Wednesday, July 31, 2019

Father Riley's sermon from Ruston, July 28, 2019 and CEC News

CEC Breaking News!
…Father Riley will lead in Holy Eucharist August 4, 2019.  Please invite others to come and see.


7 PENTECOST, PROPER XII - C - 19                    LUKE 11. 1-13



When I read this passage from Luke where Jesus’ disciples are asking him to teach them to pray like John Baptist is teaching his disciples to pray, it makes me wonder what their prayers looked like before. On the other hand, did they even pray before?

Who taught you to pray? Did they teach you what to pray? My mother taught me as a child - “now I lay me down to sleep….” You know that one. Perhaps you learned it yourself as a child and have even taught it to your own children. What does it teach us about God?

What is God like? How can we know God? We cannot fully know and understand God in this life, but if we pay attention to what scripture tells us about God, we come a little closer to knowing who He is and what He is like.

Jesus responds to his disciples with what we have come to know as the “Lord’s Prayer.” It contains the basics of prayer. Without going into it in detail, perhaps the occasion for another sermon, Jesus’ emphasis is on asking, but in his example to his disciples, the order of the petition forces us to subordinate our personal wants to the honor of God and to His purposes.

Jesus is teaching us how to pray not what to pray for and he follows it with a parable that enforces the idea that we should be persistent in our praying.


Hospitality was taken very seriously in Jesus’ day. The parable he gives has a logical ending. His audience would not have expected anything less.

Even though it was in the middle of the night when the neighbor knocked on his friend’s door, the out come was a fore gone conclusion. His persistence in knocking brought his neighbor to his feet. Although he may have been reluctant in responding, he did so and met his friend’s need. What does it tell us about God?

The point of the parable is not that God is like a man who does not want to be bothered and answers prayers only because he is tired of listening. 

Rather it is the typical rabbinic argument from the lesser to the greater. If the reluctant man responds to requests, how much more will God, who is anxious to meet our needs.

In the Old Testament lesson, Abraham persists in his asking of God on behalf of the innocents abiding in Sodom and Gomorrah. We might even say Abraham was pushing the envelope in his asking 6 times of God. What does this tell us about God? Is He like the reluctant neighbor in Jesus’ example that gives in to the friend’s request just to shut him up?

Or does our first lesson tell us something about the true nature of God? That God hears our prayers. That God is judge. God is patient and his response is merciful. Likewise, Jesus’ response to his disciple’s request tells us something of who God is as well.

God is the one who is to be praised above all else. The one who always hears our prayers, forgives our sins, and provides us with our daily needs. God is our Father, sustainer, friend, one whom we can ask, and the giver of all good gifts.

Jesus does not tell us that we shall get what we want when we ask, or that when we seek we will find exactly what we are looking for. Moreover, that when we knock at the door that what awaits us on the other side will be altogether to our taste. What he is telling us is that when we approach God in prayer we should be persistent in our asking, seeking, and knocking.

We all know how difficult prayer can be difficult at times. Times, for example, when we are grief-stricken. Our hearts are broken. We are in pain and we do not understand why things happen the way they do.

Prayer can be difficult when our minds are filled with too many things to make room for God to work in giving us and answer. Prayer becomes difficult when we are too easily distracted by what is going on around us and in our lives. Distractions cause us to lose spiritual focus.

That is exactly what the collect for today prays that we will not do, so that we may pass through things temporal, and not lose the things eternal. St. Paul warns the newly made Christians at Colossae of essentially the same thing as he encourages them to remain steadfast in the faith.

“See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human conditions….and not according to Christ.” How difficult it is to be a Christian in today’s world and in our own society. Prayer is one way we stay connected to God and maintain our spiritual focus.

In our prayer, what counts is persistence - our not giving up on God for He will answer. Jesus is encouraging a kind of Holy boldness, if you will, like that of Abraham and the persistent neighbor. He is telling us that we should display a sharp knocking on the door, and insistent asking, and a search that refuses to give up.

This is what Christ tells us that our prayer should be like. Is that what your prayer life is like? One would hope that our prayer life has matured as we continue the journey to God.

I came to realize later in life the lesson about God that my mother taught me in learning that child-hood prayer; that whether in our sleeping or our waking our lives are in God’s hands. Everyday is a gift. I confess my prayers today contain more thanksgivings than when I first learned to pray.

The “Lord’s Prayer.” then, is not just a loosely connected string of petitions. It is a prayer for people who are following Jesus on the kingdom journey and in doing so, are gaining a greater awareness and understanding of who their God truly is and what He is like.

Staying connected to God through prayer, and being persistent in our praying, not only gives us a greater understanding of what it is that we can expect from God, the giver of all good gifts, moreover, what it is that God expects from us in our relationship to Him who has made us alive in Christ Jesus, by setting aside our sins and nailing them to the cross.  AMEN+


Monday, July 29, 2019

Father Riley's sermon from July 21, 2019


6 PENTECOST, PROPER XI - C - 19                 LUKE 10. 38-42



Have you ever attended a party or some other social event where you tried to make conversation in a crowed room with someone you were acquainted with but because of all of the distractions you were unable to do so?

You were focused on them looking them squarely in the face as you spoke but could tell that they were just “not there.” Their eyes did not meet yours rather they were looking past you searching the crowed room for someone else in whose presence they had rather be.

Suddenly and abruptly, they departed from your presence as if you were never there. It has happened to all of us I am sure, as well as our having been the guilty party. How often we are “not present” to another person.

We do not hear them, and in some cases, we do not really see them. They are present to us but we are not present to them. Our thoughts are elsewhere. Our attention is not on them. We are distracted by whatever it is that has hold of our thoughts at that moment. We don’t really hear what they are saying.

Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem and the cross. As he does so, he leaves behind him towns, villages, households and individuals who have glimpsed a new vision of God’s kingdom, and for whom life will never be the same.

In today’s passage from Luke, he enters a certain village accompanied by his disciples. Here he is welcomed into the home of a woman named Martha and her sister Mary. Hospitality was taken very seriously in Jesus’ day. Every effort was made to receive and entertain both strangers and guests with liberality and kindness.

It would appear from this brief story from Luke that Martha was going all out to ensure that Jesus and his friends would be well fed with more than the usual fare. She was focused all of her energies on what she was doing to prepare the meal and set the table.

She went hurriedly about her business going in and out of the kitchen making sure that everything was just so when she realized that Mary was sitting at the feet of Jesus listening to him while she did all of the work.

Her focus suddenly shifted from her work to her sister’s attention to Jesus. “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her to help me.”

To sit at someone’s feet meant, quite simply, to be a student. Mary was learning about God’s kingdom from the lips of God in Christ himself. She was listening and learning, focusing on the teaching of Jesus and putting it all together in her own mind. Mary was present to Jesus. Martha was not.

Jesus was being served by Mary in a way that Martha’s meal and preparation could not. Christ was being fed by Mary’s attentiveness and nourished by her being totally present to him in a way that mere physical food could not do. Is this what Jesus meant when he said to his disciples at the well in Samaria that he had food of which they did not know?

Martha got worked up over the details and was distracted from what was really important - the presence of Jesus - and missed the opportunity to be present to him. How often we miss the opportunity to be present to Jesus. We allow ourselves to be distracted by the every day comings and goings of our lives. Our attention is not on God, but on earthly things.

We come to church, for example, with perfectly good intentions of offering ourselves to God in worship, song and praise. However, our thoughts drift off and our mind becomes focused on other things, most likely during the homily. Or perhaps we think about what we are planning to fix for dinner after the service and who all will be present.

We simply lose spiritual focus and forget why we are here. We may have been distracted when we walked in this morning by the thoughts and cares that were on our minds when we left home. We tried to focus on our worship but our minds were elsewhere.

We failed in our attentiveness. We were not “all there” for God. The same holds true for our prayers. How often we lose focus while praying. When our thoughts are on something other than God, it is hard to pray.

And because of that, we say that we pray but never hear God speak. Listening is an art. One has to block out everything else in order to hear what one wishes to hear. In this case, God. Mary sat at the feet of Jesus listening to his words.

Her focus was not on offering hospitality to him, per se, but in the offering of herself. She was in the presence of Jesus and she made herself present to him. Her reward in listening to his words was a glimpse of the vision of God’s kingdom Jesus was presenting and with it the hope of glory St. Paul speaks of in today’s Epistle. Because she listened to Him, her life would never be the same again.

Abraham showed hospitality to the strangers that happened his way. He focused on meeting their every need and for his attentiveness he was rewarded with the promise of a son. God always rewards our attentiveness to him. He is always present to us whether we realize it or not, waiting to speak if we will only listen.

Martha was not only distracted from the presence of Jesus by her attention to detail but by the attention Mary was giving to Jesus. Her focus was misplaced. She was in essence concerned with self, consumed by the details, and missed the opportunity to sit at the feet of Jesus.

When we are full of self and our own self-interests there is no room for God; no room for God to work in our lives, and not even a sense of his presence. Mary chose the better part that day and in so doing has given all of us an example to follow.

We need to sit at the feet of Jesus and listen to what he is saying. For he will feed us with the “real presence” of His being if we will make ourselves present to Him with our whole hearts, mind, and spirit. It is in the gift of His presence and our attentiveness to His words that we come to know the “hospitality of God,” that is, God’s love, grace, mercy and forgiveness that is given to all who seek Him.

And through the guidance and teaching of the Holy Spirit, we learn to respond to one another with that same “hospitality.”  For once, we have experienced it our lives are never the same again. AMEN+

Wednesday, July 24, 2019

Father Riley's homily from July 14, 2019


5 PENTECOST, PROPER X - C - 19                             LUKE 10: 25- 37



The lawyer’s question in today’s gospel, is one that many would ask if in the presence of Jesus. However, it is one that the church should be able to answer for those who dare to ask. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” The Church, as the depository of truth, has been entrusted with the right answer.

Obviously, this lawyer had been sitting at the feet of Jesus as any disciple would along with all those who were merely curios about who this Jesus was and what he was all about. Jesus in his usual manner answers the lawyer’s question with a question.

Christ asks him what does the law say, in other words how do you interpret it? The lawyer responds by quoting Deuteronomy word for word giving the right answer. In the Old Testament (Lev. 18.5), keeping the law was essential to eternal life. Knowing the answer and doing it, however, are two different things. Jesus told him to “do it.”

However, that does not appear to satisfy him. He has yet another question. Who is my neighbor? He is looking for a definitive answer. Jesus gives it to him in the form of a parable we know so well as that of the “Good Samaritan,” a parable that only appears in Luke.

Who is my neighbor? Ask ten people today and you will most likely get a variety of answers.

I watched a disturbing video recently where a police officer was being dragged by a suspect’s vehicle. Traffic swerved around the moving vehicle with the officer precariously hanging on and continued on their way without stopping to assist him. Eventually the officer freed himself from the fleeing vehicle and fell onto the roadway.

Traffic continued to avoid him. Finally, a car did stop behind the injured officer who lay motionless in the roadway. The man who stopped called 911 and directed traffic around the downed officer until help arrived.

He put into action what Jesus was telling the lawyer to do. He was, we would say, a modern day “good Samaritan.” Makes you wonder who the others were that did not stop and better yet, why they did not stop.

The Jews of Jesus’ day were well versed in the commandments of God, especially the first one. They knew that their duty and obligation was to God above all else and that their neighbor came second. Their interpretation, for the most part, of “neighbor” was a fellow Jew.

They would not dream of touching a corpse for fear of being defiled. Therefore, in Jesus’ example, the priest and Levite pass by on the other side assuming the man was dead. For Jesus to use a Samaritan as an example of what to do was not only shocking but also unthinkable to his Jewish audience.

A Samaritan represented racial impurity and religious heresy to an Orthodox Jew. One can only imagine the reaction on the face of the inquisitive lawyer, himself a Jew, who got more than he asked for in Jesus’ response. But did he? Regardless, of his reaction, he gives the right answer. Jesus tells him to go “and do likewise.” In other words, be like the Samaritan.

He wanted to know what he had to do to inherit eternal life and Jesus told him plainly. However, the lawyer’s question and Jesus’ answer do not quite match up, and that is part of the point.

The lawyer wants to know who counts as neighbor. For him, God is the God of Israel, and neighbors are Jewish. For Jesus, Israel’s God is the God of grace for the whole world, and a neighbor is anyone in need. Now he knew who his neighbor was anyone in need regardless of race, culture, or religion.

How difficult is that to put into practice. Are there any more divisions amongst humanity today than in Jesus’ day? I doubt it. Jesus’ response to the lawyer’s question is just as relevant today, if not more so, than then. Just look at the world around us, and even our own society, and sadly the church.

Again, the difficulty arises in not knowing what to do but in doing it. Left to our own devices our definition of neighbor would be a narrow one. Without the grace of God moving us to act we would stay in our comfort zones much like those who avoided contact with the one in need in today’s parable.

This is not what God in Christ is calling us to do. We cannot say that we love God and chose to avoid those in need, especially if they differ from us. The “right answer” for all of us is to do it. Not out of a sense of legal obligation but for the love of God in response to His love for us.

One cannot escape the demands of the law by asking who, but respond to the divine command by seeking how to show love to those in need. Thus, the question is not “who is my neighbor?” but to whom can I show myself to be a neighbor thus fulfilling the law.

The basic message is that we are to love God first and our neighbor as our self. Wouldn’t it be easier if we had a list of who it is I have been called to love?

If only I could identify those persons. If only I knew their names, but I don’t. You don’t. Our love for one another is to be limitless, unconditional, and compassionate. No one is to be eliminated in advance.

The” who” is open-ended. If we love like the Samaritan loved, we will be compassionate and generous to each person upon whom we stumble. Neighborly love knows no limits. Jesus’ answer, in essence, is an example of God’s wide-reaching grace.

What is at stake here, then and now, is the question of whether we will use this God-given revelation of love and grace as a way of boosting our own sense of isolated security and purity, or whether we will see it as a call and challenge to extend that love and grace to the whole world.

Jesus not only gave the answer to the lawyer, but He lived it as an example of how we are to respond to the divine command. He was the very embodiment of God’s wide-reaching grace and love in His living and His dying,

He has left us the legacy of that love to share with all we meet, especially those in need. It is part of the inheritance of the New Life, which we are called upon to spend now in the Hope of attaining the fullness of the Promise of the Life to come. AMEN+

Monday, July 8, 2019

CEC News Alerts and Father Riley's homily from July 7, 2019



CEC Breaking News!
…Father Riley will lead in Holy Eucharist July 14 and 21, 2019.  Jane Barnett will lead us in Morning Prayer on July 28.  Please invite others to come and see.


4 PENTECOST, PROPER 9 - C - 19                LUKE 10. 1-11, 16-20




“The Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go."

When I was a young lad growing up in Alabama it was quite common to hear of traveling evangelists that were planning to hold “revivals” and healing services nearby. The means of announcing their pending arrivals was a lot less sophisticated than it is today with all the social media at one’s disposal.

Back in those days, billboards were sometimes used. However, the most popular means of announcing the date, time, and place of the meetings were handbills placed in store windows or handed out to passer bys on the streets and tacked to telephone polls in the area by the front men, as they were called, who preceded the one who was to come.

As the day approached, huge circus like tents would be erected on a vacant lot with sawdust floors. Lots and lots of metal folding chairs were arranged with a long aisle in the middle. I remember it well because my grandmother took me to one such event to see and hear a particular evangelist.

He was quite popular at the time. Not only was he reported to be an exciting preacher but also one who was said to posses healing powers. Not to name any names, but he was from Oklahoma.

In today’s gospel passage, Jesus sends out seventy of his disciples. These were not the twelve we know so well, but seventy others whose names are not recorded for our benefit. Their mission was to go ahead of him into the towns and villages he himself intended to go.

They were to be the “front men” for Christ. Jesus gave them the same announcement to make that he himself had made when he began his earthly ministry - the kingdom of God is near. Christ also gave them the authority to heal the sick in those places where they were received and the power to exorcise demons in his name.

However, Jesus warns them that it will not be easy. They will be like sheep in the midst of wolves, meaning that some will welcome them and others will reject them. Either way, they are, as did the prophets of old, to tell them that the “kingdom has come near,” whether they receive it or not.

The Gospel message is not just a kingdom of the future but one that is near. Near, says the prophet Isaiah in today’s first lesson who shared his vision of God’s kingdom. The kingdom of God is near, Isaiah prophesied to God’s people, soon to be restored with peace and healing flowing like a river. Near, though not yet fully come.

Jesus’ invitation into the kingdom has been recognized by the signs of peace and healing. These signs the seventy bring with them too. Their mission is Jesus’ mission. In the towns and villages they enter, they heal the sick and say, “the kingdom of God has come near.”

The kingdom of God is near to you, the seventy told those who received them. To those who rejected them, the seventy’s message was simply “the kingdom has come near.” There is a difference. The “you” is missing. Those who receive them have accepted Jesus’ invitation. Those who reject them have missed the opportunity to accept God’s invitation.

Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem and the cross. The seventy represent him and the grace and astonishing, healing love of God that flowed through Jesus. This was the God whose kingdom was drawing near. To reject this message was to reject Jesus and to reject him was to reject God himself.

As we see, their mission was a success. They are excited and joyful. They cannot wait to return and give Jesus their “after action report.” “Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us!” Their names may not have been recorded in this book, according to Luke, but Jesus tells them that their names are recorded in God’s.

The fact that their names are recorded in the Book of Life, is what they should rejoice in, Christ tells them, and not that the evil spirits submitted to them. There is more than one lesson in this for all of us today.

As modern day disciples, we do not always see ourselves in the role of an evangelist, but in essence, we are by virtue of our baptisms. The font of life is the beginning of our journey to God where we promised to “follow and obey him as our Lord.” Secondly, we promised, “to proclaim by word and example the good news of God in Christ.” We were, in essence commissioned as “front men” for Christ in the vows and promises we made at our baptisms.

Let us not forget that in baptism we were buried with Christ and raised to new life in him. A new life that enables us through the guidance of the Holy Spirit to pray to the Father that his kingdom will come in its fullest, as it already is in heaven.

This same Spirit, by which we were sealed in Holy Baptism, strengthens us to live by faith and with the grace of God to acknowledge the reality of the nearness of God’s kingdom now. Our names are recorded. They are recorded in the books of this parish, for future generations to discover.

More importantly, when we were signed with the cross at baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever, our names were recorded in God’s Book of Life. We should rejoice in that above all else.

Like the seventy who were sent out to do the work God in Christ had given them to do, so we too are sent out into the market place of life to do the work God has given us to do: to love and serve Him as faithful witnesses of Christ our Lord.

It is not easy. The wolves are out there yet. It is incumbent upon us, as we continue our journey to God in this life, with the Hope of the life to come, that we ensure that our names remain in God’s Book.

We do this by fulfilling our baptismal vows. This requires a daily renouncing of all that keeps us from the Love of God and by turning again and again to Jesus Christ and renewing our acceptance of Him as our Lord and Savior by putting our whole trust in His grace and love.

Through the leading and guidance of the Holy Spirit, we strive to commit ourselves to follow in His most blessed footsteps, footsteps that will take us from the nearness of God’s kingdom now to the day, by God’s grace, when we enter into the fullness of its Glory forever. AMEN+

Thursday, July 4, 2019

Summer Camp Thank You and CEC News!

Happy Birthday America!


…Our congregation sponsored Maddie to Camp Hardtner this Summer.  Camp Hardtner is a great place for young Christians and they love it.  May we sponsor many more young Christians to Camp Hardtner in the future.

 … Father Riley will lead in Holy Eucharist July 7, 14, and 21, 2019.  Services at 10am as usual. Please invite others to join us.