Rev. Valerie's Reveille

A very extraordinary event took place in a small Virginia town last Monday evening.  The Rt. Rev. David Bane, retired bishop of the Diocese of Virginia, was restored to ministry in The Episcopal Church (TEC) by the Presiding Bishop, The Most Rev. Katharine Jeffert Schori.  Bishop Bane “abandoned” the Episcopal Church in 2009 and aligned with the Anglican Church in North America, which has different doctrinal and theological positions than TEC. A good article on the topic can be found here , and the official press release can be found here . We remember from the Catechism, the mission of the Church “is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.” (BCP p. 855) Unfortunately, too often worship communities are more interested in deciding who is “in” and who is “out” than on the reconciliation work given to us by Jesus Christ.  While I do believe there are rules and standards that we must abide by, we must be careful and loving with how we treat each o...

April 22 nd is the day our secular society has set aside to celebrate this amazing planet we call home.  As people of faith, we believe this place to be God’s good creation of which we have been entrusted to be good stewards.  It is our God-given duty to treat the earth with respect and for the well-fare of all.  To that end, the Anglican Consultative Council, when they developed the “5 Marks of Mission” as a benchmark for engaging in God’s work in the world, made the 5 th mark: To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth. I believe we humans need to hold ourselves accountable for the way we live life and how our actions affect our environment.  We are kidding ourselves if we believe what we do has no effect.  In fact, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, has gone on record to say that those who deny climate change are immoral.  You can see the video of h...

When I first read Charles Dickens’s classic Great Expectations in high school, I remember thinking about how our expectations of people and situations can affect – sometimes positively and sometimes negatively – how we actually experience a person or situation.  Our preconceived notions of people or situations – we can call them prejudices – can alter our willingness to engage with a person or in a situation without bias or an agenda.  If the experience meets our expectations, then our prejudices are proved true, if they aren’t, many times we will consider it an anomaly and not change our beliefs.  Perhaps what is most haunting about expectations is that we begin to develop them very early in life and we use them almost unconsciously to know how to navigate our world. The disciples themselves had great expectations of what the Messiah would do for the Jews – get rid of the Roman Empire, bring about peace and prosperity, and establish Israel as being the Lord’s “Chosen...