I was grateful for the willingness of the people of All Saints Storm Lake to “flip church” and begin our time gathered in the sanctuary for conversation.
The Sunday visitation was sandwiched between two extremely busy weeks including
a Board of Directors meeting on Saturday and the visit of Angharad Parry Jones from the Anglican Communion Office which led up
to the weekend. Ahead of me was a non-stop schedule of another Indaba gathering
with Angharad at St Paul’s Marshalltown and with those
congregations who had used Indaba for their annual meeting. Then it was off to
the annual overnight retreat with the Judicatories of Iowa in Newton, a
Wednesday afternoon filled with Commission on Ministry (COM) aspirants’ post-psychological reports interviews, and an overnight back and
forth to Chicago for the Board of Directors meeting of the Bexley Seabury Federated Seminary. The week ended
with the COM meetings on Friday evening and Saturday morning. The prospect of
what is to come as well as the weariness of the week past plays its part during
visitations. I appreciated, therefore, the extra time to get to Storm Lake,
which the “flipped” schedule allowed.
Our conversation at Storm Lake centered first on the new
people who had come to the church since my last visit. One new person was there
with her son for the first time—a dedicated Episcopalian from another diocese
glad of the prospect of finding a continuing Episcopal home at All Saints.
Another family had found their way to the church through the pastoral work of
Don Keeler who had reached out to them after a farm tragedy had killed a family
member. Others, too, testified of being gathered in through pastoral care. A number of regulars were away because of
Mother’s Day duties, but I heard about the church’s outreach to the elementary
school children in Storm Lake.
They collect children’s books for the elementary school
district. More than 80% of the elementary school children ( 600 children from
kindergarten through fourth grade) are living under the poverty line, and do
not have funds for books. The majority of them are also children of new
immigrants, particularly Latinos. (This was to be the second of three church
visits in two weeks in which I heard of the great numbers of young children who
are dependent on the free lunch programs of our school districts for their most
substantial meal of the day. It also means that a number of our churches share
in the work of providing meals through the summer recess.) Over an eighteen
month period the people of All Saints donated close to one thousand books to
the Storm Lake Elementary School. Other aspects of community involvement by All
Saints’ members include activities for youth, housing for child and spousal
abuse victims, as well as providing support for needy families that come their
way. I was glad to hear that the senior warden, who is the champion of the book
project, is also the parish liaison for Iowa Share. So a lot of this
activity is being shared with the diocese on the resource web page.
Members of the congregation also spent a weekend on a Habitat for Humanity
project, landscaping newly build homes.
I am always struck by the location of the parish. Being on
the south side of the lake, it is a distance from the main neighborhoods, but
the beauty of its placement on the lakeshore opens up possibilities to become a
place for retreat, as well as for community gardens, nature study and other
uses for the community, diocese and the parish. It could easily become a
sought-out center of the Spirit.
Sermon, All Saints. Storm Lake—11 May 2014
At the General Convention of The Episcopal Church,
Iowa submitted a resolution which I think must have been one of the fastest
dealt-with pieces of potential legislation—it barely saw the light of day in
committee before it was thrown out. It was entitled “The Acts 2:42 Resolution”
and invited the Church to look into the distribution of its wealth among the
Dioceses and congregations. As I say, it was DOA in legislative committee, the
body that sorts out and votes on what the two major Houses of the Convention
will consider. It was Dead on Arrival. We don’t mess with our economic system,
and we did not even mention the C word. Except Church, of course.
In fact, the early Church did not actually mandate that
everyone sell all his or her worldly goods. It is noted simply that many of
them did so. The story of Ananias
and Sapphira [Acts 5:1-11] who themselves became quite literally dead on arrival, was not about selling
everything being mandatory on pain of death, but that they actually lied about
their actions.
“In mission with Christ, through each and all” is the vision
statement of the Diocese of Iowa. The questions—Who are we? Where do we want to
go? How do we want to do our work together?—are answered by this short phrase
that sits on every desk at Mills House, and is on every piece of Diocesan
letterhead.
“Through each and all”—this marvelous privilege of being in
mission with Christ that is our baptismal calling, is a shared experience. How
do we carry this out together across the distances between us, and in the
prevalent cultural understanding of the power and significance of individual
endeavor and success, and the competitiveness it demands?
Our denominations show that we are less united in one faith
than the early church members. Also our Western society has lost its
togetherness in ways inconceivable to previous generations. It is starkly
obvious in our political competitiveness and our loss of trust in our capacity
to work toward the common good.
The common good of the early Church was their witness to the
resurrection of Jesus Christ and God’s deliverance of Jesus from death and our
deliverance with Him. They had a common experience of the Holy Spirit as God’s
ongoing presence among them. There was a common desire to see men and women
start over—forgiven and free, healed of their past ills and restored in love.
And they made sure all of their basic physical needs were met, even if that
meant those who had more sold what they had to share with the rest. “Ubuntu” an
African word which means “I am because you are” was the theme of our last
General Convention. Perhaps we ought to have tried to revive our Acts 2:42
Resolution for the occasion, but we didn’t. I don’t think there would have been
any different outcome.
These past few days, we have been enjoying the visit of
Angharad Parry Jones from the Anglican Communion Office in London. She heard
of our attempts at Indaba—a way of being the Church in conversation and
deliberation in which there are no winners and losers, but every voice is heard
and valued. We attempted this process at our Diocesan Convention to great
acclaim. And we are trying to encourage it as a way of meeting at the Chapter level
as you consider budget priorities for 2015. Some of you have used the method at
your Annual meetings, and at vestry. When Angharad saw our vision statement “In
mission with Christ, through each and all,” she said that she considered her
work here done—“they get it,” she said to herself and to the staff. But, of
course, a vision statement contains the seeds of hope—it is more a statement of
where we want to go and who we want to be. We are far from that place in which
it can be declared a reality. There is still a lot of “us” and “them” about.
In recent months I have been in a few places church-wide in
which the issue of our identification with the “other” has been raised. At the
Conference in Oklahoma called “Reclaiming the Gospel of Peace,” the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby,
called for us to walk in the shoes of those who live in poverty. He was noting
how often it is the poorer among us who shoulder the greater burden of
violence. The concept of “walking with” is something that is a dominant
learning from the Just Faith program, and also in my work with the Task
Force of the Executive Council of The Episcopal Church devoted
to the alleviation of poverty or that is asking what our part in this massive
work can be ours. Just Faith asks that we learn to walk with and give
opportunity for the expression of the voices of those experiencing poverty
rather than do and speak for them.
I realized in Oklahoma that one sign of moving in the right
direction is when my own life touches on those same places of vulnerability and
risk as does that of people in troubled and poorer neighborhoods; when, as a
matter of course, I am equally in danger from gun violence, for example,
because I am among those for whom this is a greater reality. I have known such
times—when I chose to live in a communist country and share the risks of the
faith communities in Romania.
Jesus described this as the work of the Good Shepherd. Jesus
called Himself the door, for the shepherd would literally become that door
laying down at the opening in the wall to the sheepfold. Quite literally any
wild animal or sheep stealer would have had to go through him to get to the
sheep. He would defend them with his own life. To get to the sheep you would
have to go through the Shepherd. In contemporary terms he was like the
President’s body guard—the one willing to take a bullet for the President—except
that Jesus was protecting the weakest and most vulnerable among us, not the
most powerful person on earth.
We are expected to know suffering as a matter of course as
people of faith. This is Peter’s message. I am not only referring to that which
comes to us through illness, tragedy, death—from living life in this fragile
state—but suffering because of our sense of togetherness and because we are
given all things in common from the same God. Our faith is held in common as we
shall soon acknowledge as we turn to recite the Nicene Creed. Our life in
Christ is in common—there is one faith, one hope, one baptism. Our experiences
of God are held in common and our desire for the reign of God in love, peace
and justice is prayed in common. We need each other to carry out these ends.
The early Church knew this and so they expressed it by the sharing of their
very livelihoods.
Jesus is our Way in and out. His risen life is ours for the
taking and for the putting on. Secure in Him, we are able to move out of our
safety zones and our comforts into the work of the Kingdom to bring light into
darkness, love into areas of hate, and hope for despair; and “us” against “them.”
I pray for the day that Acts 2:42 becomes a byword, and when
being “in mission with Christ, through each and all” is more than a vision, but
a daily mission and experience; when evil must first get through us as the door
of God’s beloved.
Amen
