Just what is a vicar?

What’s a vicar?(In a pandemic)

“S o what exactly is a vicar, anyway?” To say I’ve received that question a few times in 2020 is an understatement. From my southern California friends and parishioners, to folks here at St. Stephen’s, many were eager to learn more about my new adventure, beginning with its somewhat perplexing title. In the announcement By Will Stanley of my call to join you, Gary Jones gave his own answer: “A vicar is a trusted clergy person who functions as a kind of chief operating officer, who helps ensure both attention to detail and faithfulness to vision.” His words are as good a summation as any, as they had been the currency of our conversations and discernment over the weeks prior by email, phone and in person.

Detail and vison are essential ingredients for any church, organization or community. I accepted this call because I felt I was both ready to lead and eager to learn. As one of the most dynamic and exciting parish churches in the country, St. Stephen’s gave me a unique opportunity to tend to both under Gary’s leadership— building upon the (very) sure foundation of the years, decades, and century past. All of this was true way back on my first official day, Ash Wednesday, and all of it is just as true today, half a year later.

In many ways, we live now in a fundamentally different world. Physical distancing and masks have become ubiquitous. Fears of community spread continue. As such, one of our bedrock practices—of gathering together, in large, in-person groups—has had to be discontinued …for now. For me, this has meant I’ve met far more of you by Zoom, phone, and email than in person. And many of you I simply have not yet met. Yes, I’ll admit, it’s odd. It is not ideal and I long for the time when we’re able to gather again in person, knowing that time of true returning together in the flesh as we’ve known it, is likely far in the future. Yet as a person of faith, I am hardwired to ask continually: what new grace, what strange blessing of God, might be made manifest in the oddities of life? We preach a gospel which claims that true strength is found in perfect weakness, that the way the world is will not always be. Many have commented that the pandemic has only clarified, magnified, and exacerbated pre-pandemic realities, particularly ones of injustice: the unequal access to quality healthcare, the fragile employment and underemployment of many, and the sin of structural racism, to name a few. Uncovering that which was already present is perhaps the most faithful translation of “apocalyptic.” A word known well to us in the Christian tradition, this process of revelation is by its very definition unsettling. Yet the abiding truth of the apocalyptic is that God is always doing a new thing: “See, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:5). It is this perspective which provides me the deepest hope, the strongest faith “for the facing of this hour [and] for the living of these days” (The Hymnal 1982, #594). Gospel means “good news” and God is always doing a new thing, even now. Just as the pandemic is revealing, uncovering, and magnifying that which was already present, God may well be doing that which God has done “from the foundation of the world” (Ephesians 1:4), drawing us deeper into our true life, as beloved of God, so we might, in turn, answer the call to share that same gift with all creation. This is all to say, in these pandemic times, I believe we as St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church at the corner of Grove and Three Chopt are being drawn into a deeper, truer version of ourselves. Our clarion call to be a Sacred Village Green, a New Abbey, and a Healing Community could both not be more true, nor more needed than in this time.

Nearly all of the specific forms and functions of how we embody these paradigms have changed, yet their deeper identity and value are being incarnated in new ways. Due to the realities of physical distancing, our ministries around food and feeding have shifted, yet your generosity has never been deeper. While we are not able to worship in person, our digital reach through high-quality worship videos and daily prayer services has allowed us to share our ministry of worship and prayer truly around the globe, farther than we ever could have imagined. And while we cannot share the healing touch of a hug or a hand on the shoulder, we have discovered that new platforms like Zoom—and decidedly old ones like calls and handwritten notes—can convey a renewed sense of connection and care: this community’s caring of itself in these times through initiatives like the parish calling project has been extraordinary.

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Ordinary Time in extraordinary times

By Cate Anthony

I have been reading the poem “Giraffe” by a British poet named Bryony Littlefair every day for the past month or so. In it, she says this:

When you feel better from this—and you will—it will be quiet and unremarkable, like walking into the next room… When you feel better, you will take: a plastic spoon for your coffee foam, free chocolates from the gleaming oak reception desk, the bus on sunny days, your own sweet time.

1

The poem is, I think, a hopeful response to seasons of grief or anxiety: a reminder of what will come when the fast pace of an exhilarated or panicked heart is finally able to slow into a gentle thump thump thump. It is a reminder of the pattern of ordinary things which inevitably returns even after the most extra-ordinary experiences of our human lives.

By the church calendar, we’re wandering our way through a season sometimes referred to as “Ordinary Time,” the part of the liturgical calendar that falls outside the major seasons such as Advent, Epiphany, Lent, and Easter. Ordinary Time begins with Pentecost and continues until Advent begins. It is the longest season of the church year.

As a church-raised youth (and even as an exuberant seminarian), I tended to dread the long season of Ordinary Time. I found it boring, stretching on as it does month after month with none of the pageantry or emotional punch of Christmas, Holy Week, or Easter. During this season, we dive deep into stories about the life of Jesus and the many parables he tells—and these, too, bored me. I never quite understood why we spend so long on the day-today moments of Jesus’ ministry when the good stuff was, well, so much more exciting (if not also much harder to understand).

These days, though…well…Ordinary Time has taken on a new kind of meaning for me. For the past six months we have collectively been living in a global season of Extra-Ordinary Time, unprecedented and constantly shifting. And on top of that, the normal “extra-ordinary” aspects of human life continue to unfold for some of us in their usual random and up-turning ways. For me, it’s all a little too “extra.” In the midst of pandemic and national unrest and grieving for my father (who died just as I arrived in Richmond) and being so new in town, I yearn for the ordinary, for the boring, for the mundane tedium of unremarkable days and parables about wheat and Sunday after Sunday of something that might just recall a time when things were easier to predict. ✤

And perhaps that is the great learning for us people of faith in this particular extra-ordinary Ordinary Time: that the ordinary is actually anything but. There is a kind of everyday sacredness to the seasons of our lives when things just trundle along as usual. After all, they’re the seasons when faith can deepen, become steadier after the sensory overload of Easter or the death of a parent or a time of pandemic. At its heart, I think, Ordinary Time reveals to us the miracles of a spoon for our coffee, a bus across town, of shaking someone’s hand without thinking about it first. And so I wonder, for me and for you: how might we embrace the Ordinary in these extra-ordinary days, so that we might find ourselves steadied by the small graces of the usual, even in the midst of this unprecedented time? ✤

1 Bryony Littlefair, “Giraffe” from Giraffe (Seren Books: Wales, 2017).

Vicar, continued

All of this has been made possible through the grace of God made manifest through your continued generosity and the remarkable gifts of our staff and lay leadership. We have pivoted, we have reset…and we have pivoted and reset again. Let me tell you, it’s been quite the exercise of both faithfulness to vision and attention to detail! So in that sense, it’s been a busy time to be a “vicar.” Much of my work of late has been to engage with our staff to envision how we’ll organize ourselves for a year ahead unlike any other. That began by speaking truth, first to ourselves. There were losses to be grieved and changes to be weathered; there were staff teams to be restructured and new capacities to be recruited. And while God is certainly doing and revealing a new thing, it takes its toll. To that end, I’m proud of the fact that all of us have been able to take some time of rest and refreshment. It is essential, in all times, yet especially “for such a time as this” (Esther 4:14). We have a remarkable staff and perhaps my greatest joy in this role is to be one of their champions. Already, this has been a year like none other. And I wish I could tell you the year to come will be any more predictable. I cannot. What I do know is that grace is real and God is good and able and generous. God is in the midst of this place, St. Stephen’s Church, and God is doing a new thing through us. As co-workers with God, attention to detail and faithfulness to vision will be good companions to us, for they are outgrowths of grace at work in us. They will keep our eyes fixed on that which really matters. They will strengthen us as we are at times “wearied by the changes and chances of this life” (Book of Common Prayer, 133).

It is a joy and privilege to serve as your vicar, to play just one small part of this holy, gospel work. I am so grateful to be in your midst. Even in pandemic, God is doing a new thing. Thanks be to God! ✤ The Rev. William S. Stanley has been vicar of St. Stephen’s Church since Ash Wednesday 2020. Previously he served at All Saints’, Beverly Hills.