The gift of connection

When I was a child, my parents had their hands full caring for my special needs brother.  All of my grandparents had died before I was born, and none of our extended family lived in state.  Yet I was not bereft of adults who made special time for me.  I found them—or rather, they found me—at church.

Monica Schaeffer, old enough to be my grandmother, would sing All things bright and beautiful to me.  Susan Fish drove me to church along with her children and years later was my counselor at a weeklong diocesan youth camp.  I still have a rock she painted for me.  Phyllis Cowie, whose children were older, took me out for a special restaurant meal.  Mr. Connor, also the parent of older children, taught my Sunday School class.

When I joined my dad’s Presbyterian church because of their very active youth group, the volunteer leaders—Sue, Judy, Chris, Jim, Connie, Bruce, Ronee (all of them adults with families of their own)—spent hours with our group: playing, praying, teaching, encouraging, and, most importantly, listening.  Elo Tanner, an octogenarian, invited me to be a youth representative on the Outreach Committee, where I was given voice and vote and was included in the rota for leading devotions. 

All of those adults—and many others—saw me, knew my name, and cared about me.  None of them were paid church staff.  They were faithful members who took to heart Paul’s description of the Church:  we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another (Rom 12:5).

The children and youth at St. Andrew’s are members of us all.  At every baptism, we promise to do all in our power to support the newly baptized in their life in Christ.  I rejoice in the many ways that I see adults here at St. Andrew’s doing just that, not only through “official” roles such as Children’s chapel teacher or acolyte leader, but also simply by greeting our young members with a smile, learning their names, engaging them in conversation.  Thank you so much for the priceless gift of your interest and compassion.  As I know firsthand, it makes more of a difference than you could ever imagine.

I am mindful of Ginny’s observation that our families with young children crave connections across generations.  Through Christ, these families and their precious children are ours.  What a blessing; and what a responsibility.  With God’s help, let us continue to wrap them in our prayers and in our love.

I am grateful to be part of Christ’s body with each of you. 
Every blessing.  -Anne

Life is short...

Often, Sunday's service dismissal begins Life is short and we do have much time to...  My friend, John, says that life is too short for bad cheese.  The highway billboard said that life is too short for bad TV.  Sometimes when counseling, I’ve asked folks to consider that life is short: too short to put up with the difficulty any more or too short not to forgive?  Jesus' life and ministry was all too short, so in the middle of this Easter season in which we continue to celebrate what Jesus' life, death, and resurrection means for us, maybe this a good time to consider the nature of faith as it is lived in this short time frame of life.

Go ahead and fill in the blanks:
Life is too short for ________________________________________.
Life is too short for ________________________________________.
Life is too short for ________________________________________.
Life is too short for ________________________________________.
 
- Marc Vance

Easter Vulnerability

 In the days after every Holy Week and Easter, and other major points in the church year, I always take the time to write down some reflections– things that went well, ideas I want to try next year, comments from my choir members and parishioners, and so on. Some of these reflections are more housekeeping-type issues (“need one more hymn at communion”) and others are bigger picture. What struck me about Holy Week and Easter this year is that it wasn’t Easter morning that had center stage as I was reflecting. You’d think after six weeks of preparation for this big resurrection event, Easter morning would get top billing in my memory’s highlights reel.

Instead, I kept–and keep– coming back to our Good Friday 7pm service, in which Chris Stewart stood to read one of his Disabled Psalms. If you don’t know Chris, he is a parishioner who suffered a traumatic brain injury in 2022 which left him with permanent disabilities. In his Disabled Psalms, Chris reflects on his own suffering and his changing relationship with God. I went into our Good Friday service knowing it would be special but not realizing it would be transformative. As a culture–and I am certainly steeped in the culture–we tend towards wanting to offer the disabled either help or pity. As someone who doesn’t identify as disabled, I realize now that I went into that service seeing myself merely as a supportive fellow parishioner. (And, certainly, who doesn’t need support! We’re all glad for encouragement now and then.) What I didn’t expect was to be changed. As I was listening, my stature shifted from cheerleader, to something akin to embarrassment or discomfort, to total fascination, and finally awe. I knew in my bones that God was in that space.
 
My post-Easter reflections have remained stuck at Good Friday. I suppose some part of me wants to feel like, as a church musician, I should have been able to make Easter a bigger show, not to overshadow Chris, of course, but out of respect for what is supposedly the biggest holiday in the Church Year. It’s fitting, though, that God should shatter my expectations, just as Jesus did when he greeted his friends outside the tomb, on the road to Emmaus, and in the upper room. They, too, were expecting a big show. Their expectations were, if Jesus were the true Messiah, he would come back in full splendor and glory, a perfect specimen of manhood, ready to uplift his followers and vanquish their enemies. Instead, he greeted them as a mere human–as unremarkable as your average gardener–with the scars from his crucifixion still on his hands and feet.
 
What I love about these stories is that it is through vulnerability, not in spite of it, that Jesus greets us. Our instinct is often to look away from the suffering of others, or to tell people we’re fine even if we’re not. Jesus’s challenge to us is to do exactly the opposite, and he doesn’t speak to us from some sort of it’s-the-right-thing-to-do moral high ground but because he loves us and knows that it is, paradoxically, by looking suffering and death in the eyes that we find life’s meaning and our deepest connection to God and to one another. Every day we have a thousand opportunities to see Jesus right in front of us, and to follow him confidently down the bright paths as well as the dark ones, confident in God’s constant love and presence. Because we are Easter people, we know light and love are always at the end.

- Ginny Chilton, Supervisor of Children's & Youth Minsitries, Minister of Music

Hungry for hope

 Dear friends,

I recently heard Bishop Susan say that as she travels through our diocese these days, the people she encounters are hungry for hope.  This is a tough time in our country and in our world, particularly for those who live on the margins of society and those whose livelihoods have suddenly been eliminated.  Hope can be hard to come by.
 
What is hope?  According to the Oxford Dictionary, hope is a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen.  Both expectation and desire are required for hope.  To expect something but not desire it sounds to me like dread; to desire something with no expectation of ever getting it crushes a person’s soul.
 
During the Clinical Pastoral Education portion of my seminary training, I spent 12 weeks providing pastoral care in a kidney dialysis unit in Beverly, MA.  Because the patients had to come in every other day, I got to know them well.  One was a frail elderly widower whose wife had died recently.  I asked him once what gave him hope, and he immediately replied, “That I will see Helen again.”  And then he quoted Romans 8:38-39:  For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.  That faithful man’s hope was tied not to the vicissitudes of earthly life but to the divine work of Jesus. 
 
I pray that the same is true for each of us, even and especially when the world around us is dark and threatening.  That’s exactly what the world was like when Jesus came into it as one of us.  That’s why Jesus came into the world as one of us—to save us, and through his death and resurrection to give us life.  The sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ (BCP 501) is what we celebrate at Easter, no matter how bleak things seem all around us.  All our hope on God is founded, as the hymn says. 
 
Toward the end of his long letter to the Romans, Paul writes:  May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.  (Rom 15:13).  That is my prayer for you as we celebrate the Resurrection together again this year.  In Easter season—and in every season—may you abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.  And may we together be a source of hope for those in our world who so desperately need it.
 
Happy Easter!  And may your hope abound! 
Blessings.  -Anne
 
PS.  As is customary here at St. Andrew’s, an Easter offering envelope will be included in this Sunday's bulletin. Please bring it with you on Easter Day along with your Mite Box offering for Episcopal Relief & Development and your flowers to help decorate our outdoor cross. 

I look forward to walking through Holy Week with you so that we arrive together at Easter ready to receive, celebrate, and proclaim the sure and certain hope of resurrection.

Holy Week and Easter Services at St. Andrew's

Maundy Thursday - April 17

• 5:30 PM - Maundy Thursday Family Service. This gathering is designed for families with young children (although anyone is welcome!) and will include dinner, communion, foot washing, and activities for young children.
• 7:00 PM - Maundy Thursday Service (also live streamed)

Good Friday - April 18

• 12:00 PM - Stations of the Cross
• 7:00 PM - Good Friday Service (also live streamed)

Holy Saturday - April 19

• 7:00 PM - Holy Saturday/Service of Light

Easter Day - April 20

• 6:30 AM - Sunrise Service behind Hilton School
• 8:00 AM - Holy Eucharist, Rite I
• 9:45 AM - Children’s Chapel and Easter egg hunt (meet in Parish Hall).
• 10:30 AM - Holy Eucharist, Rite II (also live streamed)

Tridu - wha???

Following the spiritual roller coaster that is Palm Sunday (shouts of "hosanna!" as Jesus makes his "triumphal entry" into Jerusalem followed by a Passion narrative from one of the synoptic gospels), toward the end of the week we enter into a three-day period known as the Triduum (most common pronunciations are TRI-doo-um or TRI-dyoo-um, with a short i, though I have heard TRI-dum and tri-DOO-um) - "tri" for "three," and "duum," related to the Latin word for "days": Maundy Thursday, from which comes Jesus' Eucharistic adaptation of a Passover meal and foot-washing; Good Friday's commemoration of Jesus' crucifixion; and The Great Vigil of Easter, often held on Saturday evening or very early Easter Sunday morning, which, except for the Eucharist, is an entirely different service than we experience on Resurrection Sunday.

For those who are familiar with the Triduum services of Holy Week (there are potentially others in Holy Week that aren’t technically the Triduum, e.g. Tenebrae and Holy Saturday), you might notice that neither the Maundy Thursday nor Good Friday services conclude with any kind of dismissal; they just end with the ministers leaving in silence (often on Maundy Thursday with the stripping of the altar - a very powerful moment to allow that stark silence of the empty tomb to stand on its own).  This is because the Triduum actually is one service, walking through the entire paschal event in sequence (see BCP pp 274-295).  For reasons of modern life, however, we have come to observe each of the three parts of the service across three days because to do all three in one sitting would take anywhere from four to six hours, maybe even longer, depending on just how elaborate you make the Vigil.  These days, fewer and fewer people are observing even Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services, much less the Vigil, in their churches.  Not sure how many (if any) people would show up if we proposed to offer the entire Triduum service(s) all at once!

Regardless, all are invited come and enter deeply into the Holy Week/Triduum services that bring us into the seminal celebration of our entire year, centered in the Christian hope of the power of love over death assured for us through the life, death, and resurrection of our Lord, Jesus Christ.

- Marc

Black History Month

 Dear friends,

When my parents were looking for a place to settle near Pittsburgh in the early 1960’s, my mom intentionally selected a borough in which Black and White children attended public school together so that her own children (included the as-yet-to-appear-on-the-scene me!) would learn, work, and play side by side with Black students. 

After the Homewood Riots broke out in Pittsburgh following Martin Luther King’s assassination, Mom and a group of fellow parishioners from her White Episcopal Church started driving to Homewood every week to worship and study with the members of the Black Episcopal Church.  I am grateful for my Mom’s witness:  for her (at the time) countercultural and courageous willingness to seek out, befriend, and learn from Black people, recognizing them as fellow beloved children of God.  For me, celebrating Black History Month is a way to continue my mom’s legacy, especially her interest in entering the world of her Black friends and learning from them about their history and culture.

I am grateful to the faithful members of St. Andrew’s Response to Racism team for their commitment to fulfilling our baptismal promise to respect the dignity of every human being.  At our February meeting, we brainstormed ways we can engage more deeply in the work of social justice.  Many thanks to team member Debbie Tanner for creating the list below of ways to celebrate Black History Month.  Having visited both the Newsome House and the Air and Space Science Center, I can wholeheartedly commend them both to you.  And I’m actually on a library waiting list right now for James, hoping it arrives in time for me to make it part of my own personal celebration of Black History Month. 

Blessings.  -Anne
 
3 Ways To Celebrate Black History Month
 
1. Visit the Newsome House Museum & Cultural Center in Newport News
This historic Victorian landmark is the restored residence of the prominent Black attorney, J. Thomas Newsome. He was active in civic affairs and an advocate for education, voter registration and community improvement. He led the fight for social justice in Virginia. Located at 2803 Oak Avenue, Newport News 23607.

2.  Read James, a novel by Percival Everett.
This National Book Award winner retells the action-packed story of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the enslaved Jim’s point of view.

3.   Visit the Virginia Air and Space Science Center in Hampton
View the “Hidden Figures” exhibit telling the story of the brilliant Black women at NASA whose calculations helped launch astronaut John Glenn into orbit. Located at 600 Settlers Landing Rd., Hampton, VA 23669.

Faith is caught, not taught

 Spring is one of my favorite times in Hilton Village. Not that it is Spring quite yet, but already, as we walk to school in the mornings, the boys have pointed out that there are markedly more, and different, bird songs than there were just a few days ago. There’s tufts of green here and there, and finally it’s warm enough to spend afternoons at the Ravine, refining their “fort” in the bamboo forest.

It reminds me of my first Springs here, in the years right after my children were born. I didn’t realize until I was thrust into part-time stay-at-home parenthood how much time I would be spending outdoors. We walked to the library, walked to friends houses, lingered at the playgrounds, and poked sticks in the Ravine creek with no sense of urgency. I started to memorize the musical soundtrack of the outdoors, and marvel at how much I had missed since the end of my own childhood, when I stopped spending quite so much time outside.

To my knowledge my children have never participated in a didactic presentation on Spring. They have simply experienced enough Springs now to know, and to know deeply, what Spring is. Walking to school this morning a quote came to mind, “faith is caught, not taught.” It’s a line I’ve heard before but was reminded of in a continuing education course I recently completed. I had braced myself to come away from this class potentially feeling overwhelmed by all I’m NOT doing in my role supervising children and youth ministries.

Instead I was filled with gratitude, realizing how much we are already doing, and doing well, here at St. Andrew’s.  The professor of this course had recorded various reasons parishioners at her own church used to decline teaching Sunday School: “I don’t know that much about the Bible,” or, “I wouldn’t know how to handle the tough questions.” In other words, the barrier to teaching was content-based. Her argument, and what I see in action in our congregation, is that actually it’s the relationships that make or break how well any church is able to form children in faith.

I thought back to times I’ve lingered outside a children’s chapel classroom, waiting for a good moment to step in and share a song or two. Our children’s chapel leaders speak to our children without pretense, share in their laughter, and tell stories from their own lives. Teachers, and our parishioners in general, remember details about our children and engage with them beyond perfunctory small talk. Perhaps most importantly, our children are watching as we faithfully go about our lives of service and love. As we lay out the altar hangings each week, cook breakfast for everyone to enjoy, open our space to the homeless, collect Christmas toys and clothes to give away…our children are watching and learning: THIS is what it means to be a Christian.

This week I’ve had bouts of feeling, in the face of overwhelming suffering and fear in the world, like anything I could do to help is too small to make a difference. In a culture where producing some kind of tangible, identifiable result is the only way to measure worth, it can feel futile to get up and keep living our seemingly small, simple day-to-day lives. “Faith is caught, not taught,” has been a reminder that the way I live my life and conduct myself around other people has way more impact that I realize. Like the tulip buds about to burst forth in the next few weeks, our lives of service lead to profound change that we cannot yet see, or may never see. As individuals and more so as a faith community, our lives are the testament to our faith, and our hope for and love of this world. May the “caught, not taught” mentality, and the signs of Spring all around us, be a source of joy and hope for you all this week.

—- Ginny Chilton

 

Christ before me...

Sometimes the simplest prayer can be the most effective.  Because there are several things the Spirit thinks I need to hear every day, this is something of an adaptation out of the Celtic tradition that is part of my daily prayer.  Now as we are coming fully into the new year, maybe it can be a companion along your way, too.

Christ before me to guide.

Christ behind me to encourage.

Christ above me to bless.

Christ beneath me to support.

Christ beside me to comfort.

Christ around me to guard.

Christ within, Christ in others.

Christ in all things.

~ Marc

 

Epiphany: The light of the world

Epiphany, which we celebrate on January 6, marking the beginning of the Epiphany season (until Lent beginning with Ash Wednesday in March), is a day and season in which we emphasize light, or more specifically, acknowledging Jesus as the light of the world.  As the beginning of John’s gospel tells us: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was with God in the beginning.  In him was life and that life was the light of all humankind.  The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.  The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world.  And the Word became flesh and dwelled among us.

In the beloved prayer attributed to St. Frances (see BCP p. 833) we pray "…where there is darkness, let us sow light."  Where do you see darkness and where light - in the world, in yourself?  In reflecting the light of Jesus, where someone is dehumanized, treat them as if they, just like you, are made in the image and likeness of God; treat them as if they are Christ, himself.  Where there is the darkness of isolation, be the light of companionship and community.  Where there is the darkness of contempt, be the light of compassion.  Where there is the darkness of hate and cruelty, be the light of the love of Christ.  Where there is the darkness of violence, be the light of peace.  On the day and in the season in which we emphasize Jesus, the light of the world, be the light that shines in the darkness that the darkness will not overcome.

Marc Vance
Associate Rector