the DOVE m i n i s t r y m a g a z i n e C h r i s t i s C a l l i n g S t. D a v i d s E p i s c o p a l C h u r c h March & April 2016 Vol. 30 No. 37
In this Issue 763 South Valley Forge Rd. Wayne, PA 19087 www.stdavidschurch.org 610.688.7947 Sunday Worship Schedule 8:00 a.m. Holy Eucharist Rite I Church 9:15 a.m. Holy Eucharist Rite II Chapel 11:15 a.m. Holy Eucharist Rite II Church 5:00 p.m. Holy Eucharist Rite II Church Clergy The Rev. W. Frank Allen Rector The Rev. Amanda Eiman Associate Rector The Rev. Dr. Martha Tucker Associate Rector The Rev. Matt Welch Assistant Rector The Rev. Dennis Reid Associate Rector The Rev. Dr. Alexander McCurdy III Associate Rector The Rev. William Wood III Associate Rector The Rev. Burt Zug Adjunct Associate Staff Marilyn Callaghan Parish Administrator Diane Dowlin Administrative Assistant Elaine Giese Music Assistant Matt Grove Property Department Kay Joseph Parish Secretary Joe Konopski Property Manager Maria Leal Children s Ministries Director Rebecca Lohoefer Director of Communications Kathy Marcantonio Administrative Assistant Michael Merrick Sexton Osvaldo Montes Groundskeeper Leslie Robertshaw Finance Manager Clair Rozier Director of Music Joe Schufreider Property Department Elaine Sonnenberg Associate Director of Music Buff Barnes Spiritual Direction 610.254.0351 Judy Krischker Wedding Coordinator 610.692.2979 Margie Winters The Gift Shop 484.580.8486 From the Rector 3 An Honored Guest 4 LUX AETERNA 5 St. Alban and the Life of Grace 6 Project Ensonga 8 Christ is Calling: A Meditation on Meditations 9 Book Review 10 The Dove is a bi-monthly publication of St. David s Episcopal Church, Wayne, PA. Our mission is to know God in Jesus Christ and to make Christ known to others. We are a community founded in the love of Christ and a love of one another that seeks to draw everyone into a deeper life with God by using our gifts for ministry in building up the Body of Christ here and in reaching out to the world. For more information on ministries, events and education, please visit: www.stdavidschurch.org
Dear People of St. David s, From the Rector C h r i s t is C a l l i n g Come, Follow Me. Mark 12:14 I pray that you are well and that the love and presence of God feel present in your life, even as God is calling you and me in various places and circumstances in life. Christ is calling us, all of us, and when we hear that call on our own, through the scriptures, through other people, then we are blessed with a greater intimacy with God and a much fuller, joy-filled life. One of the most profound and helpful ways to hear Christ calling us is through the stories of others. Stories have a way of opening a way for most of us to get the sense that God s call is actually very close to the lives we re living. That is, Christ is usually calling us to take a step in another direction, to turn, or to turn around rather than to take some kind of leap into the completely unknown. Our stories of being called and the stories of others who have been and are being called gives us an idea of how Christ might be calling us in our own lives and that those calls are filled with grace and goodness and fearlessness. The Bible is filled with stories of persons and communities being called. Abraham and Sarah are called to move to a new land. Moses is called out of the burning bush to lead God s people out of slavery. Samuel is called in the quiet of the night to hear God speaking to him. Mary is called by the visitation of an angel. Jesus is constantly calling new followers. We know about their calls because of the stories that envelope or surround the actual moment of calling. This issue of the DOVE focuses on Christ s call in our everyday lives through the power and accessibility of story. The articles in this issue provide personal stories of hearing and answering Christ s call and some of the amazing, life-giving effects that so often result in us answering Christ s call. I hope you will take the time to read and reflect on the possibilities of responding in your own life and the stories you could tell and will have the opportunity to tell. For it is in our stories that we remember how we have been changed by God and in sharing them can become part of God s transformation of the world. Grace and Peace. The Rev. W. Frank Allen
An Honored Guest Sometimes, as I sit and watch a child struggle to do just the right job of representing God s face, His features, the shape of His head the cast of His countenance, I think back to my days of working in Dorothy Day s Catholic Worker soup kitchen. One afternoon, after several of us had struggled with a wino, a Bowery bum, an angry, cursing, truculent man of fifty or so, with long gray hair, a full, scraggly beard, a huge scar on his right cheek, a mouth with virtually no teeth, and bloodshot eyes, one of which had a terrible tic, she told us, For all we know he might be God Himself come here to test us, so let us treat him as an honored guest and look at his face as if it is the most beautiful one we can imagine. Robert Coles, The Spiritual Life of Children, cited in Soul Survivor by Philip Yancey as to how he Yancey learned to understand the dignity of every human being. "Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it." LUKE 18:17
LUX AETERNA I have a friend who is hearing Christ call. He is calling through his crucifixion (my friend s), although there is a mysterious conflation of his with our Lord s. Not only at this point in his life, but also throughout his days, he needed eyes to see, and ears to hear this call. We all do at such times. Some people, take Albert Camus and his vision of absurdity as god, will only see and hear God s call when they rise from their graves, stand before Jesus and look back through Him. Others are blessed to hear God s call even in the vicissitudes of their crucifixions. Crucifixions come in all shapes and forms so we don t always recognize them as crucifixions just bad fortune, pain due to illness or our own stupid mistakes. Inevitably, we must see them negatively for what they are, pray for their removal, cure or rectification, citing, for a while with Jesus, the opening verse of Psalm 22: My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me, more than that of Psalm 23: The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. But at some point in whatever forms our crucifixions, laments and fist poundings -on-tables take, there comes a moment when the light of Christ is attempting to dawn out of our dark Golgothas. Listen carefully we must. God s voice may seem faint at first, his calling but a still small voice. But it s there and when we hear it: Ba-Boom! My friend, still very much grappling with his own crucifixion, is mysteriously finding his Lord with him there. The other day I noticed that he had ordered a new license plate for his car, which actually he can t drive anymore due to the progress of his crucifixion. It read: LUX-8RNA p.s. This guy wrote a book once entitled: The Smile at the Heart of Things. It s full of wonderful pre-crucifixion insights and preparations. The Rev. Alexander McCurdy III
St. Alban and the Life of Grace If you were growing up in England in the Middle Ages, you would know Alban s story. Whether the story is true or fictional is up to historians to decide, but when the Venerable Bede recorded it in the 8th Century, it became one of those legends like Patrick in Ireland, or David in Wales which glued together a nation, giving spiritual strength and courage to Lords and the lowest alike. Suspending my own disbelief, I return to the story often as a reminder of the extent of God s grace, and his feast day on June 22nd gives me a reason to bust out my Union Jack socks. The year was 304 AD, and the British Isles were under the authority of Rome, which was in the throes of a crackdown on Christianity. Alban was a pagan and a Roman soldier assigned in Britain to enforce the crackdown, and he came upon a Christian priest who was fleeing from arrest. Within a span of a few days, the two developed a close relationship. Alban who should have arrested him and brought him to his superiors instead provided him shelter, and the priest told him about his faith in Jesus Christ. At some point Alban, fearing for his new friend, dressed himself in the priest s clothing, and walked into the local Roman military court, confessing to be the priest for whom they were looking. Alban was tortured at length, and eventually beheaded. He became England s first Christian martyr. The second martyr was the would-be executioner. Alban s last words, his confession of faith, were so overwhelming to the executioner that he refused to go through with it, and instead too confessed faith in a crucified Christ, sacrificially laying his neck on the bloodied mound on which Alban was beheaded. The priest, who, learning that Alban had been arrested in his place, raced down to the court and confessed his faith in the dashed hopes of saving Alban. He became the third Christian martyr in England. I wonder what Alban s life was like the day before he met the priest. I imagine he would have been encamped with his fellow Romans, telling stories around a campfire of the food and friends they missed back home. He might have had family about whom he worried. He might have prayed to the gods for courage in a strange and lonely land. But in an instant and not in the least bit of his own doing Alban was swayed by the love of a God who came and dwelt among the masses, offering dignity and hope to those for whom such things were unfamiliar. In an instant, Alban s life mattered. He knew that if God would call a virgin girl in Nazareth to bear the Prince of Peace, then perhaps God could make something of him too, that his hapless life as a Roman foot soldier was redeemable that all of humanity was 6
redeemable and he couldn t help but bear witness to that. The story goes that the eyes of the executioner who killed Alban dropped to the ground at the same moment as the blessed martyr s head as a lasting reminder of his unwillingness to see the grace of God before him. It is a stinging end to a story of two men who risked everything to bear witness to the light of Christ s love, and to the priest who inspired them. May we have the courage in our lives also to bear witness to such light, that our last words might echo that of Saint John the Divine: Even so, Amen. The Rev. Matthew Welch 1. Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Book I, Chapter VII, translated by the Rev. William Hurst, 1814. 2. Revelation 1:7 7
Project Ensonga No one told me how much a mission trip to Uganda would impact me. After traveling there in 2012 on a St. David s mission trip, I kept trying to think of ways to help the people have a better life. I read articles about girls dropping out of school when they began to have their menstrual cycles. This is due to no reliable sanitary products for them to use, and if they did have disposable products, there is no trash collection. Through some research, I found Days for Girls International. Their website has directions to make reusable feminine hygiene kits. I made a kit and showed it to Sarah Serunjogi, our Ugandan partner, while she was visiting this past November. She said this is a problem at their schools, Trinity Children s Centre and Centenary High School. Girls use old uniforms and rags or whatever they can find. Sarah took the sample kit back to Uganda and showed it to the tailors at the school. They have begun to make some kits. To keep this effort going, I have launched Project Ensonga to keep girls in school, no matter what time of the month it is. My goal is to make 500 kits this year to take to Uganda in October 2016. This will be a combination of collecting money to buy supplies, recruiting people to help make the kits, and setting up collections for the remaining items in the kit. Project Ensonga is part of this year s Lenten Giving. Please help by donating girls underwear, wash cloths, soap and Ziploc bags. The statistics show that after kit distribution in other Ugandan schools, the absence rate dropped from 36% to 8%! I feel that Christ has called me to this project which will improve the lives of the girls in Uganda. Leslie Roy 8
Christ is Calling: A Meditation on Meditations If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Philippians 2:1,2 For two weeks in December, my inbox is filled with Lenten meditations. As lay coordinator of our Lenten booklet, I correspond with forty-some parishioners and make spreadsheets of acceptances and assignments. A few weeks later, the meditations pour in and I read them in days, rather than weeks. My responsibilities require me to read each one several times and, in the process, they begin to breathe and have a heartbeat, filled with the voice of each writer. Experiencing these stories in this way heightens their impact and affords a new understanding. The Lenten meditations reveal that our common life does not end with the reciting of common words from a common book. We are sent out each Sunday encouraged to listen for Christ s call in the ordinary rhythms of our lives and we return the next Sunday with the stories of those experiences. A mother hears it in forgiveness from a young son; a gardener hears it while she tends her seeds, vines and branches. One seeks the call in silence; another senses it in a rock song. Many hear it profoundly in Scripture read anew and many are led out of despair by the Shepherd s voice during life s struggles. Encouragement, consolation, compassion, sympathy these are the fruits St. Paul desires in the common life of Jesus followers and these are the fruits that are revealed in our life stories. We are different in our experiences, responsibilities, gifts, and pursuits, but we are of the same mind seeking the revelation of divine love. The ordinary becomes extraordinary when our eyes have been opened by the same Love and by the sharing of the same Spirit. That unity is our strength and it fills my heart with love, courage, and hope. Gillian Waldron 9
10 Book Review: Soul Survivor: How Thirteen Unlikely Mentors Helped My Faith Survive the Church By Philip Yancey Perhaps it takes a catastrophic event, such as 9/11, to call us up short and cause us to reflect on the meaning and authenticity of life. Yet it also seems to me that churches are called to do this all the time: to tell stories about Scripture which connect up with stories about our lives and to shine light on the saints who have gone before us in order to see everyday sainthood. Philip Yancey has written an amazing book which does, in its second edition, spring from the ashes of 9/11. And yet, reading it today without an intervening event might be for us like reading the Bible not because we had to. Imagine the possibilities and the enlightenment! To fill the cracks of the crisis and the gaps left in the wake of 9/11 and in the wake of the all too necessary questions of a life lived with problems of trust, Yancey devotes a chapter to each of his mentors who upon reflection offered him opportunities for spiritual formation and moral growth. Some of these characters are famous and you will immediately recognize their names but some are obscure, even local. All are, however, stories which line up to match the shape of Yancey s life. A few examples: Dr. Paul Brand, about whom Frank has preached, did medicine his way and devoted his life to uncommon and unlikeable diseases like leprosy. He quoted Jesus to Yancey before he died, Happy are they who bear their share of the world s pain: In the long run they will know more happiness than those who avoid it. Or a personal favorite Henri Nouwen, the Wounded Healer, who ended his life s ministry as chaplain at one of the L Arche communities housing mentally challenged adults. All his degrees, his ordination, his prolific writing took him away from his authentic self and finding the home where he belonged with Christ at L Arche. Yancey says For me, though, a single image captures him best: the energetic priest, hair in disarray, using his restless hands as if to fashion a homily out of thin air, celebrating an eloquent birthday Eucharist for an unresponsive child-man so damaged that most parents would have had him aborted. A better symbol of the Incarnation, I can hardly imagine. (p.316) But for us at St David s in this year of Christ is Calling there is no better representative of formational influence than Frederick Buechner. If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is (p.259 from Now and Then).
I said to the almond tree, Sister, speak to me of God, and the almond tree blossomed. -Nikos Kazantkakis
763 South Valley Forge Rd. Wayne, PA 19087 www.stdavidschurch.org 610.688.7947