Festival of Christmas Eve:

Saturday, December 24

7:00 p.m. Holy Eucharist with The Rev. Dr. Nancy Lee Jose, Preacher and Celebrant

Christmas Day:
Sunday, December 25

11:00 a.m.   Holy Eucharist with The Rev. Dr. Nancy Lee Jose, Rector, as Preacher and Celebrant

New Years Day:
Sunday, January 1

 11:00 a.m.   Holy Eucharist with The Rev. Olivia Hilton, Preacher and Celebrant

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2011 - BISHOP GENE ROBINSON, CELEBRANT AND PREACHER. 

The Third Sunday of Advent in the Episcopal Church goes by the slightly tongue-in-cheek moniker of "Stirrup Sunday," probably first doodled on the back of some anonymous Sunday bulletin by someone not listening to the sermon but rather reading again the words of the Collect of the day that begins,  "Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us ..."!

So we're going to "stir things up" a bit on December 11th by hosting the Bishop of New Hampshire, The Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, who will be joining us at worship as Celebrant and Preacher and then for Coffee Hour and Conversation after the 11:00 a.m. service.  +Gene is a long-time friend of St. Thomas' Parish; he and and our rector, Nancy Lee Jose, have known one another for longer than he has been famous in Episcopal and Anglican circles, having met at a conference they both were attending at The College of Preachers at Washington National Cathedral more than a decade ago. 

He has been with us as "Bishop Robinson"; to kick off our Capital Campaign to raise the money for our new sanctuary; as "Gene" to eat and laugh and pray and play with us.  We are proud to welcome him into our midst again during this holy season of Advent -- and his deliciously wicked wit, soul-deep spirituality, and clear-eyed vision of what God's Reign looks like when it breaks through into the midst of ordinary people on their journey of faith together as the church. 

Put December 11th on your Calendar, and be there.  It's sure to "stir up" some more memorable moments!

The Terror Trap

Posted by Wayne Floyd
September 09th, 2011 | Category: Civic life,civility,Radical Hospitality,Terrorism

Opening up the newspaper or going online for news recently has been far more of an adventure than even many news junkies and sensationalism mongers could have expected. I was on vacation, but couldn't get away from news about

• the country, if not the world, teetering on the verge of an economic cliff

• hurricane Irene and an earthquake on the east coast in a single week

And then this morning's headlines warned of a "specific but unconfirmed threat" of a car-bomb terrorist attack in New York or Washington this weekend.

The economic crisis was a human- not a natural-disaster, and could have been avoided by different decisions being made. And the hurricane and earthquake, we must remember, were natural-disasters, but not vengeful "acts of God." While the Weather Channel let us see the former coming, despite the fact that we couldn't do much but hunker-down until it passed, the earthquake caught absolutely everyone by surprise, leaving Washingtonians and others up and down the east coast literally as well as psychologically rattled in the aftermath.

Terrorism, however, is a very different beast. It is the result of human actions, and at the heart of any act of terror is the desire to remove all of the potential victim's sense of control from the victim, leaving no action that can be taken to prevent it. Whenever "they" threaten to strike, "we" feel helpless to do something in advance to guarantee a lack of success. In spite of this, there's no way to hunker-down until the threat is gone, like in a monster storm, because by its nature the threat of terror is ongoing - it does not pass us by to move on elsewhere. Yet like earthquakes, acts of terrorism catch us off guard, and once we've experienced one, they leave us with varying degrees of PTSD responses.

So what are we to do? Make preemptive strikes against potential terrorists? Close off streets around public buildings or install detectors that seek to ‘see' a threat before it materializes into action? Be on guard against ‘them' by racial- or ethnic- or religious-profiling? Install walls and fences at our borders to keep ‘them' out?

The fact is, we have as a people tried all of these, and many people still find such responses ‘necessary' even if ‘unfortunately' destructive of the very patterns of normalcy that terrorists' themselves wish to bring about. This is what I've come to think of as "the terror trap" - becoming so paralyzed by our anticipatory anxiety that we lose a large measure of our quality of life, even as we "succeed" at temporarily forestalling the next attack.

"The Terror Trap" is what happens when we allow ourselves - consciously or unconsciously - to internalize the strategies of terrorism into our daily lives with one another, for example, through bullying behavior or actual domestic- or societal-violence. We walk around trapped in our fears of others. And we also use our financial or social or political power to entrap others in their fears of us and what we might do to them, such as stealth drone attacks in the night in Afghanistan.

However, "evil," according to the great western Christian theologian Augustine, is not some "thing" with it's own reality that needs defending against because "it" may otherwise get us. "Evil" instead is what is left when we remove the "good" from our own lives or the world around us.

The absence of intentional acts of goodness entraps us in the void of what we experience as "evil" - those places where love, compassion, forgiveness, justice, and radical hospitality no longer empower who we are or what we do.
The "evil" of terrorism is that it threatens to entrap us in places of suspicion, rather than love; self-interest rather than compassion; retribution rather than forgiveness; unfairness rather than justice; and exclusion rather than hospitality.

"The Terror Trap" isn't really something that "they" control; it is a trap that we build inside ourselves that captures the goodness that resides in each of us and holds it hostage to fear, doubt, suspicion, and anger. We have a lot more control over this than we usually realize, but we hesitate because it means changing the habits of our hearts to free the goodness that we allow otherwise to remain trapped within us. Terror is a trap, whether external or internal, that sucks the air out of the room and leaves us smothering in the void; and in the absence of the good, we begin to create the very terror we abhor.