June 2016

Dear Friends,

         This past Sunday we were surprised when we tried to turn on the air-conditioning and could not. Upon further inspection of the system, we discovered that our air-conditioning units (the five units by the garage, on the south side of the church) had been vandalized. Whoever did this showed no mercy. The units were severely damaged. The electrical wires were cut and torn off the outside wall of the church. After meeting with the police, we are certain that this happened on Saturday night. We suspect that the motive for the crime was drug related. Many drug addicts will steal anything that has copper in it, in hopes of selling the copper to a dealer for some quick cash. We have had so much copper stolen from our building over the years (all of our down spouts have been stolen) that it’s hard to believe. Ray Griffin and I actually spoke at a hearing before the relevant committee in Annapolis once on a bill seeking to address the issue of stolen copper. I don’t know that it did any good but I guess there is some comfort in knowing that we are not alone in being victims of this type of crime. It’s happening everywhere. You might say it is “a sign of the times”. In recent years we have had so much vandalism done to the church, (statues broken, plants stolen from the garden, lawn furniture ruined, the church entry used as a community toilet) that after a while you get discouraged and then you almost become numb to it.

       How do we cope with this? First of all we recognize the problem for what it is: drugs. The Dundalk neighborhood is being overrun by addicts. The same is happening to neighborhoods all over America. Every day, in addition to property being stolen, young men are dying of drug overdoses, while others commit suicide and still others are murdered. Twenty years ago, few of us had personal knowledge of such heinous things. Now we all personally know victims of these tragic events. You could say that we have lost the war on drugs and it is now full and fast upon us. I also think that it’s safe to say that this situation is going to worsen before it gets better.

       It’s no mystery why this is happening. This is happening to America because America has, over the last fifty years lost its faith in Jesus Christ. You all know the story. The blue laws were repealed, making Sunday just another work day. Then prayer was disallowed in the schools; then the Christmas pageants were abolished. The kids were not taught respect for the Ten Commandments, teaching moral relativism instead. Then the schools began planning sports events on Sundays, so Sunday Schools dried up. Some churches are still thriving, but generally all over America the local churches, Catholic and Protestant alike, are drying up and disappearing. This is a frightening thing to see for those who have faith to see it.

       Let’s recognize that God is not doing this to us. The problems we have are those that we bring upon ourselves. God is simply withholding his grace from us and thereby letting us see what it’s like to live in a land that is not fertilized and watered by the word of God. This is, at its heart, a spiritual problem with a spiritual solution. The problem is that America has turned its back on God. The answer is to turn back to God; to do as Jesus said, “Repent and believe the gospel” (Mk.1.15). The apostles warned the early church that “God disciplines those whom he loves.”(Heb) When we fall into sin he forgives the penitent, but he also lets us pay the price of suffering. The social sins of this country since the 1960’s are obvious and familiar to us all. “You reap what you sow,” the Bible also says. We have sown to the winds of promiscuity and indifference to the word of God and we are now reaping it. The way out of this is to come back to church and come back to God. God’s grace can turn this sorry situation around in a heartbeat; but before God will do that we have to give him our hearts. Prayer is the act of opening our hearts to God: pray every day for America, for Dundalk and for this church. Pray each day, really pray. God will get us thru this if we trust in Him.

       Don’t give up. The Bible is full of admonitions to, “Fight the good fight!” and “Endure to the end.” Dundalk needs the churches now more than ever “to stand against the wiles of the enemy” (Eph.6). Keep praying and get your friends and neighbors to come back to church. I mean get in their face and get them back in here! If you’re reading this newsletter but haven’t been to church in a year, I mean you! Are you willing to sit back and see this church close? Are you willing to watch and do nothing as Dundalk goes to hell? We need to take back our neighborhood; take it back from the dealers and users who have no right to it. Double your prayers, people. Don’t go to bed at night without confessing your sins and then pleading for Dundalk and for our church.  We need a miracle, and Jesus Christ is the one to do it.

Faithfully,

Fr. Jansen String

May 2016

Dear Friends,

       Conni and I traveled recently to London where she had a speaking engagement. We then took the train to Paris for three days of sight-seeing and glorious over-eating. The food in France really is even better than they say. We saw the Eiffel Tower up-close and the Louvre. We even had a half-day guided tour of Versailles. The French people whom we met were very friendly. We found the city itself to be remarkably clean and quiet. Drivers do not honk their horns. It was a delight to walk the beautiful streets window shopping in what felt like a dreamland of chocolate shops and bakeries. I hope to travel there again one day.

       But the high point of the trip for me was not one of the usual tourist spots. It was the visit we made one morning to a sacred place on a quiet street, 140 Rue du Bac, The Chapel of the Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal. It was here at midnight July 17, 1830, that the Virgin Mary appeared to Sister Catherine Labouré, a young nun who had just entered the convent. Catherine told her confessor that Mary spoke to her for two hours, telling her many things that would soon happen in France, all of which came to pass. Mary appeared to her again a few months later, on November 27, telling her to have a medal struck that the faithful should wear around their necks. The medal was to depict Mary, as she appeared to Catherine, standing on a globe with rays of light coming forth from her outstretched hands. And the medal was to read “Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.” Catherine’s story is long and involved but the bottom line is that eventually the medal was struck and because of it thousands of people in France experienced conversions and astonishing miracles, so much so that the medal became known as “the miraculous medal”. This is really a beautiful and inspirational story of faith. If you have a computer, look up the miraculous medal and read about it. Better yet, buy a miraculous medal and begin to wear it. I’ll be glad to bless it for you on the altar.

       But there is a detail to this story of supernatural grace that particularly fascinates me. It’s what I most wanted to see for myself and what I wish to bring to your attention here. The church discovered by accident back in the 700s as they were transferring the remains of Saint Cecilia from one grave to another that her body had not decomposed. Cecilia, a young Christian girl who was killed for her faith by the Romans in the first century, had been in the ground for over six-hundred years. And yet when they exhumed her body they found it showed no signs of decomposition.

        Since then, as part of the process of beatification, the church has exhumed the bodies of would-be saints. Over one- hundred saints have been discovered to be what they call “incorruptible.” Catherine Laboure died in 1876. Over 50 years later, in 1933, her body was exhumed and found to be supple and fresh. Her eyes were as blue as they were in life. Her body is now at rest in a glass tomb beneath the altar where Mary appeared to her. It was a privilege to kneel quietly before her tomb and pray. In the midst of that busy city, I found in this sanctuary a tranquil reminder that Heaven is always breaking in on us. God has much to teach us; if only we will listen with faith and open our hearts to wonder.

Faithfully,

Fr. Jansen String

March 2016

Dear Friends,

        Included in this newsletter is a letter to me from Josephine Sekajipo in which she writes about the organization that she has founded, Geebamu International, whose goal it is to support the people of Liberia with medical care. I hope that you will read it and give her organization your support.  I’d like for our vestry to do something in an organized way to help her. As a faithful member of our congregation, she deserves it.

       Josephine came to this country about twenty years ago, fleeing the violence of the Liberian civil war. Her husband was murdered before her eyes. Left with two small children, her situation was difficult. But she showed strength and resolve. She came to this country with nothing but her two children, her deep Christian faith and hope in America. When she arrived in Baltimore, the first thing she did was to seek out our church. Fr. Hart, our dear friend, her parish priest at home in Liberia, sent her to us. Many of her new neighbors advised her to get on welfare. Josephine would have none of that. She went to work at a nursing home and she watched over her children like a hawk, praying with them daily. After many years of going thru the process she became an American citizen. Josephine Jr. graduated from college and now works for the TSA and Jonathan, the finest young man you’ll ever meet, is a senior at Towson, hoping to become a physical therapist. At a time when this country is debating the positives and negatives of our immigration policy, Josephine represents the best that this county has to offer. When I asked Josephine why she was doing this she said that now that her kids are grown and she had more time, she wanted to do something to help those less fortunate than her. Let’s get behind her and help her out. The people of Liberia are among the poorest in the world. This is a perfect example of what the message of Palm Sunday and Easter is: faith in Jesus Christ is the greatest power for good the world.

            This coming Sunday is Palm Sunday. I’ll be preaching the message of the cross. Between services we will have the family breakfast. Our head chief, Ed Kopicki, has been laid low this winter with a broken ankle, but he is up again, not exactly running, but he assures me that he has a special menu prepared. Please come and enjoy the fellowship.

     We will have services on Holy Thursday @7pm. This service, which reflects on the Last Supper and the institution of the Holy Eucharist, concludes with the dramatic stripping of the altar.

     We will have one service of the Stations of the Cross with a short meditation on the last words of Christ on Good Friday @ 7pm.

     Easter Sunday we will have services of the Holy Eucharist @ 8 and 10 am, followed by coffee hour in the undercroft, andthe Easter Egg Hunt for the children in the garden, (children, bring a basket for eggs). 

January 2016

Dear Friends,

       Included in this newsletter is a letter from our bishops addressing the issue of immigration. I was going to recycle this, but I prefer to share it with you. This letter crystallizes for me the kind of liberal thinking that has dominated the highest councils of the Episcopal Church for a generation; a mindset that for all its good intentions has reduced this once prominent denomination to a shrunken sideshow of no importance. The judgment that those who would temporarily restrict the immigration of Muslims into this country are bigots, no better than Ku Klux Klansmen engaged in “arbitrary fear-mongering,” is hard to take. We know that ISIS is using the immigration wave leaving Syria as a tool to infiltrate their agents into the West. Is it a Christian virtue to ignore this threat?  Does living in peace with all people mean blindly believing that all of us have unconditionally good motives? Our Lord taught us to be good to all people and especially kind to the oppressed and strangers. But he also said, as a word of warning, “I send you out as sheep among wolves. Be innocent as doves but wise as serpents.” It’s a dangerous world we live in full of evil people who mean us harm. It is not wise to play make-believe and foolishly pretend that all religions have the same goal.  

       Last weekend the Wall Street Journal reported on recent events in Iran: “Award-winning filmmaker Keywan Karimi was sentenced in October to six years in prison and more than 200 lashes on the charge of “insulting sanctities”…The same month, two Iranian poets…each received decade long sentences and 99 lashes for kissing members of the opposite sex and shaking their hands.” This is Islam. The sentences were handed down by Iranian mullahs who are experts in Islamic law. We are playing a game of “see no evil” when we choose to pretend that Islam is a religion of peace with the same values and concern for human rights that Western liberalism has. Islam is an entirely different way of being in the world. It demands not faith but submission to an impersonal hyper-legalistic deity as unlike the loving Holy Trinity as night is from day. Rather than impugn the character and attack the motives of those who wish to prevent more attacks like the massacre we saw at San Bernardino, we need to begin a project to educate this country, beginning in our own Episcopal church, about Islam. The KKK is virtually dead in 21st-century America, but its hateful spirit is alive and well in the Islamic world. Most of the Muslim countries aligned with the Nazis in WWII, and it wasn’t just because they resented the British. Islam is much more like a fascist ideology than it is a Christian denomination. We need to wake up and realize what we are dealing with.

     I would suggest that we all do some serious study. Many important books have been written about Islam since 9/11.  The Crisis of Islam by Bernard Lewis, The Closing of the Muslim Mind by Robert Reilly, Defeating Political Islam by Moorthy Muthuswamy, Christianity and Islam by William Kilpatrick and Not Peace but a Sword by Robert Spencer would be a good reading list with which to start. Before we jump to the conclusion that everyone who is repulsed by Islam and worried that what is happening in the Muslim-only no-go zones in Paris could happen here is a small-minded bigot, we need to learn more about this so-called “religion of peace”: a “religion” that has waged offense war on and off against Christianity ever since the 7th century and routinely teaches little Palestinian children today that Jews are descended from pigs. We love and respect our bishops. Let us hope that, drawing upon our faith, we can elevate the level of dialogue in the future to include a truly educated and objective view of Islam. 

Faithfully,

Fr. Jansen String