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Emmanuel Church Newsletter July 12, 2020

Newsletter Sunday, July 12, 2020

Dear Friends of Emmanuel,

In the Collect for Sunday, July 12, we pray that we may know and understand what things we ought to do and ask for the grace and power to accomplish them. It is a lofty request of God.

Jesus after all did not live in the midst of this pandemic! Jesus did not have the racism, ageism, and sexism, etc. to deal with what we are facing today. Or did he? If we believe that God has provided guidance for all these modern things by giving Jesus to live and die as one of us, then where do we find help for today’s problems?

Actually, we can if we put our minds to it. If we pay attention. If we open our minds and hearts, the answer is there. Remember the Samaritans, the tax collectors, the lepers? Those were the communities that were discriminated against. Remember the lepers that no one wanted to go near? Remember the woman who was about to be stoned? And the woman who came to wash his feet with their hair? Remember Zacchaeus and Lazarus the rich man and many other characters in our scriptures.

Let us not be like the seed that has fallen on the rocks and turn away. Let us embrace the blessings and the challenges that are before us in 2020 as God would have us do.

The Lessons for us this week focus on seed and “sower.” Timeless images for those of us who garden or even remember from our grade school science class know about the need for water, sunshine, and good soil in order to receive a good harvest.

The analogy is simple. Everyone and everything needs to be nourished with the soil, water, and sunshine of life. When we nourish our souls and hearts, we receive the joy and peace needed to accomplish what God has for us to do.

Isaiah 55: 12-13 says, “the mountains and the hills” will burst out in song…and it will be an everlasting sign. God calls us to be safe, be comfortable, care for ourselves, and pray that God will give us the knowledge our task. And “we shall go out with Joy and be led forth with peace.” Surely peace and joy are a priceless precious gift from God.

Be well, be safe,

The Rev. Joyce Caggiano

View the taped service anytime via our website:

https://emmanuelwr.org/sermons/

New this week on our website: Presiding Bishop Michael Curry has posted a new “Habits of Grace”

Reflection.

https://emmanuelwr.org/news-events/

Hydrangeas at Emmanuel

(photo by Terri Halliday)

We may not be there—but the flowers bloom at our beautiful church. Taken on July 7, 2020.

“Habits of Grace” The Growing Edge July 7, 2020

July 8, 2020 by Susan Kryczka in Community / News

Presiding Bishop Michael Curry reflection on America post 4th of July.

https://episcopalchurch.org/habits-of-grace?wvideo=xops3jbhvi&wkey=SU5GT0BFTU1BTlVFTFdSLk9SRw==&foreign_data=mailchimp_campaign_id%3A630fba03f6

In this time, I remember the words of Howard Thurman, who I often go back to. Dr. Thurman was one of the founders of probably the first interracial and interreligious church in the United States in San Francisco, back in the forties and fifties. He was the author of Jesus and the Disinherited. He was one of the people who went and met Mahatma Gandhi in the 1940s, and brought back his teachings of non-violent social change that influenced an entire civil rights movement. He was quietly, if you will, the spiritual director of many of the leaders of the civil rights movement. Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, Martin King, many others went quietly to Howard Thurman to talk, to reflect, to pray. He wrote this in one of his meditations about times of great transition and turmoil:

Look well to the growing edge. All around us, worlds are dying and new worlds are being born. All around us, life is dying and life is being born. The fruit ripens on the tree, the roots are silently at work in the darkness of the earth against a time when there shall be new leaves, fresh blossoms, green fruit. Such as the growing edge. It is the extra breath from the exhausted lung, the one more thing to try when all else has failed. The upward reach of life when weariness closes in upon all endeavor. This is the basis of hope in moments of despair, the incentive to carry on when times are out of joint and men have lost their reason. A source of confidence when worlds crash and dreams whiten into ash. The birth of a child — life’s most dramatic answer to death — this is the growing edge incarnate. Look well to the growing edge!

God love you. God bless you. And may God hold us all in those almighty hands of love

The Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III at National Cathedral 6/28/20 “Weary Throats and New Songs”

July 3, 2020 by Susan Kryczka in Community / News / Worship

Bishop Alan Gates Reflection on Juneteenth 2020

June 19, 2020 by Susan Kryczka in Community / News

June 19, 2020

This week’s reflection coincides with the Juneteenth holiday. The observance and history of this day have not long been familiar to me. I suspect that may be true for others.

Juneteenth (a portmanteau blending “June” and “nineteenth”) commemorates the day when, on June 19, 1865, federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, to bring to the farthest corner of the Confederacy word of the formal end of the war in April. General Gordon Granger established Union authority in the state and issued an edict that “in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves.”

This, of course, was not news. The Emancipation Proclamation had been issued two-and-a-half years earlier. The Confederacy had surrendered two months before. But General Granger’s presence and his edict established that those earlier events could no longer be disregarded. Ignorance (real or feigned), oblivion, obstructionism, wishful thinking–none of these was to be justification for ignoring the reality of emancipation. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has written:

Defying confusion and delay, terror and violence, the newly “freed” black men and women … now had a date to rally around. In one of the most inspiring grassroots efforts of the post-Civil War period, they transformed June 19 from a day of unheeded military orders into their own annual rite, “Juneteenth,” beginning one year later in 1866. (i)

In ensuing decades other commemorations arose to mark various milestones associated with emancipation, but Juneteenth endured as a singular celebration. Texas adopted it as a state holiday in 1979, and most other states have done likewise. In Massachusetts, a 2007 bill was passed commending observance in the Commonwealth on the closest Sunday.

Earlier this week Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo spoke by Zoom with bishops of The Episcopal Church. Commenting upon the flood of protest following the killing of George Floyd, and the tidal wave of demand for reform linked to racial justice, Chief Arradondo–himself a person of color–said to us: “It’s 2020 and this suddenly seems like a new conversation, which is odd to me.”

The history of violence perpetrated against people of color is not news. Physical violence and countless other forms of diminishment and dehumanization are not new news and not an abstraction. If this seems like a new conversation to some of us, then it can only be because–like the 19th-century citizens of Galveston before us–we have been mired in ignorance (real or feigned), oblivion, obstructionism, or wishful thinking.

In response to a recent statement which Bishop Harris and I issued about the sin of racism, the following comment was posted: “I don’t have the sin of racism. Maybe you do.” Well, yes. Yes I do. Sin is not to be equated with some roster of bad behavior. Sin is the deep brokenness of the human condition, the gulf between ourselves and God, between ourselves and one another. Hamartia is the word: “missing the mark.”

In confessing sin our prayers invite us to acknowledge sin of both commission and omission–“what we have done, and … left undone” (ii)–as well as sin which is both individual and communal–“the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.” (iii) I cannot separate myself from the racism instilled deep within me, the racism by which our land is riven. So yes: I “have” the sin of racism.

This is a moment of intense national reckoning with our history of racism and racial injustice. It is a moment for introspection, repentance and re-dedication–both personal and communal. In such a moment, for any one of us to honor Juneteenth for the first time is of course a small gesture. However, I hope it will be understood as a manifestation of grieving for black and brown lives lost to racist violence; support of those laboring for enduring systemic change; and a signal of our intention more deeply to engage ourselves and our diocese in that hard work.

The history of that holiday, after all, points to what so many of us must renounce individually and together: ignorance (real or feigned), oblivion, obstructionism, or wishful thinking. Quoting again from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.:

Of all Emancipation Day observances, Juneteenth falls closest to the summer solstice, … when the sun, at its zenith, defies the darkness …. By choosing to celebrate the last place in the South that freedom touched, … we remember the shining promise of emancipation, along with the bloody path America took by delaying it and deferring fulfillment of those simple words in General Granger’s original order: that “This involves absolute equality … between former masters and slaves.” (iv)

A blessed and hopeful Juneteenth to you, to our nation, to us all.

Yours in Christ,

+Alan

The Rt. Rev. Alan M. Gates

(i) Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “What Is Juneteenth?” https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/what-is-juneteenth/

(ii) The Book of Common Prayer, p. 360.

(iii) Enriching Our Worship, p. 19.

(iv) Gates, ibid.

“Habits of Grace” In this month of June — June 15, 2020

June 17, 2020 by Susan Kryczka in Community / News

As we learn how to adjust our lives given the reality of the coronavirus and the request to do our part to slow its spread by practicing social distancing, I invite you to join me each week to take a moment to cultivate a ‘habit of grace.’

Clink the link to hear Presiding Bishop Michael Curry’s message:

https://episcopalchurch.org/habits-of-grace?wvideo=xops3jbhvi&wkey=SU5GT0BFTU1BTlVFTFdSLk9SRw&foreign_data=mailchimp_campaign_id%3Aad87f7f484&wchannelid=u3mbmc7c0r

A National Call For Moral Revival – Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II Sunday, June 14, 2020 National Cathedral

June 15, 2020 by Susan Kryczka in Community / News / Worship

Click below to access the sermon by The Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II, Co-Chair, Poor People’s Campaign. Given at the National Cathedral, Washington, D.C. on Sunday, June 14, 2020.

A National Call For Moral Revival

“Habits of Grace” Prayer for Quiet Confidence June 4, 2020

June 5, 2020 by Susan Kryczka in Community / News

https://episcopalchurch.org/habits-of-grace?wvideo=xops3jbhvi&wkey=SU5GT0BFTU1BTlVFTFdSLk9SRw&foreign_data=mailchimp_campaign_id%3A78a145cfc2&wchannelid=u3mbmc7c0r&wvideoid=oc9g3do82k

New England bishops respond to President Trump’s photo op

June 2, 2020 by Susan Kryczka in Community / News

Sent to clergy and congregational and diocesan leadership

The bishops of the seven New England Episcopal dioceses today issued the following joint statement in response to President Trump’s photo op at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Lafayette Square, Washington, D.C., characterizing it as “cynical” and calling out “the abomination of continued oppression of and violence against people of color in this nation.” The text of the statement appears below.

June 2, 2020

What President Trump did in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, Lafayette Square on the evening of June 1 was disgraceful and morally repugnant. Displaying a Bible from which he did not quote, using as a mere backdrop an Episcopal church where he did not pray, and – more callously – ordering law enforcement to clear, with force and tear gas, a path through demonstrators who had gathered in peace, President Trump distorted for his own purposes the cherished symbols of our faith to condone and stoke yet more violence.

His tactic was obvious. Simply by holding aloft an unopened Bible he presumed to claim Christian endorsement and imply that of The Episcopal Church. Far more disturbingly, he seemed to be affecting the authority of the God and Savior we worship and serve, in order to support his own authority and to wield enhanced use of military force in a perverted attempt to restore peace to our nation.

His actions did nothing to mend the torn social fabric of our nation. Instead, they were a blatant attempt to drive a wedge between the people of this nation, and even between people of faith. No matter where we may stand on the partisan spectrum, we, as Christian leaders called to proclaim a God of love, find his actions repugnant. Jesus taught us to love our enemies, to seek healing over division, and make peace in the midst of violence.

Our church may rightly feel outraged and insulted by having the symbols of our faith used as a set prop in a cynical political drama. The real abomination before us, however, is the continued oppression of and violence against people of color in this nation. Let us reserve and focus the energies of our indignation to serve our Lord Jesus Christ’s higher purpose: to extend love and mercy and justice for all, and especially for those whose life, liberty, and very humanity is threatened by the persistent sin of systemic racism and the contagion of white supremacy.

The Rt. Rev. Laura J. Ahrens, Bishop Suffragan, Connecticut
The Rt. Rev. Ian T. Douglas, Bishop Diocesan, Connecticut
The Rt. Rev. Thomas James Brown, Bishop Diocesan, Maine
The Rt. Rev. Alan M. Gates, Bishop Diocesan, Massachusetts
The Rt. Rev. Gayle E. Harris, Bishop Suffragan, Massachusetts
The Rt. Rev. A. Robert Hirschfeld, Bishop Diocesan, New Hampshire
The Rt. Rev. W. Nicholas Knisely, Bishop Diocesan, Rhode Island
The Rt. Rev. Shannon MacVean-Brown, Bishop Diocesan, Vermont
The Rt. Rev. Douglas J. Fisher, Bishop Diocesan, Western Massachusetts

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https://www.diomass.org/news/diocesan-news/new-england-bishops-respond-one-voice-presidents-cynical-photo-op