The Reverend Bill Blaine-Wallace, Sunday July 26th, 2026

The Reverend William Blaine-Wallace

St. George Chapel

Tenant’s Harbor, Maine

July 26, 2026

Proper 12

A poem by Iranian German poet SAID:

Psalm 10

lord

spread wide your arms 

and protect us

from the multitude of your guardians 

stand by those who wander 

who've not lost the gift of hearing 

and listen within their solitude

stand by those too

who stay and wait for you

I have been a spiritual director for thirty-three years. I have had a spiritual director for about thirty-five years. You can’t offer what you haven’t received. Spiritual direction is not as lofty as it sounds. It’s people who matter, having conversations that matter, awakening assion for what matters.

For the last 18 years, I have offered spiritual direction one or two Wednesdays a month in a parish an hour or so from home. During the first few years, I would meet with folks in whatever space was available—a Sunday school room, the rector's study if vacant. For the last several years, I have met in the quiet room, a place set apart for silence, prayer, and spiritual direction. The quiet room was part of a building renovation project.

I arrive about 10 minutes before my first meeting. One might think I use the time to settle in. More often than not, I use the time to straighten up.

I find that spaces in church buildings designated for godly endeavors become sanctuaries for stuff. One Wednesday, I may need to remove a rummage-sale banner draped over the prie-dieu. During the few weeks leading up to the annual Christmas fair, I am booted upstairs to the senior high youth room so that marketable stuff can be stored until the big day. Imagine Moses not taking his shoes off at the foot of the burning bush.

Messy holy space is a metaphor for a not so small slice of my spiritual life.  The space between God and me sometimes is filled with stuff that doesn’t seem to fit anywhere else: highfalutin agendas and pretentious intentions, big commitments and tall expectations. Once again, I’ve overdressed for the occasion. God murmurs to God’s self: There goes Bill again. Guess I’ll balance my checkbook and act like I’m listening.

 I imagine God longing for me the way my nine-year-old self yearned for dad to come to at least one or two of my Little League baseball games, if for no other reason than to give mom a hand at the concession stand.

What if God endlessly aches for our underdressed selves. What if God unceasingly, recklessly desires company with our lives the way they really are, not the way they might, could, or should be?

Words of Richard Rohr come to mind: “God is never an object to be found or possessed, as you find other objects, but the one who shares your own deepest subjectivity.” The one who seeks desires to be sought.

That’s the God who inspires us to take off our shoes, sit for a while, possibly bow before radical regard. A beatitudes kind of God.

The Beatitudes are getting a lot of attention of late. Could be because our government, and some of our Christian siblings, offer cocksure counterpoints to the Beatitudes.

The Gospel of Matthew adds two words to the beatitude about the poor.

The words? In spirit. The Gospel of Luke is more blunt. Poor is poor.

For the longest time, I held tight to the belief that poor in spirit was Matthew’s domestication of poverty. Poverty as the doldrums. Blues without the beat. Poverty light.

Older age has brought with it an emerging respect for Matthew’s more inclusive poverty. His less discriminating, more nuanced poverty makes room for us.

We’ve endured the assaults of bone-dry despair. If we claim we haven’t, our ignorance has not been bliss for us or for those around us. We have made our way through, and sometimes out of, frozen and inflamed relationships. Most of us here this morning is of an age visited by more losses than usual and greater infirmities. Marjorie and John, two of my best friends, who were also my beloved colleagues, recently died. Thursday night, I dreamed that I was on the operating table about to get my second hip replacement. Glad I only have 2.

We know poverty. We know enough poverty to step out of our shoes to sit, bow, and sometimes lie prostrate before the burning bush.

The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra canceled public performances from November 2nd to November 30th, 2020, due to measures taken by the federal and regional authorities in Germany to contain the COVID-19 pandemic.

In response to the devastating effects of the pandemic, chief conductor Kirill Petrenko added another piece, the concluding piece, to the October 31st concert, the last concert before closing: 4’33” by John Cage. Four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence.

Cage affirmed that his silent piece was his most important composition. It was a piece he considered before he wrote later pieces.

I watched a video of the performance. Mr. Petrenko had no baton. The piece has three movements. For each movement, Mr. Petrenko offered a hand motion. The motions were, for me, a choreography of passionate engagement with self, orchestra, and audience.

First movement: Arms lowered, spread wide, palms open. Mr. Petrenko makes penetrating eye contact with orchestra and audience as if to say, HERE I AM.

Second movement: Arms raised, spread wide, hands reaching out, palms open. Mr. Petrenko connects with orchestra and audience as if to say, THERE YOU ARE.

Third movement: Left arm, hand open, palm facing upward. Right arm partly extended and bent slightly, a few inches lower than the left arm, hand open, palm facing upward. Mr. Petrenko scans the orchestra and audience, as if to say, AND NOW WHAT. Not a question. Instead, a disposition, a posture of readiness. Like a chaplain resident carrying the beeper the first time she is on call.

4:33 is not a model for inhabiting the space between God and us. It is my way of going deeper into the space in order to emerge more engaged with and for the world I inhabit.

Consider quietly and regularly—in your own way— offering God the landscape of your dressed down poverty. No preconceived notions about stuff to bring to the space.

HERE I AM.

THERE YOU ARE. An unembellished self before an unadorned God enlarges self, God, and neighbor.

AND NOW WHAT. A heart prepared to engage the moment at hand., whatever is at hand.

Offering God our unvarnished self, awakens desire.

“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.

Desire is our way home to God. Desire is our path of godly resistance into the fray of a nation in peril.

Amen.

The Reverend Holly Antolini, Sunday July 12th, 2026

©Holly Lyman Antolini Sermon for Proper 10 Year A, 7-12-26

St. George’s Episcopal Church Long Cove, St. George ME

Let us pray.

Send us out in joy and lead us back in peace, accomplishing the purpose of your Word. AMEN.

It is barely a week since the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence, and I don’t know about you, but I still have the spacious skies and amber grain waves and purple mountains of “America, the Beautiful” echoing in my ears. So how irresistible that today the theme continues! There is a lovely cosmic coherence between the outside world and the lectionary world: between our fields and gardens, and the prophet Isaiah and Psalm 65 and Jesus’ parable in the Gospel of Matthew, we have flourishing plants abounding!

Rain and snow assure abundance in Isaiah, making the land “bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater.” And in God’s care, the aromatic and sturdy cedar triumphs over the thorn, the perfumed myrtle over the briar.

The Psalm underscores this divine abundance. Affirm verses 8-14 again with me, responding by half verse, after the asterisk:

Those who dwell at the ends of the earth will tremble at your marvelous signs; *
you make the dawn and the dusk to sing for joy.

You visit the earth and water it abundantly;
you make it very plenteous; *
the river of God is full of water.

You prepare the grain, *
for so you provide for the earth.

 You drench the furrows and smooth out the ridges; *
with heavy rain you soften the ground and bless its increase.

You crown the year with your goodness, *
and your paths overflow with plenty.

May the fields of the wilderness be rich for grazing, *
and the hills be clothed with joy.

May the meadows cover themselves with flocks,
and the valleys cloak themselves with grain; *
let them shout for joy and sing.

In Jesus’ parable in Matthew, all this promise of abundance gets nuanced a bit. The seed has a variety of challenges we probably know well. I live them in my garden daily, over on my point in Cushing: the hard clay resists embracing the seed, and the rocks and ledges are infamous, thwarting deep roots right and left. My lawn bakes hard and yellow in the July sun. In my pollinator garden, sharp, snagging thistles and multiflora briars spring up everywhere, threatening the bee balm and butterfly weed, not to mention my ankles and weeding fingers. And the hawthorn thorns in my hedgerow – each a good three inches long – are so tough they can pierce a tractor tire! (No myrtle around here, and no chance of cedars in my neck of the woods, though white oak acorns occasionally sprout out there, buried among my perennials by enterprising squirrels and chipmunks). Speaking of which, it’s not just birds raiding my seeds; how about those squirrels? The burrowing chipmunks? God help us: the ground hog who has taken up residence under my porch!?

Now, let me propose something some of you may find a bit outrageous, but as Jesus says, “Let anyone with ears listen!” I propose that we don’t even need the anxious and earnest second paragraph of the Gospel. Matthew borrowed it from Mark’s Gospel, as if afraid his hearers wouldn’t GET Jesus’ import. We don’t need all that exegesis for Jesus’s seed-sowing parable: God’s Word interprets itself in our backyards. Jesus’ initial parable can stand on its own! Forget the ferocious devils and moral instruction of that second paragraph and let the natural world – which, after all, is God’s Second Book, the Book of Nature, as the medieval Scholastics called it – let the natural world speak for itself. Besides, a wise poet-preacher friend once warned me not to seal off meaning in tidy anaerobic little moral packets. In so doing, he warned, you suck the oxygen out of Jesus’ story-telling and foreclose the very open-ended surprise that makes Jesus’ parables so fruitful! Their poetic ambiguity is exactly what enables Jesus’ stories to speak to such a wide variety of human experience.

Given the rich and fruitful fecundity of all this wonderful imagery this morning – resonating with the peepers in our ponds, the flittering fireflies alight in our meadows, first the peonies throwing out such a Baroque riot of petals they cannot hold their fragrant integrity more than a few days before they scatter petals like blown laundry everywhere, and no sooner do they pass than the day lilies erupt in a glory of gold and orange and burgundy and commandeer the rock walls, vying with the last imperial purple spears of the lupine – I think we might find it helpful to step back not just from Matthew’s attempt to reduce Jesus’ story to an improving moral but back from all of these readings in their burgeoning particularity. As I often must step back from a drawing or painting I’m working on and take a good long view of what I’m up to, perhaps we can step back from the details of these readings and let the underlying flow of narrative – the river of God’s Word that flows under and through the whole wondrous landscape of abundance the Scripture is weaving for us.

And what do we see from an Eric-Hopkins perspective on these readings, high above the islands of Penobscot Bay? We see an immense assurance of God’s persisting, burgeoning, overflowing, indeed riotously generous profusion showered upon us. But not just image piled upon image piled upon image of prodigality: prodigality after or even in the midst of deprivation! Isaiah is addressing a people who has suffered unimaginably in exile. The thorns and briars have wrung misery among his people for two generations. But now, rain and snow past, the seed for the sower and bread for the eater proliferate; the cedar and myrtle prevail. The mountains and hills burst into song; the trees of the field clap their hands.

Jesus’ people in Matthew have suffered Roman occupation for generations also, and Jesus’ resurrection didn’t send the Romans packing. The hard ground and burning sky of oppression has thwarted the seed; the terrible weeds of wealth’s corruptions and seductions have choked out growth. But Jesus’ divine sower has continued to broadcast the seed anywhere and everywhere, with its attendant promise of fertility and blessing wherever the ground of people’s hearts is soft and open enough, and wherever the compost of suffering has given rise to the ripeness of kindness, compassion and generosity.

All this abundance speaks of God’s blessing, as downright profligate now as ever, whatever the climate and political conditions on this anniversary of our democracy that might cause us to doubt and fear, and even to tighten up and become inhospitable soil ourselves. As God is an ever-generous God, broadcasting God’s promise of abundance upon any and all, so we, the recipients of those blessings, are called to the same generosity, the same broadcasting of abundance. As the stewards of God’s garden, we are not merely to see to the soil’s condition and harvest its plethora, we are to be sowers of blessing likewise. If it is God’s nature to bless, then we, made in God’s image as we are, are likewise to extend the blessing we receive far and wide, to draw no boundaries on who may be benefited.

In service to that extension of blessing, let me share with you as my closing prayer Verses 3 & 4 from the new hymn we are going to sing in closing today, a hymn written precisely for this 250th anniversary of America’s independence by lyric writer John Dalles and tune writer (and my long-time colleague, the Minister of Music at St. James’s Episcopal Church in Cambridge, MA) Patrick Michaels:

We the people trust God’s guidance

To enlighten and provide us

Ways to lift the low and poor,

Seeking justice evermore,

Joining hands to serve together,

Joining hearts and minds forever,

God bless America today!

We the people pledge and promise

To extend God’s grace beyond us:

Fairness, mercy, liberty,

For our world community.

May God’s people work with spirit,

Till true freedom all inherit.

God bless America always!

Amen.

The Reverend Betsy Scott, Sunday August 16th, 2016

FAITH

    It is a happy and special day, the baptism of James Ashcroft Fennessy, born February 20, 2026 to Drew and Aidan Fennessy.  Godparents are Emma Archibald and Brendan Kinnane who cannot not be with us.   And both sets of grandparents:  Michael and Martha Fennessy and Eric and Constance Silverman.  We are all here to welcome James into the Church Family of God  the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit and to promise to nurture him in  faith, a crucially important role. 

   Our Gospel reading for today is the incredibly powerful message about faith and healing, so powerful that it continues to change individual lives and even the destiny of peoples and nations. Christ heard the plea and faith of the Canaanite woman, an outsider, and healed her daughter. This message has been transforming the world for two thousand years.

     The Gospel for today is also a complement to the baptism ceremony taking place later in the service for it is about faith:  Christ said to the  Woman, “great is your faith, let it be done as you wish”  and her daughter was instantly healed. The people asked in the Gospel of John, what must we do to fulfil God’s requirements, and Christ answered: Believe.

 You might ask:  what is faith? One answer:  faith is trust in a higher power. It results in a driving force that inspires moral choices, good deeds and perseverance through hard times.  It is a relationship where we discover we are loved and not alone in this world. Faith is the core of a healthy personality.

  It is faith we are here to promise to foster in James and in all the young in our lives and for each other.

   It is very interesting that scientific studies are now corroborating the truth of this great teaching about faith. There are many studies today about the healing power for the seeker of the Holy Spirit. One of my favorites is Dr. Lisa Miller at Columbia University Teacher’s College, a professor of psychology. Dr. Lisa Miller has written two books:  The Awakened Brain:  The New Science of Spirituality and our Quest for an Inspired Life and  The Spiritual Child. She conducts studies showing through brain scans that those students who seek the spirit have a part of their brain developed that those who have not been seeking the spirit do not have that part of their brain developed. What a radical finding! The spiritual quest changes our brains. When she started, everyone was skeptical of her work, but when she showed them her scientific evidence, they had to pay attention.

 Her book reveals that humans are universally equipped with a capacity for spirituality. All human cultures have a religion.

• The awakened decision is the better decision. With an awakened perception, we are more creative, collaborative, ethical, and innovative.
• The awakened brain is the healthier brain. An engaged spiritual life enhances grit, optimism, and resilience while providing insulation against addiction, trauma, and depression. 
• The awakened life is the inspired life. Loss, uncertainty, and even trauma are the gateways by which we are invited to move beyond merely coping with hardship to transcend into a life of renewal, healing, joy, and fulfillment.

   This  last was the experience I had in my life.  After the tragic death of my husband in a car accident when I was a young mother, I went to Seminary in faith that there were answers, I just did not know what they were.   After a couple of years of full-time study, worship, talking, crying;  Christ came to me in a  mystical experience--a mystery, a  surprise--and healed my broken heart which led to another life of joy and fulfillment.  I likened myself to Job where everything was taken away and then everything was restored double.  None of this can be explained rationally, but it transformed my life. I no longer just have faith that there is a loving God, I know it from personal experience, and my experience has been repeated over and over through history.  For example, I was very taken with the experience of St Teresa of Avila when I went on a pilgrimage to Spain last year.  Here was a young woman who through seeking had many mystical experiences of the love of the Holy Spirit.

    In sum:  what we are seeing is that  scientific research  and peoples experiences corroborate the great wisdom and truth of the Bible. Faith is the  key for  it leads to a life of seeking and finding. It is promised:  he who seeks finds.

  In contrast, a book I read this summer  entitled  In the Café of Lost Youth by Patrick Modiano, winner of the  Nobel prize in literature in 2014, takes place after WW Two in Paris and it describes a woman named Louki who is  lost,  wandering from place to place.  She is not seeking, she does not believe, she has no sense that she has a mission in life.  She has no faith.  She is not a seeker. This book was awful to read. It lets the reader know what life is like for a young person without faith.  At the end of the book, Louki commits suicide. 

    I imagine you have all read  about the high rate of depression in college age young people today, but  these findings show us  that it does not have to be so bleak if we foster faith, belief and love in our young

     To continue with Dr. Lisa Miller, her research shows that college students with a developed sense of spirituality:
* are 40% less likely to use and abuse substances
* are 60% less likely to be depressed as teenagers
* are 80% less likely to have dangerous or unprotected sex and  have significantly more positive markers for thriving including an increased sense of meaning and purpose, and high levels of academic success.

   What are some ways we can foster faith in ourselves and in the young?

     We pray to God for faith and to help our unbelief.  We meditate, listening for guidance: we walk in nature and develop awe for God’s creation; we read sacred texts; we attend services.  We seek all our lives in whatever ways open-up to us, for there are many paths to the Spirit.

    We foster faith in the young by encouraging  their  wonder and inquiring minds.  For example, when a young child is wondering about  butterflies or asks why the flowers are so beautiful, we as parents can foster their faith by enjoying their wonder with them and being grateful for the beauty. We share our own faith with the young, reassuring them they will find answers if they keep seeking,

       But perhaps the most important way we teach faith and spirituality to the young is the way we ourselves lead our lives.  Are we ourselves seeking guidance from the Holy Spirit? Do we practice our own religious traditions in our homes? Do we leave room for children to doubt and express their own thoughts? Are we kind? What we do is much more powerful than what we say?

 Repeating again Christ’s statement to the mother in today’s Gospel:   “Woman,  great is your faith. Let it be done for you as you wish” and her daughter was instantly healed.

How does one’s seeking faith lead to healing?

      Have you had this experience?  Let me give an example I have seen:

 When I was leading grief groups at St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York City, there was a young woman whose father had died when she was three years old.  Her mother remarried and had several more children, but this young woman never felt like she truly belonged to her stepfather and kept longing for her own father.  When I saw her, she was probably in her late thirties.  She came faithfully to the grief group once a week for a couple of years always repeating the same plea about missing her own father and seeking healing of her grief.   She wanted to know that she was equally loved. She had faith that if she kept seeking, she would be healed.

  One day late in the session when everyone else had left, she was sitting quietly and I sensed something special was happening. I put up  my right hand in blessing, keeping quiet.  After a while, she lifted her head and opened her eyes and with a radiant face told me  her father had been there with her and now she  knew she had a father and was not alone.  The mystical experience healed this young woman.  She had been seeking healing for years and then she experienced this mystery and was healed. When I saw her after this, she was a changed person.

  The daughter in out Gospel was suddenly healed, and we are not told exactly what happened, perhaps it was something similar.

      The Spirit answers us in the Spirit’s own way, usually as a surprise when least expected but in the midst of our seeking.   I went to seminary seeking healing and an answer, and Christ came to me in surprise and let me know that He was with me, that I was known and loved and that I was not alone.  The Holy Spirit healed the heart of the young woman in my grief group. The Holy Spirit heals the hearts of the seeker in the Spirit’s own time and way.  That is the great Good News of this morning’s Gospel.

  We are all exhorted to keep faith, to keep seeking  and to be  aware how important it is,  particularly for the sake of the young in our care and today for James.

I will end by quoting a Rilke poem:

   “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.

 Do not seek the answers which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live with them, And the point is to live everything.  Live the questions now.”

    We are called to have faith, to persevere, and to believe that the answers and healing will come in God’s own way and in God’s time for in today’s Gospel we read that Jesus saw the faith of the Canaanite woman and healed her daughter.

Benediction:

Life is Short and We do not have much time to Gladen the hearts of those who travel the way with us.  Be swift to love and make haste to be kind, and May the Blessing of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit be with us all now and for evermore, Amen

The Reverend Scott Brown, Sunday August 2nd, 2026

The Rev. Scott J. Brown - St. George Chapel August 2, 2026 - Matthew 14:13-21

Karl Barth famously said that a preacher should stand with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.

My newspaper this week isn't The Portland Press Herald

It's my wife. Last week, Kimberly lost her business in the flood in Uvalde.

On Wednesday, July 15, the residents of her Assisted Living were evacuated to a Holiday Inn and the river behind the house was rising.

We were actually here in Maine and immediately changed our plans and headed home to find 4 feet of water in the house and a muddy mess. We spent the next 10 days emptying that house, demoing the floors and walls, and hauling all the ruined furniture to the city dump.

When I spoke to my 80 year old mother the next day she said something we’ve all thought, I’m sure. She said, “I don’t understand it. I was praying so hard for the water to stay out of the house. How could this happen?”

It's an honest question. And over the years I've heard all kinds of explanations for God’s role in natural disasters or tragedy .

When heartache comes, when trials flood your home or your heart, people say all kinds of things, always well intended but seldom helpful. They say things like:

"God was teaching a lesson." "Everything happens for a reason."

"God only gives us what we can handle." I have to tell you...

I don't believe that's the God revealed in Jesus Christ. Look at the Gospel for today…the feeding of the 5,000.

When I read today's Gospel, I don't see Jesus making people hungry so that he can feed them and look like the hero. I don't see Jesus creating the problem so he can perform the miracle.

That’s not how I think God works! I see something much simpler. Jesus sees a need. And he addresses it. That's what Jesus does. It’s that simple.

Again and again throughout the Gospels. He sees sickness and he heals. He sees grief and he comforts. He sees loneliness and he welcomes. He sees hunger and he feeds.

His instinct is always the same.

See need. Address need.

I think that's because that's who God is. I don't think God causes evil so that good can eventually happen. I think God is always bringing good wherever brokenness already exists.

God doesn't need tragedy to accomplish God's purposes. God redeems. God has been in the redemption business for thousands of years. If God had a business card it would say “God”. Then on the other side “I redeem what’s broken.”

While looking for a place for her residents to move to while we addressed the flooded house, my wife received a call from a local lady who had a house on the market for sale. She allowed us to move in immediately and charged us ZERO rent until we could get things settled and work out a deal on the house.

Redemption in the midst of chaos. A home for people in need. Food for a hungry soul.

That's the God we meet in Jesus. Not a God who manufactures suffering. A God who enters suffering. A God who redeems.

I don't know why God doesn’t stop every tragedy. I don't pretend to. But I do know this. Love requires freedom. Freedom means real choices. Real choices have real consequences. Creation itself is broken. But nowhere in Scripture do I see a God who delights in suffering.

I see a God who enters suffering. I see Jesus.

Jesus does something fascinating in today's Gospel. The disciples look at the crowd and say, "Send them away." In other words... "This isn't our problem." Jesus replies, "They need not go away. You give them something to eat."

Notice what Jesus is doing. He's inviting the disciples to become like him. He's inviting them into God's own work.

The disciples see a problem. Jesus sees an opportunity to love. The disciples see scarcity. Jesus sees possibility.

The disciples say, "We only have five loaves and two fish."

Only.

That's the language of scarcity. Jesus doesn’t speak that language. Jesus speaks the language of abundance.

"Bring them here to me." Bring me what you have. NOT what you wish you had. NOT what someone else has. Bring what YOU have.

Because in God's hands, ENOUGH has a funny way of becoming MORE than enough.

This is the only miracle outside the resurrection that is all four Gospels. So it was obviously pretty important.

I don't know exactly how the miracle happened. Maybe the bread multiplied. Maybe generosity multiplied. Maybe once one little boy offered his lunch, everyone else reached into their cloaks and started sharing what they had been hiding.

I don't know….But I know this.

When generosity begins...it spreads. When compassion begins...it spreads. When people begin seeing needs and addressing needs...abundance appears where scarcity once seemed to reign.

And maybe that's the calling for us. We become like the God we adore.

If we imagine God to be angry all the time...eventually we'll become angry people. If we imagine God keeping score...we'll keep score.

But if the God revealed in Jesus is always healing... always feeding...

always forgiving... always redeeming…

If the God we worship is simply LOVE incarnate…then little by little...we become the same. If Jesus, in his always loving, always healing way, sees need and addresses need...then that's our calling too.

Not just the dramatic needs. But the ordinary ones.

And you see ordinary needs every single day. I do too..... We don’t have to head to a flood zone

to find need. Right in our own backyard, in our own living room….Someone needs encouragement…Someone needs forgiveness…Someone needs a meal…Someone needs a phone call       Someone needs someone simply to notice them.

See need.

Address need.

Not because we can solve every problem. We can't. I can't help everyone….I don't have enough time….Enough money….Enough energy. Neither do you.

But Jesus never asks us to solve every problem….He simply asks us to offer what we have….And trust God with the rest.

Can I offer one more thought? It's almost another sermon...but I think it's hidden inside this one. The people in the crowd had to receive the bread. Nobody says, "No thanks….I'm fine….I'll take care of myself."

They received what others offered…..And I wonder if that's actually harder for many of us.

I know it is for me. I'd much rather be the one helping than the one needing help. I’d rather do the feeding than ask for the food.

As I was cleaning the flooded house, as sweaty and tired as I’ve ever been in my life, a pickup truck pulled up. A few teenagers got out. They were from a local church. They weren't there to rebuild houses. They weren't there with chainsaws. They were simply handing out cold bottles of water. One young man walked over to me and asked, "Would you like one?" And my very first instinct was... "No thanks. I'm good."

Isn't that funny? I wasn't good. I was exhausted. I was filthy. I was dehydrated.

I wanted that bottle of water more than I wanted to admit.

But something inside me would rather keep suffering than admit I needed help.

And here stood Jesus, in the shape of a teenage boy from a local church...offering me what I already knew I needed.

And I realized something….Sometimes the holiest thing we can do isn't just to give….Sometimes the holiest thing we can do is receive….To allow someone else to become the hands of Christ for us.

The crowd received bread.

The disciples learned generosity.

And all of them discovered the same truth.

God is always moving toward human need. Always redeeming. Always restoring. Always bringing good where brokenness already exists. This week I watched people lose almost everything. I also watched neighbors show up. I watched strangers become friends. I watched a woman open her home. I watched teenagers hand out bottles of water. I watched Christ feeding hungry people all over again.

Maybe that's the greatest miracle in this story.

Not that bread multiplied……But that the love of God still does.

This week I watched Christ feed hungry people…..Not with five loaves and two fish. But with an empty house offered to strangers…..With neighbors who showed up….With teenagers carrying bottles of cold water.

The miracle hasn't stopped…..It just looks different now.

Karl Barth once said that preachers should stand with the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other.

Today...The feeding of the five thousand in one hand...Your life in the other. And I wonder what you see.

For me, it's clear. There will always be hunger in this world. Physical hunger. Emotional hunger. Spiritual hunger.

It won't go away.

But neither will our Savior.

He is still in the redemption business. He still sees our needs. He still addresses our needs. Sometimes through a loaf of bread. Sometimes through an empty house. Sometimes through a bottle of cold water. And sometimes through you.

So this week...See need. Address need. And perhaps hardest of all…..Accept need.

And don't be surprised if, somewhere in the middle of it all, you discover that Christ was already there.

Amen.

The Reverend Richard Greenleaf, Sunday July 19th, 2026

A Sermon

The Reverend Richard E. Greenleaf St. George’s Chapel

Long Cove Road

Tenants Harbor, ME 04860 19 July 2026

Eighth Sunday after Pentecost /Proper 11/1 HE IIA

Genesis 28:10-19a Psalm 139:1-11, 22-23

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

Collect of the Day

Almighty God, the fountain of all wisdom, you know our necessities before we ask and our ignorance in asking: Have compassion on our weakness, and mercifully give us those things which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask; through the worthiness of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Good morning!

It is a pleasure to be with you again this year.

For those of you who do not know me, my name is Richard Greenleaf

and for 31 years

I served as a chaplain and a member of faculty at St. Paul’s School

over in Concord, New Hampshire.

But what I want to begin with today is a story not from then

--not from my long experience as a boarding school chaplain--but with a story from a role

much more pertinent to my life now, and that is as a grandparent,

This is very much with me because my wife Jenny and I

are fresh off a week with our daughter

and her 11-year-old daughter, Ashley, at our home down in Kittery, Maine, something that has become an annual

July event for us.

The story I want to share with you, however,

is not from our grand-daughter’s most recent visit but from a visit about 4 or 5 years ago,

when Ashley was around 6 or 7.

She arrived, per usual, with great fanfare and hugs and then proceeded to the kitchen looking for snacks,

when she spied a very large, 5 lb. bag of Dum Dums, you know those little lollipops

that come in a variety of colors and flavors.

“Wow!” she cried. “Are those for me?”

I should tell you that at that time we had recently moved my then 92-year-old father-in-law Bob

into a nearby assisted-living memory-care facility, and one of Bob’s great delights was Dum Dums.

So Jenny, Grammy, had to explain,

“Well, actually, those are for great-Grampy,

but I’m sure he won’t mind sharing some with you.”

To which Ashley responded, “Can we sort them?”

A bit surprised,

Jenny said, “Sure!” and began to set out a number of bowls

into which to sort the great variety of Dum Dums.

And, as if there this were not enough, Ashley decided that they had to count the number of each flavor

and record the results on a chart.

This turned into quite the exercise,

which Ashley seemed to take increasing delight in,

to the point where she

turned to her grandmother and exclaimed, “Isn’t this great, Grammy?”

“This is the best day ever!”

I should note

that Ashley is not OCD.

But she does have a great love of ordering things--

--things like her large collection

of life-like plastic animal figures,

which she likes to organize in various ways: by size, by color,

by species and family . . .

or by whatever story

she happens to cast them in at a particular moment.

Where does this come from, this impulse to rank and sort,

this urge the poet Wallace Stevens called our “blessed rage for order”?

I should also note that Ashley comes by this honestly, in that her father is a PhD chemist

and her paternal grandfather a professor of electrical engineering, both of them very orderly

in thought and habit.

And surely, in this life

the ability to distinguish one thing from another is the foundation of learning,

both rational and moral.

Even Sesame Street teaches this, with Cookie Monster singing,

“One of these things is not like the others One of these things doesn't belong

Can you tell which thing is not like the other By the time we finish our song?”

and series of numbers, or letters,

or shapes

are displayed on the screen

with one item in each series being different

for children to identify.

And this capacity

can be essential to survival.

It has been noted

that even the avant garde musical composer John Cage who championed the beauty of the random

in sound

was punctilious in his hobby as a mushroom hunter, because his very life depended upon

his ability to distinguish the poisonous

from the non-poisonous

in his mushroom hunting.

And this morning,

we see Jesus trying to teach an assembled crowd, using a series of parables

to help them understand

just what the Kingdom of Heaven might be like

and not like.

In fact, the whole 13th chapter of Matthew is devoted to these parables,

parables of the Kingdom of Heaven,

many of which would be familiar if we were to dig into them.

What they have in common is helping Jesus’s listeners discern and distinguish

among the various accounts of the Kingdom of God

on offer at that place and time, accounts both Jewish and Roman.

In using these parables,

Jesus is trying to develop in his listeners a kind of discernment

that is nothing less than wisdom itself!

But here,

in the parable of the wheat and the weeds, Jesus seems to do the exact opposite,

he appears to totally reverse field.

Rather than having the Master tell his slaves

to sort and gather the weeds from among the wheat, he has the Master tell them,

‘No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.

I don’t think I have to tell you that we live in a time

when the impulse

to gather and burn the weeds is great.

We live in a sometimes ruthlessly meritocratic society that seems to rank and sort

everything:

Intelligence, money, power, beauty. Talent, influence, and access.

So much so

that some despair

of even competing.

Religiously,

we rank and sort

among who’s got God’s story right, pitting religion against religion, race against race,

“we” against “they,” all against each,

all of it making our “rage for order” more “blasted” than “blessed.”

But here,

in this parable, Jesus says, “No.”

Jesus says, “Stop!”

Jesus says, ‘Let them grow together until the harvest.’

And Jesus uses this image

because the weeds of which he is speaking are darnels,

that, according to one source, is

“a grassy weed that acts as a "Vavilovian mimic" of wheat, meaning it evolved to look and grow exactly like wheat to avoid being weeded . . During their early stages, darnel and wheat are indistinguishable.

Both grow bright green, upright stalks, which makes it nearly impossible to pull the darnel without tearing up the wheat roots.”

And it’s toxic!

In classical Greece, it was known as the “plant of frenzy” used in the rites of Demeter and Persephone’s followers.

The Roman poet Ovid called it “eye-blightening.”

In medieval Europe it was used

as a medicinal plant, as an anesthetic, and to slow menstrual bleeding.

But most often, it seemed to be baked into what was called “dazed bread” or brewed into beer

to give those basics an extra kick.

And Darnel shows up in Shakespeare, particularly in King Lear,

where Lear wears it in his crown of weeds,

made up of “all the idle weeds that grow in our sustaining corn.”

One scholar even notes that

the symptoms of Lear’s madness

are similar to the symptoms of darnel poisoning

and wondered if Shakespeare had meant to insinuate that Lear had been eating the plants in his crown, and if his madness was, in part,

a self-inflicted drunkenness.

And yet

Jesus says of wheat and darnel, ‘Let them grow together

until the harvest.’

Maybe because wheat and darnel, like human beings

--like us-

cannot be accurately ranked cannot be sorted

in any final way

before the harvest. The true and the false.

The healthful and the toxic The good and the bad.

Inextricably mixed up, both in the human family and in ourselves!

This is not a call

to abandon our human responsibility for moral discernment.

But a moral reminder

that only God knows the heart,

and only God can foresee the harvest.

A moral reminder that in the end we may find

that the Divine Sower has sown only good wheat.

Amen.

The Reverend Kristen Burkholder, July 5th, 2026

What’s our instinct when we see someone carrying something too heavy?

Two months ago, I got to find out. I was, with a few other blissed out patrons, perusing the profusion of flowers at Holmes Greenhouse and Florist Shop in East Belfast.

I live in Waldo County, in a tiny town called Morrill, and Holmes is, unfortunately, a quick drive from my house. (I say unfortunately because it just makes it too easy to totally lose my mind buying plants.) … in late May, early June, those of us with “plant problems” quietly and gleefully load our arms with tons of those little pots.

I was transporting my haul to my car, and turned to walk around to the driver’s side, when I suddenly saw a stout, strong, older woman, with a fierce and overwhelmed look on her face, making her way across the parking lot to her car with a giant bag of potting soil.

Now… as any of you know who have carried one of those – they’re about yea-big by yea-big – these bags are heavy, unwieldy, slippery, and if the sun has been beating down on them for any length of time, which it had for us shoppers – HOT.

I was horrified to see her struggling because I knew what it felt like to be in that struggle: a lone person, lurching forward, muscles screaming, with a loosey-goosey weight in my arms that I am determined not to drop.

I think I had my keys in my hand? I dropped them on the ground, and ran towards her. Literally ran. “Oh my goodness, oh my goodness, let me help you with that,” I said, and before she could protest I scooped up under the bag with my arms, grabbing that crucial bottom end as the entire bag nearly slipped out of her grasp.

She thanked me, we walked it to her car, and that was that. And that WAS that, and I only share it with you, not because I’m so wonderful, but because I’m not wonderful. I’m usually quite self-absorbed, a sinner saved only by grace, capable of looking right at misery and pretending it’s not there, and in that moment, by the grace of God, something Higher and Greater took over me when I saw her struggle.

This summer we’re spending a lot of time in the gospel of Matthew, and for most of June we listened to Jesus’ instructions to his chosen twelve, ones he trusted, the ones most devoted to his message. Today we move out of Matthew 10, known as the “missional discourse” and into Matthew 11, where we follow Jesus out of the quiet intimacy of fellowship, into the maelstrom of proclamation, as he begins to travel with his message of liberation and healing.

We don’t read about what happens during this time – was it a week? Two weeks? A month? Two months – only Jesus’ response to it all. “Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me,” he says after a while, to some disciples of John the Baptist who inquire on his behalf whether or not Jesus is the Messiah.

Jesus chides those who hear him, who want miracles and healings without repentance, and delivers an especially scorching condemnation of cities who experienced most of his deeds of power and continued to live without changing the way they did so.

Most interestingly, in verse 28, after thanking his Father aloud for having bestowed Wisdom on infants (that would be us) rather than the smart people, Jesus switches tone entirely, and speaks the words that many of us love and cling to:

“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Listen to what he says. The promise is not “I will give you rest and all your hard stuff will evaporate.” Or “I will give you rest and you don’t have to do a thing “ “or “I will give you rest. You can ignore anything around you that’s upsetting.”

Jesus knows life is hard. But when we live the world’s way – trying, ever trying, to make things easier, nicer and simpler for ourselves – it actually makes life harder. We continually strive for acquisitions of any kind – be they material, relational or intellectual—that do not answer the heaviness of being alive.

We carry burdens – both literally and figuratively sometimes – that are truly too much bear, even though we try, even while they slip from our grasp.

Jesus knows this because he is one of us and knows what it is like to be in our struggle. And like the quickness of that instinct to help someone with something heavy, he is right there, ready to help us before we even know how to ask Him for help.

What is that help he offers? Jesus calls it a “yoke” and a “burden,” because he knows what he’s asking of us is not care-free passivity. Remember, we just heard in Matthew 10 all those verses in which he warned us of the trouble that comes from following him.

The yoke – accepted from a gentle, mild and loving Lord – is easy, for it is that kind of weight that is more like a good day at the gym or a satisfying session of outdoor work: exertion is required, but bearing the weight demands your all and summons forth your best. It is work towards a certain future in which all of God's dreams will finally come true.

The burden – the deep work of our neverending relationship-building with God -- is light, compared to the Beast of Accomplishment’s gaping maw, consigning us to a life of endless striving, never truly knowing what it means to love others, or be loved by them.

Life is not easy. Pursuit of ease is death, in the end. Accepting life’s difficulty moves from resignation to hopefulness, when we believe Jesus’ work for us is always undergirded by the eternal, endless, beyond all understanding power and love of our Triune God.

Pray with me:

Lord Christ, may we be willing to surrender to you, put all our trust in you, and exchange the burden of our small existence with the joyful burden of whole-hearted service to You, in all we do. Amen.

The Reverend Betsy Scott, August 17th 2025

SERMON: St George’s Chapel

August 17, 2025

Rev. Betsy Scott

Good morning: How did you feel when hearing the Gospel reading from Luke 12 this morning with Christ saying that he did not come to bring peace in the world but to bring fire and to split families. I was deeply unsettled. Having spent my life bringing families together, this message seemed at odds with Christ’s message of peace.

I started thinking about when this gospel was written and by whom. Elaine Pagels, the distinguished professor of religion at Princeton University’s new book Miracles and Wonder explains: The Romans were persecuting Jews and Christians who rebelled against Roman rule and Roman religion at the time tis was written. They were cruel and mean. They rode into communities, raped women and killed or enslaved the men and children. It was common for the Romans to crucify men who refused to pay allegiance to the Emperor and the Roman gods. Luke was a doctor from Greece who wrote according to scholars about twenty years after the death of Christ. He described what was happening in his own time: seeing families torn apart when someone in the family became a Christian, seeing Christians being tortured for their faith and for their refusal to bend down and worship the Roman emperor or the Roman gods. I imagine we can all think of similar things still happening today.

When I read this Gospel another time, it was the fire of Christ I heard most clearly: it was Christ saying: “I came to set the earth on fire and how I wish it was already kindled. I have a baptism to receive and how distressed I am until it is over.” The interpreters say he is talking about his coming crucifixion and that he knows he must go through with it because of his obedience to his father and radical love for all of us. The fire is his radical transformative love. This kind of love is divisive when it upsets and conflicts with the established order.

The fire of God’s love is a great mystery and is present even in the face of unimaginable tragedy such as we have all witnessed this summer in the lost lives of those little girls in Texas, the murders in New York City and much more around the world, but in God’s mysterious ways, His radical love enters our lives and transforms them over time. It is this love we are called to recognize. I was very taken with the Rev Holly Antolini’s answer to a question earlier in the summer about the tragedy in Texas when she said there is no explanation that satisfies the heart of the suffering of the innocent, but the answer is love.

To further explain God’s transformative love, I feel called to share with you a recent encounter I had with God’s radical love in answer to a great tragedy that happened to my family with the hope my story gives to us all increased faith and hope. This encounter came upon me in a totally unexpected and mysterious way, something I never could have imagined. I think I had this experience both to increase my faith and so I could share it with all of you.

This last June, I went with Shalem, a pilgrim group based here in the United States, to the Monastery of the Incarnation outside the walls of Avila Spain where Teresa of Avila lived in the 16th century cloistered as a nun for many years in a tiny cell with a fireplace above, a desk below where she wrote about a life of simplicity, poverty, prayer and contemplation. She is known as a great mystic who lived in a very troubled time when there were constant wars between the Moslems and the Christians with awful atrocities.

We were taken to the chapel of the monastery by a young ponytailed guide, a recent graduate of Texas A & M, and shown an elaborate reredos at the front of the chapel ornamented with gold leaf which the guide enthused was typical Spanish as she had seen similar altar pieces in Honduras colonized by the Spanish.

Our guide asked us to look up to the back of the chapel, up on the second level behind screens and bars. She told us that we were standing on the spot where Teresa stood when she peered through the screen to the second floor and saw a vision of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin Mary appeared to Teresa on that spot. Her story made me think of my devout Catholic mother-in -law who had always felt close to the Virgin Mary and who had died forty-two years ago.

Next, our guide suggested we each stand in the central spot and look up to see the place where the vision had taken place. When it was my turn, I stood in the spot and looked up, squinting to see through the screen and bars to the lights at the back of the second-floor space, perhaps another chapel. As I stood there peering to see, there to my total surprise stood a vision of my first husband Bob looking at me with his mother at his side, her only child whom she absolutely adored. My first husband Bob Jacks and the father of my children was killed tragically in a car crash, dying instantly, when he was in his fifties, leaving behind our two young children, eleven and fourteen bereft of their father and me a frightened and grieving young widow. He missed their entire growing-up, his grandchildren and so much of life, so it was to my total amazement that there they stood. My insides began to transform as I sensed their showering me with approval, acceptance and total love. I understood they were radiating love. I sensed they knew absolutely everything that had happened to me for the past forty years. I realized it was the unconditional knowing of the Holy Spirit. I felt them saying what a great job I had done since Bob had died with the children and that they were waiting to welcome me with joyful hearts, but not yet. They were thrilled with the children and grandchildren. I felt a great unexpected delight and warmth in experiencing their unconditional love, the divine fire of the Holy Spirit. My beloved second husband Al came up in my mind, the man I married seven and half years after Bob died and with whom I was happily married for over thirty years until he died three years ago. I was somewhat nervous what they would think but instead the thought came to me they had sent him to me, delighted I had had those years with him. I was experiencing unconditional, unselfish divine love, all knowing love. Total knowing, total acceptance, total presence with me. I was absolutely in awe of this divine love. How could this be? There is no rational explanation. It is the mystery of God’s healing, transforming and radical love. It was a mystical experience.

This kind of love is so amazing— it brought total joy in me, even in the face of all my years of struggle with my first husband and his mother--for my relationship with the two of them had sometimes been a challenge—but they understood, had compassion. Bob had told me love was eternal, and he was right. I can’t get over this total love and joy. This is radical transformative love.

This is the love that Holly was talking about that is eternal in the face of great tragedy. We don’t know how it will play out with all those stricken families in Texas, in New York and elsewhere, except our faith tells us that God’s radical unimaginable love, the fire that He brought to this earth, in God’s mysterious ways, will be there with them and for them forever. It is extremely painful, terrible, not understandable these tragedies—and yet God’s radical love is what remains.

I shared this story at lunch during the pilgrimage with a group of women Episcopal priests who told me I had blessed them with my sharing.

I wrote this story to my children, and my son Bob wrote back to me: “That’s beautiful, Mom. Thanks for sharing.” He then said he always said that his dad would be so pleased that Al was with us all those years since he could not be.

The Holy Spirit knows us far more than we know ourselves, is so immense that it is hard for us to take-in.

This is the love that is here now for us all, this is the fire that Christ came to bring to the earth and for which he died, and it is radical.

We all fervently pray that all grieving families in Texas, in New York City and elsewhere, and all of us here in this chapel, will experience the amazing healing love of God in God’s own way and time.

As the Gospel of John states: “The light shines in the darkness, and darkness has not overcome it.”

A recent quote from the Bishop in DC: “Some days we’d be made of stone if we didn’t feel discouraged and deeply saddened by what we see around us. But remember that hope isn’t something we need to conjure on our own. It is grace that God gives, allowing us to face evil and death, and still believe that life-affirming Spirit is always at work within us and around us to bring about good. Dare to believe that seeds of new possibilities, invisible to us now, have already been planted in the soil of our lives, and they are slowly taking root. New life will emerge from the ashes of what is lost.”

We are called by God to have faith, to seek and to recognize the love of God at work in our lives.

Amen

The Reverend T. Richard Snyder, July 6th 2025

Dealing With Our Divisions

T. Richard Snyder

July 6, 2025

St. George’s Chapel

Your people shall be my people—beautiful and familiar words. How many weddings have used those words? The story of Ruth has been told over and over to portray the commitment of two people in love.

Naomi implores her two daughters-in law to remain in their home country of Moab with its familiarity and security while she returns to her homeland in Judah. Orpah agrees, but Ruth insists on going to Judah with Naomi. Forsaking all others, she cleaves to Ruth and utters these famous words. Where you go, I will go, where you lodge, I will lodge, your people shall be my people and your God my God.

Without taking away anything from the poetic significance of Ruth’s affirmation as a model for the marriage commitment, let me invite you deeper into the story.

Think about the risk Ruth faced in going to Judah—a country unknown to her. Not only was she a Moabite, she was a widow, living with another widow. Widows in those days were extremely vulnerable. Widows were poor since property reverted to male family members. They were without protection and often subject to abuse by men. Neither Ruth nor Naomi could predict what would happen to them upon going to Judah. Would they be lonely and forsaken? Would they suffer abuse? Would they die from poverty? Or would their choice lead to new, as yet unimagined, possibilities?

The story goes on to tell how Ruth seduces Boaz and he eventually marries her and they have a child named Obed, the grandfather of King David. Imagine, the offspring of a woman from Moab as Israel’s king because she dared to make Your People, My People.

This is what we need so desperately today. If we are to avoid total chaos in our world and nation, we will need to find a way to make “your people” “my people”.

I imagine that most of you are as stunned and upset as I about the incredible divisions in our world today. The recent events in Ukraine and the Middle East have shocked the world. Putin calls the Ukrainian leaders Nazis and terrorizes the citizenry.

Over in Israel and Palestine, the long enduring and seemingly intractable stand-off is ticking away like a time bomb. Despite years of diplomatic efforts and numerous accords and agreements, the situation remains explosive. The terror of Oct 7th has torn apart many Israeli families and the bombs and military of Netanyahu have killed more than 50,000 people, almost 20,00 of them children. Colonial settlements have turned Palestine into a land of fear for the Palestinians. Israelis live with the threat of annihilation.

At home, our two political parties have been locked in a stranglehold--confounding all of us and much of the rest of the world. Our president describes immigrants as killers and rapists and sends them to prisons in other lands so as to make this a white, Christian nation. As if that were not sufficient some religious leaders in each of the three Abrahamic faiths are stirring up hatred among their adherents.

What is going on? And how do we move forward when people are being killed? How do we move forward when civil discourse is scarce, at best?--when religious leaders of differing faiths characterize the others as demonic or infidels? What is the way ahead in a world in which people, nations and religions are at each other’s throats?

Is there any hope?

No surprise, this sermon is very political. But it is not about partisan politics. It’s about politics in the broader sense of a concern for the polis. It is about securing the common good. It is about how we move forward when we find ourselves at each other’s throats.

It is not sufficient to lament our sorry state or to denounce those we consider to be the culprits. We must move beyond recrimination and blame to look deep within our own souls.

I believe the way ahead is fundamentally rooted in our recognition that we are not mortal enemies locked in eternal combat but that we are at our core sisters and brothers. That, of course, is quite a leap from where things now stand. But it is absolutely critical that we move beyond our Manichean division of people into good and evil. Unless we do, there is no hope for our nation, or for our world.

We Christians have both a responsibility and an opportunity. Our very foundation is rooted in the soil of kinship. It is not just the example of Ruth that shows us the way. The creation narrative in Genesis tells us that we are created in the very image of God. It does not suggest that only certain people—only those who believe a certain way or who look a certain way or who come from a certain place or who vote a certain way—are our kin. The lapel button young black children in New York City and elsewhere used to wear, says it all: “God don’t make no junk”.

The words of Maqsood Jafri say the same, “the corner stone in Islam is the unity of God. Allah’s unity teaches us the message that we should not divide humans into sections and sects.” In his book, The Light of Islam, Dr. Mohammad Ali Al-khuli claims that “(Islam) is a religion to all humans regardless of color, race, and language. It is a religion that tolerates other religions and orders its followers to respect and protect all humans. No people or race is superior as all are from Adam and Eve. As a result, there is no room for racial superiority. No one is superior….except in piety and good deeds. “

It is important to lift up this fundamental claim of humankind’s unity made by some contemporary Muslims since Islam has become for many what Communism was during the Cold War. Many in our nation have simply substituted one “enemy”—the communists—for another, “the Muslims”.

There are, of course, some interpreters of the Koran who assert a fundamental division of the world into believers and infidels thereby providing the foundation for extremist acts. But did Christians not treat Native Americans similarly. We find the same claims of essential separation both in Christianity and Judaism with the concomitant extremism that has marked our history to this day.

Actually, it’s all about a choice. A choice as to what we most value, what we most cherish and desire. It is also a choice about the Bible itself--which trajectory of Scripture we give most weight to. It’s true one can find stories and admonitions for separation, division and rejection—even killing-- of others in the Bible. But it also true that throughout the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, the motif of a kinship that crosses all barriers is lifted up again and again. Those who were considered “other”, those who were outcasts or infidels or enemies become one. Joseph, who was sold into slavery in Egypt, became a trusted member of the Pharaoh’s court despite having been “other”. Rahab, who harbored two Hebrews spies in Jericho as they plotted its overthrow was “other” in two important ways. First, she was a Canaanite, the enemy. Second, she was a prostitute. But her solidarity with the Hebrews was rewarded with safety for her and her family. Jesus reached across the forbidden barrier between Jews and Samaritans to speak intimately with the woman at the well. In the book of Acts Phillip engaged with a man from Ethiopia—someone from another culture and race and—most probably--gay. (The word eunuch often was a word for referring to gay men in those times.) And, in the beautiful story of Ruth we are told of the power of love to overcome the boundaries of ethnicity and nation.

Paul said that the dividing walls of hostility are torn down and those once considered “other” are now understood to be kin--that there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free--all one body, with each of the members needing the other. All of the divisions were understood to be false. I choose to live my life in this spirit of kinship

Of course differences remain. Ending the divisions does not mean eliminating differences. There are still male and female, still Jews and Greeks, still slaves and free, still Republicans and Democrats, still Christians and Muslims. The challenge is to refuse to allow the differences to be cause for division--cause for dealing with someone as “other”. It is a matter of choice. Will we treat our differences as a cause for division or a cause for celebration.

What would it mean for us to view the world in these terms--to understand that no dividing walls should be erected or allowed to stand between any people based on ethnicity, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, abilities, parties, or economic conditions?

What would it mean for Congress—for our relations with Muslims—for our response to immigrants—for our treatment of people’s whose gender identity is different from ours.?

Let’s be realistic. Getting to that point will be extremely difficult, for each of us as individuals, for political parties, for governments and for organized religion.

There are some substantial impediments to overcoming the divisions. Internationally, part of the difficulty lies in the spread of Globalization. It promises to bring an end to our divisions, to bring the world together. But too often it has functioned to cover up the differences. What it offers is conformity and sameness. No matter where you travel in the world today you find a Gap, a McDonald’s, a Starbucks, Coca Cola, and a Walt Disney. For me, Globalization is the spirit of corporate capitalism seeking to create a giant worldwide Mall in which everything seems the same.

Nationally, the current state of affairs in our government could easily lead us to despair. The lack of civility, unwillingness to hear the other, assumption of the worst motivation on the part of those who differ, and refusal to consider compromise have led us to a point of no return. If we cannot even reach across the aisle, how can we reach out to other nations, religions and cultures?

Organized religions too often have been more devoted to securing and maintaining power and privilege than in pursuing justice and unity. Today Christian Nationalism seeks to make this a white nation.

And personally, each of us has been indoctrinated with prejudices born of our childhood and constantly reinforced by the media. As children, how often did we need to see the Indians portrayed as savages and enemies before we started rooting for the cowboys. How often do we hear or see Muslims portrayed as terrorists before we view every Muslim with suspicion? It is difficult not to succumb to the stereotypes, even when we wish not to. I am reminded of Paul’s lament—the good that I would do I do not and that which I would not, I do.

But we dare not go that route. We dare not rest with despair. We dare not succumb to our stereotypes. We have a choice. We have a responsibility personally, nationally, and globally to work to break down the barriers that divide, to reach across the aisles that have become chasms, to take the risk of being vulnerable just as Ruth did when she left Moab and went to Judah with Naomi.

And as we take our halting steps toward overcoming the divisions in our world, we need to acknowledge how difficult it is to make this choice. What if our desire for unity is taken as weakness and we are taken advantage of? What if we are not trusted by those to whom we reach out? What if we are viewed as naïve or even worse, as traitors by those who considered us to be one of them? How do we stand for what we believe while being open to respecting and learning from others whose beliefs are different? How can we overcome our discomfort with those who are different? How do we prevent our life-long prejudices from sneaking up on us unexpectedly? It certainly will not be easy.

So, what are we to do? In closing, let me make two suggestions.

First, let us choose to celebrate our differences. Unfortunately, much of what passes for the search for unity is based on toleration rather than celebration. It is not sufficient to simply tolerate differences—they are to be celebrated as the gifts of creation that enrich our collective lives. Our differences make us a great nation. Our differences make us interesting. We need each other and that is to be celebrated. As Paul said, each member is needed for the sake of the body and each member is to be honored.

Second, let us choose depth rather than shallowness. We must move beyond trivial forays into the ideas, cultures and beliefs of those who are different from us. We will need to try to walk in their shoes. We need to do everything we can to listen respectfully and to understand those who differ from us. In a time when criticism of Israel is equated with anti-Semitism, when being a Christian is equated with being white, when being an immigrant is equated with being illegal, we must stand up for truth. To live in division is to live with lies.

If we stand in solidarity with Muslims or immigrants or blacks or GLBTQ or Trans or any who are considered “other” we may be misunderstood, ostracized, called unpatriotic, or un-Christian. So be it. I believe it is a choice worthy of our faith.

The Reverend Richard Greenleaf, Sunday July 27th 2025

A Sermon

The Reverend Richard E. Greenleaf

St. George’s Chapel

Long Cove Road

Tenant's Harbor, ME 04860

27 July 2025

Seventh Sunday after Pentecost /Proper 12-2

HE IIA

Genesis 18:20-32

Psalm 138

Colossians 2:6-15

Luke 11:1-13

Collect of the Day

O God, the protector of all who trust in you, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy:

Increase and multiply upon us your mercy; that, with you as our ruler and guide, we may so

pass through things temporal, that we lose not the things eternal; through Jesus Christ our

Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Now I lay me down to sleep,

I pray the Lord,

my soul to keep.

If I should die before I wake,

I pray the Lord

my soul to take. Amen.

I don’t know how many of you

know that prayer,

but that was the first prayer

I ever learned,

taught to me

by my mother (of blessed memory)

when I was a little boy

and prayed at bedtime

--with both my parents--

for several years.

When you stop and think about it,

it’s a morbid kind of prayer,

especially for a child,

and especially as an introduction to prayer.

But my introduction to prayer this prayer was,

and it came from a noble pedigree,

having first appeared in the New England Primer

in the late 1780s

and passed down through numerous generations

ever since.

2

I am sure that my mother

learned it from her mother

and that my father was familiar enough with it

to join in its bedtime recitation.

Of course, it was followed

by more specific prayers

for Mommy and Daddy,

and grandparents,

and aunts and uncles,

and cousins,

and on and on.

I even remember praying for the birth

of a new brother or sister,

who actually arrived

when I was three and a half.

All of which leads me to a question:

How did you learn to pray?

You might have learned, like me,

from one or both of your parents.

Or perhaps from a special grandparent

or family member.

Maybe you learned in Sunday School.

Or from the formal prayers said in church,

or even the formal prayers said in public schools

up through the early 1960s.

Or maybe no one taught you,

prayer being something that one just does because . . .

and this would be supported by religious historians

who tell us that prayer,

in one form or another,

is one of the oldest and most universal

of human activities,

having been with us

from the year dot,

as it were.

There’s an old saying

that there are no atheists

in the foxholes of war,

3

just as I know

there are no atheists

in hospital waiting rooms.

Even when we don’t

--or can’t—

believe,

we can and do

hope.

And that hoping is

at its heart

prayer.

I’ve always been struck

by Dylan Thomas’s closing lines

in his book

A Child’s Christmas in Wales.

After walking his readers

through the magic of a Christmas day

from his childhood in Wales,

Thomas writes,

“. . . and then I went to bed. Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight

and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other

houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I

turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then

I slept.”

“I said some words to the close and holy darkness . . .”

Some words . . .

We all grope for “some words,”

whatever words,

the right words,

as if there ever could be

“right words”

to speak to “the close and holy darkness,”

to speak to God,

in our childhood bedrooms

and in the foxholes and waiting rooms of life.

I think it is with this spirit

that one of Jesus’s disciples,

after coming upon him praying,

asked him,

“Lord, teach us to pray . . . ”

4

Then Jesus says to them,

“When you pray, say . . . “

and he goes on to teach them

what has come to be known

as The Lord’s Prayer,

or at least the shorter version of it,

the longer one appearing

in the gospel of Matthew

and used most frequently

in our prayer book.

And while Jesus does teach his disciples

the “right words,”

he does not do this

as if through recitation and repetition of the “right words”

we could make our prayers come true.

Rather, Jesus does this because

he knows that we are ritual creatures.

That when it comes to the highest and deepest experiences of life

we humans reach for ceremony and symbol,

and the repetition of these

is not mere rote recitation

but an entrance into words and worlds

that an old mentor of mine, the late Tom Howard,

wrote,

furnish us “with the very capacity our own imaginations lack

to say what we would like to say. . . They help us to say what we cannot,

left to our own spontaneous devices.”

So in the recitation and repetition

of these words,

we learn not only a formal prayer

but how to pray.

And in this prayer,

the Lord’s Prayer,

we, first of all, learn who God is

and who we are born

and meant

to be.

5

We learn that we are not addressing a “close and holy darkness,”

an anonymous “It,”

but a person who is more than a person,

a relative,

a Father,

one to whom we are related as if by blood,

if that were possible.

One whom we address not with the formal pronoun “you”

but with the now lost familiar if not intimate pronoun

“thy” and “thou.”

One whose life we share!

We learn in praying “Our Father”

that we are not an “I”

but truly a “we,”

a group of individuals who in the Father

become more than neighbors

but a family.

We cannot pray this prayer

without reconnecting not only with God

but with the world!

We learn that this Father “who art in heaven,”

whose kingdom we pray to come

and whose will we pray to be done

“on earth as it is in heaven,”

is not remote,

not in a heaven at an Olympian remove from us.

As the 4th century bishop Hilary of Poitiers wrote:

“There is no space where God is not. He is in heaven, in hell,

beyond the seas; dwelling in all things and enveloping all. Thus

He embraces, and is embraced by, the universe, confined to no

part of it but pervading all.”

We learn that prayer is to be an act of realism;

that because of God’s unspeakable nearness,

our very real needs and concerns

are not little,

not small,

but essential and continuous;

“daily”

like the Israelites’ need

for the “daily bread”

of the manna in the wilderness.

6

And that our relationships,

as individual and quirky,

and prone to aggression, conflict, and dominance as they can be,

are rather to be ones of loving reciprocity

that need the regular maintenance

of self examination and mutual forgiveness.

Finally, we learn that even though the world

and our very selves are “soaked with God,”

that evil and temptation to it

lie close at hand,

and we need help

spotting them

and resisting them.

Now Luke ends the prayer here,

with “deliver us from evil,”

but Matthew goes on to bookend the prayer

with the more familiar

“for Thine is the Kingdom, and the power, and glory

now and forever. Amen”

which functions here as a kind of refrain,

paraphrasing the words at the beginning of the prayer:

“. . . Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done,

on earth as it is in heaven. . . “

creating between the beginning and the end

a kind of horizon of hope,

an assurance

that despite all,

God’s will

will be done

“on earth as it is in heaven,”

and in each

and all

of us!

My father was a member of the family’s church choir

for over 60 years

and was fond of singing the line from the psalms,

“I will lift mine eyes unto the hills,”

and I have become convinced

that it was this horizon of hope

of which he sang.

7

In our gospel reading today,

Luke creates the a similar effect

concluding the prayer

with his parables contrasting

the begrudging response

of the human friend

with that of the heavenly Father.

We too often pray

with the idea of God as the human friend,

--the begrudging and withholding human friend--

rather than that of the heavenly Father,

--the Father whose name is hallowed

because he is

not begrudging and withholding

but bountifully generous,

and this prayer moves us

from the one

to the other.

So, we pray this prayer

but do we take its lesson?

The lesson that takes us beyond recitation and repetition,

from word to spirit;

the lesson that this is not a prayer we “have to” pray

but a prayer we “get to” pray;

the lesson that relocates our lives

on the horizon of hope?

This is the Lord’s prayer,

Jesus’s gift to his disciples,

and today it is Jesus’s gift to us

as well.

Amen.

The Reverend Holly Antolini, Sunday July 13th 2025

©Holly Lyman Antolini

Sermon for Proper 10 Year C, Revised Common Lectionary

Amos 7:7-17; Ps. 25:1-9; Colossians 1:1-14; Luke 10:25-37

Show us your ways, O LORD, and teach us your paths. Lead us in your truth and teach us, for you are the God of our salvation; in you have we trusted all the day long. AMEN.

It is a delight to be invited into this community of faith, to ponder God’s word together with you, and to break and share with you the bread that is Christ’s Body, given to revive, nourish and strengthen us first to KNOW how God would have us serve God’s people, and then, as the Collect says, to “have the grace and power faithfully” to DO SO!

Isn’t it interesting that the Collect separates the “knowing” from the “doing?” Doesn’t that make sense, though? It does in MY experience, uncomfortably so! So often I KNOW what’s needed for the general welfare and yet I fall short of actually DOING it! Maybe I lack the moral energy. Moral activity is a muscular thing, after all, requiring conditioning and practice every bit as much as running or swimming does! Or maybe the risk seems too high: we might provoke others to anger and resistance.

Which brings me to Amos. This is a passage I love at any time, but NOW seems a time when we especially NEED a “plumb line.” You all know what that is, yes? The piece of thread or string or cord with a weight on the end, so that it hangs absolutely straight, and can be used to “true” a wall, measuring the placement of each new brick against it. How wonderful that expression, that one “trues” a wall! If a wall isn’t erected scrupulously straight, it is “untrue,” and will fall!

What in our lives these days needs a plumb line? What risks being “out of true?” Being false, you might say? What is at risk of falling… or falling apart?

Amos’ plumb line led him to place bricks of prophetic warning one atop the other, foreseeing disaster for his people Israel. His heavy and portentous words caused the King, Jeroboam, and the King’s professional prophet Amaziah – there were dozens hired at any royal court - to object that Amos wasn’t being loyal, and even that he was conspiring against the King in speaking out as he did. They demanded that he go into exile.

Amos responded that he was no professional prophet, hired to tell the King what he wanted to hear. He was a mere arborist, a “dresser of sycamore trees,” and his searing truth was a word directly from God, a word he was driven – impelled against his own best interests, one must say – out of the countryside all the way to the royal court to speak, like it or not. Not he, he warned, but the whole nation of Israel stood at risk of being exiled.

Of course, on top of Amos, in the lectionary today we also have the story we’ve named “The Good Samaritan,” the so-well-known story from the Gospel of Luke to help “true” our lives to God’s plumb line in this trying time. The lawyer in this story is part of the scribal community that was famously (infamously) suspicious of Jesus from the start of his ministry to its devastating finish, people with at least a modicum of power who feared they stood to lose it if Jesus, with his message of love and his healing ministry among the poor, “took power.” The lawyer is going after the cracks in Jesus’ “Jewishness,” in hopes of forcing him into a blasphemy. Instead, Jesus adroitly turns the test on the lawyer himself, asking him to answer his own question from the Hebrew Torah, the law. So the lawyer, a sucker for proving himself “right,” quotes “The Shemah,” the heart of the Hebrew Torah, “"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind;” and then adds, “and your neighbor as yourself." Jesus approves. But now the lawyer continues on the trajectory of justifying himself, and asks, “So, Jesus: WHO is my neighbor?”

And Jesus unfolds the story, with the known Jewish authorities – the priest and the Levite - spurning the injured fellow lying by the side of the road because he might render them unclean and unfit for Temple service, whereas the foreigner Samaritan – whose faith didn’t have the same intense purity code the Jewish faith did, and who was therefore outcast by scrupulous Jews as unclean himself – stopped and helped, going out of his way not only to tend to the poor man personally, but making sure he would have care until he had recovered.

Clearly, according to Jesus here, our neighbor is NOT confined to the people nearest and most like us! Our neighbor is anyone in need. And we can hop over any differences to offer mercy to those folk. In fact, by choosing the Samaritan as the one who offers care where the priest and Levite do not, Jesus strongly implies that we’re MORE likely to offer mercy if we KNOW what it feels like to be shunned or dismissed or otherwise treated as a non-person, as the Samaritan did. Being a foreigner or an outcast MIGHT actually, for this reason, find it easier to reach out in love, to risk further condemnation even, than someone comfortable with her or his circumstances.

The story is not ambiguous about this. The plumb line is clear: if someone has need, she/they/he is our neighbor. And Jesus would have us reach out and care for them. Bar no one. Even if it gets us in trouble, as treating the injured man would have gotten those religious authorities in trouble by defiling them.

If we want our lives to stay true, so the tale of the Samaritan demonstrates, our plumb line must be CARE. Care, like that of the two young Mexican counselors, Silvana Garza Valdez and Maria Paula Zarate, 19-year-old young women who succeeded in rescuing 20 young American girls, campers in one of the privileged camps along the Guadalupe River in the Texas hill country where 27 other girls lost their lives in the devastating Fourth-of-July floods. Or the young Coast Guard rookie, petty officer Scott Ruskan, who “plucked mud-covered children to safety after his helicopter crew flew through the appalling weather to reach their campsite in rural Hunt early Friday afternoon.” [Richard Luscombe in The Guardian, “Teen counselors and rookie rescue swimmer save dozens in Texas camp flood.”]

It seems a simple guide to the straight-up life. But golly is it hard to live by it, consistently, these days, and, frankly, every day, ever. No wonder Jesus warned that the wide gate and the easy road leads to destruction, that choosing love meant choosing the narrow gate and the hard road.

The urgent counsel of these Scriptures, laid alongside each other, makes me grateful for Paul’s prayer for the Colossians – and for US – in our third Reading for today, that “we may be filled with the knowledge of God's will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding.” And that we not just KNOW God’s will, but will be filled with the strength & power to LIVE BY IT, “lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as we bear fruit in every good work and as we grow in the knowledge of God.” That we may “be made strong with all the strength that comes from God’s glorious power, and …prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled us to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light.” May it be so. Amen.

The Reverend Marsha Hoecker, June 30, 2025

Sermon 6-30-25 St. George Chapel

“For freedom Christ has set us free.

Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery.”

Freedom is of the Spirit, Paul tells us, and slavery is of the flesh.

Unfortunately the dualism in this assertion can lead to some misunderstanding.

Too often our Christian faith has identified this use of the word flesh with the physical body. The Greek word used can indeed be translated as body, but to jump to the conclusion that the body is bad is going too far

The physical body was created by God and God called it good.

The body is the home of the Spirit while we live in this reality.

We cannot manifest the Spirit except through the body.

We cannot share love, joy, or caring except through our bodies.

Our bodies smile, sing, embrace and talk.

Our bodies feel peace, as our heart rate slows and our muscles relax.

We do the work of peace by using our bodies to strive for reconciliation in many different ways.

We need our bodies to write letters, and to talk on the phone.

We need our bodies even to think of those we love.

We need our bodies to pray and praise.

The Spirit is made real through the body.

Can kindness, generosity, patience, faithfulness or self control be achieved without the body?

When St. Paul speaks of the Flesh, he is really speaking about something that happens first in the mind…lust, envy, selfishness,

anger, strife; these are all emotions that motivate us to use our bodies in destructive ways.

Perhaps it would be better to say that the body without the Spirit's guidance, is a wayward and unpredictable gift.

There are other forces that press upon the body.

These produce what Paul seems to consider works of the flesh.

But just as all good works, they proceed from the mind and heart through the actions of the body.

All that long list, fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, drunkenness, anger, jealousy, greed, etc. etc. come from a desire for power over others, or personal gratification at the expense of our own or another’s well being,

Pretty much everything on this list ultimately damages the body.

God created the body and the Spirit to be a team, working in harmony to do the will of God; to serve love, with care and concern for our bodies and those of others.

What Paul calls the “will of the flesh” is really the impulse of selfishness, self gratification without regard for others.

It is a product of the body, mind and spirit just as much as all the positive impulses are, but without Love.

What Paul names the Spirit I would name Love.

Using the scripture to denigrate the physical body poses yet another danger. If we do not love and respect our own flesh, our own bodies,

It becomes easier for us not to love and respect the bodies of others.

Human bodies have been disrespected throughout history in so many ways; slavery, torture, the mistreatment of children, sweat shops, prostitution, separation of immigrant families, inhumane incarcerations.

In Paul’s dichotomy these ills come from the will of the ‘flesh’.

I think what he really means is that they come from a mind devoid of love; a body functioning without the spiritual oversight of love.

When love is at work in body and spirit,

humanity is what God created it to be.

I welcome your thoughts on the scriptures, or on the ideas I have just shared.

How do you understand Flesh and Spirit?

The Right Rev. Rayford High, Sunday August 25, 2024

The Right Reverend Rayford High, Sunday August 25, 2024

“I AM the bread of life”

Then he said, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them”.

Many of Jesus’ followers heard this and said, “This is a hard teaching. In fact, it is tough to swallow”.

Difficult to understand? Actually, it could not have been too awkward for them to comprehend, because they knew what he told them repeatedly.

William Barclay says in his commentary on the Gospel of John, “Time and again it is not the intellectual difficulty of accepting Christ which keeps us from becoming Christians, it is the Moral Demand.

For the past four Sundays and again today, all of the Gospel readings have centered on only one chapter in the Gospel of John: the Sixth Chapter. It is here that the institution of the Eucharist is presented. Unlike the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, where the institution is an event, it is John who explains what the Eucharist does for Christians. John clearly establishes all of Jesus’ life as the Eucharist. This truth is captured in Jesus professing the fact: I “AM” the Bread of Life, the food that gives life, on earth as in heaven, Eternal Life. When Jesus says “I AM” the bread of life, He is saying emphatically I AM everything Christians need, now and forever.

Where we choose to eat Jesus’ flesh and drink His blood, as we do when we take part in the Eucharistic meal, we abide in Christ and He abides in us.

Abide: what does it mean? If we abide in Christ and He abides in us? The Greek word actually means “to make your self at home in relationship” Christ makes Himself at home within us. How does this happen? When we participate in the Eucharist we are drawn into relationship with Jesus.

So the word abide “expresses the interrelationship of Jesus and the one who believes in Jesus. That is the source of every believer’s life. But it is more, much more than that. Hear what I say: the interrelationships of Jesus and each one of us who believes is actually an extension of the interrelationship of God and Jesus!

When we as Christians participate in the Eucharist, we partake of Christ’s Body and Blood. We are empowered, both as individuals and as faith communities to follow in Jesus’ footsteps of ministry: “to do justice, and to love kindness, and walk humbly with our God” (Michah 6:8). We are empowered to continue in Jesus’s work of healing, forgiveness, acceptance of all God’s Children, of showing God’s unconditional love with those we encounter.

A rector of a large parish greeted people as they left the church service one Sunday. He exchanged the usual pleasantries like, “it was such a nice sermon…your words were so comforting…” However, the rector spoke to one of the worshippers as she was leaving, saying “I don’t know if we have met, are you visiting today?”

The lady answered “I’ve been coming here for 20 years! You all have fed me every Saturday at the Saturday Sidewalk Breakfast for those in need of food. I have received meals from this church all of these years. Today, this Sunday, I decided to go inside to worship and see if you are real. I decided to find out if you really meant what you say, that God loves each and every one of us. I discovered that it is true. I recognized God’s love through your love. It is the same love I have experienced for 20 years at the Saturday Sidewalk Service. I experienced this love in the Eucharist this morning.” This parish abides in Christ and in doing so, the people they serve find relationships with God in Christ. The love of God gets passed on and others find life! She responded by saying “this is the first time I have been been treated like a human being. For years, I have been treated like a dog. These tears that you see are tears of joy, because you all treat me like a human. Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

Conclusion:

The table is set with the gift of God for the people of God, the life giving gifts of bread and wine, “of the flesh and blood of Christ”, as Jesus Himself says “whoever eats of me will abide in Christ and Christ will abide in us”.

At the end of communion, we here today at St. George’s will “take these gifts in remembrance that Christ died for you, and feed on him in your hearts by faith, with Thanksgiving”. We are sent, we will then do the work God has given us to do to love and serve as faithful witnesses of our Lord.

We go with the life of Christ, with the host in our souls.

Let us go as a host, offered with Christ and for the love of Him to all those with whom we shall meet.

The Blessing of God almighty, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit be with you and remain with you always. Amen.

Reverend Betsy Scott, Sunday August 4, 2024

August 4, 2024

John 6:24-35

Today’s Gospel reading in John  6: 24 to 35  is  monumental.   Jesus tells us in these verses Who He is: “ The Son of Man, On Him God the Father has set his seal”. What He can do for us:     the Son of Man will give to you food that endures for eternal life   and what we need to do:   “This is the work of God   that you believe in Him who God has sent”.

  Through the millenniums, so much of the emphasis of the Church has been on eternal life  but today, many theologians are in addition emphasizing life in the here and now such as the  recently deceased  Jurgen Moltmann    who is widely known for his theology of Hope, Hope for an abundant life here on earth.

  It is the quality of the life here and now that these verses most forcefully speak to me and perhaps to you as well. 

    In these verses, the people ask Christ what they must do:   Christ answers:  “This is the work of God.  You must believe in Him whom He has sent”.

   When I heard these verses as a child or young person, I thought  it meant to just say I Believe in Him, but it always  confused me and didn’t make sense. How can saying I believe be all there is to it?

    Since then, I have learned that Belief  in Him is  a  powerful statement meaning  believe there is love in this world and we are meant to seek it. It is a call to action:  to seek, to spend time, to take very seriously, to have faith, to not give up hope to listen.  It is a call to keep going under difficult circumstances believing there are still many blessings in store for you.

  In the spiritual world, there is a huge contrast about belief compared to the secular world and this is one of the major points I want to leave with you.  In the secular world, one first sees and experiences and then believes but in the spiritual world, one is called to first believe, seek and then one will experience. You must believe  in Him first. This is absolutely major.  I had someone arguing with me recently who said he was a scientist and he only believed in  evidence and argued against a belief in God for there was no scientific evidence.  This person’s mind was made-up and nothing I said budged his thinking at all. He had missed the whole point that one must first believe, seek, knock  and then one will experience the love of God, the kind of  love  where you will no longer hunger and thirst—where you will no longer be lost, anxious, unable to concentrate. You will be able  to fulfill all you are created to be on this earth.  This is Christ’s promise in John 6.

   It is very interesting, however,  despite what I just said above, that what Jesus has been telling us for millenniums, now science is pointing in the same direction. Scientific experiments are now  demonstrating the tremendous power of belief.

     One such book of science is  the Biology of Belief which talks about the mind body connection and the power of our own thoughts on our health—not just our DNA as previously thought. So Christ exhorting us to believe is telling us to meditate on his words,  on love which  fills our minds  which in turn  are tremendously powerful—in  fact life giving.  All the cells of your body are affected by your thoughts. Robert H. Lipton PHD. a renowned cell biologist, describes the precise molecular pathways through which this occurs. He goes on to say that thought develops the grey matter in our brains. By our believing in Him, we are affecting our own growth. He further says that those people whose thought are filled with fear instead of love, are prone to disease of all kinds and their brains do not develop in a healthy fashion.e

  Quoting from the Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton:  “We can choose what to believe. You can filter your life with rose colored beliefs that will help your body grow or you can use a dark filter that turns everything black and  makes your  body/ mind more susceptible to disease. You can have a life of fear or a life of love.  You  have the choice, but I can tell you if you choose to see a world full of love, your body will respond by growing in health”. 

   There are studies going on in colleges showing that those students who have a spiritual component in their lives have much better coping skills than those who do not.  Doctor Luisa Miller has written a book entitled The Spiritual Child where she explains the power of the spiritual life  in growing the brain.   As a psychologist she has taken many brain scans and has proved her theory that the college students that have a spiritual component to their lives have a  part of their brain more developed and much better to cope with the stresses of college.   

    “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him  whom He has sent”. The promise is that he who seeks finds, he who knocks the door will be opened unto him.  2000 years ago, Christ knew the power of belief in Him.  He told us --You will find the Bread of Life where you hunger and thirst no more.

    What is the Bread of Life?  The Scriptures tell us that God is love so  the Bread of  Life is love. 

“He who dwells in love, dwelleth in God and God in Him.”  John 4:16

  The person who lacks the Bread of Love, has spiritual hunger and thirst which is manifest as  restlessness, nervousness, irritability, behavioral difficulty, impulsivity, anger, aggression, lacking purpose.

We are being given here the fundamental truths of human existence:  without love, we humans cannot grow and with love we will blossom.  We love because He first loved us.

We love because we fist were loved.

  Where is this Christ that we are exhorted to believe, to seek.  I have come to believe that it is within each one of us.

    I have to relate to you a story from my own life of experiencing the kind of spiritual love where I hungered and thirsted no more. I had a spontaneous spiritual happening that is not scientifically explainable and yet changed my life. I talked with two ministers about this and they both told me it was important and right that I share my stories.

   When I was forty-three years old with two young children, eleven and fourteen,  having just moved to a new community, my husband died an instant death in a car accident, totally out of the blue. No warning.  We were all in the midst of daily life.  Then he was gone forever.

   I had no idea how to proceed. Everything I had believed no longer applied.   I went seeking.  I  decided to enroll in  Union Theological Seminary  in New York City  in their three year MDIV program hoping I would find a new path for my life. I was in a dark night of the soul period of my life but still believed that there was something left for me even though I had no idea  what it was or even how to proceed. I felt very alone as my mother had died a decade before and we had recently moved to a new community.  I entered  Seminary and spent my time studying the scriptures, going to worship services, studying psychology and religion, going to a therapist and mourning,  talking and praying with this seminary community. In my second year,  after listening  one noon to a Good Friday sermon about Christ feeling abandoned on the Cross,  “My God, My God, Why have you abandoned me” I had an incredible experience.

       As I stood  outside the chapel talking with fellow seminarians,  the great pastor and preacher whose course I had been taking, James Forbes,  tapped me on the shoulder from the back and said to me:  “You know what they are talking about in there but can no credit for it for it has been too hard on you,  but you  know what others would like to know”.  

      I was stunned, speechless, almost frozen for he had named the unnamable.  He had articulated how I truly felt but had never  dared acknowledge.  Abandoned.  Yes,  I  truly felt abandoned.   I ran through the refectory  unable to speak to anyone who asked me what was happening and down the stairs to a small chapel in the basement, closed the doors and lay on the floor and stayed there alone  in the dark just trying to  deal with this information. All of a sudden, I became aware I was not alone in that chapel for there was a presence there, a spiritual presence  with me.  I knew there was Christ  with me.  I sensed  His  presence  totally knew me, accepted me,  and I knew and accepted  Him.  I  knew for a certainty that I was not alone in this universe.  I was not abandoned.   The Holy Spirit knew me and  loved me. I experienced unconditional love, the kind of love where one hungers and thirsts no more.   The Holy Spirit met me where I had the need. My heart had been torn asunder  and the Holy Spirit  healed my heart. My belief had been replaced by knowledge by the Bread of Life.    I was free. I was filled with smiles and new life so that friends would stop me and ask why I was so radiant? My whole life changed after that  for people seemed drawn to me rather than running away and I entered a new path in my life which included becoming a therapist, an ordained minister, and a wonderful new marriage that was a blessing to my children as well as myself. I did not have to believe because I knew there was a God  who was with me and loved me.

    I spent considerable time at Seminary after that trying to understand what had happened to me.  It is called grace and/or  mystical experience which has been reported down through the ages. I also heard of other examples.  I talked with some nuns who worked on the Aids floor of New York hospitals and they told me those wards were filled with joy.

   These passages in John 6 came true in my life, and they will come true in all of our lives, that is the promise.  Believe in Him  so that you may know the Bread of life where you will no longer hunger and thirst.

   Of course there are many different ways that believers have sought this Bread of Life, this  Holy Spirit.  Traditionally people have experienced the Holy in nature, in the Scriptures, in meditation, on pilgrimages, in art and music, in prayer, in worship services. Believe, seek and you will find.  This is the great promise that has been witnessed over and over in the lives of the seekers.

  To summarize today’s great Scripture reading,  Jesus is putting out a call to all of us to believe in Him, to believe Love is available to you, waiting for you, longing for you, that there is saving love in this world and we are to seek  it  by believing that it exists and  entering the spiritual path. He promises us that this bread he offers will satisfy forever our spiritual hunger and thirst. 

   Oh Heavenly Father, we thank you for the innumerable blessings you bestow upon us.

      Amen

Reverend Richard Greenleaf, Sunday July 28, 2024

A Sermon

The Reverend Richard E. Greenleaf

St. George’s Chapel

Long Cove Rd.

Tenant's Harbor, ME  04860

28 July 2024

Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

HE II

Isaiah 53:1-3, 12

Psalm 37:1-12
Philippians 2:1-13

Mark 10:35-45

Collect of the Day

Heavenly Father, whose blessed Son came not to be served but to serve: Bless all who, following in his steps, give themselves to the service of others; that with wisdom, patience, and courage, they may minister in his Name to the suffering, the friendless, and the needy; for the love of him who laid down his life for us, your Son our Savior Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

In the year 1886,

            the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche

                        published a work entitled Beyond Good and Evil,

                                    in which he wrote the following:

                        "I regard Christianity as the most fatal and seductive lie that has ever yet existed--

                        as the greatest and most impious lie . . . I urge people to declare open war with it."

            Nietzsche went on to write that he believed this

                        because he considered Christianity

                                    "the morality of paltry people,"

                                                the morality of "slaves" who,

                                                            only because of their own powerlessness,

                                                                        promoted an ethic of love and compassion,

                                                                                    an ethic of "turning the other cheek."

            Against this so-called "slave morality,”

                        Nietzsche argued for a "morality of the ruling class,”

                                    a "master morality" based on what he called the "Will to Power,"

                                                a morality that honors pride, vanity, power, and "dreadfulness."

                        Of this Nietzsche wrote,

                                    "The noble type of man separates from himself the beings in whom the opposite

                                    of this exalted, proud disposition displays itself: he despises them . . . The noble                                                                      type of man regards himself as a determiner of values . . . .”

Against critics, who argued that he was calling for a new barbarism,

                                    Nietzsche wrote,

                                    "'Exploitation' does not belong to a depraved, or imperfect and primitive society;

                                    it belongs to the nature of the living being as a primary organic function; it is a

                                    consequence of the intrinsic Will to Power, which is precisely the Will to Life.--

                                    Granting that as a theory this is a novelty--as a reality it is the fundamental fact of

                                    all history: let us be so far honest towards ourselves!"

I know, I know,

            the Nietzsche is

                        a bit extreme,

            but as he said,

                        “Let us be so far honest towards OURselves . . . .”

                        And, you have to admit,

                                    this is

                                                a good exhortation

                                                            at any time.

                        But I think it is an especially good exhortation

                                    for this time,

                                    the middle of a summer

                                                --and what a summer it’s been--

                                                                        that has seen the world marked

                                                                                    by political convulsions;

                                                                                                by violence, war, and unthinkable acts of terror.

                                    And here in the United States

                                                 by conflict and division;

                                                                        by the shaking of our political institutions, attempted assassination,

                                                                                                and the continued coarsening of our civic discourse.

                                    It is also the run up to a fall season

                                                that threatens to bring even more of all this,

                                                            culminating in the national election

                                                                        in just 101 days

                                                                                    on November 5th,

                                                                                                followed by the transition in administrations

                                                                                                            and the seating of a new Congress.

                                    We are also entering a time I have come to think of

                                                as the beginning of the real new year

                                                            in our country:

                                                                        the beginning of the school year.

                        And as someone who

                                    for 31 years

                                                served as a teacher and chaplain

                                                            at St. Paul’s School down in Concord, NH,

                                                            and, though now retired,

                                                                        I have been thinking long and hard

                                                                                    about just what it is

                                                                                                that we are

                                                                                                            and that we do

                                                                                                                        in both church and school

                                                                                                                                    that could possibly make a difference

                                                                                                                                                in such a challenging time.

                                                                        And what I could possibly say

                                                                                    to the students at my old school

                                                                                                who will arrive

                                                                                                            in just a few short weeks.

                                                                                    Again, in the words of Nietzsche,

                                                                                                “Let us be so far honest towards ourselves!”

            Flashback—

                        For a number of years,

                                    I taught a course on the history of ethics

                                                in which I put this exhortation

                                                --and the challenge of Nietzsche's words--

                                                                        to my students

                                                                                    in the following

                                                                                                essay assignment:

                        St. Paul's School enjoys the reputation of being an elite boarding school that

                        prepares exceptional young people for positions of power and leadership in society.

                        It also claims to be a "church school" within the Christian tradition.

                        Questions:

                        To what extent can it be seen to teach the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the love ethic

                        of Christianity?

                        To what extent can St. Paul's School be seen to actually teach "master morality"

                        and Nietzsche's view of nobility in general?

                        Are these compatible?

                        If so, how?

                        If not, why not?

            These essays

                        were usually

                                    "interesting,"

                                                 to say the least.

                        Because the question they had to take on

                                    is the question I believe to be at the heart

                                                of today's reading from the gospel of Mark:

                        Namely,

                                    is it possible to be ambitious, excellent, or successful

                                                and be morally good?

                        This is a question

                                    St. Paul's School

                                                and many places like it

                                                            struggle with

                                                                        all the time.

                                    And that very real concern about it

                                                is reflected in the School’s hard work

                                                            in the areas of its fully residential life,

                                                                        in team building, leadership training,

                                                                                    and community service,

                                                                                                to say nothing of its chapel program.

                                                Indeed, the School’s whole program

                                                            can be seen as an attempt to respond well

                                                                        to Jesus’ warning that to whom much is given

                                                                                    much is expected,

                                                                                                and not just in terms of productivity.

                                    Still, the question remains,

                                                and it is a perennial question

                                                            for people of high achievement.

                        For Nietzsche,

                                    it is a question that is easily discharged.

                                    He simply does away with the traditional understanding of good and evil,

                                                and calls power and conquest good,

                                                            opening the door to the full flowering of the will.

                                    If Nietzsche were to interpret Mark’s story of James and John’s request of Jesus,

                                                it would be James and John and “the way of the Gentiles” that was commended

                                                            and the ten disciples upbraided for not showing more spunk.

                                    It is not too hard to hear Nietzsche saying,

                                                "All who exalt themselves will be exalted,

                                                            and all who humble themselves will be humbled!"

                                                            "Let us be so far honest towards ourselves!"

                                    And to be honest,

                                                Nietzsche was right,

                                                            insofar that the way of the world

                                                                        for countless millennia

                                                                                    was the way of the struggle for survival,

                                                                                                the way of power and conquest.

                                    And success in this

                                                counted for happiness.

                        But there has always been a counter-narrative,

                                    and with the coming of Jesus

                                                the old power narrative was most fully tipped on its head.

                                    Notice that in today's gospel,

                                                Jesus tells his disciples,

                                    “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord                                             it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. 43But it is not so among                                                                    you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, 44and                                                           whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. 45For the Son of Man                                                                     came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”

                                    And the reason why

                                                is that Jesus is here

                                                            reaffirming the dignity and inherent divinity

                                                                        of each and every human person

                                                                                    --all persons—

                                                                                                            that God bestowed on them

                                                                                                                        --on US!—

                                                                                                                                                at creation.

                                                            As it is written in Genesis 1:27,

                                      “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them;”

                                                            And when asked what is the greatest commandment,

                                                            “Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is                                                                                                        one; 30you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your                                                                                          soul,    and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ 31The second is this,                                                                                               ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment                                                                                                     greater than these.” (Mark 12:28-31)

                                                            But even more, Jesus told his disciples,

                                                “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 13No                                                                         one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14You are                                                                                     my friends if you do what I command you. 15I do not call you servants any longer,                                                            because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you                                          friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my                                                     Father.” (John 15: 12-15)

                                    And in his first letter,

                                                the apostle John adds,

                                                            “Those who say ‘I love God’ and hate their brothers or sisters are liars; for those                                                                who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom                                                      they have not seen.” (John 4:20)

I was trying to think of a way

            to help us see this,

                        a living example,

                                    when I came across an article

                                                about Maria Skobtsova,

                                                            a saint of the Orthodox Church

                                                                        whom the Episcopal Church

                                                                                    also remembers in its liturgical calendar.

            Maria was born into the Russian aristocracy in 1891

                        but became a radical intellectual and poet.

                        She married, became a mother,

                                    and involved herself in the Russian Revolution.

                        Slowly, she became disillusioned with the revolution

                                    found her way back to the church,

                                                and finally fled to Paris.

In the church’s write-up,

            it is written that

                        “She became a nun,

                                    but only on condition that she could live in the world

                                                and directly serve the poor.

            As a twice-married former revolutionary and poet-theologian,

                        she was a unique fixture,

                                    to say the least.

            When she was not giving of herself to those in need,

                        she could be seen smoking cigarettes

                                    and debating theology or philosophy with her friends.

            When the Nazis took Paris,

                        she did all she could to provide shelter and escape

                                    for the Jews in the city.

            And then,

                        Maria was arrested

                                    and sent to a concentration camp.

            Of her life of service,

                        Maria wrote,

"If someone turns with his spiritual world toward the spiritual world of another person, he encounters an awesome and inspiring mystery …. He comes into contact with the true image of God in man, with the very icon of God incarnate in the world... And he needs to accept this awesome revelation of God unconditionally, to venerate the image of God in his brother."

Maria continues,

"The way to God lies through love of people. At the Last Judgment I shall not be asked whether I was successful in my ascetic exercises, nor how many bows and prostrations I made. Instead I shall be asked did I feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick and the prisoners. That is all I shall be asked. About every poor, hungry and imprisoned person the Savior says ‘I': ‘I was hungry and thirsty, I was sick and in prison.’ To think that he puts an equal sign between himself and anyone in need. . . . I always knew it, but now it has somehow penetrated to my sinews. It fills me with awe."

            And on Holy Saturday 1945,

                        Maria was martyred in a gas chamber in Ravensbrück, Germany,

                                    taking the spot of another woman.

Once again, Maria:

“To think that he, the Saviour, puts an equal sign between himself and anyone in need. . . . I always knew it, but now it has somehow penetrated to my sinews. It fills me with awe."

                                    To be sure,

                                                other religious and philosophical thinkers before Jesus

                                                            made the connection

                                                                        between love and virtue,

                                                                                    between service and success,

                                                                                                between humility and greatness.

                                    But in Jesus

                                                this connection was realized

                                                            with a fullness that

                                                                        turned the world on its head

                                                                                    and gave birth to the Christian faith.

                                                And because it was made real in Jesus

                                                            it became a living possibility,

                                                                        for each generation that followed,

                                                                        a living possibility

                                                                                    for us today.

                        My friends, we are the inheritors of a culture,

                                    --a civilization--

                                                            that was spawned

                                                                        from this core truth,

                                                                                    this form of greatness, this kind of love.

                                    It was such a radically different truth,

                                                historically speaking,

                                                            that we came to date our time

                                                                        from its origin

                                                                                    in the life of Jesus Christ.

                                    In recent years that civilization itself

                                                has once again come under threat,

                                                            and we

                                                                        --and our very way of life--

                                                                                                with it.

                                                The "open war" on the Christian ethic

                                                            that Nietzsche called for

                                                                        has been joined.

                                                But in this war,

                                                            Christians

                                                                        and all those who follow this way of love

                                                                                     are called not

                                                                                                to "triumphal domination or success,"

                                                                                    for that would be to give in

                                                                                                to the very values

                                                                                                            that threaten to undo us.

                                                            Rather, we are called to that love,

                                                                        that sacrificial goodness

                                                                                    upon which true success

                                                                                                --and true happiness--

                                                                                                                        indeed, civilization,

                                                                                                                                    and life itself as we know and love it,

                                                                                                                                                depends.

Although we stand at this critical point in time,

            there is really nothing new in this message,

                        for it is the very thing that this place,

                                    St. George’s Chapel, has been about for 123 years,

                                                and St. Paul’s School has been about for 168 years

                                                --when they remember what  and "whose" they really are --

                                                                        what they are about!

            In the end,

                        when it comes to true greatness

                                    there are really only two choices,

                                                the way of Nietzsche

                                                            or the way of Jesus.

                        But the choice . . .

                                    the choice

                                                is ours!

Let us pray:

God our Father, you see your children growing up in anunsteady and confusing world: Show them that your waysgive more life than the ways of the world, and that followingyou is better than chasing after selfish goals. Help them totake failure, not as a measure of their worth, but as a chancefor a new start. Give them strength to hold their faith in you,and to keep alive their joy in your creation; through Jesus
Christ our Lord. Amen

Reverend Marsha Hoecker Sunday July 21st, 2024

Sermon - July 21, 2024 St. George Chapel

I was encouraged to stay away from politics in today’s comments, and please trust me, I am not intending to refer to any candidates, parties or races, but boy, with an opening like,

“Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! says the Lord,” one could be sorely tempted.

I am going to talk about something that has been in the news lately though: the need to maintain our basic unity even with our differences. Our lesson today from Jeremiah is about the scattering of a people and the promise of reunification through righteous leadership and shepherding.

The lesson from Ephesians reminds us of the early disagreement in the church about circumcision. Non-Jews were not as a rule circumcised, but for Jewish men circumcision was a mark of their religious faith. With the appearance of Jesus, a prophet out of the Jewish tradition, it was initially Jews who were drawn to follow him.

As the faith moved beyond Israel, especially through the missionary work of St. Paul, many Gentiles became part of this new community called Christians. Paul himself had been a devout Jew who had seen the Jesus movement as a threat.

Until he was blinded by the light and knocked off his horse, he was intent on stopping this renegade sect. There is no question that he was circumcised.

Paul, who was an apostle to the Gentiles, rather than the Jews, clearly saw the demand for circumcision as an impediment to his mission. He went to the Christian council in Jerusalem to argue for his work among Gentiles, and to convince them that in Christ such divisions as Jew - Gentile, Circumcised - Uncircumcised, had been erased. One’s spiritual transformation in Christ required no outward and visible physical change.

Paul was about breaking down the divisions, not setting up new ones. He said “[Christ]... is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall that is the hostility between us.”

Yet even among Christians today, we see those dividing walls being built. In an election year like this one, in spite of all the talk about unity it is our differences that get the focus. And, of course that is, after all, what it is all about. We want to highlight the differences between party platforms and candidates because we are being asked to make a choice.

But highlighting differences is one thing, name calling and demonizing is something else entirely. We are all the children of one God, and each has the potential to do good as well as evil. It is our job as citizens of a democracy to evaluate our candidates based on factual and reasonable data and to make an informed choice.

We will not all come to the same conclusion. We have different scoring cards, different needs, and different beliefs about what is best for our country. I hope though, that one basic belief we can all share is that we are all children of a loving God; the same loving God. And in the eyes of that God we are all worthy of love.

And I hope we can all agree that our right to choose our leader through a democratic process is a cherished right, and because we will not ever all agree 100%, it is a right we need to protect.

Our God is a God of reconciliation and of love. We are different in so many ways, but love and reconciliation should always be our goal. Our unity as a nation and as a diverse people must be precious to us even as we disagree about the particulars. When all the voting is done let us pray that we will still be one nation under God, “indivisible, with liberty and justice for all”.

Conversation questions;

How do we love one another in the midst of contentious discourse?

How do we respect each other’s dignity when we vehemently disagree?

Reverend Bill Blaine-Wallace, Sunday July 14th, 2024

The Rev. Bill Blaine-Wallace

St. George’s Chapel

Tenants Harbor, Maine

Proper 10

July 14, 2024

It was like the prophets in the Bible. They didn’t have any special powers of seeing the future. They saw where the present was at, was all.

from This Other Eden, by Paul Harding

Malaga Island, Maine, about 60 miles south, is an icon through which I prayed this sermon to life.

The martyrdom of John the Baptist mirrors the fate of 52 people on a 42-acre coastal island at the beginning of the 20th century. Malaga Island not as brutal. No heads on a platter. Yet as absolute.

John’s execution and the erasure of Malaga Islanders foretell America’s latest struggle to renew, and possibly save, our fragile democracy.

Malaga Island was last occupied by a mixed-race fishing community established in the 1790’s by Benjamin Darling, a once enslaved Black man, and his white wife, a local resident, Sarah Proverbs. They had 9 children. Others found their way to the island—Irish, Scots, Portuguese. The community became a safer haven for the down and out and ostracized.

The community was mostly left to itself until the first decade of the 20th century. Four factors brought greater attention to the island community. These same factors presently shorten America’s reach for a more perfect union.

First: Reconstruction. The post-Civil War, decades-long blatant and stealth resistance to incorporate freed slaves into American society, and the influx of Roman Catholic French Canadians into Maine, outed previously more latent racial, religious, and immigrant discrimination. In the early years of the 20th century, Maine had the highest per capita Ku Klux Klan membership in the United States.

Studies show that about one third of Americans currently resist uplift for Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. A smaller and noisy percentage disavow non-Judeo-Christian religions and traditions, and stand against those outside the circle of heteronormality.

Second: Nativism. During the early 1900s, a growing number of Americans sought to protect the interests of native-born people. Nativists coalesced around the fear that immigrants threatened both the American way of life and jobs of American workers. The infamous literacy test of the Civil Rights Movement originated in the nativism movement.

Nativism is at the heart of white America’s current quest for greater ascendency and insularity. Note the present crusade to abolish diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at public universities.

Third: The Eugenics Movement of the early 20th century. Eugenics prospered the idea that one’s “blood” mattered. Purer the better. Segregation, involuntary sterilization, and other exclusionary measures were touted and applied in the arenas of medicine, education, and government.

“Purer” blood still matters. Extremists are becoming less subtle and quiet about the matter.

Fourth: tourism. At the beginning of the 20th century, tourism became and remains a major financial focus of Maine. The Malaga community did not help local property values. An eyesore.

As the chasm between rich and poor grows and the middle class shrinks, America’s current, accelerated greed-creep infiltrates and pushes aside communities that stand in the way. More and more cities turn their backs to and try to hide the unhoused. The Supreme Court recently upheld laws that criminalize sleeping in public.

The 4-fold assault against difference sealed the fate of the Malaga community.

In 1912, 47 residents of Malaga Island were evicted from their homes by the State of Maine. The remains of their dead were exhumed. 17 bodies were put into 5 caskets and relocated to lessen the incentive of the islanders to return. 8 residents were taken to the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded. Some were sterilized. The other inhabitants of the island were scattered about.

The dynamics that erased the Malaga community threaten our nation in ways and at a pace that, nine years ago, we could have hardly imagined.

In 2015/2016, seemingly out of nowhere, came a dangerous and determined agenda to steady the aging gait of whiteness. Principles and commitments of about half of the 61% of white Americans seek to divide and conquer the remaining 39% of us. The latest and clearest iteration of this agenda is the Heritage Foundation’s project 2025.

Seemingly out of nowhere. Emphasis on seemingly. Malaga is another reminder that the 2015/2016 outpouring of hate is the latest uprising of a brokenness that has been with us since the beginning of America’s experiment with democracy.

Now is not the time for despair. It is time to breath deep, hunker down, examine, and adjust our lives towards a specific love. For those of the progressive Christian tradition, the shape of love is the Jesus Movement.

Is the Jesus Movement, practically speaking, worthy of our trust and hope as hell abounds all around?

The question is what kind of hope. The goal of hope, in terms of the Jesus Movement, is not the victory of democracy over autocracy. Why not? Isn’t that what we are struggling for. Not exactly.

Last week, I talked with Paul, my long-time friend and co-commiserater. We deconstructed the June 27th debate, its aftermath, and consequences.

Paul asked if I had read David Brooke’s interview with Steve Bannon in the NYT. I said that I had not. I said that I started it. Too much. Couldn’t bare it.

Paul said that I should finish it; said Bannon had a point.

Coming from Paul, that was a lot. Paul grew up in NYC. He attended The Little Red School House. He is an economics correspondent for the PBS News Hour. You’d think as an economics reporter, he’d have moved back from the left edge of progressive politics, closer to the middle. Not so.

Paul believes betting odds are more accurate than polls. His father, Joseph Solman, funded his early years as an artist as a teller at Belmont Park. Paul knows betting.

Paul believes Bannon is right on at least one account. Fascism is a solid bet, a runaway winner. History records far more Victor Orban’s than Joe Biden’s.

Paul’s point. Don’t be surprised that hell abounds all around.

American democracy, history’s longest surviving democracy, is messy, hard fought, and breakable. Shock saps will and purpose.

In other words, stay composed, poised, and aware amid the fray.

Hope for democracy, as an expectation we sweat blood to reach, is not enough. Expectation gets about 3 miles to the gallon. Big time burnout.

Hope, in terms of the Jesus Movement, is a way of life. Regardless of the outcome.

Hope is the stewardship of decency, integrity, respect, attention, curiosity, and vulnerability between self and others. All others. “You mean even…” Don’t go there. Hope is the commitment to be less a self-in-the-making and more a self in relation, a self in and for community.

Jesus’ foundational aim was not to get Rome’s foot off Galilee’s neck or to undo Herod’s alignment with empire.

Jesus is grounded more in the particular moment, less in universal possibility. Jesus attends to what’s near and now. Less concerned about what might be.

Jesus, like the one who baptized him, stands with those presently displaced and erased by the public square and the temple.

Jesus’ strategy is different than John’s. The baptizer focused on repentance, which tends to separate, the sheep and goat thing.

Jesus focuses on a love that unites, a love that finds solidarity with the disinherited, a love that incites solidarity among the disinherited. And who isn’t disinherited in one form or another? Jesus’ reach is long and unqualified.

Solidarity is highly contagious.

Solidarity infects the ballot box. Like the last couple of weeks. Iran, the United Kingdom. France.

And maybe America. We’ll see.

In the meantime, words of Maine native E. B. White, cited last night by Heather Cox Richardson, are worth holding onto: “Hang onto your hat. Hang onto your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.”

Amen.

Reverend Ralph Moore, Sunday July 7th, 2024

Baptism – July 7, 2024

2 Corinthians 5:17-20, Psalm 23, Mark 10:13-16

O God, you prepared your disciples for the coming of the Spirit through the life and teaching of our savior Christ. Make our hearts and minds always ready to receive the blessing of the Spirit, that we may be filled with strength and compassion as loving servants of your grace. Amen

A few months ago one of our area's writers shared a very intimate experience in his life. (David Grima, the Rockland Courier-Gazette) In church one Sunday as he was taking communion the choir was singing and he was suddenly smitten. “I know that tune! I haven't heard that since I was a boy!” “Just as I am without one plea….O Lamb of God, I come, I come.” Transported back over 50 years ago, an unmeasurable moment, transcendent, his spirit fully accepting in the here and now “the gift of grace.” He goes on to reflect on how our given human spirit continually has the capacity “to sense the more and greater; the me, the us, the all.” To be full of the totally beautiful compassionate Spirit! Joy!

Jesus describes this when he invites the children--”to such as these the realm of God belongs….if you aren't open to this like a little child you'll never enter God's realm.” What are we doing this morning, if not seeking this overwhelming transcendent moment? And what a blessing that we've been invited to lift up and celebrate the wondrous life of Marian Grace Ott. Whenever we celebrate this sacrament it's as though Jesus himself set this up. (“sacrament”-- in the here and now touched by the sacred)

Our writer ponders how among us human beings: “what is it that goes so wrong with this [part of our human condition] that, having once tasted the transcendent, so many people have fallen back so very far as to confuse their religion with hatred, cruelty and violence.” This echoes Paul's simple reminder about us as we seek spiritual maturity. We're in the world and, --but, when we become part of the “beloved community” formed in the name of Jesus, “there is a new creation, everything old has passed away...new things have come into being!” David concludes with his hope that in the harsh, angry world about us more of us “might still hear that 'still, small voice' offering grace.”

This is an invitation to open ourselves to renewal, be as little children. Stop all thoughts! Now feelings, special high moment in our lives. “Breath on me, Breathe of God.” As little children, we “re-member.” “Remember” by Joy Harjo. Ursula LeGuin: “I stand out on the deck of my house, looking at the sky full of God's children and I know that I am one of them.” Psalm 23: “I lie down in green pastures..beside still waters..my soul revives..my head is anointed with oil..goodness and mercy follow me all my days..I shall fear no evil….” Of such is the kingdom of heaven….the realm of the Spirit.

Remember - Joy Harjo

Remember the sky that you were born under,

know each of the star’s stories.

Remember the moon, know who she is.

Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the

strongest point of time. Remember sundown

and the giving away to night.

Remember your birth, how your mother struggled

to give you form and breath. You are evidence of

her life, and her mother’s, and hers.

Remember your father. He is your life, also.

Remember the earth whose skin you are:

red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth

brown earth, we are earth.

Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their

tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,

listen to them. They are alive poems.

Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the

origin of this universe.

Remember you are all people and all people

are you.

Remember you are this universe and this

universe is you.

Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.

Remember language comes from this.

Remember the dance language is, that life is.

Remember.

“Remember.” Copyright ©1983 by Joy Harjo