Category Archives: From the Rector

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

“Sing to the Lord a New Song”

Posted on by

“Sing to the Lord a new song,” our psalm for this coming Sunday begins, “for he has done marvelous things. Shout with joy to the Lord, all you lands; lift up your voice, rejoice, and sing.” (Psalm 98:1, 5) As joyful as this psalm is, it makes me sad to read it this morning. After all, it’s been fourteen months since we’ve been able to sing together in church, and singing together—or hearing others sing together—is a profound spiritual experience. Singing hymns or hearing the choir sing unites us in spirit. We breathe in and out together, we raise our voices in harmony with one another. We create the kind of harmonious community we want to see in the world.

Music accesses parts of our spirits and our souls that spoken prayers and readings (and certainly sermons!) don’t, it taps into a part of our spirituality that nothing else we can do in church right now can. I miss singing, badly. (Maybe you do too.)

Of course, public health guidance and the public health situation are always changing, but the latest from the CDC and the Commonwealth and the Diocese discourages us from congregational singing. This won’t be forever; in fact, it may be over relatively soon. But it’s still a sad thing, now that some of us are here together in church again, not to be able to sing together.

In a way, it’s yet another example of the ever-present tension in Christian life between “the now” and “the not yet.” The psalm, after all, is not about rejoicing in general; it’s about singing to God “when he comes to judge the earth.” (Psalm 98:9) Or, as you might translate it, “because God is the one who is coming to rule the world.” There’s a tension: we sing now, we celebrate now, because of something that is yet to come. We praise God now for the things that God will do, trusting that God is going to bring about that reign of God’s love, justice, and peace in the world, and so we celebrate even though love, and justice, and peace are not yet fully manifest in our time.

We can’t sing and lift up our voices, we can’t “shout for joy,” we can’t “sing to the Lord with the harp and the voice of song.” (Psalm 98:6) Not together. Not right now. But we can rejoice still in the knowledge that what is to come is something different from and better than what is present now. We can hold on to our memories of singing together and of being together, and look forward to sharing those moments again. And as sad as it is to hear someone sing about singing on a Sunday without singing, what we’re really doing is celebrating the memory of singing and looking forward to the hope of singing.

And that, after all, is what we do every Sunday. We remember the communion of saints who gather with us around the altar, of all those whom we love who have gone before us, and we look forward to celebrating with them in heaven “as we sing… ‘Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might…’” Our song always spans the generations, and if our voices have dropped out for a few months, we know that they will return.

So “shout with joy,” quietly and masked, “all you lands; lift up your voice, rejoice, and…” listen to someone sing, over Zoom. For God is coming to rule the world, and is bringing about a reality that is not now but is yet to come.

On the Road to Gaza

Posted on by

Our first lesson for this coming Sunday is a little vignette from the Acts of the Apostles. An angel of the Lord appears to the apostle Philip in Jerusalem and tells him to go on the road down to Gaza, on the border with Egypt. On the road, he encounters the chariot of an Ethiopian eunuch, an official who’s traveled from the court of the queen of Ethiopia, down at the southern end of the Nile, all the way up through Egypt and to Jerusalem to try to understand who this God is who the Jewish people worship. He’s been at the Temple, and he’s on his way home, and he’s got a scroll of the prophet Isaiah. The Holy Spirit leads Philip to go and ask him, “Do you understand what you’re reading?” Not just “can you read Hebrew?” but, “Do you understand the prophecy you’re reading?” And he replies, “How can I understand unless someone guides me?”

So Philip sits there and rides in his chariot for a few minutes, and he explains the whole story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, and what this new Christian movement is all about. And the eunuch says, “Look, here’s some water! Why don’t you baptize me now?” So he does.

And then—this is my favorite part—“When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away; the eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing.” (Acts 8:39) And that’s the whole encounter. That’s the whole story. That’s the whole relationship. They never see each other again.

You may or may not know that Ethiopia was one of the earliest countries to embrace Christianity. Before there were even any Anglo-Saxons in the land we now call England, Ethiopia was a Christian country. Around the same time that the Roman Empire was becoming officially Christian, Ethiopia, too, had Christian kings. You can’t give all the credit for this to the Ethiopian eunuch, but there’s a long tradition that says he was the first one to bring Christianity back to his home in Ethiopia.

This is a turning point in the whole Book of Acts. Jesus had told the apostles, “you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth,” (Acts 1:8) and the story’s followed them in these concentric circles, as they spread the good news in Jerusalem, then in the surrounding areas, and now—finally—to the whole world.

What strikes me, for such a world-historical encounter, one so significant in the Book of Acts and in the whole history of the Church, is how brief it is. An angel appears to Philip. The Holy Spirit leads him to get into the chariot. And then the spirit of the Lord snatches him away as soon as the baptism’s over.

In my own life, there have been those moments where I suddenly—for no good reason at all—took a slightly different turn from what I was expecting. Where I encountered somebody, had a conversation, and soon moved along. It’s only ever in retrospect that I’ve seen what the Holy Spirit was doing right then, in those moments.

So I wonder, as you think back on your own life: What have those surprise encounters been? When have you suddenly changed direction? When have you asked for a guide to help you understand? These are the moments, as the Holy Spirit leads us down a wilderness road, when God is most present with us.  

And I wonder where you might be headed next.

It may take a long time to see those chance encounters bear fruit—hopefully not centuries!—but this is the way the Holy Spirit works: in small moments, between us, at the least-expected time.

“Good Shepherd Sunday”

Posted on by

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.

The Acts of the Apostles

Posted on by

If you’re paying attention during worship in the next few weeks, you might notice that our first lesson has switched from being an Old Testament reading to a reading from the Acts of the Apostles, a book in the New Testament.

It’s a little strange, in a way, that the lectionary does this during the season of Easter every year. After all, the Old Testament is three-quarters of the volume of the Bible; if you’re going to have three readings and a psalm, wouldn’t you take at least one of those three from the Old Testament instead of having a New Testament lesson from Acts, a New Testament epistle, and a New Testament Gospel?

But it does make a certain amount of sense. The Book of the Acts of the Apostles tells the story of the early church after Jesus’ resurrection, and in fact it’s the second in a two-volume set that starts with the Gospel of Luke. Having told the story of Jesus and his followers in the Gospel, Luke goes on to tell the story of the Holy Spirit and the early church in the Acts of the Apostles.

In a sense, this means that Acts is the most relevant book for us. We spend much of our time focused on Jesus’ life, leadership, and ministry in the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but we forget that we’re living now in the Easter world of Acts, where Jesus has died, resurrected, and ascended into heaven, and where the Holy Spirit is now guiding the church, through all of us as disciples.

It’s a familiar story, in some ways. The early church lives through the common experiences of the church. The Book of Acts starts with unity and idealism, with a simple, close-knit community that quickly falls apart into chaos and conflict. They have to work through their conflicts, and create new structures and delegate responsibilities—and then they go out and share the message throughout the world. These are ordinary phases in the life of the church: community, conflict, evangelism. They’re the same ones that Paul writes about in his letters to the early churches. They’re the same ones we live through in our own churches. But they’re very different from the content of most of the teachings of Jesus in the gospels.

We’re striving, of course, to follow Jesus, and so the gospels are central to us. But we’re living in the world of Acts. So while I won’t always be preaching on our readings from the Acts of the Apostles, I hope you’ll pay attention to see how the life of the church—and, in fact, individual people’s lives!—are being transformed in them, because the post-Resurrection world of the Acts of the Apostles is the world we live in and pray in today.

Signs of the Resurrection

Posted on by

There were three things that I particularly loved about our outdoor worship on Easter morning at the John Harvard Mall. (There were many things I loved, not least just getting to be there with some four dozen of you for worship, but there were three I want to mention!)

The first was the birdsong. It struck me as I sat there, listening to the songs of the woodpecker and the robin and the sparrow (and the occasional dog) that it was almost as if all Creation were joining together in worship and praise to God—as if the sun and the trees and the birds themselves were giving glory to the same God we were praising in those services.

The second was that we were joined, not only with one another in worship, but with others across time. As one parishioner pointed out to me, we were located very near the site of the original church in Charlestown of which John Harvard himself was the minister, at a location and in a city in which people have been celebrating the resurrection for some four centuries, and that united us with them in that moment.

And the third thing was that we were joined in worship not only by animals of other species and by people of other generations, but by neighbors of our own time and place and species, people who just happened to be walking through and picked up a bulletin and stood for a minute, or sat for a minute, or joined in the whole service, whether they’d registered or not!

These three things—community across species, community across time, community outside our own community—are signs of the resurrection. It’s no surprise that Jesus appeared in his resurrected form in a garden full of nature. It’s no surprise that Jesus’ followers looked back on their ancient scriptures to try to understand what had happened. It’s no surprise that they then went and shared the good news outside their own small circle of followers. These are the things that we do when Easter happens. We look back, into our own history. We look around us at the world. And we go and share that good news with others.

I think “Easter in the Park” will be here to stay. We’ll probably, in the future, have Easter in the church, as well! But Christmas Eve and Easter were opportunities for us to worship in a beautiful place, a historic place, and—most importantly—in our place, in our own community, with people who’d never walked through the doors of St. John’s Episcopal Church but were happy to stop and worship while they were walking the dog.

I hope that we can embrace these signs of the resurrection. I hope that we can bring them with us, not only through this fifty-day season of Easter, but into our futures and into the future of this church, as we go through our own resurrection.