A Prayer from Augustine for Trinity Sunday

Grant, O God, of your mercy,
that we may come to everlasting life,
and there beholding thy glory as it is,
may equally say:
Glory to the Father who created us,
Glory to the Son who redeemed us,
Glory to the Holy Spirit who sanctified us.
Glory to the most high and undivided Trinity,
whose works are inseparable,
whose kingdom without end abides,
from age to age forever. Amen.

An Ancient Prayer for Trinity Sunday

Keep us, O Lord, from the vain strife of words, and grant to us a constant profession of the truth. Preserve us in the faith, true and undefiled, so that we may ever hold fast that which we professed when we were baptized into the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit; that we may have you for our Father, that we abide in your Son and in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

—Hilary of Poiters

A Prayer for Trinity Sunday

Almighty and everlasting God, you have given to us your servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of your divine Majesty to worship the Unity: Keep us steadfast in this faith and worship, and bring us at last to see you in your one and eternal glory, O Father; who with the Son and the Holy Spirit live and reign, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

God in Three Persons

Sermon delivered on Trinity Sunday Year A, June 15, 2014 at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.

If you would prefer to listen to the audio podcast of this sermon, usually somewhat different from the text below, click here.

Lectionary texts: Genesis 1.1-2.4a; Psalm 8.1-10; 2 Corinthians 13.11-13; Matthew 28.16-20.

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today is Trinity Sunday where we celebrate the ineffable mystery of the one undivided God in three distinct persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Since there is an impenetrable mystery here when talking about our triune God (one God in three persons), there has been a train wreck of false teachings about the Trinity throughout the Church’s history (check out the humorous video below). Not wishing to add to the carnage of that train wreck, I have found it helpful to talk about how God has chosen to reveal himself both in scripture and in history to help us begin to wrap our minds around the Trinity and that is what I want us to look at briefly this morning.

We begin, of course, with God the Father who is the Creator of all things and the Sustainer of all life. As our OT and psalm lessons beautifully and wonderfully attest, in the beginning there was the eternal God who called into existence his good creation, culminating in God creating humans in his own image to rule his newly created world. As God’s image-bearers, God intended for us to reflect his glory out into the world by being wise stewards over it and to reflect the goodness of creation back to God in worship.

But then human sin and rebellion entered the picture and things went badly wrong in a hurry. We humans weren’t content to be God’s wise image-bearing stewards. We wanted to be rulers of God’s world based on our own authority, not God’s, and our sin allowed evil to gain a beachhead in God’s good creation to corrupt and despoil it. The rest of scripture is the story of how God intends to rescue his good but fallen creation and creatures from the ravages of evil, sin, and death. So in one sense, the Bible is all about God’s faithful love toward his creation and stubborn and rebellious human creatures. Despite our persistent rebellion against God our Father and Creator, God remains faithful to us and promises to heal and restore his creation, mysterious and enigmatic as that can seem to us at times. This is the essence of the love of God about which Paul speaks in his apostolic benediction in our epistle lesson this morning and we see the story of God’s love for his creation and creatures bracketed in the Bible: God’s creation made good but corrupted (Genesis 1.1-3.24) and God’s good but corrupted creation restored in a mighty act of new creation (Revelation 21.1-22.21).

Consistent with God’s good intentions for his image-bearing human creatures to be wise stewards and rulers over his creation on God’s behalf, we see God’s plan to rescue his fallen creation unfold in his call to Abraham to be a blessing to the nations of the earth (Genesis 12.1-3). Through Abraham’s descendants, the people whom God would call to be his holy people and who would later be known as Israel, God intended to bring his healing love to the world to rescue it and us from our sin-sickness and all the evil that our sin-sickness allows to operate in God’s good creation to corrupt it.

But Israel turned out to be part of the problem instead of the solution. So in the fullness of time, i.e., when the time was exactly right in the scope of God’s eternal plan of salvation, God became human and entered our history in the person of Jesus of Nazareth (Galatians 4.4-5). This is a profound mystery in itself because as John proclaims boldly at the beginning of his gospel, Jesus, the Word made flesh, was with God and was God from the very beginning, and through him the world was created (John 1.1-3, 14). Nowhere does John (or the other NT writers) explain how this worked, only that it did, and we are called to believe it on the basis of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. We believe that Jesus is God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, fully God and fully human, who came to announce the coming of God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven by word and mighty acts of power. We further believe that on the cross, Jesus defeated the dark powers of evil (Colossians 2.15; 1 Peter 3.22) and reconciled us to God by bearing himself God’s just punishment for our sins and the evil they produce so that we would not have to (Romans 8.3-4; Colossians 1.20). This is what Paul is referring to in large part in his apostolic benediction when he talks about the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. God offers to heal and rescue us in and through Jesus, not because we deserve to be rescued but because of God the Father’s great love for us as manifested in God the Son. Put another way, if we want to see the face of God and know God’s character, we are to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus because he is the very image of God the Father (Colossians 1.15-19).

And of course God’s rescue plan for his good but fallen creation and creatures was demonstrated most powerfully in Jesus’ resurrection. When God raised Jesus from the dead, he not only defeated our final enemy, death, God also gave us a glimpse of his promised new creation in which death is vanquished forever and all things are made new and healed completely. Our Lord’s resurrected body is a lasting reminder that creation matters to God and because God remains faithful to his creation and us, new creation and eternal life is our destiny, not death and destruction. As Paul put it, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8.1).

As we saw on Ascension Sunday, the risen Jesus has returned to heaven (God’s space) to assume his rightful place as ruler of all creation. As Jesus told his disciples in today’s gospel lesson, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him by God the Father. As we have talked about before, this doesn’t mean that the world is now as Jesus intends it to be, only that he is working to build on his defeat of the dark powers won on the cross to take the world and us from where we are—living under the rule of evil, sin, and death—and bring it and us under the rule his life-giving love (cf. Colossians 1.13). More on this in a moment.

The problem with Jesus’ ascension (if we can call it a problem) is that he is no longer bodily present to his followers as he was before his ascension. So what are we to make of Jesus’ promise to us in our gospel lesson to be with us always? Enter the third person of the Trinity: God the Holy Spirit. As Jesus made clear to his first followers, he is present to us in the power and person of the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit who hovered over the face of the waters at creation (Genesis 1.2), who raised Jesus from the dead (Romans 8.11), who came with power on all believers at Pentecost (Acts 2.1-21), and who will give life to our resurrected bodies at Jesus’ Second Coming (1 Corinthians 15.43-44). It is only in Jesus’ presence with his people in and through the person of the Holy Spirit that we are healed and cleansed of our hard-heartedness and sin-sickness so that we are prepared and equipped to be the holy people God calls us to be. This is what Paul is talking about in his apostolic benediction when he talks about the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Without the Spirit’s presence in us individually and corporately as Jesus’ body, the Church, we have no hope of ever having God’s image fully restored in us so that we can have our character and therefore our pattern of living transformed that will enable us to live faithfully as God’s holy people in the manner of Jesus, i.e., that we will be saved/healed.

Why is this important? Because as we saw earlier, King Jesus is working to build on his victory over evil that he won on the cross to reclaim God’s good but corrupted creation from Evil (remember this is the overarching purpose of God the Father). And here is the astonishing thing. King Jesus is doing this through us his followers! Now we may question God’s wisdom (or even God’s sanity) in choosing this path, but this is consistent with God’s intention for his human creatures to rule wisely over God’s good creation. Our reservations about King Jesus using his people to help bring his kingdom on earth as in heaven (the emphasis is on helping because only God can fully bring in the kingdom on earth as in heaven) would be well justified if we were not Spirit-filled people. If that were the case we would continue to be the selfish, back-biting, greedy, and hard-hearted people we naturally are without the Spirit. But because we are Jesus’ people, we are filled with the Spirit and are therefore equipped by our Lord to build on the saving foundation of his kingdom that he established by his life, death, and resurrection. We are called to be his people who think, speak, and act like King Jesus and we are assured that he is Lord and ruler of this world who will guide us in the ways he wants us to go as we do.

So what are we to do? Jesus tells us in our gospel lesson. First, we are to make disciples. We are to train people to learn what Jesus’ kingdom message—God’s plan to rescue and heal his good but fallen creation and creatures—is all about, to help others learn to imitate and follow Jesus by denying themselves and taking up their cross, and to announce the Good News that is in Jesus to a world that desperately needs to hear it but often doesn’t want to hear it. This means we need to know the Bible’s overarching story and what it means to follow Jesus ourselves. If we don’t know our Story and model these behaviors, how can we hope to make disciples of others? This is a massively important command. Had the first disciples ignored it like many of us do today, how could the kingdom come? God’s world still may be in terrible shape but think what it would be like without the love of God operating through his faithful people. So how are you doing in this area?

Second, we are to baptize these new disciples. This isn’t an option, primarily because from the very beginning, the Church has made it clear that the sacrament of baptism ties us intimately to Jesus’ name and with his death and resurrection (Romans 6.3-5), and we are called to make Jesus’ name known to the world! An unbaptized Christian is an oxymoron.

Third, and related to making disciples, we are to die and teach others how to die. Following Jesus requires a radically different worldview in which we must put to death with the help of the Spirit all that corrupts and defiles us: our idolatry, selfishness, hard-heartedness and all the rest. We are to follow (and call others to follow) the personal morality in the Sermon on the Mount, to rule as Christ calls us and not as the world does, to forgive as Jesus commands us, and to be God’s wise stewards of his world. Again this requires that we are firmly grounded in God’s word, in prayer, and in fellowship with each other, all in the power and presence of the Spirit.

Worshiping (which dictates following) our triune God and all that it entails is never easy. As Matthew tells us, from the very beginning some of Jesus’ followers doubted or were hesitant (the Greek word Matthew uses, distazo, can mean either). Unfortunately Matthew doesn’t tell us which meaning he had in mind or why some doubted or hesitated. But it’s easy enough to figure out. The fantastic nature of the resurrection and ascension as well as Jesus’ call to us to be participants in building the kingdom simply boggle the mind and challenge our preconceived notions about who God is and how God should operate. But we are to obey and not be afraid because God the Father promises to be with us always in the person of Jesus, God the Son, in and through the power of God the Holy Spirit. That means, of course, we can embrace God’s Good News, now and for all eternity. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever.

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Rick Warren: There is No Testimony Without a Test

From RNS.

RNS-WARREN-PASTORSWarren, pastor of Saddleback Church in Southern California, urged his fellow Southern Baptist pastors to draw close to others when they are suffering. He said a small group of men were on the scene within half an hour to comfort him when Matthew died. They were the same people he met with in their times of crises.

“The more intense the pain, the fewer words you should use,” he said. “You need to show up and shut up.”

Never underestimate the power of your presence to one who is suffering or in pain. Ever. Read it all.

Study: Porn Use Can Lead to Divorce

June 9, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The use of pornography in marriage can lead to a higher chance of divorce, a new study has found.

Analyzing data from the General Social Survey,  the researchers found that porn users are more open to marital infidelity, the leading cause of divorce in the United States. They published their findings in the April issue of Psychology of Popular Media Culture

The General Social Survey asked 551 married couples whether or not they had viewed a pornographic video in the last year.  The couples were then asked about their views on extra-marital relations.  The results showed a connection between the pornography viewers and those with sympathetic attitudes towards marital infidelity.

“If pornography consumption leads to more positive extramarital sex attitudes as the results of the panels suggest, pornography consumption may be a contributing factor in some divorces via extramarital sex behavior,” the study states.

Researchers have found an abundance of evidence indicating the detrimental effects of pornography on individuals and society. One study found that viewing pornography leads to a weakened sex drive, while another discovered that porn addiction distorts the brain the same way alcohol and drugs do.

Read it all and pay attention. Other studies have found that porn is more addictive than crack cocaine.

Christopher Yuan: Why ‘God and the Gay Christian’ is Wrong About the Bible and Same Sex Relationships


God and the Gay Christian begins with an emotional appeal from Matthew 7:18, “A good tree cannot bear bad fruit.” Vines states that universal condemnation of same-sex relationships has been damaging and destructive for those who identify as gay Christians, producing bad fruit (depression and suicide, for instance). In contrast, Vines asserts that loving, same-sex relationships produce good fruit. Additionally, he claims that the biblical authors did not understand sexual orientation as a fixed and exclusive characteristic. Recognizing that celibacy is a gift, Vines contends that this gift should only be accepted voluntarily. Citing 1 Timothy 4:3, Vines even argues that those who forbid gay marriage are false teachers who promote hostility toward God’s creation.

Six biblical passages directly address homosexuality, and Vines insists that none address same-sex orientation as we know it today. Thus, in Genesis 19, the sin of Sodom is not related to loving, consensual same-sex relationships, but to the threat of gang rape. Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 are not about committed same-sex relationships, but about the improper ordering of gender roles in a patriarchal society (men taking the receptive, sexual role; women taking the penetrative, sexual role). Paul in Romans 1:26-27 is not referring to monogamous, gay relationships, but instead to lustful excess and the breaking of customary gender roles. In 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10, Paul does not condemn same-sex relationships as an expression of one’s fixed and exclusive sexual orientation, but instead condemns the economic exploitation of others.

Read it all.

Creation-of-manOverall, Yuan does a pretty good job of analyzing the fallacies of Vine’s arguments and I commend his review to you. Yuan makes it pretty clear that Vine has a solution for the biblical text to follow, not the opposite, and when humans decide to make scripture submit to their authority instead of them submitting to scripture’s authority, the text inevitably gets massively violated. Sad.

Now I don’t usually comment on the topic of same-sex relationships because there really isn’t much new to be said and the battle lines are pretty well drawn and entrenched. Yet after reading this review, I never cease to be amazed that most folks in articles like this, even folks like Yuan who do submit to the authority of Scripture, fail to talk about the creation narratives in Genesis 1.1-2.25. It is in these narratives that we find God’s original and good intentions for how his human creatures should interact. All else in scripture flows from these narratives!

God created humans to be his wise, image-bearing stewards over his good creation and he calls us to do that organized fundamentally as families. Read especially Genesis 2.18-25 and notice that God saw it was not good for man to be alone so from man’s side God created woman. Notice too that the man immediately recognized that his most basic relational needs would be met in woman, his companion and helper. Notice the binary structure created here, two complimentary relational roles coming together to form a perfect whole. In other words, the text strongly implies that it was not until man and woman came together as one would the image of God be fully revealed in humans.

There is simply no way anyone can spin the goodness of gay marriage (or any other kind of alternative human arrangement) out of these passages if they take the text seriously and submit to its plain meaning.

God did not create multiple Eves for Adam. Neither did God create another Adam for Adam. He created Eve from Adam’s side. One man, one woman, incomplete while apart but complete when made whole through sexual union within a lifelong monogamous relationship (marriage). Only then can we be truly happy and the fully image-bearing creatures God created us to be. If we are going to submit to scripture as God’s authoritative word to us as his creatures, this is the only possible position we can take. To be certain, God does call some individuals to a life of celibacy, but that is the exception, not the norm. After all, it is not good for man to be alone.

That is also why the Church must speak to the issues of casual sex, multiple sex partners, easy divorce, polygamy, as well as gay marriage (an oxymoron as we have just seen) and a host of other human “innovations,” and why they are so destructive to us. If we really want to learn what will produce true happiness we must listen carefully to God’s original intentions for us as humans and how we are to fundamentally organize ourselves.

We must also treat those who do not or cannot conform to God’s good intentions for foundational human relationships with dignity, grace, and compassion, and help them to discover how God wishes them to submit to his word for their lives. There is no license to demonize or dehumanize anyone based on the creation narratives because we are all God’s image-bearing creatures and we are to treat everyone accordingly. But that does not mean we are to bless alternative solutions that violate God’s will for men and women.

This ought to make sense at some level. If God really is our Creator as scripture claims and our faith attests, who knows better than the Creator God what will make his image-bearing creatures happy? Yet we schlep along, thinking we know best, and it results not only in the breakdown of our families, it results in the breakdown of civil society and the loss of our fundamental humanity and happiness. May God be gracious to us all and give us wise and discerning hearts and minds to submit to his will for the good ordering of human life.

Fr. Ron Feister: Have You Opened Your Gift?

Sermon delivered on Pentecost (Whit) Sunday, June 8, 2014, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.

If you prefer to listen to the audio podcast of this sermon, click here.

Lectionary texts: Acts 2.1-21; Canticle based on Ezekiel 36.24-26, 28b; 1 Corinthians 12.3b-13; John 20.19-23.

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

We belong to the Anglican Church of North America, a church committed to being a church in which three streams of religious practice come together and enrich the people of God and enable the working of God to become present to the world. Today we celebrate the Sacrament of Eucharist, which draws from that stream we call sacramental, leaving here we are called to share our faith with others in that stream we call evangelical and today, on this feast of Pentecost, I want to share about that stream we call the charismatic stream.

First let me tell you a little of my life history and how I became immersed in that stream. I grew from Infancy to my teenage years in a proper Roman Catholic family. My mother was Roman Catholic from birth and my father a convert from the Reform Church (though I always suspected that he held on to some of his Protestant beliefs.) I went to Catholic Grade School where spiritual speculation was discouraged and doubts of faith quickly discounted. None-the-less by the time I reached my later high school years, I was going though a real crisis in faith. I never gave up the externals of the faith, but I did not really believe in them whole heartily. Going to college, I became active in the Newman Center, not because it was Catholic, but because it was, I felt, a safe place. Little did I realize that I would find in the Pastor there a person who would lead me into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

After college, I came to Westerville, where I became very active at St. Paul’s. I was very active in the folk mass choir and became good friends with its director. One Sunday, he invited me over to his house for a dinner party with some friends, at lease that was how I understood his invitation. That night I arrived early and as the other guests arrived, they greeted each other with hugs, not just the women mind you, but the men as well. I have never seen this before and was becoming quite concerned. Then a priest arrived and he also joined in the hugging. Must be all right I thought. The dinner went well and afterwards, all gathered for a time of prayer and praises. I had never seen people so eager to pray. The group really got serious about praising the Lord, but in what I must admit, was a fun way. The praising went on for over an hour and there was praying in languages that I did not understand. As the evening came to an end my friend gave me a little book about something called the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. Leaving the party, I went home – figured I watch a little TV. I started to but just could not get into the shows. I also could not resist reading that book. I felt drawn to it. Once I started I did not want to stop. It spoke of the wonderful out pouring of the Spirit available to the believer. That night, I got down on my knees and told God that I really would like to experience such an out pouring in my life.

Almost instantly a felt a real peace, a personal problem that had bothered me for years was suddenly gone from my life, and then I felt a strange urge to pray with sounds rather than words, a practice I would learn is called praying in Tongues. Several days latter as I was driving back from a downtown meeting, I began to question if this experience had been real and if in deed tongues was real. I asked the Lord for a sign. I said to the Lord if this is real when I turn on my radio – tuned to the local soft rock station, that I would hear Christian music.

Obviously when I challenged the Lord, I went big time. I turned on the radio and there was the song Amazing Grace by Joan Baez. The Scripture says ask and you shall receive – I did and he delivered. Shortly after this I attended my first Charismatic Prayer Group Meeting. It was at this meeting that I witnessed not only the praying in Tongues and some of the most joyful praise, but also some of those gifts that we heard about in today’s Scriptures. There was prophecy, words of knowledge, discernment of spirits. The praying for and expectation of healing with some giving testimony of healings granted. There were, however, no tongues of fire. Can’t have everything

Since that first meeting, I have been blessed in seeing the work of the Holy Spirit not only in Prayer Groups, but in many churches, sometimes even during the liturgy. The Gifts of the Holy Spirit, these gifts that were poured out on the Disciples at Pentecost are also called charismatic in the Greek with means “gifts of grace” Some churches and communities prefer to call this steam of church life charismatic as we do and others as Pentecostal. It may be interesting to note that there are more Pentecostal or charismatic believers in the family of churches that are called Catholic than in all of the Pentecostal Churches put together.

The pentecostal or charismatic renewal of the mainline churches can be traced to a major revival in 1909 and then again in 1950. While this renewal or reawakening is relatively current, the charisms, these gifts of the Holy Spirit have always been present in God’s church. They are referred to through the Scriptures and were expected in the early Church. From time to time, the leadership of the Church has attempted to limit them or to discourage the use of these gifts because they felt insecure in that they could not control them, but even in the most restrictive periods of church history, these gifts keep appearing. There is hardly a story about any one of those individuals we call saints, where there is not an acknowledgement that they experienced the Holy Spirit’s special gifts or charisms in their life.

Individuals that have experienced these special gifts, often describe the first experience as the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. It is not to be confused with Sacramental Baptism through which a person normally enters into the Community of the Church and becomes part of the Body of Christ. But it can and is often an experience that is so powerful and dramatic to the person that they feel washed over by the Spirit not unlike being dunked into a river or having cold water pour upon them.

Now the Gifts of the Holy Spirit are without limit and are of infinite variety. We do not and cannot limit the gifting of the Holy Spirit and the Spirit moves in persons and churches as the Spirit wills. Some of these Gifts are the talents and skills needed for the every day operation of the Church. We do not normally think of these as charismatic gifts, but as they are “ gifts of grace”. I will share some of these as listed in Ephesians the 4th Chapter.

The gifts of apostleship, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers and those with special service ministry. While some or most of these gifts are recognized by the Church through Ordination, but there are may non-ordained who also are gifted in these ways and serve the Church by responding to the Spirit. I would like to reflect on some other charisms or gifts that are found from time to time within the community of faith. Some of these Gifts deal with what I would describe as revelation. Words of Knowledge are words spoken by someone that share some small portion of God’s knowledge in order to meet a human need. Some of the purposes of such a Word of Knowledge are to reveal a person’s true identity, help overcome some doubt in a prejudice mind, reveal a person’s need for Christ or to reveal a lost item.

Words of Wisdom are words spoken that give a revelation of Devine purpose it may concern a person or thing. It often makes known God’s purpose to those he is going to use and brings an assurance. Discernment of spirits is the gift of knowing or recognizing the kind of spirit involved with a person or even. It is a sensing whether the spirit is Devine, Satanic or Human in nature. It is not a discernment of attitude and does not involve the finding of faults in others or of knowing their thoughts.

Prophesy, in the Holy Spirit sense, is not fortune telling or the fore telling of the future. It is God’s way of speaking though a person in a particular situation. In some cases the person will say something like, I feel “God would say:” other times the person will simply say “ I the Lord say” or something similar. This may seem strange at first, but it is really not much different than the hymn or songwriter who speaks for God through the lyrics. Later we will sing the song “Here I Am Lord” in which the composer first talks about directly hearing God and then voices God’s word of direction and encouragement,

Tongues – a strange name for a spiritual gift if you ask me. It is the praying of praises to God in languages (usually very rare) or in sounds (most common) that are not understandable to the person who is praying. It is manifested in a several forms. First is in private or individual prayer. It is not unusual for individuals on healing teams to pray a portion of their appeal to the Lord in such a way. It can also be found when a group of believers are praising the Lord in a group and the sounds become musical in nature. The third way if for one individual to pray in such sounds out-loud so as to encourage another person who has a prophesy, Word of Knowledge or Word of Wisdom to speak. This responding is called the Interpretation of Tongues which should not be confused with interpreting a foreign language.

Some Gifts manifest God’s power in awesome ways. First among these are the gift of Healing of Diseases and Injuries. The Church has always been encouraged to pray for healing and the elders of the Church are even commanded to anoint the sick and to pray for the forgiveness of any sin. In the Gift of Healing, an individual or group, are blessed to make present God’s healing touch in very powerful and effective ways. I have been part of a community where such healing was quite normal. People experienced cures from serious diseases, broken bones were mended, and some were freed from long time addictions. This Gift has the effect of bringing deliverance to the sick and oppressed, causing people to see that Jesus still has the power to forgive sin and to heal and to establish the fact that Jesus is still alive. This ministry must always be done in connection with the health providers that are caring for the sick person and in respect for the human gifts God has given to them.

Some have the Gift of Miracles. While this gift is rare, when exercised it has can have a powerful effect on the lives of many. Some have the Gift of Faith that is the ability to demonstrate in their lives faith that exceeds any human expectation. There are two Gifts that I have experience in my life, which I would like to share with you. The first is the Gift ofTears. It happens when the felt presence of God is so strong that it almost overwhelms. It is not emotional. There need be no happy or sad event only the feeling that God is in some way touching our heart.

The other is likewise a Gift of God’s Presence. It is a feeling of Joy that leads to prolonged laughter or in my case giggling. It can go on for hours without any since of pain or discomfort.Sometimes individuals who are being prayed with will receive the Gift of being Slain in the Spirit. Like the above Gifts, it seems to happen, because the person feels in some tangible way the presence of God. The person will collapse but is not unconscious or in pain and afterward feels very refreshed. It is important to reaffirm that the Gifts of the Spirit are not with limitation and these Gifts are not available to just a select few or for just those who have a Baptism of the Holy Spirit.

All of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit should be exercised in proper order. In a church such as ours that before any Gift is exercised in the church that guidance should be sought from the clergy. All Gifts need to be tested by faithfulness to the Scripture; this is especially true of Gifts of Prophecy, Words of Knowledge and Words of Wisdom. If you feel lead to exercise one of these Gifts or are wanting a richer relationship with the Holy Spirit please feel free to share this with your clergy that we might affirm and encourage you. Anyone seeking to experience this gifting, should think seriously about receiving some spiritual direction and guidance.

The Gifts of the Spirit are given has we heard in our reading from I Corinthians for the good of the whole body of the Church. While there are a variety of Gifts there is but one Holy Spirit who has given them for the common good and that is that the Fruit of Holy Spirit – love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness and self-control will be found in God’s people.

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.