Be careful what you ask for

I was wondering what to do about several options for this summer; I would need to decide pretty soon about one of them.

- Fortieth high school reunion. One of my high school classmates was kind enough to come to my Mother's funeral, and that put me in mind of these people with whom I shared those years. I would like to see them again.

- The Hymn Society of America conference, in Winnipeg. I love Canada, and have told myself that if the conference ever came to Manitoba or Saskatchewan, I would go. Well, here it is.

- A visit to my sister, as I did last year.

- A visit to my cousins and other family, and to the farm that we own “back home.” I cannot do both this and a visit to my sister, so I have not seen the rest of the family since the aforementioned funeral. I have only walked around on the farm once since it came into our possession quite a few years ago, and I would like to see it again. I wonder, too, about my responsibilities toward that piece of land. Family property or not, if I cannot be there to look after it, perhaps we should sell it to someone who can. Here is a bit more about the farm, wherein we had a "near miss" on selling the mineral rights. Fracking was in the background and was clearly the intent of the purchasers, though they carefully hid the consequences from the landowners and I did not then understand what was afoot. I continue to thank God that the deal fell through. My invitation still stands: "... when all things are made new, come and visit me. I will be up there in the hills, planting trees, or playing Bach, or sitting on the porch as the sun goes behind the hill drinking a cool glass of water from the spring. I'll pour one for you, too."

- Stay home and work. As much as I enjoy long highway trips, it is environmentally irresponsible to do any traveling that is not necessary. This applies to all of the options outlined above. The responsible thing to do would be to stay at home. I might then be better prepared for the fall choir season. I might even read some of the books that overflow my shelves at home.

- At my recent staff evaluation with the Rector, he asked that I select a date in the fall to play an organ recital, and inform him of the date. If I am going to do this, I will have to get all of the music “settled” and ready to play by mid-August, because I know from experience that there will be time for no more than maintenance practice once the choir season begins on August 22.

These decisions have been a matter of prayer, and seemed to come to the fore yesterday. Today brought me something of an answer. We had our spring planning day as a church staff, and I watched my summer pretty much disappear, especially the month of June. The first Sunday when I am not committed to duty is July 8, and that seems very distant.

Answers to prayer are not always what we want to hear. It is sounding to me like I need to stay home and work. Even if I do this, I do not see how I can prepare a fall recital. After today's news, it is clear that the whole month of June will be a matter of scrambling from one Sunday to the next, just like the rest of the year, so that leaves July and half of August – and RSCM takes a week out of that. So on that part of my prayers, I think I am hearing that I must aim for a later date. I would suggest fall 2013, but that is contingent on summer 2013 being better than summer 2012.

But I must not feel sorry for myself. Sunday night, I sought a quotation for the weekly Order of Rehearsal sheet for the adult choir, and saw this. It is a reminder that the sort of thing I have described is the normal lot of a musician, and that the work is important enough to persevere:

Often, when contending with obstacles of every sort that interfered with my work, often when my powers of both body and mind were failing and I felt it a hard matter to persevere in the course I had entered on, a secret feeling within me whispered: 'There are but few contented and happy men here below: grief and care prevail everywhere; perhaps your labors may one day be a source from which the weary and worn, or the man burdened with affairs, may derive a few moments' rest and refreshment.' What a powerful motive for pressing onward! (Joseph Haydn)

On another note, yesterday was the feast of King Charles the Martyr. I revere his saintly memory and his stand on behalf of the Church and the poor and needy of the realm, and that of his coworker and Archbishop William Laud. Mention of these two arouses strong negative reactions among some of my co-workers, so I will say no more. I will, however, provide two links:

Tobias Haller BSG

Kiefer's Bios

From Kiefer's biographical sketch:

In his struggle with his opponents, Charles considered himself to be contending for two things:
(1) the good of the realm and the liberty and well-being of the people, which he believed would be better served by the monarch ruling according to ancient precedent, maintaining the traditional rights of the people as enshrined in the common law, than by a Parliament that ended up denying that it was either bound by the law or accountable to the people; and
(2) the Church of England, preaching the doctrine of the undivided Church of the first ten centuries, administering sacraments regarded not as mere psychological aids to devotion but as vehicles of the presence and activity of God in his Church, governed by bishops who had been consecrated by bishops who had been consecrated by bishops... back certainly to the second century, and, as many have believed, back to the Twelve Apostles and to the command of Christ himself.

From Haller's essay:

Not that Charles was perfect. He was as flawed as any saint on the Calendar, the BVM excepted, of course. But in the day of decision, he stood for something — not only as a lay leader defending the episcopate, or as a pious Christian defending the Prayer Book, but in witness to a whole religious way of life, a way we call Anglicanism.

To play or not to play...

Coming soon: a recital in the Lenten series at the Congregational Church across town. For those who are local, it is Wednesday, March 14, at noon.

I played the Grande Pièce Symphonique in this series last year and wrote at length about it: this links to the last of several postings on the subject:

I wished that I had gotten the piece settled and thoroughly prepared at least a month in advance; instead, “my preparations were more on the order of cramming for a final exam.” I determined to do better this year.

I selected music for the program: the Variations on Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, by Franz Liszt. I had it fully fingered by August, with hopes of getting a First Workout through the piece, and taking it over to the church for registrations before the fall term. That did not happen. Nor did it happen during the January school break.

We are less than six weeks out from the concert, and I am not yet through the First Workout – in other words, it lay untouched through the fall, Christmas, and the first half of January. I have worked at it about six hours this week, and am about two-thirds through the workout (at the piano). I wonder if I can play it.

I was ready to give up on Wednesday, and went so far as to select an alternative program: one of the Franck Chorales and a piece by Howells. The Howells is solid; I played it for Evensong a few years ago. But the Franck is not yet fingered. I played it decades ago – it was the first “big”organ work that I learned, back in the late 1970's – but I was not careful of such matters in those days.

What to do? Take the time to start from scratch on the Franck, or press on with the Liszt? By spending most of today on Liszt, I have made my choice. There are essentially just two passages that are thoroughly virtuosic. If I can work steadily at these every day, I should be fine; the rest of the piece is well within reach – I think.

I am intentionally doing the First Workout at the pianoforte. Liszt was one of the great virtuosi at the piano, and carried that style of playing to the organ. My hunch is that solid work at the piano will be better at this point than a lot of work at the organ, which does not build strength and endurance in the same way.

And I must be patient. Even though I know better, I was speeding up on the passagework and getting sloppy. Unless the fingering is absolutely ingrained, I will not be able to play these passages. And that will happen only with lots of slow practice.

It is going to be another example of “cramming for a final exam.”

Here is a program note and a YouTube performance of the piece (in three parts):

Part I

Part II

Part III

The program will also include the Bach Fugue on a Theme of Corelli, BWV 579. I plan to play it considerably slower and more quietly than the organist on the YouTube clip. But his performance is convincing; I hope mine is, too.

As the program note above says, Liszt first composed the Variations for pianoforte. Here is a performance of that (much shorter) version by Vladimir Horowitz. I hope I can carry some of these ideas and the intensity of this rendition into the organ version when I play it.

[Edit 1/29/11 -- The Bach piece will have to wait: I added up the timings, and the combination of Bach and Liszt is three minutes over the time allotted to me. But I have something that will fit even better: a very short little piece from late in Liszt's life, "Resignation." It is only two minutes long (twenty-nine measures), very soft, and will serve as a good introduction before launching into the "Weinen, Klagen."

And I learned yesterday that I have a wedding to play on Saturday March 17. That will make for an interesting week.]

An die Musik

In preparing the next Evensong bulletin, I happened upon this resource, and have added it to my sidebar listing of favorite sites on the Net:

http://www.marlboromusic.org/downloads/Naegele_Book_2008.pdf
German Vocal Texts in Translation: An Anthology
Philipp O. Naegele (translations)

Dr. Naegele prepared these translations for printed programs of the Marlboro Music Festival over a period of nearly fifty years, 1953-2004. There are more than 400 pages of texts, a reference for listening to lieder or choral music, or simply for reading some of the finest poetry in the German language.

Dr. Naegele escaped Nazi Germany as an eleven-year-old child in 1939, becoming in the U.S. a noted violinist and violist in the world of chamber music. In his preface, he writes:

One critical concern was to respect the literary sensibilities of readers with little or no acquaintance with German, while retaining an essentially line-by-line procedure. At the same time there was a keen awareness of the sensibilities of all those bilingual artists and listeners, at Marlboro and beyond, for whom many of these classics of German poetry constitute a treasured spiritual link to a ‘Heimat’ from which they may have been evicted or painfully estranged by forces that threatened to compromise the language itself. Those spiritual links vault back to a pre-industrial, pre-ideological, even pre-Freudian world of uncontaminated and candid German speech. During the first fifty years of the Marlboro Festival such a constituency was much in evidence. Speaking as one of their number, this translator valued the labor on these tropes on love and death, hope and despair, the stars and the watery deep. It was a poignant and integrative adventure to align on the page and in the mind an earlier and more recent ‘Heimat’ of language, assuaging thereby some of the never quite healing wounds of uprootedness and reaffirming modes of perception, of yearning, and of desire.

It is not only the texts that hearken back to that better time: it is the music: from the chorales of Martin Luther through Schütz, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Bruckner. Naegele refers the reader to a song on p. 160 that says it better than he (or I) ever could:

An die Musik
Franz Schubert, D. 547 (1817)
Text: Franz von Schober (1798-1882)

Du holde Kunst, in wieviel grauen Stunden,
Wo mich des Lebens wilder Kreis umstrickt,
Hast du mein Herz zu warmer Lieb entzunden,
Hast mich in eine beßre Welt entrückt!

Oft hat ein Seufzer, deiner Harf entflossen,
Ein süßer, heiliger Akkord von dir
Den Himmel beßrer Zeiten mir erschlossen,
Du holde Kunst, ich danke dir dafür!

Thou gracious art, in many a gray hour,
When life's wild swirl held me ensnared,
Hast thou enflamed my heart to ardent love,
Hast borne me off to a better world!

Oft has a sigh, outflowing from thine harp,
One dulcet, sacred consonance from thee,
Unlocked for me the heav'n of better times,
Thou gracious art, I give thee thanks for this!

(Copyright © Philipp Naegele, Marlboro School of Music, Inc.)

A political thought

I spend most of my time here writing about Religion. That is bad enough, so I do well to steer clear of Politics, the other unmentionable in polite company. And I will continue to stay out of it. Mostly.

But I want to say this: I am glad that Hillary Clinton is the Secretary of State. The world is in a mess, with war and the threat of war in a multitude of places, to say nothing of the economic problems in Europe and elsewhere. She has been going about her work of addressing these issues through diplomacy. She has been a steady and reliable presence in the Obama administration, dealing with as many difficult issues as perhaps any of her predecessors.

It may not be enough, but it is the task set before her, and she has my respect.

Thoughts on Genesis 3

Two thoughts struck me in this morning's reading of the third chapter of Genesis at Matins. They may be obvious to others, but were not to me until now, so I share them:

“... and [the serpent] said unto the woman...”: Why was a talking snake not a remarkable thing to Eve our Mother? Could it be that Adam and Eve conversed freely with all of the animals (appropriately to their respective conditions), so a talking snake was not surprising? There is a passage in Tolkien's “On Fairy-Stories” where he writes of the primordial desire to communicate with animals, with the possibility that this might be an echo of our distant past, as well as something that might one day be restored. Perhaps this verse of Genesis hints at the possibility.

“... and he shall rule over thee” (v. 16): In some circles, male authority over women is viewed as a Good Thing, and more than that, “God's plan.” I was taught in my fundamentalist background that the Man is head of the household, and the Woman is to be submissive and obedient in all things. Islam, which is a religion based in part on the Torah, is notorious for its oppression of women, and at various points in history Christianity and Judaism have not been much better.

But this verse is not saying that male dominance is a Good Thing. It is no more in God's will than our mortality, or the “thorns and thistles” of v. 18. It is part of the Curse, somehow caught up in our disobedience as an inescapable consequence, an aspect of Original Sin. This verse, it strikes me, is crucial to the interpretation of all subsequent passages of Scripture that seem to paint male dominance as “God's plan” (cf. I Corinthians 11:1-16, Ephesians 5:22-24 for two examples from St. Paul. There are many others, from Old and New Testament). And there may be further application to any power relationships: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28)

That we “may behold thy glory face to face”: Some thoughts on liberal theology, mostly from CSL and Benedict XVI

... Because in the mystery of the Word made flesh, thou hast caused a new light to shine in our hearts, to give the knowledge of thy glory in the face of thy Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. (Proper Preface for Epiphany: BCP p. 346)

Yesterday I finished reading the first volume of “Jesus of Nazareth” by Benedict XVI, and this morning began a second reading of it. The book is filled with insights, and is all the more valuable to me because of my esteem for its author. His premise: in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, we encounter God. Further, the person of Jesus and his teachings are faithfully presented in the Scriptures.

Among living theologians and expositors, there is no one whom I trust more implicitly than Benedict. One reason for my esteem is his considerable distance from the liberal theology characteristic of the Episcopal Church and other mainline Protestant denominations, and found to a lesser degree among Roman Catholics.

Let me be clear: I do not take issue with liberal social action, such as the Catholic Worker movement, which (at least in this state) has been involved with the thoroughly worthwhile “Occupy” protests against Wall Street and what they represent. But I take issue with the sort of Biblical interpretation represented by the “Jesus seminar” and taught in most of the mainline seminaries.

C. S. Lewis wrote an essay entitled “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism,” where the salient points are laid out. He writes:

A theology [in the Church of England] which denies the historicity of nearly everything in the Gospels to which Christian life and affections and thought have been fastened for nearly two millennia—if offered to the uneducated man can produce only one or other of two effects. It will make him a Roman Catholic or an atheist. What you offer him he will not recognize as Christianity.

Lewis devotes several pages to examples of his statement that “whatever these men may be as Biblical critics, I distrust them as critics. They seem to me to lack literary judgment, to be imperceptive about the very quality of the texts they are reading.” He concludes this thought by saying: “These men ask me to believe they can read between the lines of the old texts; the evidence is their obvious inability to read (in any sense worth discussing) the lines themselves. They claim to see fern-seed and can't see an elephant ten yards away in broad daylight.”

He continues with a second point: “All theology of the liberal type involves at some point—and often involves throughout—the claim that the real behavior and purpose and teaching of Christ came very rapidly to be misunderstood and misrepresented by His followers, and has been recovered or exhumed only by modern scholars.”

A third point: “I find in these theologians a constant use of the principle that the miraculous does not occur.”

And a fourth point, which he considers the most important: “All this sort of criticism attempts to reconstruct the genesis of the texts it studies... the whole Sitz in Leben of the text. This is done with immense erudition and great ingenuity. And at first sight it is very convincing... [But] I have watched reviewers reconstructing the genesis of my own books in just this way.” He cites examples from his writings, giving also the example of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, and how literary critics confidently linked the Ring with the atom bomb. “Yet in fact, the chronology of the book's composition makes the theory impossible.” He continues:

The 'assured results of modern scholarship' as to the way in which an old book was written, are 'assured', we may conclude, only because the men who knew the facts are dead and can't blow the gaff. The huge essays in my own field which reconstruct the history of Piers Plowman or The Faerie Queene are most unlikely to be anything but sheer illusion... The Biblical critics, whatever reconstructions they devise, can never be crudely proved wrong. St. Mark is dead. When they meet St. Peter there will be more pressing matters to discuss.

Lewis concludes with a statement that I fear was prophetic: “Missionary to the priests of one's own church is an embarrassing role; though I have a horrid feeling that if such mission work is not soon undertaken the future history of the Church of England is likely to be short.”


It is difficult for a layman to take such a position. I have not been to seminary, and have studied neither higher criticism nor modern theology, nor do I intend to ever do so. What right do I have to an opinion? I take heart in siding with someone like C. S. Lewis, but he also was an “ordinary layman” of the Church, as I think he called himself somewhere.

But Benedict XVI is not an “ordinary layman.” His example gives me hope that I might not be altogether wrong in my skepticism of modern liberal theology. Further, he provides the answer I need to steer me away from my lingering fundamentalism, a “middle path,” as it were. In the Foreward to this book, he writes:

[In the 1950's and after] The gap between the “historical Jesus” and the “Christ of faith” grew wider and the two visibly fell apart... [producing] the impression that we have very little certain knowledge of Jesus and that only at a later stage did faith in his divinity shape the image we have of him. This impression has by now penetrated deeply into the minds of the Christian people at large. This is a dramatic situation for faith, because its point of reference is being placed in doubt: Intimate friendship with Jesus, on which everything depends, is in danger of clutching at thin air (p. xi, xii)

Unlike the fundamentalists, who recognize the fallacy of the modern critical methods and turn away from them entirely, Benedict asserts their value, within limits:

[T]he historical-critical method... is and remains an indispensable dimension of exegetical work. For it is of the very essence of biblical faith to be about real historical events... So if history, if facticity in this sense, is an essential dimension of Christian faith, then faith must expose itself to the historical method—indeed, faith demands this.... But we need to add two points. This method is a fundamental dimension of exegesis, but it does not exhaust the interpretative task for someone who sees the biblical writings as a single corpus of Holy Scripture inspired by God....

[The second point:] Because it is a historical method, it presupposes the uniformity of the context within which the events of history unfold. It must therefore treat the biblical words it investigates as human words....

[But] the Christological hermeneutic, which sees Jesus Christ as the key to the whole and learns from him how to understand the Bible as a unity, presupposes a prior act of faith. It cannot be the conclusion of a purely historical method. But this act of faith is based upon reason—historical reason—and so makes it possible to see the internal unity of Scripture. By the same token, it enables us to understand anew the individual elements that have shaped it, without robbing them of their historical originality. (p. xv – xix)

Unlike the liberals, Benedict perceives limits to the historical-critical approach. One sees this most clearly when he turns to the “Son of Man” sayings (p. 322 ff), and the “huge debate [about them] in modern exegesis” wherein “critical scholarship does not regard any of these sayings about the coming Son of Man as the genuine words of Jesus.” This touches on the second point made by Lewis in his essay, concerning the conviction that the Gospels misrepresent the “genuine words of Jesus,” which can only be recovered by meticulous modern scholarship.

Another example, from his discussion of the “Kingdom of God” which was proclaimed by Jesus (p. 46 ff): Benedict traces the development of this concept from Harnack and Bultmann through Moltmann and on up to the current “secularist reinterpretation of the idea of the Kingdom” (p. 53)

“Kingdom,” on this interpretation, is simply the name for a world governed by peace, justice, and the conservation of creation. It means no more than this... This is supposedly the real task of religions: to work together for the coming of the “Kingdom.” They are of course perfectly free to preserve their traditions... but they must bring their different identities to bear on the common task of building the “Kingdom,” a world, in other words, where peace, justice, and respect for creation are the dominant values.

It looks as if now, at long last, Jesus' words have gained some practical content.... On closer examination, though, it seems suspicious. Who is to say what justice is? What serves justice in particular situations? How to we create peace? On closer inspection, this whole project proves to be utopian dreaming without any real content, except insofar as its exponents tacitly presuppose some partisan doctrine as the content that all are required to accept. (p. 53-54)

Laying aside these issues, which are but a minor aspect of the book (though important for me), Benedict writes as “an expression of [his] personal search 'for the face of the Lord' (cf. Ps. 27:8)” (p. xxiii). He begins with Moses, with whom the Lord spoke “face to face” as with a friend (Ex. 33:11), and the promise that a prophet like Moses would someday arise. But at the end of Deuteronomy, it says: “And there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses.” This dilemma is resolved only in Jesus:

What was true of Moses only in fragmentary form has now been fully revealed in the person of Jesus: He lives before the face of God, not just as a friend, but as a Son.... The question that every reader of the New Testament must ask—where Jesus' teaching came from, how his appearance in history is to be explained—can really only be answered from this perspective.... Jesus' teaching is not the product of human learning, of whatever kind. It originates from immediate contact with the Father, from “face-to-face” dialogue—from the vision of the one who rests close to the Father's heart. (p. 6-7).

“Show us the Father,” said Phillip. Jesus answered: “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” (John 14:8). In Jesus, we indeed see the Father. The promise of Deuteronomy is fulfilled; a greater than Moses is here, and not only does he speak with the Father “face to face, as with a friend,” but so do those whom he has called and made his own, the sheep of his pasture. By praying “through Jesus Christ our Lord,” we join him in speaking with God, with “Our Father, who art in heaven.” So long as this life lasts, our vision of the Face of God remains imperfect (cf. II Corinthians 3:11-18), and we must continue to pray as we do this day, in the Collect for Epiphany:

O God, who by the leading of a star didst manifest thy only-begotten Son to the peoples of the earth: Lead us, who know thee now by faith, to thy presence, where we may behold thy glory face to face; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

But it will not ever be so:

And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. And there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall serve him:

And they shall see his face.

With improvisation, there are no wrong notes

Gerre Hancock, one of the masters of the art, says this regularly in workshops. There may be notes that you did not intend, but they are not for that reason “wrong.”

Today's postlude was a good example. It was based on the hymn we sing only when January 1 falls on Sunday: “Now greet the swiftly changing year” (250 in the Hymnal 1982), a jaunty six-eight tune. I planned to do several variations, progressing through the keys D, G, C, and back to D, with an introduction and coda based on our closing song, Shirley Erena Murray's “Star-Child.” But at one point while I was in G, instead of going “sol-do” (D to G) as the tune did, I played “sol-te” (D to F natural). While that could have taken me to C major, which was my next goal, it needed confirmation as a new idea – I think that I have heard Gerre say this, as well: “If you play something unexpected, do it again. That makes people think you intended it.”

These “unexpected” notes certainly feel like mistakes, but the listeners do not know that. They often lead into the most interesting parts of an improvisation, and that was the case this morning. It led me away from the tune for a bit, playing with the “new” motif. It also led to the improvisation being a bit too long for its purpose, but I think that it maintained a degree of musical logic.

Another spot that was “unexpected” came when I reduced stops on the Great, and kept reducing until none remained, and there was no sound. I continued playing with one hand (making no sound) until I pulled a stop back on. If someone was watching closely, they might have wondered about that. But upon reflection, it probably just sounded like a measure of rest, which the piece probably needed at that point.

This is all quite wonderfully liberating.

The Feast of the Holy Name

All Sundays of the year are feasts of our Lord Jesus Christ. In addition to the dated days above [the seven Principal Feasts, such as Christmas Day], only the following feasts, appointed on fixed days, take precedence of a Sunday:
The Holy Name
The Presentation
The Transfiguration
(from “The Calendar of the Church Year,” BCP p. 16)

At coffee hour, I overheard a conversation between a young man and R., our priest: “I am looking not at what a priest does, but what he is.”

Next Sunday, at the Baptism of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father does not say what Jesus does or will do, but what he is: “This is my beloved Son.”

As I mentioned in a comment on the blog of Trees of the Field, there are close connections between the Holy Name of Jesus and the LORD, the holiest of Names, made known to Moses at the burning bush: “I am that I am” (Exodus 3:14). “The LORD God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob... this is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations” (v. 15). The Name is so holy that it is not to be pronounced.

In that Name, God entered into history to redeem his people “with a mighty hand, and a stretched out arm.” The name “LORD” says nothing about what God does, but what he is – he IS, without any conditions or dependencies, uncreated and eternal.

The name Jesus says that he is Salvation, “for he shall save his people from their sins” (St. Matthew 1:21). And that Salvation is not so much what he does, but what he is. The Gospel according to St. John can be read around this theme: “I am the bread of life...” “I am the good Shepherd...” “I am the Resurrection and the Life...” In all of these ways and more, he is our Salvation. And in him, the Name of God is marked upon us, we people of every language, tongue, people and nation, as the LORD's name was upon Israel (cf. Numbers 6:22-27, the Aaronic blessing which was the First Lesson at the Eucharist today: “And they [the priests] shall put my name upon the children of Israel, and I will bless them.”)

N., you are sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism, and marked as Christ's own for ever. (BCP p. 308)

Through this Name, “our life is hid with Christ in God.” Through him, it is no longer what we do that matters – for we are saved by grace, not by the works of the law – but what we are: the children of God.

But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. (Galatians 4:4-5)

“But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart” (St. Luke 2:19). Doubtless she pondered the Name of Jesus in mystic contemplation as the child grew, adoring it with the love of her heart. We join her, for “at the Name of Jesus every knee [shall] bow... and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:10-11).


It seemed good to us on the church staff to combine our normal three Sunday morning Eucharistic services into one, both last Sunday and today. But a number of people did not get the message; several people expecting the normal 8:45 contemporary Eucharist arrived and found themselves in the one service (9:00 am), a Rite One liturgy unfamiliar to many of them. Several others arrived during the subsequent coffee hour, expecting the 11:00 service. It became clear that we should do something, for the number swelled to about a dozen people. Our priest, R., had already departed, but another priest not on duty today, C., was still seated in the church, praying. After some hurried consultation, it was determined that I would lead Ante-Communion (as well as serving as Organist, for we sang all of the appointed hymns), following the order already printed in the church bulletins (which we fished out of the recycling bin, appointing a person to be Usher and distribute them, explaining to people what was going on). Two other people read the Lessons, C. read the Gospel, and the aforementioned young man served as chalice bearer. C. then distributed communion from the Reserved Sacrament, using the form at BCP p. 398-9. It was a good service.

The name “Lord God of hosts,” or “Lord God of Sabaoth,” is uncomfortable for the liberals. They go to considerable lengths to expunge it from the Sanctus, where it has been for centuries (following Isaiah 6), using expedients in some places (not here, thankfully) such as “God of grace and love.” “Master of Armies” would be a possible translation, and points to their discomfort; it is a thoroughly warlike phrase, not compatible with their ideas about God. (An aside: the second lesson in today's Daily Offices, Revelation 19:11-16, connects with this train of thought.)


Unlike any earthly “master of armies,” the Master whom we serve unerringly fits the person to the task and the task to the person, so that it encourages growth in the person and simultaneously gets the work of the Kingdom done in the best possible way, though at the time it may not always seem so to us. Exemplary priest that she is, R. would have stayed and done the service had she known, but the LORD of Sabaoth had something else in mind. Not only did C. and I hopefully serve the dozen people who had come for church, but we ourselves were served; it was unusually clear to both of us that we were instruments, servants doing the Master's bidding. “This is the LORD's doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes” (Psalm 118:23).