https://www.facebook.com/918471064969670/

St.James Episcopal Church Activities, 474 fruit hill Avenue, North Providence, RI (2026)

06/25/2019

“THAT’S HOW I GOT TO MEMPHIS”
SERMON AT ST. JAMES EPISCOPAL CHURCH
BY REV. JOHN P. REARDON
JUNE 23, 2019
“What brings you here?” “What brings you here?” That’s the question the angel asks Elijah in this morning’s first reading. It’s a simple question, made up of four simple words. But the answer is seldom so simple or so quick. Elijah managed to get his answer worked out, though it wasn’t strictly accurate. How would you answer it? What would you say were someone to ask you what set of circumstances brought you to the point where you were sitting in this church this morning?
Some people here have long been in the habit of coming here. Some people have roots in this community that go back generations. Some others of us have started coming here within the past year or so. And there are some folks here this morning who are here for the very first time. And of those, some of you may be able to relate to the way Elijah is feeling.
Elijah had just gone through a tremendous loss, not only in terms of his mission and his success, but also in terms of his sense of who he was. And he was very depressed. The Northern Kingdom of Israel was ruled by a king named Ahab, whose wife Jezebel was a priestess of the Canaanite god Baal. Ahab was what you might call an open-minded guy, who was willing to support the Canaanite religion instead of firmly upholding the faith of Israel in the Lord. And Elijah was having none of it. His name translates as, “My God is Yahweh.” He meant business. He fiercely condemned the faithlessness of his fellow Israelites, and the king and queen were no fans of his, to say the least. As he traveled the land, Elijah performed miracles, such as bringing food in famine, and raising someone from the dead. Immediately before today’s reading, Elijah had the ultimate showdown with the prophets of Baal. He dared them to start their sacrificial fires by calling on their gods; they failed. He then covered his sacrifice in water and called on God to light it up, and God’s fire consumed it. Having placed all his faith in God, he was vindicated, and he celebrated by killing all the prophets of Baal—hundreds of them! Not exactly an example of great moments in interreligious dialogue, but those were different times.
You would think that this would be Elijah’s moment of being on top. Surely, his enemies would see the error of their ways. Their gods were useless, and the God of Israel had prevailed. But as anyone who has ever been in an argument on Facebook knows, most people are determined to continue telling the story they’ve always been telling and are extremely unwilling to let even something like overwhelming evidence get in the way. Instead of bowing down, Jezebel doubles down and issues a death threat against Elijah. But instead of recommitting himself to the faith that had shown such power in his life, Elijah buckled and ran away in fear.
That’s where we find him this morning. He’s in the desert, praying for death. “Take my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” Having fled for his life, Elijah now realizes that he is no better than the people he condemned, because in a moment of crisis he was just as faithless as they. He is in despair. “It is enough, Lord.” “I’ve had enough. I’m done.” How many of us have said something like that at moments of discouragement, of constant efforts that seemed to come to nothing, at sickness or problems that just wouldn’t go away, or the realization that we have failed to live up to our own ideals? At those times, we can feel like just rolling over in bed, pulling the blanket over our heads, and giving up. We can isolate ourselves from others and give way to the demons in our head, like the possessed man in today’s Gospel who could not stay with his community, even when he was restrained, but who broke loose and lived among the tombs.
But God is faithful. And God is relentless. As St. Paul tells us in the Letter to the Romans, the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable. God reaches out to Elijah in three ways. First, God feeds Elijah. Secondly, God gives Elijah the chance to tell his story. Thirdly, he charges Elijah with a mission.
It starts with a simple command. “Get up and eat.” That is followed by, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” In the strength of that food, Elijah then sets out, not to flee for his life, but to make a pilgrimage to Mt. Horeb, also known as Mt. Sinai, the place where God revealed himself to Moses and gave Israel the Commandments. In that encounter, God twice gives Elijah the chance to tell his story, asking the simple question, “What brings you here?”
It is very important that Elijah knows enough to recognize where to find an encounter with God. In keeping with his style, you might think Elijah would look for God in the wind, the earthquake, or the fire. But Elijah knows that the Lord is not in those things. Perhaps that is the lesson he learned from the failure of his attempt to solve Israel’s spiritual problems through violence. Instead, Elijah knows that the Lord is present in “the sound of sheer silence,” which has also been translated as a “still, small voice,” or “a tiny whispering sound.” It is in those moments, when the storms of our emotions and our circumstances have been stilled and we are able to find the silence, that we are finally able to hear the voice of God beckoning to us from without and within. And that voice invites Elijah to tell his story.
Elijah exaggerates in his story. He makes himself sound more isolated than he actually is. He doesn’t fully own up to his loss of faith. But he tries to tell God what has brought him to this place. With all his virtues and also with his failings, Elijah’s life has been a long story of a man caught up in love with God, trying to be faithful, and knowing God’s powerful presence. It has brought him to places he could not have calculated. As I read his story, I found myself thinking about an old country song I love, “That’s How I Got to Memphis,“ written by Tom T. Hall. It opens with the words, “If you love somebody enough, you’ll follow wherever they go. That’s how I got to Memphis.” And one of the ways that this song works is that “Memphis” becomes a stand-in for wherever you are personally in your life. It’s a way of answering the question, “What brings you here?”
I’d like to share it with you, so I’m going to ask Corinne for some help. Here goes:
That’s How I Got to Memphis
If you love somebody enough
You’ll follow wherever they go
That’s how I got to Memphis
That’s how I got to Memphis

If you love somebody enough
You’ll go where your heart wants to go
That’s how I got to Memphis
That’s how I got to Memphis
I know if you’d seen her you’d tell me cause you are my friend
I’ve got to find her and find out the trouble she’s in.

If you tell me that she’s not here
I’ll follow the trail of her tears
That’s how I got to Memphis
That’s how I got to Memphis

She would get mad and she used to say
That she’d come back to Memphis some day
That’s how I got to Memphis
That’s how I got to Memphis

I haven’t eaten a bite
Or slept for three days and nights
That’s how I got to Memphis
That’s how I got to Memphis

I’ve got to find her and tell her that I love her so
I’ll never rest’ til I find out why she had to go

Thank you for your precious time
Forgive me if I start to cryin’
That’s how I got to Memphis
That’s how I got to Memphis

I suspect that many of us here this morning have seen our lives take twists and turns that we could never have imagined. But if we unravel our stories, we’ll see that we got to our personal “Memphis” by following what we loved, and ultimately through the call of the God who speaks in the sound of sheer silence, for whom, as the psalmist says, our souls are athirst. Many of us have indeed known times when our tears were our food, when our inner demons asked us where our God was, and when we looked back nostalgically to better days we “went with the multitude and led them into the house of God, with the voice of praise and thanksgiving.” And each of us needs to hear again and again the psalmist’s self-admonition: “Put your trust in God, for I will yet give thanks to him.”
God feeds Elijah with bread. God leads Elijah on pilgrimage. God lets Elijah tell his story. And out of that, God gives Elijah a new mission—to head off toward Damascus and to anoint a new king for Israel.
Elijah thought he’d done enough and the journey was over. But God still had more work for him to do. When we are fed and healed by bread and by the ability to have our story heard, we meet the Living God in the still, small voice deep within our hearts, and we are given the strength to go forward to work and wonders of which we have not yet even dreamt.
So whether you have been part of St. James all your life, or whether you just arrived, I invite you to be open to that quiet voice of God which invites you to come and see what’s inside yourself and this place, to let yourself be fed, to share with a kindly listener the story of how you “got to Memphis,” and to be ready to be called to a newer and deeper life in a direction none of us can yet foresee, but to which we are led by the God of wonders, who loves each of us, and who calls us to share that love with the world.

03/24/2018

At the church this am if anyone has drop offs for savers or feels the pull to help.

02/26/2018

Father Johns sermon for the second Sunday of lent(sorry its late)HOPING AGAINST HOPE: FAITH FROM THE CENTER OF THE HEART
A Sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent
February 25, 2018
By Rev. Dr. John P. Reardon, Vicar, St. James Episcopal Church, North Providence, Rhode Island
Calculating the Odds
When I was about eleven, my father bought an old truck, a 1932 Ford pickup, from my grandfather’s cousin, Carl, in Maryland. My cousins and I had a lot of fun riding around in the back of it during the period Dad gradually restored it—you could get away with that sort of thing back in those days! Eventually, we towed the truck up to Massachusetts, where it remains in family hands to this day. A few years later, we saw Cousin Carl at a family wake. By then, he was pretty well up in years. Dad said to him, “One of these days, I’m going to bring the truck back down here so you can see it.” Carl rolled his eyes and answered, “Well, you’d better hurry up!”
Carl actually lived a while after that, but he didn’t know that would be the case, and he was displaying the very practical attitude most of us take toward most things. He knew his age. He knew the odds as to how long he probably had. And at that point, as the saying goes, he wasn’t buying more than three green bananas at a time.
That is the point at which we meet Abram, our Father in Faith, in this morning’s reading from Genesis. Here he is, ninety-nine years old! He has known great wealth, but he and his wife, Sarai, have been unable to conceive a child together. By the standards of their time, they were cursed, for to die childless was about the worst thing that could happen to you. This encounter with God, who promises him a son at age ninety-nine, was not the first time he had met God and it was not the first time God had promised him a son through Sarai. The first time it happened, Abram was a young buck of only seventy-five, when God told him to move to a land he did not know and that God would make him and Sarai the parents of a great nation. It was hardly believable then, let alone when it still hadn’t happened twenty-four years later!
Like Cousin Carl, Abram and Sarai knew the odds. They knew what it was reasonable to expect, and not to expect, at their ages. They tried to believe God the first time around, and they cooperated to a point, but they also got tired of waiting. Not only had God promised the impossible, but a lot of time went by and they weren’t seeing any results. So they hedged their bets and tried to bring about the promise part way, themselves. Abram impregnated Sarai’s maid, Hagar, and then sent Hagar and her son, Ishmael, away into the desert after Hagar’s increasingly uppity attitude toward Sarai became too much for Sarai to handle. We don’t have time to go into it here, but God took good care of Hagar and Ishmael, and according to myth, Ishmael is the ancestor of the Arab peoples. But that’s another story for another day. Suffice it to say that Abram and Sarai had had quite reasonable doubts as to whether God was as good as God’s word, and took matters into their own hands, only to produce an outcome that left them responsible for abandoning other human beings and for having been unfaithful to God.
It is at this point that God comes to Abram again. Because God is faithful, even when we sin. God tells him,” Walk before me, and be blameless.” And Abram, overcome at this manifestation of God that reveals both Abram’s guilt and God’s forgiveness, quite appropriately falls down on his face in reverence and awe. God makes the promise again, only this time under even unlikelier circumstances than when Abram was seventy-five. And God demands trust in the form of the acceptance of new names. Abram, which means exalted father, becomes Abraham, which means Father of a Multitude. Sarai, which means princess, becomes Sarah, which means Mother of Nations. You didn’t fully trust God at seventy-five. Let’s up the ante and see if you can do it at ninety-nine! And, as we know from the rest of the story, God does indeed bless Abraham and Sarah with their son Isaac, through whom the People of Israel came into being and have continued to this day to contribute much more than their share to the arts, science, medicine, and commerce to. In the end, God keeps God’s promise in abundance. But God doesn’t do it on our timetable or on our terms. And when we try to force the vision along on our own, we usually make things worse.
From Calculation to Faith
This time, at ninety-nine, Abraham finally places his whole and entire trust in God. He has finally learned his lesson. And due to that, he is known as our Father in Faith, for, as Paul writes to the Romans, he is the father of all those of us who share the faith of Abraham. This time, Paul says, Abraham knew that God “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.” Abraham “did not weaken his faith when his considered his own body, which was already as good as dead . . . or the barrenness of Sarah’s womb.” Abraham took the stance of “hoping against hope.” In the original Greek, there are two words here that both are translated as “hope.” One means hope as we understand it. The second means something more like “expectation.” Something like what I meant when I said that my cousin Carl knew the odds. It is a matter of hoping in God even when the evidence in front of us causes us to expect something much less than what God has promised.
The kind of faith Paul is talking about here is not simply a matter of believing that something is true. Our faith in God isn’t just about believing that God exists. It is about entrusting ourselves to a relationship with God. Our faith in God is about trusting God in the sense that we would trust another person, trusting that God is not only real but is who in fact God claims to be and has revealed Godself to be in Jesus. As with Abraham, our being just in the sight of God comes, not from our moral conduct or good deeds, but from our placing our complete trust in God, hoping against all evidence that God will bring about what God has promised.
Perhaps the most difficult part of faith is continuing to trust God when God does not live up to our expectations about when and how God’s promises will come true. We see time go by and we see a lack of results and, like Abram and Sarai, we begin to think maybe we need to try something different. We question whether God really is who God claims to be and whether God really is up to the job. That is what happens with Peter in today’s Gospel reading.
Losing Our Life to Save It
What do you suppose Peter thought he was signing on for when he left everything behind to follow Jesus? Usually, we don’t sign up for the losing team on purpose. I suspect Peter expected to see lots of wonders and miracles and crowds turning toward Jesus, so that with ever increasing strength and popularity, Jesus would change the world and the Jewish people would have their homeland back under their control again. There might be setbacks, but things were going to be getting better all the time. So imagine how incomprehensible it must have been for him to hear Jesus say, in effect, that by every earthly measure, everything was going to go terribly wrong. “Actually, I’m going to be rejected. Then I’m going to be killed. And then rise from the dead.” The only logical response would be, “Huh?” Perhaps it is a good thing Jesus didn’t tell Peter the rest of the story just yet. “Oh, by the way, after I rise, I’ll ascend to heaven and leave you to carry on, and ten of the Twelve Apostles will be murdered for believing in me and for several hundred years, off and on, my followers will be persecuted, then times will get better, but the Church will become corrupt,” and so on and so forth. As Bette Davis says in “All About Eve,” fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride! Instead, Jesus simply points out to Peter that he has fallen into the same trap that Abram did so long ago: “You are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” You aren’t coming from a place of faith. You are calculating the odds. You want things to happen in a straight line in your time and your way. You haven’t yet gotten to the place where you simply put all your trust in God. Like Abraham, Peter eventually gets there. As with Abraham, God remains faithful to Peter even when Peter messes up and is unfaithful to God. In the end, Peter goes to the Cross just as his Lord did.

Faith From the Center of the Heart
God chooses unlikely people to work through—the elderly and infertile Abram and Sarai to start a nation, the impulsive, temperamental, and unsophisticated Peter to be the chief Apostle, and the likes of you and me. And God works in paradoxical ways. Out of nothing, God creates being. Out of defeat, God brings victory. Out of death, God brings life. If the pattern of Scripture tells us anything, it is that God’s Word is true, but that it never comes true in the way we think would be likely, and when it does come true, it is contrary to all reasonable expectation. The question for each of us, and for us as a community, is whether we are along for the ride or not. Do we allow God’s Spirit so to dwell within us that we are filled with a conviction that God is to be trusted even when the evidence appears otherwise? Do we lose our “life” as we understand it, for the sake of the Gospel, or do we cling to having things on our timetable and in our way, only to find ourselves having lost everything that matters in pursuit of the prize we thought was important?
As we take our Lenten journey together into the wilderness toward the center of the heart, I don’t know what lies ahead for any of us as individuals, or for us as a community. But I know that to assume that just because we are small and that from all outward appearances our glory days as a parish are behind us, is as wrong for us as it was for Abram, Sarai, and Peter to calculate the odds and try to find a way other than God’s. Whatever God does in our individual or family or communal lives is not likely to follow the straight line of success we want to envision. God just doesn’t work that way. It is more likely to involve taking up the Cross in the way each of us individually, and all of us as a community, are called to do, and trusting that the God who allows the Cross will also use that Cross to bring about Resurrection, in God’s time and God’s way. Whatever happens, faith tells us that God’s Kingdom has already triumphed and will continue to triumph despite all the odds, despite all rational calculation. Faith calls us to “hope against hope,” living from the center of our hearts, where we may not know the details of how God’s plan will be worked out, but where we have already tasted God’s love, God’s grace, God’s power, and God’s utter faithfulness. Are you in?

02/18/2018

SERMON FOR THE FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT
FEBRUARY 18, 2018
THE LOVE, THE WILDERNESS, AND THE MISSION

In Florida this past Wednesday, as lovers prepared their Valentine’s celebrations and the devout observed Ash Wednesday, an extremely disturbed young man in possession of a very destructive weapon vented his rage on innocent people, bringing grief, pain, and fear where before there had been the ordinary lives of young students and their teachers. Before long, social media was awash in bitter debates, or better, dueling monologues, and the fabric of our society came yet a bit closer to shredding. If you comb through the news, or just think about the people you know, this horrific event becomes simply one more example of human beings alienated from God’s intent for us, of a world that has tasted fallenness.
It was awareness of the enormous distance between their lives and their world and the original vision of God that led people two thousand years ago to throng to the Jordan River, where a strange and oddly dressed man plunged them under the water as they confessed their sins, so that they could emerge cleansed and re-dedicated to godly lives. Today Mark’s Gospel tells us that Jesus traveled from his home town of Nazareth to undergo this very same baptism. Why did he do it? Scripture and Church tradition tell us that Jesus was like us in every way but sin. But did he know that? Was he unsure? Or was he simply following his own call to be the means by which the world would be freed from sin, so that, in solidarity with the rest of us, he, too went under the waters and, instead of being blessed by them, blessed them by his presence? Clearly, it was a significant turning point in Jesus’ life, for upon coming out of the water, he saw the skies torn open and the Holy Spirit descending upon him, and heard God’s voice, “You are my son, the beloved. With you I am well pleased.” In that moment, God told Jesus who he was in God’s eyes.
You might think that such a moment would be one to rest in and to savor, but the Spirit immediately drove Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted. We urban and suburban Americans in the twenty-first century have usually had very little experience of wilderness. We are surrounded with civilization. To go out into the wilderness is to leave all usual supports behind. We are used to having the rules and expectations of others, with their rewards and punishments, to tell us who we are and who we are supposed to be and to keep us in line and keep our lives moving according to expectations. In the wilderness, all of that is gone. There is no infrastructure. No roads, no rules, no clear lines of communication. There are wild creatures whose sounds and activities can make the world scary. There are no lights to make the nighttime feel safe. In the desert, people start to see mirages, visions of water or of campfires that might give them relief, but when they travel toward what they see, they learn they have been following an illusion.
We might not have much experience of the physical wilderness, but I suspect each of us in here has been exposed to emotional and spiritual wildernesses. The wilderness represents a time of testing, when the ordinary structures no longer support us and the ordinary rules no longer seem to apply, and we have no one but ourselves to tell us who we are. And we have to make choices about who we intend to be. Wilderness can come in the form of leaving home for school, or losing a job, or starting life in a new place, or going through the break-up of a marriage or other relationship, or becoming physical or mental illness, or disability or of losing a loved one. It can occur as a rite of passage. It can be tasted in the form of confusion or temptation. The wilderness times in our lives can be disorienting and painful. But they can also turn out to have been the most fruitful and the most central in defining who we become. They are a necessary part of becoming.
And they are only bearable if we have already heard the words God addresses to Jesus in today’s Gospel, and which God has in turn spoken to each of us in our baptism: You are my beloved child. It is not easy for us to believe God loves us. It can take a lifetime to absorb that central truth. But it is the truth that changes everything and makes us strong enough to endure the wilderness in which we accept that it is, in fact, true, that we are loved by God.
As a community, we have now been called to walk through a wilderness together. I know that this is not an easy time for many of you. You were given so little notice to prepare for the transition to a new pastor. You hardly had time to adjust to the fact that Judy was moving on and I would be succeeding her. You have known the steady presence of her deep faith, her gentleness, her great kindness, and her special love and hospitality to the children of this community. It is all too natural to be uneasy about what comes next. If it is any consolation, as excited as I am to begin this ministry, I’m scared too. When we go into the wilderness, it is all too easy to see danger when we are merely looking at shadows. But one consolation is that we get to go into this wilderness together. As we do so, let’s make a deal. I ask ahead of time that you be patient with me when I stumble and forgive me when I sin. And I promise to do the same for you. In that climate of mercy, surrounded by the same grace of God by which angels ministered to Jesus during his sojourn, there is no limit to what God can accomplish through our being together.
In baptism, Jesus heard God’s declaration of love for him. Perhaps the wilderness was necessary for Jesus to be able to accept that love and to return it. The wilderness, with all its perils and temptations, is a journey to the center of the heart. In that still point, we are asked to receive and return the love of God, and to pass it on in mission. It was only after his time in the wilderness that Jesus emerged to proclaim the Good News that the Reign of God is near, and to urge the repentance, the new form of thinking, that would allow its nearness to take flesh in the lives of those who would accept that Good News. That is the Good News that continues to beckon to us in a world of sickness, fallenness, and tragedy that is even more fundamentally a world of grace, mercy, love, and joy. We, too, are called to repentance even as we proclaim it to others. We are being prepared for that mission through the times we spend in the wilderness. But in the wilderness, if you are still enough, you can hear the voice of God say, directly to you, “You are my beloved child. With you I am well pleased.”

02/15/2018

Lenten Study Series: “Journey to the Center of the Heart” begins Sunday, February 18 after the Holy Eucharist. The study serves as a way to get to know each other in a faith-sharing setting, and reflect on the Lenten Scriptures. Reverend Reardon plans to share some ideas on the human awakening to God.

St.James Episcopal Church Activities

06/25/2019

03/24/2018

02/26/2018

02/18/2018

02/15/2018

Address

Website

Alerts

Shortcuts

Share

Category