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The Storm of Racism

6/22/2015

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A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped…He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, "Peace! Be still!" Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. Mark 4:37, 39

It has been anything but a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, to paraphrase the opening of Garrison Keillor’s weekly monologue about his fictional Minnesota home town on the radio show “A Prairie Home Companion.” In fact, this week has been much more like the storm that came up on the Sea of Galilee while Jesus and the disciples were sailing across to the other shore.

Jesus had a very full day of teaching and preaching to the crowds that had gathered at the beach; in fact the crowd was so large that Jesus had been preaching from a boat, which acted as a natural amphitheater. At the end of the day, Jesus had the disciples weigh anchor and head to the other side, giving him a little time to get a nap. And then the storm hit.

This past week many of us were making plans for Father’s Day, kids and teachers were keeping their eye on the calendar waiting for that last day of school, the 8th grade dance at Central School in Stirling was celebrated with great festivity, we went to work, we went to Shop-Rite, we went about our lives as usual…maybe some of us even got a nap in. And then Wednesday night a storm arose in Charleston, South Carolina that most of us didn’t know about or feel until sometime Thursday.

Dylann Roof walked into Emmanuel AME Church and killed nine people in cold blood.

When asked why he wouldn’t stop, he gave a racially motivated reason; and in addition to racist comments and photos on his Facebook page, his website displayed a clearly-written manifesto against black people and Jews that would be right at home in any KKK, or terrorist, or neo-Nazi propaganda. And the families of the victims, when invited by the judge to speak at the shooter’s bail hearing, all mentioned the hatred and the violence that they recognized in Dylann’s heart and mind; those who spoke also forgave him, but prayed that God would have mercy on him, and that he might repent and be delivered from the evil within him. The members of Emmanuel Church knew racism when they saw it.

Part of the past week’s storm has been a media storm, with every politician looking to score points and show off his or her leadership chops, and every media outlet trying to make a point from their own angle, and often times just making more noise and wind and hot air – sometimes in a bizarre way. But there has also been a storm of emotions – anguish, anger, grief, astonishment, bone-weary recognition, horror, heart-brokenness, numbness, devastation, a sense of ‘déjà vu all over again.’

A number of people have wanted to ascribe Dylann’s actions to mental illness; but he is not psychotic, or schizophrenic; he was not hearing voices; he was following a carefully thought-out plan. He is sick, all right, but in a soul sense, a sin sense – because that’s what racism is: sin.

It’s a sin that gets inside of you and eats away at you, corrodes your soul over time and many choices and actions and decisions, bit by bit. And it’s also a sin that lurks in our culture, like a virus that remains hidden in the nerve endings of the body until there is a flare-up, often coming back with a vengeance. It’s a sin that infects individuals and social structures in which we all participate

I think it’s important to understand what racism is and how it works. In their pastoral letter on race way back in 1994 the Episcopal House of Bishops described the essence of racism as prejudice coupled with power, and as much as it settles into the souls of individuals and groups of people, it also gets into the fabric of our institutions, our patterns of life, our assumptions about how things should be; and in its extreme forms takes the path of violence. That’s why the civil rights movement was necessary – laws, schools, businesses, the entertainment industry, the military, sports, law enforcement, the professions all needed to be changed, and they weren’t going to be changed without courageous, concerted, and consistent effort on the part of the black community and white people willing to stand and work – and yes, fight - alongside them. Individual hearts and minds needed changing, but so did institutions, customs, habits, and assumptions, and that kind of work is not over, and probably will never be over until Christ returns.

Of course, racism in the US doesn’t only target African-Americans – we know to our shame that Japanese-Americans, Latino immigrants, Jews, South Asians, people of Middle Eastern descent have all been targeted in different times and places; but this specific spiritual virus is strongest and most entangled with the black community because of our particular history of slavery going right back to the earliest days of our country.

I’ll tell you, as a white person, it is not easy for me to think and talk about racism, because it’s not targeted against me, it fades into the background, I have to focus on it to be aware of it – and because I don’t want to think that I might be participating in racism in some form; I don’t want to be that kind of person.

My great-great-grandfather was born in 1821 outside of Baltimore, and in1863 he came north to New York State and met and married my great-great-grandmother. In my child’s mind I had made up a story that he had left the South because he disagreed with slavery. I never thought much more about it until nine years ago when we were having a family history discussion over Thanksgiving dinner. Somehow it came up that my great-great-grandfather was a dry-goods merchant, and after the wedding in New York they had gone back to Baltimore to live. Now, he did not own slaves, but what is sold in a dry-goods store? Cotton cloth. And where did that cotton come from? It came from the blood, sweat, and tears of black slaves. My great-great-grandfather was a very wealthy man, and in many different ways over the years, I have benefitted from his wealth. It’s not easy.

I suspect that it is not so hard for those of you who are African-American or have black family members to talk about racism – painful, but not difficult; I am sure you have experienced it in ways I will never know anything about.

So where is Jesus in this storm? Are we just to throw up our hands and say – well, we did what we could do in the 1950s and 60s and that will have to be good enough? Or say that we bear no animosity or ill-will or hatred toward a person of another race and so racism doesn’t affect us?

No; in our baptismal promises we are asked if we will renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God – and our answer is: I renounce them. And we are also asked if we will seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves; and if we will strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being? Our answer is: I will, with God’s help. As baptized people we have committed ourselves – each one of us – to following Jesus in these ways, among others.

The work of action, attitude, justice, and prayer is something we are each called to undertake as we are able, as the Holy Spirit leads us and gives us the ability. The fight against racism is not over yet; we are called to keep on keeping on, knowing that we are not alone, that Jesus is in the boat with us, and has the power to say to the storm: Peace! Be still!

As we go forth to do God’s work, let us remember that the power of God’s love is stronger than the storm of hate, that the power of peace is greater than violence, and that the goodness of God’s purposes for all his children as shown forth in Jesus’ death and resurrection trumps all else.

The Bishop of the Episcopal Church in South Carolina has asked us to join with all those who are praying for Emmanuel Church and the people of Charleston and say together the Prayer of St. Francis, found on page 833:

Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is
hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where
there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where
there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where
there is sadness, joy. Grant that we may not so much seek to
be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is
in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we
are born to eternal life. Amen.


Victoria Geer McGrath
All Saints’ Church, Millington, NJ
Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
June 21, 2015
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Pentecost: Drunk and Disorderly?

6/4/2015

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All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, "What does this mean?" But others sneered and said, "They are filled with new wine." Acts 2:12-13
Drunk and disorderly – in New Jersey a person who is charged with disorderly conduct can end up with a fine of one thousand dollars, and up to six months in jail, or at least be charged with a misdemeanor resulting in sentence of thirty days and a fine of five hundred dollars. That’s how much we value the peace of our communities and the good behavior of our citizens.

And even though wine was very much a part of daily life in ancient Israel, and had a role in the Sabbath meal and prayers, public drunkenness was very much frowned upon. And yet that is the way some by-standers understood what was happening on the day of Pentecost – those followers of Jesus were drunk and disorderly, filled with new wine! And in some measure, that charge was not so far off-base.

The disciples were gathered together for prayer and worship on a public and religious holiday: Pentecost – which in the Jewish calendar is both the spring wheat harvest and the celebration of Moses’ receiving the Torah, the Ten Commandments. It was an important time – a day for as many people as possible to gather for worship in the Temple in Jerusalem; crowds had come from so many parts of the Jewish diaspora, all with their own languages and dialects. And in the morning the disciples were gathered together for prayer in someone’s house – with the windows open; and while they were praying there was an overwhelming experience of wind, and fire, a rushing and blowing sound, tongues of fire appearing above each person’s head. And we all know what the combination of fire and blowing wind brings on: an uncontrollable situation.

Add to this the disciples spontaneously proclaiming the mighty things that God had done; they were speaking in languages they did not know, but the words were being given to them, and they were loud enough to draw a crowd out in the street, where the people who had come to Jerusalem from so many diverse places heard them, and heard God being praised and proclaimed in their very own languages. No wonder they were thought to be drunk and disorderly!

And it was all because the Holy Spirit had been poured out on the disciples, just as Jesus had promised at his Ascension. It’s as if God was saying to those gathered: You think the resurrection was something mind-blowing? Well, take a look at this! If you were going to make a billboard poster or a Facebook meme out of it, you could have a picture of a dove, surrounded by flames with the words, “The Holy Spirit: disrupting worship and the world since Pentecost 33 AD.”

These are dangerous, disruptive images because the power that was poured out when the Holy Spirit was given was a power strong enough to change people’s lives, strong enough to shake up the status quo, strong enough to break through and overflow all institutional and hierarchical containers so that the power and the truth of God working in and through God’s people would be unleashed upon the world. That’s the whole point of Pentecost – the Spirit of God working in and through ordinary, everyday men and women, followers of Jesus, to bring the Kingdom of God to fruition here and now in our world and in our communities.

The Spirit does this by coming at us slant, sideways, like the wind which blows where it chooses and we can’t see it, but we can see its effects. And so the Holy Spirit is continually surprising us, catching us off-guard, empowering the most surprising people to be agents of change, proclamation, and hope. If we look back over the whole story of the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament, we will see this pattern over and over again: God choosing the least likely person to be God’s partner, messenger, agent of divine help, and salvation. God is always choosing the youngest, the second-born, the one with the poor track record or the stutter, the outcast to join hands with the Lord and move the story along. Even Moses, that great hero and leader, the one who received the Torah - Moses was on the run from the law after having killed a man, hiding out in the desert, tending his father-in-law’s sheep, saw the fiery bush but put up a fight in answering God’s call because he stuttered…it’s almost like a Johnny Cash song.

So in this new chapter of God’s relationship with his people and his creation, the Spirit was poured out on all the disciples – not just Peter, not just James and John, or even the rest of the Twelve. The power of the Spirit was given to all so that the gift of each person’s wisdom, experience, perspective, personality, and talents might be vehicles and agents for God to be at work in the world. That’s enlivening, and invigorating, but it’s also scary – from an institutional point-of-view – because the Spirit doesn’t usually follow chain-of-command or the proper channels; in the Christian life there is no straight line from point A to point B, or at least rarely. It’s much more like God the Spirit to push us, and nudge us, and sometimes blow us off-course to get us where God wants us to go.

Another thing to remember about the Spirit is that he is not given for the private good of any single individual, but for the good of the whole Body of Christ – which of course is the whole Church Universal, but is equally the Body of Christ as it is constituted here at All Saints’ as we live and move and have our being in this place and in the neighborhoods where we live and work. We need one another if we are to do the work God calls us to; we need each other’s wisdom, insight, discernment, understanding of Scripture, we need one another’s prayers, and we need each other to feast and play together, to work together, and to see the face of Christ in one another.

Pentecost was not just the kick-off of the Church that we remember yearly, but it is the fundamental power and pattern of God’s life with us here and now: the Spirit working in surprising, disrupting, and enlivening ways in and through and amongst every single person who proclaims Jesus as Lord – and frequently in those who don’t. A quote from Bette Davis in the movie “All About Eve” (slightly amended) says it well: Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy ride. Fire, wind, and water – the Spirit of God is here and continues to call us into God’s future; fasten your seatbelts. Amen.

Victoria Geer McGrath
All Saints’ Church, Millington, NJ
The Day of Pentecost
May 24, 2015

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In The World...With Jesus

6/4/2015

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Jesus said: And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one. John 17:11
Being in the world but not of the world – that’s a phrase that often pops up in Christian parlance, a short hand way of describing the relationship of a Christian to their surrounding culture.

There is good Scriptural warrant for this phrase, and this portion of Jesus’s prayer for his disciples at the Last Supper – which we usually refer to as the High Priestly prayer – is one of those passages that talks about the connection between Jesus’s followers and the world around them.

And yet, being in the world but not of the world is not a phrase that comes easily to many Episcopalians, because when the Bible speaks of “the world”, it is really referring to culture, and social structures, and the agreed upon patterns of human governance.
For much of the life of the Episcopal Church, and the Church of England before it, the Church both shaped and participated in its culture, along with many other main-line American Protestant churches (Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Disciples of Christ, Congregational).

In fact, as soon as the Emperor Constantine decided back in the fourth century that the Roman Empire should be Christian, the social structures of the Empire – both formal and in formal – started to be Christian. Not only were laws made that reflected at least a bit of Christian teaching and practice, but music, and painting, and architecture all began to be put to use in the service of the faith and the Church – that’s why we have beautiful churches and cathedrals in Europe that were designed, built, and decorated by some of Europe’s finest artisans and artists. Music began to be written that enhanced the Church’s liturgy and prayer life, and that sound particularly well for the sort of church buildings that were being built. As the old Roman culture of the Empire began dying away in the fourth and fifth centuries, a new culture was emerging – the culture of the Christian empire, one that was increasingly divided between the Latin West centered in Rome, and the Orthodox East which claimed Constantinople as its headquarters. So Christian faith was having a profound impact – not just on the lives of individual believers, or even on congregations full of worshippers; but on the society in which it found itself; Christianity became a shaper of culture.

We can try to describe culture in many different ways, but usually it is something we take for granted, just the way things are done, culture is to human beings as the water in a gold fish tank is to the gold fish – and most often we see it best when we can step away from our culture for a time.

That became very obvious to me when we were living in Japan in the late 1980s; not only was there a contrast between Japanese culture and American culture to get used to, but among the ex-patriot community there was a constant tug (at least among mothers of young children) between American expectations about the way to do things and British expectations – most often these took the form of complaints about children’s shoes and schools.A very clear example of the struggle between culture and faith was the decline, illness, and eventual death of the old Japanese Emperor Hirohito; his condition was reported on daily in the newspapers and on radio and TV, and yet in our English-speaking Japanese Anglican parish in Tokyo he was never prayed for.
That was because pre-1945 the Japanese Emperor was traditionally considered to be divine descended from the Shinto sun goddess. Although that officially changed after the war, even in 1989 for many Japanese Christians, praying for the Emperor was too close to praying to the Emperor, and so it was not done; the culture, in this case, trumped Christian practice.
The whole relationship between faith/Church and culture has swung back and forth, depending on where you lived, who was in power, and what were the dominant influences of the time. But for the most part, in the United States, there was a broad feeling that our American culture was Christian, or at least some lowest-common-denominator of public acceptance and understanding of the role and importance of Christian faith and Church structure and life.
Even though we’ve always had many different denominations and religions, and celebrated regional versions of our culture and welcomed (for the most part) the cultural contributions of immigrant peoples into our midst, we still had an over-arching feeling and story about ourselves as Americans that included some form of Christian culture and Church belonging.
But those days have been over since at least the mid-1960s, and with each passing year we see more and more that the driving factors in our culture are not Christian, not religious at all, but secular; no religion.
That’s why youth sports and children’s birthday parties get scheduled for Sunday mornings; its why people increasingly have to work on Sundays even though they may not have jobs in medicine, law enforcement, or emergency services; it’s why parents and teachers in school communities have trouble with expectations about children’s behavior and work ethic.
Just this past week, the Pew Research Center released a report citing the fastest growing group in the United States (religiously speaking) is people who formerly claimed some Church affiliation who now claim none – not atheist or agnostic, but no Church.
The reasons for this are too many to go into here and now, and this is not really new news, but it is instructive that these same people who are leaving Church still have a desire to pray, to be connected to God, to make a difference in their communities.
As church and a formal connection to faith has moved from the center of our cultural expectations to the margins, we Christians have an opportunity – one that is very much reflected in the apostles’ experience in this time between the Ascension of Jesus and the giving of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.
The apostles had moved from a place of confidence and clarity in Jesus’ presence with them, to wondering what was going to come next, who should be in leadership, what was going to be their role now?
The Risen Christ had given them some instructions – to go out into the world; to teach and baptize; to announce the kingdom of God; but also to stay in the city and wait until the power of the Spirit should come upon them.
Those were, at the same time, enormous projects, and very vague and unsettling.
We – all Christians, at least in America and Europe, and the old main-line churches especially – are in the same place as the apostles were.
We are wondering what comes next, what is our role in our culture and our communities; and our “new location” on the margins of our culture can actually be an advantage.
We don’t have to keep up any particular social appearances, we don’t have to work to hold onto some privileged status, or be fearful that too clear a statement of Jesus’ words and meaning (once we have really delved into what that is) will upset those who come to Church only out of habit or some vague sense of “Church being a good thing” – those days are long behind us.
We get a different perspective from the margins – one that is closer to the disenfranchised, the powerless, the poor, the overlooked and outcast, the very people that our Lord hung out with during his earthly ministry.
Instead, from the margins, we have the opportunity to explore and examine anew Jesus’ words and life and meaning, and to learn to pray deeply.
We can practice speaking with humble confidence about what God is doing with us and for us – not what someone else should or should not be doing, but how God is molding and shaping us and our life together, and why we find that life-giving.
And finally, we can allow ourselves to be curious about our neighbors, about what their lives are like – what their struggles, and hopes, and joys, and fears are – and how we might come alongside them, partner with them in ways that reflect the goodness of God.
In short, we can learn, perhaps for the first time, to be in the world, to be living in our culture, to be fully a member of American society – and at the same time, to know that we are not of our culture; to know that the values, and story, and practices that shape our lives as Jesus’ followers are fundamentally different from what is on offer from most parts of our culture.
And when we do this we will be in good company – that of the apostles as they stood on the threshold of the great adventure of life and faith guided and shaped by the Holy Spirit, taking our part in the blessing of the world.

Let us pray.
O God, you have made of one blood all the peoples of the
earth, and sent your blessed Son to preach peace to those
who are far off and to those who are near: Grant that people
everywhere may seek after you and find you; bring the
nations into your fold; pour out your Spirit upon all flesh;
and hasten the coming of your kingdom; through Jesus
Christ our Lord. Amen. ~ Book of Common Prayer

Victoria Geer McGrath
All Saints’ Church, Millington, NJ
Seventh Sunday of Easter: the Sunday after the Ascension
May 17, 2015
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Abiding Connections

6/4/2015

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I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. John 15:5
Abide…it’s a funny, old-fashioned sounding word; perhaps it conjures up visions of funerals a century ago, based on the then popularity of the hymn Abide with me fast falls the eventide Sometimes people will say something like: “I cannot abide your bad temper any longer”, meaning, “I can’t stand or put up with it.” In any case, it’s not a word we use regularly, and yet, we hear it in this Gospel passage eight times; and we’ll hear it again in next week’s continuation of the passage another three times. So what does it mean, really, and why is it so important to Jesus?

Abide means to stay close to, be connected to; and slightly earlier in this Gospel Jesus talks about “In my Father’s house are many mansions” – that really dwelling places, or abiding places. An  abiding place is where we live, where we are at home. So to abide in Christ is to be connected to, to dwell with, to be at home with Christ. And Jesus uses the image of the grape vine to illustrate how God’s People are to abide in him.

How does a grape vine grow? I think a lot of us have heard about vineyards needing the right kind of soil, light, and climate to grow grapes that will be good for wine-making; that is true, but grape vines are also pretty hardy, and under the right conditions can last anywhere from fifty to one hundred years. When I was a child a family friend had a concord grape vine growing up the corner of her porch; she did nothing special to it, and come August there were always enough grapes to eat and make jelly.

But if you are going to be serious about grape growing, you have to attend to them. The vines grow along a trellis or support, the main portion of the vine getting stronger and thicker season by season. Shoots and leaves branch off of the vine, and it from here that the grapes begin to grow in cluster. From time to time the vine has to be pruned back, cutting of the dead wood, stimulating growth along the length of the vine.

In many places around the Mediterranean, each family or household would have a grapevine as part of their everyday garden – whether or not it was a commercial enterprise for them. And in ancient Israel the grape vine was a very strong and important symbol; it represented God’s People, those whom the Lord led out of slavery in Egypt and planted in the soil of Canaan, who were to produce good spiritual fruit and crops from the abundance of God’s strength, support, and providential care as the vinegrower.
Over time, the image of the vine also became connected to the ministry of the Messiah that the People hoped and longed for. In fact, in Jesus’ day, above the entrance to the re-built Temple in Jerusalem, there was carved vine thick with grapes and overlaid with gold. The message was that the Temple was the place where the Messiah was to come, and bring to fruition all of God’s purposes for his people, who were themselves to bear the proper fruit.

Jesus says: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower”; he is making it clear that he is the genuine one, the Messiah pictured as a vine, embodying the People Israel. He also says: “I am the vine, you are the branches”; the followers of Jesus are connected to him, rooted and grounded in him, of the same stock as Jesus, the part of the vine whose job it is to bear fruit, to produce the results of Jesus’ life, because that is the way a vine works. And that’s where abiding comes in.

Jesus tells us to abide in him – to stay close, connected, dwelling in him, making our home in him; that is the way we will bear the fruit of a Christian life. Even more than that, Jesus tells us to abide in him, just as he abides in us – a mutual indwelling between Christ and us. That is more than following a check list of dos and don’ts; it’s about spending time with the Lord in prayer and meditation; being aware of God’s presence all around us as well as within us; practicing gratitude; exercising love for neighbor as well as love or God; letting the words and stories of the Scriptures soak into us.

There are so many things in our world that pull us away from doing this. We all have responsibilities, worries, schedules that move themselves into the front and center of our focus – in fact, some of us have three or four things at any given time that are jumping up and down in front of us, clamoring for attention, claiming to be THE most important thing you have to do. This is what you might call “the tyranny of the urgent”, and it is never satisfied, never will be satisfied.  So if you leave prayer and meditation for a time when your schedule calms down, or if you wait to read the Bible until your present crisis is over, or only give thought for your neighbor when you have the luxury of extra, those things will never happen; you will never develop a deep and abiding faith in God; you will be cut off from the strength and energy to do God’s work in God’s way.

Instead, abide in Christ by making your first conscious thought in the morning one of thanksgiving to God for the day ahead. One of the ways I do this with children is by teaching them to say/think/pray: Good morning, God; you’re great! We can do that each in our own way, and add our prayer for those closest to us, for whatever the day might bring to them and to us. We can ask to be faithful and true as a spouse, parent, child, sibling, co-worker – to be an agent and a vessel of God’s grace and blessing; and then throughout the day, see if we can catch moments of doing this, and offer a quick “thank you” to God. You can get the Bible, the Prayer Book, Forward Day by Day, and all manner of other Christian literature on-line, and on your smart-phone – and if you don’t have a smart phone a small Bible or devotional booklet is so easy to carry in your bag or in your car – and then discover how many different ways you can find a few minutes to pray, read, or meditate: waiting in the doctor’s office, on-line at Shop-Rite, when you’ve been put on hold on the telephone, waiting for your gas tank to get filled, riding the train or bus to work. Whatever you can do to direct your attention to God with love, gratitude, and dependence at various times throughout the day will get you in the habit of abiding in Christ; you will remember your connection to him, and it will leave you with an open heart so that Christ may abide in you.
And a final thought about this image of the vine and the branches and the vinegrower – that of being pruned. Just like a grape vine and so many other plants, when we are pruned back by God in some way, it is so that we can become for fruitful, more abundant – not just in our faith, but in the outcome of faith, what St. Paul names as love, joy, peace, forbearance/patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, as well as righteousness and justice. God does not prune back our spiritual dead-wood in some arbitrary way, but so that we will flourish, be more alive, and bring more of God’s blessing into the world.
Jesus calls us to abide in him, and to know that he abides is us; that is the way we grow in God.

Let us pray.
Gracious God, dwell in us, so that we may dwell in you and bear your fruit in your world, remembering always your love. Amen.

Victoria Geer McGrath
All Saints’ Church, Millington, NJ
Fifth Sunday of Easter
May 3, 2015
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All Saints' Episcopal Church

 15 Basking Ridge Road, Millington NJ 07946    phone: (908) 647-0067    email: allstsmill@hotmail.com