Posted by Webmaster on July 26, 2009 under Sermons | 
[This sermon was written and delivered on July 26, 2009, by Preacher Alex Wilson.]
There’s a couple who has been married for over 60 years. For the past few years, they have suffered together through a humiliating disease that has robbed them of their vitality: she has now forgotten who her husband is. The pain is overwhelming for him, how can he allow himself to grieve a life lived, but be so present to the rest of his family?
There’s a couple about to bring their child to baptism. Suddenly, the intensity of the commitments being made on their child’s behalf becomes overwhelming and they are unsure if they can live up to what the world expects of them. How can they be present for their child as it grows and matures in Christ?
There is a man waiting in his doctor’s office. He has had some mixed medical results and is awaiting the final answer. Within moments, he hears what he dreads: “You’re HIV positive.” How can he be emotionally available to the life ahead of him while living a stigmatized existence full of life-prolonging drugs and pain?
The one thing that unites all of us to these situations is self-revelation. We are all connected to one another and in this connection, the darkness we feel in these moments is overwhelming. For Mary this morning, the violence of the world has just been sent out and realized on Jesus. Now the Saviour of the world is lying cold, and bruised in the darkness of his earthen tomb. The light is gone, the apostles are scattered, scared, and Mary is left wondering- how do I live into this moment and grieve a love that has been taken from me? This wasn’t supposed to end this way! Mary’s witness calls us to ask, “In the chaos of a post crucifixion world, how do we recognize the sacred among us?”
As Christians, we believe that through baptism there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God found in Christ Jesus – not even death. However, even in the face of separation, that statement can be easier said than lived: in the final moments of the rite of Christian burial as we commend our brother or sister to the loving arms of our maker – known as the commendation – in that moment, we are struck with the reminder of just how final this moment is for our eyes: the souls of our loved ones are gone – resting within God’s loving bosom until the coming of Christ.
However, the story does not end there.
As humans, we are pathologically set up for connection, set up to be close to the things that mean the most to us. Even in death, we still need to be close to those we love- even if it’s just a plot of grass, an urn of ashes, or the cold stone of their tomb. Mary, knowing no other way to console her loss, comes back to the tomb to be close to her love, her savior, to find some closure to all the violence. Instead of finding a tranquil place to grieve her loss in the darkness of that early morning, Mary finds an empty tomb reminiscent of her longing soul as it looked down at the discarded wrappings where she had just witnessed Christ’s body laid after his death.
Such a loss or dejected feeling as experienced by Mary is not something new for many of us in the church today. All too often, we can empathize with Mary in her grief at the loss of a great love, the still point in her life.
Working within the maze we understand, as the polity of the Anglican Communion can be a cautious experience of balancing equilibriums. Yet time and again, we are reminded just how connected we remain in our divergence. Through the Apostles creed, we are linked to the church universal, connecting our worship to the host of humanity, yesterday, today, and yet to come. However, no matter where in the Anglican world we find ourselves, I often feel like we say the same words – but hear it differently. In this place, we know and affirm the love of God as it permeates all things, male, or female, and everything in between. We openly recognize the legitimacy of the ordination and consecration of female priests and bishops, but even that came with many years of discussion and some pain. This understanding of our mutual way of life within the Anglican Church in Canada is a non negotiable: this is who we are, but that does not apply worldwide. We only need to go south of the border to find a few dioceses that still refuse to ordain women, or recognize the sacred and God-given love held between two men, or two women. The polarization of the communion becomes more and more apparent as those who disagree with our expression of Anglicanism choose to assert their at-times violent and hurtful self-proclaimed orthodox visions of faith to a world confused by the existence of two interconnected voices.
This must have been what it felt like to be the disciples after Christ’s death: polarized, scared, unsure, treading into a world that had at times chosen to forget the importance and centrality of our witness. Like Mary, we try and go back to the origins of our faith – to get as close as possible to Christ in the darkened tomb. We appeal to the instruments of communion, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Primates council, covenant-working groups, dioceses and listening groups, and yet, everytime we come to the empty tomb and always hear the same question “ Woman, why do you weep?”
We stand in the shadow of that great stone tomb, thinking, wishing, and hoping the worst is over – but we know it isn’t. The world around us is a place that has chosen to grow weary of our message and our place in an ordered society. We live in one of the larger thriving urban cities in North America, known the world over as a destination city for not only beauty and personal wealth, but also stability of lifestyle. However, with every successive Canadian census more and more of our neighbors are identifying themselves religiously as “other” or “none.”
When I admit my connection to a faith community, many people I meet don’t know how to react- some take disbelief, some astonishment, some joking curiosity, and still some hostility. Throw in human sexuality and it just gets messier. However, no matter the perspective people take in reaction to our commitments to this community of faith and the Anglican expression of Christianity given to us by baptism, one thing unites them all: connection through revelation. The world is dying to know what we do, how we do it, and how they can be involved. Sexuality, internal polity, mud slinging and law suits over who has the right to minister to whom and where mean nothing to the world outside these walls. Covenants, press releases and statements of conflicting Lambeth-style conferences on the true orthodox Anglican faith mean little to the everyday lives of those who walk past our buildings or come to visit us for the first time.
What does matter is connection, and witness. Connection by which we identify ourselves with those we serve and minister to, witnessing to the majesty of the sacred within them. What the world needs to hear, as Mary did in the darkness of that tomb is the voice of hope: “Woman, why do you weep?” And not the voice of panic and anxiety: “They have taken away my lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.”
The world hungers for the sacred face of the Christ within each of us to become more prominent, yearns to see and touch the divine presence among us. However, as a church, we choose to lament the empty tomb, instead of the voice of our beloved speaking plainly to us just in front of our faces. Like Mary, we are asked to give something we feel is beyond our abilities, beyond our reach – we are asked to give ourselves over to an animated God who demands we not hold on to him, but enter actively into the divine love dance of the cosmos.
This morning, we are reminded of the generations who have been wrestling with the same quandary: how can we not hold on to stability and comfort, especially when we just found it again.
Like anyone, I love to reminisce about the “good old days,” but why do we? There really never was the-good-old-days to begin with. As the years go on, slowly the memories of yesterday begin to be rewritten by our subconscious mind. The same seems to apply to the church at times. When things move in a new direction, a new prayer book, inclusive theology or fresh ideas on ministry, we often run screaming back to the good old days of church and empire where things were perfect and all humanity worked in harmony and concord. Yet nothing could be farther from the truth. Peoples, lands and communities were enslaved, deported, tested on or demonized in the name of or with the blessing (either verbal or silent) of the church. The most precious commodity of this world – our children – were put in the care of a few within our church and for many the abuse is something we will never understand, their heritage and identities stripped from them because they simply didn’t fit our norms. The good old days indeed!
One thing that becomes more apparent for me about the witness of Mary Magdalene is how little will ever be the same. That Easter morning encounter ensures, demands that nothing will ever be the same. No matter how hard either the disciples or Mary try, there is no turning back: Christ has been taken from us, but is not out of sight. Our life, our relational existence with the world around us has changed forever through the death and resurrection of Christ. In them, we find life in the depths of pain; in that Easter morning, we find Christ all around us, so plain to us that we almost can’t accept it. In Mary’s encounter with the risen lord, we are reminded of just how connected we are, of just how present the sacred is around us, and yet how we are unable at times to recognize it.
This wasn’t supposed to end like this. The God of Abraham and Sarah, the god of Jonathan and David, Miriam and Phoebe would never die. God’s majesty is far deeper, broader, holds more possibility than what any person or empire could kill. But this morning, we have Mary weeping for her beloved.
What Mary’s witness relates to us today is this: how we relate to those around us shows us how we acknowledge the sacred within them. We are at the fundamental cores of our bodies the same. Each of us is made up of flesh, bone, hair, skin cells and pigments, blood, breath and memory. And yet, even when we look so deeply into the reflection of ourselves in those we meet, we often forget the sacred nature of those whom we are looking at. I often wonder why is it that we choose to treat the Asian sales person with contempt, because they struggle with our common language? Why is it that we feel only a certain subset of the population is appropriate for janitorial work, when they arrive in this country as educated as our own professionals? Why is it we will walk over a homeless person making a scene, wishing someone would do something to take care of the problem? Or why we feel that the relative comfort of our lives here in Canada means that we don’t need and should not be directly involved in the humanitarian crises in places like Darfur, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and the list goes on.
Mary’s witness to us today reminds us that the God of Abraham and Sarah, the god of Jonathan and David, Miriam and Phoebe, of yesterday, today and tomorrow is not dead and never will be. The true witness of Mary that Easter morning was to the power of a living and triumphant God, a God who resides in our midst and at every corner.
Here in this place, we are reminded everyday of just how divergent we are as a family. This is the single greatest truth for me in community: All are welcome here, whoever we are and wherever we find ourselves on our journey. This speaks for us directly to our interconnected voices. None of us would be here without the other. None of us can do this alone; our faith demands the recognition of the sacred in the other, and in ourselves to unite and knit the tapestry we call a church together.
The power of Mary’s witness is as a reminder to us that the resurrection of Christ is as present to us as our own breath, our own thoughts and steps in the world; is as present as the mystery that is our sacred identity. It is within this divine mystery that Christ chooses to make himself known to us, not as the finality of death, but as joy, light and hope. For us this morning, we are challenged to go out into the world and recognize the Christ in the other – even when we can’t bring ourselves to see it. The world outside our doors is begging to hear the words Mary first proclaimed to the apostles
“I have seen the lord!” And I would add, he is here in the faces among us!
ALLELUIA!
ALLELUIA!
ALLELUIA!
Amen!
Posted by stpauls on under Bible Readings, Webmaster Blog |
John 20.1-3, 11-18 ~ Gospel reading for July 26, 2009
Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.”
Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went towards the tomb. Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.”
When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?”
Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.”
Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher).
Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, `I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”
Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her.
Posted by stpauls on under Bible Readings, Staff Blog |
“Mary of Magdala near Capernaum was one of several women who followed Jesus and ministered to him in Galilee. The Gospel according to Luke records that Jesus “went on through cities and villages, preaching and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. And the Twelve were with him, and also some women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out. . .” (Luke 8:1-2). The Gospels tell us that Mary was healed by Jesus, followed him, and was one of those who stood near his cross at Calvary.
It is clear that Mary Magdalene’s life was radically changed by Jesus’ healing. Her ministry of service and steadfast companionship, even as a witness to the crucifixion, has, through the centuries, been an example of the faithful ministry of women to Christ. All four Gospels name Mary as one of the women who went to the tomb to mourn and to care for Jesus’ body. Her weeping for the loss of her Lord strikes a common chord with the grief of all others over the death of loved ones. Jesus’ tender response to her grief — meeting her in the garden, revealing himself to her by calling her name — makes her the first witness to the risen Lord. She is given the command, “Go to my brethren and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” (John 20:17). As the first messenger of the resurrection, she tells the disciples, “I have seen the Lord” (John 20:18). In the tradition of the Eastern Church, Mary is regarded as the equal of an apostle; and she is held in veneration as the patron saint of the great cluster of monasteries on Mount Athos.” (from: Lesser Feasts and Fasts, p. 298)
Posted by stpauls on July 22, 2009 under Staff Blog |
“Come and walk with Integrity…”
(cf. Psalm 84:11)
For the Lord God is a sun and shield;
he bestows favour and honour.
No good thing does the Lord withhold
from those who walk uprightly.
Integrity Vancouver (gay and Lesbian Anglicans and their friends) is inviting Anglicans from all around the Lower Mainland to join them in this years PRIDE-celebration: August 2, 2009, 8:00 a.m. special Eucharist at Christ Church Cathedral (Burrard/Georgia) followed by breakfast and participation in the annual PRIDE parade.
To register please call 604-682-3848 or email Vancouver@integritycanada.org. All are welcome. Bring a friend.
Posted by Priest on July 19, 2009 under Sermons |
“So, what do you think?” my colleague Eva asked Lydia. “I liked the story,” Lydia answered. “Especially the hero.” And then there was a pause. And Lydia continued: “It was like a road movie. There is a lot of movement. A lot of going and coming and rushing about.”
This was the first time Lydia had read the Gospel According to Mark. Even though she was an adult, she had never opened a Bible before, nor was she really familiar with its contents. And if you think this is abnormal, think again. Today, more than half of the population of Vancouver professes no faith at all. And the remaining minority is not all Christian either. We live in a world where Christianity is marginal. Many people have no idea what we believe in. And far too often, we are associated with TV-evangelists, which is neither accurate, nor flattering. Even those who might self-identify as Christians very often cannot recite such Christian centre-pieces as the Lord’s Prayer or the Creed. We can no longer assume that those who come to our worship services know what they are getting themselves into. These times have long passed. We really live in a new era.
However, this is no time to despair or get nostalgic about the good old times. Because, first of all, the good old times weren’t so good and nostalgia is not a Gospel-value. Secondly, all our moaning won’t change the situation. It just turns us into sour complainers, which ain’t pretty. Thirdly, I believe this new reality is rather an opportunity: It is a unique opportunity to share our story and to witness to God’s love as revealed in Jesus Christ. Fourthly, entering into something new allows us to get rid of old ballast and refocus on the things that really matter, such as outreach, mission, advocacy, and evangelism. Fifthly, since we have nothing to lose in a society that views us with suspicion or disinterest, we can reclaim our prophetic edge and can boldly witness to justice, peace, the preservation of creation, and a godly life. And finally – and this might be the greatest challenge – we must realize that God works in spite of us and might speak to us through the voices of those who are not members of the church. We must seek God’s voice in those on the outside, those like Lydia, whose fresh encounter with Holy Scripture might renew our interest in our sacred texts or might even give us new insights into the divine truth revealed on the pages of the Bible.
Lydia, of course, is right. There is a lot of coming and going in the Gospel According to Mark. They are all on their way all the time. It all takes place in a hurry. There is no time to be lost. The Gospel According to Mark is a rushed account of the Jesus-event. The story hustles to what Mark considers the main event: the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And there hardly seems to be any time to stop and breathe. It is all rather exhausting.
Just look at today’s gospel text. And I heard this story differently – as if for the first time – thanks to Lydia and to my colleague Eva who shared Lydia’s story and some insights. There is a lot of movement in today’s text. Just look at the text and I quote: “Come away… many were coming and going… they went away… they hurried there on foot… people rushed about that whole region… wherever he went, into villages or cities or farms…” End of quote. Here. There. Everywhere. Are you exhausted yet?
At closer inspection, we can identify two quite distinct groups of people rushing to and fro.
First: The Apostles. They have just returned from their first solo preaching and healing stint. As they come back after an intense mission trip, the Apostles are, as the British would say, knackered. They are spent. So Jesus wants to give them a day off. “Rest a while,” he says. “Rest a while.”
The second group is rather nebulous: “Many.” We don’t really know who they are, just that there were a lot of them. And they are wanting. They form a multitude in need, thinking, believing, hoping that God had come near in this young man named Jesus. They trust that healing will come through him, healing that will bring about peace in body, mind, and soul. So, hurry, that we might not miss him!
I think it is easy for us to identify with either the Apostles or with the “many,” or with both of them. We, too, seem to rush about. There seems to never be enough time in our lives to do all things we want to accomplish. We seem to always be stressed out, in a rush. During my continued education class in Germany a month ago I heard one of my colleagues earnestly say that 70 hours of work a week are normal. What madness! This kind of attitude leads to burn out, which was confirmed by another colleague, who had had a breakdown last year and was out of commission for six months. And not just clergy… We all have stories of work-madness and stressed-out lives: Stories, which also include our supposed time off, like Sundays. Did you know that Sundays have a higher accident rate? We rush to and fro from event to event and wonder why we feel exhausted at the end of the weekend – without having even started the workweek. We are spent even during times we are supposed to enjoy. Being knackered seems to be a constant state of mind these days. No wonder church attendance is low. One more thing to do on Sunday! It just gets too much for too many.
However, this won’t lead us anywhere. It is like a rat race. And most of us yearn for a better way. We yearn for rest, for wholeness, and for a restoration of the beauty that was intended for us by the Creator, but that we have forgotten about. However, we don’t seem to have time to stop, to reconsider, to contemplate, and to prayerfully discern a way out of the rat race. This is why many try to seek quick fixes elsewhere. But are Eckhart Tolle or Oprah or Jimmy Swaggert or Joel Osteen really the solution? Their insights might be a starting point for healing, but can wholeness really come from them? I wonder…
There is a third player in today’s story. Not a group at all, but a single person: Jesus. He is the person in-between, neither part of “many” nor an Apostle. He is the one who sent out the apostles. And he is the one the “many” seek. His motivation, however, is not accomplishment, is not success, is not selfishness. His motivation is compassion for others. This is a slap in the face of all who preach the gospel of success or a gospel of self-fulfilment. In Jesus, God’s compassion for all of us is revealed. In Jesus, the Apostles find rest and the “many” find wholeness and healing – and we with them.
Rest and quietness are indeed part of God’s plan. The Sabbath wasn’t created to put yet another restriction, another stress factor on our lives. The Sabbath was created for our benefit: to give us time off for respite of soul and mind and body. Sabbath-rest allows us to let go, to find strength, and to seek God’s restorative power in God’s still, small, and unrushed voice. If God needed rest after six days of creation, why do we believe we can exist without rest, without play, and without seeking solace in the Divine? Wholeness can only be found when we balance work and play and rest and also prayer. That some groups have turned the Sabbath-rest into yet another demanding task is another story and not part of this equation.
Equally, in Jesus the multitudes find healing. But it is not just about an individualistic approach to personal wellness. In returning many to wholeness, Jesus returns them also to their rightful place in the community. There is a communal aspect to divine healing. Or as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that great 20th century prophet and martyr once put it: “We become disciples all on our own, but we do not remain alone.” Jesus not only repairs our broken connection with God, but also our broken connection with one another. Only both connections together can bring about wholeness in our selves, and only in nurturing both connections do we remain whole.
Yes, Church can be messy. The liturgy can be boring. The sermon can be too long. People can be annoying. Priests do things that are disagreeable. The decisions of synods are heart-breaking. And choirs might sing off key. And it happens. It happens even here at St. Paul’s Anglican Church.
But salvation does not exist in a vacuum, void of a connection with one another. It is in the close and personal interaction both with Jesus and with the other (even with those who annoy the heck out of us), it is in all these connections that we grow and find our true God-intended identity. And it is in Jesus’ compassion and love that we find rest, rest which restores us in mind and soul and body.
Posted by Webmaster on under Bible Readings, Webmaster Blog |
Mark 6:30-34, 53-56 ~ Gospel reading for July 19, 2009
The apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught. He said to them, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.” For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. And they went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves.
Now many saw them going and recognized them, and they hurried there on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them. 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. When they had crossed over, they came to land at Gennesaret and moored the boat. When they got out of the boat, people at once recognized him, and rushed about that whole region and began to bring the sick on mats to wherever they heard he was. And wherever he went, into villages or cities or farms, they laid the sick in the marketplaces, and begged him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak; and all who touched it were healed.
Posted by Priest on July 12, 2009 under Sermons |
[Markus started the sermon by pouring water into basin.]
If you are a regular at our 10:00 a.m. services on the first Sunday of the month, you probably are now frantically searching in your purse for a raincoat or an umbrella, because you think it’s yet another renewal of the baptismal vows and I am just about to ruin your beautiful hair-do, which is so unfair, right? After all, I don’t have much hair to ruin! But you can breathe again, I am not going to asperge, i.e. sprinkle you with water today. Well, unless you make rude remarks about the length of my sermon.
Yes, I do like water.
I like water, because we baptize with it. I like water, because when I pour water over somebody in baptism in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit (and you know I do pour!!!), then God uses this very water to forge a special, deep, and lasting bond between God and the baptised, a bond not even the gates of hell can overcome. When we renew our baptismal vows and sprinkle baptismal water on each other, we remind ourselves of what it means to be Christians, what it means to have died with Christ, and to have risen with him to new and eternal life. The waters of baptism seal our baptismal covenant, which is the foundation of our faith and the manual for being a Christian, and it is the only covenant we need!
I like water also, because it is quite mysterious: Water is nurturing, but water can be quite frightening too. Without water there would be no life. But too much water can destroy life. We need water for our existence, yet, despite its importance we treat it with disdain. There is playfulness in water, as you well know. Yet, there is also a strength in water that is beyond our understanding. Water is powerful… and not just large amounts of water! Even the tiniest drops of water can – over time – shape stones, carve valleys, flatten mountains, and break through the hardest and strongest barriers. As soft as it might feel on our hands, don’t be fooled! Water is powerful, is mighty, and deserves our respect.
In all this, I believe water is not unlike love. Water is mysterious and it is powerful. So is love. Water can sweep you off your feet. So can love. Water nurtures. So does love. And we cannot live either without water or without love. In fact, we wither away like a dried-up shrub if we do not experience love. And just like water can show us the limitations of our abilities and can even destroy life as we perceive it, so perfect love, God’s love, reveals our limitations and sweeps away the pseudo-life that we so carefully erect to hide our true God-given identity.
Equally, even the smallest drop of love applied over and over again can grind down hearts of stone, can carve valleys into hardened faces, can flatten the mountains in our lives, and can break through the hardest and strongest barriers around our hearts and soul, which we raise to keep out God and one another.
There is something disarming in love. Or better, love disarms us. Nothing we have accomplished or that we failed to accomplish, nothing that has scared us or that frightens us, nothing that has marked us as members of a class, an ethnicity, or a group matters any more in love. In love, we can become vulnerable, open, and honest. In love, we are disrobed, we become naked, stripped of ballast, burdens, and barriers. In love and through love, we are nurtured into all the awesome beauty of life that the Creator intended for us even before we were born. In love, we can come as we are.
And in return, the Lover will accept the beloved for who he is. The Lover will revel in the beloved for her true self. The Lover will embrace the nakedness and the vulnerability of the beloved and will clothe it with love, which is strong and powerful, which is mysterious and beyond our understanding, and, yes, which is also sensual as it encompasses all that we are, our souls, our minds, and our bodies.
I believe this is the reason why the church has had such a hard time with the Song of Solomon: the “Song of Songs,” as it is called in Hebrew. We just get too embarrassed with bodies and nakedness, with sensuality and even love in church. It makes us sit uncomfortably in our pews, because all of this is private, best left to the places nobody can access, right?
But arguments along these lines only serve as a sorry excuse to limit God’s love, to cut God out from all aspects of who we really are, and to control God, rather than to be controlled by God’s love. These attempts to limit God’s love only lead to a screwed-up and repressed body-politic, from which the church has suffered way too long. Furthermore, this kind of control of God’s love also hinders us to embrace the abundance of God’s love for ourselves and for others. Violence, oppression, and even war can be the results of this eager attempt!
We are created as body and mind and soul and God wants to love not just one or two of these aspects. God yearns to be Lover of it all, of all that we are in mind and soul and body. God even yearns to be the Lover of those parts of our life that embarrass us, even those parts we dislike.
There is a beautiful scene in the movie Love! Valor! Compassion!, which I believe can serve as a wonderful metaphor for the way God yearns for us to allow Him to love us, neck and crop. In this movie-scene, two men, both infected by HIV, compare notes about what the AIDS virus is doing to their bodies. At one point, they even show each other the lesions caused by Kaposi’s sarcoma. In a moment of intimate tenderness, one of the men spontaneously leans over and gently kisses the lesion on the torso of the other. For a mere moment, both men can be who they really are.
This is the disarming nature of love, which judges not. And this is how God loves us, whoever we are, whatever we are. In love, God strips us naked, strips us of whatever burdens and pains may keep us from claiming our true beautiful selves – warts and all. The sensuality of the Song of Solomon therefore really shouldn’t be an embarrassment. Rather, it should be celebrated as it speaks of God’s love in tender, intimate and even sensual ways. God is the Creator of all love. In fact, God is love. And because God is love, and because love is God’s mysterious and wonderful gift, all expressions of love, all expressions of true, mutual, faithful, and selfless love celebrate this wonderful gift from God. The Song of Songs is not just an allegory of God’s love for God’s people. But the Song of Songs is equally a song that sings intimately and sensually of the love of two people. And it is good, good indeed.
Today (at the 9.15 a.m. service), Hope and Sebastien joined each other in marriage. It is a feast of love as these two will commit to each other for life before God. It is a feast of love that hopefully will not lack sensuality or gusto, as God’s disarming love is among us singing all kinds of love – songs into our and particularly into Sebastien’s and Hope’s hearts and souls. And if you look closely, you can see it in their eyes!!!
But there is more. Today is also a feast of love as we experience and give thanks for the love that has raised Hope and Sebastien through families and friendships. And today is a feast of love, because Sebastien and Hope have placed their feast in the midst of our Sunday worship. In today’s wedding, the Eternal Lover not only seeks to touch souls, minds, and bodies of bride and groom, but also seeks to touch us, who are equally God’s beloved, married or partnered, divorced or widowed, single or searching. And all are welcome to this feast of love, all are welcome.
[The Reverend Markus Duenzkofer delivered this sermon on July 12, 2009.]
Posted by Webmaster on under Bible Readings, Webmaster Blog |
Song of Solomon 2.1-13 ~ Gospel reading for July 12, 2009
I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys. As a lily among brambles, so is my love among maidens. As an apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among young men. With great delight I sat in his shadow, and his fruit was sweet to my taste. He brought me to the banqueting house, and his intention towards me was love.
Sustain me with raisins, refresh me with apples; for I am faint with love. O that his left hand were under my head, and that his right hand embraced me! I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles or the wild does: do not stir up or awaken love until it is ready!
Springtime Rhapsody
The voice of my beloved! Look, he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills. My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag. Look, there he stands behind our wall, gazing in at the windows, looking through the lattice. My beloved speaks and says to me:
‘Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away; for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtle-dove is heard in our land. The fig tree puts forth its figs, and the vines are in blossom; they give forth fragrance. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away. O my dove, in the clefts of the rock, in the covert of the cliff, let me see your face, let me hear your voice; for your voice is sweet, and your face is lovely. Catch us the foxes, the little foxes, that ruin the vineyards—for our vineyards are in blossom.’
My beloved is mine and I am his; he pastures his flock among the lilies. Until the day breathes and the shadows flee, turn, my beloved, be like a gazelle or a young stag on the cleft mountains.
Posted by stpauls on under Bible Readings, Webmaster Blog |
Matthew 22:35-40 ~ Gospel reading for July 12, 2009
And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and ?rst commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
Posted by Webmaster on July 10, 2009 under Webmaster Blog |
At the 9:15 a.m. service on Sunday, July 12, Hope Telford and Sebastien Rake will say “I do” to each other, exchange vows and rings and be married. They will ask God’s blessing as they stand among their community: their family, their friends, and their spiritual home, St. Paul’s Anglican Church. The readings for the day were chosen by the couple. All are invited to attend! Please keep Sebastien and Hope in your prayers as they begin their life as a married couple.
Almighty God, in whom we live and move and have our being, look graciously upon the world which you have made and for which your Son gave his life, and especially on all whom you make to be one flesh in holy marriage. May their lives together be a sacrament of your love to this broken world, so that unity may overcome estrangement, forgiveness heal guilt, and joy overcome despair. Amen. (BAS, p. 533)
