Seven whole days

Should you decide to take matters into your own hands and preside at a liturgical celebration with an iPad, you are all set. If, that is, you are a Roman Catholic. It seems that there is an app called the iBreviary that is made for this. It includes this missal, lectionary, breviary, and lives of the saints. (As Gizmodo notes, it is hoped that this also includes the instructions for the Holy Hand Grenade).

Alas, Anglicans are out of luck. For American Episcopalians, Church Publishing has (expensive) software for Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Palm, but not for iPhones or iPads. There is an iBCP, but it’s clunky. It seems that no one has yet made excellent liturgical software or even liturgical websites for Episcopalians.

Read more »

Hey, church geeks. If you’ve got a new iPad or similar tech gizmo, have you considered using it in church? Think carefully. I’ve preached once using my iPad instead of a conventional paper text. One person said I “seemed distracted” but others said they didn’t even notice. Generally, it was fine. I’ll do it again, because it saves paper and page rustling. If needed, I’m willing to wing it were the iPad to choke.

Presiding is another story. Here’s the story of a wedding officiant who had a rough go of it. Never mind the fact that the officiant was a do-it-yourself “clergy” person. It could have happened to anyone.

The service started well enough as you can see in the picture. Everything was happy until midway through the service when the temperature warning went off and the iPad said, “the iPad is overheating and will need to cool down. Oh, and you’re totally screwed.”

Read more »

I love travel. I love LEGO blocks. When they are combined, it is bliss.

Check it out. Leaning towers, famous clocks, giant walls. It’s all there.

Last Sunday at Christ Church, we celebrated the Feast of Dedication, and in a slightly unusual way. My experience is that very few parishes celebrate this feast day, so I thought I’d share a bit about our celebration. According to the rubrics of the prayer book, “The feast of the Dedication of a Church, and the feast of its patron or title, may be observed on, or be transferred to, a Sunday, except in the seasons of Advent, Lent, and Easter.” I love this feast day, because it’s a great opportunity to talk about why we have church buildings, and perhaps about why we gather as a church at all. It is the consummate missional feast day, and yet it goes uncelebrated. It’s a great day for preaching, because the lections are fantastic.

For this program year, we have been celebrating our 175th anniversary, and so we thought we’d end with a historical service. By permission of the bishop, we used the 1789 prayer book with the rubrics that were in place in 1834, the year of our admission into the Diocese of Rhode Island (the first American prayer book was used up until 1892, but the rubrics and the texts were edited by General Convention quite a bit in that time). We read morning prayer, and within the limits of our building, we tried to create the liturgical feel of a pre-Tractarian service.

Check out our service leaflet (PDF). Our resident photographer took some great photos (thanks, Matt!).

I preached on this occasion, and my colleague, the Rev’d Melody Shobe ably officiated, mastering the cadences of early Cranmerian prose with early American edits. In my sermon, I said, “When we celebrate the dedication of this church building, we are not celebrating the holiness of stone, wood, and glass. We are celebrating God’s presence with us here, not in a lifeless temple of stone but in the living temple of God’s people.” That’s the beauty of the feast day. It celebrates the church building, but it also elevates God’s mission in the church above that very same building.

Read more »

As longtime readers here will know, I’m a big fan of The Ongoing Adventures of ASBO Jesus. It’s one of the best commentaries on Jesus and on Christianity around, and yet it uses the fewest words. Hmmm. Perhaps there’s something to that.

Anyway, Jon Birch, the man behind the blog, was burgled. As he writes, “i have lost all my work, all my back-ups, everything, gone. all my cartoons, all my animations, all my music. not one thing left. i feel like i have been robbed of my life.” Robbery always stinks, but especially when it’s irreplaceable creative work that gets stolen.

Say a prayer for him. Perhaps, in the days to come, he’ll let us blogospheric friends know if there are other ways to help.

My good friends at Inclusive Church have done it again. I had written about my hopes that clergy within the Church of England might make some noise, and that’s happening. Naturally, it is because everyone reads 7WD. Heh. Anyway, after their excellent letter to the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Inclusive Church has written a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Here’s a snippet:

The period of engagement for which you call will not be served by putting in place further exclusionary structures. It is only the conservative extreme of the Anglican Communion which appears to support – indeed, to encourage – further division. We are profoundly supportive of the sort of frank and open conversations for which you too hope. Therefore, a question – how do you anticipate these conversations being fruitful when decisions have already been taken which further reduce the status of LGBT Christians and those who welcome them?

Read more »

The Big Picture blog has some horrifying photos from the oil spill in the Gulf. These photos are heart-wrenching to see, but we’d best be willing to face the consequences of our sinful addiction to oil. Sure, BP bears much of the responsibility for this mess. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves. Seeing a turtle drowning in oil is to view an indictment of our culture of wanton consumption.

Lord, have mercy upon us.

Besides the Anglican Communion and spilled oil, baby Jesus has other reasons to cry.

“Not to mention the dreaded manger rash” — from Indexed.

Just after I had mentioned that I wished folks in the Church of England would speak up, an encouraging message showed up in my email inbox. Inclusive Church has written a letter about their hopes for the Episcopal Church, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Anglican Communion. I’m glad to hear this voice.

We do not support the Archbishop’s position that only those in agreement with the majority view can be participants as Anglicans in ecumenical dialogue or for that matter any other representative body of the Anglican Communion. Indeed, the Episcopal Church’s diligence in undertaking “deep and dispassionate study of the question of homosexuality, which would take seriously both the teaching of Scripture and the results of scientific and medical research” with gay and lesbian people, as resolved at the 1978 Lambeth Conference, and in upholding their human rights, as emphasised at the 1988 Lambeth Conference, has been in marked contrast to the position of other provinces whose status as representative participants is unchallenged. We ask you to have the courage, commitment and humility to “remain at the table” not just until you are asked to leave but indeed until the table is removed from you. We recognise this is asking you to be in an uncomfortable place but the self-denial being asked of you is not for a gracious withdrawal but a silencing of voices that need to be heard.

Go read the whole letter.

Photo by flickr user matranson.

Over at oobject, there’s an impressive set of “9 depressing views of famous monuments”. Yes, it’s a collection of beautiful and important things viewed from unlikely and even ugly perspectives. It’s easy to look at something (literally or not) and imagine that we’re seeing the whole reality. Often it’s much more complex than that. Viewed from another angle, things may look terrific. From where we sometimes stand, things can look grim.

This is worth keeping in mind, whether it’s parish matters, our jobs, national politics, relationships, or even — God help us — the Anglican Communion.

P.S. There’s no significance to my choice of the Statue of Liberty here. It was the most arresting image of the set, I thought.

Sure, there might have been a little news from Apple today. But I’ll bet you didn’t read about this part Steve’s keynote address to a skeptical audience.

Wave of the iPhone to TUAW.

I have resisted writing about the latest goings-on in the Angst-lican Communion. For one thing, I share Jim Naughton’s sense that all this institutional melodrama may not matter that much. Plenty of other bloggers have had plenty to say. I’ve (finally) decided to add my voice to the din after reading Canon Kenneth Kearon’s latest missive. The odor (or odour, if you prefer) of hypocrisy got to be too much.

Before I get to that, a recap for my readers who are not church news junkies. Just before the Day of Pentecost, the Archbishop of Canterbury issued a “Pentecost Letter to the Anglican Communion” saying that the Episcopal Church was going to be asked to back off a couple of committees that no one had ever heard of — because we went ahead ordained Bishop Mary Glasspool. Our own Presiding Bishop offered some words about that, pointing that that ecclesiastical bullying is as much revisionism (and fresh colonialism) as anything that’s happened in the US. It was a veritable primatial smackdown!

Then comes today’s latest nastygram, from the Archbishop of Canterbury’s enforcer. Canon Kearon has written a letter kicking the Americans off the committees (whose names I can’t be bothered to look up, and whose function matters little, but keep reading anyway). Let’s start with the observation Kearon displays a shocking ignorance of what’s going on. He mentions that he has “written to the Primate of the Southern Cone, whose interventions in other provinces are referred to in the Windsor Continuation Group Report asking him for clarification as to the current state of his interventions into other provinces”. Thirty seconds on Google might have taken Kearon to this page, which shows that the “Diocese of San Joaquin” is affiliated with the Province of the Southern Cone. California being in the US, that means that this represents an active incursion into the Episcopal Church by a foreign prelate.

What I find even more shocking is a blatant hypocrisy of this whole process. The Archbishop of Canterbury was careful to use the word “formally” in his letter. In other words, if a House of Bishops somewhere passes a resolution, it counts. If you just do it quietly (in the closet), it’s fine — as long as you whisper. So the Church of England can bully the rest of us, while its leaders — including members of its General Synod and bishops — ignore what’s happening in their own church.

Read more »