Category Archives: From the Rector

Weekly articles from our Rector published in the News & Notes newsletter.

Angels Ascending

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Some time this week, autumn truly arrived. There are many ways to determine that date, from the cosmological (the fall equinox!) and the meteorological (the first morning you wake up shivering) to the cultural (Labor Day! the start of school!) and, yes, the ecclesiastical: Michaelmas, the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels, which falls every year on September 29 and marks, in its own way, the arrival of fall.

People have wildly different feelings about angels. For some, the notion of a “guardian angel” who guides and protects each person has been a comfort throughout life. For others, angels seem like an old-fashioned superstition; as the Episcopal Church’s Lesser Feasts and Fasts puts it, the depiction of winged angels with swords and white robes “has led many to dismiss the angels as ‘just another mythical beast, like the unicorn, the griffin, or the sphinx.’”

The Biblical word “angel” (Hebrew malakh or Greek angelos, hence “angel”) means, simply, “messenger.” They sometimes show up to take care of a nation, they occasionally appear when God needs an invisible army riding chariots of fire, but they mostly simply show up when God has something to say.

One of the readings for Michaelmas tells the story of “Jacob’s ladder.” The great trickster Jacob lays down for the night in a holy place, and rests his head on one of the sacred stones. As he dreams, he envisions a great ladder, stretching from the earth up into the heavens: “and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.” (Genesis 28:12)

Did you catch that? Angels were “ascending and descending” on it. Not “descending and ascending.” (This is the sort of thing preachers and pedants love.) The angels are not, as a matter of course, residents of heaven who only occasionally come to earth. They are on the earth, even now, bringing holy messages to us every day, climbing up to the heavens, and coming back again with even more to say. The journey begins and ends among us, with a constant stream of conversation with God—not just messages from God to us, but prayers from us to God.

Think what you will of angels in the literal sense. We do not live in a meaningless world from which God has absconded. Nor is our only access to God through occasional, direct encounters with God. Our “messengers” from God, our angels, are creatures too. They bear witness to God’s loving words throughout all creation. They are constantly among us, zooming to and fro before our very faces; if only we had the eyes to see them and the ears to hear.

The “Program Year”

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This Sunday marks the beginning of what we sometimes call the “program year”: that part of the church year, more or less overlapping with the school year, when our community’s life is in full swing. The choir returns, Sunday School is in session, Harvest Fair planning has begun, everyone’s enjoying the cookout, and the pews are bursting with excited crowds. (Right?)

In one sense, the social life of the church community is only ever the second-most-important thing. Our focus, naturally, is on the spiritual life and worship of the church, on hearing the Word of God proclaimed and receiving the Body and Blood of Christ that transport us into a realm of heavenly worship. We can do these things in all the splendor of a giant cathedral congregation, or we can do them in secret as a surreptitious pair somewhere in a Soviet gulag; we can do them with a full roster of acolytes and musicians, or we can limp along with what we have. If we walked into Mass and back out without ever speaking with one another, if the music were lackluster and the fellowship nonexistent, in any case, God would be worshiped.

But in another sense, this “program life” of the parish is really a training ground for the whole Christian spiritual life. The Church has sometimes been called “the school of love,” the place in which we learn what love really is and we practice what love does. The Church is, more than anything else, the community in which we learn to love God and one another as best we can, despite all our imperfections.

So as we return to the busy schedule of church life, to weekly choir practices and sumptuous coffee hours, to Sunday School and committee meetings and all the machinery that makes us go, may we be reassured by the notion that whatever we do when we worship God is good enough for God, and may we delight in the opportunity to grow in patience, wisdom, and love.

Especially when we just can’t wait for that Zoom meeting to end.

Learning to Fail Well

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“Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For all of us make many mistakes.”
– James 3:1-2

And a very happy first day of school to you, too, James!

Many of us start a new school year today with a mix of emotions: elation to finally have somewhere for the kids to go after a long summer at home; exhaustion at the prospect of a third school year shaped by circumstances beyond our control; anxiety about saying goodbye to our parents and excitement about saying hello to new friends. We start with new backpacks in bigger sizes, new cups of coffee (perhaps in bigger sizes, too), and the hope and prayer that the school bus will eventually arrive.

Not all of us, of course, are kids or have kids in school. But all of us are students, and all of us are teachers, whether we know it or not. All of us are still learning what it is to be Christian, what it is to be human, what it is to be a creature of God in this world; and all of us, every day, teach these things to the people around us through our words and our deeds.

James’s warning to teachers in our epistle for this coming Sunday makes me laugh. It is, you might say, a classic no-win situation. Each one of us, every day, is an example to the people around us, for better or for worse. Hopefully, this is mostly a positive example, an example of what we should do, how we should talk to one another and care for one another and love one another. And yet we all know it’s sometimes a negative example. “For,” after all, “all of us make many mistakes.”

But this can be a gift. We try to model goodness. We strive for perfection. And yet we are imperfect, and we constantly need to learn how to respond to our own imperfections, not to mention those of others. And in a way, learning to fail well is the most important lesson of all.

Wedding Bells

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Alice and I were the first of our friends to get married. This means that as we’ve gotten a bit older and more and more of our friends and families have had their own weddings, we’ve had the gift of seeing the whole thing over and over from the other side:  as a married couple seeing two people we love enter into marriage together.

It’s no news that marriage isn’t always easy. So I’ve always appreciated one of the prayers during our marriage service. After a long litany of prayers for the couple being married, for their health and happiness and growth together in love, we turn aside for a final petition: “Grant that all married persons who have witnessed these vows may find their lives strengthened and their loyalties confirmed.” (BCP p. 430) I have always loved this prayer, but even when it’s not being said I find it’s true: Episcopal or not, Christian or not, every wedding ceremony I attend reminds me of the beauty and love at the center of my own relationship in the midst of all life’s quotidian stresses.

I’m in this state of mind because this weekend, I’ll have the gift of marrying two dear friends of ours, right here at St. John’s, friends who’ve been a part of Alice’s and my life since the day we met. But it points to a deeper truth, one that’s not about marriage alone. This is the reason we have a church. This is the reason we don’t sit at home and pray alone, or go for a walk in the woods and feel God’s presence there. We need each other. We love each other. And we inspire each other.

It’s one of the greatest gifts of a truly multi-generational church like St. John’s. We really do have members from six months old into their nineties. We really do have members who’ve been in Charlestown for eighty years, and some who move in next week. (Yikes.) And that means that whoever you are, at whatever stage of life you are, there is someone who has walked that path before. And it goes both ways: whatever you have done, whatever the happiest parts of your life have been, there is someone else living that right now. We support each other as mentors as friends. We inspire each other as pioneers. And we, like all those who find themselves moved by someone else’s wedding, find our lives strengthened and our loyalties confirmed by one another’s love of God and neighbor.

Loaves and Fishes

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On Sunday, we packed nearly four dozen grocery bags to deliver to St. Stephen’s Youth Programs in the South End, to be distributed to families whose kids go to the B-SAFE summer camp there. On Tuesday, we made a hundred roast-beef sandwiches to share for the next day’s lunch. And this Sunday, we’ll hear the gospel story of the loaves and fishes, when Jesus takes five loaves of bread and two fish and somehow feeds a crowd of five thousand, with twelve baskets of leftovers to boot. What good timing! 

We sometimes take this “loaves and fishes” story as an example of charitable generosity. (I couldn’t tell you how many church food pantries are named “Loaves and Fishes,” but there are hundreds of them around) But that’s not quite the point. It’s not a food pantry story; it’s not about the disciples distributing life’s necessities to the hungry and poor. Jesus has no food. The disciples have no food. And the large crowd who’ve gathered aren’t poor or hungry or downtrodden. They’re just a crowd who are so excited to be following Jesus that they, too, have forgotten to bring any food.

Except for one young boy with “five barley loaves and two fish.” (John 6:9)

This is the key detail that’s often overlooked. The food isn’t handed out from above. It’s not trucked in by do-gooders from a far-off, better-off place. It’s shared by a child in the crowd. There’s no institution behind it, no program, not even any foresight. There’s just the exuberant, generous chaos that begins when someone is willing to share what they have with their neighbors, as equals, when they need it. This act of generosity doesn’t create divisions between the haves and the haven-nots; it creates community instead.

There’s been a live conversation in the last few years about whether “charity” is helpful or harmful, compassionate or condescending. (You can read books like Toxic Charity or When Helping Hurts if you want to find out more.) But at its best, this work can be more like the young boy’s gift: an open act of sharing to a neighbor in a time of need, as part of a longer-term relationship.

So thank you, all of you who gave or shopped or worked this week! Thank you for being partners with Episcopal churches in Boston and beyond, and for being neighbors to your fellow Bostonians. Thank you for your generosity; but thank you, more than anything, for recognizing that what we have is not ours to hold onto when others are in need, but only ours to share.