Field Notes: Stories from St. Martin's

Wow, God!

All week at Vacation Bible School the kids learned a "festal shout," two big words for whenever they saw how amazing God is. Wow, God! This VBS Sunday children's message starts there, with the line from our psalm, happy are the people who know the festal shout, and turns it loose on a place every kid in Keller knows: the Fort Worth Zoo. There is a marker at the zoo that tells a story most people walk right past. Long ago a flood washed the very first Fort Worth Zoo away, but the people found safe, higher ground and started it over, and it became the oldest zoo in Texas, still open today. That one little sign carries almost everything the kids learned this week. God made everything. God knows everything. God is our safe place. And God is forever. The loudest Wow of all comes last, the one we save for the end: God is love, shown on a cross and an empty tomb, a love that lasts forever and ever. A short, joyful message for the whole family, with plenty of room for the kids to shout along.

Buried Twice

Outside Pilot Point there is a cemetery called St. John's, the oldest Black cemetery in Denton County. Around four hundred people are buried there, and only about twenty graves still have a stone. Someone working to save it said these people have been buried twice. Once in the ground, and once by being forgotten. This short homily from our early service starts on that ground and lets Paul answer it. The wages of sin is death, he writes, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Not a better wage. A gift. Left to ourselves, we are dead and forgotten, and no marker holds that back forever. But God knows every name, even the ones the stones have lost, and he does not only remember the dead. He raises them. Eternal, abundant, forever, the life of the age to come, freely given at the table. Reading: Romans 6:12-23 (Proper 6) Part of Roman Roads, a summer series through Paul's letter to the Romans, each week paired with a historical marker from the roads around us.

The Bad News That Makes the Good News Good

Three historical markers stand within a few steps of each other on a trail in North Arlington. One remembers a peacemaker who freed captives and brought them home. One remembers a raid that attacked a village. One remembers a treaty that opened a people's land to be taken. A mercy, a killing, and a displacement, all on the same small patch of ground. That is where this sermon begins.It turns out Paul stands his people on honest ground too. Romans 5 does not arrive until he has spent chapters proving that no one is righteous, not one. He tells the worst of the story first. And only then comes the line that changes everything: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.This is not a sermon about cleaning up your past in order to be loved. It is the announcement that the love came first, and that is the only thing that ever makes honesty survivable. We can tell the whole truth about ourselves, and about our history, because we are not justified by the story being clean. We are justified by faith. In a year when the country is arguing over how to tell its own story, that turns out to be good news.Part of Roman Roads, a summer series walking straight through Paul's letter to the Romans, one passage at a time, each week paired with a real Texas historical marker standing on the roads around us.Reading: Romans 5:1-8 (Proper 6)Markers: Jesse Chisholm, the Site of Bird's Fort, and the Sloan-Journey Expedition, North Arlington

God Keeps Promises to the Dead

A land company promised poor settlers nearly two million acres of North Texas. For some of them the promise fell apart and left only graves on the prairie. That is where this sermon begins, at a roadside marker in Grapevine, and it turns out to be where Paul begins too. In Romans 4 he points us to a promise made to a man whose body was as good as dead and a womb that was closed, and he tells us why that promise held when so many others break. It never rested on anyone's strength. It rested on grace. This is not a lesson about having enough faith. It is the announcement that the God who makes the promise is the God who gives life to the dead, in a closed womb, in a house full of mourners, and in a sealed tomb outside Jerusalem. Part of Roman Roads, a summer series walking straight through Paul's letter to the Romans, one passage at a time, each week paired with a real Texas historical marker standing on the roads around us. Readings: Romans 4:13-25 and Matthew 9:18-26Marker: The Peters Colony in Tarrant County and the Hedgcoxe War (Grapevine and The Colony)

God is the Center

You leave vacation days on the table. You overschedule the summer. You live like the whole thing falls apart if you stop. This Trinity Sunday sermon is the Gospel’s answer to that exhaustion: you are not the main character of the story. God is.Drawing on Genesis 1, Psalm 8, 2 Corinthians 13, and the Great Commission in Matthew 28, we walk through what the Trinity actually means for a tired life. The Father creates you and calls you good before you do anything. The Son redeems you, and nothing you do or fail to do adds to or subtracts from the cross. The Spirit sends you, not because God needs you, but because God invites you. The outcome was never yours to secure.You are a creature made in love. A sinner held by grace. A servant accompanied by presence. The story does not depend on you. You can rest.St. Martin’s Episcopal Church | Keller, TexasReadings: Genesis 1:1-2:4a, Psalm 8, 2 Corinthians 13:11-13, Matthew 28:16-20