devisers of our lectionary readings edited them this way. But eventually, I got it. When you read these verses assigned for today, there’s one concept that stands out: Jesus’ compassion. The heart of this lesson is Verse 34: “As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.”
Jesus had compassion for the crowd because they were lost. Modern life isn’t so different. We are all doing our own things, going our own ways, and looking for that perfect green grass that will somehow render life perfect. Jesus’ compassionate response to this aimlessness was to teach. Likewise, we are called to share good news with people we know, to offer healing and redemption to those whose pain arouses compassion in us deep within Jesus invites us to invest in their lives by inviting them into our own, so we can teach them what Jesus taught. When we accept this invitation to discipleship, amazing, miraculous things happen. And the Kingdom of God grows.
Question of the Week: How is the Christian notion of compassion different from pity or empathy?
Faithfully,
Mark+
PRIEST’S MESSAGE – SUNDAY July 14, 2024
This week we heard the story of how John the Baptist came to be beheaded by Herod Antipas. In my experience, most preachers avoid this text because it’s legitimately gruesome. But at least one aspect of the account seems especially instructive for today.
There’s no prior indication that either Herod was especially motivated to commit the evil act with which we associate him. Still, he chose to do so. And why? The text tells us. When Herodias (Salome) asks for John’s head, the text says that Herod “was deeply grieved, yet out of regard for his oaths and for the guests, he did not want to refuse her.” He was afraid of being embarrassed in front of his guests, even if it meant killing a man; a man whom Herod considered holy and righteous. His image in the eyes of his guests, his social companions, was more important than a person’s life.
We need to acknowledge that, as human beings, we have a strong instinct to want to belong. We are social creatures. We find security, physically and psychologically, in our identification with groups of other people. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this trait. It can bind us together in ways that can be extraordinarily positive. But it is also a vulnerability. It can lead us down the wrong path. This very human trait can be manipulated and exploited.
The remedy for this potential weakness is recognizing that our humanity, while “fearfully and wonderfully made” as the psalmist says, is not our primary source of identity. Our primary source of identity is as created beings, made in the image of our Creator. Our identity finds its wellspring in God and the values that God cares about. Those values are expressed most clearly in the teachings and the person of Jesus of Nazareth. As followers of Christ, our choices must be informed principally by how they reflect our grounding in gospel values: love of God and neighbor, justice, peace, respect, humility, and kindness.
Question of the Week: What tools do you use to keep you centered on the gospel message when more worldly influences are swirling all around?
Faithfully,
Mark+
PRIEST’S MESSAGE – SUNDAY July 7, 2024
In our Gospel lesson for this past Sunday, we read about the reaction of people in Jesus’ hometown to his teaching. Instead of being proud of one of their own, the text says, they “took offense at him.” Is this a surprising reaction? I don’t believe so. I think they were offended that “one of their own,” “Mary’s boy,” the boy they had seen running around the synagogue as a child, had the nerve to try and teach them new things; radical things like you should love your neighbor as yourself (which really wasn’t new). In effect, they were asking him, “Who do you think you are?”
I wonder how many of us have had similar experiences. Repeated and compelling encounters with the risen Christ will change not just our ideas, but who we are. Some of you will be confronted by people who are not ready for the “new you.” For example, when you point out that Jesus said things like, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.” That’s not an especially popular idea right now. You may be challenged to account for this change in you and commanded to put down the tools you have acquired in favor of community or familial harmony.
Don’t do it. We are instructed to carry out our responsibilities with a confidence that originates directly from God. We must not flinch from utilizing the tools we have acquired to tell others about the transformational power of God’s love for individuals, our communities, and our world. And, even more importantly, through our open and unabashed use of them, we should encourage others to pick up those tools and use them for themselves. That is how we grow the kingdom.
Question of the Week: How do you respond when the change that your encounters with Christ have made in you brings you into conflict with the ideas in the world around you?
Faithfully,
Mark+
PRIEST’S MESSAGE – SUNDAY JUNE 30, 2024
On Sunday, we heard the story of the healing of Jairus’ daughter. Recall that Jairus sent word to Jesus to come while his daughter was still alive. However, by the time Jesus had arrived, the girl had died. When Jesus commented that she was not dead, only asleep, the people around laughed at him. If Jesus had listened to the naysayers, no one would have witnessed the miracle of Jairus’ daughter being restored to life. But he didn’t and they did.
One of the things this passage causes me to think about is the influence of naysayers. Our world is full of naysayers. You don’t have to go far to find people who will tell you what you’re doing isn’t worth doing and is probably doomed to failure anyway. But by focusing only on the negative, they block out any possibility of something different and better – even miraculous – happening.
When we open ourselves up to the presence and the action of God, we learn that there is more going on than meets the eye. We learn that what Jesus says about a situation may be a lot truer than what a naysaying crowd does or what conventional wisdom does. And if we start listening to what Jesus says, we’ll start wanting to go where Jesus goes and share in what Jesus does, and at that point, we will find ourselves in the resurrection business.
Question of the Week: Can you think of a time when naysayers tried to hold you back from something you knew you were called to do? If so, how did you respond?
Faithfully,
Mark+
PRIEST’S MESSAGE – SUNDAY JUNE 23, 2024
We all have storms in our lives, those things that batter and throw us around. And they can cause us to lose sight of the target. Just like the disciples, when those storms rage, instead of talking to God, we try to find our own solutions. I am not sure why, but instead of remembering everything we have learned about Jesus and proclaimed about God, we tend to turn to ourselves or those around us. We search for help in any number of ways instead of starting with the one who is already there.
But, friends, remember this: Jesus does not promise us that if we follow him our lives will be smooth sailing. Jesus promises that he will be with us to the end. Remember that Jesus is close by. We will endure storms. We will face difficulties in our lives. But we must remember that Jesus walks beside us. Just like the disciples, Jesus is in the boat with us. Jesus suffers through the storms with us. And Jesus assures us that God will always be present. Even when it feels like the boat is about to tip over, eventually the calm will come.
Question of the Week: Can you remember a time in which God helped calm a storm that was raging in your life?
Faithfully,
Mark+
PRIEST’S MESSAGE – SUNDAY JUNE 16, 2024
In our Gospel lesson from this past week, Jesus uses two parables to teach us about the nature of the kingdom of God. The first is a lesson about how the kingdom of God grows. And I think this is one of the most startling statements in all of Scripture: Jesus says that just as the earth produces of itself, automatically, so it is with God’s kingdom. If someone cares enough to plant the seed of the kingdom, that’s enough. Just put the kingdom out there in the world, Jesus says, even into this seriously messed up one we’re living in and it will come up a perfect kingdom all by itself…first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain.”
The second lesson suggests that, while our efforts to sow the seed of God’s kingdom may not always seem significant, the parable of the mustard seed promises that the smallest effort, the least kindness, perhaps a single invitation, or one word of mercy, or a solitary moment of grace can grow into something magnificent and wonderful. And, says Jesus, as the seed grows, the resulting mustard shrub “puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”
Question of the Week: What small seeds are you planting that God can use to change the world around you to accomplish God’s purposes?
Faithfully,
Mark+
Priest’s message – Sunday June 9, 2024
We can look at all of the wonderful and miraculous things that Jesus did in these first few chapters of Mark and say, “Well, isn’t that wonderful?” But that is absolutely not what the people in Jesus’ time thought. They thought Jesus was crazy. The people said, “He is gone out of mind.” And his mama and other family members came to get him. To restrain him if you can believe it.
Within this context, when I say “crazy,” I mean I don’t mean a mental health challenge. I mean when people say things we don’t like or they make us uncomfortable or they challenge long-held views or our notions of reality. In that sense, we might say, “Oh, those people are crazy.”
In a world consumed with violence, hate, and division – our gospel proclamation of love, especially loving those most different from us, is going to make some people say, just like those same people would have said about Jesus, “You know what: those Episcopalians aren’t playing with a full deck. Look who they socialize with. Look who that crowd from Advent invites to their church. They will want us to take our message of unconditional love and just go away. They’re crazy.”
Paul reminds us in First Corinthians, that the “wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.” So, you know, maybe we are crazy by human standards. Crazy because we believe that all people are beloved children of God – male or female, young or old, rich or poor, gay, straight, or transgendered, republican, democrat, or independent, conservative or liberal, immigrant or native-born. Crazy because we believe that the lonely, the hungry, the sick, the imprisoned, the oppressed, the poor, the addicted, and the depressed, are Christ himself, and we will see them, touch them, and love them. Crazy because we believe the love of Jesus Christ compels us to love one another, especially the people we don’t like.
If that’s what crazy looks like, then count me in. I want to be crazy like Jesus.
Question of the Week: What crazy thing are you willing to do this week to further the gospel?
Faithfully,
Mark+
Priest’s message – Sunday June 2, 2024
The Sabbath was in focus during our Gospel reading this past Sunday. Obviously, in Jesus’ time, sabbath regulations were a serious business. But Jesus also makes it very clear that “The sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the sabbath.”
I think one of our takeaways is that while tradition has its place, there are times when tradition must give way to compassion and meeting the needs of others. Tradition is useful if it helps us shape our ministry in a way that reflects God’s love. Tradition ceases to be useful when we serve tradition in and of itself rather than acting out of love towards others.
Another takeaway is that the sabbath is useful for Christians, too. God did not design us to spend our entire lives in economic activity. He gave us bodies that need a cycle of work and rest. Also, a day of rest is not necessarily a day to do nothing. We live busy lives and our weekdays are often frantic; we don’t often have time to do the good deeds we’d like to do – visiting a lonely relative, helping out a neighbor who needs some yard work done, visiting sick people in the hospital, and so on. These are all good ways of keeping a holy sabbath.
Question of the Week: How are you keeping a holy sabbath week-to-week?
Faithfully,
Mark+
Priest’s message – Sunday May 26, 2024
In my experience, the doctrine of the Trinity is hard for many of us to get our minds around. And many of us, I would suspect, allow our discomfort with the doctrine to lie quite undisturbed in the corners of our minds. But, when we do that, I think we miss an opportunity to appreciate something profound about the Trinity and us as human beings.
As Christians we believe that God is three-in-one, God’s nature is relationship. That implies that, being created in God’s image, we are created for relationships, too. The creativity and love that God experiences in the dance of the Trinity extends out into all of creation, and us. Paul talks about “adoption,” the process by which we become part of God’s “family.” Again, it’s about relationship.
The Trinity is a mystery that I cannot solve for us. I can only tell you that I find consolation, hope, and strength in knowing that God’s love draws me toward God’s self, and in the love of God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, I can rest as God’s beloved adopted child. My prayer is that you can experience that love and consolation as well.
Question of the Week: How does an understanding of the Holy Spirit as relationship change, if at all, your notions of what it means to be in relationship with others?
Faithfully,
Mark+
Priest’s message – Sunday May 19, 2024
On Pentecost Sunday, we heard about the Holy Spirit descending like tongues of fire onto the gathered disciples. They were filled with the Holy Spirit and began speaking in tongues.
While some of us might not relate to that particular experience of the Spirit, we should remember what Jesus says elsewhere in John to Nicodemus: In Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, he says, “The Spirit, or wind, blows where it chooses.”
Christians, whatever their affiliation, are spirit-filled people, whether we act like it or not, whether we feel it or not. The Holy Spirit blows to and fro in our lives, leading us in new directions. It is not subject to human manipulation; it is not subject to our desires and the limits we place on it.
And it’s not just a warm fuzzy feeling or an emotional high we get in worship. The Holy Spirit is more than that. It is more than us. And because of that it can be scary. It can loosen us from our safe moorings. But as Jesus tells his disciples in John, the Spirit is our Guide and Comforter, it is leading us forward into the future, into the truth.
Question of the Week: Where can you feel the Holy Spirit moving in your life today?
Faithfully,
Mark+
Priest’s message – Sunday May 12, 2024
In our Gospel reading this past Sunday, Jesus prayed for his disciples. It’s a long prayer and he touched on a few important themes. First, Jesus clarified that the core of the disciples’ identity was their belief that Jesus had come from God.
Jesus also clarified that, though the disciples were not products of the world, they were most assuredly in the world. He prayed to God the Father: “I am not asking you to take them out of the world….” Disciples must be in the world to serve as examples of a better way to live.
Finally, Jesus prays for the disciples to be one. “Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.” In these last moments before he is arrested, tried, executed, and resurrected, Jesus is praying for unity among the disciples, not for agreement on every subject, but for unity found in identity in Christ and forged in mutual respect, integrity, and an unwavering commitment to the Gospel message.
Question for the Week: How do you understand your identity in Christ to be linked with the necessity of unity in the Body of Christ?
Faithfully,
Mark+
Priest’s message – Sunday May 5, 2024
“You did not choose me,” Jesus said to his disciples in Sunday’s gospel reading, “but I chose you.” In doing so, he continued a long tradition of God choosing unlikely people for even more unlikely tasks: Joseph, Moses, Mary, Peter, and the countless others than we hear about in Scripture.
And, as his contemporary disciples, Jesus has chosen us, too. But chosen for what? It seems indisputable to me that the church is needed now more than ever to bring love, compassion, and hope to a world in which they are severely lacking. The question is how?
So the questions I would encourage us all to consider this week are:
“I know that Jesus has chosen me. But what has he chosen me for? How can I take the love of God that flows through me and apply it to the world in a way that impacts others for the better?”
Faithfully,
Mark+