You have probably noticed that even before Halloween, Christmas displays were starting to pop up in the stores. You have likely heard friends and neighbors complaining about it too – about the commercialization of Christmas and the stretching out of the holiday season, and maybe even about the Baseball season too, and how the boys of summer are…
Lots of people who have been Episcopalians for a long time wonder what happened to Morning Prayer. This is a simple question with a complicated answer, since it touches on how we understand scripture, the history of the church and our country, the successes and failures of the Reformation and of course our personal experiences and memories. So…
Fall is approaching, and the program year begins again at Saint James, so we welcome back the Sunday School and the Choir, along with the many members of our church family who have been away for all or part of the summer. But for most Episcopalians, autumn also means the coming of something that many of us anticipate…
Inspired by a well-known set of singing instructions by John Wesley, I wrote this piece for a parish that was in the throes of what some in the church have called “The Music Wars,” battling about what kinds of music were suitable for church and what should be excluded. I offer it to you as a look into how I think about music and worship,…
“Sing unto the Lord a new song,” says the psalmist. The Episcopal Church’s Canon II.6.1 requires each minister of the church to “see that music is used as an offering for the glory of God and as a help to the people in their worship.” But even if music were not required of us by the decree of both God and church,…
Holy week began on the Sunday before Easter with two services rolled into one: the reenactment of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem in the Liturgy of the Palms, followed by the Dramatic reading of the story of Jesus’ betrayal and death in our Passion Sunday service (‘passion’ comes from the Latin word ‘passio,’ which means ‘suffering’). After that we will walk through…
Every year on Ash Wednesday this day I am struck by the strange contradiction that we read the Gospel lesson in which Jesus tells us not to disfigure our faces when we fast, and then we disfigure our faces with ashes to begin our Lenten fast. One thing we need to bear in mind, though, as we remember Jesus’ words and prepare ourselves for a…