Feast of Saint Mary the Virgin ~ TODAY!

Come celebrate with us at St. Michael's!

Holy Eucharist at 6PM TONIGHT

"Pot Luck Dinner" to Follow in the cool Parish Center.

All are invited to bring a dish to share, or not, just join us!

All are invited! We'll be happy to see you!

Also, you are invited to join with the Society of Mary in the recitation of the Rosary at 7:45 am Saturday morning in honor of Saint Mary the Virgin. Rosaries will be available.

Many continued Blessings!
--Nancy

Don’t Look Down - a Sermon by Rev. John R. Smith

Don’t Look Down
A Sermon for Sunday, August 10th, 2014
By Father John R. Smith

Readings:
Lesson: Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28
Psalm: Psalm 105, 1-6, 16-22, 45b
Epistle: Romans 10:5-15
The Holy Gospel: Matthew 14:22-33

This past week the Church celebrated the Feast of the Transfiguration on Wednesday, August 6. August 6 is also the anniversary of the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima. The Transfiguration commemorates Jesus taking Peter, James, and John up a high mountain where they get a glimpse of Jesus’ luminous glory and divinity. This Gospel is also proclaimed each year on the Last Sunday of Epiphany, so we hear it twice, which underlines its importance.

If you remember, Moses and Elijah appear alongside Jesus in this epiphany to the “Pillars” Peter, James, and John. That these two are included in the vision is understandable: Moses was given the Law and Elijah was foremost of the early prophets of Israel. What they have in common is they both dealt with idolatry.  When Moses comes down the mountain, after his dialogue with God and receiving the Law, he finds his people and the leaders he left in charge dancing around a Golden Calf they made in their impatience. He summarily orders the idols destruction and the execution of all the worshipers of it. And you might remember the Elijah story when he confronted the 600 prophets of Baal and challenged them to a contest to see which God was more powerful and real: the Baal (which means Lord) or the God of Israel. It was a fire contest. The prophets of Baal called down fire from heaven on their wood stack and nothing happened. Elijah has water poured on and soaked into his wood pile and when he calls down fire it ignites instantly to everyone’s amazement! Elijah then orders the 600 prophets of Baal to be put to death.

Moses and Elijah provide a great contrast to Jesus. Jesus who goes to the Cross demanding no persons death, forgiving those who will put him to death, and instead will offer himself in death for the sins and idolatry of the world. And the Voice from heaven declares “This is my Son, the Beloved, Listen to Him.  In other words, God is telling the three leaders of the three great Christian communities of the early church:  Be lead by Jesus’ teaching and example. Listen to Him.

For the first few centuries followers of Jesus were focused on Jesus example and words. No Christian would be a part of taking life in any form. And in those times people dealt with the same kind of issues we deal with today, human nature and response being pretty much the same. But over the centuries, mostly due to fear and the “rational” desire to “preserve our way of life,” we’ve accumulated so many arguments for not listening to Jesus or following his example. Or, perhaps more accurately, we prefer to practice a kind of moral religion where we determine good and evil without any real reference to Jesus.  We revert, as Joseph’s brothers did, to jealousy and hatred for our brother. (Granted, Joseph didn’t do himself any good in their eyes by playing up the favor Jacob had for him!) So the brothers try to get rid of Joseph, and as things work out, they end up needing their brother and he ends up, after some intrigue, forgiving them. In this important regard the Joseph story parallels Jesus’ story: both were made scapegoats by their own people and both end up forgiving those who sought to harm them.

I believe that the one thing that will get us through the our own difficult time (Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, the Sudan, immigration and refugee crisis) is by refocusing on the person of Jesus and his teaching, acknowledging God, as the General Thanksgiving in the Prayer says:  Not only with our lips, but in our lives, by giving up ourselves to your service, and by walking before you in holiness and righteousness all our days.

We can learn from today’s Gospel:  We’re all in the boat together, but the wind is blowing and the sea is rough.  It’s easy to be afraid in such a situation. So, when something or someone approaches us. We yell “It’s a ghost!”  We’re ready to defend ourselves. But the One coming toward us is Jesus, who says: “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” It’s almost comical, if it wasn’t so serious, but impetuous Peter, the one who would deny the Lord 3 times, recognizes that it’s Jesus, and asks Jesus to command him to walk to him on the water. Jesus says: Come! So Peter, jumps out of the boat, starts walking toward Jesus, but then looks down at the turbulent waves! The moment he takes his eyes off of Jesus he falters and begins to sink crying out: Lord, save me! 

Whatever happens, no matter how afraid we are, we must not support the lashing out at the object of our fear.  Keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus at all costs. And, when we’re tempted to look down, rather than to focus on Jesus, his hand will be there to catch us and hold us up.  We have nothing to fear. Don’t look down! Look up---at Jesus!

A song I sing with the children:  Here Comes Jesus

Here comes Jesus
See him walking on the water
He’ll lift you up
And he’ll help you to stand now
Here comes Jesus
He’s the master of the waves that roll
Here comes Jesus
He’ll make you whole.

Amen!

Eggs and Diapers: The New Fish and Bread - a sermon by Rev. Clare Yarborough

Eggs and Diapers: The New Fish and Bread
A Sermon for Sunday, August 3rd, 2014
By Mother Clare Yarborough

Readings:
Lesson: Genesis 32:22-31    
Psalm: Psalm 17: 1-7, 16
Epistle: Romans 9:1-5    
The Holy Gospel: Matthew 14:13-21

I.    Back from three weeks on the East Coast! 
I ate lobster three times, caught up with old friends, went to church three times (saving the bulletins for future reference), and did my best to avoid newspapers, newscasts and all other conduits of Current Events.

In fact, for three weeks the most earth-shattering news to come my way was the trade of Jon Lester and Johnny Gomes to the Oakland A’s, which pretty much smashes any hopes of a berth on the playoffs. 

So, a good time was had—a time of lazy mornings, cooler temperatures, reconnecting with friends and family.  Thank you for allowing me and Father Smith to have these times away to rest and restore ourselves. 

II.    Jesus wasn’t so lucky in today’s Gospel. 
He tried to get away…but the crowd found out!  So here’s the story again—retold and put into the context of the rest of the bigger story.

In the section immediately before this, we hear about what happened to John the Baptist.  How he was arrested and imprisoned and finally served up on a silver platter to Herod Antipas.  The story is gruesome, even depraved, and must have been hard in the telling and in the hearing.

I can imagine Jesus’ wanting to scurry away and be alone.  How hard it must have been to hear how his mentor, cousin, friend had died!    How sobering to realize that yes indeed, this is what happens to prophets and saints, anyone who dares to speak Truth to Power.  Jesus got in a boat and went to a deserted place, also translated to a lonely place, or an out-of-the-way place…a place to cry, to pray, and to remember.

We’ve all been to these places.  In fact, most of the time you don’t need a boat to find such a place.  Nor a plane.  Nor a car.  Sometimes you don’t even need to leave the room to find that tragedy picks you up and drops you in a lonely and desolate place.

The crowd found Jesus out in that lonely place.  Perhaps he really was such a celebrity that there was nowhere for him to go without the crowd following.  Or perhaps they came for more than just a celebrity sighting.  Perhaps they came because they too were looking for a desolate place to be.   Jesus was not the only one to mourn the passing of John.   John baptized the entire Judean countryside, after all.  They flocked to John to hear his message of repentance.  They eagerly heard the message of preparation.

But they also heard the news of a banquet, a dancing girl, and a head served up on a silver platter.  If Good News travels fast, Bad News travels even faster!

Suddenly, Jesus had company out there in the lonely and desolate place.  With John’s death, the Kingdom of Heaven didn’t look so near.  Another good man extinguished simply because of a silly promise made to a little girl,

and God was silent.

Matthew’s Gospel said that that Jesus had compassion on the crowd.  “Compassion” in English is a rather soft word, in the Greek the word connotes a much stronger response—and a better sense might be a translation that says “When Jesus saw the crowd, he was heartsick.” 

So he healed them to remind them that God was still present.  The Kingdom was still nearby.

“Lord, it’s getting late.  Send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves,” said the disciples.

“You give them something to eat,” was his response. 
“We have nothing,” they responded.  “except for five loaves of bread and two fish.”

He tells them to bring the food to him, organizes the crowd to sit down on the grass, and then takes the food, says a blessing, breaks the bread and tells the disciples to pass it out.  And not only was there SOMETHING rather than NOTHING, there was a LOT of SOMETHING...actually there was an abundance.  There were such an abundance that each disciple had to get out a basket and gather up the extra food.  12 baskets in all. 

Herod’s banquet ends in a death.  Jesus’ banquet?  5,000 well fed men (plus women and children) and enough leftover for another day.  And that’s the story.

III.    My family tries to make a habit of going to Casa Maria every month to help out with the sandwich making frenzy.  I have a pretty good idea of how much goes into making 1,000 egg salad sandwiches.  A lot of bread.  A lot of eggs.  A lot of hands.  I have no idea how two fish and five loaves multiplied into enough for everyone, nor how 12 men managed to serve 5,000 plus people—the logistics alone make my mind boggle. 

But this is what I do know.  It doesn’t matter how it happened.  It doesn’t even matter whether I know that this story happened in exactly the way it’s told in Matthew.  Or Mark.  Or Luke, or John---it occurs in all of them actually. 

Every last evangelist tells this story. 
It is important for us to know this story.
Not because, I think, it’s about Jesus, but because it is about ourselves.

We are the disciples and we need to have this story absolutely seared into our DNA as Christians.  As followers.  As disciples.

Because we are always going to have 5,000 people camped out on our lawn waiting for dinner.  That’s just the world. 

Women and children at the bus station.  Gaza and Israel lobbing rockets at each other.  Western Africa in the midst of a devastating epidemic of Ebola. 

There will always be something absolutely horrible going on in the world and we will never be adequate to the task of fixing it all!

As some disasters disperse, others come to take their place.  Addressing the world’s pain is like playing Whack-a-Mole at the amusement park.  Except that it’s not a recipe for fun,

it’s a recipe for despair.

Especially for disciples who think they have nothing to give, and so want to send the problems away to the closest village. 

But…as Jesus points out—it’s not up to the disciples to judge adequacy of their resources.  So what if there isn’t enough to feed 5,000 men (plus women and children)?  If there’s something—anything—to give, then sit the people down, take the time to thank God you have something to give, and start passing it out. 

What started out as a recipe for despair will turn into a glimpse of God’s Kingdom. 

IV.    There’s a story I found on the internet, and like most good internet stories it’s been passed around so many times that it’s almost impossible to track down where and when it occurred.  But nonetheless I believe it to be a true story much like the feeding of the 5,000 is a true story.  What it teaches is True even if all the circumstances surrounding it are not.  It is supposedly told by a social worker who lived and worked in the Appalachias:

“The Sheldons were a large family in severe financial distress after a series of misfortunes. The help they received was not adequate, yet they managed their meager income with ingenuity – and without complaint.

“One fall day I visited the Sheldons in their ramshackle rented house where they lived at the edge of the woods. Despite a painful physical handicap, Mr. Sheldon had shot and butchered a bear that strayed into their yard once too often. The meat had been processed into all the big canning jars they could find or swap for. There would be meat in their diet even during the worst of the winter when their fuel costs were high.

“Mr Sheldon offered a jar of bear meat to me. I hesitated to accept it, but the giver met my unspoken resistance firmly. “Now you just have to take
this. We want you to have it. We don’t have much, that’s a fact; but we ain’t
poor!”
“I couldn’t resist asking, “What’s the difference?”

His answer proved unforgettable.

“”When you can give something away, even when you don’t have much, then you
ain’t poor. When you don’t feel easy giving something away even if you got
more’n you need, then you’re poor, whether you know it or not.”

V.  Most of us have something to give. 
Eggs for egg salad.  A packet of size 4 diapers.  A car to ferry supplies.  An ear to listen.   Completely inadequate, but nevertheless something.   Therefore we are blessed, blessed by God to have something to give.  Strangely, the more we give—the more we find things TO give.  The richer we become.

The world is large.  The pain is immense.  There are 5,000 men (plus women and children) camped out on our doorsteps with more arriving daily.

It’s time to keep breaking out the bread and the fish, the eggs and the diapers and get busy passing them out.  We’re disciples of Jesus, so that’s our job.

God will take care of the abundance. 
After all, that’s his job.

Amen.

Announcements for the Week of August 10-16th and beyond

Feast of St. Mary the Virgin Celebrate with us beginning with the Holy Eucharist at 6PM on Friday, August 15, following by a “Pot Luck Dinner” in the Parish Center. You are invited to bring a dish to share, casserole, salad, vegetable, fruit or dessert, etc. Just a great way to spend a Friday evening, attending Mass, joining with good friends, lively conversation and delicious food!

Women’s Bible Study Begins August 20th at 6:30 pm in the Parish Center. This year we will travel thru the Psalms of Ascent, known specifically as Psalms 120 ~ 134. Once again we will explore the great festivals and key elements that help us better understand worship and a life of faith and fellowship. Books are $15 and can be ordered ahead of time. Please contact Nancy in the office. (7 books are available now) You may also buy a book the first night of the study. Say it, work it, pray it. See you there!

Parish Life invites you to go Greek! Join us on Thursday, August 28th at 6:30 pm Fronimos Greek Café 3242 E. Speedway Blvd (enter from the Walgreen’s parking lot at the southeast corner of Speedway and Country Club and follow the signs) menu pricing ranges from $6 to $16m per entrée. Please contact the church office if you need a ride! SIGN ~ UP SHEETS IN BACK OF CHURCH

The flowers on the altar today are given to the glory of God and in thanksgiving for seventeen years of marriage by Peter Schmidt and Sherry Terrell. May God continue to richly bless them on their life’s journey. Amen

Notes from the Parish Office

Please note:

Next Thursday, July 31st and Friday, August 1 ~ the School and Parish Offices will be closed. There will be no entrance to the parking lots during that time as re-surfacing will be taking place. Will re-open in time for Saturday and Sunday services. Thank you for your patience and consideration in this much needed project. 

Do not forget your chance to "Jump back into the 50's and 60's" with dinner at Little Anthony's Diner on THURSDAY, JULY 31 AT 6:30 PM. Sign-up sheets are located in the back of church. Parish Life invites you to a great evening of fun and fellowship!

Stay cool! 

Nancy

Casa Maria Reminder for Friday, 7/25/14

Casa Maria sandwich making is this Friday, July 25th at St Michael's Parish Center, 602 N. Wilmot. Kitchen opens at 5 PM; come anytime after that!

School's out! It's a GREAT time to bring children to a family friendly Community Service event. WE NEED YOUR HELP! EXTRA EGGS PLEASE! Bring friends!

Please bring 2 or 3 dozen peeled eggs. We don't get extra eggs from the School students in the summer. We need medium sized boxes for transporting the lunches. Fruit boxes from Costco or banana boxes are ideal.

Come join the fun!  Experience the satisfaction that comes from helping others!

NEXT CASA MARIA: FRIDAY AUGUST 22nd. Mark your calendars for 2014! Casa Maria is every 4 weeks...

July 25th
Aug 22nd
Sept 19th
Oct 17th
Nov 14th
Dec 12th

New Sermons Page on St. Michael's Website

The Sermons page on the St. Michael and All Angels website has been fully updated! It now features five recent sermons by Father Smith, with more to follow soon. Each entry includes a list of the day's readings, and at least one picture that relates to the sermon.

Here is the most recent sermon. Click on the link above to read them all!

--Karen

Don’t Weed the Garden
A Sermon for Sunday, July 20th, 2014
By Father John R. Smith

Readings:
Lesson:  Genesis 28: 10 – 19a                                   
Psalm 139: 1-11 / 22-23
Epistle: Romans 8: 12 - 25
The Holy Gospel: Matthew 13: 24 – 30, 36 - 43

When I was a teenager, my mom kept pretty good tabs on me.  When, during the summer, it looked like I was getting bored or antsy with lots of time on my hands, she would say:  “John, go weed the garden.”  Living in the northwest with lots of rain everything grew fast including the weeds.  There were always plenty of weeds in the garden and flower beds.  It had to be done.

I dreaded hearing my mom’s request for me to pull weeds.  I wish I knew today’s Gospel passage where Jesus says to let the weeds grow and don’t pull them out lest the good plants be uprooted with them (which did happen!) so I could show it to my mother and get out of having to pull weeds all the time!

Actually, Jesus is addressing a problem in his day which we continue to have in our own time:  How do you resist evil without adding the evil of your own violent preventative actions and make things worse than they were?  In other words, Jesus is saying that we will multiply evil when we try to identify evil and weed it out.

Why is this?  Because Jesus knows we are not good at identifying evil because we are sinners too.  Like Pogo says:  We have met the enemy and it is us.  As human beings we tend to put everything into an “us” vs. “them” type of life scenario where real people get hurt or killed.

Conventional human judgment says “Let's get the bad guys and teach them a lesson.”  But we do so without any proportion to our human “justice.”  For example:  After 9/11 there was a lot of comparison to the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.  On that tragic day there were 2500+ casualties, mostly sailors and soldiers, but when we dropped the atom bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima we caused over 250,000 casualties, mostly all civilians.  And 9/11’s 3500+ dead led to a war that estimates 350,000 were killed, the majority civilians.  And in the current conflict in Gaza and Israel, Palestinian casualties are over 200 and so far only 1 Israeli has been killed.  We are not good at pulling weeds.  The more we weed the more the landscape is destroyed.

The Million Dollar question is:  How can we oppose evil without creating more evil and bloodshed and becoming evil ourselves in the process?

Jesus lived and taught an alternative to our conventional human wisdom.  When the slaves in the story ask the Master if they should pull up the weeds sown by the enemy, he replies,

“No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.  Let both of them grow together until the harvest.”

The word for “let” in the Greek text is aphiemi which can mean “permit”, “let”, or “allow.”  It’s in the command “do this” form.    But the greatest thing for me is that the word aphiemi is the word in Greek for forgiveness, in the sense of “let off the hook!”

For Jesus, the real enemy is Satan, who attempts to sucker us into conflict and to end up creating more and more woe in the world.  Jesus is saying “Don’t fall into that trap.  Step back from the sadness and look how to bring mercy to the perpetrator who has a complaint against you.  What is the complaint?  How can you answer it and make things better?

All this said, we still have to deal with Jesus’ words about collecting the weeds at harvest and throwing them into the furnace of fire where there will be “weeping and gnashing of teeth.”  Doesn’t sound much like forgiveness, does it?  We can go in a couple of directions on this:  Jesus could be saying “Leave all Judgment and punishment to me and my Father.  Wait till we get our hands on the evildoers,” (Jesus’ listeners might like this best because it gives a nod to the conventional wisdom to eliminate the bad guys) or, Jesus is saying that the Kingdom he and the Angels are trying to bring about on the earth will be unsuccessfully up-rooted like weeds by those looking to get rid of them by putting Jesus (The Weed) to death on the Cross.  Jesus himself will suffer the furnace of fire in his passion and death.  Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. were modern day examples of persons willing to suffer violence themselves before they would afflict others with violence.

I wish we could judge rightly, but we are not God.  God is love.  In God there is no darkness at all.  God makes the sun shine on the good and bad alike.  God makes rain to fall on the just and unjust.  God is removed completely from the realm of our human judgment or human morality, our judging or condemning human beings as evil.

So what do we do?  Patiently resist evil, forgive, try not to increase the evil sown in the world by anything we do create even more suffering.  Doing this, we will groan with creation’s labor pains for the Kingdom to finally come.  St Paul shares this groaning experience with us:

We, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.  For in hope we were saved.  Now hope that is seen is not hope.  For who hopes for what is seen?  But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

This is the experience of the follower of Jesus in the world:  groaning for the Kingdom of peace and justice while being joyful in hope that “Thy Kingdom come” will be a reality in this world.

In sum, I think we can be more useful to God in our patience than in trying to pull up everything we think is a weed.  Don’t we sometimes say:  Is that a weed?  It looks like a flower!  God is the Master Gardener.  Let us cooperate with God’s plan as Jesus teaches us. 

Amen!