We are a small Episcopal Church on the banks of the Rappahannock in Port Royal, Virginia. We acknowledge that we gather on the traditional land of the first people of Port Royal, the Nandtaughtacund, who are still here, and we honor with gratitude the land itself and the life of the Rappahannock Tribe. Our mission statement is to do God’s Will in all that we do. We welcome all people to our church.
November is the real fall!
Nov. 14 – 11:00am, 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
Nov. 14 – 7:00pm, Compline on Zoom – Join here at 6:30pm for gathering – service starts at 7pm Meeting ID: 878 7167 9302 Passcode: 729195
Nov. 15 – 6:30am – Be Still Meditation group in a 20 minute time of prayer Meeting ID: 879 8071 6417 Passcode: 790929
Nov. 15 – 10:00am – 12pm, Bible Study on Wednesday 10am-12pm!
Nov. 17 – 3pm-5pm, Village Harvest our 7th anniversary.
If you would like to volunteer, please email Andrea or call (540) 847-9002. Pack bags for distribution 1-3PM Deliver food to client’s cars 3-5PM.
Nov. 21 – 11:00am,
Nov. 21 – 7:00pm, Compline on Zoom – Join here at 6:30am for gathering – service starts at 7pm Meeting ID 834 7356 6532 Password 748475
The ECM (Episcopal Church Men) Holiday Challenge (until Dec. 15)!
From Ken Pogue, ECM Chair.
“Each year the Episcopal Church Men help St Peter’s provide support to those in need during the holidays. The men coordinate with the Caroline County Department of Social Services to provide families in the area with Thanksgiving dinners and Christmas gifts.
This year the Department of Social Services will be providing families with secure store specific grocery limited gift cards due to the ongoing pandemic.
Ken Pogue says on behalf of the ECM, “Your donations are greatly appreciated by the ECM and the recipients of the gifts, especially the children. Thank you so very much in advance from a grateful community for your love and your participation” in this worthy holiday project.
If you’d like to donate, please make a check to St Peter’s with ECM in the memo line. For a Thanksgiving donation, please make your donation by November 15th. Donations after the 15th will be used to assist families at Christmas.
In 2020, $1200 was donated to Caroline County Social Services in November for Thanksgiving and Christmas which was more than double the year before.
The United Thanks Offering Collection
In spite of the pandemic, the United Thank Offering is alive and well. The UTO distributed over two million dollars in the form of grants to breathe love, liberation, and life into communities around the world.
The money that you donate to the UTO this year will be given away to support innovative projects focused on care of creation led by Episcopal/Anglican ministries. Read about the UTO in 2022.
“Jesus says we are to love God, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. What if we could see all of creation as our neighbor? How would that change our prayers and our actions? Anytime we use the toil of our hands to bring newness and restoration to the world, cultivating gratitude and love alongside clean water and healthy soil, we become part of God’s healing process in creation. How better to love all our neighbors?- Jerusalem Greer, Staff Officer for Evangelism
You can make a donation by writing a check to St Peter’s and putting UTO in the memo line. The ingathering will begin on Sunday, November 7th and the ingathering will take place on the first Sunday of Advent, Sunday, November 28th. This offering is a great way to express gratitude for the blessings of this life.
Village Harvest – A big anniversary!
Consider a birthday gift to the Village Harvest coming up this month on Giving Tuesday Nov. 30
On the first Village Harvest, on Nov. 19, 2014 we attracted 60 clients and gave out 300 pounds that day. 7 years later in 2020 we are averaging 80 that number and 4 times are much food. “Give a Little, Gain a Lot”.
7 years later we have served over 8,800 clients over 92,000 pounds of food. It is clearly one of our more visible and valuable outreach expressions from our church. We are called to do like Jesus – and he fed people both physically and spiritually.
Our goal in #Giving Tuesday is to raise 25% or $500 representing 25% of our annual costs of the Village Harvest. The cost per pound is $0.14
- A $10 donation feeds 6 people, 12 pounds each. It provides 72 pounds of food and $430 in total value!
- A $20 donation feeds 12 people, 12 pounds each. It provides 144 pounds of food and $864 in total value!
Please support us on Giving Tuesday, Nov. 30. You can pledge online or through the mail (St. Peter’s Church,P. O. Box 399, Port Royal, Virginia 22535).
It all comes back to us!
We celebrate Christ the King Sunday as the last Sunday of Ordinary Time just before we begin Advent. It is the switch in the Liturgy between Years A, B, and C. This year we will switch from Year B with a focus on Gospel According to Mark to Year C reading passages from the Gospel According to Luke.
The readings for the last Sunday after Pentecost are full of references to the return of Christ, when evil will be defeated and Jesus will begin his final reign as King of kings. In Advent, the Church year begins with a focus on the final restoration of all creation to its original glory. In preparation, on the last Sunday of the Church year, we proclaim the advent of the Lord of lords and King of kings.
The earliest Christians identified Jesus with the predicted Messiah of the Jews. The Jewish word “messiah,” and the Greek word “Christ,” both mean “anointed one,” and came to refer to the expected king who would deliver Israel from the hands of the Romans. Christians believe that Jesus is this expected Messiah. Unlike the messiah most Jews expected, Jesus came to free all people, Jew and Gentile, and he did not come to free them from the Romans, but from sin and death. Thus the king of the Jews, and of the cosmos, does not rule over a kingdom of this world
Christians have long celebrated Jesus as Christ, and his reign as King is celebrated to some degree in Advent (when Christians wait for his second coming in glory), Christmas (when “born this day is the King of the Jews”), Holy Week (when Christ is the Crucified King), Easter (when Jesus is resurrected in power and glory), and the Ascension (when Jesus returns to the glory he had with the Father before the world was created).
The recent celebration came from the Catholics in the 20th century who saw some dangerous signs on the horizon…
Church Liturgical Year Table
This time of year there is a focus on the church calendar as we end one year and begin another. Here is a handy table. We have a separate page that provides descriptions of the calendar details. 
Lectionary, Christ the King, Year B
I. Theme – Christ’s kingdom is one of truth and justice and not grounded in this world’s values of imperialism, coercion, violence, and oppression.
“Christ the King” – Hans Memling (1430-1494)
“Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” Pilate asked him, ‘So you are a king?’ Jesus answered, ‘You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”” – John 18:36-37
The lectionary readings are here or individually:
Old Testament – Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14
Psalm – Psalm 93
Epistle –Revelation 1:4b-8
Gospel – John 18:33-37
Today’s readings celebrate the paradoxical kingship of Jesus Christ. What does “Christ the King” mean”?
In Daniel and in Psalm 93, the Reign of God is depicted as glorious and authoritative, but also as being manifest through a person who is “like a son of man”. In Revelation this one is seen as Jesus, who is revealed in glory and honor, and whose sacrifice is seen as the primary act in bringing God’s Reign into the world. Finally, in the encounter between Jesus and Pilate, the difference between human rulership and God’s Reign is starkly shown, as Jesus explains that he claims no human kingship, but is the king of a realm that is not of this world. It is a kingdom of truth and justice though not of “this world.”
The challenge of this week’s celebration is to avoid triumphalism. We are not to make God’s Reign out to be the same as human power systems, only stronger, more dominant, and longer lasting. Rather, we are to recognise God’s Reign in acts of compassion and justice, in service and sacrifice, and in the challenge to human systems to give up their obsession with war and conquest in order to build a world of peace and love for all.
On this day, we celebrate God’s reign, kingdom, or community of faith, that endures forever, beyond time and beyond this world, beyond life and death. It is tempting to view Christ’s Reign as a conquering, all-powerful, phenomenon that will violently destroy human power systems, but that would be to misunderstand it. Rather, what the Lectionary reveals is a Reign that is not of this world, that is a completely different reality, and that works within human systems, even as it subverts them toward justice, peace and love
We know that we can glimpse something of this reign here on earth, but whatever vision we have is incomplete. What we do know for certain is this: we have a role to play. We are important. We are treasured by God. And God wants us to be part of this, whatever it is, that is beyond our understanding. Following God’s ways of love, justice, and peace, we will surely be on the path to this kingdom—as Jesus told the scribe who asked him about the greatest commandments, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”
Our quest for the kingship of Christ in this world must begin by looking within ourselves. Does Christ reign over our lives and the conduct of our days? Or do we panic at every surprise, cling to false securities, dread change and worry incessantly about failures and flukes? If so, perhaps we have not enthroned in our hearts the One who cares for us intimately and longs only for our ultimate good. It is easy to point to a world run amuck. It is harder to admit that the tangled roots of systemic evils lie in our inertia or lack of belief.
One of the most poignant lines in today’s readings captures that personal culpability. As John envisions the second coming, “every eye will see him, even those who pierced him; and on his account all the tribes of the earth will wail.” That global lament suggests that Christ our King is present paradoxically in those whom we wound. In the bum we readily dismiss, the mousy secretary, the pompous cleric, the acned adolescent, the whiny child, the crack addict, you guessed it—in them, the King comes.
Facing that sorry lot, we wail: “If only I’d known it was you!” Salvadoran theologian Jon Sobrino poses a challenge relevant to this feast: “The reign of God presupposes the anti-reign of God, the reality of our planet today: poverty, injustice… We should look at the crucified peoples today and ask ourselves, ‘what have we done, so that they are on the cross? …and what are we going to do to bring them down from the cross?’”
May our worship remind us of this eternal, “otherworldly” Reign of God and enable us to open our hearts to receive it right here and now where we live.
…Read more about the lectionary…
Preparing for Advent, the Season of Preparation
We are ending the liturgical year on Sunday, Year B and approaching a new year, Year C. Naturally we are looking ahead and seeing if we are ready. The anomaly is that Advent starts that year which is itself a time of preparation. So this Sunday we are preparing to prepare!
The key in all of this is to begin Advent with a different or changed mindset and a resolve for doing. Here are a few steps from BeliefNet:
1. Have a proper mindset – Be ready to stop in your busy tracks and embrace the season of Advent and, most importantly, its purpose. The Advent message is “deliverance from oppression and bondage, to those who have much and those who have nothing..” The message of Advent is that, whatever our circumstance in life, Jesus Christ was born to be with us wherever we are. We have to be ready mentally to hear it.
2. Prepare a room at the Inn. Your heart is where Christ wishes to dwell and Advent is the perfect time to make room in it for His presence. If your heart is filled with unforgiveness, it has no room for Christ.
“We need to uncover that place this Advent where we can be silent, reflective, and prayerful. During this time of waiting, our eyes, ears, and minds can adjust to the radiant presence of God’s love for us in Jesus Christ.”
Make a Gift Today!
Please support our Village Harvest food distribution on Giving Tuesday, Nov. 30. You can pledge online or through the mail (St. Peter’s Church,P. O. Box 399, Port Royal, Virginia 22535).It all comes back to us! 2. Contact the Rev Catherine Hicks, Rector 5. Latest Newsletter-the Parish Post (Nov., 2021) 6. Calendar 9. Latest Sunday Bulletin (Nov. 14, 2021 11:00am), and Sermon (Nov. 14, 2021) 10. Recent Services: Readings and Prayers, Pentecost 22, Oct. 24, Readings and Prayers, Pentecost 23, Oct. 31, |
Block Print by Mike Newman
Projects
3-Minute Retreats invite you to take a short prayer break right at your computer. Spend some quiet time reflecting on a Scripture passage.
Knowing that not everyone prays at the same pace, you have control over the pace of the retreat. After each screen, a Continue button will appear. Click it when you are ready to move on. If you are new to online prayer, the basic timing of the screens will guide you through the experience.
Daily meditations in words and music.
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“We invite you to make a ‘Sacred Space’ in your day, praying here and now, as you visit our website, with the help of scripture chosen every day and on-screen guidance.”
Saints of the Week, Nov. 14 – Nov. 21 2021
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14
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The Consecration of Samuel Seabury, First American Bishop, 1784 |
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[Herman of Alaska], Missionary, 1837 Francis Asbury, 1816, and George Whitefield, 1770, Evangelists |
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16
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Margaret, Queen of Scotland, 1093 |
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17
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Hugh of Lincoln, Bishop, 1200 |
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18
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Hilda, Abbess of Whitby, 680 |
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19
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Elizabeth, Princess of Hungary, 1231 |
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20
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Edmund, King of East Anglia, 870 |
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[Mechtilde of Hackeborn & Gertrude the Great], Mystics, 1298 & 1302 William Byrd, 1623, John Merbecke, 1585, and Thomas Tallis, 1585, Musicians |
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C. S. Lewis, Apologist and Spiritual Writer, 1963 Cecilia, Martyr at Rome c. 230 |
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Clement, Bishop of Rome, c. 100 |
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24
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[Catherine of Alexandria, Barbara of Nicomedia & Margaret of Antioch], Martyrs, c.305 |