Letter from Amy: April 29, 2026

Il Buon Pastore (The Good Shepherd), Arturo Martini, 1925 (Italy). I took a photo of this sculpture at the Vatican Museum last summer because I loved the shepherd's happy expression!

Dear Incarnation,

My sermon on Sunday was on the instructions for relating to governing authorities in 1 Peter 2:13-25; a challenging passage, and a difficult one to preach the morning after yet another act of political violence. I’ve gotten a LOT of responses to that sermon, and I appreciate all of you who have reached out to share how you are praying and weighing and wrestling with Peter’s challenging words. You can listen here if you missed it.

Last week was also Good Shepherd Sunday, a day that’s always a little bittersweet for me. Four years ago, we said goodbye to our founding rector, Liz Gray, on Good Shepherd Sunday. Later that afternoon, the bishop called me to pray for a transfer of spiritual authority, and I took on the task of shepherding the flock of Incarnation.

I always think of Liz this time of year, who taught me how to be a priest and pastor and leader (and how to walk faster and play more!). There’s a passage in Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry, in which the title character is describing carrying on the farm labor that she first learned from her grandmother, that sums up my feelings:

It is hard to say what it means to be at work and thinking of a person you loved and love still who did that same work before you and who taught you to do it. It is a comfort ever and always, like hearing the rhyme come when you are singing a song.

It truly is "a comfort, ever and always" to continue in the work that Liz and I once did together here at Incarnation, and I’m so grateful for the privilege of serving as your rector (or lead pastor, in Anglican-speak).

I never set out to be a rector. When I went through the ordination process, I thought I wanted to be a hospice chaplain. I could maybe imagine myself as an associate pastor or co-planter — but never a rector. And throughout our early years at Incarnation, although I knew Liz’s retirement was looming, I wasn’t eager to put myself forward as a candidate. I’ve always been most comfortable in a behind-the-scenes role, and I was a very happy #2.

What began to change my mind, surprisingly, was January 6, 2021. Liz had just begun a sabbatical, and I was serving as our acting rector in her absence (just as Katie did during my sabbatical last summer). Our church had just reverted to online-only services in response to some variant of the COVID-19 virus (Delta? Omicron? It’s a blur…). I had doubled up on seminary coursework, trying desperately to graduate after too many years in the process, and my kids were being homeschooled because of the pandemic.

In the midst of all that, January 6 happened. We gathered online to pray compline that night. We gathered online again to worship the following Sunday, and the Sunday after that. I had a lot of phone calls and roughly a thousand walks in the cold (again, this was COVID) to listen to how people were processing it all and to pray together. It was a tumultuous, disorienting, challenging time. 

And yet something was stirring in me. As acting rector, I felt completely alone, ill-equipped, and unsure of what to do. And yet I discovered a new way of depending on God in the midst of it, a deep well of God-supplied grace and faith and courage that I hadn’t known was there before. I began to draw from that well, and for the first time — at the unlikeliest of times — I began to wonder if perhaps I could do this rector thing after all. If perhaps God might even be calling me forward, and assuring me that he would supply my need. A few months later, when Liz and the Vestry asked me to consider applying for the rector role, I tentatively agreed.

I write all that because I have always found it interesting that my saying “yes" to this role happened in a context of political instability. And my tenure thus far has been marked by continued instability, disorientation, division, and confusion. 

This is a difficult moment to be the church. It’s difficult to discern God’s call to us amidst all the loud voices clamoring for our attention and claiming to speak with Christian authority. It’s difficult to love one another across political difference, to forgive one another for the times we have all overswung the pendulum, to be ministers of reconciliation in a world that wants a fight. It’s difficult to continue in quiet faithfulness to all that Jesus has taught us, when our efforts feel so feeble against the evils we see around us. It’s difficult to hang onto the joy of the gospel and the hope of the resurrection. But that is our call.

I don’t know why God has placed me in the rector role at Incarnation during a time of such political instability. But I pray that I — and all of us — would continue to draw from God’s inexhaustible well of grace and faith and courage as we navigate these times together. And I am grateful for the privilege of being your unlikely rector as we do. 

I’ll leave us with Gandalf’s [overused, possibly cheesy, yet true and comforting] words to Frodo:

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.

"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

With love,

Amy