On
the other side of this wall is a little room where the altar party puts on our
vestments before worship, and where we keep our processional crosses and
torches and other paraphernalia of the liturgy.
It’s also where we keep a book like this, called the Register of Church
Services. Each page in it is the same, a
table of columns and rows in which we record the details of every service of
worship that takes place under the auspices of St. John’s—when it happened, and
where, and what kind of service it was, and how many people were there, and who
were the leaders, and so on. Now, there
are more services going on around here than you might realize, but even so, it
takes a number of years before a book like this gets completely filled in. It was Wednesday in Holy Week, 2012 the last
time we began a new one.
But
I still have not put this, last book to rest in the file drawer in the church
archives with the other old Registers of Church Services. I’ve kept it out on a shelf in my office,
right behind my desk. During the first
couple years of its retirement I used to look at it frequently, usually when I
was planning for a special liturgical event, and needed to remind myself what
we’d done last time, and how many people had attended. Sometimes I took it down just to look at it
for a little while, to see what stories it has to tell. It had come along with this building when St.
John’s Episcopal retook possession from the breakaway church in 2009, and its
records go back a number of years before that, detailing the worshipping life
of a parish very different from the one I know, and yet hauntingly the
same.
For
the last year or so, I’ve not looked at this Register at all, but I’ve kept it
on my bookshelf anyway. I see now that
I’d been keeping it out for today. Because
here is the record that notes that ten years ago yesterday, the 17th
of December, 2006, was the Third Sunday of Advent, and that there were 23 in
attendance at the Rite I Eucharist at 8 a.m. that day, and 140 at the 10
o’clock Rite II. And here in the last
column on the page, the one headed “Memoranda,” there is written this little
note:
12 noon—Parish Mtng.
Vote to disassociate from The Episcopal Church and Diocese of Northern
CA and change name to St. John’s Anglican Church!
Ten
years is a long time—maybe long enough that after today I can finally put this
book away in the archives. A lot has
changed. I don’t know how many of the
163 people who were in church here that Sunday are gathered again this morning
at St. John’s Anglican on the other side of town. I do know that very, very few of them are
here today. Ten years has been long
enough for the crisis to feel resolved, and the wounds almost healed. It’s been long enough for new things to grow
out of the ashes of the fire.
On
the other hand, ten years is not so long a time that we can’t still feel a
little of the anger, and the fear, and the sense of betrayal that were in the
air that morning. Which is why I’m
bringing it up today—not just because ten is a nice round number, but because
this anniversary falls in Advent, when we remember how much we hope for God to
come and be with us, to save us from our sins.
This
is the hope that Matthew’s story of the birth of Jesus is all about. The angel sums it up for us when it speaks to
Joseph in his dream. It tells him to
name Mary’s child Yeshua, which in Aramaic means something like, “He will
save,” because he will save his people from their sins. Now, this line of scripture that might make some
of us feel just a little bit squirmy.
The notion that Jesus came to “save us from our sins” has often been
turned into shorthand for, if I might say so, a somewhat simplistic and
aggressive form of Christian belief.
Which can make it hard for some of us to get any meaning out of it that
actually sounds like good news. But Matthew
can help us with this, if we realize that for him these words are not some
superficial slogan. He is making them
the centerpiece of the prologue to his gospel, so that we will read the whole
rest of the story to find what “saving his people from their sins” really
means.
By
the time Matthew has finished his writing we will learn that it’s a story that is
ongoing, and will be until the end of the age.
And it is also the continuation of the stories that came before, the
ones about Israel’s God and Israel’s people that are recounted in the Hebrew
Bible. That’s why Matthew fills his
gospel with quotations from scripture, so we see that the events he describes
fulfill the ancient prophesies and promises.
It’s why he makes even the structure of his book to be a kind of
reflection of the Torah, so that the genesis of Jesus is patterned on the
beginning of that other, more ancient story.
Like
the Book of Genesis, the story of Jesus begins with a man and a woman, who are
intended for one another. And then there
comes betrayal. In Genesis the Serpent
convinces the woman to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree, and to give some to
her husband. In Matthew, it is found that Mary, who has yet to be joined to
Joseph, has conceived a child.
In
Genesis, when God finds his creatures hiding in fear and shame in the bushes of
the garden, Adam points his finger at Eve and says, “She did it!” And Joseph is tempted to do the same. He would have been within his rights under
the law to publicly disgrace his fiancée for dishonoring him in this way, or even
to demand that she be stoned to death.
But, says the gospel, Joseph is a righteous man, and in this manner Matthew
is already telling us that “righteousness” is going to have a particular
meaning in the story that follows. It is
not the self-righteousness that is superior and judgmental toward others, but
something more akin to forgiveness, understanding, and compassion. Still, Joseph decides that his trust in Mary
is broken (who can blame him?), and that it’s best for them to quietly go their
separate ways, but just then the angel comes with news from God.
In
his dream Joseph learns that Mary has not betrayed him at all, and that he can still
trust her to love him and be his wife, and more than that, that all his pain
and doubt has been for God’s extraordinary purpose. At the same time, Joseph is left knowing that
something mysterious happened to Mary that will always remain between her and
God, and that her first-born son will never be exactly his. He will always have to live with the
knowledge that the neighbors can subtract from nine, and that some of them
might see his marriage as not quite up to the highest standard. He will always have to live with the memory
of his painful feelings of betrayal, of jealousy, and rage; the memory of his
struggle to master those feelings, and his resolve to break off his
engagement. But being saved from our
sins is not the same as having them erased from memory, as if they never
happened. It means that they are
prevented from destroying us.
I
cannot help but see the fact that today there are people worshipping from the
Book of Common Prayer at two St. John’s churches in Petaluma, as a sin. Which is not to say that no good has come of
it, or that we cannot find in what happened ten years ago yesterday and all
that followed, stories of courage, and kindness, healing, and hope, both on
“our side” and on “theirs.” All things
considered, it might be better this way, at least for now. One thing that I am sure of is that God did
not allow this sin to destroy us, but has birthed miraculous new life out of
the brokenness of anger, rejection, and betrayal. I hope this is true for “them” as well as for
“us,” and it would not surprise me a bit if it were. Because that is what happens when Christ
comes.
