Third Sunday after Pentecost
Today’s assigned readings:
Sirach 46:11-20, Revelation 15:1-8, Matthew 18:1-14
…[T]he temple was filled with smoke from the glory of God and from his power, and no one could enter the temple…
Revelation 15:8
In 1983, I was in my first year at NYU. I heard about a huge service at the Episcopal Church of St Mary the Virgin celebrating the sesquicentennial Oxford Movement. The Lord Bishop of London, Graham Leonard, was preaching; Paul Moore, the Bishop of New York, would be there; John Maury Allin, the Presiding Bishop of ECUSA, was, if memory serves, the principal celebrant of the mass. The great liturgist, Canon Edward N. West, was the Master of Ceremony. There were other Bishops present: it was a huge to-do. Everyone in the diocese was there, clergy in procession and clergy in the pews, monks, friars and nuns, and pile of laity filling in the remaining nooks and crannies.
I was newly come to NYC and I journeyed up to W 46th Street from my fraternity house in Greenwich Village with a friend from High School. The crowd was huge and there were no seats available that had not been reserved for some VIP or parish or religious order. We were standing on the steps of St Mary’s Church feeling kinda lost, when a familiar face popped around the corner. My parish priest from upstate, John Osgood, crooked his finger at us and escorted us inside and past the ropes. He brought us up to the front of the church, sitting just under the pulpit. We had a prime - if slightly obstructed (by the pulpit) view of full-on Anglo-Catholic piety. As the saying goes, it was so high you had to look down to see heaven.
After the mass and concluding prayers, there was sung a solemn Te Deum. All the clergy came and stood before the altar. Memory says it was the Langlais Te Deum, although I know that thing is 25 mins long. It was glorious and loud. The opening bars of the Te Deum were simple chant and suddenly the organ stomps in: BLARGH! BLARGH! BLARGH! BLARGH! I started forward in shock at the sound. After those first bars, it was not traditional at all: it was loud and clashing and the organ seemed ready to leap out of the loft and fall down on all of us! There were three thuribles of incense flaming away in great pendulum swings and the incense was a great cloud. Eventually it obscure the altar: the Church of St Mary’s is not known as “Smokey Mary’s” for naught. (Neither is its other appellation, The Temple of Isis, in vain, but that’s for another time.)
Years later I wanted to check my memory: had the altar really been obscured? A book had been published of sermons and papers from the Sesquicentennial. The last page was a photo taken from the loft at St Mary’s during the Te Deum. You can see me and my friend, Cele, standing by the pulpit. A few pews in front of us a fog worthy of Hogwarts begins and only a few mounted peeks of Episcopal mitres break the banks between us and reredos. That is the scene in my head when I hear the today’s reading from the Revelation.
He called a child, whom he put among them, and said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.
Matthew 18:3-5
There was a child at St Gregory’s Church… one that drove me up a wall. His mother was a priest. I’ve forgotten her name and his name. I’ve not forgotten two things, however:
1) How distraught I was that every Sunday he was very noisy, beyond what I thought should be normal or acceptable for a child in public (where children should be seen and not heard).
2) How I went to the rector and complained and, in his loving way, he chastised me for not being hospitable to the child.
When I joined the Orthodox Church I discovered that, in those parishes without pews, people would let their children play and crawl around in the huge open spaces. Even in some tiny spaces, I grew very used to praying with children who were reading books, playing with Spiderman dolls, and generally, having fun in God’s house.
And there’s the contrast I want to see - and I’m sure you can see it too:
On the one hand the Temple filled with the smoke of the glory of God. And on the other, a little child held in Jesus hands like the Eucharist, (one tradition says that Child was St Ignatius) and declared to be the way to receive Christ, himself.
I’m tempted to draw them as different images, to show that some how the Temple-Filled-With-Smoke is something about an Angry God while the Child-With-Jesus is about a Loving God.
I want to draw contrasts between the seriously ritualistic structure of Eastern Rite worship or the military corners of Western Rite worship, versus the joy of a danced liturgy at St Gregory of Nyssa or Emergent Church home worship.
But I’ve been in churches too long.
I know that often there is great joy expressed in those military corners. I’ve been awed by the moment of silence in the elevation and breaking of the Consecrated Host as clouds swirl around it and then, suddenly, the state trumpets blow from the back of St John’s Cathedral, and, then is sung in holy awe, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us!”
I’ve been moved to tears by Orthodox poetry, standing in liturgy singing:
We, who mystically represent the Cherubim,
And chant the thrice-holy hymn
to the Life-giving Trinity,
Let us set aside all earthly cares
That we may receive the King of all,
Who among us invisibly
borne by the angelic Hosts.
I’ve laughed for sheer joy in the communion of the Saints going forward to the chalice; or smiled warmly at people leaving confession and, being moved to love by the rite, sweeping each other up into great hugs.
I’ve danced laughing in a crush of people around an altar decked out in Ghanan nwentoma cloth, standing under a canopy of variegated silks. I’ve guffawed in holy hilarity at the beginning of the service, jesting with the Cantor, Sandford, that the hymn, “O Wondrous Type referred to the (Font) Fount of Every Blessing. I’ve been frozen in stunned awe giving communion to a mother, great with child, realising I was communing the child, Sophia, as well as the mother. And I will never forget the moment that past between us as I addressed the mother saying her name and the child’s, “this is the body of Christ.” Then I’ve cried giving First Communion to that same child.
I’ve embraced - and been embraced - as we all sang:
Come sing and dance to Jesus’ lead!
“The Lord provides for every need.
My joy in you will have no end
because I call you each my friend.”We see your likeness in each face.
You freely give all holy grace.
Your friendship, God, is our desire:
Inflame our hearts with holy fire!
I’ve wrapped myself in the Grief of Holy Friday and been “whallopped” over the head, turning around to see a church filled with light on Easter. I’ve opened the doors to welcome the dancing hoards.
But I’ve also been horrified to see a priest turn around from the altar and give a look to his wife, the Choir director, that moved her to weeping and left his own children terrified of what might happen when they got home. I’ve entered a church where no one dared speak because the priest had a bad day. I’ve struggled as the only cantor and bible reader and prayer leader, while as the priest attempted to put on the right worship (orthodoxy) for Holy Cross Day: my solo chanting of hundreds of “Lord Have Mercy”s as the priest held aloft a gold cross and a congregation of 3 others stood around being bored.
I’ve experienced the horror of a community worship service that seemed to violate the second commandment. I’ve argued with people who have “never done it that way before” as if their own innovative liturgy, its current form less than 2 years old, were some kind of Passion Play of Oberammergau that could never be changed for fear God would curse us. I’ve been angered by a child I couldn’t welcome, and by a priest that was wearing far too many bells - both disrupting “my prayer” by their ability to show how unloving I could be.
In short, I’ve managed to be a human who, in community with other humans, was found by God in his friendship in all these places.
The internet is filled with the “Worship Wars”. Low church Protestants debate praise bands vrs traditional hymns, Romans argue about the Novus Ordo vrs the 1962 Missal, while the traditionalists wait to gloat over the release of a long-rumoured permission to do which ever liturgy they wish including the Tridentine rite. Fleeing the supposed horror of such a banquette-of-choices, many American Protestants enter Orthodoxy and discover a liturgy they imagine to be “Unchanging”… until the first time their parish priest or the choir director (acting well within his or her rights) changes something. Then they flee further into “Holy Unchanging Tradition™” deeper and deeper into the schismatic insanity of “True Orthodoxy” vrs “World Orthodoxy.”.
I’ve been in all of them. I’ve heard justifications for all of them. Aand I’ve been a partisan in all of these arguments. I still have some pretty strong opinions about them, to be honest. We create stumbling blocks, however, when we imagine that God “wants” one and not the other. The dance is disrupted. “Occasions for stumbling are bound to come, but woe to the one by whom the stumbling block comes!”
But I know that somehow, praise bands or Gregorian scholla, dancing around an altar or standing stock still, huge open cathedral or tiny Catholic chapel, kneeling in awe before the elevated host, scrunching down before a gold spoon, or passing baskets of consecrated pitas and clinking glass goblets around the dinner table, somehow we are all one in Christ. John has been granted to see exactly what God sees, and I beg for the grace to see it, too:
And I saw what appeared to be a sea of glass mixed with fire, and those who had conquered the beast and its image and the number of its name, standing beside the sea of glass with harps of God in their hands.
And they sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb: “Great and amazing are your deeds, Lord God the Almighty! Just and true are your ways, King of the nations! Lord, who will not fear and glorify your name? For you alone are holy. All nations will come and worship before you, for your judgments have been revealed.”