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Block Print by Mike Newman
Projects
Shred-it, May 3, 4:30pm-5:30pm. Do yourself and the environment a favor — get rid of the sensitive documents you do not need to keep – those 10 year old bills, tax documents, recipts. Let Shred-it make sure your documents are securely destroyed. Bring your boxes to St. Peter’s. We would appreciate a donation of $5 per box to pay for the truck and generate funds for St. Peter’s ministries.
Link to the reports from Jan 15 Annual Meeting
Daily meditations in words and music.
Your daily prayer online, since 1999
"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, April 23 – April 30
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23
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[George, Soldier and Martyr, c. 304]; also [Toyohiko Kagawa, Prophetic Witness in Japan, 1960] |
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24
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[Genocide Remembrance] |
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25
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Saint Mark the Evangelist |
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26
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[Robert Hunt, Priest and First Chaplain at Jamestown, 1607] |
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27
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[Christina Rossetti, Poet, 1894] |
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28
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29
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Catherine of Siena, 1380? |
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30
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[Sarah Josepha Buell Hale, Editor and Prophetic Witness, 1879] |
April 23 – Easter 2
Magical Strings at St. Peter’s, April 22, 2017. See the story and gallery
From Last week…
The Week Ahead…
April 26 – 10:00am, Ecumenical Bible Study
April 29- 6pm. "Ladies Night Out"
April 30 – 10:00am, Godly Play (preschool through 2nd grade up)
April 30 – 11:00am, Morning Prayer, Rite II
Sunday, April 30 Readings and Servers
May, 2017 newsletter – at a glance
First of all, thank you for the pot of flowers that the Vestry gave to us on behalf of the church. Ben and I are enjoying the bright colors and the flowers brighten up our deck. Thank you! We’ll miss you all tomorrow at Ladies Night Out and on Sunday as well. We’re taking off some time to celebrate our anniversary.
Please read the newsletter–especially the Prayer Corner. We’ve had several recent prayer requests, I’ve put a little about recently added people that we’re praying for. They need our prayers. Also, please be praying for Johnny’s sister-in-law, Nancy, who is in the hospital.
Here are the links to the newsletter.
Peace, Catherine
Some highlights
- Shred it Wed May 3, 4:30-5:30pm followed by the Village Dinner. Get rid of that excess paper, safely and securely
- Parish retreat, May 5-7
- A new Christian Ed course at night May 13 for 6 weeks
- A visit to the National Cathedral May 20
- UTO Spring Ingatherine, May 21
- Ascension, May 25, Memorial Day 29
- Check out the supplemental newsletter for a strawberry recipe (it’s that time!) and a poem of the season by Wendell Berry
Village Harvest sets monthly record, April 19!
A new single month record! 157 people served! We are seeing people not only from Port Royal but also Essex County, King George County and even into Westmoreland. The need is certainly there. Our enthusiastic volunteers are pictured above.
The food distributed was the second largest month at 1,559 pounds consisting of produce – corn, cabbage, cucumbers, onions and potatoes as well as meat and bakery goods.
The ministry is still growing at about 25%, though the growth is slowing. The first four month of 2017 served 535 people vs. 419 for the same period a year ago. Foods distributed consisted of 4,963 pounds this year vs. 3,986 pounds last year.
Today St. Peter’s (and Port Royal) grew by 20,000 creatures. Andrew Huffman brought his gift of bees to St. Peter’s.
They will be placed in a specially designed hive in the back of the church yard. Hopefully, there is a queen bee in there. The expectation is that they will have honey and wax ready for production in a year.
Todays work was smoking the bees to keep them less agitated and add combs to the hive as well as food of sugar water to help their growth.
Read more about Andrew. We will have an article for the May newsletter about the bees. We thank him for this new ministry!
We are in Eastertide until Pentecost, June 4
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 29th). 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.
Lectionary, April 30, 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.
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 March 22, 2016 | 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.
YouTube dramatization of the "Road to Emmaus"
Starring Bruce Marchiano ("Gospel of Matthew") Road to Emmaus follows the story of Luke 24:13-49 and imagines what the conversation between Jesus and the two disciples might have been. It builds from the actual stories and passages of the Bible (the writings of Moses and the prophets as well as the further explanations in the New Testament).
The Link to the video