St. John's Episcopal Church - Centreville, VA
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Parish News - May 12, 2021
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Dear St. John's Parishioners and Friends:
I hope you are as thrilled as I am that we are preparing to regather inside the historic church for worship. It's been a long, hard year for all of us and, as restrictions are starting to be lifted, we will be able to worship together. As you know, there will still be restrictions, but as more and more people get vaccinated, we might see the end of those restrictions soon.
On Sunday, May 16, we will have the last of the pre-recorded services of Morning Prayer. Sunday, May 23 is Pentecost and we will have a service of Holy Eucharist outside at 10:00 AM (to give the sound equipment people a bit more time to set up.) Please bring a chair, a mask, and wear red if you can. You will need to socially distance yourselves. On Sunday, May 30, we will have our first indoor service in over a year at 9:30 AM. Please be sure to sign up below if you plan to attend that service. We are limited to 35 people because of social distancing.
Just as a reminder, here is what to expect on May 30:
-We will be able to receive the Holy Eucharist, but only the bread, which will be in individual cups.
-The pews will be clearly marked as to where people can sit to maintain a six foot distance from others. Stickers on the pews will say "Please sit here".
-People will be seated from the front to the back.
-We have a limit of 35 people so there will be a sign up sheet for those who want to attend each service. The link to the sign-up sheet is posted further down in the e-notes. If we have more than 35 people who want to come over the course of the first few weeks, we will look at our options.
-We will record the service and put it on YouTube, so we will still have services online. (We still need some people to take on that ministry.)
-People will need to enter the front door and exit by the breezeway door.
-Masks will be required.
-There will be no coffee hour.
-Extra masks and hand sanitizer will be available.
-The church will be cleaned each time we use it.
-There will be no congregational singing, but two choir members will sing the hymns.
-Those who sign up to be a lector will read the two lessons and the psalm and will have a reserved seat up front.
-The usher will stand outside (weather permitting) to welcome people and give them instructions.
-Prayer books will be available in the pews.
- During the first few weeks of in-person worship, we may have to make minor changes if something is not working. I ask that you be patient and flexible as we launch into this.
I look forward to seeing you in person, on May 23 outside at 10:00 AM, and on May 30 at 9:30 AM inside our beloved church.
The Rev. Carol Hancock
Rector
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Carol will be returning to work at the St. John's office on Monday, May 17. She has spent the last year working from home. The Bishop is allowing staff and small groups of people who are vaccinated to gather indoors with masks and social distancing. She will be in the office Mondays - Thursdays and continue to have her day off on Fridays.
If you are in the hospital or planning to have surgery, please let Carol know. She would like to visit you (when that's allowed) and offer prayers for healing. We can put your name on the prayer list as well, if you would like.
When we return to in-person worship in the church, we would like to have altar flowers. The sign up sheet for the altar flowers is below. Please also indicate your intention for the flowers, such as "in thanksgiving for our 35th wedding anniversary" or "in memory of John Doe". That information is put in the bulletin.
We had so many different and very good readers for our online services during the pandemic. I would like to encourage you to sign up to be a reader when we return to in-person worship. The link is below. (Readers will have a reserved seat!)
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Online Service Videos
When we return to in-person worship on May 30, it will be important for us to continue our ministry of having our services online. Some people may not yet be comfortable returning to indoor gatherings, some people are shut-ins, some may be sick, and some would rather watch from a distance. The videos we posted during the past year have gone far beyond the boundaries of Centreville. Some people have sent the videos to family and friends in other states.
When we regather, we will need several people to take turns recording the service on Sunday mornings. To start off, we can use an ipad or iphone and see how that works. We will learn how to post it to YouTube. As our skills increase, we may be able to learn how to livestream and know what equipment is involved. Can you help? We need several people so it doesn't fall on the shoulders of one person every week. Please let Carol know.
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Congratulations to Tom and Marie McDermott!!!
Tom and Marie received the President's Volunteer Service Award for their volunteer work at Western Fairfax Christian Ministries. Tom received the Bronze Award for volunteering over 100 hours last year. Marie received the Gold Award for volunteering for over 500 hours. Many thanks go to them both for living out the gospel to help those who are less fortunate.
Graduations
As we begin the season of graduations, we want to recognize those from our St. John's family who are graduating from high school, college, or with other post-graduate degrees. Let us know where you are graduating from and what your plans are for the coming year. We want to celebrate your accomplishments! Please send your information to Carol.
-Lisa Heller is graduating from Virginia Theological Seminary with a Diploma in Theology on May 13.
-Gray Jones is graduating from Chantilly High School and will be attending Virginia Tech in the fall, majoring in Business Information Technology.
-David Daniel Weir is graduating from George Mason School of Engineering with a Bachelor of Science degree in Information Technology.
WFCM requests backpacks for the fall
Western Fairfax Christian Ministries has asked St. John's to provide 15 girls backpacks for Lees Corner Elementary School. These backpacks would be for elementary school girls. Solid colors are preferred in pink, yellow, purple or turquoise. The backpacks are not needed until early August but you can drop them off at the church anytime.
Centreville Labor Resource Center needs delivery drivers
The labor Resource Center would like to have 5 vehicles and drivers for food delivery on the following Mondays in May: May 17, 24, and 31. Each volunteer and vehicle will take five boxes of food, each box weighing 30 pounds. We are asking that each volunteer arrive at the center at 2:15 PM and we will have the routes and boxes ready for each volunteer. CIF staff will load the boxes in each volunteer's car and provide them the routes. We will be letting our members know that volunteers will be dropping off the boxes outside their doors and they will knock/ring the doorbell and that the delivery will be a contactless dropoff. All the routes will be Centreville with the exception of the possibility of a few in Manassas/ Manassas park.
If you can assist, please email John Cano ([email protected]) to make final arrangements. Please help us in our attempt to deliver much-needed food to our members and their families.
John Cano
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When in-person services resume, be a Sunday service reader or usher. We welcome, need, and value your help! The lector will read the 2 lessons and the psalm. The usher will be outside the church to welcome people and give information. If you would like to do either of these, CLICK HERE to sign up on SignUp Genius.
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In-Person Sunday Service Attendance Sign-Up Link
Among other COVID protocols (see above), the pews will be clearly marked as to where people can sit to maintain a six foot distance from others.
To sign up to attend in-person services which begin May 30, please use this link
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Service of Evening Prayer
Every Wednesday, St. John's has a Service of Evening Prayer at 6 PM. It is a peaceful way to end the day, and it's now being held virtually. Here is the link to this evening's service:
Wednesday, May 12
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Altar Flower Sign Ups
Click here:
Since we will be starting in-person worship soon, we will need people to sign up to provide flowers. May 23 and 30th are covered so it starts on Sunday, June 6. The Sign Up is designed for you to enter your name, and how you wish your flower donation to appear in the Sunday bulletin. (Wedding anniversary, in memory of someone - something special you want to remember by providing flowers.)
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Still happening-
The link to the Sunday service is sent out each Saturday as usual. Then join us for the coffee hour from 10:00 - 10:30 and the Adult Lectionary Class at 10:30 AM on Zoom. The links will be sent out in Saturday's email to all.
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SUNDAY WORSHIP & EDUCATION
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The Adult Lectionary Forum
Now being held virtually via Zoom. All are invited to join in, following the virtual Sunday service. The links to the Forum and the service are sent out in a separate email on Saturdays.
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We can prepare our hearts & minds by reading ahead
for the Sunday Service lesson
The Seventh Sunday of Easter
May 16, 2021
The First Reading:
Acts 1:15-17, 21-26
The apostles pray that God will guide their choice between two candidates to take the place of Judas. The lot falls to Matthias.
The Psalm: 1, page 585, BCP
The Second Reading:
1 John 5:9-13
God’s testimony is that eternal life is found in the Lord Jesus.
The Gospel:
John 17:6-19
Shortly before his death, Jesus prays that the Father will protect his followers, who will face much the same opposition that he has.
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Online Contributions
to St. John's
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St. John's now offers three buttons for online donations via Tithe.ly. You may use the buttons below to go directly to Tithe.ly, or you may download the Tithe.ly app on your phone or tablet.
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The Pledge payment button may be used only to make your pledge payment (after signing up to be a pledger, which may be done at any time in the year. See Carol or Vestry)
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The Facility Campaign button may be used only for any contribution for the facility's buildings and grounds, or special facility campaigns.
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The Donation button may be used for any other type of donation to St. John's. To designate a special purpose (i.e. Organ Fund, Ministry Partner payments, etc.) please send a note to [email protected].
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A Meditation for the Seventh Sunday of Easter:
Ascension
Back in the good old days, when the earth was flat and the sun flew around it (perhaps pulled by wild stallions), and a sturdy but unpredictably leaky membrane or dome or something – anyway, a firmament – held up the water above the sky – in those days these things were so much easier to communicate. The dead went down into the ground (like they mostly do now), and so the realm of the dead, in whatever way you understood that, was underground. The divine had its place on the mountains and perhaps beyond the stars. There wasn’t much notion that you might, as a human, travel beyond that. Icarus over in Greece had given it a try and the whole affair went quite badly. The Greeks looked to Olympus and thunderbolts, and the Hebrew people to Sinai/Horeb and the luminous clouds above. “Down” was the realm of death. “Up” was the realm of immortality and eternity.
These days, there’s a piece of humans’ first known successful attempt to ascend toward the firmament – a fragment of Orville and Wilbur’s flying beach contraption – stuck to a helicopter flitting around Mars. We have the International Space Station. Kate Rubin, the astronaut daughter of the Rev. Ann Hallisey and Bishop Beisner, just returned from orbiting the planet in it for a few months, and she has reported no sightings of divine beings frolicking above, or plotting interference on, the planet surface. Meanwhile, back on Earth, generations of students advancing into middle school have taken a look at the VBS craft projects involving tagboard cutouts of the bottom of Jesus’ feet stuck to the ceiling and started making sarcastic cracks about how far toward Alpha Centauri Jesus might be at this point. It gets awkward. The metaphor – the concept of the Ascension as levitation – is regularly crushed in a collision with post-Copernican cosmology, and one can see why the Holy See fought the new science so hard. Preachers have been thrashing around for 500 years, trying not to lose everybody who has advanced past the third grade.
Of course, it really happened. Of course, Luke is telling the truth, in the Gospel and in Acts. Jesus, in a form that they could see and touch and share a clambake on the beach with, really gathered the disciples one last time after his resurrection. And then he was “taken up.” He “ascended.” Like Moses, he disappeared into the Cloud of the Presence of God, which, remember, in the geography of the time, might well have been overhead – but not necessarily literally. Maybe yes, maybe no. Unlike Moses, when the Cloud went away, Jesus was no longer here in the flesh; he was wherever the Cloud goes. But the story isn’t about locating the personal body of Jesus of Nazareth on a GPS. It’s about a new state of being for him, for us, for the whole relationship between God and human beings. The story is not about time and space. It’s about how that which is beyond time and space is real, right here in the space-time world we are able to perceive, and it is also simultaneously real in the world that is beyond our measly comprehension. It’s about a curtain pulled aside for a moment, between us and the reality that’s usually beyond our perception. It’s a sighting, a glimpse, a showing that the way through the grave does not simply lead “down” to the land of the dead, as we had theretofore imagined, but “up” to the realms of grace and light and love and eternal life with Creator and Redeemer.
There’s nothing wrong with the old story of the Ascension. We just misplace the key sometimes. Don’t feel too bad about it – angels apparently had to come and tell even the people who were standing there at the time to stop staring up at the sky and to please try to remember how God actually comes and goes in the world. Maybe riding on the clouds with muscular arms uplifted and looking like Charlton Heston with extra bronzer and lots of hairspray. Or maybe like a baby in a barn, or a country preacher, or a mysteriously successful feeding program, or the taste of bread and wine and tears. Remember?
If we can’t see Jesus most of the time, how do we stay in touch with this ineffable reality that defies metaphor? Our Lord had the grace to anticipate that question. Hang tight. Stay together. Fire and wind, comfort and counsel, power and answered prayers, are on the way.
Come, Holy Spirit, come.
Blessings,
Bishop Jennifer Brooke-Davidson
Ascension Day Prayers and Readings here.
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Friend
Jesus calls us “friend.” One of the wonderful things about speaking to a trusted friend is the freedom not to be guarded, to let whatever you need to say just tumble off your lips. A trusted friend will understand you; a trusted friend will not necessarily take everything you say literally, but rather, they will take it truly. They know you. We can take Jesus at his word, that he listens to you as a beloved friend. When you pray, don’t worry that you get it right; get it real. Jesus will get it right.
-Br. Curtis Almquist
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and the office number is 703-803-7500.
May our ministry together spread God's love to all whom we encounter.
- Carol
The Rev. Carol Hancock, Rector
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