Month

Dear People of Christ Church,
Blessings on the first days of fall!
I’m excited to share the news that on Monday the Christ Church vestry took a vote, based on parishioner feedback, to adopt the Stations of the Cross from St John the Evangelist, Boston. Marjorie Hartman told me that her father had attended church there when he first came to the United States and that he had always loved the pageantry of the Episcopal Church, eventually leading him to our own Christ Church. That’s the same thing that I loved about St John the Evangelist, too, when I interned in the year 2000/01 before I went to seminary. I was sad to hear that the space was closing as a parish (it’ll become condos, most likely), but I’m so delighted to have a little piece of that sacred place here.

There was a time when the Anglican tradition made a huge fuss about rejecting anything that seemed more in line with the Roman Catholic side of the church. Not politely, such things were dismissed as “popish” idolatry. In the mid 1800s, a group based at Oxford began a revival of heretofore “Catholic” practices, like incense, candles, and more formal ritual, coupled with a commitment to ministry in the city. The response? In 1874 the ‘Public Worship Regulation Act” sent clergy to jail for wearing chasubles (that’s the big tent-like garment worn by the priest at the Eucharist in some churches). Using wafers at communion and water in the wine—all pretty non controversial now—were also suspect.

Kneeling at communion had long been a political question. In 1552 a text was written that came to be known as the “black rubric” because it was pasted in afterwards clarifying that worshippers were to receive communion kneeling, but not to get any ideas about the traditional (Roman Catholic) understanding of transubstantiation: For as concernynge the Sacramentall bread and wyne, they remayne styll in theyr verye naturall substaunces, and therefore may not be adored, for that were Idolatrye to be abhorred of all faythfull christians.

The black rubric has come out of there since then and our Anglican view of what the sacraments mean has broadened, somewhat, and become a little depoliticized. Every church still has their own traditions about their practices, but the wider world just doesn’t view things in those categories quite the same way. Are you “low” church or “high” church? The distinction seems pointless. I hope to lead our worship into good church, to be able to pull out all the stops with incense and bells and all the rest once in a while, but also to be comfortable enough that we understand that our prayer is to help us to give glory to God, not our own performance.

Blessings,
Sara+

Dear People of Christ Church,
This week, I write with a mixture of joy and sadness. Joy at the amazing gift of the ten year anniversary of ministry celebration on Sunday—truly, it is a marvelous gift to be your priest—and sadness, with the death yesterday of Christ Church friend Paula Tatarunis. Paula had been on a complicated road of recovery from an AVM in her brain that came to light in February, and had been in various states of consciousness since then, almost recovering in April and having a setback when her brain began to bleed in a procedure intended to prevent future strokes. Paula was a brilliant, creative, dedicated, thoughtful, and just generally remarkable human being. She went from lurking in the back pew to being in charge of the altar guild in about five minutes, and helped to keep the choir together in some pretty lean times. She read everything from classical and medieval theology to inter-church debates over Anglican polity with the same intellectual fervor, humor, and some skepticism. She was a doctor at the clinic at Lawrence Memorial in Medford, but had also spent time as a “jailhouse doc” at MCI Norfolk, with a deep passion for justice for the men who were incarcerated there. Paula never rested on anything so simple as tradition or custom in her own spirituality, but was unfailingly dedicated to embodying the wider church tradition, setting the altar with a military precision pretty impressive for someone who was more of a pacifist.

Over the years, Paula came to find that she and Jesus were working through some differences that felt irreconcilable to her. The amount of translation she found herself needing to do to be in church was just too much. The mystery of God for Paula was silence and stillness, out taking pictures of dead weeds. God was harder to find for her in the particularity of Jesus and the practices of the church. We emailed off and on throughout her sojourn away—she was always still wrestling, always still seeking. Last December she came one Sunday and as we were emailing afterwards said it felt good, but that she felt like her vocation was in the outer darkness. She had so much light, though. It was a privilege to be her priest and a daunting wonder to plan her funeral for this Saturday.

I don’t know how other clergy do it, but I fall in love with each of you every single time, and it’s always bound for heartbreak. I cry at your funerals and your baptisms, just astonished at the grace of God and the fleeting nature of it all. This, of course, is the way of the cross—it’s the shape of human life that loss and grief weave through unbearable beauty. One of the graces of the time of accompanying Paula through her journey these last months has been getting to know her husband, Darrell, who, though he dismisses himself as an “agnostic Jewish heathen” shows a love for his wife so deep I can only see God there. The way of the cross is the way of life, as, too, resurrection. Whatever Paula finally thought about the theology of the Trinity, I am so sure that Jesus was just as in love with Paula as those of us who were blessed enough to know her in her life.

Services for Paula will be at Christ Church this Saturday at 1pm, with a larger memorial service with poetry and jazz planned for late October.

Blessings,
Sara+

Dear People of Christ Church,
This week, as hopefully we all are, I’ve continued to be moved by the European migrant crisis. I came across a book of sermons by Walter Brueggeman, an Old Testament scholar, where in a sermon about a passage in the book of the prophet Isaiah he writes this:

There is something about [Jerusalem] that forgets the very mandate of fidelity that makes a city work. There is nothing here about removing these failed poor and making them invisible, deporting them because they are an economic inconvenience. No, because widows and orphans are not an inconvenience. They are a measure of the health of the city, to be measured in terms of justice and righteousness, and Jerusalem has failed that measure (p 50).

Jerusalem failed—our world has clearly failed, too. Refugees are not an inconvenience. Homeless people are not an inconvenience. Victims of addiction, war, environmental devastation. Not an inconvenience, but a signal of health or ill health. That’s about the world. No one is an inconvenience to the heart of God. Yes, we are failing. Yes, I falter. But it’s not hopeless.

The harsher realities of the world, a world where children are abandoned and whole swaths of people dismissed as criminals, have always been so. Whatever Jesus himself meant the time he said that the poor would always be with us, over the last two millennia, at least, so far he’s right. But economic poverty exposes spiritual poverty, and meeting economic need fulfills spiritual need. It goes both ways. The thing I love about Brueggeman’s point is that this is that it offers enough of a breather from the usual guilt/shame/despair cycle to allow for the breath of God to enter. It is only when it appears that the problems of the world and our souls rest in our own power that we get lost. If there is no hope, then that makes it awfully easy to do nothing.

I’ll share again here the prayer I offered on Sunday as part of the children’s sermon. It’s based on one from Thomas Keating, a Roman Catholic priest who has worked to return contemplative prayer and meditation into the Christian tradition.

Welcome, welcome, welcome.
I welcome everything that comes to me today
Because I know that God is with me.
I welcome the world
I welcome joy and sadness
I welcome fear and delight.
I welcome my friends
I welcome those who are difficult for me to love
I let go of my need to be in charge
I let go of my need for people to think I’m the best
I open myself to the love of God.
I open myself to the love of God.

To which, today, I would add: I welcome the discomfort of seeing those who are in pain. I welcome the feeling that I want to do more to help. I welcome the opportunity to see those here who are in need, asylum seekers to the United States who are in no less need than those across the ocean. I welcome the opportunity to ask hard questions, at how our hearts are moved and when, and what makes them blind. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

And what can you do?
Check out Refugee Immigration Ministries,
based in Malden works with local communities to marshal support, from spiritual resources to homestay. Talk with each other about whether a new ministry could be right for Christ Church.

Be informed. What’s a migrant? A refugee? Why is the difference important? Read here.

Remember you’re part of the wider church, and pray. Remember Muslim brothers and sisters who experience violence because of their faith. Ask how your Christian faith can be deepened by knowing those who are different from you. Check out this from the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Blessings,
Sara+

Dear People of Christ Church,
This week I’m thinking about stuff, preparing for our blessing of backpacks—and phones, ipads, briefcases, brooms, and whatever else you use to make the magic of your work or school happen. Things surround us—books and papers and clothes and dishes and whatever else. On the one hand, I do my best to try to feel unattached. I remember my time this summer in the stark, empty beauty of the Utah red rock wilderness, “needing” only everything I could carry five miles into the woods. Listening to Scripture—Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.—I try to extend this to clothes and books and whatever else I get distracted by.

On the other hand…there can be a thin line between being anti-materialistic and falling into the trap of our disposable culture. Lose one water bottle? Get another. Computer slowing down? You’ll just need a new one soon, go ahead and get it now. It’s just stuff. I recently read Marie Kondo’s book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and it’s 100% materialistic—but in a very careful way I really appreciated. The author is Japanese, and it’s grounded in kind of a Shinto spirituality that asks where you’ve come from and how you want to live your life. After you figure that out, how do your possessions support you in that? If your sister gave you a sweater that you hate and every time you see it hanging in your closet you remember how she doesn’t really know you, it’s time to let it go. It has fulfilled its purpose of being given, and you can say thank you and goodbye and stop feeling bad every time you see it. The question is whether things spark joy. If not, let them go with gratitude. It goes perhaps without saying that in the face of the rampant disrespect for human beings evinced in the European refugee crisis (and some of the toxic language in the US around immigration) that the question of our materialism is pretty minor.

Of ultimate importance or not, in the Christian tradition, we do have a long legacy of blessing things. It’s not 100% heretical to think that our things can bless us back, that God is able to be present with us as we encounter the world around us. I don’t know what Marie Kondo would think about the special candelabrum to be used on St. Blaise’s Day (February 3), for blessings throats. But the material world is important. Jesus was resurrected in his body, and famously told Thomas to put his hand in his side. Our bodies are holy. The earth is holy. These are material things, and they matter, though as with all things the invitation is to keep perspective, not to confuse the thing that helps point us toward God with the immaterial unsayable true nature of God.

Our material surroundings are part of the story of Christ Church, too. In seminary there was an expression that always came up in our liturgics classes: “The building always wins.” You can try to make the most airy, contemporary and laid back liturgy, but if you’re doing it in a space that has more in common with a cave, it’s just not going to happen. But things still grow and change. The building of Christ Church has been as much a living thing as the congregation over the years—it’s changed and grown. In 2006 we put in the freestanding altar in memory of Bob Hughes Sr, and the cross that hangs over the high altar was a gift from Muriel Nurse in memory of her mother. She told me the story of how she and Father Bill had chosen it out of a catalog and “hoped for the best” waiting for it to be shipped from England. 42 years later, I think it still works.

So our building, and our community, continues to grow and change. See the announcement from vestry below about the Stations of the Cross—another decision, another opportunity to say “yes” to something new or “no, that’s not right for this place.” Please let us know what you think, and don’t forget to bring your backpack or gear for work or school this Sunday!

Blessings,
Sara+