 St Alban’s Episcopal Church Bolivar, Missouri Tuesday, August 9, 2022 The first sign of fall If you are anxious about COVID – stay home  The first sign of fall  It’s not very bright – the extremely dry summer means we might not see much color this fall. But what we do have already are shorter days, longer nights, and leaves that are letting go of the branches to which they have been attached. This didn’t come from my tree or from any that I can see in my neighborhood, but it was blown onto my driveway by the wind and rain last night. Gale Roberts wrote this: “Human beings fail. Sometimes the church fails. But the clockworks of the solar system never fail (I know the clockwork will fail in a couple of billion years, but that is well beyond the timeframe I worry about.) “So we are moving quickly through the last days of summer and into children’s return to school, then into true fall – which leads us finally again into the fall celebrations of Holy Cross, All Saints, and Christ the King. We may fail to do it well. We may in fact mess up badly and get it all wrong sometimes, but the good thing is that in our liturgical cycle as in the solar cycle, we get to come around to each celebration again and again and try to open ourselves more fully, to enter each season more consciously. And, of course, that is true every week. A rabbi friend of mine comments that the Sabbath comes ever week, with the invitation to slow down, to rest, to come together to worship and to be open to God – It comes, but how we enter it is up to us. COVID still in the news I know of several local families where there are children with COVID now.. So far nobody is seriously ill. But if you are immunocompromised, or if you are in any other way more vulnerable to this virus, please, please stay home and stay safe. People are still dying of COVID in the US. There are still people who are living with long COVID. If you can, stay away from crowds, stores, or indoors anywhere without a mask. And if you are uneasy coming to church, stay home. There is no judgment here, and no pressure to show up. Gale Roberts’ immunocompromised older brother is sick with CVID now; so Gale won’t be coming to us or going anywhere, until the new vaccine which is specific to this strain is available in the fall. No need to freak out. It isn’t the same as it was in the beginning of this pandemic. But with school starting, and apparently no masks or other precautions in place, we are likely to see more young people positive, even f not really sick. We will continue to have a shorter Eucharist – with only two readings and few hymns for now. We just want to reduce the amount of time we are close together indoors – even masked.  This appeared on an Episcopal site yesterday. It’s true. We are sinners. Sometimes we scandalize each other. Everybody else is, too. Sometimes we are scandalized by others. It isn’t that we don’t care about sin. It’s just that we care more about our own – and our own church’s, than anybody else’s.  |
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