From the Rector: Getting Up For Us

The other day I was in the church listening to organ music while standing across from the third station of the cross which commemorates Jesus falling for the first time.  For whatever reason, I found myself thinking not about Jesus falling but about Jesus getting up for us.  It mattered that he got up and kept going.  It matters too that you and I get up and get going for others and for Jesus.

From Father Mead: Corpus Christi

The church owes its celebration of Corpus Christi (officially, the Feast of the Most Holy Body of Christ) primarily to the devotional practices of the laity in the midst of the growing theological emphasis in the West on the real presence in the Eucharist during the thirteenth century.  When the Church began to stress the whole and complete real presence of Jesus in the Bread and Wine of the Eucharist, the people reacted by demanding that they be able to see our Lord.  To this we probably owe the elevations during the Mass and the practice of Eucharistic Exposition (displaying the Sacrament for the people).

From the Rector: Trinity at Saint Mary’s

It is to Pope John XXII, a bishop of “Rome” from 1316 until 1334, who never made it to Rome – he was the second pope in Avignon – that we really owe credit for two of the three “theme” feasts that survive across the wider Church, Trinity Sunday and the Feast of the Most Holy Body of Christ, commonly called “Corpus Christi.”  In John XXII’s day, both celebrations had been around for a while, a Mass of the Holy Trinity since the eighth century, Corpus Christi since the thirteenth.  This pope imposed both celebrations on the entire Western Church.

From the Rector: Pentecost & the Unity of Eastertide

When I begin to reflect on or write about the calendar of the Christian Church, it is important for me to remember that before there was an Easter, a Christmas, a Pentecost or anything else, there was Sunday.  Sunday is the original, weekly celebration of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  It is easy to lose sight of the meaning and importance of Sunday for lots of reasons.  But without knowing Sunday as the weekly celebration of Christ’s dying and rising, Christian practice and faith can be overwhelmed by secondary things – the outward signs of ashes and palms come to mind.

From the Rector: Requirements

When I served in Louisiana I knew a retired priest who had come over to the United States years before from the Church of Ireland.  I once interviewed for a position he had held.  He was remembered in that small Louisiana town for many good things, but he was also remembered because he had refused to give out ashes on Ash Wednesday.  Matthew’s gospel says very plainly that we are not to do this, and it was done in his day in the Church of Ireland.  I also remember a priest in Louisiana originally from the evangelical wing of the Church of England.  He simply would not pray for the dead –

From the Rector: Burning the Candle

We manage to use up almost all of our candles one way or another here at Saint Mary’s.  But one candle that has gotten very little use in recent years is the Paschal Candle.  The one we buy is 55 inches tall.  There’s always a lot left over, but not this year.  The candle has been burning, whenever the church has been open, since it was first lit at the beginning of the Great Vigil of Easter.  It will make it through Evensong on Pentecost, the last service of the Easter Season.  There won’t be much left, and that is fine with me.

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.