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Fourth Sunday of Easter; Sermon, May 12, 2019

Topic:  The Right Kind of Messiah

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church 601 Poyntz Avenue, Manhattan, KS 8:30am Service Easter 4C Readings Main Focus Text: John 10.22-30

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Third Sunday of Easter; Sermon, May 5, 2019

Topic:  Going Back to Work

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church 601 Poyntz Avenue, Manhattan, KS 8:30am Service Easter 3C Readings Main Focus Text: John 21.1-19

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Easter: The Sunday of the Resurrection; Sermon, April 21, 2019

Topic:  Good Friday Mindsets in an Easter World

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church 601 Poyntz Avenue, Manhattan, KS 10:45am Service Easter Sunday Readings Main Focus Text: Luke 24.1-12

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Holy Saturday; Sermon, April 20, 2019

Topic:  The Honor of Serving in the In-between

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church 601 Poyntz Avenue, Manhattan, KS 9:00am Service Holy Saturday Readings Main Focus Text: No specific focus, just preaching on the Day.

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Good Friday; Sermon, April 18, 2019

Topic:  Dead. Thanks be to God!

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church 601 Poyntz Avenue, Manhattan, KS 7:00pm Service Good Friday Readings Main Focus Text: John 18.1-19.42 (especially John 19.18-22)

There they crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, with Jesus between them. Pilate also had an inscription written and put on the cross. It read, ‘Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.’ Many of the Jews read this inscription, because the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city; and it was written in Hebrew, in Latin, and in Greek. Then the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate, ‘Do not write, “The King of the Jews”, but, “This man said, I am King of the Jews.” ’Pilate answered, ‘What I have written I have written.’

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Fifth Sunday in Lent; Sermon, April 7, 2019

Topic:  The Stinky Perfume of Baptism

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church 601 Poyntz Avenue, Manhattan, KS 8:30am Service Lent 5C Readings Main Focus Text: Psalm 12.1-8

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Fourth Sunday in Lent; Sermon, March 31, 2019

Topic:  Always With Me!

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church 601 Poyntz Avenue, Manhattan, KS 8:30am Service Lent 4C Readings Main Focus Text: Luke 15.1-3, 11b-32

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Burial of Lorraine Walterscheid; Sermon, March 29, 2019

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church 601 Poyntz Avenue, Manhattan, KS 10:00am Service Main Focus Text: Psalm 121, John 14.1-6

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Third Sunday in Lent; Sermon, March 10, 2019

Topic:  Is Metanoia Hard? Maybe You Need Some Manure

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church 601 Poyntz Avenue, Manhattan, KS 8:30am Service Lent 3C Readings Main Focus Text: Luke 13.1-9

Common English Bible Translation of the Gospel:

Some who were present on that occasion told Jesus about the Galileans whom Pilate had killed while they were offering sacrifices. He replied, “Do you think the suffering of these Galileans proves that they were more sinful than all the other Galileans? No, I tell you, but unless you change your hearts and lives, you will die just as they did. What about those eighteen people who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them? Do you think that they were more guilty of wrongdoing than everyone else who lives in Jerusalem? No, I tell you, but unless you change your hearts and lives, you will die just as they did.”

Jesus told this parable: “A man owned a fig tree planted in his vineyard. He came looking for fruit on it and found none. He said to his gardener, ‘Look, I’ve come looking for fruit on this fig tree for the past three years, and I’ve never found any. Cut it down! Why should it continue depleting the soil’s nutrients?’ The gardener responded, ‘Lord, give it one more year, and I will dig around it and give it fertilizer.Maybe it will produce fruit next year; if not, then you can cut it down.’”

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Second Sunday in Lent; Sermon, March 17, 2019

Topic:  I Really Mean It

This sermon was delivered by Dr. Yvonne Amanor-Boadu, Diaconal Postulant from St. Paul’s. Yvonne is a first-year student at the Bishop Kemper School for Ministry.

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church 601 Poyntz Avenue, Manhattan, KS 8:30am Service Lent 2C Readings Main Focus Text: Genesis 15.1-12, 17-18

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Burial of Don Whittlesey; Sermon, March 11, 2019

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church 601 Poyntz Avenue, Manhattan, KS 10:00am Service Main Focus Text: Matthew 5.1-12

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First Sunday in Lent; Sermon, March 10, 2019

Topic:  Temptations Tell You Something

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church 601 Poyntz Avenue, Manhattan, KS 10:45am Service Lent 1C Readings Main Focus Text: Luke 4.1-13

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Last Sunday after Epiphany; Sermon, March 3, 2019

This sermon was preached by the Rev. Sandy Horton-Smith, Deacon at St. Paul’s on the last Sunday before she began her first diaconal sabbatical.

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church 601 Poyntz Avenue, Manhattan, KS Last Sunday after Epiphany Readings Main Focus Text: Luke 9.28-43a

The Feast of the Transfiguration is August 6th, but those who made the decisions about the Revised Common Lectionary chose to have this gospel reading on the Last Sunday of Epiphany, the final Sunday before Lent.  We have a reading about the Transfiguration every year on this Sunday -  this year from Luke, last year from Mark, and next year from Matthew.  So why is this story significant at this time of year?

The Transfiguration is so familiar to us. At least, I thought it was familiar to most Christians.  I asked my office-mates at work what they thought the Transfiguration was about and found out that neither one of them knew what I was talking about.  They had to look up the passage in Luke to know what it was.  But the more I thought about this story of Jesus going up on the mountain and being transformed before his disciples, the stranger it seemed.  It seems so out of place compared with the rest of the gospel story of Jesus’ life, his teachings and the miracles, healing the sick, casting out demons, and dining with sinners.  Jesus didn’t show off his divinity with flashy displays even though Jesus and his disciples lived surrounded by a society with Roman and Greek gods.  Those gods would transform themselves into animals or disguise themselves in order to interact with people and mess with their lives.  But Jesus didn’t do that.  He didn’t shoot lightning bolts from his fingertips or fly through the air.  So why did he go up on the mountain to pray and then start glowing? 

And why were Moses and Elijah there?  And how in the world did Peter, John, and James recognize them?  I mean they didn’t have photos of these people, so how did they know who they were?  If you look at some paintings done of this scene, the artist gives them props to indicate who they are – the stone tablets with the 10 commandments for Moses, of course, and a scroll for Elijah which relates to a bible story about him.  Those props help us to identify them in the paintings, but I wonder if Moses was really hauling those tablets around on the mountain-top.

The obvious answer is that it shows the divinity of Jesus as he is glorified on the mountain.  This is part of that mystery of the incarnation that took centuries to be worked out and led to cries of heresy and persecution of those who came up on the wrong side of the argument.  It involves fun words like homoosia and homoiousia and the great puzzle of one person with 2 natures.  But what can you take away from that today into your week that has any real connection?  So I dug deeper into the passage and didn’t find much help there either.

The story of the Transfiguration is loaded with elements that point to other parts of scripture, one little bit after another.  Moses and Elijah are often taken to represent the Law and the Prophets, giving their seal of approval to Jesus and his place in God’s plan.  As the disciple Phillip said to Nathaniel, “We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote.”  Moses and Elijah also both witnessed the glory of God on a mountain-top in stories from the Old Testament.  Our first lesson was about Moses coming down from the mountain after such an encounter with his face glowing from that experience.  Elijah went to the mountain to meet God and experienced the power of a great wind, an earthquake, and a fire, but met God in a sheer silence and a quiet voice.  These two again experience the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus.

The presence of Peter, John, and James in this story reminds me that they are the 3 disciples who were also went with Jesus when he went to the garden of Gethsemane to pray prior to his arrest and crucifixion.  They were sleepy on that night, too, and Jesus chastised them when they couldn’t stay awake just one hour.  And poor Peter!  He once again doesn’t quite get it.  Just before this in Luke, he declares that Jesus is the Messiah, but when he sees this undeniable evidence of the divinity of Jesus, he gets so excited that he says to Jesus, “This is soooo amazing!  Let’s just stay here on the mountain and we’ll put up a tent for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.  And it’ll be great!”  Jesus had just told him that the Son of Man would have to face great suffering and persecution and be killed.  The point is not to hang around on the top of a mountain.

Finally, Jesus’ face being transformed sounds to me like the way he was changed after the resurrection so that the disciples didn’t recognize him.  Mary Magdalene thought he was a gardener until Jesus said her name.  The disciples on the road to Emmaus walked with Jesus and talked with him about him but didn’t recognize him until he blessed and broke the bread.  So in Jesus’ transfiguration there are echos sounding of his death and resurrection. And all of that is very interesting and would make a good exegetical paper for a class on Christology, but what does it mean for us today?  Well, I think the answer comes, not from Luke, but in 2nd Corinthians, our epistle reading today. 

“All of us... seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.”  Just as Jesus was transformed in his appearance, we are transformed by seeing his glory.  Step by step, moment by moment, encounter by encounter, we are meant to be changed by having Jesus in our lives.  How we encounter Jesus and how we are transformed will differ, but all of us should be made different by our experiences.

Encounters with Jesus can come in many different forms.  You may meet Jesus in visiting the elderly during a pastoral care visit.  You may see him while watching a child first learn about the wonders that are chocolate chip cookies.  Or you may hear Jesus in the words of our presiding bishop about how the most important thing in all of God’s good creation is love.   Mother Teresa said “I see Jesus in every human being. I say to myself, this is hungry Jesus, I must feed him. This is sick Jesus. This one has leprosy or gangrene; I must wash him and tend to him. I serve because I love Jesus.”  You will encounter Jesus many times today, but will you be transformed?

Transformation can also take on many different forms.  Your time with Jesus may lead you to spending your time with those who need you most – those who are sick, poor, tired, or lonely.  You may feel called to witness to another person about the effect on your life you have felt from being a part of this congregation.  And sometimes that transformation involves a cathedral full of people, 14 bishops, vows and prayers and a change of wardrobe including a funny hat.  As Cathleen Chittenden Bascom was transformed into our bishop yesterday at Grace Cathedral.

In just a few days, Lent begins.  It’s a time to slow down, reflect, pray, and spend some time with Jesus.  It’s up to you whether you will be transformed by it.  You can breeze through the next 6-1/2 weeks coming to Easter just as you are now.  Or you can open your heart, recognize the presence of Jesus in your life, and be transformed by the encounter.  

I’ll be going on a 2 month sabbatical starting on Thursday.  I’ll be going on a retreat in Tennessee about spiritual discernment to start.  Then I’ll explore other churches in Manhattan to see what ministries lay people are involved in and how they are encouraged to become involved.  My plan is to come back and present an adult formation course on discernment and explore forming a lay discernment committee to help all of you explore your questions about how you are feeling called to serve.  I ask you to pray for me during this time so that I might have some encounters with Jesus and be transformed.  And I will pray for all of you for the same.  

Unveil your faces, see the glory of the Lord, and be transformed.

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Seventh Sunday after Epiphany; Sermon, February 24, 2019

Topic:  Reasonable

This sermon was delivered by Will Chaney, Program Assistant at Canterbury of Lawrence (Kansas). Will was in town with a group of youth from the Diocese of Kansas who spent the weekend practicing youth event music. The group played at the 10:45am service.

You can find Will on Facebook and Instagram. He’s also the sole-proprietor of the Red Book 79 Vegan Food Truck.

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church 601 Poyntz Avenue, Manhattan, KS 10:45am Service Epiphany 7C Readings Main Focus Text: Luke 6.27-38

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Sixth Sunday after Epiphany; Sermon, February 17, 2019

Topic:  It’s Inevitable

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church 601 Poyntz Avenue, Manhattan, KS 8:30am Service Epiphany 6C Readings Main Focus Text: Luke 6.17-26

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Prophet Isaiah Antonio Balestra, 1666-1740

St. Paul’s Bulletin Art Reflection The Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, February 10, 2019

Just over seven years ago I was ordained a priest at Grace Cathedral in Topeka (January 7, 2012). Among the readings on that day was a portion of Sunday’s reading from the sixth chapter of Isaiah. Because the preacher made special focus on that reading in his sermon, it’s been near and dear to my heart.

It makes sense as a reading for an ordination because it’s a “call story,” the moment when Isaiah receives his prophetic commission. In our lectionary, it joins a grouping of such call stories. On Sunday we heard Paul describe his call to the Corinthians and we heard Luke tell the story of how Simon (Peter), James and John joined up with Jesus when he invited them to “fish for people.” Last Sunday, we heard a portion of the prophet Jeremiah’s call story.

There’s rarely total clarity in the moment of a call. For many of us, the sense of what God is asking us to do develops slowly over the course of time. Even those of us who can recall a specific moment when God’s call was clear and pointed end up having to understand it in the course of a much larger movement. In the Episcopal Church, we recognize this truth in the way we construct our ordination discernment processes: those of us who feel the call to ordained ministry meet with the Bishop and with at least two different small groups of fellow Episcopalians, one over a longer period of time. These prayer-filled conversations are an important part of sussing out the Spirit, a check on the power of the individual ego to misunderstand the source of a heart’s yearning. But there are other ways to process what happens in our lives, which is one of the reasons I love Italian Rococo-period painter Antonio Balestra’s interpretation of Isaiah’s call.

Isaiah’s call is a solemn and terrifying event. He finds himself in God’s throne room, the walls are shaking, smoke fills the air, angels circle and sing of the glory of God. Isaiah responds to the scene with fear and trembling, “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” He’s frightened and believes he’s unworthy. It’s serious, but there’s a funny thing that’s happening in Balestra’s imagining, but it’s hidden unless you can read Hebrew. Balestra shows the response to Isaiah’s fear: God sends an angel with a hot coal to touch Isaiah’s lips, purifying them/him. And what is Isaiah doing while this is happening?  He’s writing! It’s both upside-down and right to left because it’s Hebrew:

What is it that Isaiah has just written? “Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs.” Yes, Isaiah is live-tweeting his revelation and call! The most terrifying, powerful moment of his life is happening and he’s writing it down instead of experiencing it! Or maybe he’s processing it by live-tweeting it…

It puts me in mind of a conundrum: Isaiah processes his call instantly. I was able to process my call through the structures of the diocesan discernment process. However, few of us are called to ordained ministry, fewer still to prophetic ministry, BUT ALL OF US ARE CALLED! What are we to do to discern the truth and reality of our calls?

Assuming the Council of Trustees consent next week, I am pleased to tentatively announce that Deacon Sandy, with the support of the vestry, will begin a sabbatical after Ash Wednesday and these questions will be at the forefront of her work! Sandy will begin her sabbatical by attending a conference in Tennessee called The Art of Teaching Spiritual Discernment. (Indeed, she has already begun the five weeks of “pre-work” for the conference!) In the course of that week and throughout her sabbatical, Sandy will explore the possibility of establishing, upon her return after Pentecost, a discernment group for lay ministry here at St. Paul’s! You’ll hear about the rest of her plans after the Council formally consents, but it’s an exciting opportunity nonetheless!

As I explored my call, my discernment committee was an important part of the process. Obviously Isaiah benefited from his own discernment. I’m excited that Sandy, who in her work with Education for Ministry is already demonstrating the influence of small groups in empowering lay ministry, is interested in exploring these questions more formally. Formal processes of discernment could be a powerful tool for the lay people of St. Paul’s. However you respond to God’s call, you should be well supported!

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Fifth Sunday after Epiphany; Sermon, February 10, 2019

Topic:  Boats & Nets & Shallow Water & Deep Water

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church 601 Poyntz Avenue, Manhattan, KS 8:30am Service Epiphany 5C Readings Main Focus Text: Luke 5.1-11