St. Martin's in the Field, Biddeford Pool

Join us for worship on Sunday!
https://conta.cc/3QKc4Gw

Join us for Evensong & Pig Roast on August 16th (to benefit Seeds of Hope in Biddeford):

Corrected Date: Aug 16- RSVP by Friday Pig Roast Fundraiser for Seeds of Hope     Sincere apologies for an incorrect date in yesterday's invitation. The correct date is Wednesday, August 16 The entire Biddeford Pool Community is invited to

One week until Evensong & Pig Roast!
RSVP by Friday!

Sunday, July 30th: beautiful flowers and strong bell ringers!

No filter or photoshop used… simply capturing the beauty of God’s colorful creation!

Sunday morning helpers!
Please be in touch with Dina if you or your family members/guests would like to…
-Ring the bell to begin worship,
-Read one of the texts,
-Assist with the offering plates, and/or
-Lead the prayers from the prayer book.
(And thank you, bell ringers, for helping today!)

Today’s sermon (the Rev. Dina van Klaveren, preacher):

In celebration of the Feast of the Transfiguration today, we read the account in Luke’s Gospel. Throughout the Gospel of Luke, Jesus was compassionate towards outcasts, he healed and extended grace and forgiveness to people whose lives were broken by illness, trauma, oppression, isolation.

In Luke, we find The Prodigal Son, my favorite parable. It’s the shocking story of a father’s mercy, a parable Jesus used to teach us to live compassionately, to forgive other people, to be reconciled.

In Luke, Jesus is completely in this world, in this beautiful yet brokenhearted creation, ministering to people directly, with his own hands. They hear his words as he speaks them, they hear him laugh with joy and they see him cry as he witnesses suffering. He sees their brokeness, he draws them into wholeness. He uses the parable of a son who squanders everything and returns home to the loving arms of a father to reveal that God is merciful, longing to wrap arms around human beings and welcome them home with a feast! Jesus is immanent, nearby, present, dwelling in the world, understanding heartbreaks and longings.

And then on a mountaintop as Jesus is praying, Jesus turns unreal- glowing, transfigured, changed to dazzling white. The three followers who accompany Jesus suddenly know that Jesus, the human being that is dwelling with them in this world in all those intimate and experienced, sensed ways, is also a transcendent being. It is other-worldly, strange, weird, paranormal.

Some of us prefer an exalted transcendent God, light inaccessible hid from our eyes. If we go too far with it, we end up believing that God is distant from us, way way out there somewhere and uninterested in us.

Some of us prefer an immanent very near to us God, Jesus take the wheel. If we go too far with this, we end up believing that God mirrors our desires, to confuse our will with God’s will.

As we grow wiser and open our hearts more fully to how God is active in the world, we appreciate the immanence AND transcendence of God.

Peter, James and John walked with Jesus everyday. They had to be shocked into understanding the divinity of their teacher and friend. For many of us, we are so aware of God’s divinity, of our inability to understand the enormity of the creator of the universe, that we must be shocked into understanding God’s nearness to us.

Perhaps you have experienced such a shocking and strange moment with God, where God made God’s presence intimately known to you. My most intimate experiences of God’s presence have been other-worldly, a strangely palpable awareness of God’s presence, God’s voice. These moments have shocked me into understanding God’s nearness. Such shocking moments have happened when I have been quiet and alone. In the darkest part of the night, or in a space when the noise of daily demands have been silenced, when my mind is quiet and my heart open.

Thomas Merton had a shocking moment on a busting street corner! Thomas Merton, author of several excellent spiritual writings, was a Trappist monk who lived in solitude in a hermitage in Kentucky. He wrote:

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut…, in the center of the shopping district,
I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness.…
it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed.… “

“At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, … This little point of nothingness … is the pure glory of God in us.… It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely.”[1]

Thomas Merton’s mountaintop was a street corner. He saw all of humanity transfigured, changed from earthly beings into beings illumined by the light of God’s divine love radiating from the center of their beings.

Some of us judge ourselves or others to be unworthy containers for the glory of God’s incomprehensible grace.

So let us remember Luke’s Prodigal Son parable: how God runs out to embrace us in our unworthiness, how God sees us coming back to beg for mercy after all of our mistakes, and welcomes us home.

God has planted that dazzling light within us, and God delights in our return, in our awareness of that bright light in our own being, and in one another, wrestling as we must to shake off our judgements and doubts.

My prayer for each of us on this feast of the Transfiguration is that we acknowledge the dazzling glory of God in us and in others, that we use the collective light of Christ within us all to shock this world into goodness, into wholeness. Let us be dazzled by the shocking love of God with us, in us and in the world around us.
—
Quote by Thomas Merton- from “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander” (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965, 1966), 140, 142.

Worship on Sunday, September 4th at 8:30 am in person only. Guest minister: the Rev. Travis Smith.

Join in worship - Morning Prayer.

Join in worship this morning at 8:30 am to …
Explore together how Jesus taught table fellowship to his followers,
Gather with others around the saving love offered at God’s table,
And sing praises in gratitude for how the Holy Spirit continues to guide God’s people forward!

Sneak peek at Sunday's hymns!
Join us on Sunday at 8:30 or 11:15 am to sing these favorites:
"When morning gilds the sky,"
"Eternal Father strong to save" (Navy Hymn),
and
"O God, our help in ages past."

The flowers on the altar today were arranged by Bethany Williams and Anne Umphrey and given in loving memory of:
Dorothy & Bruce Williams, Sr.
Diane & Bruce Harper
Phoebe Bowman & John Healy

Learn more about ministries that transform futures globally:

Please come to:
-Evensong Service TONIGHT Wednesday, August 17 at 5:30pm.
-Picnic INDOORS at the Abenakee Club to follow at 6 pm.
(NO GRILLING DUE TO WEATHER.)

Come sing favorite hymns, pray for the world, and learn about innovative practices in global outreach to children in need. All are welcome- invite friends, neighbors and houseguests to come along. Special outreach offerings will be taken for Seeds of Hope in Biddeford, and El Hogar Ministries in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

Join us afterward for fellowship at a BYO-style picnic hosted at the porch of the Abenakee Club. We will not be lighting the grills due to the wind and rain.

Evensong Service on Wednesday, August 17 at 5:30pm

Picnic at the Abenakee Club to follow at 6 pm

Come sing favorite hymns, pray for the world, and learn about innovative practices in global outreach to children in need. All are welcome- invite friends, neighbors and houseguests to come along. Special outreach offerings will be taken for Seeds of Hope in Biddeford, and El Hogar Ministries in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

Learn more about these life-giving outreach ministries below:
https://elhogar.org
https://seedsofhope4me.org

Join us afterward for fellowship at a BYO-style picnic hosted at the porch of the Abenakee Club. We'll have lighted grills for you to use if needed. (If there are weather-related changes, we will send out an update email.)

El Hogar, a home an education and a future Transforming lives for more than 40 years in Honduras. El Hogar provides a home to those who needs it and education from 1st to 12th grade.

Sermon for Sunday, August 14, 2022.
The Rev. Dina van Klaveren, preacher

Construction sites are messy, noisy places. Eventually, the construction crew and sawdust give way to something lovely and useful, and we enjoy a new, improved space until the next time we notice that repairs and renovations are in order.

Theology is similar. Theology- the exploration of ideas about God, is a construction site that is messy and noisy, then it is lovely and useful. Until it isn’t anymore, and renovations are again in order.

Fairly often, when I invite adults to take a Bible Study class or into a theological discussion group, someone will give me a variation of this statement: “I prefer the God of the New Testament to the God of the Old Testament.” I get it. The Old Testament, or Hebrew Scriptures, is a collection of amazing, holy, and interesting literature, with a lot of problematic content within.

A flood that wipes out everyone but Noah and family. Abraham taking his son Isaac up a mountain, because he thinks child sacrifice is what God wants. (It is not.) We could go on and on. In contrast, the New Testament gives us Jesus. Baby in a manger with angels singing, who grows into a revered teacher and healer who says: “Let the little children come to me.”

The simplistic gloss falls away when we get to today’s text from Luke 12 (verses 49-56, see below) where Jesus sounds anything but warm and fuzzy. In Luke 12, Jesus who is God goes off on a rant that is really tough to interpret. Jesus said, "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” That sounds horrifying to me, which is why I am very grateful for the scholarship of theologian Bruce Malina who writes that:

“To bring fire to the earth” refers to lighting an outdoor oven, called earth in many ancient texts of the era, including Matthew’s Gospel (5:13). It is an idiom for “getting things started”, or as we might say, let’s “start things cooking.” (Bruce D. Malina’s Social Science Commentary of the Synoptic Gospels) Isn’t that a useful piece of information?

Now, the rest is pretty much as it seems. These words describing family divisions sound shocking to me. I imagine that they were even more horrifying to the ancient listener. When Luke was writing this Gospel, families were disowning their adult children for converting to Christianity. The text likely hit close to home for many.

According to Malina’s research, the roles of father, mother, husband, wife, sister, brother determined everything about a person’s life, and the relationships were vastly different in an ancient agrarian society than the relationships we expect to have today. Here is one key difference: the strongest emotional ties in Jesus’ day existed between siblings, whereas today we might say that the most important and intimate relationship exists between married couples, or parent and child.

When people converted to Christianity, they likely left all of this behind. They joined a surrogate family of Christians and called one another “brother” and “sister” which were powerful words for people cut off from that most important relationship with their biological siblings. Their new surrogate family in Christ was a place of genuine refuge, creating a new identity in the face of family rejection.

The community hearing these words that sound so harsh to us today may have understood that Jesus came to get things cooking in a revolutionary way that directs the people of God toward love and justice. Those brothers and sisters rejected by their families may have nodded along and felt some comfort in that solidarity with their new Christian siblings. Or, they may have been as confused as we are about these pronouncements.

Whether we look at the Old or New Testaments, the Bible is a reflection of how people imagined God. Throughout the Bible, various voices tell us what God is thinking and doing and why, which of course, is a really difficult thing to get right for humans to get right, both ancient and modern. While I find some of the imaginings problematic, I respect the desire to construct a theology. To build something that will serve the people as they seek to be in a relationship with God. Despite the problematic content, the Bible contains all that we need to find salvation in God.

This said, I do not believe that God desires the death of sinners, nor do I believe that God commands us to invade and annihilate. I do believe that the people of God interpreted the events around them as best as they could, and pinned a whole lot of violence on God because they couldn’t figure out another way to make meaning of their circumstances.

When someone says to me: “I prefer the God of the New Testament to the God of the Old Testament, ” I understand that it is a way to quickly say how uncomfortable we are with the ways the ancient people imagined God. Some days I’m uncomfortable with how current voices imagine God, to be fair to the ancients. I urge us to lose this oversimplified phrase, if for no other reason than it is rude to our Jewish brothers and sisters. Perhaps we might say instead: “Reading the Bible is a challenge for me because of the problematic content it contains.”

Some of our favorite hymns have beautiful theological expressions, and like the Bible, some contain problematic imagery. We can still sing them without giving intellectual assent to every idea they contain, especially if they remind us of going to church with grandmother or the familiar tune uplifts our spirit.

I respect the need to move from an understanding of God as filled with wrath to an understanding of God as full of compassion, generous in grace and in goodness. Our images of God reflect our understanding of ourselves and vice versa, so as we understand God as compassionate, perhaps we grow in compassion as well.

Each of us is a theologian, constructing and deconstructing our ideas about God, and then renovating when we need a more productive way forward. For many years, universities taught courses called Systematic Theology, where students could learn the building blocks of God ideas and put them together into a coherent system of ideas- all neat and tidy. Some of the doctrines seemed a bit forced to fit together, because we do prefer those neat & tidy arrangements.

In response to this, the field of Constructive Theology emerged, where theologians such as Sallie McFague, Catherine Keller, and my own beloved theology professor Marion Grau encouraged students to acknowledge the constructed nature of all ideas about God. Ideas in the Old Testament and New Testament, ideas taught to us in Sunday school and hymns and creeds, ideas shared at dinner tables and on long hikes, ideas taking shape in our own hearts and minds right now that shape how we will live.

Let us invite the Holy Spirit into our hearts and minds to shape the ways that we explore and construct ideas about God. Let us embrace the interior theological construction site - messy and noisy, until it takes shape as something lovely and useful. This is our work together, to dismantle images of God that mirror the worst of humanity, and to instead see in God and in one another what is pure and infinite, true and life-giving.

——-

Luke 12:49-56
Jesus said, "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided:
father against son
and son against father,
mother against daughter
and daughter against mother,
mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law
 and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law."
He also said to the crowds, "When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, `It is going to rain'; and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, `There will be scorching heat'; and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?"

On Sunday, August 14th, the flowers on the altar were arranged by Nancy Williams and Gail Camalier,
and were given to the glory of God and in loving memory of
Armistead Williams,
Maria & Dutch Sjostrom,
David Sjostrom,
Jane Sjostrom Wyman, and
Allie & Glenn Scott.

On Sunday, August 7th, the flowers on the altar were arranged by Lee Lee Gioia, Erica Kuppin, and Emily Gioia, and
given to the glory of God and in loving memory of
Lee & Henry Wetter, Sr.;
Elise & Henry Morgan, Sr.;
Hunter Stratton;
Mr & Mrs. A.G. Seale; and,
Mr. and Mrs. M.T. Scrivener.

Curious about hymns, special music solo, and readings for worship tomorrow? Click the link to learn more!
https://conta.cc/3PBNXpD

Services on Sunday, August 14 at 8:30, (9:45), and 11:15 O how our hearts beat high with joy, whene'er we hear that glorious word St. Martin's in the Field PO Box 274 Biddeford Pool, ME 04006 Sunday worship schedule for Sunday, August 14 8:30 am Holy Euchar

Join us at 8:30 or 11:15 this morning for worship. If you are worshiping online, find the service at 11:15 live right here on Facebook.

Join us for worship!

The August vicar, the Rev. Dina Van Klaveren, has arrived in Biddeford Pool. Join us for worship on Sunday, August 7th at 8:30 or 11:15 am. All are welcome!

Greetings, friends in BPL!

You can find a couple of sermons from August here: goodnewslifestyle.net/sermons/nothing-wasted
and here:
https://goodnewslifestyle.net/sermons/peaceprosperity

Feel free to share with others.

See you in 2022, friends!

Peace & joy,
Dina
(August Vicar)

Nothing Wasted — good news lifestyle Preached August 15, 2021 at St. Marin’s-in-the-Field, Biddeford Pool & St. Philip’s-by-the-Sea, Fortunes Rocks

August 2021

A festive send off as organist Jan retires from both St. Martin’s in the Field and St. Philip’s by the Sea.

Welcoming Jackson into the household of God!

10 glimpses of beautiful St. Martin’s in the Field.

From the August Vicar-
Good morning & a blessed Lammas Day!

🥖Lammas Day is an ancient Anglo Saxon celebration of the first fruits of the grain harvest every August 1st. Today we offer ourselves in worship to God together, and share our experience of and longing for the Bread of Life. Join us!

😷Please wear a mask, as the public health recommendations have shifted. We aim to keep the community safe as we worship indoors.

Peace & joy,
Dina Van Klaveren