Church adventures

After the long Candlemas service Friday at St. Paul's, I determined that I should go to church someplace different this morning. I've been bad lately, so I wanted to go someplace with a corporate confession, which ruled out the Catholic parishes. Robert emailed and wanted to go to church before his luncheon engagement in Ballston, so, I decided we should meet at the Church of the Epiphany, which is right by the Metro Center subway stop downtown.

What a beautiful little downtown church!

Epiphany dates back to the 1840s and was one of the main Union soldier hospitals during the Civil War. They are blessed with some absolutely beautiful old, traditional, stained glass windows and there's a precious wrought iron rood screen dividing the chancel from the nave. The pews are divided down the center of each bank, and the old pew numbers are still visibly painted on the ends of the pews.

In the 1980s, though, they seem to have had some unfortunate architectural revisions to the worship space that brought the altar out to the crossing and surrounded it on three sides with an altar rail. The former chancel and sanctuary now is largely filled with the organ and organ pipes; their beautiful white marble high altar and reredos has been pulled forward in front of the pipe chests and serves largely as a decorative backdrop these days. The balcony in the back of the nave is so large and deep, I wonder if that used to be the choir loft. There was something through a door to the right of the altar space—a bathroom, perhaps?—that attracted a lot of traffic during the course of the service, but the room design required people to walk all the way up the center aisle to the front of the nave and then cross over. As they did that, I kept thinking that they were going to have some kind of role in the service. It was highly distracting.

As is often the case with inner city parishes, Epiphany is challenged by their ministry to the homeless and the street people of downtown Washington. We saw them on the sidewalk, in the narthex, and quite a number of them scattered about the nave, some sleeping, some talking to themselves, some sitting patiently. Probably about a quarter of the congregation today (including the street people) were African-American; the rest were Anglo. I also noticed it was an older parish, with only three seemingly single mothers there with small children (all white); all the acolytes and choristers were adults.

It was this mix of people that was observing "Black Heritage Month" in February. They were using a different, modern liturgy that they usually use early on Sunday morning with their street person feeding ministry with that experimental language that tries to use "God" or "Christ" instead of masculine pronouns.

The mass setting was all black/gospel sounding stuff, and the service leaflet wasn't clear as to whether or not it was a formal mass setting or just a motley collection of things. The Gloria was replaced by a "song of praise" called "The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases," by Carl Haywood (b. 1949), written in the African-American style. I'm not sure if Haywood is responsible for the rest of the music. They sang the Sanctus to similarly styled music. For the Memorial Acclamation, they sang "Jesus Christ has died" to the tune of "We Shall Overcome" that I found oddly inappropriate.

I always find it really strange when white people try to sing/play African-American music in their attempts to prove their inclusiveness. There's all of one African-American in the choir and the organist-choirmaster is a young white man.

Hymns today were Nettleton ("Come, thou fount of every blessing") for the processional, Dillow ("Put down your nets and follow me") for the sequence, New Britain ("Amazing grace") after communion, and Vineyard Haven ("Rejoice, ye pure in heart") for the recessional. A simplified Anglican chant by Robert Knox Kennedy was used for the psalm.

The choir sang "O for a closer walk with God" arranged by Charles Villiers Stanford for the offertory and "Jesus lead the way" by Richard Proulx based on Seelenbräutigam for the communion motet. The choir was only about a dozen, but they sounded fine save for some occasional excess soprano vibrato. The acoustic of the remodeled space, however, is not at all kind to unamplified choral music.

Today we endured a guest preacher from Seattle who found it necessary to give a rambling and unfocused sermon that lasted at least half an hour. Now, that may be normal for many of you non-liturgical Protestants, but in the Episcopal church, the "standard" is for a sermon to be about twelve minutes long. This was excessive. In fact, I was very tempted to going up to the priest after the service and telling him I noticed he didn't have a watch, so I thought I would give him mine. I would have, too, but Robert was being too ebullient and chatty with the clergy on our way out, so it didn't work out for me.

The celebrant today was a large priestess. She looked ethnic, but I couldn't quite place her....was she Maori? Polynesian? Mixed-blood African? What? Even though there were two priests present, they didn't concelebrate and they looked rather bored and inattentive during the consecration, so I wasn't going to take communion, but my curiosity got the better of me. They had this odd communion bread that looked like thick piece of lavosh, but during the Fraction, there was no crisp breaking sound. So, I went ahead and went up. It turned out to be some kind of tough, chewy bread that reminded me a lot of cold Indian fry bread.

I wasn't really excited about their seating plan for the altar party. The choir was seated in the congregational chairs in the south transept facing the side of the altar, and the clergy and acolytes sat in the pews at the very front of the nave. Finally, during the offertory, they all went up to take places behind the altar, but meanwhile, it felt quite awkward.

This is one of those huggy-kissy parishes during the passing of the Peace. Once they greeted their immediate neighbors, instead of sitting down, they emptied out of their pews and wandered around talking to everybody. They also had the annoying tradition during the prayers of the people of encouraging and pushing members of the congregation to add their own prayers and petitions out loud, and that quickly got old.

Robert wrote an interesting account of this morning's service in his blog. You should go look at Robert's blog to hear his diatribe about having to drink from the common chalice, sharing it with those street people, and a little poll he created for people to express their opinions on drinking with the indigent.

I don't know if I'll go back to Epiphany or not. If I do, it will be after they complete their Black Heritage Month observances so I can try to see their "normal" worship.