St. Paul’s friends and family,
This Advent and Christmas Schedule is a little different than it has been in the last couple of years so I thought I’d outline exactly what is and is not different so anyone who is interested can know what goes into worship planning.
First, the 2022 Advent Lessons and Carols service boasted over 100 people. It was a fitting send off for Charles and a welcome first Sunday for me. In 2023 we has 35 people attend, including a 12-person choir most of whom were paid. In 2024, 2 people came, late, when Steve and I were packing up thinking no one had come at all.
Many of you have beautiful memories of a very large production Charles spent years perfecting and months planning each year. Perhaps in time we will return to that. This year without a musician and with a questionable workability for the organ, I am omitting that service entirely.
Second, for the second year in a row the Christmas Dinner will feature a pianist playing Christmas carols and playing with the kiddos who might want something more to do than just sit at the table with their family. More details will follow.
Third, the Blue Christmas service, which is designed for people who feel the holidays is a deeply sad and perhaps even rage-inducing time, will not be held on Gaudete Sunday (Joy Sunday) but rather in the evening of the fourth week of Advent. This is so no one comes right from the service of lament directly to the fun Christmas party. It was a mistake to pair those events last year.
Fourth, we will once again have an early evening Christmas service which features a type of pageant that requires no rehearsals. This year almost two dozen Episcopal Churches will use my script for their Christmas Pageant and “Sam Sheridan of St. Paul’s Petersburg Va” will appear in Christmas eve bulletins all across the country. It is not a revenue stream but there is no downside to more people reading about and thinking about St. Paul’s. Then we will have a more normal, much calmer, candlelight service late in the evening.
Fifth, again we will have a Christmas Day Eucharist. If you’re bored, want to kill a couple hours, and learn some new no-no words please ask me what I think of my colleagues who do not hold Mass on ChristMas day.
Finally, the joint service on December 28th is also called Lessons and Carols. For three years I’ve confused various people by not explaining this adequately. The Book of Occasional Services, from which Lessons and Carols comes, has two distinct and unrelated versions of the service. One is designed for Advent, framed around the end of the extraordinary violence of World War I, and concerned with human sin and depravity. The other is designed for Christmas, and was created some 70 years later so good Anglicans, who would never sing Christmas Carols before Dec 25th, could have a day to sing all the Christmas Carols they were hearing on the radio (on radio stations owned by people who do not recognize the historical liturgical seasons of the Church).
If you’d like to kill even more time and don’t feel my sermons are long enough ask me what I think about churches who don’t understand we have to prepare for the Feast of the Nativity and the triumphal condescension of the Lord our God into this mortal plain such that the icy sting of death should be no more forever. I will find a literal soap box.
Silent Night on the radio the day after Thanksgiving? Y’all, those people need Jesus. AND they need Him after Sunset on December 24th when He arrives.
You may not care about any of that. But the worship and fellowship calendar of the church requires literally hundreds of considerations. Some of them are things we must follow. Some of them are traditions of the broader Anglican community. Some are how we have operated here at St. Paul’s. Some are just your preferences if you share them with me (every person who came to the last Blue Christmas said it was terrible to then be happy for the Christmas dinner… mea culpa, mea maxima culpa).
If you want to just see what calendar gets printed and show up, that’s totally fine. If you have things you want to see, or see changed, or just want to know about I’m happy to add your preferences to all the things we juggle when putting the calendar together. We can’t do everything. But in the fullness of time we can probably do most things.
Yours in Christ
Sam+