St. Thomas’ Parish at Dupont Circle
Tradition
Hot time at St. Thomas’ Parish
Aug 25th
Lots has been going on at St. Thomas’ over the summer; and right on cue Blogging-Thomas crashed for a month! Resurrection, however, is at hand — just in time for Richard Morgan’s edgy and thoughtful and fun Washington Post “On Faith” article, “Once a victim, St. Thomas’ Parish rebuilds.”
Some of my favorite parts (disclaimer: I am, after all, the spouse of the rector at St. Thomas’ Parish!) –
That hot August 24 morning, the building that The Washington Star in 1923 called “one of the most beautiful edifices in the country” was ordered razed. The next day the church paid $50,000 to demolish itself.
The congregation is a motley crew — former Catholics, Lutherans, Evangelicals, Quakers, families from Silver Spring and Alexandria, African-Americans, Asians, Latinos, and a pride parade’s worth of gays (“a He-Man Woman Haters’ Club for Jesus,” said one, “except we actually do have female members, and they’re pretty cool too”).
St. Thomas’ is a church at its most human, its most tender and frail and vulnerable, asking questions of itself and of its past and future — and, toughest of all, its present — that it never imagined. Akin to a 40-year-old leaving his hometown for the first time, the personal sense of identity here asks a secret, taboo question: What does church mean to you? And what would you do — how would you handle it? — if you could rebuild yours?
There’s Nancy Lee Jose, 61, the fourth-generation Washingtonian who is a priest of equal parts Geraldine Ferraro and Mary Lou Retton — petite, joking, gentle, bold — a confection of a woman topped with a whipped-cream dollop of Miranda Priestly hair. [WF: "That's my sweetheart!!"]
It’s not a best-face-forward church. It’s honest, treating people as valued, as good, as loved. God, gays, education, equality. They’re all so strong here and all about the same thing: understatement that’s both powerful and radical.
This is a real church. And bit by bit we’re building a stronger community every year. By the grace of God we may build a new building. But God has been at work in this place for a long time, building what lasts – a place of faith, and love, and hope … the only things, after all, that last forever.
Who are we? My Top Ten.
Jun 29th
We want you to know who we are at St. Thomas’ Parish; here are some good ways to start:
1. We try to be a place where all can find and be found by God. We are a community of ordinary people on a joyful and thoughtful spiritual journey together. Our ministers are called Priests; and the senior minister in an Episcopal Church like ours is called the Rector.
2. This is a Christian community, which for us means that we are part of a long line of people who share a long story that stretches back two thousand years to Jesus and almost two thousand years before that to the earliest memories of the Jewish people. In particular we are part of the Anglican line of Christians which stretches back to the earliest Celtic Christian communities in the British Isles, and took its Episcopal Church form in the United States following the American Revolution.
3. We practice what we call Radical Hospitality, patterned after Jesus’ own teachings and personal practice. This means that everyone is welcome – there’s no litmus test. All of you is welcome – you don’t have to check part of yourself at the door – not your mind, questions, body, feelings, doubts, or background.
4. Worship is at the center of who we are as a community, and shapes all else that we believe and do. Our Sunday morning worship is centered on the Holy Eucharist, or Holy Communion, a commemoration of Jesus’ last meal with his original followers, and a central way that we celebrate Jesus being present with us today through eating bread, and drinking wine together. Wherever you may be on your faith journey, there is room at the table for you.
5. Our worship is ordered by what is called The Book of Common (that is, community) Prayer, which contains many of the oldest forms of worship and prayers that Christians used when they first gathered together.
6. When we gather for worship, we usually start with music and singing. We read from the Bible, and listen to sermons (shorter than those in many other Christian churches!) that help us to connect the stories of the Bible with the stories of our own lives. We pray together, give God thanks for our blessings, confess our failings, ask for forgiveness, and lift up our own needs and those of others to God’s hearing.
7. We regularly recite what is called the Nicene Creed, a shorthand way of reminding ourselves of the shape of the whole story of God interacting with our world: God made everything, and everyone. God took human form in Jesus and loves us so much that Jesus was willing to suffer and die on our behalf. God could not be defeated even by death, and lives on now with us as the Holy Spirit, who called the church into being.
8. Episcopalians are a combination of Catholic and Protestant styles of Christianity — our sacramental emphasis on Holy Eucharist is brought together with a deep reverence for the primary authority of Holy Scripture in telling us about God and ourselves. We are a both-and, not an either-or, church; the world isn’t black-and-white, and we are confident that God is with us in all that life brings our way.
9. We also believe in the goodness of human reason, as a God-given resource for understanding who we are. And we trust in what we call tradition — the ways that faith has been passed on over the centuries, down to the present day, in the beliefs and practices of faithful people long before us.
10. At the end of worship, we are sent out to be bearers of God’s love and compassion and justice in the world. Our mission as Christians is to represent Christ in our daily lives, bearing love and justice that is the life-giving power at the heart of reality. Worship gives us strength for our journey and courage to be God’s people in a challenging world.
Come and visit us and see for yourself. There is a place at God’s table for everyone.
Tradition – The Dangerous Memories of Forgotten Gifts
Jun 3rd
- Main Entry:
- tra·di·tion
- Pronunciation:
- \trə-ˈdi-shən\
- Function: noun
- Etymology:
- Middle English tradicioun, from Middle French & Latin; Middle French tradicion, from Latin tradition-, traditio action of handing over
- Date:
- 14th century
When I still had a brain, I was for an embarrassing number of years a graduate student in philosophy and theology, and I read tons (quite literally) of books from the past. I was sifting and sorting – a crucial part of education, I later discovered – to find the significance of at least a piece of the past for my own life in the present.
One of my intellectual guides was a theologian and social critic named Johann Baptist Metz. He kept me reading on many a long night because he was convinced that one of the main reasons we should read history is to rediscover the “dangerous memories,” the gifts buried in the past and forgotten.
- They are dangerous because some forgotten things can harm us, like an injury we suffer and forget because it is too painful to remember, and yet our life is changed forever by what had happened. Such things need to be remembered so that we can be whole again, so that we can regain health that we once had, but lost.
- Other memories are dangerous because they make demands on us; they need to be remembered because in them the Tradition had a potential that was never realized, and even the people who knew them are dead and buried. Children killed in China or Myanmar will always have “a meaning which is as yet unrealized,” in Metz’s phrase, until and unless we or someone else remembers them and gives them some of the life they never had themselves.
In either case, memory has a very powerful role in who we become as we grow up into adulthood.
For Episcopalians, the power of memory is what is meant by the only-apparently stodgier word, tradition. This is the word we use to speak of turning back to hear the voices of those who have fallen behind us in death, but who still live on through the stories they told, the things they wrote.
These formational narratives from the beginnings of a society or relgion give shape to the world of meaning as we know it. We are who we are because of the stories that we are capable of telling.
For Christians the Biblical stories have a voice in our identity, as does the voice of Reason. And these stories from out of the past, passed along to us in the present, are the Tradition that is the third and equal point of authority for catholic Christians.
One of my heroes, Dorothy Day, in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, wrote: “Tradition! We scarcely know the word any more. We are afraid to be either proud of our ancestors or ashamed of them. We scorn nobility in name and in fact. We cling to a bourgeois mediocrity which would make it appear we are all Americans, … all of a pattern, all prospering if we are good, and going down in the world if we are bad.
“‘Tradition,’ G.K. Chesterton says, “is democracy extended through time. Tradition means giving the vote to that most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. Tradition is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who are walking about.”
Honoring Tradition means admitting that it’s actually never been “all about me.” Others don’t go away just because I’m oblivious.
Tradition is dangerous, though, because to learn about the Tradition may mean we have to rethink everything else we have ever thought, like African slaves in America had to rethink slavery, which they had been told was their God-given lot in life, once they learned again the stories of their ancestors, kings and queens of their native lands, and of the freedom that they once had practiced with abandon, though in servitude they had virtually none at all.
Tradition means giving voice to the dangerous memories of forgotten gifts; it means letting dead insights and the persons who had them come back for another round of life. Jesus remembered his friend Lazarus, and the memory alone was enough to raise him from the dead.
Tradition is not dusty, musty, old, and boring – at least not always. To rediscover it can be like finding forgotten gifts that had been yours all along, although you had forgotten that you had ever had them. But beware of the danger – when you explore the past, you may be changed by what you find.
