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2. Contact the Rev Catherine Hicks, Rector 5. Latest Newsletter-the Parish Post (July, 2018) 6. Calendar 8. What’s new on the website 10. Latest Sunday Bulletin (July 22, 2018 11:00am), and Sermon (July 8, 2018) |
Block Print by Mike Newman
Projects
| Green | Ordinary Time | Jun 3-Oct 31 | |
3-Minute Retreats invite you to take a short prayer break right at your computer. Spend some quiet time reflecting on a Scripture passage.
Knowing that not everyone prays at the same pace, you have control over the pace of the retreat. After each screen, a Continue button will appear. Click it when you are ready to move on. If you are new to online prayer, the basic timing of the screens will guide you through the experience.
Daily meditations in words and music.
Your daily prayer online, since 1999
"We invite you to make a ‘Sacred Space’ in your day, praying here and now, as you visit our website, with the help of scripture chosen every day and on-screen guidance."
Saints of the Week, July 22 – July 29
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22
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Saint Mary Magdalene |
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23
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24
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Thomas a Kempis, Priest, 1471 |
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25
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Saint James the Apostle |
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26
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[Joachim and Anne, Parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary]; also [Charles Raymond Barnes, Priest, 1939] |
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27
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William Reed Huntington, Priest, 1909 |
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28
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[Johann Sebastian Bach, 1750, George Frederick Handel, 1759, and Henry Purcell, 1695, Composers] |
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29
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Mary, Martha, [and Lazarus] of Bethany; also [First Ordination of Women to the Priesthood in The Episcopal Church, 1974] |
July 22, 2018 Pentecost 9, Proper 11
Pictures and text from this Sunday, July 22
The Week Ahead…
July 25 – 10:00am, Ecumenical Bible Study
July 29 – 11:00am, Pentecost 10, Morning Prayer, Rite II
Sunday, July 29 Readings and Servers
Lectionary, Pentecost 10, Proper 12 Year B
I. Theme – Providing for each other out of our abundance
"Feeding of the 5,000" – Daniel Bonnell
The lectionary readings are here or individually:
Old Testament – 2 Kings 4:42-44
Psalm – Psalm 145:10-19 Page 802, BCP
Epistle –Ephesians 3:14-21
Gospel – John 6:1-21
How do we provide out of our abundance ? What is hunger ? In this week’s lectionary, multiplication of food given to Elisha demonstrates God’s power to provide abundantly in the Old Testament. Paul exhorts the Ephesians to use their spiritual gifts to build up the Body of Christ. Jesus multiplies five loaves and two fish to feed the hungry crowd. The feeding of the 5,000 is the only miracle of Jesus’ ministry recorded in all four gospels. As so often emphasized in John, Jesus takes the initiative, even before the people arrive.
Hunger is multidimensional. People are hungry not only for bread but also for dignity, meaning, and happiness. Thus, we might ask the same question Jesus did: “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?”
It’s a tricky question, as John implies with his parenthetical comment. The things which most satisfy our deepest hungers can’t be purchased. Still on the literal plane, Philip despairs: no amount of money could assuage the vast crowd’s hunger. (While they may well be physically hungry, remember that they followed him initially because of his compassion toward the sick.) Jesus’ silence directs us to look toward our own resources.
Faith is what helps us to understand the incomprehensible. Faith is what holds us to the path of God, the way of Christ. We are faced with temptations every day to live for ourselves, to satisfy our own greed and desires, and we forget the needs of others and God’s desire to live for others. In living for others, we find that we have life. In living for Christ, we find that we have lived for others. In thinking of the needs of others, we are reminded that we can be overwhelmed, as Elisha’s servant and Jesus’ disciples felt, or we can have faith, as Elisha and Jesus did, that the needs will be met when we serve and give out of what we have. It is not easy, but it is what we are called to do—and God always provides enough. We may not be able to solve the world’s hunger problems, but we can do our part to help those around us—and we may be surprised at what God can do with the little we have.
The child’s lunch box and the mother who probably packed it are a delightful reminder that “those who would be a blessing for others must bring what they possess to Jesus.” Without a scoff, a snicker or a doubt, Jesus takes the bread and fish into his hands with all confidence. Ignoring Andrew’s concern about scarcity, he provides an abundance. His action reassures those of us who deem our efforts too meager or skimpy to ever count as ministry, or to have any significant effect within God’s design. Instead we can count it, as did St. Ignatius of Loyola, “a toweringly wonderful thing that you might call me to follow you and stand with you.”
The miracle adds a new dimension to the picture of God given in Psalm 145. There, the people look hopefully to God as the source of their food. The opening of God’s hand satisfies their desires. In light of John’s gospel, we enter more directly into that process. No longer does God stand on one side of an abyss and we on the other. Now, Jesus takes our barley loaves into his hands and blesses them. In a co-creative act, we bring the food, share it with Jesus and each other, then gather the left-overs.
Those who are, as Ephesians calls us, one in body and spirit, cannot blame God for world hunger, neglected children and all our other social ills. For God has called us to partnership, graced our efforts, and made us abundant blessings for each other.
Read more about the lectionary…
Daniel Bonnell on his painting "Feeding of the 5,000"
"This is an important divine moment here that perhaps we miss. The scripture says that Jesus took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed the loaves and the fishes. All eyes are on Him as the crowd is instructed to sit down in the grass. He then gave thanks. In this painting all the focus is upon Jesus, the viewer looks up as if he or she were one of the crowd. Jesus raises a basket with two small fish in it to the sky. He gives thanks and before he finishes speaking the basket is filled to overflowing. Jesus is called the bread of life. We see Him performing many miracles that have symbolic meanings to those — that have eyes to see. He is victory over death. We see Him raising the dead in more than one instance. He is the water of life, as he tells thewoman at the well. He is the Prophet who knew of her five husbands. Look closer and you will see Jesus not just raising a basket of bread to the sky but you will see him upon the cross. The band of white sky forms a perpendicular bar with his arms and hands, which are pierced."
On the Sacraments
David Lose, President of Luther Seminary . David extracts the central concept of providing bread in the Feeding of the 5,000 providing thoughts on the Eucharist
"So the sacraments hold this unusual place in the Church, in that they are both central to our life of faith and yet also can be so very confusing. In an attempt to clarify the connect between the sacraments and our daily lives, I’ll start with a phrase from St. Augustine: “visible words.” I find this phrase attractive because it helps me appreciate Baptism and Communion as the visible, physical counterpoint to the preaching and teaching of the church. That is, the sacraments are the embodiment of the proclaimed and heard gospel in physical form, the gospel given shape in water, bread, and wine. They serve us, then, as physical reminders of what we have heard and believe simply because we are physical creatures and remembering and believing can be so hard. And so we have the gospel preached to us so that we may hear it, and we have the same gospel given to us so that we may taste and touch and feel it with our hands and mouths and bodies.
"Visible, physical words for visible, physical people. Now, if this is true, then the sacraments will share the same character as the proclaimed gospel. That is, the sacramental word, as with the preached word, will be primarily about one thing: telling the truth. And perhaps this is where our difficulty with the sacraments begins, because to do this — to tell unflinchingly the honest-to-goodness truth — is rarely easy and almost never welcome.
" Frederick Buechner, in his book Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale, describes why this truth telling can be so hard: Before the gospel is good news, he writes, it’s just news. Let us say that it is the evening news, the television news, but with the sound turned off. Picture that, then, the video without the audio, the news with, for a moment, no words to explain it or explain it away, no words to cushion or sharpen the shock of it, no definition given to dispose of it with such as a fire, a battle, a strike, a treaty, a beauty, an accident. Just the thing itself, life itself, or as much of it as the screen can hold, flickering away in the dark of the room (14).
" News, news describing the way things really are. And from such news, as Buechner goes on to explain, there is no escape, as we are confronted with who we really are, forced to look honestly at ourselves with no illusions, excuses, or hiding places.
" This is the gospel; this is the sacraments: the telling of the truth. And, as Buechner also writes, such truth is “bad news before it is good news. It is the news that man is a sinner, to use the old word, that he is evil in the imagination of his heart…. That is the tragedy. But it is also the news that he is loved anyway, cherished, forgiven, bleeding, to be sure, but also bled for. That is the comedy,” the good news .
" This news, tragedy before it is comedy, bad before it is good, law before it is gospel. It’s not what we want to hear, really, but there it is all the same. The sacraments tell us first the difficult truth about ourselves, and only then tell us the glorious truth about God’s loving response to us and abiding concern for us.
" And of all the truths the sacraments tell us about ourselves, the first is that we are not in control. Now, I know that you don’t need to be told this. After all, any illness, or job loss, or tragedy great or small reminds of just how precarious life is. And yet…and yet it is so tempting to believe otherwise, to try to arrange our life just so and in this way delude ourselves into believing that we really can be masters of our own destiny, captains of our fate. And so the gospel first reveals to us the difficult news that we are not in control.
Another Way to Feed the 5,000 – in a Chevy!
"Fort Worth has an unusual new entrant in the food truck scene: Arlington Heights United Methodist Church.
"The West Side church on Sunday officially launched Five & Two – a take on Jesus’ feeding of the multitude with five loaves and two fishes – in a refurbished 1996 Chevy plumbing truck.
"’It’s a full commercial kitchen on wheels,’ Allen Lutes, associate pastor and director of the church’s new food truck ministry, said after a dedication ceremony with hot dogs and chips.
"The church sees the food truck as a way to take its ministry to people, rather than rely on them to come to the church. “How much more meaningful if we meet them where they are?” Lutes said during a Sunday sermon.
"Beginning June 18, and on the third Thursday of each month, Five & Two will begin serving dinner to the 30 homeless veterans who live at the Presbyterian Night Shelter’s Patriot House off of East Lancaster Avenue.
"In July, the truck will be at the Night Shelter’s women and children’s unit once a month. ‘This is going to be an opportunity to do more,’ to serve as mentors and work with children, Lutes said."
Food Facts
The information presented here is excerpted from the above book. Marion Nestle is Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University and author of several food related books
1. Food is an enormous business that generates well over $1 trillion in annual sales in the United States alone. Food must be produced, processed, distributed, and prepared before it is eaten, each of these steps conducted by companies with special interests in what the government and nutritionists say about food choice
The food industry is vast. It encompasses everyone who owns or works in agriculture (animal and plant), product manufacture, restaurants, institutional food service, retail stores, and factories that make farm machines and fertilizers, as well as people engaged in the transportation, storage, and insurance businesses that support such enterprises.
2. The problem is not production but distribution
The world produces an abundance of food, more than enough to meet the needs of its more than six billion people. But food is distributed unequally. Not everyone has enough resources to obtain adequate food on a reliable basis. In public health terms, such people lack “food security.”
In the 1960s, the discovery of widespread malnutrition in rural areas of the South shocked the nation and led President Lyndon Johnson to declare war on poverty. Congress enacted food assistance programs such as food stamps. These helped. The prevalence of malnutrition declined.
Beginning in the 1980s, however, reductions in government expenditures, rising inflation, and losses in higher paying jobs widened the income gap. Government agencies began to document increasing levels of food insecurity.
Today, USDA economists say that nearly 15 percent of US households are food insecure, with 5 percent seriously so. The least secure segments of the population are households with children headed by single women, especially those black or Hispanic. Economists estimate that 22 percent of American children live in homes with incomes below the poverty line. Hunger, they conclude, still exists in America.
For many out-of-work and out-of-luck Americans, some formerly in the middle class, having to balance food purchases against other necessities has become a normal part of daily existence.
When Congress enacted food stamp legislation, it made the program an entitlement. Anyone who met income limitations could obtain benefits. The program is now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in recognition that participants use Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards rather than stamps to purchase food.
In 2012, the declining economy and increasing rates of unemployment drove a record-setting 46.6 million Americans—many of them working for low wages and half of them children—to obtain SNAP benefits. Although the average benefit was only about $135 per month, the total cost to taxpayers was $75 billion that year
The critics of federal food assistance complain that the programs cost too much, are beset by fraud, and mostly encourage dependency.
A Food related issue – handling waste
Feeding the 5,000 is a program, part of the European organization FeedBack that is tackling hunger in a specific way – using food that would normally be wasted. They work to glean crops from farms that would be wasted also but host public events to bring awareness to this issue. They explain it this way "At each event, we serve up a delicious communal feast for 5000 people made entirely out of food that would otherwise have been wasted, bringing together a coalition of organizations that offer the solutions to food waste, raising the issue up the political agenda and inspiring new local initiatives against food waste."
The most recent event took place in Vancouver, Canada on May 27, 2015.
It was grassroots “lunch and learn” on a grand scale. Everything on the menu came from industry donors. Those attending got a tasty free 3 course lunch, an appreciation of food waste in the region, connections with those already taking action to reduce waste, as well as ideas for reducing food waste in their own lives. There is a separate website on just the event. Here is the photogallery and a video.
Two facts on food waste:
1. There are nearly one billion malnourished people in the world, but the approximately 40 million tons of food wasted by US households, retailers and food services each year would be enough to satisfy the hunger of every one of them .
2. The irrigation water used globally to grow food that is wasted would be enough for the domestic needs (at 200 litres per person per day) of 9 billion people – the number expected on the planet by 2050.
The Physics behind Feeding of the 5,000
Those of you who are scientific minded probably get tired reading all these words. What about numbers ? Quick now, using Einstein’s mass/energy conversion equation how much energy did Jesus have to muster to feed the 5,000 ?
Christian Gaffney answers that for you
The Feeding of the 5000 and the Graham cracker
In the mid-1800s there was a group of people in America known as the Millerites–a Christian sect firmly convinced that Jesus would return sometime late in the year 1843. He didn’t, setting off what was called "the Great Disappointment."
At least some of these folks, however, made the best of the situation by declaring that as a matter of fact Jesus had returned but that it had turned out to be an invisible, spiritual advent. Believing themselves to be living in an already-present millennial kingdom, these Adventists decided that as part of this new identity they should invent alternative foods as a sign of their not being fully in this world.
One preacher named Sylvester Graham invented a new kind of cracker for his congregation to eat. Sylvester Graham (1794-1851) believed physical lust was harmful to the body and caused such dire maladies in the sexually overheated as pulmonary consumption, spinal diseases, epilepsy, and insanity, as well as such lesser ailments as headaches and indigestion. Graham believed a strict vegetarian diet would aid in suppressing carnal urges; to this end, he advocated a regimen devoid of meat and rich in fiber as a way of combating rampant desire.
His famed "Graham bread" was fashioned from the coarsely ground wheat flour he espoused and which came to bear his name. Convinced that eating meat and fat leads to sinful sexual excess, the good reverend urged total vegetarianism. He also warned that mustard and ketchup cause insanity, urged followers to drink only water, and recommended sleeping with one’s windows open regardless of the weather. More reasonably, he touted the merits of a high-fiber diet and promoted the use of homemade unsifted wheat flour instead of refined white flour.
Some sources assert Graham himself invented the snack in 1829; others claim the graham cracker did not come into being until 1882, 31 years after Graham’s death. Many bakers tried to market the crackers, but it wasn’t until 1898 that the National Biscuit Company (now Nabisco) made any real inroads into the market with their Nabisco Graham Crackers product. Nabisco achieved even greater success with their Honey Maid line, introduced in 1925, which boosted the original graham flavor through the addition of honey.
Today’s graham crackers are made with bleached white flour, a deviation that would have set Sylvester Graham to spinning in his grave — he regarded refined flour as one of the world’s great dietary evils.
Another Feeding – Babette’s Feast, Grace in a movie
Summary – In this 1987 film, French War refugee Babette works for 2 sisters & their ascetic sect. When she cooks a feast they reluctantly eat but soon the grace of the meal transforms all, including a former suitor of one of the sisters.
Babette’s Feast is a high regarded Danish Academy Award winning movie from 1987.
The setting of the film is a barren, windswept coastal village of Denmark in the 19th century. The village is populated by a very conservative and pious community of Protestant believers. It is led by two elderly sisters who struggle to maintain the faithfulness and the spirit of the community, which is aging and growing quarrelsome. When Babette, a political refugee from Paris, turns up in their village, the sisters charitably take her in and make her their housekeeper. They ask Babette to cook their very simple fare, for extravagance is suspect, and enjoyment of worldly pleasures (including lavish eating and drinking) is sinful.
For fourteen years the three women live together amicably. Fourteen years pass. The parishioners meet regularly for prayer and a meal at the sisters’ home. But their meals are as filled with grumbling and bickering as they are with prayers and hymns. They harbor resentments and grudges against each other for wrongs committed long ago. Interestingly, their bickering always stops when Babette enters the room to serve their simple meal. A disapproving glance or a clearing of her throat is enough to bring shame and silence. Her mere presence is a rebuke to unworthy words or thoughts.
Then Babette, quite astonishingly, receives a letter from a friend in Paris saying that she has won the Parisian lottery. She asks the sisters if she can use her winnings to prepare a feast for them, in thanks for all they have given her over the past fourteen years. They reluctantly agree. .