A WORD FROM THE RECTOR
Greetings in the
Name of our Lord, Jesus Christ!
Our Lord died for us and lives for us. In
Eastertide the office of Morning Prayer changes. At the Invitatory and Psalter, instead of
using the Venite (from Psalm 95) or Jubilate (Psalm 100) to begin
our prayer, we pray the Pascha nostrum (“Christ our Passover,” found at BCP
46 and 83). This ancient prayer is
comprised of verses from 1 Cor. 5, Romans 6, and 1 Cor. 15, and in praying this
we recite our faith that our Lord has been sacrificed for us, that Jesus
lives now and we live in Him, and that we shall all be made alive unto life
everlasting through the redemption effected by Jesus Christ. This prayer is, in effect, a creedal
statement, something that we proclaim, and this spirit of proclamation echoes
what happens in the Lectionary for the season.
In our three year cycle of eucharistic lessons, our Sunday Gospel lessons come from
Matthew (Year A, our current year), Mark (Year B), and Luke (Year C), but each
year in Lent and Eastertide we hear from John.
In Eastertide we also replace our Old Testament reading with a lesson
from Acts. Our lessons from Acts focus
on three sermons: (1) Peter to the crowd
in Jerusalem, proclaiming salvation through Christ (Acts 2); (2) Stephen in
Jerusalem, proclaiming the fulfillment of God’s plan of salvation in Christ
(Acts 7); and (3) Paul in Athens, proclaiming that God draws believers to Him
(Acts 17). And what happens at the end
of this season? Pentecost! The Spirit is given to the Church.
Paralleling these sermons from Acts, the
Gospel lessons tell of Jesus instructing His disciples how all Scripture
pointed to His fulfillment of God’s plan (Luke 24); of His breathing the Spirit
upon His disciples (John 20); of how He calls believers, and we recognize His
call (John 10); and the promise of the Holy Spirit (John 14). And then comes Pentecost!
Do you notice a pattern
here? God reveals Himself and His will
for us in His holy Word, and we do well to pay attention not just to the
lessons we hear on a given Sunday, but to the trajectory of these lessons. (This is in itself a good reason for
faithfulness in attendance on Sunday worship.)
When we pay attention to trajectory and pattern we not only notice but receive
direction. The fact that we are going
somewhere becomes more evident. The overall trajectory in Acts (following the
pattern set at Acts 1.8) is that nothing can stop the Gospel, which
spreads from Jerusalem and Judea (Peter and Stephen) into Samaria (Philip, in
Acts 8), to the “end of the earth” (under Paul ). The trajectory in our Gospel lessons is that
our salvation is part of God’s plan, and He sends us His Spirit to guide us in
this plan. So what can we be afraid of? Nothing can stop the Gospel. Nothing stops God’s will for us. As phrased by St. Paul, “For I am sure that
neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present,
nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all
creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our
Lord” (Rom. 8.38-39). To Him be blessing and honor and glory and might for ever and ever! Amen!
And so you ask, “How can I
better follow the pattern of God’s message when those times arise when I can’t
join in Sunday worship at the church, or when I want to go deeper than I can on
a given Sunday?” You can, of course,
reflect on God’s word and pray on your own.
The lessons for each day can be found using the “Online Lectionary” link
on our parish website, www.incarnationwestpoint.org, and if you don’t
have computer access the parish can provide portable lectionary materials such
as that found in the Forward Day by Day pamphlets. The website also contains a Bible Study
summary for all Sunday lessons, posted the week before the lessons are used in
worship, the sermon for the prior Sunday, and educational materials found in a
new folder “Christian Education”.
Explore the website. You’ll find the hymns for the coming month,
useful study links, the newsletter, photos of parish activities, and in the
Christian Education folder you’ll find materials that focus, e.g., on
Scripture (a study guide for the Old Testament, with one for the New Testament
to follow this month), Reason (the history and use of The Book of Common
Prayer; Anglican theological method, an instructed eucharist) and Tradition
(the history and exposition of the Creed).
All materials are available in hard copy. Do go deeper, and consider how you can grow
in faith through study, in Christian Education on Sunday or on your own, or in
a small group. (You can also use the
website in evangelism, referring friends who may have questions about The
Church.) Just as Scripture has a
trajectory, so let each of us have a trajectory of growth in faith (and in
evangelism), as we continue to grow together in the Body of Christ
Yours in Christ Jesus,
March
Vestry Highlights
After discussion of the Discernment
Committee report the vestry voted to nominate Patricia Cantrell as a candidate
for Postulancy to the Diaconate and authorized nomination to the Bishop to be
sent from our Parish.
The spring clean-up date was set for Saturday,
April 19, at 9 a.m.
Fr. Karl and Fr. Jeff Reich will be
alternation weeks starting June 12, directing the Bishop’s Mission Corp this
summer at Bratton-Green.
Delegates to 2009 Council are Patricia
Cantrell, and Diann and Ron Powell. Bert
and Sharon Falkner, and Rufus Ward are alternates.
Grace Notes
Holy Days: This year the Feast of St. Joseph (19 March)
and the Annunciation (25 March) both fell in Holy Week. They are thus transferred to the first
available days after Easter Week, 31 March and 1 April, but in our case (since
we celebrate eucharist on Wednesday), Annunciation
will be celebrated on 2 April (thus “bumping” the founder of my own seminary,
Bl. James Lloyd Breck). On 9 April we
commemorate Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great Christian witness and martyr against
fascism, executed by special order of Heinrich Himmler on the same day Adolf
Hitler committed suicide; his death thus providing an additional witness for
our Lord against evil. Other notable
feasts include Alphege, the only Archbishop of Canterbury to be remembered as a
martyr (19 April, d. 1012), St. George (23 April, patron of
Music:
Music in Eastertide focuses on the Good News of Easter,
that we are saved in Jesus Christ.
The hymns remind us of this Good News, following themes found not only
in the Gospel readings but also in Acts, lessons from which serve as the first
lesson in our celebrations of Holy Eucharist, in the place where we would
normally find a lesson from the Old Testament.
This substitution reinforces the message that the covenant made between
the Lord and the Jews has in
Christ been extended to all peoples. The
Old Testament has become the New Testament to all. In this light, we acknowledge the lordship of
Jesus in hymn 435, At the Name of Jesus every knee shall bow, a
nineteenth century hymn which paraphrases in part the great Christological hymn
found at Phil. 2.5-11. The office of
Jesus as our Mediator is recited in no. 447, The Christ who died but rose again, a twentieth century hymn paraphrasing Romans
8.34-39. This hymn is set to the melody
“St. Magnus,” which first appeared in 1707, in The Divine Companion, one
of the first unofficial hymnals that were a feature of revival in
Most of our hymnody in
Eastertide is familiar. One familiar
hymn which is of great contrast musically to the nineteenth century harmonies
which dominate is no. 1, Father, we praise thee. The melody, “Christe sanctorum,” is from the
seventeenth century Antiphoner, a collection of hymns made in the German
Reformation. This melody is itself
derived from a plainsong “trope”. A
trope is a feature in chant in which the cantor extends one syllable over many
notes, as part of a rising or falling phrase.
A familiar (and short) trope from our normal service is the “Alleluia”
sung at the fraction, in settings such as those found at S152 and S154 in The
Hymnal. In singing a trope we are
following an ancient monastic innovation which was originally intended to avoid
the monotony of unchanging chant (known sometimes as “death by plainsong”!)
Church
Pictorial Directory
Olan Mills will be at Incarnation Monday, April
21, from 3 until 9:30 p.m. to take photographs for our Church Directory. If you have not yet signed up, please do
so. Each family photographed will
receive a free 8x10 photograph and Church Pictorial Directory. We also need pictures of church activities for the
directory. Please look through your
photos and bring any we may use to the office.
For more information see Debbie.