When I think about Lent, I’m often reminded of the instructions that one of my mentors as a priest gave to the Flower Guild at the first church I served, where she was the interim rector at the time. They had asked her whether she had guidance for flowers during Lent. She answered that many churches didn’t have flowers during Lent at all, and they were shocked. They had always had flowers in Lent before… So she came up with a compromise proposal: Flowers would be fine, but they should try for an aesthetic she summed in a phrase that’s stuck with me: Lent was, she said, a season for “desert beauty.”

The Flower Guild pondered this at their monthly meeting, put their heads together, and came up with a stunning idea: on each side of the altar, they placed a single, pale purple orchid, in an undecorated pot, and they carefully tended each flower through the whole season of Lent.

On Tuesday, I sat in a clergy meeting as priests and deacons shared their Lenten practices of giving things up and taking them on. The final priest to share, who serves a parish downtown, offered her favorite part of Lent: at the end of each day, she writes down the most beautiful thing she saw that day. For her, every day of Lent is punctuated, as she walks through the crowded streets of Back Bay and the barren trees of the Public Garden, with the question: “Is this the most beautiful thing I’ll see today? What about this?”

The forty days of Lent reflect the forty days Jesus spent in the wilderness, in fasting and prayer, facing temptation. We journey through these forty days, too, facing our own small temptations, praying our own avid prayers. Perhaps we learn something about ourselves. Perhaps we grow closer to God. But in this muddy season of Lent, in this long, grey season of Lent, in this taxing, chocolate-free (coffee-free, wine-free) season of Lent—whatever it may be for you—it can be hard to see the beauty.

And yet.

There is a “desert beauty” in life stripped down to its essentials, a beauty revealed when a few luxuries are given up or a new commitment to pay attention is made. It’s the beauty of your life, as it is, without the distractions. It’s the beauty people are seeking when they go out to the wilderness, the beauty you can sometimes find when you’re left alone with God, and the world becomes quiet enough for you to hear the voice of God speaking to you: “This is my beloved child, in whom I am well pleased.”

Because you are (God’s beloved child.) And God is (well pleased with you.) And wherever these forty days of Lent take you, however muddy or beautiful, however loud or quiet it may be, the Holy Spirit is there with you, inviting you always to search for and to tend to and to rejoice in the small, beautiful things of the world.

On January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany marked the conclusion of the Twelve Days of Christmas. “Epiphany,” derived from the Greek word Epiphaneia, or “Manifestation,” celebrates “the Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles,” the moment in which God’s love was revealed to all the nations of the world. Eastern celebrations of the day remember three kinds of epiphanies: the arrival of the Magi (the “Three Kings”) at Bethlehem; the Baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan; and Jesus’ first miracle, transforming water into wine at Cana. These mysterious epiphanies reveal God’s love and Christ’s power to the world. We sing “We Three Kings” and we eat king cakes and we bless chalk to bless our homes.

And then we find ourselves in “the season after the Epiphany,” a phrase I’ve always loved. It’s the season in which all of us church people live our lives. Presumably, if you’re part of a church like this in a city like this in 2023, it’s not by accident. It’s not because it’s convenient, or because it’s expected. Presumably you’ve had some kind of “epiphany” or your own, along the way. Something’s happened in your life to reveal God’s love for you.

But now you’re in the season after the Epiphany, in one of those in-between times, living ordinary life and trying to muddle through. And it’s in these seasons, not during the big holidays, that we really see what it means to live a life of faith. What does it mean to remember the warm candlelight of Christmas Eve in the grey slush of January? What difference does it make to have heard the herald angels sing when their voices are long faded from the sky? What’s life like in the long season after the Epiphany, while you wait for the next big thing to arrive?

O God, by the leading of a star you manifested your only Son to the peoples of the earth: Lead us, who know you now by faith, to your presence, where we may see your glory face to face; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

When the parties are all over and the presents all unwrapped, Christmas remains. When the family trips are over and the kids are (finally) back in school, Christmas is still here. The City of Boston is happy to pick my Christmas tree up for composting on the January 3 but that’s only the Tenth Day of Christmas, and my tree is here to stay. (Although that part’s more procrastination than piety.)

I say all this not just as an old-fashioned and curmudgeonly comment about celebrating the full Twelve Days of Christmas, but because, to me, the disconnect between the hubbub of the holiday schedule and the quiet of this first week of January comes as a huge relief.

Our cultural Christmas begins in late November and peaks on Christmas Eve, with holiday parties and Christmas Spectaculars and NORAD’s annual Santa Tracker. But when the rush of activity dies down, the Church’s celebration is just beginning. And it extends far beyond those Twelve Days.

This week, the baby Jesus has only just been given his name, on Monday. The baby’s still half-asleep, his parents still figuring out how to raise their newborn child. This week, the Magi are still en route, with royal and unnerving gifts: gold for a king, frankincense for a god, the myrrh that perfumes bodies in the tomb. The days of Jesus’ ministry are far off; even the day when the precocious child wanders away to sit in the Temple won’t come until he’s twelve, an age unimaginable to his parents now. In forty days, they’ll go to the Temple for the first time, to present Jesus there: for now, they’re praying he’ll stay “tender and mild” for long enough for them to get some sleep.

The choirs of angels have faded from the sky. The shepherds have been called back to their fields. All the quiet, plain activities of life have started up. And yet Jesus remains, and Christmas remains, and the tidings of his birth remain good news—now that it’s quiet enough for us to hear them, maybe even better news than before—“For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.” (Luke 2:10-11)

This week, we welcome the Right Reverend Alan Gates, our Diocesan Bishop, for a visit to St. John’s, which will be his final formal visit here before his retirement next fall. This morning, our diocesan Bishop Nominating Committee published a new diocesan profile, the result of several months’ work reflecting on the life of our diocese and gathering stories and input from people all over the area. Wednesday, we celebrated the feast day of arguably the most famous Christian bishop in history, St. Nicholas of Myra—better known to his modern disciples as Santa Claus.

I mean: Come on! Same guy.

In the spirit of seasonal fun, and as a break from our exceptionally-apocalyptic Advent lectionary readings, I thought I’d share my three favorite stories about Saint Nicholas of Myra (c. 270–343), in their family-friendliest versions.

1. Saint Nicholas, like many early Christian leaders, was born into an aristocratic family, but gave much of his wealth away. One poor family included three teenaged daughters whose father could not afford a dowry, limiting their prospects for marriage.* Wanting to help the family without dishonoring them, Nicholas secretly dropped three bags of coins into their home, one for each girl’s dowry. One version of the story says that he dropped the bags of coins through the window; another says that Saint Nick dropped the gold even more circuitously through the chimney, whence it fell into the stockings they had left drying by the fire. (Sound familiar?)
2. In another story, Nicholas visits a region undergoing a great famine. He happens to pass by a butcher’s shop when he senses something strange going on. Nicholas makes the sign of the cross over a large barrel, upon which three small children emerge. The children had been killed and pickled by the butcher, who had planned to sell them to the hungry townspeople as ham. Luckily, Nicholas’s prayer was sufficient to achieve their resurrection. This is an extraordinary tale, but one that was widely believed and often depicted in medieval art—with the result that Saint Nicholas became commonly associated with children, of whom he is a patron saint!
3. Saint Nicholas’s Day (December 6) became the day on which some communities elected a “boy bishop” for the year, a child chosen to exercise episcopal authority until Holy Innocents’ Day (December 28). In a tradition of tremendous theological depth** and great silliness, the boy bishop donned the (adult) bishop’s mitre and crozier, and he and a coterie of boy priests ran the cathedral for the month, leading all worship except the Mass.

One wonders whether our Bishop’s appearance just after Saint Nicholas’s Day ought to evoke any of these associations. I don’t believe we’re missing any possibly-pickled parishioners,*** and I haven’t spotted any bags of gold—But should our acolytes attempt a coup in the chancel this Sunday, then… Well. They may well be within their rights.

* One can fill in the details about the likely future employment of three poor young women who could not be married.
** “he hath put down the mighty from their seat / and hath exalted the humble and meek”
*** although at home, we’ve just finished reading The Big Friendly Giant…

Election season is here! And I’m not talking about the next President. I’m talking about the election for our next Bishop.

People often ask me what makes the Episcopal Church or the Anglican tradition different from the Roman Catholic Church. If you’re reading this email, you probably know that there are many different ways to answer that question. But ultimately, the answer is “polity.”

Not “politics,” as in how our churches’ values correspond to different political parties. But “polity”: how we organize ourselves as a church body, and how we make decisions about our lives together as Christians. Since the time of the Catholic Reformation (or “Counter-Reformation”), the Catholic Church’s polity has been basically top-down and centralized: authority flows from the Pope down through Archbishops and national councils of bishops, down to diocesan bishop and on to parishes.

But for the whole history of the Episcopal Church, since its inception after the American Revolution, our polity has worked in the other direction, from the bottom up. Our church polity reflects the representative ideals of our Republic. So the laypeople of our parishes elect Vestries that meet monthly to govern our local churches, and our churches elect delegates to a Diocesan Convention that meets yearly to govern life in our Diocese, and our dioceses elect delegates to a triennial General Convention that makes binding decisions for our whole Episcopal Church. (There is, for better or for worse, no pan-Anglican body that can make decisions that are binding on, say, both the Episcopal Church and the Church of England.)

This description may already have put you to sleep, but it’s really important. In fact, this difference in polity has directly enabled the more visible or obvious differences between our churches. How is it that Episcopal priests can marry, or that women can be ordained as bishops and priests, or that our church affirms the identities, lives, marriages, and transitions of LGBT+ people? Because we decided to! Churches can argue back and forth about the theology underpinning any of these things, but what gave us the freedom to embrace each one of them was the fact that we organize our church’s life as a representative democracy, and that we—the ordinary lay and ordained people of this Church—decided that they are right.

The same goes when a Bishop retires.

Our current bishop diocesan, the Rt. Rev. Alan Gates, plans to retire at the end of 2024. His successor as our spiritual leader will not be appointed from above or selected by a secret committee. His successor will be elected by the people of God, guided (we pray) by the Holy Spirit of God.

This is literally true: at our Annual Meeting this winter we’ll be electing lay representatives to vote to elect our next Bishop in May. And it’s also true in a broader sense than just that technical one. Our diocesan search process has begun, and the Nominating Committee wants to hear your voice! As they begin developing a profile for the search, they are inviting input from people around our Diocese via a series of listening sessions, to which you are all invited.

Each session is located in a different reason, and some are especially intended to hear from people representing different demographics. Here are a few of the sessions that might be convenient for members of our parish:

I hope that you’ll have the opportunity to attend one of these, in person or by Zoom, to share your hopes and dreams for the future of our church, and to connect with Episcopalians from around Massachusetts. It is an incredible gift to have this kind of say in the way our leaders are chosen; I hope you are able to be a part of that process.