Our Sending Capacity – Annual Address to the Parish
by The Rev. John F. Koepke III
Sermon
February 14th, 2010Reflections on the Readings
February 11th, 2010Last Epiphany, Year C – February 14, 2010
Exodus 34:29-35
2 Corinthians 3:12–4:2
Luke 9:28-43
If today’s readings strike you as familiar, it’s not just the déjà vu effect of hearing the same Scripture passages regularly every three years. We also hear this morning’s first reading and Gospel as the readings appointed for the Feast of the Transfiguration, which appears in our Church calendar on August 6. We Anglicans celebrate the Transfiguration twice a year. This miraculous mountaintop revelation is always commemorated on the Last Sunday of the Epiphany. (And the mountaintop theme is carried over into our diocesan celebration, on this day, of ministries by and to the mountain peoples of Appalachia.)
Today’s first reading and Gospel draw parallels—and contrasts—between the mountaintop epiphanies experienced by Moses on Mount Sinai and the three apostles on Mount Tabor. Today’s second reading, from Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, is a kind of commentary on this diptych, emphasizing the contrasts. Paul tells the Corinthians that the Israelites were unable to tolerate the brightness of Moses’ countenance, transfigured by his encounter with God in the giving of the Law, without the protection of a veil. In Jesus, however (Paul says), the veil is lifted; we look on God directly, and are transformed. Paul uses two allusions to underline his point. He describes the synagogue custom of respectfully veiling the scrolls of the Torah as “proof” that Israel was incapable of bearing the fullness of God’s presence. And he reminds his Gentile readers of the Greco-Roman belief that an encounter with a god transformed a human into that god’s image.
Today’s readings are filled with transforming light, but it is regrettable that Christians over the centuries received them with minds veiled by prejudice. In his eagerness to embrace the new epiphany of Christianity, Paul described the Torah as “the glory that was being set aside”—promoting the mistaken theology known as supercessionism, which falsely claims that the new covenant supercedes the old, instead of fulfilling it. A slip of the translator’s pen by St. Jerome changed the “rays of light” springing from Moses’ face to “horns”—inspiring medieval art that depicted Moses and all Jews as horned devils. And Jesus’ impatient words to the crowds pressing him for healing after the Transfiguration—“You faithless and perverse generation!”—have too often been taken by his followers as a condemnation of all Israel.
Today, as we stand in the mountaintop light of Epiphany for the last time this year, let us put aside all the veils of ignorance that keep us from seeing and being transfigured by God’s image in all people.
© Joanne K. McPortland
Reflections on the Readings
February 4th, 20105 Epiphany, Year C – February 7,2010
Isaiah 6:1-13
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
Luke 5:1-11
The epiphanies of the Epiphany season aren’t just generalized revelations of God’s powerful love. They’re calls to proclaim and live that love, directed to particular people. We know these people called and sent by God as prophets and apostles, and today we hear how three of the greatest in our tradition received their vocational epiphanies.
Isaiah, in the first reading, is granted an astonishing vision of the throne of God, borne on seraphic wings. As their angelic Sanctus echoes around him, Isaiah learns that he is being asked, somehow, to share this transcendent epiphany with a people so stubbornly set in their sinful ignorance that they might as well be without the use of their senses. And he is to wrap this message of eternal love in the unlikeliest of packages: dire warnings about the devastating destruction of the Promised Land.
Paul, in the second reading, alludes to the epiphany that changed his life as he writes to the Corinthians. Tracing the authenticity of the message he proclaims, Paul names all the eyewitnesses of Jesus’ saving mission, including himself among them because of his encounter with the Risen Christ on the road to Damascus. “Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.” And not only appeared, but called.
The fisherman Simon Peter, in today’s Gospel reading, has a fisherman’s epiphany: the abundant love of God embodied in a catch so miraculously huge it threatens to sink his boats. Jesus chooses this moment of wonder to call Simon away from his nets to a wider ocean and a more difficult catch.
Each of these three has doubts about his fitness for the task. “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips,” cries Isaiah. “For I am the least of the apostles,” Paul acknowledges to the Corinthians, “unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.” And Peter, impulsive as ever, anticipates God’s call with a startled shout: “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!”
As we learned last week with the call of Jeremiah, however, God has little patience with his prophets’ self-doubts. Isaiah’s unclean lips get a fiery makeover, courtesy of a live coal from the divine altar. Peter is handed both forgiveness of his impetuous sins and the keys to the kingdom of God. And Paul, sight returned, is infused with the grace of God. “By the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain.”
It is by the grace of God that we are who we are, too. And the call of Epiphany is directed to us as well. In spite of, or even because of, our flaws and brokenness and doubts and fears, God calls us, apostles and prophets one and all, to share and live the good news. With Isaiah we say, “Here we are, Lord. Send us!” © Joanne K. McPortland
Reflections on the Readings
January 28th, 20104 Epiphany, Year C
Jeremiah 1:4-10
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
Luke 4:21-30
It’s not easy being a prophet.
Today’s second reading, from 1 Corinthians, is probably one of the most familiar and beloved passages in the New Testament—so much so that we often forget the occasion for these glorious words. The Christians of Corinth, who thought of themselves as a church full of prophets, had grown pretty full of themselves, spiritually. They saw the call to prophecy as a point of pride, and vied with one another to claim the title of most esoteric and Spirit-filled speaker in tongues. Paul, who knew well the perils of the prophetic vocation, compared this foolishness to blurred vision, as though they were gazing into the dim metallic mirrors that were a key Corinthian export. (Many of us know and love these words in their Authorized Version incarnation: “For now we see through a glass, darkly.”) Only love—not competition, not pride, not even an abundance of spiritual gifts—makes the prophet’s life endurable.
The first reading and the Gospel today give us two prophets at the beginning of their public ministries: Jeremiah and Jesus. Each is given the blessing and curse of revealing God’s word to the world—Jeremiah in his eloquent and bitter rants, Jesus in his very flesh. Each will know the pain of being rejected, ridiculed, and betrayed into suffering for being a living epiphany. Jeremiah is called to predict the fall of Jerusalem, Jesus the coming of the New Jerusalem. And though their public lives begin in triumph, with Jeremiah “appointed over nations” and Jesus’ listeners “amazed at his gracious words,” each will come to a moment of terrible desolation. “Cursed be the day I was born!” Jeremiah will cry to God, and Jesus will quote on the cross the psalmist’s lament, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
What provokes the resentment with which the prophet is greeted? In the case of today’s Gospel, Jesus’ audience goes very quickly from pleased amazement to rage, because the message he brings is not the one they thought they wanted to hear. Yes, the long-awaited kingdom of God is at hand, Jesus says, but it’s only going to be perceived by foreigners and outcasts—those too deeply preoccupied with searching for God to spend much time gazing at themselves in dim mirrors.
Ouch. Not the revelation anyone—Corinthians, Israelites, Judeans, us—wants to hear. That’s why it’s important to remember the truth that sustained Jeremiah, Paul, and Jesus, even in the darkest times: the God who knew us before we were born is with us now to deliver us, and we will one day know him as fully as we are known. Prophecy, and the need for it, will end. Love alone remains.
©Joanne K. McPortland
Reflections on the Readings
January 21st, 20103 Epiphany, Year C – January 24, 2010
Nehemiah 8:1-3;5-6;8-10
1 Corinthians 12:12-31a
Luke 4:14-21
Have you ever heard a passage of Scripture with new ears, as though for the first time? In this week’s readings, we eavesdrop on two groups of people for whom God’s Word comes alive in breathtaking ways.
The first reading, from the Book of Nehemiah, recounts the pivotal moment when the Torah went from oral tradition to written word, and all of us became People of the Book. The small remnant of Persian Jews, having been allowed to return to Jerusalem after a 70-year exile, have succeeded in rebuilding and rededicating the Temple. In the process, their prophet, Ezra, has miraculously come upon a buried scroll of the Torah, the five books of the Law of Moses. (The likely truth behind this miracle is that the Torah was not written, collected, or edited into the form we now know it until very late in the exile, or even after the return.) The people call upon Ezra to read the Scriptures to them in a great public assembly. The reading takes hours, and is accompanied by the first known scripture commentary or sermon, to aid in understanding—either because the details of the Law were unfamiliar after years of exile, or because it was written and read in Hebrew, when the common tongue was Aramaic.
What was the people’s response? They wept. Ezra had to remind them that God’s Word is given in joy, because they were so overwhelmed by what they had heard. It was the missing piece in their return to Jerusalem, and in hearing the Scriptures they had finally come home.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus participates in a synagogue service. Offered the honor of reading the passage from the Book of Isaiah that describes the coming of God’s messianic kingdom in fullness, the Rabbi Jesus adds a startling commentary of his own: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” That’s certainly enough to make any congregation sit up and take notice, and Jesus’ listeners marveled.
In this Epiphany season, God is waiting to be revealed to us in and through the Word, if we have ears to hear. What passage will cause us today to weep, or to marvel? Might it be—in these weeks when our Haitian human family is suffering so terribly, and so in need of our solidarity—today’s second reading? Surely there is no better time to hear again with new ears, as though for the first time, Paul’s words to the Corinthians: “Just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free. The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’” No Haiti is an island, John Donne might paraphrase Paul today. Would that this Scripture might be fulfilled today in our hearing!
©Joanne K. McPortland
Reflections on the Readings
January 14th, 20102 Epiphany, Year C
Isaiah 62:1-5
1 Corinthians 12:1-11
John 2:1-11
Epiphany is party season in New Orleans. Traditionally, there are parties every weekend from the Feast of the Epiphany through Mardi Gras, with people sharing colorful King Cakes (the person who finds the image of the Infant Jesus hidden in the cake, traditionally, is responsible for hosting the next week’s party). It’s party season in church, too. Last week we celebrated the baptism of Jesus and the baptism of little Henry. This week we’re invited to a wedding feast, complete with the very finest of Anglican beverages. God’s love “shines out like the dawn,” as Isaiah says in the first reading, in just those places where people gather in gladness to celebrate human love and community.
It’s a truism that every bride is beautiful on her wedding day, transformed by loving and being loved. But the beauty of daughter Zion is not the superficial glamour of fashion magazines, any more than the wine of joy that Jesus pours out at Cana is Two Buck Chuck. It’s the earthly reflection of God’s unfathomable love, the love that is an eternal wedding feast. “How priceless is your love, O God!” today’s passage from Psalm 36 marvels. “Your people take refuge under the shadow of your wings. They feast upon the abundance of your house; you give them drink from the river of your delights.” In the Jewish mystical spirituality of the kabbalah, Beauty (Tifaret in Hebrew) is one of the divine attributes, and offers a window on Chesed, God’s merciful loving-kindness. The beauty of holiness, Tifaret, is the splendor of God’s love made visible to human eyes, and it makes beautiful everything loved by God. This is the promise that Zion receives upon being reconciled with God, her bridegroom, after the estrangement of the exile: “You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God.”
The beauty of holiness is not a passive object. For most of human history, people believed that seeing was an active process in which light rays were exchanged between the viewer and the viewed. To fall in love at first sight was to touch and be touched by the lover’s gaze, to embrace in epiphany. In the same way, we don’t just see the beauty of holiness in this season of Epiphany; we are seen, and changed, by God’s beauty and goodness: “in your light, we see light.” Zion becomes a young bride, glowing like a burning torch. The water of Cana becomes wine to gladden the hearts of wedding guests. The early Church, activated by the Holy Spirit, overflows with abundant gifts: “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.”
The beauty of holiness changes us, too. We are gifted and beautiful, and our God delights in us. That’s good reason to party, in any season.
©Joanne K. McPortland
Reflections on the Readings
January 7th, 20101 Epiphany, Year C – January 10, 2010
Isaiah 43:1-7
Acts 8:14-17
Luke 3:15-17;21-22
During the season of Epiphany, which this year lasts for six Sundays, we hear readings celebrating the revelation of God’s love and power—in the messages of Israel’s prophets, in the story of the early Church, and most clearly and fully of all in the life and actions of Jesus. Epiphany, the Greek word for “manifestation,” comes from a root that literally means “lifting the veil.” This time of year, we lift the veil of ordinary life—the life Jesus shared with us—to catch a glimpse of the miraculous, the possible, the promised.
On this First Sunday after the Epiphany, we commemorate the baptism of Jesus. We do that best by celebrating, as we do today at the 10:30 service, the baptism of new members of our community. Baptism, like the faith it sacramentalizes, is at heart a response to the call of a loving God, the acceptance of an invitation to enter into family relationship with God and with our sisters and brothers in Christ. Today’s readings help us hear again the call to which we responded long ago.
The first reading is one of the most beautiful and reassuring passages of Isaiah’s words of comfort. Here God speaks to Israel and to us, calling us back into relationship:
Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you. . .
Because you are precious in my sight,
and honored, and I love you . . .
Today at St. Paul’s a child—precious in God’s sight, and loved—will pass through the waters and be called by name, as Christ’s own forever. And God’s love will be made manifest once again.
Today’s Gospel reading (the first part of which we heard only a few weeks ago, during Advent) describes Jesus’ baptism by John. The sights and sounds of this miraculous lifting of the veil are impossible to miss: the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus “in bodily form like a dove,” and the voice of the Father (calling Jesus by the name Son, claiming him in love) is heard from heaven. No such obvious signs accompany the laying on of hands done in Jesus’ name by Peter and John in today’s second reading, from the Acts of the Apostles (Luke’s sequel to his Gospel). But clearly an epiphany takes place: the Holy Spirit is present where the Holy Spirit had not been present before. Baptized in the name of Jesus, even the reviled Samaritans are redeemed, precious, honored. As are we, when we lift the veil of ordinariness and see ourselves as Christ’s own, loved by God, filled with the Spirit, never alone.
©Joanne K. McPortland
Reflections on the Readings
December 31st, 20092 Christmas – January 3, 2010
Jeremiah 31:7-14
Ephesians 1:3-6;15-19a
Matthew 2:1-12
We seldom get to hear today’s readings in this particular juxtaposition, because the calendar rarely allows us two Sundays between Christmas and Epiphany. Each individual passage is relatively familiar, but set together, they tell an even richer, deeper story, one with the theme of journeys and homecomings.
Today’s first reading, from the prophet Jeremiah, is a poem of yearning for a family reunion—something many of us long for this time of year. Jeremiah’s words, describing the hoped-for return of Israel from exile, are just that: a yearning, a hope that Jeremiah himself never lived to see fulfilled. But we are here, today, because it was fulfilled. God promised to bring the lost ones “from the land of the north, and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth, among them the blind and the lame, those with child and those in labor, together; a great company, they shall return here. With weeping they shall come, and with consolations I will lead them back; I will let them walk by brooks of water, in a straight path in which they shall not stumble.”
Psalm 84 describes another kind of homecoming, the joy of the annual pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem—a joy denied to those in exile, but never forgotten. “Happy are the people whose strength is in you! whose hearts are set on the pilgrims’ way. Those who go through the desolate valley will find it a place of springs, for the early rains have covered it with pools of water. They will climb from height to height, and the God of gods will reveal himself in Zion.”
And today’s Gospel, taken from Matthew in anticipation of the Feast of the Epiphany, brings us yet more travelers: the mysterious Magi, Persian astrologers, who follow a star from their home (which, ironically, had been the Israelites’ place of exile) to a house in the hill country of Nazareth in search of a newborn child worth believing in. They reach their goal (after a detour into Herodian politics), are “overwhelmed with joy,” give the gifts that inspired our whole last month’s frenzy of shopping and wrapping, and quietly return home “by another road.”
This time of year, we walk the pilgrims’ way with all these companions. We, too, long for a return to the place we can truly call home, yearn to be welcomed into the house of the Lord, and follow the star of wonder to seek hope, faith, and love at the heart of a family—one we’re born into, one we choose, one that chooses us. All those roads lead here, where we are reminded once again that we are God’s beloved daughters and sons, destined for adoption from the beginning of time. The writer of the Letter to the Ephesians prays our family blessing at journey’s end: “I pray that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe.”
©Joanne K. McPortland
Adult Education
December 22nd, 2009Angels in Scripture – Part 4
Reflections on the Readings
December 17th, 20094 Advent, Year C – December 20, 2009
Micah 5:2-5a
Hebrews 10:5-10
Luke 1:39-45
On this last Sunday of Advent we return to two ancient and powerful images of God’s unfailing love: a shepherd’s care for his sheep, and the exultation of a woman who has conceived a longed-for child.
The first reading comes from the prophet Micah, who lived in threatening times. Jerusalem was teeming with refugees after the fall of the northern kingdom, and the bloodthirsty Assyrians were gathering like wolves at the sheepgate. Most of the Book of Micah is directed to the people, chiding them for their injustices and failures to live according to the covenant—failures that have led directly to their dire straits. But in this passage, Micah holds up a vision of a righteous shepherd who will arise from the little town of Bethlehem, the ancestral home of that other great shepherd-king, David.
Psalm 80 gives voice to Israel’s desperate longing for God to shepherd his lost sheep. With a tone of unabashed intimacy that characterizes the relationship between God and Israel, the psalmist dares to give God a wake-up call, crying “Wolf!” in all earnestness, trusting that the cry will be heard.
In the Gospel passage from Luke, we are present at the Visitation, the meeting between Mary and her kinswoman, Elizabeth. Both women are pregnant—one in old age, after a lifetime of barrenness; one in virginity, by indescribable miracle. Elizabeth, whose child quickens in her womb in recognition of the presence of the Messiah, praises God for promises kept: “Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”
Mary responds by singing the canticle we know as the Magnificat (from its first words in Latin). This spontaneous hymn of praise builds on the psalms and prophecies of the righteous shepherd-king, with which Mary must have been familiar. Like the Beatitudes her Son would later weave into his sermons, Mary’s Magnificat speaks of a world turned upside-down and remade in the image of justice, compassion, and peace. It also echoes another hymn of praise sung by a woman whose prayer for a child was granted: the canticle of Hannah, the mother of Samuel, from the Hebrew Scriptures.
The coming of justice is like a miraculous new birth, a promise kept, a rescue. As Advent turns to Christmas, God’s face shines on us, and we are saved.
©Joanne K. McPortland
