Pentecost 15 2026

Our Peppercorn

           SO many of our heroes have gone on to God in these last weeks — Dolly Parton, Gloria Steinem, Wendell Berry, and, if you can believe it, on the very same day as Dolly, Tim Curry. These beloveds’ life projects were very different from each other, yet each of them left a gracious legacy: lives lived with courage, meaning and purpose, with concern for others part of how they walked out in the world — in Tim Curry's case, accessorized with fishnet stockings. Their concern for the wider community will last beyond their earthly lives. Granddaughter Whitley is thrilled every month to get her book in the mail from Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, and our global community benefited from Dolly's generosity through her $1M gift supporting the earliest mRNA research in Covid vaccines, eventually protecting us all, whether or not we received the vaccination.

           THIS is stewardship. Stewardship is what happens when a person decides she’s a member of the larger community — a bigger circle of concern — than just herself. Dolly Parton viewed planning for the future as a form of enduring hope. Planning is hope in action just as our courage in taking on that planning is faith and prayer in action. We need to lean in and hear St. Dolly on this as we summon our own faith and courage for action to support Emmanuel’s thriving. As our annual stewardship campaign ramps up in these next weeks, it’s time right now for us to focus on how we care for our community. 

           Wendell Berry, the great poet-farmer of Port Royal, Kentucky — gone on to God this last week — spent seventy years creating prose and poetry about what actually holds a community together. His word for it was membership. In his novel The Wild Birds, Berry put it simply: We are members of each other. All of us. Everything. Berry is writing here about the kind of community of wide invitation and deep belonging that we’re building at Emmanuel. You can see this in the expansive inclusion of our amazing preaching team — women and men, younger, older, lay, ordained, from Newport, the Midwest, England, East Africa, Jerusalem, Australia — representing both the wider Anglican Communion and traditions that are new to us.

           You can see Berry’s dream of All of us. Everything … in our community’s every day collaborations: Newport Classical and Emmanuel leaders working alongside the City of Newport and RENEWport (Newport’s council of leaders working for our community’s thriving), Rhode Island public schools, Rhode Island Legal Services, the McKinney Men’s Shelter, Lucy’s Hearth, Laundry Love, MLK Community Center, Newport Prevention Coalition, the Middle Passage Project, Housing Hotline, Newport Mental Health, Rhode Island Outreach, and others — none of us doing the same work, none of us needing to, together building the same beloved community. 

           Sharing our home — this gorgeous historic register community center and house of faith — Mrs. Brown’s Big Dream for the people of Newport — does two things at the same time: 1) fulfills our purpose of loving our neighbor — God’s law that governs all we do — and 2) provides the very community we need to support this beautiful home for all of Newport. Here’s where we come to what Geoffrey Hoare, rector of All Saints’ Atlanta during our time there, used to refer to wryly as The Sermon on the Amount: About 60 households make a financial pledge to Emmanuel each year, and together we raise around $250,000. That sounds like a lot until you realize that it barely covers the most basic requirements of a functioning parish: a rector, a parish administrator, and a very spare music staff. All you have to do is add a parish life coordinator, music for the choir, Emmanuel’s apportionment obligation to the diocese, postage stamps, and some sheet music, and we’re over budget. 

           We've gotten resourceful, making a virtue out of finding creative ways to make do with what we have. That's why we have a pickup choir that rehearses only on Sunday mornings — we simply can't afford to pay our non-volunteer musicians for a second rehearsal during the week. Other than our Salve Choral Scholars, Caleb, Music Coordinator Duffy (and Nellie before them), all our Musicians’ Circle are both volunteers and active, pledging members of the congregation, amplified by ringers Nellie, Duffy, Caleb, and Ethan, whose responsibilities as Emmanuel staff include Sunday mornings. Suzanna's role as our Artist in Residence is itself an act of generosity — she shares her talents — and her elegant Yamaha concert piano — as a member of the community. 

           In an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir published last week in The Atlantic, Gloria Steinem wrote, Everything we do matters. Steinem was talking about faith in action, like Saint Dolly’s commitment to planning for the future as a form of hope.  In Emmanuel’s own faith in action and hopeful planning for the future, Joe Griffin has joined us as director of operations, to plan, manage, and oversee the daily life of this building in all of its collaborative uses and functions. Joe’s role frees up your church staff — Ethan, Duffy, and me — to do what you actually called us here to do: build community, preach, offer pastoral care, and show up for parish life. This is a big and hopeful change. It should also — with Joe’s effective, knowledgeable, professional management devoted specifically to that purpose — let the building itself begin generating revenue through wider community use that will help defray the very cost of the operations staff that maintains it. This is entirely consistent with Mrs. Brown's Big Dream of making Emmanuel a home for the whole community. But! before we can be that home, we have to be the church — in a great big, healthy, holy way.

           Emmanuel’s legal structure is really unusual, and it’s also the very foundation of our thriving. Here’s how it works (this is SO cool!): The building and grounds are owned by the Emmanuel trustees — Deb Venancio, Valerie Martin, Jennie Huttler, and Bishop Knisely. They’re self-perpetuating. The trust was created in 1855 for the sole purpose of providing a home for an active, thriving Episcopal worshiping community in all of its many gospel purposes that you see in our collaborations and in our worship today. The trust provides that we — the congregation — lease this building for a nominal rent each year — a peppercorn, for the lawyers among us, which is the legal term for consideration so small it's almost a formality. 

           Here's our faith in action, though, embedded in that peppercorn: if at any time this congregation stops thriving — stops nurturing the community, stops fulfilling its function as an Episcopal church — the trustees are obligated to nail a notice of forfeiture on the door, and every glorious use of this building for the whole wider community would end that same day. That's not a remote possibility or unlikely legal outcome. It's just clear and true from the plain language of the trust.  

           I think it's actually good news. It means the building is bound to the church, not the other way around. So your pledge doesn’t support the building. An acre and a half of historic stone is too heavy for us to carry on our own. Your pledge keeps us — this particular, wonderful, diverse, improbable, surprising, loving, and faithful membership of people — alive and thriving so that all the rest of what’s glorious in our community can keep happening here. This building only gets to be a home for RENEWport, Newport Classical, and our whole community, because we, the congregation, keep following everyday saints Dolly, Gloria, and Wendell, making our planning an enduring form of hope, and choosing All of us. Everything … to be members of each other. Please respond when you receive your pledge letter, and be as generous as you can, in your own way, with your own talents and resources — whatever that looks like for you — in supporting this beloved community that has chosen God and each other. As St. Gloria wrote, Everything we do matters. Amen