Weekly Clergy Letter from Mother Anne Turner

Dear Friends in Christ,

 

How big is your gospel?

 

Growing up at St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church over in Springfield, I thought I knew what the gospel looked like.  As you might expect, my gospel was populated by a lot of people who looked a lot like me.

 

After college, I moved on to Northeast DC and began working with the formerly homeless.  It was hard and challenging and awkward.  But the gospel got a lot bigger really quickly.

 

In the decades since, the gospel has kept growing.  Travels to Russia and Myanmar and Ghana pushed its boundaries.  Work in the arts and with public schools and finally seminary and ordained ministry enlarged those boundaries further.  Was it hard and challenging and awkward?  Just about every time.  But it has been worth it to realize that God is bigger than the small ideas of my childish imagination.

 

Monday is the Feast of the Epiphany, which celebrates not only the arrival of the Wise Men at the manger but also the global range those men represent.  We honor them by remembering that the gospel is always getting bigger.  Whoever we might forget, God remembers.  Whoever we might exclude, God includes.

 

Here at Grace, we will observe the feast on Epiphany Eve, Sunday, January 5, with a bilingual eucharist.  Our parish celebrates these bilingual services a few times a year, and they are always a reminder of how large the gospel can become.  Are they hard or challenging or awkward?  Sometimes people find them so.  It can feel strange to sing in a foreign language or to say familiar prayers with unfamiliar words.  But these services remind us that no one tribe or language or people or nation (to use the language of the prayer book) can alone express the fullness of God.

 

I hope your gospel keeps getting bigger and bigger.

 

Yours in Christ,

Anne+