What has been labeled, “The Lord’s Prayer” (aka, Pater Noster, or the Our Father) is found only in Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels (Luke’s version is shorter).  The closing, or doxology, (“For Thine is the kingdom,” etc) is not found in either version.  Some Church manuscripts from the fourth century include it while others do not.  Roman Catholics have never included the doxology in their liturgy, but uniformly the Orthodox branch of Christendom has prayed this concluding phrase.  The English wording of the Lord’s Prayer (used by both Anglicans and Catholics) was the one first mandated by Henry VIII while the English church still communed with Rome, and it did not include the doxology.  Later translations replaced “which art” with “who art” and “in earth” with “on earth.”  The first few editions of the Book of Common Prayer did not add the doxology.  However, during the reign of Elizabeth I and a resurgence in the desire to rid the Church of England from Catholic vestiges, the Lord’s Prayer was changed to include the doxology.  The Lord’s Prayer in most instances in our Book of Common Prayer concludes with the doxology.  However, when it is used in our Compline Service (pp 132-133), it is omitted.
~Dr. Gil Haas, Saint Augustine of Canterbury Episcopal Church, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

John 4:1-26
Now Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that he was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John-- although in fact it was not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples. So he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee.

Now he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon.
When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)

The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)
Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

 “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water?  Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?”

Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”

He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.”

 “I have no husband,” she replied.

Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.”

“Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”

“Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”

The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”

Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”

Meditation
Jesus meets the Samaritan woman by asking her for water.  She refuses because he is a Jew.  Jesus then explains that he can give her living water, that will spring into eternal life, and she will never thirst again.  He explains that she worships what she doesn’t know but we (Jews) worship what we do know and salvation is from the Jews.  He goes on to say that a time would come when true worshipers would worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth and they are the kind the Father seeks.  “God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”  She said she knew the Messiah was coming and he would explain everything, he tells her “I, the one speaking to you-I am he.”  When we know Jesus, we know God and the Spirit, we know the truth.

Prayer
Dear God, thank you for the living water, the truth, provided by your Son, Jesus, Amen.

 Submitted by Elizabeth Wallingford, Saint Augustine of Canterbury Episcopal Church, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Christians often employ a doxology as a song of praise to the Holy Trinity.  In keeping with this tradition, the final stanza of several hymns incorporate a doxology format.  The Gloria in Excelsis Deo, also known as the Greater Doxology, is the hymn that angels sang at Christ’s birth.  The Gloria Patri, which is known as the Lesser Doxology, is literally translated from Latin as “Glory (be) to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost.  As it was in the beginning, and now, and always, and to the ages of ages.  Amen.”  “Always” is often rendered in English as “and ever shall be” with the final phrase rendered “world without end”.  A modern version of this doxology is phrased: “Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit; as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be for ever.  Amen.”    Another doxology in widespread English use is often referred to as “The Common Doxology”.  It begins with the well known phrase, “Praise God, from whom all blessings flow”.   These words, when sung to the tune “Old 100th”, frequently serve as a dedication of offerings at Sunday worship. 
~Dr. Gil Haas, Saint Augustine of Canterbury Episcopal Church, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
August 22, 2021
John 6:56-69
 
Bread, bread and more bread! We’ve been hearing about bread for several Sundays now! We are overflowing with bread stories, which begs the question, “Why so many repetitive, overflowing bread stories?” What more can we say about bread?
 
Through these teachings we are reminded that Jesus is the Bread of Life. And, like all these overflowing bread stories, we want Jesus to overflow in our lives. It seems like the wisdom of the early church leaders who structured our Sunday readings, is purposefully causing us to over-focus on the bread of life! This growing repetition is almost like yeast causing the dough to rise and take on larger proportions in our life; taking up such space in our readings and in our life that it cannot be overlooked but must be dealt with!
 
In these readings, we are speaking about the physical and the spiritual: The physical bread baked in an oven or on a hot stone, feeding our physical bodies. The spiritual bread we call Jesus, nourishing our spiritual beings. During the Eucharist, the priest blesses the bread, makes it holy; elevates this body of bread, and breaks it. This blessed bread of life is broken just as Jesus’ own body, blessed and holy, was raised up on a cross, and broken. This breaking of bread is not solely a representation of Jesus’ sacrifice of being broken, but the bread of life is broken open to us as an invitation to follow, to step up and step in. When the physical body of Jesus is no longer with us on earth, it is our time, our turn to be the Body of Christ on earth. We step in to do the ministry of Jesus on earth.
 
Recalling that Jesus took time away from the crowds that followed him so that he may be in solitude and prayer with his Father, then seeing Jesus join his spiritual community of apostles to move out to do his ministry, the renowned author, Henri Nouwen[i], identifies three disciplines for ministry based on these actions of Jesus. For us, it is a journey sustained by the Bread of Life, and it is a journey that moves us from solitude to community, and on to ministry.
 
Nouwen says the first discipline is prayer, developing a discipline of solitude or communion with God in prayer. Recalling that Jesus accomplished this discipline by removing himself from the crowds to find solitude, a time for communion with God, we also can feast on Jesus, the Bread of Life, in our time of being with Him. This communion is a different prayer form than simply asking Jesus to supply or fix things, but is a beginning point of being with God, of developing relationship with Jesus. If we are without an established prayer practice, our ministry will suffer—we will suffer; those we minister with and those we minister to will suffer.
 
After establishing a routine prayer practice, the second discipline is recognizing and gathering together in community, a place of spiritual belonging. It is good to recognize here that there is a difference between a social community and a spiritual community. Spiritual community could happen at church, but it could also happen in friendships and family. It could happen in 12-step programs or any number of places we find spiritual belonging.
 
Nouwen acknowledges that, “Community is the place where the person you least want to live with always lives.”  So, community is not always sugar and spice, but probably will include the hard work of acceptance—which again, is a significant difference between a social community and a spiritual one. Being in a social community it might be easy to distance ourselves from the folks we don’t want to be around. Being in spiritual community can require the hard work of recognizing that “I am the beloved of God, and you are the beloved of God. Together we can build a place of welcome.” As a Facebook meme recently reminded me, “You will never look into the eyes of another that God does not love.”  Whoever you see, whoever you encounter, God loves them and holds them as God’s beloved—just as God holds you as God’s beloved.
 
Because community requires us to meet the other where they are, community requires us to let go of our self-will and really live for others. Without belonging to a spiritual community, Nouwen writes, “we become individualistic and at times, egocentric.”  I’m sure that those of you who have found spiritual community in this home of St. Augustine’s find these aspects of community familiar: This is a place of spiritual belonging; there likely is someone here who, at first glance, you don’t want here; and you have surrendered yourself from individualistic needs and cares, from egocentricity, to care for and accept that person as God’s own.
 
In addition to these characteristics, forgiveness and celebration are also aspects of spiritual community. Life in this community helps us recognize that God is the only true source of unconditional and boundless love. When we forgive, we recognize that the offending person is not God and therefore does not have absolute unconditional or boundless love to offer, but will love—even at their best—in a flawed, human way. We’ll do well to remember that they very likely are doing the best they can given their life circumstances, personal burdens and limitations. When we can forgive, we can celebrate the other’s short-comings that make them just as human as we are, but we also celebrate the gifts and graces they possess which are truly reflections of God.
 
So, the first two disciplines of prayer and being in spiritual community are building blocks that bring us to the third discipline, the discipline of ministry or compassion. Likely we all agree that to minister to someone is to attend to them; to care for them; to comfort and support them. These same words could also describe compassion, too. And to be sure, we are making no distinction between the ministry of clergy or the ministry of lay people. We are talking today about ministry, the ministry of all of us.
 
Nouwen writes that Jesus’ ministry flows from his compassion—a result of prayer and living in spiritual community. As a result, Jesus didn’t pick and choose who he could help and who he couldn’t help. Jesus helped everyone. And, just as Jesus was sent into the world to share his compassion and heal through it, we are also sent as Jesus’ followers into the world to share our compassion and heal through it. As such, ministry cannot simply be an activity we try to do on our own, but ministry is the fruit that blossoms when we find our gifts and offer what we have. This fruit naturally blossoms when we are living in communion with God—being nourished by the true bread of life, bringing Jesus into our lives in all ways, when we know that we are God’s beloved; and when we make ourselves available for service. When we do these things, we cannot do other than minister. Ministry is the overflow of your love for God and others.
 
Worth repeating: Ministry is the overflow of your love for God and others. I have mentioned that I was a deacon for nearly 21 years prior to being ordained a priest. In about the fifth year of my deaconate, I visited with then Bishop Robert Moody about what I perceived as a call to the priesthood. He sent me to a pastoral counseling center in Dallas for a preliminary assessment. In talking with a psychologist there, I was asked a simple question: “Why do you want to do this?” I was a little surprised, but to a simple question, I had a simple answer, “Out of a sense of duty,” was my honest reply. This was an answer that had been formed in me from religious experiences since early childhood. The psychologist’s reply surprised me even further, and caused me to put on the brakes hard: “Don’t you think this calling should be out of a sense of love?” …a timid “yes” was my response. Sorting out this response took another dozen years of discernment.
 
Similarly, I was recently asked if I knew the difference between a channel and a reservoir?  This wise person said that he hears a lot of people say that they “want to be channels for God’s love.” He said, “You know, what a channel does is, it provides a conduit for something to run through it—whether it’s water or electricity or God’s love. The channel is a means to an end. It may have an effect on the receiver, but there’s little effect on the channel.”
 
“A reservoir, on the other hand, is a pool—it must be filled up first, such as filled with God’s love, and then overflow. What overflows is ministry. It is God’s love overflowing.” From this little analogy, we can clearly take away that ministry is not some technique that you perform on another—and when that does pass for ministry, it doesn’t work. Ministry is our love of God, overflowing to others. And this describes all of our shared ministry.
 
The bread of life is an important aspect of that overflowing love. It is this very overflowing love that Jesus had that caused him to minister ceaselessly and eventually to become an offering and sacrifice to God on our behalf. When we eat this bread and drink this cup, when we bring Jesus figuratively, spiritually and concretely into our very beings, into our lives, we bring Jesus’ love into ourselves. When we couple this act with a disciplined life of prayer and a discipline of living in spiritual community, we move ourselves into that boundless love of God; love so unbounded that we must share it with others.
 
Amen.


[i] Nouwen, H. (2006) HarperCollins books. Spiritual Direction: Wisdom for the long walk of faith.

~Rev. Canon Tony Moon, Saint Augustine of Canterbury Episcopal Church, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

John 3:22-36
After this, Jesus and his disciples went out into the Judean countryside, where he spent some time with them, and baptized. Now John also was baptizing at Aenon near Salim, because there was plenty of water, and people were coming and being baptized. (This was before John was put in prison.) An argument developed between some of John’s disciples and a certain Jew over the matter of ceremonial washing. They came to John and said to him, “Rabbi, that man who was with you on the other side of the Jordan—the one you testified about—look, he is baptizing, and everyone is going to him.”
To this John replied, “A person can receive only what is given them from heaven. You yourselves can testify that I said, ‘I am not the Messiah but am sent ahead of him.’ The bride belongs to the bridegroom. The friend who attends the bridegroom waits and listens for him, and is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom’s voice. That joy is mine, and it is now complete. He must become greater; I must become less.”
The one who comes from above is above all; the one who is from the earth belongs to the earth, and speaks as one from the earth. The one who comes from heaven is above all. He testifies to what he has seen and heard, but no one accepts his testimony. Whoever has accepted it has certified that God is truthful. For the one whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for God gives the Spirit without limit. The Father loves the Son and has placed everything in his hands. Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on them.

Meditation
John was sent before Jesus to spread the good word about God and his Son, and to baptize anyone who wanted to know God and to walk in his ways.  When Jesus was baptizing by the river, where John was also baptizing, John said “I am not the Messiah but am sent ahead of him…The friend who attends the bridegroom waits and listens for him, and is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom’s voice. That joy is mine, and it is now complete.”

Prayer
Dear God, thank you for sending your Son to bring heavenly knowledge to the world so we may have eternal life in your kingdom, Amen

 Submitted by Elizabeth Wallingford, Saint Augustine of Canterbury Episcopal Church, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

This is Our Story
From ancient times the gospel lessons have been collected in a large book with an ornate cover, often illustrated and adorned with icons and jewels.  This book if called a Gospel Book or Evangelion.  The concept of an ornate Gospel Book was restored with the 1979 Book of Common Prayer which suggested that the lessons and gospel “be read from a book or books of appropriate size and dignity” (p 406).  From the 4th century Gospel Books were produced as “display books” for ceremonial and ornamental purposes.  When carried in procession, the Gospel Book is held as high as possible, and this function is often performed by the deacon.  At the time of the gospel lesson, the deacon (who before proclaiming the gospel receives the presiding priest’s blessing) then processes the book to the ambo (i.e., lectern).  If incense is used, the Gospel Book is censed by the deacon before the reading.  The Second Council of Nicaea in 787 decreed the icons, crosses, and gospel books may be venerated as sacred images, just as the incarnate Christ is the image of the invisible God.  At the gospel’s conclusion, the celebrant kisses the beginning of the gospel text. 
~Dr. Gil Haas, Saint Augustine of Canterbury Episcopal Church, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 

~I grew up with a mom that fixed hair in the funeral home/mortuary world.  I was around death a lot as a kid/young adult.  I went to a lot of funerals as a kid because of this, I visited a lot of gravesites. One of the things that I remember from my childhood is that we had one graveyard in my neck of the Oklahoma plains. We had lots of different cemeteries; family, community, ethnic group, Catholic, etcetera but only one graveyard. Wait, there’s a difference between cemeteries and graveyards? Cemeteries are not a part of  a church property but a graveyard it shares the same grounds as the church. I think about it though, Imagine every time you went to your church you were confronted with the gravestones of those who had died.  

They might have been family, friends, neighbors, or people you weren’t especially fond of. How might that experience/practice form you as a disciple? How might this continual confrontation with the inevitability of death inform how you live? I am sure that some of you might be thinking right now. Dear me Lance, are you okay, you are talking a lot about death,  do we need to call your therapist? I get it, death for many of us is; understandably uncomfortable to talk about, it is a distilled encapsulation of grief, fear, loss, and pain. It is however something we need to talk about. And If the church isn’t the place we can talk about these things, where is the place? 

Our culture both church and secular, has made death a faraway thing, a sterile thing, we hide it away and shun talking about it.  We spell it out in front of our children.  We spell it out like it is profanity’s x, which only works as long as your kids are illiterate. We change words to make it more palatable/less stark. They passed away,  they passed on, they were called home. In our awkwardness we try to treat death with humor, they kicked the bucket, they bought the farm, they are taking the long dirt nap. None of us has a fixed beginning or end point, all our stories begin and end the same. The fact of the matter is this, time is real.   

Sometimes times we feel like time is running out….. Because it is, your time is running out; all of our time is running out. One of the inexorable facts of life is the reality that our time will end, which is a poetic way of saying you are going to die. Everyone we know and love and/or hate is going to meet the same thing, death. So Fr Lance where is the hope, where is the good news for us in the midst of this?

Our passage from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians that we lift up today, is about engaging the lives we have seriously and with intention.  “Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil.” This epistle comes to us reminding us we have but one precious life to live and we are to make the most of it. But we easily get distracted and caught up in the wrong things and lose focus on the important things.
 
However with discipline and practice we can focus our lives so that we can live fully and purposefully as engaged conscientious  disciples. Paul goes onto write in this letter… “So do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery." This is oft used as license to call for the nonconsumption of alcohol , that very narrow understanding of these words robs all the power and beauty from it.  

This isn’t just a call for temperance/abolition it is a profoundly more exciting/invigorating call for Christ followers to  cast aside distractions  and live fully into their calling. This is an injunction/teaching to flee from anything(which might be the abuse of alcohol) that causes you to live lives that are wasted, unproductive, focused on the wrong thing.  The letter to the Ephesians is a reminder for us to practice always living into and remembering the beautiful life giving  calling of God that has been placed on all we disciples of Jesus Christ. 

We must be about something for the sake of the world that is different from the peculiar prevailing souls destroying narrative that teaches us to focus on entertainment, novelty, and self promotion.  


Our lives ought be a testimony of the power of God at work in our own stories.  How do we do this?  

This isn’t about telling others through crafty intellectual gymnastics; it is about engaging in life that speaks to the power and experience of God that you have had. Living authentically and loving well shows far more about your values than any utterances from your lips. So how do we focus on the important things and clarify our ongoing experience of the grace of God and the fellowship of the church?

One of the best ways for us to make the most of the time we have is to purposefully engage in the practice of Memento Mori.  
Memento Mori is the very ancient intentional practice of remembering and meditating on one’s own death.  
Through the intentional practice of making space daily/weekly to remember one’s own death, it brings into focus the rest of the life that we have. Remembering death often—not ignoring it, hiding ourselves from it, sugar coating it, or facing it only after someone we know dies brings us to a new kind of spiritual health, rooted in the death and resurrection of Jesus.

As Christian disciples of Jesus we are to be about “making the most of every opportunity” and the practice of remembering often our own death helps us to see ourselves, others, and God clearly and differently.  
Our practices as individuals and as a body help us bring into focus the important things in this life. As we disciples of Jesus Christ grow more honest about our finitude and the inevitability of  death the more we will enjoy life.

A deepening understanding of death shapes how we live, and the more we interact/remember/work with the reality of our own death we can cast aside the petty grievances and hang ups of life because we will remember what is important.  
We will see life with a different set to lenses and begin to focus more on what matter, loving God, loving others, and healing the world. We will enjoy more what we have and not what we don’t have.
Two certainties exist…..Life is a gift, death is inevitable.  As disciples we make the most of every opportunity  because the days are fleeting. Live for eternity. Love Jesus, love others with abandon, forgive and be forgiven, give sacrificially, be humble, be gentle with others. Anything less is a waste of time.
In short, live as if you were dying. Because you are, we all are. AMEN.
     
~Fr. Lance Schmitz, Saint Augustine of Canterbury Episcopal Church, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
​

This is Our Story

An antependium is a hanging cover, and, when applied to an altar, it is called a frontal.  The frontal is often made of silk or brocade cloth and matches the liturgical color of the church season.  Altar hangings were once on all sides of the altar.  However, as altars were placed against back walls of churches in the later middle ages, only the front of the altar was visible to the congregation.  Frontals may also be made of precious metal, decorated wood, gems, enamels, and ivories.  When the front of an altar is elaborately carved or painted, the additional cloth altar frontal normally reaches down only a few inches from the top of the altar table; this is called a “frontlet”.  A Jacobean frontal will cover the entire altar.  The Anglican Canons of 1603 order that the Lord’s Table should be “covered, in time of Divine Service, with a carpet of silk or other decent stuff, thought meet by the Ordinary of the place”.  Covers for lecterns and pulpits are generally similar to a frontlet, normally covering the desk of the lectern or pulpit and hanging down about a foot or longer in front.  

​~Dr. Gil Haas, Saint Augustine of Canterbury Episcopal Church, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

John 6:35, 41-51
Ephesians 4:25-5:2
Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
August 8th, 2021
 
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
It was an old wooden farmhouse out in the middle of an Oklahoma wheat field. The house was simple. You enter a mudroom with a short hallway where a deepfreeze was housed, and passing by the one bathroom in the house you enter the kitchen. Off the kitchen were a living room and three small bedrooms. I remember the kitchen had sheet linoleum on the floor, and the other floors were wood. Being in the middle of the wheat field, the house was quiet. It was just so quiet out there—maybe all that was to be heard was a slight breeze coming off the wheatfields whipping through the open screened windows, curtains rolling in the breeze.
This was the home of my older brother’s in-laws. I don’t know how long they’d lived there, but I do know that my sister-in-law grew up there, and the house felt like a comfortable old chair that had been set in for decades. My sister-in-law’s dad was an old farmer, but then, I was only 12, so he may have been 45 or 50. It was her mother, Hattie, that I remember best. Before our family drove the 30 or 40 miles to their farm, Hattie would have been up preparing ducks and chickens for lunch, vegetables from the garden, and baking cakes and pies and bread. Hattie was one of those farm wives who was absolutely certain that if you didn’t eat everything in sight, you’d surely fall over from starvation. “Here! Finish this pie,” she’d insist after I’d already had a large lunch and too much dessert. I’d look up to see that she was talking about “just finishing up” half a peach pie. “Oh, no thank you! I couldn’t,” I’d politely protest, knowing full well that my little 12-year-old voice could never convey strongly enough my desire to not pop on the spot. Before my words of protest had left my mouth, however, Hattie already had a slotted spatula under a quarter of the pie, heaving it onto my plate. Resistance was futile. I knew I needed to be prepared to eat this and then quickly slip out of the chair to get away before the other quarter of the pie landed on my plate—something Hattie would do almost absent-mindedly as an aside as she talked with my Mom. Food was Hattie’s love language. Feeding those she loved was her way of showing love. Of course, I was too young to know that then. I just thought she was a nice woman who liked to get rid of leftovers and saw my stomach as the most direct route.
Food is a theme that shows up again in today’s Gospel lesson, just as it has for the last few weeks. We’ve been having a string of these food-focused lessons—including the feeding of the 5,000, the crowd seeking out Jesus for more food, and today, where Jesus tells his followers that he is the living bread.
To get to this Gospel lesson of living bread, let’s enter first through the Epistle reading where St. Paul writes to the Ephesians about a “rule of life.” He tells them who they are to be and he tells them what they must do to live this new life in Christ. As Christ followers, he speaks to us, as well, giving us this rule of life.
In essence, St. Paul tells us to put away falsehoods and speak truth to others. He acknowledges that we may have feelings of anger, but we shouldn’t let that lead to sin. He suggests that anger should be short-lived; we should not bring the anger of one day into the next day. “Thieves,” Paul directs, are to give up stealing and do honest labor, giving to the less fortunate from their wages. And here, Paul likely is not specifically addressing those whose job description is “thief”—like bandits lurking in the dark of night with little racoon masks tied around their eyes, but Paul is addressing any of us who take or covet anything that is not rightfully ours.
St. Paul cautions us to not speak ill, but to build up others, letting our words give grace to them. Similarly, Paul bluntly tells us to keep away from negative emotions and negative actions in favor of being kind, tenderhearted and forgiving. It’s almost like Paul is among the world’s first psychologists, promoting solid values and behaviors. He acknowledges that poor behavior comes back on us when Paul states, “we are members of one another”—acknowledging that our lives are all interconnected, woven like a fabric. And, when we cause damage to the fabric, we cause damage to ourselves.
Paul’s teaching to these followers in Ephesus comes close to sounding secular until we come to the concluding verse, “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us, and gave himself for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” Paul is no longer speaking secular psychology or social psychology; he is no longer simply speaking of holding honorable values, but is casting his vision for Christ followers. He’s saying, ‘here’s a rule of life for you: “Imitate God—see through God’s eyes; hear through God’s ears; think with God’s mind.” “Live in love” which is another way of saying, “live in God.” “Love as Christ loves us.” “Live as selflessly as the one who gave himself up for us...” “Walk in love,” or “Walk as God.” This seems to sum it up: Walk in love.
Just as St. Paul tells us through his words to the Ephesians who we are to be and what we are to do, St. John in today’s Holy Gospel, gives us the “how.” How can I do that?  How can I walk in love? Just how can I get there?
St. John records Jesus saying, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” Essentially, whoever joins with me—sees through my eyes, hears through my ears; thinks with my mind, will be spiritually fed. You will never be spiritually hungry or thirsty—a human condition which can be every bit just as real and difficult as physical hunger and thirst.
The words, “Whoever comes to me” kind of conjures up the image of consulting with someone. I’ve had lots of clients as a therapist and consultant who “came to me.” We’d do our work, and then we’d part company. This kind of encounter is not what Jesus has in mind, but unfortunately, is too often how we interact with Jesus--I’ll check in during this crisis, and then Jesus and I will depart from one another. To re-orient from checking in, to that of living a life with Christ, to living as Christ, we must focus on Jesus’ statement, “I am the bread of life.”
In these words, St. John is setting the stage for what is to come at the Last Supper when Jesus tells his followers to take this bread, which Jesus has identified as his body, and eat it: Consume me. Let me nourish you; let me be in you, just as the Father is in me.
As we’re getting clearer on what we are to do and about who we are to become, today’s Gospel lesson offers the key to making these things happen: Join with me. Be in communion with me. Become as I am. …The what and the who will then fall into place.
 
You heard that Hattie’s love language was food. This is true for Jesus, also. Jesus wants us to feast on him, to bring him into our being physically, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually, so that our whole being will be filled up with Jesus. Jesus will not force more food onto us, but invites us to be nourished with him. The decision is ours to make. So, let us enjoy the feast and live this life in Christ that the Father calls us to! As our Psalmist says, “Taste and see that the Lord is good; happy are those who take refuge in him.”
Amen. 

~Rev. Anthony Moon, Saint Augustine of Canterbury Episcopal Church, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

This is Our Story
The disagreement that split Christendom asunder concerned a single word: “Filioque” (fil·ee′oh·kwee) which is translated as “and the Son”.  Filioque was added to the Nicene Creed at the Council of Toledo in 589.  The filioque clause stated that the Holy Spirit proceeds not only from the Father, but from the Father and the Son.  The Eastern Orthodox churches condemned the addition as contrary to the Council of Chalcedon in 451 that barred changes in the NIcene Creed.  The inclusion of the phrase was one of the major reasons for the Great Schism of 1054 that wrenched apart Eastern and Western Christianity.  A second point of disagreement that fueled the split included the use of unleavened bread at Eucharist by the Western church, while the Eastern Orthodox only used bread with yeast as a symbol of Christ’s New Covenant with His church.  The final point of controversy was the claim by Rome of Papal Supremacy.  The Lambeth Conference recommended in 1988 that filioque be dropped by all churches within the Anglican Communion to foster relations with Orthodox churches.  The 1994 Episcopal General Convention resolved to delete the filioque phrase from the NIcene Creed in our next Book of Common Prayer. 

~ Dr. Gil Haas, Saint Augustine of Canterbury Episcopal Church, Oklahoma City