Epiphany 5 2022 Joann Saylors

Good morning.

Welcome to everyone who is gathered here in person, and a special welcome to those who join us online.

My name is the Reverend Canon Joanne Sailors.

I am here to worship with you this morning.

I bring greetings from the bishop's office where I serve, and I thank you for the invitation to join you in praising God.

Blessed be God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid.

Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you and earthly magnify your holy name through Christ our Lord.

The Lord be with you.

Let us pray.

O God, the strength of all who put their trust in you, mercifully accept our prayers, and because in our weakness we can do nothing good without you, give us the help of your grace, that in keeping your commandments we may please you, both in will and deed, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever.

Amen.

Please be seated for the reading of Holy Scripture.

Thus said the Lord, cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh of their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord.

They shall be like a shrub in the desert and shall not see when relief comes.

They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness in an uninhabited salt land.

Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is in the Lord.

They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream.

It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green.

In the year of the drought, it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit.

The heart is devious above all else.

It is perverse.

Who could understand it?

I, the Lord, test the mind and search the heart to give all according to their ways, according to the fruit of their doings.

Hear what the Spirit is saying to God's people.

Happy are they who have not walked in the council of the wicked.

Their delight is in the law of the Lord.

And all these law they can take day and night.

They are like trees planted by streams of water, bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither.

Therefore, the wicked shall not stand upright when judgment comes.

For the Lord knows the way of the righteous.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and will be forever.

Now, if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead?

If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised.

And if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain, and your faith has been in vain.

We are even found to be misrepresenting God because we testified of God that He raised Christ, whom He did not raise, if it is true that the dead are not raised.

For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised.

If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins.

Then those also who have died in Christ have perished.

If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.

Hear what the Spirit is saying to God's people.

And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.

Then he looked up at his disciples and said, Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.

Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.

Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man.

Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven, for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.

Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.

Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.

Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.

The gospel of the Lord.

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen.

Please be seated.

Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.

But do we even know what we're hungry for?

Some of you may have been to Hershey, Pennsylvania, the self-described sweetest place on earth.

The Baltimore son once noted that the sweet smell of chocolate, reminiscent of pudding cooking on the stove, welcomes you as you drive into town.

A childhood friend of mine and her sister were absolutely addicted to chocolate, and their mother decided that the perfect way to cure them would be to take them to Hershey and let them eat as much chocolate as they wanted until they got sick of it.

So off they went, and the sisters ate and ate and ate and ate some more.

I really have no idea how much chocolate they managed to get down.

Because they just kept eating and eating.

The plan failed because they never got sick of chocolate.

Our human hungers are not reliable.

The Brothers Grimm wrote a fairy tale called The Fisherman and His Wife about a lonely old couple living by the sea.

Once the old man went to catch some fish and after a few fruitless efforts, pulled out his net with just one single fish in it.

A flounder.

A special flounder because it could talk.

As things happen in fairy tales.

Ask for whatever you wish, but let me go, cried the fish.

I don't need anything, replied the old man, and threw the flounder back into the sea.

However, when he got home and told his wife about what had happened, she turned furious.

We are so poor, and still you ask for nothing?

Why didn't you ask for a cottage instead of our miserable shack?

Go back to the magic fish and ask for that.

The old man was disappointed, but went back to the seaside and called for the flounder.

It appeared on the wavetop, listened to his story, and told him to return home.

When the old man came home, he saw his wife standing at the door of a cheerful cottage with pretty furniture, a full pantry.

Are you satisfied now?

he asked.

No, I'm not, replied the old woman.

Why didn't you ask for more?

We need a castle.

Go back to the magic fish.

The old man was more disappointed, but he went again and told the flounder of his wife's wishes, and once again the fish sent him home.

When the old man returned, he saw the castle with servants and fine furniture and carpets and livestock and a beautiful garden, undoubtedly a labyrinth.

But she was angry again that the old man didn't ask for more.

Although he assured her that what they had was more than enough, she demanded that he return to the flounder so that she could be king.

The man was sad and knew it was not right, but he asked, and the wish was granted.

It was not enough, however, for his wife, and she made him go again so he could ask for her to be made emperor.

And so she was.

And then, as the emperor, she ordered him back to the sea to ask the flounder to make her Pope.

Even with that new status, she was not content.

She lay awake because of her inordinate desires.

Finally, she expressed a wish to be lord of the universe and to have the sun and the moon as well as the flounder in her service.

Now, when the old man told the fish about that, it turned away and was gone.

On coming home, the old man found his wife sitting in her old clothes by their old shack.

They were just as they had been before, only sadder and more tired and disappointed in each other.

What strikes me about that story is not simply that the fisherman's wife's pursuit of what she thinks will fill her hunger causes her to lose everything.

Even sadder is that the misguided process damages her relationship with her husband, so that the lonely old man and woman are even lonelier by the end of the story.

Our human hungers are unreliable.

I saw a sculpture once at a conference called, Blessed are you who hunger for righteousness, for you shall be filled.

That was the sculpture, not the conference.

Now that is from Matthew's gospel.

As compared to Luke's, Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.

But I think it actually works even better for what we heard this morning.

It was done by artist and author Charles McCullough, who is noted for the biblical themes of his works, including a series on the Beatitudes.

If you go to the website, you can actually see pictures of them.

On the front side of this particular one, the hungry side, are a man and a woman.

Her face is in the front.

She's looking out, and something about her face is reminiscent of Dorothy Lang's migrant mother, that iconic Dust Bowl photograph of a woman with two children staring hopelessly into the distance.

Behind the woman in the sculpture is the man kneeling against a wall, bottle beside him.

They are separate, isolated, surrounded only by their particular kinds of hunger.

It was a work that captured for me what hunger is like.

But McCullough's Beatitude sculptures are all two-sided, showing both the blessing and the promise.

I found that the back side of the sculpture, the filled side, jarred me.

I'm not sure quite what I expected, but it was something different from what I saw.

The woman, still in the foreground, has become plump and giddy.

Her arms are overflowing with bread.

The man behind her is now smiling as he opens his bottle.

My guess is that the sculptor was making a statement about God's overflowing abundance being what fills those who are hungry to be fed, whether literally or metaphorically.

But the two aren't looking at each other or really even standing together.

So what I saw instead was an image of two overfed, overindulged people, each still standing alone in their particular hunger.

Our human hungers are not reliable.

Without a container, they are insatiable.

They drive us to the wrong things, they harm our relationships.

And yet we keep trying to feed ourselves.

Whether it is for fame or power or money or excitement or something more tangible, we are wired to always want more.

Writer and Harvard professor Arthur C.

Brooks notes in a recent article in The Atlantic that our natural state is dissatisfaction.

We've evolved to strive for goals that are elusive, because in their elusiveness they motivate us to keep striving.

He cites philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas, who said that in the desire for wealth and whatsoever temporal goods, when we already possess them, we despise them and seek others.

The reason for this is that we realize more their insufficiency when we actually possess them.

How often does the institutional church operate on these same principles?

Don't we also chase after what we think will feed us, always grasping for more?

How often do we talk about church in terms of our own individual hungers?

I have.

So our average Sunday attendance keeps going up, and our pledges keep going up.

Then we can finally have that new building we want, or stained glass windows, or whatever it is.

But when we think about church that way, how are we different from the world, really?

How are we the city on a hill?

Aren't we still just chasing after the next shining thing?

Is it any wonder so many in the world are uninterested in the idea of church as an institution if the institution of the church isn't different from all the other choices they have out there?

But church is different.

Here we can be fed in a way that tames the hunger of our souls, a hunger that we try fruitlessly to fill with food or drink or material object or something intangible instead.

As I stood looking at that sculpture, feeling sorry for the man and the woman, or really, I guess, feeling sorry for all of us in our misplaced strivings to feed ourselves, I heard someone behind me explain the smiles on the man and woman.

Look, it's all about the sacrament.

See, there's bread and there's wine.

And I hope it does show that.

Because we know what truly fills us.

It's Jesus Christ.

The body of Christ is what feeds our deepest hunger, the longing for more that we can barely begin to name.

Our tangible reality of Jesus is in communion.

We can be fed by bread and wine as the Holy Spirit makes them the body and blood of Christ.

For those who are here, remember in particular how hungry we were for the bread and the wine in the early days of the pandemic, and how satisfied and delighted we were when we tasted them again.

But communion is not only the bread and the wine.

It's never just me going to the altar to receive Christ's body and blood.

Blood.

I might not even be here in person.

We don't stand apart waiting for each of our individual needs to be met.

It is as the body of Christ that we gather together, as the body of Christ that we are nurtured and fed.

We hungry are blessed together as we gather with our arms stretched before us, waiting for whatever will fill us.

The communion that comes from being the members of a body that prays together, learns together, eats together, is what stops the rumblings of our lonely and hungry souls.

And we are fed again when as the body of Christ we go forth together with our arms outstretched, offering bread to a hungry world.

Now, I am not remotely artistic, so I can only imagine this, but if I were sculpting that second side, the filled side, I'd make it different.

The man and the woman wouldn't be separated anymore.

They would be right up close to each other, looking at each other, joined by their brothers and sisters in Christ, smiling as they fed one another.

Our human hungers are unreliable and can never be sated.

But our true hunger, our hunger for God, that can be filled.

It is filled at our communion feast when we receive the body of Christ and bread and wine here in the church building.

And when we are the body of Christ for our sisters and brothers in the world when we leave here.

Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.

Amen.

We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.

We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally the Father, and God, life and light, true God and true God, becoming of one being with the Father.

For us for our salvation, he came in from heaven.

By the power of the Holy Spirit, he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary and to save man.

For our sake he was crucified under conscious father.

He suffered death in the spirit.

On the third day he rose again in accordance with the scriptures.

He ascended into heaven and seated at the right hand of the Father.

He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no men.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son.

With the Father and the Son, he is worshipped and glorified.

He has spoken through the prophets.

We believe in one holy Catholic and apostolic church.

We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.

We live for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.

Amen.

Grant, Almighty God, that all who confess your name may be united in your truth, live together in your love, and reveal your glory in the world.

Lord, in your compassion, we pray for all who govern and hold authority in every nation, for the members of the armed forces throughout the world, and for all who struggle for peace and justice, that they may act with prudence and vision to plant the seeds of your kingdom everywhere.

Lord, in your compassion, give us all a reverence for the earth as your own creation, that we may use its resources rightly in the service of others, and to honor your and to your honor and glory.

Lord, in your compassion.

Bless all those whose lives are closely linked with ours, and grant that we may serve Christ in them and love one another as He loves us.

Lord, in your compassion.

Lead our parish.

Source of wisdom, guide us.

Source of strength, support us.

Source of love, unify us.

We pray, Lord, and your compassion.

Guide St.

Thomas the Apostles' School, that those who teach and those who learn may rejoice in the knowledge of your truth, that we may teach our students to love whatever is just and true and good, and that we may be bearers of your grace to all who come throughout through our doors.

Lord, in your compassion.

Comfort and heal all those who suffer in body, mind, or spirit.

Give them courage and hope in their troubles.

And bring them the joy of your salvation, especially Chris, Ken, Nancy, and Amber.

The congregation is invited to name celebrations or petitions silently or aloud.

Lord, in your compassion.

We commend to your mercy all who have died, especially Johnny, that your will for them may be fulfilled.

And we pray that we may share with all your saints and your eternal kingdom.

Lord, in your compassion.

Compassionate God, make your healing and peaceful presence known to the world.

Comfort those who mourn, strengthen those who are weary, encourage those in despair, and lead us all to fullness of life.

And now let us humbly confess our sins unto Almighty God.

Holy God, creator of all that is, donor of grace and give of life, hear our prayer.

There are facts in our lives, deep valleys that separate us from one another and from you.

We confess that we have allowed those risks to grow, for fear of making our part in the separation, for fear of being rejected when we reach out.

You call us to a reconciled life, to heal relationships, to a wholeness with each other and with you.

Amen.

Please stand.

Yes, I'm Herb Meiger, Senior Warden.

In Mike's absence, let me make a few announcements.

First, the Daughters of the King will be meeting directly after the service.

So if you're in the DOK, please join them.

Tuesday at 6 30, the vestry will be meeting, and we will be meeting here at the church.

So it'll be at 6 30.

And lastly, Saturday, March the 5th, we're gonna have our spring clean.

We haven't had one in a couple of years.

All those projects, almost all those projects will be outdoors so we can be social uh separated.

Um and uh we'll have several several projects.

If there's one that you want to champion, please give me a call.

And uh we'll start at nine o'clock in the morning and we'll end at about noon.

And uh the holy smokers will be providing us with lunch of uh hamburgers and hot dogs.

So I hope to see you there.

Is there are there any other announcements someone like to make?

Okay, thank you.

It is made ready for those who love him and who want to love him more.

So come, you who have much faith and you who have little, you who have been here often, and you who have not been for a long time or ever before, you who have tried to follow and you who have failed.

Come, not because the church invites you, it is Christ, and he invites you to meet him here.

The Lord be with you.

And also with you.

Lift up your hearts.

We live unto the Lord.

Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.

It is right to give God thanks for us.

It is right and a good and joyful thing, always and everywhere to give thanks to you, Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, because in the mystery of the word made flesh, you have caused a new light to shine in our hearts, to give the knowledge of your glory in the face of your Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord.

Therefore, we praise you, joining our voices with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven, who forever sing this hymn to proclaim the glory of your name.

Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might, heaven and earth are full of your glory.

Hosanna in the highest.

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, Hosanna in the highest.

Holy and gracious Father, in your infinite love, you made us for yourself.

And when we had fallen into sin and become subject to evil and death, you in your mercy sent Jesus Christ, your only and eternal Son, to share our human nature, to live and die as one of us, to reconcile us to you, the God and Father of all.

He stretched out his arms upon the cross and offered himself, in obedience to your will, a perfect sacrifice for the whole world.

On the night he was handed over to suffering and death, our Lord Jesus Christ took bread, and when he had given thanks to you, he broke it and gave it to his disciples and said, Take, eat.

This is my body which is given for you.

Do this for the remembrance of me.

After supper, he took the cup of wine, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them and said, Drink this, all of you.

This is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.

Whenever you drink it, do this for the remembrance of me.

Therefore, we proclaim the mystery of faith.

Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

We celebrate the memorial of our redemption, O Father, in this sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.

Recalling his death, resurrection, and ascension, we offer you these gifts.

Sanctify them by your Holy Spirit to be for your people the body and blood of your Son, the holy food and drink of new and unending life in Him.

Sanctify us also, that we may faithfully receive this holy sacrament and serve you in unity, conscience, and peace.

And at the last day, bring us with all your saints into the joy of your eternal kingdom.

All this we ask through your Son, Jesus Christ.

By him and with him and in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all honor and glory is yours, Almighty Father, now and forever.

Amen.

And now, as our Savior Christ has taught us, we are bold to pray, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever.

Amen.

Therefore, let us keep the feast.

Take them and remind in remembrance that Christ died for you and feed on him in your hearts by faith with thanksgiving.

Let us pray.

Loving God, we give you thanks for restoring us in your image and nourishing us with spiritual food in the sacrament of Christ's body and blood.

Now send us forth a people, forgiven, healed, renewed, that we may proclaim your love to the world and continue in the risen life of Christ our Savior.

Amen.

May Christ the Son of God be manifest in you, that your lives may be a light to the world, and the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit be upon you this day and remain with you forever.

Amen.