March | 2018 | Grace Episcopal Church (Sheldon, VT)

Good Friday March 30, 2018

Posted on March 30, 2018 by Beth Crane

The following are excerpts from a meditation by Martin Smith of the Society of St, John the Evangelist. The meditation is called “No More Tears.”

The suffering of God is one of the deepest mysteries of the Christian faith. Those who hear about it for the first time are often shocked, for this mystery doesn’t lie on the surface of the scriptures but deep down.

…In the agony and crucifixion of Jesus God was not hurt merely by sympathy with the latest prophet to be martyred. God suffered in Christ. The audacious teaching of the early Christians that Jesus was the Incarnation of God’s Word and Wisdom had the staggering consequence of making the crucifixion on Golgotha God’s climactic suffering at the hands of his own creatures. God suffers.

Maybe this [Good Friday] could be a good time for [us] to ponder this mystery. It could help [us] realize how revolutionary the doctrine of the incarnation is. If Jesus is nothing more than the greatest prophet of God, then we can leave God out of suffering in heaven. But if the Crucified is God, then God is revealed as the one who is with us in suffering. The concept of God as a remote and dispassionate observer is smashed as an idol.

What effect might is have in [our own lives] to ponder this mystery?…We may find our way of thinking of God’s presence in the world undergoing a change. If God suffers, then God can truly be recognized by faith as present everywhere in a creation that groans in travail. We will stop praying to God to pay attention to this or that tragedy. God doesn’t need to pay attention to suffering because he is already present in and with the sufferers, and from that place of pain is moving us to contribute our caring and loving to his.

Contemplating the mystery of God’s cross will change the way we come to terms with our own pain. If we have explored the mystery beforehand we may, when sickness, death, betrayal, or disappointment befall us, be better prepared to see that God is not far from us, but keeps us company and continues to hold us up with those hands that from the beginning of time have been pierced with unimaginable nails.

But such is the mystery that all the seasons of Lent left to us in this life will not be enough to sound its depths. Only by seeing Christ in the glory of the Father with his hands, feet, and side still pierced with wounds will we grasp that Mystery—or be grasped by it.

Martin L. Smith, SSJE, “No More Tears,” in Nativities and Passions, pp. 148-151.

Filed under: Reverend Janet Brown | Tagged: "No More Tears", Crucifixion, Good Friday, Martin Smith of the Society of St. John the Evangelist | Leave a comment »

Maundy Thursday March 29, 2018

Posted on March 29, 2018 by Beth Crane

Exodus 12:1-4, (5-10), 11-14
Psalm 116:1, 10-17
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
John 13:1-17, 31b-35
Maundy Thursday comes from the Latin Mandatum Novum, meaning “new commandment.” Jesus said, “ I give you a new commandment,that you love one another.” Jesus did two other revolutionary things on that day. He took the bread and wine that they had shared before, and he said the usual blessings, but then he said of the bread, “This is my body” and of the wine, “This is my blood.” And he said, “Do this in remembrance of me.”” The word translated as “remembrance” is anamnesis. Literally, “un-forgetting.” Do this for the unforgetting of me. Do this to call me into your midst.
And then, after supper, he washed their feet. He did a thing that servants, slaves would do. Peter could not bear this. Martin Smith of the Society of St, John the Evangelist has a wonderful meditation on this. He says that Peter’s difficulty in accepting Jesus as a servant mirrors our own. He points out that it is much easier for us to look up
to Jesus as our Lord and Master that it is for us to look down at him as he washes our feet. We have been trained to be self-sufficient, and it is extremely difficult for us to accept the unconditional love that we receive from our Lord this day and every day. It is that unconditional love that is touching me very deeply this year as we gather for this service. Martin Smith says that Jesus is telling us that, if we don’t let him wash our feet, we will be cutting ourselves off from him. That is why Peter asks Jesus to wash his hands and his head as well.

God’s unconditional love is so beyond our earthly imaginings that I believe we have to spend our whole lives gradually learning to accept that love. In a profound sense, Maundy Thursday is about learning to allow our Lord to minister to us, to serve us, to wash us. At the end of his meditation, Martin Smith offers this prayer: Spirit of yielding, Spirit of consent, Spirit of Yes, Spirit of letting-go, Spirit of acceptance, Spirit of humility and openness, Spirit who trains my eyes to look down at Jesus looking up to me, ever ready to wash and serve me—I need you, I need you to give me a fresh receptivity to the unconditional love of God, to make my embrace of the Cross real and not just a matter of words.” (A Season for the Spirit, p.154.)

And my prayer, Beloved Lord, open our hearts to your love. Amen.
Beloved Lord, open hour hearts to your love. Amen

Filed under: Reverend Janet Brown, Sermons | Tagged: 1 Corinthians 11, anamnesis, Exodus 12, John 13, Martin Smith, Maundy Thursday, Psalm 116, Society of St. John the Evangelist | Leave a comment »

Palm Sunday Year B March 25, 2018

Posted on March 25, 2018 by Beth Crane

Isaiah 50:4-9a
Psalm 31:9-16
Philippians 2:5=11
Mark 14:32-15:39

At the beginning of our service on Palm Sunday, we welcome our King. We throw palms in his path and shout Hosanna, as well we should. Isaiah describes the suffering servant as one who listens to God so that he can “sustain the weary with a word,” and how many times has our King sustained us with his word and presence. Writing to his beloved congregation at Philippi, Paul tells us that our Lord “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave,” and humbled himself to the point of suffering death on a cross.

Why would our King do such a thing? Why didn’t he summon a huge army and destroy those who wanted to destroy him?

First, our King knows all too well that empires defeat empires and it goes on and on, endlessly. Earthly power is not the ultimate solution. Yes, sometimes earthly power has to be used, as in World War II when Hitler had to be stopped. But there is another way, and that is the way of love. Our sequence hymn beautifully expresses this.

The only way God could get through to us was to come among us as one of us—someone who grew up the son of a carpenter, truly loved everyone he met, healed and taught many people, and they loved him and followed him, and so have we, and here we are, two thousand years later, still loving him, still following him.

But he made some people very angry, people who had a great deal of power but did not use that power in the way God wanted them to. And they tried to destroy him with the worst they could do. With unwavering courage, he endured their torture. Yes, they killed him.

And here we are, two thousand years later, following him. Amen.

Filed under: Reverend Janet Brown, Sermons | Tagged: Isaiah 50, Mark 14, Philippians 2, Psalm 31 | Leave a comment »

Lent 5B March 18, 2018

Posted on March 18, 2018 by Beth Crane

Jeremiah 31:31-34
Psalm 51:1-13
Hebrews 5:5-10
John 12:20-33

In our opening reading, which dates back to 587 B.C., over twenty-five hundred years ago, God tells the people that God is going to make a “new covenant” with them. Scholars tell us that this is the first time the term “new covenant” is used in the Scriptures.

God speaks these words from a position of deep intimacy. God says that God is the husband of the people. This gives us some sense of the love God has always had for us. And God says something that is almost too difficult to grasp—that God is going to put God’s law within God’s people, within us. God is going to write the law on our hearts.

Webster’s dictionary tells us that a covenant is a “solemn agreement between two parties.” When Moses brought the law down from Mount Sinai, that was a sign of the covenant between God and the people. The law was the glue that bound the people together and bound together God and the people.

For us as Christians, the New Covenant is expressed in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. His life speaks to us. Everything he says and does means something to us. His words and actions, his attitudes and thoughts are like lighthouses guiding us to safety on a stormy sea. They are like springs of water giving us new, fresh lives.

Today, Jesus tells us one of the most important things he has ever said to us. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains just a single grain: but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” We could meditate on this for the rest of our lives, and, in a sense, that is what we do as Christians. Last Sunday, we were talking a bit about the writer Elizabeth Goudge. Her characters think about this statement of Jesus in many ways and in great depth.

Let’s imagine for a moment. Each of us is like a grain of wheat. Each of us is a little seed, enclosed in our protective capsule, our hard little shell. Imagine each of us, a little, self-enclosed seed wrapped in our secure little shell. Each of us is on a big rock. Far below is God’s fertile, loamy earth.

We’re sitting on our rock, but if we stay here, we will always be alone. We will never be part of anything bigger. On one level, it’s great to be on our rock. We are in total control of our little world up here. We can make our decisions and run things the way we want to. But staying up here is not what we were designed for.

We are being called to give up our control. We are called to jump into the earth. And it’s scary. Very scary. Will we disappear? What will happen to us? There’s something big we are called to do, but we’re going to lose control and give ourselves to something much bigger.

Finally, we take the leap of faith. We jump into God’s wonderful earth and bury ourselves in that good, warm soil and let the sun shine on us and warm us and let the rain come down so that we can sprout, and put down our roots, and reach up toward the sun and break through the earth and reach up and up and up to God and to the sun and grow until we are a part of a beautiful field of wheat.

We look around and see all this golden wheat, waving in the wind. And it is beautiful. This wheat will be gathered and made into bread, perhaps Communion bread. In the words of Richardson Wright, “We make, O Lord, our glorious exchanges: what Thou hast given us, we offer, that we may, in turn, receive Thyself.”

As followers of Christ, we are called to jump into the fertile loam of God’s love. We are called to jump into the stream of goodness in the universe. We are called to take the risk of giving up what we think is so important—our thoughts and plans and theories—and jump into the loving arms of God and grow into the persons God calls us to be.

When we do this, we enter a process of transformation. We are caterpillars that turn into butterflies. We are little grains of wheat that become part of something very, very big and very, very good. We become part of God. We become one with God. The grain of wheat falls into the earth and it bears fruit. That grain has died to self and now lives to God.

The cross was a horrible instrument of torture designed to make people suffer untold pain and cruelty and to humiliate them. And to fill them with fear of the power of the Roman Empire. It was a form of death reserved for the lowest of the low. When Jesus breathed his last on that horrible cross, he was propelled into the arms of God. He fell into the good earth of God’s love. The Apostles’ Creed says that he descended to the dead. He went there to share God’s love with those in the underworld.

Nothing in this universe is untouched by God’s love, not even Hell.

If we are going to bear fruit, we have to give up our little islands of isolation and jump into God’s love.

And then we will bear fruit. The fruit of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. It’s a lifelong journey, and we’re on that journey.

May we continue to take those leaps of faith. Amen.

Filed under: Reverend Janet Brown, Sermons | Tagged: Elizabeth Goudge, Hebrews 5, Jeremiah 31, John 12, New Covenant, Psalm 51 | Leave a comment »

Lent 4B RCL March 11, 2018

Posted on March 11, 2018 by Beth Crane

Numbers 21:4-9
Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22
Ephesians 2:1-10
John 3:14-21

In our opening reading today, we are journeying with God’s people. God has given them a great leader, Moses, and Moses has led them out of slavery . Now they are traveling in the wilderness toward the promised land.

They are also complaining. The longer they are away from their slavery in Egypt, the more they complain. They think longingly about the great food they had there, but they forget that they were doing the backbreaking labor of making bricks for the Pharaoh, and the quotas kept going higher and higher. This is so like us humans. God is trying to lead us out of slavery into new life and all we can do is complain.

Of course, the situation gets worse. They hit a point on the journey where there are poisonous snakes. When people are bitten, they die.

The people ask for God’s help, and God instructs Moses to make a little statue of a poisonous snake, put it on a pole, and lift it so that, by looking at the snake, the people can be healed.

In our gospel for today, the lifting of our Lord on the cross is compared with the lifting of that bronze snake which saved the lives of God’s people. Our Lord was also lifted high when he rose from the dead and when he ascended to be God. I love looking at our window which depicts the ascension. God so loved the world that God gave us Jesus. God so loved the world that God came among us. Jesus gave us a new commandment—that we love one another as he has loved us.

This gospel comes after the meeting between Jesus and Nicodemus in which Jesus talks with Nicodemus about being born again, not literally, but through the power of the Spirit. We are now in that new life.

Today is Mothering Sunday, a time when the penitential tone of Lent is lightened somewhat. It is also called Laetere Sunday, from the Mass text, “Rejoice, O Jerusalem.” There is a note of joy on this day. In the ancient Church, a rose was sometimes used in the liturgy as a symbol of the coming of spring. Some churches use rose vestments on this day.

In our readings that note of joy is struck mostly in our reading from Ephesians. Paul brilliantly traces our spiritual journey. Once we humans lived following the “desires of the flesh.” When he speaks of the flesh, Paul means that we lived totally self centered lives. We thought about our own needs, our own wishes, our own plans. There was no place for God in all of this.

But God, in God’s infinite love, as Paul says, “made us alive together with Christ.” Paul tells us that God raised us up with Jesus and in God’s amazing generosity, God shows us “the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” Then comes that passage which we love so much: “For by grace you have been saved by faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God….”

Paul was the first Christian theologian, and he outdoes himself in this passage. He has given us the history of the human race and our own history. We humans were living lives centered on ourselves, and those lives led nowhere. God, in God’s great love, came among us and became our Good Shepherd, leading us to the good pastures and the still waters where we can find peace, and leading us into life that is rooted and grounded in him. He calls us to love and serve others in his name. As we focus on God’s love and the wonderful gift God has given us, we can certainly rejoice.

Gracious God, thank you for your healing, your unfailing love, your grace, and the gift of new life in you. Amen.

Filed under: Reverend Janet Brown, Sermons | Tagged: Ephesians 2, John 3, Laetere, Moses, Mothering Sunday, Numbers 21, Paul, Psalm 107 | Leave a comment »

Lent 3B RCL March 4, 2018

Posted on March 4, 2018 by Beth Crane

Exodus 20:1-17
Psalm 19
1 Corinthians 1:18-25
John 2:13-22

This is the Third Sunday in Lent, and our readings give us so much food for thought that we could go on for hours thinking about these words and how they apply to our lives. I’m happy to tell you that I am not going to preach for hours.

In our opening reading from the Book of Exodus, Moses brings the Ten Commandments to God’s people, who have escaped slavery and are on their journey to the promised land. Scholars tell us that this was really a worship service, a solemn ceremony in which the people accepted God’s covenant.

These commandments provided an ethical structure for God’s people, and they still do that for us. If we were to summarize these rules for living, we could say, 1). There is one God. 2).Don’t worship idols, These days, our idols are not Baal or Astarte. They are things like status, possessions, and power, but they can lure us far from what really matters. 3). Use the Name of God only in sincere prayer. Use the Name of God for good purposes. 4). Take time to rest and be with God on the Sabbath Day. These first four commandments are about our relationship with God.

The next six commandments are about our relationship with our family and others. 5) Honor your father and mother. Family is important, and those relationships are very special. Let us put God’s love in the spaces between us and our family members. 6). Don’t commit murder. That includes the kind of murder we can commit with our tongue, with a nasty comment or with malicious gossip, or posts, or tweets. 7). Don’t commit adultery. We are called to be faithful to our marriages and committed relationships and to honor the marriages and committed relationships of others. 8). Don’t steal. That includes other people’s ideas. We give credit for the thoughts of others which we quote. We pay royalties when they apply. We honor copyrights. 9). Don’t lie. As we look at the world around us, it would be so refreshing if we would all simply be honest in all our statements and in all our dealings with each other. 10). Don’t covet. In our society today, there is such a pressure to keep up with the Joneses, to have the right clothes, the right car, and on and on. That is not what is important to God. These commandments are as helpful and relevant today as they were over three thousand years ago when God first gave them to our ancestors.

As we think about our gospel for today, we need to keep in mind that Jesus knew these commandments very well, and it is because of his knowledge of what God is truly calling us to be and to do that he is as angry as we will ever see him when he looks over the travesty of the moneychangers in the temple.

I can still remember the tone of my beloved mentor, David Brown, when he was Rector of Christ Church, Montpelier. He talked about the cult of “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild” syrupy terms that were almost funny, except that this is such a serious issue. Jesus was not always meek and mild. He had a steely determination; he had fortitude and courage like no other. And in today’s gospel, he is enraged. He is angry beyond belief.

Why is he angry? It is the time of the Passover. At the Passover, everyone was supposed to offer a sacrifice at the temple. If you were rich, you would offer a lamb. If you were poor, you would offer something cheaper such as a dove. So, first of all, this offering was a burden on the poor. They had no money to spare for buying a dove to sacrifice. They were trying to feed their children.

But it gets worse. In order to buy these animals for sacrifice, you had to convert your Roman coins to the temple coinage. To do this, you had to go to the moneychangers. Scholars tell us that the moneychangers could charge any kind of fee they wanted to for this service. This placed a double burden on the poor.

So, when Jesus walked in to this place that was supposed to be a holy place, this place where people were supposed to be able to have an encounter with God and “worship God in the beauty of holiness,” he saw these moneychangers robbing the people, and he got so angry that he threw over their tables. If we had been there, we would have been deeply impressed by his attitude. Possibly, we would have been scared.

The temple officials challenged Jesus on his behavior, and he made a rather mysterious statement, “Destroy this temple, and in three days, I will raise it up.” He was talking about his body, because he knew that they were going to have him killed.

Jesus was angry because the religious leaders were putting barriers in the way of people who were trying to worship God, people who were trying to be faithful. These barriers were a great hardship especially for the poor. We need to remember that Jesus was the champion of the ordinary people. Like so many of our brothers and sisters today, they had to work night and day just to provide the necessities for their children. The religious leaders should have made it easier for them to worship, not harder. But they refused to hear what our Lord was saying. It is a tragic day when religious leaders cannot hear God’s truth being spoken to them.

Our Lord is calling us to honor the dignity of every person and to make worship accessible to everyone. By the time of Jesus, legal and religious scholars had expanded the ten commandments to over six hundred and thirty rules that one was supposed to follow. This was so difficult that only the leisured class had the time to follow these rules.

This kind of thing made Jesus angry.

Here at Grace, this is why we stop and make sure that everyone has the books and handouts we need for the service, and why we help each other find our places. Accessibility is so important.

Gracious and loving God, give us grace to hear what you have to say to us. Jesus, our Savior and brother, lead us and guide us so that we may follow you faithfully. In Your holy Name we pray. Amen.

Filed under: Reverend Janet Brown, Sermons | Tagged: 1 Corinthians 1, Exodus 20, John 2, moneychangers, Psalm 19, Ten Commandments | Leave a comment »

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