Tag Archives: feasts

Be joyful in Love, all you peoples!

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Easter 7B, 123 May 2024. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

  • Acts 1:15-17.  The crowd numbered about one hundred..
  • 1 John 5:9-13.  So that you may know that you have eternal life.
  • John 17:6-19. So that they may have my joy made complete in themselves.

O God of our complete joy, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may and cost what it will.

In the church year, we are now as deep into the Easter Season as we can go. We have just passed the Feast of the Ascension, which is a Principal Feast Day in the Episcopal Church, but a celebration that is perhaps a little embarrassing for many progressive Christians. I mean, it’s a little embarrassing to commemorate a day when, according to the writer of Luke and Acts, a full forty days after he was raised from the dead, Jesus opened their minds to the scriptures and gave his final blessing. He then was lifted up off of the ground, and a cloud took him out of his disciples’ sight. But as my friend Brother James Koester, the Superior at St. John the Evangelist across the river in Cambridge, recently wrote: [1]

The Ascension is not rocket science, and it loses its power if we reduce it to a literal description….Instead, the Ascension is about the mystery of Christ’s present reality: risen, ascended, and glorified. This not only shall be ours one day but it is ours today. Continue reading →

Blessed Pauli Murray

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Feast of Pauli Murray.  9 July. 2023. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

  • Sirach 15:1-6. They will lean on her and not fall.
  • Galatians 3:23-29. There is no longer Jew or Greek…slave or free…male and female.
  • Mark 12:1-12.  The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone [or keystone]; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing.

O God of reconciling love, grant us the wisdom, the strength and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

Today is a long-anticipated, special day at Emmanuel Church because we are celebrating the Feast Day of The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray with the unveiling of a statue of her, beautifully rendered by our Artist-in-Residence Ted Southwick. The statue is installed on the sanctuary pulpit, from which Dr. Murray preached. We are thrilled and honored to welcome her niece Rosita Stevens-Holsey, who will speak with us after the service. While Dr. Murray’s feast day is July 1, the day that she completed her earthly mission, today is the 112th anniversary of her baptism at St. James’ Episcopal Church in Baltimore. Just prior to being ordained, she had described herself as: woman, Christian, seminarian, poet, lawyer, person of color, and senior citizen. Last week in Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion in the bigoted-website case, she recalled Murray’s pioneering work with regard to public accommodations.[1] I want to assure you that Pauli Murray is still speaking to us all. Continue reading →

2012

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Photo credit: UNC. Carolina Digital Library and Archives via WikiCommons.

Photo credit: UNC. Carolina Digital Library and Archives via WikiCommons.

The 77th General Convention of The Episcopal Church resolved to add The Rev. Dr. Anna Pauline Murray to Holy Women, Holy Men and the Calendar of the Church Year, which now commemorates her life on the day of her death, July 1.

Murray attended Emmanuel in the early 1970s and served on our vestry (1973-75).  In her autobiography (1987) , she credits former Rector Al Kershaw with encouraging her to leave her faculty position at Brandeis University and pursue ordination in The Episcopal Church.  In 1977, at the age of sixty-six, she became The Church’s first black-woman priest.

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