Frontpage, April 19, 2020 – St. Peter's Episcopal

April 19, 2020 – Easter 2

The Week Ahead…

Sunday, April 19, 2020 – Easter 2 at 9:30am for gathering – service starts at 10am

April 19 – 11:15am – National Cathedral church service online In honor of the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, the Cathedral celebrates creation with special prayers and music.

April 19 – 2:00pm – National Cathedral church service online The Cathedral and Interfaith Power & Light are co-hosting this online service focused on our shared call to climate action. Leaders from Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Latter-Day Saints, Muslim, Sikh, Unitarian Universalist and other spiritual communities share their traditions’ gifts through sacred text, commentary, and song, and call us to collective action.

Wed., April 22 – 10:00am – Ecumenical Bible Study through Zoom

Sunday, April 26, 2020 – Easter 3

Join here at 9:30am for gathering – service starts at 10am

April 26 – 11:15am – National Cathedral church service online

We are in Eastertide until Pentecost, May 31

Eastertide is the period of fifty days, seven Sundays from Easter Sunday to Pentecost Sunday. Easter is not a day but a season and it is one to examine the Resurrection, more broadly and deeply. There are a number of questions.

Is Resurrection just about death has been swallowed up in victory (1 Corinthians 15:54-56) ? Is Resurrection of Jesus is a precursor to your own resurrection (1 Corinthians 15) ? Does it say something about our own ability to expect to see Jesus (Luke 24) ? How does the new Christian community begin to function making Christ the central part of daily life ? (Acts 2)

Jesus physically appears in Easter 2 and 3 making the Resurection tangible. The shepherding part of his ministry is explored in Easter 4. From Easter 5-7, Jesus must prepare the disciples for his departure. He is going to leave them. Jesus prepares his disciples for continuing his ministry without his physical presence. Themes explored include the holy spirit, the Prayer of Jesus and God’s glory through His Son and the church.

Christ ascends on the 40th day with his disciples watching (Thursday, May 5th). The weekdays after the Ascension until the Saturday before Pentecost inclusive are a preparation for the coming of the Holy Spirit.This fifty days comes to an end on Pentecost Sunday, which commemorates the giving of the Holy Spirit to the apostles, the beginnings of the Church and its mission to all peoples and nation. Note that the Old Testament lessons are replaced by selections from the Book of Acts, recognizing the important of the growth of the church.

Earth Day, 2020 – April 22 – 50th Anniversary

Earth Day was founded in 1970 and included environmental teach-ins that educated Americans about environmental and species conservation issues, and connected those issues to their health and well-being.

On April 22, 1970, 20 million Americans took to the streets, parks, and auditoriums to call for a healthy, sustainable environment in massive coast-to-coast rallies. Thousands of colleges and universities organized demonstrations and teach-ins against the deterioration of the environment.

Earth Day 1970 activated a bipartisan spirit that motivated the passing of the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species Acts. 2020 is the 50^th anniversary Earth Day

The theme for Earth Day 2020 is climate action. The enormous challenge — but also the vast opportunities — of action on climate change have distinguished the issue as the most pressing topic for the 50th anniversary.

“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children. ”— Chief Seattle, 1854

How can we celebrate Earth Day at home?

We can do this through:
1. Our role with food. What is the effect of our food intake ?
2. What can we do about endangered species and lands ?
3. How can we tackle the plastics problem ?

All can be done at home. Take one area in the link and give it a try!

What is your Carbon Footprint?

Whether we agree on the effects of Climate change, there are things we can do to both conserve and save money. However, you first need to understand your energy usage as defined in your carbon footprint .

What’s your carbon footprint ? A carbon footprint is defined here http://timeforchange.org/what-is-a-carbon-footprint-definition/ as:

“The total amount of greenhouse gases produced to directly and indirectly support human activities, usually expressed in equivalent tons of carbon dioxide (CO2).

“In other words: When you drive a car, the engine burns fuel which creates a certain amount of CO2, depending on its fuel consumption and the driving distance. (CO2 is the chemical symbol for carbon dioxide). When you heat your house with oil, gas or coal, then you also generate CO2. Even if you heat your house with electricity, the generation of the electrical power may also have emitted a certain amount of CO2. When you buy food and goods, the production of the food and goods also emitted some quantities of CO2.

“Your carbon footprint is the sum of all emissions of CO2 (carbon dioxide), which were induced by your activities in a given time frame. Usually a carbon footprint is calculated for the time period of a year.”

Calculate it using Berkley’s Cool Climate Calculator

How to reduce your footprint? – Drive less, change to a more vegetable diet particularly with local vegetables, plant a garden, unplug your devices, line-dry your clothes, set up a compost system, reuse items to keep them out of landfills

A Poem for Earth Day

“The Peace of Wild Things”
by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Lectionary, April 26, Easter 3

I.Theme – "Now what do we do after the Resurrection?"

"Road to Emmaus" -Bonnell

The lectionary readings are here or individually:

First Leason – Acts 2:14a,36-41
Psalm – Psalm 116:1-3, 10-17 Page 759, BCP
Epistle –1 Peter 1:17-23
Gospel – Luke 24:13-35

The answer to what we must do after the Resurrection comes in the various readings to this week’s lectionary.

In Acts, Peter declares God had made the risen Jesus both Lord and Christ. The people respond, "What must we do?" "Repent and be baptized."

The Epistle answers "live as the baptized" in reverent fear of God, and with deep affection for one another from the heart.

The writer of the Psalms package was in a time illness, near death, the answer is to love and praise God since God saved him from this affliction. He will worship the Lord, and praise the Lord in the worshipping community in the temple.

The Gospel reading on the Road to Emmaus provides the fullest explanation. It occurs on the day of Resurrection. Mary discovers the empy tomb at the beginning of Chapter 24.

The emphasis is on evangelism and mission – after encountering and recognizing Jesus in the scriptures and in the Eucharist, the two individuals went back and shared their faith experience with the community, the Body of Christ. What would sustain the community of faith was the Word of Jesus, friends involved in community worship and participating with the sacraments. They had to live out and experience Jesus through revelation. The followers needed to open their minds and hearts to new possibilities as they fulfilled the mandate to preach repentance and forgiveness everywhere in the name of Jesus. We need to expect Jesus outside our normal experience.

Read more from the lectionary

St. George’s "Road to Emmaus" Window

Many people may not know that St. George’s Fredericksburg has a wonderful Tiffany stained glass window depicting the story. The window, the first of three Tiffanies at St. George’s, was donated by Mary Downman in honor of two deceased sons:

The window was dedicated at Easter, 1912.

This window is loaded with most of Tiffany’s techniques of glass and color. Christ faces toward us, but the men are turned inward, a compositional device that gives the illusion of depth. The robes are made of drapery glass which shows the folds in their garments. Glass while molten thrown onto an iron table and rolled into a disk. The glassmaker armed with tongs manipulated the mass and by taking hold of it from both ends like dough and pulling and twisting till it fell into folds. The faces of Christ and the two individuals were hand painted with enamel.

To the side of Christ is a landscape created with mottled glass which was a given a spotted touch with the addition of fluorine in the firing process of glass. Tiffany is best known the creator of opalescent glass, those skies that are milky and streaky in appearance and created through years of experimenting with alternating heating and cooling of the glass and with the addition of chemical additives to create the desired effect.

The window is dark in the morning representing the mystery of Christ’s identity and then becomes lighter during the day representing the travelers’ recognition of Jesus.

As we approached the 100th year of this windows, the inside was in generally good condition inside but the outside needed modernizing – a new protective covering and ventilation system as well as preservation of the wood. The Church received a grant from the Community Foundation for the Rappahannock for that purpose as part of their Duff Green grant program.

We rededicated the window on Sept. 30, 2012 with two members of the Downman family attending. In the weeks preceding, we located another relative living in Seattle as a lawyer and completed a family tree. For the rededication a new brochure was done that you can read here. It contains more information about the family and the window.

Do You Know the Way to Emmaus?

By Heather Hahn, UMNS

"Road to Emmaus" – Robert Zund (1877)

Christ shows up in the most unexpected places — in the wisdom of a stranger, in the breaking of bread and even in those moments when all hope seems lost.

That is one lesson from Luke: 24:13-34, the only detailed account of Jesus’ post-resurrection walk to Emmaus. The risen Christ travels about seven miles from Jerusalem alongside two grieving disciples. The two already know the testimony of the women at the empty tomb, but they fail to recognize their teacher until he joins them for a meal.

Here is another lesson from the story: A Christ encounter tends to get people up and moving. After Jesus reveals himself, the disciples rush back to Jerusalem with a fervor that the strangely warmed heart of John Wesley would recognize.

“Weren’t our hearts on fire when he spoke to us along the road and when he explained the Scriptures for us?” the two say to each other.

The familiar Bible story remains cherished Easter reading and, in fact, is one of the possible lectionary passages for this Easter Sunday. The account also provides the name of the Walk to Emmaus movement, a ministry of ecumenical spiritual retreats organized through The Upper Room at United Methodist Discipleship Ministries.

Scholars and other Christians see plenty of reasons why the story still resonates with Christ’s followers today.

“The storytelling catches me every time,” said Ryan Schellenberg, a New Testament professor at Methodist Theological School in Ohio. He calls the Walk to Emmaus one of his favorite Bible passages.

“There’s this beautiful irony in the disciples not knowing it when Jesus is walking among them. Then there is this scene of revelation when Jesus reveals himself in the breaking of the bread.”

The passage explains how people in the post-resurrection era come to recognize Christ, said the Rev. Thomas E. Phillips, a New Testament scholar and dean of the library at United Methodist Claremont School of Theology in California.

“They come to recognize Jesus through the opening of the Scripture (24:27) and through the breaking of bread (24:30),” said Phillips, who served as the lead translator for the Gospel of Luke in the Common English Bible (Abingdon, 2010). “That is, Christ is made known to us through preaching and Eucharist.

19	Alphege, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Martyr, 1012
20
21	Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1109
22 22	[Hadewijch of Brabant], Poet & Mystic, 13th c. John Muir, Naturalist and Writer, 1914, and Hudson Stuck, Priest and Environmentalist, 1920
23 23	[Toyohiko Kagawa], Prophetic Witness in Japan, 1960 George, Martyr, 304
24	Genocide Remembrance
25	Saint Mark the Evangelist
26	Robert Hunt, Priest, 1607