ben | 
10 30th, 2009| 
View archived copy of The eClarion here.
Oct
30
The Friday Letters
30 October 2009
My Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Besides being the day before Halloween, today is the last Friday of the month, which means it’s time for Youth Café. For those who don’t already know, Youth Café is our middle school and high school youth program. We meet the last Friday of the month, from 7 to 10pm, in the youth room and conference room downstairs in the church. Italian sodas are served, pizza is ordered, games are played. It’s a good time.
Since the retirement of Gary Chausee and Charlie Clayton, who founded this ministry, Youth Café is being hosted by a small group of volunteers. I would love to have that small group of volunteers become a slightly larger group of volunteers. The tasks are simple; there’s even a handy check list for things to do in preparation and during the event. Each Youth Café takes one shopping trip, a half an hour on the phone, fifteen minutes set-up, and then the three hours of the event itself. These jobs can be shared out between the volunteers for each event. We need two adult volunteers, preferably one male and one female (see Genesis 1:27), and preferably not related (for insurance purposes married couples only count as a single adult, see Mark 10:8). At this point I have two fairly regular male volunteers. I could use another, and we need some women. I attend every Youth Café that I can myself. Please let me know if you’d be interested in learning more about this fun and necessary ministry; I can e-mail you the job description if you’re interested. Also, there’s a need for another (preferably female) volunteer this evening, if you’re up for it.
Once the excitement and gluttony of Trick or Treating is over, I hope you’ll all come to church Sunday morning. Daylight Savings Scam ends this weekend, so you’ll get an extra hour of sleep to recover from all that high fructose corn syrup, or to recover from your children’s consumption of same. Kids of all ages (that means silly adults too) are invited to wear their Halloween costumes to church Sunday morning.
This Sunday is also All Saint’s Sunday, a traditional day for baptisms. Tiffani O’Malley, who is five years old, will be baptized at the 10am service. This being the first Sunday of the month, our Children’s Chapel event will also take place. Please bring your kids, of any Sunday School age, to church at 9am. I’ll be doing a chapel lesson, including a Godly Play story of Baptism, and the kids and I will present the sermon at the 10am service.
In addition to All Saints, Thanksgiving, and the beginning of the “Holiday Season”, November means that it’s time to think about funding the next year of our ministry together. It hasn’t been an easy year financially, either for the nation, our parish, or individuals. Yet Christ Church is hanging in there and I remain hopeful about our future together. Stewardship letters and pledge cards will be going out next week. You will hear much from me about giving over the three middle Sundays of November, and then on the last Sunday of the month, as we celebrate Christ the King, we will gather in the offerings with thanksgiving and blessings.
Sorry for the list of announcements instead of some deeper reflection! Looking forward to seeing you all soon,
Peace,
Ben.
Oct
23
The Friday Letters
23 October 2009
My Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
I realized early this week that I am approaching ten years of ordained ministry. I realized this in the context of whining about some mandatory diocesan training for “new” clergy. I put “new” in quotes not because it is dialogue but in order to disparage it with sarcasm. Clearly, I whined, if I’ve been ordained for nine and a half years, I ought not qualify as “new” clergy any more. If anything, I should be going to the training sessions for “bitter, old” clergy, so that I’m ready for that phase of my career.
They’ve got me on a technicality, however. They defined “new” as not only newly ordained, but also as new-to-the-diocese or new-to-your-position. At two and a half years I still think they’re stretching the definition of new, but it’s a less compelling argument than nine and a half years.
At any rate, as soon as I got done whining about how experienced I am, I had something completely outside my experience happen to me. In this way the universe keeps me humble. Over the years I’ve had many an odd or unique experience. Some of these have been great: celebrating a wedding with full military honors including walking down the “tunnel of steel” formed by drawn swords, and co-celebrating at a Jewish/Episcopal wedding performed in a Unitarian Temple. Others of these have been decidedly odd: being asked to help with an exorcism in a parking lot, or to provide a gallon of Holy Water for use at home by someone who’s girlfriend was having bad dreams.
This week I had someone ask me to preside at their virtual marriage. Or should that be virtually preside at their marriage? The marriage isn’t virtual, but the blessing would be. Or no, the blessing wouldn’t be virtual either, it would be real enough, but would be delivered in a virtual setting. Lord, this is confusing. I hope the next General Convention approves the development of an official liturgy for online weddings.
Here’s how it breaks down: a friend of mine is getting married. She and her fiancé will be legally married in a civil ceremony. Then, they will have their marriage blessed at their church on a Sunday morning. So far so good: this is just the way I like to do it. The problem is that both my friend and her fiancé play World of Warcraft, an online multi-player game in which they have many friends, some of whom they know in real life (IRL, to use the lingo) and some whom they don’t. They want to include these friends in their celebration, and so have decided to have a second blessing of their marriage performed in-game. They’ve selected me to do these honors.
This raises some interesting and some hilarious questions. Does a blessing spoken over a voice-over-internet-protocol chat room and enacted by a virtual avatar carry any religious weight? Should said avatar be, in games terms, a priest, or would it be OK if it was a warrior? I dealt with the question of virtual sacraments in Seminary (very trendy, we were) and have long since decided that I prefer my relationships, rituals, and religion to be carried out in the real world (IRL). That said, while I am skeptical, I am not willing to deny the existence of virtual community, and if such community exists then such a community could, in theory, have rituals that were “real”. In this particular case, it doesn’t much matter whether the blessing I’m being asked to deliver meets any particular criterion of efficacy since the marriage will already be legally solemnized and religiously blessed in the more traditional manner.
I’ll probably go ahead an perform the blessing. Maybe it’s silly. Possibly some would see it as blasphemous. I don’t see how it could do any harm, and there’s a real chance it will be meaningful to the folks for whom it is being done. In the end, I’ll do it because I have learned, over nine and a half years of ordained ministry, that it is not wise to decide where God can and cannot be. If God wants to bless a relationship manifested in some anonymous computer server farm running a fantasy-based role-playing game, who am I to tell God that that can’t be done?
Peace,
Ben.
Oct
18
A sermon by Benjamin J. Newland on the twentieth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 24)
I first began to understand something about God on the shores of Lake Couer d’Alene in northern Idaho at an Episcopal installation named Camp Cross. Situated on a little peninsula that juts out into the lake, there is no road to Camp Cross. There is a dock, to which your luggage would be taken by boat, while you walked around a little bay, through some wetlands at the head of that bay, over a stream, and up and along a ridge of land. Walking was the long way around, but even when they got a bigger boat and started shipping us along with our luggage, the sense of isolation was profound. For a kid who grew up in a subdivision with wide paved roads and an attached two car garage, that there could be such a place where cars were not able to go was startling.
There were a couple buildings that pre-dated the camp. Back when it was a summer home for Bishop Cross there was just the dock, a corrugated metal roofed Quonset hut for storing boats during the winter, and an old house which we called Paige Hall. The interior of Paige Hall was condemned, turned over to the auspices of the local squirrel community, and forbidden to us campers. The porch of the building however, which ran along all three sides facing the water and was covered by a mossy, shamble-shingled roof, was an acceptable place to be.
Paige Hall was from the first my favorite spot at camp. It was where, as a counselor in later years, I always took my campers when we were assigned to have conversations about God. It was where I went to cry when one of the girls at camp that year said she didn’t like me in that way. It was the place where I could stand and face the lake in such a way that not even in my peripheral vision could I detect the touch of human hands. I stood there, and looked out, trying to see God in the vast expanse of water, the surrounding hills covered with climbing swaths of trees, the upside down and gigantic blue bowl of the sky. When I stood on the porch at Paige Hall I could look out at creation and feel small, and somehow that was comforting.
Many of you will have experiences like that I imagine. I’ve heard enough other people tell me about that feeling of happy insignificance in the face of the awesomeness of nature, that I think it is a genetic emotion, coded into us through millennia of respect and place. It is from this feeling that we get the oft-repeated statement, “I don’t need a church, I worship God in nature”. The first half of that statement is questionable, but the second is not. To say that we find God in the wide and beautiful and dangerous world around us is to touch on a religious insight as old as consciousness.
There is something of this insight in today’s reading from the Book of Job. In last week’s reading (in fact, at all points previous to this in the story that bears his name) Job argues furiously with his friends about the unfairness of his suffering. We talked last week about retributive justice, the idea that people get what they deserve—the righteous are rewarded and the wicked punished—and this is how God runs the world. Job does not argue with the way the world works, only with the fact that in his case something has gone wrong and God is not paying attention. Job argues with his friends for more than thirty-five chapters, but who he really wants to argue with is God.
I have the most profound respect for Job, precisely because he does not exhibit that patience which he has incorrectly become so well known for. It is not patience that Job has, it is tenacity. More specifically, it is tenacity in faith. In Job’s place, suffering as he has suffered, I wonder if I might simply give up on faith. Job does not. In fact, far from walking away from his faith under duress, Job grabs it by the throat and clings on as if his life depended on it—as if he might strangle an answer out of God.
It is this respect and admiration that I have for Job which makes chapter thirty-eight so stomach-lurchingly awful. Job has complained so loudly and for so long and with such faith that God has deigned to answer in person. But the answer Job gets is so unlike the answer he expected that he cannot utter a singe word in response. Job has discovered another of the terrible truths of faith: the only thing worse than a God that will not answer your questions, is a God who will.
I don’t know what else to say about God’s answer. You can read it for yourself, the parts of it we have for our scripture portion this morning. The parts they left out are simply more of the same. God’s reply to Job is an overwhelming torrent of hypothetical questions. Sixty times God says to Job, Who are you? Where were you? How can you? Job has said to the Lord, “I am suffering and I do not deserve it!” God replies, “I am God. You are not.” As far as I can tell, it is the most bitingly sarcastic thing our deity has ever said to one of us. It is an answer to make you loose your faith, except that for Job faith is no longer even part of the equation. You don’t need faith to believe in a God that is standing right in front of you raining perspective down on your head like all the waters of creation pouring over the lip of a waterfall, bearing you under without breath.
I honestly have no idea how the Book of Job got into the Bible. You have to be at least three kinds of crazy before Job become a spiritually comforting story. The only thing I can figure is that God must want it in there—God must need us to read and ponder this story. On the shores of Lake Coeur d’Alene I found the utter indifference of nature to be oddly comforting. Alone in that vast wilderness I was taking in through my eyes, I was insignificant and unnecessary, but I was there. At the end of the Book of Job I find the incomprehensible indifference of God to be oddly comforting. From the perspective of the Maker of the Universe, we are insignificant and unnecessary, but we are here. God may have appeared only to remind Job of his relative unimportance, but God did appear. Centuries later, we still don’t understand God’s answer, but God does answer, so at least he’s there.
The problem we are dealing with in the Book of Job is the problem that arises when two things that we believe to be true about God cannot be true at the same time. We believe that God is good. We believe that God is all-powerful. How then, if God is good and all-powerful, can God allow tragedy to happen? Why does God allow evil to exist?
There are three good answers to this question (at least three, feel free to come up with your own) and I will describe them very briefly as each one qualifies for a sermon length description on its own. First, it is possible that God is all-powerful and all-good, but that God’s goodness is qualified when it comes to humanity. This is the most modern answer to Job’s central question, because it seeks to compensate for the fact that we are very self-centered creatures. Perhaps God is all-powerful and is also good, but God’s goodness is applied to all of creation and not just us, so that what seems to us injustice towards us is in fact justice towards all of creation.
The second answer is simply to say that God is all-good, but not all-powerful, Or more precisely, that God has chosen to self-limit God’s power that we might have free will. If God will not allow me to choose evil, am I really free to choose? If I cannot choose wrong, is there any value to my choosing right? This answer goes beyond a simple free-will theism where God made a choice to withhold God’s self long ago. As the creator, God creates reality, and the reality that God creates is not one that can be tampered with even by God.
The third answer is the most clearly derived from chapter thirty-eight of the Book of Job. It is the most mystical of the answers, which makes it in some ways the most satisfying, and in other ways the least. The third answer is that God is in fact all-powerful, and God is in fact good, and if it seems to us that either of these might not be true, then that is only proof that we are not God, that God’s ways are not our ways, and that as the creation we are not able to fully understand the creator.
When I was in high school, during that time when I went to Camp Cross each summer, I took several classes from among the High School curriculum that particularly appealed to my father. My dad spent his career as a Nuclear Engineer. He has a certification as a health physicist, reads math text books for fun, and builds complicated polyhedral and hyperbolic paraboloid structures in his living room. In general, my dad’s expertise were of very little use to me as a teenager. Yet when I signed up for High School physics, I thought maybe he’d come in handy. I’d get stuck on a problem, and I’d go to him for help finding the answer. He was absolutely no help whatsoever. He was too smart. I needed to solve an equation to find a vector, and he could only talk about the first principles of motion. I just needed to find X, but he wanted to start from the theory of the big bang.
Please don’t tell my dad that I’m comparing him to God in a sermon again, but here it is. I wonder if Job’s conversation with God wasn’t something like my conversation with my dad. God couldn’t have answered Job’s question in any way that Job would have understood. We are simply not yet wise enough to comprehend the wisdom of God. And, somehow, that is oddly comforting. AMEN.
Oct
16
The Friday Letters
16 October 2009
My Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Hugh Latimer, one of today’s three saints, is remembered best for his famous last words, which he spoke to his friend Nicholas Ridley. Latimer said, “Be of good cheer, Master Ridley, and play the man, for we shall this day light such a candle in England as I trust by God’s grace shall never be put out.” The fact that he said this while tied to an upright stake back to back with said Master Ridley while they were both being burned to death as heretics is the kind of thing that gives the English such a reputation for black humor. Ridley and Cranmer both participated in the crafting of the original Book of Common Prayer. These three Anglican Protestants began their work under Henry VIII and continued it under his son Edward. Then Edward was succeeded by his sister Mary, who was not so protestant and who believed that the best way to deal with heresy was to burn heretics. Latimer, Ridley, and Cranmer were three of the more than three hundred she is credited with killing in the name of Christian orthodoxy.
Surely there is no coincidence between the remembrance of these three martyrs on Friday and the fact that Friday is also the longest day of our annual Diocesan Convention. Right?
At any rate the draft agenda for convention does not include any heretic burning, which is just as well, since on any given day at least half of all Episcopalians are guilty of one heresy or another, myself included. There are just too many heresies out there to avoid all of them all of the time.
Back in the day when heresy was a serious topic of conversation at church councils, the arguments were generally about doctrine. Was Jesus Christ a man? or a god? While Jesus was on earth, where was God? Is the Holy Spirit God at the same time that Jesus was God, or during creation? If a bishop renounces his faith and sacrifices meat at a pagan altar, do all the people that that bishop baptized need to be re-baptized? Actually, even today that last one comes up more often than you’d think.
Nowadays we tend to argue about social issues more than doctrinal ones. The question about the appropriateness of the legality of abortion is a serious question—one that requires our intellectual, moral, and ethical engagement. Neither side of the issue, however, is heretical. Not technically, at least. We are still very fond of calling each other heretics, even if we’re not using the word in its original, doctrinal, context. It sounds better than calling each other jerks, I guess.
A couple months back I read Heretics for Armchair Theologians by Justo Gonzalez. It’s a short book—an introduction to the heresies that shaped Christian orthodoxy from the first through fourth centuries. I was impressed by how pertinent the discussions were to modern faith while the context was so antiquated. Indeed, I discovered the proper names of one or two ancient heresies that I myself have subscribed to on occasion. Of course, my wondering about the eternal sonship of Jesus Christ and how it reconciles with a coeternal God and Holy Spirit is not likely to get me burned at the stake. (Annoying the Altar Guild might, however.)
I will be away from Thursday morning through Saturday evening at Diocesan Convention. I’ll be back in time for church Sunday, of course, and am looking forward to another round with my favorite book of Scripture, Job. If you missed last week’s sermon and feel like you want to catch up, you can always find them on the CECoP website.
Until then, try not to fall into any heresies, and if you can’t avoid it, beware vengeful queens and their bonfires.
Peace,
Ben.
Oct
11
A sermon by Benjamin J. Newland on the nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 23)
‘Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the Kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it’. And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.
This is what Jesus said in the verse that immediately precedes our portion of the Gospel text for this morning. I repeat it for you today in part because with all of the St. Francis Day excitement we missed it, and also because it is useful to have this saying in mind as we consider what Jesus has to say to the rich man.
The rich man runs up to Jesus and kneels before him and says, “what must I do to inherit eternal life.” Clearly, he wasn’t listening to what Jesus just said. Jesus has only just finished instructing all who would listen that in order to enter the Kingdom of God it is necessary to receive it as a little child. What could be more passive? Little children receive what we give them because to a great extent they are incapable of getting what they need for themselves. They are also to a great extent incapable of knowing what they need. This is how Jesus describes entering the Kingdom of God, as a passive act of receiving what we cannot get for ourselves and what, even if we could get it, we probably wouldn’t know we needed it in the first place.
Then comes the rich man, who suffers from the same problem that all of us rich men suffer from: he believes that he is in control. He believes that there is something he can do to cause eternal life to be his. He wishes to excel, to be the best, to have control over his own salvation. He is not a bad man, indeed he is blessed with outward signs of divine favor and he is a faithful practitioner of the Law. Yet even if he missed what Jesus just said about little children (running late from one appointment to another no doubt), he should have noticed the contradiction in his own statement: what must I do to inherit. Generally, leaving out the plots of many a nineteenth century murder mystery, there isn’t anything you can do to inherit. Inheritance implies something that falls to you through the agency of someone else.
Jesus chooses not to point this out to the rich man. Instead, Jesus answers him in the same terms which he has asked his question.
The story of the rich man and his question is biblically famous. Nearly everyone with any experience of the Christian scriptures knows this lesson. Another parable, equally well known, is that of the Good Samaritan. These two famous stories feature Jesus doing the same rhetorical trick. The question which prompts the parable of the Good Samaritan is a selfish question: “who is my neighbor?” The one asking wishes to know who, exactly, is his neighbor, so that he can more accurately fulfill the commandments and thus ensure his own salvation. Jesus replies by telling a story that takes the focus away from individual salvation and turns it to gracious action toward others.
The rich man asks the same kind of selfish question: “what must I do?” He wishes to know, having fulfilled the letter of the Law, if there might be something more he could add to his salvific résumé. He wants to know if there’s an extra credit question. Jesus replies by taking the focus away from this man’s individual salvation and turning it to gracious action for others. He has only just finished saying that to enter the Kingdom of Heaven you need simply to accept it as a little child accepts things. Yet to the rich man he asks something far less passive, and far more difficult for one who trusts in his wealth. The rich man has asked the wrong question in the wrong way, and has received an answer that he likes very little indeed.
Let us leave the rich man to his misery for a moment and consider another whose misery is much more transcendent. The portion of the Book of Job which we read aloud this morning is one of Job’s many replies to his friends. Friend Eliphaz has just finished speaking and Job replies. Job, as you know, is suffering. He has lost everything. He has lost his wealth, his family, and his health. He deserves none of this. The vast majority of the words in the Book of Job then, are an exploration of the most popular theology of all time: that of retributive justice. Theology is a four syllable word and retributive justice sounds very academic and complicated but I assure you, you know this theological idea very well already. It is simply this: the righteous are rewarded and the wicked are punished. This idea is the central tenet of all the wisdom literature, it underlies nearly all of scripture, and you believe it too. I know, I know, we all have examples of people and occasions where it hasn’t worked out that way. Bad things do happen to good people. And yet, we still believe in retributive justice. All of our examples to the contrary amount to exceptions that prove the rule. Sure, the Book of Job is the story of a righteous man who suffers without cause, but it is the only book amongst many that we consider scripture to carry this theme, and in the end everything turns out OK for Job.
In fact, the Book of Job upholds the idea of retributive justice. Job’s friends make a mistake in that they apply it backwards: they reason that since Job is suffering it must be because he’s done something wrong. Retributive justice works the other way: those who do wrong are made to suffer. It works that way around, but not necessarily the other way around.
Yet even still, Job does not disagree with his friends. He does not say, “I have done nothing wrong and yet I suffer, therefore retributive justice is bunk, God does not always punish the wicked are reward the righteous”. Instead, Job says something far more terrifying. Instead, Job says, “I have done nothing wrong and yet I suffer, therefore God is not paying attention. Where is God?”
Oh that I knew where I might find him,
that I might come even into his dwelling!
I would lay my case before him,
and fill my mouth with arguments.
There an upright person could argue with him,
and I should be acquitted forever by my judge.
Job is not asking for mercy, but to be judged. He is right; he does not want God to overturn the way the world works, he simply wants God to pay attention. Yet God is nowhere to be found.
If I go forward, he is not there;
or backward, I cannot perceive him;
on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him;
I turn to the right, but I cannot see him.
Job’s problem is not with God’s justice, but with God’s absence. This portion of chapter twenty-three is simply a warm up for the twenty-fourth chapter, in which Job will let fly with a torrent of accusation against God. God is absent, indicts Job, and the wicked run roughshod over the weak.
“Where is God” is one of the most terrible questions of faith. It is a question that we are fairly horrible at answering as well. “Where is God?” The question is asked each time we encounter suffering. Where is God when children get cancer? Where is God when young people are killed in accidents? Where is God when tragedy strikes? Our answers to this question are pathetic. Whenever national disasters occur you will see some people make desperate and failed attempts to answer this question. I remember seeing an image on the internet a few weeks following the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. Someone had decided that where God was could best be addressed by using Photoshop to make the smoke pouring out of the World Trade centers look like the face of an old man. Others answered even worse, saying the God was with the terrorists, providing us with some much needed punishment for our sins.
The fact is that we don’t know how to answer this question any better than Job did. Where is God? When faced with tragedy, whether it is on the national scale or far more personal, it seems we have but two responses. We can choose to be resigned to our fate, and say, “this must be the will of the Lord, so I will endure it,” or we can choose to reject God entirely. These are our real answers to the question, “where is God?”
Job has another. In other books of the Bible and in a popular statement of wisdom, we are recommended to the patience of Job. The funny thing about that saying is, Job had no patience with God at all. Job never looses his faith in God. He is full of arguments, yes, but they are arguments with God. Job rails against his fate, he screams his unjust suffering into the emptiness, but he does so because while he believes that God isn’t paying attention he also believes that God is.
What is a good faith life? What does it mean to be strong in your faith? Does it mean that your life is always peaceful? Does it mean that you do not doubt? Or does it mean that, like Job, you have the courage to argue with God? To accuse the almighty of not paying attention? Does it mean taking seriously the very words of Jesus Christ himself spoken on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Is that despair? Or is it faith? And in the midst of tragedy, how would we know the difference?
At the beginning of his story, Job is every bit as wealthy as the rich man who comes to Jesus to ask about his salvation. The question that anonymous rich man asks, and the answer that Jesus gives him, is not about wealth per se, but about our attitude towards wealth. Is wealth our security? Or is God?
Would the story of Job have been different if Job had been even wealthier? What if Job had enough money that when his flocks all died and his house burned down, he could afford to buy new ones? What if Job had enough money that when he lost his children and his wife turned against him he could get a divorce and start a new family with a new wife? What if Job had enough money that he could afford the very best medical care and his failing health could have been dealt with. What if Job had enough money that he could have convinced himself that his wealth would be enough to keep him secure in the face of suffering. Could then Job have afforded to argue with God? Would he even have bothered?
The rich man fails with Jesus because he doesn’t really need God. His trust is in his wealth. Job succeeds in the end, in fact is granted that prize that so few are granted and sees God in person, because Job’s trust was never in his wealth, but in his God, even when that God seemed to be absent.
Where is God? There may not be an answer to that question. But if we, as Christians, could stand up in the world, and instead of foisting bad answers on people, have the courage of Job to argue with God… Well. That would be something. AMEN.
Oct
9
9 October 2009
My Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
What an excellent Sunday we had last week! St. Francis Day is always a fun celebration. This year we had a handful of dogs visit the eight o’clock service, and a huge pack at ten o’clock accompanied by two very brave cats and a tortoise named Turtle. Blessings were well received by the animals, and those who stayed for the service were very well behaved indeed. Attendance was so good that I’m wondering if we shouldn’t invite animals every Sunday. My thanks to Luke Owen, who preached at the early service.
Last Sunday was also the first of what I’ve been calling Children’s Chapel Sundays. On these days, generally the first of the month, our regular Sunday School teachers get a break from teaching and I have all the kids together for a combined lesson on Eucharist and another special topic. Last Sunday our special topic was, of course, St. Francis. I told three stories of St. Francis before we had an informal Eucharist-like meal together. During the ten o’clock service the kids came to the front and helped me remember those stories to the congregation. I learned a great deal during this first Children’s Chapel and am looking forward to the next one on November 1st.
Finally, many, many thanks are owed the faithful workers who stayed after the ten o’clock service to take on several tasks of building maintenance. There was a crew of around a dozen when I counted at lunch. Barry O’Brien, your Jr. Warden, organized this endeavor, so thanks to him, and thanks again to those who labored. We’ll likely have another work party in the Spring, as there is always maintenance to be performed on an old and venerable building like ours.
This Sunday will no doubt be quieter, but every bit as lovely. I look forward to seeing you.
Peace,
Ben.
