NEWS & EVENTS

A number of years ago a person new to the parish asked me why we didn’t have year-round classes for adults and children, and why we didn’t work to make summer a time of sustained activity. In addition to the problem of finding all the people to do this work in the summer, I suggested that there is a positive value to having a quiet season in the year. Continuous busyness is not the message of the Gospel.

If we study the Gospel accounts carefully we find that Jesus took many opportunities for quiet, prayer, and reflection. He prioritized listening to his Father’s voice, and that meant varying the pace of life. All of his activity was based on this ongoing communion. This is a clear sign of how we are to live in our own day.

The variation of liturgical activity in the summer allows us a sustained period to listen to God’s direction and to apply what we have learned in the heady seasons of Lent, Holy Week, and Eastertide to the daily routines of life. Here we find the holiness of the ordinary, the sanctity of the simple, the mystery of the routine. The glory of Trinity Sunday’s rich liturgy is as connected to how we approach healing broken or strained relationships as it is to considering the Triune Majesty. Lent’s fast finds its real meaning in how we use the gifts God gives us in the daily flow of activity. The intense emotional engagement of Holy Week keeps our hearts from growing cold when seeing needs in our own community. We might call this the “practical mysticism” so characteristic of Anglicanism.

Summer’s relative liturgical simplicity is an underrated gift. In our anxious and over-charged times we need its message of listening to the Father’s voice on warm summer days as we “walk the talk” in the world. By observing a distinctively different tempo, we can experience a season of new understanding, new possibility. This, too, is the work of discipleship, the rhythm of faithfulness, the path of partnership with our risen Lord.

The Daily Office: Ecclesiastes and Scripture's ‘Minority Report’
Many of you know that one of my favorite books of scripture is Ecclesiastes. If you use the Church’s lectionary for daily scripture readings, then we are making our way through it together once again.

This quirky, mordant, sometimes pointedly elliptical and yet often arrestingly poetic text has always had a controversial aspect to it (indeed, it is the only book in scripture which has what amounts to three ‘book reviews’ at the end—with varying levels of support!). There were those who never wanted to see it in the canon of scripture to begin with, and many people seem to feel it is just too “out of step” even today. 

Ecclesiastes (meaning “the Preacher” in Hebrew), together with Job, forms part of what might be thought of as a “minority report.” The book looks at the world very differently from the usual “virtue is rewarded” perspective and is unafraid to tear off the pretty surface of conventionality. It insists that many of the ways we avoid dealing with the brevity, fragility, and irrationality of life are nothing more solid than a mist (the word translated as “vanity” or “meaningless" in many English versions).

The Preacher confronts the fact that we cannot use youth, pleasure, work, power, health, wealth, and all the other clever techniques of human devising to escape our mortality or give meaning to our life, and ends up urging a remarkably simple type of life and faith. This relentless honesty drives us to the gates of the gospel precisely because the only way to overcome the power of death is through death itself (“trampling down death by death…”).

Reading scripture through the week, step by step, is one of the great pleasures of the Christian life. When we do so in the context of our experience of Christ and by the leading of the Holy Spirit we learn to encounter differing perspectives and sometimes thorny, dissenting viewpoints. Ecclesiastes and Job require us to lay aside conventional or easy answers and subject our beliefs to careful examination. It is sometimes uncomfortable work, but leads to a much sturdier yet supple faith. It also leads to further reading, conversation, and openness to new learning—all of them “Anglican values,” so to speak.

Christian encounter with sacred scripture was never meant to be a “Sunday only” thing. It truly is “our daily bread,” and our walk through this notorious and yet fascinating book is yet one more example of the gift of the Daily Office in our tradition. Making daily prayer and sacred reading part of your life is one way of acquiring what St. Paul calls “the mind of Christ.” I commend it to you. 

Brandon+