Featuring Rob’s sermon from Sunday, the link to revisit our evening Requiem Mass Service for All Saints, a Prayer for Elections, as well as links to all our content!
Featuring Aaron’s sermon from Sunday, a recording from last year’s Choral Eucharist Service for All Saints, and links to several of our content clearinghouses for all your SJC content needs!
Featuring Rob’s sermon from Sunday, and a new recording of a powerful anthem from the Parish Choir, as well as links to all our content!
Featuring Rob’s sermon from Sunday, and a new recording of a powerful anthem from the Parish Choir, as well as links to all our content!
Featuring our guest preacher Sam DeFlitch’s sermon from Sunday, a Retreat Wrap-up with video slideshow, an update from the Building Hope Campaign, and an important update regarding the appointment of Dame Sarah Mullally as the next Archbishop of Canterbury, and links to several of our content clearinghouses for all your SJC content needs!
Fiscal responsibility and accountability to empower our mission. This week, we will be looking back at this tumultuous year with key members of our leadership team. Today is the first of this week’s annual meeting offerings. Please RSVP for our community zoom on 1/31 at 9am.
Once I accepted this little bat for what it was, I was able to close my eyes and sleep! I slept that night better than I had in a long long time. Every night until I left, I would hear the little bat come into my house, I would say a little greeting to it, then drift into a pleasant and restful night.
The state of our society today, however, seems to thrust this familiar verse into our everyday lives in a new and more immediate way. The patterns of our lives have been disrupted and short term concerns and worries crowd out seemingly all else. We perceive novel challenges at every turn. We have hopes for positive outcomes, but assurance seems very hard to come by. Do we have faith? Can we have faith?
"How do you stand it ?"a close friend asked me not long ago. It is not always easy. Some days my tears flow freely, especially during the holiday season. I know I am not alone So many, maybe most of us, have suffered great losses of one type or the other during this time of the COVID-19 and in our lives. Through all our sufferings, God is with us. I have experienced this reality many times in my life. This I, with
certainty, know.
The psychologists who work with resiliency point to a range of other resources that contribute to resiliency, many of which involve ways and degrees of connection and community, apart from the attributes of the individual. When those can be strengthened and enlarged, both the individual and the community are more resilient. I pause at this – doesn't this echo strongly a message we hear so often at St John's, that the work of the church is community?
At the age of 89, she was carried out of the fire at her retirement home on the shoulder of a firefighter and declared ‘My, my, I will never forget that if I live to be a hundred!’ Nannie didn’t quite make it to one hundred, nearly though, and I was so blessed to have known her into my young adulthood.
The passage is central to my understanding of God and to my call as a beloved child of God, a unique work of God’s hands, molded in divine love. It tells me that as a created, thinking being, I am not yet fully formed. It helps me to understand that NOT knowing all of the answers to my big questions Why am I here? What is the meaning of life? That it is more than fine, it fact it’s may be my destiny to not fully understand the nature of God. To continue to play and wrestle with that understanding throughout my lifetime is a mission in itself.
Christmas is season and today is the Twelfth Day of Christmas – probably the highest profile day of the Christmas Season other than Christmas Day itself. At one time, the festivities of the Eve of the Epiphany rivaled those of Mardi Gras which might have been a reason for Shakespeare naming his play of romantic mayhem and disorder ‘Twelfth Night’.
On the Twelfth Day of Christmas, as the song goes, a gift of twelve drummers drumming was given.I have been collecting Christmas ornaments depicting ‘a partridge in a pear tree’ and all the other Twelve Days giftsover the years.One of my favorite sets of ornaments comes from Louisville Stoneware.
My very favorite set of Twelve Days ornaments came from the old Strawberry Banke shop which some years ago stood on the site of the restaurant Mombo. I love these needlepoint ornaments and have great joy in bringing them out each year.
The celebration of the Twelve Days of Christmas, and the Feast of Epiphany are not as much a focus in the US as in some other countries and I am always a bit sad to see a Christmas tree out on the street on December 26. But however you approach this season, it is what comes next that matters most. In his book ‘The Mood of Christmas’, Howard Thurman offers a prayer that reminds us not to forget the reason for the season as we pack away our beloved Christmas treasures. As this Christmas season draws to a close, I offer you The Work of Christmas and encourage you to wonder with me how we might respond to this invitation.
The Work of Christmas
When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among others,
To make music in the heart.
Merry Christmas, St. John’s! I am connected to your wonderful community because my little brother is Fr. Rob Stevens. Living in Evanston, IL, I am a member of Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago and work as the Village Forester in a neighboring community. It has been one of the silver linings of the pandemic to be able to witness Rob’s work and thus feel more connected to him and your community. Thank you for being a shining light!
It is still Christmas! Even after the “big” day, after New Year’s, it is still Christmas and all the Christmas merchandise is on sale in the stores. Rick & I used to go every New Years day to Marshall Field’s in downtown Chicago and be first in line to eat at the Walnut Room under the big Christmas tree. It was a great time to go because everything was still decorated & we had no problems getting a table. We would meet his Aunt for brunch/lunch and then afterwards we would shop. That was my favorite part! All of the Christmas stuff would be marked down to 75% off! I love getting a good deal. I often bought gifts for people for NEXT Christmas! It’s been a while since I’ve done that, but I still enjoy those memories and I still love getting a good deal!
Of course this year the Walnut Room is closed & I don't even know if they put up a tree. It has been a sad year and so hard for so many, but today it is still Christmas! God has become one of us and there is hope. See below a wonderful adaptation of Psalm 110 by Nan C. Merrill from Psalms for Praying, An Invitation to Wholeness. As you read and pray these words, please remember those whose reality is so different from yours and whose 2020 may have been so much worse.
You, O Divine Breath, dwell within
our hears; with
unconditional Love, You assuage
our fears.
You call us to holiness, to justice,
and integrity,
to free those bound by oppression,
to bring light where ignorance
and darkness dwell.
Come! Drink from the streams of
Living Water.
Come! Feast on the Bread of Life.
I love you all! It is still Christmas!
In this time of our lives when there is no "normal life", I have been enormously inspired by Henry Nouwen, a spiritual writer and mentor to many. I share some of his insights from his book, Here and Now, Living in the Spirit. One of our "faithless fears and worldly anxieties" is to be overwhelmed by a fatalistic response to severe problems in our earthly lives. Nouwen offers us this response, "Fatalism is the attitude that makes us live as passive victims of exterior circumstance beyond our control. The opposite of fatalism is faith. Faith is the deep trust that God's love is stronger than all the anonymous powers of the world and can transform us from victims of darkness into servants of light. It is important to identify the many ways in which we think, speak, or act with fatalism and, step by step, to convert them into moments of faith. This movement from fatalism to faith is the movement that will remove the cold darkness from our hearts and transform us into people whose trust in the power of love can, indeed, make mountains move.
I invite us all to focus in our spiritual journey on our actions of love which reveal God's light amidst the darkness of our world. I pray that "God is light and in God there is no darkness at all". May we walk in the light as God is the light and together, may we minister supported by God's love to this broken world.
