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Pentecost 13 August 30, 2009

James 1:17-27                                                                      

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23                                                      

Well, the school buses started rolling by this past week and the air turned crisp, so another summer is drawing to an end. No matter how long we’ve been out of school, fall is still somehow another beginning, isn’t it? It set me thinking of that old saying that wisdom is what remains after you’ve forgotten everything you learned in school. And I wonder if it isn’t true that holiness is what remains when we’ve forgotten everything we did in church? A thought, anyway.

It goes with our focus this morning, which is the last in our summer series on worship: “Being the Body of Christ in the World” – in other words, what happens after the service. We’ve received the Body and Blood of Christ into ourselves. We’ve “become what we are,” in those words of St. Augustine that we used for the title of this series. The whole point of our worship is now what comes afterwards, the formation of our lives in the world. There’s no point in liturgy, no point in prayer, if it doesn’t make a difference – the right kind of difference – in who we are and how we live in the world.