Category Archives: Miscellaneous

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Enriching Our Worship

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You might notice a few small changes to our liturgy in a couple weeks. Along with the return of the choir (hurray!) and new settings for the Gloria (“Glory to God in the highest”), Sanctus (“Holy, holy, holy Lord”), and other service music, you might notice that the texts of some of our prayers have changed. If you’re curious to know where these are from or why we’re using them, read on!

Since the English Reformation in the 1540s, one of the hallmarks of Episcopalians and Anglicans has been our emphasis on “common prayer.” Walk into almost any Episcopal church in the country, and you’re likely to recognize nearly the entire service, and to find it on exactly the same pages of the Book of Common Prayer, our primary text for worship.

One of the big questions of the last fifty years in our tradition has been how to balance this emphasis on common worship with the desire for variety and freshness. It’s a fine line, after all, between “familiar” and “boring,” between “known by heart” and “recited by rote.”

Another big question of the last half-century has been how the language we use to address and talk about God in our worship shapes (and maybe distorts) our idea of who God is. Traditionally, Christian theology teaches that God is neither male nor female; these are human categories, not divine ones. But as you’ve probably noticed, our traditional liturgies refer to God almost exclusively using masculine terminology and imagery (he, Father, king, lord, etc.)

During the 1990s and early 2000s, the Episcopal Church published additional worship materials in a series called Enriching Our Worship, which essentially addressed both these issues at once. EOW provided alternative options for much of the liturgy, with an emphasis on “expansive language” for God, i.e., language that expanded our repertoire of terms and images beyond the traditional masculine ones. This ended up providing some really great alternatives for different parts of the service — where the BCP gives two post-communion prayers, EOW adds a third, and so on.

The Eucharistic prayer we’ve been using this summer comes from Enriching Our Worship. This fall, we’re switching back to good old Prayer A from the BCP, but we’ll be using the confession and post-communion prayer from EOW. Throughout the year we’ll likely use different options for other parts of the service as the seasons change.

I hope these new words bring out new facets of your relationship with God. If you love them, I’m so glad! If you hate them—don’t worry. They’ll rotate to something else again soon enough.

Note: These changes in the liturgy will begin on September 18, not this Sunday; I just have something else to write about for the newsletter next week!

Training Time

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In the last few weeks several of you have told me you’ve seen me out running. While I’ve been a casual runner since college, this month I’ve started training for my first road race in almost twelve years. (I’m going for the title “Fastest Priest in Charlestown,” which I don’t think will be very hard to achieve.) Adding some more serious track workouts into my running schedule has reminded me that athletic training has long been one of the core metaphors for Christian spiritual life. “An ascetic” has come to mean someone with a particularly strict regimen of spiritual self-denial—a monk living on lentils and water in the middle of the desert, wearing a hair-shirt or something—but in fact the Greek word askesis means exercise, practice, or training. Ascesis is what athletes do. And ascesis is what people of faith do. We train our minds. We exercise our souls. We show up for our “spiritual practice”!

But my new workout schedule has also reminded me of something crucial to both kinds of exercise: finding the right setting to make it possible.

You see, for scheduling reasons I tend to go to the track for an interval workout twice a week: once right before I pick Murray up from school on Wednesdays, and once early on Saturday mornings, before we get going on our plans for the day. On Wednesdays, the track is empty. School is still in session; adults are at work or on errands or whatever they do on Wednesday afternoons. It’s just me, the sun, and an occasional baseball practice. I have the whole place to myself.

Saturdays are a different story. On Saturday mornings, the soccer field inside the track plays host to several dozen of Charlestown’s kindergarteners and first and second graders, who are just learning the sport, and to several dozen more of their parents and siblings, who spill out onto the track to chat, drink coffee, throw lacrosse balls, ride tricycles, and so on.

This is a terrifying thing. The average six-year-old does not exactly have much control over their soccer ball; the typical three-year-old tricyclist is not paying much attention to the traffic on the track. And while I’d never begrudge them use of the playing area—they, after all, have reserved the field for the morning and I’m intruding on their space to use the track—it’s rather alarming to see someone sitting cross-legged, reading a book, in lane one at the finish line when you’re trying to run 400s.

Suffice it to say that my Saturday workouts train a rather different set of skills from my Wednesday afternoons: careful attention in case I need to swerve to avoid a toddler, gracious patience as I remind myself I don’t own the track, intercessory prayer that the ten-year-olds throwing a lacrosse ball across the track (why not in the ample free space around them? I don’t know) don’t bean me.

For many of you, the life of prayer is something like this. Perhaps you are the audience for the book I once joked about writing when Murray was a baby and a toddler, which I’d call Praying One-Handed: Spiritual Life for the Overwhelmed Parent. Perhaps you’re like my friend and mentor Cathy, who used to say that she’d perfected the art of praying in parking lots while waiting to pick her kids up from something or other. Perhaps your distractions come from within: the internalized cacophony of fear and anxiety, grief and despair that has leapt from our TVs and our smartphones directly into our brains. Or perhaps, setting your intention to be just a bit more “spiritual” in 2022, you arrived at the track of prayer to find that things were quite busy and went away, finding that your spiritual training plan wasn’t going quite so well.

You might say that I should just change my schedule and find another time to run. Or you might say, to be perfectly honest, that dodging kids and balls and off-leash dogs is itself pretty good training for a road race in Charlestown. I don’t know which one of those is right; but I do know that training under less-than-ideal conditions has value, in spiritual exercise as much as in physical.

If we only ever pray while on retreat—if we only ever turn to God when our minds are calm, and our homes are quiet, and our to-do lists are done—we’ll only ever learn to see God in those tiny, rare, tranquil moments of our lives. To run alone on a track is a wonderful thing. But to run through the chaos of life, rejoicing in it nevertheless… that is truly divine.

“The Lord Will Make You a House”

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“The Lord Will Make You a House”

 
 
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Sermon — July 18, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Alice and I have had quite a few landlords in the last dozen years or so, from universities and big management companies to a guy who lived a few towns over to someone who lived in North Carolina and could only be reached through the manager of the convenience store next door. Some landlords are more responsive when there are problems, some are less so, and we’re used to that. But as I walked through our new apartment with an inspector on Wednesday, it struck me: this was the first place we’d be living as adults that was really ours.  This was our breezy porch, our spacious kitchen, our completely-dysfunctional toilet chains. (One won’t flush; one won’t stop flushing.) This was our new home.

Whether you rent or buy or live with a friend, there’s a visceral difference between a place you’re staying and a place you can call your own. And you can feel it. When you’re home, I think, you feel a kind of comfort. This is, one hopes, a safe place, a place in which you have no master, and no boss. A place you can relax and be yourself. (And fix the toilet.) Shelter is one of the most basic human needs. But “home” isn’t too far behind.

You can almost see King David’s mind working through these thoughts in today’s first reading. After years of tumult and war, the Lord has finally “given him rest from all his enemies around him,” and “now…the king [is] settled in his house.” (2 Sam. 7:1) And it’s pretty good. David, you might remember, had spent years out in the pastures with his sheep, and then years more out in the countryside, as a soldier, a fugitive, a king. There were days he was so hungry that he and his companions took holy bread from the temple to eat. This palace, though—this palace isn’t half bad.

And now that the king is settled in his house, his mind turns to God. David had a new home; but God did not. There was no Temple, there was no permanent physical place in which the holiest objects dwelt. There was a tent, the Tabernacle, the portable shrine in which had God lived as the people traveled in the wilderness, and in which God’s presence had remained in the centuries leading down to David’s own day.

“But God,” you can hear David thinking, “Don’t you want a home? Don’t you see how nice this is? How comfortable? How glorious? How can it be that ‘I am living in a house of cedar, but the ark of God stays in a tent?’” (2 Sam. 7:2) And the prophet Nathan can almost read his mind. “Go,” he says, “do all that you have in mind; for the Lord is with you.” (2 Sam. 7:3)

But he’s only half-right. God comes to Nathan in a dream and tells him David’s got it all wrong. It’s not David who will build God a house; it’s God who will build David a house, not a physical house but a royal house, a dynasty to lead and guide his people. “Thus says the Lord,” goes the message, “I will raise up your offspring… and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me.” (2 Sam. 7:8, 12-14)

On one level, this is quite literally true. David’s son Solomon, who’s not yet been born, will inherit his throne. It’s Solomon, not David, who will build the Temple as a house for God.

But Solomon’s kingdom will not quite be “established forever.” In fact, when Solomon’s own son rises to the throne, the kingdom will split in two halves, north and south, and it will never be united again. The House of God, meanwhile, will be destroyed a few centuries later, and mourned, and restored; and then destroyed again, never to be rebuilt.

By Jesus’ day, there hadn’t been a descendant of David on the throne in five hundred years. During the first few decades of the Church, the Temple, too, would be destroyed forever. And so it was that the early Christians came to understand these words in a very different way. The “offspring” of David to whom God promised an eternal kingdom was not his son Solomon, but his great-great-great-great-great-great…great-great-grandson Jesus. It was his throne that would be established forever. It was he to whom God would be a father; it was he who would be the Son of God.

And it would be his body that would be a “holy temple in the Lord.” (Eph. 2:21) Not the house of God once built in Jerusalem as the Temple. Not even the physical body of Christ, in which God dwelt. But the Body of Christ as in the Church. Not this church, the building. Not our church, the people. But the Church, the universal body in which we are, as the Letter to the Ephesians writes, “no longer strangers and aliens, but fellow-citizens” living together in one eternal home, built on Christ the cornerstone and stretching back before Christ to the prophets and forward through the apostles and all the way down to us as we are “built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.” (Eph. 2:19-22)

For “Christ,” Paul writes, “has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.” (Eph. 2:14) It’s not just a metaphor. The “Temple” was a huge outdoor complex, made up of a series of concentric rings, with the Temple proper just a tiny building at the center. The outer areas were open to everyone, but as you neared the center access was restricted. There was a “Court of the Gentiles” open to all, and then a series of walls. Israelite women could come so far, and no further; Israelite men a little further; priests a little further; and all the way inside the Temple itself, the Holy of Holies, which only the high priest could enter and only on the holiest of days. And they took these divisions seriously. Inscribed on the wall of Temple during the Herodian era were the ominous words, written in Greek, the Gentiles’ common language, so they’d understand: “No foreigner may enter within the railing and enclosure surrounding the temple. Whoever is captured will have himself to blame for his subsequent death.”

 Paul is playing with this idea. Christ has “broken down the dividing wall.” Christ has brought all the nations of the world into the holy and beloved people of God. We’re no longer “far off” from the holy place. We’ve been brought near. All of us are at home, in this one household of God, whoever or wherever we are. And thanks be to God for this universal embrace.

And yet: oh no!

Because that means the house of God, this long-promised family that God is gathering from all the nations of the earth, includes Them too. I don’t mean “Them” as in the Jews; not “Them” as in the Gentiles. I mean Them, whoever They are in your life. Those members of that political party whose ideas you find abhorrent and un-American. Those people from those places, who started moving in and the neighborhood has never been the same. Those members of your family with whom you just don’t talk about that topic, especially at Thanksgiving, lest the turkey be sent flying across the room in rage!

Them! You know Them, right?

I’m sorry to say, you’re going to have to share a house.

(And you thought the toilet chains were annoying.)

I went to a great workshop on conflict a few years ago, led by two of the brothers at the monastery in Cambridge. When you take life vows as a monk, you’re committing yourself to a life of more than a little domestic frustration. You’re choosing to live together forever with a group of other human beings, with all their foibles, without even the consolation of romantic love or biological relationship to make it easier to deal with them. So monks, as much as you might think of them as pious and ethereal, are really very good at petty disputes. They have them all the time. And I remember what Brother Curtis said about the people who get under your skin. “God loves you,” he said. “And God loves them. God loves you, God wants to spend eternity with you. And them. Together.”

And that’s is the issue, isn’t it? The dividing walls between us, whatever they are, are gone! We are being built together into one household, one holy dwelling place for God. We have an eternal home in God’s love. And yet it’s not our house. Our names aren’t even on the lease. Or rather, we are among a billion squabbling roommates who can never quite agree whose turn it is to take out the trash.

But we’d better work it out, because whoever They are in your life—whoever the people are whom you simply cannot stand, for reasons good or bad—they are the beloved children of God with whom you will, God willing, spend eternity.

Thank God we don’t have to work it out alone.

I said earlier than Nathan was only half­-right. “Do all you have in mind” he tells David. “The Lord is with you.” He just means “God will support your plan.” He’s wrong about that—God’s going to tell him soon enough—but he’s right about something. “The Lord is with you,” God says through Nathan’s lips. You don’t need to build God a house; God is with you now. And indeed, God says, “I have been with you wherever you went—I have been moving about!” (2 Sam. 7:9, 5) God is building us a house; or rather, God is building us into a house, and God is not going to leave us alone but is coming to dwell among us.

We live in fractious times. Families, nations, even churches find themselves divided. And many of our conflicts and disagreements are important. (If they weren’t important, they wouldn’t be conflicts!) There is conflict any time someone tries to make the world a better place. And sometimes the stakes are life and death.

But Christ has reconciled us all in one body to God, and has proclaimed peace “to those who are far off and to those who are near.” (Eph. 2:17) And our reconciliation with one another will be powered by the Holy Spirit of love that lives among us. This doesn’t mean we have to compromise. It doesn’t mean we have to give up our own values. But it does mean that we need to find a way to live together. Because God has broken down the dividing wall. God has built us into a one house, one spiritual dwelling place for God. And we’re all going to live in it.

“Getting Sundays Right”

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During my first few months at St. Johns, I heard one phrase over and over again: “Getting Sundays right.” I heard it from members of the Search Committee as they interviewed me, from Wardens and Vestry members as we planned from the year ahead, and from parishioners just walking in and out of Sunday morning services. “What we want,” people would say, “is to get Sundays right.”

Of course, we sometimes need to be reminded that we’re Christians seven days a week, not just on Sunday mornings, that we bring our Christian identity and the truths of our Christian faith with us on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday as we go about our daily work and live our lives at home; that we are Christian, as the hymn goes, “Seven whole days, not one in heaven.” And this is important to remember. But it’s also true that our Sunday morning time together uniquely prepares us for those other six and a half days.

Possible self-portrait of Dunstan. Detail from the Glastonbury Classbook

I was reading Morning Prayer this morning (Wednesday morning, as I write this), and it turns out that it’s the feast day of Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury. I didn’t know anything about this 10th-century bishop. I’ll be honest, after reading his bio I haven’t picked up much. He was one of a number of monastic reformers who helped the Church recover from the shock of the Viking invasions, and brought back some of the splendor of its former days. What really struck me, though, is that he ended up with a really remarkably beautiful prayer in the book of saints Lesser Feasts & Fasts (2018), which is not always known for the beauty of its prayers.

I think it says everything about what we mean when we say we want to “get Sundays right”:

Direct your Church, O Lord, into the beauty of holiness, that, following the good example of your servant Dunstan, we may honor your Son Jesus Christ with our lips and in our lives; to the glory of his Name, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

“Direct your Church, O Lord, into the beauty of holiness, that we may honor your Son Jesus Christ with our lips and in our lives; to the glory of his Name.”

What a remarkable prayer. That’s exactly what it means to “get Sundays right.” We want to come here and be directed into the beauty of holiness—and then we want to go out and continue to honor Christ with our lips and in our lives, with the things that we say to one another and to the world and the things that we do for one another and for the world.

What an outstanding statement about Sunday-morning worship. This almost deserves to be taken away from Dunstan (sorry, Dunstan) and brought into the Sunday-morning liturgy. You might say it before worship on Sunday: “Direct your Church, O Lord, into the beauty of holiness, that we may honor your Son Jesus Christ with our lips and in our lives; to the glory of his Name.”

As I write this, we’re awaiting updated guidance from our bishops, which is supposed to be coming later this week. (Maybe I’ve already summarized it in News & Notes by the time you’re reading this!) We’re expecting them to loosen restrictions on in-person worship significantly, in accordance with the CDC and the Commonwealth’s recent decisions. This is a victory! We have, in fact, through all our efforts and the success of our public-health efforts, really reduced the risk of gathering together to “worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness,” as Psalm 96 goes. They’re still working out the details of questions like how to return to singing together, how long to keep masks for, and so on, and I would continue to urge everyone to be patient as we remember that not all adults, let alone teens or children, have even had the six weeks since vaccine eligibility necessary to be fully vaccinated. And so we won’t be jumping back in 100% right away, but this is really good news.

So direct your Church, O Lord, into the beauty of holiness, that we may honor your Son Jesus Christ with our lips and in our lives; to the glory of his Name. Amen.

The Ascension

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“It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.” (Acts 1:7)

Today is the Feast of the Ascension. It’s been forty days since Jesus rose from the tomb on Easter morning, and during those forty days, according to the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts, he’s been appearing to the disciples and teaching even more about the kingdom of God than he had when he was alive. And so they wonder: is this the moment?

They ask him, “Lord, is this the time when you’ll restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6) We once had our own nation, and we lost it. We once had you, and we thought you’d lost you—but now you’re back. So is this the moment when you’ll restore the kingdom? Is this the moment when life will finally go back to the way it should be?

He gives them an unsatisfying answer. Jesus says to the disciples, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.” (Acts 1:7) And then, after a few more words, he’s lifted up into the sky and disappears behind a cloud.

It’s a very unsatisfying answer. “It’s not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set.” They’re asked simply to trust.

This is a frustrating idea, especially for those of us who’ve spent the last fourteen months waiting, and waiting, and waiting to know when things will go back to normal, or at least when we’ll be able to do things that feel a little normal again: When we’ll be able to drop our kids off in the nursery or Godly Play and go to church; when we’ll be able to travel on an airplane to visit relatives without fear; when we’ll be able to walk around, living our everyday lives and worrying about our ordinary concerns without the looming threat of a pandemic.

“It’s not for you to know the times,” Jesus says, and it’s a frustrating answer.

There is an insight, though, in what happens next.

Jesus has disappeared into the clouds, and two angels appear, and say to the disciples: “Galileans, why do you stand looking up into the heavens? This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will come in the same way as you saw him go.” (Acts 1:11)

Why are you looking up into heaven, they ask? Jesus is gone. This man you loved has disappeared; but look! You’re all still here!

If we try to plan and to control the times and seasons of the next few months, if we try to pin everything down to know for sure when we’ll be able to go back to normal, we’re only going to be banging our heads against the wall. We can’t control or predict state guidelines or church guidelines from the bishops’ office.

But we can control where we set our eyes.