I am grateful for you!

Dear friends,

I am grateful for:

Busy moms who take the time to craft a poignant Maundy Thursday service where children learn to wash each other’s feet

Hardworking altar and flower guild members and leaders who polish, scrub, lug, decorate, refill, iron, launder, organize, replenish, and arrange to create such beauty for our worship week by week, season by season, year by year

Those whose hands hold and distribute the bread and wine, helping us partake of Christ himself, inside the church and elsewhere

Volunteer receptionists who answer phones and doors and endure long periods of potential boredom in order to spring into action when needed

Musicians and their leaders who grace us with the gift of their voices and other instruments, leading us in song and enriching our worship

Those who guide us to and from the altar, collect our offerings, provide us with bulletins, and greet us with a smile

Teachers and helpers and nursery staff who enfold our littlest ones with love

Acolytes of all shapes and sizes and ages; those who are learning and those who are mentoring

All who plant and rake and weed and water, stewarding our precious grounds
Cooks and dishwashers, servers and table setters; all who nourish us in body and spirit through church fellowship

Those who pledge and tithe and give; and all who count and organize, deposit and manage our finances, caring wisely for that which has been entrusted to us

Sound operators and video streamers, ably overseeing electronic ministries and gamely leaping to assist each other when glitches arise

Those who study and those who teach; on Sundays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays and so many other times in between

Lectors who read God’s word for us and offer our heartfelt prayers to God

Staff who scramble to ensure that funerals and receptions are a source of comfort and hope for grieving families; that our spacious and somewhat challenging building is well cared for; that concerns are addressed and communication happens

Vestry members who grapple faithfully with knotty problems in order to serve God and their fellow parishioners

People who come and worship even when they are tired or stressed or overwhelmingly busy; even when the morning hasn’t gone smoothly and the car ride wasn’t pleasant

Those who speak or text or email sweet and encouraging words to uplift tired spirits and remind people of God’s love

All who go out into the world for God’s sake and on our behalf

You  😊
 
Easter blessings and much love.  -- Anne

Eastertide

Eastertide is the season where we get to hear a little each Sunday from the book of Acts, a record of the wild experiences of Jesus’s first disciples as they went into the world to tell the good news. After having taken a good look inside ourselves during the season of Lent, in Eastertide Jesus pushes us from the nest and we find ourselves, like those disciples, bumping our way through actual discipleship in the real world.

It’s exciting, especially at first, when the memory of the risen Lord is fresh in our minds. Think of the last time you had a personal revelation, or you read a book you adored; you couldn’t wait to tell someone.  But at some point the newness wanes and the vigor you once felt is no longer enough to properly fuel your work in the world.

That is, I believe, where your Christian community comes in. For the members of the choir, for instance, we feel refreshed in our knowledge of the risen Lord when we work intensely on an anthem and it comes together on a Sunday morning. We hit just the right chord and there is something sacred born that is more than the sum of the individual notes. In children’s church, interactions amongst children who had just met were of course hesitant in September; now those same children huddle together in excitement as acolytes, waiting for the procession to begin. I see God at work every week when going about my responsibilities at church. Parishioners show up, without fanfare and probably sometimes without thanks, to collect and deliver food to the food pantry, to water the plants inside and out, to make sure the children’s activity bags are freshly stuffed and have a rotating selection of activities.

Much of God’s work is difficult and tedious. Not every gathering of the faithful produces a golden moment you treasure, but it is because we did not neglect to meet that we gather what we need in order to do what Jesus sent us to do. This Eastertide, as you flap your fledgling disciple wings, I hope St. Andrew’s can be your place to flock and renew yourself week after week.

Ginny Chilton, Minister of Music

An Easter saga

At my old church in Florida, every year when we came out of church on Easter Sunday morning, the cars in the parking lot were plastered with fliers that decried Easter as having nothing to do with the resurrection.  The word “Easter” was a reference to a pagan god of fertility or something and, indeed, my dictionary of etymology says that Eastre was the name of a Germanic goddess, deriving from the word “east”, indicating an original reference to the goddess of dawn.  OK, but my etymological dictionary also begins the definition by stating that by the year 1103, it was a festival commemorating the resurrection of Christ, from which we get the name Ester (the title of a book of the Old Testament, last time I looked.)

Along those lines, I have never figured out what the heck the Easter Bunny has to do with the resurrection.  And why would a rabbit go around laying eggs anyway?  Besides, rabbits don’t lay eggs, so where would an oversized rabbit get eggs - from the Easter Chicken?  OK, an egg can represent new life, new life being offered by the resurrection, but Jesus didn’t lay an egg in the Garden of Gethsemane.  Egg hunts are harmless fun, but the closest thing I can come to a biblical reference for them is a horde of locusts descending on the landscape!
 
Eastre, bunnies, eggs…  I really wouldn’t mind coming around to what some have begun referring to as Resurrection Sunday.  Seems to say what we’re celebrating pretty straight-forwardly, but then, since its earliest days, Christianity has been shrewdly appropriating the dates of pagan holidays, taking what has already been considered sacred and overlaying it with the Christian story (everyone likes Christmas trees, right?), sanctifying the time to the Lord, but until it becomes more common, happy Easter!
 
— Marc Vance, Associate Rector

Life is changed, not ended

Dear friends,

If you have attended a funeral at St. Andrew’s, you have probably seen a note from the Book of Common Prayer in our bulletin.  It begins The liturgy for the dead is an Easter liturgy. It finds all its meaning in the resurrection. Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we, too, shall be raised.

A funeral is an Easter liturgy.  That’s why we vest the altar and the clergy in white, why we light the Paschal candle at every burial office.  We are an Easter people.  Even at the grave, as the words of the commendation tell us, we make our song:  Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!

In a few days we will begin our slow, sad walk through Holy Week.  On Good Friday we will come to Jesus’ grave.  But the journey does not end there.  It ends with the resurrection light of Easter Sunday, of Jesus alive again and giving us that life, in this world and the next.

This is it:  Christians’ holiest season, the remembrance of Jesus’ death and celebration of his resurrection.  Not only does the burial liturgy find all its meaning in the resurrection; so do we.  Easter matters not only on the appointed spring morning but also, and more importantly, at every other moment of our lives, in all seasons, in joy and sorrow. 

The resurrection we celebrate with happy hymns on Easter Sunday is the central truth of our lives, from birth to death, and beyond.

One of my favorite lines in the funeral service is from the preface at communion:  For to your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended.  That is our faith in a nutshell.

Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we, too, shall be raised.  I look forward to celebrating Jesus’ resurrection with you on March 31—and to our living and walking as Easter people in all of the days to come.

Blessings.  -Anne

 

Wednesday, March 27

11:00 AM  -  Lenten Service of Holy Eucharist

Thursday, March 28

5:30 PM  -  Maundy Thursday Family Service: Click here for details & RSVP
7:00 PM  -  Maundy Thursday Service

Friday, March 29

12:00 PM  -  Stations of the Cross
7:00 PM  -  Good Friday Service

Saturday, March 30

7:00 PM  -  Holy Saturday/Service of Light

Sunday, March 31  -  Easter Day!

6:30 AM  -  Sunrise Service behind Hilton School
8:00 AM  -  Holy Eucharist, Rite I
10:00 AM  -  Children's Chapel with Easter Egg Hunt (gather in the Youth House beginning at 9:45)
10:30 AM  -  Festal Eucharist, Rite II

Maundy Thursday Family Service
March 28, 5:30 to 6:30  in the Parish Hall.
This gathering is designed for families with young children (although anyone is welcome!) and will include dinner, communion, foot washing, and other activities suitable for young children. Click here for more info and to RSVP.

Easter Children’s Chapel & Egg Hunt
On Easter Sunday, Children’s Chapel begins at 10:00 AM in the Youth House.  It will include an Easter Egg Hunt for children of all ages (bring a basket). Please begin gathering at 9:45 AM. 

Love's Endeavor, Love's Expense

 One of the many fun parts of my job is picking out new music for the choir. I can listen to new music online, or sit down with a stack of anthems and immerse myself at the piano. In school we focused mostly on music written 100 or even 300 years ago. Works by the great masters are still my staples, but I find I also have a need for new texts and music. A new hymn or anthem can be disarming in how it finds ways to expand my sense of God and address issues peculiar to modern life.

In past eras of church life, and still in certain Christian cultures and denominations, the focus of Lent and especially Holy Week is on Jesus’s acute suffering and the graphic nature of his Crucifixion. These things can’t and shouldn’t be overlooked, but to focus on them too much detracts from the self-sacrificial love at the heart of Jesus’s final hours.
 
In light of this, I was glad to come across a new anthem, “Love’s Endeavor, Love’s Expense,” which the choir plans to sing on Palm Sunday. As Holy Week fast approaches, I hope this beautiful poetry draws you closer to Jesus, to the fascinating paradoxes of power in weakness and life out of death, and most of all to his unconditional love for you.

Morning glory, starlit sky,
Soaring music, scholar's truth,
Flight of swallows, autumn leaves,
Memory's treasure, grace of youth:
 
Open are the gifts of God,
Gifts of love to mind and sense;
Hidden is love’s agony,
Love’s endeavor, love’s expense
 
Love that gives, gives evermore,
Gives with zeal, with eager hands,
Spares not, keeps not, all outpours,
Ventures all, its all expends.

Drained is love in making full,
Bound in setting others free,
Poor in making many rich,
Weak in giving power to be.
 
Therefore he who shows us God
Helpless hangs upon the tree;
And the nails and crown of thorns
Tell of what God's love must be.
 
Here is God, no monarch he,
Throned in easy state to reign;
Here is God, whose arms of love,
Aching, spent, the world sustain.

W. H. Vanstone (1923-1999)
 
—  Ginny Chilton, Music Minister