Podcast
Hope Springs Eternal
Hosted by Alan Bentrup · EN
Sermons from the Rev. Alan D. Bentrup, rector of St. Martin-in-the-Fields Episcopal Church in Keller, Texas.
15episodes
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Wow, God!
2w ago00:15:20Tap to summarizeAll week at Vacation Bible School the kids learned a "festal shout," two big words for whenever they saw how amazing God is. Wow, God! This VBS Sunday children's message starts there, with the line from our psalm, happy are the people who know the festal shout, and turns it loose on a place every kid in Keller knows: the Fort Worth Zoo.There is a marker at the zoo that tells a story most people walk right past. Long ago a flood washed the very first Fort Worth Zoo away, but the people found safe, higher ground and started it over, and it became the oldest zoo in Texas, still open today. That one little sign carries almost everything the kids learned this week. God made everything. God knows everything. God is our safe place. And God is forever. The loudest Wow of all comes last, the one we save for the end: God is love, shown on a cross and an empty tomb, a love that lasts forever and ever.A short, joyful message for the whole family, with plenty of room for the kids to shout along.
Transcribe →Buried Twice
3w ago00:08:49Tap to summarizeOutside Pilot Point there is a cemetery called St. John's, the oldest Black cemetery in Denton County. Around four hundred people are buried there, and only about twenty graves still have a stone. Someone working to save it said these people have been buried twice. Once in the ground, and once by being forgotten.This short homily from our early service starts on that ground and lets Paul answer it. The wages of sin is death, he writes, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Not a better wage. A gift. Left to ourselves, we are dead and forgotten, and no marker holds that back forever. But God knows every name, even the ones the stones have lost, and he does not only remember the dead. He raises them. Eternal, abundant, forever, the life of the age to come, freely given at the table.Reading: Romans 6:12-23 (Proper 6)Part of Roman Roads, a summer series through Paul's letter to the Romans, each week paired with a historical marker from the roads around us.
Transcribe →The Bad News That Makes the Good News Good
Jun 1400:15:59Tap to summarizeThree historical markers stand within a few steps of each other on a trail in North Arlington. One remembers a peacemaker who freed captives and brought them home. One remembers a raid that attacked a village. One remembers a treaty that opened a people's land to be taken. A mercy, a killing, and a displacement, all on the same small patch of ground. That is where this sermon begins.It turns out Paul stands his people on honest ground too. Romans 5 does not arrive until he has spent chapters proving that no one is righteous, not one. He tells the worst of the story first. And only then comes the line that changes everything: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.This is not a sermon about cleaning up your past in order to be loved. It is the announcement that the love came first, and that is the only thing that ever makes honesty survivable. We can tell the whole truth about ourselves, and about our history, because we are not justified by the story being clean. We are justified by faith. In a year when the country is arguing over how to tell its own story, that turns out to be good news.Part of Roman Roads, a summer series walking straight through Paul's letter to the Romans, one passage at a time, each week paired with a real Texas historical marker standing on the roads around us.Reading: Romans 5:1-8 (Proper 6)Markers: Jesse Chisholm, the Site of Bird's Fort, and the Sloan-Journey Expedition, North Arlington
Transcribe →God Keeps Promises to the Dead
Jun 900:14:01Tap to summarizeA land company promised poor settlers nearly two million acres of North Texas. For some of them the promise fell apart and left only graves on the prairie. That is where this sermon begins, at a roadside marker in Grapevine, and it turns out to be where Paul begins too.In Romans 4 he points us to a promise made to a man whose body was as good as dead and a womb that was closed, and he tells us why that promise held when so many others break. It never rested on anyone's strength. It rested on grace. This is not a lesson about having enough faith. It is the announcement that the God who makes the promise is the God who gives life to the dead, in a closed womb, in a house full of mourners, and in a sealed tomb outside Jerusalem.Part of Roman Roads, a summer series walking straight through Paul's letter to the Romans, one passage at a time, each week paired with a real Texas historical marker standing on the roads around us.Readings: Romans 4:13-25 and Matthew 9:18-26 Marker: The Peters Colony in Tarrant County and the Hedgcoxe War (Grapevine and The Colony)
Transcribe →God Is The Center
Jun 100:11:34Tap to summarizeYou leave vacation days on the table. You overschedule the summer. You live like the whole thing falls apart if you stop. This Trinity Sunday sermon is the Gospel’s answer to that exhaustion: you are not the main character of the story. God is.Drawing on Genesis 1, Psalm 8, 2 Corinthians 13, and the Great Commission in Matthew 28, we walk through what the Trinity actually means for a tired life. The Father creates you and calls you good before you do anything. The Son redeems you, and nothing you do or fail to do adds to or subtracts from the cross. The Spirit sends you, not because God needs you, but because God invites you. The outcome was never yours to secure.You are a creature made in love. A sinner held by grace. A servant accompanied by presence. The story does not depend on you. You can rest.St. Martin’s Episcopal Church | Keller, TexasReadings: Genesis 1:1-2:4a, Psalm 8, 2 Corinthians 13:11-13, Matthew 28:16-20
Transcribe →The Reason Nobody Wants to Hear About Your Faith (And How to Fix It)
May 1000:10:32Tap to summarizeWhat does your mom have to do with evangelism? More than you think.This sermon starts with a simple question: if you wanted to tell someone about a woman who shaped your life, what would you say? You wouldn't hand them a spreadsheet. You wouldn't list her measurable outputs. You'd testify -- about how she loved you, showed up for you, changed you.So why do we think sharing our faith looks like winning a debate?Drawing on 1 Peter 3, this message reframes "always be ready to give an account" away from intellectual self-defense and toward something far more honest: testimony. Something happened. It changed me. Let me tell you about it.The hope Peter is talking about isn't a vague feeling that things will work out. It's the specific, resurrection-grounded claim that we are free to live differently right now -- free to do good even when it costs something, free to love even when it's easier not to.That's a hope worth knowing well enough to say out loud.
Transcribe →God's Mercy is Bigger than You Think!
May 400:10:59Tap to summarizeOn the Fifth Sunday of Easter, Fr. Alan Bentrup preaches from Acts 7, John 14, and 1 Peter 2 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Keller, Texas.Two of the most misused texts in the New Testament show up in this week's readings. John 14 has been turned into a border checkpoint. 1 Peter 2 has been stamped onto a flag. Both readings have been used to draw the circle small and keep people out.But then Luke slips a single sentence into the story of Stephen's martyrdom: the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul.The man who wrote half the New Testament was holding the coats.This sermon asks what it means to worship a God whose mercy is bigger than our categories, bigger than our politics, bigger than our preferences, and bigger than the lines we have drawn around who deserves it.St. Martin's Episcopal Church | Keller, TexasEaster 5, Year A | Acts 7:55-60, Psalm 31, 1 Peter 2:2-10, John 14:1-14
Transcribe →Jesus Doesn't Wait for Your Doubt to Resolve | A Second Sunday of Easter Sermon
Apr 1200:10:50Tap to summarizeWhat does it mean that the risen Jesus keeps saying the same thing? To frightened disciples behind a locked door. To Thomas in his doubt. Over and over: "Peace be with you."In this Easter Sunday sermon at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Keller, Texas, Fr. Alan explores John 20:19-31 and what the resurrection has to do with a plumber named Mike Jesus, a week of doubt, and the moment every Sunday when a room full of people turns toward each other and says the peace.Jesus does not wait for the fear to lift. He does not wait for the doubt to resolve. He walks in and says it anyway.That is not a small thing. That is the resurrection moving through a room.St. Martin's Episcopal Church | Keller, TexasSecond Sunday of Easter | Year AJohn 20:19-31
Transcribe →The Sound of Hell Undone | The Great Vigil at St Martin's
Apr 500:04:58Tap to summarizeAll week we have been listening.A crowd. Water poured out. A hammer. And then silence.Tonight the ground shook.In this Great Vigil of Easter service from St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Keller, Texas, Fr. Alan offers a brief reflection on what the resurrection actually sounds like: not a quiet next chapter, but an earthquake. The sound of a door torn off its hinges from the inside. The sound of death discovering it has been outsmarted.Hell made its move on Friday. It looked like a victory.It was not a victory.And no one has ever said that better than John Chrysostom. Written in the fourth century and never improved upon, his Paschal Homily is one of the great proclamations of the Christian faith. Rather than compete with it, Fr. Alan steps aside and lets Chrysostom preach.Listen.The Sounds of Holy WeekSt. Martin's Episcopal Church | Keller, TexasScripture: Matthew 28:1–10
Transcribe →What Sound Defines Easter?
Apr 500:08:29Tap to summarizeEaster is not optimism.The people in this story are not people for whom hope came easy. They watched their friend die. They buried him. They came back to the tomb in the dark because they didn't know where else to go.Jeremiah wrote to survivors who had lost everything: the people who survived the sword found grace in the wilderness. Not after the wilderness. In it.That is the world Mary Magdalene is living in when she comes to the tomb before sunrise. She is not coming in hope. She is coming because grief pulls you back to the last place you saw someone.And then Jesus says her name.One word. One syllable. The whole resurrection in a single breath.In this Easter Day sermon from St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Keller, Texas, Fr. Alan explores what resurrection actually sounds like. Not a trumpet blast over easy circumstances. A name spoken quietly to someone in the wilderness. To someone who came expecting nothing.Grace does not wait for you on the other side of the wilderness. It meets you inside it.He is already ahead of you. Already calling.The Sounds of Holy WeekSt. Martin's Episcopal ChurchKeller, TexasScripture: John 20:1–18
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