We Are All Saints

We are small and of no account.

That’s my church: All Saints Episcopal on Terracina, across Magnolia Avenue from Riverside Community College.

1. Shrub among cedars.

We’re a shrub among cedars. The shadow of Rick Warren’s Saddleback Community Church touches us from Orange County. They plan to plant churches in Europe and Asia. And Harvest Fellowship, a few miles away, overflows its deep, wide sanctuary into an outdoor amphitheater where the preacher is a giant on a giant screen. I’m speaking of the Riverside campus. There’s also an Orange County campus, and smaller campuses elsewhere. Harvest reaches worldwide at sports-stadium events.

These are two nearby colossi among several.

2. Moses and Joshua.

But here I am at All Saints. My road to hope took me first to Harvest, and I was glad to be there. The preaching was good, and I reclaimed the habit of Bible study because of it, after over a decade of neglect. Pastor Greg Laurie was my Moses, bringing me out of Egypt.

But, rightly or wrongly, I think that God took me from Harvest to All Saints. And at All Saints Father John was my Joshua, leading me across the Jordan River to the promised land. Not that he necessarily knew that he was doing that. I told the story in an earlier post about how I was restored to hope, having believed for a long time that I would die condemned.

3. High church.

All Saints is high church. The priests dress in liturgical robes. There is an alter. If it’s profaned (like someone casually leaning on it as if it were a kitchen counter), there is a ritual to restore its holiness. Before taking their pew, most members of the church bow toward the alter.

Which some might think is over-the-top. Their theology might teach that God is everywhere. They are not wrong. And since God is everywhere, to them there might be nothing special about the sanctuary, the alter, or the priests.

There we disagree. My Evangelical friends and I agree that that God is everywhere, and where God is, his holiness is with him. But, rightly or wrongly, I think there’s something special about a church.

Maybe it’s like this: Moses could wear his sandals anywhere; but in front of the burning bush, he had to take them off, because he was on holy ground. There is blamelessness like Job had, but his righteousness was not the righteousness of God. There are levels of holiness, levels of God’s presence, and there’s something somehow higher about the sanctuary. The high-church elements of All Saints express that higher-ness.

4. Wide church.
 
In the view of some Evangelicals, the Episcopal church seeks out sin, and when it finds it, it makes it a bedrock of its doctrine.

Since getting opinions, I’ve never attended a church where I agreed with everything I heard. But at least I understand the positions. That’s been true in Evangelical churches. It’s true at All Saints.

Ultimately, they might be right or wrong. We are saved by grace. We won’t earn our way into heaven with an answer sheet, a number-two pencil, and a certain percent of right answers. And more than some churches, the Episcopal Church knows that.

We don’t define ourselves by a particular doctrine or orientation. We are united by The Book of Common Prayer. It contains certain core beliefs.

It also has liturgies – words and orders of worship. It has prayers and psalms. I carry The Book of Common Prayer with me. When I recognize that my thoughts are going away from God, I can pull it out, read a prayer or a psalm, and feel afterward that my mind in more subjugated to God.

Sometimes I seek out a particular psalm; sometimes I read what I happen to open to. Often times what I open to is apt for my needs; other times, I find a psalm more apt by reading forward or backward.

5. Liturgy.

The congregation shares in the blessing of the worship, so it also shares in the conduct of the worship. This is not a come-sit-and-leave church. Worship is active.

This is different from many Evangelical churches where there is singing, but the main event really is the teaching. The teaching is often high-quality, usually lengthy. Heaven forgive me, I think I never heard a whole Evangelical sermon without looking at least once at my watch.

So: at All Saints, there are four substantial readings from the Bible. There is an Old Testament lesson, a psalm (which the congregation reads out loud together), a reading from an Epistle, and a reading from a Gospel. They relate to each other in some element or theme, and the sermon picks up a thread from them.

There are the hymns. The hymns are traditional – not to everyone’s taste. I like many of the modern hymns of other churches, but I cherish many of the ancient hymns. Some people might say: "When I Behold the Wondrous Cross? Wake me when it’s over." But I often study the words in the hymnal after the singing stops, to hold onto a thought from whatever hymn we just sang.

There is confession. We read a liturgical confession, the same one every week. It’s generic, "[W]e have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed," etc. Then the priest pronounces the forgiveness of sins. I think the same thing about this that I think about the specialness of the sanctuary. I believe that God moves through priests in a special way. The Holy Spirit is not bound or limited by sin; therefore, he can act through a priest without regard to the holiness of the particular priest, and he is not limited by any priest’s lack of holiness. So there is authority behind the forgiveness of sins, pronounced every week.

There are other readings, said or sung by the congregation. Hearing and saying them each week fixes them in the mind. So it’s easy to remember them in times of busy-ness in the world. Like:

Lord Jesus Christ, only Son of the Father, Lord God, Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world: have mercy on us; you are seated at the right hand of the Father: receive our prayer. [Etc.]

There is communion, every week.

There is sharing the peace. The congregation mingles for a few minutes, shaking hands and speaking peace on each other.

There is the sermon. It's shorter than sermons in many churches, because other elements of the worship occupy relatively more time in Episcopal services compared to some others.

(All this is not in the order that it happens in the service.)

6. Learning curve.

All of that implies that worship at All Saints  is not passive. But with time, you pick up on things. Father John knows that, and so he might briefly explain how to do communion, if you choose to do so. (The usher comes to your pew; you go forward; you kneel at the front rail; the officiant puts a wafer in you hand; you consume it; then the cup comes; you sip from it, or you cross your arms over your chest instead and receive a spoken blessing.)

The bulletin has a blue sheet and a white sheet, and it took me a while to learn which sheet to look at to find, for example, the psalm being read, or to be able to say the prayer with everyone else.

7. The congregation.

The congregation is varied. There are fiercely conservative members of the church who (*shudder*) call Governor Jerry Brown Lucifer. Others (*ahem*) made substantial effort to get Barack Obama re-elected. We are mixed race; we are mixed orientation.

I walk into the sanctuary on Sunday and sit. Others are there ahead of me, and more come in behind. Many of them kneel and pray for several minutes before the service begins.

More than any other mainline church I have gone to, I know at All Saints people have had supernatural experiences. A woman described seeing an angel at the foot of her hospital bed and knowing then that she would get well. Others have had supernatural visions. My sister-in-law speaks English roughly. She joined me at church once. She didn’t follow the words, but she felt God in the hymns.

There is broken-ness at All Saints, too. In a Bible study, it turned out that a surprising number of these people had known homelessness.

And there’s trouble. We’re human. We fall down as to one another.

8. Bethlehem.

I think of All Saints and I think of words in Micah chapter 5 – not that we will be great, nor that the Messiah will come out of us, but in the sense that, overlooked in the world, we are known to God. God regards the small, the last-born, the lowly.

I don’t want to be arrogant. No man, no woman, no church, no parish is guaranteed tomorrow. I am not; nor is All Saints. But I’m hopeful. And I’m glad to be a part of this small church, overlooked like tiny Bethlehem. Who knows what good might come out of a tiny church unknown in the wider world?

9. Prayer (from The Book of Common Prayer, p. 817.)

Almighty and everliving God, ruler of all things in heaven and earth, hear our prayers for this parish family. Strengthen the faithful, arouse the careless, and restore the penitent. Grant us all things necessary for our common life, and bring us all to be of one heart and mind within your holy Church; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.