En el nombre del unico Dios, santo y vivo. In the name of the one, holy, and living God. Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Valori Mulvey Sherer
I'm cruising on the river of life, happy to trust the flow, enjoying the ride as I live into a new season of life and ministry as the Priest in Charge at Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Webster Groves, MO. I am also co-founder of the Partnership for Renewal, a church vitality nonprofit. You are most welcome to visit my blog anytime and enjoy the ride with me. Peace.
Sunday, July 6, 2025
4 Pentecost, 2025-C: Essential humility
Sunday, June 8, 2025
Pentecost, 2025-C: Continuing prophetic witness
Last week, the clergy of our convocation gathered at Emmanuel for a Clericus (which simply means a gathering of clergy), led by our bishop. Among the many concerns we discussed were the issues of serving victims of the tornado in the long haul given FEMA aid remains unattained and among reports that folks in some zip codes are being refused insurance referrals for construction help, inaugurating a modern form of redlining.
We also discussed serving vulnerable populations like people of color, LGBTQIA2S+ folks, and immigrants. Our bishop is, as you know, an immigrant himself. He is also a black, married gay man, making him a member of several vulnerable populations currently under fire in this cultural moment. He is married to a hispanic immigrant, and their family has already suffered from the arbitrary interpretation and enforcement of immigration law.
This led us to a discussion about the need for churches to be prophetic. Those of us who can must speak out on behalf of those who can’t, those who are being silenced, disappeared, ambushed, and dismissed to the margins.
Bp. Deon wisely reminded us that being prophetic doesn’t always require doing something flashy, but consistently doing the small things that demonstrate the truth we hold as Episcopalians.And what is that truth? We can find it in our Baptismal vows on page 304 in the BCP: to gather and break bread together, prayerfully nourishing the bonds of our community of faith so that we can proclaim by our words and our lives the Good News we know; to persevere in resisting evil and repent, that is, return to God, whenever we sin; and to seek and serve Christ in ALL persons, respecting their dignity as we strive for God’s justice and peace. No small task.
There are two things we need to accomplish this: God and each other. Every Sunday we celebrate the love of God that binds us as a community of faith. We nurture ourselves with the spiritual food of Scripture and Holy Communion. Today, on the Feast of Pentecost, we celebrate the truth that we have God in us – individually and communally.
The story of the first Pentecost found in the Book of Acts is a familiar one, as are the images associated with it – the small tongues of fire emanating from the dove-like Holy Spirit, hovering over the heads of the gathered faithful. We imagine those same tongues of fire hovering over our own heads. To embody that, we wave a dove over us during our opening procession.
Fire, as you have often heard me say, is Bible-talk for the presence of God. The tongues of fire are small bits of the Almighty Themself, being given to imperfect, unfinished humans, who are motivated and equipped to serve by that very presence of God that rests on them.Our remembrance of this event each liturgical year is an opportunity for us to reopen our awareness to the truth that God is co-existing with us and what that means. These tiny pieces in each of us, when taken together, become a powerful force for love, a prophetic, revelatory vision of the living God. We become more together than any of us can be alone. This is church.
Whatever gifts we have, individually and as a community, are evidence of the presence of God within us. One of our responsibilities as a church community is to be the place where each person's gifts are discovered and nurtured. We then discern what our collective gifts are so that we can use them to serve the world according to God’s purpose and plan for us.
Our churches also work together in community, which for us, is the Diocese of Missouri. All of us serving God synergistically - better and more faithfully than any one of us can serve alone – and we have plenty to do.
In Scripture, we learn that it didn’t take long for some of those disciples upon whom the spirit of God descended to be edged out to the margins of the community once again. As the fledgling church began to form its institutional identity the new wine of this Pentecost reality was shoved back into the old skins of the Jewish temple system, edging women, slaves, the poor, and others right back to the “outer courts” of the community. The doors that Jesus had flung open began to close, and that initial institutional system evolved into the one we have today, a system that continues to reflect an ancient ethnic and patriarchal advantage.
In the novel, “The Healing” by Jonathan O’Dell, set on a cotton plantation in pre-Civil War Mississippi, a young slave girl named Granada is apprenticed to a mixed-race, midwife and healer named Mother Polly. Mother Polly was purchased by the master to intervene in the cholera epidemic, which was wiping out his “stock” of slaves. Knowing abolition was on the horizon, the master wanted to treat his slaves well enough so that when freedom became an option, they’d have no need of it – a condition Mother Polly called being “freedom stupid.”When Granada complained to Mother Polly that she didn’t want to leave the plantation to go to freedom-land, she asked, “Where was it, anyway?” It isn’t a place, Mother Polly told her, it’s a way of being.
This story is such a great metaphor for the church. Church isn’t a place. It’s a way of being. We don’t go to church. We are the church, the body of Christ in the world.
In the reading from Acts, Peter quotes the prophet Joel who declares God’s intention to pour out Their divine Spirit onto ALL flesh: sons and daughters, men and women, old and young, slave and free. This is that time, Peter proclaims. Emmanuel family, I proclaim to you now, this is still that time because God is still redeeming. God is always redeeming.
Like young Granada, however, so many in the church, unable to comprehend the magnitude of the freedom of God’s spirit and trust its power to transform us, our community, and even the world, choose to be “salvation stupid,” turning away and choosing to fall back into a spirit of fear as St. Paul said.
We look back at the pre-Civil War era and wonder how Christians could ever have believed that kidnapping and enslaving humans, snatching babies from their mother’s breasts, and children from their innocence; working people to near exhaustion, and killing them as if they weren’t humans, was in any way in keeping with Jesus’ commandments to love. Looking at our current news reports leads me to wonder the same thing about us today.
Thankfully, God is still redeeming. God is always redeeming until “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” God continually sends forth God’s own Spirit to create and re-create the world; and God has chosen us as partners in this work, making manifest on earth the eternal truth that God is love, and we ALL are God’s beloveds.
This is a tremendous gift, one that often overwhelms us, but when we gather together, the bits of God’s Spirit in each of us unites with the bits of God’s spirit in all of us, and the fullness of God is made manifest through us on the earth.
Even with all our imperfections, we can, by the grace and Spirit of God, be prophetic and revelatory of the loving God we serve in small and big ways. One small way we are doing this is the display of PRIDE flags on our church property. We used to have one flag on a pole next to a metal sign out front. That flag was stolen, and our pole was destroyed. In response, we screwed PRIDE flags onto the two metal signs on our property that are awaiting refurbishment. Those signs will soon have permanent PRIDE flags as a continuing, prophetic witness to our love for our LGBTQIA2S+ siblings in Christ.Happy birthday to the church in our continual becoming... and Happy PRIDE Month. Amen.
Sunday, June 1, 2025
Fst of the Ascension & Wear Orange Sunday, 2025: The unitive community of God
En el nombre de Dios, nuestra vida, nuestra protección, y nuestra paz… In the name of God, our life, our protection, and our peace. Amen.
Sunday, May 25, 2025
6 Easter, 2025-C: The promises of God in Christ
En el nombre de Dios, quien promete vida, paz, protección y provisión. In the name of God, who promises life, peace, protection, and provision. Amen.
The one whom God promises will proceed from us is the Holy Spirit of God. Spirit means breath, in Hebrew, ruach. This same ruach that breathed life into all creation, including the first humans, continues to breathe life into us now, and through us, into the world.
My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.
Amen.
Sunday, May 4, 2025
3 Easter, 2025-C: Children, have you Jesus?
The Scripture stories we share after Easter are so empowering! We can see the various ways Jesus made himself known to the disciples and began the movement that became Christianity - a movement that changed the course of human history… and continues to change it.
- Night is Bible-talk for darkness of sight, understanding, or experience.
- Light is Jesus’ presence with us - the light that penetrates the darkness and is not destroyed by it.
- Water… remember our recent discussions where the chaos waters were calmed and ordered by the breath/ruach of God so that they nourish and don’t destroy.
- Jesus cooking on the beach is him preparing a table for the disciples, pointing to Psalm 23. This story reminds us that transformation happens in the midst of our everydayness. Do what you always do and see how my presence in you transforms it into divine action.
- 153 fish - a very specific number, don’t you think? This refers to the Hebrew word ‘rob’, which means abundance, greatness. The catch of fish the disciples brought in symbolizes that this gift from God is meant to feed so many more beyond themselves.
- Feed my lambs, Jesus says, my babies, my children (as he had called them earlier). This refers to those in the inner circle of our lives. Feed them, nourish them with the holy food prepared by God for the holy people of God.
- Tend my sheep. Sheep is Bible-talk for the flock of Christ - all followers of his Way. We all must look beyond caring for those only in our inner circles, our churches, and tend to the larger family of Christ. These will come in different varieties, like the 153 fish - all nations, all peoples. Tend to them all. Serve them all.
- Feed my sheep. This is Jesus’ invitation to us to serve the global community. All nations, all peoples are to be nourished with God’s love by the holy food prepared by God for God’s holy people; and it is to be given to them with the same abundance and generosity that God gives it to us.
Sunday, April 27, 2025
2 Easter & Baptism of Mel Pey: Drenched in God’s love
St. Teresa of Avila, 16th-century Spanish mystic, wrote a prayer that I think is familiar to most of us:
“Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes through which to look out Christ's compassion to the world. Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good. Yours are the hands with which he is to bless [people] now.”
1) that God accepts us where we are and leads us to where we need to be;2) that there are many ways to come to faith and many ways to live faithfully;3) that God is present in the gathered community.
A little girl dropsher wafer in the wine. She’ssoaking up God’s grace.
Sunday, April 20, 2025
Easter Day, 2025: The birth of faith
Happy Day of Resurrection - the mystery that defines us as followers of Jesus. As Episcopalians, we don’t try to resolve this mystery; we simply enter it and let God do Their work in us. This is the benefit of our commitment to taking the Bible seriously, but not literally.