From the Rector

Dear Friends in Christ,

This Sunday is the Fourth of July. It’s a time for remembering the promises of our nation, its founding values, and both the cost and benefits of freedom. It is also a time when we are challenged to remember that the freedom many of us enjoyed was not the reality for many of our fellow citizens at our founding. That freedom is something they have had to bravely fight for in the land of the free.

Like a nation, many of us have not chosen the Church, we have been born into it. We are heirs to the promises offered and receive them without earning or even necessarily being aware of them at a deep and abiding level. There are those who sacrifice to make their promises manifest – soldiers offered in wars to make many free and saints dying as the praises of God live on after they are taken into glory.

Both as a citizen of this Republic, and the Kingdom of God, I commit myself to the promise of both. This necessarily means knowing where our faults are so that we can continue to grow into the ideal that each offers to us and our fellow-citizens. 

The promises of each can seem beyond our reach and yet we struggle with all the freedom and power given us as citizens of the City of God. Those of us who live as members of the Body are called with our whole self to reflect back to our nation where it is failing to live up to its own promises, to its own people, and to the world around it. We are the conscience of the whole of society and yet we get it wrong, too, and are just as accountable to those we serve (the whole of the people of God). 

So, we hold a tender balance in our hands and hearts. Any inheritance must be handled with a certain humility—with a knowledge that we have inherited something precious and the hope that we can live in such a way to pass it on in better form (whether that be a Church or a nation).

Citizens of the Kingdom are called to know the fullness of the promises of God and to make them known. When we live as citizens of this state we are called to reveal, to work for, to proclaim the nature of justice, the fullness of equality, the essence of freedom. We are called not just to celebrate them but to live them and work for them on behalf of those who haven’t known their promise yet.

These terms have their essential promise in the nature of God's call to his people—in how we care for and sustain one another. So, we live knowing that we fall short of their fullness and yet we can celebrate that these notions are at the core of our national identity as we strive to make them realized, lived, and embodied. The terms do not describe things as they are—they describe things as they might be—they are promises and potential and that we can celebrate even as we get back to the hard, hard work of making them known.

So let us celebrate all that we have inherited and set our hearts, minds, bodies, and spirits to sharing the fullness of that inheritance with each and every member of our community and nation.

Yours in Christ,

Fr Robert