My uncle, Lawrence Matthews is eighty-seven years old now. He is a retired Baptist minister, his last years as an American Baptist. He and the congregation he served left the Southern Baptist Convention over the issue of the ordination of women. He’s been retired since, I think, 1997.

Today we commemorate Saint Columba, Abbot of Iona, who died in 597. Columba, or Colmcille, was a learned monk, a missionary, a fierce preacher, and a founder of monasteries. In the annals, he is remembered as a big man, powerfully built, with a “loud and melodious voice,” not bad things in a preacher. His family was not poor, and he got a good education, studied Latin and theology, became a monk, then a deacon, and finally a priest. He spent time in more than one Irish monastery and was imbued with the traditions of Celtic spirituality, mostly at the famous onastery of Clonard in Ireland’s northeast, where Columba was taught and guided by Saint Finian.

Today we commemorate the institution of the first Book of Common Prayer. It came into use on the feast of Pentecost, June 9, 1549. Edward VI was king. He was ten-years old. A regency council was in charge of his kingdom. Thomas Cranmer was archbishop of Canterbury. And it is largely to Thomas Cranmer, whose study and knowledge, along with his gifts as a translator, that we have a Prayer Book tradition that has stood the test of time. The history and theology of Anglicans is still defined by its Prayer Books.

I first came across the name of C. Kavin Rowe, a professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School, in Paul Bradshaw and Maxwell Johnson’s book The Origins of Feasts, Fasts and Seasons in Early Christianity.[1] Rowe had published an article on the meaning, for the evangelist we know as Luke, of the Greek words kyrie, Lord, and soter, savior, in Luke’s gospel and in his Acts of the Apostles.[2]

When Jesus and his disciples went to the grave of his friend Lazarus, Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”[1] Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life.”[2] His words do not prevent Martha from objecting to Jesus having the grave opened. Biblical blindness, if you will, the kind of blindness to God’s presence in the world that begins with the story of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.[3] So today, with the appointed gospel from the supper before the Passover, we hear Philip say to Jesus, using an imperative form of the verb, “You, show us the Father.” Jesus’ reply, “Have I been with you so long, and yet you do not know me?”[4] Biblical blindness.

With the advent of live-streaming, we priests here at Saint Mary’s have been doing more formal preparation and writing out our homilies for weekday Eucharists. On Monday, March 30, Monday in the Fifth Week of Lent, the gospel was John’s account of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery.[1] My preparation included coming across an explanation for its complicated textual history. In some important manuscripts it’s found in Luke. It is absent “from the best Greek [manuscripts].”[2] Raymond Brown in his An Introduction to the New Testament wrote that, though canonical, “almost certainly it is out of context here in John.”[3] He suggests that the story may have “traveled independently of the four Gospels and could not be included until there was a change in the church’s reluctance to forgive adultery.”[4]

Today and tomorrow our gospel lessons together are what we know as the last chapter of John, chapter 21, widely regarded as an appendix, or an epilogue, to the first twenty chapters. The gospel seems to end with these words of Risen Jesus to Thomas and the others, “ ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.’ Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name.”[1]

Yesterday, today, and tomorrow, we are hearing John’s account of Jesus alone, praying to the Father, before he gathers his friends to go across the Kidron Valley to a garden. The beginning of today’s appointed passage can be understood as the point of Jesus’ prayer. He says, “Holy Father, keep them in your name which you have given to me, in order that they may be one just as we.”[1] That’s a very big ask. In other words, he asks that believers should have the relationship with each other that God the Son has with God the Father.

Since sheltering in place began in March, the friars and your parish clergy read Morning Prayer at home. We have this daily Eucharist at ten o’clock. For Evening Prayer, we gather according to the schedule we had before we were closed for public worship. On weekdays we pray Evening Prayer at six, weekends at five, here in this chapel.

Last summer, our former colleague Father Matthew Mead engaged me in a conversation about the decision made for the 1979 Prayer Book to use in three places the personal and sacred name for the God of the Hebrews, twice in the psalms and once in the Song of Moses,[1] a canticle appointed to be sung at the Great Vigil of Easter after we have heard the story of Israel’s deliverance at the Red Sea.[2]

My seminary education began in the fall of 1980. It was shaped in many ways by the prevailing scholarship across all of the theological disciplines that had developed for Western Christians after the Second World War. New work would be done. For example, by the end of the century, liturgical scholars Paul Bradshaw and Maxwell Johnson would show that a fifty-day Easter Season was limited to a few regions of the Mediterranean world and was never as universal as we were taught.[1] It doesn’t follow that it is a bad thing, but it suggests that study and reflection should be an ongoing part of our lives.

It’s the supper before the passover. Jesus, having washed the feet of those who were with him, while all of them were eating said, to Judas, “ ‘What you are going to do, do quickly’ . . . [Judas] immediately went out; and it was night.”[1] After speaking to the men and women[2] who were with Jesus about his departure, he speaks of the vine, the vinedresser, and the branches, of abiding—remaining—and bearing fruit. Then he says, “These things I have spoken to you-all in order that my joy may be in you-all and your joy may be fulfilled.”[3]

We heard the beginning of the John’s narrative of the supper before the passover on Maundy Thursday. The passage ended with these words, “If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.”[1] Two Thursday ago, April 30th, our gospel lessons at these Easter weekday Eucharists have continue with the rest of John’s supper before the passover narrative. At the end of the first day of this continuation, Judas, “went out, and immediately it was night.”[2]

Looking back, my own spiritual journey with John’s gospel and today’s gospel lesson really began a few months after beginning work as rector of Trinity Church, Michigan City, Indiana. I arrived in December 1988. In the spring, I attended a workshop at our cathedral on formation programs for children. There I was introduced to the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, an approach to Christian formation for children that evolved from the collaboration of a Hebrew scholar, Sofia Cavalletti, and a Montessori teacher, Gianna Gobi, in Rome in the early 1950s.

It’s the supper before the passover. Jesus, having washed the feet of those who were with him, while all of them were eating said, to Judas, “ ‘What you are going to do, do quickly’ . . . [Judas] immediately went out; and it was night.”[1] After speaking to the men and women[2] who were with Jesus about his departure, he speaks of the vine, the vinedresser, and the branches, of abiding—remaining—and bearing fruit. Then he says, “These things I have spoken to you-all in order that my joy may be in you-all and your joy may be fulfilled.”[3]

Let me begin with the good news that, when I sat down at the desk in my study this morning, there was an email from our church’s bank with the documents to be signed for the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program. The board of trustees will know soon how the parish’s finances were affected at the end of April. The loan, and the expectation of loan forgiveness, will be a great help to our parish.

In the rectory there is an important collection of service records dating back to the late 1870s. The oldest volumes are now too fragile to be handled. There are also bound copies of the parish’s monthly newsletter Ave, that was replaced early in my tenure by the weekly Angelus. There was no mention in the May 1965 issue of Ave about the change Father Donald Garfield would be making to parish worship three months after becoming rector on February 1 of that year.

Saint Philip is named as one of the twelve in all four gospels and in Luke’s second book, the Acts of the Apostles. Today’s gospel lesson is from John’s narrative of the supper before the Passover. Philip and Thomas who, in the end, will doubt the words of resurrection that he hears, will see, and will believe, team up with Jesus with questions, demands, for Jesus. Where are you going? Show us the Father. That will make everything all right. They do not believe as they will come to believe.

I recently watched a documentary on PBS called “Inside the Vatican.” At two hours long, it covered a fair amount of ground, but it was only two hours long, so there were many things it didn’t discuss. I yearned to hear more about the role of women in the church. But the film didn’t shy away from controversial issues: it dealt extensively with Pope Francis and his reforms; and it talked frankly about clerical sexual abuse.

There were no, what came to be called, “lesser feasts” in the American Prayer Book until 1979. Quite honestly, I was surprised early this morning to discover that the commemoration of Catherine of Siena, who died on this date, April 29, in the year 1380,[1] was included in the first edition of the book we commonly call Lesser Feasts and Fasts, published in 1963.[2] There are only two commemorations in that calendar that are included with no description, unlike for example, Saint Luke the Evangelist or Francis of Assisi, Friar. One is Saint Joseph, the other, Catherine of Siena.[3]