Emmanuel Episcopal Church

Homily for the Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost - Why?

Job 42:1-6, 10-17
Psalm 34:1-8, (19-22)

Hebrews 7:23-28
Mark 10:46-52

 Homily by Fr. R Christopher Heying

Shortly after landing in Dallas in the summer of 2004 I called my first cousins’ grandmother, Mary Essie Morrow, better known to her family as MaMa, and said, “MaMa, this is Chris.”  She immediately responded, “I know who you are: I recognized your voice.”  I immediately thought to myself, “That is remarkable.” 

You see MaMa, born in August of 1899 was 104.  My heart was warmed and the thought formed in my mind: “That’s like God, is it not?  I know who you are: I recognized your voice.”

For those who may have just now begun to worry that in calling me as your priest, you weren’t thinking about such longevity, there’s no need to worry: I am adopted and don’t share those genes!  My time on this earth may not be as it was for MaMa or for Job, “old and full of days” (Job 42.17).

But then neither has it been for some of MaMa’s direct descendants.  In 2001, I returned from New York to bury my cousin Kristin who died of melanoma at the age of 43.  And in January of 2005, with MaMa very much alive and alert at 105, I returned from Virginia to preach my first cousin’s son’s funeral.  George William, at just sixteen and with an undiagnosed heart problem, fell down the stairs and died.

The hardest sermon I have preached to date.  An “innocent” farm boy who loved his goats and his chickens and had significant learning disabilities and speech issues, having been born with an umbilical cord around his neck, and none could hold back tears as we watched George William, as his body was put into the hearse for his final ride, receive his Eagle Scout Award, earned days before his death.

MaMa, his great grandmother, went on to live two months shy of her 108^th birthday (with sisters who lived to be 103 and 109).  Yet George William dies at 16, not so old, not so full of days.

Your life no doubt has been touched by tragedy, by hope cut short for no reason, at least no reason that you can understand.

Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost

Download the Service Bulletin for 28 October 2012

Homily for the Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost - What is a priest?

Job 38:1-7, (34-41)

Hebrews 5:1-10

Homily by Fr. R Christopher Heying

A few weeks ago, my four-year-old Patrick looked up and said to me, with high level of frustration in his voice, “are you going to be a priest forever?”

At first I thought about the quotation on the front of the booklet for my ordination: “A priest forever after the order of Melchizedek” but then also to the possibility that however full-time my ministry may be I am only providing a temp service in the House of the Lord, for is it not Jesus who alone is the true priest forever, around whose throne we will one day gather, when the roll is called up yonder?

But more directly connected to the readings this morning, we might ask ourselves, “What is a priest?”

What is a priest, really? And what does priesthood have to do with you and me?

Through the centuries, Christian priesthood has been viewed with varying lenses, most of which shed some light on aspects and none of which is able to contain the whole of it, priesthood.

Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost

Download the Service Bulletin for 21 Oct 2012

Homily for the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost - How will we leave?

Job 23:1-9, 16-17

Hebrews 4:12-16

Homily by Fr. R Christopher Heying

It is not about how we come but how we will leave.

The truth of the matter is that all of us—priests and laity alike—come this morning before God to whom all hearts open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid and know all too well that we have erred and strayed from God’s ways like lost sheep following too much the devices and desires of our hearts.

You and I gather this morning before a holy and righteous God who knows that we have each sinned, we have each fallen short of the glory of God, that holiness to which we are called. By God’s own call to us, you and I gather this morning before God who knows that our slate is neither blank nor clean.

Bishop Terwilliger, sometime bishop suffragan of Dallas, put it this way:

“One should compare oneself to Jesus Christ. And if he comes up poorly, he should go to confession. If he comes up well, he should go to a psychiatrist.”

And so we gather this morning before a holy God, knowing that not only that all generally have sinned but also that you and I, by what we have done and by what we have failed to do, have sinned and that there is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

One author put it this: “At some time or other, a man must stop running from himself and his God—possibly because there is no other place to run to” (Barclay, Hebrews, quoting Kermit Eby in “The God in You”).

Jim Mathieson Day at Emmanuel

Honoring Jim Mathieson for his ministry at Emmanuel: Senior Warden, Billy Simpson with The Reverend James W. Mathieson on Sunday, September 23, 2012

 Click here for more photos.