A Letter From Hunt
Day of Pentecost, 2008
Dear People of god who are Emmanuel Church,
Greetings from Georgia on this day we recall that as the Church, we are the body of Christ, drawn together and given life by the Holy Spirit.
Lisa, Will and I have started to set our sighs firmly on an island in Lake Washington and we are incredibly excited about the possibilities that await us there as we begin to become part of the Emmanuel community. Know that we have spent the past couple of weeks saying goodbye to our friends at St. Paul’s, as well as friends we’ve made during the past 20 years that we’ve lived in metro Atlanta. Our last Sunday at St. Paul’s was May 4 – a wonderful and sad and fun-filled day. The congregation met for the 10:30 service at a retreat center about 12 miles from the church building. We celebrated the Eucharist in a huge pavilion on a bright sunny late spring day, singing old camp meeting songs, shape note music and selections from our hymnals. We then moved from the Eucharistic feast of bread and wine to the Eucharistic feast of fried chicken and every kind of salad, vegetable dish and dessert you can imagine. A true southern spread and a wonderful day.
As you might imagine, we’ve said goodbye a lot lately. And as much as we’re going to miss people here, all three of us are starting to realize that we’re anxious to start saying hello. That’s why I’m writing – to begin to say hello to all of you. There’ll be plenty of time and opportunities for all of us to go deeper, but friendships have to start somewhere, so I’m beginning ours now.
For the next several months, I want to make sure we have lots of time to get to know each other. The Spirit has been plenty busy in your lives and in the life of Emmanuel Church and I want to see and hear what she’s been up to in recent months and years. Each of you has a story to tell about who you are, where you’ve been, how God is at work in your life, and about what your hopes are for our common life. Those are the stories of our life in God and we need to tell them and we need to hear each other’s stories as well. In July, August and perhaps in September, I want to get together with smallish groups of Emmanuelites to do just that: to listen and to talk. More details to come, but if you’d like to host a Saturday morning coffee or a midweek dessert in your home, or at the Church, let us know when the time comes to get it organized.
In the next month or two, I’d like for all of us to read Conversations with Scripture: the Gospel of John, a new book written by the Rev. Cynthia Briggs Kittredge. It’s a very accessible book written for parish groups with varying degrees of familiarity with biblical texts. There will be no quiz, I promise. My hope is that lots of us will read it and what we learn will inform our discussion on what it means to be a Christian community in 2008 in metropolitan Seattle. John’s Gospel has a lot to say on the topic of Christian community and I imagine we will as well. The nice folks at Island Books tell me they’ll have copies in stock after May 18. It’s also available online, but supporting Island Books sounds like a good idea to me.
I’m grateful that my beginning with you is during this season after the Pentecost, a season our Roman Catholic sisters and brothers refer to as “Ordinary time.” It’s the long season of the church year from Pentecost until Advent when our readings, prayers and music help us to discover again what it means to live life as followers of Christ in the ordinary ebb and flow of our lives. Christmas, Easter, Pentecost and the seasons that surround them provide us with our “mountaintop” moments. But once the trumpets stop playing and the incense stops smoldering, we’re called to come down from the mountain, to be the hearts and hands and feet of Christ in our beautiful and troubled world.
Lisa, Will and I plan to attend all of the services on June 15 and sit together (we don’t get to do that too often) because I hope from the beginning that you’ll see us as a part of the community. I, of course, have a particular role among you, but I can’t do without the ministries of all of you. We’re in this together.
One more thing: when you get a chance, take a look at the blog about our big adventure traveling from Georgia to Washington. The address for “The Priest’s Big Adventure” is www.ga2wa.blogspot.com. I don’t promise anything profound (at least from me), but it’ll be fun to have you with us as it’s easy to leave a comment if you feel so called. We’d love to hear from you!
God’s peace,
Hunt Priest.e
