We are a small Episcopal Church on the banks of the Rappahannock in Port Royal, Virginia. We acknowledge that we gather on the traditional land of the first people of Port Royal, the Nandtaughtacund, and we respect and honor with gratitude the land itself, the legacy of the ancestors, and the life of the Rappahannock Tribe. Our mission statement is to do God’s Will in all that we do.

2024 Sun March 17

Chancellor’s Village sermon March 12, 2024

The local region provides clergy for Chancellor’s Village Retirement Community for their weekly Eucharist on Tuesdays. The responsibility is shared and Catherine goes about once every two months. Currently, we have 3 residents there from St. George’s so it is a good opportunity to to see them as well.

While the service is a typical Sunday service, the priests can shorten it based on those in attendance. Today, there was only one reading, the Gospel with a shortened sermon. Today we had 16 in attendance. Cookie and Johnny from St. George’s also drove up for a visit.

The sermon was Lent 4 with the Gospel reading from John 3:16. Her complete sermon is here with an excerpt below:

“Events in this life, especially at this time of life, and the things that go on in the world, do shake our faith.  Suffering and evil take their ongoing toll, often randomly and unfairly. Those timeless and unanswerable questions that we ask about evil and suffering, only to come up with ..what?… challenge us. Paul says that of faith, hope and love, love is the greatest.  I find that when faith and hope get shaken, then the little bit of love we can cling to, in whatever form that takes, whether it’s some reminder of God’s love for us, or the love we have for one another, or the love we share out in the world in spite of the barriers that the world raises, are the shreds of love we hold up to God, and God can use that little bit of love to weave faith and hope back into our lives.

“Love your friends who are hurting in the ways that come to you. God will do the rest, in God’s time.

So love yourself and others, as inadequate as your love can seem. For when you do any deed out of love, you have done that deed in God, and God will turn your imperfect love into the fullness of God’s own love, the love that suffers with us, carries us through, and brings us into the resurrection life that never ends.”

The Creeds Class, Part 4, March 13, 2024

“Worship the Holy Spirit” – Lance Brown

I believe in the Holy Spirit

Collect for Trinity Sunday – ” Almighty and everlasting God, you have given to us your servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of your divine Majesty to worship the Unity: Keep us steadfast in this faith and worship, and bring us at last to see you in your one and eternal glory, O Father; who with the Son and the Holy Spirit live and reign, one God, for ever and ever.” Amen

This session completes the Trinity with the Holy Spirit. There were 6 participants.

The Holy Spirit

In Hebrew and in Greek, the word spirit means “breath.”  Our spirit is the breath of life that allows us to be active.  God’s spirit is God’s activity throughout all the ages, beginning with creation and continuing into our lives today. 

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Sunday’s Thoughts – March 17, 2024

We are heading down the last lap. John is here to wrap it up with his mystical interpretation of events with a chronology that is all his own.

The word “glorify” or derivation of that appears four times in one Gospel reading. Looking it up it means to “honor” but it must mean more. John talks about glorifying his name – “Father, glorify your name.” John Piper writes about this -“When God glorifies a human being, he grants to that person the privilege of beholding his infinite beauty and becoming like him as much as a creature can”. His references are Romans and not John

“Father, glorify your name.” The idea is to approach the truth of God in direct connection to God.

For us it is dying to the things of the earth, the greed,the sin, and approach God on his own terms. We have to have a new heart and substitute God’s desires for us for the desires of this world, to focus on serving others.

John illustrates by using an object, a seed, that all know well especially in that agriculturesl society.

This meaning is enhanced by the second saying John sets in parallel: “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” Plants go through their own death and resurrection from starting as a seed to becoming a plant and providing benefits to others in the form of nourishment. Likewise, we move from a focus on the needs of ourselves to the needs of other and this world.

The next to last sentence states, “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself.”

Debie Thomas writes of the Greeks who wanted to see Jesus at the beginning of the passage and then this one. “In the end, what this week’s Gospel reading teaches me is that I don’t have to strive and strain to see Jesus. ”

She is comforted by the conclusion to which she arrives – ” He loves whether I love or not. It has taken me a long time to believe this and to trust it, but now I do: Jesus’s longing for me is the ground upon which all of my desire — however abundant or stingy — rests. He wishes to see me — to see all of us — far more urgently than we’ll ever wish to see him.”

This comforting message can help us walk the way of Holy Week with less than a heavy heart. We will be lifted up.

Lenten Study, The Creeds, A Guide to Deeper Faith

When we say the Creeds (the Apostles’ Creed at baptisms and at Morning Prayer and the Nicene Creed when we celebrate the Eucharist), we are stating our belief in what the church believes, in faith, about God—that God is one being in three persons—that is, three “persons” within the one Godhead. 

It’s easy to say these words without much thought because they are so familiar.  And yet, they are the words that create community among Christian believers around the world, past, present, and future, the Apostles’ Creed being the most widely used of all of Christianity’s confessions of faith. These words are so important that they are permanently attached to our altar wall, along with the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer. The creeds not only bind us together in communities of faith,  but these words, if taken into our hearts, can lead us to a deeper faith. 

During this season of Lent, we will study these creeds, learning about how they came to be, what they mean to the Church, and we will also reflect on how they may help us grow in faith as Christians. 

The study is scheduled for five Wednesday nights of Lent—Weds Feb. 21st, 28th, and  March 6th, 13th, and 20th at 7PM on Zoom ID: 833 7014 5820 Passcode: 528834

Sermon, the Rev. Catherine Hicks, Chancellor’s Village, March 12, 2024

Sermon, Chancellor’s Village, March 12, 2024

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son…

Even though we do not have crucifixes hanging in our churches, but instead the empty cross, to remind us to focus on the resurrection, this phrase about God giving his only Son, especially in the context of the quote from the Old Testament at the beginning of today’s gospel about the bronze serpent, holds before us the image of Jesus suffering and dying on the cross. 

Why would this image of suffering be an image to bring love to our minds?  The suffering and dying of Jesus sanctifies our own suffering and helps us to know that Jesus will go through the valleys of the shadow of death with us, and will bring us safely home, through the grave and gate of death, into an eternal life of the fullness of love in God’s presence. That is the gift of God’s love for us.  God never deserts us, even when we have trouble imagining that God is present.

We live in a world of suffering and pain, our own, the pain of our friends, our family members and the news is nothing but one long report of pain.  How can we, in our small ways, be present to all this pain without it killing us?  Making us depressed?  Or angry?  Or just an ongoing dull hurt that won’t go away? 

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