A couple of weeks ago my family spent a few days in Washington, DC, and as is always the case when I travel I love to search the local record stores for unusual finds. This time, I found a conversation.

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ou have to be careful back here… this music will make you weep.”

I looked up from the rack of CD’s I’d been flipping through in the jazz section at The Melody Record Shop, a classic little independent store on Washington’s Connecticut Avenue, to be met by the eyes of a thin, graying African-American man.

“Yeh, I know,” I replied, though given the casual, almost distracted nature of my search through the discs, my reply was maybe just a little too automatic. He was on to something, this guy.

“Like this,” he said, holding up a copy of Bill Evans’ The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961. “This man can play.”

“I love Bill Evans,” I responded, “particularly from that era. I don’t have the complete sessions, but I’ve got the single disc edition, which I’ve listened to a lot.” And so we talked a bit about the music we each owned, and what moved us. He seemed to like the fact that my tastes were mostly rooted in the 1950s and 60s. And then the conversation shifted.

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a sermon on Jeremiah 2:4-13 and on Luke 14:1,7-14

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ear what the prophet Jeremiah spoke to Israel, five hundred years before the birth of Jesus:

Listen, as Jeremiah asks the nation, “Why have you forgotten the story in which you were born, the way of life that is true life? How could you have forgotten our collective birth story, of being freed from bondage in Egypt and carried through the desert, sustained by manna and by living water flowing in the midst of the arid wilderness?”

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a sermon preached on Isaiah 1:1, 10-20

In our reading from the prophet Isaiah, we have heard hard words for a hot summer night; words challenging all of the ritual, liturgical and priestly practices of the people of Judah, of the city of Jerusalem.

Jerusalem the holy city, set at the heart of what was meant to be a holy land and a holy people, now characterized as Sodom and Gomorrah; as being cut from the same cloth as the most debased and corrupt examples of a broken humanity that this people has in its collective memory. It is like calling a church a brothel, and at the same time accusing the government of being a mafia mob. (more…)

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A note from Jamie Howison: Sunday August 1 saw us celebrating a baptism at saint benedict’s table, which meant I preached a slightly shortened sermon with a particular focus on the meaning of baptism. That same day, however, I had been invited to preach at the parish of St Mary Magdalene, and in that setting I really couldn’t talk about the baptism! What follows here is the text from the morning’s sermon, some of which found its way into my reflections in our evening liturgy. The texts for the sermon are Colossians 3:1-11 and Luke 12:13-21.

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ver the past six months or so, a lot of my free evenings and weekend afternoons have been given over to work on a biography of my great-grandfather, Sidney Smith. Smith was one of the founders of Winnipeg’s Elim Chapel, a noted lay preacher and conference speaker, and a confidant of some of the giants of the evangelical world of the first half of the 20th century.

He was also a highly successful grain merchant, and a very wealthy man. And as I’ve unpacked his story by reading through his sermon texts and correspondence, and by searching through his heavily underlined copy of the Scofield Reference Bible, it is clear that he experienced his wealth as being both a responsibility and a burden. His life-defining scriptural verse was: “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.” (Luke 12.48b) The underlining in his Bible marked any number of verses referring to the transitory nature of wealth—from Proverbs (23:4-5) “Labour not to be rich: cease from thine own wisdom. Wilt thou set thine eyes upon that which is not? for riches certainly make themselves wings; they fly away as an eagle toward heaven”—and included the famous verse from Mark about it being “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” (more…)

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a concert review/reflection by Rudy Regehr

saint ben’s regular Rudy Regehr has recently moved to BC, but is staying very much connected to us through this website and by e-mail. He recently had the opportunity to attend a unique house concert, and we asked him to write about the experience for our site.

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hen David Bazan released his first EP as part of the group Pedro the Lion on Tooth & Nail records in the mid 1990s, he caught a lot of people by surprise. His ability to tell stories with his music made it clear, from the beginning, that Bazan was a unique songwriter. Bazan tells a different side of the story than what some are used to, though. His lyrics have often been ironic, exploring important perspectives about a variety of subjects such as drug addiction and infidelity, but also about doing one’s best to live a good life. Bazan’s songs were never preachy, but instead took the route of making points by telling parables from the point of view of the character of the story. As Bazan explored his thoughts on life and morality, his outside-the-box thinking was refreshing for those who were tired of pat answers. Bazan was a Christian artist who always stayed true to himself. He didn’t feel it was necessary to blow his own horn by counting the number of times he said “Jesus” in his songs, but rather explored Biblical subjects. He was the most recent prophet the Christian faith had in North America.That’s why it was so surprising to his following of fans in the faith when Bazan’s most recent album came out. (more…)

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an artist profile of Jodi McLaren

From time to time we try to offer something by way of a profile of one of the artists who calls saint benedict’s table home. Last summer we did feature pieces on two recording artists – Jaylene Johnson and Alana Levandoski - so this year it seemed right to highlight the work of one of our visual artists. Not that Jodi isn’t also passionate about music… the photograph below was taken on one of the Sunday evenings that she was singing and playing a bit of percussion with one of our music ensembles.

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or as long as she can remember, colour has caught the attention of Jodi McLaren. “I have always loved colour,” she commented. “I bought a badge the other day that said ‘Life is too short for beige.’” And since the age of eight Jodi has never not had some project on the go. For years, it was beadwork and needlework of one form or another; craft projects into which she would always insert a bit of her own personal touch, along with that passion for colour.

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a sermon on the compact version of “the Lord’s Prayer,”  Luke 11:1-13

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esus was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.’”

The disciples are looking for what? Some sort of spiritual formation or religious training of the sort that John the Baptist seems to have offered to his own disciples? Or maybe they just want something of what they see in Jesus; again and again, they’ve watched him quietly slip off into a space on his own and enter into prayer – into comm-union – with God. We want that, they think to themselves. (more…)

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a sermon on Colossians 1:15-20

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mere fifteen verses into his letter to the church in Colossae, Paul suddenly launches into song. At first glance, we might not recognize it as such, as most of our translations don’t show the text as being of a different character from Paul’s usual prose. I suspect as we heard these verses read aloud here tonight, very few people would have had any sense that they were hearing poetry.

But that is what we read, and while he was composing his letter to the Colossian church, if Paul didn’t quite burst into song surely his soul was singing as these words were scratched across the parchment. Hear those words again:

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A couple of Sundays back, someone who might be called a bit of a “lost stranger” wandered across the church yard, and ended up coming into the church and connecting with a couple of different people in the few minutes that preceded the beginning of worship. For all that he came across as a pretty rough looking character – and for all that he was more than just a drink or two on his way – the guy was strangely vulnerable. One of the people he talked with that night wrote the following meditation, imagining how it all looked from the stranger’s perspective. And he wasn’t just a nameless stranger. He said his name was Joey.

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ife is full of mistakes. I walked through the wrong door. I was hoping to score a free cup of coffee from this church, so I asked a girl standing outside the front doors to bring me a cup, and she told me to come in and get it myself. I waited around outside for a minute but another lady started asking me for cigarettes and I didn’t have any to spare. Besides, free coffee seemed like as good a reason as any to walk into a church and so I did.

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a sermon for the Feast of St. Benedict, on Luke 10:25-37

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onight we’re marking not only the 7th  Sunday after Pentecost, but also the Feast of St Benedict; our forebear in this faith, whose name this community bears. According to Stanley Hauerwas, the church is a “story-formed community;” a people that derives its common identity through the stories it tells.  It is one of the reasons that church communities in this tradition are named for saints; to locate our life together in the context of a story of someone who has walked before us, and about whom there might just be a story worth telling. Benedict has much to teach us about what makes for a community of disciples, but tonight I want to focus on one particular piece; the extension of hospitality.

In his rule for communities, Benedict wrote, “All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ, who said: ‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me.’” Lest the monastic communities he founded had any question as to what kind of guest Benedict might have been talking about, he went on to add that “Great care and concern are to be shown in receiving poor people and pilgrims, because in them more particularly Christ is received.”

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