From the Rector: Music at Saint Mary’s

Robert McCormick has accepted the position of music director and organist at Saint Paul’s Parish, Washington, D.C.  I expect his last Sunday with us to be sometime in July.  Details remain to be worked out about how we will celebrate his work for this parish, but today I want to thank him and to wish him the best in his new position.   He’s done great work here for us, for which I cannot help but be thankful.  I am also thankful that we have a wonderful opportunity to build on all that we as a parish community have done in the past seven and a half years – and in the past 138 years of worship of this extraordinary parish community.

From the Rector: Unexpected Learning

I found myself back on an MRI scanning table last week.  I hadn’t had an MRI since 1995, when I was seriously ill with what turned out to be a brain abscess.  This MRI was to make sure there was no infection in the tissues around one of my ears.  I’m not sure that without my history I would have agreed to the procedure, but with my history, I didn’t object.  The MRI is an easy test, as these things go.  Everything is fine; my body is just getting older.  As I lay there for the exam, it was easy to relax – despite the noise of the magnets.  I found myself very, very thankful for life – and for modern medicine.

From the Rector: Easter Unbound

I’m old enough to remember going to church with my Roman Catholic grandparents when Mass in their church was still celebrated “in a tongue not understanded of the people.”  For whatever reason, just recently this has hit hard in my analytical gut, as it were.  I don’t have the vocation or time to begin to study, think and theorize about the developmental consequences of this for Christianity in Western Europe.  I confess I have never had the urge to read widely or really to study Christianity in Eastern Europe.  My sense is that I am only slightly aware of the consequences for us, today, of the Western Church in Europe being frozen in Latin for so long, before and since the Protestant Reformation.

From the Rector: Easter and Annunciation

On Tuesday, April 1, 2008, the Most Reverend Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop and primate of the Episcopal Church, will be with us as celebrant and preacher for the Feast of the Annunciation.  I hope very much that many members of the wider parish and diocesan community may be able to be with us.  Robert McCormick will be playing an organ recital at 5:30 PM.  Solemn Pontifical Mass is at 6:00 PM.  A reception in honor of Bishop Jefferts Schori and all of our guests will be held in the parish hall immediately following the service.

From the Rector: Easter Celebrations

Easter is the only celebration the Church really knows.  All of our worship on all days of the year finds its origin, meaning and purpose in proclaiming the Paschal mystery: the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Christians are people who celebrate Easter – on Christmas, on All Saints’, on All Souls’, in life and in death, we celebrate Easter.  When the Church celebrates Baptism, Mass, Matrimony, Confirmation, Burial, Reconciliation or anything else, the Church is celebrating Easter.  In a real sense, it is all Easter, all of the time, even in Lent.

From the Rector: Holy Week Meals

Christians gather for many reasons, but most of all we gather as a community to eat and drink the Supper of the Lord.  That’s something that’s all too easy to lose sight of.  For a lot of reasons – not the least being that for a thousand years Christians in Western Europe celebrated Mass in a language almost no one spoke – the meal became hidden by rite.  The special ceremonies and observances, of the week that begins with the Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday and ends with the Great Vigil of Easter, at their best do not obscure who we are or what we are here to do. 

From the Rector: Sundays and Triduum

By the middle of the second century Easter was being celebrated with enough variation for the Christian community to have a fight over the Sunday it was to be celebrated.  Sunday seems to have emerged as the weekly day for Christian worship well before the end of the first century.  It is the day Christians celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ – the central confession of the Christian faith.  The first Christians were also Jewish and they brought to what came to be regarded by them and by others as their new faith a sense of a cycle of festivals through the year, mostly connected to the cycle of the earth’s seasons.  Christian festivals would be associated with the events of Jesus’ life, most especially, his death and resurrection.

From the Rector: Grace Period

As we go to press, the parish staff is pretty deeply into preparation for Holy Week.  Bulletins are in production.  An enormous amount of work is done beforehand, so that when Holy Week comes, we can move into the richness of the rites without being distracted by details.  Larger questions about the basic shape and approach to the week were settled here a long time ago.  Holy Week matters at Saint Mary’s.

From the Rector: Onan and Tamar

There are five women mentioned in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus (Matthew 1:1-16).  They are Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, and Mary.  I finally realized last week why I have a hard time remembering who Tamar is.  This Tamar is not Tamar the sister of Absalom, King David’s son, who was raped by another of David’s sons, Amnon.  This is Tamar, the widow, who conceives a child by playing the role of a harlot and having intercourse with her deceased husband’s father, Judah. 

From the Rector: Christian Sunday

Sunday worship has been normative for Christians since the time of the apostles.  Sunday worship sets apart Christianity and Christians at all times and in all places.  Almost always, this gathering for worship is the Eucharist, a meal.  Sunday is the day when Christians break Bread and share the Cup.

From the Rector: Gospels of Lent

When I was first ordained, I served at a parish where I was the most junior of five full-time priests.  All of the others were senior men.  One topic that often came up was their joy and delight in preaching through the then new three-year lectionary.  The old Prayer Book used just under 17% of the gospel texts in its annual cycle.  The new Prayer Book uses just over 71% of the gospel texts in its three-year cycle.  There is no season when the importance of the new lectionary is more apparent than Lent in the first year of the three-year Sunday Mass cycle.  We have five gospel “home runs”, or, if you will, five Super Bowl victories.

From the Rector: Lent Is Upon Us

Father Mead sent Father Smith and me an e-mail earlier this week to remind us that this Sunday’s lessons were those appointed for the Last Sunday after the Epiphany, not the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany.  The First Day of Lent this year is February 6.

From the Rector: Nine Years On

Sunday worshippers know that after years of preaching without a text, since December I have been writing out my sermons.  For a long time I’ve made sure to have a text or an outline at Christmas and Easter – these days are far too full to keep what I want to say in my head.  I was especially glad to have a text when I preached at Father John Beddingfield’s institution service earlier this month.  As I began my sermon I was very aware of the many threads of my own life represented in the room.  The text kept me from digression.

From the Rector: Holy Week 2008

Let’s start with something that’s wonderfully special: The Most Reverend Frank T. Griswold, XXV Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, will be celebrant and preacher for the liturgies of the Easter Triduum.  Plan now to be at Saint Mary’s for all of them.

From the Rector: Baptism of Christ

Some of you have heard me say in different contexts how much I enjoy watching very young children learning to walk at Saint Mary’s.  For those who may not know New York well, our church and many of its rooms are by far the largest space young children are usually in and free to walk around in.  I’m talking babies who are just beginning to walk.  When turned loose, they will walk as far as they can until their muscles tire.  Then they collapse with, almost always, a huge smile.  Their whole beings are experiencing something new and they love it.  They aren’t talking yet.  But they are growing and changing and anyone looking at them can see this.  It’s truly natural, truly our nature that God made.

From the Rector: Epiphany Complex

The Church remembers in its worship its earliest traditions.  Three ancient great feasts of the Church take precedence over all other commemorations.  They are, in order of precedence: Easter, Pentecost and Epiphany.  Of the three, the last is the richest in its layers of celebration.  Epiphany is, first, the “manifestation” of Christ in his birth to the wise men who journeyed, second, Jesus’ baptism and, third, the first miracle in John’s gospel at Cana in Galilee.  It is in a real sense the ancient feast of Christ’s kingship, the kingship of the Child.  The wise men asked, “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews?  For we have seen his star in the East, and have come to worship him.”  Epiphany is not about the wise men or the star.  It’s about Jesus’ revelation of himself to us in history and his revelation to us and through us today.

From the Rector: Twelve Days of Christmas

Saint Mary’s celebration of the Twelve Days began formally with music on Christmas Eve before the 5:00 PM Sung Mass of the Nativity.  Some preparations for Christmastide actually had begun in the spring.  That’s the very latest that certain decisions about music and the service schedule can be made here.  The activity intensifies in early November as music and server rehearsals and flower decorating and everything else are settled.  There is a flurry of emails among staff and volunteers about everything from deliveries to mailings.

From the Rector: Merry Christmas

Few things can take most of us more easily to a godly place in our heart and minds than Christmas can.  Most of the time, the joy and fun I have known in my life at Christmastide break through the nonsense of life and of the season pretty easily for me.  I don’t think this is really surprising.  Jesus Christ makes sense of the world around us.  I believe in him.  The celebration of Christmas is a natural for believers.  It is a day when we can focus on the joy of new birth, the birth promised to all of us.

From the Rector: Christmas at Saint Mary’s

Tuesday, December 25, is Christmas Day.  On Christmas Eve, there will be two Masses, a Sung Mass at 5:00 PM and Solemn Mass at 11:00 PM.  The parish choir will sing for both services and there will be special Christmas carols and music before both services.  On Christmas Day, there is one service, Solemn Mass at 11:00 AM.  Yours truly is celebrant and preacher for all of these Masses.  Each one is glorious and different in its own way.

From the Rector: Welcome, Father Smith!

The Reverend James Ross Smith has joined the parish clergy staff as one of our two curates.  He has served here for almost a decade as an “assisting priest” and as an “assistant.”  At Saint Mary’s there are often priests associated with the parish who are on the roster in some capacity because of their commitment to Saint Mary’s and because of their availability to help the regular parish clergy with the liturgical schedule.  But “rector” and “curate” are terms used at Saint Mary’s for the full-time parish clergy who are the pastors of the congregation.