Church of the Ascension

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a pastoral message in light of easing restrictions

Dear friends,

We are entering a new stage of the pandemic which presents particular challenges to us as a community.  With the relaxation of measures such as distancing, masking, and vaccine mandates, the burden of protection is falling primarily on people who are the most vulnerable to infection and those who care for them.  It is important to remember that what might be a source of relief and delight to one person may be scary and, potentially, exclusionary to another. How do we navigate this time with kindness, justice, and humility?

We consider the variety of needs in our community and do our best to balance risk and harm.

For example, allowing individual speakers, using microphones, to remove their masks substantially increases the quality of participation for people who have impaired hearing while minimally increasing risks of infections.  However, some people may feel unable to serve as readers or may choose to leave their masks on while reading because COVID infection is a more serious risk in their lives. 

We strive to be sensitive to the range of emotions experienced in the community.

Do not assume that everyone shares your perspective; both happiness and frustration are tempered by the knowledge that others in our community are experiencing the reverse. In particular, displays of joy or relief are unhelpful to those who are feeling heightened regret or worry.   

We move slowly and cautiously, possibly more slowly than required by public health/our diocese and possibly more slowly than some of us would like. 

For example, although technically permitted (as of March 10), we are not going to be lifting the capacity limits of our on-site services yet.  We will take time to talk to one another, to explore creative accommodations for differing needs, and to see what the infections rates in our city do.

We practice patience with one another and with ourselves.  

There are very few “right” decisions.  We seek to make the best decisions we can and to share the burden of the costs of those decisions as justly as possible, acknowledging that “as possible” will always be inadequate this side of God’s Beloved Community.

We pray. Pray for wisdom, for protection, for healing, for generosity of spirit, and for one another. 

I am deeply grateful for this community – there is none I would rather be navigating with during these difficult times. Thank you for your faithfulness and for your deep love for this church.

Yours in Christ,
Rhonda

Cultivating Grateful Hearts – Lent 2022

Lent is a season of turning our attention away from temptation and distraction and towards God and God’s will for our lives and the world. We make space to make our relationship with God a priority, taking stock of the ways in which we have failed to do that and the ways in which God nonetheless continues to be faithful to us.

This year, you are invited into a particular Lenten discipline of gratitude. Fast from complaining and grasping and focus instead on the good and growing things God has placed in your life. Find ways to see God at work even in the hard things. Let your gratefulness overflow in acts of love and generosity. 

Some specific practices to consider:

  • Keep a daily journal, in which you record not only the things for which you are grateful but the experience of discovering and naming them.
  • Say grace at every meal. (download a selection here)
  • Send a thank you note to at least one person each week.
  • Find ways to share those things for which you are thankful with people who may not have such easy access to them.
  • Use these weekly reflections and prayers, drawing on the Psalms appointed for use in Lent.
  • Join in an Evening Prayer service every Wednesday at 7:30 pm in Lent, March 9-April 13. Contact Karen McBride for the Zoom link.

Praying for our City

download a pdf of these prayers

Be pleased, O God, to deliver us.
Make haste, Holy One, to help us.                                                                                   

A reading from 1 John 3:19-20

Little children, let us love, not in word or speech but in truth and action. By this we will know that we are from the truth and will reassure our hearts before God whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and God knows everything.

silence

God of love,
Our hearts are heavy, filled with worry and sorrow for the people of our city.
We pray for all who are exhausted, worn down by the noise and chaos of occupation.
We pray for all who are fearful, made into targets because of their race, gender, sexuality or vulnerability.
We pray for all who are angry, whether with the protesters or the police or both.

take time to add your own prayers

Our hearts are heavy, filled with worry and sorrow for the health of our communities.
We pray for all whose bodily well-being has suffered during this pandemic.
We pray for all whose mental well-being has suffered during this pandemic.
We pray for all whose economic and social well-being has suffered during this pandemic.

take time to add your own prayers

Our hearts are heavy, filled with worry and sorrow for the state of our nation.
We ask for deliverance from racism and the sin of white supremacy.
We ask for deliverance from misinformation and political manipulation.
We ask for deliverance from dehumanization and hatefulness.

take time to add your own prayers

Our hearts are heavy, O God; we turn to you. 
Give us eyes to see your ways.
Give us ears to hear your word.
Give us lips to speak your truth.
Give us hands to do your work.
Give us hearts to trust your presence.
Amen.

As Jesus taught us, we gather our prayers together and say:

Our Mother, our Father in heaven
hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us
Save us from the time of trial
and deliver us from evil.
For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours,
now and for ever. Amen.

We go forth in the name of Christ
Thanks be to God.

prayers composed by Rhonda Waters

In Solidarity with our Neighbours

As Christian Clergy in downtown Ottawa, we write in solidarity and care for residents, retailers, restaurant owners, and all who work in the city centre during the ongoing protests and occupation. We see and know the anxiety and distress that this causes, particularly to the most vulnerable among us. 

Our faith tradition calls us to seek the welfare of the city in which we live. It pains us to see how the chaotic, unruly and unlawful behaviors, and hateful language, signs and symbols hurt our community. Like many of you, we have experienced the intimidation used by protesters to target our city’s citizens. We lament how this tears at our social fabric and we call on all levels of government to continue to work for a peaceful end to the protest.  

The present protest shocks us all. We know the civility, respect and dignity within the DNA of our neighbourhoods. Because you live and work in the Nation’s Capital, you have seen many protests, but this situation has become untenable. 

While the language of individual rights permeates much of what we are seeing, we would recall you to the identity we have as a community and the care we are called to offer each other, body, mind and soul. None of us are in this alone. Along with other faith traditions and community support, we are also here for you. Our resilience can come from the hope we find in mutual encouragement, the recognition of our neighbours and their needs, and the generous flow of compassion. From our love of this city, our pain and sorrow, and even our outrage, will come resolve to carry us through this present darkness.    

In hope and solidarity, 

Clergy of Downtown Ottawa Christian Churches 

The Very Reverend Beth Bretzlaff, Rector of Christ Church Cathedral, 414 Sparks St.
The Reverend Teresa Burnett-Cole, Glebe-St. James United Church, 650 Lyon St. South
The Rev. Geoffrey S.W. Chapman, Incumbent, St. Matthew’s Anglican Church, 217 First Ave. 
The Rev. Dr. Karen Dimock, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, 82 Kent St.
Rev Demanya Kofi Akoussah, Eglise unie St-Marc, 142 Lewis St.
Rev. S.K. Moore, Southminster United Church, 15 Aylmer Ave.
The Rev. Canon Hilary Murray, Chaplain, Cornerstone Housing for Women, 314 Booth St.
The Rev. Canon Stewart Murray, Church of St. Barnabas Apostle and Martyr, 70 James St.
Rev. John C. Perkin, Minister, First Baptist Church, 140 Laurier Ave. West 
The Rev. Jim Pot, Knox Presbyterian Church, 120 Lisgar St.
The Reverend Victoria Scott, St. Luke’s Anglican Church, 760 Somerset St. West
The Rev. Gary van der Meer, St. John the Evangelist Anglican Church, 154 Somerset St. West
The Rev. Rhonda Waters, Church of the Ascension, 253 Echo Dr.
Rev. Paul Wu, Minister, St. Giles Presbyterian Church, 181 First Ave.
Rev. David White, Centretown United Church, 507 Bank St.
Chaplain Sid Ypma, Ottawa Campus Chaplaincy, 151 Laurier Ave. East
Rev. Dr. Anthony Bailey, Parkdale United Church, 429 Parkdale Ave.
Rev. Joel Crouse, St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, 400 Sparks St.
Rev. Laurie McNight, MacKay United Church, 39 Dufferin Road
Rev. Peter Woods, MacKay United Church, 39 Dufferin Road 

A Theology for the 21st Century

An address by the Rev’d Bill Baldwin, originally given at the Ottawa Muslim Christian Dialogue

A Theology for the 21st Century

Bill Baldwin

I like the idea of a theology for the 21st century because I need a theology to help me make sense of my life in the century in which I live.  Hans Küng would have been thinking the same way but needed to see his life story as part of a longer story – so he wrote A Theology for the Third Millennium (1934).

Each of our life stories is part of the longer story of the faith journey of our faith community, which is part of the story of humanity and that in turn is part of the story of life on this planet.  Theology needs to deal with all of this and this is especially clear in the 21st century, as global warming, a global pandemic, and much else force us to know that we humans are one family and part of a global ecosystem.  

We live in a world of cultural diversity and much spiritual uncertainty.  In our Muslim/Christian dialogue group we have an important ministry to people who are trying to find their way.  Christian and Muslims share a common story, which we tell in different ways. 

Each of the Abrahamic faiths has a strong sense of being in a covenant relationship with God, but along the way there is an opening up to our need to learn from one another. In the Book of Ecclesiasticus, Wisdom journeys through the world looking for a home and finds a place to settle in Jerusalem. In the 4th Sura of the Quran, God tells the prophet Muhammed about the messages he gave to Moses, to Jesus, and to the prophet himself and says he has formed his people into different communities so that they can test one another. (I would also like to see a discussion, in some depth, of how we look at our scriptures in our two traditions.)

Küng writes that Christian theology needs to be based on the witness of the New Testament writers to Jesus of Nazareth.  Most Christian theologians would agree but what is significant is his insistence that we need to keep going back to that.

There is a diversity of witnesses in the New Testament. The New Testament writers tells us about who Jesus was, what he was like, things he did and about his teaching.  There are quotations of things Jesus said, some of them probably accurate Greek translations of what he said in Aramaic.  There are remembrances written down a generation or two later.  There are testimonies to the person of the risen Christ in the life of the early church.  It may seem a bit messy but Küng is comfortable with the messiness.

From all these witnesses we can see that Jesus spent a lot of time helping people to understand that the Jewish Torah by which they were trying to live was a way of living out the commandment to love God with heart and mind and strength and to one’s neighbours as oneself and we know that he saw neighour as including all of humanity.

Over the past 2000 years, Christians have been trying with greater or lesser success to live out this vision of Jesus and sometimes they have gone badly astray. In the 21st century, we have a secular society with a diversity of cultures and religions. Global warming and global pandemic force us to think about how we are interconnected while information technology makes it easier to be in touch with one another.  We are also being forced to think more about our relationship to the ecosystem of nature.  All of this makes Jesus’ vision of humanity more relevant than ever.

Thus, Küng’s emphasis on the New Testament writers’ witness to Jesus as the basis of theology is especially relevant in the 21st century.  In this and subsequent books, Küng has some good questions for faith communities to ask one another.  He did not believe in giving answers before really asking the questions.

Küng believes there really was a need for reform in the 16th century church but asks if it could have happened without schism and the wars of religion if people could have listened to one another. He also wants to be open to the truth in the different faith communities in our day.

Here, however, I note an absence of any reference to redemption through Jesus’ death on the cross.

Küng deals with this in a later book: What I Believe.  He contrasts the serene benevolence of South East Asian images of the Buddha with the image of Jesus on the cross.  Does this mean that Christians need to back away from talking about the cross?

I would suggest that it means that rather than theologizing about it we should turn to Jesus’ own words.  At the Last Supper, he speaks of “the new covenant in my blood” referring to how the prophet Jeremiah spoke of a new covenant written on people’s hearts. Jesus seems to have seen his sacrifice as a means of bring that to pass. 

Each of us is on a faith journey that is part of the much longer journey of the faith community to which we belong.  Along the way there are certainties and uncertainties. A theology based on the diversity of witnesses in the New Testament to Jesus of Nazareth is needed as we face the complexity of our own time.