We are a small Episcopal Church on the banks of the Rappahannock in Port Royal, Virginia. We acknowledge that we gather on the traditional land of the first people of Port Royal, the Nandtaughtacund, and we respect and honor with gratitude the land itself, the legacy of the ancestors, and the life of the Rappahannock Tribe. Our mission statement is to do God’s Will in all that we do.

Sermons

5 Keys to the Lord’s Prayer, a 2019 sermon

“Ask and it will be given you; search and you will find; knock and the door will be opened for you.”

We have lots of locked doors in our lives. We lock our doors to protect ourselves and our possessions.

And as we grow older, we start locking the doors of our hearts too.

Sometimes we lock the doors of our hearts to keep out the people who have hurt us.

Sometimes we even lock the doors of our hearts against God, out of anger or despair, or a feeling that God didn’t hear our prayers when we prayed.

So when Jesus taught us the words of the Lords’ prayer, he gave us a set of keys to use to unlock those closed up stuffy places in our hearts.

So let’s take a look at this set of five keys in the Lord’s Prayer and see what doors they will unlock for us.

Key Number One—God’s Love.

When we pray, “Father, hallowed be your name,” we have a key to the door of the places in our hearts where we have locked out God’s love.

When we stand before this door of God’s love and unlock it and go in, it’s as if we’ve entered a whole universe of love that has been waiting there for us all along. Prayer gives us the courage to enter the space and to explore God’s love for us, and the farther we go into this space of God’s love, the more expansive the space becomes, until we realize that we can never come to the end of God’s love, but that the more we search, the more we will find.

Key Number Two—Hope.

We have locked up a great deal of our hearts to hope. When we find ourselves saying, “Whatever,” “That’s just the way it is,” or “I can’t do anything about that so I’m going to ignore it,” or my mother’s favorite, said in either a discouraged or horrified voice, “This world is falling apart!” we have opened ourselves up to despair, by locking out hope.

When we pray these words, “Your kingdom come,” we unlock the door of Hope. When we work up the courage to enter that space of hope, we remember all that God has promised about God’s kingdom becoming a reality here on earth.

Suddenly, we see what we couldn’t see before, like Abraham, who looked up into the sky and saw in the millions of stars the promise of God about his descendants, who would become a great and mighty nation through which all nations would be blessed. And so Abraham set out, not knowing where he was going, because he was full of hope that God would fulfill the promise.

When we enter through the unlocked door into Hope, we see, in the midst of the reality of life around us, with its violence and discord and disorder, the heavenly city described in the book of Revelation coming down out of heaven, a city with God at the center, with the river of life giving water flowing through the center of the city, lined with the fruit trees with their leaves for the healing of the nations.

We can imagine this world where children have enough to eat and clean water to drink, where people have safe places to live and meaningful work to do, where walls that separate are unnecessary, where prisons are unnecessary because violence has ended, and where everyone works for and desires the common good for everyone else, a world where people value God’s creation rather than to exploit it for their own gain.

If we unlock the door to the hope that is waiting in our hearts, we can see that already this heavenly way of living is becoming a reality,

and that the dirt or the asphalt that we trudge along sparkles with the golden flecks that will someday turn to those streets of pure gold that we’ve heard described in the book of Revelation. We can’t help but rejoice and walk with a hopeful spring in our steps. When we live in hope, we know that God will keep God’s promises and God’s kingdom will once more be realized on this earth, full of life, light, and brilliance.

Key Number Three—Dependence

When we pray, “Give us each day our daily bread,” we unlock the door to remembering our dependence on God. People who live from day to day, like people I met last summer in Guatemala, literally live each day hoping to make enough money to buy the food they need to eat that night. Daily bread is just that—bread for that day only.

We treasure our independence, our delusion that we have all we have sheerly through our own efforts, our own power, or our own abilities and that we can store up all we need to last our lifetimes so that we won’t become dependent on anyone else, even in our old age.

But when we remember to unlock the door to our dependence on God, we enter a place of power far beyond the slight power of our own independence. God fills us with a power we cannot have on our own, summed up in that verse from Ephesians that I love so much, “Glory to God, whose power working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or even imagine.”

Key Number Four—Love your Neighbor

When we pray “Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us,” we unlock the doors to the spaces in our hearts where we hold grudges, where we ignore those in need or worse yet, blame their need on them. This space of unforgiveness can fill up in a hurry as people annoy us, hurt us, take from us—we tend to just shove them all in this space of unforgiveness and throw away the key!

But Jesus gives us the key to open that locked door and to release all that we’ve crammed in, to forgive, and to clear out that space so that God’s love can come pouring in, freeing us to love instead of to resent or hate or ignore our neighbor.

Key Number Five—Trust

When we pray, “Do not bring us to the time of trial,” we unlock the door that opens into trust for God, the God we love, the God who gives us hope, the God we depend on, the God who gives us the ability to forgive. Along with the psalmist who wrote today’s psalm, we trust God to protect us, to increase our strength, to keep us safe in the midst of trouble. We trust that God is with us, and that God will never abandon us, even in sickness and in death.

When we unlock the door to trust in God, the door we may have slammed shut years ago when we went through a time of trial and forgot that God was there, in this space of trust we now remember—God is with us, especially in our troubles and distress.

God, help us to remember that you are with us, even when we are going through the trials and temptations of this life.

We’ve examined all the keys on this key ring.

Father, hallowed be your name. God’s love.

Your kingdom come. Hope.

Give us each day our daily bread. Dependence.

And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. Love your neighbor.

And do not bring us to the time of trial. Trust.

God gives us keys to help us open the doors we have locked.

And prayer is that key which unlocks our hearts to God.

Epiphany Sermon, Trinity Episcopal, NY, Jan. 5, 2025

Sermon Trinity NY. Jan. 5, 2025 Sunday Sermon, The Rev. Kristin Kaulbach Miles

The three themes for today’s scriptures are arise shine,  redemption as relationship,  and another road home.

Epiphany, one of our seven principal church feasts, means manifestation, the manifestation of the divine, specifically the coming of God into the world through the birth of Jesus. It’s about seeing stars and people and discerning what is true. It reminds us that paying attention is a very important practice

The writer Sylvia Boorstein says that liberating understanding comes more from seeing how things are than from seeing how we are. She says we ruminate and regret and reflect and rehearse endlessly. We pass by now only briefly on the way from ruminating to rehearsing, hardly pausing to relax.  In her book about meditation, Don’t just do something, sit there. Sylvia shares how she has covered her habit of transforming neutral fact into painful opinion many years ago.

Many years ago when she phoned a monastery to arrange for a private retreat, the person she spoke with said you need to speak with Robert. the retreat master. She left a message for Robert and was assured he would call back. The following day she had a message on her answering machine from Robert saying he had returned her call. The day after that she phoned and was told once again that Robert wasn’t there. She explained that she had called Robert and Robert had called her and here she was now calling Robert again. She added, maybe this is a sign that I’m not supposed to do my retreat there. The response she got was  “I think it’s just a sign that Robert isn’t here.”

Epiphany is a day to receive God’s gift of God’s self for us by being present to where we are to see more clearly what is,  not more than it is and not less .

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Sermon on Compassion, Jonathan Myrick Daniels commemoration

Today (Aug 14) we remember and give thanks for the life of Jonathan Myrick Daniels. Jonathan appears in this book, Holy Women, Holy Men.

The people who live within the covers of this book are those whose lives and actions have pointed to God’s work and God’s glory in this world.

Bishop Shannon has asked the churches in the Diocese of Virginia to remember Jonathan on this day, to bring Jonathan out from his resting place in this book into our midst, to be alive once again with us, to speak with us, and to challenge us to be people of compassion in the unique ways that God calls to each of us to be.

Jonathan is considered a martyr since he died seeking justice for black people in Alabama who did not have the right to vote. Fifty years ago now, in 1965, as a young seminarian from Keene, NH, studying at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, MA, he answered Dr Martin Luther King’s call for people from all over the nation to come to Selma to help secure voting rights for all the citizens of that state. In August of that year, Jonathan Daniels was shot to death on the steps of a small store in Hayneville, AL, protecting a seventeen year old black girl, Ruby Sales, from the shot that would have taken her life had Jonathan not taken the shot himself.

What I found out, as I learned more about his story, was that the selfless action that resulted in his death was the natural culmination of his life which had been shaped by acts of compassion.

Saints come from all walks of life, and the circumstances of their lives vary, but all of them have one thing in common.

They are all people of compassion.

What exactly is compassion?

Karen Armstrong, in her book, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life, says that “’compassion’ derives from the Latin patiri and the Greek pathein, meaning ‘to suffer, undergo, or experience.’ So ‘compassion’ means ‘to endure [something] with another person,’ to put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes, to feel his or her pain as though it were our own, and to enter generously into his or her point of view. That is why compassion is aptly summed up in the Golden Rule, which asks us to look into our own hearts, discover what gives us pain, and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else.”

What I found fascinating about Jonathan’s story is not that he went to Selma, like so many others did after witnessing the brutality of the police against peaceful protesters, and heeding Dr King’s request, but that once there, Jonathan realized that if his life was to make a difference in the civil rights movement that he must stay, to share in the day to day lives of the black people who were second class citizens, without rights and without respect, simply because they were black.

And so he stayed in Alabama. He continued his seminary studies on his own while living with black families in the area and working to document the abject poverty of the region and to press for equal rights for all people. He went back to the seminary in May, took his exams, and then returned to Alabama , against the wishes of his friends and his family, to continue his work.

Luckily for us, he wrote regularly in a journal, because we have a great deal of his story in his own words.

Jonathan wrote in his journal about the hatred and disgust he felt for the people carrying the guns and the tear gas and the water hoses that they used against the protesters. But as time went on, Jonathan realized that he could not carry this hatred for those on the other side.

Here’s his entry about the day his feelings about “the enemy” began to change.

“I think it was when I got tear gassed leading a march in Camden (AL), that I began to change. I saw that the men who came at me were themselves not free. Even though they were white and hateful and my enemy they were human beings too. I began to discover a new freedom in the cross, freedom to love the enemy and in that freedom to live and to try to set him free.”

Jonathan was experiencing compassion for the enemy, to feel the enemy’s pain, to enter into the enemy’s point of view, and to realize that the enemy was held prisoner by fear and hatred, and being driven by these fears into violence toward the enemy—the enemy, according to Karen Armstrong—being “something or someone that seems to threaten your survival and everything you stand for.”

How do we become people of compassion?

In writing about how to develop compassion in our lives, Karen Armstrong suggests the following course of action when it comes to dealing with our enemies—and we can see how Jonathan’s life was shaped into one of compassion by these very things.

The first thing we must do is to acknowledge our hatred and “our profound reluctance to turn an enemy into a friend.”

The next step is “to try to make an impartial, fair-minded assessment of the situation in the cause of peace…to try to wish for your enemy’s well –being and happiness; to try to develop a sense of responsibility for your enemy’s pain.”

“Once you realize that your enemy is suffering, you look into his own eyes and see a mirror image of your own distress….and then you realize that he too deserves compassion.” You then direct your friendship, compassion and sympathetic joy toward that person—and we Christians do that in prayer. “Pray for those who despitefully use you,” Jesus said. “Love your enemies.”

I know this plan sounds impossible.

But it works.

Have you ever hated someone or something because of something they’ve done to wrong you?

Maybe you find that you spend more and more time wrapped up in those hateful thoughts. You wish for revenge. Or maybe you try to protect yourself from ever getting hurt that way again. And before you know it, your whole life is run by and revolves around that person or thing that you hate.

I can vouch for the fact that the alternative that Karen Armstrong (and Jesus before her!) suggests really works when it comes to developing compassion for the enemy.

“Start where you are, with your own feelings of hatred. And then, as hard as it will be, pray for that person’s happiness.”

I’ve done this—I can tell you that over a period of time, that prayer for my enemy’s well being and happiness brings me great freedom. That prayer helps God to give me the freedom to love that person, to leave that person to God, and to direct my energy toward doing God’s work in the world for God’s glory, rather than being bound up in hate and hungering for violence.

Remember what Jesus said as he was being nailed to the cross?

“Forgive them, Father, for they do not know what they are doing.”

When we live with compassion, we become vulnerable because we are wide open to our enemy. That’s why most of us cannot believe that we can live this way. It’s just too scary.

And sure enough, people who live this way, in freedom from hatred, often end up dying as they work for justice in the world–Jesus, for starters, and in our own time and memories, Dr Martin Luther King and Jonathan Daniels.

Jonathan had this to say about this freedom from hatred. “I had realized that as a Christian, as a soldier of the cross, I was totally free, at least free to give my life if that had to be, with joy and thankfulness and eagerness for the kingdom no longer hidden from my blind eyes.”

The results of Daniels’ death were far reaching and led to a reshaping of the national legal and political landscape.

The jury system across the South changed after an all white male jury acquitted Jonathan’s murderer and he went free. A series of affirmative action lawsuits meant that in courtrooms across the South, men and women of all races got to serve on juries, which meant the opportunity for more impartial verdicts.

Eventually, voting rights were extended to all Americans.

As Senator John Lewis from South Carolina puts it, Jonathan’s life and death helped not just to redeem the soul of Alabama, but also helped to redeem the soul of the nation.

Fifty years later, we still have so far to go, but today we give thanks that as Americans we have come so far.

But we can go further.

Probably none of us will end up in a book like Holy Women, Holy Men, or enshrined as a “Modern Martyr” in Canterbury Cathedral, but we can all attempt to live lives of faithful compassion, even and especially for our enemies. This is God’s calling for each and every one of us.

Jonathan leaves us with a challenge today.

“The more I got involved I knew I must try and witness to the gospel in the quest for a just society. We too may set our faces to go to Jerusalem, as he has gone before us. We go to preach good news to the poor and to proclaim release to the captives and the recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. We go to stand with the captive and the blind and the oppressed. We go in active non-resistance, not to confront, but to love and to heal and to free.”

“We go in active non-resistance, not to confront, but to love and to heal and to free.”

When we undertake such a journey of love, we too, can grow into the compassionate people that God calls us to be.

Amen.

Resources:

Holy Women, Holy Men . “Jonathan Myrick Daniels: Seminarian and Martyr, 1965,” pages 52-527. Copyright 2010, Church Pension Fund.

https://vimeo.com/14117023 “Here Am I, Send Me. The Story of Jonathan Daniels.

Armstrong, Karen. Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.

Sermon on Ephesians – Respecting all

Introduction- In 2012 St. Peter’s began participating in a Bible Study at Peumansend Jail near Bowling Green, VA.

The facility opened in September 1999 as the Peumansend Creek Regional Jail and features a campus style layout, designed to operate as a fourth-generation direct supervision facility. Low custody inmates from six jurisdictions and the Virginia Department of Corrections were housed at the facility until March 2017 when it closed .

Catherine’s sermon for this Sunday in 2012 used the ministry as a main focus to consider Ephesians 4:25-5:2:

“This past Thursday night at our monthly jail Bible Study, a prisoner started off our discussion with this question.

“So if you were challenged by someone who was going to take your life depending on whether or not you were a Christian, and you said you were, and then they killed you because you’d said you were Christian, would you go straight to heaven?”

“The ten men there pretty much agreed that yes, the person would go to heaven because he had died professing his belief in Jesus.

“But then another prisoner pointed out that it’s not just what we say we believe, but it’s how we live out those beliefs, because how we live reflects what we truly believe.

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Sermon, Pentecost 6, June 30, 2024 – “This day of ending is also a day of resurrection, a day of new beginnings for all of us.”

Sermon, Proper 8, Year B 2024

We are an alleluia congregation. 

Throughout the year, except during the season of Lent,  the last word we share as we head out the door each week is “Alleluia!”  Despite the directions of the prayer book and our bishops, who all remind us that alleluia is only to be added to the dismissal during the Season of Easter, our last word every Sunday is “Alleluia!” When Bishop Shannon visited us several years ago, I warned him ahead of time that we would be following our custom and that alleluia would be our last word.  He looked taken aback, but then he laughed and gave our out of season alleluia his blessing.   Because think about it!  What bishop wouldn’t want every church in his or her diocese to be an alleluia congregation?

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Sermon, 5th Sunday after Pentecost, June 23, 2024, “Storms in our Lives”

Sermon, Proper 7, Year B, 2024

“Christ Asleep in His Boat”, Jules Joseph Meynier (1826-1903)

Do you ever wonder “Why?”  and get frustrated with God when life is a struggle and you find yourself in a metaphorical storm tossed boat, wondering if you’ll survive?   

In today’s Old Testament reading, Job, a good man, has had his world fall apart and has lost everything, even though he has lived a good and righteous life.  Job bitterly complains to God and accuses God of not hearing his cries.

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Sermon, June 16, 2024, Pentecost 4, “Seeds”

Mark 4:26-34, 2 Corinthians 5:6-10, 14-17

When Jesus appears in Galilee at the beginning of Mark’s gospel, proclaiming the Good News of God, the first thing Jesus says is this. “The time if fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near.”  In his ministry Jesus talked a lot about the kingdom of God, trying to help those who would listen understand that God’s kingdom was like no earthly kingdom that they had ever known.  Instead, it was something much more astounding and wonderful.  Many of the parables of Jesus are about the kingdom of God, including the two that we just heard read from today’s gospel. 

In today’s gospel from Mark, Chapter 4, Jesus is teaching beside the sea, and there’s such a big crowd around him that he gets into a boat to teach.  During this teaching, Jesus tells parables.  

Everyone gets to hear the parables, but Jesus doesn’t explain the meanings of his parables to the crowd.  He saves the explanations for the insiders, his disciples and followers.  

Mark doesn’t record the explanation that Jesus must have shared about these two parables about the kingdom of God.  As Jesus’ followers, we get to prayerfully draw our own conclusions about what these parables might mean.   So let’s dive in and hope that God will help us out.    

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Sermon, Pentecost 3, Year B, June 9, 2024

Mark 3:19-35

If you were a character in Mark’s gospel, who would you be?  In what group would you belong? As you heard today’s gospel, where did you imagine yourself in the story? 

Right before the scene in today’s gospel, Jesus has been on the mountain where he has called his disciples.  Verse 19, which I included in the gospel reading, says that after gathering his disciples Jesus goes home to Capernaum, to the house that he uses as headquarters. 

Outside the house are the crowds, who follow Jesus everywhere, excited by all that he is doing.  In Mark, the people in the crowds are those who are on the fence, the undecided voters, the ones who cheered Jesus when he came to Jerusalem for Passover and then shouted “Crucify him” when Jesus gets hauled before Pilate.  Right now, in this story, the crowds have surrounded the house where Jesus and the disciples are, hoping that Jesus will come out and work some miracles.  The crowds are the “what’s in this for me” group. 

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Sermon, Second Sunday after Pentecost, June 2, 2024 – “Treasure in Clay Jars”

2 Corinthians 4:5-12

We do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake.  For it is the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” 

But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. 

Paul makes our work and our joy as Christians crystal clear! 

Get out there and be the light!  God shines in our hearts, for we have seen Jesus, and we are children of God’s light. 

“Let there be light,” God said at the beginning of creation. 

This is our prayer, new every morning. 

“God, let there be light, your light,  in my life today! And let your glorious light shine through me.”

But then Paul, ever the realist, continues by saying… BUT……

We have this treasure in clay jars.

So let’s do a little experiment.  I need a helper. 

Turn on this flashlight and put it inside this jar.  Now we’ll put the lid on. 

Can you see the light?  Yes, it shines right through the glass. 

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Sermon, Trinity Sunday, May 26, 2024 – “Imagination”

John 3:1-17

“Nicodemus Visiting Jesus” (1899)- Henry Ossawa Tanner

I spent last week in the Outer Banks.  While I was there, I visited the Wright Brothers National Memorial, one of the Outer Banks national parks.  What an inspiring place! 

Back in the early 1900’s, Wilbur and Orville Wright, two brothers from Dayton, Ohio,  were fascinated with the idea of human flight.  Although many had experimented with gliders, and Samuel Langley had created powered model gliders, no one had ever figured out how to fly in a manned, heavier than air machine that could leave the ground under its own power, one that could move forward without losing speed and land on a point as high as that from which it started.

The Wright brothers began to explore all that had already been done regarding human flight.  Wilbur wrote to the Smithsonian.    After studying the information they received from that institution, the brothers realized that they had as good a chance as anyone to be the ones to make human flight possible. 

So they got busy, and for the next four years, they tested current theories about aerodynamics, many of which didn’t work.  They developed their own theories, and devoted themselves to the goal of human flight, determined to be the ones who would turn the dream of human flight into reality.    

The Wrights imagined success at what until then had been an unreachable goal.  They had faith in themselves.  And they worked hard to make what they imagined become reality. 

As they got closer to realizing their dream, the two searched for an isolated spot with unrelenting wind, high dunes and lots of sand for soft landings where they could try out their ideas about flight.

On December 17, 1903, Orville and Wilbur lifted off for the first time in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, in their invention, The Flyer.  That day was the first time that anyone had ever flown in a manned, heavier than air machine that could leave the ground under its own power, move forward without losing speed and land on a point as high from which it had started.     

The Wright brothers’ dreams had become reality.  But even these two dreamers probably could not have imagined that only  sixty-six years later, people would take what the Wright brothers had accomplished, would add their own dreams and hard work, and would fly all the way to the moon.  Incredible!  Only sixty-six years—from the windy, white sandy dunes on the coast of North Carolina, to the charcoal gray dusty surface of the moon, thanks to incredible imagination and the hard work by so many to make the dream of people walking on the moon a reality. 

One thing I really appreciated about the museum exhibit at the Wright Brother’s memorial was the emphasis on imagination, for imagination is the source of all creativity.  God imagined the universe into being, from the farthest galaxies to the tiniest living microscopic life on our planet. “O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder, consider all the things thy hands hath made…..”  Not only the universe, but we ourselves have been brought to life from God’s imagination.

The whole Bible is the story of what God imagines for creation and the reality of what really happens—God’s imagination distorted by our own desires, and we can use the word “sin” as shorthand for that corruption that continually threatens to destroy us and our planet. 

Which brings me to Jesus, the ultimate imaginative act of God.  Nothing else having gotten through to us, God imagines God’s self in human form, and as we Christians believe, Jesus is born as one of us, lives as one of us, and dies as one of us. 

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