Easter 2

May my words and my thoughts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my refuge and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)

SEASON: Easter 2
PROPER: C
PLACE: St. John's Parish, Kingsville
DATE: April 19, 1998

An Address to the Congregation

TEXT: John 20:19-31 . . . he breathed on them and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained." . . . "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe."

ISSUE: The passage is the call to the disciples to become the apostles, those who are sent, and who become the risen body of the Lord. To believe and trust in the calling of Lord is so very honorable, and it is our calling as Christians in the world today. Through our association with our parish church, as a vital comitted and lively congregation we are the living body of Christ in the world, calling folk to the forgiveness, the hope, and the love of God revealed in Jesus Christ.
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Grace to you and peace from our Lord Jesus Christ:

On the first Easter, the Gospel account of St. John reports that the resurrected Lord appeared mysteriously behind locked doors to breathe the Holy Spirit of God upon his disciples thereby commissioning them to be his apostles and giving them an authority to proclaim a message a forgiveness and reconciliation to a broken world. Since that time through various liturgies and commissionings the church, having become the living body of Christ in the world today, has continued to call people into being the living spiritual presence of Christ in the world. Ordinations of bishops, priests, and deacons has been one way in which the Holy Spirit has been given to selected men and women to be the church's authority figures as they perform specific functions in the body of Christ. But be reminded that the commissioning and bestowing of the Holy Spirit has never been solely limited to the ordained ministry. Each of us share in the apostolic ministry by virtue of our Holy Baptism when we were commissioned and "received into the household of God to confess the faith of Christ crucified, to proclaim his resurrection, and to share in his royal priesthood."
Later this morning we will all be gathering as the body of Christ in the Parish Hall for our annual Congregational Meeting. At that meeting we will be giving attention to how we are doing as the body of Christ in the world and to select several people and commission them in the special work of serving on our Parish Vestry. We are fortunate to have five people who have accepted nominations to serve. To serve on the Vestry of this Congregation is a significant undertaking. Our church is a several hundred thousand dollar corporation. Vestry members and officers have an important management role to fulfill along with providing spiritual leadership, promulgating the faith and teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ.
To be on the vestry is no mere honorary position. It requires regular attendance and involvement in monthly meetings, and leadership on committees. It requires assisting with the collecting and accounting of funds received on Sundays. It requires a personal commitment to stewardship and a developing maturing spiritual life through their regular attendance at worship. It is also essential that vestry members develop friendships with both older and new members of the congregation.
The congregation of this church needs to be well aware that those who are serving on the Vestry are giving significant time and energy. The congregation needs to be supportive of the Vestry, assisting with various church projects and by yourselves being good stewards and faithful contributors to the church. Step forward to ask how you can be involved and participate more fully. Encourage your vestry members and let them know how much you appreciate what they do to make St. John's a well administered and maintained church community. Your vestry are not merely volunteers, they are committed people who believe our Lord's church is vital in the world. Please support them in their efforts with your own expression of regular worship and faithfulness.
All of us working together with the Vestry need to commit ourselves to a better and more concentrated stewardship effort. Sometime ago the Vestry had hopes that by the year 2,000 we could stop using our endowments funds for supporting the regular church budget. In all the years of my ministry we have taken a monthly check from the Endowment Fund to subsidize the Budget. Instead of moving ahead to changing this practice, in the summer of 1997, the Vestry took an additional lump sum of money to keep the church afloat during the summer months, and to keep us from having to pay late charges on various bills. This action was taken in the best interest of the church at the time. It helped, but it was still a backward step. When Bishop Ihloff was with us in March he mentioned that one of the serious overall problems the church is experiencing is poor stewardship. While the National Church has set the tithe as the goal for giving, Bishop Ihloff indicated that if Episcopalians gave just 1% - 2% of their incomes, the church would see a significant change in what we were able to do and accomplish so far as our churches and their missions were concerned. We must continue to work toward being faithful Christians so far as our giving is concerned, and this needs the efforts of the Vestry, as well as the overall support of the congregation. We must all remember that the Vestry's efforts to encourage our people to pledge to the church is out of their concern for God's work and his church. It is not as if the Vestry themselves are getting a salary!
Stewardship also involves the time and and efforts that we can give to the church. Many work hours have been given to the church over the years by people who have helped with raking leaves and other maintenance items. The giving of ourselves in varieties of ways has been enormously helpful and appreciated.
For the most part, I believe we have a church with a fellowship of people who enjoy one another and are usually a friendly and welcoming community. At the same time we can not help but get caught up in the our culture which is very consumer oriented, individualistic, and quite secular. People today expect to be able to buy everything they need. People "shop" for a church that will provide them what they need spiritually for themselves and their children. They will look for and select the church with the best Sunday School. What makes a good Sunday School, a good youth program, a spiritual church is the people who make up that church. We have to put ourselves into the things we want to have in our church, and not merely believe that it will somehow be miraculously provided, and we can somehow buy it and then consume it.
People today are very individualistic. They like to do their own thing, at their own time, and think and believe their own thoughts. It's the good old American way. But, rank individualism leads to isolation, splintered meagre efforts, loss of developing deeper friendships, and thinking that is narrow and sometimes downright self-righteous. While the church values the indiviual gifts and talents of its people, it is still a community, a body of people, the body of Christ, which can do far more in corporate involvement than through isolated individualism. It works at staying open to and hearing varieties of points of view, and to new understandings to old problems and new possibilities. Staying in community with one another, knowing one another, and welcoming the strangers that come our way is so important to the church, to its very definition of what the church is, and to church growth as well. They body of Christ is a living organism capable of love and caring, forgiving, reaching out and listening to the needs and pain of others. To simply do things individually for the organization, to be mere volunteers, is to function as if the church were merely a museum to be maintained. We can also be satisfied to be club-like and turned in on ourselves. But when newcomers see a full church gathered for worship, followed by a community of people sharing their lives and concerns with one another over the coffee hour in the parish hall, a significant witness is made about this place; it is perceived as being a warm, cordial, and welcoming place where God is present. Our regular participation is a significant witness to the Gospel.
Here in the parish there are some additional specific things that we could be doing as the living community and body of Christ. We have shut-ins that could be visited on a more regular basis by people in our congregation. Our shut-ins are people who themselves served our parish well in the past. They deserve our attention. But once they become aged and infirm, sometimes institutionalized, they become forgotten. To have some of us visit these folks and others as well on some kind of a regular basis would be a wonderful ministry.
It would be a great thing too, if our choir, and other parishoners as well, could occasionally visit nursing homes to perform some of the music they work on for us in the pews on a Sunday morning. Such performances would be a significant outreach ministry. Being creative in our attempts at outreach and concern for others beyond our parish boundaries is important to our being active in God's mission.
It would be great too if we could have some folks work regularly with our Acolytes, to be present regularly on Sundays assisting them to vest, to see that their vestments are clean, to provide for some mending of the vestments, to provide some training, to encourage them in their ministry, and to show some interest in what they do as the young people in our church. We need to be continually imaginative and creative in our efforts to work with our young people so that they always feel and important and integrated part of our church community.
We need to continue thinking about and exploring ways to make our church building more accessible to and for the handicapped. A significant part of the ministry of Our Lord Jesus was his concern for the handicapped who were excluded from the Temple by virtue of their handicap or illness. We do not have the luxury of writing off this issue as something that can't be done. If we can send a man to walk on the moon, and explore the sunken Titanic three miles below the surface of the sea, it seems highly likely that we ought to be able to get a wheel chair in St. John's. It does make a difference in the lives of people and families when they attend their children's graduations or other religious ceremonies (such as weddings and funerals) when handicapped grandparents or friends are left to wait outside the church in a van. This issue is still very much with us to be considered.
Another concern for us here at St. John's is to prevent keeping our lamp under the bushel basket, instead of on the lampstand where all can see the good things we do. We are slow to toot our horn about some the good things we do and have to offer. We need to work on presenting ourselves and this church to the community around us. We have often allowed ourselves to be invisible when we sit on one of the most visible and prized pieces of real estate in all of Greater Kingsville. We often do too little too late in terms of advertising our offerings and our best efforts. We need a new up to date highly visible well lighted modern sign that tells the thousands of people who travel up and down the Belair Road corridor that we are here. What's more, in big easy to change welcoming letters we should be succinctly telling people when we worship, when Day School Registration will be held, when and what time the Passion Play will be performed, who our next guest preacher is. We should be able from time to time to present some catchy aphorisms that make our church more clearly visible to the community.
The former Christian Seedlings gave to the Memorial Fund a gift in excess of $2,000. in memory of the late Phil Curley. The Vestry voted to use this seed money toward the purchase of a new sign, and it is likely we will need additional funding. The details are yet to be worked out. I hope we can move quickly with this project. We must be urgent about doing what we can to make our church grow, and to make ourselves known, if we are to continue to be true to our apostolic calling.
Secularism is taking its toll in our time. People are caught up in materialism and an inordinate busyness. Once we heard that we would be entering a time of great leisure. That came to be something of a false prophecy. People today often work harder and longer than ever. Family life is thought to be severely suffering, as is people's time for reflection, meditation, and for spiritual things. I ask that all of our various committees and organizations begin their meetings and time together with prayer and scripture reading. I ask all of you to re-commit yourselves to regular prayer, Scripture reading, and to regular attendance at worship on Sunday's and major holidays of the church year. These things are at the very heart of our being evangelistic. We cannot proclaim what we don't know and haven't felt. Thomas had a hard time getting into this resurrection thing. "Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe," he said. But Jesus came again and said, "Peace be with you . . . . Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand it put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe."
Once again at this season, God calls us to new life receiving the Holy Spirit , to trust, to believe, to accept our apostolic ministry, to act decisively and faithfaithfully, to be the living body of the risen Christ in the world today.