The Message September 2021

SEPTEMBER 2021 • Volume 23, Number 5

Going Viral: 3 Take it to the Lord in Prayer: 7 It’s all about LOVE: 8 I was a stranger and you invited me in: 11

The Message this month: Contents:

Contributors:

Christ Church Staff: The Rev. Patrick Gahan, Rector

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

The Rev. Scott Kitayama, Associate Rector

Music Ministry ................................7

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

Youth Ministry .................................8

The Rev. Justin Lindstrom, Associate Rector for Community Formation

Family Ministry ...............................9 Our Church Life .............................10

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

PATRICK GAHAN

Great Commission ..........................12

Halleta Heinrich, Director of Family Ministry

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

Lily Fenton, Nursery Director Avery Moran, Youth Minister

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

Susan Lindstrom, Director of College Ministry JOSH BENNINGER

Front Cover photo: Amy Case

Joshua Benninger, Music Minister & Organist

CEC Youth at Top Golf

Back Cover photo: Gretchen Duggan

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

Choir Anthem

Charissa Fenton, Receptionist

Editor: Gretchen Duggan

Robert Hanley, Director of Campus Operations

Live Stream Services: www.cecsa.org/live-stream

Darla Nelson, Office Manager

AVERY MORAN

Donna Franco, Financial Manager Gretchen Comuzzi Duggan, Director of Communications

9:00 & 11:00 a.m. Sundays 11:00 a.m. Wednesdays

Monica Elliott, Executive Assistant to the Rector

In Person Services: Sundays 7:30 a.m. - Rite I 9 & 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. - Rite II

HALLETA HEINRICH

Robert Vallejo, Facilities Manager Rudy Segovia, Hospitality Manager Joe Garcia, Sexton

Sunday School 10:00 a.m.

Christian Education for Children, Youth, and Adults Wednesdays 11 a.m. - Morning Prayer with

2021 Vestry:

BRIEN KOEHLER

Andy Anderson, Senior Warden Margaret Pape, Junior Warden

Communion

Lisa Blonkvist

Visit us on-line at www.cecsa.org Follow us:

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facebook.com/ChristChurchSATX @christchurchsatx @cecSATX

Elizabeth Martinez, Kitchen Manager

Andy Kerr

Catherine de Marigny David McArthur JUSTIN LINDSTROM

Meagan Desbrow

Lisa Miller

Rick Foster

Garry Schnelzer

Tobin Hays

Garnett Wietbrock

Viral Love

by Patrick Gahan The bishop of West Texas called for “papers” from members of the diocese to describe how their parishes dealt with the Covid-19 pandemic and share how they will advance the Gospel in its aftermath.

The following is my submission, which I offer on behalf of all of us.

At 11:35 a.m. on Friday, March 13, 2020, I stepped out of Jim’s on Hildebrand and made the call. Josh Benninger, our Music Director, and I were returning from visiting Brent Boller, a Texas Public Radio announcer, parishioner, and a dear friend, who was dying from a returning onslaught of cancer. Josh had been Brent’s Bible study leader, and by the look on Josh’s face, we needed to stop and talk about the painful farewell. Stepping into the restaurant, we found it eerily empty of the expected chattering lunch crowd.

I excused myself to phone an infectious

disease physician. She confirmed what I dreaded; Sunday worship at Christ Church must be cancelled.

I returned to the table and said, “Josh, we must broadcast the 9 and 11 a.m. services on Sunday.” Setting his grief aside, he answered, “That gives us about 20 daylight hours to get ready.” We did so, and on Sunday morning, March 15, we offered our first ever streaming worship.

Music, prayers, readings, preaching, and a joke or two, all issued from Josh’s tiny iPhone. While the whole enterprise seemed otherworldly to me, the real miracle is that so many tuned in to the broadcast. Love, emanating from that familiar 107-year-old chancel, was the medicine we needed to combat the Coronavirus.

During those first days of the crisis, we made some fundamental decisions.

One, we were determined to offer the congregation live worship. As people retreated behind the ramparts of their

homes, they needed contact with real people in real time, such that even the on-screen hiccups, flops, and faux pas were welcome signs of life. Two, music was essential. Worship is propelled by singing.

On that first Sunday, we asked people to send in requests for their favorite hymns.

For 15 minutes before each celebration, our quartet led an on-line sing-along. We have continued that practice, because the requests keep rolling in, such that we repeatedly sing The Old Rugged Cross, I Come to the Garden Alone, Abide with Me, Rock of Ages, and Great is Thy Faithfulness – confirming that a good number of our people have come to us via the sawdust Gospel trail. Three, we had to preach Jesus Christ and his indefatigable faithfulness to us. Abstract or angry messages would not assuage the hurt and fear our people were experiencing amidst the roiling waters of lethal disease and poisonous politics.

Four, humor was a gift. I began our first live broadcast on that first Sunday with a joke, albeit a bad one, and they are getting 3

From Our Rector... weekday Bible studies.

Love has a face.

worse. Laughter disarms us, so that we take ourselves a bit less seriously. Fifth, and crucial to all of our innovations, was the determination to stay connected to the congregation. Spread over fourteen zip codes, our worship needed to be an antidote to the viral isolation blanketing our everyday lives. Love defeats fear.

Complementing our worship and fortifying our efforts to stay connected were our Sunday school classes, Bible studies, pastoral ministries, and outreach.

Zoom was a verb or a noun describing jet airplanes or spaceships before the pandemic. Afterwards, Zooming became common parish vernacular, as we Zoomed all our Sunday School classes for children, youth, and adults in addition to ten or so

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Pastoral ministry necessitated less tech and greater touch.

Thus, we began planning neighborhood Eucharists in backyards, front yards, parks, pool sides, driveways, and nursing home parking lots. Participants remained masked and physically distanced, but the presence of others was restorative, if not lifesaving. I’m convinced that the twentysix burials held at Christ Church from late September to early December were as much from isolation and suffocating loneliness as from viral infections. Our JOY group (Just Older Youth) implemented a phone-tree to converse with every person in the parish and discovering some were awash in pain. Love calls.

Our outreach ministries adapted and ballooned. For twenty-five years, Christ Church has provided essential weekly groceries for needy families. By April 2020, the number of families coming to us on Saturday morning doubled. We were providing food for 450-550 individuals, clothing them, providing them essential

toiletries, and supplying them with cat and dog food. While we could no longer serve our Saturday friends with the accustomed sit-down breakfast and coffee, we did our best to extend hope and demonstrated compassion to those desperate for help.

Love acts.

We were reassured by our timely response to the congregation and larger community, and yet we knew it was not enough. People were set adrift in their tiny apartments and cavernous homes. Even ranches, beach houses, and RV’s became islands without others beyond family and clan. Christ has made us an interdependent body and we ignore that to our spiritual, emotional – and yes – physical demise. Paul confirmed this with the spiritually strident, go-it-alone Corinthians, ‘The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you.” And the head cannot say to the feet, ‘I don’t need you” (1 Corinthians 12:21). Heeding his admonition, we moved our worship celebrations outdoors in early June 2020; although we continued to livestream both celebrations. Across the heart of the campus, we set up 200 chairs, in varying assortments. This was a pivotal decision for us. Being outside, the singing and preaching took on the guise of a frontier revival, and the announcements were laced with levity. We were overjoyed to be in each other’s presence, so that we were experiencing firsthand the Lord’s promise, ‘For where two or three are gathered in my Name, there am I with them’ (Matthew 18:20). Love is with us.

From Our Rector...

We are back in our buildings now, and our eyes confirm what our fears predicted: the parish body has shrunk. Eighteen months of Covid-19 has winnowed our congregation. Some are afraid to return with news of fresh waves of the virus coming ashore in the delta-variants.

Others have settled comfortably in front of their screens, happy to experience worship pajama-clad with coffee at hand.

The greatest number of missing, we fear, are no longer worshipping. Worship is a habit, a habit that can be broken by the seductive calls of lesser things. Our Lord is always seeding our pathways with tokens of his love and signs of his kingdom, but long uncultivated faith becomes shallow and easily strangled.1 Because the Church has a long history of calamity and rebirth, we are not staring at a blank page in this task of reconnecting and rebuilding. The first crisis that literally forced the Church to abandon its usual meeting places occurred in Rome during the late third and early fourth centuries, under the reigns of the four Tetrartic Emperors Diocletian, Maximian, Constantius, and Galerius (286-305).

Providentially in the preceding century, Christians had dug into the soft basalt rock beneath the capital city to bury their dead in catacombs, setting them apart from the pagan shrines dominating cemeteries on the surface.

Scarcely a hundred years later, those four tyrannical emperors arose with the determination to stifle, if not, destroy the nascent Church. Unable to worship openly any longer, congregations descended into the catacombs to celebrate Sunday worship amongst the sarcophagi.

Sixty of the Christian catacombs have been excavated, and bereft of windows and light, we have discovered the congregations’ created evocative wallpaintings. Two pictures predominate in all sixty recesses: Christ the Philosopher and Christ the Good Shepherd.2 The drawings of Christ the Philosopher 1 Matthew 13:1-23 2 Alister McGrath, The Landscape of Faith: An Explorer’s Guide to the Christian Creeds (London: SPCK, 2018), 110.

on the catacomb walls depicts the Lord with a staff in one hand and a book of the Gospels in the other. The staff represents Jesus Christ stamping out death, a poignant reminder to adorn a cemetery wall. Because death did not have the final word with Christ, death will neither have the final word with those at rest in the underground tombs, nor with those secretly meeting beneath the city streets for Sunday worship.3 Our present congregations must hear this message afresh. The Coronavirus has tyrannized us, forcing many of us to huddle in our homes for a year and a half and leading us to envisage a terrifying future. Many of us constantly lament, “Is this the new way of things?”

We Christians have a far more hopeful and enduring message to impart: Jesus Christ is setting things right.4 Most people erroneously believe that sickness, pain, epidemics, and death are the natural order of things, when, in fact, those things are an aberration – vestiges of a fallen world. Christ’s crucifixion on Calvary is the cosmic vaccination for the healing of humanity and the world, and his resurrection and ascension portend our full recovery.5 The Holy Spirit has been given to the body as evidence that God is healing us and that his kingdom is shattering the dark powers that have infected us, working in us like a strong antibiotic that breaks the hold of a festering disease.6 Fueled by the Spirit, we become heralds of the Good News that God is not finished with us.7 Love has a voice.

In Christ the Philosopher’s other hand, he grasps a book of the Gospels. Christ holds the secret to meaning in this present life.

The sirens of affluence, entertainment, sensation, and self-help have shipwrecked us on the barren shoals of egotism.

Countering the voices that once beguiled us, Christ invites, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’, just as he is herded to the cross (John 14:6). His words intersect his 3 Revelation 21:4 4 N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: Harper One, 2008), 179.

5 Romans 8:19-21 6 Ephesians 1:13-16 7 Philippians 3:12-14

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From Our Rector...

Christ and Apostles, Catacombs of Domitilla, 2nd century, Rome

subsequent march to crucifixion to paint an unmistakable portrait. Real meaning is found, not in sheltering, but giving away our lives for love’s sake.8 Dying to self and living for Christ puts us on the voyage to a full life instead of a truncated one.9 The other picture painted most often on the catacomb walls is Christ the Good Shepherd, a graphic assertion that those escaping underground to offer their praises and raise their petitions were known by the Lord -- ‘I am the good shepherd,’ says Christ, ‘I know my own and my own know me.’

And they were loved by him, even to the point of death – ‘And I lay down my life for the sheep’ (John 10:11-14). Standing in that subterranean cemetery, they would have been revived by the truth that Christ leads them into death, and Christ leads them out.10 The modern Church is one of the few places where people are not deftly sequestered from death. The reality of life’s end is acknowledged in stark contrast to a world that strives to anesthetize the fact. We publicly commit our loved ones to the resurrection, boldly proclaiming that Christ’s love has the final word and not death.11 This is the heartbeat of the gospel we must share, for the message is not some 8 2 Corinthians 5:15 9 Luke 9:24; John 13:34 10 Colossians 2:12 11 The Book of Common Prayer, 349, 382 & 482-483; 499

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ethereal wish of “pie in the sky,” but has immediate concrete consequences. As C.S. Lewis famously asserted, “If you read history, you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next…

It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.”12 Our sacrificial actions in the present are fueled by the hope that our lives have meaning,

that our personal histories are going somewhere, and that we are being led by the one who walked through death for us.

Christ is guiding us out of the shadowing enclaves of the Coronavirus, and the fear and dispassion it has sown, so that we may light the way out for others.13 Love, after all…is contagious.

13 Matthew 5:14-16

12 C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Harper One, 1952), 134.

Christ the Good Shepherd, Catacombs of Priscilla, 3rd century, Rome

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Prayerful Cure Music Ministry

by Josh Benninger Lord my God, I called to you for help, and you healed me. (Psalm 30:2)

“Josh, do not think of Hell as fire and

brimstone; that’s not the real message.

Being in Hell means living separate from God and knowing you could have been with him, but you chose not to.” My teacher, Roberta Keller, delivered this mic drop when I was a teenager in the infantile stages of mastering the pipe organ. I’ve contemplated her words numerous times this past year as I’ve dwelled on my cancer diagnosis and treatment. I discovered I had spent so much time researching what science could do to fix me, that I forgot to ask what God could do. I had fallen into a trap, and Roberta’s accusing words rang loud and clear. I was slowly but measurably separating myself from God by not acting, specifically, by not praying for healing.

Though I didn’t realize it at the time, Roberta wasn’t merely interested in my musical training; she was building a

foundation for my faith. In a sense, she was my first pastor. I was a naïve sheep, so I didn’t put much stock into what my shepherd was saying, but now, more than ever, her discipleship all those years ago resurfaced with a vengeance.

I asked myself, “What am I doing to stay connected with God?” The answer: not much. As the last five months of cancer treatment have gone by, so too has my tether with God. I realized I wasn’t praying for healing. I wasn’t praying for

By inaction, I was accepting my illness as a fate, an inevitable and immovable thing that the power of

Christ could not change.

restoration. By inaction, I was accepting my illness as a fate, an inevitable and immovable thing that the power of Christ could not change. I had become so ignorant!

In the hymn, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” the second part of verse one goes like this: “Oh, what peace we often forfeit, Oh, what needless pain we bear, all because we do not carry everything

to God in prayer!” Take note that the author uses the phrase “Take it to the Lord in prayer” a whopping four times. I award this hymn as the go-to source for reminding us that we are not alone on this journey; we have a Lord and Savior who is always present and listening.

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever!

Amen. (Ephesians 3:20-21) The passage above from Paul’s letter to the Church of Ephesus is a rallying point, an anchor to secure my walk with Christ.

No matter what impossible task I believe Jesus is unable to achieve, he can do even more. To move forward, the trap I need to disarm is simple; I must accept that God has more love and grace for me than I can quantify and that he is the true healer.

Paul prayed that the Ephesians “may have the power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.” (3:17-18) I want this power, too; I pray to close the gap between God and me. Christ sent the invitation; now, I need to accept it.

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Put Love in the Driver’s Seat Youth Ministry

by Avery Moran

The CEC Youth have a lot of things

happening this coming year. On Wednesday nights, we’ll be having a Bible study where we go through the book of Romans. Every other Saturday, we’ll have a service opportunity at Sidewalk Saturday. The weekends we aren’t helping with Sidewalk Saturday, we’ll have a social event. But what I really want to talk about is our Fall Sunday School series.

This Fall we will be covering the Fruits of the Spirit. In Galatians 5, Paul states that the Fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

The first that we’ll be talking about is love, and this probably isn’t too surprising. It’s the fruit that we are probably the most comfortable explaining. When we look through scripture, love is constantly talked about. In the same chapter that Paul mentions the fruits of the spirit, he also states that what really matters is “faith

expressing itself through love,” and that we should serve each other humbly in love.

Proverbs 10:12 says “Hatred stirs up conflict, but love covers over all wrongs.” And of course, most famously, John 3:16 which says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

I think that Paul best explains the importance of love in 1 Corinthians 13, a chapter I’m sure many are familiar with. This is the famous “Love is patient, Love is kind” chapter. But what I want to focus on comes before this, specifically 1 Corinthians 13: 1-3. Paul starts this chapter off by saying: “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.”

Picture the fruits of the spirit as a car. Cars have all these parts that have different

<a href=’https://pngtree.com/so/car’>car png from pngtree.com/</a>

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functions. You have a radiator to cool the car, brakes to stop the car, and wheels to turn the car. I won’t continue listing car parts, you get the idea. All these parts come together to create a vehicle that works, but what happens if we unplug the battery? Well, the car won’t turn on. You can put as much work as you want into the car, but without a battery, that work means nothing.

In a similar way, love is the battery that powers the rest of the fruits of the spirit, and that’s why we’re start with it. Love is the reason that Jesus was able to give his life for us. Love is what makes the Joy of God possible. Love is what enables us to be patient, or kind, or gentle, or exhibit self-control.

Please pray for us and especially for our youth as they start this coming school year.

Avery Moran

“Love Bears All Things...”

1 Corinthians 13:7 CEC Family Ministry

by Halleta Heinrich

I could not think of a better scripture

theme for this year in Children’s Ministry as we begin our Fall programs than Paul’s comforting words in his first letter to the Christians of Corinth - “Love bears all things...” I must confess that not only our current challenges, but the gifts of two big stuffed bears led me to choose this scripture theme. What can I do with the big, beautiful, brown Teddy Bear and the equally beautiful big Panda and her cubs?

Of course - they can be our Children’s Chapel Mascots seated at the front of either side of Chapel, bringing joy to our children as they are decorated seasonally.

I will call them our Love Bears. Amazing!

Their name fits right in with our theme!

Love has born all things for this last year and a half – a shutdown of church and Sunday School for a brief time, the holding of Sunday School and church outdoors, the wearing of masks for safety’s sake, the flooding of the Family Ministry

Center caused by the Big Freeze, the packing up of all items and furnishings on the second and third floors of the FMC (and we have lots of stuff!), and the final Big Unpack, which is still going on as I write, in preparation for Rally Day. Love has gotten us through. Of course it has because God is Love! Paul goes on to say “Love is patient, love is kind, ...It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.”

The love of God through Jesus Christ has certainly helped us be patient and kind even when we didn’t feel like it. This Love has helped us to trust God in a way we never had before because we didn’t really have a choice. We have never given up hope and continue to persevere because we know we are loved unconditionally

by God who is Love and came to save us through Jesus Christ. This God of Love never fails us and is with us always through the good times and difficult challenges of this life.

I thank God for this church and my church family! You are a reflection of the Love that never fails.

Halleta

THANK YOU I give thanks for all of those who have led Sunday School and Children’s Chapels through these tumultuous times. I give thanks for the following who have committed to lead Children’s Sunday School for the next nine months. Please thank them when you see them! God does provide!

Preschool Level 1 Catechesis of the Good Shepherd: Leita Carter and Tobin Hays (and me) First and Second Grade Level 2 Catechesis of the Good Shepherd: Carmen Lewenthal and Monica Elliott Third and Fourth Grade The Story: Stephen Archer and Ashlee Biechlin Fifth Grade Grapple Pre-Teen Class: Jeanne and Kelvin Tatum and Carla Solis 9

World Mission in Pandemic Time

CEC World Missions

by Brien Koehler

This is the column that would, in

“normal” times, be the place where mission trips completed in the traditional summer mission trip season would be celebrated. Well, not this time! Mission plans to visit and participate in Christ Church’s world-wide mission program are all (not surprisingly) on hold. When circumstances permit, we will be sending our teams to Honduras, Uganda, and the Middle East but the question remains – when? Plans are at least set for tentative mission work to resume this fall, but local circumstances in each place must be considered. Health concerns are at the top of the list, but also political, and other local concerns must be favorable as well.

In the meantime, our World Missions Committee has not been idle. We have

re-examined our planned budget to direct funds from Christ Church to places we know well, to meet needs we did not expect. We have made emergency grants to two dioceses in Uganda where Christ Church has long and established ties through the work of many decades.

Christ Church’s help has provided food for families, as well as helping to ensure that parish clergy are able to remain in place as pastors to their people. Other relief has been provided in Kenya, through our longterm partner on the ground, Getachew Bizabeh.

In Honduras, where hunger and economic depression received the triple-hit from two hurricanes and Covid, Christ Church has been in partnership with the Diocese of West Texas providing food for nearly 100 families in the Copan region of Honduras.

The priest from that Deanery recently wrote to the Koehlers saying, “the food relief project is a great blessing for those families, and it is helping the deanery to survive.” He continued, “the people are

Emergency food delivery in the Bunyoro-Kitara Diocese in Uganda.

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very thankful for the support that Christ Episcopal Church has been sending.”

Christ Church also continues regular monthly support of our missionary families, the Millers and the Olsons. The Millers continue their ministry in Spain, and the Olsons are hoping to return to the field in the Philippines soon.

Finally, our new relationship with the Episcopal Church in Navajoland is developing, but slowly. The restrictions on travel into the reservation (a direct result of Covid) have hampered our hopes, but in partnership with five other parishes in the Diocese of West Texas, we are engaged in a “getting to know you” project with our clergy counterparts in Navajoland.

There are still no plans for mission trips to the Navajoland churches, but please pray for the continued development of our relationships leading into meaningful work together.

Food relief in Honduras

Caring for “The Stranger” CEC Outreach

by Justin Lindstrom “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in” Matthew 25:35

“The Border Patrol is awesome at their job checking for criminals,” Flor said. “They take the migrants’ biometrics to check for any criminal record. Then, they meet with an officer to make their case that they have a credible fear of remaining in their country. Finally, they take a COVID test and if they test positive, they are isolated.”

The credible fear interview is extremely detailed. Family members are divided up and interviewed separately. If the stories don’t match, the family is returned to their country. Proof is needed, such as photos or records.

Border Patrol agents have said that they find two categories of people crossing. The cartel members avoid the Border Patrol.

The asylum seekers actively seek officers to turn themselves in and start the process.”

Flor explained the difference in the two migrant categories.

Flor Saldivar

For Flor Saldivar, it’s personal. A native of the Rio Grande Valley, a Latinx, an Episcopalian, Flor is also the Director of Immigration and Refugee Ministries for the Diocese of West Texas.

“As Episcopalians, we serve with dignity and respect,” she said. The asylum seekers coming here need that support as they continue on their journey to their sponsors, most of whom are scattered across the country.

Flor recently addressed a Christ Episcopal Church Sunday school class to explain her mission and ask for help.

Migrants served by our diocese and other organizations are in the country legally as persons seeking asylum. They’ve endured an arduous journey just to get to the bridge, but from there must make their case to stay.

Refugees have a major advantage.

As people who have left their home countries because of fear of persecution or disturbed public order, refugees are entitled to international protection. The United Nations has provided them with refugee status and they are entitled to help once they reach American soil. They are entitled to food stamps, health care, and other services.

per family member. So, the sponsors try to find the money, take out mortgages on their homes, whatever they can do.”

For the asylum seekers whose sponsors can’t help them, the choice is to go home or try to swim across. The cartels won’t leave them alone even then. Flor recounts being told that the cartel members will shoot at the people desperately trying to swim across the Rio Grande, even as Border Patrol on the American side are trying to save their lives.

In San Antonio, the asylum seekers most typically need support as they make their way from the bus station to the airport. All have final destinations; they just need some basics like a change of clothes, underwear, a sack lunch – or sometimes a place to stay for a short period.

“We’ve received a grant and were able to buy a van,” Flor said. “St. Luke’s got a group of volunteers certified to drive it, so now we have transportation from the bus station to the airport.”

Needs are varied and there are a number of opportunities for CEC members to volunteer:

Then, after a journey that can take months or even years, the asylum seekers become cartel targets.

X PPE and Food Kit drive X Baby kit and child item drive X Airport and bus station outreach volunteers X Volunteer drivers X Hospitality teams (Available to respond to an essential need – i.e transportation to doctors’ offices; reimbursable purchasing of and dropping off of essential items, etc.)

X Short Term Hosts – persons willing to host for short stays (from one night to one month) X Become a sponsoring congregation for a family

According to Flor, “The cartels own the border. They hold families for ransom when they get to the bridges. They contact their sponsors in the U.S. who try to come up with the money. Sometimes it’s $5,000

Cynthia McWhirter is the liaison for Christ Episcopal Church’s Immigration and Refugee Ministry. Contact her with questions or to offer to volunteer. 773-3015329 or Cynthiamc926@gmail.com.

“Asylum seekers don’t have any status and are the most vulnerable of any group,” Flor said. “They are in immediate fear of death if they stay in their country. Most don’t want to leave their homes; they love their families and their native land.”

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Music to our

Ears

or perhaps there is such a thing as free lunch!

Great Commission Society

by Patrick Gahan

Jack Walters has been my friend starting

before I even arrived at Christ church. He, along with Sam Wright, served as advisors to the Search Committee who called me to serve here nine and a half years ago. Jack was particularly close to Bob Ayres, a man I consider my mentor and adopted uncle, and that brought Jack and me together in an inseparable bond. Therefore, when Jack asked me to lunch a few Fridays ago, I jumped at the chance to be with my friend. Besides, he was paying!

Over my bowl of gumbo and his clam chowder, Jack surprised me with the news that he planned to make an extra gift each year beyond his annual financial offering to support the Music Endowment. The generous amount he quoted had me drop my soup spoon on the table. The brief conversation that ensued is worth sharing: 12

Patrick: Jack, what moved you to make this unexpected gift to the church’s endowment?

Jack: For one, Lucy, my late wife, loved music. It was very important to her. This gives me a way to honor her memory.

As for me, my grandfather in Delaware had a large impact on my life. He had a magnificent baritone voice, and he sang in the choir of his Methodist church until he died. He modeled the importance of supporting your church.

Patrick: Is there another reason?

Jack: Yes, I want my children and grandchildren to see what we should do with our money. We shouldn’t hold it close to our chests but invest in those things we care about. That’s what it means to be a steward.

Patrick: I’ve heard you say something similar about the family farm Lucy and you bought outside of Seguin.

Jack: You’re right, I did not want to

simply leave money to my children and grands, I want them to become stewards of the land. That is very important right now and taking care of the land does good things for the people who do it. I am already seeing that transformation in our family.

Patrick: Jack, you are a walking advertisement for stewardship.

Jack: I don’t know about that, but I want you to know that I am very proud of Christ Church and the way we’re preparing for the future. People my age want the things they love to endure, and Christ Church takes first place on my list.

Join Jack in considering an extra gift to the Christ Church Endowment or visit your attorney or financial counselor to make provision for Christ Church in your will.

Your gift will outlast us all!

Your brother, Patrick+

PAGE TURNERS – From the Rector’s Book Stack Forget UT, OU,

A&M, Bama, Notre Dame, Ohio State – all of the big names.

Those gridiron royals have nothing on the football teams fielded by the old Masonic Home for Orphans in Ft. Worth. Twelve Mighty Orphans: The Inspiring Story of the Mighty Mites Who Ruled Texas Football, by Jim Dent is the most unbelievable and inspirational sports story ever written. The story is unbelievable because twelve orphans, with names like Dinky, Pinky, Donkey, Red, Soap, Chigger, Floppy, and Tinfoil defeated most every powerhouse high school team in Texas. With only one reserve player, they beat Highland Park – Dallas, Dallas Tech, Amarillo, North Side – Ft. Worth, Wichita Falls, and so on. Coaching with no assistants against vastly greater squads with a hundred times the financial support, Coach Rusty Russell amassed a record of 127-30-12. Leaving prestigious Temple High School for the orphanage, Russell and his family received less than a livable wage for his work as coach and principal of the school. What’s more, he had to drive his teams across the state on the back of a flatbed truck (he eventually added some wooden rails to keep his boys from rolling off the side). His only companion in the truck and on the sideline was Dr. E.P. “Doc” Hall, who kept the twelve patched up, sewing as many as twelve stiches in a boy’s head and sending him back into the fray. Doc never missed a practice or a game. On Saturdays, the two coached the middle school boys, who played barefoot and whipped every opponent in Ft. Worth. These were the Great Depression years and Texans from as far away as San Antonio, Corpus Christi, and Houston would make the long trip on Friday nights to see the “Mighty Mites,” who gave them hope to overcome the economic gloom.

Eric Fenton gave me this book to read on my sabbatical. I finished it in four days

and excitedly quoted so many excerpts to Kay that she read the book in self-defense.

Allow me to add that Coach Rusty Russell is one of the most admirable sports figures of all time – especially in an age of overpaid, pampered, simpering athletes.

Russell would scout opponents, drag in at midnight, and not go to bed until he wrote an encouraging letter to one of his boys. He is the greatest Texas high school football coach of all time and one of the finest men to ever hang a whistle around his neck.

Just before I left for sabbatical, my colleague and friend Scott Kitayama slipped a copy of Who God Is: Meditations on the Character of Our God, by Ben Witherington, III. I had to admit to Scott in my thank you note that I actually finished the book before we boarded the plane. At only 102 pages, Witherington, an acclaimed New Testament scholar, draws the reader in with his first words of the Prologue: “That God is love tells us something very different than saying we have a loving God. That God is life is different than saying God is living or lively. That God is light is different than saying God is enlightening… Too often we emphasize the adjectives without fully taking in the nouns.” The book is an astounding illumination of those most important nouns about the God we call the Word!

Kay’s eagle eye discovered P.D. James’s Death of an Expert Witness hidden in the rack of “Free Books” along the main aisle of a shopping mall in Santa Fe, NM. She pulled it out from the bottom shelf and held it

up as if she had landed a prize trout in a Montana river. The sixth Adam Dalgliesh mystery in the English novelist’s series of fourteen, the book is as intelligent as it is enthralling. Kay knows a prize when she fishes one out. Chief Inspector Dalgliesh is a celebrated poet who translates Latin straight off the page of a letter penned by the recently murdered: Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem – ‘Lord, let me know mine end, and the number of my days…’

Dalgliesh must solve a murder and a suicide, both of which take place on the campus of a forensics laboratory. Those who study death under a microscope are now fearfully numbering their days.

An Irish-Western combination seemed far-fetched until Kay urged me to read The Searcher, by Tana French.

French, a celebrated mystery writer, admitted to taking the name of John Ford’s epic film, The Searchers, as the inspiration for her eighth novel. John Ford’s protagonist is the weary soldier, Ethan Edwards (played by the inimical John Wayne), who is returning home from the Civil War. Tana French’s hero is Cal Hooper, a disillusioned, newly divorced, Chicago detective, who strikes out to rural Ireland to escape his past. Like Edwards, who is compelled to search for his niece who has been kidnapped by the Comanches, Hooper is coerced to seek a missing teenager with ties to Dublin drug traffickers. Hooper discovers that the bucolic Irish countryside has a thin veneer.

Malevolent deceit lurks beneath the quaint thatched roofs and amongst the men huddled in the firelit pub. French, who has written seven NY Times bestsellers, was born in Burlington, Vermont but now lives in Dublin, brings modern Ireland to life for her readers and draws us into a crime for which very few of his Gaelic neighbors are innocent.

The Gettysburg Address ends with these 13

PAGE TURNERS – Continued lyrical, yet sobering lines, ‘this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’ At 272 words, Lincoln’s speech, delivered on November 19, 1863, very possibly comprises the greatest oration of all time – both in tone and substance. I thought of Lincoln’s words repeatedly while reading Emma Larkin’s, Finding George Orwell in Burma. Now bearing the dubious name Myanmar, that government of the people has perished and has been replaced by one ruled by a cabal of army generals. “Emma Larkin” is a pseudonym for the 71-yearold American journalist who, from her base in Bangkok, Thailand, has spent ten years clandestinely studying and writing about Burma. Her love of the Burmese people heightens her despair over their crushing oppression at the hands of the cruel junta.

In this book, she spends a year traveling through the regions of Burma where George Orwell served as a colonial policeman for the British Empire. Larkin’s thesis is that Orwell’s disillusionment with the Empire’s increasingly harsh, repressive tactics to control the Burmese people and wrest the natural resources from their land, led him to write his celebrated trilogy – Animal Farm, 1984, and Burmese Days.

Throughout the book, she quotes lines from 1984 as Orwell’s bleak predictions of a surveillance state comes to life in modern day Burma. The generals have employed an undercover army of informants, so many, in fact, that the people’s mere fear of being reported does the government’s work without the assistance of their neighborhood spies. Much like the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, academics, writers, and politicians who oppose the state, have their names expunged from all signs, books, rolls, or media of any kind, as if they no longer exist. More insidious than their torturous prisons, are the generals’ systematic efforts to erase 14

Burma’s history and replace it with faux facts to support their autocracy, which means they have denuded education of any substance at every level.

Across our world totalitarian states, large and small, are increasing in number. Larkin’s bold journalism is a bell resounding amidst all lovers of freedom, awakening us to relearn the fundamental elements of democracy, teach those elements to our children, and refute all efforts to dilute the collaborative mechanisms of the republic. It is also time, regardless of economic consequences, to disclose the demonic maneuvers of world’s oppressors – whether they be in China, Turkey, Russia, Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, or even in our own country – so that governments ‘of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth’.

The Tale of the Missing Books may be the title I would append to our time in Maine this summer. A week before Kay and I left for the cooler Pine Tree State, I posted a large carton of books for us to enjoy. The box contained five or six novels, a history or two, three theological texts, and an anthology of essays. The box never arrived. I tracked the parcel to the New England U.S. Postal Distribution Center in Springfield, MA, where it arrived on May 28 and then disappeared. Someone is either being religiously enriched or has additional tinder for his hearth. Once I raised the white flag of surrender, I realized the Lord wanted me to scrupulously study Alister McGrath’s The Landscape of Faith: An Explorer’s Guide to the Christian Creeds. McGrath’s extensive understanding of the Nicene Creed inspired me to write the curriculum for our new threshold class at Christ Church – Beginning Again. The author has published fifty books, including biographies on C.S. Lewis, John Calvin,

and J.I. Packer, a half dozen histories of the Reformation, another half dozen volumes of apologetics, a history of the King James Bible, and a trilogy of novels entitled The Aedyn Chronicles. Still, McGrath, a celebrated Oxford biochemist and theologian, is best known for his public debates with Richard Dawkins and the cadre of New Atheists, which highlights the author’s passion to engage Christians intellectually so that we do not concede the high ground of wisdom to the pagan culture. McGrath proves unequivocally that science and faith are not at odds but complement one another. “Faith is an attitude to reality,” declares McGrath, “a way of seeing things that helps us grasp how much there is to discover, and its potential to transform lives.”

McGrath was converted to faith in Christ while studying at college. His conversion was not so much a surrender as it was an engagement with the “intellectual capaciousness” of Christianity – a far cry from the hollow sloganeering of Christians that grab the headlines today. That “capaciousness” or largess of the Gospel is how McGrath explains the Creed.

Repeatedly, he states that we are part of a much larger story than we presently imagine. The Creeds are a prayer (hence they end with “Amen”) enticing us to expand the understanding of our faith, not shrink it. The book is organized around four poles: 1. Mapping the Landscape of Faith; 2. The Living God; 3. Jesus Christ, Lord and Savior; 4. The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life. I have typed five pages of notes from the text and need to record at least two more.

McGrath’s understanding inspires me with the certainty that our faith in Christ ushers us into a life of meaning – an expansive, vividly colored life. In his own words, “Christianity is not a religious ideology, appealing to the cold logic of reason. It is a vision of reality, a ‘big picture’, a ‘grand story’, which captures our imaginations and expands our capacity to see and make sense of our world and our lives. It is a way of seeing things, which, once grasped, opens us to a new landscape of ideas and values.”

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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 23, Number 5.

Our choir makes a joyful noise even WITH masks on!