A few weeks ago, I had a remarkable experience. One of our members asked me what I was going to talk about in that week’s Thursday-morning Lent discussion on prayer, and I said we’d be talking about intercessory prayer—in other words, about what it means to pray for other people. We got to talking, and she shared with me a beautiful image for what we do when we pray for someone else. I thanked her, and said I’d share it with the group.

Later that week, I sat down at my desk, and pulled out an article I’d been hoping to read by Brother Geoffrey Tristram, one of the monks at the Society of St. John the Evangelist, the Episcopal monastery in Cambridge. And right there, in his discussion of prayer, he quoted former Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey using the exact same image for prayer.

Great minds think alike. So what was this brilliant image of prayer?

Brother Geoffrey writes: “True intercession is being with God with the people we love on our heart.  In The Christian Priest Today, Archbishop Michael Ramsey writes movingly about intercessory prayer, and he gives a great image for what we are doing when we pray for others, drawn from the Book of Leviticus.  Aaron, the high priest, would go into the Holy of Holies in the Temple wearing a breastplate on which were jewels representing the tribes of Israel, whose priest he was.  He literally went into the holy presence, the heart of God, carrying the people, represented by the jewels, on his heart.”

We come before the presence of God, carrying the people we love on our hearts. The essence of praying for another person is not praying for something, asking God to bring about the outcome we’re seeking. We do this, often enough, asking God to give them that promotion or to heal them of that sickness or to change or grow or maybe to forgive us, and that’s okay. But it’s not what’s really at the core. What’s at the core of prayer is holding someone in the love of God, and inviting God’s love to transform us both. And when our prayers aren’t answered—when the outcomes we’ve been praying for don’t occur—it doesn’t mean our prayers weren’t heard, or prayed.

This is a gift, because it means we can pray for a person without knowing what we’re “praying for.” We can pray when we don’t have the right words. We don’t need to come up with something to say, or even know what someone needs. We simply stand before God with the people we love written on our hearts.

And as Brother Geoffrey writes, “when we do this, something else rather wonderful can happen to us.  This kind of prayer can change us; it can mould and shape our own hearts.”

So if you’re still reading this, there’s your homework: take a minute, or five minutes, or fifteen seconds to pray for someone else. Don’t pray for anything. Don’t worry about coming up with words. Just hold them between your love and God’s, and be still.

It may seem strange, but I imagine that decades from now, some of my fondest memories of St John’s will involve water, in all its troubling and inconvenient forms: Talking on the phone with Doug from my summer vacation in Long Island as he scrambled around the church setting up tarps and buckets to prepare for the hurricane that was on its way; Priscilla showing me how water poured through a particular hole in the outer kitchen ceiling from the windows upstairs, and hearing Tom and John drilling holes in the windowsills to let the water flow through; seeing the look on Louis’s face as our Search Committee chairs showed me around the church for the first time and realizing how badly the paint on the arch in the balcony had peeled; seeing that same arch sanded and painted for the first time as I stood at the altar; watching Simon and the kids scooping shovels’-worth of water out of that vexatious puddle in the Garden; watching half the congregation shovel snow out of the Harvard Mall so we could have an outdoor Christmas service.

This morning (Tuesday), I walked into the building as rain poured down and the nor’easter pummeled the city. I took off my rain pants and jacket, folded up my umbrella, and walked around. Not a sound of gushing water, not a drip-drop anywhere. “Hm,” I thought to myself. “I guess we’re watertight, for now.”

And then the second thought, as I looked up at the ceiling over the stairs. “Was that water damage always there?”

Because I’m a preacher, I live in a three-year lectionary cycle. So I’ve been reflecting recently about March 2020, the last time we heard this set of readings on the Second and Third and Fourth Sundays in Lent, Year A. The crisis and the emergency of the pandemic are over, although the virus and sickness remain. Our lives are mostly watertight, for now. But I can’t help but find myself looking at my life, from time to time, and thinking, “Huh. Was that damage always there?”

You may find the same thing has happened in crises in your life. When the emergency is over, and you’ve made it through to the other side, when you finally have the space to look around, you may see that the damage is still there, that you’re still carrying pain or worry or grief from that time. And that’s okay. Healing is a process that takes much longer than being hurt. (Heaven knows sanding and repainting can take much longer than fixing the leak.)

I’m reminded often of the fact that when Jesus appeared to the disciples after his Resurrection, he did so still bearing his wounds. He appears to them, and he says, “Peace be with you,” and then he shows them his hands and his side. (John 20:19-20) The promise of the Resurrection is not that our wounds will disappear and be forgotten. It’s that they will be transformed, that we will be transformed, still bearing them. For better or for worse, they have shaped us into the people who we are. But there will come a day when they don’t hurt any more, when the storm has passed and the drainage has been fixed and the damage has been repaired; when we can finally look back on all our crises and see the presence of God’s love, working in and through them, despite it all.

There’s a preaching podcast I listen to most weeks while I’m walking up or down Main Street to church, early in the week; two preachers reflect on the readings for the upcoming Sunday and what’s speaking to them this week. It’s always nice to have another perspective on the texts.

This week, one of them mentioned that this Sunday’s psalm is the Venite, Psalm 95, a psalm I know quite well. And I was suddenly overcome by a memory: the memory of preaching on this very psalm on the Third Sunday in Lent three years ago, March 15, 2020, the very first Sunday of remote digital worship.

We’ve made it through the lectionary cycle, once more.

Since I was at a different parish that Sunday, and since I won’t be preaching on the psalm this Sunday, I thought I’d share with you an excerpt from my sermon on that day. I’ll preface it by saying that as I read it, I was reminded of a lesson I’ve learned again and again over the last few years: what is true of God in the great and global crises of our lives is also true of God in our smaller, more personal crises.

Come, let us sing to the Lord; *
let us shout for joy to the Rock of our salvation.
Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving *
and raise a loud shout to him with psalms.
For the Lord is a great God, *
and a great King above all gods.
In his hand are the caverns of the earth, *
and the heights of the hills are his also.
The sea is his, for he made it, *
and his hands have molded the dry land.
Come, let us bow down, and bend the knee, *
and kneel before the Lord our Maker
For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand. *
Oh, that today you would hearken to his voice!

            I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said these verses of Psalm 95. These words, known as the Venite, are the default opening prayer of Morning Prayer in our prayer book, which I’ve said more or less every day for more or less eight years, and so I did a little back-of-the-envelope calculation—to be honest, I did a type-it-into-the-computer calculation—and realized I must’ve said these words about 2,500 times. [2023 note: Add another thousand or so over the last three years.]

Okay, let’s say I took off Saturdays for most of that time and skipped a few weeks on vacation and used a different psalm occasionally, and so I’ve said them, what—2,200 times? [Say, 3000…]

And they’ve never felt more true to me than they do today.

I feel right now as though we’re the residents of a seaside community who’ve just been warned that a tsunami is coming. The local university’s seismographers have detected a massive earthquake far out in the ocean, and we’ve been given a couple hours’ warning that something big is coming. So we’ve packed our bags and gathered our families and fled to higher ground, and now we’re sitting behind our sandbag walls and waiting for the waves to come.

Some of you, like Garrett [the Rector of St Anne’s] and I, have spent the last week inundated with emails and phone calls and meetings as you try to figure out how to prepare for what’s coming. Some of you have probably not seen that behind-the-scenes activity. Maybe you wonder what all the fuss is about. In any case, as a society we’ve pooled our wisdom and our resources and settled on our plans, and now we settle down to wait.

I don’t know what you’re feeling right now. Confusion, or fear? Anxiety, or panic? Exasperation that we’re all overreacting to something that might just flop? To be honest, I’m praying that it flops. I’m praying that the coronavirus-skeptics are right, in the same way that I pray that climate-change deniers are right. I hope that in 50 years we look back and laugh at the climate catastrophe we thought we coming, and I hope that in six months we look back and laugh at how silly we were for canceling all these events. Because if we look like fools in six months, it will be because we took the right precautions today. [Alas.]

Whatever you’re feeling, though, God is right there with you. If you can’t “shout for joy to the Rock of [your] salvation” right now, then wail in lamentation. If you can’t “come before [God’s] presence with thanksgiving,” then “raise a loud shout” of fear or frustration. Trust me, there are plenty of psalms for that.

“For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods.” God is with us when we’re down in the darkest caverns of the earth, and she’s with us up on the highest hills of joy. The tumult of the sea is his, for he made it; and her hands have molded the driest wildernesses of our lives.

If you ask me where God is a global pandemic, I can’t in good conscience just quote St. Paul in this morning’s epistle and say that “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” (Romans 5:3-4) Maybe that kind of thing is helpful to you; it’s cold comfort to me. But I can tell you that wherever you are today—not only literally, on this Sunday of live streams, but emotionally—wherever you are, God himself is there, right beside you.

There’s so much to say about the events of the last three years, more than I can put in any newsletter article. We are, in nearly every way, “back to normal.” But we will never be back to normal. There are people we lost—who died, or moved away, or became strangers to us—to whom we never had the chance to say goodbye. There are memories of fear, or hope, or joy that have reshaped how we think about our lives. For many of us, there is unexamined pain inside those three years that we’ve never had the time to really let heal.

This was not the first global pandemic, and it will not be the last. It was not the first crisis that upended our daily lives and shook the Church, and it will not be the last. It was a new and an extraordinary experience for all of us, in a way that I hope we’ll never encounter again. For a time, we all experienced many of the same experiences of grief, anxiety, fear, loss, and hope; now, we’ve returned to experiencing these things in our own cycles and our own ways. But whatever any one of us encounters in our lives, God is there.

I pray, this week, for the nearly seven million people who have died during the course of this pandemic. May their souls, and the souls of all the departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.

This week plays two very different roles in our church calendar. On the one hand, it’s the first week of Lent. On the other, it’s the due date for our annual Parochial Report, the preparation of which is more often dreaded than enjoyed. Most years, this involves cracking open the big red Service Book and tallying up total attendance for the year, filling out financials and summing up spreadsheets. This year, for the first time the Parochial Report asked for some demographic data about the congregation, which amplified both the dread of those who resent the added tallying, and the delight of those who—like your Rector—are total nerds. So who exactly are we, Saint John’s?

Well, you might be a little surprised to find out.

Before I tell you, I want to take a small step back. It’s not secret that, statistically, the Church is in decline. I don’t mean Saint John’s Church in particular, or even the Episcopal Church, or even the traditional mainline Protestant churches. Generally speaking, in terms of membership and engagement and finances, Christianity is in decline in North America, although this is not at all true around the world. And one of the most common anxieties you’ll hear in churches around the country wraps around the question of the magical, elusive, and highly-valued “young families,” a phrase that’s become so common in church conversations that I’m inclined to give it its own capital letters.

“How do we attract Young Families to our church?” members wonder, in towns and city neighborhoods across the country. “Will this new pastor attract Young Families?” a search committee might ask. Young Families are, it seems, the solution to a huge variety of struggling ministries, church conflicts, and financial woes—never mind that they have no time to spare and even less money.

I don’t mean to sound resentful. It’s nice to feel wanted. But the focus on one demographic or the other in the church obscures what matters in the church and what makes for a strong church. It’s not the number of Young Families: it is the love and the respect and the care for one another that we show every person, as a sibling in the family of God. Young Families are great, and so are Old Singles, and Empty Nesters, and People Who Wish Their Families Would Come to Church But They Just Won’t, and I’m The Only One I Know Who Even Believes in God…ers. And everyone can tell—from 2 years old to 92 years old—whether you’re treating them as a human being, or as a representative of a group, desired or not.

And I guess very few of you would be surprised to hear me say that… You know I spend as much time chatting with some of our younger members at Coffee Hour as I do with some of our older ones. (Well, sometimes a little more…)

So who are we, Saint John’s? Well, just to keep it to the question of generations and stages of life— We’re pretty much like Charlestown.

The Parochial Report asked us to count people in certain categories — children (0-12), youth (13-17), young adults (18-34), middle adults, (35-64), senior adults (65 and older). (Their categories, not mine!) So I thought, after looking through the parish directory and adding numbers up, that I’d compare to some recent Census data for our little neighborhood. (Those data are from 2017.)

This is really astounding, to me. Sure, we all know that 20-to-30-somethings are unusually unlikely to go to church in general, and retirement-age folks are much more likely. But overall, these numbers are astounding: generationally, if not racially and ethnically, our church reflects our neighborhood really well.

I loved the Parochial Report this year. But what I loved the most was not the discovery of how many children are in our church, or how many middle adults, or how many seniors or anyone else. It was reading through the list of names, thinking about and praying for and remembering each one of you, the beloved children of God.