June 4, Pentecost

Pentecost

2017

Pentecost completes the 50 days of the Easter Season.   We celebrate the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples confirming their faith in the resurrection and empowering them to bear witness to it to the ends of the earth. 

The Holy Spirit gives gifts that enable disciples to tell the whole world about Jesus, such that all people can hear the Gospel in their own language.  Pentecost reverses the curse of Babel where humans were separated from each other by individual languages known only to one’s own exclusive group.  Pentecost celebrates the promise of unity and diversity at the same time, that God will be all in all without doing violence to any.  A cursory glance at each day’s news reveals how desperate the world is for such a miracle. 

Disciples are now the presence of the Risen Christ in the world.  The Holy Spirit pours out gifts to enable us to be this and tell the world what we know.

1. Counsel:  The gift of helpful words of advice to others.

2. Fear of the Lord:  This does not mean being afraid it means, respect, awe, and wonder in the presence of God.

3. Knowledge: The gift of knowing more and more about God.

4. Understanding:  The gift to realize how God is at work in everything.

5. Wisdom:  The gift of knowing how to use your knowledge.

6 Fortitude:  The gift of strength to love God with your whole self and to not be afraid of anything.

7. Piety:  The gift of knowing how much greater than all things is God.

Be thinking about this over the next several days..  What gift would you like on Pentecost this year?

We Had Fun!

Thanks to everyone who attended the Evensong last Sunday evening, and for those who put it on.  Special thanks go to Jim Stanley, Barbara Trevino, and the choir.  Also Steve Leland, Brian Bennett, and Jim Goltz who organized the wine and cheese as well as the coffee tasted test.  

We’ll do this again!

New Reading Group:  Thursday, June 1, 7:00 p.m.

Fr. Bob will lead a group in reading The Religious Potential of the Child, by Sofia Cavalletti.  This is the foundational text for our spiritual formation program for our children called The Catechesis of the Good Shepherd.  This reading group is for people seeking to understand more deeply how the life of faith develops in children and how adults can facilitate, that is cooperate with God in what he is doing in the depths of their children.   The group will meet in Fr. Bob’s office.  This coming Thursday we’ll have an overview of the book and some demonstrations of the insights contained in it.  Fr. Bob has books available.  Get a hold of him if you need one.

Emmaus Road  Monday, June 5, 7:00 p.m.

Emmaus Road concluded its reading of Teilhard de Chardin and the Mystery of Christ.   We now move on to a new book, Simple Gifts: Living Lessons From a Shaker Villiage, by June Sprigg.  The book is available from Amazon

Here’s a description :

In Simple Gifts, June Sprigg tells the story of one of America's last Shaker communities--Canterbury Shaker Village, in Canterbury, New Hampshire--during its twilight years, and of its seven remarkable "survivor" women, who were among the last representatives of our longest-lived and best-known communal utopian society. As a college student Sprigg spent a summer among them, and here she gracefully interweaves the narrative of their lives with the broader history of Shakers in America as she shows us how her experiences there affected her own life and opened the door to her creativity.

Gleaning information from old records and journals that she pored over that summer and later, Sprigg brings to life the generations of Canterbury Shakers from the eighteenth century to the present--their customs, their architecture, their spirituality. She also explores the social and cultural forces and the internal imperatives and tensions that caused membership to decrease, all of which, by 1972, brought the community to crisis.

Chronicling the daily life of the village as she found it, Sprigg uncovers the affirming energies of the Shakers--the prominence of mutual love and respect, the devoted tradition of mothering surrogate children, and, above all, the surviving women's spirited eccentricities. She reveals the Shakers as individuals--their personal histories, their wildly different beginnings, what they gave up to join the Shaker community, and, more important, what they gained.

Through her lively text and drawings and her intimate connection with the community, Sprigg brings us close to its people with a book that both enlightens and inspires.

Outreach Committee

 The Outreach Committee met Sunday, May 21 and continued our discussion on how to move forward to address needs beyond the walls and grounds of Church of the Angels.  We are in the process of incorporating new ideas for activities and continuing to check in and support ongoing ministries. So, while we are still working to support the De La Torre family and helping build up the school library in Uganda, as well as selling crafts for Global Hands of Help, we can also have activities that anyone and everyone in the parish can participate in "at home". 

 We are now gearing up to create Blessing Bags that parishioners can take and give to those in need that we encounter on our daily journeys in the community.  The idea behind Blessing Bags is to provide necessary items to people who are homeless.  To start, we need to collect personal hygiene items, non-perishable food items, etc.  We will have a container to collect donated items at church on Sundays.  

 The items we are looking to gather now are:

 Toiletries - baby wipes/body wipes, dry shampoo, travel toothbrushes, travel toothpaste, dental floss, lotion, sunscreen, chapstick, tissue packs, women's sanitary products, combs, deodorant, band-aids (please no mouthwash or hand sanitizer)

 Foods - (think easy to open packaging, easily consumed by those with limited dental care) small ready-to-eat cans with easy open lids, applesauce, pudding, crackers, soft cereal bars, beef jerky, trail mix, bottled water, dried fruit, nuts

 Other - new socks, new sunhats or ball caps, ponchos, emergency blankets

 During the summer we will have a gathering to put together bags to be dispersed.

Another outreach organization that to note is The Interfaith Refugee and Immigration Services, which is a non-profit, non-sectarian organization that offers refugee resettlement assistance, employment placement and immigration legal aid.

They are a program of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, and the Southern California-based affiliate of Episcopal Migration Ministries, Church World Service, and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. Despite their affiliations, they embrace people of all faiths, races and ethnicities.

Recent immigration policies and developments have greatly affected their work. Their greatest need at the moment is for donations to keep operations going, but they are occasionally in need of furniture or help with a last minute move. For more information please feel free to contact Anne Miles (Anne.e.miles@gmail.com)

Working our Way Through the 95 Theses.

#37.  Can’t we make the choir music more accessible to the choir than Jim Stanley having to tramp up and down the stairs to the room off the upper loft?

Why yes.  Mary Matyseck took a few moments from working on the choir pews to help Fr. Bob install the new file cabinets in the closet behind the choir stalls so the music will be readily accessible, and yet out of the way.