FROM FATHER SMITH: THINGS TO COME

It is a rainy and muggy day here in New York as I sit down to work on this edition of the newsletter. Friends from England report that it has been chilly in London, but not here in New York, not yet. Still, there are signs of autumn in the air at Saint Mary’s, despite the late-summer heat. The Stewardship Committee is hard at work on the fall campaign. The Capital Campaign Committee has also been busy, preparing for a launch toward the end of the year.

FROM THE RECTOR: “CLARITY AND CONSENSUS”

The 2015 General Convention directed the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music “to prepare a plan for the comprehensive revision of the current Book of Common Prayer” and to present that plan to the 2018 General Convention. And if this were not enough for them to do, the convention also asked the Commission “to prepare a plan for the comprehensive revision of the Hymnal 1982.” So, I went to the web page of the Archives of the Episcopal Church to look at the records of the Reports to the General Conventions (the so-called “Blue Books”) and the Acts of General Convention.

FROM THE RECTOR: MORE FROM SAINT MARK

Until Father Pete Powell introduced me to Ulrich Luz’s commentary on Matthew, I never found the commentaries I owned very useful for preaching. Luz changed my mind about how I think about commentaries and how I read them. Now I have another one that I value highly, Joel Marcus’s two-volume commentary on Mark (Anchor Yale Bible series)

FROM THE RECTOR: OUR CAPITAL CAMPAIGN

On Easter Day 2010, when I came down from the rectory for Evensong, parishioner Hardy Geer met me in Saint Joseph’s Hall with what looked like small rocks. He told me that some small chunks of stone had fallen from the 46th Street façade of the church. Within a day or two a sidewalk shed was put up. Architects were hired. The lay leadership of the parish and I began the long journey to the capital campaign.

FROM THE RECTOR: PLANNING FOR CHALLENGE

Part of my daily reading since last April has been a paragraph or so from a book about Bowen Family Systems Theory. The first book was Your Mindful Compass (2013) by Andrea Maloney Schara. Right now, I’m just about finished reading Perspectives on Congregational Leadership: Applying Systems Thinking for Effective Leadership (2009) by the Reverend Israel Galindo. An American Baptist minister, Galindo is now an associate dean at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia,

FROM THE RECTOR: ASSUMPTION & TRANSITIONS

Our principal celebration for the Feast of the Assumption will be on its eve, Friday, August 14. There will be an organ recital at 5:30 PM by David Macfarlane. I will be celebrant and preacher for the Solemn Mass at 6:00 PM. We’ve been blessed with better weather lately, and I hope I won’t feel moved to begin my sermon on this evening, as I did one year, with the words, “Gentlemen may remove their jackets.” It’s a lovely Mass—and always a special one. This year it is also parishioner Mark Peterson’s last service as interim organist and music director. He’s done a great job for us, and there will be a special reception in his honor after the service.

FROM THE RECTOR: WHICH LECTIONARY? WHICH PRAYER BOOK?

Since we use the original 1979 Prayer Book lectionary, over the last two Sundays we heard Mark’s accounts, first, of the feeding of the five thousand, and then, of Jesus walking on the sea. In the new Prayer Book lectionary, adopted in 2006, which the great majority of parishes use, last Sunday they heard John’s account of the feeding of the five thousand and Jesus walking on the sea. For the next four weeks, all of us will be hearing almost all of the rest of the sixth chapter of John. This Sunday, August 2, we will all be hearing the same passages from Exodus and from John—though we will have different psalms and different passages from Ephesians. Sunday’s gospel begins with the crowds seeking Jesus. It ends with this verse:

FROM THE RECTOR: ANXIOUS CHRISTIANITY

On Wednesday, July 22, we celebrated the Feast of Saint Mary Magdalene. It’s one of two days in the church year when the Prayer Book requires us to proclaim, if there be a Eucharist, John’s account of the Risen Jesus speaking to Mary Magdalene—the other day is Tuesday in Easter Week. Note: neither of these days is a Sunday.

FROM THE RECTOR: BOUNDEN DUTY AND SERVICE

Last weekend I went looking for a half-remembered phrase. I found it—almost as I remembered it—in the second of two “Offices of Instruction” in the 1928 Prayer Book. The Offices were new to the 1928 book. Massey Shepherd (1913–1990) wrote, “The 1928 revision revamped the Catechism into the present form of a general service of worship, designed not only for those preparing for Confirmation, but also for all ‘the people’ ” (The Oxford American Prayer Book Commentary [1950], 283).

FROM THE RECTOR: MORE TO LEARN

In the first essay in a collection honoring Notre Dame liturgical scholar Maxwell Johnson called, “The Relationship between Historical Research and Modern Liturgical Practice,” his now-emeritus Notre Dame colleague Paul Bradshaw writes that, in light of more recent scholarship, some of the words and rituals that were introduced in the 1970s in the name of recovering ancient practice miss the mark. One example is what the Prayer Book calls, without further explanation, “The Peace.” Roman Catholics call it, “The Rite of Peace.”

FROM THE RECTOR: REFORMED WORSHIP

I’ve subscribed for many years to Worship, which describes itself as an “international ecumenical journal for the study of liturgy and liturgical renewal.” The May 2015 issue led with an article by Nicholas Wolterstorff, professor emeritus of philosophical theology at Yale: “Reformed Worship: What Has It Been and Should It Continue So?” It’s an article I think I will come back to again.

FROM THE RECTOR: ONE FOUNDATION

While in seminary I went every year to my sponsoring parish for Christmas Eve. My rector thought I and my family should get used to me not being home for Christmas from the get go. (He was fine with my flying home on Christmas Day after church in the morning.) One year as I came into Saint Helena’s Church, Burr Ridge, Illinois, a few days before Christmas, the rector was there on a step ladder adjusting a veil on a statue of Mary. He turned to me and said, “They know you mean business when you dress your statues.” It was a great line.

FROM THE RECTOR: SHORTCHANGING MARK

In 2006 the General Convention of the Episcopal Church adopted a new lectionary for the Prayer Book. After a permitted three-year transition period, we began using this new lectionary on the First Sunday of Advent 2010. But, in the summer of 2012 the General Convention gave permission for bishops to permit the use of the original lectionary of the 1979 Prayer Book. Bishop Mark Sisk acted quickly. With his permission we returned to the original on July 22, 2012. Because of this timing, we missed August of Year B with the new lectionary, and with it, an important example of how both the original 1979 lectionary and the 2006 Revised Common Lectionary shortchange the Gospel According to Mark. The original 1979 lectionary took four Sundays in August from Mark and gave them to John; the new lectionary starts its taking for John at the end of July and gets five Sundays. But I get ahead of myself.

FROM THE RECTOR: MORE THAN GOOD INTENTIONS

This morning I tried to get a visitor who was sitting in one of the front pews of the nave to join us in the chancel for Morning Prayer. She smiled and seemed to welcome the invitation, but she stayed put. I’m sure visitors sometimes stay in the pews because they don’t know what they might be in for if they come forward. And sometimes newcomers really just like the view from the nave pews, and I certainly respect that.

FROM THE RECTOR: NOVELTY IN RITUAL

By the beginning of the thirteenth century, looking at the bread at Mass had replaced eating the bread and drinking the wine at Mass as the focus of worship. The Eucharist was no longer understood or experienced as food that nurtured and sustained life in Christ. Rubrics begin to appear that required the celebrant to receive at Mass—because Masses were being said where not no one, not even the celebrant, ate and drank. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 required all Christians to receive Communion at Easter so that they would receive the Eucharist at least once a year. It took a long time for the ritual of the Eucharist to catch up with this understanding of the Eucharist.

FROM THE RECTOR: TRINITY SUNDAY 2015

The Middle Ages gave Western Christians two new major feasts, Trinity Sunday and Corpus Christi. Both reflect very much the spiritual life of their times; and both represent a significant departure from the liturgical tradition of the church. They are “feasts of ideas” (A. Adam, The Liturgical Year [1981], 167); neither is associated with an event in the life of Jesus Christ as recorded in one of the gospels.

FROM THE RECTOR: PENTECOST GOSPELS

What the Prayer Book now calls “The Day of Pentecost: Whitsunday” was originally a fifty-day season that began on the Sunday of the Resurrection. Our English word “Pentecost” comes from the Greek words for “fifty” or “fiftieth.” “Whitsunday” comes from “White Sunday”—a common term for this baptismal day in northern Europe where it’s much warmer at Pentecost than at Easter. (“White” referred to baptismal garments: think of the temperature in unheated buildings in late, not early, spring.)

FROM THE RECTOR: FINDING MORE EASTER

One of my favorite collects begins, “Almighty and everlasting God, increase in us the gifts of faith, hope, and charity” (The Book of Common Prayer [1979], 235). Since the deaths in 2013 of my mother and last Christmas of my father, I sense that I have experienced an increase in faith. The experience has not been any kind of reverie or dream, but a greater, almost physical, awareness of interior space, a very quiet place. No words, just awareness.

FROM THE RECTOR: EASTER IMAGES

At the end of April I was on vacation in Florence, Italy. I was last in Florence in 2008; but I had not been inside the Pazzi Chapel and the adjacent museum, which are part of the Santa Croce parish complex, since my first visit there in 1997. The Pazzi Chapel (with its echoing acoustics) is fun—though I think it would be very hard to read or sing a service in it. Of all the things I saw on this trip to Florence, Venice, and Rome, it was a painting in Santa Croce’s museum that moved me most: the Descent of Christ to Limbo, signed and dated 1552, by Agnolo di Cosimo (1503–1572), known as Il Bronzino, or Agnolo Bronzino.

FROM FATHER PACE: MAY CHRIST FIND THIS CANDLE EVER BURNING

Something wonderful happens every day of the week at Saint Mary the Virgin during the Great Fifty Days of Easter. And what happens is very rare indeed. Here, in the middle of Times Square, beside the high altar, a Paschal candle burns brightly in its stand for all the faithful to see—every day! The Paschal candle is a symbol of the paradigmatic Easter Proclamation that Christ has risen from the grave and that the promise of eternal life has come forth from the empty tomb. The tradition at Saint Mary’s is as clear and simple as it is profound: from the time when the doors are opened in the morning until they are shut at night, the Paschal candle remains lit, proclaiming Christ’s victory over the darkness of sin and death.