Church of St. Luke and The Epiphany

Please take a minute to view the St. Luke's 2021 Stewardship Campaign Kick-off Video. We appreciate your continuing support of St. Luke's through your time, talent and treasure, and look forward to connecting with you through our various online activities. Remember, to reserve a date to return to in-person worship when you are comfortable doing so. Feel free to share the video with a friend you think may be interested in our St. Luke's community. Thank you! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWclI9PRFuw&t=1s

Please join us tomorrow night at 7pm for our LIVE Streamed Prayer Around the Cross Service. Find more information here at our website... https://www.slatechurch.org/online-fellowship

We recorded the Sunday service at church today. It was a little warm in there! Sunday August 16 Holy Eucharist at 9am.

Dear Parishioners, Not long after George Floyd’s tragic death at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, the idea was broached in the office of St. Luke’s to do something to express our support for the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement. We talked about it, and settled on the idea of a banner for the front of the church. We put the idea in the capable hands of Brigid and Marya at Creative Characters and they came up with the design you see reproduced below. Thirt...y feet long and attached to the wall that fronts 13th Street, the banner’s bold lettering is set against a background that mimics asphalt paving, evoking the words painted on streets around the country, including in Manhattan. Our banner is just a first, tangible step in our effort to confront and engage in the challenges facing St. Luke’s and other predominantly white institutions large and small. We’re called by the love of Jesus first to acknowledge more deeply our enmeshment with our national history of institutionally tolerating and often supporting white supremacy, and second, to take action to bring our Black sisters and brothers closer to full and equal citizenship in the workplace, government, schools, neighborhoodsin all the ways we live together as loved children of God.. In the coming days you will hear from the Anti-Racism Committee some of our first ideas about specific ways to deepen awareness of how and why we find ourselves in a centuries’ old acceptance of less than status for the vast majority of Black Americans, and how and why White Americans insist on, or resist, the hard and demanding work of real equality. We welcome ideas and commentsand actively taking partfrom all of you as we seek to find our way in the this time of what should be great hope and promise for a transformed national life that respects the dignity of every human being. Peace, Bob The Rev. Robert C. Smith Interim Rector

We recorded the Sunday service at church today. It was a little warm in there! Sunday August 16 Holy Eucharist at 9am.

https://youtu.be/c4aNZ00ij8M

Dear Parishioners, Not long after George Floyd’s tragic death at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, the idea was broached in the office of St. Luke’s to do something to express our support for the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement. We talked about it, and settled on the idea of a banner for the front of the church. We put the idea in the capable hands of Brigid and Marya at Creative Characters and they came up with the design you see reproduced below. Thirt...y feet long and attached to the wall that fronts 13th Street, the banner’s bold lettering is set against a background that mimics asphalt paving, evoking the words painted on streets around the country, including in Manhattan. Our banner is just a first, tangible step in our effort to confront and engage in the challenges facing St. Luke’s and other predominantly white institutions large and small. We’re called by the love of Jesus first to acknowledge more deeply our enmeshment with our national history of institutionally tolerating and often supporting white supremacy, and second, to take action to bring our Black sisters and brothers closer to full and equal citizenship in the workplace, government, schools, neighborhoodsin all the ways we live together as loved children of God.. In the coming days you will hear from the Anti-Racism Committee some of our first ideas about specific ways to deepen awareness of how and why we find ourselves in a centuries’ old acceptance of less than status for the vast majority of Black Americans, and how and why White Americans insist on, or resist, the hard and demanding work of real equality. We welcome ideas and commentsand actively taking partfrom all of you as we seek to find our way in the this time of what should be great hope and promise for a transformed national life that respects the dignity of every human being. Peace, Bob The Rev. Robert C. Smith Interim Rector

Happy Friday! All are welcome to participate in Prayer Around The Cross tonight. Please follow this link to our site and find the directions under "Prayer Around The Cross" --https://www.slatechurch.org/online-fellowship

Join us today in worship, starting at 9am! https://youtu.be/q_thUdqD8V8

5/31/2020 Washington Post: Presiding Bishop Michael B. Curry As a black man, I understand the anger in our streets. But we must still choose love. By Michael B.... Curry May 31, 2020 at 8:00 a.m. EDT Michael B. Curry is presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. I am an African American man, blessed to serve as the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. In my 67 years, I have seen our country change a great deal. But what happened to George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Sandra Bland, Paul Castaway, Melissa Ventura, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin and countless others has been a sad constant. Back in the 1960s and ’70s, my father ran the Human Relations Commission for the city of Buffalo. He organized sensitivity trainings for the police department, many of whose members he respected and liked. He also warned me to be careful whenever I interacted with the police, because he knew the dangers for a young black man were real. As events in Minneapolis have revealed, that danger has not changed. What has changed is technology: Today, cellphones document racial terror. That is why we see frustration, pain and anger rippling through our streets today. We should all feel the same. But that frustration must not lead to fatalism or despair. We are not condemned to live this way forever. I recommend a different path the path of love. Our nation’s heart breaks right now because we have strayed far from the path of love. Because love does not look like one man’s knee on another man’s neck, crushing the God-given life out of him. This is callous disregard for the life of another human being, shown in the willingness to snuff it out brutally as the unarmed victim pleads for mercy. Love does not look like the harm being caused by some police or some protesters in our cities. Violence against any person is violence against a child of God, created in God’s image. And that ultimately is violence against God, which is blasphemy the denial of the God whose love is the root of genuine justice and true human dignity and equality. Love does not look like the silence and complicity of too many of us, who wish more for tranquility than justice. What does love look like? Not like this. These words spoken Thursday night by my friend Craig Loya, the newly elected Episcopal bishop of Minnesota haunt me. I look at searing images of racialized violence across our country against the backdrop of the disproportionate number of covid-19 victims who are black, brown and native and I cannot help but notice love’s profound and tragic absence. So what is the path of love? In times like these, how can we find it and follow it? When I think about what love looks like, I see us channeling our holy rage into concrete, productive and powerful action. In this moment, love looks like voting for leadership at the local, state, and federal level that will help us to make lasting reform. Love looks like calling on officials and demanding they fulfill their duty to protect the dignity of every child of God. Love looks like making the long-term commitment to racial healing, justice and truth-telling knowing that, without intentional, ongoing intervention on the part of every person of good will, America will cling to its original, racist ways of being. Love looks like working with local police departments to build relationships with the community and develop mechanisms that hold officers accountable. It means ensuring that no police officer with a history of unauthorized force or racialized violence is shielded and allowed to endanger the lives of those they’ve sworn to protect and serve. Love looks like all of us people of every race and religion and national origin and political affiliation standing up and saying Enough! We can do better than this. We can be better than this. What does love look like? I believe that is what Jesus of Nazareth taught us. It looks like the biblical Good Samaritan, an outsider who spends his time and money healing somebody he doesn’t know or even like. What America has seen in the past several days may leave us wondering what we can possibly do in this moment to be good Samaritans to help heal our country, even the parts we don’t know or like. But we have the answer. Now is the time for a national renewal of the ideals of human equality, liberty, and justice for all. Now is the time to commit to cherishing and respecting all lives, and to honoring the dignity and infinite worth of every child of God. Now is the time for all of us to show in our words, our actions, and our lives what love really looks like.

Good Morning! Please consider joining us this morning for online fellowship at 9am. https://www.slatechurch.org/stream-sundays-service

WHAT'S NEXT? Dear Parishioners, Alleluia. Christ is risen. This must be among the strangest of Eastertides, when we are joyful and unsettled at the same time. I want to thank all of you for your warm acceptance of the services during our disrupted Holy Week worship times. We miss being together; we miss the choir, but we celebrate and praise nevertheless. My early Sundays and Holy Week here have certainly been blessed by the faithful and talented colleagues: Lisa Thomas..., Jonathan Bowen, Gabi Thomas, and Victor Psoras especially made the streaming services much better than I would have guessed possible before I came. What’s next? As the bishop suggested, we will suspend service this Sunday, and resume with the 11:00 service only on the 26th. At a staff meeting yesterday, we agreed on a recording of a service in the church with a still smaller group: a cameraperson, Jonathan, and me. (I will share communion with one of them.) Jonathan is looking into the possibility of using the virtual choir software, for which individual people record voice and video separately and then the performance is blended into a Zoom-like array of faces with voices blended. To make the service safer, we’re also moving the readers for each service from the church to home recording, which Gabi will edit into the recording for Sunday streaming. Tentatively, it looks as though the Bible Study group will Zoom its gathering on the first and third Sundays at 10, and the Book Group is organizing to meet on the second and fourth. I want to test the waters in the next few weeks about doing a streaming Daily Office from home. It would be valuable to hear from folks who would like to have morning or evening prayer available. One reminder for us all: to reduce in-office paperwork, we’re moving to online offerings of pledge payments and other gifts. We’re in the process in the next week or two of removing the option of giving by credit or debit cards and going instead to the service Parish Giving, for which you authorize periodic deductions from a bank account. I hope we all can maintain our generous giving to the work of the church, even while understanding that some of us may find ourselves in straitened circumstances during the economic chaos of this pandemic. Speaking of giving, for those who wish to find ways to aid those who are suffering during this time, below are two links, one from The Philadelphia Citizen and another from The New York Times, to places local and national for emergency giving during these months of extraordinary need. Stay strong in the Lord, Bob The Rev. Robert C. Smith Interim Rector

https://www.facebook.com/12213051/posts/10222417400643442/

Alleluia! Christ is risen. Happy Easter! Let us join together in fellowship online at 10:45am this morning to celebrate the risen Lord. ... The streaming of the service will premiere at 10:45am with Jonathan Bowen playing an extended musical prelude. The service will officially start just before 11am. We hope you are staying safe, feeling faithful and blessed this Easter morning. Link to this morning's service: https://www.slatechurch.org/stream-sundays-service

Join us tonight for our Maundy Thursday service! Follow the link to our website to watch the service start at 7pm. https://www.slatechurch.org/stream-sundays-service

Good Morning, Please view this morning's service on our website at 11am as we celebrate Palm Sunday. Follow this link: https://www.slatechurch.org/stream-sundays-service ... Also, please email the church administrator, Gabi at [email protected], if you would like to give toward's our Easter Flower Memorials. Memorials should be sent in no later than Monday, April 6th. Blessings, SLATE Church Staff

Our Holy Week Schedule 2020 Dear Parishioners, Let us all continue our prayers for healing for the world and our country, as well as our closer communities and families, including this community and family of the people of God. ... We will have a shortened and changed Holy Week schedule this year, observing as best we can in this dark time the Christian message of new life from the ministry, suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Here is the schedule of services, all of which will be streamed on Youtube, with links to them on the SLATE website. Sunday, April 5, 11 a.m.: The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday. Soloist: Baritone Todd Thomas. Thursday, April 9, 7 p.m.: Maundy Thursday, celebrating the institution of the Holy Eucharist. Friday, April 10, noon: Good Friday. There will be no Saturday evening Easter Vigil in church this year, but we’re sending out soon in a separate email, instructions for celebrating The Easter VigilAt Home, suggesting, among other things, how to light the new fire at home using a fire pitor a candle. Sunday, April 12, 11 a.m.: The Sunday of the Resurrection: Easter Sunday. We’re planning of offer links to Easter music in the online bulletin accompanying the streaming service. Many thanks once again to all who have made possible these online versions of our services, especially the technical talents of Gabi Thomas and Victor Psoras; Jonathan Bowen’s music; and the generous volunteering of acolytes and readers organized by Richard Keiser. Let’s all try to keep in our hearts and minds, as we navigate the mortal dangers of Covid-19, the words Jesus to his disciples when they were afraid for their lives: Take heart; it is I. Do not be afraid (Matthew 14:27). Peace and blessings, Bob The Rev. Robert C. Smith Interim Rector Church of St. Luke & the Epiphany