The View from Bolton Street

Have you ever been to the Baltimore Zoo?  Not the flamingos, or the new elephant exhibit or even the merry-go-round… but the goat petting corral. Yes. this is where it is at.  Did you know they have a goat that can paint?  I won’t comment on its talent or the authenticity of his work, but there are numerous paintings hanging in the barn to remind you of this unique talent.  So you get to the corral, and after a brief instruction from the staff you walk in, grab a small rubber bristled brush and you can brush the goats.  No feeding, no grooming, just brushing.  

I know, as a kid, you would put a quarter in the machine and get a handful of pellets to feed to the goats, and you could pet them and ride them, all that stuff. 

But these days, we know better.  So no more feeding, no more riding or harassing, just some light brushing with vet-approved devices.  It’s not unlike the Dolphins at the aquarium.  No more dolphin shows for our entertainment, just dolphin exercises for their exercise and enjoyment.  Slowly, we are learning to be better shepherds.  In this week’s Gospel Jesus talks about the Good Shepherd - one who brings life, and life abundantly.  

There is something beautiful about being in that goat corral and it being their space. We come to the gate, and we are only let in if we promise to take care of the sheep (well, goats).  In return we get to see them live, play, and yes, even paint.  It may seem less fun to not climb on the goats and cheer on the dolphins, but there is some value in being a good shepherd. Because you get to bring life to others.  

In a world that is increasingly commodified, extractive and parasitic - there is a lot of value in giving space for life.  It is what I love about the goat corral, the dolphin tank, and the Church.  We make space for life, abundant, abundant life.  

What are ways you bring life to the world?  To the city? To your home? 

The View from Bolton Street

Memorial Episcopal Church continues to be a unique community of faith, steeped in our traditions and open to the work of justice in the world around us –or as I like to call it, following Jesus’ example.  

This year our children’s program is bursting at the seams, our justice and reparations work is on track and picking up steam, and we are feeling a return to pre-pandemic-type attendance as our numbers for church attendance and volunteerism are picking up. All the while we continue to offer streaming services.  We welcomed two new young members to the faith with confirmations this Holy Week, and continue to see new members who have joined the Church in the last year.  It is energizing and exciting!  Did I mention the new floors are finally installed and the air conditioning should be operational any day now?  It has certainly been a long time coming.

Unfortunately, giving has not returned as quickly and our annual stewardship drive is more than $30,000 less than it was last year, and we also have eleven fewer pledges. As we seek to do good work in the community, help develop young Christians and have a powerful music ministry within worship, we are still dependent on the financial support of our members, friends and neighbors to keep the lights on and our programs going. 

If you have not yet made a pledge to Memorial but would like to, you can do so here: Stewardship 2022 — Memorial Church (memorialboltonhill.org) And if you have other skills to offer, grant writing, maintenance, graphic design, or any other skills and talents you’d like to share with the world, don’t be afraid to reach out.  There are many ways to be good stewards of the gift of this parish, and they are all received with equal joy.

Of course, the best way to support the memorial is with your presence! Either in person or online we would love to have you at any of the events listed below, in worship on Tuesday or Sunday mornings, or at future events. As we continue to build the beloved community it is good to remember that it is even more beloved with you in it. 

The View from Bolton Street

The View from Bolton Street

Now on that same day, the first day of the week, two of the disciples were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, and talking with each other about all these things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him.

Luke 24: 13-14

What a great day we had on Sunday! The music! The people! The coffee hour! The resurrection! The flowers! The trumpet!

It was all glorious. Let’s do it again!

In this easter season, I am reminded that Jesus continues to appear to us, whether on the road to Emmaus or the highway to Towson, Jesus continues to appear. But… we need to have our eyes and ears open so that we are able to recognize him, and what better way to do that than to be in community with each other.

It is true that where two or three are gathered, the Holy Spirit is present, but I think we can all agree that often it is easier to hear the Spirit speaking when there are more of us together! Communal worship allows us time to reflect, time to gather perspective on our lives, and an opportunity to consider what God might have in store for us; what joy might be waiting for us.

If you are looking for joy, if you felt joy on Easter, or you might like to feel it again - perhaps you would join us this Sunday and for the rest of this Easter season!

The View from Bolton Street

Isaiah 50:4 

The Lord God has given me
the tongue of a teacher,

that I may know how to sustain
the weary with a word.

Morning by morning he wakens--
wakens my ear
to listen as those who are taught.

Another week. Another school shooting.  Six more victims are in the legacy of inaction in this country when it comes to gun violence.  We worship a God who takes on, among other names, that of teacher, and Isaiah reminds us that we are God's students, every day is woken by the words of our heavenly teacher.  

Yet six of God's students, God's children, did not wake up today.  And despite the painfully obvious fact that the one constant in nearly every school shooting - the use of a gun, not just any gun but a semiautomatic AR-15 style assault rifle - as a culture we go everywhere else looking for blame. 

This time, because the shooter attended the school as a young girl and now identifies as a man, it is the trans community.  For such a small part of our population they already bear a tremendous burden - to have the blame for mental illness and school shootings put on them is just more hurt on top of, more hurt on top of more hurt. 

So let me offer a word to the weary here: 

Sin is indeed the cause of the continued, and increasing, trauma of school shootings in this country.  But it is not a sin connected to sexual identity or mental illness or who someone is or who they love.  Living into the person God called you to be is not SIN, it is HOLINESS.  And a community that allows and encourages that transformation is one of GRACE, not shame. Memorial, I pray, will always be such a holy and grace-filled community. 

 It is the sin spelled out for us in the ten commandments, that we read every Sunday during lent.  'Thou shalt not make for thyself any idol.' And this country has made an idol of guns.  In particular, cool-looking guns that make us feel powerful, independent, protected, and superior to everyone else.   

Whether it is a golden calf, a warm gun, or an Old Flag -- any totem that we put our trust in over and above God, in place of God, or as a symbol of God, is an idol.  Jesus Christ is the only thing that saves us, yesterday, today, and forever.  No number of guns in your safe, ammo in your stockpile, or food in your basement will be your salvation.  As a culture, and as a country, we have to stop worshipping the false promise that we as individuals can save ourselves or anyone else.  I also loved 'Red Dawn' - but it was a movie, and it turns out, Nicaraguan revolutionaries weren't the ones bringing guns to our street, it was Wall Street Corporations. Because the God they really value is not red or blue, but green.  

The Good News is, the truly Good News, is that we at Memorial and in the Episcopal Church represent a group of people committed to being a community of love.  Where we find safety in the community, not carbon steel plating; where we find hope in the resurrection, not a light trigger pull; and where we share God's love with everyone - no matter who they are, who they love, or how they live.  

My only prayer is that more people give up the idols of guns and money and power for the God of peace, justice, and resurrection. 

The View from Bolton Street

Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you,

and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.”

Ezekiel 37

Okay, but what can God do with empty pews?

It is a harsh reality that many clergies these days feel a bit like Ezekiel, prophesying to half-empty spaces hoping to see the bones of the Church rise up. I can only imagine what it feels like to sit on the other side, wondering where the person on your right and on your left has gone, why it feels so empty in a space that once felt so warm.

As a Christian community we are confronting an outside world that in some ways has moved on from church; living in a secular society skeptical of a religion that purports to tell everyone how to live, that seems to thrive on judgment and division, and that, during the worst of the COVID pandemic shut its doors to people when perhaps they needed God most. Perhaps worst of all, we are confronted with a group of people who love what we do but who simply found other things to do on a Sunday morning. Antagonism and indifference.

If 2020 brought twin pandemics of COVID and white supremacy, the post COVID era has brought on ‘the Great Resignation’ - not just from work but from public life: church, community, politics, even family. More and more of us have decided to just simply be alone. Or perhaps to be ‘online’ - that is to be together, but only in the context of a curated world where we have more control over how we are perceived and understood, and who we interact with, than we ever have to find in real life.

While preachers and pastors have always lamented sermons falling on ‘deaf ears’, now we wonder if they reach any ears at all. Some, perhaps, are simply resigned to it.

They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’

And yet I walk outside and I see lots of people out and about enjoying the seasonable (if mercurial) weather. I walk into Church on Sunday and I see a glut of small kids following Miles to Sunday School, I see people timidly stepping foot in the church for the first time or the first time in a long time looking for meaning. I see people hungry for a call to justice, to action, to community. I see new neighbors and new communities popping up around us. I see energy, and joy, and life.

I see the bones, and I see the new flesh, muscle and sinew and I pray that they can come together.

But the muscles need something to attach to. The sinews and flesh need a frame to fill out. This valley of dry bones needs to be attentive to the work of the spirit and see and connect to what God is offering to us as a community of faith right now and embrace and support it so that it can grow.

Even if that skin has a different hue. Even if those muscles flex in different ways. If the body that forms has different interests, passions, directions.

The Church will always be the Body of Christ at work in the world. The challenge for worshipping communities like Memorial today is that we have to decide if we want to be a part of building up the Body of Christ or to stick with what we have always done. If we want to hoard the gifts and talents and treasures we have, or do we want to turn around and share them with the wider world, not for our glory, or Memorial’s glory, or the Episcopal Church’s glory… but for God’s Glory.

Despite increases in attendance, program and need in the broader community - Stewardship at Memorial, including volunteer hours, financial contributions, and gifts of time and talent, are all declining. Our own great resignation. We can be resigned to this fact. That there is opportunity and potential out there and perhaps we are not the community to do it.

Or we can look at the abundance all around us. Stop worrying about what we don’t have and revel in the joy of what we do. And in so doing find Christ and each other and in that, everything we could possibly need to share with the world.

For when the Lord calls “and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act.”

The View from Bolton Street

“Frank Tracy Griswold III (1937-2023) served as the 25th presiding bishop of The Episcopal Church from 1998-2006.

Griswold co-chaired the Roman Catholic-Anglican Commission from 1998 to 2003 and made significant contributions to the 1979 Book of Common Prayer and to its practical use in the liturgical life of the church. Griswold’s private spiritual practice was deeply informed by the early mothers and fathers of the church, and he championed Eastern traditions of the open-hearted and healing power of God’s love.

Born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, Griswold earned a Bachelor of Arts at Harvard College and a Master of Arts from Oriel College at the University of Oxford. He was ordained as an Episcopal priest in 1963, and he married his wife, Phoebe Wetzel, in 1965. They raised two daughters in Philadelphia and Chicago, where Griswold was elected as Episcopal bishop in 1987. Griswold practiced a wide ministry of teaching, writing, lecturing, and leading retreats, nationally and internationally. After completing his term as presiding bishop, he served as a visiting professor at seminaries and universities in South Korea, Cuba, and Japan, as well as at the Episcopal Divinity School, the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Virginia Theological Seminary and Seabury-Western Theological Seminary. Griswold also served as bishop visitor to the Society of St. John the Evangelist.

His books include “Going Home” (Cowley Publications Cloister Book), “Praying our Days: A guide and companion” (Church Publishing Group), “Tracking Down the Holy Ghost: reflections on love and longing” (Church Publishing Group), and, co-authored with the Rev. Mark McIntosh, “Seeds and Faith” and “Harvest of Hope” (Eerdmans).” Resource - The Episcopal Church

Presiding Bishop Michael Curry’s Statement about the passing of Bishop Frank Tracy Griswold.

The View from Bolton Street

Sometimes… we just don’t get it

In this weeks Gospel Jesus has a unique encounter with a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well. In this brief story he divulges to her that he can offer living water to any who ask, knows her whole life story, offers her forgiveness and acceptance into the Kingdom of Heaven, and she, in turn, says she is waiting for the Messiah and when she realizes that Jesus is the one she has been waiting for, she runs to tell everyone she knows.

And the disciples big takeaway was…. You shouldn’t be talking to that woman. You must be delirious. Here, have some food.

Sometimes…we just don’t get it.

We are so fixated on doing the right thing, the safe thing, the correct thing, that we miss the BIG THING that God is doing.

This week, many of our minds at Memorial are on questions of scarcity. Will we have enough. Do we have enough. Can we be enough. It is not unlike the disciples who rush off to find food for Jesus only to come back and find out that he has his own food! They are too busy being frustrated to turn and ask him for this bread of life. Fears of scarcity are completely rational. Normal and part of our human condition.

But we worship a God of Abundance. A God who provided food and water in the desert - even as God’s people complained! A God who sent his son to redeem the world. A God who even now offers us blessing after blessing after blessing even as we turn away, ignore or claim God’s blessings as being of our own design.

Even as you are fretting about your own budgets and accounts and burdens, God is right there, providing exactly what you need.

Sometimes… we just don’t get it.

Fortunately, God gets us. God loves us. And God provides for us.

I have no doubt that as tenuous as our 2023 budget looks - Memorial will be just fine. Not because I have a secret answer to budget woes and falling stock markets, but because I believe in a God who is always right on time. Sometimes we just have to get out of God’s way and prayerfully consider what God would have us do in the moment.

The Vestry and staff will be guided by a very basic principle as we navigate this current budget crisis — does this work we are considering bring us closer to God? And if the answer is yes, then we can move forward; if not, we should take a step back, and ask ourselves how we can better use our resources to the glory of God here in Baltimore.

And if we do that? No matter what the balance sheet says we will be just fine in the end.

The View from Bolton Street

So Abram went, as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him. 

Genesis 12:4

He makes it look so easy. “So Abram went.” Abram/Abraham, this common ancestor the Christian, Muslim and Jewish faiths all share, represents for all of us the pinnacle of faithfulness. God commands. Abraham does.  There are more than a few of you I am sure thinking, if only it were so easy. 

The reality of course is that it is not.  Not even in the Bible. You see Abraham doesn’t just go when God says go. God didn’t just show up and start ordering Abraham around and he was like, ‘yes God whatever you say God.’  Sometimes in our simplified Christian view we forget that something went before the obedience. The faithfulness. The steadfastness in the face of adversity. 

You see God and Abraham had a covenant. We will read it this Sunday. “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” And God keeps God’s promise. EVEN WHEN ABRAHAM (and all of us) didn’t keep his.  That is the way covenants work.  We have precious few covenantal relationships in our lives, the bond between parents and children, the covenant between clergy and the Church, and the marriage covenant are a few examples. They aren’t perfect, because we aren’t perfect, but these are relationships where we have a certain set of obligations and commitments to each other that do not depend on the actions of the other side because we trust that the other side is faithful even when we can’t see it.  

When I was ordained I submitted to the doctrine and discipline of the Episcopal Church even though I have no idea how those doctrines will change and move over time, because I trust that God is working through the Church even when I don’t see it.  

Perhaps then Abraham’s faithfulness - while impressive - is not as shocking. After all he got to have his ancestors be as numerous as the stars in the sky and stretching across every part of the known world. Pretty cool, really. 

You know who we should pay attention to?  Lot. 

“And Lot went with him.”  

It is one thing to be faithful because you have an agreement with God.  It is quite another thing to be faithful because you trust in someone else’s relationship with God.  If Abraham is the first priest/rabbi then Lot is the first congregant. And Lot does suffer, doesn’t he.  He trusts! But it is not without loss.  And there isn’t nearly as much glory in being Lot, is there.  

But I submit that Lot’s life was still better than if he had state behind in Haran.  Not because things would get better or worse for him personally socially, or professionally.  

But because by following Abraham he gave up everything for the simple joy of getting to know God up close.  He didn’t ask what was in it for him, or how long they would be gone, he just went.  And his life was profoundly changed. 

So to can your life be profoundly changed.  So to can you get to know and follow God more closely.  Not by doing what I say (heaven forbid!) but by following the life and teaching of our chief priest, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.   

This season of Lent we are invited back into that covenant relationship.  We are invited to walk again the path of Christ.  To forsake the commonplace and ordinary for the life of a Christian.  Which, if you are doing it right, is seldom boring. 

The View from Bolton Street

Forgive or Forget

Ash Wednesday 2023

One of our most powerful qualities as humans is forgetting. It is our ability to forget that helps us get back on the horse when we fall, back on the bike when we crash, back into our job, life, church, and community when we fail, stumble, or make mistakes. We (hopefully) develop muscle memory around the failure, but we are able to create enough mental space from our previous mistakes to make another attempt. This can be a beautiful thing! Think of all the inventors, all the advocates, all the visionaries who struggled at the beginning. If they had not been able to forget the pain of those other failures where would they, or we, be?

Perhaps, then, this is not forgetting at all but forgiving.  Forgiving ourselves and trusting that we can learn and do better next time.  

The shadow side of this is of course forgetting you ever did anything wrong and proceeding to continue to come back and do the same hurtful and damaging thing over and over and over again. 

Many of us have been there as well. On both sides of the equation. 

Lent is an opportunity for us to move from forgetting to forgiving.  From continuing to hurt ourselves and others, to learning and growing from our mistakes.  From walking confidently in our own knowledge to walking humbly in the shadow of our God. 

This Ash Wednesday we remind ourselves that we are nothing more than ashes and dust. As Deacon Natalie reminded us on Sunday, “Life is short, and we have little time to gladden the hearts of those who travel with us. So be swift to love and make haste to be kind.”  I hope you take some time to forgive yourself and to seek to practice restoration, healing, and hope this Lent. 

The View from Bolton Street

Transfigurations and Transformations

This Sunday we hear the story of the Transfiguration. Jesus is on the mountaintop with Peter and James and John and the total confusion that ensues when Jesus becomes something he is not supposed to be. 

The disciples are scared, confused, and ultimately humbled -- deciding that they should just stay here where this amazing thing has just happened! Why go anywhere else?! 

Today I am thinking about the need for transfigurations and transformations in West Baltimore. More than 15,000 registered vacant homes in this city, thousands more unregistered, and even more barely livable. Many, many of those are a stone's throw from our front doors. 

Honestly, this has been the case for so long that most of us just say, well that is the way it is. This is what Baltimore looks like.  

But there are people working to transfigure and transform West Baltimore.  This is probably the only time I will link to an article from Apartment Therapy in this space, but this interview with Shelly Halstead, along with photos of the transformation of her own home, is well worth your time. (Design Changemakers 2023: Shelley Halstead Combines Carpentry and Advocacy | Apartment Therapy) 

Shelly is a light to all of us.  And she has transfigured Etting street into something almost unrecognizable. And it is tempting to leave it there.  But she has bigger dreams for her organization and for West Baltimore than a few renovations.  

This includes business incubators, access to healthy food, artist and community spaces — all by black women for black women. Truly visionary. 

The question for us is how do we go from seeing the small vision to the big vision? How do we go from charity to justice? 

Tomorrow you are invited to join us at 10:30 am at Greater Harvest Baptist Church on Saratoga street to join with dozens of congregations from across the city to call for city and state action to support real action on vacant homes and affordable housing in Baltimore. 

We have to stop looking for people who defy the odds to make it work, and start changing the odds so everyone has an opportunity.  Please plan to join as you are able and wear a BUILD or a Memorial “Jesus Centered - Justice Focused” shirt.