Seven whole days

This is the 1,000th post on 7WD. Back in February 2008, I posted the first one. In that time, just under 50,000 unique visitors have had a look at this little corner of the interwebs. We’ve had some great conversations here. Two or three times, I’ve had to apologize to someone for a post too hastily (and crankily) written. I was once treated as a celebrity at the salad bar in the refectory of General Seminary. “Hey, it’s the guy who writes that blog!”. This was strange, and they probably know about 7WD only because the hymn from which the blog’s title is taken is sung to the tune “General Seminary” in this country. I didn’t burst their bubble to let them know that “Seven whole days” existed in poetry before their beloved seminary. (General people like to live in their own special world.) As usual, I have digressed. Mostly I’ve enjoyed my blogging. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading 7WD on occasion.

Over on Facebook, I asked my friends what I should blog about for this 1,000th post. The suggestions ranged from a video I had posted (about William Shatner stealing Leonard Nimoy’s bicycle) to millennialism. There were further suggestions to write about the current mess over in the Church of England or cupcakes. Mmmm, cupcakes. The latter suggestion came via Twitter, perhaps because “cupcakes” is well short of 140 characters. Having ranted about the CofE in post 999 and chocolate in 998, I felt it wise to eliminate those. Not feeling inclined to cover all things millennial, I decided to follow another suggestion: write about why I do this.

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I have (mostly) resisted writing about recent goings-on in the Church of England. It seems better for my spiritual health to write about mission of the church or to fill this blog with silly sundries. Still, recent events have pushed me to say a few words. Here we’ll quickly cover three different, yet strangely related events: “mitregate”, “The Betrayal of John (redux)”, and “Ewww! It’s a ‘Bishopess’!”

Mitregate

In case you were living under a rock, sanity departed the Church of England in last month’s incident in which the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church was told she could not wear her mitre whilst celebrating the Eucharist in Southwark Cathedral. Yes, the primate of the Episcopal Church, who was vested as a bishop at the Lambeth Conference in 2008 (among other places), was ordered not to wear her pointy hat, lest this bring about the ruination of Christendom. At first it seemed that this was Lambeth bureaucracy being too efficient for its own good. Then it emerged that plenty of women bishops have been wearing mitres all over England. It’s just Katharine who can’t wear hers. How would one satirize such a thing?

The Betrayal of John (redux)

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Right after coffee, chocolate is at the top of my list of favorite substances. It turns out that today is the anniversary of the introduction of chocolate to Europe. For thousands of years, cacao had been cultivated and consumed in the Americas (pardon my use of the anachronistic and colonial term). On July 7, 1550, it is said that chocolate was introduced to Spain.

Whatever its original date of introduction in Spain, chocolate did not stay there. Spanish friars spread the gospel of Theobroma cacao throughout Europe as they traveled from monastery to monastery. Hot chocolate became a hit with French royalty after cocoa enthusiast Marie Therese married Louis XIV in 1660. At the Palace of Versailles, courtiers regarded the drink as an aphrodisiac. London’s first chocolate house opened in 1657. English cafe society believed the drink to be a cure-all medicine capable of treating tuberculosis. Initially flavored with coffee, wine and pepper, hot chocolate finally achieved liftoff in the early 1700s when English and Dutch impresarios hit on the idea of adding milk and sugar.

So go celebrate! Eat some chocolate. Here in New England, I’ll be taking mine in the form of ice cream on this stifling hot day.

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There a bit of a tradition of me posting patriotic music here on 7WD for Independence Day. This year’s installment is a Fugue on the Star Spangled Banner. Alas, the first part of the piece — a set of variations — does not seem to be on Youtube.

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Here’s what I wrote for our weekly parish email newsletter this week. It explains why we’re not celebrating Independence Day on Sunday morning, even though it’s July 4. In an earlier post, I had a few things to say about the cross versus the flag. All that said, tomorrow after church I’ll be celebrating the birthday of the US with friends, food, and fireworks.

This Sunday many people will probably focus more on cookouts and fireworks than on offering thanks to God. At Christ Church, we’ll gather as we do every Sunday to feast on God’s presence in Word and sacrament.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with fireworks and cookouts. But we Christians should make sure that we have our priority straight: God comes before everything else. Period. While we are celebrating the birth of our nation, we would do well to put God in the center. How might we do that?

• We should give thanks to God for all the blessings of our lives. All that we have is a gift from God, not the result of our own labor.
• We should pray for our nation’s leaders — and all voters — that we might be guided to bring justice and dignity to all people.
• We should pray that we might continue to grow as a nation, celebrating our strengths and also admitting our need to improve.
• We should pray that our nation might be a beacon of hope to all nations, and that we might be worthy of that vocation.

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As I mentioned in my previous post, I have just discovered the Sacred Sandwich. Add it to your blog reading list right away. Here’s a sample:

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I’m tired of people talking about “the E-word”. I wish we Episcopalians would practice more evangelism, and I wish we’d get over our squeamishness. All those tired jokes about “E word” suggest that there’s no urgency and that it’s all a quaint relic of some bygone era. This Sunday’s Gospel should clear things up: the harvest is plentiful and the laborers are few. A few days ago, a funny video made the rounds. It’s satire, but it might be a verbatim conversation about inviting people to church, for all I know. We’ve come to a place in which we’re unwilling to share the Good News. And then we wonder why our churches are emptying out. Without the harvest, the grain rots and the barn sits empty. OK, so I’ve abused the metaphor. You get the point anyway, right?

Let’s start at the beginning. If church is just a “nice” place to spend time with like-minded do-gooders, we should just close up shop now. Any number of non-profits are already doing that, and they’ll do it better than we’ll ever manage. In the Episcopal Church, we’ve been saddled with two generations of preachers who have taught people that “God loves everyone” is the limit of the Good News. There’s not been much preaching about the need for redemption or about what salvation might look like. NEWS FLASH! Jesus is more than a teacher. Jesus is more than a Divine Super-Love Super-Guy. Jesus is our savior.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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