From the Rector

Dear Friends in Christ,

This Sunday we will mark Saint Philip’s Day with the Bach Mass in B Minor and celebrate two baptisms, as well. We will bring into the household of faith two new members of the Body of Christ and Saint Philip’s—which seems a good thing to do on our patronage feast day.

Both of these events are what have made our parish what it is over the decades. When people ask me about Saint Philip’s I always mention two things in particular: our music program and our Children, Youth, and Family Ministry. Both are unusual in Episcopal churches these days and, in an increasingly secular society, are signposts for what makes us different.

But what makes us truly unique is a sense of possibility.

There is a base of incredible talent here that makes almost any project or program reachable. In any successful business or non-profit or, just life, a sense of possibility is the beginning of any kind of growth or change. It always takes a certain kind of brashness and bravado to start anything! But I think here that has been tempered over the years with experience too.

Sunday will mark a celebration of a certain kind of brashness.

We will sing that stunning Bach within the context of the liturgy in a way rarely done.

We will baptize two children into the faith in a time when people are walking away from faith in droves.

Both require a certain kind of mad insistence on the stability of God’s promise, and our willingness to remain fixed on him—and not on the obsessions of the moment.

It would be much easier for us to go down the street, check out a mega church or two, and copy what they do. It would be far easier to simply content ourselves with being a place for yoga classes and the occasional concert. Those are the pressures of the world—tempting us with easy success and a calm glide path toward irrelevance.

However, we have chosen a different and more difficult path. We have chosen to be who we are in a world that always demands we be something else.

We have chosen to offer the best of human musical expression as our worship.

We have chosen to maintain a ritual that has held us steady for two millennia ever since Christ commanded that we do this in remembrance.

We have chosen to be a place of welcome and refuge, service and prayer, community and communion, justice and tradition, artistic beauty and wonder of nature.

In all of this we will never be perfect. But the striving is worth it.

Choosing to do what we do is hardly easy but it’s made easier because God has chosen us—has chosen all of us to be the Body of Christ. With an irrepressible love, and joy in his creation, God has provided all that we can ask or imagine. God has set our course and it is only our task to remain faithful to it.

Worshiping the Lord in the beauty of holiness. Going out and baptizing in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Doing this in remembrance. These are our first and vital charges.

Those are the things we will do on this Saint Philip’s Day. The events will take some time but these two baptisms were two millennia in the making. This mass setting has gathered itself for centuries to be sung just at this moment. Let’s not rush or shortchange them. If they’re worth doing then they’re worth doing for an extra fifteen minutes or so!

All of our history, indeed all of Christian history, points toward the simple things we will do on Sunday as we choose, once again, to try and remain faithful, full of a sense of possibility, and ready to walk in love wherever Christ is calling.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Robert