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Sermon
Synopses - March 2007
Sermons
at Trinity are usually ex tempore, that is done without
notes...Please enjoy our "Sermon Synopses" or
short summaries of sermons preached at Trinity.
Link
to Sermons Synopses for
additional summaries available from this year.
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March 28, 2007, Wednesday
in the Fifth Week of Lent
Text: John 8:31 – “If
you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples.”
What
does it mean to be a disciple? Throughout his
gospel, John gives several answers: “Come and
see” and follow Jesus; “believe;” “abide;” “Feed
my sheep;” recognize Jesus’ the Good Shepherd’s
voice; “Keep my commandments;” “Love
one another.” In today’s Gospel reading,
John lists yet another characteristic of a true disciple: “continue
in my word.”
The Ash Wednesday liturgy,
which sets forth our mandate for Lent, urges us to “self-examination
and repentance; prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and reading
and meditating on God’s holy Word.” We
can continue in Jesus’ word this Lenten season by “reading
and meditating on God’s holy Word.”
Todd gave
three suggestions for reading and meditating on God’s
Word for newcomers to meditation:
- Choose an accessible passage
such as from the Gospel of Mark, or maybe a short, cheery
epistle like Philippians. (Todd recommends against beginning
with books like Chronicles or Numbers.)
- Schedule a regular
time and stick to it. Prayer
takes time, and is unlikely to happen unless we set aside
time for it. Set aside a realistic amount. (Fifteen – even
ten – minutes per day for starters.)
- Begin your
time with prayer, asking God to make a place in you for
the word (See John 8:37).
These steps will open up a
place in us for God’s word,
which can become in us like a well or a fountain, quenching
our thirst.
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Wednesday, March
21, 2007, Thomas Ken, 1711
Text: Philippians 4:6 “Do
not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and
supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made
known to God.”
Todd read a brief bio of Ken
from Lesser
Feasts and Fasts. Highlights: As a leading
prelate during the reigns of Charles the Second and James
the Second, he publicly criticized the Prince of Orange
for his treatment of his wife, and he refused to allow
Charles’ mistress,
Nell Gwynn, lodging in his home. Bold actions! Ken
is described as a man of principle and integrity, even
going to the tower at one point for refusing toread one
of the King’s proclamations.
To some it might
appear that Thomas Ken was a reckless man. What
led Ken to his actions? Pointing
to the text from Philippians, Todd said that Ken’s
strength for his bold actions in speaking truth to kings
and rulers came from his being a person of prayer. Ken
did not “worry about anything,” was not afraid
of anything, but persevered in prayer – “in
everything by prayer and supplication” making his
requests known to God. That Ken’s two hymns
in our hymnal are a morning hymn (“Awake, my soul,
and with the sun…” Hymnal 1982 #11)
and an evening hymn (“All praise to thee, my God,
this night…” #43) suggest that Ken was
a person who prayed in the morning and in the evening;
his day was surrounded by prayer.
If we would be free from
worry and fear, we, like Ken, are to pray. Praying
is at once extremely easy – we
were made to pray – and extraordinarily difficult. How
we so easily set prayer aside at the least provocation! Todd
said that “we are to learn that prayer has a much
larger place in our lives than we have yet discovered,” and
that “if we persevere in prayer, no matter what besets
us, we can be sure that we are where God would have us
be.” He urged us to please keep praying, for
our sake and for the sake of the whole parish and wider
community.
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The Fourth Sunday of Lent,
March 18, 2007
Text: Luke 15:11-32 (The Parable of the Prodigal
Son)
Todd began by telling a
story about spring in Minnesota: the
sure sign of spring was the smell of the earth, earth frozen
for months would gradually ease and thaw, and the smell
of thawed soil filled the air. It was a smell of
fecundity, possibility and new life. The only time
Todd smells the smell of exposed moist soil here on the
densely-populated East Coast is in cemeteries at burials.
The
Prodigal Son is a story of thawing out. A son
leaves a generous and loving father, goes into “winter” in
a faraway country – frozen and insensitive to his
father’s great love for him – and only comes
to himself (thaws) while in the fields, feeding pigs. Imagine
the smell! The soil that surrounded him was about
to become his grave, he realized, but instead it became
a place of fecundity and new life, leading him to realize
his need for his father and causing him to go home.
We are
all the prodigal. We have all been created
for life in God, but we have all wandered away at least
in part, “frozen” and insensitive to God’s
great love for us. It is when we “smell the
soil” – when we like the Prodigal become hungry,
when we remember our mortality (“Remember that you
are dust, and to dust you shall return”) when we
remember that we need God – that we come to the
possibility for new life.
Willa Cather once wrote that “Home is the place
where you have failed, and where people yet accept you” (more
or less, from Lucy Gayheart?). Lent is a time
to come home. In Lent we “remember that we
are dust, and to dust we shall return,” as we heard
on Ash Wednesday. Lent is a time to soften and ease
into being human, to accept that we are not God and that
we need God. Lent is a time to come home to a loving
Father, who welcomes us with open arms and showers us with
kisses.
Sidebar: Beware the elder brother! As in dreams
where we are every person in our dreams, so in scripture
might we be each of the characters. We are all the
Prodigal; we are also all the “older brother” who
wants this world to be fair, who wants to have a modicum
of control over the Father’s response to us. Not
so! God is in charge, and will love us as much as
God wants to love us (which is a lot).
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Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Texts: Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 5-9 and Psalm 78:1-6
Today’s
texts speak of handing things on to subsequent generations. Today
Todd will hand on something of what he has learned from
those who have gone before him.
Todd began by telling the
story of the “demon lady,” a
homeless woman who used to frequent the monastery where
he was a brother and who did little exorcisms around the
perimeter of the property and in the chapel. “There
are demons in here!” she would yell. Todd used
to think it odd that she did this, until one day one of
the older brothers said, “She’s right, you
know.”
Walter Wink, a New Testament
scholar somewhere in the American South, wrote a series
of books called “Naming
the Powers,” in which he contends that in their concept
of “demons” the ancients had a quick, concise
vocabulary to describe a very complex reality that still
beguiles us and for which we rational, scientific people
have lost a way of naming. “Spirits” inhabited
people, families, institutions and countries and could
be good or evil. They still do, argues Wink.
Todd
tells of a wise bishop who once warned a group of clergy
that the “demons” always come out in
Holy Week. The closer we get to God, the harder the
demons work to keep us away from God, and Easter is the
heart of the church year when demons are most likely to
be working overtime. We don’t know how the
demons will manifest themselves, but Todd warned us that
it is likely that they will. They are especially
likely to be active among us, the Wednesday night crowd,
who come to church not only on Sundays, but on Wednesdays,
too!
What can we do? Persevere in our disciplines of
prayer, fasting, almsgiving, works of mercy and reading
the scriptures. Demons detest all these disciplines,
and the more we are faithful in doing them, the less the “demons” can
do to lure us away from God.
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The Fourth
Sunday of Lent, March 11, 2007
Text: Exodus 3:1-15, (Moses at the burning bush)
Todd
told the stories of crossing guards in Newton, how they
know his children’s and all their friends’ names,
how they stop traffic, tell the kids “safe to cross,” shepherd
them across and send them on their journey to school. The
death of a crossing guard last year was mourned by the
whole school; kids talked about it for weeks. Crossing
guards make quite an impression in children’s lives! Though
adults may have become desensitized to it, children yet
grasp the magnitude of what it means to cross over: to
hear someone calling out our name; to leave a place that
is known and familiar; to step into a place of fluidity,
movement, transport and danger – a place that has
the power to alter our life irrevocably; then to arrive
safely at the other side and continue on the journey. Children
appreciate the significance of “crossing over.”
The
texts we have been hearing from the Hebrew scriptures in
the past weeks are texts about “crossing over:” Moses “crossing
over” to the place where God was on Mt. Sinai, then “crossing
over” to climb back down to the people (Exodus 34);
Abram “crossing over” from a place of disbelief
about God’s promise of many descendants – “I
continue childless, and the heir of my house in Eliazar
of Damascus” (Genesis 15) – to a place of believing
God’s promise; and this morning’s reading is
part of the story of Israel’s great “crossing
over,” of Moses going to Pharaoh to bring the Israelites
out of Egypt and into the promised land.
Todd is struck
by two things about these texts: 1) There
is always an element of fear in “crossing over” – the
Israelites afraid to come near Moses after he descended
the mountain, Abram experiencing a “deep and terrifying
darkness;” Moses’ repartee with God about
going into Egypt (“Who am I to go to Pharaoh and
bring Israel out of Egypt?”) And, 2) God always
gives assurance that God will go with us: e.g., “Do
not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield.”
We the baptized are people
who have “crossed over” and
who are committed to continually “crossing over.” We
have left the edge of familiarity and safety living as
people of the world; we have taken the plunge and entered
the dangerous waters of Baptism and the Church that have
the power to alter our lives; and we have made our way
to the other side where we are called to live “crossed
over” lives. Like the crossing over stories
of the Hebrew scriptures, our crossing over may be frightening
to us: it is scary to leave the safe and familiar,
to enter into a world of power that can alter our lives,
and then to live as people of God in a culture shorn of
God. God assures us that he will go with us.
Todd
issued an invitation to all unbaptized present to be baptized. “God knows your name, and is calling
out to you, to take the plunge, to cross over to the other
side and live changed lives.” Trinity is currently
undergoing a discernment process to discern how we can
help candidates be prepared for Baptism and how we can
accompany them on their journey.
Lent is a time of “crossing over,” when we
are called to persevere in our disciplines in order that
we might be available to hearing God’s call to us
to “cross over” and to live more fully as disciples
of Christ. Even if you have not taken up a Lenten
discipline, it is not too late! Recall the parable
of the workers in the vineyard, who started working at
different times during the day but were all paid the same
wage at the end of the day. No matter if you start
a discipline of prayer or fasting today, three weeks into
Lent, or if you began on Ash Wednesday. Your reward
will be great.
Christ, our crossing guard,
knows all our names, is calling to us to “cross over” and live “crossed
over” lives. Take courage, leave the curb,
and follow.
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Wedneday,
March 7, 2007
Perpetua and her
Companions, Martyrs at Carthage, 202
The account of Perpetua’s
martyrdom is quite gripping: a
22 year-old mother of an infant, friends and her aged father
entreating her to renounce her faith, Perpetua and her
companions mauled by savage beasts in a coliseum, an inept
soldier missing his mark as he tried to stab her in the
throat to finish her off, Perpetua helping to guide the
blade to the appropriate place at her neck.
As we hear this
story, we imagine what we ourselves would do, were we in
Perpetua’s place. Would we renounce
our faith? What would it be like to be in a coliseum
with beasts? What would it be like to be killed
by a sword through the neck?
It is intentional on the Church’s
part to tell us the stories of the saints. The Church’s
stories of the saints leads us to imagine what it would
be like to live lives such as theirs. And, as we
imagine the saints’ lives, to perhaps live such
lives ourselves. To
wit, consider the following story told by Augustine of
his conversion:
In his Confessions,
Augustine describes his own encounter as a tentative catechumen
(newcomer to the faith) with Simplicianus, an elderly priest
in Milan. In
the course of Augustine’s interview with Simplicianus,
Simlicianus grabbed onto Augustine’s reference to
a treatise of Victorinus, a well-known rhetorician. Simplicianus
told Augustine that he had personally known Victorinus,
and told him about Victorinus’ gradual conversion
to Christianity. Augustine, still trying to decide
whether or not to be baptized, mulled over Simplicianus’ story
of Victorinus’ decision to be baptized. Eventually,
Augustine decided to be baptized, too: “I began
to glow with fervor to imitate him; this, of course, was
why Simplicianus had told it to me.”
The Church tells
and retells the stories of the saints in order that we
might imagine ourselves as being capable of living great
lives as they did. Could you do what Perpetua
did? And what can our community of Trinity do to help
form saints such as Perpetua?
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