This week, we welcome the Right Reverend Alan Gates, our Diocesan Bishop, for a visit to St. John’s, which will be his final formal visit here before his retirement next fall. This morning, our diocesan Bishop Nominating Committee published a new diocesan profile, the result of several months’ work reflecting on the life of our diocese and gathering stories and input from people all over the area. Wednesday, we celebrated the feast day of arguably the most famous Christian bishop in history, St. Nicholas of Myra—better known to his modern disciples as Santa Claus.

I mean: Come on! Same guy.

In the spirit of seasonal fun, and as a break from our exceptionally-apocalyptic Advent lectionary readings, I thought I’d share my three favorite stories about Saint Nicholas of Myra (c. 270–343), in their family-friendliest versions.

1. Saint Nicholas, like many early Christian leaders, was born into an aristocratic family, but gave much of his wealth away. One poor family included three teenaged daughters whose father could not afford a dowry, limiting their prospects for marriage.* Wanting to help the family without dishonoring them, Nicholas secretly dropped three bags of coins into their home, one for each girl’s dowry. One version of the story says that he dropped the bags of coins through the window; another says that Saint Nick dropped the gold even more circuitously through the chimney, whence it fell into the stockings they had left drying by the fire. (Sound familiar?)
2. In another story, Nicholas visits a region undergoing a great famine. He happens to pass by a butcher’s shop when he senses something strange going on. Nicholas makes the sign of the cross over a large barrel, upon which three small children emerge. The children had been killed and pickled by the butcher, who had planned to sell them to the hungry townspeople as ham. Luckily, Nicholas’s prayer was sufficient to achieve their resurrection. This is an extraordinary tale, but one that was widely believed and often depicted in medieval art—with the result that Saint Nicholas became commonly associated with children, of whom he is a patron saint!
3. Saint Nicholas’s Day (December 6) became the day on which some communities elected a “boy bishop” for the year, a child chosen to exercise episcopal authority until Holy Innocents’ Day (December 28). In a tradition of tremendous theological depth** and great silliness, the boy bishop donned the (adult) bishop’s mitre and crozier, and he and a coterie of boy priests ran the cathedral for the month, leading all worship except the Mass.

One wonders whether our Bishop’s appearance just after Saint Nicholas’s Day ought to evoke any of these associations. I don’t believe we’re missing any possibly-pickled parishioners,*** and I haven’t spotted any bags of gold—But should our acolytes attempt a coup in the chancel this Sunday, then… Well. They may well be within their rights.

* One can fill in the details about the likely future employment of three poor young women who could not be married.
** “he hath put down the mighty from their seat / and hath exalted the humble and meek”
*** although at home, we’ve just finished reading The Big Friendly Giant…

Election season is here! And I’m not talking about the next President. I’m talking about the election for our next Bishop.

People often ask me what makes the Episcopal Church or the Anglican tradition different from the Roman Catholic Church. If you’re reading this email, you probably know that there are many different ways to answer that question. But ultimately, the answer is “polity.”

Not “politics,” as in how our churches’ values correspond to different political parties. But “polity”: how we organize ourselves as a church body, and how we make decisions about our lives together as Christians. Since the time of the Catholic Reformation (or “Counter-Reformation”), the Catholic Church’s polity has been basically top-down and centralized: authority flows from the Pope down through Archbishops and national councils of bishops, down to diocesan bishop and on to parishes.

But for the whole history of the Episcopal Church, since its inception after the American Revolution, our polity has worked in the other direction, from the bottom up. Our church polity reflects the representative ideals of our Republic. So the laypeople of our parishes elect Vestries that meet monthly to govern our local churches, and our churches elect delegates to a Diocesan Convention that meets yearly to govern life in our Diocese, and our dioceses elect delegates to a triennial General Convention that makes binding decisions for our whole Episcopal Church. (There is, for better or for worse, no pan-Anglican body that can make decisions that are binding on, say, both the Episcopal Church and the Church of England.)

This description may already have put you to sleep, but it’s really important. In fact, this difference in polity has directly enabled the more visible or obvious differences between our churches. How is it that Episcopal priests can marry, or that women can be ordained as bishops and priests, or that our church affirms the identities, lives, marriages, and transitions of LGBT+ people? Because we decided to! Churches can argue back and forth about the theology underpinning any of these things, but what gave us the freedom to embrace each one of them was the fact that we organize our church’s life as a representative democracy, and that we—the ordinary lay and ordained people of this Church—decided that they are right.

The same goes when a Bishop retires.

Our current bishop diocesan, the Rt. Rev. Alan Gates, plans to retire at the end of 2024. His successor as our spiritual leader will not be appointed from above or selected by a secret committee. His successor will be elected by the people of God, guided (we pray) by the Holy Spirit of God.

This is literally true: at our Annual Meeting this winter we’ll be electing lay representatives to vote to elect our next Bishop in May. And it’s also true in a broader sense than just that technical one. Our diocesan search process has begun, and the Nominating Committee wants to hear your voice! As they begin developing a profile for the search, they are inviting input from people around our Diocese via a series of listening sessions, to which you are all invited.

Each session is located in a different reason, and some are especially intended to hear from people representing different demographics. Here are a few of the sessions that might be convenient for members of our parish:

I hope that you’ll have the opportunity to attend one of these, in person or by Zoom, to share your hopes and dreams for the future of our church, and to connect with Episcopalians from around Massachusetts. It is an incredible gift to have this kind of say in the way our leaders are chosen; I hope you are able to be a part of that process.

As we continue using Eucharistic Prayer 1 from Enriching Our Worship 1, I thought I’d continue reflecting on pieces of that Eucharistic Prayer. Every Eucharistic Prayer is a “thanksgiving” that re-tells the story of salvation. After blessing God for creation, the prayer takes us into the spiritual betrayal of the Garden of Eden:

But we failed to honor your image
in one another and in ourselves;
we would not see your goodness in the world around us;
and so we violated your creation,
abused one another,
and rejected your love.

This is as good a definition as any other of “sin.” God created us human beings in God’s own image, as bearers of the divine characteristics of compassion, creativity, and love. But we have, in oh so many ways, failed to honor that image, in ourselves and in one another. This is what “sin” is. Sin is not, as the grocery-store checkout magazines would have you believe, a matter of pleasure; there’s no such thing as a “sinfully-good chocolate cake.” Nor is sin a matter of moral rules and regulations, of things A, B, and C that you must do, and things X, Y, and Z that you must not do. “Sin” is an unfortunate reality of the human condition, an affliction and a distortion in which we do not treat ourselves, or one another, or creation, or even God the way they ought to be treated. I love Billy Joel as much as the next guy, but “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints” just makes no sense, at least from a Protestant point of view: every one of us is, as Martin Luther used to say, simul iustus et peccator; simultaneously righteous and a sinner. Especially in a world in which our future is threatened by climate change and our clothes are made in sweatshops, all of us are inextricably caught up in systems of human invention that violate God’s creation and abuse one another… and that’s not to mention our dozens of daily, petty sins, our gossip and resentment, our rudeness and self-centeredness and all the rest. (You can’t tell me that these aren’t real; I drive around Boston, too.)

And yet God continues, always, to love us and guide us. As the prayer continues:

Yet you never ceased to care for us,
and prepared the way of salvation for all people.

In it all and through it all, God continues to care for us, to love us, and to lead us toward a different reality. God plants the seeds of a kingdom among us that’s different from the kingdoms of the world, and waits for it to grow. God gives us the good news that there is another way, and invites us to follow it. God forgives us all our sins, small and large, and draws us into wholeness of life.

The story of the prayer doesn’t end here, with this frank admission of our failings. The Christian story should never end here, with judgment or condemnation. And the way we talk to and talk about one another should never end there either. We are not simple creatures. We are always mixed. We are, each one of us, both laughing sinners and crying saints; full of good intentions and inevitable failings, and always, always loved by God.

We rotate some of the prayers in our liturgy seasonally, using certain forms for a time, then switching to another. This summer we’ll be using some of the prayers provided by the book Enriching Our Worship 1, which—although it was published nearly a quarter century ago—is still not as familiar as our slightly-older Book of Common Prayer.

I thought I’d spend a few weeks this spring reflecting on some of the new prayers, in the hopes that these reflections might, well, enrich your worship when you hear them on a Sunday morning.

The Eucharistic Prayer we’ll be using begins as they all do, with the opening dialogue (The Lord be with you. And also with you. Lift up your hearts… and so on), a preface, and the Sanctus (“Holy, holy, holy Lord…”)

Then it continues, like all Eucharistic prayers do, by telling the story of salvation, of our creation, fall, and redemption.

I’m struck by that first paragraph, by the words about our creation:

Blessed are you, gracious God,
creator of the universe and giver of life.
You formed us in your own image
and called us to dwell in your infinite love.
You gave the world into our care
that we might be your faithful stewards
and show forth your bountiful grace.

The prayer begins as traditional Jewish blessings and some early Christians prayers begin: with some variation on the phrase “Blessed are you, O God, creator of the universe.” The Eucharistic Prayer is, more than anything else, a prayer of thanksgiving. (That’s what Eucharistia means in Greek, “Thanksgiving,” and indeed if you travel to Greece today and order a sandwich, you can tell the cashier Efcharisto when they give you your change. “Thank you,” the same word in modern pronunciation.) And what we being by thanking God for is simply being God: “You are blessed, O God, creator of the universe,” could be an entire prayer.

But out of God’s goodness and grace flows something else. God, of God’s goodness, chooses to give us life. It’s in God’s very nature to share that life with us. So God “forms us” in God’s own image, giving us life. You don’t have to adopt some kind of creationist view to think that this is true; it’s all perfectly compatible with evolutionary science. To say that God forms us in God’s image is not about biology: it’s to say that on the moral and spiritual plane, we are creatures built to show forth the nature of the God who is Love, to be visible images of God’s own self-giving love.

Like a potter, God is shaping and forming us for a purpose. And like lumps of clay, we can sometimes be hard to work with. God has a very clear vision for the things we are becoming, but God works with and through the material of our lives to do it.

So what’s that shape?

Just as God forms us into new shapes, I sometimes like to form words into new shapes; so here’s a paraphrase, reorganized a bit:

God formed us and called us
            to dwell in God’s infinite love.
God gave the world into our care, that we might
            be God’s faithful stewards
            and show forth God’s bountiful grace.

God does three things, and we do three things. God forms us, calls us, and gives us the world. We dwell in God’s love, practice faithful stewards, and show forth God’s grace. God’s action and our response are in a continuous interaction, a constant shaping and reshaping like a bowl-to-be on the potter’s wheel, always beginning with what God does for us.

God formed us in the shape of love; may we dwell in that love.

God gave the world into our care; may we care for the world in love, treating it as stewards and not owners, as people who have the responsibility to tend to God’s garden but not the right to destroy it.

God calls each one of us by name, speaking to us in love; may we share that love with the world, showing forth the signs and telling the stories of God’s grace in our lives.

And what God has done for “us” as a human species, God does for each one of us. So may each one of you reading this know that you are the beloved child of God, being gently and carefully formed, day by day, into a vessel of God’s love for the world; into the very image of God.

        …he ascended into heaven
            and is seated at the right hand of the Father…

The Feast of the Ascension, which we celebrate today, is one of the stranger days in the church calendar. The Ascension seems simultaneously to make no sense and to capture a fundamental truth. It’s a day of paradox and mystery, a day about an event in the past that’s really about our lives in the present.

The Acts of the Apostles tell us that Jesus remained with the disciples for forty days after his Resurrection, appearing to them and teaching them even more about the kingdom of God. (Acts 1:3) And then, on the fortieth day, “as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.” (Acts 1:9) The same Jesus of Nazareth who had descended from heaven and who had risen from the dead now rises again, lifting off from the face of the earth to return into heaven.

There’s just one problem with this picture. (Not the Rembrandt, but the idea.) Heaven isn’t “up,” at least not in any sense we can tell. It may’ve made sense to think so, thousands of years ago, but we’ve built telescopes and spaceships, put astronauts on the moon. As the classic Space-Age Soviet propaganda poster put, cosmonauts have scoured the heavens, and look—“No God!” To say that Jesus “ascended” into heaven and “is seated at the right hand of the Father” seems to make a spatial claim that simply doesn’t fit with what we know of physics, at least as it exists in three-dimensional space.

And yet at the same time, the Ascension captures a simple, daily truth. Christians have always expressed a belief in the Resurrection, in the idea that Jesus rose from the dead. And it’s obvious enough that he’s no longer walking around on the Earth. And yet—while it’s not so common in our tradition as in others to talk about our faith in terms of a personal relationship with Jesus—it’s equally true that many people, from the earliest disciples to the most modern people of faith, seem to experience his presence in their lives. The Ascension is one way of expressing that truth: Jesus is no longer with us, and yet he is.

And in fact, the same modern physics that make this make no sense, start to make sense of it, too. Heaven can’t be “up,” in the sense that it’s some point in the universe found by going in one direction or another from our planet’s molten core. If heaven is a place at all, if it’s a reality can be found somewhere, it must be something else—something like another dimension, another reality that can be moved into and out of, another world that overlaps with and interpenetrates our own.

And in fact, that’s quite good news. Because if heaven and earth are two separate things, one up, and one down, and Jesus has gone away, then Jesus is gone. But if heaven is another dimension that exists across our three, then Jesus is still here. He is with us. He can still teach us, and guide us, and comfort us. And that heavenly reality in which he lives is not a realm completely different from our own. It’s one that we can see, sometimes, hidden within our own. And at the Ascension, Jesus didn’t leave us to go somewhere far away. He left off existing in a particular point in space, so that he could return to being everywhere at once; as one of the collects for the day says, he “ascended far above all heavens that he might fill all things.” He leaves the realm of ordinary space and time, becoming timeless and universal; giving each one of us the chance those few disciples had to see him face to face.

Almighty God, whose blessed Son our Savior Jesus Christ
ascended far above all heavens that he might fill all things:
Mercifully give us faith to perceive that, according to his
promise, he abides with his Church on earth, even to the end
of the ages; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and
reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory
everlasting. Amen.