Dear Friends in Christ,

This week I spent a couple of days at a Board meeting in Oklahoma City. I’d never been there before and that was interesting in and of itself.

We spent the time discussing the needs of the wider church regarding discipleship and formation materials, church growth research, and more. The highlight for me, however, was the time spent in worship at a relatively new church.

Grace Episcopal Church was a restart of a restart of a parish. It has taken nearly forty years for a church to really take root and start to grow in its suburban neighborhood, but grow it has.

The church looks nothing like any I have served in or attended. It’s a modern building. It has four big screens. It had band equipment and all the other accoutrements of an evangelical church plant.

So it is not in my wheelhouse liturgically speaking.

But it was fantastic. We went to Evensong which was done right according to the Book of Common Prayer. But it looked nothing like Evensongs I have attended before. The band led contemporary settings of the psalms and canticles.

Oftentimes in churches, contemporary means written in 1990 or before. These were all new and certainly could have felt like they came right out of Hillsong or another non-denominational church in terms of style.

But of course they weren’t.

They were ancient texts set to modern tunes.

They were singing the Magnificat and the Nunc Dimmitis.

They were singing the psalms and the responses.

They were praying prayers written by Cranmer or inherited from even earlier.

It felt disorienting but utterly familiar.

The really moving part, though, was looking around the room. This was a church full of people from so many backgrounds.

At dinner before Evensong, at my table were two educators with their daughters. One daughter was a fan of, as she put it, “dusty old tomes,” and she had found a home here where the ancient was studied and sung. The other daughter was on the spectrum somewhere, but obviously at home.

One of the educators spoke of her wife. I talked with a man who had been part of an evangelical church. While on an overseas mission he told the group leader that he thought he might be gay. A couple of days later he was told he needed to pack up and was flown home from Africa to be told he was being kicked out of their church.

He left the church and spent decades wandering. In that time he’d found meaning wherever he could but mostly spent his time going ever deeper into whatever bottle he could find until he hit bottom. He said he decided to give God a chance again when he started AA and that he’d been led here.

During Evensong two women sang with their daughters. One was wearing a “Don’t tread on me” t-shirt and the other a “God loves you” t-shirt. It could have been a scene from any rural mega-church. But it wasn’t. The women were holding hands and their eyes were filled with tears as they sang of Mary’s promise in the Magnificat.

What I kept thinking as I looked around and had heard the openly offered stories of just some of these folks, was that they were here, in a place, where all the love of God they had heard about in their evangelical upbringings was made to come alive.

This was a place where literal outcasts—those cast out—had found a home.

There are times here, at Saint Philip’s, where I tear up at the beauty of what we offer. On Good Friday I tried to stop crying as I watched so many of you come to the foot of the cross to venerate. Some came for the first time and some, God knows, maybe came for the last.

There is a beautiful thing that happens here as all of our stories unfold under the wings of ancient tradition. We hold fast to things that are passing away in our culture.

At Grace Church the same was happening. It was radically different but achingly familiar. They, too, were holding fast to things passing away in our culture.

Respect. Gentleness. Love. Patience. Openness. Generosity. Kindness.

These things seem to be passing away in our culture.

I pray that here we don’t just hold to ancient forms of worship but that we hold to something more.

I pray that we hold to the enduring values that once defined us.

We protect the vulnerable.

We defend the helpless.

We welcome the outcast.

We make room at the table.

We widen the margins.

We open our hearts when the world tells us to harden them.

I am proud that we hold fast to much that is passing away in our culture. I love that we are, in so many ways, a bulwark against the cruel tides of our political and social trends.

I hope also that we are willing to remember just how radical a thing it is to proclaim that God’s love is for all people across the battle lines of the culture wars.

I hold fast to an ancient hope. God so loved the world. However that is proclaimed, whether by choirs like ours or bands like Grace’s, it is a truth worth sharing again and again.

We sing, in so many ways, of the love of an awesome God.

Thanks be to God.

—Fr Robert