Earlier this week, the FBI warned that armed protests are being planned for Washington D.C. and all 50 state capitals sometime between Saturday, January 16, and the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden on January 20. As your bishops, we write today imploring you to stay away from these protests and any counter-protests that might occur.

Lincoln knew in that moment, in the moment of a national crisis, a moment of great danger, that such a moment was a moment of decision, when a nation, when a people must decide who shall we be? What kind of nation, what kind of people shall we be? A hundred years later, Martin Luther King faced the same reality. Who shall we be? The civil rights movement was waning. The great victories that had been won had been won. And yet now questions of poverty and economic despair and disparities raised an awesome specter on the nation. We were at war.

Wednesday evening, the Rev. Noah Sutterisch and the Rev. Christopher Decatur were ordained to the sacred Priesthood at Trinity Cathedral. Against the backdrop of violent and unthinkable insurrection in our nation’s capital, it was a moving and healing event. This was not because it provided for us a distraction from the seditious breach of both the Capitol Building and the Constitution, but because it focused each of us on the brokenness and divisions of our nation and on our vocation as Christians: to bring God’s gifts of justice, mercy, truth, and peace to a country and world desperately in need of them, and like the Magi, to do so with honesty, fidelity, humility, and courage.

Between 800 and 900 families received food for the Christmas holiday from Grace Episcopal Church food pantry Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning.

The Rev. Matt Wahlgren of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Fremont used the story of Christ’s birth to point hurting people to the hope that can be found in God.