November 16, 23rd Sunday after Pentecost

Food For Thought:  Video Version

Sundays, 9:00 a.m.  Science & Religion DVD

We turn our attention toward developments of Geology and Cosmology and their relationship to biblical chronology. 

Coffee Hour Sign Up

The Sign up Sheet for Coffee Hour for November and December will be on coffee table this Sunday.  Please sign up to take a turn. 

 Thank you to Adrian and Jacqueline Beltran, Carol Law, and Briony James for filling in some of the open spots.   We still need more people to help. 

 You can also sign up by emailing the Church Office as well as using the Sign Up Sheet on Sundays.

 Dates Needed:   7:45 November:   November  23, & 30

                            10:15 November:  November  30

 Dates Needed:  7:45 December:  December 7, 21, 28

                            10:15 December:   December 14, & 28

Information Updates: 

On Sunday we’ll put out the current Parish Directory and Email list so you can make corrections to it.  Each will be in a separate file folder.  You need to check both and make any necessary corrections in both files because they are in different parts of the computer.

 Year of Grace Calendars

The Year of Grace Calendars for the Christian Year which begins on the First Sunday of Advent, November 30, will be available for purchase on Sunday.  They come in three sizes:  Laminated Poster, which is great for hanging on your refrigerator door, Laminated Notebook size which is 11 x 17, and Paper Notebook size.   An envelope will be available for checks and cash. 

 Altar Flowers for 2015

The Sign Up Sheet for Altar Flowers for Sundays in 2015 will be on the table outside Church on Sunday.  Sign up for the Sundays you would like to give Flowers.  The cost is $55.00 per Sunday. 

 Annual Giving for 2015

Stop the Presses!

Faith and Reason Don’t Contradict Each Other!!!!

 On Monday The Wall Street Journal had an article in its Wealth Management section, entitled, “Can Money Buy Happiness?”  The article reported on some research in this area.

The results, at first glance, may seem obvious: Yes people with higher incomes are, broadly speaking, happier than those who struggle to get by.   But dig a little deeper into the findings and they get a lot more surprising—and lot more useful.

In short, the latest research suggests , wealth alone doesn’t provide any guarantee of a good life.  What matters a lot more than a big income is how people spend it.  For instance, giving money away makes people a lot happier than lavishing it on themselves.  And when people do spend money on themselves, people are a lot happier when they use it for experiences like travel than for material goods. 

The article explored the difference in the experience of acquiring things vs. experiences reflecting why satisfaction in acquiring things has a very short shelf life.  It makes an interesting case for exercises is self denial as a way of enhancing one’s satisfaction in what one has.  Maybe there is something to Lent after all!

What is really interesting in the article is the subsection called, Try Giving it Away

The paradox of money is that although earning more of it tends to enhance our well-being, we become happier by giving it away than by spending it on ourselves.   An experiment was conducted with some college students who were given a sum of money and telling them to spend it on themselves and others to spend it on someone else.  Those who spent money on other people were happier than those who treated themselves. 

This was followed up by similar experiments in other countries with the same results.  The Gallup World Poll found that people who donated money to charity were happier in rich and poor countries alike.  “The fact that we were able to observe the same we’d seen in Canada in places like South Africa and Uganda was probably the biggest surprise of my career,” the researcher said.

“A lot of us think we’ll give to charity one day when we’re richer, but actually we see the benefits of giving even among people who are struggling to meet their own basic needs.”

What moves the needle in terms of happiness is not so much the dollar amount you give, but the perceived impact of your donation.  If you can see your money making a difference in other people’s lives, it will make you happy even if the amount you gave was quite small.

Isn’t it interesting that things Christians have known and proclaimed for two millennia turn out to be confirmed by scientific research protocols.  It shows once again that faith and reason don’t contradict each other. 

What is described in the article is carried out in what we call The Four Fields of Christian Giving:

Annual Giving:  Financial Support for the life and work of the local parish. 

 Mission Giving:  Financial Support for the spread of the Gospel and the relief for human need  For us this usually means sponsored by the Outreach Committee, funded by 10% of  income from movie locations

 Capital Giving  Occasional Financial Support for building new or upkeep of Church infrastructure.  This is funded by income realized from the Church being used as a movie location, and endowment income from gifts left by the Campbell Johnston family and other benefactors.  Which leads to…

 Legacy Giving:  Making a provision for the Church out of your estate so that your support continues beyond your lifetime so that future generations may enjoy what we’ve all come to value. 

 The Annual Giving Letter and Pledge Cards have been mailed out.  We ask your participation and to please return them to us as soon as possible.

 Outreach Committee

Mission Giving

Thanks to everyone who purchased items in the last two weeks for Global Hands in Hope.  We’ve been able to send them $366.00 from the proceeds.

 The picture below shows some of the women working on items to sell

Emmaus Road  Monday, November 10, 7:00 p.m.

Reading through Chapter 16.  It’s a quick read and holds one’s attention

Emmaus Road goes from one end of the spectrum,  having concluded Fr. James Martin’s book Jesus, to the other, or maybe we should say, “dark side.”   We will be reading Tosca Lee’s novel, Demon: a Memoir.   It is a portrayal of Lucifer.  And through this novel we will encounter much of the thinking on the nature of evil in the Christian Tradition.   Emmaus Road read Ms. Lee’s novel, Iscariot, earlier in the year.  This fictionalized portrayal of Judas captured all of the current biblical scholarship about him, in a very engaging way.   Just in case you think we’ve gone off the deep end, we did read some years ago The Screwtape Letters.  So we’ve met this guy before.   The book is available from Amazon.  Everyone is welcome to join the discussion.  Below is description of it from Amazon.  

 Recently divorced and mired in a meaningless existence, Clay drifts from his drab apartment to his equally lusterless job as an editor for a small Boston press--until the night Lucian finds him and everything changes with the simple words, "I'm going to tell you my story, and you're going to write it down and publish it. "What begins as a mystery soon spirals into chaotic obsession as Clay struggles to piece together Lucian's dark tale of love, ambition, and grace--only to discover that the demon's story has become his own. And then only one thing matters: learning how the story ends.

 Thanksgiving

Liturgy for Thanksgiving:  Wednesday, November 28, 7:00 p.m.

We will celebrate Thanksgiving on the evening before, Wednesday, November 28 7:00 p.m.  with the Holy Eucharist.  This liturgy is wonderful as we hear Scripture that touches very deeply our American consciousness, along with hymns that recall us to our heritage as well.  Doing the Eucharist on the Eve of Thanksgiving  gives us the benefit of touching our deep Christian and American roots, as well as leaving Thanksgiving Day free for family and friends.

 Advent is Coming

 Advent Event:  Sunday December 7

Following the 10:15 Liturgy on Sunday December 7 we will have a Parish Potluck in the Parish Hall and make Advent Wreaths for use at home. Hand’s of the Angels will have knitting crafts for sale.  A signup sheet for the potluck will be outside Church the next several Sundays. 

 Food For Thought

 We ran out of the article s from the current issue of Pacific Standard,  entitled, We Are All Confident Idiots..  We will have more on the Food For Thought Table this Sunday.  And this time we’ll have all the pages, promise!

 A description of the article is below.

 As the author writes, “The trouble with ignorance is that if feels so much like expertise.  A leading researcher on the psychology of human wrongness sets us straight.”   What really does make it so hard to admit, “I don’t know?”   I guess I’ll have to turn in the T-shirt Leigh Torgerson found in an airline magazine.  On the front of the T-shirt it says, “Of course I’m right.  I’m Bob!”