The architectural drawings from the Sunday, November 10 master plan presentation with Stephen Koenig are available below along with the Rev. Joe Hensley’s introductory remarks. We welcome your comments and questions which will help us discern our next steps.
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Thank you!
The following is Associate Rector Areeta Bridgemohan’s monthly opening message from our weekly e-newsletter the St. Georgian. If you’d like to receive our weekly e-newsletter, sign-up here.
“God comes to us disguised as our life.” – Paula D’Arcy
‘The Way of Love’ is patterned after the monastic rules of life. I like the analogy of a rule of life as a trellis; a structure around which the rest of our lives can grow and take shape. We all have core values and commitments that we orient our lives around, sometimes these are expressed formally as in baptism or wedding vows, and sometimes they function as an internal compass, quietly shaping our decisions and responses.
The vows in the ordination service form a trellis. In preparation for ordination, I spent some time reflecting on the vows I was about to make. One of the promises that excited me the most was: “Will you be diligent in the reading and study of the Holy Scriptures, and in seeking the knowledge of such things as may make you a stronger and more able minister of Christ?” This vow articulated a commitment to a life of intentional learning about God, our sacred story, and all of God’s creation. Implicit in that promise, is the idea that we are not expected to have all the answers and that we are constantly in a process of becoming, of growth and learning, and ultimately transformation.
Learning requires a certain posture: it embraces curiosity and questions, it relies on a desire and willingness to receive, and an openness to wonder. These are helpful postures to life in general, which is perhaps our greatest teacher. My spiritual director often refers to life experiences as “earth school”. Experiences that teach us something new about ourselves, something new about God, that expand our capacity for love and healing, providing us with opportunities to grow into the full stature of Christ. I have taken earth school classes in self-acceptance, embracing solitude, to let go of control and trust God… I’ve come to suspect that the curriculum is as long as my life! Where is learning in the trellis of your faith? What class in earth school are you taking right now? How might this faith community support your learning?
May our faith journeys never cease to be a source of learning and growth.
Yours in Christ,
Areeta+
St. George’s Episcopal Church will host The St. George Chamber Orchestra on Sunday, November 17 at 3:00 pm as part of the church’s Chamber Concert Series. Selections for the concert include works by Russell Holsapple, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and J. S. Bach.
James Kazik, staff arranger at one of the premiere Washington D.C. service bands since 2001, will conduct the Chamber Orchestra. Kazik is a renowned composer and orchestrator, staff writer for Hal Leonard Corp, and the current composer-in-residence for the Washington Metropolitan Philharmonic in Washington D.C.
Located at 905 Princess Anne Street in historic downtown Fredericksburg, Virginia, St. George’s Episcopal Church offers a wide range of concerts throughout the year featuring local and out of town musicians. The nave’s lush acoustics provide the perfect backdrop for “beautiful music in a beautiful space”.
The concert is free with donations accepted at the door. For more information, contact (540) 373-4133 or send an email. To learn more about St. George’s concert series, visit www.stgeorgesepiscopal.net/music/concerts.
The following is Rector Joe Hensley’s monthly opening message from our weekly e-newsletter the St. Georgian. If you’d like to receive our weekly e-newsletter, sign-up here.
Dear St. Georgians,
As followers of Jesus, we strive to “live the life that really is life” (quoting the end of Paul’s first letter to Timothy). Last year, Presiding Bishop Michael Curry unveiled the “way of love” which summarize such a life for Christians in seven essential actions: turn, learn, pray, worship, bless, go, and rest.
Post-sabbatical, I am at a turning point in my ministry. Having had a chance to reflect on my rhythms of life, I no longer want to fit my “life” around my work. I want my work as a priest at St, George’s, which I love, to blend more with the wholeness of my life and the other work that I do as a father, spouse, and as “Joe.” That means being more intentional about what I do, about my time, and about creating ongoing space for reflection and turning to God on a daily basis.
I also want to resist the temptation that our society lures before us to find worth in productivity and how much work we can accomplish. Our work as followers of Jesus is often just as much about “being” as “doing.” Turning to God is about going deeper, not farther.
In that spirit, we are shifting from a weekly to a monthly article in the St. Georgian with more depth. Over the next year, we will feature the seven actions of the Way of Love as well as themes of our liturgical seasons. The article will be printed in the first newsletter of the month with a link to the article in subsequent weeks so that more of our readers will read it or re-read it.
The first action, which I have already alluded to, is “turn.” In order to follow Jesus we have to turn toward him, turn toward God. While on retreat this summer, I observed that there are many levels of turning. At first glance, simply going on retreat was an act of turning. It required a literal turn off the main highway, down a winding wilderness road to a monastery in the desert. It was turning to God by entering a place where the goal is to become closer to God. “Step one, accomplished,” right? Once on retreat, though, there was more turning that needed to happen. In prayer services with the monks, my mind would wander. Over and over I would have to turn my attention back to what was in front of me. I got bored. My internal voice would yell at me like a drill sergeant, “Turn back!” At some point, though, I wondered, “do I have to yell?” The inner voice became more gentle and the turning more subtle. I realized that a person could spend a long time learning to turn toward God with more and more sensitivity. Going deeper, I wonder if it is actually God who turns us once we stop trying so hard.
I wonder how you experience the act of turning. For example, how do we enter a worship service? By coming to church, we have already made a significant turn towards God. Then when we enter the worship space, we have more turns to make. Our inner voice may make a fuss when our mind wanders. Or maybe it grumbles because of external distractions. The act of turning attention back to God is far from simple. I encourage us to take time to observe that inner turning. Take a breath. Turn with sensitivity to the soul within which longs to be turned by God ever so gently.
As the old Shaker song says, “to turn, turn will be our delight, til by turning, turning we come round right.” May God bless us at all the turning points of our lives.
Yours in Christ,
Joe+
Sermon from the Rev. Joseph H. Hensley, Jr., Rector, St. George’s Episcopal Church
Fredericksburg, VA | The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost Year C: September 29, 2019
In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells a story, a parable, a teaching story, and this story is told to the Pharisees and to his disciples about a rich man and a poor man. Parables are supposed to be mysterious, so I don’t want to try to wrap it all up and tell you exactly what it means. But I do want one thing to be abundantly clear, and that is that God is always coming to our assistance, helping us to live the life that really is life, a life of wholeness and beautiful proportion.
Why does Jesus tell this parable, this story? After he tells the parable of the unjust steward which we heard last week, Jesus is ridiculed by the Pharisees, the Jewish teachers and law experts, and the text of Luke tells us that they were lovers of money. So Jesus is telling these stories about money, and they are immediately criticizing him. In response to their criticism, Jesus really calls them out. He says, “You try to justify yourselves in the sight of others, but God knows your hearts. For what is prized in the sight of human beings is detestable before God,” and he’s talking about money. Then he goes on to remind them of the enduring truth of the scriptures, of all the law and the prophets, and then he tells the story of this rich man and this poor man named Lazarus. Notice the rich man is not given a name. The rich man is disproportionately wealthy. He wears the finest clothes of purple and linen every day, and he is feasting every day as if it were a holiday every day. The poor man Lazarus is disproportionately poor. He has absolutely nothing and is disproportionately ignored by the rich man. Only the dogs notice his suffering and come to lick his wounds.
Now the Pharisees would have been surprised by the turn the story takes. Because it was often thought, as Bob told us in his sermon last week, that people who suffered in their earthly life were being punished by God for their sins or for the sins of their forebearers. Likewise, people who prospered in the world were seen as blessed by God and being rewarded for something. But Jesus reverses the order when he says that Lazarus when he died was carried by the angels themselves to be with father Abraham, the faithful ancestor of the Jewish people, whereas the rich man suffered in Hades, the land of the dead. Jesus dramatically shows the gap between the rich man and the poor man, and this probably shocked the Pharisees. I think this is why Jesus tells the parable.
Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine has described parables as bombs thrown into our status quo, bombs thrown into our status quo to explode our understanding, and so while we might wonder is Jesus saying that the rich people go to the bad place, and the poor people go to the good place, is this what heaven and hell are going to be like? I think that the purpose of the story is not to predict what will happen, not to paint a definitive picture of what heaven is like, or the afterlife. But it is to surprise the hearers, to explode their understanding such that they might wonder in some new ways. I think Jesus tells the parable to the Pharisees so that they, and us, may take a hard look at our own disproportions and do something about them. And that we might consider that our disproportions in this life have spiritual consequences for us now and in the life to come.
I don’t think I need to spend a disproportionate amount of time in this sermon talking about the disproportionate way our world has become in terms of wealth and poverty, but I’ll just say a couple things. Just as in Jesus’ time, we have people who are so rich, who have so much it is obscene. And we have people just as in Jesus’ time who have so little it is sickening, and we have ignorance of the needs of the poor now just as there has always been. Just as in Jesus’ time, there are self-righteous persons who justify their abundance and who maybe give a little bit here or a little bit there, but in their hearts there is only the impoverished love of money.
Now I think most of us are somewhere in the middle, somewhere on the spectrum. We might be at the high end of the spectrum, in the middle, or at the low. Most of us are not obscenely rich, nor are we desperately poor. And we may not even love money, but we feel like we have to give a disproportionate amount of our time and our energy worrying about it. We may feel trapped because money and the system of money rules our lives. The funny thing is that compared with most of the world and compared with humanity through most of human history, we, most of us in this room, have so much more than we need, and yet we worry that all it will take will be a turn in the markets or a crisis in our life, and we will be, we will not have enough. Such disproportions in life are not what God wants for us individually and us as a community.
So, what bomb does this parable drop into our status quo? How might this parable challenge us to look at our disproportions, to look in the ways in which we are out of balance, in which some parts of our lives take up way too much room and other parts do not have enough room? I can’t answer that question for you, you’re going to have to wrestle with that yourselves because I don’t know your individual circumstances, but I wonder if this parable also invites us to ask about the proportions we would like to see. How can our lives be proportioned such that it shows wholeness and the life that really is life?
Several years ago, my wife Sarah and I got together with four other couples for some dinners and some conversations in each other’s homes around the topic of Sabbath economics. We got together to explore and imagine how our lives might more proportionately reflect the Biblical values of Sabbath. Sabbath is not just taking one day off a week for rest. Sabbath is a way of living that is centered around the fact that God is God, and we are not, and that God provides what we need, and that everyone is invited to share in rest and abundance. So, as couples we talked with each other frankly about the reality of living in a world that worships money and how hard it is when we would like to order our lives differently but it’s difficult to see how. We talked about the joys of giving and sometimes the challenges of not feeling like we can give as much as we wanted to or the invitation to live more simply and yet how difficult it can be to live in such a complicated world. Like the parable, some of these conversations were a bomb dropped into our status quo, they really blew our minds open. I think that everyone who participated ended up doing something differently as a result. None of us changed our lives dramatically overnight. It certainly wasn’t enough, but it was a start, it was a start.
We’re entering as a parish into this time of year that we often call stewardship season, a time of praying about our sacred financial offerings, our gifts that we give back to God through the church in gratitude for the wonder in all that God has done. I think many of us feel like we wish we could give more. We’re not sure how to start. We’re talking about money after all, and money is one of the most difficult topics, especially in church, and as Paul reminds us, the love of money is the root of many kinds of evil, that is not money itself but the love of it that gets us into trouble. Maybe it’s time for a bomb in our status quo. This year as you consider what you might give back to God in the form of financial offerings here at St. George’s that you discern whether you can commit to that, your offerings in the coming year and let us know what those are in the coming weeks on your pledge card. The invitation may be not just to consider what you can do but to consider the proportions of your life. And not to start with what’s realistic, but to start with what you’d like to see, what proportion of your time and energy would you like to give to the people and the things you care about most? What proportion of your income, what percentage of your income would be a fitting offering to God in thanks for all that God has given you? Where would you like to be? If you really want to throw a bomb in the status quo, find some people that you trust and talk with them about it. It might open your eyes in some new ways. Start with the right proportions and then work back to what you think you might be able to do to make those proportions more a part of your reality. Dream audaciously, and then see how those proportions might start to come into balance.
This idea of proportionate giving is thinking of your giving as a percentage of your overall income, so the Bible gives us the tithe of the ten percent as one standard. That may not be where you are but thinking of those gifts not in terms of the amount but in terms of the proportion of the whole. This way of thinking also though kind of invites us to think of our lives not as fragmented pieces that are fighting with one another but our lives as one whole that fits together. One of the things I’ve said after my sabbatical is I don’t want to try to fit my life in around my work anymore. I want my work to be a part of the whole of my life, and I want my giving to be part of a greater whole of how I take care of what God has given me. How is God inviting us to live lives of wholeness and beautiful proportion? Maybe your pledge this year to give one part in ten or one part in twenty or one part in a hundred, whatever it is, maybe it will be a stretch, maybe you can make it a stretch for you, not just as a sign of what you’ll give but as a sign of your desire to live a life of wholeness and proportion.
If you figure out how to do this, please let us know because we’d love to hear your wisdom. Most of us feel daunted by this in some way, shape, or form. So the good news from the parable today is that the poor man in the parable is named Lazarus, and Lazarus in Hebrew means my God has helped, and God has always and will always help the poor, and that includes, thanks be to God, the poor in imagination, the poor in courage, the poor in resolve. When we turn our hearts from seeking the things of this world to seeking the things of God, God will give us a disproportionate measure of grace because that’s how God’s economy works, and possibly God might give us a bomb in our status quo because that’s also how God often works. So, watch out for that. God has helped, God is helping, God will help us to live lives of beautiful proportion. Thanks be to God.