Reflections from visitation to St James’ Episcopal Church, Independence—3 & 4 May 2014

Independence Mayor Bonita Davis signs the Proclamation
naming Sunday, May 4, 2014 as St. James' Day.

This weekend was the culmination of the yearlong celebration of the 150^th anniversary of the church building which houses St James’ Episcopal Church  in Independence. I was with them in September as the people filled and dedicated a time capsule to be buried in the foundations of the Church. The spot was close to where they had found a time capsule from one hundred fifty years ago. Throughout the year, the people of St James put on a church-wide display of their history for the community, complimenting their growing ministry of presence within their town.

For years, St James had fallen on hard times. Numbers were very small, and often services were taken by clergy and lay leaders who would come regularly from Christ Church Cedar Rapids,  or Trinity Iowa City.  The names of as many of them as could be found were offered to God in thanksgiving during the litany of thanksgiving in the celebration on Sunday. I remember the annual pledge of the congregation would be $25, a sign that the congregation felt that it was barely surviving. It was significant, I thought, that the teaching session on Saturday afternoon was on the subject of “reframing hope”. Certainly I was teaching within a community that was a living example of attempting to do just that. Ten years ago, I don’t think we could have imagined that the mayor would be visiting St James on May 3, 2014, and in honor of their 150 years of ministry, be declaring May 4, 2014, as “St. James Episcopal Church Day” in Independence!

This successful revival has been led by Deacon Sue Ann Raymond, who returned to Independence to spend Thanksgiving with her family and heard God’s call to leave Colorado and come home. Soon, her energetic efforts at lifting up the church’s profile in the town were being supported by new leadership in the congregation, especially by Senior Warden Marilyn Basquin. And, Sean Burke, a priest who teaches biblical studies at Luther College in Decorah, joined the congregation. In turn, Sean brought a young graduate of Luther, Steven Lieberherr. For my part, I invited Tom and Sara Early, who are now preparing to go to Sewanee for ordination formation in August, to make their church home there.

The wonderful hospitality both for the clergy lunch on Saturday and for the Sunday celebration was but an example of what the community of Independence enjoys every Friday on what is now known as “Hot Dog Friday.” It is good to see more long-standing members and leaders revitalized by the presence of the new. The basement of the church now houses a walk-in clothes store with its own access to the street, which is professionally managed and presented. The Church has also teamed up with the large community congregation that takes up the whole block one street over from St James in some shared ministries. Rather than be overwhelmed by the close proximity of such a Church (whose popularity often make our own congregations feel small and forgotten and gives cause for collective low self-esteem), St James has sought to partner with their neighbors, knowing that they provide a different way of presenting and being Jesus for the population. Theirs is a complimentary partnership in Christ. 

Saturday was also my 64^th birthday. If I worried that someone would still need me and feed me, I had no such fear. On Saturday night members of the congregation took me out for a birthday dinner, where I learned about feeding chickens and cow herding and calling from very worldly-wise eight and eleven year-olds, who were our torch bearers the next day (and sold me two dozen eggs).

Reframing hope was the appropriate theme for the weekend. The people of St James have been seeking to do this these past few years. In one sense, it is a congregation that has held on through some difficult times waiting for the kind of new leadership that has come among them and through whom God has sparked some new life. Placing the capsule into the foundation to be discovered in another hundred years is another action of hope. Growing into the name of their town of Independence, and learning a leadership which is not dependent on one or two, but can reach into the next generation and into the community beyond the current congregation, is how that hope will be realized. It was a wonderful way to spend one’s birthday, and yet another experience that underscores how much we need to share and learn from one another.   

From left: the Rev. Kate Campbell, the Rev. Sarah Lopez,the Rev. Elizabeth Popplewell, the Rev. Dr. Sean D. Burke, the Right Rev. Alan Scarfe, Bishop, the Rev. Chuck Lane, the Rev. Ruth Ratliff, the Rev. Liane Nichols, the Rev. Maureen Doherty and the Rev. Sue Ann Raymond.

Sermon at St James Episcopal Church, Independence—4 May 2014 

Easter 3: Acts: 2: 1-14, 36-41; 1 Peter 1: 17-23; Luke 24: 13-35

The Bishop Suffragan of the Diocese of Los Angeles, Mary Glasspool, asked the House of Bishops in March if we had one story from Scripture to tell that conveyed the essence of the Gospel, what would it be? For her it was our Gospel reading today from Luke, and the two men on the road to Emmaus. I wonder what yours might be? I could go with this one.

It talks about the events in Jerusalem culminating in the crucifixion of Jesus. They speak of the hopes and anticipated promises of those who had been following Jesus like these two men, and even mention the rumors of the resurrection which they clearly did not believe. In many ways, as they tell their story to Jesus, we are learning more about them than we do the stranger who has joined them: their hopes, and their tragic disappointment, their permeating sadness and the grief which overwhelmed them and resisted any fanciful testimony about a resurrection appearance.

It is not difficult to see ourselves through their eyes. At points in our lives we have been where they are, or at some point we will be. And it is only then that the stranger begins to weigh in on their situation, and we start learning something about this inquisitive companion.

He points out things beyond the facts. He reframes their conversation within the context of a new way of looking at the Hebrew tradition. Starting from Moses, he signals the clues to a new presence within the Holy texts—texts with which we are more familiar because down the centuries we have been taught to see Scripture through this new perspective. Think of Moses lifting up the serpent in the wilderness, or the familiar words of Isaiah 53, or Psalm 22: He is asking, “Are you sure that is what was really happening?” And yet, all along the way, there is no self-revelation, nor any challenging of their incredulity about their unbelief about the revelation. Jesus placed Himself at the mercy of their reciprocal inquisitiveness, and their hospitality as the day came to its end. And his patience was rewarded.

The weight of intrigue and interest had shifted—from their sorrow and preoccupations to the stranger’s intriguing narrative, insight, and yes, possibly his person. Maybe they thought this man speaks with authority and not like the scribes and the Pharisees, and where had they heard that said before and about whom?

They were ready for further conversation—and so it happened—but again at the pace of their own capacity for insight. They recognized Him at the breaking of the bread, and He left them wanting more.

Jesus asked questions first. He came alongside them. He asked about their conversation and allowed them to talk out their sorrow and their profound disappointment and confusion. He was unreactive to their initial surly attitude—“Where have you been these past few days? Are you the only one not to know what has gone on?” they asked. Ironically he was center stage for the whole event. He knew it in his bones and stricken flesh. He had experienced it all first hand. Yet he never became defensive. He refused to turn the conversation to become about Him. His focus was on them; until he felt that they were ready for a lesson in interpreting prophecy!

Then his expertise began to show itself, and because He had listened to them, they were now ready to listen to Him, even to the point where they began to feel their own hearts burn with an unclear longing and recognition as He talked.

This is a rare glimpse of Jesus as an evangelist. We might compare it to John 4, and his encounter with the woman at the well. His success stems from His willingness to be about the other person rather than tell them about Himself or even be seeking to tell them what he knows.

Is it possible that until we learn to care more about people beyond our church walls than we care about telling our own stories, we will always miss out on the invitation into people’s homes, or on receiving the invitation to “stay with us?” Isn’t it really what you are seeking to do when you host people for hot dog Fridays? And maybe we need to settle as Jesus did for when the opportunity comes to be invited to their homes—rather than be overly eager to offer ours. This is how Jesus prepared someone for conversion—for a new perspective on life.

What evokes from people the question from Acts of the Apostles: What then should we do? When we listen to you we felt a longing for something different, something more. You shift our sense of ourselves and give us hope that there’s something else to how to see and live our lives. What then should we do?

Only then do we respond about being turned around, going in a different direction, about baptism that demonstrates that, about being forgiven and restored with a new Spirit who pours perfect love into our hearts.

Bishop Glasspool chose a good passage. It really does say it all. Above all it reveals Jesus the Evangelist. As such He shows us that sharing good news is first about showing interest in people; paying attention to their story; making room for their story and to how they are feeling about it; keeping quiet and giving yourself to listening; learning through the process to care more deeply for them.  It is after you have honored a person with listening that you might receive the right to speak. Then you can speak your truth as you understand God to reveal it, and you wait for the invitation to stay around, and to be asked, “What then should we do?”

Let us make this passage our prayer, and see what roads and among what strangers God will lead us.

                                                                                                                                                                                                      Amen

Reflections on visitation to Grace, Decorah—27 April 2014

“If there is a low Sunday for us, it is probably Easter Day rather than the Sunday afterward,” one parishioner told me. Seeing that the attendance was about the same for Easter 2 as it was a week earlier, this seemed to be a reasonable assessment. It would also appear to be an understandable experience for churches in small towns that have a significant liberal arts college. Grace Episcopal Church in Decorah  takes its rhythm from the academic year of Luther College. It has not always been a worshipping destination for Episcopal students who attend the Lutheran facility, but Episcopalians who teach or are part of the administration have found a constant church home at Grace. Their willingness to pursue the Ministry Development Team approach to ministry and leadership over this past decade has paid dividends. The congregation before me on Sunday was a microcosm of every demographic that tends to be found seeking God through the Episcopal Church, except in this case it seemed that there was one example of each kind! It is a place of great singing, or “participation” as the organist put it. A number of the members come from the music department at Luther and it shows. I also met a couple of religious department faculty who, as a former Pentecostal and a former Southern Baptist, are just the kind of married couple you’d expect to discover their place in the Episcopal Church. Together with their young child, and one on the way, they provide the young family demographic representation for the Church! 

As I prepared for a portion of my sermon to include a recent Ted Talk I had heard on the subject of education, I forgot that I would be addressing a group of people for whom education was their life’s blood. Maybe it was fortunate that they had been willing to switch around the worship and the fellowship times! That switch was a great help in managing the travel time from Des Moines, which, as it was, required a 6am start. Once again people seemed to appreciate the opportunity to sit and chat before we went upstairs to worship. There weren’t any pressing matters, though we wondered a little bit about the right timing for exploring a second generation of a ministry development team. That was probably more my topic of conversation than theirs. The people commended the team and how much they had grown in leading the worship these past few years. That confidence was very evident as we went to prayer.

I was moved by an apparent refusal to rush during the service. Ironically I had spoken about how in the course of liturgical development some lesser liturgies had been formed to bridge movement in the service from one location to another. Often there had been a tendency for such liturgies—or soft tissue—to fossilize and become rigid traditions even when their original purpose had passed on. Yet here I was experiencing a willingness to let silence reign, for example, at the presentation of the gifts. The hymn had ended and in the silence, four people walked up the aisle—two with offertory plates, one with bread, and a fourth with wine. The gifts were offered and each was received with its own offertory sentence. The oblation bearers acted also as acolytes, with the one bearing wine and water offering wine first across the altar, and then the water with the much dignity. As the monetary gifts were presented, we said the customary “All things come of you, O Lord,” and then the four moved back to their seats—all in absolute and unrushed silence. We were ready for Eucharist. Now perhaps this is something fitting for a small sanctuary. It certainly caught my attention.

Grace Decorah stands at one of the corners of the Diocese. It is 210 miles from Des Moines, and is probably the second-longest trip for me as bishop. Nevertheless, it is not isolated from the Diocese. Priests from Its ministry development team serve Charles City, and I expect will also serve neighboring Church of the Savior in Clermont in the future after Kate Campbell retires. Luther College attracts Episcopal students and faculty members and as such is an important gathering place for leadership. Sean Burke, another professor from Luther and an Episcopal priest, also travels most Sundays to St James independence. I am often guilty of only thinking about the potential impact of larger congregations as the sustaining source for smaller communities, but Grace reminds me that you can become a significant hub anywhere. You just have to have a wider view of yourselves and the possibilities that God can work through you. What may have started out as a survival gesture—Ministry development—is turning out to be a vital life-giver. What can happen if we begin to be more intentional about the gathering of Episcopal presence and its proclivity towards Episcopal leadership at Luther and Grace in Decorah?   

Sermon at Grace, Decorah—27 April 2014            

2 Easter (Acts 2: 14a, 22-32; 1 Peter 1: 3-9; John 20: 19-31)

This week I was sent a link to a Ted Talk by Ellen Bruckner, who many of you know in her support of your Ministry Development Team. The subject matter was the education system, and the question posed was “What is a school for?” What is the purpose of schools? To underscore his point, he opened with a familiar greeting—“Good morning, everybody!” To which he invited the response: “Good morning Mr. Godin.” He noted how we all knew how to respond and that we had been taught to do that from an early age as part of our formal education. “Order and obedience,” he said, were the goals of the school system. He then went on to highlight other school traditions, including the use of the #2 pencil, which may have had good intentions when first introduced, but lost their purpose as they became stalwart aspects of school life. Institutionalization and the needs of the institution have taken over, and the original intent of education is being lost, he claimed. And he wondered who was asking the fundamental question: What is the purpose of our schools?

Of course, you can imagine Ellen’s take on this as she asked how much of this relates to the church!

Have we lost sight of the purpose of the Church, and have we allowed customs and traditions, which may have begun with limited purpose, to become more significant than important, and precisely so as the needs of the institutionalization have grown? Now I know that this is true as a pattern for liturgical action. There was a study on the development of liturgy in the Eastern rite Churches, in which lesser liturgies were created to cover necessary movement or action during the Great Liturgy. For example, churches in the early days had baptismal fonts that were in a different building. Liturgies were written to cover the procession outside and back again with candidates. In time, everything was located within the church, but the chanting for the little procession continued even though the action was no longer carried out. Maybe liturgical reform has helped reduce these things, but the process of hardening what we might call ‘soft tissue’ of our common life and perhaps losing more essential aspects is a pattern still with us.

So forgive me for asking the obvious: Why are we gathered today? One fundamental response needs always to be placed before us.

An Orthodox priest friend of mine had asked to use St Barnabas for a Sunday afternoon liturgy. He built a beautiful iconostasis on hinges which could be pulled out from the walls to create that mysterious line between sanctuary and chancel. He dressed the altar with a gold brocade frontal and dressed himself in fine vestments. The congregation average on a Sunday was three and that included his deacon and sometimes his mother and father. One day I asked him if he did not get disheartened at the poor turnout. “God is here,” he said. “My responsibility is to worship God with heart, soul and mind, and to offer praise and thanksgiving for His goodness and mercy. That is all that is important.”

As I say—we need to begin with this fundamental purpose of being gathered. God is with us and we address everything to God—our prayers, our praise, our thanks, and we listen to God’s word to us. It is not about us, but about God—this is an essential first principle of the life of the Church, and one we easily forget. This is also a fundamental point to be carried over into our daily lives—creating our routines for prayer, stopping to give thanks, recognizing God among us and in one another—and it is something we gather to encourage each other to grow into as life stretches before us.

Secondly, we gather to remind each other of these things. Are we therefore so arranged as we come together to do this? Does what we do bring us into the presence of God—make us more God mindful—and does it afford us the opportunity to feel and know the Divine? We need to keep our liturgical life fresh, and our opportunity for meaningful conversation in the assembly accessible.

The passages of Scripture for today add another dimension to the purpose of the Church.

Peter in Acts declares that “this Jesus (whom you crucified) God raised from the dead. And of that we are witnesses.” The early Church was witness to an historical miracle, and was accountable to give voice to it. They also lived long enough to see their testimony pass on to a new generation—one that had not seen and yet had believed just as they had not seen but had learned to love, as Peter writes.

Placing that statement alongside the more familiar story of Thomas shed a new light for me on John’s purpose for both that story and other aspects of his Gospel.

Often we concentrate on Thomas’ doubting and questioning and we use this Sunday to evaluate or even encourage ourselves in our hesitancy in embracing the resurrection. We think about his realism which Jesus is willing to confront with a special appearance complete with the invitation for Thomas to place his fingers in the nail holes and into the pierced side. But it is what comes next that is the clincher for me. “You have believed because you have seen. But blessed are those who have not seen and yet believed.” Blessed, in other words, are the likes of you and me as the faith community spreads out through the centuries. That is the fresh miracle of the Church—that the witness of eyewitnesses becomes transferred into the belief and witness of those who have not seen and it creates followers and lovers of God through Jesus Christ to this present day.

It is something to do also with what Jesus did when he first appeared to the disciples—as he said “Receive the Spirit” and you will be able to pass on this gift of forgiveness and new life along the generations. You will also pass on this giving of the Spirit!

When people talk to me about closing churches, or especially when they tell me how they have calculated how many years they have to live as a community because of the rate their endowment is being eaten up, I know that they have forgotten their purpose as a Church of God, and I wonder if they have also forgotten their faith. For in the end, it really does not matter if an institution closes or not, but that a community of faithful disciples continues and draws strength and courage to carry out this witness to the Risen Christ, and to the inner life of devotion and gratitude to God. In that sense, maybe Ellen’s pointer is in the right direction.

I couldn’t fully identify with the TED Talk speaker because I did not recognize fully the educational system he was describing. I was raised with a tutor and an optional opportunity to attend lectures. The purpose of my weekly educational endeavors was to pursue knowledge, focused knowledge, to its frontiers if possible. My days were my own except for the weekly check-in with my tutor and the huge subject matter I was expected to pursue. Education was never divorced from my personal formation, nor even from the expectation of a growing sense of vocation. I was also raised in a Church that focused on mission and on developing in each of us a faith that was about God’s revelation and God’s purposes for the world and for each of us. It was never about perpetuating the system, but using the system to best perpetuate the formation of faith and mission—which was seen as an extension of the will and purpose of God.

Maintaining this sense of freshness in this aspect of our faith is a great challenge. To this end I would ask: What is the purpose of the Church?

As a way forward I would invite you to consider the witness of the evangelists—Peter and John. They describe us as a people who have been given a new heart; a living hope; an imperishable inheritance—all through our Lord Jesus Christ. This is Peter’s witness. John adds that he writes that we might know Jesus Christ and in so knowing have eternal life. We are the blessed who believe even though we have not seen, and as such are more blessed than Thomas or Peter or John.

How can we become such witnesses? How can we remain faithful? How can we reshape our priorities or perceptions of our purpose to maximize the potential of such a call to witness? “Receive the Spirit.”

                                                                                                                                                                                                                      Amen