Tag Archives: ordination

2025

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March 30.  We continued our annual meeting, which had begun in February via Zoom due to a snowstorm, with a celebration of the 15th anniversary of our rector’s installation. Actually Pam came to us as priest-in-charge 17 years ago and preached her first sermon on March 2, 2008.

Wardens Pat Krol & Rebekah Shore were joined by Jill Silverstein of Central Reform Temple in congratulating our rector Pam Werntz.

May 4.  Our rector presided at a memorial service in Lindsey Chapel for benefactor James Theodore Bartlett (2/13/1937 – 11/7/2024).  A beloved member of our congregation, Jim served for years as chair of our Finance Commission.

May 11.We dedicated our third pulpit statue to the Rev. Dr. Suzanne Radley Hiatt: theologian, prophet, priest, professor, and advocate.

Ordained as one of the Philadelphia 11 on July 29, 1974, this “bishop to the women” served as an inspirational mentor to many, including our rector, whose dedicatory sermon can be watched about 28 minutes into our recorded service.   For Dr. Hiatt’s connection to Pauli Murray, please see We’ve Come This Far by Faith.  We thank Ted Southwick and the friends of the late Dr. Hiatt for supporting this project.

Sculptor Ted Southwick smiled while our rector asperged his figure of the Rev. Dr. Suzanne Hiatt. Photo: JG Bullitt

Marianne Iaucco, vestry member (2007-08), Clerk of Vestry (2009-10); Mary Blocher, Treasurer (1995), vestry member (2007-11); Anna Pauline Zeusler, vestry member (1990-93)

Dec 21.  We bade farewell to Mary Blocher and Marianne Iauco as they joined our diaspora in order to be closer to family after their four decades of service on our vestry and Worship Commission. Pauli Zeusler, who had known them when she served on our troubled vestry in the early 1990s, came to the luncheon they gave the parish before their departure.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dec. 22.   The Rt. Rev. J. Clark Grew II, Bishop of Ohio (1994-2004) and our Associate Priest for many years, died in Boston. Born 20 Dec. 1939, he was the namesake of his great uncle J.C. Grew, US Envoy to Denmark & Switzerland, Ambassador to Turkey & Japan, then Undersecretary of State during WWII. The Grew family held Pew 62 from the foundation of Emmanuel, and Annie Clark (Mrs. Henry) Grew held the deed for Pew 51 from 1897-1925. 

Our souls tell out.

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Advent 4C, 22 December 2024. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

Micah 5:2-5a. And he shall be the one of peace.
Hebrews 10:5-10. In burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure.
Luke 1:39-56. Blessed is she who believed.

O God of she who believed, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

I have always loved Mary, the mother of Jesus, the Godbearer, more than it seems a good Protestant girl should. It is Mary who draws me to the catholicity of the Episcopal Church. I’ve never understood her to be meek or mild, and I don’t know how anyone who reads Biblical accounts of her could understand her that way either. I don’t know how anyone who hears the words of the Magnificat, which are taken from the Song of Hannah in the Book of Samuel, could hear anything but a religious and political manifesto sung to overthrow tyrants and systems of oppression. Some years ago, the Rev. Nancy Rockwell, wrote an essay entitled, “No More Lying about Mary,” which captured what I have always believed about Mary: she was brave, and she was strong.

Rockwell writes, “God chose a spunky woman” to be the mother of Jesus. She points out that nothing in the text indicates Mary’s age or sexual status, just just that she is not married and has not previously delivered a child. Here’s her description: [1] 

Mary is unmarried when the angel comes. The angel’s invitation and her independent decision tell us Mary does not need permission of clergy –or her parents-– to become pregnant. Mary, wanted by God, according to the angel, for her bold, independent, adventuresome spirit, decides to bear a holy child – for a bold agenda: to bring the mighty down from their thrones; to scatter the proud in the imagination of their hearts, to fill the hungry with good things and send the rich empty away. This is Mary: well-spoken, wise, gritty. Traveling alone, like every prophet before her, she sets out on her …journey, to [her kinswoman] Elizabeth’s house, to declare her agenda. There will be more journeys: to Bethlehem; to Egypt and back [according to Matthew], to Jerusalem [at least several time until Jesus was]…crucified.

After Jesus’ death, according to Christian history, Mary traveled northwest to Ephesus, where she lived out the rest of her days, in a city well-known for the professional leadership of women.

 It seems to me that Mary’s courage doesn’t imply an absence of fear. I imagine that she left Nazareth and headed for the hills driven first by a desire to get out of town and to check in with Elizabeth, whom the angel Gabriel had said was also unexpectedly pregnant. Perhaps this was before Mary was convinced that any of the news she had was good. Perhaps she wasn’t sure any of her news was good until she was greeted with joy and declared blessed by Elizabeth: “Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.” Notice the circularity of the manifesto:  the poor will become rich, and the rich will become poor. “Where is the good news in that?” the rich might wonder. Well, as soon as one becomes poor, the blessings start to flow again. The description is not of a particular cataclysmic event or end, but of the circle of life. I’ve experienced this firsthand. Perhaps you have too.

This most fantastic story is of the only two pregnant prophets to have a scene in the whole Bible, and with uninterrupted dialogue! Joseph wasn’t there, and Zechariah had lost his ability to speak. Reflecting on the scene this past week as I worked on this sermon, I felt stirred to retell a story from my young adulthood.

Back in the early 1990’s, I was beginning the difficult and frightening process of coming out of the closet…as a church lady who felt called to the priesthood. Coming out as a Lesbian, even in the hostile territory south of the Mason-Dixon line, was much easier than coming out as someone imagining ordination in the Episcopal Church. Most of my straight church friends and queer unchurched friends thought I was insane. Looking back on that struggle, however, all of it seems easier than coming out of the closet as someone who has had mystical experiences, sleeping and waking.  I have never wanted people to think of me as the religious nut that I probably (okay, actually) am. Perhaps some of you have suspected it all along, but I am always reluctant to offer evidence from the pulpit.

My journey from Vice President of Human Resources for a large corporation based in Virginia to seminarian at Episcopal Divinity School in Massachusetts included some real danger and sizable emotional and financial cost. I risked everything, although I’m glad to say that I didn’t lose everything, I did lose a lot. I’m still paying for it; and I’m still benefiting from it. The love and support of other people made it possible, but what really propelled me forward during those early years was a series of vivid dreams. They were so compelling that I wrote them down; I studied them, analyzed them in therapy, and prayed with them. That’s not really the religious nut part. The things I had dreamed, however, started appearing in my waking life. Scenes and activities in my dreams that I had understood as symbolic, metaphorical but not real, started actually happening in the months and few years that followed.  I kept that mostly to myself. As I settled into life in Massachusetts, the memories of the dreams stayed with me.

In one of the dreams, I had returned to St. John the Baptist Roman Catholic parish school run by Franciscans in Joliet, Illinois, which my brother and I had attended for four years of elementary education. Back then, it wasn’t just my status as a Protestant that kept me from having a turn serving at the altar at daily Mass; Catholic girls were not allowed either. But in my dream, a guide encouraged me to journey into the sacristy and then to the altar. The invitation was thrilling, and I accepted with great joy. Then I was told that the whole improbable journey to being permitted to stand at the altar was powered by the surprise discovery of a spring of living water, a source of energy deep within, underneath the structure (the building); and I was invited to walk downstairs to see that wellspring. I awoke with a renewed sense of wonder and courage, well-being and thanksgiving.

Almost fifteen years after I had that dream, in 2007, when I had been a priest for just a few years, I traveled to Palestine and Israel with a group from Parish of the Epiphany in Winchester. Part of the pilgrimage included a stop at The Church of the Visitation at Ein Karem, in the Judean hill country. There in the courtyard is a stunning sculpture of Elizabeth greeting Mary, arms outstretched, with their pregnant bellies nearly touching. Behind the statue is a wall covered with ceramic plaques painted with the opening words of the Magnificat: “My soul magnifies the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior”, in more than thirty languages, which makes it abundantly clear that this song applies and belongs to everyone, to the whole world.

The Church of the Visitation stands on the site traditionally identified as the location of the home of Elizabeth and Zechariah. There are Byzantine ruins of a chapel there and subsequent buildings, which have crumbled through the centuries. In 1937 the Franciscans built on top of the ruins in order to preserve the remains of previous chapels found there. When I walked into the chapel, a guide invited me to walk down several flights of stairs to see an ancient wellspring. It was the very wellspring I had seen in my dream so many years earlier. I really don’t have words to describe my shock at seeing it. I was overwhelmed and thrilled by the holy mystery of the fulfillment of what had been shown to me in a dream.

In Luke’s story of this pair of pregnant prophets, I have always heard a story of allowing God’s blessing in difficult situations, of claiming “the privilege of doing hard things,” as one vestry member has called it. I have experienced this Gospel story as giving us an example of how we might be inspired, filled with a spirit of holiness, and how our souls might enlarge or magnify the view of God in the blessed and the stressed situations of our own lives. In this story, each of us is given words to say, “Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord,” and in our own languages to repeat whenever we receive an untimely blessing: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”  I also hear this as a story of coming out, as acknowledging having received inspiration and  blessing, not only bearing it, but sharing it: telling it out loud. It occurs to me even more deeply that in gestating and giving birth to inspiration, we are called to more than a private experience. We are called also to a form of coming out.

One of the things I’ve learned, as I reflect back on the movement for LGBTQ rights and recognition over the last decades, is that what has made all of the difference is individuals telling their stories: coming out. I believe the Episcopal Church, indeed Emmanuel Church, each one of you (whether you are here for the first time or the umpteenth time) could grow stronger and strengthen others by coming out as who and Whose you are, more and more. The song of Mary applies and belongs to everyone. And as anyone who has come out about anything knows, coming out isn’t ever a one-and-done. Once you come out, staying out becomes a lifetime practice of coming out over and over and over again.

Perhaps you remember the beautiful words of the 13th-century prophet and mystic Meister Eckhart, who wrote this:

What good is it to me
if this eternal birth of the divine Son
takes place unceasingly
but does not take place within myself?

And,
what good is it to me
if Mary is full of grace
and if I am not also full of grace?
What good is it to me
for the Creator to give birth to [a] Son
if I do not also give birth to him
in my time and my culture?

This, then, is the fullness of time:
When the Son of God
is begotten in us. 

I want to add, ‘This, then, is the fullness of time: when our souls tell out the greatness of the Lord.”

  1. The Rev. Nancy Rockwell, “No More Lying about Mary:,  http://www.patheos.com/blogs/biteintheapple/no-more-lying-about-mary.

 

2024

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  • 6 Jan. Our Candidate for Holy Orders, The Rev. Joshua Padraig (Paddy) Cavanaugh, was ordained to the priesthood at All Saints Church, Richmond VA.
  • 4 Feb.  Senior Warden Elizabeth (Liz) Levin retired after an eventful four-year tenure.  She ably steered us through the Covid pandemic, our rector’s sabbatical, and much more.   Rebekah Shore became senior warden and Pat Krol, who had retired after 15 years as Executive Director of Emmanuel Music, became junior warden.

    The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray & The Rt. Rev. Barbara Harris on our Sanctuary’s pulpit

  • 28 April.  The Rt. Rev. Dr. Carol J. Gallagher, Assistant Bishop of our diocese, presided at our Sunday service for the dedication of Ted Southwick‘s statue of the late Rt. Rev. Barbara Harris.
  • May. With funding from Hanna and James Bartlett, John Tiedemann‘s crew cleaned our Sanctuary’s reredos and walls below its clerestory.  Jim Anderson designed a replacement herald for a window that had been broken in 2000 by firefighters.

    Photo by Julian Bullitt

    Charles Connick had designed its original to match Kempe’s heralds in the south clerestory.  Its banner reads in Latin:  with angels and archangels.  We thank Jill Zunshine, who funded it in memory of her husband Zach and in thanksgiving for her faith and hope.

  • 28 Sept.  The Rt. Rev. Alan M. Gates preached and presided at a service commemorating the Centennial of Lindsey Chapel.

    Thanks to the generosity of Hanna and James Bartlett the walls of our apse were cleaned.

Reasons to Rejoice

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The Third Sunday of Advent, 3B, December 14, 2014; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

Isaiah 66:1-4, 8-11. To give them a garland instead of ashes.
1 Thessalonians 5:16-24. Rejoice always, pray without ceasing.
John 1:6-8, 19-28. This took place in Bethany across the Jordan where John was baptizing.

O God of hope, may we have the wisdom, the strength, and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth – come when it may and cost what it will.

One of the benefits of sharing sanctuary and programs, families and friendships, with a synagogue is that we are regularly called out of theological complacency when it comes to our Christian scripture and Church tradition’s references to Jews – or Levites, priests from Jerusalem, high priests, Sadducees, scribes, or Pharisees. I changed the word Jews in our Gospel lesson to Judeans by way of putting a speed bump in our path, not because Judeans is necessarily the best translation of Judaios here, but because I want us all to slow down a little bit when we listen to this reading. John the Evangelist (that is, John, the Gospel writer) begins his version of the story of Jesus with tension between “the Jews” and Jesus in a way that the other three Gospel writers do not. For John the Evangelist, the tension started before Jesus even appeared on the scene. It’s not exactly clear to scholars who John means when he writes Judaios. He’s certainly not talking about all Jews or all Judeans even at the time, since Jesus and his followers were all Jewish. He may be contrasting Judeans and Galileans, but most likely he’s writing about some of Jerusalem’s religious authorities.[1] He clearly has an ax to grind that the other Gospel writers do not have. The Gospel of John uses the term Judaios some sixty-four times compared with six in the Gospel of Mark, five in Matthew, and three in Luke.[2] It seems that John, who was writing in the late first century, is caught up in a late-first-century conflict, which he is applying retroactively to the first part of the first century. I wonder if John is using the word the way some of us refer to “the police,”  “the military,” or “the government,” when we are angry or despairing in the midst of struggle. I don’t know John’s intent, but I do know that we cannot let it slide. Continue reading →

2016

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deacon Greiner

The Rev. Robert Greiner

June.  The Rev. Robert Charles Greiner was ordained to the diaconate and began his blessed tenure with us.  After joining our Building Commission, he began photographing our building’s features and posting his photos of it and parish activities to our Facebook page.

Kevin Neel began his six-year tenure as organist and director of our parish choir.

Kevin Neel playing our Rogers organ

1977

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January 8.    Pauli Murray was ordained a priest at the Washington National Cathedral by the Rt. Rev. William F. Creighton, bishop of the (Episcopal) Diocese of Washington. She was the first African American woman, and one of the first women, to be ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church.

February 13.  At the invitation of the rector of The Chapel of the Cross, Chapel Hill NC, the Rev. James Peter Lee, The Rev. Dr. Murray celebrated her first Eucharist.   She read from her grandmother Cornelia Smith‘s Bible, from a lectern that had been given in memory of the woman who had owned Cornelia, Mary Ruffin Smith. This was the first time a woman celebrated the Eucharist at an Episcopal church in North Carolina.  In her autobiography (1987), p. 435) Pauli described her thoughts about the service, which our Parish Historian Mary Chitty attended:

Whatever future ministry I might have as a priest, it was given to me that day to be a symbol of healing. All the strands of my life had come together. Descendant of slave and of slave owner, I had already been called poet, lawyer, teacher, and friend. Now I was empowered to minister the sacrament of One in whom there is no north or south, no black or white, no male or female – only the spirit of love and reconciliation drawing us all toward the goal of human wholeness.

See also:

1976

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  • 27 Jan. Craig Smith & Edward Simone conducted a free concert in celebration of Mozart’s 220th birthday.  With standing-room only in our sanctuary, soprano Jane Bryden brought the house down with Popoli di Tasaglia (K.318), which Globe correspondent Richard Buell deemed “flabbergasting [and] insouciant”. They celebrated Mozart’s birthday with a concert for years to come.  Lenny Matczynski, who later became its executive director, joined the orchestra of Emmanuel Music.

  • Pauli Murray received a Master of Divinity degree from General Theological Seminary.  She was then ordained a deacon in The Episcopal Church by The Rt. Rev. Morris F. Arnold, Suffragan Bishop of Massachusetts.

  • The Episcopal Church, at its General Convention in Minneapolis, voted to ordain women as priests, beginning January 1, 1977.

1973

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  • Pauli Murray, who was a vestry member, left her tenured position at Brandeis U. and  entered the General Theological Seminary. The Rev. Alvin L. Kershaw had helped her discern a call to ordination.

Once I admitted the call of total commitment to service in the church, it seemed that I had been pointed in this direction all my life and that my experiences were merely preparation for this calling.  In spite of my own intellectual doubts and the opposition to women’s ordination which was widespread within the Episcopal Church at the time, I took the fateful step of applying to The Rt. Rev. John Melville Burgess, Bishop of the Diocese of Massachusetts, for admission to holy orders. (Autobiography, 1989, p. 427)

  • Organ built by James Ludden, given by Priscilla Rawson Young in 1973

    4 Nov. Priscilla Rawson Young gave a portable pipe organ, built by James Ludden, which is still used for rehearsals in our Music Room.

See also:

  1. Pauli Murray and Timeline entries:  1970, 1977,1985, 1989, 2012 & 2015.
  2. Priscilla Young:  Timeline entries: 1909, 1939, 1942, 1971, 1994 & 2000.