Before the Crisis

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel

Mortality has a way of focusing our attention. Suffering, anguish, and crisis put daily distractions in perspective and focus our minds on what is essential. Most people seek out pastoral support in times of crisis. We are always here for you in that moment whatever time of day or whichever day of the week. Always make that call. We have the spiritual resources most needed in crisis - love, listening, compassion, prayer, community, and most importantly the presence of Christ in sacraments and in the midst of believing people. “Wherever two or three are gathered, I will be in the midst of you,” said Jesus.


In a sense we can be grateful for crisis and suffering when they encourage us to “wake up,” “seek help,” “go deeper,” and “depend on God.” On the other hand, I would like to advise all of us to engage our spiritual growth and development well before the moment of crisis hits. Imagine getting the horrible news that you have only months to live. Do you want to cram a lifetime of spiritual growth and development into those months when coping will be hard enough? The Good News teaches us that God will complete our healing on the other side of death. But, we will be better equipped to meet all our challenges on this side of mortality if we have embraced the learning and growing made available by grace each regular, normal day.

If I have learned one thing in 23 years of ministry it is that people who embrace the baptismal cycle of dying to self and rising to new life in Christ during their quotidian life are more prepared for the final instance of that cycle when death comes.

Perhaps it all depends on what you think the end game is. If you are only preparing for eternal life with God in the hereafter, perhaps you can leave your spiritual growth to the last minute. On the other hand, if your desire is to witness to the Gospel in this life - for your life, your love, your energy to radiate the life-shaping freedom of the Good News now - then we need to delve deeply into prayer, scripture, community, service, and intentional spiritual reflection daily.

The latter path requires virtues acquired through habit, through practice. Only through daily prayer, weekly study, steady service, and ongoing, faithful relationships do we build a heart attuned to what God is saying to us. Such a life of habitual approach to God both requires and builds up the virtues of endurance, perseverance, courage, and patience in us. These virtues bring a steadiness to our life that we desperately need in tumultuous and distracting times. Reacting to every provocation, chasing every fad, making every minute productive, chasing immediate gratification - these habits pull our souls apart, leaving us exhausted, fragmented, and ungrounded. The Good News is that we know a better way.

Blessings,
The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
Rector

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Contact the clergy in crisis:

Rev. Jarrett Kerbel, rector
jkerbel@stmartinec.org | 215.247.7466 x101 | 215.704.5499 cell

Rev. Anne Thatcher, associate rector
athatcher@stmartinec.org | 215.247.7466 x105 | 509.876.1924 cell

Rev. Carol Duncan, deacon
carol.duncan8031@gmail.com | 330.705.4795 cell

Barbara Ballenger, associate for spiritual formation & care and postulant
bballenger@stmartinec.org | 215.247.7466 x102

With You Every Step of the Way

“You are always there when I need you.” That is the highest praise. 

When I was a Youth Minister in Chicago, the young people at our retreats would repeat this phrase over and over when they described people who loved them. When someone is “always there for us” we feel  remembered, valued, assured, and safe in our overwhelming and confusing world. 

One day last week, I sat beside the bedside of a member who was in the hospital. His phone rang and when he answered it was a member of St. Martin's on the phone checking up on him. Recognizing her voice, I smiled and then remembered that the day before two Eucharistic Visitors had come from St. Martin's to bring Holy Communion to this same man. He was literally surrounded by caregivers from our church. 

I could say to him, “The church will be with you every step of the way,” and I would be telling truth.

Our second Core Value as a church community is: “In giving and receiving care we encounter Christ.” One reason we know this is an authentic value of the church is illustrated by my bedside pastoral visit described above. At St. Martin's we have a deep and virtuous habit of caregiving. Because of this strength in our ministry it makes me so happy to say that our pastoral care commitment at St. Martin's is to be with our members every step of the way.

We are here to be a resource to you from birth to death and everything in between. We will celebrate the birth of your children, baptize, teach them in church school, confirm, and then marry them. We will be with you when you are sick, troubled, guilty, depressed, angry, struggling financially, or going through a divorce. We will be with you by your bedside for surgeries and medical appointments – celebrating your healing and recovery and mourning the losses and struggles. Finally, we will be with you in your final hours with the soothing comfort of prayer and anointing to see you through that last transition into our ultimate healing. 

My first Rector taught me never to leave the graveside until the casket was safely lowered and everyone else had left. This simple action symbolizes our commitment to be a faithful pastor every step of the way whether people are there to notice or not. 

Every step of the way includes – indeed is mostly practiced by – our amazing lay ministers at St. Martin's. Stephen Ministers, Lay Eucharistic Visitors, the women of Women Connecting, the leaders of Wellspring, the tables of learners at Biblical Studies, the Parenting in Faith circle, and just from friend to friend and neighbor to neighbor throughout the church community. 

I am so proud of our community and our caregiving. We will be looking for ways to advance this work in the parish in the next years. 

- Jarrett Kerbel

The Severed Wasp

During my third year of Divinity School, I served as the interim Chaplain at the Cathedral School of St. John the Divine in New York City. Each week I led classes of elementary-aged children into the cavernous Gothic/Romanesque Cathedral for chapel. The ceiling was so high that on the gloomier days it would be lost to sight. Each week we would try out a new chapel among the chantry chapels radiating out from the chancel, each ‘chapel’ as large as most churches I had known up to that point.

At the Cathedral I had the pleasure of attending a class with Madeleine L’Engle a favorite author from my childhood who wrote A Wrinkle in Time and the The Wind at the Door among other highly mystical novels for children. The fact that she was an Episcopalian only confirmed my love for her. 

L’Engle - with her tongue firmly in her cheek - lovingly referred to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine as the ‘Severed Wasp.’ The Cathedral is famously unfinished, with a gap in construction in the area of the transepts where the great central tower should rise over the crossing. Founded in last years of the 19th century the Cathedral was intended to be a celebration of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) cultural dominance in the United States. Hence the ironic double meaning of ‘Severed Wasp.’

Built on the highest outcropping of stone on the Island of Manhattan, this grandiose seat for the Bishop of New York was a direct response to the completion of St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cathedral on 5th Avenue. The charter of the Cathedral clearly envisions the structure as an assertion of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant hegemony in the face of surging immigration. The cathedral was even to have its own militia to protect the right order of things. 

Then the ruling classes went bankrupt in the stock market crash of 1929. 

The work on the Cathedral stopped, just as hundreds of ambitious Episcopal building projects stopped.  Some stopped in mid-span like St. Luke’s in Evanston, Illinois and others never got started like a proposed Cathedral in Chicago, and a gigantic Cathedral in Baltimore (the current very large church was to be the chapel). Our own aborted Cathedral in Andorra is another example of a grandiose project on a towering high point cut down first by market forces and then by fading interest. 

You see, we lost. We lost the battle for dominance in our society and had to learn to share with immigrants and people of many races, classes, ethnicities etc. Some folks are still fighting and some are still pretending that by dint of our heritage, family trees and taste we are still a special breed apart and above the rest. 

The fact is, we lost, and that is the best thing that ever happened to the Episcopal Church, in my opinion. 

We mistook a warped amalgam of class, ethnicity, and white supremacy and made it an animating principal of gross and grandiose assertion of privilege. These temples were raised to the wrong glory. Losing is humbling and humility is the right position to give God glory in fellowship with all our neighbors, as equals in God's sight.

Jesus said, “We must lose our life to find our true life.” As a church, I believe we are in a very exciting time. Dying has brought tremendous opportunity for discovering new life set free from old identifications and dead ends. Dying teaches us to keep Christ at the center and to resist all substitutes. Christ is the glory of God we seek and the Gospel of John always reminds us that this Glory is Cross-Shaped in our hearts, in our communities, but maybe not in the stone of grandiose buildings. 

The good news is that enlightened leadership made St. John the Divine a center of job creation and job training for the people of Harlem during the 1970s, wrapping up this story on the happy note of redemption. One never knows where the new life of Christ may arise, old stones, old stumps, old churches too. 

- The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel