Veterans' Day Statement - November 11, 2020

Recently, Polly and I joined the many in our country who have immediate family members in the military. Our oldest son is now a Captain in the U.S. Army, serving as a doctor at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.. … HERE

Bishop Rob's Covid-19 Statement: November 11 2020

Dear friends,

Grace and Peace be with you in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,

I want to speak about the re-emergence of the COVID 19 virus in our state. There are new facts and trends of the coronavirus that now confront us. And there is troubling news in the short-term, even if we have been given real hope of an effective vaccine on its way in the coming months.

Over the past two weeks, we have seen a dramatic increase in the numbers of infections among us. Though we had certainly hoped to avoid a second wave this fall, its clear that our country has not yet succeeded in stopping the rate of infections or effectively slowing the way one person can infect even several others. This virus has never fully left us, but it is again knocking at our doors with a new ferocity.

New England case rates have remained lower overall than other parts of the country, but all of our numbers in New England are rising and rising quickly, indicating a potentially exponential spread of the virus in the coming weeks. The chief means by which this virus is skyrocketing is by small group gatherings, including religious and sporting events.

The Diocesan Short Term COVID response team is closely monitoring the spread of the virus county by county in New Hampshire through the COVID Act Now website. They are working on a Frequently Asked Questions guide that will answer questions that have been arising such as; What creative worship alternatives are our churches in this diocese offering?

Now, in New Hampshire, our church has relied on the wise, prudent, compassionate caution that each of our congregations has demonstrated to prevent us being a means of infection. We have sought to be the means of God’s grace and health and not sickness.

I want to express how deeply and utterly thankful I am for the leadership of our clergy and lay leaders who have been straining to do just that, to be means of health, hope, God’s presence, even as we are called into this period of exile. Words cannot convey the depth of gratitude and admiration that your care and collegiality mean to me. It is truly astounding, inspiring and I believe, inspired of God.

Now our approach thus far has been one of what we call "Guided Autonomy." And that principle remains. We need to trust each other to do the right things in the coming months. Medical professionals and scientists expect this to be hard winter, and it is with both sadness and grief and resolve that we will meet the journey ahead. Each of our congregations still has autonomy, but I want to stress, emphasize, counsel us all to slow down our plans to have indoor worship together for the time being. Please. God loves you, God loves your neighbor, and God loves our church too much for us to risk our lives by this virus.

I believe God, and I know your bishop, simply love you too much to ask you to go back to our sanctuaries when they are not sanctuaries from this potentially fatal disease.

Having said that, God does not want you to be comfortless. Nor do I. And so I would like to make a more hopeful announcement.

Before the First Sunday of Advent, on November 29th, we will make available to our church in New Hampshire a service where we can share a sacred meal of bread and wine together via zoom or other means of broadcasting. Known as an Agape or Love Feast, our ancestors in the faith, both Jews and early Christians, celebrated and called forth God’s love and redeeming Presence by sharing a meal where ever they found themselves, whether it was wandering in the desert, or in a prolonged period of exile, or after the destruction of a Temple or sanctuary, in times of disease and distress.

I am not going to say what this meal that we will share together beginning in Advent means or does not mean for us, except to say that it is what God makes available to us now. I hope it will offer us, each of us and our communities, the comfort, the assurance, the blessing, the means of reconciliation, and spiritual endurance and nourishment that our community so needs for the extended road ahead.

I will offer the prayers on the First Sunday of Advent on what is coming to be our Virtual Cathedral on Zoom and YouTube Live. The Liturgy Committee is working hard to prepare an instructional video and a brochure so that you can, at last, “Try this at home!”

Just as many of our Jewish friends worship at home every Friday evening with a Shabbat meal, which is a recitation of the Passover Meal, the simple meal of bread and wine that we envision will be a new source of resilience for our local parishes and diocese for the time ahead.

May our prayers, our actions and our commitment to God and each other in Christ continue to support and even enliven and deepen our faith. May our Lord Jesus Christ come among us in a new and needed way this Advent and Christmas.

We live in God’s re-creative power and presence,
We live in truth that the rising of Jesus Christ from the dead assures us that we have not even death to fear,
We live in the power of the Holy Spirit which sends us new creative blessings every hour and every day.

May God bless you with joy, hope and love, today and always.

WATCH BISHOP ROB’S VIDEO HERE

A Prayer from Bishop Rob - How Little I Have Known You

A Prayer From Bishop Rob: How Little I Have Known You

A Prayer From Bishop Rob: How Little I Have Known You

O Jesus of Nazareth in Galilee, I’m just beginning to see how little I have known you.

You didn’t talk like me, in the accent of a New England prep school or the Ivy League, or with the elegant linguistic economy of the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer — a book you never held in your calloused hands.

The other day, O Jesus, I heard a black man speak. His brother was murdered when a white officer of the law knelt on his neck, suffocating him.

The brother spoke within marbled halls, in an expensively paneled room on Capitol Hill. And he used language — nothing profane and nothing obscene — but language which didn’t sound at all like the way I talk.

And this is a sample of how I was taught to talk about you, O Jesus of Nazareth,

Just as the postmodern sublime is figured through both the fragmentation of form and a (pseudo) regathering sublime is figured through pastiche or bricolage, so too the Christian sublime involves both the shattering the Christ-form upon the cross, and a regathering of that form through the resurrection, a regathering that has an intrinsic element the regathering of the scattered disciples into an ecclesia...

O Jesus of Nazareth, what does that even mean? Would you even recognize that we were talking about YOU in all that code? More likely, we were just talking about ourselves—to people like ourselves.

The language of George Floyd’s brother contained verbs that didn’t always agree in the number of their subjects. Sometimes he said, “I’m axing you...” instead of how I learned to make a request.

And, like John the Baptist, he took an ax to the root of my supremacy. He spoke Truth. More truth, because it came from your own broken heart, O Jesus of Nazareth in Galilee.

I heard him more than I’ve heard anyone witness in those stately leather-chaired rooms before. Rooms where Laws are made. It was the language you more likely spoke than how I speak. Forgive me, O Jesus of Nazareth, I have dismissed your syntax all these long, empty white-washed years.

O Jesus of Nazareth in Galilee, When you were lynched on that hill by the garbage heaps of Jerusalem, by officers of the Law, you cried, “Into your hands I commend my Spirit.”

The Book of Common Prayer took those words and bleached them into such bloodless concepts: oblation, satisfaction, atonement. But what you were saying then and what you’re saying to me now, right now, from the lynching cross, is “I can’t breathe.”

Jesus, I don’t know Black. In college here in New Hampshire, Black writing, Native American writing, Asian American writing, Gay and Lesbian writing were all electives, not serious, believed to come from a lesser muse and inferior talent. If you need a “gut,” take those, I heard, and for heaven’s sake don’t take them seriously. So, I avoided those classes. Gutless.

O Jesus, I could have met you in the strains of Coltrane’s Love Supreme, or Ellison’s Invisible Man, or Morrison’s Song of Solomon, or in Baldwin, or Erdrich, or Angelou, or Hughes, or the songs of Marvin. But in that old oak empaneled English Department, with its afternoon teas and white-buck shoed croquet on the manicured lawn below Baker Tower, —the Tower with the caricatured Indian and the peace-pipe weathervane on top - we all found ways to dismiss your revealed Truth, Truth we substituted for playful and clever theories about semiotics and metaphorical structure. Nothing that would disrupt how to love and move in this world of unlikeness.

O Jesus of Nazareth, they shot you right out of their Western Canon. With the sublime chords of Handel in the background you were, Despised. Rejected over sherry in crystal stemware.

O Jesus of Nazareth in Galilee. They made fun of the way you talked, of who you hung out with, (or should I say whom?). And when you got too uppity, they hung you, from splintered timber, nothing like the clean silver and brass cross I wear while sitting at my desk, air-conditioned.

O Jesus of Nazareth in Galilee. You didn’t look or talk or dress like me. To be honest, Jesus, your friends usually make me nervous. To be honest, O Jesus, more and more you make me nervous. But I trust you.

How long and how many times do I need to remember that I don’t really know many people who look more like you, O Jesus, than who look like me? And so, my dear Lord, the truth is I have not really known you as much as I’ve thought or as much as I’ve claimed.

And I’m not alone. Help us. O Lord Jesus of Nazareth in Galilee. Help us. Amen.

A New Book by Bishop Rob: "With Sighs Too Deep For Words: Grace and Depression.

Bishop Rob has just published a new meditation and prayer companion for those who struggle with depression, With Sighs Too Deep For Words. 

The stigma around mental illness in our culture has had a damaging effect on those who suffer from its grip. As a priest and bishop, Bishop Rob has quietly been in treatment for depression for decades. In his book, he now shares his own experience publicly. The Bishop offers short meditations, prayers, and suggestions about how one can follow and call upon Jesus for strength and peace during times of emotional upheaval. For more,

“My depression continues to teach me about God’s love and grace,” said Bishop Rob. “I wrote in the hope that my experience might resonate with others who bear similar pain and struggle. My intent is to offer some hope to those who experience depression, especially those who have swallowed the dangerous myth that mental illness is somehow a moral flaw, or a sign of God’s judgment, a myth that is tempting to believe—or at least it has been for me.”

The Bishop’s book, with its prayers and practical suggestions for spiritual and creative practices and resilience, can be a companion for those who suffer so that they may know more deeply the resilient love of Jesus.

With Sighs Too Deep For Words is available at local independent NH booksellers including Gibson’s in Concord, the Bookery in Manchester, and Toadstools in Keene, Nashua, and Peterborough, as well as Church Publishing (www.churchpublishing.org/withsighstoodeepforwords), Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.

Following the Good Shepherd Version 3.0

As the state of New Hampshire announces its “Safer at Home Advisory” and continues on the path of re-opening for business, employment, and services, Bishop Rob shares this “3.0” document to provide continued guidance regarding how we may go about regathering in our churches.

Read more…

Province 1 Bishops' Response to President Trump's Actions at St. John's Church in Washington, DC

New England Episcopal bishops respond with one voice to President’s “cynical” photo-op by calling out “the abomination of continued oppression of and violence against people of color in this nation”

What President Trump did in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, Lafayette Square on the evening of June 1 was disgraceful and morally repugnant.  Displaying a Bible from which he did not quote, using as a mere backdrop an Episcopal church where he did not pray, and – more callously – ordering law enforcement to clear, with force and tear gas, a path through demonstrators who had gathered in peace, President Trump distorted for his own purposes the cherished symbols of our faith to condone and stoke yet more violence.

To read more, Click HERE

Bishop Hirschfeld's Pentecost Sermon

Each year on this day we celebrate the birthday of the church. Normally it is a day of joy and exuberance as we open ourselves to the possibility for God’s renewal, for a fresh inhale of God’s life-giving, light bearing Spirit.  The Holy Spirit, the breath of God, that brooded over the chaos before the creation, that shapes a random mess of particles into atoms and mass, and life, and meaning and purpose.  The Holy Spirit that invades all boundaries and isolated individual interests to form communities of love and concern and compassion.  For more, click HERE

Say Their Names

As bishop, I invite the membership of our parishes to listen to this list of these individuals, each created in the beautiful and strong image of God.  I don’t care if you learn about the Parthians, the Medes, the Elamites, the Phrygians and all the rest this year.  I urge you to listen to these names  As you hear or read these names, please invite the Holy Spirit to choose a name for you to come alongside in the coming weeks of what may be a long summer.  Say the name in your daily prayers.  Learn who that person was. Learn when and where they were born.  To read more, click HERE

Bishop Rob's Letter Regarding Stay at Home 2.0: Places of Worship

May 30, 2020

On Friday May 29, Governor Chris Sununu shared a document, Stay at Home 2.0: Places of Worship, that ostensibly allows houses of worship to begin re-admitting worshippers to their sacred spaces for religious services only. I am grateful that the Governor takes seriously the particular complexities of risk and demand that we all face as we contemplate gathering again for religious services. The Governor’s order is informed by the advice of health professionals, immunologists, as well as members of various religious communities in New Hampshire. To read more, Click HERE.

The Church and Stay at Home 2.0: Following the Good Shepherd and the Path Ahead

Dear Clergy and Lay Leaders, 

As the state of New Hampshire begins to walk towards a gradual "re-opening" of the state - for business, employment, and services - while maintaining important public health measures to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, I am sharing this document to provide guidance about how we might think about "re-opening" our churches. 

Following The Good Shepherd On The Path Ahead 

As always, the diocesan staff and I welcome your questions and concerns and we stand ready to pray, consult and partner with you now and in the days ahead. 

Yours in the Risen Christ,

+Rob

The. Rt. Rev. A. Robert Hirschfeld

Bishop of New Hampshire