Join us October 3 at 5pm for an outdoor Blessing of the Animals. Animals on leashes or in carriers are warmly welcome, as are stuffed animals and photos.
“I am not a priest—I just poorly play one on Facebook live. My study of the Bible is relatively recent and shallow—I didn’t find my way into regular worship until I met Gene. Sure, my childhood featured Easter Sunday services in fluffy Talbots dresses and two-weeks each summer of Vacation Bible School… but those were less an expression of my belief in God than they were my being easily bribed by flowery dresses and weeks of time at Grandma’s house.
I’m not a rector, but Iama writer. I’ve consumed a lot of stories in all sorts of different media. I love the craft of storytelling, and the tropes and tools we writers use to tell a story right. That’s why I think I love John’s gospel.”
“This fourth Sunday of the Easter season is awash in images of shepherds and flocks. This Gospel passage, and the 23rd psalm from which its imagery derives. The original audience listening to Rabbi Jesus would have been more than familiar with the frequent use of images of sheep and flocks in scripture and teaching.
Years ago, when I dropped out of college for a bit of time that was graciously considered by the dean of students as a “leave of absence”, I lived on a farm in the Upper Connecticut Valley in New Hampshire. This farm raised blueberries and trees and was self-sustaining for its own produce. Living there was, quite literally, living off the land. Like most New England farmers, the man who owned the farm was responsive to his neighbors’ needs. Farming in New England is not for the faint of heart and you survive in solidarity with the other resolute souls who try to earn their living out of that stony ground and frequently harsh climate. One of the neighbors kept sheep, and when he would need to leave town for a time, we took care of his sheep. It was thus that I had a very short-career as a not very capable shepherd. The Mediocre Shepherd, you might say.”
Easter Sunday puts a pause on the world’s worries: pilgrims make their pilgrammages; choirs belt out their strong hallelujah’s; the pope says mass for thousands; preachers mock death; the adorned altar proclaims spring, and for a brief shining moment the hope of Jesus Christ risen is tangible. But then the world blinks, as it were, loses its concentration and returns its attention to other pressing matters: COVID variants in the air, a border in disarray, a boiling planet and brutal gun violence. Then it turns to look for this hope again, and it’s gone. An array of forces is approaching us led by the baddest bully of them all: death. Where is that Easter bravado today?
One week after, do you still believe in Easter? How? There was once a man who did not believe in Easter. His name was Thomas the Twin; we might call him St. Skepticus.
It’s hard to believe that the season is shifting from summer to fall, and as hard to believe that after six months, we are still needing to safely manage and navigate COVID 19 risk in all that we do as individuals and as a faith community. This has been a difficult time for all of us….
But I will go on to say that I feel proud that St. Anne’s has been able to slowly and successfully move forward over the past six months, and I would like to point to a few of our blessings.
Not long into quarantine a friend on a school board shared something she heard the head of school say as they were thinking about re-opening procedures: “We are living at the nexus of persistence and patience as we do our best to plan ahead.” I have very much felt to be at the intersection of persistence and patience. This is a challenging tension to live into – personally, I am much better at persistence. I love a good challenge, or a new opportunity for adaptive thinking. Patience is much more difficult, especially when life throws you into Patience’s classroom and you have no idea when class lets out.
As Christ’s body, we have been given the good work of raising up leaders and empowering them to serve in new ways and in new places. It’s always been a great sign of the life and Spirit present in our community that we do this — forming, equipping, and sending out leaders – and it’s been one of the key ways St. Anne’s in-the-Fields continues to serve our diocese. With this in mind, it’s something of bittersweet news that Greg has accepted a call to serve the people of St. John’s in Charlestown.
“Many people find comfort in the ideas of a divine plan or of the prosperity gospel. It’s comforting for many people to imagine that God must have a plan for everything. It’s comforting for many people to imagine that if they just stay strong and keep their faith, everything will be okay. It’s comforting, at least, until someone else uses these ideas to try to wipe away your pain. Hence the bittersweet title of Kate Bowler’s book: ‘Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved.’”
“If You Want to Walk on Water, You’ve Got to Get out of the Boat. That was the title, some years back, of a popular book written by John Ortberg. And the title reflects what is surely the most common take on this story. Peter had the right idea getting out of the boat, and stepping out on faith…Like Peter, we must heed this invitation, find the courage needed to swing our legs out over the boat’s side, and then step out into the waters…But something tells me this won’t do.”
In mid-June, 30+ parishioners gathered to form the Racial Justice Allies (RJA) group with the intention of exploring ways to take action at St. Anne’s to address racial injustice. Various activities are already underway, and we recently crafted a vision statement to articulate what we acknowledge, what we believe, and what we commit to doing.
“Like every founding myth, in other words, Hamilton tells us at least as much about how we imagine ourselves today as it does about what happened years ago. And so I find it completely delightful that this bizarre tale from Genesis is how the Bible tells the story of the founding of the people of God. Because the moment when Jacob wrestles with God is like the Bible’s equivalent of the Declaration of Independence: it’s one of a handful of turning points in the relationship between God and humankind.“
“Back in late February and the first week of March, as we all made a few last trips to the grocery store, people stocked up on what they imagined to be the essentials. Some people filled their broom closets with toilet paper. I bought about 300 diapers. And all across America, yeast and flour disappeared from the grocery-store shelves.”
“Well, you have never seen such pathetic vegetables in your life. Tiny lettuce plants shriveled up even smaller than the seedlings we’d bought from the store. Bulbous zucchini two inches long and covered in tiny squirrel chew-marks. The only things that really grew well were the herbs, and that just meant I was trying to add mint to everything until Alice finally got sick of it sometime in mid-July. But the tomatoes were a different story.”
While we will begin offering an 8am outdoor service, our principal worship offering continues to be online at 10am through Facebook and our website. The 10am online service – as well as our other online programming – will continue to be offered throughout the summer and into the fall; whether you are at your summer home, battling a cold, or just being cautious about public safety, please feel encouraged to continue to join us online at 10am.
Our choir sings “America the Beautiful” for our service on July 5, 2020.
“St. Paul knows that we live before an unknown future, and he’s casting around for what he can trust, who he can trust to give him directions. ‘Who can save me from this dead body?’ he asks. You could say that Romans 7 is about a man struggling with the future as he finds himself doing what he doesn’t what to do. He longs for a reconciliation in himself that is half glimpsed, half heard.“
“God had promised that Abraham would be the ancestor of many nations—and indeed, in some ways he’s become the spiritual ancestor of all the Abrahamic traditions, of all Jews and Christians and Muslims, four billion of us in the world today. And yet at this point in the story, that great lineage hangs by a thread. Abraham nearly kills his own son, nearly cutting off God’s promise to create a great people, nearly ending the story of the great love affair between God and the people of God before it’s really begun.”
If I had to sum up the paradox that is Christianity, the “the joy of being wrong” is close to the heart of it. If I had to say what one of the prevailing anxieties of our moment is, it’d be “being wrong.” “Systemic racism” has gone from being a top-shelf theoretical concept to a phrase used in everyday language by 6th grader and 60 year old alike.
“I remember sitting with a woman in the transept of the church an hour or so before the service one Sunday. She was bent over a little and weary, and I could tell that she was out of breath. She was sweating a little bit too. ‘Ma’am, is everything okay?’ She went on to tell me about how her husband had decided, after twenty-seven years, that he’d had enough… ‘I took the long way here this morning to your church, through the park, and here I am. To be honest, I’m just looking for a little peace.’ … I’ll never forget her, and I thought about her this week: out of breath and looking for peace. It feels a little bit like our society right now.”
“Back in 2008, Tania Luna founded Surprise Industries as a way to tap into our culture’s yearning to be surprised. For a small fee, Luna’s company would surprise you or your family or your company. You just paid a little monthly subscription fee, and you literally have no clue what will happen. Surprise Industries might show up at your workplace and unleash a hundred puppies. Or they might tee up a flash mob, or bring a circus act to your doorstep… Surprises, Luna discovered, have a paradoxical feature. They tell us we were wrong; yet paradoxically, we still yearn for this.”
