Twenty Years of a New York Rectorship
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TWENTY YEARS OF A NEW YORK RECTORSHIP
The Rev. J. Donald Waring
Grace Church in New York
The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 15, 2024
Jesus said, “But I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me but I chose you.” (John 15:15-16)
On Sunday, December 6, 1903, I was not the Rector of Grace Church. I have been here for a long time, but not that long. In those days the Rev. Dr. William Reed Huntington inhabited the big house next door. On December 6 – nearly 121 years ago – Huntington stood in this very pulpit and preached a sermon he entitled “Twenty Years of a New York Rectorship.” I have read the sermon many times. It is nearly six-thousand words long – approximately three times the length of my own sermons, I might add.
In his anniversary sermon, Huntington, the 6th Rector, explained that once in twenty years a minister might be suffered to be egotistical, or at least autobiographical, without blame; that he might, as often as that, excusably take his people into his confidence, and talk freely of the past workings of his mind and heart. He described arriving here twenty years earlier and being awed by what he found: a highly organized, thoroughly equipped, modern parish. He praised his predecessor, Henry Codman Potter, who had inspired people to fill the windows with brilliant stained glass. Potter had built the chantry, the parish house, and other buildings for the work of ministry to the poor. Then he had been elected Bishop of New York.
One of the last things Potter did as the 5th Rector was to secure the gift for replacing the old wooden spire with a new one made of stone. Huntington took the new spire, still under construction when he arrived, to be an exclamation point on the ministry of the one who came before him, as if to suggest, “You’ll never top this.” In his sermon he said, You can imagine my feelings, as a newcomer, at finding everything done. I faced, almost with dismay, a situation where such a thing as progress seemed to have been made impossible by the attainment of the goal.
Today I rise to preach a sermon by the same title as Huntington’s: “Twenty Years of a New York Rectorship.” It is the first time in 121 years that any Rector of Grace Church has been able to claim the title for a sermon. Fun fact: by my count it will be the 504th Sunday sermon that I have preached from this pulpit – not including twenty Christmases, Good Fridays, and other holidays. I can assure you that not once in 504 Sunday outings have I rattled on for six-thousand words. Also, when I first arrived, I suffered no such dismay that everything was done. In fact, certain people had warned Stacie and me that what needed to be done here quite possibly could not be done. Some of you may remember how things were. So return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when the good people of Grace Church were not happy.
The congregation was not happy about what had been several unpleasant, controversial clergy leadership transitions, including my predecessor, the 13th Rector. They were angry about the extended interregnum that the diocese was requiring. It took 5 ½ years and two interim rectors before the vestry had the green light to call the 14th Rector. The congregation was angry about the plan to grant Grace Church School its legal independence. Some saw the move as a sign of institutional failure. Ominously, the top third of the spire had taken on a dangerous tilt, and the whole thing was encased in scaffolding. The people were worried about money. The endowment, which had peaked at $23 million was down to $10 million. In the year 2002, the only way to balance the budget was to withdraw $2 million. As it was explained to me, it was five years to shut-down at the current pace.
The Vestry had not been idle all this time. Though contentious meetings went on for hours, one of the important things they did was to draft an ambitious turn-around plan. They needed to call a rector who not only would agree with the plan, but help to implement it. As for me, I had to figure out in a hurry how this “call from God” thing worked. Stacie and I were living a perfectly happy life with our two little sons in a lovely, leafy suburb of Cincinnati. But if God’s call came to me and I said no, how could I ever again preach from the pulpit of the church I was serving? How could I ask my congregation there to do anything? Did I really want to be someone who followed the command of God only when it was convenient? For all of us, on both sides of the equation, it was time for a spiritual gut check. To make a long story short, what I took to be a genuine call from God did come, and I said yes. Grace Church chose me, and I chose Grace Church.
Still, we didn’t know what to expect, and I must confess that I was girding myself for battle. The opening hymn we sang just a moment ago – “Christ, the fair glory” – is the same one that began my installation service twenty years ago today. It calls on help from angels, archangels, all the company of heaven, even the blest mother of Jesus, and the Father, Son, and Spirit for good measure. We needed all the help heaven had to offer. The help came, but in ways I never would have expected.
I will always remember something that happened very early on in our time here. It might even have been my first Sunday on July 4th, 2004. Nobody that day was highly organized. Our move out of Cincinnati had been delayed, and I lost several days of what would have been time to get ready. Circumstances did not allow any overlap with the interim rector, so it was just me, without even an acolyte. In those days the summer Sunday morning nine and eleven o’clock services were boiled down to one at 10 am (which was another thing that made people mad, by the way). I wasn’t even sure how to get to the front of the church to begin the service. So my plan was to greet people at the Broadway door as they arrived. Then I would saunter up the north aisle, slip into the Rector’s stall, and announce the opening hymn.
As I rounded the corner from the narthex to the north aisle, I saw from the length of the nave, the door by the baptismal font open. Coming through the door were Stacie, James, and Luke – the boys being 5 and 2 at the time, dressed for church in their little sport coats and bow ties. Luke looked up, and upon seeing me, he broke free from Stacie’s hand and shouted “Daddy!” Then he ran down the aisle and leaped into my arms. The whole gathered congregation saw it, and it was as if everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief. All of the tension left the room. The simple, happy scene conveyed: This can be good. Church doesn’t have to be a fight. We can turn the page. We can be friends. We had chosen each other, as Jesus had chosen us all, and called us friends.
Next, to live into our friendship in Christ, Stacie and decided that we would invite everyone in the parish to dinner at the rectory – not all at once, of course, but little by little, and alphabetically. Stacie has an MBA from Tuck and ran a GM component plant, so she knows how to make the line move on a budget. So began a series of dinner parties for twenty, every other Thursday. It took about a year and half to invite everyone. At the same time, I was working to restore relations with Grace Church School, which had become quite frosty under my predecessor. For ten years I coached the 7-8th grade baseball team with George Davison. One year we achieved a perfect season, unblemished by a single victory.
Also, we needed to get the building open. In the latter part of the interim, budget shortfalls required the church itself to be closed for most of the week, except for Sunday mornings and an hour on weekdays for Bach at Noon. But it just wasn’t right to have a building like this on the greatest street in the world and not be open to the public. The question was, why do we have a building like this at all? What’s the point? Some accuse of us having an edifice complex. We are too focused on the building, they claim. We should be more spiritual. What we say in reply is that we, “dwellers all in time and space” that we are, live in a sacramental universe. What I mean is that God conveys the Spirit to us only through the material order. In fact, we would have no access to the spiritual realm whatsoever were it not for flesh and blood, bread and wine, paper and ink, bricks and mortar, wood and nails, stained glass and stone. This building declares the glory of God, and it is our duty and delight to practice and to secure a ministry of presence: God’s living, loving presence.
To do everything God calls us to do is expensive. Discipleship is costly. Some people look at Grace Church and want music for nothing and priests for free. They may find it on MTV, but not here. Over the past two decades the Spirit of the Lord has moved us to raise money – lots and lots of money. First it was the Bicentennial Campaign in 2008, then the Power of Grace in 2012, followed by Lift up Thine Eyes in 2017, and finally Making all things New just earlier this year. To help pay for the organ we rolled out Adopt A Pipe in 2010, which was a much better theme than what I suggested: “Be an Organ Donor.” And in 2019 we celebrated the 125th anniversary of the choir and school by raising the funds to restore the chancel furniture. All of these campaigns have been on top of our annual campaigns, which have steadily grown over the years despite many challenges: the collapse of historic financial institutions, a pandemic, and lawsuits that grieved our souls, just to name a few.
In today’s reading from his letter to the Romans (12:1-8), the Apostle Paul writes of spiritual gifts. Among those he lists is the spiritual gift of generosity. Grace Church is blessed to have in our fold people with the spiritual gift of generosity: people who give sacrificially, cheerfully, and gratefully because they know Jesus has called them friends. St. Paul goes on to list other spiritual gifts, and in subsequent letters he would name even more. Many of these gifts I have seen at work among us: around the vestry table, among our talented staff, in my clergy colleagues, from the voices of our choristers, through the fingers of Dr. Allen, and in the quiet devotion of people who come to church week by week. St. Paul described it this way: For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.
So it is that William Reed Huntington and I have a few things in common. Now we have both preached a sermon entitled, “Twenty Years of a New York Rectorship.” Also, we both arrived at a time when the spire was encased in scaffolding. At Huntington’s arrival, the spire was new. It suggested to him that everything was done, and that he himself would have no progress to make. In truth, Huntington quickly discovered much to do. He was the principal author and architect of the 1892 Book of Common Prayer, the first revision since 1789. He founded Grace Church School. He built Grace Chapel over on East 14th Street. He was a giant in the Episcopal Church at a time when the Episcopal Church was a giant on the religious landscape of the nation.
For all of his accomplishments, however, I may have one thing up on him. My guess is that he never climbed the scaffolding to the top of the spire. But I can tell you that when the opportunity presented itself to me, I took it. In fact, standing next to the nine-foot cross up there was among the first things I did in the summer of 2004, and I have the pictures to prove it. I remember looking down on Grace Church, shaped like a cross itself, and being amazed by what I saw. I was grateful that by the grace of God, Grace Church chose me and I chose Grace Church. I confess that I was semi-overwhelmed by what I knew needed to be done. Yet I was eager to get busy.
St. Paul warned us all not to think of ourselves more highly than we ought to think. At the risk of transgressing Paul’s exhortation, I will say that for twenty years now I have striven to be a good steward of the office I occupy. You and I, filled with the Spirit of the Lord as we are, still have much to do together, and we have all the time God grants us in which to do it.