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Luke 10: 38-42
Fussy Martha
readied the table,
readied the meal,
poured fine wine.
Resting Mary
sat herself down at his feet.
The sound of his voice
stilled her heart
and filled
her
soul.
O Jesus,
call us to rest at your feet and hear;
to share for a while with you
the one thing that is
necessary.
Let us feast on it
as we bustle
about on
our
days!
The Sunday Website of Saint Louis University
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Read the Pope's Encyclical Laudato Si
On Care for our
Common Home
HERE
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Remember to view videos of the Synod on our website and on our Facebook Page.
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Remember to bring something for the food bank!
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Please know that you can email us your Prayer Requests.
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Mass at 10:30 am on Sundays.
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Contemplative Prayer and Scripture Study
Mondays at 1:30 pm in the Sacred Space. Meeting every week alternating each week with Contemplative Prayer and Scripture study.
Recommended books:
Open Mind, Open Heart: a Contemplative Dimension of the Gospel by Rev. Thomas Keating. Prayer: Our Deepest Longing by Rev. Ronald Rolheiser. For more information contact Fr. David. |
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Emmaus ECC
Celebrating God's wonderful Diversity
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Interfaith Works
Needed...
The Emergency Overnight Shelter located here at First Christian Church needs the following items:
- Blankets
- Socks
- Gloves and hats
- Hand warmers
- Coffee and creamer
- Plates, bowls, sliverwar
Contact Meg Martin by email:
[email protected] or call: 360-357-7224.
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Good Shepherd Community of the Ecumenical Catholic Communion
Mass time is 3:00 pm
Sundays.
In Tacoma WA
Christ Episcopal Church 310 North K street
In the parish library
Contact Father David.
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Contact Br. Elijah
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Celebrating Ordinary Time
Let us pray for all countries that have suffered from violence, and now especially for France. May God have mercy on us all.
Ministry opportunity: Come to mass early and help out!
Each Sunday the Sacred Space needs to be set up for mass
. Come at 9:30 am. It isn't hard, so come give it a try.
Something new in our newsletter! Last week we added a donate button. When you are away on vacation you can still donate to your community. You'll find the donate button on the left sidebar. And anyone who would like to support us and our ministry, please feel free to use that donate button, too! We are a tithing parish so when you donate to our community you are also helping other organizations.
First Christian set up a Go Fund Me site to help them recover from hosting the Warming Center. Read more about it below.
We are happy to be members of Interfaith Works. This allows our small community to be involved in big projects that make a difference in our neighborhood.
United Churches is holding discussions on racism - July 17th, July 24th, July 31st, at 7:00 pm.
The ECC Synod will be held on October 10 - 13 of this year. Read the invitational letter from our Presiding Bishop below. More information about the 2016 Holy Synod can be found HERE. You can see pictures from the last Synod HERE. We still need another HOL rep. Any volunteers?
Faith Formation:
In September
we will once again study together after mass, so start thinking of what you would like to study together.
If you or someone you know is looking for a wonderful way to be Catholic, you can find an authentic Catholicism at Emmaus ECC. We are
a Catholic community that is welcoming of all. We do our best to follow the teaching and example of Jesus, and welcome everyone into our community, and to our table -- regardless of their race, gender, marital status or sexual orientation. Following the example of Jesus, we believe that everyone is the beloved daughter or son of God, and welcome at the table of the Christ. No kidding!
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Sixteenth
Sunday of Ordinary Time
Seek First the Relationship of Love
Abraham in the first reading for Sunday illustrates one of the essential demands of humanity in scripture - hospitality. God expects hospitality not just from Covenanted people, but from all people. The lack of hospitality was the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah, and this led to destruction. While the hospitality of Abraham leads to blessing. Hospitality is the welcoming and showing of kindness to strangers, and is to be taken seriously.
If you recall, when Jesus sent out the 72 disciples he sent them out wholly dependent on the culture of hospitality. Martha, in our Gospel story for Sunday, was fully aware of her primary duty of hospitality. She opened her home not just to Jesus, but to all those traveling with him. We also know that Martha, Mary, and Lazarus were good friends with Jesus. He visits them often, and loves them. Now he stops at their house on the way to Jerusalem.
It is important to understand the context of this story. Jesus is fully aware of what awaits him in Jerusalem, and this may be the last time he visits this house, and these friends. Those who are about to die have a hunger to see their friends one last time. I doubt if Martha and Mary were quite aware of what was going on. I'm guessing they are simply happy to see him, and host him and his friends.
There are so many things going on in this very short story. I can only speak to a few of them. The first thing going on is the hospitality of Martha, who gave of her time, energy, services and resources to Jesus, and his ministry depended on the hospitality and service of others. Martha is doing a very good thing, and Jesus loves her. Like the Good Samaritan in the story last Sunday, Martha illustrates the doing of good things. But then there is also Mary. Mary sits at his feet, taking an exclusively male privilege to herself. She wants to learn everything from him. If you saw the movie Yentl, you know that for centuries only boys and men were allowed to be educated. Or if you pay attention to the news, and remember the attack on the young Pakistani girl who was shot for being a strong advocate for the education of girls, you know that in some places, this is still the rule. But Jesus encourages and defends Mary's right to be there. In protecting Mary, Jesus protects all women. Mary is doing a very good thing, and Jesus loves her.
But then Martha blows it. What surprises me is that Martha doesn't call out to Mary for help, or give her a come here sort of signal. No, she goes to Jesus and first accuses him of not caring about her, and then tells him to tell Mary to help her. She puts Jesus smack in the middle. Psychologists call this triangulation. Martha, a woman, has bought into the stereotype for women in her culture. Mary's place is helping with the household tasks, not sitting with the men at the feet of Jesus. She shows her resentment that Mary would break the cultural rules.
Now the problem is not that Martha is busy serving and providing hospitality. She has chosen a good thing. The problem is that she is anxious and distracted by many details, and now she is resentful of her sister, who has made a different choice from her own. She has lost sight of the most important thing. She has forgotten that the point of hospitality is not doing a lot of things and having the perfect dinner party. The point of hospitality is the guests. When you are too busy in the kitchen, and fussing with all the details so you have no time for your guests, you've missed the mark.
Jesus yearns for Martha to quit fussing around and doing things, and to take time to be with him. Remember, he is on his way to Jerusalem. He may never see her again. How much he would want her to stop fussing, and keep things simple, and just be with him.
Since this story follows the story of the Good Samaritan scholars say that the two stories illustrate the law of love. The Good Samaritan illustrates love of neighbor. The Martha and Mary story illustrates the love of God. Discipleship includes both; it includes both the doing and the being with. Martha was forgetting to be with Jesus. Only one thing is necessary, says Jesus. That one thing is the relationship of love. The doing will pour out of the relationship of love.
Jesus was not lifting up one way of being a Christian - the contemplative - over the other way - the worker. He is inviting us into his presence, and into relationship. Seek first that relationship of love, and all the rest will fall into place.
Mother Kedda
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 Request for Assistance
June 24, 2016
Dear Spiritual Leaders,
I am requesting your assistance in spreading the news about our recent situation in trying to keep the Olympia Emergency homeless shelter and homeless daytime warming center at First Christian Church of Olympia. As a lot of you know, for more than a year now the First Christian Church of Olympia has been permanently housing the Olympia Emergency homeless shelter in the church basement. We also welcomed the homeless Day warming center this winter for three out of seven days a week. All of this additional use on the church building, caused great stress on our church's old, more than 90 year old, sewer and storm-water pipe infrastructure. We were having continual backups of our sewer system and when the rains come hard in the spring, the storm-water drains overflowed and caused flooding in the shelter. All of the backed up toilets and threat of storm-water flooding caused great stress on the sometimes fragile homeless residents in the shelter. This was making life in the emergency homeless shelter more difficult than usual.
Since serving the homeless community of greater Olympia is one of our primary missions of our church, we wanted to fix our plumbing problems to make the sewer and storm-water problems permanent fixed. Fixing more than 100 feet of sewer line under
our basement and shelter home and repairing our entire storm-water line was quite expensive and our total expenditures for our new pipe infrastructure was $55,000. As
a result of all of these outlays, we set up a Go Fund Me site to allow other organizations who understand the importance of providing homeless residents with a healthy and safe
place to stay at night to contribute to our cause of providing housing for homeless residents. Below is a link to the Go Fund Me site where you can make contributions to our church's recent expenses. Thanks for your support in assisting us in our mission to providing shelter for God's most fragile individuals in our community.
Sincerely,
Lizbeth Martin-Mahar
First Christian Church of Olympia
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The Ecumenical Catholic Communion
From the Office of the Presiding Bishop:
June 22, 2016
Grace and peace to all of you!
According to our constitution, it is my responsibility and privilege to call a Holy Synod every two years on behalf of our entire Communion. And so I call all the official delegates of the House of Laity, the House of Pastors, and the Episcopal Council, indeed every interested member of the Communion to come together in Ft. Worth, TX, October 10th through the 13th, 2016, for our 6th Holy Synod.
This is especially a time of being together in the presence of our Head, Jesus Christ and of experiencing the action of the Holy Spirit as we are re-formed into the Body of Christ. Here we will worship together, enjoy and celebrate the connection we have with one another, and discern how the Spirit is leading us on the next leg of our precious journey.
The Leadership Council, whose responsibility it is to prepare the synod, has chosen the theme: "Strengthening Our Roots, Living into Our Dreams." This Holy Synod will be a time for us to continue building a strong foundation for our growing Communion, rooted in deep faith and supported by sharing with one another what we have learned over the years. We also hope it will be an exciting time of dreaming big together, and living boldly into our unknown future.
There are a number of concrete issues about which we will be discerning during our time together:
1. Hispanic Participation. Most of our communion's membership is Hispanic. How do we create and maintain communion across cultural and linguistic borders? One place to start is to get to know each other better. I predict the more we reach out and share with one another, the more contact we will desire and find ways to make happen. Bishop Armando will address exciting models of church that he is employing, from which those of us who are Anglo can learn a great deal.
2. International Communities. There is much interest in the ECC globally. We want to encourage those who are inspired by our story. We also want to maintain realistic mutual expectations for relationship and for church building. A commission on our international communities intends to propose legislation to help us do just that as we continue to grow and build church together across borders and oceans.
3. Women in the ECC. From the beginning the ECC has been inclusive of the gifts of women. Let's assess how we are living out this original commitment in practice and where we may be called to grow. Are we building a church for our daughters that our daughters would want to live in and live out of? The synod will host a "women's caucus" to reflect on these matters and share their findings with the whole Communion.
4. Youth. Young priests and youth ministers tend to attract younger members to congregations. What can we do to develop a younger group of pastoral ministers? What plans do we have for passing the torch from one generation to the next? I will be proposing a plan about this.
5. Constitutional Revision. The committee charged with providing a draft revision of our constitution has been hard at work to make our Constitution clear, concise, and consistent. The goal is to have the Houses consider the revised constitution for approval at this Synod.
I am also pleased to announce that Dr. Julie Byrne, the author of The Other Catholics, Remaking America's Largest Religion, has agreed to address us at synod. Publisher's Weekly said of her book, "Byrne's enlightening research and analysis will undoubtedly raise awareness of these little-known Catholic denominations." I will ask Dr. Byrne to speak to what she has learned about our synod theme from the other Catholics she has studied. She has a very broad understanding phenomena like ours. She can give us insight into wisely strengthening our foundations and boldly dreaming into our future.
So our Synod is a time to worship, a time make and renew friendships, a time to learn, a time to play, a time to work, and a time to be surprised by God's gifts to us. Please, let's gather together in October and take it all in.
Your brother
+Francis
ECC: A wonderful way of being Catholic!
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Schedule:
Contemplative Prayer/Scripture study
--Mondays at 1:30 pm.
Regional ECC Phone Conference: August 24th at 6:30 pm.
Adult Faith Formation -- coming in September.
ECC Holy Synod -- October 10-13 in Ft Worth, Texas. More information HERE.
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| Regional ECC Meeting
The Ecumenical Catholic Communion has several regions. We are located in the Pacific Northwest Region (Washington, Oregon and Idaho). Bishop Thomas Altepeter is our Vicar. The plan is to have a phone conference on every 4th Wednesday.
We need more lay representatives at these meetings!
For years the laity have complained that they have no voice in the Church. Well, you are invited and encouraged to attend these meetings. In order to encourage more participation we have our meetings by phone.
Let Mother Kedda know if you are interested in being on the call.
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| Interfaith Works
Volunteer Opportunities: Would you be willing to volunteer, or to recruit a volunteer, to help with Interfaith Works programs? IW office staff is ready to offer all kinds of support services to volunteers. To get involved, or to request information about any program, please call 357-7224, 9:00am to 2:00pm Monday through Thursday.
Go
HERE to read more about Interfaith Works, and all their programs.
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NOTICE
The Sacraments of Marriage, Reconciliation and Anointing, are available upon request. Preparation is required for Baptisms -- for parents when children to be baptized are below age seven; for those over age seven, our community supports the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults. Our priests are also happy to meet with you individually, and confidentially, to discuss any spiritual or pastoral concerns you may have.
Email: Mother Kedda
We Support Marriage Equality
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