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21st Sunday after Pentecost

Mark 10:17-31 So we are taking a bit of a break from our Season of Women this week.   There’s no women in our lectionary this week and a whole lot of us are going to be at Crossroads this week so we are are taking a couple of weeks off.   But don’t worry, the women will be back at the end of the month and there are some bangers coming.   But alas, I apparently didn’t plan this well because we return to Mark this week with a humdinger of a text (Maybe I should have just found a woman to talk about).   But that’s okay, we can work with this, because you know what, I like this passage.   Quite a lot actually.   And it contains a lot more good news that one might think at first glance. Our story opens with a man who approaches Jesus on the road asking for guidance.   He is a religious man and he wants to know what he must do to inherit eternal life.   And so after questioning him and discovering that he is already a devout man who knows and keeps the basic commandments, Jesus tells him
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20th Sunday after Pentecost

  Genesis 2:4b-9, 18-24 Season of Women Alright everybody, buckle up because today in our season of women we are going to go all the way back to the beginning.   To the very first woman.   To Eve and to the story of the beginning of humanity that we see in Genesis.   And I am going to invite you to go ahead and get out your bulletins and flip them over to the 1 st Lesson and follow along if you want because we are going to look really closely at this text today.   And I am willing to be bet that you are going to discover a bunch of things that you have never seen before.   But first before we begin, I need to give a big shout out to the Rev Dr Wil Gafney, the incomparable black female scholar, who did a lot of the Hebrew work I am going to share with you today because my Hebrew was never all that great but she has shown me so many amazing things about the Old Testament.   So here we go. Now I bet unlike some other stuff we have read in this series this text for today was actua
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18th Sunday After Pentecost - Reflection

  Not just for Women Is the "capable wife" in this passage really a universal call for all Christians? by  Father Lee Davis  on September 09, 2024 https://stmmcs.net/reflections/not-just-for-women/ Not just for Women When we think of Proverbs 31, many of us might picture the "capable wife" or "woman of noble character" described in verses 10-31. This passage has often been seen as a model for women in the biblical tradition, celebrating virtues like hard work, wisdom, and faithfulness. But is this passage only for women? Or can it also speak to all of us, regardless of gender, who strive to follow God? In the Episcopal tradition, where we seek to engage Scripture with both heart and mind, it's valuable to explore this passage in a way that broadens its meaning. By understanding Proverbs 31 as more than just a portrait of an ideal woman, we can see how it offers timeless wisdom for everyone in the church community. Throughout the Book of Proverbs, wisdo
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17th Sunday after Pentecost

  Proverbs 1:7-8, 20-27; 8:22-36; 9:7-12 So we are back for week 2 of our Season of Women.   And I unfortunately didn’t give myself any easier of a task than I did last week.   Because this week we are reading from Proverbs and we are studying Lady Wisdom, also known as Woman Wisdom or Holy Wisdom.   This section we read from today spans the first 9 chapter of the book of Proverbs.   And is constructed as a sort of a teaching tool, a way for a mother and father (who are perhaps dying) to pass on knowledge to their young son.   It represents the basic urge still present in all of us to ensure that knowledge and right living are passed on to the next generation.   And the book of this book is old, really old, more than 3000 years old, so late bronze age humanity, before invention of iron tools, sailing ships, or horseback riding, and only shortly after the wheel and importantly for us durable writing systems, which also begs the question, which actually came first the Proverbs or the a
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16th Sunday After Pentecost

    Mark 7:24-37      So welcome this week to the start of our Season of Women here at St George’s.   I know we have been stopping to notice great women when they appear in our lectionary all year, but now this fall we really get to dedicate ourselves to this task because the lectionary includes many of the great women of the Old Testament in its readings over the next 2 months.   So we really get to dig in and experience these stories together.   And we are going to get to revisit a bunch of what I would consider our Sunday School greats, Eve, Esther, Deborah, Mary & Martha, characters you are probably pretty familiar with.   And man, I wish we could have kicked off our series with one of them, with an easier story to talk about.        But alas, we are beginning our journey someplace else, in the New Testament with the story of Jesus and the Syrophoenician Woman.   And trust me this would not have been my first choice because this story is weird.   Jesus’ behavior today seems
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15th Sunday After Penetcost

James 1:17-27; Mark 7 So the season of the Bread of Life is finally over and now this week we have returned to Gospel of Mark.   We are going to have a very short stopover here before we begin our Season of Women next week where we will study biblical models of women in leadership until the end of November.   But for now today, we are going to stop and take a moment to think about who we are in community together. As the election season heats up, we seem to be struggling more than ever as a nation with how best to live in community and care for our neighbors right now, so maybe now is in fact the perfect time to look to scripture for some help. And so today we reenter the Gospel of Mark where Jesus has this controversy brewing about this controversy brewing between him and his disciples and the Pharisees and their disciples over how best to follow God’s law and what needed to be done or not in order to do so. And one of the things that struck me this week as I was thinking about
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13th Sunday after Pentecost

John 6:51-58 You are what you eat.   I think most of us have heard this line at some point before.   Usually it used to try to spur people into making more ethical or responsible food choices.   If we are what we eat, then it matters what food we choose.   Perhaps it encourages us to choose healthier options, to eat less or no meat, to buy local or organic, to avoid chemicals, additives or GMO’s.    It helps us to think more deeply about what we put in our bodies and how we are feeding ourselves. For the first time perhaps in human history the majority of Americans struggle with food not because of its scarcity but because of its abundance and the sheer mass quantity of food options available to us at all times, much of which does not really nourish our bodies.   If we are what we eat, then are we letting ourselves get too filled up with junk? Today in our gospel lesson however, Jesus offers us new food.   “I am the living bread that came down from heaven.   Whoever eats of this
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