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Welcome

Welcome to St. Alban’s Church! Every Sunday, and most days in between, people gather in this place to worship, to learn, to grow, to share the joys and struggles of our lives, and to seek God’s grace in the midst of our lives. We do not come because we have it all figured out, but because we are seeking light on the way. We come as we are and welcome one another.

On this website, you can find information about our worship, our classes for people of all ages, membership at St. Alban's, and about how we seek to make a difference in this world. We warmly encourage you to join us for a Sunday service or for some of the many other events that happen here. You belong at St. Alban’s.

Please fill out this welcome form to connect with us.

Contact us with any questions. Call (202) 363-8286 or email the church office.

 

Service Times 

Weekly In-person Sunday Service Schedule (Please note: Service times may be changed during the seasons of Christmas and Lent and during the summer. Please refer to our calendar to confirm the times.):

8 a.m. (English) in the Church
9 a.m. (English) in the Church
11:15 a.m. (English) in the Church
11:15 a.m. (Spanish) in Nourse Hall (same building as the Church)

Communion in one kind (i.e. wafers) will be offered at the main altar, although we will happily bring communion to those for whom steps are challenging. 

Weekly Live Sunday Services are live-streamed on our Youtube channel (St. Alban's DC) at 9 a.m. every Sunday, as is our Spanish service at 11:15 a.m. 

Evening Prayer Thursdays, 5:30 p.m. via Zoom, join us for a time of reflection and sharing at the close of your busy day. Contact Paul Brewster for the link. 

 

Directions

St. Alban’s Episcopal Church is located next to the Washington National Cathedral at the corner of Massachusetts and Wisconsin Avenues in the northwest section of the District of Columbia.

From either direction on the north loop of the Capital Beltway/I-495 follow signs for Route 355/Wisconsin Ave south toward DC. St. Alban’s is located on the left just before the intersection of Massachusetts and Wisconsin Avenues NW. Make a left onto Lych Gate Rd before you reach Massachusetts Ave. As you enter the drive, the church will be on your left and Satterlee Hall and the Rectory on the right. Stay on Lych Gate until it becomes Pilgrim Rd.

From any Virginia main in-bound thoroughfare (George Washington Memorial Parkway, I-395, Route 50, I-66), follow signs to Rosslyn and take the Key Bridge from Rosslyn north across the Potomac River into Georgetown. Go right on M St, left on Wisconsin Ave. St. Alban’s is located on the right just after the intersection of Massachusetts and Wisconsin Avenues NW. Make a right onto Lych Gate Rd after passing Massachusetts. As you enter the drive, the church will be on your left and Satterlee Hall and the Rectory on the right. Stay on Lych Gate until it becomes Pilgrim Rd.

Parking is available on Pilgrim Road Monday-Friday after 3:30 pm and all day Saturday and Sunday. Parking is also available in the Cathedral’s underground garage for a fee Monday- Saturday and for free on Sunday.  You may also park on neighborhood streets according to DC parking signs.

What to Expect

Visiting a church for the first time can be a bit daunting. So we have tried to put together the answers to some of the questions you’re likely to have and to ensure that you find a warm welcome here. Click on the questions to learn more.)

How do you worship?

What time are services on Sunday morning?

How long do services last?

Where can I park?

Do you offer programs for children?

What should I wear?

Do you have provisions for the differently-abled?

For Your Kids

Children’s Ministry

At St. Alban’s, we believe that a child’s spiritual growth is just as important as their physical and intellectual growth. Our goal is to help children name and value the presence and love of God in their lives. We do this through a variety of means – by providing stable and consistent adult mentors, encouraging strong peer relationships, and supporting parents in their families’ faith lives at home.

Worship: This Fall, Children's Chapel meets during the first half of the 9:00 a.m. service in Nourse Hall (a spacious parish hall in the same building as the main worship space.) Kids and families join "big church" at the Peace so everyone can receive Communion together. To learn more, contact the Rev’d Emily Griffin.

Education: We've resumed our formation programs for the 2022-2023 period. Here’s everything you need to know:

  • Sunday School and Youth Group Classes are from 10:15 to 11:05 a.m.
  • Nursery, 2s & 3s, PreK to 1st Grade, 2nd to 3rd Grade, and 4th to 6th Grade all meet upstairs in Satterlee Hall. Youth classes meet downstairs in Satterlee Hall.
  • If you haven’t registered your child or teen yet, it’s not too late. Register in person at the start of class or click here

Questions? For children, contact the Rev’d Emily Griffin at . For youth, contact the Rev’d Yoimel González Hernández at .

Learn more about Children's Ministries
Youth Ministry

Four teen groups participate in formation classes at St. Alban’s on Sunday mornings. We use the nationally recognized Episcopal curriculum “Journey to Adulthood," or J2A. J2A has two guiding principles: 1) Manhood and womanhood are gifts of God; and 2) Adulthood must be earned. This is a strong program with over 50 youth participating, many of whom engage in a wide variety of ministries at St. Alban’s. Two or three adults mentor each of the groups for two years, sharing their own faith journeys and forming strong bonds of fellowship with the participants.Learn more about Youth Ministries

The Episcopal Church

As Episcopalians, we follow Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. We believe in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We believe God is active in our everyday lives through the power of the Holy Spirit.  

The mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and with each other in Christ. The Church pursues its mission as it prays and worships, proclaims the gospel, and promotes justice, peace and love. The Church carries out its mission through the ministry of all of its members.

We uphold the Bible and worship with the Book of Common Prayer. We believe the Holy Scriptures are the revealed Word of God. In worship we unite ourselves with one another to acknowledge the holiness of God, to hear God's Word, to offer prayer and praise, and to celebrate the Sacraments. The Celebration of Holy Eucharist is the central act of worship in accordance with Jesus' command to His disciples. Holy Communion may be received by all baptized Christians, not only members of the Episcopal Church.

The Episcopal Church is part of the worldwide Anglican Communion with 70 million members in 165 countries.  The word "Episcopal" refers to government by bishops. The historic episcopate continues the work of the first apostles in the Church, guarding the faith, unity and discipline of the Church. Both men and women, including those who are married, are eligible for ordination as deacons, priests and bishops. 

We strive to love our neighbors as ourselves and respect the dignity of every person. We welcome all to find a spiritual home in the Episcopal Church.

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Honoring the Darkness

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12.11.16

Honoring the Darkness

Honoring the Darkness

Series: Advent

Speaker: The Rev'd Emily Griffin

“Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” It’s an Advent question, if ever there was one. And if anyone’s earned the right to give Jesus a little push back, it’s our season’s Anti-Santa, John the Baptist. Let’s be honest. A fat and jolly joy maker John is not. No one really hopes that John the Baptist, with all his locusts and camels’ hair, will come down their chimney this Christmas. But for once, John isn’t playing to his audience in today’s Gospel reading. No – this is the honest question of a man who finds himself living in the dark.

Personally, I find it misleading that we hold most of our Advent celebrations in the morning. It’s false advertising. We’re down to less than 9 ½ hours of daylight these days; that leaves a lot of time to ponder in the dark. This season of waiting and hoping we call Advent, by definition, occurs more in darkness than in light. I wonder if it’s possible somehow to honor the darkness of these days – to find the gifts in it and not just wait for the light. I suspect that it is.  

John the Baptist in today’s Gospel asks his question from the darkness of a prison cell. It’s no shock that he landed in jail. He did what prophets do. He spoke truth to power one too many times, and you can’t call your religious leaders “broods of vipers” or call out the king in public for his unseemly marriage without getting into some hot water.

 But this PK (aka priest’s kid) who shook off his father’s Temple long ago for the open sky and freedom of the wilderness has been caged for a while now. He who spoke with such certainty about the kingdom of heaven coming near now wonders what happened if he, the one who prepared the way, is left behind in the dark. What happened to the LORD setting the prisoners free? John promised a baptism with the Holy Spirit and fire. But he’s not seeing fire. Jesus doesn’t seem to be doing enough to bring about justice, to make what’s wrong right. John is frustrated and disappointed and wants to know if it was all in vain. So he sends others to ask Jesus directly: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”

Jesus’ answer takes the poetry of prophets like Isaiah, like John seriously. He tells them to relay what they’ve seen: that in Jesus, “the blind receive their sight,” the sick are healed…“the poor have good news brought to them.” In other words, the seeds of the kingdom John helped to plant have borne fruit – albeit somewhat inefficiently. Why heal one person, we might ask, when Jesus could conceivably heal all of us at once? Why allow anyone to continue suffering in the dark, much less a good and faithful servant like John?

Honestly, I’ve never found answers to the “whys” of suffering all that sufficient or helpful – particularly when I’m in the dark night of the soul myself. Sometimes, as in John the Baptist’s case, we suffer because we want justice, because someone has to speak up against wrong – and if we don’t, who will? Other times though, we suffer because we’ve chosen to love, and love is by its very nature messy. Our suffering may be the result of a foolish choice or the simple fact that we live in frail bodies that don’t always match up with our minds or hearts. And sometimes, there’s no answer to the why that we’ll ever understand. It just is. We don’t need anyone to tell us that we’re lost and in need of a way home. That’s not news. What we need to know is that we’re not alone in the dark and that while weeping may remain for a night – and that night might last a while – joy can and does come in the morning. Who knows? We may even find songs in the night. 

Those of us waiting around in the dark long for tidings of great joy, and that’s what we’re given today from Isaiah – a vision worth walking toward, even if it is still beyond our sight. “Say to those of a fearful heart, ‘Be strong! Do not fear! Here is your God…For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert.” What does that mean practically? Well, on one level, it’s an invitation to take the long view, to not get tripped up by the pain of the moment.

No matter how long the dry spell has been, we’re told, no matter how long we’ve had to wait, rain will come eventually. It’s as sure as the dawn.

But there’s another invitation here, I think. We don’t know exactly when this text was written, but supposing that the exiles in Babylon had at least some knowledge of it, these images held particular weight. The desert wasn’t just a metaphor for them. You see, the route from Jerusalem to Babylon and back was not a direct journey from A to B. They’d been marched the long way up through Syria and then back down along the Euphrates to Babylon. Going straight through the desert to get back home was considered too dangerous an option. There wasn’t enough food or water, for one. Besides, that particular wilderness was full of predators. You had to avoid it, sidestep, go around such dangers; it wasn’t possible to just go through, was it? Yet here Isaiah is promising that someday, when there is no choice but to go through the mess together, we’ll find what we need along the way.

It’s interesting to me the order in which Isaiah makes his promises. It’s only after he tells them not to fear that the next lines come… “Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped.” Perhaps letting go of our fear of scarcity, our fear of loss, our fear of the unknown, is part of what it makes it possible to see and hear more clearly, to sing again for joy. Perhaps it’s our fear, in part, that blinds us to the streams that are already in the desert, to the signs of joy and life that are already here. Our job is to look for what makes that kind of joy and growth possible. And one of those things, believe it or not, is darkness.

The truth is, we need the dark as a time of rest. We need time sometimes to do nothing, to stop trying to earn the love that can only be offered as a gift. We need seasons for stillness and silence, time to slow down and listen to our own breath for once, time to remember that for all our problems – we are alive in this beautiful world. We need time to dream of a different future when the future we’ve hoped for has been taken away, and it’s the darkness that gives us the freedom to do that.

Some of us need the dark as a time of healing. Darkness can give us the opportunity to try leaning on our other senses: hearing, tasting, touching. We can learn in the dark, those times of openness and not knowing, what it really means to walk by faith and not by sight. I realize this is a privileged thing to say for those of us who have no trouble seeing, who can choose to turn on the light or just put on our glasses. I am not romanticizing physical blindness; I know there are true losses there than cannot be “metaphored” away. What I am saying is that there are other senses we can use when we find ourselves stumbling around in the spiritual dark.

In the dark, without the distractions of all the blinking Christmas lights, we can perhaps hear God’s Word to us in a new, less judgmental way. We can taste the bread and the wine in a new way because we know our spiritual hunger all too well. And we can be brought within reach of those who love us. Darkness has a way of forcing us to acknowledge our dependence on others – our families, our friends, our community, our church. That reliance is there in the day too, of course; we’re just blind to it in the light.

Whether we like it or not, we need times of darkness if we’re ever going to grow. As Jan Richardson in her book Night Visions writes: “we require darkness for birth and growth: the seed in the ground, the seed in the womb, the seed in our souls.” Maybe the seed that is trying to grow in you is a compassion you’ve never known before because you’ve never walked this road before, or a wisdom you wouldn’t have gained except by going straight through. It might even be a joy grown deeper and stronger this time – because of the space that suffering has carved out along the way.

As today’s reading from James reminds us, just as the farmer waits for the early and the late rains, so we too are called to be patient- with God, with ourselves, with each other. If we pull up our roots too quickly for better light and fairer weather elsewhere, we could, in fact, do greater damage to ourselves and those we love. And we need time to develop roots if we’re newly planted, don’t we, time to deepen our roots and grow strong again when we’ve been beaten down. All of this growth happens primarily in the dark. We can, of course, outgrow where we’ve been planted and need to be planted again somewhere else, but perhaps the darkness is what helps us to know when this is true as well.

In the meantime, to those with a fearful heart today, who wonder how long we have to wait, I say, “Be strong! Do not fear!” Why? Because fear only blinds us to the good things that are already here, that are waiting for us. Because, like with John the Baptist, the seeds we plant as people of faith take a long time, even generations to grow. Just because we might not see growth right now doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Healing, like anything worth waiting for in our lives, can take a while. But primarily, I say do not fear today because “here is your God.” Not out in the light while you wait in the dark, but here and now. God is here with us in the darkness as well as the light of Advent, allowing us time for rest, for dreaming, for healing, and yes, for growth. In the Name of the One for whom darkness shines as brightly as the day – Amen.