Bishop Rob Delivers Final Address at St. Paul's School - April 13, 2026
Good morning. It is a deep and awesome privilege to be with you again. Thank you for your welcome. This passage that we just heard from John's gospel is the first of what are referred to as the resurrection appearances of Jesus. He comes and he meets the disciples the evening after he rises from the dead and he comes with wounds. He comes showing them the evidence of their having abandoned him at the cross. They're locked in a room. They've locked themselves into a room for fear and probably shame. Each of them in that room left Jesus to hang and die.
It's of note that when Jesus comes, he could have just said, "Where were you? You promised to be with me even to the end of time, to the end of this whole journey, and you all took off—each one of you.” Instead, the word Jesus speaks is, “Peace.” Peace. It's a message of forgiveness, a message of healing, a message of restoration, of community in the midst of division, hatred, and fear. Yesterday, most Christian churches that follow what's called the Revised Common Lectionary read that passage of Jesus extending peace, but the same day, we also heard in the news that prospects of peace in the Middle East were becoming more remote.
And it occurred to me, as it often does, that there will be no world peace if there's not first peace among us, peace within our own communities, our own neighborhoods, among us in our own schools and churches and synagogues and mosques, peace within ourselves. And peace is not something that urges us to just forget what we've done with each other, against each other or to each other. Real peace does erase our memory of past hurt, but it holds us accountable without rancor, without hatred, always respecting the dignity of every human being. I can never read this passage of being in a locked room--the disciples in a locked room for fear and shame, and Jesus entering that room --without remembering of a moment in my life when I was very young, 13 years old, that bears some similarity, although in a much less significant way. But for me, it was a pivotal moment.
I grew up in suburban Connecticut, outside of New Haven, and I was a freshman in high school at the time. And I remember one day, it was late fall, and the bus took us home, and I got off the bus and we started to walk. It was about a quarter mile walk from the bus stop to my house, and there were a number of other students. One was Mary, my next door neighbor, with whom we shared homework with our algebra or geometry, whatever that was, which I was never good at. And there were three brothers, Billy, Gary, and David. And we got off the bus and started walking home, and one of the brothers noticed a crab apple tree on another house in that development. Something came over him, and he decided that he would pick up one of the crab apples that had fallen to the ground. There was a whole nest of them. And he picked it up, and he threw it at Mary, hitting her in the back.
He did it again, this time hitting her in her cheek. She began to cry and quickened her pace, and then the other brothers followed, gathering fistfuls of crab apples and hurling them at Mary. And then they asked, "Robbie, how about you? " And so I picked up a crab apple and also hit Mary. It landed in the back of her head, hard enough to sting. We all made it home. After that, I went into my house. Both my parents worked, so I opened my math book and started to try to do my homework. About a half an hour went by and the doorbell rang, and I wondered who could that be. So, I went down the hallway and I could see through the panel of windows on each side of the door that it, of course, was Mary.
I pretended not to hear. I hid away, but she kept ringing the doorbell. Finally, I couldn't pretend anymore, and I had to open the door. And there she was, her face tear-stained, and she said, "Rob, the Miller boys, they always treat me that way. I could expect it from them, something like that. But today, today it was you. I thought we were friends.”
God help me, I just melted at that moment. I don't think I could even say, "I'm sorry." But she knew that even at 13 years old, even though we didn't know the language of forgiveness and grace and all of that, we knew that there was a deep hurt.
We were not at peace. Now, God bless my mother. She always had a cookie jar of those wonderful Toll House cookies. I said, "Mary, come in, please." And I put out some of those cookies out and poured some milk. Maybe that was the beginning of my decision to become a priest. It was like teenage communion, and we just sat there in silence and had cookies. Somehow we got through the next hour or so. We talked about math. We made small talk. Small talk is not to be underestimated in our healing with one another, small talk, lowers temperatures. Small talk begins the tender bonds that build and restores relationships.
The next morning, we went to the bus stop and I knew that I had to stand with Mary and walk alongside her as she faced the cruelty, the senseless, gratuitous, pathetic cruelty of my other neighbors. Sure enough, they picked up crab apples even the next morning and started hurling them this time at both of us. That afternoon when we came back from the bus, I think they realized that it was puny and pathetic what they were doing. They had stopped.
You remember that scene in the Lion King? (This is a transition.) When Simba is called back to the pride, (interestingly called, “the pride”), to come back to community after living a life of Hakuna Matada—where you just look after your own desires and wants and concerns. Rafiki, who holds a staff and has vestments, is a priest but he’s also, of course, a baboon. (Clergy are sometimes thought of that way.) Anyway, Rafiki leads Simba to a pool of water and he, Simba look at the pool of water. The movie superimposes this image of his father, Mufasa. And somewhere Mufasa says, "Simba, you have become less than you are.”
You have become less than you are.
When Mary rang that doorbell and she said, "Rob, today it was you” That was my Mufasa moment. “You have become less than you are.” Jesus doesn't bother to ring the doorbell. He goes through locked doors and when he shares peace to those disciples undeserving and needing to be held into account, he reminds them that you have the power to forgive or to retain the memory of hurt. That's the message of our faith. That's the message of Easter. If we can't reckon with the call to become who God has created us to be, holy, flawed, deeply flawed, wholly beautiful and forgiven, there's no chance for this world. It starts here. It starts in our own hearts.
Thank you.
Easter Message from Bishop Rob — April 2026
Every year, a close reading of the same gospel, even if we’ve read it over a life-time, brings something fresh, something green, and new—something surprising. It may be very familiar and obvious, but the Holy Spirit wants us to notice it as though for the first time because we need to hear it for the first time. This year what springs up as though a new sunrise is the verse in John’s gospel, at the end of the Good Friday reading, when we hear these words:
Now there was a garden in the place where he was crucified, and in the garden, there was a new tomb in which no one had ever been laid.
To this day, in the Holy City of Jerusalem, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is also known as the site of Calvary, Golgotha, the place of the crucifixion, where tradition tells us that a relic of the cross was uncovered AND it is also the place where Jesus was laid in an unused tomb. It’s from the tomb, of course, where God raised him from the dead. Execution and resurrection happen in the same small piece of real estate: the place of unimaginable suffering by human hands and hearts AND the site of the world changing triumph of life over death, love over fear, forgiveness over hatred. It is the place our savior expresses humankind’s deepest abandonment by God and humankind. And it is the site of recognition: of us recognizing Jesus and then the risen Jesus seeing us as a friend. It is the site of the most holy “both/and” which is our life in the Risen Christ.
Our Calvaries are legions. There are so many, too many, and too heartbreaking to list. We all know what they are. The effects of human sin and cruelty, done by us and to us, are all around. We see them. They burden and grieve us. Those crucifixions lead us to times of both despair and hope. They are the reason for our prayers, our seeking help from God and each other. They are the cause of our thirst for righteousness, our struggles to forgive, and our cries to be forgiven. The desolate Place of the Skull and the Garden of Resurrection are layered on top of each other. The suffering and death of bodies, of communities, of hope itself, occur in the same place, and with even more power where we meet Jesus’ Rising. From out of the depth of the Sepulchre, Jesus calls us each by name just as he called to Mary Magdalene on that first Easter morning.
May your Good Fridays, your scenes of deep loss and sorrow be converted into a glorious resurrection, a rising to life, to a love and a life that is stronger than death. What courageous joy that gives us, to know in our bones that nothing, not even death, or the fear of death, will separate us from the love of God in Jesus. May that love and life rise in our hearts this Easter, and may every day be Easter. Jesus Christ is Risen. Alleluia.
Bishop Rob and Bishop Angel, of Cuba, spend time together.
Report from Bishop Rob - House of Bishops Spring Meeting - March 17-25, 2026
It was a privilege for me to attend the spring gathering of the House of Bishops at Camp Allen in the Diocese of Texas. Though I always hate to leave my beloved Diocese of New Hampshire, I find the time enriching to be with my colleague bishops from the whole Episcopal Church, including from the dioceses in Latin America, Europe, and Taiwan.
By now a Word to the Church has been issued. Its intent is to offer a message of hope, unfailing in the Good News of Jesus Christ, even in times of crisis and discouragement. The new war in Iran—extending to the whole Middle East—the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine, Sudan, and other parts of the world weigh heavily on all of our hearts. Such suffering is a call for us all to pray, fervently, for efforts for a just and lasting peace. I am humbled by the work of my fellow bishops and their churches as they strain to hold together community in Christian fellowship even as forces of inhumanity toward immigrants are rampant and political rages foam.
We always come together in prayer. I have been part of a small but growing number of bishops who devote daily time on contemplation. We do this because as our world experiences such chaos, disorientation, and division, and even war, it is essential that Christians, especially Christian leaders, stay rooted in the awareness of God’s enduring, loving, and life-giving presence in the Incarnate, Crucified and Risen Jesus. Any word or action that is not rooted in prayer is, as Paul says, like a noisy gong to a clanging cymbal. I believe that the tenor of our discussions during the more business-oriented sessions of the House has been more open to deep listening and respect because of the critical mass of bishops who practice contemplative prayer, even those who consider themselves more activist on certain issues.
We spent much of our time discussing the state of theological education, particularly for the raising up of priests in our Church. The landscape of traditional seminary training has shifted significantly in the past 15-20 years. Our denomination has gone from relying on eleven 3-year residential and very expensive seminaries to something like seven, and each of those offering paths that are more accessible to postulants for Holy Orders in local settings, such as rural New England. Much of the changes in education have been driven by economic and demographic forces. The bishops’ discussion of these trends was much overdue. It was so confirming to me to see how our establishment of the School for Ministry, for laity, deacons and priests is something that is becoming more and more accepted and even normative in the wider church. As I spoke with bishops from Ecuador, Columbia, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Massachusetts and Pittsburgh, I was heartened to learn how we are all facing similar challenges in the urgent need to raise up new ministers of the gospel. New Hampshire’s hybrid model is something looked to and admired by such different settings in the Episcopal Church.
We also heard of Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe’s diligent efforts to reform and reshape the organizational structure of the Episcopal Church in a way that supports evangelism, church planting, and redevelopment. There are significant and overdue changes being contemplated, about which we will hear in the coming months. This support for church renewal is of keen interest to us in New Hampshire as we initiate new missions in Manchester, Claremont, Portsmouth, and more in the coming years. This is so important to consider and welcome as demographic models predict a movement northward of the U.S. population in the coming decades. We have been praying for young adults and families for years. I pray that the spiritual and organization work we have done in our Diocese in recent years has helped us prepare for the growth that, God willing, is coming our way.
We discussed proposals in the wider Anglican communion that seek to deepen and further relationships with other provinces of the Church where relationships have been strained and in disrepair for a variety of reasons. The Nairobi-Cairo Proposals are fascinating to read because they imagine a church that is seeking ways to be in communion, and defining what communion means, in an era when the long-term trend for churches, religions, indeed almost every institution in society is toward greater splintering. Though the bishops are, in my view, rightly cautious about the proposals, it is encouraging to think of the many who continue to do the hard and sacred work of true reconciliation across serious differences of practice.
I was so grateful to hear a fulsome presentation from Bishop Ann Ritonia, Bishop Suffragan for the Armed Forces and Federal Ministries. Our church’s work to provide pastoral care and accompaniment to chaplains in the military, federal prisons and hospitals is truly essential, especially when so many of these chaplains encounter tremendous moral, spiritual, and physical trauma. I am grateful for Bishop Ann’s witness to both the gospel of Jesus Christ AND the U.S Constitution’s protection against the incursion of governmental establishment of religion of any kind.
Finally, the return home through a Houston airport stressed with dramatically fewer TSA agents and many more ICE agents felt like being in a country that has changed. As I walked through the labyrinth paths to the security check points, along with thousands of others, I thought of the many pilgrims throughout millennia who have walked the Way of the Cross in Jerusalem, recalling the path the Jesus took from his entry into that City, to his actions in the Temple, to his Trial, his Crucifixion, his burial and his Rising.
I hope that wherever your journey and observances this coming Holy Week takes you, you may know how Jesus Christ walks alongside you, sharing your hopes, your joys, and the depths of your sorrows.
He will raise us all in peace and glory.
Yours in the Risen Christ,
+Rob
Statement on President Trump's Executive Order re: Immigrants and Refugees
Yankee folk wisdom says, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Each of the issues the recent Presidential Executive Orders seeks to fix deserves a considered, bi-partisan conversation, combined with a measure of humility from all sides. Blunt force can make matters worse.
The Executive Order tightly restricting immigration and refugee resettlement based on religious identity has done very little but intensify global tensions while worsening human suffering among those who honor and admire this nation. What is called for is competent diplomacy, informed statesmanship, and a clear commitment to the biblically informed ideals of hospitality to the stranger and the oppressed. That these values are being so cavalierly rejected in favor of rash and fear-based edicts not only violates the dignity of those immediately affected, but also damages our own reputation. This is not what gaining respect in the community of nations looks like.
We appear to be descending quickly from the Republican vision, as held up by President Ronald Reagan, of America as 'the shining city on the hill.' It is worth noting that President Reagan was quoting John Winthrop, a Puritan who was himself, like so many refugees of our day, fleeing sectarian persecution and tyranny.
--A. Robert Hirschfeld, Bishop, January 30, 2017
Bicentennial Sermon for St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Concord, NH
Sermon for St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Concord, NH, on the Occasion of their Bicentennial Celebration
By The Right Reverend A. Robert Hirschfeld, 10th Bishop, Episcopal Church of New Hampshire
delivered January 8, 2017
“And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehendeth it not.”
So, the newspaper reports that we can’t help talking about fires around here. That may be so. The fire I want to talk about this evening is the fire of God's love that kindled the hearts of the several souls who decided to build a church in the Anglican tradition in Concord. More than that, I want to talk about the fire of God that couldn't be contained within the boundaries of heaven itself. It is the fire of love that burns so wildly and urgently that it came down from heaven and took the form of a human being in Jesus.
As we celebrate the beginning of this parish community, I can't help but first talk about the very beginning, the beginning of creation. The prayer for this Sunday speaks of how God wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature. And, granted us grace to share the divine life of the One who shared our humanity: Jesus Christ our Savior.
The early church spoke of the relationship between God and Humankind as a fire intermingling with its medium. In a fourth century Christmas-Epiphany sermon, Basil the Great, the bishop of Caesarea, spoke of the mystery of God becoming human and shedding light into the world using fire and an analogy:
How, then will you say, did the light come everywhere, through one sole person? In what manner is the Godhead in the flesh? Like fire and iron: not by moving about, but by spreading itself. The fire, indeed, does thrust itself toward the iron, but remaining where it is, it distributes its own power to it. In doing so, the fire is in no way diminished, but it completely fills the iron, into which it spreads.
In other words, we are to see ourselves on fire, our own bodies, minds, souls, utterly consumed by a God who choses to be ablaze in our lives, but who also promises never to incinerate us. Because the papers say we can’t help but talk about a fire, let us always keep in mind that wonderful showing up of God who calls Moses to free the people of Israel from their oppression by Pharaoh. Remember the burning bush by which the God of all history, the one who stated his name as “I who am, who was, and who will be,” burns wildly when being revealed to us, but is not destroyed. Thus it is to be with us.
This is the image of our life in Christ, in a God who is indeed suffering, is crucified, and yet who lives. That same God lived and inspired the first men and women who founded a church first named for one is famous for doubting, and then was reformed into a church named for one who is famous for his preaching to the religious and ethnic outsiders: St. Paul. They were aflame with love for God’s mission, for over 200 years, and yet this congregation was never incinerated.
I’ve been thinking of the second law of thermodynamics in the light of the today’s gospel, the construction, and the continual reconstruction, renewal, and re-creation of St. Paul’s. I’ve consulted with some physicists, and this is what they tell me the law says in terms a scientific layperson like me can understand.
Things fall apart. Indeed, everything falls apart. Energy, when converted into motion or work, eventually expends.
Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, in a recent column in the Wall Street Journal wrote:
The Second Law deepens that discovery: Not only does the universe not care about our desires, but in the natural course of events it will appear to thwart them, because there are so many more ways for things to go wrong than to go right. Houses [churches] burn down, ships sink, battles are lost for the want of a horseshoe nail. Matter doesn’t spontaneously arrange itself into shelter or clothing, and living things don’t jump onto our plates to become our food. What needs to be explained is not poverty but wealth.
In summary: poverty, social decline, the disintegration of values in our political and social spheres…all can be seen as analogies, parallels, of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It’s worth noting, by the way, that the Second Law was postulated, as it happens 200 years ago, just as Messrs. Albert Cady, Hill, Greenleaf and their colleagues chose to organize themselves as church and to worship according to the order, not the disorder, of the Book of Common Prayer. Presumably, they found, like I do, that one’s soul is strengthened and equipped better to confront the entropy of life when one reads the daily office, is nourished by the sacraments together, and seeks to build a commonwealth of good under the benevolent auspices of a God who gives and forgives,
Here’s what saves us from being a collection of Debbie Downers or Bob Bummers: “In the beginning is the Word. And the light that enlightens everyone has come into the world.”
You and I, empowered by the Holy Spirit, are being continually remade, rebuilt, re-inspired, re-ignited, reconverted, re-born again, to our original Godly glow. Though the original founders of St. Thomas Chapel encountered some kind of failure in their beginning, and though St. Paul’s has encountered episodes that might have led to its undoing, including fires, conflicts both within and outside its walls, not to mention a civil war, World Wars, and national political upheavals that would have shaken its confidence, the Second Law doesn’t really apply to us.
We are not a closed system. The power of God’s love continually infuses new energy, new vision, new confidence, indeed new joy and delight in our worship of God and each other. It’s not that we have to generate the power and energy to come here every day to offer our prayers for the world and our prayers of thanksgiving. Rather, God is praying us, continually drawing us into God’s eternal and infinitely life-giving presence.
God is heating the cold iron of our hearts, aglow with God’s loving, justice seeking, peacemaking Spirit, so that the world may see the Incarnate Christ, God’s very presence, in our bodies, in our actions, in our thoughts and words, in the hands that reach out in service to those in need and to find reconciliation, even with those who have hurt us or seek to cause harm.
Otherwise, we’d be nothing but burned out, unforgiving, grumpy and tired. Instead, God calls us to into a warm strengthening fellowship without which life can indeed be as Thomas Hobbes describing in the 17th century “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Here, we partakers of the Jesus movement, indeed people of all descriptions of belief and unbelief, have found the peace that surpasseth understanding, and therein the power, the fire, to bring light to this fallen world where for many life is very dark indeed.
My wood stove…the embers burn…even after several days of what looks like cold and ash, there is still light within the pile. So I take a piece of kindling, blow on it, watch the kindling ignite, then a dry log or a piece of birch bark, and behold, the thing is set ablaze again. All from a small, wafer-sized ember.
So it is with us. Our embers seem totally extinguished, from exhaustion, despair, frustration. Sometimes, driving around Concord or the highways and byways of New Hampshire, seeing very hostile stickers from the left or from the right, I can fall into despair at what the cover of Time magazine referred to as the Divided States of America.
But then I come to a church like St. Paul’s. To see the light pass through the faces of these persons on these reconstructed windows, essentially the light of Christ enlightens them all, faces that cannot be separated from the light that fills them. So, let us welcome the light, the fire of Jesus’ love for you and for this broken world. Let us welcome it. And, may it burn continually in our lives, which we offer in God’s service to the world.
A Christmas Message from Bishop Hirschfeld 2016
For all the boots of the tramping warriors
and all the garments rolled in blood
shall be burned as fuel for the fire.
For a child has been born for us,
a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders;
and he is named
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. (Isaiah 9:5-6)
Tramping boots and blood-drenched garments. These images herald the birth of the Messiah: the words we hear on Christmas Eve. We’ve read them for years on that night, but perhaps have tuned them out of our hearing. Even Handel’s Messiah skips over them. But this year we might notice them as though for the first time.
Despite all our attempts and desires to make Christmas warm and cozy--chestnuts roasting on an open fire, St. Nick softly landing on snow-blanketed roofs--the Biblical witness does not shy from the real and stark context of Christ’s appearing. To the prophet Isaiah, God’s people lived under the very near and present danger of oppression, and even deportation after a hostile invasion by Assyria. Jumping ahead to Luke’s account of Jesus’ birth, we learn that the Holy Family is compelled to leave their hometown of Nazareth because the Emperor Augustus decreed a census--presumably to prepare for a tax that would help defray the exorbitant expense of Rome’s military expansion and occupation throughout the known world. Even further on, “on the Fourth Day of Christmas,” those who are keeping to the liturgical calendar will hear, not of four calling birds, but of the slaughter by Herod of the Innocents, the brutal massacre of all the first-born males of Bethlehem on the orders of a thin-skinned and insecure tyrant who is afraid of being usurped by a mere newborn.
These are the settings into which God chooses to enter the world. And these are the settings into which God chooses, in our own time, to continually take on our frail, broken, selfish, injured and fearful human condition.
Still ringing in our ears are the shouts of rallies, even in our own country, calling for the execution of a political adversary. Deeply disturbing to our hearts are the images of young children so traumatized by the destruction and displacement of their families in Aleppo that they cannot even cry. Beyond our conception is the laughter of a young man confessing his murder of nine black parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charlestown, South Carolina. Heartbreaking are the senseless deaths of hundreds, here in New Hampshire, caused by a scourge of opioid addiction that has touched families of every race and class.
Despite, indeed because of, all these facts and realities, I look forward more than ever to this Christmas, and I cherish even closer the joy and privilege of being a disciple of the Christ child. In the midst of our perennial divisions and conflicts, I need to see and know that Holy Presence that is the “US’ that binds me together, however uncomfortably, with those with whom I may disagree, dislike, and even fear. Jesus is the deep compassion of God-made-flesh that links all humankind with each other, that binds us to God’s creation, indeed to God’s own heart. The Bible tells us that God’s compassion in Jesus is the path toward peace, justice, love, and eternal life itself. God chooses what is weak in the world to put the powerful and cruel in their place and to make all things new.
Richard Wilbur in his poem “A stable lamp is lighted” captures the essence of God’s taking-on our flesh so that all human flesh can have means to God’s peace and glory. The poem was set to Hymn #102 in our Hymnal 1982. I always look forward to hearing it, even more so this year. The final stanza reads:
Yet now, as at the ending,
The low is lifted high.
The stars shall bend their voices
And every stone shall cry.
And every stone shall cry
In praises of the Child
By Whose descent among us
The worlds are reconciled.
May we enter anew the life of the one who came among us so that we may be reconciled with God and each other in Jesus, Immanuel, God-with-us. And may our Christmas be filled with the steadfast hope and joy that God is still at work within us, doing things that we cannot even ask or imagine. (Ephesians 3:20)
A Prayer for Standing Rock
“Almighty God, we give you thanks for the gift of water.” These are the words that open our prayer over water when we baptize your children into a life of freedom and life in your risen Son Jesus. It was over water that you initiated the Creation. Water is the source of life and is needed for the health of all we know of health. And yet, O God, in our sin and brokenness, we have polluted this gift for so many, turning the blessing of water into a curse, and into an occasion for painful division, oppression, and the demeaning of the indigenous peoples of this land. Send your Spirit, O God, to your people, turn the hearts of those would threaten the health and safety of his sacred gift at Standing Rock. Re-knit us together in bonds of love, a vision of justice, and deep peace that we have yet to know but we yearn for with a longing you have placed into our hearts, in the name of Jesus.
Amen.
A Post-Election Message from Bishop Hirschfeld
As I walked on the streets of Concord this morning, the sense of division in our society was very clear, as some citizens rejoiced and others looked profoundly dejected. We all knew that no matter who won the election yesterday, that person would preside over a nation that is deeply fractured and hurting. We also knew how afraid and angry so many of our fellow citizens are. If half of us were tempted to deny that fear and rage, we all have to admit it now.
At such a delicate and vulnerable moment such as this, I take strength in remembering that, for followers of Jesus, such fractious and anxious, even dangerous, times as these are not unusual or even strange. Sure, times like these may seem strange for a certain class or segment of American Christians, who have for many decades enjoyed access to privilege, wealth, and power. But, nervous times as these were not at all strange for the first disciples of Jesus and certainly not for the vast numbers of saints who have come before us. They are not strange for a majority of Christians in the Holy Land, in China, and in many other places on the planet. They were not strange even for generations of Americans who have faced sacrifice, war, and economic hardship. Even Jesus, on the night before he died, told his followers to find their true peace in him and, in the midst of persecutions, to take courage for he has already conquered the world with his love. (John 16:32-33)
Recognizing me as a member of the Church, someone stopped me this morning to introduce herself. She was feeling quite distraught this morning about the change in direction our country is taking, especially for refugees, girls, and religious and racial minorities. She asked, "What are we to do now?" She was a stranger, someone I've never met before, and it seemed that maybe such unplanned encounters will be a hidden blessing of these times. The only words that came to me were:
Pray.
Seek justice.
Love mercy.
Walk humbly with your God.
Pray some more.
Love your neighbor.
Don't go it alone. There's been enough of that.
Never has there been a time in my life or ministry when this short list seemed such a high and urgent calling as it does now.
Now is the acceptable time, says the Apostle Paul. (2 Corinthians 6:2) Now.
Faithfully Yours in Christ,
+Rob
HERE to read the 214th Annual Diocesan Convention's Prayers of the People.
Prayers of the People from the 214th Annual Diocesan Convention
We thank you for the great resources of this nation. They
make us rich, though we often exploit them.
Forgive us.
We thank you for the men and women who have made this
country strong. They are models for us, though we often fall
short of them.
Inspire us.
We thank you for the torch of liberty which has been lit in
this land. It has drawn people from every nation, though we
have often hidden from its light.
Enlighten us.
We thank you for the faith we have inherited in all its rich
variety. It sustains our life, though we have been faithless
again and again.
Renew us.
We pray for our own needs, and those of others (pause)
We pray for those who have entered into life (pause)
Help us, O Lord, to finish the good work here begun.
Strengthen our efforts to blot out ignorance and prejudice,
and to abolish poverty and crime. And hasten the day when
all our people, with many voices in one united chorus, will
glorify your holy Name. Amen.
Episcopal Bishops Issue a Word to the Church
The House of Bishops has issued a Word to the Church. Bishop Hirschfeld served as a co-author and appears int he video. You can read more HERE.
A Poem for the 15th Anniversary of 9/11
Azure that morning. Later we learned that the flight paths
may have taken all three planes directly over our home.
Did they fly above the lawn, the forest in which the kids
imagined a perfect world away from adults, the path through the woods that led to their school playground?
Had I looked up, I would have seen those contrails in the
cerulean sky, never guessing such hatred could soar so.
This Sunday, we imagine the Good Shepherd coming for us.
Scanning the landscape to find us,
not to destroy or dismember or dis...
but to search, restore us and all that we've lost,
before that day, on that day, and after that day.
Centuries ago, from the borderlands of Syria,
--Aleppo?-- came a praying poet.
Ephrem saw the Shepherd who seeks us,
not merely on the pasture ground,
but from the skies. He praised:
"The Shepherd of all flew down
in search of Adam, the sheep had strayed;
on His shoulders He carried him, taking him up;
he was an offering for the Lord of the flock
Blessed is his His descent, his hovering!
Blessed is Your rising up!"1.
O Savior, fly down again. O carry us up from the smouldering Pile.
1. Ephrem the Syrian (306-373 CE) The Paradoxes of the Incarnation