Blessings for 2015!

Dear Friends,

As we stand together on the brink of the year, we give thanks for the year past, for both the good we have received and the difficult we have survived. And we look forward together to the blessing and the possibilities that live within the year we are about to live.

Let us join hands and hearts and enter 2015 with shared hope.

Blessings and thanks,
John Mc Ginty+

Dean, Mercer School
Canon for Formation

Jesus, Saint Stephen, and Us

December 26, 2014
Saint Stephen's Day

Dear Friends,

How was your Christmas Day? I hope you had time for worship with your church community, and the opportunity to gather with family and friends to share a meal and fellowship as well.

Today the blessed invitation and good work continue.  As Meister Eckhart said: unless Christ is born in me it matters little whether he was born in a stable or in a palace.

That 'being born in us' is the work of God's grace in us, of our openness to what God wills to do in and through us today and every day.  Saint Stephen, the first martyr, whose faith and sacrifice we celebrate this 26th of December, invites us to follow.  These two days following one another, the birth of the savior and the death of his disciple, remind us powerfully that to be enitrely alive is to be willing to offer our lives entirely, to pour ourselves out in love as God does in Jesus Christ.

This is the continuing invitation and good work.  And today is the day.

John McGinty+
Dean, Mercer School of Theology
Canon for Formation
Diocese of Long Island

Something's Coming . . .

December 5, 2014

Dear Friends,

Already we find ourselves approaching the end of the first of the four weeks of Advent. Among many other ways this season may be quite legitimately described, it is a season of expectation.  Not that we pretend that the Christ has not already and long since been born into this world and offered into our lives!  Rather that we expect his coming again, and that we are called all our days to renew our sense of his presence and activity in our living and in our world.  And so, yes, there is "something coming" as the West Side Story lyrics proclaim:

Could be! 
Who knows? 
There's something due any day; 
I will know right away, 
Soon as it shows. 
It may come cannonballing down through the sky, 
Gleam in its eye, 
Bright as a rose! 

See and hear it here: http://youtu.be/Rux2CkLWvcQ

But more appropriately, in this case the something coming exceeds any words we can provide of description.  Only God's own Word can adequately proclaim the coming of God's own Word incarnate.  The something coming is, of course, Someone.  And that Someone speaks a Word that renews creation.

This Sunday, Mark's Gospel introduces to the season the figure of John the Baptist who, in his person and dress and activity and word is a shouting proclamation that "something's coming."  See the extraordinary poetic presentation of John, The Man Who Was A Lamp, by John Shea on our Facebook page, Conversations at Mercer.

Advent peace,
John McGinty+