Dispatches from Dean Dane
Dispatches from Dean Dane is a weekly blog from the Very Rev'd Dane Boston, dean of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral. He welcomes your questions and commentary at dboston@trinitysc.org.
September 12, 2024
At the coronation of King Charles III last May, the moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland played a unique role. After the king had been formally recognized by the congregation filling Westminster Abbey, before he took the solemn oath of his office and before the sacred rites of anointing and crowning were accomplished within the celebration of Holy Communion, the senior cleric of the Scottish Church presented the king with a copy of the Holy Bible. As he did, he spoke these words: “Sir, to keep you ever mindful of the law and the Gospel of God as the rule of the whole life and government of Christian princes, we present you with this Book, the most valuable thing that this world affords.” He concluded, “Here is wisdom; this is the royal law; these are the lively oracles of God.”
What an astonishing assertion! Amidst all the trappings of grandeur and pomp that the British monarchy and Westminster Abbey can furnish–the glittering crowns and rich gowns, jeweled swords and shining scepters, sacred vessels of gold and silver and all the countless historic treasures of the ancient building itself–a mere book was pronounced “the most valuable thing that this world affords.” There is something fitting in the fact that the words were spoken by a Presbyterian minister in a plain cassock, standing as he did among the bishops of the Church of England all swaddled in their rich copes. There is a hint of Scottish defiance in it all: kingly power and earthly wealth may awe and impress us, but “the lively oracles of God” are to be found in a humble book.
That declaration of the Bible’s supreme value was made at the summit of earthly grandeur (even if it is no longer the summit of earthly power in this democratic, post-colonial age). But the truth of it is proved in circumstances far removed in setting and splendor. The truth of it is seen in the devotion of Chinese Christians in the underground church, who risk life and limb to produce hand-written copies of the Bible for their countrymen. The truth of it is seen in the unending efforts of those who seek to translate the Scriptures into the most remote and obscure languages on earth, driven by the desire and conviction that every person should have the chance to read “the lively oracles of God” in the tongue of his or her birth.
And the true value of the Bible can be seen even in the privileged churches of North America. The transformation that can take place when cradle Episcopalians open and begin to read “the most valuable thing that this world affords” is extraordinary. New efforts for church growth and congregational development in mainline churches highlight Scripture reading and study as among the most powerful tools available to us. Deep-set and long-held fears of fundamentalism and literalism are, in many places, melting away in the light of a growing awareness that the answer to bad Bible reading is not to forsake Bible reading but rather to initiate good and faithful Bible reading. Lives are changed as folks who formerly knew the Scriptures only through the short lessons in Sunday worship begin daily to dig deeper into “wisdom…the royal law…the lively oracles of God.”
But there’s a problem. Whether we know it or not (and if we are honest about our biblical literacy levels, most of us do not), we Episcopalians are actually devoted disciples of St. James. Just a few weeks ago, we heard the admonition of his epistle: “Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only.” And oh how we strive to be doers! As Bible studies proliferate and individual Christians begin to explore the amazing library of the Scriptures, the inevitable questions of “practical application” begin to grow more urgent. Time and again, folks who have dipped only the tip of their toe into the deep pool of the Bible immediately begin to task, “Well, how do we do this? What does this look like in the real world? How do I apply this to my life?”
Those are not bad questions at all. Indeed, those are natural and necessary questions whenever we grapple with Scripture’s awesome scope and overwhelming declaration of the power and purposes of God. The Bible compels a response. It impels us to action.
But the problem is that those practical questions, when posed in the merest infancy of a person’s Bible reading life, rest on a faulty foundation. For many Americans, action is our natural state. We are bodies in motion. We want to be doing something, always. And we define ourselves and determine our worth on the basis of the things we do. The perennial cocktail party question “So, what do you do?” says an awful lot about the way we regard one another and ourselves. Activity—work—doing: these things give us the measure of a man or a woman. And the way others respond to our description of what we do gives us a clue as to how we should evaluate ourselves.
So for people like that—for people like us—opening the Bible can cause enormous anxiety. Just re-read the Sermon on the Mount, or St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. For people who determine our worth by our doing, how can we read words such as those and not immediately see how far below them we fall each and every day? Scripture—and especially a first encounter with Scripture—convicts us. Matthew 5-7 makes me squirm. I Corinthians 13 shows the selfishness and inadequacy of most of what I usually call “love.” And my standard response to that feeling is to try to find a way out of it as fast as possible.
That dynamic is, I believe, the driving force behind the desire to turn immediately from “hearing the word” to “doing the word.” The early inclination to find a way to apply the words of Scripture to my life is a bit like the immediate recoil of a child who has touched a hot stove. Seared by hearing or reading the sacred words, we seek a soothing balm in our doing. And so “applying the text” actually becomes a way of silencing the text. If I can do something, I can quiet my feelings of conviction and inadequacy. If I am doing something, then the Bible can be made to fit within the ordinary, expected patterns of my existence. If I can just do something, I’ll be able to check “Bible reading” off my list, and go on in confidence and comfort to the next thing “to do.”
But the Bible’s worth can never be reduced to the actions it inspires. “The most valuable thing this world affords,” is not chiefly valuable because it somehow baptizes our ordinary patterns of frantic activity, of working and doing, and our tendency toward measuring ourselves and others according to all our busy-ness. The “lively oracles of God” are not primarily concerned with creating a class of do-gooders busily building the Kingdom of Heaven on earth through their own herculean efforts. The Bible is not an instruction manual wherein we can read step-by-step the proper processes for becoming good, decent, upstanding people. The true reason for reading the Bible has nothing to do with us at all.
Rather, we read the Bible because through it God reveals himself to us. The Holy Bible is an announcement. It is God’s self-disclosure. The Scriptures are an unveiling of the power and purposes of the Almighty. That is what makes the Bible “the most valuable thing this world affords”: it points to and speaks of and makes manifest things beyond the scope and imagining of this world. That is what makes the Scriptures “the lively oracles of God”: not because they represent God’s anthropocentric (human-centered) pleading to an unheeding humanity, but because they shine forth with the brilliance of the Lord’s own theocentric (God-centered) announcement to an unworthy world. The true value of the Bible is not in the words printed on its pages but in the Word printed in the shining letters of Scripture’s great story, made incarnate in Jesus Christ.
All of which is why, in our time and place, the great Jacobean injunction must be reversed: we must become “hearers of the word, and not doers only.” It does no good to take a superficial, appropriating glance at the surface of Scripture’s deep waters and then to spin off into our own frenzy of doing. What we need instead is to dive in—to plunge ourselves into the depth of the Bible’s grand announcement. We need to learn to hold the essential, inevitable questions of “application” at bay, and to surrender ourselves instead to the great arc of Scripture’s story. We need to learn to live in the world of the Bible—not the historical world in which it was written, but the new Creation announced and enacted in its every word.
That is my purpose in initiating the Dean’s Big Bible Study as our Sunday morning Satterlee Hall offering. In setting the goal of teaching through all of Scripture, my hope and prayer is that we will remember that we are the humble recipients of the most valuable thing this world affords. I am excited to see what the Holy Spirit will accomplish in us here at Trinity as we dive into God’s Holy Word, and remember that its story is our story.
For it is only when we inhabit that story—only when we swim in Scripture’s strange and wonderful depths—only when we truly become “hearers of the word,” that we will find grace to “do” in a way that will last: to announce the Word Incarnate—Jesus our Lord—in our every word and deed.
So be ye hearers of the Word, and not doers only.
September 5, 2024
“Abide with me, fast falls the eventide;
the darkness deepens, Lord with me abide…”
Are you afraid of the dark? My children are, especially when it comes time to go to bed. Each evening they insist that Debby and I walk with them up the stairs and down the dark hallway, turn on the nightlights in their rooms, and make sure that their closet doors–those gloomy gateways into pitch blackness–are shut tight.
The truth is that all people are afraid of the dark to some degree or another. We have to be. At night we lose, or find significantly diminished and distorted, our sense of sight. Electric lights notwithstanding, when the sun goes down we simply cannot see as well or as clearly as we do in broad daylight. Familiar objects cast strange and ominous shadows. Doorways through which we pass without a thought ten times in the morning and afternoon suddenly become portals to the unknown. Obstacles we easily overcome and avoid during daylight hours–table-legs and floor lamps and, most treacherous of all, Legos scattered on the rug–become downright dangerous. And that’s all within the relative safety of our own homes! To venture outdoors at night when the moon is new or the clouds are thick is to enter a world utterly unlike the world we know during the day. Even the strongest and calmest among us rightly fear who or what may lurk in the shadows, or cry in the darkness, or come hurtling down the dimly-lit road toward us.
Night makes us think of death. The rhythm of light and darkness, dawn and dusk, day and night, is a reminder, every twenty-four hours, of our own mortality. We are afraid of the dark because we are afraid of the unknown, and death is the last and greatest unknown that all who are born must face late or soon. Each time we close our eyes in sleep we are confronted with the fact that we will one day close our eyes forever. So the darkness that looms before us each evening is a shade and likeness of that deeper, deepest darkness of the tomb.
A cheerful reflection, I know! But the Church has an answer to our daily dose of dusk and darkness, just as she shouts “Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!” even at the edge of the grave.
For thousands of years–pretty much as far back as we are able to trace human culture, in fact–people have set apart and sanctified the hours of the day and night with prayer. In the ancient Jerusalem Temple and through the synagogues of the Jewish diaspora, in monasteries and convents across the Christian world, and in countless parish churches where ordinary folks gather, God’s people have greeted each dawn and blessed each nightfall with Psalms and Scripture, hymns and canticles, petitions and praises. We have declared, even in the face of that which might make us most afraid, that “the darkness is not dark to thee, O Lord; the night is as bright as the day; darkness and light to thee are both alike.” (Psalm 139:10, 11)
In our own Anglican tradition, we call this ritual and rhythm “the Daily Office,” for it is the officium–the work–of sanctifying each day with prayer. And we especially pray at the turning points of each day, both when the light rises triumphant from the dying darkness of the previous night, and then again when the shadows begin to lengthen, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Each morning we offer Morning Prayer–sometimes called “Mattins”–and each evening we pray Evening Prayer or, as it is called when the service is sung, Evensong.
To pray the Daily Office, whether together or alone, is to consecrate our days and our nights to God. We remember that all we do, all we are, all we have, including even time itself, comes as a gift from the hand of the Lord and, through the blessed work of prayer, can become an offering, however meager, that we return to him. We are taught by the words of holy Scripture and our own sacred tradition that the darkness, though frightening to us because it is unknown and unknowable, is not bad. For just as the death of Jesus has made our own eventual death not a doom to be dreaded but the very gate of grace and life, so the sanctification of each day’s descent into darkness assures us that our God is Lord of all things known and unknown, seen and unseen, familiar and frightening–and nothing can separate us from him. Though our eyes must close at last on this world of sunshine and shadow, they shall open again to behold the everlasting brightness of the face of our risen Savior.
So, beloved, don’t be afraid of the dark. Take time each day to pray, and particularly in the morning when you rise and in the evening when the darkness falls. Explore the Daily Office in The Book of Common Prayer, and ask one of our priests to help you learn to pray it. Join us for Morning Prayer at 8:30 a.m. on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays in Keenan Chapel. Come and bless the close of the day through Choral Evensong at 4:00 p.m. on Sundays in the Cathedral, a very special offering sung by our incredible choirs each week in the program year.
Most of all, I hope that you will not be afraid of the darkness or the light. For our Lord holds our days and nights, our times and our seasons, our lives and our deaths, in the palms of his nail-printed hands.
“Hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes;
shine through the gloom, and point me to skies;
heaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee;
in life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.”
August 29, 2024
“Please, can't we just stay with the single 10:00 service?!”
I get that question every year around this time. Indeed, I get that question every year around this time. Nothing feels better than a full church, and the Sundays in late August after school has gone back to session and folks have returned to town from their summer activities are wonderfully full. In fact, these late summer Sundays–excepting the Sunday of Labor Day weekend–are consistently second only to Easter and Christmas for attendance. And it’s a wonderful thing to see a packed church!
So…why do we got back to our full schedule–what we sometimes call our “program year”?
The first reason is straightforward and practical: there just isn’t room for everybody! As a large and growing congregation, Trinity’s active membership cannot all safely and comfortably fit into our beautiful and historic Cathedral for a single Sunday service, let alone welcome newcomers and visitors in our midst. This is a wonderful problem to have, of course, and it makes it necessary for us to offer additional services throughout our busiest seasons.
But there is also a much more important and meaningful motivation behind our annual schedule expansion. We Episcopalians are deeply blessed with a rich variety of liturgical and musical resources, all firmly rooted in the texts of The Book of Common Prayer and the traditions of the Anglican Communion. As the Cathedral of the Diocese of Upper South Carolina, it is our responsibility and our privilege to glorify God and edify his people through a range of worship styles, treasuring and sharing the precious gifts that are unique to our heritage. Our full schedule allows us to worship in ways that are all joyfully and distinctly Anglican, but that suit different schedules and different tastes.
Our 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. services in Keenan Chapel begin and end each Sunday with the Holy Eucharist offered in a quiet, contemplative manner, using the traditional language of Rite I in the morning and the more modern language of Rite II in the evening. Our joyful 9:00 a.m. service in the Cathedral varies with the seasons of the Church Year, utilizing all of the different versions of the Great Thanksgiving available to us in the Prayer Book, and inviting the congregation to sing settings of the service music–the Gloria (or Kyrie, or Trisagion), the Sanctus, and the Agnus Dei.
Our 11:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. services offer prayers and praises to God through the glories of our Anglican choral heritage and the timeless words of the historic Prayer Book liturgies. At each of these services one of Trinity’s extraordinary choirs sings portions of the liturgy set to some of the most beautiful and meaningful music ever composed. Whether at the choral celebration of the Holy Eucharist in the morning or at Choral Evensong on Sunday afternoons, these liturgies offered during the program year exalt our Lord in the full splendor of our rich tradition.
Though these ways of worship have deep roots in our tradition, there are very few cathedrals and parishes in this country and around the world that have the capacity to offer worship in these special ways. Trinity is truly blessed by the rich architectural legacy of our worship spaces, the poignant words of our Prayer Book and Hymnal, the majesty of our Anglican choral tradition, and above all the incredible array of joyful worshippers who gather here to lift hearts and minds and voices before the throne of grace.
So how do we keep the energy and excitement of these late summer Sundays going all year ‘round? Simple: COME TO CHURCH! Come and be part of this strong and vibrant community. Come and live into our traditions, ancient and ever new. Come and be equipped to go and serve the world in the name of Christ. Come and worship the Lord with us!
Whichever service you attend and whichever style of worship nourishes your soul, I invite you to be with us every week…and I want you to invite someone to come with you.
August 22, 2024
The Week of the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
“Will you who witness these vows do all in your power to support these persons in their life in Christ?”
At every celebration of Holy Baptism the people of Trinity enter into a covenant: a solemn, sacred, self-offering commitment both as individuals and as a congregation. Before we reaffirm the Baptismal Covenant–the expression of our common Christian faith and life–we first bind ourselves to the candidates that have been presented that day and make a special covenant with them. We promise to “do all in [our] power to support these persons in their life in Christ.” And, through us, the whole Church Universal in every place and every time pledges to uphold, sustain, challenge, inspire, nourish, equip, and love with Christ’s own love all those who come to him in faith at the font–and the parents and godparents who bring them, too.
The people of Trinity have made this covenant thousands of times over the years. We will make it, God willing, many thousands of times in the years to come. We made it again this past Sunday when three sweet babies became, by water and the Holy Spirit, the newest members of the Church and of Trinity Cathedral Parish.
So…how are we doing? How are we, as a community, keeping our covenant? Are we really doing all in our power to support the children and adults who have been baptized at Trinity as they grow in their life in Christ? How can we, by the power of the Holy Spirit, do more?
The strength and vitality of our programs for children and youth are profoundly encouraging manifestations of Trinity’s commitment to that covenant we have made. In children’s programs, fellowship offerings, Sunday school classes, liturgy preparation worship services, Vacation Bible School, and a bustling array of parent gatherings, the Cathedral is supporting our youngest members as they grow in their life of faith. And through weekly EYC (Episcopal Youth Community) groups for middle and high schoolers, diocesan retreats and events, mission trips, Bible studies before and after school, and the inclusion of young people as leaders in worship as acolytes, choristers, ushers and lectors, Trinity continues to sustain our youth as they come to full and mature ownership of their baptismal promises at confirmation.
And remembering that there is no expiration date on our covenant, how are we doing with adult members? Here, too, we find vibrant gatherings and meaningful growth. Daily services of Morning Prayer, weekday offerings of the Holy Eucharist, lunchtime Bible studies, evening small groups, fellowship events and opportunities for service all abound. “Will you…do all in your power to support these persons in their life in Christ?” We sure seem to be trying!
But the fulfillment of our covenant with every baptized member of the Church cannot and should not be accomplished by staff members and program offerings alone. Because we all have promised “to do all in [our] power to support these persons”, we all must find a way to keep our common commitment. Not everyone has the gifts or abilities (or patience!) to be a Sunday School teacher or a youth leader. But every member of Trinity can and must find a way to support the critical, covenantal work of supporting our members, young and old, as we grow together in faith.
How will you do your part to help keep our community’s covenant in this new program year? Pray about it, think about it, and then contact Director of Children and Family Ministries Leila Barwick, Director of Youth Ministry Taylor Gibby, or Trinity's Canon Catechist the Rev'd Mia C. McDowell to offer your support and get involved. I know the amazing Trinity congregation will do it–with God’s help!