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.

Sunday’s Thoughts Feb 4, Epiphany 5

This week is unique in how it unfolds. The message from the Gospel shows Christ during a typical day as healer to Peter’s mother, casting out demons in the community and creating wholeness during his preaching.

But he found time for renewal – “In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.” In Isaiah, “From Isaiah “but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

This is an important lesson for all of us in our time. The Washington Post reported in April 2022.”Unlike every other industrialized nation, the United States has no mandatory paid vacation or holiday leave. Workers who have paid leave often don’t take it. And even when we take leave, many of us can’t leave work behind. The technology that lets us work anywhere, anytime, makes it hard to disconnect even when we’re supposed to.”

Taken as a whole, last week’s Epiphany 4 prefigures Epiphany’s major themes — healing, restoration, and hope. We continue them this week (Epiphany 5) that will define the heart of Jesus’ mission.

Healing  – The passage pivots around four key verbs:  (“to come near”),  (“to take hold”),  (“to waken, to raise”) and  (“to serve, to minister”). The first two verbs go together: Jesus “comes near” Peter’s mother-in-law, close enough to “take hold” of her hand. Throughout the Gospel, Mark distinctively emphasizes the power of touch, including the idea (as we’ll see in the weeks ahead) that Jesus is unafraid to touch and be touched by the supposedly “unclean.”

Restoration – Having taken her hand, Jesus “raises her up.” The same word (egeiro) is used of Jesus himself at the resurrection — it’s there in the famous line, “He has been raised; he is not here” (Mark 16:6) — and so the term evokes a renewed strength, a reinvigoration, a reawakening, a restoration, a return. She is awakened – restored.

Illness not only debilitates the body but it also can cut a person off from his or her social life and contributions to community — and this can feel like a loss of dignity or purpose.

Hospitality was highly prized in the ancient world, and for early Christians, to be hospitable in a way that advanced the Jesus movement was both an art and an honor. in this way, for Mark, the healing in this story is not only a matter of a fever departing; it’s also a matter of restoration to community, and of participation in the movement. This social dimension of healing is a key theme to which Mark will return again and again.

Hope – And while the episode with the possessed man in Epiphany 4 provides a sense of what this liberation is “freedom from,” this week’s story points toward what it is “freedom for.”

What is she renewed for? For diakonos, “ministry, service,” the same root that gives us the word “deacon” (she is the original deacon!). What’s more, the word diakonos literally means “to kick up dust” — this is an active, practical, on-the-move, change-the-world sort of work. In short, she is lifted up to serve. She is freed for ministry, to kick up some dust and get some things done. She is the pioneer who blazes the trail for the anonymous woman who causes a little dust-up near the end of Mark’s Gospel by anointing Jesus (“what she has done will be told in remembrance of her,” Mark 14:3-9), and also for the group of women at the crucifixion who stay and keep watch and remain with the vandalized body, even as the male disciples panic and flee (see Mark 15:40-41; the Greek word translated as “provided for” is diakoneo).

The Presentation and Candlemas, Feb 2

“Today is a day of purification, renewal, and hope.”

 

The Presentation of our Lord commemorates when Mary and Joseph brought the infant Jesus to the Temple in Jerusalem where he was greeted by Simeon and Anna. By the Law every first born male was to be consecrated to the Lord.” This happened 40 days after his birth at Christmas.

It is a feast day though it does not often fall on a Sunday. Candlemas occurs at a period between the December solstice and the March equinox, so many people traditionally marked that time of the year as winter’s “halfway point” while waiting for the spring.  

Candlemas is actually a very old feast, celebrated by both the churches of the East and the West, and in some places it is on this day that the creche is finally removed from the church.  The passage from The words in this scripture are often part of Compline

According to some sources, Christians began Candlemas in Jerusalem as early as the fourth century and the lighting of candles began in the fifth century. Other sources say that Candlemas was observed by blessing candles since the 11th century. An early writing dating back to around 380 CE mentioned that a feast of the Presentation occurred in a church in Jerusalem. It was observed on February 14. The feast was observed on February 2 in regions where Christ’s birth was celebrated on December 25.  It is also Groundhog Day in the United States and Canada on February 2.

Candles are blessed on this day (hence the name “Candlemas”). It was the day of the year when all the candles, that were used in the church during the coming year, were brought into church and a blessing was said over them – so it was the Festival Day (or ‘mass’) of the Candles. Candles were important in those days not only because there was no electric lights. Some people thought they gave protection against plague and illness and famine. For Christians, they were (and still are) a reminder of something even more important. Before Jesus came to earth, it was as if everyone was ‘in the dark’.

Pieces of these candles are considered of great efficacy in sickness, or otherwise. When a person is dying, a piece is put in his hand lighted, and thus he passes away in the belief that it may light him to Paradise.

Story of a painting – Rembrandt’s “Presentation in the Temple”

Rembrandt returned to the subject, "Presentation of Jesus in the Temple" at least 5 times from 1627 to 1654, two paintings, three etchings.

The subject is the biblical story of Simeon. Jesus was still an infant when Joseph and Mary took him to the temple to be presented to God. There they were approached by Simeon, a devout old man who recognised the child as the Saviour and praised him to God.

The most famous of these works was in 1631 when he was about 25 and still living in Leiden. Later that year he moved to Amsterdam. This painting is the high point of Rembrandt’s Leiden years: it represents the sum total of his artistic abilities at that

Most of his paintings are in very dark tones out of which his figures seem to appear to the foreground. Rembrandt was the master of dark and light and most of his pictures are made in this style of struggle between dark and light, night and day, sorrow and joy.

The key to the picture is how carefully and delicate the figures are painted, even those in the darkest part of the painting. The beautiful contrast, between the light on the central group and the soft dimness of the remoter parts of the cathedral, illustrates a style of work for which Rembrandt was very famous.

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Sermon, Rev. Thomas Hughes, Jan. 28, 2024

Sermon is transcribed from the video.

The lessons today are all about spiritual considerations. If you spend a little time with them, the lessons are all about the spiritual nature of what it means to live in this world before God. So with that in mind there are really four things I want to talk about today. One is knowledge and kinds of knowledge . There are two kinds of knowledge – there’s spiritual knowledge, there’s intellectual knowledge and there’s also this basic drive that human beings have for wholeness. Then I want to talk a little bit about symbols and how they are an expression of our spiritual lives.

I’m sure we’re all aware that our culture is really starving spiritually. There’s no other way to describe it. You hear descriptions of  places where there is  a food desert.  I’ve heard that expression lately talking about places where there is food that is not available in the way that people need food. Jesus  said you did not live by bread alone. Jesus’ teaching is all about being fed spiritually even though he is very mindful of what it required to live in this world and what human beings  needed to do to survive. There’s no reason to think he wasn’t always respectful of people’s knowledge. Certainly growing up in the in the carpenter shop he knew how to build things; he understood how things in this world work so he was not naive about that. Yet his life was  all about something else altogether different. His life was all about teaching and revealing the spiritual nature of the world and of God and of the spiritual nature that we all have to all the people around him. 

Now, the idea that there are spiritual things at the heart of all goes to a little quote here in Jeremiah where it says I  created you as a strong vine with your roots firmly in the ground to produce for me. Why is it then you have produced wild grapes instead of those for which you were  created? Going all the way back some 700 years before Christ we had the great Prophet Jeremiah writing about the fact that what was coming up in our lives, what was coming up in civilization was not what God had intended. God had planted plants that were to give birth to a whole new kind of life of the spirit. Instead, something else was happening it’s still happening even though all these 2,000 years later. 

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