The Good News of St. John’s

The St. John’s Annual Meeting is a time for us to come together and have a larger conversation about what St. John’s has done in the past year and what we’re looking forward to in the coming year. You may recall that we held the Annual Meeting online last year, combining it with our Sunday worship. This year, we’ve decided to do the same thing. As the rector, I don’t believe that we could effectively have the kind of interaction we need to have while keeping each other safe during this rise in COVID rates.

So, please plan for the following:
We will meet online only for a combined worship service and annual meeting on Sunday, January 30 at 10:00 am. For those who cannot meet online via Zoom at home, we will have some minimal accommodation in the St. John’s Parish Hall, where we have a large screen. Please be in touch directly with Rev. Michelle if you need assistance in coming to the Annual Meeting.

Regarding the blue Ministry forms that you were given on January 16, please do fill them out and bring them to church with you either this coming Sunday, Jan 23 or the following Sunday, Feb 6. We will have some time set aside during the Annual Meeting to discuss ministry for the coming year.

Thank you, once again, for your flexibility as we continue to live through this pandemic together.

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Seeds of Hope

One of my Christmas gifts from Ana this year was a gift certificate to Hudson Valley Seed Company. I savored the idea of choosing which seeds to grow this coming year and, when I had some time, I sat down and went through their website and made my choices. Then, later that week, we stopped by their store in Accord to pick them up. And it’s so exciting!

We have honeynut squash, zucchini, tri-color beans, purple tomatillos, rainbow carrots, several kinds of tomatoes – including one that is good for drying and processing… and lots more. Then I also ordered some flowers – sunflowers, zinnia, marigold, sweetpeas… I sigh with joy whenever I think about it this year’s garden. Soon it will be time to begin sowing some of these seeds inside.

And it reminds me of something I read a few weeks ago – I plant seeds because I live in hope.

Hope is one of those tricky concepts, I think. We often equate “hope” with wishing, limiting our hope to only what our imagination can fathom. But real hope is so much bigger and also a little harder. Hope is a belief in life itself – without attachment and expectation. Every time I plant a seed, I suppose there is the hope of a fruitful harvest, if I’m honest. But really, I also love the process of watching things grow and transform and become who or what they were meant to be.

So, even though I’ve never grown carrots before and so many people say that they have trouble growing carrots, and even though I dream that we have some amazing carrots to eat… I have to remember that’s just one part of all of this. Because, really, what God is asking of me, is to be present with these seeds and the seedlings they become and the process of nurturing them into plants. And then… seeing what they are going to do.

May we all plant seeds of hope that bring us joy.

In God’s love and mine,
Rev. Michelle

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Announcements for
January 23, 2022

Altar Flower Slots for 2022: The following Sundays are open for those who wish to make a dedication in the name of their loved ones with altar flowers. April 24, June 12, June 26, October 30. Please contact Elaine Lawrence via email to discuss: eslawrenc@aol.com

Standing for Election to Vestry on January 30
Every year we vote for people to be on the Vestry. Each vestryperson serves a term of 3 years and each warden serves a term of 2 years. Here is the 2022 slate: Claudette Ford, running for a second term as warden; Paula Wisneski, running for a second term as vestryperson (having completed Jeanne Ruddy’s term); Sara Hutton, running for a first full term as vestryperson (having completed a one-year term).
Questions? Ask one of our wardens, Lynn Dennison or Claudette Ford or Rev. Michelle

Announcing a new program at St. John’s!
Click here for more info!

Page Turners Book Club: The books for the next several months have been announced: February 1- Oh, William, by Elizabeth Strout; March 1-The Rules of Magic, by Alice Hoffman; April 5- Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr; May 3- The Murmur of Bees, by Sofia Segova. Speak with Lynn Dennison for more information.

Have an announcement?
Please send by Wednesday at noon to stjohnskingston@aol.com.

St. John’s Upcoming Schedule
Jan 30: St. John’s Annual Meeting – ONLINE
Feb 6: St. Brigid’s Feast Day, transferred
Feb 13: Guest Preacher: The Rev. Richard Witt, Rural and Migrant Ministries
Feb 27: All Ages: Building the Lent Ark, St. John’s 2-4 pm
Mar 1: Shrove Tuesday
Mar 2: Ash Wednesday
Mar 5: Vestry Retreat at Huntington House
Apr 10: Palm Sunday
Apr 14: Maundy Thursday
Apr 15: Good Friday
Apr 16: Holy Saturday and Easter Vigil
Apr 17: Easter Sunday

A New Formation Program at St. John’s
Have you ever been reading one of our Biblical stories and wondered, “What if… ?” Or “Why?” All of us are invited to join in wondering together as we inhabit one of our most treasured Bible stories – Noah’s Ark. The Rev. Suzanne Guthrie (Amma Suzanne) will be joining us for an afternoon of all-ages fun in a program called Building the Lent Ark on Sunday, February 27 from 2-4 pm. We begin by exploring the story of Noah’s Ark together. Then, the adults and the younger people will have time apart to reflect and pray. Finally, we will come back together for singing and a snack.

All are invited – people at St. John’s, people from other churches, people who don’t go to church at all. All, we ask is that you register so we know how many are planning to come. It’s easy to do, just fill out the form here: Building the Lent Ark – Registration

There are more events like this coming throughout the year so be on the lookout and register for them too!

Christian Formation at Home
During the pandemic, we have also been sending kits home so that families can engage in Christian formation. For Epiphany, a season in which we are invited to bring the light of Christ with us so that it may be shared with others, our take-home kit is the Epiphanytide Home Blessing Kit. Each kit contains a set of prayers plus a small jar of Holy Water and some chalk, elements used in the blessing of a home. Plus, there are directions for Making Prayer Stars which can be shared with others or can be used as reminders throughout the year of the call to carry Christ’s light through our intentions and prayers.

We will bless the kits this Sunday when we bless the water in the font together so that everyone may take them home. We’ll have the kits on hand throughout the Season After the Epiphany, which ends on March 2, Shrove Tuesday.

Look for more take-home Christian Formation activities for all ages! Later this month, we will hand out kits to make St. Brigid’s Crosses at home at the beginning of February.

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Ministry and Recommitment

Our Pledge Campaign last year focused on 3 themes – Recommitment, Renewal, and Reconciliation. When we developed these 3 themes, the Stewardship Team wanted to use them to frame our entire year of 2022 – in liturgy, in formation, in stewardship, in prayer… in everything. For the Season After the Epiphany (January and February) we will focus on the theme of Recommitment. In Lent and Easter (March 2-June 4), we will focus on Renewal. And during the Season After Pentecost (June 5- Nov 20), we will focus on Reconciliation.

It’s not unusual that the theme of Recommitment comes in January, at the beginning of the year. It’s a traditional time of recommitment – we make plans, we make resolutions, we go on diets, so on and so on. But the question out there is, what are we recommitting ourselves to? For that matter, WHO are we recommitting ourselves to?

Believing that the God we worship is the God of Life who is Love is an important place to begin, I think. Because everything else can flow from that belief. If God is Love, and I am committing myself to Love and to truly living into that, then what does that mean for me?

If we start with Love, what flows from us becomes ministry, regardless of where that takes place. When we come from Love, we are using our gifts to co-create God’s Reign on earth because we desire to make love, in all its forms, a reality. For ministry isn’t something that only feeds others, it feeds us too. The more we offer love, the more we experience love. This is a truth that’s hard to believe until we begin to experience it for ourselves.

And… we are not a bottomless source of anything. We need to take stock of what we are able to offer – in time, talent, and treasure. I hope that, this year, you will spend some time during this month of January, to consider your ministry at St. John’s… and beyond. What are you committing to in this coming year? Are you ready to learn something new? Do you want to do more of what you already love to do? Are you willing to help out in other ways to support the larger community of St. John’s?

We’re handing out a blue Ministry Survey during worship over the next several weeks. Please take it home with you and pray about the ministries listed on the sheet. See what God says in your prayer time. At the end of the month, on Jan 30 at our Annual Meeting, I’ll collect them from you and make sure that ministry team leaders are aware of your commitments for the coming year. And if you’d like to talk it through me with, please reach out to me. I’d love to help you discern.

In God’s love and mine,
Rev. Michelle

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Announcements for
January 16, 2022

Page Turners Book Club: The books for the next several months have been announced: February 1- Oh, William, by Elizabeth Strout; March 1-The Rules of Magic, by Alice Hoffman; April 5- Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr; May 3- The Murmur of Bees, by Sofia Segova. Speak with Lynn Dennison for more information.

Standing for Election to Vestry on January 30
Every year we vote for people to be on the Vestry. Each vestryperson serves a term of 3 years and each warden serves a term of 2 years. Here is the 2022 slate: Claudette Ford, running for a second term as warden; Paula Wisneski, running for a second term as vestryperson (having completed Jeanne Ruddy’s term); Sara Hutton, running for a first full term as vestryperson (having completed a one-year term).
Questions? Ask one of our wardens, Lynn Dennison or Claudette Ford or Rev. Michelle

Announcing a new program at St. John’s!
Click here for more info!

Have an announcement?
Please send by Wednesday at noon to stjohnskingston@aol.com.

St. John’s Upcoming Schedule
Jan 30: St. John’s Annual Meeting and Ministry Fair
Feb 27: Building the Lent Ark, from 2-4 pm at St. John’s
Mar 1: Shrove Tuesday
Mar 2: Ash Wednesday
Mar 5: Vestry Retreat at Huntington House
Apr 10: Palm Sunday
Apr 14: Maundy Thursday
Apr 15: Good Friday
Apr 16: Holy Saturday and Easter Vigil
Apr 17: Easter Sunday

Hopefully, it’s no secret that the St. John’s building is available for use by a wide variety of programs and organizations. We have and continue to rent our space to 12-step groups and exercise groups and prayer groups… just to name a few. These organizations are a part of the larger St. John’s Community. What we are creating with the people who share our space is much more than an agreement or a contract. It’s a relationship, a covenant – to share and build community together.

For the new year, the Vestry wants to expand our missional focus of sharing our space and resources. They have voted to expand our rental program to include a focused effort on renting our commercial kitchen. Not only will this expand our reach into the community, it will also enable new entrepreneurs who are a part of the evolving Kingston “foodie” scene, to have a place to develop their craft and their business.

Because we will increase the income we receive from this part of our budget, we are hiring two new part time employees to support the rental program – a Sexton and a Rental Manager. These two positions will directly support the rental program. The Sexton will ensure that the facility is clean and well-maintained (this includes the Rectory and the grounds) and the Rental Manager will ensure that people know about our facility and will manage communications and contracts with all of our renters.

We need your help! You can find these job descriptions on our website at Employment Opportunities – St. John’s Kingston. Will you please share these job descriptions with people you know? You may know someone looking for a job like this or you may know someone who can get the word out to a wider group of people. You can download them from the website and email them as attachments or just email the link to this page of the website.

And stay tuned for more information! Soon, we will have a page on our website devoted to our expanded rental program and other ways to pass along information to those who want to become a part of our extended St. John’s Community.

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The Vestry met for an emergency Zoom session on Thursday, January 6 and voted to install a new gas furnace in the Rectory. The furnace is an upgrade to a 95% efficient Ruud model and will be installed this coming Tuesday (January 11) by HWS here in Kingston. Matt from HWS has been great to work with so far and the Vestry is pleased with the choice, especially that he can schedule the installation on such short notice.

The Buildings and Grounds Committee worked hard over the Christmas season to do some good, solid research on options – including those that explored the possibility of getting the Rectory off of fossil fuels. There were several options to choose from and they also consulted with the architect who is consulting on our larger project of roof repair and accessibility concerns in the church building. In the end, because the Rectory is an historic structure with stone walls, the choice was clear and the Vestry voted unanimously to accept the recommendation by the Buildings and Grounds Committee.

Rev. Michelle is deeply thankful for the ministry of both groups and the effort they made to expand their knowledge and ask the right questions. Well done!

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The Endless Season of Uncertainty

I love to make plans. You can ask my wife Ana… I spend so much time and effort creating my own planner each year out of a dot journal, including pages for planning my garden, my wish list for books to read, and my plans for liturgy and formation at St. John’s. This year, Ana and I also spent a few days doing some vision boards together so that we could become more intentional about our life together.

I find this to be an extremely life-giving practice every year because it offers an opportunity for reflection about what’s important in my life and my ministry. In other words, it’s a form of prayer – listening to God’s Holy Spirit inform my choices so, when I’m tired or become upset about something, I can refocus myself instead of just waiting for the next thing… which is more like a default setting for me. It’s an opportunity to recommit myself, just as prayer always is.

It was during this process over the past couple of weeks, that I realized the exact source of why this Christmas has been so difficult for so many of us – uncertainty. Last Christmas was challenging but this Christmas, we were hit with a new surge just when we thought we might have figured a few things out. This pandemic has most definitely created a great deal of fear and anxiety in our lives. So much life has been lost. And, underlying all of this, is this endless season of uncertainty. So much for all my planning, right?

When the pandemic started, we thought if we marshalled our efforts, we could “get back to normal.” Soon, of course, we realized that wasn’t going to work because, as we’ve observed, vaccines are a big help but they aren’t eradicating anything. And I don’t know one person who isn’t tired of masks and Zoom. The deeper issue is that we are wholly uncertain, and we don’t know when our uncertainty is going to end.

In our liturgical life of the church, we are given seasons of uncertainty to dwell in the experience of not-knowing – Advent and Holy Week come to mind. Even still, neither of those quite hold the space for what we are going through, mostly because we know those seasons end in our two most joyous festivals and… they are short. The reality is, we don’t know what’s at “the end” and we don’t know when that end will be.

What I do know, is that God is in this with us. I believe that with everything I am. But I also know that it helps to acknowledge just how helpless and vulnerable and, perhaps, angry, all this uncertainty makes us feel. To give it a name gives us the power to lift ourselves and reach out a hand to help lift others. In so doing, we usually find that God is right there doing all the lifting for us.

So, in the midst of this season of uncertainty, what is it that we can make plans for? How do we recommit ourselves to our deepest values and our own heart’s desire?

I offer a quote from Madeleine L’Engle who lived nearby in Litchfield, CT and wrote A Wrinkle in Time – a beautiful mix of Christian faith and science. This quote isn’t from that book, but from her larger work.
Epiphany:
Unclench your fists
Hold out your hands.
Take mine.
Let us hold each other.
Thus is God’s Glory
Manifest.

As we begin this new year, having knelt at the manger of Love’s birth among us, may we recommit ourselves to this path and to one another as we follow Christ’s light in the way of truth and love.

In God’s love and mine,
Rev. Michelle

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Announcements for
January 9, 2022

Page Turners Book Club: The books for the next several months have been announced: February 1- Oh, William, by Elizabeth Strout; March 1-The Rules of Magic, by Alice Hoffman; April 5- Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr; May 3- The Murmur of Bees, by Sofia Segova. Speak with Lynn Dennison for more information.

EfM- Education for Ministry: Participants in the Episcopal Church program, EfM, spend a year studying each of these 4 topics: Hebrew Bible, New Testament, church history, and theology/ethics and commit to one year at a time. While the course materials provide academic content, the focus of the program is on understanding the call to ministry in our daily lives. EfM provides Christians with a life skill which creates a foundation for Christian ministry — theological reflection. A new group is forming soon in our area! If you are interested, please contact Deacon Teri Jones, group mentor, at terijones@optonlinline.net or 845-453-0422.

Announcing a new program at St. John’s!
Click here for more info!

Have an announcement?
Please send by Wednesday at noon to stjohnskingston@aol.com.

St. John’s Upcoming Schedule
Jan 30: St. John’s Annual Meeting and Ministry Fair
Feb 27: Building the Lent Ark, from 2-4 pm at St. John’s
Mar 1: Shrove Tuesday
Mar 2: Ash Wednesday
Mar 5: Vestry Retreat at Huntington House
Apr 10: Palm Sunday
Apr 14: Maundy Thursday
Apr 15: Good Friday
Apr 16: Holy Saturday and Easter Vigil
Apr 17: Easter Sunday