St. Philomena Church Trip to See SAMSON

               ST. PHILOMENA CHURCH
              and Touriffic Travel present:

Sight & Sound Millennium Theatre

Lancaster, Pa

           TUESDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2016




The world’s first superhero … the strongest man who ever lived…. He killed a lion with his bare hands and defeated a thousand soldiers … but he’s not a hero because of the strength of his hands, he’s a hero because of the faith in his heart! One of the most captivating stories in the Bible, SAMSON is filled with colorful characters, extraordinary feats of strength, and amazing special effects that your whole family will love. When Samson stands between two colossal columns in a godless temple and starts to push – it’s an immersive scene that literally brings the house down! A message of hope for the wayward, comfort to the weary and the incredible grace of God that enables us to truly be strong in Him!

Daytrip Itinerary:
10:00am         Depart St. Philomena Church via deluxe Celebrity Motorcoach
11:30am         Arrive at Shady Maple. Enjoy a bountiful Smorgasbord Lunch. Lancaster County's     largest smorgasbord featuring authentic Pennsylvania Dutch cooking. You won’t go away hungry! Make sure to visit their spectacular gift shop afterwards.
1:15pm           Depart for the Theatre
2:00pm           Arrive at Theatre – Take your Center Orchestra Seat!
2:45pm           Show begins. Enjoy!
5:15pm           Departure from Theatre
7:00pm           (Approx.) Return Home
                                                            $ 106.00 Per Person
For Reservations, please contact Marie Chenoweth - (610) 622-0972 marie_chenoweth@hotmail.com

Booking Information: Payment is required as soon as possible to confirm your reservation. Sign-up Early!! No refunds unless a replacement is made. Show tickets are non-refundable. Gratuity to driver is included. Touriffic Travel, their employees, representatives and suppliers act solely as agents in arranging for transportation and other services and do not assume any liability whatsoever for injury, damage, loss, death, accident or delay due to any act, negligence or default of any company or person engaged in rendering any services for any tour.

             Make your check payable to St. Philomena Church and remit with coupon to:
                         Marie Chenoweth - 307 Lincoln Avenue - Lansdowne, PA 19050
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Announcing "God Talk" Webinar Series

God Talk 2016/2017

The Heart of Discipleship

Come see and experience God's story and have the Bible and your faith come alive!

            The Heart of Discipleship is excited to present a Christian adult formation series of webinars that will enrich your understanding of the Bible as well as strengthen your relationship with God and others.

            Is God Relevant in your life? The Deacon Carmen J. Viola will be pointing us towards self-discovery and a bigger way of seeing and experiencing God. Let those who have eyes see! Carmen’s webinars will use visuals from his new book as well as images from his trips to Israel to make biblical concepts come alive.  Come join us.  If you sign up before Sept 30^th you will also receive the PDF copy of The Heart of Discipleship for free.

            It has often been said that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” During the Middle Ages, churches used vivid imagery, including stained glass windows and paintings, to tell God’s story. Prior to the modern era, most people could not read or write so they relied on pictures and religious interpreters to understand the Bible. Pictures, for many of us, are still a powerful way to share stories and understand biblical context. 

            The book by Carmen Viola is beautifully illustrated and involves you in the ongoing conversation and narrative of what it means to follow Jesus. The illustrations in this book depict stories from the Bible to illuminate God's word. The images can be viewed by a child one level, while an adult can view the same image and be led into a more complex understanding of the Creator. Often seeing things from a different point of view can give us fresh insight into God's plan for our world and our lives. These stories of the ancient world come alive in pictures and show all of us why God’s word is still important and relevant today.

            What if you could see the world as God sees it – not only with an open mind, but with an open heart? Come! Discover what God has been trying to show us all along. God will meet you wherever and however you are…Right Here, Right Now!

            We invite you to participate in this series of Free webinars and on-line discussions. The Webinars will “go-live” every Monday evening beginning on Sept 26th through on-line invitation.  The time is from 8PM to 9PM.  To sign up please email us at heartofdiscipleship@gmail.com. You will be given an invitation link and the syllabus for the year as well as the free color PDF of the book. Missed seminars can be seen on YouTube at The Heart of Discipleship channel.

Grace & Peace!

Fragile Vessels

Fragile Vessels

 

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience 

but spiritual beings having a human experience"

- Pierre Telhard Chardin

     We are all fragile vessels created by the potter. We all get cracked and broken occasionally. People hurt us, abandon us, betray us, disappoint us. We disappoint us. And we break. But it is through those fractures, through those breaks that the grace of God can enter in and help heal us. 

     God does not make mistakes. There is a reason for everything even if we do not see it immediately. I have always found that when you reach the lowest point in the valley, that the only way to go is up. And slowly we find our way again. 

    One thing that we all need to remember, as Christian, is that Christ unconditionally forgave us through his sacrifice. He gave us the perfect examples of how we should live our lives in order to reach heaven. I believe that unconditional forgiveness is one of the key examples.

    We need to forgive those who we feel have caused us injury and we need to do it unconditionally with no expectation of recompense.  There is an axiom that ‘Hurt people, hurt people’.  Understanding this we may better understand that the offender may, themselves, have been hurt or are hurting.  Forgiveness to them can have a profound impact on their being and for that matter could have an impact on their future generations. To take forgiveness a step further, most times the only one hurt by your withholding forgiveness is you.  That wound is still open and until you truly forgive, it may never heal.  

     There is also one other individual that we tend to forget when it comes to forgiveness.  We need to forgive ourselves.  We all make mistakes, bad choices even if no one else is aware and we all beat ourselves up time and time again.  We need to forgive ourselves.  The past is the past and we cannot change it.  However, today and hopefully tomorrow could be brighter and more alive if we just let it go….and let God!

 

Grace and Peace,

tom

Grace and Peace

Seems that there are two types of sermons you will hear on any given Sunday.  One type tells us that it’s all OK; that you are already worthy of God’s love.  You are a child of God.  You are enough!  You are a Human Being not a Human Doing.  Be still and know that I am God.  Just breathe!  This is a message about grace – a gift given freely that was not earned.  A pure gift, just like your breath and your life, it pours out upon you unceasingly each day.  You receive grace with a heart of appreciation.  Then there is the sermon about getting off your butt and bringing about some change in the world.  A message about you doing something to bring reconciliation and wholeness to the world.  You each have a unique gift.  You have something the world needs and it’s time to get off the couch and do your work in the world!  The Hebrew word for peace is Shalom.  It’s not peace in the absence of negativity.  The word shalom has a much deeper meaning.  This is a peace felt when one is in right relationship with yourself, your neighbors and the planet.  It is the peace of being whole and it involves action.  So go out and bring about peace.  Be an agent of change and social justice.  Bring about the kingdom of God!  It is here that you now provide grace to others.

There are two types of messages - one about grace and one about peace.  When things are crazy in your life and you can’t seem to catch your breath.  When you feel out of control and tossed about by your circumstances.  Then you need a message about grace.  But when you are bored and you don’t seem to have a clear purpose or direction.  When you sit waiting for God to move you.  This is when you need a message of Shalom.  Grace and Peace to you!

As you get ready to start the summer, reflect upon whether you need grace or peace in your life right now.  Is there Sabbath and rest needed in your life or do you require passion and purpose?  Grace and Peace are different sides of the same coin reflected in our faith.  The apostle Paul closed each letter to the early Christian churches with this phrase.  Paul himself was either on the road evangelizing by bringing a message of God’s hope for reconciling the world or he was in prison silently reflecting upon the grace of God.  Life reflects this cycle of receiving and giving.  First you receive grace – you breathe in.  When you are full and overflowing you give – you breathe out.  You are either receiving or you are giving to another.  You receive grace or you’re providing grace to someone else.  You receive what you need; then you give from your abundance that which someone else is missing.  It’s a wave - a cycle that you are always in.  You must learn to recognize where you are at in your life.

Each Sunday we provide a message of grace and/or of peace.  Each Sunday we celebrate our common life in Christ together.  Notice that throughout the Service we both give and receive.  We reflect the nature of our interdependent life together as we share in the grace of Jesus’ life poured out for us.  The deacon then dismisses us with the charge of now bring that message of hope and reconciliation to a hurting world through us – “the Body of Christ.”  So be aware that all of us are either in need of grace or peace at any given time.  Be aware of how we both receive from and then serve one another.  Grace and Peace to us all!

Your faithful servant,

carmen

Love One another as I have loved you…Not so simple!

     All you need is love.  The Beatles sang those words in the turbulent times of the 60’s.  Reaction came in two forms: and enthusiastic embrace as the simple solution for all of the worlds’ problems or a critical rejection of a dreamy emotion that distracts us from real world solutions.  Today we still get these same reactions:  One side cries out can’t we all just get along?  And the other side demands a clear-eyed acknowledgement of and a forceful response to the base motives and evil intent of others.  Neither one finds much support in Jesus’ mandate to love one another.  Jesus certainly praises love – it is a gift from God, an excellence of character, and a way of life; nothing here dismisses it as a flight of fancy.  On the other hand the word love is highly ambiguous.  Jesus can’t just leave it at Love one another!  He needs to describe this love and offer examples.  As beautiful as love may be, we too often throw the word around lightly.

     I Love my wife, I love my children, I love my pet, I love chocolate, I love this pillow…I find it ironic that the English language has so many words for many mundane things like the color red for instance: Carnelian, Vermillion, Carmine, Crimson, yet only one word for love. 

     In the Greek language, that language that the Bible is written in, the word love translates into several Greek words.  Even in Greek the words for love do not offer mutually exclusive definitions.  For example: it is not the case that eros and epithymia are always focused on desire, or that agape and philia are always free of this element.  Nor are some of these words associated only with God, while others are reserved for humanity.  In this particular command, however, the word love is always translated from agape.  Love in this sense is seen as a virtue, an excellence of character that God has by nature and in which we participate through grace.  Such love is primarily interested in the good of the other person, rather than one’s self.  It does not attempt to possess or dominate the other.  Nor is it limited by the scarcities that are imposed by time and place: one can have a few good friends and fewer lovers, but one can have agape for all.

     For Christians, the true archetype of love is found within the inner life of God.  According to Jesus’ analogy, the disciples’ relationship to one another should conform to their relationship to Jesus, which in turn finds its ultimate example in the Word’s relationship to the Source.  The love among the persons of the trinity helps us to understand what a truly wondrous love this is: concerned about others first; not possessive or subordinating or judgmental - thus allowing genuine space for the other to just be; and superabundant - such that can be offered without reserve.  One of the many analogies that St. Augustine offers for helping us to understand the nature of the trinity is that God is the lover, the beloved, and the love that unites them.

     The love that structures the inner life of God gives us a sense for the pattern of Christian love.  Far from a mere feeling of Euphoria, it is a disciplined habit of care and concern that, like all virtues can only be perfected over one’s lifetime.  As Jesus demonstrates - this love is so deeply woven into our lives that we may even find ourselves called to die for it.

      Thus when Jesus says “you are my friends if you do what I command you”, he’s not merely offering a useful or pleasurable friendship to those who have done his bidding.  He is describing this deep and abiding agape as we then are invited into this kind of relationship with Jesus and thereby God.  So part of our goal as Christian’s is to take on God’s own characteristics as our own – and to love one another as God loves us…then, all we will truly need is love (agape)!

Your faithful servant,

carmen

Oneness

“A mind, once expanded by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.”

-       Oliver Wendell Holmes

"The way of the church is not to condemn anyone for eternity, but to pour out the balm of God's mercy on all those who ask for it with a sincere heart.  We in the church must leave behind her four walls and go out in search of those who are distant, those who are on the "outskirts" of life.  We must adopt fully God's own approach, which is that of mercy.  The church must feel the impetus to become like Jesus for all of humanity."

This was written by Pope Francis.  It resonates with me as I awaken to the fact that God is larger than any religion and larger than the labels and distinctions we give to people or people groups.

Much of the language of the Bible talks in ways that the ancient people at that time would understand.  Where is God?  In the ancient world they understood the universe differently.  In three theirs: up there is heaven, where the gods live; here is all of creation, where we live; and down below was the underworld, furthest from the gods.  Yet the Bible also hints at something much deeper and more authentic as well.  Fast forward thousands of years and we know that the earth is not flat and that the heavens are not up there, but all around us.  We are not at the center of the universe, but are part of an ever changing, always in motion creation.  So where is God for us now?  Up – Down, Inside - Outside…our view of our universe and conversely God is evolving as we get more information.  What’s interesting is that the Bible is still relevant today and pointed at the universe we now know to be true.  Paul tells those in the Church of Rome that in God “We live and move and have our being!”  Paul is saying YES!  God is all things and is in all things and around all things.  Paul evolves in his own view of God and by the end of his ministry he even is telling us that there is no Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female.  Paul is trying to describe the Oneness of the creator and creation.  He sees that labels and categories in this regard are not helpful when trying to describe his experience of the Divine.  He comes to discover the Spirit of God in everything - the electricity that the all of creation is plugged into.  God gives motion and purpose and oneness to it all; for in God we live and move and have our being!

Throughout the Bible there are glimpses of this universal truth.  Hear O’ Israel the Lord our God is One!  So Jesus comes into the world to point to this reality of interconnectedness by focusing on that which we have marginalized as not belonging to the whole.  Jesus seeks to reconcile all of creation back to wholeness by serving the least of these…and Jesus further tells His disciples that by serving the least of these they are serving God itself!  He sends His disciples into the world to continue bringing God’s redeeming grace and mercy to those that the world has said doesn’t belong in it!

That is the work of the Church my friends, that is what we are all here to do.  We must bring the light of Christ, and be the light of Christ to those that the world would push away.  Paul would say today there is no American and everyone else, there is no Christian or Muslim, there is no male and female…for in God’s eyes we are all His children…and we are all One in Him…for in Him we live and move and have our being!

Shalom!

Your faithful servant,

carmen

The Flowers Bloom

"Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death

should not be a greater one." — Vladimir Nabokov

Death and suffering are all about us these days not to mention the man made sufferings from continued war and strife in the Middle East.  It can be very disheartening to our souls.  When you talk to some of the elderly or if you look back at history you come to find that death and suffering have always been a part of our lives and no matter how hard we try to insulate ourselves from them we cannot escape it.  As we go through Lent we remember the darkness that this world sometimes has to offer.  It becomes easy to get caught up in the events around us and to feel despair or that we are too little to make a difference.  It’s into and through this world that Jesus enters into our lives.  Jesus was no stranger to pain, oppression and human despair…a world where everyone was too small to change things…a world we they needed a miracle – a messiah – God promised!  Where is God in all this?

…and God came, but not with trumpets and armies; he came in the hope of a small baby who would grow up to be the son of God.  His words would be the seed of God in men’s hearts. His life, death and resurrection the foundations of God here on earth - Christianity and the Church!  Take note that God may seem almost insignificant at first.  As it is said in his parables God comes to us in smallness, he uses the broken and downtrodden to do his will and bring the kingdom of God to earth.  His only son had to suffer this same anguish to enter into our lives, and through the darkness God’s glory came to us in the resurrection - the hope and light of the world!  To say that suffering and death don’t have the final say in our lives!  But even that took three days…God’s work in the world requires patience… WAIT… for the kingdom of God requires patience – the kingdom of God is likened to a seed not a vending machine.  Sometimes in the midst of despair and darkness, when we are experienced suffering, death and the empty tomb we want God here - RIGHT NOW!

God’s work in the world also requires YOU!

Remember the Kingdom of God is first and foremost a reality to be experienced.  You can write about it, think about it and talk about it forever... but it needs to be experienced to be understood.

There’s tension between how the world is and how we want the world to be.  The kingdom is about expressing God’s peace, joy and love right here in the tension.  It becomes a reality that transcends our human circumstances.  By emptying US of self importance, poured out for others, we make room for Christ, whose grace pulses into the world through US that love and serve in the world.

Faith in Jesus is neither a vehicle to cultural power nor spiritual self-improvement.  God has far bigger plans than that.  C.S. Lewis compared God’s work in human restoration to that of renovating a cottage.

“Imagine yourself living in a house.  God comes in to rebuild that house.  At first, perhaps you can understand what He is doing.  He is getting the drains right and stopping leaks in the roof and so on: you know that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised.  But presently He starts knocking the house about in ways that hurt abdominally and does not seem to make sense.  What on earth is He up to?  The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of…throwing out a wing here, putting an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards.  You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but he is building a palace.  He intends to come and live in it himself!”

As Jesus points out “My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples” (John 15:8).  By nurturing and offering the life giving fruits of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control - Gal 5:22-23) we become branches of divine grace, vehicles Christ uses to extend himself to others – that’s US!

God’s image is always under construction in us.  God calls people not for what they have but for what they lack – empty hands can receive, empty wombs can be filled, empty tombs can proclaim the RESURRECTION!

In fact, God does not ask us to give ourselves to others. God asks us to give CHRIST…who transforms us, dwells within us, and fills us with self-giving love.  Paul says it like this (Gal 2:20) It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.  In the fruits of the Spirit, we offer Christ to others, not some holier version of ourselves!  The kingdom of God is here…right here and right now…The kingdom of God is inside each one of you!  That’s what Jesus continues to tell us. 

Alleluia, the LORD is risen indeed, ALLELUIA!

Happy Easter!  The seeds have been sown…The Flowers Bloom!

Your faithful servant,

carmen