FROM THE RECTOR: FRESH LOOKS

This spring and summer I’ve been working with two small leadership groups in the parish that I haven’t written much about, a Capital Campaign Committee and a Music Search Committee. Both committees have started their work, but there’s not a lot to tell yet. The members of the Capital Campaign Committee are MaryJane Boland, Steven Heffner, Clark Mitchell and Mark Risinger. The members of the Music Search Committee are Grace Bruni, James Dennis, Robin Landis, Mark Risinger and Geoffrey Williams. (Mark, who serves on both committees, is vice president of the board of trustees.)

FROM THE RECTOR: PATH OF LIFE

Many of the parish community remember the Reverend John Beddingfield who served here as curate before accepting a call to be rector of All Souls’ Memorial Church, Washington, D.C. For All Souls’ weekly announcements for June 29, 2014, he wrote a short and powerful essay, “Why Does Church Matter?” These words from the essay have continued to turn over in my mind:

FROM THE RECTOR: GOD AND COUNTRY

The Prayer Book permits Independence Day to be celebrated on Sunday. That’s not our tradition, but I can certainly understand that there could be times when it would be appropriate here for us to celebrate Independence Day on a Sunday and that there are places where it is always appropriate. That said, on the Sunday nearest Independence Day we have sung two hymns every year since I arrived, “Lift every voice and sing” at the preparation and “God of our fathers” as the final hymn. These hymns help us, not only to praise God, but to call to mind, to borrow a phrase, “our American journey."     

FROM THE RECTOR: PETER AND PAUL

In the older Prayer Book tradition there were many fewer holy days. If a holy day fell on a Sunday, during most of the year it was celebrated in some way on a Sunday. A generation ago, for example, Saint Michael and All Angels—especially with its great hymns—was a popular celebration throughout the Episcopal Church in the years it fell on a Sunday.

FROM THE RECTOR: WITNESS OF SOUND

Extraordinary devotion to the Eucharist arose in the Western Church in the early Middle Ages, a devotion completely unknown to the church of earlier centuries—or to the Christian east even to today. During the Middle Ages the Eucharist continued to be celebrated in Latin, a language understood only by an elite few. This Christian community lost its experience of the Eucharist as spiritual food. Here’s an excerpt from the “confession” which the theologian Berengarius of Tours was forced to make in Rome in 1059:

FROM THE RECTOR: POWER OF IDEAS

Trinity Sunday and Corpus Christi are the earliest of what Adolf Adams (1912-2005) called the “idea feasts” in his book The Liturgical Year (1981). Both were introduced to the “universal” calendar of the Western Church by bishops of Rome in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. For several hundred years before, their predecessors had resisted the introduction of what had been local commemorations in Spain and France (Trinity Sunday) and in Liège (Corpus Christi). They resisted because the church’s liturgy had always been rooted in the actual life and teachings of Christ. The church was already proclaiming the Trinity at every Mass, was already celebrating the Body and Blood of Christ at every Mass.

FROM THE RECTOR: DAYS OF PENTECOST

Here’s a very brief, but I hope faithful, summary of some things Paul Bradshaw and Maxwell Johnson tell us about Easter and Pentecost in their book The Origins of Feasts, Fasts and Seasons in Early Christianity (2011), especially chapters five through eight:

FROM FATHER SMITH: A SABBATICAL

I write this late on Thursday evening, the sounds, sights, and scents of this evening’s Solemn Mass still very clear in my mind. As I walk to the laundry room on the fourth floor of the Parish House, I can smell the incense lingering in the building. This is an odd benefit of living here at Saint Mary’s: sacred things often gently insinuate their way into everyday things, blurring the distinction. The building is quiet now, the streets less so. A jackhammer vibrates relentlessly nearby. The crews in the garbage trucks have begun to make their nightly rounds. The haulers whistle sharply to the drivers, signaling to them to move on to the next stop. Those guys work hard. Whistles are more efficient than words. This is my neighborhood. These are the sights and the sounds and the smells.

FROM THE RECTOR: ASCENSION 2014

Bishop Allen Shin’s ordination last Saturday at the cathedral made me very aware of how many lives are touched over time by the ongoing life of our parish community. We were well represented by members of the congregation and our clergy. I suspect that there were others there who have been connected with Saint Mary’s that I do not know. It was a day to be happy, proud and, above all else, to be thankful for God’s presence and work in the life of Allen Shin. The new bishop will be with us as celebrant and preacher for the Solemn Mass on Ascension Day, Thursday, May 29, at 6:00 PM. I’m sure there will be a large congregation—so come early for the organ recital at 5:30 PM.

FROM THE RECTOR: ANGLICAN EASTER

Just after writing about the fifty-day length of the Easter Season of the first centuries for last week’s Angelus, I again picked up my copy of liturgist Patrick Regan’s book Advent to Pentecost (2012) to read a bit more on the subject. The first thing I came across was his statement that, when there was a fifty-day celebration, it was not known as the “Easter Season.” The whole period was known as “Pentecost.”

FROM THE RECTOR: RENEWING EASTER

That the Risen Jesus did not appear in the gospels for the Easter Vigil or Easter Day until the reforms of the 1970s continues to surprise me. Quite honestly, it leaves me speechless. How was this possible? How has this been shaping Christian life for 1400 or more years in the Western church? It’s worth noting that the word “alleluia” does not appear in its Latin or Hebrew form in our Prayer Books before 1979. Just because the Risen Jesus is now with us, a lot of things have not changed. Roman Catholics still never hear from him on Easter morning. It will be a long time before Western Christians, Protestant or Roman Catholic, experience their faith as being about not just a crucified Jesus, but a crucified and Risen Lord.

FROM THE RECTOR: EASTERTIDE CHANGE

On May 2, 1965 the new rector of Saint Mary’s, the Reverend Donald Garfield, decided that communion would be offered to congregation at the 11:00 AM Sunday Solemn Mass. In 1965 this was “Good Shepherd Sunday,” the Eastertide Sunday when the gospel was John 10:11-16. This is from the note he wrote in the bulletin:

FROM THE RECTOR: EASTER LEARNING

As I worked on my sermons for the Easter Vigil and Easter Day last week I discovered that until the lectionary reforms of the 1970s the gospel lessons for the Sunday of the Resurrection (Vigil—Matthew 28:1-7; Sunday—John 20:1-10; Mark 16:1-8) never included the appearances of the Risen Jesus. There was only an empty tomb, confusion and sadness. It sounds unbelievable, but it’s true.

FROM THE RECTOR: JOYFUL TRIDUUM

Father Jay Smith and I went out into Times Square about twenty minutes before 11:00 AM on Palm Sunday. There’s construction everywhere, lots of equipment in the roads. The procession made it into and around the square thanks especially to a few of our fearless ushers. The more limited space wasn’t a problem, perhaps it even helped. I can’t remember a more joyful Palm Sunday.

FROM THE RECTOR: HOLY WEEK 2014

Holy Week begins at Saint Mary’s on Saturday evening, April 12, with the Sunday Vigil Mass at 5:00 PM. On Sunday morning, there are two Eucharists: Liturgy of the Palms & Sung Mass at 9:00 AM and Liturgy of the Palms, Procession through Times Square & Solemn Mass at 11:00 AM. The Communications Office of the Episcopal Church will be filming the 11:00 AM Liturgy of the Palms & Procession through Times Square—it should be online sometime on Palm Sunday afternoon.

FROM THE RECTOR: APPROACHING HOLY WEEK

While working on the sermon for last Sunday I realized that one of my favorite prayers is not as true to scripture as it probably should be. It’s the prayer we use at Mass at the conclusion of the prayers of the people when there is no confession of sin (during Eastertide and on principal and major feasts). It’s so familiar that I’ve never really given it a second thought—I’ve just enjoyed it. This is the prayer:

FROM FATHER PACE: STATIONS

Last week as a member of the congregation I attended Stations of the Cross, which is offered here during Lent on Friday evenings at 6:30 PM. I have been present at many Stations of the Cross services during Lent over the years both as officiant and as observer; but, for several reasons that I will explain below, the service really moved me on this particular evening.

FROM THE RECTOR: ENCOUNTERING JESUS

When Jesus read from Isaiah in the synagogue at Nazareth (Luke 4:16-21), he was the only person in the room who had the text in front of him. Until the industrialization of printing, “listening” remained a normative experience across many settings of life. It’s not surprising that the act of listening is significant in all of the gospels. Two examples: Jesus concludes the Parable of the Sower (Mark 4:1-9; Matthew 13:1-23; Luke 8:4-15) with the words, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear” and in John Jesus says, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:27).

FROM FATHER SMITH: “A BROKEN AND CONTRITE SPIRIT”

Sydney Harris (1917-1986) was a journalist and syndicated columnist whose work, at one point, appeared in more than 200 daily newspapers. In his column, “Strictly Personal,” and in a recurring feature entitled, “Things I Learned En Route to Looking Up Other Things,” he shared with his readers various discoveries, insights, observations, and bits of wisdom. He was particularly good at constructing the short, terse, well-balanced sentence that said a great deal in very few words (not a bad strategy when your typical reader is reading your column while eating her breakfast cereal). One of Harris’s aphorisms, often quoted, goes like this: “Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to remain the same but get better.”

FROM THE RECTOR: REASSESSING LENT

Nicholas Russo is a liturgical scholar and an assistant undergraduate dean at Notre Dame. While looking online to see if his dissertation, “The Origins of Lent” (Notre Dame, 2009), had been published—it has not, I discovered a short essay he wrote last year for the Center for Christian Ethics at Baylor University. It’s called, “The Early History of Lent.” Russo begins with what we thought we knew about Lent just a few decades ago and continues with what we know about the origins of Lent today. I quote from the last paragraph: