Easter giving

Dear Friends in Christ,

Joy. That is at the heart of the Easter celebration.

There’s the joy found in an egg hunt or a special meal. There’s the joy found in Easter flowers and pastel ties.

There’s a joy we associate with the season that seems to give voice to the new life of flowers, trees, and all of nature. It’s as if creation decorates itself with joyful color anticipating the source of that joy.

The Resurrection is at the heart of this joy. Flowing out of an empty tomb are twenty centuries of art, music, poetry and more that express the depths of the reality of the human contemplation of the death of death.

We need joy these days. We need hope. We need to reconnect with the joy and hope of two millennia of Christians who have marked this day with all the exuberance humans can muster.

At Saint Philip’s we celebrate Holy Week and Easter with all the gifts of human creativity that we can bring to bear. Your giving helps us mark the day with joy. Memorial gifts enable us to pay for musicians, flowers, and so much more to celebrate together.

Your Easter offering will also support the UK Choir Residency.

This is a life-changing experience we offer our young choristers. They travel to the places where the music we sing was shaped, and sing that music in some of the places where they were first sung. It is an encounter with living history and connects them, and us, to those who have given voice to our worship from generation to generation.

Saint Philip’s is a living link to Christians across cultures, continents, and centuries who have striven to put words, notes, brushstrokes and more to one simple truth:

Christ is risen from the dead.

Let us mark it with joy.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Robert