On Bringing the Church and World Together…

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bless, church, community, fellowship, holy, identity, rogation, sacred, service, welcome, world

Photo credit:  http://stas.org/en/media/photos/rogation-days-2016-15612

This coming Sunday at Hickory Neck, we will be adding a procession and blessing before our service begins in honor of Rogation Days.  Traditionally, Rogation Days are the three days before Ascension Day during which the litany is said as an act of intercession. In England, Rogation Days were associated with the blessing of the fields at planting, and in the United States they have been associated with rural life, agriculture and fishing, commerce and industry, and the stewardship of creation.[i]  For Hickory Neck, we are using this year’s Rogation Days to give thanks for rainwater collection barrels built for our Community Garden by a Boy Scout in our parish.  We will also bless the Garden, praying for a fruitful harvest for our parishioners and neighbors who use the gardens this year.

What I love about this upcoming event is that it represents a confluence of everything about which the church should be.  Our Community Garden has long been an example of using our property as a way to bless and welcome others.  At the garden, I see strangers become friends, people planting and tending in sacred silence, and the fruits of labor shared with one another.  Meanwhile, it has been a joy to watch our parishioner take leadership of an Eagle Scout project that benefits the church, the community, and his troop.  Watching our parishioner bring his faith community and his service community together has been a tremendous witness to each of us about how to make connections between the various parts of our lives.  And marking Rogation Days with liturgy is the church’s way of making the everyday parts of our lives sacred.  We take the labor of our hands, the fellowship of friends and strangers, the bounty of creation, and we name it all as holy.

Often when people think about church, they think about the building and the people who regularly attend worship services on Sundays.  But the church is much more about what the faith community does outside of the walls of the building, and how the community uses the blessing of its property to bless others.  This Sunday, we celebrate the ways in which we are living into the fullness of our identity, while also challenging ourselves to ever be outwardly-minded in our ministry.  I hope you will join us, but mostly, I hope you will invite a friend as we celebrate the ways in which the blessing of our community flows out into the world!

Rainwater Collection Barrels Installation.  Photo credit:  Paula Simmons.  Permission required for reuse.

 

[i] Donald S. Armentrout and Robert Boak Slocum, eds., An Episcopal Dictionary of the Church:  A User-Friendly Reference for Episcopalians, “Rogation Days,” as found at https://www.episcopalchurch.org/library/glossary/rogation-days on May 1, 2018.

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Homily – 1 Peter 5.1-4, George Herbert, February 27, 2014

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call, faithful, George Herbert, God, homily, priest, service

Today we honor George Herbert, a priest and poet in the church.  Herbert was born in 1593 to a well-connected family in England.  Though he flirted with politics, he eventually turned to the church, becoming a priest age 33.  Two things are notable about Herbert.  First he is well-known for his poetry, some of which became hymns.  He influenced many other poets, as his poems moved people on issues of prayer and the spiritual life.  Herbert was also well known for his devotion and service to others.  His approach toward life and ministry inspired many.  In fact, his words, “Nothing is little in God’s service,” remind Christians again and again that everything in daily life, small or great, can be a means of serving and worshiping God.  When talking about his poetry, Herbert seemed to meld the two passions when he wrote about his poems as being “a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed betwixt God and my soul, before I could submit mine to the will of Jesus my master, in whose service I have found perfect freedom.”

What Herbert reminds us of today is the sacred nature of all our calls.  Sometimes, we do not feel comfortable using “call” language for what we do on an everyday basis.  In fact, we read passages like the one from first Peter, and we presume that only clergy, or “elders,” have a call.  Though first Peter is talking about how a spiritual leader should lead, we cannot assume we are exempt from similar instructions.  In fact, I might argue that the call that each of you live out in the world is far greater than the call I live in my position.  You have the much together jobs of witnessing in everyday life without such clear markers of faith and devotion like a collar.  And you have the ability to reach way more people that I could ever hope to because unlike what many people assume about me, you are actually “normal.”

What first Peter and George Herbert would both like us to see is that all of us have kingdom work to do, and our aim is to do that work faithfully and with enthusiastic hearts.  Herbert only lived to be 40 years old, and yet one of the things we honor is the way in which he was a faithful, humble, enthusiastic priest – not a bishop, or martyr, or leader of some great movement.  He was just a parish priest who knew that nothing is little in God’s service.  As we celebrate his passion for everyday life and everyday call, we too are emboldened by knowing that fulfilling our calls is not “little” in God’s service.  Amen.