Monthly Archives: February 2013

“I want my daughter to grow up hearing a pipe organ,” the visitor said, nodding with appreciation, holding his baby girl in his arms.

That’s not something you hear every day. The young man was visiting our parish church this morning and noticed the organ high in the loft. I wondered about what he said.

Did I take this huge instrument for granted? I knew it was a costly one.

I Googled pipe organ and learned that the pipe organ’s supply of wind from the pedal-board allows it to sustain notes much longer than a piano, giving the rich multi-textured timbre, which I fear we take for granted as we sing our hymns in the pews below. I also learned that for a time the pipe organ was the most complex manmade device, until the invention of the telephone exchange in the late nineteenth century (thank you, Wikipedia).

I know from parish experience that organs are becoming obsolete, largely because they are large, and cumbersome, but also because they are very expensive to maintain. Our parish accountant can attest to that, as well as our organist who at present is somehow playing with only a partial keyboard… until the next overhaul is sanctioned by our vestry and our limited budget.

So the words of the young man resonated… we have a unique experience at St. Peter’s, Oakland. Maybe I should pay more attention.

It was one of those curious coincidences (or angels flitting around in my life) that strike you all of a sudden. For I had just mailed some children’s books to a friend this last week who ordered through our church publishing house, the American Church Union (I help in the office from time to time). I knew Josephine but didn’t realize she was an organist until I Googled her name. But she is so petite! I thought, amazed. Very pretty and sweet and charming, but very petite. How does she reach those pedals?

The pipe organ. I thought how I love singing the robust hymns of the nineteenth century, often powerful words put to Bach and Handel and medieval tunes, sometimes songs going back to first monasteries and psalm-singing. They are glorious and fill our nave with a sound that is truly indescribable.

All because of our pipe organ.

I began to think of the other parts of our service – the Elizabethan language of our Book of Common Prayer, the psalmody from the ancient monastic “hours” going back to the fourth century, the creed, the Our Father given to us by Our Lord himself, the Scripture readings, the sacrifice of the Mass – the offertory, consecration, communion. In fact, all of the pieces of our Anglican liturgy, like the Roman Catholic liturgy, are rooted in these two thousand years of praise and offering and celebration. We sing into these past years, and we sing into the present year as well, dancing the Church seasons into the future, following a path that our ancestors followed, a path making sense of that historic moment when the tomb was empty. That first Easter Day.

The immensity of what happens in that single hour of Sunday morning worship struck me forcibly this morning. We have a pipe organ because it produces big immense music. We want big notes, magnificent melody, glorious song, because we are expressing a big and glorious and immense and magnificent truth: the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of the Son of God.

The Gospel today was the account of the Canaanite woman who begs Jesus to heal her daughter. Jesus (oddly, one thinks at first) replies, “It is not meet to take the children’s bread and to cast it to dogs.” Our preacher explained that until this moment in time God had invited only his Chosen People, the Jews, the People of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Israel), to his table. But with Christ, the invitation is extended to the rest of us – gentiles like this Canaanite woman. The woman countered his rebuke that even dogs eat of the crumbs that fall from the master’s table. Jesus heals her daughter. (Matthew 15:21+) She is happy for the crumbs. I, too, am happy for the crumbs.

From the time of Christ the history of the world changed course. Indeed we use that dating still, B.C. or before Christ, and A.D. or Anno Domini after the year of Our Lord. Like the tip of a fulcrum, things shifted. Today we are in that time, that second half, Anno Domini. We are in the Apocalypse now.

Our organ booms. We think it an immense sound for we believe in an immense God. In the time and space of all Creation it is probably a tinkle. But I think, that since Christ, since Anno Domini, our God of immense love welcomes our song filling his nave and sanctuary. God hears our voices, our prayers, our joys, our sorrows. Christ carries them in his body, heavenward, for we have been invited to his Father’s table.

This week we began the penitential season of Lent. We mark these forty days with Ash Wednesday, a day in which we recall our bodily mortality. So this last Wednesday I knelt with my fellow parishioners and raised my forehead to the priest, who marked me with a cross of ashes, saying, “Remember o man, that dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return.” (God’s words to Adam and Eve, Genesis 3:19)

This is a powerful liturgical action and within this ritual lies the story of man – his birth, life, death, and resurrection.

Stories are satisfying accounts of life. We listen as children at bedtime, we listen around the campfire, we listen in conversation, always hoping to hear a story emerge. “Tell me a story…” “I’ve got this story to tell you…” “Have you heard the one about…” Stories explain the mysteries of life.

Stories are different from sentences strung together. Speech doesn’t always contain stories but stories usually lie behind the words, sometimes hidden.

It is said that we pass our culture to the next generation through our stories, for good or for ill. We want them to learn from our mistakes so we tell them about the dangers of speeding, the rewards of hard work, the joys and sufferings of love.

Sometimes we create stories without words, using rituals and traditions – family dinners at holidays, Fourth of July picnics, Graduations. These stories may be simple ones, but nevertheless vital to all of us: we gather, we share, we honor and celebrate, we un-gather. The movement, the gathering, becomes a story and in the celebration we find stories within the story. We announce our beliefs about ourselves through these rituals and traditions.

Stories have beginnings, middles, and ends, and their very structure satisfies something within us. For we too have beginnings, middles, and ends. We travel through time in a linear direction. We are born, we live, and we die. We are familiar with the birthing and the living, but it is the last – the dying – that perplexes and confuses us most. How does the story end? Or more importantly, how does my story end?

So it was particularly striking this first week in Lent the three Old Testament readings appointed by our Book of Common Prayer for Morning Prayer on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, the days immediately following our ashen Wednesday. As a preview, Evening Prayer on Wednesday told the story of Jonah and the whale, that tale of running away from God. Jonah runs, is thrown overboard and swallowed by the whale, repents, is spit out, and obeys God’s commands.

But we wake to Thursday morning and the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Two angels in the form of handsome men visit Lot and his family to rescue them from the destruction soon to come. The angels arrive, escort Lot’s family across the plain to the mountains, and the cities are destroyed in a rain of fire and brimstone. (Earlier in the passage, Lot’s brother Abraham had bargained with God, crying what if there were fifty good men, shouldn’t they be saved…. finally negotiating to ten good men, shouldn’t they be saved… but that is another story, one of many Old Testament negotiations with God.)

Friday we wake to Abraham banning his concubine Hagar and their son Ishmael to the desert. Hagar cries to God and a well appears. The boy is saved, to become the father of a great nation.

And finally on Saturday God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. An Angel intervenes, a ram appears to be sacrificed, and Abraham has proved his love and obedience to God. He will be the father of a great nation, from which will come the savior of the world.

Beginnings, middles, and ends. These endings answer the question we long to ask, what is my end? For our world is full of fire and brimstone, full of estrangements and deserts, and full of moments of crucial choice, of life and death.

The good news for Christians is that our God of love is the ending of our story. God rescues us from the burning cities and leads us to the mountains, he gives us living water in the desert, and he provides himself as the sacrificial ram-offering.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. My body, made from the earth, will indeed return to the earth. The ashen cross on my forehead contains my salvific certainty, that Christ will lead me to heaven, my true end.