We are a small Episcopal Church in the village of Port Royal, Va., united in our love for God, for one another and our neighbor. Check out our welcome.
Coffee Hour, Aug 1, 2021 with the new Parish House bell
Aug. 8 – 11:00am, Holy Eucharist. In person in the church or on Zoom. – Join here at 10:45am for gathering – service starts at 11am Meeting ID: 869 9926 3545 Passcode: 889278
Aug. 8 – 7:00pm, Compline on Zoom – Join here at 6:30am for gathering – service starts at 7pm Meeting ID: 878 7167 9302 Passcode: 729195
Aug. 9 – 6:30am – Be Still Meditation group in a 20 minute time of prayer Meeting ID: 879 8071 6417 Passcode: 790929
Aug. 11 – 10am-12pm – Bible Study, Parish House
Aug. 11 – 5pm-6pm – Village Dinner, Gather at Our Table! Pickup or eat in
Menu -– Baked chicken legs, Roasted potato and butternut squash, broccoli salad (all gluten free), dessert.
Aug. 12 – 4:00pm – Vestry
Aug. 15 – 11:00am, , Holy Eucharist
Aug. 15 – 7:00pm, Compline on Zoom – Join here at 6:30am for gathering – service starts at 7pm Meeting ID 834 7356 6532 Password 748475
Aug. 15 – 11:00am, , Holy Eucharist
Local schools begin on Aug 10, 2021
School supplies are thought of a pencils, pens, paper and the like but prayers and blessings should be part of the supplies as well. From BuildFaith:
“Blessings and prayers are practices that help ground and guide us. Prayer reminds us that our community extends beyond what we see in front of us, connecting us to something bigger than ourselves. Blessing reminds us of God’s love in our lives. During times of transition and change, establishing a pattern of prayer and blessing can offer space to express worries and joys, hopes and dreams, and a time to both accept God’s love and peace, and extend it to someone else.”
Here are two prayers from Buildfaith:
A Prayer for the New School Year
“God of all wisdom, we praise you for gifting us with curiosity and learning. Give to all students, teachers, and caregivers a clear sense of your love. May they feel your presence throughout this school year. Guide their choices, their quest for knowledge, and their relationships. Use their successes and failures as opportunities to grow in understanding of who you would have them to be. Continue to shape them, that they may walk in the way of Christ, grow strong in Spirit’s love for all people, and know the complete joy of life in you. In the name of Christ our Great Teacher, we pray. Amen.”
Linda Witte Henke, adapted, “From the Vine,” in Marking Time: Christian Rituals for All Our Days, Moorehouse Publishing 2001, p. 63.
A Prayer for Parents
“Loving God, We confess some days the worries of parenthood are as abundant as the joys. Guide us through the valleys, so we may be present for our children in their valleys, until we are all brought again to the the mountaintop. We ask you to bless our children with hearts of compassion and courage, and keep them safe from harm. Fill them with the knowledge that they are loved and beloved. And may we always remember to pray: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen.”
Meg Bucher, adapted, www.sunnyand80.org; Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Serenity Prayer”
Lectionary, Aug. 15, 12th Sunday after Pentecost, 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.
Read more about the lectionary…
Who Was Jonathan Daniels ?
We celebrate his feast day on August 14.
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.”
The Feast Day of St. Mary the Virgin, Aug 15
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.
Make a Gift Today! 2. Contact the Rev Catherine Hicks, Rector 4. Server Schedule Aug., 2021 5. Latest Newsletter-the Parish Post (August, 2021) 6. Calendar 9. Latest Sunday Bulletin (Aug. 8, 2021 11:00am), and Sermon (Aug. 8, 2021) 10. Recent Services: Readings and Prayers, Pentecost 8, July 18, 2021 Readings and Prayers, Pentecost 9, July 25, 2021 Readings and Prayers, Pentecost 10, Aug. 1 2021 |
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Saints of the Week, Aug. 8, 2021 – Aug. 15, 2021
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8
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Dominic, Priest and Friar, 1221 |
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9
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[Edith Stein (Teresa Benedicta of the Cross)], Philosopher, Monastic & Martyr, 1942 |
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10
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Lawrence, Deacon, and Martyr at Rome, 258 |
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11
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Clare, Abbess at Assisi, 1253 |
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12
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Florence Nightingale, Nurse, Social Reformer, 1910 |
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13
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Jeremy Taylor, Bishop & Theologian, 1667 |
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14
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Jonathan Myrick Daniels, Seminarian and Martyr, 1965 |
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15
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Saint Mary the Virgin, Mother of Our Lord Jesus Christ |