Frontpage, July 7, 2019

July 7, 2019 – Pentecost 4

Photos and Text from Sun, July 7, 2019

The Week Ahead…

July 8 – 4pm – Vestry

July 10 – 10:00am-12pm – Ecumenical Bible Study

July 10 – 2:00pm-4pm – Children’s Summer Program

July 10 – 5:00pm-6:30pm – Village Dinner

July 12 – 7:00am-ECM at Hornes

July 14 – 11:00am – Holy Eucharist, Rite II

Sunday, July 14 Readings and Servers

July 4, 2019 at Peter’s

1. Pictures and article

2. Videos

Summer Program for Children started Wed., July 3

The Summer Program continues July 10^th between 2pm-4pm. We had 9 children on the first week. See the photo gallery

Activities included free play, getting to know one another, an introduction to the program, God and Family, which included some games and a short Bible study. God and Family is a Cub Scout merit badge curriculum which we have done before. The children enjoyed some watermelon and cookies before the end of their time together.

We’re going to do it in the afternoon in hopes that we might be able to continue it as an after school meeting if the kids would want to keep coming.

School Supplies for the Village Harvest July 17

We plan to distribute school supplies at the Village Harvests in July (July 17) and August (Aug 21). Caroline Schools begin Aug. 12. Please bring them and leave them on the back pew .

We have a list of requested supplies for Grade 1 to Grade 5 by grade and item. The list is here – School Supplies 2019-2020

The most prevalent items are glue sticks, crayons and gallon size ziploc bags, requested in all five grades. Four of the five grades request these items: dry erase markers, hand sanitizer, headphone or earbuds, highlighters, quart-size Ziploc bags.

Between the Village Harvest dates is the Virginia tax holiday August 2-4, 2019. Qualified school supplies $20 or less per item will not be taxed.

Lectionary, July 14, 2019 – Pentecost 5, Proper 10

I. Theme – God’s call challenges us to obedience, compassion and action for justice

"The Good Samaritan" – Van Gogh (1890)

The lectionary readings are here  or individually: 

First Reading – Deuteronomy 30:9-14
Psalm – Psalm 25:1-9
Epistle – Colossians 1:1-14
Gospel – Luke 10:25-37 

Today’s readings focus on God’s call challenging us to obedience, compassion and action for justice. In Deuteronomy (Track 2), Moses assures the people that God’s call to obedience is not too difficult nor is it hidden. Paul writes that Christ, the image of the invisible God, is our Creator, Sustainer and Reconciler. Jesus answers a lawyer’s question by telling the story of the Good Samaritan.

What we say about ourselves is not nearly as important as how we live out what we say—how we live out our lives with Christ. We are called by God throughout scripture and tradition to care for the poor, the outcast, the oppressed, and the marginalized—but throughout our history and scripture, we have found ways to make excuses. We have put ourselves before others and have justified our way of life, while others around us and in the world continue to suffer. We cannot remain ignorant of the struggles of others. Eventually, justice catches up to us

Moses warned the people in the wilderness, and they did not listen. Jesus questions the lawyer who wants the right answer to be given, who wants to speak aloud the truth, and helps him to realize that it is about a love that shows mercy, a way of living towards others. How are we living out our faith? Are we just saying what we believe in? Is it more important to have the right statements of faith, or is it more important to do what Jesus has called us to do and live out our faith?

How often have we passed by persons in need or deferred social involvement to keep our own schedule ? We are not bad persons either; we simply place our broad spectrum vocational callings ahead of the concreteness of God’s call in the present moment.

Our challenge is to grow in stature, so that we can creatively and lovingly balance our personal and institutional responsibilities, including our self-care and care for families and congregations, with the unsettling challenges to go beyond our immediate responsibilities so that we may become God’s partners in healing the world. Jewish mystics remind us that to save one soul is to save the world. From a God’s eye view, this means to care for our loved ones and ourselves as well as those who are loved by God and beyond the walls of our communities. This will lead to agitation but our agitation will find completeness and comfort in feelings of wholeness which emerge when we join our well-being with the well-being of our most vulnerable local and global companions.

Read more from the lectionary 

This Week – Focus on the "Good Samaritan"

Compassion without Boundaries -Background of the "Good Samaritan" in Luke from author Alexander Shaia

Some background of the Gospel of Luke provides insight of why this story appears in this gospel and no others. Luke wrote in the 80’s AD after both Matthew and Mark (and before John). Jesus resurrection was 50 years earlier.  He wrote it in Antioch in Turkey at a time when Christianity was expanding to the Gentiles all throughout the Mediterranean. How was Christianity to unite these peoples ?   

The issues are taken up in The Hidden Power of the Gospels: Four Questions, Four Paths, One Journey by Alexander Shaia. (We used this book as the basis for a Christian Ed class early in 2011).Here is what he wrote:

“Nero had executed the Jewish Christus followers of Rome twenty years earlier, although persecution had not extended to Christus believers throughout the rest of the empire at that time. Then in 70 CE, Vespasian leveled the Great Temple of Jerusalem and massacred all its priests, throwing Judaism into total disarray. In the steps that religion took to survive, a process began that still resonates in the lives of Christians and Jews.

“The slaughter resulted in a complete lack of religious authority. The Pharisees, educated teachers of Jewish religious law but not officially con­nected to the Temple, stepped into the vacuum. By the mid-80s CE, the time of Luke’s gospel, their role had significantly increased. In many Jewish communities, their voices rose to roles of clear leadership. In others, they represented merely one of many voices struggling to advise how best to move forward in the face of great loss. Eventually, the Pharisees became the primary voice of the Jewish community, reunifying the people in the ab­sence of the Temple and its priests—but not before  Luke began to write.”

And as part of their ascension “The Pharisees advocated for the removal from Judaism of all variant sects who believed that the Messiah had already come. Chief among these were the "Followers of the Way"’ (the Christus sect), who maintained that the Messiah had arrived for the salvation of all people, not just Jew

“They carried pain, and some of them likely had a touch of ar­rogance attached to their lingering resentments. They had also migrated all over the Mediterranean basin, which presented them with persecution from another quarter. The Roman government was more than nervous about the Christus followers—it was terror-stricken.

"The fear of this message led to its oppression of the Christus communities—and the persecution increased steadily.

Read more….

The Good Samaritan – ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’

"Good Samaritan" – Van Gogh (1890)

This is one of the most practical Bible lessons.  

“Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? This is a basic, universal question that is asked by almost all human beings, even today. In Mark and Matthew, the question is more of a Jewish question. That is, “What is the greatest/first commandment of the law?” Mark and Matthew were asking a fundamental Jewish question; Luke was asking a fundamental universal question.

Luke was written to a larger world which he knew as a follower of Paul. This was the first time the idea of Dt 6:5 (“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” being combined with Levticus 19:18 (“Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself.”)

Jesus is challenged by a lawyer. The lawyer’s presence and public questioning of Jesus shows the degree of importance his detractors are placing on finding a flaw they can use. He is trying to see if there was a distinction between friends and enemies. Luke in the Sermon on the Plain (Luke 6:20 “But I tell you who hear me: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.”) had eliminated the distinction and the lawyer was trying to introduce it again. As Jesus’ influence with the crowds continues to grow, the alarm of the religious establishment grows as well.

His first question is “what must I do to inherit eternal life.” Jesus answers “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 your neighbor as yourself. The lawyer follows up with a second question, also a very good one. If doing this, i.e., loving God and loving neighbor as oneself, is a matter of eternal life, then defining "neighbor" is important in this context. The lawyer is self-centered, concerned only for himself.

Jesus shifts the question from the one the lawyer asks — who is my neighbor?–to ask what a righteous neighbor does. The neighbor is the one we least expect to be a neighbor. The neighbor is the "other," the one most despised or feared or not like us. It is much broader than the person who lives next to you. A first century audience, Jesus’ or Luke’s, would have known the Samaritan represented a despised "other."

Of the four characters in this story (besides the robbers and the victim) – the lawyer, levite, priest and Samaritan – the first three were known in Jewish society. The Samaritan is the outsider.

Read more….

Martin Luther King on the Good Samaritan

Anything but Ordinary! – Ordinary Time

Beginning Sunday, June 16, Pentecost 2, we enter the Church year known as Ordinary Time. After Easter, Jesus’s ascension into heaven, and the coming of the Holy Spirit to us at Pentecost, we accept responsibility for being and becoming Christ’s body in the world. We are called by Jesus to live in community, our lives together guided not only by the example of Jesus, but by the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
 

Basically, Ordinary Time encompasses that part of the Christian year that does not fall within the seasons of Advent, Christmas, Lent, or Easter. Ordinary Time is anything but ordinary. According to The General Norms for the Liturgical Year and the Calendar, the days of Ordinary Time, especially the Sundays, "are devoted to the mystery of Christ in all its aspects." We continue our trek through the both the Gospels of Luke and John- through parables challenges, healings – some great stories and teachings.  

Vestments are usually green, the color of hope and growth. Green has long been associated with new life and growth. Even in Hebrew in the Old Testament, the same word for the color “green” also means “young.” The green of this season speaks to us as a reminder that it is in the midst of ordinary time that we are given the opportunity to grow. 

Ordinary Time, from the word "ordinal," simply means counted time (First Sunday after Pentecost, etc.). we number the Sundays from here on out in order from the First Sunday after Pentecost, all the way up to the Last Sunday after Pentecost The term "ordinary time" is not used in the Prayer Book, but the season after Pentecost can be considered ordinary. 

The Church counts the thirty-three or thirty-four Sundays of Ordinary Time, inviting her children to meditate upon the whole mystery of Christ – his life, miracles and teachings – in the light of his Resurrection.

You may see Sundays referred to as "Propers". The Propers are readings for Ordinary Time following Epiphany and Pentecost, numbered to help establish a seven day range of dates on which they can occur. Propers numbering in the Revised Common Lectionary begins with the Sixth Sunday in Epiphany, excludes Sundays in Lent through Pentecost and Trinity Sunday, and resumes the Second Sunday after Pentecost (the first Sunday after Pentecost is Trinity Sunday), usually with Proper 4. 

In some ways, it might be right to think of this time as “ordinary”, common or mundane. Because this is the usual time in the church, the time that is not marked by a constant stream of high points and low points, ups and downs, but is instead the normal, day-in, day-out life of the church. This time is a time to grapple with the nuts and bolts of our faith, not coasting on the joy and elation of Christmas, or wallowing in the penitential feel of Lent, but instead just being exactly where we are, and trying to live our faith in that moment.  

It is a reminder of the presence of God in and through the most mundane and ordinary seasons of our lives. . It is a reminder that when God came and lived among us in the person of Jesus Christ, he experienced the same ordinary reality that we all experience. And that God, in Christ, offered us the opportunity to transform the most ordinary, mundane experiences into extraordinary events infused with the presence of God. God is there, present in the midst of the ordinary, just waiting for us to recognize it.  

Only when the hustle and bustle of Advent, Easter, and Lent has calmed down can we really focus on what it means to live and grow as Christians in this ordinary time in this ordinary world. It is a time to nurture our faith with opportunities for fellowship and reflection. It is a time to feed and water our faith with chances for education and personal study. It is a time to weed and prune our faith, cutting off the parts that may be dead and leaving them behind. And we have a lot of growing to do, so God has given us most of the church year in which to do it.