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Restorative Justice.

As Christians we know the forgiveness of sin and the gracious embrace of God; we hear and experience God’s promise of new beginnings. This week we are reminded that we are called to be agents of God’s forgiveness, embrace and gracious new beginnings for others, and in particular the men and women who are caught up in our contemporary system of retributive justice governed by fear and anger.

Did you know that Canada’s crime rate has hit a 45 year low this year, but this year also marks an all time high of people incarcerated in prison? I didn’t. Did you know that two thirds of provincial prisoners have not been convicted of anything: they are in prison only because they cannot come up with bail, exposing a link between poverty and incarceration. I didn’t. Did you know that a typical Canadian prison cell was built for one prisoner and now houses three, and they are allotted twenty minutes fresh air a day? I didn’t. Did you know that the annual average cost to incarcerate an individual is now estimated to be $117,000? My mind fills with thoughts about how such a sum could be spent more productively, respectfully, and indeed faithfully.

As we continue this autumn through the Acts of Apostles, we arrive at a scene in which Paul is in prison (Acts 16). The earth trembles, the doors open, and he is freed. When the jailer awakes, he prepares to kill himself, knowing well what the consequences were for those who allowed prisoners to escape. But Paul shouts that he has not left. He has remained, not out of passivity or fear but thinking of the jailer. This jailer embodied oppression and violence, but Paul did not respond to him with hate or even apathy. To this individual the apostle extended a new beginning. As the doors of the jail were opened for Paul, so did Paul open his oppressor to life. There is freedom, and there is freedom.

Lots to think about. Lots to prayer about.

Due to a glitch in the church office, there is no Order of Service appended online this week. You will just have to join us in person … and you would be welcome!

 

 

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Have a look at our congregational newsletter for the month. (It is meant to be folded into three, so you need a bit of imagination to understand its layout!) Please consider each announcement a personal invitation to join us in Christian worship, community and service. It is the month that includes St. Andrew’s Day!!

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The last post, lament and reveille … with silence at the centre … and prayers for peace. The apostle Paul crossing from one continent to another with the gospel, and the first Christian of Europe is a woman, Lydia of Philippi (Acts 16:6-15). A celebration of the Lord’s Supper, the presence of the Living One.

There are several threads to our service of worship this Sunday morning at St. Andrew’s. Come as you are, and allow God to weave these threads, and many others, together for good, for your strength, for your joy.

Have a look at the Order of Service and join us if you are in the neighbourhood. Clergy Street is now open! A nursery and programme for children are available during the service.

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As we journey through the book of Acts, we hear now the story often called ‘the conversion of Cornelius’. It is fascinating and it is challenging – I hope you can join us!

Cornelius is a Roman centurion stationed in Caesarea, who becomes the first non-Jew, the first Gentile, to be welcomed as a Christian, into the fellowship of the Church, and embraced as a brother in Christ. The Church becomes the Church!

After reading and re-reading this story, I have thought it might better that this story be called ‘the conversion of Peter’. Peter has been raised within the covenant people and raised up by Jesus as representative of the ‘rock’ upon whom the Church will be built. On his way to Caesarea Peter receives a dream, with a command from on high to eat food long forbidden to the faithful. He resists eating the ‘gentile’ food to keep himself ‘pure’ as one of God’s chosen people, but finally Peter understands – God has enlarged the boundaries of those to be embraced within the community of the faithful, and now to be numbered among the faith he needed to enlarge his own embrace.

How wonderful to hear and ponder this story on Reformation Sunday, with the great exhortation brought forward over the centuries – the Church ‘reformed … and always reforming’! Not change for the sake of change, but change in accordance with the call of the Holy One. As with Peter, so may it be with Presbyterians.

Join us if you are in the area. The concrete sidewalks have been poured along Clergy Street and are open. Ample and free parking is available along neighbouring streets and in the public lot off Queen Street just behind the church. During the service there is a nursery for infants and children up to and including 3 years of age, and also a programme for older children. Have a look at the order of service and the announcements – I invite you to consider each a personal invitation to grow in Christian faith, community and service. You would be welcome!

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As I sit at my desk, I am wet and cold. But my heart is, as John Wesley once said, ‘strangely warmed’.

I was out at the Collins Bay federal penitentiary this morning. A group of 17 men there had organized a long distance run as an opportunity to raise money. Given the limited amount of money that incarcerated men there have, the total of over $300 was incredible. They had heard about the Sunday Supper programme of St. Andrew’s Church, offering a free home cooked meal to all, and the chaplain had arranged for the cheque to be presented this morning to help cover the costs of a couple of meals. It was a privilege to represent the congregation. And it was humbling to acknowledge how these men took up Christ’s mission of extending the care of neighbour and stranger.

Earlier in the week we had begun our Tuesday evening study series. This autumn we are focusing upon the dynamics of the Reformation, in preparation for next year’s 500th anniversary of Luther posting his 95 theses upon the door of the church in Wittenberg. To begin, I invited each table to use paper and a marker to draw some image of the history of the Church and Christian faith. One table drew a line with a beginning and an ending, but with many peaks and valleys between, signifying a movement towards God’s kingdom but filled with eras of both faithfulness and unfaithfulness, inspiration and conformity, growth and decline. Among the others, another table drew a rough picture of the continents, and with arrows showed how the gospel had spread from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth … and then all around and even back. I am very aware of the wonderful mission movements of the Presbyterian Church through the 19th and 20th centuries, but equally how now we are welcoming the gospel by way of new Canadians. It is humbling, and affirming, to celebrate how at St. Andrew’s Kingston we are being strengthened by members who come to us filled with Christian faith from Ghana and Korea and Indonesia and other cultures and nations.

Mission is particularly on our minds and upon our hearts this month.

Each week this autumn we have received on Sunday morning consecutive portions of a paper by the Committee on Church Doctrine entitled ‘Living God’s Mission Today’. The point these paragraphs make is that it is all God’s mission, not ours. It is God who is at work in this world for healing and justice and hope. We are blessed when we participate in God’s mission. By standing with our Living Lord in this world, we allow the love and life of God to flow into and through us to others. And often, as in a penitentiary and a congregation, we can feel the love and life of God flow into us from others!

10154179_10153970302800117_782001521696425002_nThis Sunday morning we welcome Lucie Howell of Mustard Seed Canada to tell us about the work being supported in Asia in the name of Christ. Join us if you are in the area. There is a nursery for infants and a programme for children during the service. Clergy Street remains closed, but there should be walkways providing entrance to the church, and the public parking lot behind the church off Queen Street offers free parking as well as neighbouring streets. There is an accessible door (and washroom) available off Princess Street to the west side of the sanctuary.

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Sunday October 16, 2016, marks 175 years to the day that a Royal Charter was granted to the Synod of the Presbyterian Church in connection with the Church of Scotland to begin an institution of higher learning in Upper Canada. An alternate was sought to the publicly funded King’s College of York (Toronto), which demanded all students as well as staff subscribe to the tenets of the Church of England. The Charter granted by Queen Victoria decreed that the new institution, to be known as Queen’s, would be built within three miles of St. Andrew’s Church Kingston, in recognition of the formative role of the congregation and the denomination. First classes were held early in 1842, with a Principal, a professor of classics, and eventually over a dozen students. Though it was open from its beginning to students of all religious backgrounds, it was the Presbyterian community that provided the leadership and financial support to maintain the college through its first eight decades, until the university was handed over to its graduates in 1912 and government funding secured.

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This Sunday of Homecoming Weekend we will celebrate the contribution Christian faith (and the Presbyterian Church) has made to our nation – we will remember the St. Andrew’s cross at the centre of the Queen’s crest, and the university’s motto ‘Sapientia et Doctrina Stabilitas’ (Isaiah 33:6). We will celebrate how Queen’s and Christians continue to contribute to the life of our nation, to the glory of God.

Join us if you are in the area. There is free parking on street around (though Clergy Street is closed) and in the public lot just behind the church off Queen Street. An accessible entrance is available along Princess Street at the west end of the church. There is a nursery for infants and children up to and including three, and older children will be greeted with an activity bag and invited to remain in the sanctuary for worship. Have a look at the Order of Service – we look forward to welcoming you!

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Now thank we all our God with heart and hands and voices,
who wondrous things has done, in whom God’s world rejoices,
who from our mother’s arms has blessed us on our way
with countless gifts of love, and still is ours today.

It will be good to gather this weekend and give thanks.

Otherwise it can all be so overwhelming. The issues of the groaning creation. The violence and injustice suffered by so many peoples within our nation and beyond. The frailties, failures and fears of each of us as individuals. These dimensions of our days, and so much more, can easily overwhelm and rule our lives.

They are real. But there is another reality that can release rather than constrain life. And this is the weekend that reality returns to view. We can give thanks. We can acknowledge the wonder of soil, sun and water bringing forth grain for bread and vines for wine. We can remember the labour of many for the common good. We can recognize that not one of us choose to be born, and that we are inheritors of generations of inspiration and beauty and example. It is all gift, and we can give thanks.

We can not give thanks generally, however. No gift is truly a gift unless the giver is thanked. This weekend we return to the Giver, ‘Now thank we all our God’.

And in the thanksgiving, life is renewed. The issues, the burdens, the struggles remain. But we are renewed with a larger perspective. We have the assurance that we are not only of origin and destiny, but we are accompanied. We know this in Christ. And gratitude gives way to freedom and generosity in the Christian, whatever the season or circumstance.

As we continue to read our way through the stories of the first Christians, we come to the conversion of Saul upon the road to Damascus (Acts 9). Might our conversion in Christ be one to gratitude, deep and full? It would certainly set me on a different path in this world.

If you are in the area, join us in the worship of God this Thanksgiving Sunday. Scroll through the order of service below. There is a nursery for infants and a programme for children during the service if they are interested. Clergy Street remains closed – if parking in the free public lot off Queen Street behind the church, you may need to walk from the manse driveway and around the stone wall on the grass.

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