GEC-Sermon-2017-07-30 - Pentecost 8

Grace Church Sheboygan

Help! My browser can't play this video. Grace Episcopal Church Sheboygan, Wisconsin The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 12](A) 1 Kings 3.5-12, Psalm 119.129-136, Romans 8.26-39, Mtt. 13.31-33, 44-52 May the Lord be in my mind, on my lips, and in my heart, that I may rightly and truly proclaim His holy Word. Amen. We pray to God that we “may so pass through things temporal []that we lose not the things eternal …” We pray this in our collect, using words appointed for this Sunday at least since the tenth century, and probably since the seventh. Prayers that do not originate in Scripture, or that are not used in all worship gatherings, only last when they come especially close to the heart of the matter, and the heart of the matter is that this life is not all that there is. Even if we are as wise as Solomon—and despite God granting Solomon what our first lesson describes as “a wise and discerning mind”, we have to question the wisdom of a man who would have seven hundred wives!—our wisdom amounts to exactly what at our death? Wisdom is not a thing we can cling to at death. But we can cling to something, to Someone, who transcends death; who inheres in both this life and the next for all who trust in Him; in (in St. Paul’s words) “the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord”. This past week I was reminded, again, of the hold God has on His children. Late in the afternoon one day the telephone rang. When I answered, in a tentative voice a woman asked if she could speak with the priest. I identified myself, and she proceeded to ask me if I would visit her mother in a nursing home, to give her last rites. I learned, in the conversation, that the mother had been a member of this parish many years ago, as had the daughter (the caller), but that neither had been to church here or elsewhere in decades. The family name certainly was not familiar to me, or to Mthr. Michele. Part of me wanted to say something like “Why are you calling me?”, but my old Catholic training kicked in alongside the promptings of the Holy Spirit to allow me to focus on attending the dying as a corporal work of mercy (for any Christian), and certainly as a part of my ordination vows. So I grabbed a stole and an oil stock, a prayer book, and headed to a small nursing home on the south side of town, where I found a woman in her 80’s, alone and unconscious, with advanced lung cancer, breathing difficultly and spasmodically the breaths of one who had been transferred the day before into a hospice care setting, and who was probably medicated heavily. She certainly did not respond to my presence in any way I could sense, and so I just began to pray aloud. I ...