A Few Updates

What I have been up to? Many things. For most of the winter I have been spending time every Wednesday with a small group of guys building some canoes. My boat is almost done. The ribs and planks are all in place. Now I've got to finish sanding the interior (I've already made one pass at it) and then coat it oil. While the oil soaks in we'll "fair" the outside shape of the canoe with sanding to make it perfectly round. Then comes many layers of varnish inside. We'll stretch canvas on the outside with a special filler. Then paint. Then she's done!

This is the first boat I've ever built, and I one of the things that I've noticed is that I have far more emotional attachment to her than to anything else I've made. Something about the organic quality of a boat really makes the connection visceral. When I hammer in a nail I notice the way the whole boat vibrates. She is organic and living. If you've never built or owned a boat you might think this is hyperbole, but really I mean it. The Japanese have a concept of "Kami". Many objects, like Samurai Swords, are said to be inhabited by a Kami, and I totally get that. I'm certainly not going to worship my boat, but I do respect the mysterious quality of spirit that seems to inhabit it.

There is a natural affinity between pastoral work and boat building, which you can see best embodied, perhaps, is places like The Carpenter's Boat Shop. It's a Christian Community that is also a school that teaches apprentices the skills of wooden boat building. One of my classmates, Kim Hoare, has recently become the Director of the Carpenter's Boat Shop, and I really hoping to be able to do one of their "Boat Building for Clergy" retreats. So much of what we clergy is do is stuck up in our heads that using our hands to build things is enormously satisfying.

Life in the parish has been complex. Like many small urban congregations, we face a lot of challenges that have their roots in deep societal trends. For the last year I've been dealing with a radical decline in staffing that has left me shouldering more and more responsibility. At the peak I had three people at my staff meetings. Now... I find myself unclogging toilets and creating the leaflet for Sunday and everything in between. My Youth and Children's Ministry person (part time) will be gone by the end of the summer, and all that's left is a very part time person who mainly just checks the phone and e-mail and manages space booking.

Easter nearly killed me (spiritually). In Lent I broke down crying more than once. My Interim Director of Music, Bruce Kirkptrick Hill, died on Lent 4, a mere two weeks before Easter. I've known Bruce and his wife well for about six years (going back to my St. Mary Magdalene days) and so this was a personal loss as much as a professional one. What do you do when your organist dies right before Holy Week? well, first you take care of people. In this case that meant being there for Stephanie, his window. As it happens, I was her communications link to Canada while Bruce was dying. I relayed messages and did my best to comfort Steph.

Steph. I call her "sis" when I see her in person. I started that back when we were serving together at St. Mary Magdalene's. When she was hired we hit it off incredibly well. Perhaps it was here Mennonite background (Betsy shares some of that heritage) or something else, but we just always had a great deal of mutual respect and trust.

So I did my best to be there for Steph. I had been there for Bruce--visited him in the hospital, even--before his fateful trip to Cuba. But after he died I was pretty grieved.

There was a Tuesday BCP Eucharist that I did for some older members of the congregation shortly after his death. I could barely get through the sermon because I started crying as I preached about Bruce. The reading was about Jesus feeding the 5,000. And my sermon was about how, in the Resurrection, Jesus pulls together all the crumbs. All the fragments of this man's life would be pulled drawn back together in the kind of abundance and fullness that characterizes God's crazy abundance. I cried and cried. And these old folks, who know and love me as I love them, were right there with me. Honestly, if I had hand picked the people in my life I would like to break down crying with, it wouldn't have been much different. Older folks know grief and have a patience and compassion that is deep, deep, deep. I composed myself and did a liturgy that would have made Bruce proud.

I was honoured to be asked to be the Liturgical Deacon for Bruce's Requiem at St. Mary Magdalene's. It was wonderfully familiar to be back there, and yet there were some changes. As usual, I was awestruck by the professionalism and poise of the "SMM" crew. These guys know liturgy. Not just by rote, they really understand the principles of what makes good worship at adapt flawlessly to changing circumstance. Father David is doing a great job there, and I applaud and support the work they are doing.

Now, imagine 570 people packing the church. Standing room only. Then imagine many of the best church musicians in Toronto packing the Gallery Choir. How about one of the best Organists in Canada on the bench. I have been to many church services in my life, including some in great Cathedrals of England, and I have to say that this was the best church music I have heard in my life. It was out of this world, literally. I was really glad I could be a small part of that.

Back at Messiah we scrambled to find a musician to fill in for Holy Week. Someone to pick up the pieces and move forward with what Bruce had planned. He did a fine job, but attendance was disappointing. It is hard to determine why, but we simply had fewer people this year for Holy Week Services despite having what I thought was some pretty awesome liturgical content. I won't give you a blow-by-blow, but the worship (music, prayers, everything) were pretty impressive, I just wish more people had come for it all.

Normally I would have taken a few days off in Lent to make a retreat and then a Sunday after Easter to recover. I could do neither this year, and the result is that I have been really struggling to keep it together. I'm pretty much totally burned out, but it hard to see how I can take any time off until my Honourary Assistant comes back from holiday. When he does, my plan is borrow a canoe and take Henry into the woods with a guy friend and his 2-year-old for two nights.

Perhaps I'll get some rest this weekend. Friday and Saturday I'm going with my skipper from sailboat racing to pick up his new boat. we are looking forward to a very exciting summer of racing on the lake, and this new boat is a whole new league for us.

There are many challenges the parish faces that I don't feel I can blog about. It is much on my mind, of course, but it's hard to say much at this stage. I'm obviously exhausted and burned out. But I think we are moving things forward despite that.

On a Diocesan level I've been heavily committed. I'm now a Fresh Start Coordinator, which means that I spend 3/4 of a day once a month teaching clergy in transition. It's a sort of continuing education initiative designed to keep people sharp and in tune with the latest research in the field of ministry.

And I'm also serving on a committee that is helping to reshape the communications strategy of the Diocese.

And I'm helping to coordinate new media (particularly video) projects for the Diocese.

And I'm "consulting" with the Back to Church Sunday Committee (the contest to give an iPad to the best commercial inviting people to church was my idea).

And I'm still involved with the "Fresh Expressions" movements in the Diocese. The committee is being restructured, but I'm part of all that.

And I've been asked to help with some other one-off projects. I do say "no" to some of them... but perhaps not as many as I should. Sigh.

This summer I'm travelling to England for a retreat at Canterbury Cathedral. It's the reunion for the the group that did the same thing two years ago. I love Canterbury, and I really look forward to resting in the arms of the mother church of the communion. I expect England itself will offer up the usual charms, as well. I'm hoping to maybe visit the maritime museums in Greenwich. I'm also interviewing a Church of England big-shot on behalf of the Diocese (we have a kind of information exchange with them). We were hoping that Betsy and Henry could come with me, this year, but we just don't have the money for that, and a grant we thought might come fell through. It turns out that no grant organization we can find thinks clergy families should be supported to go on retreat. Don't get me started on the short-sightedness of that particular policy!

Henry is amazing. Right now he is daily mastering new phrases and words. This morning, for perhaps the first time, he said, "I love you daddy" when I dropped him off at Daycare. How incredible is that?! He just started a fixation on Thomas the Train. Ilove him to death, and I want nothing more than to load him up in a canoe and take him in to woods and love him in the wild way of nature. I have so much I want to teach him and show him. He's a delight.

That's probably a good place to end for the moment. If you've read this far you deserve a special prize! So here it is: last night I had a crazy dream in which I went sailing with President Obama on a high-performance racing Catamaran. It was just the two of us racing this carbon fibre beast. I spent a lot of time with the guy in my dream, actually, and can tell you that he is exactly what you would imagine.

-t

Sermon - Easter 4 2012

Here is my sermon from Easter 4 ("Good Shepherd Sunday"). Thanks to various circumstances (like people not showing up for scheduled appointments) I had an unusually large amount of time to prepare for writing this sermon by reading more than the usual number of commentaries. I found lots of inspiring content, and the results are evident. Even the way that I am speaking too fast is evidence of how excited I was by what I found in the research time of my sermon prep.

Incidentally, speaking too fast is my go-to homiletic sin. But sometimes my flow gets going and it's hard to slow down. But if I had to choose between too-fast and excited and slow and detached, I'm going to choose the former mode every time. Because I believe strongly that the role of emotions is preaching is absolutely critical, and I am willing to make many trade-offs in order to have an emotive moment in preaching, especially with this congregation. The Church of The Messiah values authenticity above all else, and they will forgive me talking too fast if they think I am telling them about something that excites me.

Anyway, I felt like this was one of my stronger sermons in the last few weeks, so I went ahead and posted it. Enjoy!



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Sermon - Lent 3 2012

I found this to be a fairly challenging sermon to put together. One of those times when I felt strong about it in the preparation stage but then felt that it didn't quite work in the execution like I had hoped. That's one of the risks with extemporaneous preaching, you can feel very confident and good about your plan and what you want to say, but extemporaneous preaching isn't about merely "delivering" pearls of wisdom that are the freeze-dried product of a previously dead-and-gone process. No matter what process has gone before, there is a new stage of process that happens as the sermon is being unfurled in front of the congregation, and that can be very difficult to predict, even for someone with five+ years experience doing it! But, of course, with risk comes the possibilities of great reward, and many of my best sermons at Church of The Messiah were simply unimaginable to me before I started giving them.

Anyway, one of the main themes I wanted to deal with in this sermon was the general distaste people have for "organized" religion. We live in an age where it is fashionable to be cynical of institutions. I probe that a bit in this sermon. Cheers.

Sermon - Lent 5 2012

I was very pleased with how this sermon turned out. I was dealing with material from a variety of sources, including the Zombie Apocalypse show "The Walking Dead" to make sense out of the hope that Jesus offers us. The implications of the bodily resurrection mean that salvation goes beyond those parts of ourselves that we like towards all the parts of the world that we inhabit and infect with our human capacity to relate.

Resurrection in an anxious world was also a poignant theme because of the death of our Interim Organist (and a personal friend) Bruce Kirkpatrick Hill last week. His funeral on Saturday at St. Mary Magdalene's was magnificent. More than 570 people packed the church, and the music was simply stunning. I preached through my grief in a passionate and delicate sermon on Tuesday, but by the time Sunday came around I had contextualized some of the lessons from Bruce's life and death into the larger story that he had dedicated his life to proclaiming through music.



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What Dreams May Come

Last night I dreamt that I died, saw the "Mansion with Many Rooms," and was brought back from the dead to be part of some supper hero crime-fighting team.

The dream started when I was part of the Roman Imperial Court. Over lunch we discussed the benefits of empire, and I was arguing vigorously that a particular people should be allowed to keep their language and customs. The conversation moved on to the Ceasar's son, who had just been born. I was sent to the priests to observe the ritual of choosing his name.

The Roman Priest carefully three small darts from bird feathers and needles and then flung them at the wall. I helped measure their exact height off the floor, which somehow translated into a name.

Quickly the dream transformed and I found myself sneaking into a room full of RIM (Research in Motion, the people that make Blackberries) employees and executives. It was a preflight briefing for a corporate charter flight. We all loaded up into some wide body jet. After takeoff we were enjoying a close up view of Manhattan when the airplane pitched up radically, stalled, shuddered, and then began to yawl. I knew instantly that the pilot didn't have enough altitude to recover and that we were most probably going to die.

I decided to spend my final seconds saying the Lord's Prayer and thinking of my family. As we crashed into the East River I was thinking of my little Henry.

When I "woke up," I was confused and disoriented. I was inside, a large building. As I began to wonder around I saw that the different areas of the building were decorated in radically different design schemes. I admired some of the designs. Many of the rooms had projection screens. There were some people around, but I didn't want to talk to anyone.

In the dream, I then saw some of the news coverage of the crash. Apparently the pilot was the only survivor. He had apparently tried to ditch the plane in the river like Sully had, but failed and as riddled with remorse. Soon I realized that there were other members of the flight in the mansion. One of them had a digital audio recorder (he had been part of a video crew). When we played it, we heard the sounds of the crash and then a woman's voice explained that we had been brought back from the dead and taken to a secret island where we would be crime-fighting super heroes.

At that point the real Henry woke me up with some kicking and thrashing around.

It was a neat dream. I think my favorite part was seeing my mind's version of heaven. Maybe I'll get to explore it again, sometime!
-t

Every Marine a Rifleman -- Every Christian an Evangelist

One of the organizational maxims of the U.S. Marines is "Every Marine a Rifleman"--which means, in a literal sense, that every US Marine must be proficient is using a rifle and maintain that proficiency, no matter how useless the skill might be to their assignments. In point of fact, most members of the U.S. Military (or most others) are not front-line combat troops, and they contribute best to the war effort in other ways (logistics is an obvious example). Spending time on on the rifle range might seem like a waste of time to someone who spends every day managing supply trains, but that's the rule.

The Christian application of this philosophy might be something like "Every Christian an Evangelist." Meaning, it doesn't work to leave communication about the faith the well-trained, paid elite corps. We need everyone involved in the work of making Christ known.

So I find it odd that people expect that all communications coming from a parish will flow through my office. I simply don't have enough time to
-Update the parish voice mail message
-Update the the street sign
-Update the parish Facebook Pages
-Update the parish Website
-Produce and Post posters
-Produce and distribute fliers
-Manage a parish newsletter
-Make an interesting service bulletin every week
-Send out a parish-wide e-mail blast
-Produce and post sermon videos
-And notify local publications about upcoming concerts and events
And that's not at all an exhaustive list of all the things our church does on a regular basis to reach people. Some of these things I've managed to delegate to others, but there is still a tremendous hole. And I realize that there will continue to be a gap between what's possible and what we do until we get away from a top-down communications strategy.

If every member of my church took it upon themselves to tell a few people in their circle about the exciting and worthwhile things they do at church, our communications problems would be completely solved. Alas, most people are reluctant to do so.

Solutions? Well, to start off with, I think we need to equip our people. They need to be coached on the basics of how to share their faith in a way that is respectful and engaging. The weird thing (to me, at least) is that people have become habituated to sharing all kinds of intimate details of their lives, and yet are quiet about this one. Is faith the last taboo? Or perhaps they just don'tf find their lives to be particularly worth commenting on (a sad thing, if true).

So I'm just thinking about this quesiton of whether we are raising the bar high enough for people who profess to call themselves followers of Christ. Surely they would not have committed their lives to God, and given up a few hours every weekend, unless there was something worth sharing in this whole God business?

-t

Sermon - Epiphany 3 2012

Diana Heath preached this wonderful sermon on the third Sunday of Epiphany. I was the building at the time--doing church with the kids. I think she did very well, and it's gratifying to see lay-preaching developing in my congregation.



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Chestnut "Chum" Restoration: Part 1

Here is a first look at the Chestnut "Chum" type canoe that we are restoring this winter. This canoe was graciously donated to us, and we planning to restore to her to stock condition, plus fit her with a mast partner so that we can sail her. Yes, we are planning to sail this canoe. We think she will probably end up living at the QCYC sailing club where she can be shared among a group of us for day-trips around the Toronto Island.



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Bending Stems

This winter a group of us guys are building and restoring some canoes. In this video, we are bending the "stems" of the canoe. The stems are the structural bones in the bow and stern which create the shape of the ends. To bend these pieces of ash, we first soaked them in water for a week or so. Then we baked them in a "steam box" for a while. The purpose of the steam is simply to conduct heat to the wood, there is no magic in getting the wood moist through using steam. Nor, according to experiments that have been done, is there any point to pressurizing the chamber. We were using a wall paper steamer to generate the steam, and it wasn't quite enough. The rig worked, but barely, so we are going to add some more steam generation when we steam the ribs.

Anyway, so you get the ash pieces hot and then you quickly bend them to shape on the form and clamp the whole thing in place for several weeks. Eventually the ash will maintain it's now shape. This is an ancient technique used by boat builders for centuries.



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Synod 2011 Video Responses

Here are two more videos that Matt and I (mostly Matt) created as part of our coverage of Synod. Part of what we were trying to do was make Synod more approachable for people who have never been, will never go, and have zero patience for reading the reams of paper produced by such a gathering! These are just short little pieces that gather some vox-pop responses to the events of the two days.





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The Archbishop's Charge to Synod: 2011

Here are parts 1 and 2 of the Archbishop's Charge to Synod for 2011. It was given to about 700 people gathered on the first day of the semi-annual meeting of parishes in the Diocese. It was a busy and intense few days!

Part 1

Part 2

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What's God Up to in the Diocese of Toronto

This was the third and final video created this summer by Matthew Carter, the "Video Intern." He shot almost all of the video for this and did all of the editing. I got a "Producer" credit for mentoring and guiding him at various points in the project. But mostly this is really Matt's impressions based on his summer exploring what God is doing in the Diocese. Some say this is their favourite of the three videos, and I can understand why.

Special thanks to Tim Elliot who volunteered his time and skill to play some of the music you hear on the background of the video. That's him playing Piano at the end (at Messiah). He was impressed by our piano and the acoustic of the church, which made me quite proud. Actually, the church works very well for recording piano.

Funny story, while Tim and I were at the church recording, I left Henry with Tim's son Jeremy at the Paul Hahn Piano store. Jenny Andison, a priest and friend of mine, walked in with her husband piano-shopping. She says to Jeremy, "You have a very cute son, he looks a lot like Henry Moss." "Well," said Jeremy, "In fact it IS Henry Moss...." Small world, heh?

When I came back to pick Henry up after our recording was done, Judy Maddren, Tim's wife and Jeremy's mother, was just returning from taking Henry for a walk. She threatened to kidnap him. So he was clearly in affectionate hands while I was gone.