Sermons from St. Martin-in-the-Fields St. Martin-in-the-Fields

Listen in to the sermon from Ms. Anne Alexis Harra for The Third Sunday after Pentecost, June 26, 2022.

Support the worship and ministry of St. Martin's by giving online: stmartinec.org/give

Today's readings are:
1 Kings 19:15-16,19-21 Psalm 16 Galatians 5:1,13-25 Luke 9:51-62Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/
Sermon text:

It is a remarkable honor to meditate on the Words of Life with you this morning, which admittedly feels rather heavy. I originally was on the schedule to preach next week - on Wednesday afternoon, Pastor Jim asked if I might switch to this week. Little did I know. Shaping these words to you, my Beloved St. Martin's, a community in transition and one that is feeling a tremendous weight, is an outstanding gift. I am honored.

A great injustice was done on Friday, the exact type against which Paul warns in the passage from Galatians. The freedoms of powerful people were used as an opportunity for self-indulgence, to abuse the name of religious freedom and to strip away the dignity and bodily autonomy of women.

After the news broke on Friday I found myself in the midst of a crisis of faith. Finding the words to say to myself, let alone to a congregation already shouldering so much, was almost impossible. Around 7:30 last night with tears in my eyes I angrily said to my far-too-patient partner, "I have no words. This pain is too much. I don't know where God is, and I don't know what the future will bring." My sweet Cole said to me, "Preach what's on your heart. You'll find the words."

I feel like I resonate most with the words of the Psalmist this morning, who opened the psalm with a plea to God for protection during turbulence in Israel. The Psalmist reiterates that it is God who is her only good; with God's presence near her, she will not fall. Let us take those words with us this week to hopefully lighten our burdens.

I fear we are staring down a long road of anguish and factionizing. St. Paul had this same concern for the Church in Galatia, a portion of whose Letter we read this morning. Despite having brought the Good News of God in Christ to Galatia, Paul was concerned about its factionizing. The Galatians were factionizing and dividing amongst themselves over the interpretation of the law. The Judaic faction of Galatia was adamant that Christian converts should practice Mosaic law, even going so far as to demand that these converts receive circumcision. Paul does not mince words when he warns the Galatians not to trade one form of subjugation for another. Subjugation of any body based on former law infringes on everybody's freedom. It drives us apart, and it pulls us away from God.

This passage from Galatians today reminds us that our freedom does not come from us, but from the Love of God in Christ, the same Christ who willingly set out on a journey from Galilee to Jerusalem to meet his fate on the cross. True religious freedom comes from Christ and begets the Fruits of the Spirit: joy, patience, gentleness, faithfulness. It does not harm another for righteousness' sake. Instead, we are coming face to face with profoundly gross misinterpretations of religious freedom, the kind which keep us stuck in the past and unable to move forward in our journey towards the Dominion of God.

In the gospel, Luke illustrates a strange encounter with Jesus, but highlights a harsh truth: The freedom that comes from following Christ involves sacrificing what we once thought was best. At the end of the gospel, we hear a peculiar dialogue between Jesus and one potential follower. The man wants to follow Jesus but asks to offer his family farewell, first. Jesus does not hold back: "No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God." These words would have been bizarre to anyone in ancient times because the "plowing norm" involved the person operating the plow looking backwards routinely to ensure that the rows were straight. I

Hear from the Rev. Dr. Nora Johnson preaching for our Pride Evensong service.

Today's readings are:
Psalm 150
Romans 12:9-18
Matthew 5:1-12
From the Gospel of Matthew this evening we have been given the beatitudes from the great Sermon on the Mount. I love the Sermon on the Mount. Everybody loves the Sermon on the Mount. In fact, if we aren't careful, many of us have heard the Sermon so many times that it can almost sound like an abstract checklist to us: blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are the meek, blessed are the persecuted. It can sound like we are hearing a set of policy statements by Jesus, or a set of ideas, or worse yet hearing a politician's list of talking points.


Sometimes, to escape that deadening familiarity, I like to try to imagine what it must have felt like for Jesus to look out at those who were listening to him speak, and what it must have felt like for them to listen to him and meet his eye. Catching the eye of Jesus as he says "Blessed are those who mourn" is just a fundamentally different experience than hearing Jesus's abstract ideas about mourning or about seeking righteousness.


To be in that group around Jesus listening, with the disciples or with the crowd from which he has just come, is to have, I think, a deep experience of one's own blessedness. And I have to believe that Jesus spoke these words not to make an impression on his disciples, not to teach someone a lesson, but because he was moved by the grace and the beauty of those people he loved. In their awkwardness and in their folly and in their hunger, he loved them. He spoke from his heart. He didn't so much explain to them that they were blessed. He blessed them deeply in that moment.


It seems possible to me, too, that Jesus was moved to narrate his own experience here as one who was himself outcast and downtrodden. I think he saw himself in the eyes of the poor and the lowly. He told us that if we were looking for him, that's where we would find him. So we could think of the beatitudes as a kind of homecoming for Jesus, a moment in which he himself is resting in love, at rest right in the place where he belongs. You are blessed, he says to them, and in that moment he is one with them just as he is one with God. I can almost imagine that this moment of homecoming and belonging gave him a vast sense of patience. His vision of us from high on that mountain is maybe part of what allows him to let us be who we are, let us take our time coming to him. He sees the blessedness we can't begin yet to express ourselves.


It's a paradox, but probably not an accident, that the ways of being that Jesus describes in this sermon on the mount can be ways of getting cut off from other people. Poverty of spirit, like physical poverty, can make you excluded from systems of justice, isolated in grief, everyone around you speaking evil of you and persecuting you for no reason. Or you are forgotten: too meek to push your way to the front of the line, looking to make peace where all is war and destruction and peace is just a laughable afterthought, dismissed from the beginning as a peacemaker. Trying to practice mercy in a merciless environment. What friends do you have? Jesus recognizes himself I think in this awful isolation. that threatens us at every moment.


There he is, the very love of God incarnate, one day to be executed like a criminal and abandoned by his friends. Jesus knows about isolation and exile, and he knows that there is a particular beauty, a particular healing, in looking into the eyes of the poor and the meek and those who long for justice, and being one with them. Knowing that in his gaze they are one with God, that he is the meeting place between human frailty and divine life.


The awful isolation to which we willingly subject an outsider is just swept away in his loving gaze. The doors open and the walls come tumbling down.


Now that loving gaze that we feel coming from Jesus is

Listen in to the sermon from the Rev. James H. Littrell for the Day of Pentecost, June 5, 2022.

Support the worship and ministry of St. Martin's by giving online: stmartinec.org/give

Today's readings are:
Acts 2:1-21 Romans 8:14-17 John 14:8-17, (25-27) Psalm 104:25-35, 37Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/
Once upon a time, there was an old (ish) retired (sort of) gay (totally) Episcopal priest who arrived, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, at a lovely--idyllic even--Episcopal church sitting in a lovely swath of greenery almost at the apex of the tallest hill in a great and ancient city (ancient by American standards anyway) in a part of the world, relatively temperate and plentifully watered, not too far but far enough from a great ocean, for millennia populated by a great variety of more or less indigenous people, most recently people who called themselves Lenape, and more recently (in human time) settled by a strange group of humans who had crossed that self-same ocean, at some risk to life and limb and, in some cases, fortune. In varying degrees, these new people had left their homes far away in search of, variously, better lives, fuller liberty, greater opportunity and perhaps fortune. Sailing up a great river from the ocean, they eventually landed and began to settle in, made rough homes, dug rough passages from pathways, and then rough streets and roads from these passages, traversed a tributary of the great river, crossed the peninsula created by the two rivers. Therein they made plans for and executed a city of sorts, a city of square parks, interlaced by parallel and perpendicular streets named for lovely green trees. Many of these people were members of a new religious society, a people who styled themselves Friends and who claimed to come in peace, seeking harmony with all God's holy creation and all God's creatures. Indeed, right behind me in that window back there, as many of you know, is one notion of the leader of that first settling society. William Penn his name was, and up there he is smoking a pipe of peace with his new Lenape neighbors, a pipe, he and his Society said, was of peace and brotherly love. That, in fact, is what he named the city: Philadelphia.

Like most human aspirations to perfection, the city fairly quickly fell short of its own expressed values. Faith and commerce held hands, and, yes, Indian wrestled, until Friend's quest for a city based in and living out the loving values it espoused, collapsed under the sheer power of the vast commercial enterprises that inevitably unfolded in the land. So rich was it in abundance and resource that the urge to commerce and the concomitant necessity of ordinance to safeguard the engines of that commerce, and the power necessary to maintain order and law, all combined and simply vanquished the initial impulse to be a city of mutual love, based in the God of love and the love of God.

Time passed. The great city grew and grew and grew. The indigenous people, mutual friends though Friends may have wanted them to be, withered and perished under the onslaught of commerce and trade. There arrived others, too, non-Friends, seizing the handles of burgeoning wealth and opportunity with very little aspiration to brotherly or sisterly love as foundational in their actual lives. Some of the early Friends and then, in greater numbers, the people who arrived a little later, came to the growing city with other dark-hued humans from Africa, humans who were nonetheless numbered and registered right along with sheep and goats and cows and horses as property and as chattel. They too were harnessed, quite literally, to the great engines of commerce.

The city grew yet larger. A great war came with the great king across the ocean who thought the land and commerce and a portion of all its proceeds belonged to him. The war was fought in the name of many things, most often liberty and freedom from foreign oppression. So

Listen in to the sermon from the Rev. David Potter for the Last Sunday of Easter, May 29, 2022.Support the worship and ministry of St. Martin's by giving online: stmartinec.org/giveToday's readings are:Acts 16:16-34Revelation 22:12-14,16-17,20-21John 17:20-26Psalm 97Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/Where do we go from here?

The Rev. David Potter

May 29, 2022

On this Ascension Sunday, we commemorate the earthly departure of Jesus with these words. And through them, the Church is called to unity.

This prayer Jesus offers anticipates and responds to a question which will no doubt later surface for Jesus' followers: "Where do we go from here?"

Throughout this past week, this same question has continually rumbled around in my own thoughts and prayers. And after completing seminary just last weekend, it is especially relevant. For myself and any others in this graduation season, what comes next is often a question posed to us--just as much as it is a question and discern we ask of ourselves.

And surely this same wondering is present here in this community at St. Martin-in the-Fields. Uncertainty is inherent in any search process for new clergy, to say the least.

But, still even more widely, in light of over two years of pandemic concerns and restrictions, especially now as they begin to ease, this question seemingly lingers everywhere. Where do we go from here?

We are in transition. A world lies behind us which is no more--and the world before us remains unknown. Now, living through these times of change like these is far from easy. At times it may even feel like simply too much.

The tension between what has been and what will be can feel like chaos. And in this place, I often find myself searching for some reassurance of stability--for some anchor to hold on.

So, for those carrying burdens here in this place this morning, receive this as permission to come as you are. In these brief moments, may we all know and may we remind ourselves that we hold these burdens with and for one another.

"That they all may be one." In a moment of tremendous transition, Jesus prays these words. In the remaining instruction of his earthly ministry, his desire for the disciples, for his followers, becomes abundantly clear:

that they know they are loved,

that they love one another,

and that through them the world might come to know love.

Soon the disciples will no longer have Jesus with them--and they will face many challenges and much unknown. And it is in this context with great obstacles to loving one another, that Jesus admonishes his followers toward unity.

This kind of unity is a discipline to which he knows they will need to return over and over again--because apart from a resilient commitment to one another, the heavy burdens they carry will simply be too much to bear.

This kind of unity is no simple feel-good-warm-and-fuzzy feeling. And neither is it a demand for uniformity within the disciples. Rather, what Jesus calls them to, and calls the church to, is something essential to both their individual and their common wellbeing.

Now, I admit, in these polarizing times, my initial impulse is not always toward becoming "completely one" with those I disagree with. Perhaps this is something you can relate to. Because cultivating unity across the broad chasms of ideological and political difference can often seem futile and quite naive.

And when great potential for harm exists by remaining in relationship with others, especially with others who may not affirm our right to exist, appealing to unity can be quite dangerous.

In this past week, yet another mass shooting has claimed the lives of innocent children. This time at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas--merely weeks after the deadly and racist shootings in Detroit and Buffalo.

But in the numbing wake of senseless death and overwhelming grief, there are simply no adequ

Listen in to the sermon from the Rev. James H. Littrell for the Memorial of William Newbold, May 28, 2022.

Today's readings are:
Lamentations 3:22-26,31-33
Romans 8:14-19,34-35,37-39
John 14:1-6

New Every Morning
Fr. Jim Littrell
May 28, 2022

The writer of the Book of Lamentations, a little bit of which we just heard, says to us:

"The steadfast love of God never ceases. God's mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning. Great is thy faithfulness!"

And then Paul, writing to the first Christians in Rome, that great imperial capital, from jail, from his cell facing a terrible death, writes that nothing in all creation will be able to separate all those early Christians and himself from that same steadfast love of God. And John, in that Gospel I just read, assures us that God's domain, God's dominion, the space of God, is more spacious and open and welcoming than any of us can begin to imagine. Using the metaphor of a house, he speaks to us of its endless, endless capacity to take us in. It's endless capaciousness. The steadfast love of God is as vast and nurturing and loving and hugging and warm and safe as anything any of us can imagine, and then so much more than that.

So I am here to tell you this terrible morning, when every heart in this room is fractured, is in so much pain, that your son, your brother, your grandson, your cousin, your nephew, your friend William Connor Newbold is right now, in this very heartbroken time, saying to us, with Jesus, "do not let your hearts be troubled. I am fine. God is holding me close. And you would not believe how wonderful that is." But, he begs us with God, "please do believe it!"

Heartbreak is a real thing, Leslie mused to me in one of our conversations this week. It's a real thing. It actually hurts. And she's right. Hearts break, and hearts in this holy place this morning are broken. And I believe that into that fracture, that brokenness, God's steadfast love and God's infinite Light is pouring right now. I want to tell you two things about that.

First, heartbreak is like any other human fracture. It hurts. And it will heal, in time, and especially - and this is really important - especially if it is nurtured by your love and care for one another in the days and months and years ahead. And second, also like a broken bone, your broken hearts will heal, but they will never be the same. There will always be a space in them where William was.

What I want you to believe with me is that he is, right now, right here, in this room, working with God to mend your hearts. He and God want you to laugh again. They want you to play again. They want you to see the colors of the world bright again. And they want you to love and care for one another in this moment and in the time ahead.

And, also, they know you will weep. And weep. And weep. They know how sad you are, and will be. And they love you and all your tears so much. And they say, God and William, that even your pain cannot separate you from God's endless love. God loves you always and in every condition, and God will wipe away the tears from your eyes.

"And how do I know that?" William says to us. How do we know that William is now held in God's love? "Well, here's how," William says to you: "I know because all my tears and my sadness and my pain are gone. Gone. All my pain is gone."

The steadfast love of God never ceases. God's mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning! They are new this morning.

There is a hymn I like a lot and I want to share a little bit of it with you. It's by a composer of contemporary hymns named Brian Wren. It's a prayer hymn, of sorts, inviting us to bring the many names of God into our hearts: he invokes in the hymn the God of all the stories we tell,the parables we tell of our God, the God who is a mother to us, nurturing, ordering, and piloting and caring, the God who is a loving father to us, hugging every child, a God he calls (an

Listen in to the sermon from the Rev. James H. Littrell for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, May 22, 2022.

Support the worship and ministry of St. Martin's by giving online: stmartinec.org/give

Today's readings are:

Acts 16:9-15

Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5

John 5:1-9

Psalm 67

Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/

River

Fr. Jim Littrell

May 22, 2022

Listen again and pray with me God's Word to and for us this morning:

On the sabbath day, we went outside the gate by the river, where we supposed there a was a place of prayer. And women were there, talking and praying....And Lydia said, Come home and stay with us. And they said, No.no. We would not trouble you. But Lydia insisted, and so they went with her, to her home.

Then the angel of God showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city...where there will be no more night; no need for light of lamp or sun, where God will be their light forever and ever.

Now in Jerusalem by the Gate of the Sheep, there is a pool, called Bethesda, which means place of healing, which has five porticoes or entrances. In these lay many invalids: blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man, we are told, had been there for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he went over to him and said, "Do you want to be made well?" The sick man answered him, "Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am crawling to the water, someone else gets ahead of me, and I just never get to the pool." Jesus said, "Come. Stand up. Take up your mat and walk." At once, we are told, the man was made well, took up his mat, and, haltingly we must imagine, began to walk. Now that day was the sabbath.

I come to you this morning in the name of almighty God, whose insistent love wills us into being in every moment of our lives and in our deaths: in our endings, in our heartbreak and mourning, in our grief and sorrow, and, when the morning comes again for us, in our joy and in our gladness. May it be so. Amen.

Good morning, friends.

I am, as most of you know by now, Jim Littrell. I am a priest in the Episcopal church and I am really glad to be with St. Martin's this morning, to have been with you this last week, and, God and my new friend and boss and your Rector's Warden, Barbara Thomson willing, glad to be with you for the next few weeks, eight, to be exact. We're not quite sure what title I might have. "Supply priest" always sounds to me like something you order from Amazon to replenish the broom closet or restock the plates and cups in the kitchen.

So I thought, no, that's not it. I thought I might call myself a bridge priest, albeit the very first bridge after a bridge goes out, a one-way, very temporary bridge where the light takes forever to change. And then after a while they lay down a second sturdier two-way temporary bridge and that bridge suffices for the time it takes for the parish to build a lasting bridge, and that bridge is built and it's a good solid bridge and it lasts for a long time. That doesn't quite do the naming job, but what I am titled is not very important, to me or to you. What's important is what I will try to be and do while I am with you in this limited time that really matters. And I think a large part of my job is to spend time with you as we are nurtured in the river of Light, as we gather and pray by the river of Life, and when either necessary or just desirable, to take a dip in the healing waters of the Bethesda pool.

I love a good clean country river. I do. My partner, Louis and I seek them out. We have hiked for miles to get to a great swimming hole.

And when I get to those swimming pools, I just plunge in and feel every single time like I've been washed in the blood of the everlasting Lamb that John