Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Uh oh! Miscellaneous is the category for articles that someone forgot to catagorize properly!

“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.

“Good Shepherd Sunday”

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We sometimes call this coming Sunday, the Fourth Sunday of Easter, “Good Shepherd Sunday.” Every year we read from John 10, where Jesus says, “I am the Good Shepherd.” Every year, we say prayers and listen to music on the theme of God as a shepherd. And every year, as well, we read Psalm 23, which many people know. It’s one of the most popular and often-quoted parts of the Bible, especially in that old King James Version: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not be in want.”

Christ the Good Shepherd with exhausted sheep.

The verse that’s been stuck in my head for the past fourteen months is the one that goes: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” (Psalm 23:4)

We have indeed been walking through the valley of the shadow of death. Think about the image: when you go down into a valley on a spring day and the sun’s warmth is cut off by the hills on either side, when you move from a sunny 60 degrees to a shady 58, you feel the cold. The sun is still there on the outside, but its light and its warmth are blocked by something.

Maybe what’s been casting the shadow of death for you is the loss of a family member or a loved one. Maybe it’s been the loss of relationships with loved ones and family members, whom you haven’t been able to see precisely in order to protect them. Maybe it’s been the loss of school or work or even church community. We have all felt the cold and the isolation of that valley.

Some of us, now, are beginning to come out the other side. Some of us are feeling that spring warmth on our backs as we, fully vaccinated, can go out into the world. Others are still in the darkness, still desperately clicking refresh at 6:30am trying to get an appointment. The most important thing for us to remember right now, though, is that we’re not alone. We are a flock, with one Good Shepherd. That means that we have comfort and solidarity in community. It also means that we still have responsibilities to one another. Some of us, it’s true, are safer than we’ve been in a long time. Others aren’t quite there yet, and we still need to support and protect one another.

So while we’ll be resuming some indoor, in-person worship and some outdoor, in-person worship this Sunday, we’ll also continue with online worship and we’ll continue being one community. Even if we’re separated in space, we’re still one in body and in spirit, and it’s important that we maintain those relationships until we can all be together safely again.

But remember: whether you’re here in the church or outside in the Garden or still sitting at home, you are part of one flock, with one shepherd—not me, but the Lord who is our shepherd, Jesus who is our Good Shepherd—whose rod and staff lead us an guide us along the twisting paths of our lives. So may we all find the comfort of those green pastures and still waters where our shepherd leads us, wherever we are this Good Shepherd Sunday. And I hope and I pray to be together as one flock again soon, out in the sunlight on the other side of that valley.

Missed Birthdays

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This month, millions of people around the world are missing their second birthday celebration in a row, including both my mother, whose birthday is in mid-March, and my wife, whose birthday is on the thirty-first. In fact, one of the last things that Alice and Murray and I did with other people last March before everything shut down was to go to a birthday celebration for our elementary-school-aged neighbor down the hall. Later in March, people didn’t feel much like celebrating, but we still tried to celebrate birthdays in our small ways. It was hard, though, to have a celebration, a real party where we could see the people we loved outside our own little family units.

Last Sunday, the fourth Sunday in Lent, was a day that the church sometimes calls “Laetare Sunday.” It comes from an old Latin introit, part of the liturgy for that days; it means, “Rejoice!” It’s a day of rejoicing in the midst of Lent, when some of the rigor of the season is relaxed. Even the purple on the altar will sometimes be changed out for pink or rose, as a sign of joy. It’s the same thing that we do in Advent, on the third Sunday, which is why there’s a pink candle in your Advent wreath. It’s a moment of joy in a penitential, somber season.

There’s a lesson for me in that, about all of life. We recognize that even in the midst of sorrow, there’s always joy; and in the midst of joy, there’s always sorrow. On any given day in any normal time of life, I may be feeling joy, I may be feeling happiness; but there’s inevitably someone else who’s suffering grief or loss. The same goes the other way around: I may be feeling sadness or frustration, and someone else is feeling relief or contentment.

It’s important for us as human beings to recognize that we don’t always experience the same things at the same time, and while many of us have been united emotionally by our experience of this pandemic, it’s become clearer over time that we’ve also been divided—not just politically, but emotionally. We’ve experienced different parts of this time in different ways over time, depending on our own circumstances and personalities.

But there’s another lesson, too, which is the importance of rejoicing, even in a serious time, the importance of celebrating those small moments even when things are hard. The lesson of a tragedy like this pandemic is not that we shouldn’t rejoice—it’s that we should! We should appreciate those moments, we should celebrate those birthdays. Not in an unsafe way, but with real and genuine joy. We should recognize and mark those things that are important to us, because even if the world is hard, even if the world is full of sorrow and struggle, it is also full of joy. They don’t cancel each other out. You can’t do the math and add the up to a positive or negative number. They just exist there, alongside each other, always.

So rejoice in your joy. And weep in your sadness. And know that they’re always there together.