News Update

A Message from the Honduran Missioners
Working in Talanga, Honduras

June 29, 2009

In the news today (Monday, June 29) are reports of a non-violent military coup in the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa, on Sunday, June 28. The Diocese of Maryland is in the midst of its annual high school youth mission trips to the country, serving El Hogar de Amore y Esperanza, an Episcopal orphanage in Tegucigalpa, and the orphanage’s agricultural and technical training school in Talanga, located north of the capital city.

We are pleased to report that the 13 youth missioners currently working at the training school in Talanga and their adult chaperones are safe, having arrived in the country on Friday morning, June 26, prior to the changing political situation. The group destined for the orphanage on Saturday, June 27, returned to Baltimore after reaching Miami, the first leg of the trip.

Read more...

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A Message from the People, Clergy and Bishops of the Diocese of Maryland regarding the Holocaust Museum Attack

Posted June 11, 2009

The People, Clergy, and Bishops of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland extend our deepest condolences to our brothers and sisters of the Jewish community on the occasion of the senseless attack at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. on June 10. We are saddened that the museum, which is dedicated to teach the world of the horrible consequences of hatred, has become the target of an attack borne of hatred and bigotry.

We also offer our sympathy to the family of Stephen Tyrone Johns, the courageous security guard at the museum who lost his life in the attack in doing his duty to protect others.

We rededicate ourselves to the cause of interfaith dialogue and understanding that so many of our clergy and congregations are regularly engaged in on an ongoing basis.

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Diocese of Maryland Supports “Summer of Peace”

Posted May 27, 2009

Bishops Eugene Taylor Sutton and John L. Rabb of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland, today join with Archbishop Edwin O’Brien of the Archdiocese of Baltimore to declare a “Summer of Peace” on city streets, a broad faith-based effort to promote peace in Baltimore.

Download the entire statement from our bishops

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Presiding Bishop visits Trinity Church, Towson

Posted May 26, 2009

The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, preached at the Ascension Day service, May 21, at Trinity Church, Towson. Celebrating both the occasion on which Christ is taken into heaven after appearing to his disciples for 40 days and Trinity’s 150th Anniversary, Jefferts Schori reminisced, “I can’t think about Ascension without seeing those old stained glass windows and paintings that show Jesus’ bare feet in midair.”

Maryland Church News editor Sharon Tillman filed a story about Bishop Jefferts Schori's visit. Read it here.

Read the text of Bishop Jefferts Schori's Ascension Day sermon

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News from the 225th Convention of the Diocese of Maryland

Bishops' Addresses

Bishop Suffragan's Address
The Rt. Rev. John L. Rabb
Friday, May 1

Bishop Diocesan's Address
The Rt. Rev. Eugene Taylor Sutton
Saturday, May 2

Resolutions

• 2009-01
  Right to Seat, Voice and Vote at Convention
  Resolution was passed
• 2009-02
  Clergy and Lay Employee Compensation
  Resolution was passed
• 2009-03
  Amendment to Constitution - Communicants
  Resolution was passed
• 2009-04
  Amendment to Constitution - Lay Delegates
  Resolution was referred to the Committee on the Rights to Seat
• 2009-05
  Camps for Children of the Incarcerated
  Resolution was passed
• 2009-06
  Prison Ministry Sundays
  Resolution was passed
• 2009-07
  Liturgical Commemoration of Justice Thurgood Marshall
  Resolution was passed
• 2009-08
  Date of Annual Convention
  Resolution was passed

Visit the Convention Page for more information about the 225th Convention.

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Regarding Liturgical Practices during the “Swine Flu” Season

Posted April 30, 2009

We have heard from some in our diocese of health concerns as we face a potential pandemic. In an effort to encourage confidence during this time, we want to offer these guidelines for contact during worship and especially around the Holy Eucharist. Read more...

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Greening our Diocese

The Spring Issue of the Maryland Church News is now available online

Give us all a reverance for the earth as your own creation, that we may use its resources rightly in the service of others and to your honor and glory. (BCP, p. 388)

This issue of Maryland Church News is about God’s creation and our responsibility to maintain it, to strengthen it, to leave it in better shape than how we found it for generations to come. And there are some practical tips for what one person, a congregation of people or even the diocese can do to “green our diocese.”

Click here to read MCN Online and download the print edition

'Be Proud to Take the Lead'

Our first town hall meeting was held at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation where Bishop Sutton expressed his desire to "make people be proud to be an Episcopalian -- to be proud to be part of the diocese that is taking the lead in this issue, first by trying to put our own house in order." Read about it in this story by Val Hymes.

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Bishop Sutton attends Death Penalty Rally

Most likely before midnight, today before midnight someone in this state will die under violent circumstances. For the survivors of yet another dead person, hopefully the killers will be punished? Understandably we will all be outraged at the senselessness of the murder. There will be public cry to kill the perpetrator.

Many will provide text of scriptures as a religious justification for this action especially the verse: an eye for eye, and a tooth for a tooth. We will all be tempted to succumb to the baser emotions of our nature…and call for revenge. but who wants to live in a society full of revenge -- one marked by the continued use of state sponsored killing in response to killing?

You only have to look at the news headlines every day from around the world to know what happens to whole societies and nations that use violence to rectify violence.

There is no room for state sponsored killing and state-sponsored revenge. To kill and to revenge for the killing of another person contributes to a cycle of killing. Applause.

Jesus Christ who is my Lord and Savior came, not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. He told us the fulfillment of the law is the law to love. But the test of love is not found in doing the loving thing whenever it is easy to do so. Love is doing what is right precisely when it is hard. Jesus taught his disciples to go beyond an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, for that would inevitably lead to what MLK and others would call an “eyeless and a toothless society.” Instead he taught us to love even the unlovely and stop the cycle of violence. Stop the hate. Stop the killing. Simply stop.

I am here before you today in a small part because of my African American hero and my mothers and fathers in the civil rights era and our white, Jewish and other friends of every creed and color. They took those words to heart, and they employed those principles to battle hate and murderous violence in their day. I want to close with a portion of an address given by MLK about 6 months before he was killed.

To our most bitter opponents. We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will And we shall continue to love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws, because non cooperation with evil has as much a moral obligation as cooperation with good. Throw us in jail, we shall still love you. Send you hooded perpetrators of evil into our communities and beat us and leave us half dead and we shall still love you. But be you assured that we will wear you down buy our capacity to love. One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we shall win you in the process. And thus our victory will be a double victory.

That’s the power of love. That’s the power that saved this nation from violence and from ruin in the 1960s. I am still convinced that it’s the most powerful weapon that we have to deter violence and murder today. It is more powerful than the electric chair. It is more powerful than lethal injections. We are not going to kill our way out of a society that is awash in violence. That’s why I implore you and all our legislators. Follow your conscience and believe in that power again, in this century, so that we all may be saved.

……Today am proud to say our governor has demonstrated a strong moral compass and political courage to end state-sponsored killing in Maryland.

The Rt. Rev. Eugene Taylor Sutton
Bishop of Maryland

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