Words matter.
They can create or destroy possibilities. Human beings, perhaps unique in all earthly creation, have access to a linguistic power that can influence, for good or ill, our relationship with each other, with other communities, with ourselves, and with God.
I would like to begin my address by introducing the 213th Annual Convention to our new Presiding Bishop, Michael Bruce Curry, by video presentation.
By introducing Presiding Bishop Curry, I am also introducing the Episcopal Church of New Hampshire to ourselves and to our mission as members of the Episcopal branch of the Jesus Movement.
Every time we share communion, we restore our identity as members of the Risen Christ, an identity given to us when we are buried with Christ and raised to new life in him through baptism. It is fitting that, as we recommit ourselves to Christian service as a Church, we renew the promises made at baptism. There’s a prayer that we offer at every baptism, and I now make it a practice not just to pray it myself, but to invite the whole congregation to join in its petition. Please join me.
Heavenly Father, we thank you that by water and the Holy
Spirit you have bestowed upon these your servants the
forgiveness of sin, and have raised them to the new life of
grace. Sustain them, O Lord, in your Holy Spirit. Give them
an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to
persevere, a spirit to know and to love you, and the gift of joy
and wonder in all your works. Amen.
(Book of Common Prayer, p. 308)
Now, we could pray this only for our own kids, the ones who come into our church, our doors. But I am convinced that Jesus would tell us that that’s not enough. As God spoke to God’s people through the prophet Isaiah, so God urges us:
It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and to restore the survivors of Israel:
I will give you as a light to the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.
(Isaiah 49:6)
In other words, it’s not enough for us to be fixated on the life of the Church and on those who make up our church directories and membership lists. The Church is here as a light to the world, a light to reach the despairing and hopeless and distressed places right here in New Hampshire.
For decades we have been overly concerned with things too light, too easy: the survival of the local parish church, the institutional stability of the church in the face of the culture wars, sparked by debates about human sexuality and gender. There was a season for this.
In the meantime, more and more of the youth of our communities know nothing of the love of God in Jesus. More of our children are caught up in a culture that is becoming dangerously sexualized, unhealthy, violent, and spiritually deadening.
Visiting our churches on any given Sunday, I see fewer children or teenagers sharing stories with me about where they encountered God in school or on a service trip or on an athletic field or anywhere else. As if this is not enough, the agonizing trial this summer in Concord of a recent St. Paul’s School graduate reminded us all how perilous a world it is for our youth.
The challenges that face children in New Hampshire are of critical concern to me, and it and it pains me deeply to see how God’s children are growing up in an increasingly unsteady and confusing world.
But today we have good news. We have what it takes to bring Gospel light and hope into our communities. As part of the Jesus Movement, we are called to be apostles, which simply means to be sent in Jesus’ name. As apostles, we get to bring the loving concern of Jesus to the youth and at-risk families in our own Galilee, here in the Granite State.
We get to look for those places where God is already at work, showing up to protect, nourish, guide, mentor, teach, and raise youth who are falling off the cliff of a culture that breeds violence, addiction, fear, and hatred toward the neighbor. The call is to GO, to be sent, pushed out of our comfort zone, to wear down the soles of our shoes, to put on our coats and parkas and windbreakers and get out to the playing fields, hockey rinks, dance studios, and classrooms, and cafeterias where all our kids need us.
That’s what it means to be apostolic church, a church that is eager to share in God’s mission rather than waiting for people to come through our intimidating red doors. Our new presiding bishop, Michael Curry, told us at his Installation this week that The Episcopal Church is now committed to two of the hardest things -- not light things or easy things, but essential things.
We are to be about evangelism and reconciliation. We are to be about bearing good news and about bringing together those who have been divided by race, class, nationality, gender, or religion. What the scissor graphs this morning showed as cutting us into divided classes, we can help heal by being apostles.
Let me be blunt. Lamenting over the lost youth in our churches is not apostolic. Stressing over just the right Sunday school curriculum in the hopes that it will be the magic formula to bring in all those kids in town -- along with their pledge-making parents -- is not apostolic. We have for too long bought into the myth that if we had just the right Sunday school teacher, or youth director, the kids would just pour into our churches, like following the Pied Piper of Hamlet.
I’ve seen the annual reports of our churches, and I can tell you it’s a myth. It doesn’t bear up to close scrutiny. And, when we hold on to such myths, such illusions, while expecting different results, we can either be diagnosed as delusional, or be accused of the age-old sin of sloth. Either way, we are not being apostolic. Not being sent.
So here’s what we are called to do: Over the next year, we will establish a new, apostolic Commission for Youth. The Commission’s charter will be to determine the ways our churches are furthering the mission of God to give the children and youth “inquiring and discerning hearts, the courage to will and to persevere, a spirit to know and to love God, and the gift of joy and wonder in all God’s works.”
The Commission will be charged to review ways in which each of our convocations or parishes will partner with others in an effort that will bridge the gap between those kids who come to church and those who don’t; between those who can get supplemental tutoring for their SAT’s and those who don’t; between those who can afford to go to private schools and those who don’t. The question, “Why aren’t kids coming to church anymore?” needs to be transformed by the waters of our baptism to “Why isn’t the Church where Our Kids are?”
To get this party for Our Kids started, I am requesting that this Convention approve the 2016 proposed budget, as Amended, which designates over $46,000 for youth and young adult ministry. Additionally, I am pleased to announce that, thanks to a generous donor who wishes to support the Jesus Movement here in New Hampshire, we will be able to make even more funds available in the near future.
By similar fundraising and budgeting, I want to make $100,000 available in the 2017 budget for after-school programs, mentorships, music and art schools that reach those kids that would otherwise be excluded from such opportunities. (Just to remind us, the total funding in this area of our mission in 2015 was $29,000, only $5,000 of that was for children).
More effective than hiring another staff position in Diocesan House, a Commission will actually go out to see the way that godly people, whether Episcopal or not, are already furthering God’s mission among all our children and then come back to seek the prayers and the support of the Church. That’s the one, holy, apostolic church that we believe in.
We heard of several ways this morning of how we can partner with schools, agencies, and organizations that are already doing the mission of God.
What if we heard Jesus speak to you right now, right here in the Grappone Center in Concord, telling us this: “Your parochial report may tell you that you have less than a dozen kids in your church. But I say unto you, you have several hundreds in your parish, the region that falls within the influence of your church. I am already out there among them,” says, Jesus. “I’m waiting for you. When are you going to go out and meet me out there, in the Galilees of New Hampshire?”
Epiphany Church, Newport heard the voice of Jesus say that. They met with the principal of the Middle School across the street. Many parents have to get to work early in the morning and have to leave their kids at the school, but the school can’t open early enough to in the day. So members of the newly formed team ministry of St. Andrew’s, New London and Epiphany get up way early, just like the first apostles did at the empty tomb on the first Easter. They welcome children before the school hours, keep them safe, get to know who they are and to hear their stories. Apostolic.
St. Paul’s, Lancaster and St. Mark’s, Groveton, Trinity, Claremont, Grace, East Concord, all feed children who would otherwise go hungry during school or during the weekend when school lunch is not available. St.John’s, Portsmouth, and Union, Claremont, St. John’s, Walpole, St. Andrew’s, Hopkinton all seek to strengthen children through the healthy discipline of art or music. St. Andrew’s, Manchester invites students from West Manchester High School to partner with them in feeding the hungry and they offer a scholarship to a college bound senior committed to a life of service.
That’s being apostolic. These are Our Kids, and God’s mission.
The Gospel says, “Go!” and we are going.
Apostolic evangelism is not about “come and see” as much as it is about “go and listen.” Go and be formed and shaped by the people we encounter in the parks where addicts hang out, on the soccer fields where kids are striving, in the homeless shelters and soup kitchens, on the committees for social justice and environmental stewardship, in our prisons where art classes and bible studies are offered, in the halls of the State House when we advocate against the death penalty and work for gun safety.
Wherever we go is a chance to find Jesus and join God’s mission. Go. The model for evangelism that Jesus showed wasn’t one that would have us hunker down in safe church bunkers until we feel adequately prepared for mission. He said, “Go, seek me in Galilee,” which is to say, outside the religious establishment, among the secular, the spiritual but non-religious, and among those whose religion does not look like our own.
The presence of the Resurrected Jesus presence is not weak. It is powerful, stronger than death. It embraces all. We learn about and become like Jesus in the seeking, in the serving, in the listening. So, here are some examples of how the Episcopal Church of New Hampshire is poised for a new age of mission:
Thanks to the dedicated and courageous efforts of Grace Church, East Concord, they have been endorsed as the first Episcopal Service Corps Center in northern New England, choosing the name of Assisi House after St. Francis of Assisi.
Assisi House will host five young adults in an intentional residential community of prayer and service. The interns will be sent to serve in social service agencies that address issues such as poverty, care for the creation, and homelessness as they practice showing up, telling stories, splashing water, sharing food and witnessing how God surprises.
With the ambitious apostolic vision of a little seasonal chapel on the Seacoast, we are actively exploring building a community of women who seek freedom from the shackles of human trafficking, domestic violence, and sexual exploitation. Based on the pioneering work of the Rev. Becca Stevens and her sisters at the Magdalene Project and Thistle Farm in Nashville, we are gathering funds and energy to proclaim, “love heals” and bring release to the captives and good news to the oppressed. That same chapel is also setting aside funds for a new curate position, being envisioned as we speak, to do critical mission work.
Last year, in faith of a promised but unforeseen future, the Convention voted to allow Trinity Church, Tilton to close. This happened in February.
Since then we have established close communication with leaders in that town who are eager and excited for this building to be an economic, social and spiritual center in their community. We will soon be reviewing proposals from town leaders as, together, we envision this property as a centerpiece of the downtown.
Likewise, I am seriously considering the establishment of a new Episcopal worshipping community in Franklin or Tilton. The Spirit of Christ is urging us to go to this suffering part of our State and find Jesus. One of the windows of the former St. Jude’s Church depicts a phoenix rising from the ashes of desolation. The phoenix has become a sign of crucifixion, resurrection and stored hope. We are being guided by the light of Christ to bring hope to those in the grips of despair, addiction, poverty and who feel forgotten by the Church.
To be apostolic means that we will strive to establish up to three new missions a year…that’s right, three new missions every year, where God’s people, expelled from the waters of our baptism, will be sent out in mission to meet the risen Christ. Whether on the streets of Tilton or Manchester, on the ships in the port of Portsmouth, in the schools of the Groveton and Lancaster, in the prisons of Berlin or Goffstown, God’s mission is happening already, we just have to go after it.
Here’s the thing: when we do these apostolic things, I promise you, we will not be siphoning off energy or resources from the congregations. In fact, our churches will be reenergized and renewed. Every church that is involved in its community is enlivened, just like the most robust of the vines that insinuate and push out of the limit of the pot which can both nourish but limit its growth.
The churches that are growing in that way, you know who you are. The parishes that are not actively involved with the community are suffering from a kind of fetid claustrophobic enmeshment. And you know who you are. The good news is that the Jesus Movement seeks to push you out of the tomb and unbind you to show the glory of God.
To paraphrase Jesus:
“Go. Make disciple of all the nations, imbuing them with the water of life in the name of the God whose love draws all into true freedom and life: the Creator, Christ, and Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I will be with you always to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:19-20)
Thank you.
“In the wake of what has now become an endemic part of American life—a mass shooting in a peaceful community of personal growth and learning—I hope the members of the Episcopal Church of New Hampshire are not lulled into a spiritual torpor. In our prayers may the Holy Spirit pierce our numbness with sharp empathy for those who mourn the dead and for those who are wounded in Roseburg, Oregon. In our actions, may God lead us to the courage of Jesus who faced down the powers of dominating violence, not with more violence, but with death-destroying love shown on the Cross.
Baptized members of the risen Body of Christ are called to resist the temptation of allowing the heinous actions of a distorted soul to make us more violent. Christians who advocate to take up more weapons in reaction to these acts of evil betray the meaning of our having already triumphed over death in our baptism. Fear is not a Christian virtue or habit of being, and yet, tragically, we continually cower in the face of those who equate unlimited accessibility to guns with the way of Jesus. May God lead us through the wounds of these horrible events to a place of deeper trust in God and not the proliferation of deadly weapons.”
The Rt. Rev. A. Robert Hirschfeld, Bishop, The Episcopal Church of New Hampshire, 10/2/15
A week ago in Church, we read again of how Jesus travelled outside of his home territory into the Roman province of Syria, more specifically the region of the old cities of Tyre and Sidon. There, He encounters a person of a different ethnicity, religion, gender, and probably even race, than his own.
The story of the “Syrophoenician woman” of Mark’s Gospel provides us a clear and irrefutable response to the provocative question, “What would Jesus do?” When faced with the desperate need and the urgent appeal of a stranger--a person who can claim no cultural or national affinity with Himself--Jesus allows Himself to be moved. Even if he felt initially resistant to helping the Gentile, or “pagan,” he allows his own heart to be opened to feel compassion for the plight of this unnamed foreign woman and her suffering daughter. What would Jesus do? He would allow his own privilege and allegiance to give way to the suffering of the one who humbled herself, asking for mercy.
Also a week ago, we also began to receive the persistent accounts of this woman’s own descendants, Syrians from the same region of the world, who seek to be relieved from the unspeakable violence of the civil war that rends apart that country. We hear of the scores of refugees from the Middle East, including young children, being left for dead in an overheated truck in Austria. We also saw the photograph of the lifeless body of a three-year-old boy, Aylan Kurdi, washed up in a Turkish beach having drowned, along with his mother and five year old brother, as they fled the fighting in their Syrian hometown in the hopes of eventually finding safety with family in Canada.
It’s really not a question of what would Jesus do, as though Jesus were absent now and available to us only as a matter of speculation. It’s a question of what the Risen Body of Jesus Christ, the Church, is doing and is capable of doing, right now, among us. The Bishop of Rome, Pope Francis, has issued a call for every Roman Catholic parish in Europe to provide refuge and sanctuary for at least one refugee household. As I have heard from several congregations now in New Hampshire, I am confident that were we located there, most of our congregations would answer such a call with compassion and hospitality. As the U.S. State Department considers how to bring refugees to communities such as Manchester, Concord and Laconia, we can prepare ourselves to be open as Jesus was, and still is, open to the Syrophoenician woman, who may be coming to New Hampshire.
In the meantime, we pray and work for peace in this and all parts of the world terrorized by violence and war. We pray for those most vulnerable of populations, especially women and girls who are targets of sexual violence perennially used as a weapon of warfare. And, we give of our substance, not just the crumbs that fall from the table, of our own relative abundance.
To learn more about the causes and the extent of this, the worse refugee crisis since World War II, you can go to website for the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR), which maintains a web portal for aid groups in the region to share information and coordinate response: http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/regional.php.
“Refugees From Syria, a Cultural Orientation Backgrounder,” offers provides more information about the unique experiences, trauma, and needs of the Syrian refugee population: http://www.culturalorientation.net/learning/backgrounders.
Or, watch The Episcopal Migration Ministries’ video on “Syria’s Refugees: The Episcopal Church’s Response:” https://vimeo.com/114033002.
President Obama announced this week that while the administration was continuing to examine responses to a refugee crisis, the United States will raise the number of Syrian refugees admitted to at least 10,000 in the new fiscal year beginning in October, from fewer than 2,000 in the current fiscal year. Learn more at https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/09/24/fact-sheet-us-humanitarian-assistance-response-syrian-crisis.
To provide meaningful relief to those affected, I encourage our parishes and people to make contributions or learn more about these partners, who are equipped to help:
Episcopal Migration Ministries
Episcopal Migration Ministries is The Episcopal Church’s foremost response to refugee crises. Working in partnership with offices and groups within the church as well as with governments and non-government organizations (NGOs), Episcopal Migration Ministries assures safe passage and provides vital services for thousands of refugee families upon their arrival in America: English language and cultural orientation classes, employment services, school enrollment, and initial assistance with housing and transportation. For each family, the goal is self-reliance and self-determination. Learn more at: http://www.episcopalchurch.org/page/episcopal-migration-ministries.
Episcopal Relief & Development
Episcopal Relief & Development is the compassionate response to human suffering in the world. Hearing God's call to seek and serve Christ in all persons and to respect the dignity of every human being, Episcopal Relief & Development serves to bring together the generosity of Episcopalians and others with the needs of the world. You can make a gift or learn more at https://www.episcopalrelief.org.
Welcoming America
Welcoming America is a national nonprofit that helps communities achieve prosperity by becoming more welcoming toward immigrants and all residents. National Welcoming Week is celebrated September 12-20. To find events in NH and across the US, visit: http://www.welcomingamerica.org
Ascentria Care Alliance
Ascentria is the local community service organization, which works most closely with the resettlement of refugees, serving their needs socially, spiritually and economically. Inspired by their faith-based heritage, Ascentria “envisions a world in which everyone can realize their fullest potential and share with others in need.” More at
The Missionary Society
The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of the Protestant Episcopal Church pools its members together to advocate for solutions to a variety of pressing issues, including domestic poverty, environmental protection and global justice. More at http://www.episcopalchurch.org/page/missionary-society.
Please download HERE a message from Bishop Hirschfeld and the Lessons appointed for use on the Feast of Jonathan Myrick Daniels, Seminarian and Witness for Civil Rights, 1965.
Bishop HIrschfeld's Baccalaureate Address at Holderness School for Pentecost Sunday, May 24, 2015, Text: Acts 2:1-21
Today is both an end and a beginning.
In the readings we just heard, we learn that today is the day when the earliest disciples no longer could claim a special status as having known Jesus personally. Suddenly, everyone had access to the power of God through the communication of the Spirit. If the small band of apostles thought they were special, or privileged, or were truly religious, then after Pentecost, the day of the spreading of the Spirit, anyone who had ears to hear, or whose heart was open to it, had within them the power of God to heal, to forgive, to bring justice and hope to a world that was broken and full of despair.
As Peter quoted from the Hebrew Bible:
In the last days it will be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young shall see visions,
and your old shall dream dreams. (Joel 2:28-29)
The disciples had been thinking that they had true religion, they had a unique relationship with the Resurrected Jesus because they knew the Jesus personally. But after Pentecost, all who heard and received the message that God’s love and justice and peace was stronger than anything that humanity could accomplish in this world, anyone could claim to be a child of God. All people who accepted the Spirit could be drawn into the Presence of God. All those strangers, (and congratulations, by the way to the young man who read so well all those strange names) all those foreigners, all those people from outside Judea now could say that they may not be religious in the old sense, but they were spiritual. Because the Spirit does not care were you come from, or what family you were born into, or who wealthy you are, or even what faith you practice, the Spirit just wants you to know that you are made in the image of God, and God will never leave you alone.
How many continents do we have represented here. We know we have students from North America, of course. How many here are from Central America? South America? How many are from the Pacific Rim? From China? Korea? Vietnam? India? How many from one of the many countries in Africa? How about the Middle East? Central Europe? Western Europe?
Would it be safe to say that there are maybe a dozen languages represented in this room? At least! And yet, over the past few years you have all learned to speak the special language of Holderness. There is something about your being here with each other that has shaped how you will meet and greet the experiences ahead of you. To speak Holderness you learn the grammar of the outdoors through your Outback, you learn the vocabulary of snow, of activity, of art, of mutual support and care, of striving and accomplishment, of laughter, of sorrow, of concern for those who are less fortunate than you. All these make up a language, and it’s a language of the Spirit of this place. Whether you are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindi, Buddhist, questioning, atheist, agnostic, whether you relished your times in this Chapel or you suffered through them with while grinding your teeth, this school helped teach you how to communicate love, curiosity, care, a hunger for truth and a thirst of justice. We all can understand that language. That’s Pentecost.
When the fiery Spirit came down with the power to communicate in language that had not been spoken or understood before, God shows that true religion is not about all being of the same mind, or looking the same, or praying the same, or having the same talents or viewpoints. Rather, God’s power is made known in difference, in conflict, in confusion, in surprise, in reconciliation, in making spectacular mistakes. That’s what it means to be truly spiritual but not religious. And any religion that does not make room for difference, or failure, or questioning, is not at all spiritual. I urge you to run away from that as fast as you can. It may be that that kind of religion may be the most urgent crisis that you will face in your time: religion that is devoid of the Spirit of love always leads to violence, and brutality of the soul and of the body.
So here you are, many languages, many nations, about to spread out into the world with the language of Holderness in your hearts and in your minds. The grammar of Pro deo et pro genero humano. For God and for humankind. Go look for God’s deeds of power. You will see them. Come back and tell us of them. We will be listening.
As I said, today is an ending. The Holderness you have known will cease to be the moment you step off this campus. Sure there will be things you will recognize, but it won’t be the same because this particular assembly of friends, faculty, classmates, staff, won’t be here. That may be sad. But that’s what happens when brings forth a new birth. Something comes to completion. Ends. Even dies in a sense
And as many people refer to Pentecost as the birthday of the Church, so it is also your birthday in a sense, as you celebrate a commencement, a fresh beginning, and your readiness to learn and create worlds of meaning and purpose. Seek the Spirit. It brought you here. The Spirit guided you and protected you while you were here. And in an hour or so you will be expelled from Holderness. The Spirit is now expelling you out from here so that you will serve God and humankind in ways that only you can.
Amen.
“When our hearts are wintry, grieving, or in pain,
Thy touch can call us back to life again,
Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.”
Wintry hearts. Fields dead and bare. For many of us in New Hampshire, suffering from cabin fever and severe snow-fatigue, the springing green that accompanies the celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus is almost bewildering. What does bare ground even look like? Green leaves? Flowers? Some may even say, “I forget. What does the skin of my arms and legs even look like in the light of day?”
On my desk is a postcard reproduction of the Italian Renaissance artist Andrea del Sarto’s rendering of Jesus at the moment of his returning to life from the dead in the tomb. Del Sarto’s “Pieta” is the only depiction that I have found in the whole world of visual arts of that mysterious moment. Even the writers of the Gospels withdraw from that scene, choosing instead to say simply that the tomb is empty. Del Sarto instead takes us into the tomb before the first witnesses of the Rising arrive to show us a quiet Jesus contemplating both the past days and the future. Our Lord is sitting up, as though for the first time, examining the openings in his hands and feet. The wound in his side is subtly shown, but raw. The soft palette of the fresco almost invite us to hear his first breaths filling again with air, exhales echoing in hewn stone.
It’s a pause just before the world will be turned upside down as he walks out from the tomb, the stone rolled away. Soon he will appear to the women, and then the other disciples, and then the two walking on the road to Emmaus. Soon he will set in motion the movement of Life that we move forward today. But for now, in the tomb as imagined by del Sarto, he appears himself quite possibly overwhelmed and bewildered by what has happened, even if he himself told us it would happen this way.
In many ways this pause is exactly where the Church is today. The Church has been crucified, hasn’t it? It has been pushed to the side of our society and the spheres of influence, status, and privilege. In some places of the world, such as we saw on the shores of Libya, we are watching a new age of Christian martyrdom. We remember Jonathan Daniels in that same light. The days when Church did not have to compete with youth activities and programs are long gone. The days when political parties took serious notice of our witness for peace, mercy, and justice in the name of God are also fast fading. So, the image of Jesus, just waking up to what is real and true after the crucifixion is in a deep sense the image we have of the Church in our day. Not triumphant, not muscular, but no longer asleep either. What a beautifully freeing place to be! We are learning to live again, ready to step outside the stone cave, curious about what comes next.
Of course, Jesus is not only curious about his body. When he appears to the disciples after the Third Day, he starts asking questions: “Whom are you looking for? What are you discussing along the way? Have you tried putting the nets on the other side of the boat? Do you love me?” His questions lead others not merely to believing, but to belonging.
Could it be that to the extent we are not curious about what God is doing in the lives of our neighbors and our world, we remain in the tomb, gaping at our wounds. But marvelously, everywhere the Church is curious is we are waking up to new life, as though sitting up once again with new wind in our lungs. So I hope you will spend this Eastertide with patterning your life on the inquisitiveness of Jesus and ask things like “What’s going on with my neighbors? Who lived here anyway? What are we discussing along the way? Who’s hungry? Who, like our Savior, is wounded? Who are we not noticing? How is God showing up in this place?”
As it was at the first Easter, it is again time for questions such as these to lead us out of our tombs into the new life in Jesus. Then may our wintry hearts warm again to the life that springeth green!
I have been watching CNN’s coverage of the demonstrations taking place all over the country. Crowds have been gathering, mostly peacefully, in the wake of the grand jury acquittals of two white police officers whose actions lead to the deaths of two black men: Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York.
The news coverage of the demonstrations included camera footage of Mr. Garner’s death, the result of being in a “choke hold” by the officer who clearly used excessive force in an attempt to arrest him. On the film, I saw Mr. Garner:
—questioning why he was being confronted by the police
— being surrounded by at least five police officers
—being held around the neck by an officer in a t-shirt
—falling to the ground
—having his head pinned to the sidewalk
—pleading for relief by saying numerous times, “I can’t breathe.”
—lying motionless, possibly dead, on his side for several minutes while the police did not attempt to revive him using CPR nor take any other life-saving actions.
This is what we all saw. We are witness of these things.
That sentence brings me to the accounts we have in the Bible of the events of Jesus birth, life, and resurrection. What does being a witness mean? Telling the truth? Believing what we’ve seen? Sharing it? Allowing our lives to be changed by the truth?
On the same day I saw the video of Mr. Garner’s death, I had gathered with clergy of the Episcopal Church in New Hampshire for a time of prayer and study of St. Luke’s account of Jesus’ birth. Here’s some things I learned:
—the principals involved in the birth of Jesus, the Christ, were a teenage girl (Mary) and elderly and barren woman (Elizabeth) and a group of anonymous shepherds. All of whom, by reason of their gender, age, and economic class and occupation, would have been ineligible to bear witness to any jury or court of their day. Whatever they had to say about that first noel would not have been given credence to those who held either religious or civic power in their day.
—Zechariah, the only one who would have a had credible status in his community, was rendered mute, as though God chose to circumvent the structures of power, status, and institutional authority to bring the events of Jesus’ and John’s births to pass.
—Mary’s song of praise that shouts of how God has already turned the world upside down by scattering the proud, casting down the mighty, lifting up the lowly, filling the hungry with good thing and sending the rich away empty—that song was not sung in lofty King James’ English, but in a rough dialect that was spoken on the streets of her day. When we hear the language and dialects of those most hurt by the agonies in Ferguson, Cleveland, New York City, Los Angeles and elsewhere, we can note the cultural division in our land. And we can hear the language of Mary---broken, course, uneducated, dangerous, and yet shimmering.
And now in a bizarre twist, we find ourselves, millions of us, who have been witnesses to these tragedies, equally discredited as witnesses. What we have seen and heard with our own eyes and ears doesn’t seem to matter to the systems and structures, the “powers and principalities” with which we have entrusted our welfare. We find our ability to “testify” shares the same ineligible status as Mary, Elizabeth, the shepherds, and the muted Zechariah.
May God loosen our tongues, and open the ears of those who can hear the cry of the poor and the disenfranchised in our land. May we, like John the Baptizer, prepare the way of God’s realm by crying out in this wilderness. Though we may do that from the margins of our society, (the church is now, blessedly, more and more on those margins), may our testimony be as enduring and shimmering as those unheard of women in Jesus’ day: Mary, Elizabeth, and Anna, each of whom rejoiced at the arrival of the Holy One in their day.
Restore us, O God of hosts; *
show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved.
Turn now, O God of hosts, look down from heaven;
behold and tend this vine; *
preserve what your right hand has planted.
We have work to do. We have work to do. And it’s the sweetest work anyone can be called to. We get to tend the Vine that is the mission of God in the world. We get to join the work of God whose delight it is to bring fruitfulness to what God has planted.
Let’s face it, for many of us, the work we have felt called to perform has been thankless, onerous, bearing meagre fruit. In some of our churches, we keep having to do more with less. For many of us, our buildings, though in the past were centers of community gathering, learning, and hospitality, are now more often sources of stress and fatigue. We wonder where the youth are. We wonder where the people are. We wonder why things are not quite like they used to be.
When you leave this convention tomorrow, and your neighbor will ask you what did you do this weekend, what will you say? Perhaps you’ll say, “We went to Concord. We heard the bishop talk. We voted on a budget, on what clergy should be reasonably paid. We voted on the status of a struggling congregation in the middle of the state. We voted on a position on capital punishment. We sang some songs. We heard about the work of the diocese.” The diocese.
And your neighbors might ask, “what’s a diocese?” Or they may ask, “So how’s the diocese in New Hampshire doing? Growing anywhere? Any more youth or children in church? What does a diocese do anyway?” And then maybe your friends and family members will shake their heads with a mixture of sympathy or befuddlement.
But what if, when they asked you what you did this weekend, you said, “You know what?, I re- joined a movement. I showed up for a cause, the most important in my life. I decided to join the Mission of God to restore a fallen world full of injustice, cruelty, anger, decay, damage. I heard again, but as though for the first time, that I am connected to a cause that is greater than my own self-interest. I found that instead of just another pledging unit, I am nourishing a web of relationship and concern that I need to live and that needs me to live. Instead of being counted as another who makes up the ASA the Average Sunday Attendance, I am essential because every encounter I have, from Monday to Saturday, adds to the number of Average Weekly Encounters with God we have in the world. So more than just ASA (average Sunday attendance) my life increases the Average Weekly Encounters--AWE.”
We got work to do, but it’s sweet and awesome work because it’s the work that brings joy to God’s heart.
Here’s the sweet and awe-filled work that I see we have to do in this part of the Vineyard that we know as the Episcopal Church in New Hampshire. Yes, I’m calling it the Church of New Hampshire, and not the diocese. This is because we are all called into this fellowship of love, of abiding together, of tending the vine together. I’ve only been bishop for two years, and I’m already tiring of being linked to a bureaucratic word that divides me and the bishop’s office from the life of the parishes I am coming to love, and the schools, and all the ways we find to worship and serve God.
So how do we tend the vine?
I’ve come to see that there are Five Practices, five activities that are how we share the work of God, the Divine Vinedresser.
First, We show up.
We present ourselves. We make an opening in our lives for God when we stop and say God is here and I want to be present for God, in my own life, in my community, in my family, friends and neighbor, familiar or stranger. You showed up today. You said no to certain things that you could have done today, in order to be changed by encounters beyond your control. We show up when we pray, placing ourselves in the steadfast and surprising Presence of God who is beyond our control, but who loves us. We show up in our ministries in the world. We show up to discover how is God making God’s-self known in this crisis in my town, in my family. The two most frequent words Jesus uses are “listen” and “go.” We show up because as part of a living vine, we are destined for growth, exploration, and fruitfulness
The Church in New Hampshire is being called to show up in some curious ways. We used to think that showing up for youth and children meant having Sunday School rooms full. We relied on families to show up on Sunday, saying no to the cultural machine that says, in effect, unless your child makes the soccer or the hockey team or first seat in the school orchestra or accomplishes, they will not succeed in life. We have effectively lost the competition for Sunday morning. And then we lament that failure. But children feel connected to the Vine when they see adults from their church communities show up for these events, cheering them on, showing healthy curiosity and showing concern. The Church of the Holy Vine in New Hampshire is a church that stretches out beyond itself. Sometimes we resist going out and listening. We are more accustomed to staying and waiting for God to being the people to us, and then we feel a sense of failure and frustration when they do not come. When God asks “whom shall we send to bear witness to God?” we have bright examples in our midst of our churches going out and saying, “Here we are. Send us!” Here’s one example:
Twenty-one years ago, there was an epidemic of teenage suicide in Goffstown. The church there could have easily hunkered down, paying attention to its own membership and buried its head in the sand to the multiple tragedies that brought national attention. Instead the ministers both lay and ordained of St. Matthew’s went out. Actually, to hear Father Bill Exner tell it, he and others in the church had been knocking on their doors for a long time before the crisis reached epidemic proportions. They initiated a practice of monthly conversations with others in the community and created a way to have ongoing conversations with school administrators, educators, parents, children, youth, teachers, to talk about the deepest most pressing concerns facing youth today. Those conversations continue, and the whole community of Goffstown is the stronger for it. They are now considering addressing the concerns not only of middle and high school students, but of the distressed population of young adults in their twenties. That’s showing up. That’s going and listening. I am learning that the most lively churches and the most effective leadership in the Church of New Hampshire is when the ministers, both lay and ordained, see themselves not so much as taking care of St. Matthew’s, or Trinity, or St. Andrew’s, or Good Shepherd, but they say that the church is showing up, in Christ’s name, and for Christ’s sake, for Goffstown, or Colebrook, or New London. We show up.
Second Practice, We Tell the Story.
Stories are the way the seeming chaos of our lives is joined and brought to order within the overarching story of God in Christ. The story of the Vine itself is only one example of a story that stretches back from the Creation where Adam and Eve were tasked to take care of the Garden, to the days of the prophets Isaiah and Micah, to the great parables of Jesus to the carvings and drawings on so many of our vessels from which we eat and drink from the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. When you tell a story, virtually any story, you can find a way to connect it to the stories of God’s people seeking meeting and life and relationship.
We are people of a story. The story of “our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life, and above all of the redemption of the world through our Lord Jesus Christ”, is actually a constellation of countless stories. We are our stories. Stories shape our understanding of reality. The Gospel is simply “the good story” that gathers up all of our stories of failure, loss, success and renewal, hate and love. The failure of the Church to include children and youth in our life is not so much a failure of low numbers in Sunday School, but a failure of all of us to creatively find ways to share our story. As a result children find themselves ill-equipped to face the colossal and threatening forces that take them away from the love of God. Telling the story is about forming Christians for the 21st century. The forming and education of Christians is undergoing a radical and rattling change. Sunday School for many churches does not work anymore as a means to share the story. But every other Wednesday during Family Worship led by Grace Burson, Rector of Holy Spirit, Plymouth, the story is actively shared in the Dining Hall of the Holderness School. And the number of participants in Weld Hall rivals what happens in the Church of the Holy Spirit on Sunday Morning.
I sometimes wonder if we might do better to stop trying explain what the Bible says in our sermons, but just retold the story without explanation. Let the power of the story do its own work. Or if we held open mic opportunities for members of our communities “members or not” to share their own stories of healing, forgiveness, grace, hope and resurrection. The St. Mark’s in the Bowery Poetry project, now at least fifty years old, is one example of the vine reaching out to the outside community of writers, playwrights and poets and being interwoven into the Vine through the Word made flesh. What stories are waiting to be told in our congregations to link us to the world and to God?
Third practice: We splash water.
Jesus’ baptism was not something that excluded him or set him apart. He wasn’t joining an elitist tradition of religious fanatics when he went out to the Jordan. He wasn’t looking to separate himself from the wounded creation or from the full catastrophe of human society. When he entered those waters, Jesus immersed himself into both the infinite possibilities and the infinite tragedies of being human. When we pour water at a baptism, or when we splash water on our faces when entering a church, we remind ourselves that we are joined with Christ in his complete joining of the human race. We also acknowledge that we are part of a wounded creation that needs our care because we cannot live apart from it. When we splash water at our baptism or when we enter a church, we proclaim the cosmic truth expressed by the South African Nguni Bantu word Ubuntu, which means “I am because you are.” My soul, my life, my personhood, my dignity depends on your soul, your personhood, your dignity. And my life, my personhood, my dignity depends on the health and vitality of the creation. Water is what connects all of us, spiritually and as a church, water is how we can ensure the growth and vitality of the Vine.
So, let’s invite anyone who wants to live in the Ubuntu of Jesus to enter those waters. Let’s see some baptisms, for God’s sake. I saw a Parish Register this year whose last baptism was in Bishop Phil Smith’s episcopate. (That was in the 70’s, my friends.) Likely, that was a matter of sloppy record keeping rather than actual practice, but still. In my travels around the Church of New Hampshire, I’ve encountered congregations who would prefer to be isolated and cut off from their neighborhood, preferring instead to just keep to their own. The waters of our baptism, like the waters of the Red Sea, expel us to join the mission of God in the world even if we would sometimes pine for the old days of our bondage. One reminder of that inclusion and expulsion would be to take those ornate and carefully carved lids off the fonts around here, and get some water in those fonts, let’s celebrate that God wakes us up with the water of new life from the nightmare of separateness from the creation and from each other, from other races, classes, other political parties. Here’s another way we can celebrate God’s mission of Ubuntu by splashing water:
Might we be called to show up in a laundry mat, as is being done in other parts of The Episcopal Church. Small teams, maybe of only two apostles (which, remember, simply means person who is sent) offer to pay for and do the laundry of those who use a coin-up laundry. They offer to pray for whatever is on their heart. Before long a community forms. One such a community of “Laundry Love” gained enough strength that Bishop Jon Bruno of Los Angeles actually ordained a deacon to help support it, and the ordination took place in the laundry mat. That’s showing up. That’s tending a vine that has stretched beyond the ivy-covered towers. Vines need watering. Let’s go find some ways to splash it around.
Fourth, We share the food.
Tomorrow we will approach a table, just as you we all do every Sunday morning and at other times during with week. We will share a time of divine invasion into the work of our Convention as our prayers will call the Holy Spirit to transform our gifts of bread and wine into the very presence of the Risen Christ. We will share this most holy food, we can do no other. And when we do that, we will become once again what we receive, the hands and feet and heart and eyes of Jesus Christ. We will become what the world so hungers and thirsts for us to become, fellow servants of God for a broken world.
Because we can share it in a convention center as well as we can share it in the most meticulously cared for, and venerated, gothic arched chancel, we can be bearers of God’s death-defying forgiveness, peace, and justice in the world. When the world sees us, with all of our conflicts and complaints, in all of our glamour and our poverty, gathering reconciled at the eucharistic Altar, the world rightfully comes to expect that we extend that same thanksgiving meal in prisons, from the ChIPs program to Death Row, in feeding programs, at our workplaces, on the streets, the laundry mats, behind the ballot curtains, in the marbled halls where just laws are being fashioned in the State House.
And when the world sees us not caring, not exhibiting the same compassion that Jesus had for the hungry crowd who seems to him helpless and harassed, like sheep without a shepherd, the world will quite understandably dismiss us as self-absorbed with our own survival. The place where youth and young adults seem most to connect with our aging denomination is when we, unabashedly in the name of Jesus, go out into the highways and byways, the shelters, the tent cities here in Concord, in the wounded earth, and among the dispossessed, and show leadership by service. Will Pendleton, of Christ Church, Exeter, is our first representative in the Young Adult Service Corps, having returned from Cuba as a servant leader. The Young Adult Service Corps, and the Episcopal Service Corps, are like an Episcopal Peace Corps, offering opportunities for young adults in their twenties to serve those in need, both locally and abroad, and to experience the mission of God in the world. We hope in the coming year or two to establish such a mission here in New Hampshire, to serve the communities among us that are finding themselves off-the-grid of the economic recovery. Places like Tilton and Franklin, Coos and Sullivan counties are places where we might plant new vines where God can give the growth in ways we can only imagine.
The connection between how we share the holy food of the altar, and how we establish justice was made crystal clear to us in the words of Jesus: The words “when you do it the least of these, you do it to me” are St. Matthew’s version of saying, “All are meant to be connected in the vine. See your selves and others as separate from the vine only at your spiritual and economic peril. “ Episcopalians, of every political party. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Episcopalian, Republican spoke some shimmering words that I recently discovered framed and hung on the walls of Edgerton House, our center for chaplaincy at Dartmouth College. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
Ike got it. He tended the Vine. How are we sharing the food to tend the vine of a peaceful society? Where are we being called to share the food, in the coming year?
The Last Practice is not something we do, but something we watch for: God Surprises
It’s God’s life breaking through into the life of our Church, into the life of the world. There are many ways God surprises, and as sure as I am standing here, I know that each of us can list at least several surprises of the past year. Surprises of how God brought delight to us when we saw persons in our church, people who had been at enmity with each other, find a way to reconcile. That is always a surprise, even when we spend our days striving and praying for it. In a world marked by the need for retribution and violence, a world addicted to holding grudges, to angry rhetoric and partisanship, in a world of such coarseness as ours, never, never take reconciliation and forgiveness for granted.
But, let me list a few other godly surprises that I’ve seen over the past year.
When I asked at St. John’s, Walpole during a baptism of a child if anybody else wanted to wade in the water and a father and his teenage son nudged themselves through the pews and got themselves pretty drenched and something stirred among the whole congregation. God surprised us all then.
When Hannah Anderson convened a group of souls at St. Andrew’s, Manchester to be trained in Servant Leadership fifteen persons showed up, more than 9 congregations were represented and are on fire for bringing Gospel servanthood into our communities. That is a God Surprise.
I was surprised by the openness by which the good and faithful people at Trinity, Tilton chose to live into the hope of the resurrection, even as they face the strong likelihood of their closing. The parish church, one expression of God’s community, sometimes may need to so radically transform itself, so fundamentally alter how it is faithful to the Spirit, that it needs, like a grain of wheat, to die. The conversations continue, though with sadness and grief, into the unknown. But surprisingly, new people that God has brought to that church will continue to gather among themselves, or in the nearby congregation, to wait in prayer and silence, a wilderness of some kind, without jumping into an easy remedy too hastily. Though the conversations have been stressful and painful and direct, we can be surprised by the sense that God is showing up in some new way that asks us to show up. If this decision feels like a pruning, a cutting off, it’s important to remind ourselves that what is being pruned is a building and a way of being that has brought more suffering and pain in recent years than life. It is not people who are being pruned, they are being loved into a new way of being and worship and service that is full of the light and joy rather than anxiety and burden of an institution.
God surprised me when Tim Breen, the Head of School, and the Trustees, of the White Mountain School chose to reaffirm and reclaim its roots by including this sentence in its new mission statement: “Grounded in our Episcopal heritage, we prepare and inspire students to lead lives of curiosity, courage and compassion.” The trustees are looking at architectural rendering of a new chapel. The Head and Trustees of the Holderness School are also looking at plans for an enlargement and refurbishment of its Chapel of the Holy Cross and having open conversations about how to strengthen its spiritual life program for its students. What surprises me is the movement toward being what Bishop Andy Doyle calls “unabashedly Episcopalian.” We may hear ourselves saying to a skeptical world, “As an Episcopalian I am a Christian but I’m not closed hearted, rigid in my thinking, or fearful of those who act and believe differently than I. Instead, I am beginning to hear schools like the White Mountain and Holderness say, “It is Because we are Episcopalian, that we are curious, compassionate and courageous when facing the unknown and the challenges of world.” Do you hear the difference? That’s God surprising us in a place we wouldn't have expected.
I was surprised by the presence of members and leaders of the Lutheran, Roman Catholic, United Church of Christ, and other denominations in the state house and state senate on Maundy Thursday, as we bore witness against the death penalty on the eve Good Friday. Marti Hunt of St. Andrew’s, Hopkinton and Father Dan Ferry of Grace Church, Manchester, and many others, urged us to show up and stand up to say that because of the execution and resurrection of God in Jesus the violence of the death penalty, has no place in God’s kingdom of mercy and justice. God surprised me by the leadership of those who will continue that work and witness, work and witness which we are invited to continue tomorrow afternoon when we come to our resolutions.
As I was writing this address a surprise arrived in the mail in the form of an approval of a grant from the United Thank Offering to help fund our observance next summer of the 50th anniversary of the martyrdom of Jonathan Daniels. Next year, we will be invited to hear some powerful preaching at blessed Jonathan’s home parish in Keene, and at other places in New Hampshire, and to participate in a civil rights pilgrimage in the south that ultimately leads to the site of Jonathan’s witness to God’s justice for all God’s children. When you become aware of God’s surprises and you begin to give thanks for them, the more they seem to land in our laps. The Vine wants to grow. It’s what vines do.
When I gathered the clergy a few times over the course of the past year, and despite vast, differences in circumstances, part-time, full-time, rural, or urban, suburban, some of their churches burgeoning with growth, others just hanging on, all of them facing seismic changes in how we are the Body of Christ in a society that world, I do not take for granted the depth of respect, mutual concern, and prayerfulness among them. It is a deep honor to serve them and the all people of this Church, this part of the vineyard. Even as we find old unfruitful ways of serving God are being trained to grow in new ways, and even pruned, may we continue to abide with each other and in Jesus who is doing some new and powerful things among us. God surprises because that is the nature of a God who is ultimately beyond our knowing, but who loves us deeper than we can love and care for ourselves.
So, come, let us tend the vine, together with God.
Turn now, O God of hosts, look down from heaven; behold and tend this vine; *
And let us help, for in aiding you we will find our life restored, refreshed, and renewed. Here we are, O, Lord, send us!
