The Message - November 2022

NOVEMBER 2022 • Volume 24, Number 6

Playing with Fire: 3 A quiz to get you in the holiday spirit: 7 Getting Ready for Jesus: 10 Heavenly Inheritance: 12

The Message this month: Contents:

Christ Church Staff:

Contributors:

From Our Rector ..............................3

The Rev. Patrick Gahan, Rector

Music Ministry ................................8

The Rev. Scott Kitayama, Associate Rector

Youth Ministry .................................9

The Rev. Brien Koehler, Associate Rector for Mission and Formation

Family Ministry .............................10

The Rev. Justin Lindstrom, Associate Rector for Community Formation

Outreach Ministry...........................11 Great Commission ..........................12

PATRICK GAHAN

Karen Von Der Bruegge, Director of Vocational Discernment and Pastoral Care

Page Turners...................................13

Halleta Heinrich, Director of Family Ministry

Photo Album...................................15

Lily Fenton, Nursery Director Avery Moran, Youth Minister

Front cover photo: Gretchen Duggan

Susan Lindstrom, Director of College Ministry

Trunk or Treat Superheros

Back Cover photo: Gretchen Duggan

JENNIFER HOLLOWAY

Sidewalk Saturday Superheros

Jennifer Holloway, Assistant Music Director, Children’s Music Director & Social Media Manager

Editor: Gretchen Duggan Worship Services: Sundays 7:30 a.m. - Rite I 9 & 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. - Rite II *9 & 11 a.m are live streamed

Charissa Fenton, Receptionist Robert Hanley, Director of Campus Operations Darla Nelson, Office Manager Donna Franco, Financial Manager AVERY MORAN

Gretchen Comuzzi Duggan, Director of Communications

Sunday School 10:00 a.m.

Christian Education for Children, Youth, and Adults

Monica Elliott, Executive Assistant to the Rector Elizabeth Martinez, Kitchen Manager

Wednesdays 11 a.m. - Eucharist with Anointing and

Robert Vallejo, Facilities Manager Rudy Segovia, Hospitality Manager

Healing Prayers. *The service is also live streamed

HALLETA HEINRICH

Saturdays 8:30 a.m. - Eucharist on the Outreach

Andy Anderson, Senior Warden

* www.cecsa.org/live-stream

Margaret Pape, Junior Warden Doug Daniel

Visit us on-line at www.cecsa.org

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facebook.com/ChristChurchSATX @christchurchsatx @cecSATX

Joe Garcia, Sexton

2022 Vestry:

Pavilion lawn

Follow us:

Joshua Benninger, Music Minister & Organist

Lisa Miller

Catherine de Marigny Garry Schnelzer JUSTIN LINDSTROM

Rick Foster

Garnett Wietbrock

Spencer Hill

Julianne Reeves

David McArthur

Scott Rose

Playing with Fire:

The Recreating Power of the Sabbath Prometheus, Peter Paul Rubens, 1636, Museuo del Prado, Madrid

by Patrick Gahan

No one ever told us, “Don’t play with

fire.” My two dozen cousins and I had a graphic, repeated warning thrust upon us: my grandfather’s legs. When he was a child, his legs were terribly burned, such that the charred, scarred, melted skin never completely healed. Most of our large family’s festivities took place at my grandparents’ one-bedroom apartment, and we were thrust into proximity with Granddaddy. On those occasions, He would perfunctorily hike up the legs of his trousers to above his knees – first one then the other – and paint the oozing and crusted sores with Gentian Violet, a mysterious plum-colored potion. He would keep his trousers hiked up until the fluid dried to a deep purple, indifferent to our presence. His two legs looked like photos of the surface of the moon, and

they served as a billboard forewarning of what playing with fire would do to you.

That’s not to say that we were not given apocryphal, moralistic explanations of how Granddaddy burned his legs. All the tales included curiosity, disobedience, and a beguiling five-gallon can of gasoline. No additional warnings were issued after one of my aunt’s renditions of the story. Our grandfather’s weeping, purple-streaked legs were deterrent enough. The fear of fire swept through the ranks of the cousins like a North Texas twister.

The nightmarish, apparitional remembrance of my grandfather’s legs came back to me after learning of the firestorms raging through Burgundy, France. To celebrate our fortieth wedding anniversary, Kay and I traveled through that region of rich soil, thick forests, Roman ruins reaching back to Julius

Caesar, and some of the most prized and productive vineyards in the world. When writing this essay in mid-August, 34,000 residents had already been evacuated from their homes in a desperate effort to spare their lives from the fast-moving conflagration. Global warming has visited South Texas temperatures on Europe with the raging wildfires that attend them.

Fire is not to be played with, yet without it, humanity could not have advanced. By most estimations, nearly a million years elapsed before homo sapiens learned to kindle and effectively use fire, ushering in unequaled advancement for mankind.

The most measurable improvement was the more varied and nutritious diet cooking with fire made possible. Better diet precipitated larger brain size, which, in turn, moved humanity to develop language, strive for cooperation, foster 3

From Our Rector... a social economy, and cultivate artistic expression. Knowing that, it makes one wonder why it took our forebears so long.

The ancient Greeks weighed into this question early. Beginning in the late 8th century BC, the Hellenic tribes developed their immortal deity myths to coincide with the inaugural Olympic athletic games. Their goal was to explain the origins of civilization. Fire took a prominent place in these elaborate myths.

Two hundred years after the inaugural Olympic games, Aeschylus (525-455 BC), the celebrated tragedian, immortalized one of these myths, Prometheus Bound, to explain mankind’s advancement through fire. Most are familiar with the drama’s hero Prometheus, sentenced by Zeus, the ruler of the Olympic Gods, to be chained for all eternity to a boulder in an untraveled wilderness. All day, every day, his body burns under the blistering unobstructed sun as vultures tear through his abdomen and devour his liver. At night, shivering under the moon’s bright light, Prometheus watches as his liver repairs and his flesh grows back, forecasting the torture he will endure during the new day to come. This Hollywood horror film ending is prefaced by the meat of Aeschylus’s play, the part that tells us who

Prometheus and Atlas, Laconian black-figure kylix by the Arkesilas Painter, 560-50 BC, Museo Gregoriano Etrusco, Vatican Museums

we are and how we got here.

Why did Prometheus, a god himself, end up in such unbearable straits? Zeus condemned him to torture for sharing the mystery of fire with humans. According to Aeschylus’s imagination, the gods were quite content to keep man in “darkness” 4

for the better part of those million years.

But sharing the secret of fire was only one part of Zeus’s indictment of the demoted God. Prometheus’s first infraction was to hide the day of everyone’s death from them. Before Prometheus’s revelation to humans, the gods giddily announced each person’s day of death to them, casting a pall of inevitable end and hopelessness over them. Why try, why even get out of bed, for death inexorably marches toward us? Accordingly, Prometheus’s second infraction is closely related to the first.

Human beings received from him the gift of uninhibited ambition, the desire to invent, innovate, and create, irrespective of earthly limitations. Prometheus gave this inner fire of discovery to man before he gave them fire itself. The flame was already burning within human beings before they sparked their first campfire.

That betrayal by Prometheus is what whipped Zeus into a fury.

The entire Olympic court were feverishly angry at their immortal comrade. With Prometheus’s three gifts, humanity could become like them and would certainly no longer be content to serve as minions to their capricious whims. The gods’ fear was justified. Given the gift of freedom, technology, and fire, humanity could and would do terrible things. Vladimir Putin’s threats of nuclear holocaust are indicative of our aberrant use of “fire.”

However, standing in stark contrast to the Russian despot’s tyrannical ravings, is the international scientific community’s response to Covid-19. 350,000 papers, experiments, and formulas from across the world were shared in a show of unencumbered cooperation. The result was the development of a vaccine in mere months as opposed to the fifty years it took to construe one for polio and the several centuries it took to immunize us against smallpox.

About the time the Greek tragedians were composing their mythological tragedies in a richly artistic attempt to explain humanity’s origins and prodigious resolve, the writers of the Old Testament were putting the revelation they received from God about human destiny in its

final written form. Not surprisingly, an unextinguishable fire burns at the beginning of the Biblical revelation.

The flames draw Moses up Mt. Sinai as seductively as Mt. Everest drew Sir Edmund Hillary. Moses, by that time, had fallen into a contented, undistinguished life. The fire lures him up the mountain and replaces his staid self-satisfaction with implacable determination. The result is that Moses and the exodus he leads become the foundational saga of the Old Testament. Once Moses “turns aside” to approach the fire on the mountain, an undistinguished, disparaged people are gradually formed into Israel, God’s covenant people. Those same hapless people, long enslaved, are freed by the God who speaks from the fire. Their marching across the wilderness beneath the shadow of Sinai is the march of God’s people into the history He has planned for them rather than the mindless trudge as flunkies under the whip of the Egyptians.

Looked at that way, Moses becomes Israel’s Prometheus because Moses shares the “fire” which was first given to him.

“Set my people free,” orders God from the fire on the mountain, “so that they may worship me on this mountain” (Exodus 3:12, 7:16, 8:1, 9:1). It is not enough that Israel gains physical freedom, they must be spiritually liberated, as well. On the initial short leg of their trek from the banks of the Red Sea to the base of Mt. Sinai, Israel demonstrates how truly slavish they have become. They cannot look forward to the possibilities of life in a promised land and future. No, they can only look back with lament at the loss of the shriveled comforts they eked out in Egypt. Only a handful of days into their journey of freedom, the Israelites bitterly complain, “If only we had died by the LORD’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but Moses has brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death” (Exodus 16:3).

How immensely illustrative it is that Israel is led out of their enslavement in Egypt by a “pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night” (Exodus 13:21). No

From Our Rector... longer stagnant, Israel is now advancing on a God-illumined path. Secondly, as they struggle onto Sinai’s plain beneath the mountain, God thunders, “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, you shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:2). Israel has been freed to pursue a God-directed future, which is undoubtedly risky, but surely transcends staking their existence on meager dishes of “leeks, onions, and garlic” (Numbers 11:5). The liberated community is to be set on fire to blaze a new future with God. In Egypt, the people’s lives were bookended by the certainty of slavery. Now their days are characterized by the uncertainty of freedom. They are to live in obedience to God, which promises undisclosed adventure.

Thirdly, Moses kindles within Israel the fire of creation. They are not so much given the blind ambition of the Greeks as they are promised that the hope of God’s new destiny for them will be constantly re-lit. The fervor of their newly given freedom need not wane. To this end, Moses delivers God’s most unique commandment: Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.

Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. Exodus 20:8-11 God’s Fourth Commandment promises Israel that they will not merely experience this flare-up of freedom and subsequently endure its inevitable cooling into the ash of forgetfulness. The gift of the Sabbath is the weekly rekindling of freedom God has bequeathed to Israel. God creates time as surely as He creates the universe.

Therefore, God reorders our days – week by week – to conform with His designs.

Considered this way, Sabbath worship

is not a chore to be endured but our weekly bonfire to inflame our lives with expectancy!

Therefore, the Sabbath is much more than a nifty contrivance that God conjures up at Sinai. The Sabbath directs us to the divine architecture of the universe. That architecture is disclosed in the curious verbal pattern God uses at creation, “There was evening, and there was morning a first day…second day…third day…fourth day…fifth day…and a sixth day” (Genesis 1:5,8,13,19,23,31). Six times the pattern of night leading to day is repeated, yet it is not simply poetic syncopation. No, the pattern describes when God speaks the light, sea, lakes, land, plants, critters, and we humans into life.

God begins the six iterations of creation, not in the day as we would expect, but at

“The gift of the Sabbath is the weekly rekindling of freedom

God has bequeathed to Israel...

Sabbath worship is not a chore to be endured but our weekly bonfire to inflame our lives with expectancy!”

night when human beings are sleeping.

The hard work is done with no help from us at all. We arise from slumber to see what God has created, and then he invites us to tend, husband, and steward all that He has made. God provides, and in the light of day, we marvel at the provision he has provided. Jewish and Christian covenant is incontestably a one-sided proposition, with God creating the world in which we work, love, and live freely. Understood this way, creation, like salvation, is unqualified grace.

Once we realize the largess of God’s covenant with us, we realize that grace did not just recently arrive in Jesus.

Undoubtedly, Jesus Christ is the incarnate revelation of God’s grace. He is the ultimate rendering of God’s covenant with humanity. Grace, as punctuated

in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, is the acme of creation. This fact, however, hearkens us back to the Fourth Commandment to keep Sabbath. To fashion the disorderly, ungrateful rabble at the base of Mt. Sinai into a people, they must begin to comprehend that God’s grace which freed them is the same grace that creates and sustains all creation.

Keeping Sabbath for them and for us, confronts us week by week by revealing we operate in an ocean of grace. Failure to keep Sabbath results in forgetting who we are. Once that occurs, we’re no different than the mob dancing chaotically around the Golden Calf at Sinai or the mob viciously screaming into Pilate’s court, “Crucify him. Crucify him” (Exodus 32:1-21; Matthew 27:22-23; Mark 15:13-14; Luke 23:20).

Of course, that is why Jesus comes down so hard on the Pharisee’s perversion of the Sabbath. “Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). Jesus isn’t insisting, “C’mon guys, can’t you give people a break and let them rest awhile.”

Not hardly. Jesus is warning the religious authorities that they are blocking people from the torrent of God’s love, and doing so they keep the people from knowing who they are because they are defined by that love. This is a capital offense. “Whoever causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea” (Matthew 18:6).

What inflames Jesus’ fury? The religious leaders are obscuring how human beings are to be in relationship with God. God frees us to love Him, to love others, and to experience his wondrous gift of creation.

When we grasp this truth, we cannot imagine returning to “Egypt,” wherever or whatever our personal “Egypts” may be.

This is the revelation that Paul understood more intensely than anyone else. In his early years, he lived pretty much like other religious people, then and now, mostly by trying to position himself favorably before God. “Life is what we make of it,” we often say, and Paul would have agreed until his disarming encounter with Christ.

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From Our Rector...

The Conversion on the Way to Damascas, Caravaggio, 1601, Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome

After Paul is knocked into the dust of the Damascus Road, his mantra changes: “Life is what God makes of us.” Grace did not end at creation, he realizes. “It is new every morning” (Lamentations 3:22-23).

We are not actors on a stage for eighty years endlessly trying to eke out a living and ceaselessly attempting to appease a largely absent, insatiable God. By no means. The Sabbath reminds us that the God who creates us intends to create something new in us with the advent of each day.

In his previous life as a Pharisaic bounty hunter, Paul obstinately believed if he eliminated the scourge of Christians who were polluting Israel, God would, again, fill the Temple with His presence as He did during Solomon’s time (2 Chronicles 7:1-16), the Romans would be expelled from their land, and God would confer His acceptance and righteousness on him for his deeds. Paul’s explosive meeting with Christ on that road confronted Paul with the revolutionary truth that nothing we can do makes us acceptable to God. Our acceptance and righteousness are accomplished for us and conferred on us freely through Christ’s sacrificial death on Calvary. That’s why we call it grace…and, for that matter, “amazing.”

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Sabbath observance is a reminder from where grace proceeds – the God-ward side. In time, Christians moved our Sabbath observance to Sunday, the day of Christ’s resurrection.1 This makes perfect sense, for Christ’s resurrection assures us that nothing can come between God’s grace-full love and us – not even death. Consider how Christ emphasized the importance of our Sunday-Sabbath observance. He commanded that when we come together, we break the bread and drink the wine to remember Christ’s death and resurrection on our behalf (Luke 22:19; 1 Corinthians 11:23-25; BCP 335, 368). The act of Sunday-Sabbath worship is not nostalgia, but a reminder of the irreversible grace freely extended to us.

This weekly reminder reorients the rest of our week around the great love that saves us and directs our lives. When we ignore the Sabbath, the results are predictable.

We live out our weekdays centered on self, which leaves us famished for that which we cannot attain on our own. The only sustenance that will fill this egoistic hunger is to recenter ourselves in Christ’s love and freedom. ‘I am the bread of life, whoever comes to me shall not hunger…’ (John 6:35).

I was fortunate that one of my seminary professors knew the importance of the Sabbath and was intractably unapologetic regarding what people should experience at Sunday worship. Dr. Hilmer Krause was my homiletics professor, and he pressed upon all seminarians that the SundaySabbath, week after week, must remind worshippers that we are entirely loved by God and are set free by His love. To that end, Dr. Krause insisted we put every sermon we preach to a three-way test: 1.

Is God in this sermon? 2. Who is God in this sermon? 3. What are we asking the people to do?

Admittedly, the first test, “Is God in this sermon?” seems unnecessary or even silly at first glance. Not so. I cannot number the times I have painstakingly worked on a message only to find that God made no appearance whatsoever in the text I was about to share with the people. Instead, I 1 A number of Christian denominations maintain Saturday as their Sabbath observance including – Seventh Day Adventists, Sabbatarian Baptists and Pentecostals, Messianic Jews, and the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland.

had spun a moralistic screed, replete with demands but without God to love us and empower us to act.

The second test is the most important: “Who is God in this sermon?” Again, I have repeatedly caught myself foisting a God in my messages who bears no resemblance to the Incarnate One revealed in Jesus Christ. I have, instead, conjured up a god who is big on judgment and small on mercy. Thank Dr. Krause that I usually wake up before I erase the cross altogether. A cross-less universe comes naturally to us because we imagine a god who is about our size, one who keeps score, who derives satisfaction from judging us, and who removes himself from us in disgust. The cross tells a very different story. The God revealed to Moses on the fiery summit, who commands him to free His peevish people from slavery in Egypt, is further revealed in Jesus Christ, who frees us from sin and any other impediment that keeps us from loving God and each other. The God revealed in Jesus Christ creates the world with no

“The act of Sunday-Sabbath worship is not nostalgia, but a reminder of the irreversible grace freely extended to us.

This weekly reminder reorients the rest of our week around the great love that saves us and directs our lives.”

help from us, and He saves us by the same love demonstrated on the cross. Christ alone is crucified, while we are guilty onlookers and complicit in his execution.

We are unworthy recipients of salvation, not heroic actors. Dr. Krause knew that if Christ’s “amazing grace” is not preached, we dilute the power of the Sabbath and betray our congregations.

Krause’s third interrogative test, “What are we asking the people to do?,” reorients our Sunday-Sabbath observance from ecclesiastical entertainment to Gospel

From Our Rector... challenge. If Christ’s crucifixion saves us from our sin and his resurrection and ascension raise us to freely share life with Christ, what is left for us to do? The answer is stark and unalterable: Live in that freedom and refuse to fall back into slavery. St. Paul was emphatic on this point, ‘For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery’ (Galatians 5:1). Once confronted by Christ, Paul was set free from endlessly positioning himself to be accepted by God. On the Damascus Road a divine conflagration swept over Paul, transforming him to live in the fire of grace. ‘I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me’ (Galatians 2:20). Every one of Paul’s subsequent letters resound with the drumbeat to trust in the unshakeable love of God demonstrated in Christ’s sacrifice.

To trust in God’s grace is to undergo a complete metamorphosis. We, like Paul, experience an inner explosion of gratitude, a power that is much, much greater than obligation. Those closest to us will see the monumental change in us. Yet, even so, it is easy to ignore God’s grace, forfeit out freedom, and return to suffocating thralldom in Egypt.

Thirty-two years later, I understand why Krause pushed us so hard. The SundaySabbath is the avenue God uses to remind His people of the ocean of grace in which we swim. Week after week, people must be challenged to forego the temptation of posturing ourselves to be acceptable to God and others. Krause knew, just like Paul before him, that the only life worth living is one where we trust God’s love for us and act under that aegis of love. That’s the Biblical understanding of “believing in God” – to trust in him with all our heart and, armed with that love, acting in faith.

These two men, separated by 2,000 years, knew that we will attend to others much more generously when we are liberated from the slavery of self-advancement.

Sunday-Sabbath worship is choreographed to emphasize both halves of the freedom bequeathed to us and

subsequently expected of us. In fact, the first half of the Eucharistic worship is termed “The Liturgy of the Word,” for it is when we hear the Bible read and its truth expounded by the preacher. Hence, Dr. Krause’s obsession with preaching that represents God’s liberating act of love in Christ. The second half of the Eucharist is entitled “The Great Thanksgiving” because we are invited to act on what we’ve just heard by participating in Christ’s liberating passage from the cross to the empty tomb. It is the “Greatest Story Ever Told,” and those who enter the story know that it cannot be told enough. The word “Eucharist” means “thanksgiving.” We come together each Sunday-Sabbath to be reminded of the greatest gift we’ve been given, which has freed us to receive God’s unconditional love and then share what we have been given.

Christ said, ‘Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, I will be in the midst of them’ (Matthew 18:20). Those are not just comforting words but descriptive ones. When we come together on Sundays to worship, we become a sign to a world operating beneath a shroud of hopelessness and meaninglessness.

Like Israel becoming ‘a light to all nations” (Isaiah 49:6), we become light for Castle Hills, Alta Vista, Alamo Ranch, Olmos Park, Rogers Ranch, Alamo Heights, Elmendorf, Floresville, and for eight more

“Our most important act of evangelism is to show up on

Sundays.”

zip codes blanketing the city. Our most important act of evangelism is to show up on Sundays. By doing so, some people will see how to be set free from their cardboard, secular, ego-controlled life. The single mother who gets up on a Sunday morning, shakes her two-year-old daughter into her best tights, combs the cowlick out of her five-year-old son’s hair, and timidly makes her way to Church is not looking for self-help strategies. No, she is looking for transformation. For her sake and for

Moses and the Burning Bush, Marc Chagall, 1966, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France

the sake of countless others, we cannot adulterate the sign of the Sabbath. That’s what Dr. Krause knew and relentlessly demanded of us.

Because of Dr. Krause, I find it best to compare Sunday worship to the burning bush atop Mt. Sinai. The blaze drew Moses from his predictable life to one dictated by God’s voice radiating from the fire. Self-preservation drove him out of Egypt, but self-sacrifice drew him back in. Our Sunday-Sabbath is kindled from that same fire that inflamed Moses with new life. Thus, our worship is not an appendage to our week, something we add on if time permits. No, it is the foundation, where we are reminded who we are because of Whose we are. Jesus said, ‘I came to cast fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!’ (Luke 12:49).

When we kneel at the altar on Sunday mornings, we are playing with fire!

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Christmas Carol Quiz Music Ministry

by Jennifer Holloway

Think you know your Christmas carols?

This quiz lists 30 phrases from Advent and Christmas carols, hymns and songs.

Name the song from which each phrase comes. Some songs may be used more than once. There is only one correct answer for each question. No peeking at the answers!

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1 With joyous Christmas wishes from The General Board of Discipleship of The United Methodist Church, Center for Worship-Preaching-Music, PO Box 340003, Nashville TN 37203-0003. Website: http://www.umcworship.org .

Toll-free telephone: 877-899-2780, ext. 7070

Answers: 1, Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus. 2, Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.

3, Angels From the Realms of Glory. 4, Joy to the World. 5, He Is Born the Divine Christ Child (Il est né). 6, It Came Upon the Midnight Clear. 7, O Come, All Ye Faithful.

8, The First Noel. 9, The Virgin Mary Had a Baby Boy. 10, There’s a Song in the Air. 11, O Little Town of Bethlehem. 12, We Three Kings. 13, Rise Up, Shepherds. 14, Silent Night. 15, Good King Wenceslas.

16, What Child Is This. 17, O Come, O Come, Emmanuel. 18, Infant Holy. 19, Love Came Down at Christmas. 20, The Friendly Beasts. 21, Good Christian Friends, Rejoice.

22, In the Bleak Midwinter. 23, Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming. 24, O Come, O Come, Emmanuel. 25, Once in Royal David’s City.

26, Go, Tell It on the Mountain. 27, The Snow Lay on the Ground (Venite Adoramus).

28, Star-Child. 29, I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day. 30, How Great Our Joy.

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1. Born a child and yet a King ____________________________________________ 2. Mild He lays his glory by_______________________________________________ 3. Ye who sang creation’s story ____________________________________________ 4. And wonders of His love ______________________________________________ 5. O how lovely, O how pure _____________________________________________ 6. And still their heavenly music floats ______________________________________ 7. Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing ________________________________ 8. On a cold winter’s night that was so deep __________________________________ 9. He come from the glorious kingdom ______________________________________ 10. Lie the ages impearled ________________________________________________ 11. Where meek souls will receive Him still ___________________________________ 12. Sealed in the stone-cold tomb ___________________________________________ 13. You’ll forget your flocks, you’ll forget your herds _____________________________ 14. Radiant beams from Thy holy face _______________________________________ 15. Such a Babe in such a place _____________________________________________ 16. Haste, haste to bring Him laud __________________________________________ 17. That mourns in lonely exile here _________________________________________ 18. Thus rejoicing, free from sorrow _________________________________________ 19. Love for plea and gift and sign ___________________________________________ 20. I gave him hay to pillow his head _________________________________________ 21. Ox and ass before him bow _____________________________________________ 22. Our God, heaven cannot hold him _______________________________________ 23. True man yet very God ________________________________________________ 24. Disperse the gloomy clouds of night _____________________________________ 25. He came down to earth from heaven _____________________________________ 26. God sent us salvation that blessed Christmas morn __________________________ 27. And thus that manger poor became a throne _______________________________ 28. God’s stupendous sign_________________________________________________ 29. The wrong shall fail, the right prevail _____________________________________ 30. This gift of God we’ll cherish well ________________________________________

Are You Listening?

The Listening Room, Rene Magritte, 1952, Brussels, Belgium, Menil Collection, Houston, TX

Youth Ministry

by Avery Moran

In November our high schoolers will

be looking at the book of Habakkuk, a minor Old Testament prophet, for our monthly Bible study. The entire book is three chapters in length but contains an incredibly important message about prayer. The prophet Habakkuk begins his book with a prayer containing a series of complaints that he has - 17 verses

of complaints to be exact. However, in chapter two, Habakkuk displays an incredibly important part of prayer, listening.

Habakkuk starts chapter two by saying “I will stand at my watch-post, and station myself on the rampart; I will keep watch to see what he will say to me, and what he will answer concerning my complaint.” I don’t know about you guys, but I have a really hard time sitting still. It is difficult for me to sit down in a room, and simply just pray about something. It’s even harder for me to keep sitting down and wait after

I pray. It is very easy to pray and simply move on with our day. Much easier than it is to sit and listen for God, especially when it isn’t always clear what we are listening for. Silence is uncomfortable, especially in a world where we all own headphones.

But prayer is a conversation with God. It is important to spend our time in prayer not just asking, but also listening, the same way we would have a conversation with those around us.

To get involved with Youth Ministry, contact Avery Moran at 210-736-3132 or averym@cecsa.org.

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ADVENT

A Time of Preparation for the Birth of Christ

CEC Family Ministry

by Halleta Heinrich

Nearly every time I ask the children

“Where is Jesus?” they respond without hesitation, “He’s in our hearts!” When we light the candles in Children’s Chapel or in the Atrium, I ask “What does this light remind us of ?,” “Who is with us?” they always say, “Jesus is the Light!”

When we snuff out the candles, I ask “Just because we put out the candles, does that mean Jesus is not with us?” They reply enthusiastically, “He’s in our hearts!”

The children know the unconditional love God has for them in Christ, and that His abiding presence is with them. They remind me of that each week. I am blessed to be a witness of their faith!

It’s Advent, and we all need to be reminded of God’s abiding love as we prepare our hearts as a place to receive Christ as we await His birth at Christmas.

We have some parish family events that will help. When I say family, I mean all of you, no matter your age or size. We are a family together – the Body of Christ here at our beloved Christ Episcopal Church.

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Family Advent Event We gather as a family at our Family Advent Event to make Advent Wreaths to take home as a reminder of the four weeks of Advent as we await Christmas.

What a joy to see families of all ages and sizes line up to collect greenery, candles, ribbon, and wire with which to construct their wreath. We ask God’s blessing on our wreaths, then light the first candle of our wreath together. A booklet of prayers for each week of Advent is distributed to each family so they can carry on the preparation for the birth of Christ at home.

Children’s Christmas Pageant Our children are the stars of the Christmas Pageant each year. I have never seen our church more beautiful than when our many children process into the church and line up in their colorful costumes at the front, all aglow with excitement. This is a “Big Deal” to the kids. It is a memory maker that will live with them forever as a positive reminder of God’s love and their church. I still remember with warmth my angel wings from my first pageant as a three-year-old. This happy memory is one of the reasons I have made sure we continue our Christmas Pageant tradition.

Children’s Epiphany Celebration Although the Epiphany Celebration takes place after Advent and Christmas, I had to include it because it’s so meaningful and fun! We follow the Star and the Three Kings in a journey to find the Christ Child. The children take with them their gift for baby Jesus, their heart, and place it in the manger. It is so beautiful to see our baby Jesus doll covered in the children’s decorated hearts. The children in return receive a star at the manger representing the Light of Christ that will be their guide throughout their lives. As a finale, we all go out into the world with the Light of Christ to share as our main purpose in life.

The events mentioned above are simple and child-like, but they reflect a deep spiritual message. God is Light and Love.

Jesus came here as a fragile human baby to be with us as so that we could be with Him forever in Heaven – our eternal home. What greater love is that? Happy Advent!

Halleta

Saturday Service

CEC Outreach

by Justin Lindstrom

About six months ago, people from our

Sidewalk Saturday community requested a worship service so we began to worship with a lesson, meditation, and prayers every Saturday. Then some folks asked for

Holy Eucharist. So, during late summer and early fall, we had Holy Eucharist about once a month. The desire to have Holy Eucharist every week grew and a launch team was formed.

On Saturday, October 29, we launched a weekly Holy Eucharist Worship Service.

Bishop David Reed came to preside and dedicate a new altar donated and

refurbished by Kurt Wahrmund. Music was led by our Youth Minister, Avery Moran. It was a joyous celebration with about 125 folks receiving communion.

We will worship and celebrate Holy Eucharist every Saturday at 8:30 am. on the Outreach Pavilion lawn. Come and join us.

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“We are Heirs of God”

An Interview with Kay Bashara Great Commission Society

Editor: What first drew you to Christ Church?

Kay: We moved to San Antonio in 1971.

One of our neighbors invited me to be a summer school teacher at Christ Church’s Project Ole’ for underprivileged children, which was begun by the rector, Ben Benitez.

Most of the teachers were members of Christ Church. At that same time, the popular Associate Rector, Tommy Tomlin, was teaching a new confirmation class, and I joined the group. Upon completion I was confirmed as an Episcopalian and made Christ Church my home.

Editor: Are you hopeful about Christ Church’s future and why?

Kay: I am very hopeful for the future of Christ Church. If we continue to serve our members through pastoral care and become more compassionate and diverse through outreach, we will grow in spirit as well as in number.

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Editor: You have a long history of advancing non-profits in San Antonio. What are some challenges you see on the horizon for our church?

Kay: The key challenge will be leadership.

At present, we have a treasure chest filled with leaders who are Christ-centered who inspire us to serve others. If Christ Church continues to raise up faithful leaders who pursue our three goals of evangelism, outreach, and formation, we will continue to prosper.

“...the ask is easy if you believe in the cause...”

Editor: What moved you to make Christ Church a part of your testamentary giving?

Kay: Several times Patrick mentioned at Sunday morning worship and at our Annual Parish meeting that gifts had been made through individuals’ last wills and testaments. That planted a seed in my mind and heart. One morning I woke up and reasoned, if “we are heirs of God,” as

Paul insists (Romans 8:17), shouldn’t His work be an heir of ours?

Editor: In a recent conversation, you got Patrick’s attention by declaring, “Just Ask.” What did you mean by that statement and what must we do to inspire others to add our church to their wills and other planned giving?

Kay: When a young Girl Scout won the prize for selling the most cookies, she was asked what her key to success was.

Her response to the emcee of the awards banquet was, “How would you like to buy one box of each flavor of cookies I have to sell?” If the answer was “Oh no, I can’t do that,” she simply said, “then how about buying four of your favorite flavors?” Now that she garnered the entire audience’s attention, she boldly declared, “You have to make the ask.” It has been my experience that the ask is easy if you believe in the cause and if you’ve made a gift yourself. I love Christ Church, and I want people to know that, and I don’t mind asking you to remember our church in your wills and estate planning.

PAGE TURNERS – From the Rector’s Book Stack Any longtime

reader of The Economist will insist you read the last page of the magazine first.

Why? To enjoy the featured obituary for the week.

Only occasionally do the editors choose a marquis personality to cover. Most often, the person chosen to be venerated on the last page is one who exhibited substantial courage to render a unique gift to the world. Irishwoman Dervla Murphy is one such courageous person, whose remembrance I read in the May 22nd edition. Riding a second-hand bicycle, which she christened Roz – short for Rosinante, Don Quixote’s steed, she peddled alone across India, the Peruvian Andes, Madagascar, Cuba, Siberia, Afghanistan, the Middle East, and twenty other far-flung destinations. She kept plentiful detailed notes, which, in turn, became 26 books penned in perfect prose.

Her autobiography, Wheels within Wheels: The Makings of a Traveler held me spellbound, but for reasons exceeding her wanderlust. Born in 1931 in Lismore, Ireland, she spent most of her childhood and early adulthood nursing her disabled mother. Mid-century Irish culture left no doubt to do so was her fate, even to the extent of having to drop out of school in 8th grade. In August 1962, her mother died, and Dervla wasted no time packing up Roz and heading out into the world denied her for 31 years. Three decades of hardship and Irish poverty prepared her for her spartan journeys. Cresting a hill to see a hundred miles of uninhabited land in Siberia or Afghanistan, filled her delight and the desire to put her feet back on the peddles with no intention of stopping.

When the battered and terrified survivors in an inflated rubber lifeboat pull in one more person from the raging waters, they perfunctorily ask him his name.

“The Lord,” he replies, and the reader knows at once that The Stranger in the Lifeboat, by Mitch Albom is a

very different novel.

Just a few pages in, the reader will also realize the novel is very suspenseful, as well. I could not put it down, and, in fact, I hungrily read every word on a flight from San Antonio to Minneapolis. Mary Sponhaltz gave me the book, but she did not warn me that I would be engrossed in it from the first chapter.

Accentuating the novel’s uniqueness, are its two narrators – one on the sea, Benji Keaney, who tells the story through his daily journal entries, and one on the land, police officer Jarly La Fleur, who finds Keaney’s journal in the empty raft that has washed to shore. Both narrators have experienced devastating losses they have been unable to confront…until they encounter hope subtlety, if not cryptically, expressed by the stranger. Albom’s novel, like the Book of Job, approaches the difficult question, “Where is God when we are suffering?” It is a question that is not easily candy-coated. Just ask Mitch Albom, who travels from Detroit to Haiti every month to work with terribly battered, abandoned children in a school he founded. The celebrated author has provided his own lifeboat for them.

When I was a boy, I yearned for my mother to marry again. I so badly wanted a “Dad” like other kids in my neighborhood and school. If I had read Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, I very likely would have amended my desires. Wolff’s gripping memoir of his childhood is a chronicle of pain endured by a boy by a succession of brutal men. In 1955, “Toby” and his mother, “Rosemary,” drove cross-country from Florida to Utah in pursuit of a better life. The two no sooner arrive in Utah when Rosemary is discovered by Roy, her former lover, whom she and Toby escaped

in Florida. In due time, any peace Toby and his mother had achieved was dashed when Roy moves into their newfound home. A few months later, the two flee further west to Seattle, where they move into a boarding house amongst an array of eccentric, single women. Rosemary’s dark history repeats itself when she is courted by sweet-talking Dwight Hansen, who moves the family to “Concrete,” a company town in the shadowed mountains of Washington whose name accurately describes its bleak environs. Far worse than the dreary landscape is the treatment Toby suffers under Dwight’s hand. His stepfather relentlessly beats and humiliates the boy whenever Rosemary is absent.

Toby, ever enterprising, eventually finagles himself a place in the freshman class at The Hill School, an elite East Coast academy. Toby’s inadequate preparation to matriculate at Hill is slowly disclosed.

This leads to his dismissal and to Wolff’s second and equally riveting memoir from his military service in Vietnam, In Pharoah’s Army: Memories of a Lost War. At the beginning of Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare: The World as Stage, the reader learns that we have little or no idea of William Shakespeare’s actual appearance. Three portraits and a bust survive from which we draw our ideas as to how the greatest playwright looked, but none of the four are definitive. Bridging the late Elizabethan Period to the early Jacobean Period, we know precious little about the man. The fact that he was raised in Stratford-on-the Avon and eventually died there, we can reasonably confirm due to a smattering of official documents and real estate purchases.

The extent of his education, the slant of his politics, and temperature of his religious fervor can only be surmised from a collection of plays he wrote, which are unmatched in human history. The fact that we call William Shakespeare “genius” has brought its own set of challenges,

continued....

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PAGE TURNERS – Continued however. Ensuing after his death in April 1616, critics on both sides of the Atlantic insisted the philosopher Francis Bacon, who despised the theater, and Christopher Marlowe, who died fifteen years before Shakespeare’s greatest play were composed, were the actual authors of the works. Bryson, a painstaking journalist, carefully explains that critics throughout the ages cannot conceive that one man with such undistinguished beginnings could write so well and understand human beings so completely. But one man did.

Testing Bryson’s hypothesis, I next read two of Shakespeare’s plays with which I was unfamiliar: The Winter’s Tale (c.1609-11), which reveals the monstrous machinations that jealously evokes, and Measure for Measure (c. 1603-04), which elucidates the veiled fury of hypocrisy and the expansive grace of mercy so effectively that one imagines Jesus took the bard’s hand when writing it.

Lingering in the Minneapolis Airport for a few hours is dangerous for me.

The expansive, colorful bookstore in the middle of the main gallery draws me like the beguiling songs of the Sirens drew Odysseus. Kay’s Scottish restraint limited me to one book, so I chose carefully. Brightly lurking on a turnstile in the fiction section, I found Peter Heller’s latest, The Guide. I read Celine and The Dog Stars previously and found Heller’s fusion of the Colorado outdoors and suspense irresistible. This novel’s magnificent natural setting carried me out of the artificial environs of the Boeing 737. The plot of the novel is propelled by the Coronavirus which has mutated and, again, saturated the planet, such that the immensely rich seek protected outdoor venues to recreate. Jack, the protagonist, is hired to guide the glitterati fly fishing for trout along a portion of the Taylor River known as the “Billionaire’s Mile.” Raised on a Colorado ranch but lately educated at Dartmouth, Jack is assigned to guide Allison, an intelligent, tough, and quite 14

lovely country music star. The two begin to discern not all is right in paradise. Twice, Jack catches sight of emaciated children not far from the resort’s property. Once he asks questions, the sudden antipathy of his supervisors further fuels their suspicions.

But what could these pitiful shrunken children have to do with a five-star resort nestled in the Rockies? The real fishing expedition is about to commence!

It wasn’t a burning bush but an outof-the-blue phone call that changed the direction of Willa Drake’s life.

In Anne Tyler’s Clock Dance, Willa is ensconced in her predictable life of retirement in Tucson, when she receives a call informing her that her son’s ex-girlfriend, Denise, has been shot and needs her to fly out to Baltimore immediately. Willa has never met Denise, never visited Baltimore, and certainly had no idea that Denise has a precocious, independent nine-year old daughter, Cheryl. The quirky, working-class residents in the old urban neighborhood receive Willa as if they had been waiting for her. And between endless card games, cooking forays, and morning walks with “Airplane,” the dog, Cheryl becomes Willa’s granddaughter. At the same time, Willa’s own two adult sons have become boorish and only perfunctorily contact her, while her husband would rather control her than love her. Willa is faced with returning to long chardonnay-laced lunches at the Tucson Country Club or to the unpredictable spontaneity in a neighborhood where people live far messier lives. Anne Tyler, Pulitzer Prize winner for the Accidental Tourist and finalist for the Booker Prize with A Spool of Blue Thread, will make you reassess what is really “golden” about the golden years.

Living fully in the present – characterizes my favorite novel from last summer. In the Housekeeper and the Professor,

by Yoke Ogawa, a distinguished math

professor suffers a traumatic brain injury in his midforties, such that he can only remember things in 80-minute segments. Now in his seventies, the Professor has become irascible and goes through one caretaker after another. Finally, an indefatigable young housekeeper is assigned to the Professor, who, rather than be exasperated by the necessity to reintroduce herself every morning, is, instead, entranced by the Professor’s wisdom. Even with his badly injured brain, he sees mathematics as poetry, and throughout the book he explains whole numbers, natural numbers, algorithms, triangles, pi, and quantum theory as if he were describing Byron’s She is Lost in Beauty or Auden’s Lullaby. The housekeeper has an eleven-year-old son, whom the Professor loves, even though they must repeatedly reintroduce themselves each afternoon when school lets out. He dubs the boy Root and daily traces an invisible square root sign atop his head. The boy receives the only name in the book. The two adults remain simply the Professor and the Housekeeper.

This is a beautiful, entirely unique novel.

Yoko Ogawa is one of Japan’s favorite authors, and the translation by Stephen Snyder takes nothing away from its original setting. Japanese baseball is one ingredient that draws the trio together.

Although the Professor’s favorite players are thirty years in the past, he explains baseball statistics to Root in a way that brings the sport fully alive for the boy and his mother. The enchantment of Ogawa’s novel centers upon the abandonment the three have previously experienced in their lives until they find one another and become an odd, yet beautiful family.

This fact is accentuated by the author’s inclusion of the actual mathematical numbers and equations. For the Professor, the Housekeeper, and Root, this is real life, not an abstraction. They have no alternative but to live each day fully in the present.

Photo Album

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E P I S C O PA L Christ Episcopal Church 510 Belknap Place San Antonio, TX 78212 www.cecsa.org

The Message (USPS 471-710) is published bi-monthly by Christ Episcopal Church, 510 Belknap Place, San Antonio, TX 78212. Periodical postage paid in San Antonio, TX. Postmaster: Please send address changes to Christ Episcopal Church, 510 Belknap Place, San Antonio, TX 78212. Volume 24, Number 6.

Helping out at Sidewalk Saturday