Remote and In-Person, It's All Embodied Church!

Today, an Op-Ed in the New York Times, written by a priest in the Anglican Church of North America, the Rev. Tish Harrison Warren, put forward the thesis "that the time has come to shut off hybrid and remote worship and to encourage people to come back into physical churches for worship." 

At the parish where I am priest in charge, we follow a hybrid approach. About 40-50 of us gather in person on Sunday, and others take part via Facebook Live and YouTube, with the numbers of views hovering around 65 to 100 every week. It's small potatoes, yeah, but it is now at the heart of how this community functions.

My experience as a Christian communicator, parish priest, and hospital chaplain informs my belief that this technological shift is not only long overdue but is consistent with the practice and ministry of the Church since the beginning of the Christian era. Furthermore, just as we cannot dispense with books, musical instruments, or writing, we cannot simply dispense with technology simply because it has limits, temptations, distractions, or challenges. Tech changes Christian community... and gives us tools to communicate the Gospel! This isn't to say it's either automatic or easy.

Personally, I don't think we can put this genie back in the bottle. Even if the pandemic should magically end tomorrow, we have been habituated to a new way of interacting that is here to stay. We must find ways to embody Christian community and communicate the Gospel in the ways the culture understands.

In light of that, I am posting here the letter that I wrote to Pastor Harrison Warren in response to her piece (which is exists behind the NYT paywall) that I forwarded through the portal at the NYTimes website where her essay appeared. Since comments were not open on the column itself, I chose to write her through that portal. I await her reply.

(An earlier version of what follows also appeared in the Facebook site of "The Episcopal Café," where I was a once a regular columnist and an editor.)

Dear Pastor Harrison Warren,

I read with interest your Op-Ed Column in today's New York Times. I am sure that by now you have received many bouquets and brickbats from those in and out of the wider Anglican world about what you wrote. I appreciate the vulnerability of putting oneself "out there" whether it's in the pulpit or in the newspaper to both proclaim the Gospel and to reflect on theology in public spaces. 

I am sad to say that, as an Episcopal priest with nearly forty years experience-- with almost fifteen of those years as a clinical chaplain in both secular and Catholic healthcare settings as a Board Certified Chaplain, also have served congregations, large and small, rural, suburban, and urban, and who is now serving as priest in charge of a small south Florida congregation-- that I found your column today to be both wrong-headed and unhelpful.

While I do appreciate the ideal that the best worship is found in community, and that it is essential for communities of Jesus' modern disciples to encounter Christ in worship among crying babies, the stranger, the homeless, the poor, and so on, in what may appear to us as random encounters, this does not mean that we should shut off the tools of remote worship now that we are passing through this phase of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In an ideal world, I believe, as you do, that all of God's people should, whenever possible, physically gather in one space at the same time, certainly on the Lord's Day around the Eucharistic table. Such a hope is at the heart of the doctrine of the Christian Hope: that we will all gather at the Throne of the Lamb in eternal praise, basking in the glory of God! Our Eucharistic theology reminds us that every Eucharistic gathering points us to both mystical bonds we share in Christ and to the promise that we will all one day gather at the banquet feast of the Lamb. So to me, to write off all those who still might need to worship remotely... even the homebound and shut in!.. is to me beyond shocking! It is callous and belittling.

Way before this pandemic, during my time in hospital ministry (particularly when I was a chaplain in a Roman Catholic hospital), we broadcast the Mass on closed-circuit television to patients throughout our hospital. On days when we could not hold Mass in our own chapel, we would broadcast the daily Mass from one of the Catholic cable networks. In both instances, broadcasts were followed as soon as possible by the rounds made by deacons or, more typically, lay eucharistic ministers. If LEM's, deacons, or staff chaplains could not see every patient who might have wanted communion, or if the patient was unable to receive, we understood that the grace of the Sacrament was still present and available to the faithful (as the rubrics of our own 1979 BCP clearly state).

I understand that you might say that is totally different from a "Zoom Mass," a service on Facebook Live, YouTube, or whatever, except that you wrote in your column:

Our worship is centered not on simply thinking about certain ideas, but on eating and drinking bread and wine during communion.

“Christians need to hear the babies crying in church. They need to see the reddened eyes of a friend across the aisle,” Collin Hansen wrote in his Times essay about online church. “They need to chat with the recovering drug addict who shows up early but still sits in the back row. They need to taste the bread and wine. They need to feel the choir crescendo toward the assurance of hope in what our senses can’t yet perceive.”

I find the sentimentality at the heart of this both understandable and unhelpful. I understand the desire--and the call-- to gather with all God's people and especially with those who are at the edges of society or who, because of their illnesses, find themselves disconnected from Christian community. The 1979 Book of Common Prayer groups the various kinds of rites of reconciliation (Ministry to the Sick, Confession, and so on) together for just this reason. But to extend from that the technology behind remote worship is in and of itself harmful to Christian community is a logical leap that cannot be sustained. 

One might as well as say that the Apostle Paul should never have depended on epistles delivered by couriers via Roman ships and Roman Roads, or that Henry VIII's 1539 decree that the Great Bible be left open and available in every English parish church somehow separated people from the word of God because there was no one there to interpret it. In fact, we know from history that this those letters and roads were a blessing to the work of the Apostle and the early church. We know that those open Bibles were a hallmark of the English Reformation and that many people were blessed precisely through that widely distributed technology that allowed ordinary people to be able to read or hear the Word of God delivered in the plain language of the people. 

All through the Church's history, the Church has experimented with the technologies of their age in the service of the Gospel, from the Roman road, to the printing press, to radio and television, to the internet. 

My experience of evangelicals has been that they as a group are generally more open to technological innovation and experimentation. So I wonder if something else might be at work in your narrow understanding of "embodiment?" 

At the same time, I worry that hidden not-so-deeply in your column is a kind of judgmentalism and perfectionism that weakens your pastoral theology, not to mention showing off a kind of weak, tepid, ecclesiology... as if somehow the Body of Christ and the Action of the Holy Spirit might somehow not stand up to the rigors of Zoom!  At any rate, I am concerned that it reveals a kind of cruel perfectionism, of a theology of Church that depends only on the gathering of like minded (and physically able) persons in the same local space...which might certainly seem to limit the action of God!... and in so doing manages to write off centuries of Christian pastoral theology, practice, and tradition in the service one small facet of a greater ideal that somehow the only valid worship is worship where people can interact in the same physical space. 

I understand that in a consumer culture, where convenience is king, the kind of solitary encounters with a screen is a poor (but very tempting!) substitute for an embodied and sacramental community. But in the case of my little congregation, we have found that the hybrid nature of in-person and remote worship has by every metric drawn us closer together precisely when the pandemic (and society generally) wants to pull us apart. 

And this is at the heart of my disagreement with your op-ed essay: the Body of Christ is served by the wise stewardship of all kinds of technology. How these new, and often old-but-reimagined, technologies get used in the service of the Gospel will require experimentation, learning, trial and error, and creativity. 

No, it's not time to end hybrid worship, as you suggest. I suspect that in fact, we've only scratched the surface of what God has in store for us! And the best is yet to come!

Faithfully yours!

Andrew+

How big is God?

How big is God?

From time to time, I would ask this question of kids. And sometimes they’d shrug, and sometimes they’d shout back “Big!” 

Hmm, I’d say. “This big?” (holding my fingers and thumbs apart) 

“Bigger!” 

“Ok, this big?” (holding hands apart) 

“No! Bigger!” they’d all shout.

“Okay, then. How about this big?” (hold arms wide apart) 

“Bigger!” …. you get the idea!

This exercise reminds of that last scene in the 1997 film Cosmos, where astrophysicist Dr. Eleanor Arroway, played by Jodie Foster, meets a group of school kids in front of the deep space array of radio telescopes in New Mexico, talking about how big space is and about the possibilities for intelligent life "out there." A lot of Christians, especially Episcopal ones, love that film because it asks all the Big Questions and shows pretty well how scientists go about answering it with a sense of awe and mystery and respect, which we Episcopalians deeply share. To paraphrase (in a way that the original author, the late Dr. Carl Sagan, might object): for me, God is there, and God is real, because if God weren’t, “it’d be an awful waste of space.”

So how big is God? And how would you go about describing God? I have nearly a truckload—literally! -- of books on that subject, but in the end not even all those books even scratch the surface!

In ancient times, cultures dealt with this in a variety of ways. Some divided up God into bite-sized chucks. Some cultures had a particular god for a particular locale or tribe. Others, like the Greeks or Romans, divvied up their gods by function: a god of love, a god of evil, a god of thunder (with or without the hammer!) and so on.

Some limit God solely to the luminous or transcendent, who is so far away that if the divine is knowable at all… it is only through certain specific skills or disciplines, or perhaps for the very few with some kind of "special" knowledge.

As Seinfeld once said “Not that there’s anything wrong with that…” but, these only scratch the surface.

The Hebrews had the triply scandalous notion that there is only One God; that the One God is both holy and at the same time immanent (a fancy word for "not far away") living in a covenant relationship between God and God's people; and that it is the job of God’s people is to make God known to the world by following God’s ways. In some Jewish circles, it's understood that the observance of the law and the prophets is really for and on behalf of us all!

Of course, Christianity holds this concept too, but with a different emphasis on the syllahble.

Christians believe that the One God came to earth and joined with humanity in the person of Jesus Christ and his incarnation, and that the One God is made present to us in the person of the Holy Spirit, and that the One God creates and reigns over all creation God, in the Christian context, is at once accessible, complex... and busy! It is by the grace of God combined with our God-given curiosity and imagination that brings it all together.

I know a lot of folks who just can’t wrap their minds around the Trinity: it’s either too big, too esoteric, or because—no matter how much you reassure them that it’s not—it sounds to them like Tri-Theism. But here it is: there is One God, undivided. And we see all of the fullness of the One God and all of the fullness of all of humanity in the person of Jesus Christ; we see all the Fullness of the One God in the Father; and we see all the fullness of the One God in the Holy Spirit.

But wait! There’s more! 

The One God is with us, near and immediate, involved in everything we do and experience while, at the very same time, setting us free to think, make choices, and to act, in response to God or to our impulses or both…!

The One God has a moral and ethical core which is at the heart of our own moral and ethical longings, our own sense of meaning, but is at the heart of creation itself, which is once free and subject to the laws of physics and nature, but also endless its minutiae and its expansiveness.

We see the One God expressed in a Trinity—a Unity of persons—and where each person of the Trinity each witnesses to the One God in the integrity of their persons. Where God is at once transcendent and knowable by us who are created and living in God’s own image.

I know: Ka-boom! Mind blown. 

Wasn’t that fun?

Once, many years ago, a friend of mine, who is a Unitarian Universalist minister, invited me into his church in Southeast Ohio on Trinity Sunday to talk about, or debate with him, the Trinity before his congregation, remember, of Unitarians in all their variety. My point was that in the early church, when these things were being debated, it was the Trinitarians who were the true Unitarians by emphasizing this dynamic unity!

I don’t think I changed any minds, but it was a whole a lot of fun!

So how do you get at it… how do we make sense of the Trinity? Well, the theology helps even if it is a little, uhm, complex. And we have a wonderful Catechism in the Book of Common Prayer that can walk us through that. 

Some people choose to ignore the whole subject… by glossing over the complexity. Others dodge the intellectual bullet by making the debate about something else, misrepresenting the Trinity and then, presto!, refuting the very silly idea that they just made up.

Other try to defend it by just going to the Creeds; but in a bland kind of “The Creeds say it, I believe it, that settles it!” way. To me, this is kind of the theological equivalent of plugging your ears and saying “la la la!”

I mean, look, it's hard. If I only heard some of things people have been told about the Trinity from various pulpits and Sunday school classrooms over the years, I wouldn't believe it either!

Okay. So how do we get at it?

In participation. We get at the Trinity by living faithfully every day with an inquiring and discerning heart.

I have discovered in prayer, holy silence, and meditation, that an open mind and heart helps. And yes, meditating on the Apostles and Nicene creeds line by line, is a good thing to do. I’ve done it in retreat and as a prayer and journaling exercise.

I have found in art, literature, dance, theater, cinema, music, and science that imagination also helps.

Imagination invites us and allows us to experience the fullness of God… and imagination opens us to hear and be challenged by God’s call. To open our minds, our hearts, our wills, and our imagination to fullness of God, is to hear God’s voice just as God called out to the young Samuel while he was trying to sleep.

I think that we need to let the artistic and poetic side of the brain in on the conversation when we contemplate the Trinity: this is a place for poets, musicians, and artists as much as it for systematic theologians, scientists, and apologists.

The Holy Trinity, through the sacramental life, scripture, life in community, prayer and contemplation, invites to a life steeped in holy imagination. Not making things up... but resting in God, listening to the traditions of the Church and paying attention to world around us.

Allow me to demonstrate.

Think of your favorite hymn.

Got it? Terrific!

Now think about the text of that hymn… how does it speak to you? What aspect of God does that text activate in you?

One hymn that stands out for me is an American hymn called “Wondrous Love” which begins:

What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul?
What wondrous love is this, O my soul?
What wondrous love is this that caused the Lord of bliss
to bear the dreadful curse for my soul, for my soul,
to bear the dreadful curse for my soul?

The third verse goes:

To God and to the Lamb I will sing, I will sing,
to God and to the Lamb I will sing,
to God and to the Lamb who is the great I Am,
while millions join the theme, I will sing, I will sing,
while millions join the theme, I will sing.

I think that meditating on your favorite hymns is one way for you to know how God best makes Godself known to you… and to know how you might most easily approach God! It isn’t foolproof—but when it come to meeting the God of all Creation, what is?

It’s still a very good place to start.

So let’s try it. Turn in your hymnals to Hymn 409 (in the Episcopal Hymnal 1982). This is another one of my favorites. First of all… the tune. What can top this magisterial score by none other than Franz Joseph Haydn? This hymn paints a picture of in music and text of the wonder of creation, evoking “the spacious firmament with all the blue ethereal sky….” Let’s sing the third verse, which is the punchline:

What though in solemn silence all
move round the dark terrestrial ball;
what though nor real voice nor sound
amid their radiant orbs be found;
in reason's ear they all rejoice,
and utter forth a glorious voice,
for ever singing as they shine,
'The hand that made us is divine.'

Oh, yeah! It’s oh so very 18^th Century, isn't it? But then so were the folks who wrote our constitution! When you sang it, did you see a picture, painted in your minds eye, of God revealed in… and the source of… everything? Or, as we might say, God the Father!

Turn to Hymn 435. King’s Weston is a marvelous tune by the great Ralph Vaughn Williams, describing and extolling the Lordship of Christ. In six verses, the hymn sums up how we understand who Jesus is and what God is doing in and through him. The hymn invites us to come to him in love, wonder, and joy.

Let’s sing verses 2 and 5:

Humbled for a season to receive a name
from the lips of sinners unto whom he came,
faithfully he bore it spotless to the last,
brought it back victorious, when from death he passed.

In your hearts enthrone him; there let him subdue
all that is not holy, all that is not true;
crown him as your Captain in temptation's hour:
let his will enfold you in its light and pow'r.

A lovely little hymn about the Holy Spirit is hymn 513, written by Father Carl P. Daw, Jr., an Episcopal priest, it appeared for the first time in the Hymnal 1982. It beautifully evokes both the power and the intimacy of God the Holy Spirit. Let’s sing verse 1:

Like the murmur of the dove’s song,
like the challenge of her flight,
like the vigor of the wind’s rush,
like the new flame’s eager might:
come, Holy Spirit, come.

Finally, let’s contemplate the fullness of the One God in Trinity of Persons through this well known and magnificent Reformation hymn Nun danket alle Gott, “Now Thank We All Our God,” Hymn 396, singing verse 3 together:

All praise and thanks to God
the Father now be given,
the Son and Spirit blest,
who reign in highest heaven
the one eternal God,
whom heaven and earth adore;
for thus it was, is now,
and shall be evermore. 

Trinity Sunday is the first Sunday of what some call “ordinary time” or the Sundays after Pentecost. But there is nothing ordinary about our Creating, Redeeming, and Empowering God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit! 

We have now entered a season of contemplation and action. We will spend the summer and next fall learning to follow the teachings of Jesus. We listen for the Spirit to move us to do them! Day by day we stand in awe and humility before the presence of God, as we learn to know and walk with God. We do that in lots of ways: Baptism and Eucharist, Scripture and prayer, Holy Service and Holy Companionship. We do this in concert with the Church Catholic in all time and places. God has given us imagination, intellect, art, music, science, and more to bounce off the witness of Scripture and the life of the whole Church and see God working and alive… and then we only catch the merest glimpse of God’s love, God’s power, God’s majesty….

Blessed with holy imagination, we find that in all that we do, in all whom we love, in all our creativity and inquiry, and in all our care for each other and creation, that our loving, living, Triune God is active in all of us and in our world.

In the Trinity, we see that the fullness, the love, the intimacy of God is bigger than the universe, and as near as our hearts.

+++ +++ +++

A sermon for Trinity Sunday, May 30, 2021 at St. John's Episcopal Church, Clearwater, Florida

Here is a video of the Liturgy for Trinity Sunday (Facebook)

Here is a video of the Sermon only. (Vimeo)

When will we gather again and when we will receive Communion?

(Updated Tuesday, May 19, 6 p.m.) Yesterday, I got an e-mail from a member of my parish. It raises a number of questions that I know have been floating around my congregation (and others). I have decided to post his note and my response.

We are in this for the long haul.Our pastoral and liturgical response to this unfolding pandemic will require theological inquiry, community reflection, and liturgical creativity. 

Here is part of the letter that started this:

Andrew, 

...Do you plan to celebrate Morning Prayer only until we have in-person worship?  Is there a date for the return to in-person worship?Trinity Wall Street returns June 1.  St. Paul's, Doylestown returns June 14. Why haven't we done online Eucharist?

Here is my response:

Thank you for your e-mail and for your questions. I will try to answer them as best as I can. 

When will we re-open and gather for in-person worship?

Before I start, I would like to refer you to Bishop Kevin Nichols' pastoral letter to the Diocese of Bethlehem "A Phased Approach to Regathering." Following what Bishop Kevin has written, we are still in Phase I across the whole diocese of Bethlehem. As a result, we are limited to the following protocols:

• Gathering for online worship, formation, and community

• Limiting service ministries to safe protocols dedicated to essentials such as feeding ministries  

Bishop Kevin's "Phased" approach roughly corresponds to the Commonwealths Color-coded scale. Northampton, Lehigh, and Bucks counties are all "Red" according to the Commonwealth.  The description that the Diocese of Bethlehem has laid out follows the Commonwealths nearly word for word. 

There are several  questions I don't have answers to. For example, does that mean that the whole diocese will move through the phases together or will we move through regionally depending on how the situation unfolds in different areas? I can foresee the rural northwest of our diocese reaching "green" (following the State's scale) well ahead of us in the Lehigh Valley, but Bishop Kevin could decide to have the whole diocese re-open at once rather than by region as an act of unity and visible communion. That will be up to him in consultation with the Diocesan Council and Standing Committee. 

As for the June 1 date at Trinity Wall Street and June 15 for Doylestown (Diocese of Pennsylvania) that you mention, as I read their websites, these are tentative dates. I can't say what TrinWall's criteria is, but if Doylestown follows the protocol laid out by the Diocese of Pennsylvania, their reopening will depend on how new cases develop in their county.

Even in places that have reopened, the requirements for physical distancing, hand-washing, masking, etc. might rule out Communion as we know it. Many places are also prohibiting (or at least discouraging) congregational singing. (For example, the Royal School of Church Music has suspended the King's College Course normally held at St. Stephen's Wilkes-Barre in mid- to late-July because singing blasts the droplets that might carry the contagion.) 

Keep in mind that the virus is passed along from people who are asymptomatic, and because of the scarcity of testing supplies, asymptomatic people are generally not tested. That means that by the time a person pops symptoms and tests positive, they may have been conveying the virus for 14 or more days before a definitive diagnosis. This is why the isolation and physical distancing is the required (and wisest) protocol. 

As for our own Diocese, when the Lehigh Valley reaches "Yellow" we'll see if that moves us to Phase II on the DioBeth scale. I don't know when that will be, so I don't know when in-person worship will return. (Update: Bishop Kevin has distributed guidelines as to how we'll enter "Phase II" of our COVID-19 response in the Diocese of Bethlehem.)

Right now, at Trinity, Easton, I know of at least five people who have either tested positive for COVID-19 or have been exposed to someone who has. One parishioner has died from COVID-19. So I have opted for an assertive approach to handling this crisis.

Will we only be doing Morning Prayer for On-Line worship?

Right now, we have no specific guidance from Bishop Kevin as to the do's and don't's of on-line worship. If the Cathedral sets the norm for the diocese (and this is the only place where I've seen Bishop Kevin preach and/or lead worship on-line), then the norm is Morning Prayer. I suppose that Ante-Communion is also an option. 

My approach has been to assemble worship with as many people as possible reading or leading prayers from either home or on-camera from church while practicing safe physical distancing. Our virtual choir happens as members record their singing and then the voices are mixed into a single recording and then edited into a Power Point. All of this is saved mixed as an MP4 video and published on YouTube. After publication, it is posted on our web-site, our social media, and a link is sent to folks on our e-newsletter list. 

Again, my goal is to involve as many people as possible rather than have a point-and-shoot worship (which is how we do Wednesday and major Holy Day services via Facebook Live) focusing only one or two clergy in a largely empty room.

This is where my read of Anglican theology of worship comes into play. One Episcopal parish in the LV is doing an on-line Eucharist, but the reception is only by the presiding priest and there is no congregation present either in actuality or on-screen. As you will see below, in my mind this does not meet the minimum criteria for Eucharist 

The concept of spiritual communion in our tradition has been reserved to special circumstances such as those sick or infirm to receive by mouth, or, interestingly, to soldiers in battlefield situations. Older editions of the Armed Forces Prayer Book (an Episcopal document in origin) first set out the prayer that we reprint in the e-newsletter for spiritual communion.

I am also informed by my work in Catholic Healthcare. From 1994-2002, I was the director of pastoral care in a Catholic hospital. We had an extensive ministry by both deacons and extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist. When we had Mass in the hospital's chapel, the LEM's and/or Deacon would fan out immediately after Mass. On days when we did not have Mass in our Chapel, we'd time their work--- utilizing pre-sanctified elements-- so that it would take place immediately after the televised mass on EWTN at mid-day. The point was to connect the communicant with the community in communion. 

Before the extent of our physical distancing was announced mid-Lent, I considered doing something very much like that: small groups in the presence of an LEV or Deacon who would then receive from pre-sanctified elements, while I would lead a liturgy via Livestream or Facebook Live. But this is not possible (nor advisable) in the current situation. The virus is just too virulent and too communicable.

On Private Masses and Distance Consecration

I believe that our Anglican tradition discourages both private masses and "distance" consecration. 

A private mass is when the priest celebrates the mass without a congregation present. 

Another approach, suggested by Dr. Diana Butler Bass (a lay theologian who migrated from Evangelicalism into the Episcopal church) and others, is that I could say the words of consecration on my end of a TV or Livestream broadcast and you could hold a piece of bread and cup of wine, and we could say that it was somehow consecrated and then you could receive... this is what I mean by "distance consecration...." I believe that this pushes us in a direction where we don't want to go: the Eucharist is a Sacrament, and Sacraments are not magic. The prayer of consecration is not an incantation but a work of the people of God in community. 

At the same time, the Sacrament is not a point of personal privilege nor a private possession. It is an act of community that communicates Christ and mediates grace. 

Dr. Butler-Bass has suggested that not having even a televised/live-streamed Mass is an act of "hoarding" by the clergy who are keeping the laity from the Sacrament, a view that I strongly disagree with. Reducing the question into a faux justice issue is, in my view, unhelpful, and misses the point of how sacraments function in Christian community.

Sure, God can do whatever God wants! Who is to say that the One who lives in Kairos (God's time) can't transcend Chronos (human time) and consecrate the elements across a TV or the internet. But Sacraments are not magic and the Eucharistic Prayer is not an incantation. I personally believe that the gathering of community is an essential element at the heart of the Eucharist. 

Short of specific guidelines from the Episcopal Church (except for the general guidance of the Presiding Bishop, Bishop Kevin, and various other diocesan bishops), I have fallen back on the guidance I lived under during my time in Catholic healthcare nearly twenty years ago. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops set out useful guidelines for televising the Mass, (updated in 2007) which in my view covers the issues of televised and live-streamed Mass in much greater detail in a very helpful way. A key passage says:

Since the liturgy is the work of Christ and the work of God's people, the televised Mass should always be celebrated within a living community of God's people whose presence reveals the full, conscious and active participation of the faithful. Even when the liturgy to be televised is taped apart from a regularly scheduled parish liturgy, there should always be a group of people who participate in the liturgy as fully as possible by their prayer, song, and presence.  

Because the present Coronavirus situation precludes the gathering of a group of people who can fully participate in the liturgy, even for the purposes of video recording, I am wary of doing a broadcast mass that would seem to reduce the Eucharist to mere performance. 

This week, I will be meeting with Fr. Raymond (a fine liturgist), Deacon Fran, and members of our parish's worship committee to discuss the possibility and limits of doing Eucharist on line and how we can do that according to the guidelines I've noted above. When Bishop Kevin issues guidelines for Phase II, we'll also meet as a Vestry to make some decisions. 

Fortunately, we have inherited the traditional monastic offices in our Anglican tradition. Thomas Cranmer sought to apply the monastic pattern of frequent daily prayer. Before the consecrations of Samuel Seabury, William White, and William Provost as our first bishops, the Anglican (later Episcopal) Church in America functioned quite well not only without bishops but with very few priests. For almost a century and a half (or more!) before our church was formed in 1789, congregations in North America lived and thrived on the pattern of Morning Prayer, metrical psalms, and preaching (often by lay preachers reading from pre-printed sermons). They did this in a frontier church in a new country building new communities. 

We are in a new frontier right now. We will have to think about mission, liturgy, community, and formation in new, creative ways. I think that we can mine those resources and our Anglican and Catholic tradition deeply and to good effect. When the day comes that we do find a way to more formally express ourselves Eucharistically, I don't know what it will look like, but it will be different and it will be wonderful! Right now, we are in an in-between time of waiting,  experimentation, exploration, innovation, and prayer. 

On Trinity Sunday: an exercise in holy imagination

Trinity Sunday, 2018 

What is your way into God? What opens the door to the divine for you? Is the vastness and wonder of God’s creation? Is it sense of meaning and redemption that you have found in your relationship with God? Maybe you were a person who suffered addictions, or abuse, or stuck in a cycle of really bad choices and found healing and wholeness when you came to faith. Perhaps there was a time when you sought meaning, hope, or direction, and it came to you in an encounter with God. Maybe the door opened for you when you came to sobriety, to health.... or just to your senses!

However it is that you meet God, I’ll bet that there is hymn for you.

The Trinity, the Christian doctrine that we contemplate today, says that the oneness of God is expressed in a trinity of persons and a unity of being. The One God is manifested in a Trinity of persons. This is much more than metaphor, and we must avoid the temptation to reducing our language of God to mere "base three" thinking. The Trinity tells us several things about the very nature of God. Not only do we know the One God as a unity of persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but the Trinity also tells us that: 1) God is complex to the point unknowing; 2) God is relational; and because of that, through God's grace and action, 3) God is knowable.

So, among other things, the Trinity also tells us that God offers us a variety of ways “in” to our relationship with God. We can contemplate the majesty and wonder of the God of All Creation in God the Father. We can enter in to intimate, healing relationship in God the Son. We can enter in to the mystic power and mysterious movement of God in God the Holy Spirit. These "ways in" should not be confused with the "roles" or "functions" of each person of the Trinity, and remember each person of the Trinity all contain the fullness of the One God. The Trinity shows us that God is complex, mysterious, and knowable all at the same time.

Of course, God is so big and beyond our knowing that the best we can do is use analogies to describe the fullness of God. This is a start but it can get us into trouble. What we need is holy imagination, grounded in prayer, scripture, tradition, and in the worship of the church.

Now, I am not a musician, nor do I play one on television, but I do sing and I have found that one way that we can discover how each of us activate holy imagination is to look at our favorite hymn.

So... What is your favorite hymn? What piece of music makes you say, when it pops up in church, “Oh! Good!”

I have a hunch that your favorite hymn is not only your favorite because it makes you tap your toes but that there is something about that hymn that is pointing you to how you enter into your relationship with God. Something about that hymn stirs something in you, pulls you, and takes you beyond yourself.

Let me demonstrate by sharing with you some of my favorite hymns.

As it happens, one of these is the one we sang this morning at the start of our liturgy. It is a classic that shows up nearly every time we celebrate the Trinity. Using imagery from the Book of Revelation, it talks about the time we hope and pray for, when Earth and Heaven will be joined and all creation will ring out in praise to God (In the Episcopal hymnal, H-362):

Holy, holy, holy! All the saints adore Thee,
Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea;
Cherubim and seraphim falling down before Thee,
Who was, and is, and evermore shall be.

Holy, holy, holy! Though the darkness hide Thee,
Though the eye of sinful man Thy glory may not see;
Only Thou art holy; there is none beside Thee,
Perfect in pow’r, in love, and purity.

Another favorite of mine talks about how all creation points to The Creator. Written by Joseph Addison (H-409), in our hymnal it is set to a marvelous tune by Franz Josef Hayden.  It presents a stirring image of God the Father as both creator and one who can be known through creation. Be warned: this is a very seventeenth century hymn because it also makes the case for a unitarian approach to God through the window of reason. I am pretty sure that Addison didn't mean to do this, but the hymn is also a description of one way that prevenient grace works. 

The Spacious Firmament on high,

With all the blue Ethereal Sky,

And spangled Heav’ns, a Shining Frame,

Their great Original proclaim:

Th’ unwearied Sun, from day to day,

Does his Creator’s Pow’r display,

And publishes to every Land

The Work of an Almighty Hand.

If I were to pick a hymn that sums up for me the meaning of Jesus’ redemptive love, it is this American folk hymn (H-439), whose authorship is unknown but whose words speak of an eternal, saving love:

What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul!
What wondrous love is this, O my soul!
What wondrous love is this, that caused the Lord of bliss
to bear the dreadful curse for my soul, for my soul,
to bear the dreadful curse for my soul.

There is a lovely hymn to the Holy Spirit written by an Episcopal priest, Carl P. Daw, in 1981 for our Hymnal 1982 (H-513), and it is also one of my favorites:

Like the murmur of the dove's song,
like the challenge of her flight,
like the vigor of the wind's rush,
like the new flame's eager might:
Come, Holy Spirit, come.

To the members of Christ's body,
to the branches of the Vine,
to the Church in faith assembled,
to our midst as gift and sign:
Come, Holy Spirit, come.

So what’s your favorite hymn? And what does it tell you about your walk with God?

Maybe it’s something like “Amazing Grace” written by an Anglican priest who came to faith in Jesus and repented from a life as sea-captain of slaving ships.

Or maybe it’s a Christmas carol like “O Little Town of Bethlehem” which talks of God breaking in to our world for our redemption in the new-born Jesus. Written by another Episcopal priest named Philips Brooks, the original poem had five verses. 

It is a subversive little hymn, and on some level our inner Scrooges must sense this because the fourth verse of his original poem is almost always dropped out. It is even asterisked in our hymnal (H-79), indicating that it is optional, but to me this verse is the heart of the text. Singing it just might turn your heart at Christmas just as old Scrooge's heart was turned in A Christmas Carol:

Where children pure and happy

Pray to the holy Child,

Where misery cries out to thee,

Son of the Mother mild,

Where charity stands watching,

And faith holds wide the door,

The dark night wakes, the glory breaks,

And Christmas comes once more.

Part of what I hope you get out of this exercise on this Trinity Sunday is not only a sense of the complexity of God in Three Persons, but also God’s marvelous accessibility. 

In the beauty of this music, I hope and pray that your imaginations will be activated to see all the ways that God is inviting you—all of us—into a living, holy, and transforming relationship with God.

In activating our holy imagination through prayer, music, art, and liturgy, we begin to discover that, among other things, that the Trinity is not some esoteric, dry as dust dogma, nor a game of theological trivial pursuit. The Trinity shows us that our complex God is at once relational, knowable and intimate.

These hymns, I think, are but one clue as to how you are attracted to God, and how God invites us—all of us—in all our particularity, and with all that we bring, into living relationship with The One God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

One last hymn tells a story that moves us from contemplation to action, and reminds us that discipleship is at once freeing and costly. William Alexander Percy wrote this little hymn in 1924 that contemplates the cost of discipleship (H-661), describing those first fisherman who heard Jesus’ call and followed him:

Contented peaceful fishermen
Before they ever knew
The peace of God That fill’d their hearts
Brimful and broke them too.

And verse 4:

The peace of God, it is no peace,
But strife closed in the sod,
Yet, brothers, pray for but one thing–
The marvelous peace of God.

So what’s your favorite hymn? What hymn speaks to you? Look it up. Read the text. Pray the text. And listen to how the Triune God is as close to us as our hearts, and is as near to us as the song on our lips.

The geography of the holy

Ascension Day - 2018

There is an old story that comes from the heady days of the space race between the USA and the former Soviet Union. The story goes that when Yuri Gagarin, the first person to fly in space and orbit the earth, made his voyage in 1961, that he looked out the window and observed that he did not see God.

It gets weirder. It turns out that Gagarin never said anything one way or the other about seeing God out the window of Vostok-1, but we do know this: before his rocket lifted off from Star City on the Wednesday after Orthodox Easter, Gagarin took his daughter, Yelena, to be baptized.

The only record of the infamous comment in fact comes from a speech by Nikita Khrushchev in the month or two after the flight. And he didn’t quote Gagarin but rather, in an attempt to mock religion, said what Gagarin didn’t see. The Western press, perhaps spotting an opportunity for propaganda (or else not being able to understand Russian) immediately attributed the words to Gagarin. 

I wonder if this comment, and the geo-political flap that arose from it, didn’t inspire the 1963 film Heavens Above!, where Peter Sellers plays a naïve but well-meaning vicar who gives away food and welcomes the poor into his church, becoming such an annoyance that he is shot into space as the new Bishop of Outer Space, orbiting the earth reading the psalms over the radio. 

The misquote attributed to Gagarin was definitively answered by three American astronauts, Bill Anders, Jim Lovell, and Frank Borman as they orbited the moon in Apollo 8 on Christmas Eve, 1968. The three astronauts took turns reading Genesis 1:1-10, the creation story, on the same flight that gave us the iconic image of the earth rising over the horizon of the moon.

The geography of holiness is a tricky and dangerous thing.

Here we are, forty days after Easter, on another Feast of the Ascension, celebrating the return of the living, crucified and resurrected Jesus to heaven.

What is described in both the Book of Acts and in the Gospel of Luke is not a mere disapparation. Jesus doesn’t just fade into the ether, but instead physically rises up into the sky, leaving the disciples staring into the heavens, mouths agape, until an angel comes along and tells them, essentially, to snap out of it and come back to earth.

As sophisticated as we are, no matter how many airline flights we take, and no matter how many space shots we’ve witnessed, we still tend to think of heaven as “up” and hell as “down”, with us living somewhere in the middle. But as interesting as this cosmological hot-hero sandwich might be, the real significance of the Ascension is not geography but relationship.

If you turn to the catechism in the Book of Common Prayer, you will discover that “the mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.” (p. 854)

In both the Gospel of Luke and in the Book of Acts, before he returns to heaven, Jesus tells his friends and apprentices to say put, and await the gift that God will send them.

He also teaches them and reveals to them one last time how everything they have seen and heard fits together as God intended. We discover that the disciples were not powerless nor afraid, but spent their time together in what must have seemed like a transformed community, praying and singing and spending time in worship. They stop hiding, but now live out in the open going between their home(s) and the Temple.

The geography of holiness had changed. Their place, their city, once a place of foreboding and death, is now a place of wonder and worship. They saw the world and their place in it with new eyes, and this even before the Paraclete would arrive in another ten days.

You see, the Ascension didn’t just take Jesus back into heaven, into God’s realm in the cosmos, the Ascension revealed how the friends and apprentices of Jesus were now themselves drawn living in a new relationship with God and each other through Christ. They were changed. Their relationships with each other and even, in their eagerness, with the world was transformed.

The Ascension shows us the sneakiness of God. It’s importance is exactly backwards from what we expect. We think it is about going “up,” when all along is about tuning our hearts and senses towards Christ, so that we can see more and more that God’s work is being done on earth—all around us!-- just as it is in heaven!

The Ascension shows us how we are drawn into Christ, to each other, and toward the world. Christ draws us towards heaven while at the same shows us that the only place we can really find God is right here.  The Ascension shows that God’s power and healing is not reserved for the someday but is also right now. The Ascension demonstrates that in all of our everyday living, the Risen and Ascended Christ continues to be present.

Metropolitan Anthony Bloom reminds us, “that the realm of God is dangerous. You must enter into it and not just seek information about it.” Look at what happens in Luke and Acts. Jesus draws us to heaven and directs us to "stay in The City"—in the places and in the relationships where God has placed you. We hope for heaven, and the place where we receive “power from on high” is in “the city,” where we his people live, pray, work, and worship.

When we do heavenly worship, with glorious music, we certainly are drawing ourselves towards heaven at the same time we are witnessing to the reality that God is all the time bringing heaven to earth. 

I told you… God is sneaky that way. This is the geography of the holy. 

As God’s people, the more we are drawn to heaven the more we live in service to the world; the more we are drawn to that ascended vision, the more find the sacred in the city. In the geography of the holy, we don’t need to go elsewhere to find God because the place where we find the power of God is right here all along!

It is said by some who knew him, that Yuri Gagarin carried in his pocket a small icon, both in his space flight and later when he died in a plane crash in 1968. I don’t know about that. But I do know this: we here in this "city," in this place, in our witness, worship, and in our holy work, we baptized people are icons of the holy. What God is doing on earth with us now is what happens in heaven, just as Jesus said when he taught us to pray.

In the Ascension, we are invited to both see heaven and live in the city and so inhabit the geography of the holy. 

Acts 1:1-11, Luke 24:44-53

A sermon for the Feast of the Ascension, May 10, 2018 at the Cathedral Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

The Odd Three Days

If the period from Maundy Thursday through Good Friday to the Great Vigil of Easter can be called "The Great Three Days," then maybe the series of observances from All Hallow's Eve, going through All Saints Day, and then ending with All Soul's Day (or Faithful Departed), might be "The Odd Three Days."

Look at the arc of the story. It starts with ghosties and ghoulies and long-legged beasties and things that show up on your doorstep asking for candy, and then it ends with two feasts focused on the dead: All Saint's, remembering all those holy people who don't get their own holy day; and, All Soul's or All Faithful Departed, where (depending on where you land on the universalist spectrum) we remember all the faithful (baptized) who have died, even if they weren't all that saintly, or everyone who has died regardless of their fitness for the Kingdom.

At any rate, what we are doing is recalling those who have died while at the same time thumbing our noses at death.

Back on April Foole's Day, we made fun of Kings, Queens, Bishops and other clergy, the wealthy and the celebrity, and anyone who thinks themselves important.

Yesterday, on Halloween, we made fun of devils, demons, ghosts, goblins, and monsters. We looked death in the face and laughed.

Halloween stores and parties aside, secular society does this very nervously. That's because most people don't get the joke.

The reason that we followers of Jesus can put on make-up and join the mockery is that by reason of Jesus' incarnation, death, and resurrection God has defeated and put to flight the ultimate power that sin, death, and the grave have over us. Our bodies may die, but the spiritual power of death no longer has any hold over us.

We might be tempted to think that when are praying for our deceased loved ones that we are pleading that God might give them a break from the torments of purgatory or hell. This kind of fear, combined with clever fund-raising, is one of the things that sparked the Reformation 500 years ago. But, in fact, what we are doing is joining with all those everyday saints and souls from all time and every place who, as we heard in today's reading from Revelation, have gathered around the throne of the Lamb and together we sing "Alleluia."

During this Lesser Triduum, these Three Odd Days, we look at the expanse of the church year now winding down, gear ourselves up for how God will wrap up history and fill all things, reflect on the coming of winter, and remember all the ways that God has shown up in the lives of ordinary people--especially in the ones we love but see no longer-- and we discover once again that God in Christ has swallowed up death forever.

The saints and souls we pray for, those near and dear to us, and those known to us only in name and story, are--just like us-- going from strength to strength in the life of perfect service.

These "three odd days," this lesser triduum, may seem like we are whistling past the graveyard, but why settle for whistling when we can sing?

We are able to sing as the Apostle Paul did to the Corinthians; "Where, O death, is your sting...? ...Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!"

We are, in fact, living in a new creation where the power of death, the power to separate us from God, each other, and creation, has been defeated forever in Christ's life, death, and resurrection.

Homily for The Feast of All Saints, November 1, 2017 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Easton, PA.

Living baptism by immersion

A Sermon for the Easter Vigil, March 19, 2014

At the baptisms of Melissa Ashley Bilza and Jessica Rose Floray

Once upon a time a man walked into a small country church and asked the preacher about being baptized. After some conversation, the pastor agreed and on the following Sunday the two men along with the members of the small church gathered at the river for the big moment.

They waded into the river, and the preacher took the man by the shoulders and shouted “Do you believe?”  “Yes!” the man said, and with that the preacher pushed him way under the water until the bubbles got smaller and smaller and then after a moment pulled him up.

“Do you believe?” the preacher shouted again. Spouting water from the first question but still determined, he nodded his head and once again the preacher pushed his head under the water and then after a moment, pulled him to his feet.

A third time, the preacher shouted into the man’s face “Do you believe?”

The man pushed the preacher away and said, “Yes! I believe! I believe you’re trying to drown me!”

All of which is to say that Baptism can be a little overwhelming.

While we did not march down the Delaware and we will not dunk Melissa and Jessica in the river, and just because I am going to pour water on your heads at that font, don’t think for one minute that we Episcopalians don’t immerse.

Episcopalians live our baptisms through immersion. Every day.

Take tonight’s liturgy. What we did today was immerse ourselves in a whole lot of symbolism. We lit and blessed a brand new fire and we held candles in the darkness to remind us that in Christ, God drives away the darkness of death and sin and brings light to our lives. We steeped ourselves in Scripture, hearing again snippets of the long story of how God has never forgotten us. We heard that from the moment of our creation and all through our history God has worked to save us from the consequences of our sin…right down to this very moment. We have sung ancient and new songs of hope and worship and expectation. We have joined with Christians all over the world who tonight carry the same light and sing the same songs and tell the same story. We have joined with Christians who have been doing this for centuries.

We have engaged every sense in telling the story: sight, smell, sound, taste, and touch to remind us that God is engaging our whole being, our minds, our hearts, our imagination, and our ethics. What you two women are doing tonight, and what every Christian does in their baptisms, is to immerse yourselves in a new relationship with God in Jesus Christ.

The Apostle Paul is talking about this kind of immersion when he asks the Christians in Rome “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?”

He is saying that when we go down into the water it is like going down into the grave. And we come up out of the water, it is like stepping back into life.  He says that we immersed in Christ’s death and in that immersion we are changed, we take on Christ’s life.

Baptism is the complete initiation into Christ’s body, the Church. But “initiation” in this case is not mere hazing, mere boot camp after which you get a medal or certificate, but “immersion” into Christ. Paul uses the word “with” six times in this short little passage. You are not just joining a club in baptism, you are being immersed into the divine and this will change you.

Have you ever tie-dyed a shirt? What do you do? You bunch up the shirt and tie the bunches together with string and then you dip—baptize!—the shirt in dye. And when you untie the strings the areas that were bunched up, voila, you have a shirt with a new design! And if you repeat the process with different colors, you can get a different funky design. The colors may fade or run or blend with each other but they won’t go back to being a white t-shirt from Target because in the dyeing process the very fabric, the very threads, have changed from their old color to the new.

In the Book of Acts, we hear of a woman named Lydia, who knew all about baptism. She did it for a living. She lived in the Greek city of Phillipi and she was, the Bible tells us, a seller of purple cloth. To make that cloth purple she had to take the wool and bleach it—baptize it in a bleach and water mixture—to get out the impurities. And then she had to baptize it again in the rare purple dye to make into a very valuable, rare and much sought after fabric that all the wealthy and fashionable people wore in Paul’s day.

Lydia, a woman who was both wealthy and the head of a household—a rare thing in the first century—heard Paul preach about Jesus and decided that she, too, wanted to be baptized, immersed into the life of Christ. And so she was, she and her whole household. Lydia was one of the earliest supporters of the brand-new church. I will bet that when she heard the Apostle Paul talk about being immersed in Christ, and coming out new and whole and changed, she knew exactly what he meant.

Being immersed in Christ will change us. As we take the plunge into baptismal living we will discover that God in Christ will have the way of getting into the secret parts ourselves, and changing us in ways we never expect. It is not that we never be without tension, or choice, or difficulty, but rather that we are being changed at the very fiber of our being into the people that God made us to be.

In the early days of the church it was a common baptismal practice for those entering the water to lay aside their old clothes, depicting their surrender of the former life of sin and death. They emerged from the water like newborn babes and then were clothed in new, white garments. According to Eugene Peterson’s version of Colossians in a version of the Bible called “The Message,” it is not just new garments that are put on. No, the newly baptized are "clad in the wardrobe God picked out for them: compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength, discipline and the all-purpose garment of love." The symbolic garment we will put on each of you, a white stole, is more than a fashion statement. It is another reminder that you have put on Christ.

In your baptisms, you have immersed yourselves in Christ.  You choice to be baptized tonight has led you to be immersed in grace and now be filled with the life of the risen Christ. 

So as you have been immersed, immerse yourself in prayer. Take the plunge into scripture and become part of the story of God’s salvation. Steep yourselves in the rhythm of the sacraments, the church’s year, and the church’s time. Wade into the world with acts of mercy, justice and practical caring. Marinate yourself in Christian community, where you find people who far from perfect and who often stumble but who are just as immersed in this ongoing,  unfolding, joyous, spiritual experiment called baptismal living.