The View from Bolton Street
Feast of the Transfiguration
August 6th marks the Feast of the Transfiguration, a Principal Feast of the church where we commemorate Christ’s transfiguration before Peter, James and John on his way to Jerusalem. It is also the subject of Memorial’s Altar Tryptich - currently veiled as it is a memorial to a long time priest who was active in keeping Memorial and Baltimore segregated.
Please join us for this important service. The Rev. Grey Maggiano is presiding and the Rev. Natalie Conway is preaching.
Time: Thursday August 6th at 6:00PM Eastern
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E-Faith@8, 8/9
The Faith@8 group is continuing to meet during this time of social distancing. Join us for an informal, community led service with more questions than answers and an open spot for whoever appears. Just follow the Zoom link below!
Memorial Faith@8
Time: Sundays at 8:00AM Eastern
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Meeting ID: 639 499 4372
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E-Church 9:30am, 8/9
To join us, all you need to do is click on the link below. We will have the order of service up on the screen to follow along. We recognize that all of us have different levels of comfort with technology - we will do our best to help everyone do what they need to feel comfortable and participate!
Two tips for Zoom worship:
1) Let us see your face! If at all possible, please start a video feed so we can see each other face to face, even across distance.
2) Please mute yourself unless you have a speaking role in the service. And if you find you are muted, please don’t unmute yourself unless asked. However - even when you are muted, please do respond to the prayers and readings, as we are all worshipping together.
Join Zoom Meeting
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E-Faith@8, 8/2
The Faith@8 group is continuing to meet during this time of social distancing. Join us for an informal, community led service with more questions than answers and an open spot for whoever appears. Just follow the Zoom link below!
Memorial Faith@8
Time: Sundays at 8:00AM Eastern
Join Zoom Meeting here: https://zoom.us/j/6394994372
Meeting ID: 639 499 4372
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E-Church 9:30am, 8/2
To join us, all you need to do is click on the link below. We will have the order of service up on the screen to follow along. We recognize that all of us have different levels of comfort with technology - we will do our best to help everyone do what they need to feel comfortable and participate!
Two tips for Zoom worship:
1) Let us see your face! If at all possible, please start a video feed so we can see each other face to face, even across distance.
2) Please mute yourself unless you have a speaking role in the service. And if you find you are muted, please don’t unmute yourself unless asked. However - even when you are muted, please do respond to the prayers and readings, as we are all worshipping together.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84992001341?pwd=QUMvMFYzZU9HQkRLVmxISkVPRGlIQT09
Meeting ID: 849 9200 1341
Password: 563025
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The View From Robert St.
24 strangers, picked to live on Zoom, and see what happens when pilgrims stop being polite, and start getting real. The Real (Virtual) Pilgrimage: The Holy Land!
With apologies to MTV's 'The Real World', our Virtual pilgrimage to the Holy Land feels a little like this! 24 intrepid travelers have come together to journey into a land of conflict, disagreement, pain - and also joy, beauty and hope. On Day one we have already talked about what it means to be Jewish as a person and in terms of religion, the challenge and reality of the Israeli Defense Force, and how you can grow up in New Jersey and never meet a Christian until you go to Israel.
In our reflection today Dr. Marcie Lenk reminded us of two stories in the bible, Genesis 12 and Exodus 19. In Genesis 12 Abraham is told by God that he and his descendants will be the Chosen people, while in Exodus Moses is reminded on Mount Sinai that this is true IF they follow the commandments. Two competing understandings of what it means to be Jewish. Both Biblical! Both valid!
This was a helpful reminder that scripture is a conversation. For the Jewish people and for us. We have to be in dialogue with the text, to be conversant in the language of scripture and comfortable wrestling with the lack of clarity and living in the uncertainty.
This Sunday we have a laundry list of images for the Kingdom of God, many of them in conflict. No one of these is sufficient to explain the Kingdom, but together all of these examples, confounding and confusing as they may be, might give us a small picture of what God is like.
Church, like the Real World, is not easy. But it is fun. Especially if we are wiling to be uncomfortable, confused, lost and ultimately found by God.
E-Faith@8
The Faith@8 group is continuing to meet during this time of social distancing. Join us for an informal, community led service with more questions than answers and an open spot for whoever appears. Just follow the Zoom link below!
Memorial Faith@8
Time: Sundays at 8:00AM Eastern
Join Zoom Meeting here: https://zoom.us/j/6394994372
Meeting ID: 639 499 4372
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The View From Robert St.
What’s New and What’s Next
Well it has been a long time since we have been together. Our last in person service was March 8th, and it has been 18 weeks of Zoom and YouTube liturgies that have been exciting, challenging, dysfunctional, beautiful and everything in between.
Over the past 18 weeks we have also done a lot of other things. We raised 15k dollars to purchase iPads for the Chaplains in the Lifebridge hospital system so they could safely pray with COVID patients and help them connect to their families and friends outside the hospital. We delivered food and PPE supplies to 75 neighbors in Druid Heights in conjunction with St. Katherine’s Episcopal Church. We’ve collected and donated LOTS of food and soap and masks and dollars to Samaritan Community to keep their clients healthy, fed and housed. Many of you have signed up to deliver boxes of food and other supplies to clients. We also raised almost 10k dollars for BlackWomenBuild - and are in the process of developing a stronger partnership between BWB, Saint Katherine’s and Memorial.
We continue to listen for prophetic voices - even in this time of isolation. From Rachel’s call to challenge the gender and identity of God, to Natalie’s call to divest of the Legacy of Slavery that is in our past in order to welcome members of every color and nation as full members of Memorial and of the Body of Christ. We have decided to take down our historic plaques and commission the Triptych in order to explore commissioning a new piece of art for the Sanctuary.
We have also been there pastorally for each other in a most challenging and unique time. From phone calls to book studies to zoom coffee hours, to our Daily Devotionals and online Lectio Divina. We have gotten to know our E-Seminarian Rachel Johnson and helped prepare yet another person for a lifetime of ministry in God’s One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. We’ve welcomed another intern, Karen Mercer, to carry us through the Summer and Fall, and continue to support Carolyn Armstrong on her path to Ordination.
We’ve also had to say goodbye to two dear people, Louise Miller and Matthew Fenton III, and we mourn greatly that we still have not been able to gather as we should to say goodbye to them. We continue to pray for Nancy in her grief and Matt and his family in his, and we long for the day when we can commend them both to the glorious company of the Saints in Light.
It has been a journey. And I have been grateful to walk it with each and every one of you.
So.... now what?
Unfortunately it does not look like COVID-19 is going away any time soon, and the actions and inactions of local, state and federal leadership means that we are one of the few developed nations in the world that has an out of control epidemic and no good path to returning to regular in person worship, or any broader sense of normalcy anytime soon. Scripture has much to say about plagues and how they befall sinful and prideful people, and while I don’t believe that God made COVID to punish us, It is certainly true that our nations pride, arrogance, stubbornness and unwillingness to care for our neighbor has resulted in this particular plague being worse here than almost anywhere else. Because of this, with the advice of both the vestry and the worship committee, Memorial will not begin in-person worship this summer. We are going to submit an application to the Diocese for outdoor worship so that, if circumstances change, we can gather a few times in late summer/early fall but for the most part all of our worship will be online for the foreseeable future.
However, the worship committee is working on a large pastoral initiative to make sure everyone who would like to receive communion this summer will be able to. Details are still being worked out, but we will train a large group of LEMs to deliver the sacrament in a safe, socially distant manner with little to no risk for either party. It won’t be ideal, but it will be something.
In addition, because we will be worshipping online for the foreseeable future, we are also announcing a few staffing changes. As we say goodbye to our E-Seminarian, Rachel, we recognize we will need more support. This week Derek Olsen has begun as our part-time Parish Administrator. Derek has a PhD in New Testament studies and has worked and taught in IT for 20 years; he is quite literally the perfect person to help prepare us for a more online life. Derek is the spouse of The Rev. Meredith Olsen, who will be our clergy supply in August while I am on vacation. This will allow Hannah to transition back to doing community engagement and youth programming full time, which wil be a whole new world with a largely online existence in the fall. Finally we are renewing our Deacon Associate agreement with Natalie so she will continue to be with us for the foreseeable future. Justine continues as music minister and is developing a whole new set of technological skills to make it work, I am grateful for her leadership and care for the Music program. Additionally, we have entered into an agreement with a new organist, Brian Edwards, who is an extremely talented Organist from the Caribbean who has just moved to Baltimore. Brian will be recording preludes and postludes, as well as I hope conducting the occasional socially distanced Organ Concert from the Sanctuary.
Having the summer to plan for the new reality of digital church in the fall will allow us to improve the quality and variety of our worship offerings, and hopefully begin to expand our reach and impact as well. None of this is, of course, ideal. But there is no other group of people I’d rather be on this journey with than you all.
E-Church 7/19 9:30am
To join us, all you need to do is click on the link below. We will have the order of service up on the screen to follow along. We recognize that all of us have different levels of comfort with technology - we will do our best to help everyone do what they need to feel comfortable and participate!
Two tips for Zoom worship:
1) Let us see your face! If at all possible, please start a video feed so we can see each other face to face, even across distance.
2) Please mute yourself unless you have a speaking role in the service. And if you find you are muted, please don’t unmute yourself unless asked. However - even when you are muted, please do respond to the prayers and readings, as we are all worshipping together.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84992001341?pwd=QUMvMFYzZU9HQkRLVmxISkVPRGlIQT09
Meeting ID: 849 9200 1341
Password: 563025
One tap mobile
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Dial by your location
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+1 346 248 7799 US (Houston)
Meeting ID: 876 9436 6639
Password: 729226
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The View From Robert Street
The Image of Christ
There has been a lot of discussion recently about ‘White Jesus’ and not just at Memorial. As is expected, whenever a religious topic enters the public sphere the dialogue ends up watered down and muddled. Because we are having our own discussions (and actions) around one image of a white Jesus it makes sense to offer a few thoughts on it here.
A few basic things to keep in mind:
the image of Jesus has always been contested and political and its pointless to pretend otherwise.
It is good that there are as many images of Jesus as there are people on earth - because we should all be able to see Christ in each other.
Jesus wasn’t white.
We make a mistake when we argue against ‘White Jesus’ because we want to be ‘historically accurate.’ Jesus Christ WAS a man who lived in 1st century Galilee AND Jesus Christ is a universal savior for all humanity. If we limit Jesus’ image to what he looked like when he was alive, we also limit the reach of his salvation. As Christians we believe that Christ resides in each of us. The tomb is empty for a reason, so that we may seek and find Jesus in all places. So there is nothing in principle wrong with an image of Jesus with white skin.
But that is not what ‘White Jesus’ is about. When we talk about ‘White Jesus’ we are talking about a modern effort to sanitize the liberating story of Christ into a mild-mannered blond haired, blue eyed Sunday school lesson. More discreetly, we are talking about an effort to take Jesus out of the universal and in to the particular. Jesus is made in the white man’s image as a reminder of who holds power and who doesn’t. Who is in control and who isn’t. This ‘White Jesus’ imagery derives directly from the institution of slavery, both of native americans and African-Americans. Black and brown people are ‘less than’ - which justifies their enslavement, but if they accept Jesus taught to them by white men about the salvific acts of this one white man, they may be redeemable.
This is the thinking that allowed Churches to give out ‘slave bibles’ that were missing all the stories of liberation from the Old Testament. That made it okay to have slave galleries or slave porches in churches. That made it acceptable for White Churches to provide black congregations with white pastors until they had grown enough in their faith to be on their own. This is the thinking that led the Dame Family to dedicate ‘The Transfiguration Painting’ in our Sanctuary to the memory of The Rev. Dr. William Meade Dame.
Now this does not mean that previous images of Jesus, or other images of Jesus in other cultures and contexts aren’t problematic. That’s why I started with reminding us that the image of Christ has always been political and disputed. From the very beginning! After Jesus’ resurrection Mary doesn’t recognize him in the garden, Thomas refuses to believe in his return until he sees for himself, the Disciples on the road to Emmaus don’t recognize him till he breaks bread, Peter is so confused by his appearing that he strips naked and jumps in the Sea of Galilee. A good portion of the book of Acts is dedicated to whether or not Paul did in fact meet Jesus on the road to Damascus. And that’s just the first few books of the New Testament!
As early as the 300s you can find images of Jesus as a Roman Soldier and a Rabbi, with and without a beard, with dark skin and light skin, in stunning detail and as a stick figure. By the 1000’s images of Jesus as a woman were easy to find. The impact and import of these images change and shift over time. What they mean to us changes too. During the crusades it was common for returning crusaders to get tattoos in Jerusalem to mark their conquest. Today you will find every returning group of young hipster Christian pilgrims to Israel coming back with the same tattoos - mostly oblivious to the origin.
All of these images and symbols were and are political. We can debate the windows in Notre Dame or the Sistine Chapel or Rafael’s forum, or the work of Caravaggio in another forum. They may have used a light skinned Jesus, but that is not what we mean when we talk about ‘White Jesus.’
“White Jesus’ is not just about the image of a light skinned savior. It is also about the intention, the purpose, and the symbolism of the work. We are talking about images, teaching, and theology born out of a need to legitimize slavery that depicted good people as white and bad people as black and Jesus as the best of all. The image of Christ became then a tool of repression rather than liberation and a symbol of bondage rather than salvation. It is for this reason that we should interrogate both the art and the underlying theology of our churches and institutions so that we can depict a universal Christ who offers salvation to all, even us sinners.