FROM THE RECTOR: MYSTERY OF GOOD

Some years ago I realized I would always be learning something about the Bible that I didn’t know before. This kind of discovery can happen while I am reading an academic commentary. More often it happens when I am listening to lessons being read at Morning or Evening Prayer. Just this morning I heard again the story of King David arranging the murder of Uriah the Hittite (2 Samuel 11:1-27). I heard something new. I heard in a new way how David plotted to do evil, to become a murderer.

FROM THE RECTOR: AWAY FROM HOME

When I was in high school I was vaguely aware of bluegrass music. Sometime while I was in college I heard about a band from the Washington, D.C., area called The Seldom Scene. Their first album, Act 1, came out in 1972. The group stayed close to home and I heard them play a couple of times in Alexandria—once with my dad and stepmother who turned out also to be fans.

FROM THE RECTOR: SIGNS OF COMMITMENT

There was an uproar when, in the run up to the present Prayer Book, the Standing Liturgical Commission published Prayer Book Studies 18: On Baptism and Confirmation (1970). It proposed that the Episcopal Church return to a “unified” rite of Christian initiation. The rite would encompass all of the following as normative: a public commitment of faith, washing with water in the names of the Trinity, the laying on of hands, anointing with chrism and the reception of Communion. The bishop would “normally” be the “chief minister” of the service, but in his absence a priest could officiate and say and do all that a bishop would do.

FROM THE RECTOR: SARA LOUIE COOKE, 1841-1892

Behind the open double doors in the center of the narthex there are two memorial plaques commissioned by the board of trustees in 1897. The first plaque to be approved was not the memorial to William Scott, who died in 1889, but the one for Sara Louie Cooke, who died on July 21, 1892. Scott was the first president of the board of trustees of this parish and a generous benefactor in his lifetime—he was also the first rector’s father-in-law. But it was Sara Louie Cooke’s bequest that built the second and present church. This Sunday is the one hundred twenty-first anniversary of her death.

FROM THE RECTOR: NEW HEARING

I can’t remember when I first heard of Dom Gregory Dix’s book The Shape of the Liturgy (1945), but I think I knew about it before I went to seminary. I do remember quite well the impression words from this book made on me the day Louis Weil read to my class from Dix’s concluding reflections on the Eucharist—in particular, these words: “He told His friends to do this henceforward with the new meaning ‘for the anamnesis’ of Him, and they have done it always since. Was ever another command so obeyed?” (744).

FROM THE RECTOR: HOW WE SEE

Last week I went to Larchmont to have lunch with Tom Nicoll, rector of Saint John’s Church. He, Doug Fisher—now bishop of Western Massachusetts, formerly rector of Grace Church, Millbrook, and I were the three priests from our diocese attending a 2007 session of a conference sponsored by the Church Pension Fund. Until Doug’s election as bishop last June, the three of us got together for lunch three times a year—once in Larchmont, once in Millbrook and once here in the city. It turned out to be one of our responses to the “Credo Conference.” Tom and I have continued.

FROM THE RECTOR: SUMMER BEGINS

It certainly feels like summer now in New York City. The heat and humidity have arrived and will be with us most days until October. There are many visitors in Times Square—and everywhere really. There’s a lot of construction near the church on both 46th and 47th Streets. The city feels alive right now, not yet tired, lazy from the summer weather.

FROM THE RECTOR: JOHN, PETER AND PAUL

Before the middle of the fourth century, the church in Rome was celebrating the birth of John the Baptist and the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul at the end of June. We know this because a calendar exists for the year 354 for the church in that city (Bradshaw and Johnson, Origins of Feasts [2011] 193-5).

FROM FATHER SMITH: SUMMER SOLSTICE

I moved to Saint Mary’s in January 2007. A few months later I was walking down Sixth Avenue one evening, just before sunset. The sky was very clear. It was really lovely out. I reached 42nd Street and stood at the corner, waiting for the light to change. I happened to glance west, looking towards the Hudson River. I was stunned by what I saw: the sun, a huge red globe, was hanging there just above the horizon, perfectly centered and framed by the skyscrapers lining the avenue, and the sunset’s colors were reflected in the windows of the buildings up and down the avenue.

FROM THE RECTOR: WHAT WAS I THINKING

Thirty years ago I was preparing to be ordained deacon on Saturday, June 11, at the Cathedral of Saint James, Chicago. I had graduated from Nashotah House Seminary a few weeks before. I was getting ready to move to Dallas to begin work at the Church of the Incarnation on Monday, June 27. Over the past few days I’ve been trying to recollect what I was thinking in those days about what my life would be like—and I’ve been chatting about this with Father Jay Smith who was ordained deacon at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine on June 10, 1989

FROM THE RECTOR: CORPUS CHRISTI HISTORY

Nathan Mitchell is a liturgical theologian, now emeritus, at the University of Notre Dame. His book Cult and Controversy: The Worship of the Eucharist Outside Mass (1982) remains the standard work on the subject of Eucharistic adoration apart from Mass.

FROM FATHER SMITH: THE SPIRIT HELPS US IN OUR WEAKNESS

The Wednesday Night Bible Study Class met for the last time two weeks ago and has now begun its summer break. Our studies will resume in October. Last night, to mark the occasion, the members of the class, Mother Mary Julia Jett, and I headed over to a local Thai restaurant. We spoke of many things, as Saint Marians tend to do; and we actually discussed Scripture over our green curry and Pad Thai.

FROM THE RECTOR: NEW SOUNDS

The new sound system was installed in the church this past week. As I write on Friday morning, May 17, it’s looking and sounding really good. It is not inappropriate that the new system is ready for this Sunday, the Day of Pentecost, on which we recall, among other things, the gift of speaking in tongues recounted in the New Testament. The new system cost $21,618 and has been paid for by the special gifts of the parish community at Easter. Every worshiper in this church will be thankful for these gifts for years to come.

FROM THE RECTOR: ALREADY HERE

Last Sunday, as I was working on my sermon, I was surprised to discover that the appointed gospel now heard on the Sixth Sunday of Easter, John 14:23-29 (“If anyone loves me, he or she will keep my commandments . . . ”) used to be part of the gospel passage Episcopalians, Lutherans, and Roman Catholics all read on Pentecost before the revisions of the 1970s. The historic reading for Pentecost, it turns out, is not the one most of us are used to: John’s account of Jesus’ appearance to his disciples on the evening of Easter Day and the gift of the Holy Spirit to them to forgive sins (John 20:19-23).

FROM THE RECTOR: GOING HOME

As I wrote in the newsletter last week, my mother, Barbara Knoeller, died on Wednesday, April 24, after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. Her funeral was held at her parish church in St. Mary’s City, Maryland, on Saturday, April 27. Trinity Church sits on a cliff above St. Mary’s River, which flows into the Potomac just above that river’s entrance into the Chesapeake Bay. St. Mary’s City was the first town in colonial Maryland. The parish dates from 1638. There is no town there now, just Saint Mary’s College and the church.

FROM THE RECTOR: EASTER PASSAGE

My mother, Barbara Knoeller, died yesterday, Wednesday, April 24, at 5:25 AM at the nursing home in Fairfax County, Virginia, where she had lived for the last five years. She will be buried on Saturday, April 27, at her parish, Trinity Church, Saint Mary’s City, Maryland.

FROM THE RECTOR: ALWAYS EASTER

The church has been reading through the first six chapters of Daniel at Morning Prayer for the last two weeks. (Good, recent and short introductions to the content and textual issues of this and the other books of the Bible can be found in The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version With The Apocrypha [2010]). We will finish up these readings tomorrow.

FROM THE RECTOR: EASTER NOW

When I read Patrick Regan’s remark that none of the collects for what we now call the Third through the Seventh Sundays of Easter in the pre-Vatican II Roman Rite “use the word ‘paschal’ or contain or refer to any aspect of the paschal mystery” (Advent to Pentecost [2012] 258), I went right for my copy of the 1928 Episcopal Church Prayer Book. It turns out that what was true for the old Roman Rite was also true for the old Prayer Book rite. One can say that in a real sense, apart from Easter Day and“The First Sunday after Easter,” there really was no Eastertide in the old rites in the sense of prayers and lessons pointing to the death and resurrection of Jesus. There were titles, to be sure; and, surprisingly, all of the Fridays of Eastertide were days of abstinence.

FROM THE RECTOR: EASTER FORWARD

Joseph Fitzmyer in his commentary on Luke points to a major difference between the accounts in the four gospels of Jesus’ execution and those of Jesus’ resurrection. The former are far longer and more detailed, and there is far more agreement among them about Jesus’ arrest, trial and crucifixion. He concludes, “The need for a continuous story of the appearances of the risen Christ neither emerged nor could have been seen as crucial”

FROM THE RECTOR: PASCHAL FEAST

Before I went to seminary, I did not pay much attention to what has become one of my favorite texts during the Paschal Triduum, the first anthem at the devotions before the cross on Good Friday. It’s an antiphon with verses from Psalm 67. The verses begin, “May God be merciful to us and bless us, show us the light of his countenance and come to us.”