IDOLS:  AMERICAN, WAGNERIAN, ET. AL.

Kathy says I've become an "American Idol" junkie, relishing the comparison of my own musical evaluations with the judges.  It's not terribly surprising that I'm most in step with Simon Cowell -- and also not terribly surprising how far my opinion continues to waver from whatever segment of the culture is casting all those votes - well over 65,000,000 for the grand finale. Not a single one of our presidential nominations has garnered that many ballots.

What disturbs about "Idol" can be said of many other aspects of our society, that is, the medium is more important than the message.  Of the ten semi-finalists who failed to claim the "Idol" title, at least five possessed more talent, more originality, and more potential than the final pair.  I think of a teenage boy with over-sized glasses or a young co-ed from Georgia, both of whose voices had not quite developed but who sang with far more intelligence and flair than either of the two finalists. "American Idol" consistently bypasses real talent (the finished song) in favor of the package. By contrast, wasn't it refreshing the other evening at the end of the competition to hear the seventy-something Dionne Warwick, her voice tattered and worn by age, sing just a few lines from some of her old Bacharach / David chestnuts. Kathy and I found it cathartic simply to listen to the sound of her vowels.

Throughout the competition, we heard each of the judges say things like:  "The song wasn't important or very good, but you presented it so well."  Translation:  You didn't sing very well, but you sure looked great.  You really know who you are."   Our culture is more concerned with who someone is (the packaging), as opposed to what someone is (the fruits of the package). 

The opera Lohengrin is rather long.  Action is basically non-existent, nor is there much of a plot.  As with most of his operas, Wagner's gorgeous music compensates for a story line which on the surface could seem boring or unimportant.  Lohengrin, the proverbial knight in shining armor, comes to the aid of Elsa who has prayed to God for someone to defend her honor against a slanderous and treacherous accusation.  He defends her, woos her, and weds her, but only after he makes her promise never to ask who he is:  "You must never ask my name or lineage."  I always wonder why Elsa just didn't make up a name for her hero.  In thirty years of marriage Kathy has perhaps on five occasions called me "Rick" rather than "Poopschoen", and neither of us are too much the worse for wear.

Anyway Lohengrin's behavior is splendid and exemplary.  He champions everything which is good, true, and beautiful - as well he should given how his father Parsifal is the guardian of the Holy Grail -- which the audience doesn't find out until the very end when, with Elsa's curiosity undone she asks the fatal question:  "Who are you?" Unfortunately, she is the only person consumed enough over who her husband is.  Everyone else is more than satisfied with what he is, because Lohengrin's acts speak for themselves.  "By their fruits ye shall know them."

How easily we forget that with Jesus, we know very little about who He is as well.  The gospels leave out about thirty of His thirty-three earthly years simply because Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are more interested in what He is (the Son of God).  They value the product more than the package.

When we dedicate our energies toward discovering who someone is or who  we are, we really do run the risk of making idols of them and ourselves.  "What does Paula Abdul eat for breakfast?"  "Do Bill and Hillary Clinton have an actual relationship?"  "Do Katherine McPhee and Taylor Hicks  flirt with each other backstage?"  Am I the only one sick and tired of all the time wasted the last few weeks getting to know the contestants "up close and personal", when they could have been singing - giving us a better understanding of their product?!

Enough ranting.  The fact is God looks upon us not as who we are, but as what we are.  When we are baptized, God makes you and me members of Christ, children of God, and inheritors of the Kingdom of Heaven.  With all our sins, negligences, and ignorances; with all our continued worry over who we are; with all the energy we spend and waste attempting to morph ourselves and others into whatever version of the "American Idol" we see fit, what happens if we don't win?  Does anyone other than God remember the name of the runner up from last year?  Is it not blessed relief that God cares more about what we are:  members of Christ, children of God, and inheritors of His Kingdom of Heaven? - and that for Him, the product is more important than the package.    FAB

 
CHURCH ATTENDANCE

The Sunday of Memorial Day weekend we had about the lowest attendance at church I can recall in recent years, so as we begin the summer diaspora, perhaps a reminder from the Second Office of Instruction of the Book of Common Prayer is in order:

"My duty [as a member of the Church] is to worship God every Sunday in His Church; and to work and pray and give for the spread of His Kingdom."  (p. 291)

I know we travel; I know we need to "take a break" every now and then.  Let us however attempt to remember that were it not for the Judeo-Christian tradition and our Lord's Church, there would be no "week-end" for us to enjoy.

My friends, a word to the wise is sufficient.  We really can really do better than we are.   FAB

STATIONS OF THE CROSS

After hearing nothing but positive comments as well as how the church would now seem empty with their absence, at its May meeting the Vestry voted unanimously to leave the Stations of the Cross in the church on a permanent basis.

EPISCOPAL YOUNG CHURCHMEN NEWS

We will take a break for the summer and resume meetings with a pool party at the beginning of the school year.

Andrea and Chip Hancock

 
A LETTER FROM THE SENIOR WARDEN

Dear Parishioners: 

We have almost completed our latest round of repairs to our church buildings; from replacing the front porch, to replacing and painting a substantial amount of siding, to restoring the roof system on the parish hall.  The repairs have gone well, and I hope that they have not been a great inconvenience to you.  Our physical church is unmatched in beauty, but really requires a great deal of upkeep to preserve her attractiveness.    Many of our stained glass windows, sashes, sills and shutters are in dire need of repair or replacement.  We are fortunate that we have some assets (namely Flowers stock shares) which we might liquidate to affect these much needed repairs.  Unfortunately repairs only get more extensive and costly as time passes.   I hope you will seriously consider our physical buildings in your giving to All Saints' Church.

The vestry had an excellent retreat on Saturday May 20.  The meeting was very productive and plans were put in place to continue to help make All Saints' Church the best that it can be. Thanks to all vestrymen, Brad Jackson, Philip Watt and Fr. Buechner for their valued input and direction.  I look forward to continuing a good year in the work of our church.

Faithfully,

Tom Simmons
Senior Warden

VACATION BIBLE SCHOOL

We had a great turnout of twenty-seven children of Church members and friends. 

A special thank you to all the VBS teachers and volunteers:

TEACHERS - Elizabeth Young, Nan Myers, Nancy McCollum, Kim Bragg

LUNCH VOLUNTEERS - Jenny Ladson, Laurie Simmons

EYC VOLUNTEERS - Marie Olson, Elizabeth Olson
    Chris Bragg, Taylor Bragg


CHOIR NEWS

The adult choir will take a summer hiatus for the next ten weeks.  The Church and Margit want to thank everyone who participated this year.  The choir adds so much to the service and we are truly blessed to have such dedicated parishioners.  

Margit Miller

USHERS FOR JUNE

June 4     

Paul Adams     
Paul Gurley     

June 11

C.B. Grubbs
Robert Balfour

June 18      

John Daniel  
Tom Simmons

June 25

Jim Funk
John Glenn

TRANSITIONS:

Happy Birthday in June to:

Russell Therrien    6-1-88
Branden Therrien   6-5-92
Carmen Ellis    6-9-87
Christopher Sanford   6-12-88
Anna Kelly    6-18-97
DJ Grooms    6-27-90
Olivia Kavouklis   6-27-92
Eliza Parvey    6-30-00

Happy Birthday in July to:

Elizabeth Mason   7-1-88
Mary Catherine Lanigan  7-7-85
Michael Mirocha   7-21-91
Madeline Claire Bruhn   7-22-98
Stanford Hancock   7-30-96
Henry Simmons Ladson   7-30-02

 
THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY’S SERMON

On March 21, 2006, the Anglican Communion celebrated the 450th anniversary of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer (author of the Book of Common Prayer) being burned at the stake.  The current Archbishop, Roland Williams, preached the following on that occasion at St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford.

Please take the time to read it carefully, as it presents a profound and beautiful appreciation for the rationale of the traditional liturgy.  FAB

From today's epistle: 'The word of God is not bound'.

When it was fashionable to decry Cranmer's liturgical rhetoric as overblown and repetitive, people often held up as typical the echoing sequences of which he and his colleagues were so fond. 'A full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction; 'Have mercy upon us, miserable offenders; Spare thou them which confess their faults; Restore thou them that are penitent'; 'succour, help and comfort all that are in danger, necessity and tribulation'; direct, sanctify and govern'; and of course, 'earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust'. The liturgical puritan may well ask why it is not possible to say something once and for all, instead of circling back over what has been said, re-treading the ground. And in the same vein, many will remember the arguments of those who complained of the Communion Order in the Book of Common Prayer that it never allowed you to move forward from penitence to confidence and thanksgiving: you were constantly being recalled to your sinful state, even after you had been repeatedly assured of God's abundant mercies.

Whether we have quite outgrown this reaction, I'm not sure. But we have at least begun to see that liturgy is not a matter of writing in straight lines. As the late Helen Gardner of this university long ago remarked, liturgy is epic as well as drama; its movement is not inexorably towards a single, all-determining climax, but also - precisely - a circling back, a recognition of things not yet said or finished with, a story with all kinds of hidden rhythms pulling in diverse directions. And a liturgical language like Cranmer's hovers over meanings like a bird that never quite nests for good and all - or, to sharpen the image, like a bird of prey that never stoops for a kill.

The word of God is not bound. God speaks, and the world is made; God speaks and the world is remade by the Word Incarnate. And our human speaking struggles to keep up. We need, not human words that will decisively capture what the Word of God has done and is doing, but words that will show us how much time we have to take in fathoming this reality, helping us turn and move and see, from what may be infinitesimally different perspectives, the patterns of light and shadow in a world where the Word's light has been made manifest. It is no accident that the Gospel which most unequivocally identifies Jesus as the Word made flesh is the Gospel most characterised by this same circling, hovering, recapitulatory style, as if nothing in human language could ever be a 'last' word. 'The world itself could not contain the books that should be written' says the Fourth Evangelist, resigning himself to finishing a Gospel that is in fact never finishable in human terms.

Poets often reinvent their language, the 'register' of their voice. Shakespeare's last plays show him at the edge of his imagination, speaking, through Prospero, of the dissolution of all his words, the death of his magic; Yeats painfully recreates his poetic voice, to present it 'naked', as he said; Eliot, in a famous passage of the Quartets, follows a sophisticated, intensely disciplined lyrical passage with the brutal, 'that was a way of putting it'. In their different ways, all remind us that language is inescapably something reflecting on itself, 'talking through' its own achievements and failures, giving itself new agendas with every word. And most of all when we try to talk of God, we are called upon to talk with awareness and with repentance. 'That was a way of putting it'; we have not yet said what there is to say, and we never shall, yet we have to go on, lest we delude ourselves into thinking we have made an end.

So the bird is bound to hover and not settle or strike. Cranmer lived in the middle of controversies where striking for a kill was the aim of most debaters. Now of course we must beware of misunderstanding or modernising: he was not by any stretch of the imagination a man who had no care for the truth, a man who thought that any and every expression of Christian doctrine was equally valid; he could be fierce and lucidly uncompromising when up against an opponent like Bishop Gardiner. Yet even as a controversialist he shows signs of this penitent scrupulosity in language: yes, this is the truth, this is what obedience to the Word demands - but, when we have clarified what we must on no account say, we still have to come with patience and painstaking slowness to crafting what we do say. Our task is not to lay down some overwhelmingly simple formula but to suggest and guide, to build up the structure that will lead us from this angle and that towards the one luminous reality. 'Full, perfect and sufficient' - each word to the superficial ear capable of being replaced by either of the others, yet each with its own resonance, its own direction into the mystery, and, as we gradually realise, not one of them in fact dispensable.

You can see a poignant concomitant of this in Cranmer's non-liturgical prose. When he wrote to King Henry in unhopeful defence of Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell, the convoluted sentences and sentiments show, not only a constitutionally timid man struggling to be brave (and all the braver for that), but a man uncomfortably capable of believing himself deceived and of seeing the world in double perspective. What both letters in effect say is: I thought I saw the truth about this person; if I was wrong, I was more deceived than I could have thought possible; how in this world can even the King of England know the truth of his servants' hearts? I see both what I always saw and the possibility that it has all been a lie; is this a world where we can have certainty enough to kill each other?

And in his last days, this was Cranmer's curse. If there was no easy certainty enough to kill for, was there certainty enough to die for? That habit of mind which had always circled and hovered, tested words and set them to work against each other in fruitful tension, sought to embody in words the reality of penitence and self-scrutiny, condemned him, especially in the midst of isolation, confusion, threats and seductions of spirit, to a long agony, whose end came only in this church minutes before his last hurrying, stumbling walk through the rain to the stake. It is extraordinary to think of him drafting two contradictory versions of his final public confession, still not knowing what words should sum up his struggles. But at the last, it is as if he emerges from the cloud of words heaped up in balance and argument and counterpoint, knowing almost nothing except that he cannot bring himself to lie, in the face of death and judgement. What he has to say is that he has 'written many things untrue' and that he cannot face God without admitting this. He cannot find a formula that will conceal his heart from God, and he knows that his heart is, as it has long been, given to the God whom the Reformation had let him see, the God of free grace, never bound by the works or words of men and women. Just because he faces a God who can never be captured in one set of words, a God who is transcendently holy in a way that exacts from human language the most scrupulous scepticism and the most painstaking elaboration possible, he cannot pretend that words alone will save him. 'If we deny him, he also will deny us'. He must repent and show his repentance with life as well as lips; 'forasmuch as my hand offended in writing contrary to my heart, therefore my hand shall first be punished'.

He is not the only theologian to have found at the last that words failed: Aquinas after his stroke, speaking of how all he had written seemed so much straw; or, disarmingly and mischievously, Karl Barth summing up his Church Dogmatics to an interviewer in the words, 'Jesus loves me, this I know, For the Bible tells me so'. But neither Barth nor Aquinas would have said that there was any other way to this simplicity and near-speechlessness except by discovering in the very experience of struggling to talk about God that limit beyond which no human tongue can go. 'The word of God is not bound'. At the boundaries of speech, we are only at the beginning of the fullness of the Gospel.

So Cranmer draws the terrible and proper conclusion from a lifetime of skill and balance, of 'rightly dividing the word of truth': what appears bit by bit in our words about God as they are prompted and fired by the Word Incarnate is the realisation of the God who is always in excess of what can be said. The rhetorical excess of repetition and rhythm is not just a stately game to decorate or dignify a basically simple act of acknowledgement directed towards God. It is the discipline that brings us to the edge of our resource; just as the insistent reversion to penitence in the Communion Order is not neurotic uncertainty but the sober expression of the truth that we never 'move on' from being saved sinners, and our amazement at God's free forgiveness has to be spoken out again and again. The edge of our resource: that is where faith belongs, and that is where the language of worship has to lead us.

It led Cranmer - as it led so many others in that nightmare age, as it led the martyrs of our own age, Bonhoeffer, Maria Skobtsova, Janani Luwum - to something more than a contemplative silence: to a real death. When we say that the word of God is not bound, we say that death itself can be the living speech of God, as the Word was uttered once and for all in the silence at the end of Good Friday. Cranmer speaks, not only in the controlled passion of those tight balances and repetitions in his Prayer Book, but in that chilling final quarter of an hour. He ran through the downpour to the town ditch and held out his right hand, his writing hand, for a final composition, a final liturgy. And, because the word of God is not bound, it is as if that hand in the flames becomes an icon of the right hand of Majesty stretched out to us for defence and mercy. 

 
MAKING ROOM FOR CHILDREN IN THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST
(The following article was 'pinched' from the Rev. Frank Logue, vicar of King of Peace Church in Camden County.  He credits it to a professor at Virginia Theological Seminary.  FAB)

WORSHIP AND LEARNING.  Worship is one of the basic ways people learn what it means to be a Christian.  Children learn worship by worshiping with the congregation Sunday after Sunday.

 They learn they belong to Christ and are welcome in His Church.
 They learn to know the Lord's Prayer and other parts of the liturgy from memory.
 They build a fund of memorable shared experiences of Christian community against which they may draw when they are older.
 They are enriched by the beauty of music and art as expressions of praise and as human responses to God.
 They hear stories from the Bible read and interpreted, and begin to see Christian worship as one place where God may speak to them.
 They witness the drama of Baptism and Holy Communion as signs of God's kindness and favor.
 They discover that they are valued as persons by God and by the people of God's Church.

Bringing children to worship may not always be easy, but it is an essential part of their growth in Christ.  The Body of Christ assembled is incomplete in their absence.

SCHOOL-AGE CHILDREN.  The school-age child brings some new abilities to worship, including a greater capacity for attentive listening, an increasing ability to read and the ability to organize and memorize information.  Parents can help this primary child toward greater participation in worship as these capacities develop when they:

 Help him memorize the Lord's Prayer and other parts of the liturgy.
 Review the bulletin with the child to identify new or difficult words and preview together those parts where the congregation responds by reading and speaking.
 Find hymns in the bulletin (or on hymn board) and go over the words.
 Talk about the sermon and ask the primary child what he remembers best about it.
 Encourage the child to listen to the sermon for stories, answers to questions or important thoughts.