Sundays @ 7 Now at Holy Trinity!

Sundays @ 7 now calls Holy Trinity Episcopal Church “home.” Holy Trinity is located at 1832 W. Dean Avenue in West Central Spokane and is the oldest, continuously-active Christian church in Spokane.

Keep Holy Trinity and its people in your prayers as they endeavor to undergo a total restart in the face of changing demographics and complex neighborhood issues. Come and join us as together we figure out what it means to be “church” in this time and this place. Get involved and help lead us into our next stage of life and service in West Central. See you there!

 

lent is on the way

Lent begins this Wednesday (2/21) with Ash Wednesday services at 7am, 10am, 12noon, and 7pm at the Cathedral and 7pm at Holy Trinity.  Come get ashed with your friends and family and begin together this season of prayer and preparation for our own cycle of dying and rising with Christ!  Check with Michelle at the cathedral (838.4277) to get your copy of the Episcopal Peace Fellowship’s (EPF) lenten meditation guide for students. 

The cathedral will also host a Shrove Tuesday pancake supper this Tuesday (2/20) at 6pm in the Great Hall.  In the mardi gras (fat tuesday) tradition of celebrating to excess, we clear out our cupboard and refrigerators in preparation for the long season of fasting and prayer in the desert of our hearts and minds.  How many pancakes can you eat and still drive home safely?  Come and see!

 

Ministry “Meaning & Purpose” Poll

As a young person in ministry, and as a person fairly newly ordained, I often find myself reflecting on the fundamental question, “What in the world am I doing here?”

Reckoning that I’m not alone in this — though am perhaps given more permission to wonder about these things, as a young clergy person — I’d be interested to hear a bit of your own musings on this question, and for us to hear a bit from each other.  As this isn’t exclusively for ordained folks, but for all of us who try to find a meaningful connection between our faith and our action, I invite you to direct others to this post, as well. 

If you’re willing, would you please take a few moments to reflect on and answer the following questions.  Simply post your reply in the comment box.

Thank you, and God bless.

Questions to Consider:

I believe_______.

I believe God created me to________.

I thank God for________.

I serve God by________.

I serve others by________.

Do you serve the Church? Where? How?

What do you enjoy most? Least?

On what do you spend most of your time? Least?

Why did you decide to serve the Church?

Is your work with the Church satisfying?

If ‘yes,’ how so?  If ‘no,’ why not?

What keeps you coming back?

What do you most want others to know about service with the Church?

Here endeth the questionairre. 

Thank you for your time and energy!

 

This Just In: “You reap what you sow!”

Ya know, I’m all for folks asking tough questions and coming up with even tougher answers, assuming this process of questioning and answering comes with enough humility to consider that other faithful Christians just might be doing the same kind of tough questioning and answering themselves — all the while claiming Jesus as Lord.

As some of you may know, this epistemological humility — not to mention Christian charity — has been missing from much recent conversation in The Episcopal Church, and from both sides of the aisle. The difference, however, is that some folks have decided that TEC no longer holds a valid claim to communion with Canterbury — that is, TEC has “walked away from the Anglican Communion.” Those who believe this to be true — predominantly from the more socially and theologically conservative side of the aisle — have decided that, in order for them to remain in communion with Canterbury, they must jump ship from TEC and hope to be picked up by the passing ships of other boundary-jumping bishops from around the globe. Most have been successful in this effort — being rescued by the likes of Uganda, Nigeria, and Recife (Brazil). Strangely enough, though, this emergence of trans-geographic dioceses has created its own tangled mess. Seems the schismatics are beginning to recognize the fruits of division — confusion, indirection, and fear.

One wonders how Archbishop Kolini of Rwanda can, with any integrity, suggest that there’s a unity which transcends ecclesial structure — the unity of ‘mission’ — our common concern for the world in which we live. If I understand our Christian unity correctly — and I’m open to being corrected here — it is rooted in the “gift” of unity we receive as baptized members of the Body of Christ — the unity of being “One in the Spirit” — what Anglicanism refers to as “communion.” They both work together — you can’t really choose one and not the other. Believe it or not, though, that’s just what the likes of CANA, ACN, AAC, and AMiA have done. They’ve chosen to abort the fundamental reality of our unity in Christ, and are attempting, now, to take the high road of Mission in Christ’s Name. Eventually — and you can count on this — some group among the schismatics will decide that a historically excluded group is worthy of affirmation and care, and some other group among the schismatics will disagree. Because they don’t agree on the trajectory of God’s love for the world — and because they’ve demonstrated a lack of belief and commitment to our spiritual unity in the Body of Christ — they will choose to further sever ties with each other, and further divide the Body they so strongly profess to care for.

How do you feel about worshiping in a church with people whose beliefs and/or behaviors you disagree with? Have you experienced this? How have you dealt with it before? Are there limits to your willingness to “stick together”? How do your understandings of God and Church play into it?

Read on, and see what you think. Peace, Paul

Jacksonville (Fla.) Times-Union
Jan. 20, 2007

Anglicans raise questions of unity

By JEFF BRUMLEY
The Times-Union
The Anglican conference concluding today in Jacksonville was described as Christian unity in action.
About 1,300 to 1,600 participants of the Anglican Mission in America conference shared a zeal for spreading the gospel and a repulsion from the Episcopal Church’s growing acceptance of openly gay clergy
and same-sex blessings.

But between workshops on topics like church planting and creating effective children’s ministries, the buzz among vendors’ tables and coffee kiosks often centered on where the whole Anglican experiment
in America is headed. With about a dozen national organizations representing Anglicans who have quit the Episcopal Church, plus nearly as many foreign bishops overseeing parishes in the U.S., many worry the movement is becoming irreparably fragmented. “It’s all part of the balkanization of the Episcopal Church,” said David Virtue of Virtueonline.org, an Internet-based Anglican news and commentary site that boasts 4 million readers.

Theologically conservative Episcopalians left the denomination after 2003 when an openly gay priest was elected the Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire. In doing so, they sought oversight from like-minded Anglican bishops in places like Africa, South America and Southeast Asia. On the First Coast [sic], former Episcopalians from more than a dozen congregations have accepted oversight from bishops in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Brazil.

Meanwhile, at least 10 national Anglican organizations have been formed, including the Anglican Communion Network, the American Anglican Council, the Anglican Province of America and the Anglican Mission in America. Some fear the longer congregations are led by different foreign dioceses, the harder it will eventually become to draw them together under a common banner.

Anglican parishes are stuck in a “survival mode” as long as that fragmented state exists, said the Rev. Jim McCaslin, a priest who led All Souls in Mandarin out of the Episcopal Church and into a Ugandan diocese in 2006. The church also is one of about 20 in the Anglican Alliance of North Florida, and McCaslin is the leader of Anglican Communion Network congregations in the region. It is crucial that the communion’s world leaders create a new hierarchical structure for Anglicans in the U.S. and Canada - hopefully during their triennial meeting next month in Tanzania, McCaslin said. “If they don’t, that leaves you with a fractured church with unity in the gospel but no structural unity,” he said.

Such a new organization could exist beside the Episcopal Church within the Anglican Communion, Virtue and some priests at the convention said. But some of the overseas archbishops attending the Jacksonville conference hinted that Anglicans in America may have to adjust their expectations.

“To me, structure is the wrong way, the wrong direction,” Archbishop Emmanuel Kolini of Rwanda, founder of the Anglican Mission in America, told the Times-Union. Kolini said he believes an important kind of unity already exists - that which unites Christians from different denominations in fighting problems such as AIDS.

The Rev. Sam Pascoe, rector of the Kolini-led Grace Anglican Church in Orange Park, said a new denomination is necessary eventually. Otherwise “it’s just complete disintegration and everyone goes their own way and you end up with hundreds of different jurisdictions,” Pascoe said.

 

A Fellow Anglican on Church and Scripture

I invite you to visit the following post to hear from one of the great hearts and minds in The Episcopal Church today.  Brother Tobias Haller, BSG is both passionate and balanced in his approach to these fundamental questions of our day — a refreshing voice in what is often a very vitriolic conversation about the proper role and function of Holy Scripture in guiding and guarding our journey into the heart of God and back, again, to the hopes and needs of the world.  I trust you’ll enjoy what he has to say.  Do take a look!

http://jintoku.blogspot.com/2007/01/leviticus-and-anglican-deformation.html

 

Politics and Faith

Now that the gears of the political machine have shifted once again — from election to installation — it’s worth paying close attention to the language of public perception and opinion.  I’m especially cognizant, here, of the PR gymnastics our new Speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, is training for.  In a recent news article about her celebration party in D.C., one of Pelosi’s PR strategists noted how important it will be to frame her public image as a loving, East Coast grandmother before her political opposition is able to frame her as a  radical, California feminist.  How strange, I thought, that she couldn’t possibly be framed positively as both. 

So, too, with Sen. Barack Obama, who’s quietly waging his own PR battle over his choice to be honest and transparent, in his first book, about his drug use as a young person.  Some criticize his former indiscretion.  Others praise his openness.

So all this got me to wondering, once again, how it is that faithful Christians are to wade through this barrage of PR strategy?  On what bases are we to select our elected leaders, given the manipulation of their public images, both for and against?  

What values do you look for in your elected leadership?

What kind of character do you look for?

What issues are the most important to you as a person of faith? 

 

3000 and counting

What are folks doing to commemorate this horrific landmark?  What are folks doing to creatively and sensitively express support and concern for our soldiers, while at the same time attempting to speak a prophetic and constructive word about the sacrificial witness of Jesus, whose violent death on the cross was to be forever, for you and for me, God’s definitive ‘no’ to our preponderance to agitate and escalate the cycle of violence — inner-personally and inter-personally, locally and globally?

I know and trust that we share a fundamental vocation as Christians here in this time and place to bear witness to God — shining light in the darkness.  What it will look like for us, I don’t really know. But I think it’s time we start thinking and acting like we believe God actually has something to say about the state of the world we live in. How shall we live? What shall we do? Who’s active on this in Spokane? How can we support and encourage each other? 

 

Washington Post Article: What say ye?

Episcopalians Against Equality, By Harold MeyersonWednesday, December 20, 2006; A23

Don’t look now, but Virginia is seceding again.

On Sunday nine Episcopal parishes in Virginia, including the one where George Washington served as a vestryman, announced that they had voted to up and leave the U.S. Episcopal Church to protest its increasingly equal treatment of homosexuals.

In 2003 an overwhelming majority of the nation’s Episcopal bishops ratified the selection of a gay bishop by the New Hampshire diocese.

This past June the church’s general convention elevated Nevada Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori to the post of presiding U.S. bishop. Jefferts Schori is the first woman to head a national branch of the Anglican Church. Worse yet, she has allowed the blessing of same-sex couples within her diocese (which includes the ever theologically innovative Las Vegas).

Whether it was the thought of a woman presiding over God’s own country club or of gays snuggling under its eaves, it was all too much for a distinct minority of Episcopalians. The dissident parishes in the Virginia diocese contain only about 5 percent of the state’s parishioners. But it’s the church the defectors have latched on to that makes this schism news.

In slamming the door on their American co-religionists, the two largest parishes, which are in Fairfax City and Falls Church, also announced their affiliation with the Episcopal Church of Nigeria. The presiding Nigerian archbishop, Peter Akinola, promotes legislation in his country that would forbid gays and lesbians to form organizations or to eat together in restaurants and that would send them to jail for indulging in same-gender sexual activity. Akinola’s agenda so touched the hearts of the Northern Virginia faithful that they anointed him, rather than Jefferts Schori, as their bishop.

Peer pressure played a role, too. Explaining the decision to leave the American church, Vicki Robb, a Fairfax parishioner and Alexandria public relations exec, told The Post’s Bill Turque and Michelle Boorstein that the church’s leftward drift has made it “kind of embarrassing when you tell people that you’re Episcopal.” It must be a relief to finally have an archbishop who doesn’t pussyfoot around when gays threaten to dine in public.

The alliance of the Fairfax Phobics with Archbishop Restaurant Monitor is just the latest chapter in the global revolt against modernity and equality and, more specifically, in the formation of the Orthodox International. The OI unites frequently fundamentalist believers of often opposed faiths in common fear and loathing of challenges to ancient tribal norms. It has featured such moving tableaus as the coming together in the spring of 2005 of Israel’s chief rabbis, the deputy mufti of Jerusalem, and leaders of Catholic and Armenian churches, burying ancient enmities to jointly condemn a gay pride festival. The OI’s founding father was none other than Pope John Paul II, who spent much time and energy endeavoring to reconcile various orthodox Christian religions and whose ecumenism prompted him to warn the Anglicans not to ordain gay priests.

John Paul also sought to build his church in nations of the developing world where traditional morality and bigotry, most especially on matters sexual, were in greater supply than in secular Europe and the increasingly egalitarian United States, and more in sync with the Catholic Church’s inimitable backwardness. Now America’s schismatic Episcopalians are following in his footsteps — traditionalists of the two great Western hierarchical Christian churches searching the globe for sufficiently benighted bishops.

In recent years Anglican churches have experienced their greatest growth in the developing world, which could tilt the entire global Anglican Communion toward more traditionalist norms. Only 13 of the

38 national churches within the communion ordain women as priests; only three — the United States, New Zealand and Canada — ordain women as bishops.

The American church, by contrast, has largely paralleled the transformation of Rockefeller Republicans into liberal, Democratic secularists. The old joke of New York politicos was that Jews had the incomes of Episcopalians but voted like Puerto Ricans. Now it’s the Episcopal prelates who are voting like Puerto Ricans, or, more precisely, like liberal Jews. Some traditionalists fear the church isn’t really theistic anymore. The comforting middle ground of the church of yore — affirming the equality of some, not discussing the equality of others — has eroded as the demands of women and gays and lesbians could no longer be dismissed.

The irony is that the Episcopal Church owes its existence directly to the American Revolution; it broke away from the Church of England during the war and was reborn as a distinctly American entity between 1784 and 1789. Fully two-thirds of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were active or (like Washington) nominal Anglicans, and, having repudiated the political authority of the king of England, they could scarcely have gone on affirming his ecclesiastical authority.

The founders of the church believed, within the context of their time, that all men were created equal. Today’s defectors have thought it over in the context of our own time, and decided that they’re not.

meyersonh@washpost.com

What do you think?  Is this article fair?  What’s it missing, if anything?

 

On God in the Flesh

It’s when we face for a moment the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know the taint in our own selves, that awe cracks the mind’s shell and enters the heart: not to a flower, not to a dolphin, to no innocent form but to this creature vainly sure it and no other is god-like, God (out of compassion for our ugly failure to evolve) entrusts, as guest, as brother, the Word.  — D. Levertov, The Stream & The Sapphire

On God in the Flesh: What’s the point? What difference does it make for God? What difference does it make for us — for the way we live with our bodies and minds and souls? 

I never cease to be amazed by the general unwillingness of the Church — the Body of Christ — to talk about itself as a body and its members as bodies – real flesh and bones and blood.  Perhaps it’s why we’re so scared to talk about sex and why we shouldn’t be so surprised at the recent data suggesting that 90% of all American adults have had pre-marital sex.  It’s no big surprise, nor is it necessarily something to lose sleep over.  What we should be losing sleep over is the incredible disconnect the Church has sown between sex and stewardship — the right care for all that God entrusts to us, including but not limited to our power for pleasure and procreation.  God’s Incarnation into a real body with real parts, endowed for all sorts of wonderment, reminds us that it’s always to the Church’s peril not to say something encouraging and helpful to those on the cusp of sexual activity.  Perhaps the numbers on per-marital sex would drop.  Perhaps the rates of HIV/AIDS and other STDs would drop.  Perhaps the number of unplanned pregnancies would drop.  Perhaps the number of divorces would drop.  Who knows?  Either way, we’d speak a powerful Word into the most intimate place of any person’s life — and they’d hear that God isn’t afraid or embarrassed to be there — and they’d hear that they, in all they do with the precious gift of these incredible bodies, are destined, like Christ, for divinity.  

 

First Week of Advent: Tuesday, December 5th

From Luke 20:9-18 — “The the owner of the vineyard said, ‘What shall I do? I will send my beloved son; perhaps they will respect him.’ But when the tenants saw him, they discussed it among themselves and said, ‘This is the heir; let us kill him so that the inheritance may be ours.’”

The allegory is clear — God sends a succession of prophets into the world to call the world back into right relationship with Him. Time and again, the prophets are rejected, beaten, and sent away until, at last, God sends His own Son (that’s J.C.) into the world, sure that the world would respond to the heir’s authority. Instead, the response is even more hostile than before — rejected and beaten, for sure, the heir is also, this time, murdered. And the tenants (that’s the world and you and me) are certain that at last the world will be totally and completely ours — free of the inconvenient demands that come with Christ’s Lordship (e.g. taking care of each other, the world, etc.). The joke is on us, however, as the allegory continues on to reveal God’s Will that the new creation, the Kingdom of God, be built on “the stone that the builders rejected”; that is, the solid form and likeness of Christ, whose clear-cut edges reveal the shape of love that is to support the world forever.

The allegory works strongly enough upon us if we’re able to read ourselves into the story. It’s the form and intent of the allegory that it not require too much elaboration to make its point. So I’ll leave it alone and let it work on us today with little more than a simple thanksgiving: How grateful we are to live with a God whose love for us says ‘no’ to every careless and callous rejection of His desire to be near us — even to the point of sacrificing Himself. A sure sign, once again, that God is faithful — that God is loving — and that God takes risks to make that love known to us.

Keep an eye out today for God coming near you. Look for the subtle invitations to say ‘yes’ to others and to the Christ in them. And give thanks to God who loves us far too much to simply leave us alone as we are!