Presiding Bishop Michael Curry provides weekly a video reflecting on the Habits of Grace. This week he has included a request we all unite in one common prayer.
Written “to unite us in common prayer and revive us for common mission” during this crisis in the spirit of Pentecost, Curry and his Lutheran counterpart, Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton, invite congregations to pray it from Pentecost through the first Sunday in September. In addition to expressing a shared desire for renewal in a troubling time, the collect also commemorates nearly 20 years of full communion between The Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The collect will be used in Washington National Cathedral’s Pentecost service, during which Curry will preach.
A Prayer for the Power of the Spirit Among the People of God
God of all power and love, we give thanks for your unfailing presence and the hope you provide in times of uncertainty and loss. Send your Holy Spirit to enkindle in us your holy fire. Revive us to live as Christ’s body in the world: a people who pray, worship, learn, break bread, share life, heal neighbors, bear good news, seek justice, rest and grow in the Spirit. Wherever and however we gather, unite us in common prayer and send us in common mission, that we and the whole creation might be restored and renewed, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Here are four short video clips of the progress on the church expansion. Dick reported on Sunday that everything is going to plan and he is very happy. Things will look different when we finally get to gather together again.
Inside of the church. Zoom Coffee Hour is going on while this was video. Construction in front of church. Watch your step!Going inside of hall. Plastic is there to cover opening where the doors and windows used to be.View of the new foundation and front yard. Love hearing the birds!
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.’ A new meditation will be posted on Mondays through May. These meditations can be watched at any time by clicking here.
May Day and the Church looks dominate. But really it is just getting ready to burst wide open for a new beginning. Tresses arrived next week and things will really start to get messy. Check back in and we will share with you the progress week by week.
At our Standing Committee yesterday, I began appointing a Task Force for Reopening Arizona Churches which will meet over the next two weeks to draw up a plan for how to safely reopen our churches during the COVID-19 epidemic. We are taking into account resources from the Centers for Disease Control, a paper from Johns Hopkins University directed at state governors, and the Episcopal Diocese of Texas. The Task Force represents churches of all sizes, spread geographically across Arizona.
Part of the intense difficulty of this epidemic is that we cannot know exactly when it will be safe for churches of different places, sizes, and vulnerabilities. We are going to do our best to take into account all of those variables, and offer a plan that will give your congregation the tools necessary to regather when it is safe to do so, in a way that maintains the best chance of keeping the community safe. It is hard to live into an unknown future. But with Jesus as the Way, the Truth, and the Life, I have confidence that we will do so with God’s blessing and help.
In the meantime, I hope that you will enjoy the following theological reflection on life on the ark, and the patience that Noah and his family must have had to keep themselves safe during and after the flood.
From Episcopal News Service:Executive Council meets virtually to start discussing what a post-pandemic church might look like
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At a special virtual meeting of The Episcopal Church’s Executive Council on April 29, church leaders discussed some of the possible changes in store as the church prepares to “re-tool” in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The brief, previously unscheduled meeting of Executive Council – called for by Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, House of Deputies President the Rev. Gay Clark Jennings and Council Secretary the Rev. Michael Barlowe – was held on Zoom in advance of the council’s regular June meeting, which was scheduled to take place in San Juan, Puerto Rico, but will now be held online.
During his remarks, Curry praised the church for its swift and creative response to restrictions on in-person worship, as bishops and other church leaders navigated unprecedented legal, medical and theological dilemmas. Questions emerged about the logistics of the Eucharist – including canonical concerns about the availability of both the bread and wine and hypothetical scenarios like remote consecration – that required quick and thoughtful responses, and ministries like food pantries adapted their practices to the new reality on the fly.
“I saw this church do what I wouldn’t have dreamed of, and I thank God for that,” Curry said, praising clergy for their ingenuity in pastoral care and remote Holy Week worship.
“It wasn’t perfect and it wasn’t always pretty, but doggone it, this church kept the feast,” Curry said, echoing the message of encouragement he shared in his Word to the Church released the previous day.
Officers of Executive Council, which is tasked with enacting the policies adopted by General Convention and meets at least three times per year, shared updates and discussed topics that the various committees would need to take into consideration before the June meeting. Among the possible changes discussed was a reorientation of the church’s operating budget to provide more support to dioceses. While council was assured that the church has enough funds to continue operating, the ongoing financial implications of the pandemic have forced the church to reevaluate how funds will be spent in the coming year.
“We need to assess how we can transform our grant programs to support more fully the new realities that dioceses and congregations are facing and consider how we can provide relief to the dioceses that may soon be unable to pay their full assessments,” Jennings said in her remarks.
Diocesan assessments (The Episcopal Church’s largest income source) are still coming in, said Treasurer and Chief Financial Officer Kurt Barnes. The Rev. Mally Lloyd, chair of the Joint Standing Committee on Finance, said dioceses have been assured that they will have some flexibility in paying their assessments, as they are able, but only two dioceses have so far requested relief. And the Diocese of Dallas, which had previously held off on paying its full assessment, has decided that it will do so for 2020 and future years.
Other budgetary concerns discussed during the meeting included the need to examine grant applications in light of the pandemic. While previously approved grants are still being disbursed, Lloyd said it will be important to ensure that going forward they are not funding unsafe practices like large group gatherings or going to organizations that may have folded.
Jennings and other members of council talked at length about the need for the church to address the systemic racism that has been illuminated and magnified by the pandemic, including much higher death rates from COVID-19 for African Americans against a pre-existing backdrop of widespread racial disparities in access to health care.
And just as COVID-19 has exposed the race- and class-based fault lines in Americans’ physical health, the same has been true for financial health, Jennings told council. One of council’s priorities, she said, will be to ensure that it is not only the wealthy churches that survive the pandemic.
“In order to emerge from this pandemic with a church that matters, I believe we have to keep the injustices and the systemic racism that the coronavirus has laid bare in a new way at the center of our conversation about who we will become,” Jennings said.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that The Episcopal Church had received $3 million from the Payroll Protection Program. The church has applied for those funds but has not yet received a decision.
– Egan Millard is an assistant editor and reporter for Episcopal News Service. He can be reached at emillard@episcopalchurch.org.
In the midst of this COVID-19 pandemic, we are now at another one of those threshold moments when important and significant decisions must be made on all levels of our global community for the good and the well-being of the entire human family. In this moment, I would ask you to allow me to share with you a Word to the Church: What Would Love Do? (Way of Love companion resources available here.)A Word to the Church The Easter Season A.D. 2020 ——————– “What Would Love Do?”Jesus calls us; o’er the tumult of our life’s wild, restless sea, day by day his clear voice soundeth, saying, “Christian, follow me”Text of Hymn 549, verse 1 – Cecil Frances Alexander (1818-95), alt.
Throughout the Book of Common Prayer there are rubrics, those small or italicized words that don’t always catch our eye, that provide direction and guidance for how a liturgy or service is to be conducted. Rubrics tell us what must be done and what may be done. They limit us and they give us freedom. They require us to exercise our judgment. And when we are at our best, we exercise this judgment under God’s rubric of love.
Jesus tells us things like: Love your enemies; Bless those who curse you; Do unto others as you would have them do unto you; As you did to the least of these who are members of my family you have done to me; Father, forgive; Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, all your strength. This is the first and great commandment and the second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus makes it abundantly clear that the way of unselfish, sacrificial love – love that seeks the good and the well-being of others as well as the self – that love is the rubric of the Christian life.
This rubric of love is seen no more clearly than in the twenty-first chapter of the Gospel according to John.
When [the disciples] had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my lambs.” A second time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Tend my sheep.” He said to him the third time, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” And he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep. Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” (He said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God.) After this he said to him, “Follow me.” (John 21:15-19)
The death of Jesus had left his followers disoriented, uncertain, and confused, afraid of what they knew and anxious about what they did not know. Thinking that the movement was probably dead, the disciples went back to what they knew. They tried to go back to normal. They went fishing.
They fished all night but didn’t catch a thing. Normal would not return. When the morning came, Jesus showed up on the beach, alive, risen from the dead. He asked them, “Children, have you any fish?” They answered, “No.” Then he told them to cast the net on the other side of the boat. They did and caught more fish than they could handle. And then, Jesus invited them to breakfast.
After having fed his disciples, Jesus turned to Peter and three times asked him, “Do you love me?” Three times Peter said, “Yes.” And Jesus said, “Feed my lambs,” “Tend my sheep,” “Feed my sheep.” In this, Jesus told Peter what love looks like. Love God by loving your neighbors, all of them. Love your enemies. Feed the hungry. Bless folk. Forgive them. And be gentle with yourself. Follow me. You may make mistakes, you may not do it perfectly. But whatever you do, do it with love. The truth is, Jesus gave Peter a rubric for the new normal – God’s rubric of love.
Today, like Peter and the disciples, we must discern a new normal. COVID-19 has left us disoriented, uncertain, and confused, afraid of what we know and anxious about what we do not know. Our old normal has been upended, and we hunger for its return.
I do not say this from a lofty perch. I get it. There is a big part of me that wants to go back to January 2020 when I had never heard of COVID-19, and when I only thought of “Contagion” as a movie. Looking back through what I know are glasses darkened by loss, I find myself remembering January 2020 as a “golden age.”
But of course, January 2020 wasn’t perfect, not even close. And anyway, I can’t go back. None of us can go back. We must move forward. But we don’t know for sure what the new normal will be. Fortunately, God’s rubric of love shows us the way.
In her book The Dream of God the late Verna Dozier, who was a mentor to me, wrote:
Kingdom of God thinking calls us to risk. We always see through a glass darkly, and that is what faith is about. I will live by the best I can discern today. Tomorrow I may find out I was wrong. Since I do not live by being right, I am not destroyed by being wrong. The God revealed in Jesus, whom I call the Christ, is a God whose forgiveness goes ahead of me, and whose love sustains me and the whole created world. That God bursts all the definitions of our small minds, all the limitations of our timid efforts, all the boundaries of our institutions. [1]
Kingdom of God thinking is already happening. God’s rubric of love is already in action. I’ve been watching bishops, priests, deacons, and lay people of our church following Jesus in the practices that make up his way of love and doing things we never imagined. The creativity and the risk-taking – done with love – is amazing.
We’ve been trying, making mistakes, learning, regrouping, trying anew. I’ve seen it. Holy Week and Easter happened in ways that none of us dreamed possible. I’ve quietly read Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, and Compline online with you. I’ve seen soup kitchens, pantries, and other feeding ministries carefully doing their work in safe and healthy ways. Zoom coffee hours, bible studies, and small discipleship groups. I’ve seen this church stand for the moral primacy of love. I’ve seen it, even when public health concerns supersede all other considerations, including in-person worship. That is moral courage. Who knows, but that love may demand more of us. But fear not, just remember what the old slaves use to say, walk together, children, and don’t you get weary, because there is a great camp meeting in the Promised Land. Oh, I’ve seen us do what we never thought we would or could do, because we dared to do what Jesus tells us all to do.
As our seasons of life in the COVID-19 world continue to turn, we are called to continue to be creative, to risk, to love. We are called to ask, What would unselfish, sacrificial love do?
What would love do? Love is the community praying together, in ways old and new. Love finds a path in this new normal to build church communities around being in relationship with God. Love supports Christians in spiritual practices. Prayer, meditation, study. Turn, Learn, Pray, Worship, Bless, Go, Rest.
What would love do? Love calls us to care for our neighbors, for our enemies. Love calls us to attend to those in prison, to those who are homeless, to those in poverty, to children, to immigrants and refugees. Love calls us to be in relationship with those with whom we disagree.
What would love do? Love calls us to be gentle with ourselves, to forgive our own mistakes, to take seriously the Sabbath. Love calls us to be in love with God, to cultivate a loving relationship with God, to spend time with God, to be still and know that God is God.
Jesus says, Simon, son of John, do you love me? Jesus says, Michael, son of Dorothy and Kenneth, do you love me? Jesus says, Do you love me?
Jesus says, Follow me, and take the risk to live the question, What would love do?
This, my friends, is God’s rubric of love. This, my friends, is God’s very way of life.In our joys and in our sorrows, days of toil and hours of ease, still he calls, in cares and pleasures, “Christian, love me more than these.”Jesus calls us! By thy mercies, Savior, may we hear thy call, give our hearts to thine obedience, serve and love thee best of all.Text of Hymn 549, verses 4 and 5 – Cecil Frances Alexander (1818-95), alt.
God love you. God bless you. And may God hold us all in those almighty hands of love.
Amen.
+Michael
The Most Reverend Michael B. Curry Presiding Bishop and Primate The Episcopal Church
[1] The Dream of God, Verna Dozier, Cowley Publications (1991), Seabury Classics (2006)
Imagine what it would be like if we not only had stay-at-home orders but in addition there was virtually no way to get to a grocery store – our pantries and freezers would become bare, and then how would we get basic necessities to feed our families? This is reality for Iglesia San Marcos, our sister church in the northeasternmost part of Honduras. This is a very poor region where people depend on public transportation as their only means of getting to shopping, medical care, etc. There are no grocery stores within a day’s walk.
Like the rest of the world, COVID19 is in this region and the government has imposed strict stay-at-home orders which means that the public transportation services are not running. Thus, most of the people living in northeastern Honduras cannot get to grocery stores. The exception is the very few who own private vehicles; they charge exorbitant fees to take people to the next town where there is a grocery store – these people are too poor, because of COVID19 precautions, many are not able to work so they have no income. In early April the Church of Our Saviour family and the Medical Team who hold a clinic in San Marcos annually generously donated funds for the purpose of providing foods to the very needy families served by Iglesia San Marcos and the surrounding communities. The monies were sent to a highly trusted member of Iglesia San Marcos; her daughter in Georgia helped to coordinate funds and logistics including paying for a grocery store delivery fee to San Marcos. Enough money was collected to purchase beans, rice, soap, cooking oil, salt, pasta and tomato sauce, and eggs to fill bags that were distributed to 94 families! pictures of some delighted recipients are on the COS website.The stay-at-home order will not be lifted before the groceries need to be replenished. More money is trickling in but so far there is about half as much as the amount that was sent a few weeks ago. The funds that have been collected will be sent to buy more foodstuffs. We have been asked if it might be possible to send money in time for to shop, package, and do a second distribution on Mother’s Day.
Blessings for your continued generosity. In His Name,
Barbara Stone–
The video shows a snapshot of the community of Iglesia San Marcos and the efforts to organize to assist families during this time of crises.
Church of Our Saviour is committed to support families living in Iglesia San Marcos. Currently we are providing funds to hire a driver and truck to go to a nearby city to purchase food. You can donate by clicking the donate button and selecting the Church Discretionary Funds Money will be sent to an identified person who is helping us distribute food to families.
