The Episcopal News

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Several members of the Diocese of Los Angeles community took part in this church-wide witness against hate. http://ow.ly/jXs550EbDA1

Requiescat: The Rev. Canon Charles Sacquety Jr.

#stopasianhate #feedinghungryhearts #holyweek2021 Joyce Swaving, the Rev. Canon Pat McCaughan, vicar, and the members of Saint George's Episcopal Church in Lagu...na Hills organized a moving candlelight vigil last night to remember those killed in Atlanta and Denver and call attention to the particular sin of violence against Asian, Pacific Islander, and Asian-American people. The evening breeze made our candles flicker. The chairs facing us, seeming to embrace us, bore the names of those murdered. Prayer and testimony -- from Iman Saymeh, the Very Rev. Keith Yamamoto, Joshua Wong, Dustin Vuong Nguyen, and Joyce herself -- drew us deeper into Holy Week remembrance of him who died in innocence by hate. I was along to reflect on what we might learn from our exile experience these 56 weeks about building back better beloved community. Thank you, Joyce and St. George's. See more

"Litany in the Wake of a Mass Shooting," offered this Maundy Thursday afternoon by the Rev. Antonio Gallardo, vicar of St. Luke's of-the-Mountains Episcopal Chu...rch/San Lucas de las Montañas in La Crescenta, and me, thanks to Antonio's hospitality at St. Luke's. Bishops United Against Gun Violence, found on Facebook at Episcopalians United Against Gun Violence, first offered this litany after the Borderline shootings in November 2018, here in the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles. It was updated after yesterday's shooting, in which four died and two were critically injured, in Orange, near Trinity Orange. To learn more about Bishops United and the common-sense policies for which we advocate, visit here: https://bishopsagainstgunviolence.org. Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy. See more

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Easter message from Presiding Bishop Michael Curry / Two online diocesan services planned for Eastertide / Candlelight vigil at Laguna Hills church remembers shooting victims / and more in the Episcopal News Update for April 4, 2021. Blessed Holy Week and happy Easter!

About every 30 seconds, someone in America dies from COVID-19 each day. We are about to cross the unbelievable threshold of half a million Americans lost to thi...s pandemic. On Monday (Feb. 22), interfaith clergy will join us in the mourner's prayers from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and Sikhism as we toll the Cathedral's funeral bell 500 times -- once for every 1,000 lives lost. The memorial bell toll will start at 5 pm ET, and the public is invited to the Cathedral grounds (masks and social distancing required). Our interfaith partners will join us on a livestream of the toll, available here on Facebook and via cathedral.org. Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

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#feedinghungryhearts #lent2021 Every Wednesday at St. Stephen's Hollywood and Thursday at St. Barnabas Eagle Rock, the Rev. Canon Jaime Edwards-Acton, the Rev. ...Carlos Ruvalcaba, and scores of colleagues and staffers -- with the epic support of Seeds of Hope and its partners -- distribute tons of food to their neighbors. I dropped by this morning to meet and thank the St. Be's crew. As we all know, hunger gnaws more urgently than ever in our neighborhoods because of the pandemic. These two service- and justice-driven churches have a Facebook fundraiser going on where every $5, $25, and $75 from you will make an incredible difference. Check it out here, and help our neighbors give up being hungry for Lent: https://www.facebook.com/john.h.taylor.9/posts/10158741311133046

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Comments welcome. Keep 'em civil, please.

#feedinghungryhearts Is it the bridge of the Starship Enterprise or the Great Hall of St. Paul's Commons, Echo Park? That's Canon Luis Garabay, the Rev. Thomas ...Quijada-Discavage, the Rev. Canon Melissa McCarthy, and convention coordinator Samantha Wylie getting set for our digital diocesan convention, "Servants of the Spirit," coming up on Saturday, Nov. 14. We'll have plenty of digital content the week before for folks to enjoy at their leisure and, on Sunday, Nov. 15, an all-diocese service of Holy Eucharist with the Rev. Canon Stephanie Spellers as preacher. Have you considered running for a diocesan office to help us make our diocese stronger and even better? Learn more here: https://www.diocesanconvention.com/nominations See more

www.diocesela.org/voter-empowerment

Camp Stevens is having an online auction!

Video tells story of refugee housing ministry at St. John's Church, San Bernardino / Change to canon law would assure nontraditional communities seat, voice at Diocesan Convention / Historic Episcopal parish is first stop in new African-American history audio tour of Pasadena / GFS offers girls a chance to 'reconnect and reboot' at virtual Rally Day / and more in the Episcopal News Update for Oct. 18, 2020.

#feedinghungryhearts What a joy to be with you this morning and see familiar faces and those of new friends who have made St. Andrew's Episcopal Church Fullerto...n their home for worship, fellowship, and acts of lovingkindness toward your neighbors. St. Andrew's became my life-saving spiritual home a quarter-century ago. I lived and worked nearby, in Brea and Yorba Linda. My first wife and I had separated, and our school-age daughters were suffering the consequences. Things were getting weird at my job at the Nixon library. It was a classic story, almost a cliché. I hadn’t attended church regularly in years. Christ often gets his fishing hooks into us not when we’re happily splashing along in the sunlit currents near the surface but laboring through deeper waters, down below, in murky darkness. It was time for me to begin to walk humbly with my God. The grandson of Anglicans from London and Lancashire, I’d grown up at The Cathedral Church of St. Paul, Detroit Michigan, where my journalist mother, Jean, edited the diocesan newspaper. So I ran home to momma. My daughters Valerie and Lindsay and I began attending St. Andrew’s, and we felt instantly at home. Eventually Kathy Hannigan O'Connor did as well. So you can imagine how I felt a few years later when St. Andrew’s told me I had to leave. I’d begun to discern a call to ordained ministry. Then and now, part of the process was to spend a year away from one's sponsoring parish, serving in another church, with people one doesn't know. But I felt cozy, nestled in my safe harbor, namesake of Andrew the fisherman. I was uninterested in setting sail again on the choppy Sea of Galilee. I still remember my friend and mentor, the Rev. Canon Mark Shier, standing at the edge of the parking lot and waving as I drove off. See you in a year, he said. Perhaps you know the feeling. When you left church that last Sunday back in March, your creative, devoted rector the Rev. Dr. Beth Kelly didn’t get a chance to say, See you in six months, or seven, or 12. Imagine if she had. Imagine how you would’ve felt. My story was one of spiritual adolescence. I had found St. Andrew’s when I was hurt and confused. By God’s grace, I began to experience healing here, with you. It was painful to imagine not spending my Sundays in the sunshine of Fullerton’s smiles. I even wrote emails to the powers that be about the injustice of it all. But the church needed me to understand that sacrament is mobile. That Christ built no churches and had nowhere to lay his head. That we are to model and proclaim the gospel of love whenever and wherever -- in our homes, our workplaces, even on street corners. That a parish is better understood as a base camp than a sanctuary a place of preparation and refreshment for the real work of Christ, which is always out in the world, where the spiritual hunger is gnawing and unending, where billions need healing from their own hurts and confusions and the injustices and oppressions of brutal systems. I understand that my experience was different than yours. I was choosing to discern about being a priest, and going away from this place I loved was part of the package. You made no such choice with the exception of your sister Miriam Helene Edwards, now a postulant for holy orders. And you well remember when happened to her. Banished by her bishop for a year in the faraway City of Orange! Indeed when the pandemic began, some churches said, We have the right to stay inside our building. The government is taking away my rights. Whereas St. Andrew’s said all the churches in he Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles said We look not to our rights and our interests, but to the safety of our neighbor. You gave up the Sunday morning experience you love for the sake of the higher love, the love that sacrifices and gives up and gives away. Behaving as you have, choosing to spread love instead of the germ, you have kept tombs empty and made every Sunday an Easter Day. We can actually make every day an Easter Day by getting up in the morning, giving thanks for the day the Lord has made, and dressing for Resurrection. I’m not talking about not wearing shorts or pajama bottoms to Zoom church. Jesus has absolutely no problem with that. I'm taking about the more important way we get dressed. Remember the parable we just heard, where the king banishes the guest who’d come to the great celebration without his wedding robes. It’s actually not hard to find these particular garments. We don’t have to go to TJ Max or Nordstrom or Amazon. We do our shopping in Paul’s letter to the Philippians: Let your gentleness be known to everyone. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. [W]hatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable ... Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you. This is how we get dressed in the morning, whether we can go sit in a pew or not. We put on gentleness. Truth. Honor. Justice. Purity of heart and intention. Thanksgiving and forgiveness. We don’t worry. We pray and give thanks to God, and then do what is commendable and pleasing. There’s an article in the paper this morning about how some men think COVID masks aren’t masculine. They think men who wear them look weak. And yet look at Philippians again. The Christian man puts on gentleness every morning not pride, not insecurity, not self-consciousness. And so he puts on his mask, too, for the sake of the neighbor he has been commanded to love, more even than he loves himself. Our masks are wedding robe accessories, signs that we want our Lord to hold our place at the great feast, where God will wipe the tears from every face, especially Lynn Curtis’s as she mourns her beloved Harlan, and swallow up death forever. Beth tells me that in a couple of weeks you’ll begin a parish conversation about Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility. If I may, since I’ve read it, some advice before you come to the feast. Before you open to page one, put on your wedding robe, as a sign that you can accept difficult truth with gentleness and grace. I mentioned my journalist mother, Jean. She grew up poor, couldn’t afford to go to college, and earned every penny she ever had. But she nevertheless enjoyed white privilege. In the late 1940s, in my cruelly segregated hometown of Detroit, when she was 17, she got her first job working at the J.L. Hudson Co. I can’t look into the hearts of the people who hired her. But I know we all know that in our country, in my city, in those times, there were 17-year-old Black girls who were just as talented as Jean but didn’t have the same chances she did. Everything about Jean Taylor’s life, everything about mine, proceeded from that advantage and many others. As yet as you will read in Beverly's book, it’s sometimes hard for people like me to hear that we’re standing not just on other people’s shoulders but on their backs and necks. When I’m wearing my wedding robes, I give thanks for the insight and pray to my God in Christ for the grace to make it right and help build the beloved community. Walking through your doors 25 years ago, I could tell St. Andrew’s was a base camp for an ascent toward the beloved community the place the Lord God has prepared for us at the foot of the holy mountain. All these years, you have welcomed your neighbors to a feast of rich food, namely the Soup Kitchen. Your teaching and preaching. Your glorious worship and music and let us give thanks for the ministry at St. Andrew’s for so many years of the late Sara McFerrin, remembered for us this morning by her devoted son, Bobby, in his setting of the 23rd Psalm. Those wonderful parish weekends at Camp Stevens . Offering us the leadership in diocesan councils of Canon Janet Wylie and Donald R. Harrelll. Your never-failing bienvenidos. May even these quarantine days prove to be a blessing. With our wedding robes on, we can reckon almost everything as a blessing. You’ve shown you can still glorify God and care for God’s people. You can pastor to one another. You can pray and teach and learn and be a refuge for the poor. Above all, St. Andrew’s people St. Andrew’s wardens and vestry St. Andrew’s rector do not worry about anything. That mentality comes straight from Philippians and fits everybody right off the rack. After all, none of us has reached our destination. We’re all on a pilgrim walk together. We’re making our way through the wilderness toward a future which, though indistinct in earthly terms, couldn’t possibly be clearer to those wearing their wedding robes. Glory. Safety. Peace. Justice. Love. Eternal life. Wherever you are, whomever you meet, people will see what you’re wearing. Even with your mask on at Trader Joe's, that your eyes are smiling, and your voice is warm and kind and forgiving. Perhaps you’ll have a chance to tell people where you shop for your sacred raiment. Either way, even in these polarized political times, by the infinity of ways we can manifest the joy of Resurrection to other people, we fulfill our gospel obligation to invite everyone in the streets to the great banquet. We do that, and I promise God will keep caring for and sustaining God’s church, and especially St. Andrew’s. [My sermon this morning at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church Fullerton. The photo shows the Rev. Canon Mark Shier and me before the germ.]

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A video report on the refugee housing ministry at St. John's Episcopal Church, San Bernardino, with help from interfaith partners at CLUE (Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice). https://youtu.be/-faz3WfHRqQ

Presiding Bishop Michael Curry to speak at Nov. 7 Bishop's Gala virtual fundraiser; everyone welcome to log in / Guides help voters through election process, reflect diocesan, interfaith priorities / Stephanie Spellers to address Diocesan Convention / Commission on Ministry: Discerning God's call and where it leads / San Bernardino church turns unused space to housing and hope for asylum-seekers / and more in the Episcopal News Update for October 11, 2020.