<html><body><div>I've been wrestling and editing this for a while, and will continue to do so!</div><div><br></div><div>Here's part 1</div><div><br></div><div>Bob</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>
<p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'>THE
EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF ST. ALBAN, ALBANY<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>THE EIGHTEENTH SUNDAY
AFTER PENTECOST</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'>EXODUS
20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>PROPER 22a</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'>PHILIPPIANS
3:4b-14<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>8<sup>th</sup>
OCTOBER, 2017</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'>MATTHEW
21:33-46<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>PSALM 19</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;">
</span></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>How do you feel about your faith?
How do we grow to understand that God is present, even in the dirt, and shame,
and smell? How we begin to do this is a sign of the growth of our faith. It
doesn’t all come at once, of course. The blinds aren’t taken away fully – they
never are till we take that final step. But we keep the faith!</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>In weeks like the one we’re still
experiencing, we wonder about our faith.</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>We all wish that there were simple
answers, just as we wish that there were simple solutions. Yet when stressed in
any way we can turn to faith – even people who’ve avoided faith studiously
throughout their days leading up to tragedy, and disaster, and evil. In 2009,
when Flight 1549 was brought down safely on the Hudson River and all were taken
off alive, “Passengers who said they hadn’t believed in God nevertheless prayed
to him on the plane, then publicly thanked him for sparing their lives.” <sup>1</sup>
When confronted by fear, by shock, by any sort of unknown, by evil, it seems
that we all turn to faith of one sort of another. There must be something
embedded in us so deeply, something that some may not ever have occasion to
look for it, or allow it to surface in their lives; there must be something in
us which cries out in terror or in joy to God. Maybe this is what various
writers of biblical stories call “the image of God in us”. Maybe this is the
incredible gift which God gives us, in the hope that we’ll use it frequently.</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>Is it this which prompts our faith,
even when we don’t know what it looks like, or even acknowledge that it’s there?
<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>How incredible of God to give
us such a life-affirming basis for our journeys, and then to allow us to look –
or not look – for it as we will! The most precious thing we own, and we take it
so much for granted. Perhaps if all were more aware of it us, we might take it
out for a spin, kick the tyres, check the oil and battery, put in some fuel;
perhaps if we became willing to be open, to check out God’s image and our
faith, then we might find ways in which our faith, the hope of our life in God,
could grow stronger. Perhaps if we, if all humanity, let our faith out in our
lives more, then we may be able to find ways in which we can discover God
working in and through us, reaching out to touch us in all the “slings and
arrows of outrageous fortune”. But, alas, we’ve a tendency not to let our faith
off the leash to explore how God may help us draw closer. I’m just like others
who tend to keep any thoughts about my faith on a very short leash. So our
faith may be prevented from developing.</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>Faith, then, is one of many things which we <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><u>MUST</u></b> talk about, for own health
as well as that of others. Of course, it won’t stop evil. But it’ll help us
face up to it and live through it. Our faith will get stronger, changing and
deepening as it meets with and interacts with both the good and the bad in the
world.</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>But why do we not talk about it? Why
don’t we push our faith, to let it grow?</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>I don’t know if it’s a generational
thing, but my mother repeated to my sister and me over and over again, “Ages,
wages, politics and religion are nobody’s business but your own.” So much so
that, until she died and the head stone was carved, I had no idea whatsoever in
what year she’d been born. And as for her faith – I knew she believed, and that
she attended church every Sunday, but how did it help her?</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>How much does this shortchange those
who would seem to be the most important people in our lives? How much does this
deprive our spouses, or our children and grandchildren of what we hold most
important and most valuable to us? If we like, we can even use this as a way of
teaching our children and grandchildren that there are reasons why we aren’t
totally free with facts and thoughts with any old Vladimir and Lyudmilla. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><u>NOT</u></b> to talk to our family
members, no matter how extended they may seem from us, deprives not only them,
but also ourselves from the possibility of actually <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal"><u>LIVING</u></b> our faith. If you and I <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal"><u>DON’T</u></b> talk about our faith, about what we feel a lifetime of
living with God is continuing to teach us, then who is going to talk to them
about it? </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>Seriously, there’s a vital need to
talk to those whom we feel we can trust best to be honest with us when we talk
about our faith. It’s not simply a matter of saying, “This is what I believe,
take it or leave it.” I think we’ve all reached sufficient maturity to be able
to say, “Here’s where I am right now. This is how the Bible speaks to me. This
is what my involvement with this congregation; this is what my own personal
experience teaches me about God and about living into God’s values. But it’s a
journey.” I’m sure we’ve all travelled far enough on the pilgrimage which is
life to be able to realise that what we thought we understood as a five, or
ten, or even twenty-year-old; where we were in our young adulthood may well
have set out the pattern we hoped to follow. I’m sure that we’ve all been led
by God to discover that we can <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><u>NEVER</u></b>
know all about God, or even where we and God may end up. Life, in all its
mysteries, is filled with changes, with growth, I pray, with deeper and deeper
revelations about where we stand with God, and how God wishes us to discover
how endless are the possibilities of God’s love.</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><u>NOT</u></b>
to share this with our children, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><u>OR</u></b>
our spouse, would seem to me to be cutting them out of how the process of
engaging life’s journey is going for you. That, and not witnessing to them that
changing one’s mind, changing course, no matter how radically, is quite within
the realm of possibility in God’s wishes for you and me. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal"><u>NOT</u></b> to share that could actually be harmful.</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>None of this is to say that what you
and I think must be how our family members think; nor is how they think to be
how you and I think. But it <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><u>DOES</u></b>
open the glorious possibility of discovering new lines of thought; new ways of
approaching difficulties and dangers, for you, for me, and for those with whom
we discuss this. At the very least, this lets younger, perhaps less
experienced, members of our families know how we arrived at the decisions we’re
making right now. It opens our own and other peoples’ minds to the use of rational
thinking, and how that colours and strengthens our faith, our sense of who God
is and how God longs that we’ll live.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><br></span></p><p style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style='margin: 0px; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;'><br></span></p>
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