08/17/2008
Proper 15
By The Rev. Katharine Armentrout
Brothers
Very early one morning about six years ago I was sitting in our daughter’s den on the sofa with Davis, our then-four year old grandson. We were reading a story while the rest of the house slept.
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05/04/2008
Sunday after the Ascension
By The Rev. Mary P. Johnson, Rector
I’ve often joked about how I don’t really trust writers who have Five Easy Ways to Lose Thirty Pounds; or The Three Sure Ways to Get Rich. Nor do I feel very comfortable with preachers who give their congregations God’s Plan for Your Life in four points beginning with the letter W. So it feels a little bit strange that I am about to speak with you about the time between Ascension and Pentecost, and use three words with the Letter P to characterize this time. The words are Promise, Presence, and Power.
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04/27/2008
Easter VI
By The Rev. Dr. Ted Hackett
We are counting down to the end of the Great Fifty Days....
The Fifty Days of the time in the Jewish calendar between Passover and the Feast of "Weeks" when the first-fruits of the Spring Harvest were presented at the Temple in Jerusalem.....
Which was the feast during which the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles...
The Feast of Pentecost...which we'll celebrate in two weeks.
In the meantime....next Thursday....will be the Ascension...
for forty days after the Resurrection...Jesus appeared to his disciples....
And then on the 40th day.....
next Thursday....
He took leave of them....
Scripture says: "he was carried up into Heaven".....
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07/05/2007
Explain the Holy Trinity???
By The Rev. Mary P. Johnson
My esteemed colleague in ministry, the Rev. Ted Hackett, promised you last week that I would explain the doctrine of the Holy Trinity to you in my sermon this week. What a way to set me up! I told him I’d have to ask the Vestry to dock his pay 50%. (As a retired priest who doesn’t have to attend meetings any more, he’ll earn the same pay from Holy Family whether we cut his pay in half or double it!) Ted told me that he’d be listening to any references in my sermon to creeping Sabellianism, and he’d report his findings to the Bishop. I’m not sure I’d recognize creeping Sabellianism if it crawled under my seat here in the church and started eating the wasps that sometimes litter our floor up here.
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07/05/2007
Calling down fire, or Walking in Love?
By The Rev. Mary Johnson
I love when I get to preach after Father Ted here at Holy Family. I love it because he consistently sets me up. Sometimes that is a pretty overwhelming thing. Remember how, at the beginning of June, Ted told you that I would give you some help understanding why and how we speak of God as Holy Trinity? Well, once again, Ted said two things in his sermon last week that gave me pause and that gave me focus as I prepared to share God’s word in ways that might open it up for us here and now, at Holy Family, exactly halfway through the Year of Our Lord, 2007. Ted promised a continuation of the story of Elijah on which we’ve been meditating for the last several weeks. And he made a very brief allusion to Elijah’s expectations of God when he journeyed to Mount Horeb and hid in a cave. Ted said that Elijah had expected God to make his life secure.
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03/01/2007
Bless, O Lord, Us your Servants
By The Rev. Mary Johnson
Almost every Sunday when we gather the people together who serve at the altar, the celebrant begins with a prayer. If I am the celebrant, I often pray a prayer that is a revision of one that our children’s choir director taught them, and with which they began every rehearsal and every procession into the church to sing. I pray, on behalf of our group:
Bless, O Lord, us your servants who minister in your temple.
Grant that what we speak with our lips, we may believe in our hearts,
And that what we believe in our hearts, we may show forth in our lives;
Through Jesus Christ our Lord; Amen[1].
[1] Adapted from the Royal School of Church Music Choristers’ Prayer
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