St. Elizabeth's Episcopal Church - Elizabeth, NJ
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  • Home
  • Welcome
    • History >
      • Historical Sizzle
    • I'm New
    • Let's Get Acquainted
    • Rev. Canon Andy J. Moore
    • Leadership
    • Mission
    • Habits of Grace: Prayer into Action
    • Bishop Curry Who is my Neighbor
    • Bishop Curry
    • Make a Gift
    • Services
    • Sunday Service Aug 30th 2020
    • Zoom Service Aug 23rd, 2020
    • Zoom Service Aug 16th, 2020
    • Zoom Service Aug 9th, 2020
    • Zoom Service Aug 2nd, 2020
    • Gallery >
      • Harvest Sunday
      • Sunday School Father's Day 19
      • Men's Club Community Flea Mkt
      • Community Christmas Party
      • Thankgiving Baskets
      • Celebration for High School Gradates
      • Homecoming 2018 >
        • Homecoming
      • Music in the Garden
      • Mother's Day 2018
      • Mother's Day 2018
      • Sunday School Youth Sunday
      • Maundy Thursday
      • Christmas Mass St. Elizabeth's
      • Christmas Eve Mass
      • Christmas Eve Mass
      • Christmas Eve Mass
      • Community Christmas Party
      • Frist Presbyterian
      • Feast of All Saints
      • Sanctuary Sunday 2017
      • International Food Festival
  • Get Involved
    • Sunday School
    • Sunday School Lift Ev'ry Voice
    • Moments in Black History 2019
    • Black History - MLK
    • Sunday School Black History
    • Sunday School Black History ii
    • Youth Ministry
    • ESL Fall 19 Classes
    • ESL Cerificate of Achievement
    • Computer Literacy
    • Episcopal Church Women
    • Mens Club
    • Outreach
  • Hall Rental
  • Calendar
    • News & Events >
      • Free Testing for COVID-19
      • Robin Pierre DCN
      • Pastoral Letter April 24th
      • Holy Week Schedule
      • Church Services Suspended
      • Reading Lent4 - Mar 22nd
      • Lift Ev'ry Voice & Sing Challenge
      • Absalom Jones Service Sunday 2/16
      • Brad Kleiman in Concert
      • Annual General Meeing
      • Christmas Service
      • Cathedral Day 2019
      • Bern Nix Jazz Festival
      • All Saints Sunday, 3rd, November
      • Sight & Sound 2019
      • Int'l Food Festival July 13th
      • UMHA - Workshop Canceled 6/15
      • Prayer Breakfast Mar 16th
      • MLK Day of Service
      • UMHA - Sunday Dec 16th
      • New Year Eve Service
      • Christmas Celebration Fun Night
      • ECW Trip to Lancaster PA
      • Homecoming 2018
      • Music In the Garden
      • Saxophone Recital
      • Elizabeth Homeless Coalition
      • From Your Door to Heaven's Door
      • Urban Garden
      • Black History Events
  • Contact
  • Realm E-Giving Launch
  • Harvest Baskets Giveaways
  • Rector's Harvest Message
  • 25 Years of Priesthood Gala
    • 25th Years of Priesthood Gala
  • 25 Years of Priesthood Gala
  • Sunday May 5th
  • Lent 2019
  • Living Like Job
  • Operation Warm Heart
  • 9th Annual Food Festival
  • it's Friday....but Sunday Comin!!
  • Bishop Curry
  • Poor People's Campaign
  • Zoom Sunday Service Oct 4th
  • Stewardship Sunday 10/18/2020

Saving a Bigot...

1/16/2021

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The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, "Follow me." Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. Philip found Nathanael and said to him, “We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth. "Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth? Philip said to him, “Come and see.” John1: 43-46

John begins his creation narrative by casting a sharp contrast between darkness and light. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. (John 1:5&9)

The church has traditionally used the season of Epiphany to delve deeper into an understanding of Jesus as the light of the world. Possibly, this may be due to the desire to help the world wrestle with the long dark winter nights. Light satisfies our human need for warmth and comfort.  John uses a unique narrative of the incarnation as light to express God’s love and his wonderful act of salvation for all in a metaphysical realm.

Thus, when we set out on January sixth of this year to celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany, we were totally unprepared for what the day’s events will reveal about the depth of darkness that has overshadowed this nation. The Christian ideals of goodness and love collided with the evils of greed, bigotry, and brokenness.

The horrible killings and insurrection that we witnessed on January sixth was a carnival of bigotry beyond what any of us has witnessed in recent history.   Confederate flags waving in the Capitol building!  A noose attached to a wooden beam erected on the front of the Capitol building! 

Note well, bigotry has always been part of the very fabric of this nation.  Bigotry is tightly interwoven into the white American narrative of democracy and theocracy.

As the great and mighty advocate and fugitive slave Frederick Douglass wrote in 1845, when the nation was only about 70 years old, “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ I recognize the widest possible difference – so wide, that to receive one as good, pure and holy is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt and wicked.”
So, from the very creation of this nation, white theocracy was actively involved in the sin of systemic racism.  It created a theological vacuum by denying the humanity and soul of our people.  But the black Christian rejected the hypocrisy and iniquity of the white church.   The white church continues today to be complicit in systemic racism in the evangelical cry to take back America. There was even a Bible toting insurrectionist!

The black church today continues to be the light and the voice crying out for justice and real-life salvation from the hell of social injustice emanating from every institution in the nation … including the church. This all comes to the forefront as we prepare to celebrate the life work and witness of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  Dr. King’s teachings of love and peaceful resistance clashed last week with the dark words of President Trump that incited violence and death in the capitol of democracy … all in the full glaring light of the world on the Feast of The Epiphany 2021!

My friends, in today’s Gospel reading, John introduces to us a Jewish bigot. It is fascinating and revealing to witness the conversion of Nathanael.  His bigoted question, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” is probably often applied also to the people of Elizabeth, NJ, and every other place where large populations of people of color live … anywhere in the world including the very ghettos of Palestine today.

We encounter Nathanael possibly wrestling with his bigotry while mulling under a fig tree when Philip calls him. We witness the conversion of Nathanael in his realization that without Nazarenes there will be no Christianity.  My friends, the work of Phillip was to usher Nathanael to Jesus and away from bigotry.  This was pivotal to the survival of early Christianity. Without Phillip there may not have been an orthodox Jew willing to embark on intentional discipleship. Phillip’s baptism of the African Eunuch (Acts 8:26-40) shows us that without Gentiles, there will be no church. It also reveals the early presence of the African in God’s work of reconciliation of His world.

And guess what, my friends?  Just like without black labor there will be no prosperous USA, without black people there will be no authentic Christianity in America. These truths bring us to a truer understanding of what Epiphany is at its heart – it’s a day and period of reckoning that ushers in a new era of spirituality, reconciliation, and renewal.

 For many years we have sought through many arenas to call the wider society through the church to the work of reconciliation. At the heart of Christianity is the call of reconciliation “that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.” (2 Cor.5:19) Anything otherwise is sinful.  Yet the church persisted in sustaining the brokenness rather than urging its members to surrender their white privilege and work towards the healing that was needed. 

Now, we find ourselves at another dark point in our history and we are being asked to help dismantle a system that has victimized us and that we had no part in creating. Epiphany of January 6, 2021, revealed that the light has once again broken through the darkness and a deafening call is being made for all to work to defeat the evil of racism. How do we walk forward into the light?

By revealing Nathanael’s bigotry against the Nazarene community, John’s gospel today also makes us witness the manner in which Jesus dismantles this deep-seated human sin. Jesus tells Nathanael, “I saw you before Philip.” In other words I knew you when you were struggling with your bigotry. In other words, Jesus made it clear to Nathanael that he knew him as an individual not by his heritage or whatever he sought to lay claim to for his legitimacy. It seems that Jesus’ approach to conversion was not a bold upfront demand but a guarded engagement.

Similarly, for too long we have invited the church to see the urban community not as a community to look down on and to pity, but as Christian brothers and sisters who are actively participating in the redemption of the world.  Too often, the church has refused to look at us in this way. The black church learnt the fine art of cautious engagement. Any reading of W.E.B Du Bois, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes M.L.K, Fredrick Douglas or Ta-Nehisi Coates one can discover the theme of cautious engagement.

 As urban communities we are well aware of the lack of social power that we marginalized people of color experience in every sphere of our lives.  From a very early age, we have been taught to be extremely cautious and guarded in engaging with the wider society and to avoid confrontation. Our experiences have taught us that we are often wrongly perceived as threatening and engagement with the other can sometimes cost us our lives.  Thus, we see recognize Jesus’s cautious engagement with Nathanael is totally different from his call to Peter, John, and James with whom he was certainly more comfortable.

 Jesus had to save Nathanael from his bigotry. He had to retool him to use his passion not to protect a collapsing heritage but to help build a new world built for the glory of God. And this is the work we, too, are being given to do: save the church from the sin of racism and bigotry for the glory of God.  This may place us in the darkness of uncertainty much like a fig tree.  But Christianity demands a level of powerlessness to engage with the world.  As St. Paul declares, “God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power. (6:14)”. Our power will be God-given.

Power of God to confront the evils of the world seems to be more open in his demands. Its like training a wild animal we do so with cautious engagement! No different than the dynamics of Samuel as the only one to confront Eli on the evils of his heritage. (1 Sam.3:18) Jesus needed Phillip!
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Let us like Phillip call the nation forward to the light of Christ which brings judgement along with hope and new pathways forward. We are called to be like Samuel and Phillip calling Eli and Nathanael out of the comforts of their bigotry to begin the difficult work of discipleship. WE do this remembering the words of Jesus Christ “be wise as serpents and gentle as doves.” Cautious engagement !

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Watch Night Sermon

12/31/2020

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“When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child”, Luke 2:17

So, here we are again standing on the cusp of another year; truly, no one regrets saying farewell to 2020.  The year was one overshadowed by the pandemic titled, COVID-19; it was not only an unprecedented illness but, in many forms, demonic.  It bought pain, fear, grief, and untold loss in lives and livelihoods; it drove us away from families, friends, and human relationships; it droves us away from workplaces, schools, movies, parks and even from our church buildings.  Many lives were lost, and when combined with the inability to grieve in traditional ways, we were left empty, lonely, and angry. 
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2020 also revealed the combination of politics driven by the twin evils of greed and racism which were so palpable, they became a shroud of deep-seated bitterness.  The thin veneer of normalcy was ripped away by the vulgarity of the public execution of George Floyd along the horrible attempts to cover up the murders of Breonna Taylor and other unarmed and poor black people.  These atrocities have led to an ongoing revolution the likes of which we have not witnessed since the sixties.

My friends, all of these cruelties combined with so many ongoing crises can be the evidence of the work of an alternative power which seeks in every way to negate the presence and power of goodness, hope and joy. Yet, this evermoving force of time brings us again to a new year.  Many began 2020 lacking the sobriety that new beginnings and fresh starts often demand.  Many of us will prefer to remain stuck in the chasm of yesterdays and times far long gone.  Many of us will not trust the future based upon things all that was exposed in the fires of COVID-19, institutionalized racism and institutions which are no longer viable enough to support us in our new future. Yet, there are those who will grasp the world of ZOOM, MasterClass, Google Class and all the other leaps of progress which have been developed during the year of 2020.
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My friends, as the shepherds discovered Jesus buried beneath swaddling clothes in a cold animal trough, they unearthed something truly amazing. Their amazing discovery remains an ongoing, unfolding mystery. The discovery was that the powerful presence of God cannot be denied, smothered, or limited by all the combined forces which may seek its elimination.  For over 2020 years the Good News of Jesus Christ has lived on through plagues, wars, slavery, communism, capitalism, and despotic leaders.  As we also stand in the same theological space as the shepherds, we are called to proclaim the same message, Tell the world that God is with us.  Our churches will be called to do something in new and exciting ways. We will need to configure ourselves differently. We may need to continue to congregate in new ways and maybe in different spaces, and yet, the message remains the same, Go tell the world that Jesus Christ is born!

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The Lights of Advent

12/12/2020

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Wilderness

12/5/2020

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Mark 1:4   John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.

Generally, when we think of a wilderness, we think of an uncultivated, uninhabited, and inhospitable physical region, the Mojave Desert or the dense jungles of the Amazon.  Sometimes, it can a position of disfavor; especially in a social context.  I remember doing many things as a child that would make my mother angry.  She wouldn’t physically punish me, but I was certainly in a wilderness she imposed upon me.  It can also have significant meaning for people in a physical way. I remember a feeling of dread of riding through wooded areas with my kids, and another black parent with us commented, “It’s only due to the kids we are not perceived as a threat”.  Bad things happen to black folks out in the wilderness and in the cities and towns where we live.  I recently saw an interview of black members of the Sierra club where they shared one of the fears they had to overcome was that of being black in the bushes.  Their feeling was if you went into the woods by yourself and you are black you may not come back.  And of course, we cannot forget this spring in Louisville and summer in Kenosha. 
The questions are, “How do we define wilderness in the world today? What is my wilderness experience?”

We have all found ourselves in a place of deep uncertainty as we face life within the horrors of the COVID-19 Pandemic.  As human beings, we are social animals. We get our food, our sense of being and our purpose by our association with others; isolation has always been linked to punishment. This when we are now called to self-isolate for our own protection and the protection of others places us in conflict with our very own nature. This has, of course, led to rebellion by many, but for those of us who accept the worth and value of self-protective isolation, there is a tremendous cost.  Mentally it takes a huge toll as we seek to create some space within which we can remain connected to reality.  Spiritually, our faith can often be tested as we seek to connect with God outside of the traditional format. Our homes and family become not only a refuge, but for some, the new battle ground where small fissures now become cavernous, unnegotiable barriers. In the social world the pandemic has revealed the public health crisis of racism even as the names George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor seem to fade for many.

My friends, in many ways both the prophet Isiah and John the Baptist faced similar challenges as the prevailing socio-economic and political world of their times reflected what we face today in many ways.

All the traditional signs and symbols of God’s presence were either forcibly removed or hidden from plain sight. Their community was seeming left to thrive on their own or seek out false replacements for God.  Many were now willing to accept the view of their captors and settled down to thrive in a foreign world which provided false hope and meaning.

The role of the prophets then and now is to call the community to a sense of renewed identity and purpose symbolized by their own faith in the power of their God to transcend the present.  Both Isaiah and John began with a call for repentance.  Repentance is the humbling admission of our role in the brokenness we face both within our homes and the societal level. Repentance is the call to acknowledge our weaknesses in seeking to act without God’s love.

Increasingly, many are identifying the original sin of this nation has led to a public health crisis which started on plantations and now resides within communities of color where there is violence, disparities in health and health care, poor education, and lack of meaningful jobs. We, however, are not free from guilt, for often times, we create spaces for those forces to exacerbate an already tenuous situation. We allow other voices to shout their new-found liberal thoughts over our pleas for restoration and justice.  John the baptism therefore sets a clear pathway that cannot be muddled by false hopes or bad intent.

 Mark 1:1&4  The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
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The fresh start and new beginnings for those who wished to embark on a new faith journey with God through Jesus Christ begin with acknowledgment and repentance of sins; not by good intent, empty promises, or new ways to sustain old positions of power.
For the season of Advent may we humbly follow the call of the odd fellows of Isaiah and John the baptist and allow God to meet us in the wilderness of the unknown to lead us to a new and bold future.

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St. Elizabeth's Urban Centre Technology Hub

11/6/2020

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​St. Elizabeth’s Episcopal Church Urban Center was recently awarded a $6000 grant from the Becoming Beloved Community Rapid-Response Grant, funding allocated to allow churches to better respond to the needs of poor communities hardest hit by COVID-19.   This $6000 funding will provide St. Elizabeth’s the opportunity to develop a Technology Hub that will provide our community access to the type of technology that will support parents and children as they work virtually either in our church or in our parking lot.  It will also allow job seekers to look for employment and to connect to employers via the Internet. 
   
The population of the City of Elizabeth is approximately 125,000.  Forty-two percent of the population are foreign born with English as their second language; 64.5% are Latino and 18.6% are African American.  The high school dropout rate is 26%, and 16% of the City’s population lives in poverty (2010 Census).  St. Elizabeth’s is located in the center of the City of Elizabeth and has already been providing our community with educational services that include access to computer technology and ESL instruction. 


Urban areas with a high concentration of students from low-income households have been less likely to expect their school systems to provide real-time lessons, track student attendance or grade assignments because of the digital divide made more evident by the COVID-19 virus.  The COVID-19 crisis has revealed that access to technology is vital, and because poor students don’t have the ability to access computer technology, a critical component for them to connect to their schools, instructors and fellow students, their ability to succeed in school is limited.  Additionally, adults who are homeless are totally excluded from accessing this service making it impossible to look and apply for employment.  


St. Elizabeth’s Episcopal Church proposes to develop an Urban Technology Hub as an extension of our Urban Center.   Our existing computer labs will be reconfigured to meet all Center for Disease Control guidelines while the Church’s existing internet capability will be enhanced to offer WIFI access to individuals who own devices (i.e. cell phones, tablets and laptop computers) but do not have reliable access to the internet, have limited access or no access at all.  Parents will be able to park in the Church’s parking lot, access the internet and help their children with homework.  Individuals looking for jobs will be able to access the internet in our garden or could access our existing computer labs to job search and submit resumes.    

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St Elizabeth’s
305 N. Broad Street
Elizabeth, New Jersey 07207

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