Dear Cathedral Family,
In our worship and annual meeting last Sunday, we gave thanks for the retiring Vestry class of 2022—Senior Warden Leslie Ladd, Junior Wardens John Brooks and Bill Skinner, John Ferguson, Chris Hume, and Meg Mattei—and welcomed the new Vestry class of 2025—Senior Warden Bob Israel, Junior Warden Lewis Golden (joining Bragg Van Antwerp, class of 2024), Molly Bolt, Tony Brown, Richard Gaal, and Tray Hamil. Together, we expressed our thanks for their willingness to serve and to lead. In doing so we acknowledged that along with their more material and mundane duties, Vestry members serve to embody the selfless service Christ calls us to share as his disciples. This is the essential quality of Christian leadership.
Although I did not say so specifically last Sunday, I know that we all join in thanking the retiring class for their selfless service during an extraordinary three years in our life together. We wrapped up a major capital construction and renovation project, hosted a diocesan convention, navigated a pandemic, rebuilt community, and began charting a way forward in a re-shaped world. Through all of this, these leaders demonstrated for us the truth of Paul’s claim that through Christ we find our greatest strength in our weakness. They have shown us how we learn together as we live together as disciples.
This Sunday, as we gather to celebrate the baptism of Watts Ruzic, we will renew the baptismal promises that inform the way we live as disciples, and we will remember that these are the things we are charged with teaching all our children. These promises are grounded in two of our readings for this Sunday. The first is the prophet Micah’s nutshell description of the ethical life of the people of God: remember that the Lord has told you what is good and requires that of you—to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God. The second is Jesus’ foundational teaching about his mission and ministry in “the beatitudes” that begin Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount.
We learn to do these things not only in worship and encounter with God’s word, but also, vitally, though the lives of good people who help us to become good. Thanks be to God for the servant ministry of such people in the Cathedral Family.
Faithfully,
Beverly+
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