Frontpage, August 12, 2018 – St. Peter's Episcopal

August 12, 2018 Pentecost 12, Proper 14

Jackie Collins last Sunday Aug. 12 before departing to Vanderbilt, studying for an MA.

Pictures and text from this Sunday, August 12

The Week Ahead…

August 15 – 3pm-5pm, Village Harvest food distribution

Help needed: 9:30, help needed to unload the truck. Many hands make light work. help 1PM, help needed to set up. 3-5PM help needed for the distribution itself. Thank you for your contributions of both food and time. By working together, we can keep this important St Peter’s ministry going.

August 19 – 11:00am, Morning Prayer, Rite II

Sunday, August 19 Readings and Servers

August 22 – 3:30pm Funeral Service for Marsha Dobson. Covenant Funeral Home, 4801 Jefferson Davis Highway, Fredericksburg.

Village Harvest expands coverage for 3rd straight month.

After reaching a high number served of 153 in April and dropping in May to 112, we have been steadily increasing the numbers served over the last quarter. June fed 100, July 119 and this month in August rose to 140. We have served 860 people this year which is below 2017 (1,039) but above 2016 (763).

We again had school supplies for recent school opening and a wide variety of vegetables and fruits (corn, cucumbers, broccoli, oranges), grocery items and meats.

The numbers of pounds served was 801 which was low compared to earlier months. Food served on average has increased in contrast to numbers served. We have averaged 1,501 in 2018 which is above 1,254 in 2017 and 1,058 in 2016. The increase for 2018 is 120%. The value per shopper was consequently lower in August at $34.33 compared to an average of $76.92 for 2018.

Read more and see Andrea Pogue’s pictures..

Catherine in Guatemala, Aug. 15, 2018

"In a few minutes I’ll be walking down a beautiful cobblestone road lined on one side with flowers and coffee plants interspersed with orange trees on a cool clear morning. The the road curves left, and the street becomes lined with huge trees on one side, and coffee growing under shade trees on the other.

"Vivero y Cafe La Escalonia is past the trees and on the left. When I step inside the gates, I have a perfect view of two volcanoes. To the right is the cafe, with its tables nestled within a lush garden. The nursery stretches out behind the cafe, full of lush plants and also clever plantings in recycled containers.

"And another delight, in which I plan to indulge this morning, Guatemalan hot chocolate! The Cafe La Escalonia has a dark sweet brew that makes me want to sing.

"Here, Marleny, my teacher, and I will spend time working on verbs. I hope all the verbs didn’t spill out of my head as I walked here! We usually study in my house, with another beautiful garden surrounding us.

"I’m blessed. I wish all of you could be here to enjoy Antigua with me."

Catherine in Guatemala, Aug. 10, 2018

“I am learning a lot, having an amazing time!

“It’s great to have a kitchen in this apt because I don’t have to eat out every meal. I really like going to the market and just getting a few things, and then at supper, getting back here before dark and eating whatever is on hand. Last night I had some string beans I bought in the market for nothing (at home Guatemalan string beans are so expensive!) and an avocado with lime juice (from a lime from the tree right outside my door) and some bread I got at the bakery. Food is so inexpensive here. The other night I had an early supper at the bakery–a pizza, personal size, total cost, $5.

Read more from Guatemala

Lectionary, Pentecost 13, Proper 15 Year B

I. Theme – Living the Abundant life -Connecting to God as source of wisdom, energy, and adventure.

"The Wedding Feast" -Jan Breughel the Elder (undated, died in 1625)

The lectionary readings are here or individually:

Old Testament – Proverbs 9:1-6
Psalm – Psalm 34:9-14
Epistle –Ephesians 5:15-20
Gospel – John 6:51-58

Today’s readings continue the theme of God’s sustenance with the emphasis on the eternal consequences. In Proverbs Wisdom gives a feast to which all are invited. Paul encourages Christians to be filled with God’s Spirit. Jesus promises that all who eat his flesh will live forever.

Jesus’ words about eating his flesh and drinking his blood in the Gospel shocked even his disciples. Early in the Old Testament, blood was identified with life and deemed sacred because God is the source of life. The spilling of human blood was considered an outrage against God.

Eating flesh containing blood was prohibited in the Pentateuch. The penalty for doing so was expulsion from God’s people. Blood was removed from use as food and reserved for sacramental purposes. In the rites of atonement, blood symbolized the yielding up of the worshiper’s life to God and the atoning communion of worshipers with God.

But in John’s gospel, Jesus tells the people, enigmatically, that he is the fulfillment of this sacrificial atonement. In the light of the age-long prohibition against eating flesh containing blood, his words, heard in a literal sense, were quite offensive. But they brought a promise of eternal life.

Not only the atonement, finished on the cross, but also the living instrument of its communication—the eucharist—transcends our ability to understand. In some unseen, incomprehensible way, the energy of redeeming love is transmitted, and we receive food for eternal life. By faith, we allow Christ’s life to penetrate our being and nourish our life. God’s own life comes to us through the natural and temporal elements of bread and wine, so that we, natural and temporal creatures, may become vehicles of God’s supernatural grace. We participate in terms of a radical embrace of God’s vision so that it becomes the center of our self-understanding. God is in us, just as we are in God.

Eating and drinking are of symbolic significance in most religions, especially in Christianity. Natural life depends on our giving and taking these necessities. The eucharist reminds us of the self-offering of our lord and our dependence on him for our soul’s life. It provides us with a continuous supernatural apprehension of eternity. It suffuses our little lives with the creative spirit of Christ and fits us for our vocation to transform the world.

Who Was Jonathan Daniels ?

We celebrate his feast day on August 14.

Three years ago, July 2015 Bishop Johnson wrote this letter about devoting a Sunday to remember Jonathan Daniels and three years later to remember his short life:

"Since 1991, he has been commemorated in our Lesser Feasts and Fasts, and now in Holy Women Holy Men. The day of his commemoration is August 14. Jonathan is one of only two Americans enshrined as "Modern Martyrs" in Canterbury Cathedral, the other being Dr. Martin Luther King, who himself praised Daniels’ act as "one of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry."

"Therefore, I am designating Sunday, August 16, being the Sunday closest to Jonathan’s Prayer Book day, as our diocesan-wide commemoration of one of our most inspiring witnesses to the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the last five decades"

Links:

Here Am I, Send Me: The Story of Jonathan Daniels . This is an excellent documentary produced in 1999. Highly recommended.
Remembering Jonathan Daniels 50 Years after his martyrdom Episcopal News Service. Video only. The video focuses on Daniels in his hometown of Keene, NH and his lasting influence there.
Biography. Short biography
VMI Archive Daniels seemed an unlikely cadet but he was valedictorian of his class and made a name for himself.
Video from 2010 commemoration event

Somebody must visit the sick, and the lonely, and the frightened , and the sorrowing. Somebody must comfort the discouraged, and argue lovingly and convincingly with the anguished doubter. Somebody must remind the sick soul that healing is within his grasp and urge him to take the medicine when his disease seems more attractive. Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send ? And who will go for us ?" The said I "Here am I. Send me." – Jonathan M. Daniels – Sermon St. James Episcopal, Keene, NH

A summary of his biography follows:

Jonathan Myrick Daniels was born in New Hampshire in 1939, one of two offspring of a Congregationalist physician. When in high school, he had a bad fall which put him in the hospital for about a month. It was a time of reflection. Soon after, he joined the Episcopal Church and also began to take his studies seriously, and to consider the possibility of entering the priesthood.

After high school, he enrolled at Virginia Military Institute (VMI) in Lexington, Virginia where at first he seemed a misfit, but managed to stick it out, and was elected Valedictorian of his graduating class.

In the fall of 1961 he entered Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near Boston to study English literature, and in the spring of 1962, while attending Easter services at the Church of the Advent in Boston, he underwent a conversion experience and renewal of grace. Soon after, he made a definite decision to study for the priesthood, and after a year of work to repair the family finances, he enrolled at Episcopal Theological Seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1963, expecting to graduate in the spring of 1966.

In March 1965 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, asked students and others to join him in Selma, Alabama to push for voting rights legislation. He and others left on Thursday for Selma, intending to stay only that weekend; but he and a friend missed the bus back, and began to reflect on how an in-and-out visit like theirs looked to those living in Selma, and decided that they must stay longer. They went home to request permission to spend the rest of the term in Selma, studying on their own and returning to take their examinations.

Jon devoted many of his Sundays in Selma to bringing small groups of Negroes, mostly high school students, to church with him in an effort to integrate the St. Paul’s Episcopal Episcopal church. They were seated but scowled at. Many parishioners openly resented their presence, and put their pastor squarely in the middle. (He was integrationist enough to risk his job by accommodating Jon’s group as far as he did, but not integrationist enough to satisfy Jon.) (Our bishop Shannon Johnston served this church as his first congregation).

As time went on, Jonathan’s anger flared up not only in confronting the white power structure but also dealing with reluctance of Christians to speak against the racial inequalities.

However, Jonathan gradually saw his work in terms of a larger purpose – the way of the cross. – "ultimately the revolution to which I am committed is the way of the Cross."

He was coming to a new realization that as a “soldier of the Cross” he was “totally free- at least to give my life, if that had to be, with joy and thankfulness and eagerness for the Kingdom."

He began to tie in concepts of freedom in terms of doing God’s will -obedience.

"The Gospel is less and less a matter primary of the intellect. And more and more a matter of living and dying and living anew.”

"When the Christian first begins to answer with his own feeble love the overwhelming Love of God, he finds himself animated by an attitude that is equally “holy obedience” and “perfect freedom.” In that freedom which is holy obedience, the Christian has only one principle, only one agenda. And that is the dynamic of life –in-response to the loving, judging , healing, merciful revelation by God Himself of His Holy Will."

In Camden after a tear gas bombing he found a new depth to the freedom of obedience-

"I think it was when I got tear-gassed leading a march in Camden that I began to change. I saw that the men who came at me were not free: it was not the cruelty was sweet to them (though I’m afraid it is) but that they didn’t know what else to do. Even though they were white and hateful and my enemy, they were human beings too…"

“Last week in Camden I began to discover a new freedom in the Cross: freedom to love the enemy. And in that freedom, the freedom (without hypocrisy) to will and to try to set him free…As I go about my primary business of attempting to negotiate with the white power structure…, there is a new factor – I rather think a new Presence – in our conversations: the “strategy of love.”

On Friday 13 August Jon and others went to the town of Fort Deposit to join in picketing three local businesses. On Saturday they were arrested and held in the county jail in Hayneville for six days until they were bailed out. (They had agreed that none would accept bail until there was bail money for all.). The prisoners were released on August 20 but were not provided with any means of transportation back to Selma.

Stranded in the 100 degree heat, Daniels and the others sought a cool drink at a nearby store Varner’s Cash Grocery Store. This store was one of the few shops in the area that didn’t impose a “whites only” policy. However, they were met at the door by Special Deputy Tom Coleman with a shotgun who told them to leave or be shot. After a brief confrontation, he aimed the gun of 17 year old Ruby Sales in the party, and Jon pushed her out of the way and took the blast of the shotgun himself. (Whether he stepped between her and the shotgun is not clear.) He was killed instantly.

As Daniels’ companions ran for safety, Coleman fired again, critically injuring Richard Morrisroe, a Catholic priest from Chicago, who survived.

Not long before his death he wrote:

"I lost fear in the black belt when I began to know in my Bones and sinews that I had been truly baptized into the Lord’s death and Resurrection, that in the only sense that really matters I am already dead, and my life is hid with Christ in God. I began to lose self-righteousness when I discovered the extent to which my behavior was motivated by worldly desires and by the self-seeking messianism of Yankee deliverance! The point is simply, of course, that one’s motives are usually mixed, and one had better know it. "

"As Judy (seminarian friend) and I said the daily offices day by day, we became More and more aware of the living reality of the invisible "communion of saints"–of the beloved comunity in Cambridge who were saying the offices too, of the ones gathered around a near-distant throne in heaven–who blend with theirs our faltering songs of prayer and praise. With them, with black men and white men, with all of life, in Him Whose Name is above all the names that the races and nations shout, whose Name is Itself the Song Which fulfils and "ends" all songs, we are indelibly, unspeakably One."

There was large scale public outcry over the shooting; and deep shock that a white unarmed trainee priest could be shot and killed by a policeman for protecting an unarmed girl. As was the case in numerous race-related crimes during the civil rights era, an all-white jury acquitted Coleman when the defense produced witnesses who claimed that Daniels had a knife and Morrisroe had a pistol and that Coleman was acting in self-defense. The shootings and Coleman’s acquittal were condemned across the country.

Describing the incident, Dr Martin Luther King said that “one of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry was performed by Jonathan Daniels.”

Daniels was added to the Episcopal Church Calendar of Saints and Martyrs in 1994 to be remembered each Aug. 14, one of 15 martyrs recognized by the church in the 20th century. This is the 50th anniversary of the original shooting. Bishop Johnston will be attending a pilgrimage marking this 50th anniversary in Alabama, from Montgomery to Hayneville. The grocery store has been demolished but a historical marker will be dedicated.

The procession will then return to the Courthouse Square for prayer at a memorial erected in his honour by his alma mater, the Virginia Military Institute; before concluding at the Courthouse with a service of Holy Communion in the courtroom where Coleman was tried and acquitted. Presiding Bishop elect Michael Curry will preach.

What happened to Ruby Sales? Sales went on to attend Episcopal Theological School in Massachusetts which Daniels had attended (now Episcopal Divinity School). She has worked as a human rights advocate in Washington, D.C. She founded The SpiritHouse Project, a non-profit organization and inner-city mission dedicated to Daniels.

The Rev. Gillian Barr in a Evensong in honor of Daniel in Providence RI provides an apt summary of Daniels. "He was a young adult who wasn’t sure what he was meant to do with his life. He had academic gifts, a sense of compassion, and a faith which had wavered from strong to weak to strong. He was searching—searching for a way to live out his values of compassion and his faith rather than just studying them in a book. He was living in intentional community, first at VMI, then at EDS, and then finally with activists in Alabama. His studies, and his prayer life, and his community all led him to see more clearly the beauty and dignity in the faces of all around him, even those who looked very different and came from very different backgrounds than the quiet boy from Keene, NH."

Jonathan M. Daniels honored at National Cathedral

Links:

State civil rights hero honored at National Cathedral
Huffington Post article from Aug. 7. Some pictures of the Selma march also included.

Soon, an 8-inch-high likeness of Daniels will be ready for viewing by the 300,000 people from around the world who tour the National Cathedral each year. The carving, located about 11 feet off the ground at the base of an archway molding, will be part of the cathedral’s Human Rights Porch, putting Daniels in the same company as Mother Teresa and Rosa Parks.

Daniels was chosen in part because of his relative obscurity.

“He was young at the time, a lay person, and he saw a need and he went out and met it,” cathedral spokesman Kevin Eckstrom said. “In 1965, he saw a need to go assist African-Americans across the South, and he did that. On that day he died, he saw a more immediate need to save Ruby Sales’ life, and he did that.”

Daniels, originally from New Hampshire, was a student at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge when he and several of his classmates answered the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s call for clergy to help finish the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama in 1965, two days after state troopers beat marchers in what became known as Bloody Sunday

After more than three years of consideration, church and cathedral officials settled on Daniels for the third of four stone portraits overlooking the Human Rights Porch.

“Part of the idea was to have a lesser-known saint in with Mother Teresa and Rosa Parks, so it was a deliberate choice to find somebody within our own ranks that we could lift up and memorialize,” Eckstrom said. The fourth person has not been chosen.

At the cathedral, stone carver Sean Callahan has spent the last couple of weeks on scaffolding, chiseling Daniels’ image into a square stone block at the end of the molding around the arch. Callahan is working from a clay sculpture done by North Carolina artist Chas Fagan.

Using a three-dimensional mapping tool to measure and mark the contours of Fagan’s work, Callahan carves the limestone with a mason’s touch and an artist’s eye.

“I know a lot of Episcopalians hold (Daniels) in high esteem, which puts the pressure on to do it right,” said Callahan, 50, of Silver Spring, Maryland.

The Feast Day of St. Mary the Virgin, Aug 15

St. Mary the Virgin - Assumption Day On August 15, the church celebrates the Feast of Saint Mary the Virgin. This is the traditional date of her Assumption, bodily taken up to heaven. Mary, the mother of Christ, has been celebrated since the earliest days of the Christian church though there was no scriptural basis for the assumption and grew upon writings from the 4th century. The iconography of the eastern church (to the right) always showed Mary with Child as the mother of the deity though in the West she is pictured alone.

The Gospel of Luke contains a “Song of Praise” that was sung by Mary when her cousin Elizabeth recognized her as the mother of the Lord (Luke 1:43). Elizabeth was pregnant with John the Baptist when her cousin Mary, who was pregnant with Jesus, came to see her.

Mary’s Song of Praise (The Magnficat)

"My soul magnifes the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.

"Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me,and holy is his name. His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm;

"he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has flled the hungry with good things,

"and sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants for ever. (Luke 1:46-55)

This Feast Day comes a day after that for Jonathan M. Daniel

The Magnificat which held special meaning for Daniels. Just after the "Bloody Sunday" march in Selma, March 7. He wrote the following:

"My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour." I had come to Evening Prayer as usual that evening, and as usual I was singing the Magnificat with the special love and reverence I have always felt for Mary’s glad song. "He hath showed strength with his arm." As the lovely hymn of the God-bearer continued, I found myself peculiarly alert, suddenly straining toward the decisive, luminous, Spirit-filled "moment" that would, in retrospect, remind me of others–particularly one at Easter three years ago. Then it came. "He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things." I knew then that I must go to Selma. The Virgin’s song was to grow more and more dear in the weeks ahead.

Mary’s song is one where a young girl rejoices that despite being lowly "the humble and meek" she will be have a part of redeeming mankind. She understands that she is now personally caught up in the larger story of God acting on God’s passion for the plight of the weak, the hungry, the oppressed, the lowly. She is now to be a partner in God’s work of liberation and redemption. She knows that God consistently uses the least likely, the least powerful, to be instruments of God’s will.

Daniels’ life showed a pattern of putting himself in the place of others who were defenseless and in need. The pattern was evident even at VMI, where as an upperclassman he was known to have compassion on and defend first-year cadets as they endured the brutal hazing of the VMI “Rat Line.” During seminary he went beyond the call of duty in his field work study in Providence RI he gave up his entire weekend to tutor black children.

His decision to go to Selma, though it perhaps took some people by surprise, was really just his compassion expanding in a greater circle. When the initial fervor of the Selma marches faded and most of the white northerners had returned to the safety and routines of their homes, Jonathan looked at the local poor black activists still fighting and risking their livelihoods and lives, and realized he could not abandon them.

Here is an analysis of the Magnificat from Songs in Waiting by Paul Gordon-Chandler.

12	Florence Nightingale, Nurse, Social Reformer, 1910
13	Jeremy Taylor, Bishop of Down, Connor, and Dromore, 1667
14	Jonathan Myrick Daniels, Seminarian and Martyr, 1965
15	Saint Mary the Virgin, Mother of Our Lord Jesus Christ
16
17	[Samuel Johnson, 1772, Timothy Cutler, 1765, and Thomas Bradbury Chandler, 1790, Priests]; also [Baptisms of Manteo & Virginia Dare]
18	William Porcher DuBose, Priest, 1918; also [Artemisia Bowden, Educator, 1969]
19