Response to Canon Brandt's sermon

It was a fabulous day at St. James’ this past Sunday as we celebrated our historic connection to St. Michael's Church, also in Manhattan, with our guest preacher, Canon George Brandt. He opened his sermon with greetings to St. Michael's’ “daughter” church--not sister, not mother, but daughter! St. Michael's, he said, is the older of the two churches, and has never moved from its current location, and therefore should have the “mother” designation. What a wonderful concept!

In the Gospel this week (Luke 3:7-18), we find ourselves witnessing John, about to baptize a crowd of people. John opens with “You brood of vipers!” Quite an ominous greeting! He continues on, offering advice to the tax collectors, soldiers and others in attendance. He concludes his exhortation to the crowd by proclaiming the good news that “one who is more powerful than I is coming.”

Canon Brandt interpreted John’s words and actions, saying “Who you are, and where you come from, is utterly unimportant in baptism.” Moreover, he noted how John completely upended the economic order of things of that time. For example, he encouraged tax collectors to collect only the right amount (and not strong-arm people into paying more taxes as was the custom). John’s unconventional actions symbolized the coming of Christ, Brandt said. “If you truly believe that Jesus is the Christ, then this is the way we are going to live.”

What a wonderful Advent message. This is the time of year when all of us can cheer the coming of Christ and personally re-evaluate our ways. As we enter 2010, and continue to celebrate St. James’ Bicentennial, we thank Canon Brandt for his wonderful message of encouragement and hope.

--Willa B. Baynard

Living Out Jesus' Command

My sermons and my presentation on Sunday will focus on mission and ministry in New York. Need I say that the focus will center on the life of the Episcopal Church in New York?

From the establishment of the Anglican Church in North America, it was understood that while it provided chaplains to the English colonists, it was also to be a missionary enterprise. Missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts(SPG) were obligated to Baptize Africans and native peoples as well as European settlers. Early bishops of the new American Church were zealous missionaries-not least John Henry Hobart of New York, Philander Chase of Ohio and Jackson Kemper of Wisconsin. Both of our parishes were founded both as conveniences for summer residents who were pew holders of Trinity Parish, and as mission enterprises to local rural populations. They quickly developed from summer chapels to year-round congregations.

As some of you know, my parish of St. Michael worships in a magnificent building which with other church structures covers three-fifths of the city block on which it stands. Like your parish of St. James' it is a 19th-century building and it is reflective of the assumptions of the Church in New York at that time: to grow a congregation and to build to accommodate that growth.

My predecessor, Dr. T.M. Peters who was a priest in the parish from 1843 to 1893 and Rector from 1858, addressed the need for a new church building in 1887 by asserting in his Annual Sermon that “we must build the foundations broad” in order to do the work the church was called to do. For him and for others of that time there were two sides to the Church’s work that were inseparable: the ministry to the community in which the particular part of the Church (the parish) found itself and the building up of the congregation of the parish itself. So in the construction of the new church (the third building on the site) there was also projected a Parish House to minister to the needs of the new immigrant populations settling to the north and east of the church.

Among the positions taken by Dr. Peters during his rectorate was that St. Michaels would be come a Free Church without rented or sold pews; ministry was extended to black and mixed-race people in various ways; and his oft repeated claim that St. Michael’s was ideally suited to proclaim the Gospel in its neighborhood as the well-to-do lived to the south and west of the church and the poor and immigrant lived to the east and north. Thus all manner of folks could worship God and respond to the Gospel together.

This effort continued with his son John Punnett Peters who succeeded him in 1893, and indeed, there were some signal events that marked his very remarkable ministry.
In addition to the initiatives of his father, the second Dr. Peters caused the parish to assume responsibility for an African American mission congregation in 99th Street; he attended the Niagara Conference where the NAACP was founded; a member of the parish, Margaret Elizabeth Furniss Zimmerman, bequeathed $1 million+ to St. Michaels in 1918 for its mission work, and shortly after Peters' death, the Vestry appropriated $200,000 of endowment funds (in 1919 dollars) to construct St. Jude’s Chapel for that African-American congregation for which he had assumed responsibility. Bishop Manning consecrated it in 1922.

This period up to the first World War is known as the Progressive era, and many social changes began during and after it. The question I would pose is this: Have those changes in the society--Jim Crow laws imposed in the south, Asian exclusion laws in the west, anti-immigration legislation, increased lynching; the Great Depression, World War 2; and the suburban migrations thereafter caused the Church in New York and the Episcopal Church generally--allowed part of its DNA (the English village church) to overcome Jesus’ command to go out and to proclaim the Good News and to Baptize in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit? The Episcopal Church has vastly more parishes of 100-200 members than parishes like St. James' or St. Michaels. We seem to like those small village-like churches(our DNA, yet what about Jesus’ command and the legacy of our founders and forbearers?

The Rev. Canon George W. Brandt, Jr.+
Rector, St. Michaels, Manhattan

The Rev. Canon Brandt will be the next Bicentennial Guest Preacher at St. James' on Sunday, December 13. He will preach at both the 9:10 a.m. and 11:15 a.m. services and speak at the adult education forum at 10:30 on "Ministry and Mission in New York City."

Building on the Foundation of Loving One Another: Response to the Rev. Mark Anschutz

In his characteristic enthusiastic style, the Rev. Anschutz led the whole congregation in a singing of the children's "If you're happy and you know it touch your nose." Following the Gospel reading, he had adults and children try to build a wooden block tower, which, as he placed the top piece, crumbled and fell, giving a strong concrete example of Jesus’ teaching that while it is difficult and we are tempted to do otherwise, we should always remember the truly firm foundations of the Christianity are not tangible edifices, but love, faith, faithfulness, peace, God, grace and generosity. He reminded us that God gave us the gift of generosity, and that we should care for each other and our community around us. We are called to be part of building part of God's Kingdom and our work is to build a church, which is a group of a people, not a physical building. He emphasized how the generosity of loving one another is such an important part of any religious church congregation. He ended his sermon at the 9:10 a.m. service by engaging the whole congregation in a sung Amen. In his 11:15 a.m. sermon, he expanded on many of his previous comments, especially the tenet of "love one another as he loved you," saying it is the ultimate source of a sustained community.

In the forum, the Rev. Anschutz spoke of how humbled and grateful he was to be called to be a shepherd to a congregation and how proud he was to be an Episcopalian, and he lauded the efforts of St James' to be at the forefront of very difficult issues: racism and apartheid; the Vietnam war; the role of ordination of women; and most recently, human sexuality. He talked about his concerns for the Episcopal church in the USA: its aging population (and what a great thing it is to be in a church filled with children and young people as St. James’ is); Anglicanism and the assault on its core; some groups in the church not really wanting to enter into a dialogue and communicate, but only wanting to push their own agenda; little evidence of interfaith work, which will be so essential to our future as a Church and for the world. His passion for the Church’s role in alleviating poverty and drawing others into support of the Millenium Development Goals has become a great passion for him and was evident in both of his sermons and at the forum as he spoke movingly about the suffering of the children of Haiti, and how transformative it is to see poverty up close.

-Seth Cunningham