Holy Eucharist on September 6

Dear friends,

During these months of pandemic, I have so missed being able to celebrate Holy Eucharist together and share in our central meal, and I know that many of you have been feeling the same way.  After much prayer and reflection, I have decided to offer communion once a month for as long as we continue our virtual worship services.  Consecrating and consuming the bread and wine is not something that clergy can do by themselves; the Eucharistic prayer and the eating of the holy meal are meant to be done in community.  Therefore, on the Sundays when our worship service is the Holy Eucharist, there will be a few representative parishioners (with clergy, fewer than 10 people total) in the sanctuary.  The first date for Holy Eucharist for us will be on September 6.  Please read the following information carefully to learn how you can receive the precious Body and Blood.  I look forward to sharing in this Sacrament with you once again. 

Blessings,
Anne

How can I receive the bread and wine?

You have two options:

1.   Wearing a mask, come to the River Road door of the church between 12 and 2 PM on Sunday, September 6 to receive communion from the clergy.  Social distancing protocols will be in place.  An alms basin will be available if you would like to drop off your offering.

2.   Immediately following the morning worship service on September 6, communion will be delivered to those who are unable to come to the church to receive. Delivery will be to your front door; no one will come inside your home.  

      If you would like to have communion delivered to you, you must contact Bill Wilds by Wednesday, September 2.  Call or email at 595-0371 or saec.bill19@verizon.net.

What is being done to prevent the spread of COVID as we celebrate Holy Eucharist?

All clergy and lay people distributing communion will be masked.  Those receiving the bread and wine will also be masked and will step away to a separate spot to consume the elements.  We will be using prepackaged, sealed, single-serving containers of bread and wine, which will be placed on trays on the altar to be blessed.  Those who come to the church door to receive communion will pick up it up from a tray; no one else will touch your container.  Communion kits being delivered to people at home will be bagged by gloved hands for transportation, so no one other than the recipient will touch the container.

Which parishioners will be in the sanctuary for the service of Holy Eucharist?

Parishioners who will be delivering communion to people’s homes will receive individual invitations to come to the service. 

How often will we have a service of Holy Eucharist?

For the time being, while we continue with virtual worship, we plan to offer Holy Eucharist once per month.  For home delivery, you will need to make a reservation each time.  

If on September 6 I receive communion at my home,

what will that look like?

Sometime Sunday morning, we hope that you will take time to pray through the Holy Eucharist booklet that we will be sending you.  Shortly after our online service ends (around 11:30 AM), a fellow parishioner will come to your door with the bread and wine.  Your visitor will lead you through the litany found on the next page.  (Notice that you already know all of the responses, so you do not need to be holding a copy of the litany.) 

For safety, your visitor will remain masked at all times, and you will wear your mask until time to consume the elements.  Your visitor will step away briefly when you open and consume the bread and wine.

Please note that your visitor will be bringing communion to other parishioners as well and so cannot stay more than a few minutes with you.  He or she will not come into your home. 

Litany for home distribution of Eucharist during pandemic

Masks on; social distancing

LEV: The peace of the Lord be always with you.

Parishioner:  And also with you.

LEV:  Jesus said, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall not thirst.”

LEV: The body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ keep you in eternal life.

Parishioner:  Amen.

LEV hands communion package to parishioner and steps 6 feet away to allow parishioner to unmask and consume the elements.

(If at a home with a storm door, the parishioner can simply shut the door and then consume the elements.)

LEV: Let us bless the Lord.

Parishioner:  Thanks be to God.

 

Take up your what?

From Hymn 675:
Take up your cross, the Savior said, if you would my disciple be;
Take up your cross with willing heart, and humbly follow after me.

It would be nearly impossible for us to hear these words as the disciples heard them. Finely wrought processional crosses lead our church service participants and we even wear them as jewelry. To people in Jesus’ time, crosses were seen in processions to the most unimaginable state-sponsored terrorism.

We can only take on faith the promise of Jesus: (to paraphrase) give up something significant –maybe old attitudes and habits that create walls. By symbolically losing our life (or even literally, as some have), Jesus promises a real gaining of LIFE.

No pain, no gain. It’s an eternal truth from Jesus, who redeems.

Brad Norris
Minister of Music

An Immigrant Story from Bob Killebrew

Introductory note from Anne:

Dear friends,

Our fellow parishioner Bob Killebrew, who with his wife Pixie came to us from St. Paul’s, Newport News, asked me several months ago if St. Andrew’s has any kind of outreach ministry with immigrants.  At the moment, we do not.  I asked Bob about his interest in such a ministry, and he told me he’d be glad to write the story of his family’s involvement with reaching out to immigrants.  I’m so glad he did.  Here it is:

When our daughter served a tour in Afghanistan in 2014, her interpreter, a medical doctor named Abed (not his real name for this article), asked for her help immigrating to the United States under a special program for translators under threat for helping Americans.  My wife Pixie and I volunteered to be Abed’s sponsors.  Pixie, though, did most of the real work.

Two years later, on a hot summer midnight, Pixie and I met Abed, his wife Hunoon and their four children at the Newport News airport.  Only Abed spoke English, but they were all exhilarated to be in their “new” country.  Here’s the story of how that worked out.

Just getting here was tough.  Despite the official program, it took Abed two years to complete the paperwork, interviews and security checks required to immigrate, which exposed his family to risk by revealing he had been an interpreter.  It might not have happened at all, but Pixie badgered US Senator Mark Warner until he asked the State Department for a status report.  A week later Abed got permission to immigrate.  Without Senator Warner’s intervention, I doubt that Abed would have gotten permission in this “special” program and he and his family would be at great risk today.

To help immigrants negotiate the early stages of their migration, the State Department provides assistance funds through established charities, in Newport News Commonwealth Catholic Charities (CCC).  A CCC representative (an immigrant from Iraq) was at the airport with us and took Abed and his family to an apartment in the Denbigh neighborhood with beds made, food in the pantry and a hot ethnic meal waiting for the exhausted family. CCC furnished the food; Pixie had scrounged the furniture.  CCC paid the first two months’ rent on the apartment.  For the next few months, we took on some of the tasks that CCC would have done, so they could put their (scarce) resources elsewhere.   Here are some lessons we learned. 

First, the US Immigration System is in complete chaos.  Getting someone to the US in 2016 was tough; it would be near impossible today, leaving many of our interpreters and supporters, especially in the Middle East, at grave risk.  CCC has taken big cuts in programs, and recent policy changes leave even legal immigrants like Abed at risk of deportation for using SNAP, state insurance for the kids and so on.

We have a much more sizable immigrant community in Newport News than we natives realize, mostly centered on the Denbigh neighborhood where there are a lot of inexpensive apartments; in some areas, women in headscarves appear frequently.  Abed and Hunoon found an Afghan community and friends from other countries, and that community is trying hard to fit into the United States.  But assimilation is difficult – much harder than we “natives” understand.  Some of it is just unfamiliarity: Hunoon, who had never been to school, wouldn’t drink water from the tap until Pixie demonstrated it was safe.  Abed never had a bank account – banks are distrusted in Afghanistan.  The social security system and all its complexities were bewildering.  Even the daily mail was a challenge, with all its giveaways that Abed initially took at face value – it was “official” mail, right? 

But some of it is just bewildering bureaucracy, the kind we’ve long adjusted to.  Americans are friendly folks, but our society is brusque and loaded with red tape – getting the water bill corrected, for example, or getting an appointment to see a medical professional is a tough process for someone with a limited grasp of the language.  With new anti-immigrant regulations, it’s quite possible that some legal migrants have been cut off from SNAP and other programs they need without someone to help them deal with the various social agencies.   Sponsors who can take time to help, like Pixie, are essential.  Pixie committed hours and hours helping Hunoon and Abed negotiate the red tape of becoming an American; sometimes it bewildered us.

A bright spot was enrolling the four kids in school – Newport News has an excellent English as a Second Language (ESL) program, and they were soon started.  (Hunoon commented that the teachers were “so kind” in the US).  We can’t say enough good about the Newport News school system.  After a year Hunoon observed that her kids were speaking English and Spanish.  As with kids everywhere, soccer became the universal language.

Abed, and his other immigrant contemporaries, are enterprising and incredibly hard-working.  CCC gets immigrants a job within two weeks of their arrival; Abed found a job after only two days – and then was cheated out of two weeks’ pay.  The CCC job turned out to be stacking pork halves at Smithfield at midnight, which he did for a year, damaging his hands and getting by on two or three hours’ sleep a day.  Eventually he found a better job, and has recently moved his family to Fredericksburg, Virginia for another, better job and he’s bought a condo.  Gradually, Abed and Hunoon and their kids – including a fifth child, a brand-new natural-born citizen – are making it. He has given up his dream of being a doctor in America, as he was in Afghanistan, and is working now for his children’s’ future.  

They aren’t out of the woods yet; COVID slowdowns have hit them hard financially, and cuts to social services have hurt, too.  Their oldest child – a very bright young lady – is a rising high school senior with college potential, but the family is pretty strapped.  But they’re safe from bombs and bullets.  He has a job, a mortgage, and car payments, just like all of us.  He and others are fighting their way into the American dream, like our ancestors did.  It just shouldn’t have to be so hard.

The Art of Smiling with Our Eyes

Have you been practicing the art of smiling with your eyes?  So much of the way we communicate with each other falls into the category of “non-verbal” communication - our facial expressions, hugs and handshakes, body language. A lot of these ways of conveying our feelings are not available to us when most of our face is covered with a mask and we’re not able to get within 6 feet of one another, let alone touch. 

So in these social distanced times we find ourselves searching for new ways to communicate warmth and support to the people we meet. In the grocery store for example, in pre-COVID days, even something small like maneuvering my cart to let another shopper pass would be accompanied by a smile to say “it’s not a problem...I’m happy to offer this courtesy.”  When you think about it, it really boils down to “I see you as a person not an obstacle,” conveyed in one simple, heartfelt smile. 

How do we hold onto basic but essential human connections during these times of separation, when more than ever people are feeling isolated and alone on multiple levels?  It’s a small thing and it requires practice but the art of smiling with our eyes is a good place to start. 

Missing you and sending you smiles and hugs,

Rachel 

Common Miracles

In case you didn't get to see the video fromMonday, August 3...

We all know the biblical stories of miraculous events, everything from Jesus' first miracle at the wedding in Cana where he turned water into wine to feeding the multitudes, like we heard about yesterday; from healings to walking on water.  How would you define what a miracle is? Merriam-Webster: An extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs.  Dictionary.com: An effect or extraordinary event in the physical world that surpasses all known human or natural powers and is ascribed to a supernatural cause; such an effect or event manifesting or considered as a work of God.  Vocabulary.com: A noun meaning “amazing or wonderful occurrence," comes from the Latin miraculum “object of wonder."  Dig way back and the word derives from smeiros, meaning "to smile".

Of course, we've heard amazing stories like this one from beliefnet.com:  In March 2015, Lynn Jennifer Groesbeck, 25, lost control of her car and landed in the icy Spanish Fork River in Utah.  Fourteen hours later, first responders found her 18-month-old daughter, Lily, in her car seat hanging upside down just above frigid river water.  Prior to finding Lily, both police officers and firefighters report that they heard an adult voice yell "Help me!" from inside the car.  They discovered that the voice could not have come from the young mother, who likely died from the impact.  The rescuers still can’t explain the voice or how the girl survived hanging upside-down for 14 hours in freezing temperatures without being dressed for the cold.

Sometimes we hear of miraculous healings that are attributed to prayer, and that may well be true, but that also inevitably raises questions about why for this one and not for that one, for which there is no answer, leading many to disbelieve in miracles as fanciful stories.  I wonder that if we only think of miracles in terms of grand divine intervention, or disbelieve altogether, less spectacular miracles might escape our notice, the so-called common miracles that occur right in front of us every single day.  Like Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh observes: "People say that walking on water was a miracle.  I think walking peacefully on the earth is a miracle."

I watched a bird perched just outside the back door one morning last week, chirping away at what I'm assuming was its mate.  It truly gave me a sense of wonder.  What about the tenaciousness of tufts of grass stubbornly pushing their life up through asphalt of a parking lot?  How about the simple act just of breathing...which isn't so simple, but which we seldom think about as our autonomic nervous system just keeps us plugging along?  Or think about a newborn baby; truly a miracle of life, and one the parents actually get to participate in.

It may well be simple or we may even come up with scientific explanation, but does that make it any less miraculous?  Indeed, that we can understand the processes sometimes heightens the miraculousness of it.  We can maybe explain what happens, but not how it happens in the first place; it's just this amazing unfolding of life that occurs, not because we initiated it or can explain it, but just on its own, often without any intervention from us.  It may well be feeding multitudes and walking on water, but it may just as well be walking peacefully on the earth; maybe just a chirping bird or a tuft of grass in a parking lot or your next breath - the common miracles that occur right in front of us every single day.     

Marc+

A Follow-up to Our July Shoes for THRIVE Outreach Program

Textiles, including shoes and clothing, represent over 16 tons of content in our landfills each year.  By supporting THRIVE Peninsula with the shoes we collected, we have participated in the Funds2Orgs Group where the shoes collected are shipped to many micro-enterprise partners around the world in order to promote commerce and business for small business owners.  The Group seeks to provide an opportunity for people to help themselves out of poverty.  The shoes are not given away, as this would decimate the local market for shoes and destroy local jobs.  The shoes, after being repaired as needed, are sold by these small business owners in communities in need of proper footwear at very inexpensive prices.  Hopefully, these micro-enterprises are creating a path out of poverty for themselves in countries where there are limited, if any, job opportunities that pay a living wage.

Haiti is one of the countries supported by Fund2Orgs Group.  It is the most impoverished country in the Western Hemisphere.  Over 59% of the population live below the national poverty level of $2.41 per day.  Another 24% live below the national extreme poverty line of $1.23 per day.  The average per capita income in Haiti is $480 compared to $33,550 in the United States. 

Meet Silvia:  she and her young son, David, were living on about $2.00 a day before the earthquake of 2010.  Shoes were needed after the earthquake as essential in preventing disease.  Silvia was asked by a friend to help her sell shoes.  Working seven days a week for 12 hours a day, she was determined to find a path our of poverty for herself and her son, whom she also wanted educated.  Today, she sells the footwear that she purchases for pennies on the dollar and now earns about $60 a day.  David has graduated from high school and is attending college – the first one in his family to do so.

For the shoes that are not sold, they are used to fix and make other products or to create something new.  Some of these new products are home insulation and stuffing for car seats and furniture.  Single shoes and excess scrap are sent to Pakistan where they are purposed into many useful objects.