 St Alban’s Episcopal Church Bolivar, Missouri Sunday, February 13 6th Sunday after Epiphany Year C   Prayer concerns Even before you come to church today, please pray for these persons: Anna Williams and Ellie who have COVID. John Mark and Ryan are free of it; it is likely that Anna contracted it at work, caring for COVID patients in the ICU despite protection. Lowell Korber who has continued to fall home. Last night he fell around 10:30 pm, but the battery on his alert button hadn’t been charged, so he couldn’t call for help. He was taken to Cox South by ambulance for evaluation because he had hit his head. He is home now, with no identified head injury but a back brace, continued confusion and very edematous legs that are draining. Pray also for Debra Beal, his daughter, just back from Hawaii, will have to get him to a wound car clinic this week. They are planning to move him to Nebraska to a nursing facility where he will have more help. We hope to have him in church one more Sunday before he goes, so that we can express our love for him and say goodbye. He is one of our oldest and most faithful members. Pray for Lily Shepard. She is wearing a heart monitor for a couple of weeks as they try to figure out what caused her cardiac incident. This is disconcerting for someone so young; pray for peace for her and forher family. And pray for this little girl, Abigail Davis, the great-granddaughter of Gale Roberts. She is having difficult symptoms and is being referred to a pediatric rheumatologist. Pray for the people who will still be at home this week, either because of illness or because of their own immuno-compromised status, including Paula Shepard, Gale Roberts, Melody Adams, Dana Rocha.  News You may have noticed the red banner across Southern Hills Baptist Church and the smaller signs around town on the main roads. They read: The Gender Choice, whose is it? and are advertising a one-day event next Saturday discussing whether there actually are LGBTQ or Transgendered persons, how to “fix” those who claim to be – and what the “Biblical” design for human identity is. They will also discuss “complementarity” which defines the role of women as completely different from men. And they claim Biblical authority to reject the lived identity of many Christian persons. Of course, every speaker is a young, white Evangelical male. If you look at their Facebook page you will see that I did respond to this because it first appeared on the Bolivar MO public page. I have elected to stay out of an argument, but to simply state an alternative way of understanding which is also biblical – and thoroughly Episcopalian. One response I saw to my comment was the flat assertion: “There are no LGBTQ Christians. “This is one reason we Episcopalians exist: to acknowledge the equal dignity of every human being, to defend it, to honor God’s image in those whose identities and experiences, we may not share; and to welcome into our fellowship anyone who shares our faith in Christ the Lord. Pray for all who will attend, including those who will find confirmation of their biases and preconceived prejudices. We can do better. We need to. |
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