In-Gathering Sunday
If you have not yet sent in your pledge card, it would be very helpful for us to receive it this week so we can plan the 2012 budget. Thank you for your support of our parish life and ministry.
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Lessons and Carols
Saint Margaret’s Choir will be singing at both the 8AM and 10AM services this coming Sunday, the 18th for the yearly Lessons and Carols Service.
Lessons and Carols. The “Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols” tells the story of mankind through a “tour” of Biblical readings: the fall from grace, the promise of the Messiah and the birth of Jesus, are told in nine short Bible readings from Genesis, the prophetic books, and the Gospels – interspersed with the singing of carols, hymns and choir music. The format is based on a service created by Edward White Benson, (later Bishop of Canterbury), the Bishop of Truro in Cornwall for use on Christmas Eve, 1880. His service was also designed to encourage greater participation by including contemporary songs (carols). His intent was to link the teachings of the Bible with everyday song and society.
First Lesson: Adam and Eve are cast out of the Garden of Eden.
Our Selection: “Adam Lay yBounden” is a 15th century English text of unknown authorship. The British Library dates the work in which it is found to c.1400. The carol relates the events of Genesis, Chapter 3. In medieval theology, Adam was supposed to have remained in bonds from the time of his death until the crucifixion of Christ (the “4000 winters”). The second verse, which narrates the Fall of Man following Adam’s temptation by Eve and the serpent, has a tone of astonishment – almost incredulity – in the phrase “and all was for an apple”. An apple such as a boy might steal from an orchard seems such a little thing to produce such overwhelming consequences. But, as the carol goes one to say, it must be so, because “clerkes” say so in their “book” (probably the Vulgate itself). The song concludes on a positive note hinting at Thomas Aquinas’ concept of the “felix culpa” (blessed fault). And we end this carol on a major lift to signify that promise. (As an aside, It is interesting to note that there is no apple mentioned in Genesis.)
Second Lesson: Prepare for Redemption
Our Selection: Prepare the Way is a carol based on a Dala melody and arranged for the Real Group by group member Margareta Jalkeus who says it reminds her of “the warm feeling of candlelight in the dark and icy Swedish winter.” If you were to attend a Swedish church in early December, you’d probably hear this lovely tune. As the pastor lights the Advent candle, Swedes sing “Prepare the Way”. The melody comes from the Dalarna province of Sweden, a region with a rich and unique folk culture, and distinct music often centered on Biblical themes.
Third Lesson: Prophesy of the Birth of Immanuel
Our Selection: Saw You Never in the Twilight is based on the 15th century love song Chartres, “Hellas! je l’ay perdue,” as published in G. Paris and A. Gevaert, Chansons du XVe siècle, 1875. The harmonization was done by Charles Wood for the Cowley Carol Book, 1901. The lyrics were written by the Irish poetess Cecil F. Alexander in 1853, who based her poem on the writings of Isaiah. Born in 1818 in Dublin, Cecil’s husband was William Alexander, bishop of Derry and Raphoe – and later the Anglican primate for Ireland. Alexander wrote over 400 hymns in her lifetime; her best know piece: “All Things Bright and Beautiful”.
Fourth Lesson: A Song of Joy to Celebrate God’s Promise of Peace
Our Selection: Shepherds Arise is from the Copper Family of Sussex, England who appear to be the only traditional source. Probably from the 18th century, extensive searches have failed to reveal its origins. James ‘Brasser’ Copper (b.1845), founder of the Copper family singing tradition and sole archivist of many traditional English songs, said it was one of the oldest carols he knew. This arrangement is based on one found in “The Sacred Harp”, first published in 1844 by B.F. White and E. J. King and later revised in 1991. This style of singing is based on singing schools from the colonial period in America. For many years only preserved in the rural South, Sacred Harp singing (also called fasola singing or shape-note singing) is making a major resurgence in cities throughout North America.
Fifth Lesson: The angel Gabriel tells Mary she will bear the Son of God.
Our Selection: The Angel Gabriel. Please join us in singing this traditional carol. The Angel Gabriel is a Basque carol collected and translated by Sabine Baring-Gould of “Onward Christian Soldiers” fame. It was originally a Pagan carol celebrating the Mother Goddess. It was transformed into a Christian carol between AD200 and AD500, and then transformed once again by the Basques into their native language. It was finally translated into English as an Anglican hymn by Baring-Gould. It is interesting to note that Baring-Gould “transformed” Gabriel – an archangel of “terrible” being in stature and deed who, according to scripture, presided over the “Ikisat” (fiery serpents) – into a typically Victorian diaphanous being with white wings. Gabriel would have been mortified.
Experience Advent through Art: The Nativity
Haitian nativity
The Advent Adult Ed series of “Experience Advent through Art”concludes on Sunday, December 18, Advent 4, with “The Nativity”. Starting at about 9.15 a.m., we will be able to experience Advent themes through works of art displayed on the screen, and have an opportunity to reflect on what we see in the images. The sessions, led by John Gregory and Susie Kraeger, are offered as part of our fellowship time together, so bring your coffee and pull up a chair, and enjoy.
The men always seem to be the first in line!
Twenty parishioners dined on Swedish meatballs, beet salads, Hesselback potatoes, apple cake, anise-flavored cookies and other treats last Saturday night at St. Margaret’s Global Cuisine Potluck.
Roy Reed provided a slide show of scenes from Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Greenland and a few islands not always identified.
The next in our Second Saturday series will feature the cuisine of Hungry, a rich tradition drawing from Turkish influences (a 150-year occupation left its mark) as well as Slovakian, Serbian, Croatian, Romanian, Russian, Polish and German influences. The Budapest Tourist Guide advises that “authentic Hungarian dishes are definitely not for people on a diet” but allows as how “their rich flavor, aroma and texture compensate for the slightly excessive calorie intake.” We’ll see what St. Margaret’s cooks can devise.
Recipes will appear on the time and talent table soon.
Dinner will be at 6 on Saturday, Jan. 14. Invite your Hungarian friends to come (and to cook). Guests are always welcome. Bring your neighbors along, too.
December MOMS
The December meeting was held at the usual site — the parish hall, and well attended: 14, including new participant Chris Scott, who was also the presenter. (We were particularly pleased that Fred Whaley was also able to get time away from rehab in order to attend.)
Reverend Chris was ordained years ago in Glasgow, Scotland, and he spoke on Christmas customs in places where he’d lived, Northern Europe and Hawaii — quite the contrast in style! Our chef was Lou Pelletier. Bob Whidden read a poem he’d written at a long-ago Christmas.
Next month: John Gregory, speaking on newer directions in prostate cancer screening & treatment.
Flowers at Christmas
Wreaths and poinsettias are a part of our Christmas celebration at St. Margaret’s; they will decorate our church at this very Holy time of year. If you would like to participate in the purchasing of wreaths and poinsettias, please bring your contribution (noting who you are honoring) to the office by Tuesday, December 13th for inclusion in the Christmas bulletin. Envelopes will be available at services this weekend.
There is also an opportunity for you to dedicate flowers at other times during the year. Sign up on the calendar on the table at the back of the church; notify the church office a week or so in advance who you are honoring or the occasion you are celebrating; and include the memo “flower fund” on your donation. Any questions on flower donations during the year – contact Ellen Kenney at 338-4232.
Thank you and best wishes for a Blessed Christmas season, from the Flower Committee.
Hands-to-Hands Making Connections for Mission and Ministrty
The Stewardship Committee has set up a Hands-to-Hands table in the Parish Hall, asking each one of us to commit to doing one new thing in the coming year for the deepening of our spiritual life and connections. Here’s how –
Choose from the list provided or–better still–add something of your own. Then–
1. Trace your hand on a sheet of paper, and cut out.
2. Write the name of your new venture on your paper hand, and sign your name.
3. Place your hand in the basket for blessing at the altar at Epiphany.
Read Martha’s Sermon from Sunday, December 4, 2011
(To print out this sermon and to see footnotes, click here for a .pdf file.)
St. Margaret’s Church
Sermon for December 4, 2011
Year B
Advent II; Annual Meeting I
Isaiah 40:1-11; Ps. 85:1-2, 8-13; 2 Peter 3:8-15a; Mark 1:1-8
The Rev. Martha Kirkpatrick
Today is the first part of our Annual Meeting, when we’ll elect new leadership for the coming year and we’ll also reflect on where we as a community of faith have been over the past year and consider the year ahead. It is Advent, a time of preparation.
A lot of organizations do some kind of assessment at the end of the year, and it’s good to ask ourselves by what standards we hold ourselves accountable. What have we done with the gifts we’ve been blessed with? Because what we measure, what we hold ourselves accountable to and for, reflects what we value, and what we understand ourselves to be about. Is it the number of people in church on Sunday? The number of programs and new initiatives? The size and health of our budget? For that matter, how do we take stock of our own lives, as Christians? How’d you do this year? Drink less? Lose weight? Go to the Y more often? Spend less money on non-essentials? It’s not that these don’t mean anything. Good habits and practices count for a lot. But their focus is on behaviors, and this is too limiting.
Let’s ask the question this way: we’re standing before God and held to account for ourselves individually and for the church, this part of God’s body. Now what’s the measure?
I want to suggest to you that this kind of accounting has much to do with word we hear every Advent. Repent. Prepare the way of the Lord. This is the way we begin our new year, so it is fitting that it is where we might look at the end of it. We use the word “repent” a lot in our Christian vocabulary, and if I were to take a poll I’ll bet most of us would say it has to do with confessing our sins, faults, and mistakes, acknowledging how we’ve wandered off course and resolving to do better. There are those behaviors again. We are so hard wired with this understanding that is hard to unplug ourselves from it, even though many of us know that this is quite far from the meaning of the Greek word metanoia. Meta means “beyond” or “large” and noia refers to perception, understanding, or mind. So the word we translate as Repent! Actually means to beyond the mind, go into the large mind, the large perception. This reminds me of a moment in the movie “What the Bleep do we Know?” where it is suggested that when faced with a choice, the question is not what is right or wrong, but rather “does this evolve me, or does it not evolve me?” This is a much larger question than right/wrong. We are ever in need of evolving, to go into the larger mind.
A couple of weeks ago I talked about Jesus as a wisdom teacher, and that in the tradition of wisdom teachers Jesus came as a teacher, not of right/wrong behaviors, but of inner transformation. Jesus wants to change us from the inside out, to change how we perceive the world. We talked about the heart as an organ of spiritual perception that acts as a homing beacon to God. Deep within the heart’s resonance is the understanding that there is no separation between me and another, and that God dwells in all of us. But the signals get blocked by the smaller mind, the ego mind that differentiates, that competes, that is consumed with my wants and my needs and my story. And it is this smaller mind, this egoic mind through which we see ourselves as separate from everyone else, that it the source of the bad behaviors we talked about earlier, and loneliness, and fear, and pain. Sheila spoke last week about how some of us can get locked into a story of trauma or pain, and how everything that comes after that that is bad validates the story, and everything that is good is ignored or perhaps not even perceived. It is from this that Jesus wants to free us, to transform us from the inside.
How fitting it is that it is John the Baptizer who exhorts us to repent, to enter into the large mind. John the Baptist, with his wild hair and clothing, crazy eating habits and questionable hygiene. The very person we might very well cross the street to avoid. It is he who calls us out of the gated community of our mind, the gated community the church can never be and call itself Christian.
So all this leads us to ask ourselves how we are doing with this repentance, this moving into the larger perception. Is not an esoteric or abstract question; we already know what it looks like. It is known by its fruits, which are compassion and solidarity, the kind of being with another that breaks down barriers. There is lots of harvest to be gathered here. The Vestry and the Mission Outreach committee spent many hours in conversation this past summer about what mission means for St. Margaret’s. This was foundational work, and it helps guide and shape everything that comes after it. It wasn’t a dramatic change of direction, but a deepening and making more explicit what we already knew, that mission is about putting our hands to work to make connections and to deepen the connections we already have. We demonstrate this every time St. Margaret’s operates the Food Cupboard when our turn comes around. If you’ve ever been you know it’s like old home week. Handing out bags or receiving them or checking people off the list, people are greeted by their first name, asked how they are and how their children are doing. That same spirit pervades Toddlers’ play date. St. Margaret’s has taken over the General Assistance support this year, and this was a huge step for us. Word gets out fast, and we are becoming known in the community in ways we haven’t before.
We’re venturing into new territory in other ways as well, in particular in our ecumenism. I am learning that ecumenism – opening our hearts and minds to people of other faiths — is a lot easier to profess than it is to practice. It’s not about losing our “Episcopal-ness.” And it’s not enough to skate on the surface and identify the big ideas on which we agree. It involves listening to the deep places of another person’s faith, and when it is done well we find our own spiritual life and faith practice deepened and strengthened. We understand more fully what it means to be a Christian and an Episcopalian, and we grow in our understanding of other faiths. The world needs way more of this. We did several new things this year along this vein. We held a Lenten adult ed program in conjunction with the UCC church. This wasn’t a big leap theologically; we saw and experienced how much common ground there is, over the shared soup supper as well as in time in conversation. For the first time – in a long while at least — we were the host church for a Ministerium Good Friday Taize service. And several people regularly attend our weekly interfaith meditation early Wednesday mornings. And connecting on a spiritual level with people of other faith traditions, we also learn how to make connections with people who are spiritual but not religious. The spiritual hunger in the world is wide and deep.
All of this It expands our hearts and moves us more deeply into the place of the larger mind. We do this when we share a pot luck supper, visit someone in the hospital, pray with them when they are lonely or scared. We do this in the many ways we assist in our common life together, doing the heavy lifting to update our financial system, making sure we are good stewards of our buildings and grounds, or giving a Saturday to put our gardens to bed. Maybe it comes down to the many ways we find to say to each other and to our neighbors “You’re not alone.”
To speak personally, this is what the year here at St. Margaret’s has been like for me: deepening my spiritual life, stretching into new places, feeling free to try new things, supported when they work and when they need adapting and revising, feeling part of a church that is weaving itself more deeply into the fabric of our wider community. I hope it is that for you too, or if not, that you will help all of us to identify how we can grow into the kind of faith community that supports and nourishes you, nudges you to go deeper when you’re tempted to stay in your comfort zone, to trust God within you and to see the divine in others.
What it comes down to is that we are not called to be primarily the church about Jesus, but the church of Jesus. This is the church where Jesus is not simply worshiped, but is an active, living presence in which we participate freely and joyfully, giving and receiving with abundance and gratitude.
Amen.
Women’s Group Meeting
A reminder that our meeting will be this Wednesday, December 14th at 11 A.M. It will be our traditional gathering for regular business, tasty potluck, and (best of all) wrapping presents. Since Daughters of the King meets at 1 PM in the Parish Hall, we will need to be especially efficient in getting all accomplished by 1PM.
Summary of Annual Meeting Part 1
We had a lively and well-attended Annual Meeting (Part 1) between the services last Sunday, ably led by Wardens Peter Taylor and Amanda Littlefield. Randy Curtis presented the proposed budget for 2012, and our projections for the remaining budget year look good. There are summary sheets on the table in the Parish Hall, and detailed budget sheets for anyone interested. We elected new Vestry members Randy Nichols, Nan Cobbey and Sarah Tarpley. We also elected delegates to Diocesan Convention (which will be at Point Lookout this year!): Peter Clain, Susie Kraeger, Faye Ward and Linda Dunson, with alternates Cipperly Good and Susan Mayer. Congratulations! and thanks to all for your engagement and enthusiasm.
Vol III #1 p. 1
