I first met the Rev. John H. Finley IV, Headmaster of Epiphany School in Dorchester and our guest preacher this Sunday, nearly ten years ago, when he came to preach at a service at the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard. A few years later, I bumped into him while visiting St. Mary’s in Dorchester, where he serves as a priest associate, and he invited me on a tour of Epiphany, a tuition-free, independent Episcopal middle school for economically-disadvantaged children in Boston.

John is an enthusiastic man — his email sign-offs alternate between “Your Grateful Fan” and “Your GRATEFUL Fan” — and it’s not hard to see why. Epiphany is an extraordinary place, part school and part life-long community. The school’s sense of community extends in every direction. Students spend longer-than-usual days during a longer-than-usual year at school, but the school spends even more time on them, following students for years after graduation and providing ongoing support for alumni as they continue to grow and learn. (How many middle schools do you know, after all, that run SAT prep classes?) In lieu of tuition, families commit to volunteering regularly for the school. Teachers stay on for years; current Principal Michelle Sanchez has been at Epiphany since its founding in 1998. And Epiphany is connected in dozens of ways to the neighborhoods around it, to Episcopal churches throughout Massachusetts, and to schools in a network across the country.

More recently, Epiphany has become both younger and greener, adding a 22,000-square-foot Early Learning Center and expanding its community garden program, and I’m excited to hear the school’s ministry continues to grow, and what they’ve learned from the experience of the last couple years.

More than anything, though, I’m excited to hear John preach once more, and to welcome him (back) to St. John’s. I hope you can join us this Sunday for his sermon at the 10am service, and for an informal conversation about Epiphany School that he’ll lead during Coffee Hour.

It was a delight to welcome Canon Gallagher to St. John’s on Sunday to preach, to preside at our celebration of the Eucharist, and to offer some prayers for my not-so-new ministry here. And it was especially delightful to stand to make those vows with our two wardens, Alice Krapf and Doug Heim. It seemed to me to be a perfect symbol of the place of the wardens within the life of the church: standing alongside the rector as the people’s elected leaders, in need of your prayers!

“Senior Warden” and “Junior Warden” are no longer positions of power and prestige, to be occupied by the most-important and second-most-important men in the parish for such time as they see fit. (God bless dear Mr. Peter Hubbell, who served this parish as warden for twenty-three years; God bless especially Mrs. Hubbell.)

But the role of “warden” is still an extraordinarily important one. In ordinary times, they serve as close advisors to the rector, working together to lead the Vestry and the parish and to shape the ministry of the church. In a practical sense, they bring the ideas and concerns and dreams of the laypeople of the parish to the clergy, and ensure that the property and finances of the church remain in good order.

In extraordinary times, the wardens transform from sage advisors and dedicated volunteers to become, in many ways, the primary leaders in the parish. In the absence of a rector, for example, the wardens take over many of the rector’s responsibilities, supervising other staff and chairing the Vestry, ensuring that worship continues and picking up much of the slack of what is usually another person’s half- or full-time job!

Needless to say, Doug and Alice—and Catherine and Sarah before them—have spent much of their time as wardens leading in extraordinary times. During a sabbatical and a medical leave, an interim period and a global pandemic, they have epitomized the Christian ideal of “servant leadership,” holding the church together with calm strength.

I’d like to think things have become a bit less extraordinary over time, and they’ll continue to do so; absent some crisis, Doug and Alice’s final months as wardens, before their terms end at our Annual Meeting early in 2022, should be among their least tumultuous! I’ll be sad to lose their wisdom and their laughter at our meetings every few weeks, although I’m sure they’ll share them with me in other contexts. And I’ll look forward to working with whomever the Holy Spirit, the Nominating Committee, and your votes elect as our next wardens!

For now, I can only express my deep gratitude to Alice, Doug, Catherine, and Sarah for their leadership over the last few years: Thank you!

It’s church—it’s Halloween—it’s Churchoween!

In honor of this Sunday’s septennial combination of Halloween and a Sunday morning, I thought I’d celebrate by replacing my weekly column of profound and moving spiritual thoughts with three fun facts about Halloween; or, to be more precise, about Churchoween, the places where the candy-and-costume-themed holiday and its Christian origins still connect.

(For your reading pleasure, I’ve arranged them in order of obscurity!)

1. “Halloween” Let’s start with the name, which is the “fun” fact you’re most likely to know. “Halloween” is a contraction of “Hallow e’en,” which is in turn a 17th-century Scottish shortening of “Allhallow-even,” that is, “the Eve of All Saints.’” While most of our Halloween traditions have only a tenuous connection with All Saints’ Day, it is in fact the beginning of a week-long observance of the Octave of All Saints, beginning with the Eve of All Saints on October 31, and continuing with All Saints’ Day on November 1 and All Souls’ Day (The Commemoration of All Faithful Departed) on November 2 and All Saints’ Sunday, when we usually celebrate All Saints’ Day in church.
   
2. Orange and Black Everyone knows their holiday colors; red and green for Christmas, assorted pastels for Easter, orange and black for Halloween. The origins of Christmas and Easter’s cultural colors are easy to guess (red holly berries on green leaves, eggs died blue and yellow and pink). But do you know why Halloween is orange and black?
   
   I’ve read lots of explanations online, but never seen the one I’m pretty sure is true, which was handed down to me by a wise old priest while showing off his new electric candles. (A story for another time.)
   
   A natural beeswax candle, he pointed out, is not white or yellow; it’s a fairly vibrant orange. And the liturgical vestments worn for a medieval or early modern funeral—or, it turns out, for All Souls’ Day—wouldn’t have been the white or gold of the Resurrection we wear today, but a more solemn black.
   
   Darkening evenings and orange gourds may have something to do with the popularity of the orange-and-black Halloween color scheme in more recent times, but you can transport yourself into a spooky enough scene simply by imagining a medieval Catholic priest whispering the prayers of the mass in Latin in a dark sanctuary lit by beeswax candles, all while wearing a chasuble for All Souls’ Day like the one on the right below!
   
3. Spooky Services The Episcopal Church’s Book of Occasional Services (2018) includes a special Service for All Hallows’ Eve, patterned on a service like Lessons & Carols or the Easter Vigil, but containing all the BIble’s spookiest readings: the Witch of Endor raising the ghost of Samuel, a bone-rattling spirit appearing to Eliphaz the Temanite, a valley full of skeletons suddenly reanimating and walking around, and a war in heaven between the angels and the dragon. The rubrics suggest a visit to a graveyard may be appropriate, and primly add, “Suitable festivities and entertainments may take place before or after this service.”

I’ll have much more to say about All Saints’ Day next week, but for now — see you on Sunday, and have a spooky Churchoween! (Costumes in church are certainly allowed, but by no means required.)

We spent most of my birthday on Saturday in our old neighborhood in Cambridge. We ate breakfast at our old breakfast place. We played for a while at our old playground. And then we walked across the street to celebrate the arrival of fall at the Danehy Park Family Festival, where I had my greatest kite-flying experience of all time.

Danehy Park is a huge, open space—once a brickyard, then the city dump, now a beautiful park with rolling hills and walking trails, a flock of ducks living in some restored wetlands, and more baseball and soccer fields than I can count—and Saturday’s fall breeze made it the perfect spot to fly a kite. And, in fact, it was easy to count five or ten huge kites flying a hundred feet in the air, and dozens more zipping over the heads of what seemed like half the ten-year-olds in Cambridge. There was, we soon discovered, a stand selling kites for a few dollars. Given that our last kite is a crumpled, tangled mess somewhere in the basement, we thought we’d really splurge and buy two.

After a few false starts in Saturday’s shifty breeze, after Murray had finished an elaborate game involving coiling and uncoiling the string, when most the kids had gone, when I’d finally taken back control of my kite’s string and wrapped it back around the reel, I gave it one last try.

As I threw the kite up into the air, a sudden gust took it and I let go. I let the reel spin freely around my fingers as the kite flew up unbelievably high, past the shifty breeze over the baseball diamond into a downright wind a few dozen feet overhead.

And suddenly, things became a lot easier. Apart from the fact that the kite was nearly being ripped out of my hand and my fear that I was about to dive-bomb the toddler a hundred feet away when it finally came down, the kite became much easier to fly. I no longer had to run back and forth, letting out the string or reeling it in to keep the kite aloft. I just stood there—in fact, I sat down on the ground—and the kite flew on its own.

I realized, after a few minutes, that it was all a matter of percentages. When the kite is flying at an altitude of only ten or fifteen feet, a few seconds’ break in the wind is a disaster; a ten-foot drop is the end of the story. When the kite is up at fifty or eighty or a hundred feet, the problem’s gone. It’s not only that the wind is steadier further from the ground; it’s that a two-second pause or a ten-foot drop doesn’t matter any more.

It’s true, of course, of human life as well. When we are flying high—when we’re well-rested, and well-fed, and centered in our relationships with God and one another—it’s easy to handle momentary blips. When our spirits are low, when we are tired or frustrated or isolated (so, most of the last two years, now!) even something that seems small can drive us into the ground. And the further we can let out our strings, the more we can care for ourselves and connect with one another and with God, the greater the chance that we might have a minute, just now or then, to sit down and let life fly on its own.

I hope this fall, you find some way to help your spirit fly. I hope you’re gentle with yourself when you sometimes crash! And I hope that our life together as a church can be a way of lengthening that string, of helping one another stay afloat, however shifty the breeze may be.

This Monday (October 18) is the Feast of St. Luke. I’ve always loved St. Luke, in part because Luke’s gospel combines the aesthetic beauty and the concern for social justice that I think the Church reflects at its best. While Luke’s is the most polished Greek prose and his Gospel provides the texts for the famous canticles so often sun at Morning and Evening Prayer, the Benedictus and the Magnificat and the Nunc dimittis, Luke’s is also the Gospel in which Jesus most clearly advocates for the poor and the marginalized.

Tradition holds that St. Luke was, among other things, a physician. So the Old Testament given in the lectionary for St. Luke’s Day is as follows:

Honor physicians for their services,
for the Lord created them;
for their gift of healing comes from the Most High,
and they are rewarded by the king.
The skill of physicians makes them distinguished,
and in the presence of the great they are admired.
The Lord created medicines out of the earth,
and the sensible will not despise them.
And he gave skill to human beings
that he might be glorified in his marvelous works
By them the physician heals and takes away pain;
the pharmacist makes a mixture from them…
My child, when you are ill, do not delay,
but pray to the Lord, and he will heal you.
Give up your faults and direct your hands rightly,
and cleanse your heart from all sin.
Then give the physician his place, for the Lord created him;
do not let him leave you, for you need him.

Sirach 38

Ben Sira, the author of this text, wrote around 180 BCE, in a world in which the practice of medicine was a radically different thing. To put it mildly, they weren’t exactly manufacturing mRNA vaccines in Hasmonean Judea. But even then, Ben Sira put forward this remarkably-apt summary of the appropriate relationship between faith in God and trust in your physician: “Pray to the Lord… Then give the physician his place.” God created medicines; let the pharmacist mix them, and the physician wield them!

One of the strangest reversals of the last year has been the treatment of physicians and nurses. The “healthcare heroes” of Spring 2020, honored every night with banging pots and pans, soon became mistrusted messengers, trying their hardest to promote public health practices, and later vaccination, to a public that had grow tired and, in part, skeptical. Article after article tells the story of healthcare workers who are burnt out, unable to believe that some people still won’t take the threat seriously, even after everything they’ve seen. Perhaps the problem is that it’s easier to honor someone for their sacrifice than to honor them by listening to their advice, and making some sacrifices of our own.

So I hope that you pray, once again, this St. Luke’s Day, for all the physicians and nurses and pharmacists, janitors and cafeteria workers and CNA, who are instruments of God’s healing for us. Pray for all those who suffer, of any sickness. Pray, when you are ill, to the Lord—then give the physician her place!