Plan on Being Here

This coming weekend, March 7 through March 9, there is a constellation of events that give us a wonderful opportunity to worship and to celebrate.

On Friday evening, March 7, at 7:00 PM, the Right Reverend Mark S. Sisk, bishop of New York, will be here to officiate at Stations of the Cross.  It’s a wonderful service.  It takes about forty-five minutes.  It’s the first Friday in Lent.  We hope that there will be a good congregation from our own parish and from other midtown Episcopalians who appreciate this great devotion.  The Stations themselves and the layout of the church make Saint Mary’s a wonderful place for this service.

PRAYER LIST . . . Your prayers are asked for Jim and Adele who are hospitalized and for Bart, Nora, Kiyushi, Nicole, Kenneth, Jack, Thomas, Sarah, Grover, Annie, Patricia, Paul, Robert, Eileen, Gloria, Jerri, Margaret, Marion, Olga, Rick, Charles, priest, and Paul, bishop and Walter, bishop, and for the members of our Armed Forces on active duty, especially Timothy, Patrick, Edward, Keith, Kevin, Christopher, Andrew, Joseph, Mark, Ned, Timothy, David and John . . . GRANT THEM PEACE . . . March 4: 1989 Timothy Francis Meyers.

Looking to the Triduum

I’ve been reading Louis Gerstner’s account of his work at IBM, Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround.  It’s a very good read.  When he arrived at IBM, the company did not lack for talent.  It had a culture problem, in a nutshell.  Too much of its corporate life had begun to take on a life of its own, independent of the needs of its customers.  One famous example was the IBM company dress code: suits, white shirts, conservative ties.

Looking to Lent: Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday is the usual name given to the First Day of Lent, the season during which the Church prepares to celebrate the Easter Triduum (Triduum: “Three Days” - Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Day).  More people, 2500, perhaps 3000, will be in our church this day to attend Mass or to receive ashes.  It is a day when the local parish has the single greatest opportunity to serve others in numbers.

Looking to Lent: Stations

This year we will be having Stations of the Cross every Friday night of Lent.  The service is from The Book of Occasional Services of the Episcopal Church.  The service itself consists of fourteen meditations related to the traditional events between Jesus’ condemnation before Pilate and the burial of his body in the tomb.  The words of the service are said.  Short verses of Stabat Mater are sung as the congregation moves between stations.  One hymn is sung at the end.  Because of the design of our church it is possible for the congregation and the clergy to process from station to station.

Presentation

The Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Temple is the last of the cycle of  liturgical celebrations based on the infancy narratives of Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels.  Forty days after his birth, in accordance with the tradition of the time, Mary and Joseph bring the infant Jesus to the temple in Jerusalem.  There he is recognized as the “Light.”  Yet even those who recognize who he is and understand his future do not have faith until he rises from the dead.

Holy Week 2003

The Calendar of the Church Year and the regular services of the Church, the Holy Eucharist and Daily Morning and Evening Prayer, have ordered the common life of Saint Mary’s since the parish’s beginning.  Over time, of course, the schedule and range of services celebrated during the church year has evolved. 

Our Parish Life

I am writing to you on Thursday morning, the day I usually write the weekly newsletter.  Today is an ordinary weekday at Saint Mary’s.  Four weeks of very intensive celebrations are now behind us.  Because of the late date of Easter this year, there is something of a break between now and the first week of March.  (Ash Wednesday is March 5.)  The calendar will give us some time to complete tasks that it was simply not possible to complete as we prepared for the holidays, celebrated Christmas, Epiphany and the anniversary of the organ.

Never an Ordinary Time

When the calendars of the western liturgical churches were revised in the 1960s and 1970s, our Episcopal Church maintained the traditional Twelve Days of Christmas.  For Lutherans and Roman Catholics, the Christmas Season extends through this Sunday, the Feast of the Baptism of Christ.  For us, when the sun sets on Epiphany (again, for us, always January 6), we begin the “Season after the Epiphany.”  This season Roman Catholics call “Ordinary Time.” 

Music at Saint Mary’s

There are many reasons to celebrate music at Saint Mary’s this month.  It is the seventieth anniversary of our parish organ, an astounding and outstanding instrument.  Its design and execution at the beginning of the Great Depression was a central event in the history of our parish and in the history of American music.  It is one of the first of what are known as “great American classic organs.”  It was an experiment and building it required vision and faith, the kind of vision and faith for which this parish has stood since its birth.

Christus Vincit

“Put not your trust in rulers, nor in any child of earth, for there is no help in them,” (Psalm 146:3), says the Psalmist.  This Sunday the Church concludes its year with the celebration of the kingship of Jesus Christ, he who conquers, reigns and rules all from “before time and for ever.”  We believe in him.  He is our Savior.  He is the Lord. 

Our Parish Vocation

As far as I know, no biography of our founder, the Reverend Thomas McKee Brown, has ever been written.  Considering the greatness of his vision for Christian life and mission, it is interesting that no one has ever studied his work.  I suspect that by now his papers have long disappeared.  We do have a record of his funeral and tributes that were written at the time by those who knew him well.

So Very Proud

There may have been another parish in the Episcopal Church that celebrated three Solemn Masses, one on each of the three great days which occurred last weekend; but I do not know of it.  Two great parishes in Washington, D.C., Saint Paul’s Parish, K Street, and the Church of the Ascension and Saint Agnes, shared Solemn Masses on All Saints’ and All Souls’.  I suspect a handful of other parishes where the liturgical tradition has a primary role in shaping the common life of the local congregation will have done something similar.

By Signs and Words

“Poetry in Motion” is an advertising series in the subway sponsored by Barnes & Noble, Inc.  For several weeks now there has been a famous quotation from the end of T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets on many trains I have ridden.  I wonder if the person who decided to put it up realized it was a statement of Christian belief:

PRAYER LIST . . . Your prayers are asked for Sarah, Julia, Grover, Annie, Paul, Robert, Eileen, Gloria, Jerri, Myra, Tessie, Margaret, Marion, Olga, Rick and Charles, priest.  Pray for the members of our Armed Forces on active duty, especially Patrick, Edward, Christopher, Andrew, Robert, Joseph, Mark, Ned, David and John.  Your prayers are also asked for the repose of the soul of Mildred . . . GRANT THEM PEACE . . . October 31: 1964 Earl Brandt Bird; 1990: David Hessing; November 1: 1997 Mark Hamilton; November 2: 1957 Elsinore Janmott; 1958: C. Y. Wong; 1960: Mabel Amelia Hoover; 1970: John Arthur Schwartz; 1973: Howard Montague Smith; Doris White; 1976: Winona Claire Peterson; 1982: Robert William Kennedy; 1983: Marie Anne Andokian; 1987: Clasine A. Van De Geer.

Passion for Saint Mary’s

My correspondence with the wider community of the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin began on Monday, December 7, 1998.  The Board of Trustees had elected me rector on Saturday, December 5.  The letter came from a retired bishop who lived in Arizona.  It was short, full of kind and supportive words.  He had mailed it on Saturday the fifth. 

Joining the Mystery

The Christian community assembles for the Eucharist so that an epiphany of the Lord’s death and resurrection may take place.  Our individual intentions are not always so clearly focused.  Many Christian communities on any day can have many ulterior motives for assembling.  But following the Lord’s commands, his plan for the salvation of the world and the traditions of the Church, Christians assemble to make the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ present in the world today.

Daily Adoring

One of the hymns most of us look forward to singing every year is “Only-begotten, Word of God eternal.”  The basic text has been in The Hymnal since 1940.  The last two verses were composed by the translator of this ninth century office hymn for the feast of the dedication of the church.  The translator and composer was Maxwell Julius Blacker (1822-1888), a priest of the Church of England. 

Michaelmas

The first time I served as subdeacon I was a senior at Nashotah House.  Following English university practice (recall that the universities were Church institutions until the late nineteenth century), the fall term was called the “Michaelmas Term.” 

Evil Is Not Greater Than Life

A sermon preached by the Rector on Tuesday, September 10, at Solemn Evensong offered for the employees of Citibank, N.A. who were killed on September 11, 2001.

There is something profoundly unnatural and evil in the death of any human being by violence.  There are no words that can begin to express the enormity of the evil done to those who were killed on September 11 and the enormity of the evil done to their families,