Sermon: The Rev. Gary Jones
St. Stephen’s, Richmond
Jan. 24, 2014 – 219th Annual Council
I love our bishops’ exhortations that we should look for the new thing the Holy Spirit is doing.And after this morning’s presentations, I can see we don’t have to look far.This church’s (St. Paul’s Church’s) Downtown Mission; St. Andrew’s Church’s intentional community; the touching and deeply moving ministry at Buck Mountain, Earlysville; the vitality at the Falls Church and the Church of the Resurrection; the amazing GIRLs at St. George’s, Fredericksburg. The list is goes on and on.
But I’m convinced the Holy Spirit is active beyond the church in ways that should get our attention.
The cover of Time magazine this week is entitled “The Mindful Revolution,” and it pictures a young woman dressed in Lu Lu Lemon in a meditation pose.I’ve heard that the most popular time for yoga classes in many major cities is Sunday morning.What is the Holy Spirit doing?
We live in a noisy, information saturated, multi-tasking world, and people know something is wrong.I just sometimes wonder why so many people seem to be looking everywhere but the church for answers.
When Oprah hosted a web-based discussion on meditation with Eckhart Tolle a few years ago, so many tried to log on that it ended up crashing Oprah’s website.The amazing thing is that Eckhart Tolle is simply popularizing ideas and practices that have been a part of the Christian tradition since the days of Desert Monasticism, Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine of Hippo.Apparently, we’ve been distracted with other things.
It’s enough to make you believe that the Holy Spirit is going to reach out and care for people with or without the church.And this is one reason we started offering Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction classes at St. Stephen’s Church.We are constantly over-subscribed, and other contemplative groups, yoga classes, Tai Chi, and Centering Prayergroups are popping up all the time.Some people quickly make the association between our Centering Prayer offerings and the 14th Century Anglican work, The Cloud of Unknowing, which in fact is the basis for Centering Prayer, but who cares if the Holy Spirit is flying under the radar and getting to people without the churchy labels?“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” so we don’t about that.
It doesn’t surprise me that often the largest of our six Sunday services is the quieter and more meditative Celtic service.And with a single cantor instead of several paid choir members, it also happens to be one of the least expensive of all our worship services.
The Holy Spirit seems to be moving in other interesting ways at St. Stephen’s.One of our largest congregations is our weekly Farmers Market, attended by people who might not want anything to do with organized religion, but who are serious about caring for creation and their own bodies.Lots of young people with strollers, lots of dogs, lively, foot-tapping musicians, joggers meeting for morning coffee, … all manner of folk coming together at a church.We like to think of it as a modern village green; and it frequently occurs to people to bless each other there in our church parking lot.“God bless you,” I hear people say to each other as I pass by incognito in my sunglasses and jeans, “I’ll be praying for you.”And some, who apparently have no interest in institutional religion, but who feel at home on the church grounds during our market, some of these people, particularly in times of crisis, tend to seek refuge with us, and ultimately join our worship or our community meals.
We don’t report such people as official members of St. Stephen’s to the diocese or the larger Episcopal Church bureaucracy, but they know they truly belong.
A friend of mine who is rector of one of the largest churches in the country recently told me that his church was thinking about opening a “Center for Spirituality” in his city – a place off campus where people could go to learn about meditation and other spiritual practices, take classes on healthy eating, and so on.
But wait a minute, I thought.Isn’t the church supposed to be a “center for spirituality”?I think my friend was simply acknowledging that many spiritual seekers today are so put off by the agenda of Christian churches that you have to start a whole new entity to attract them.I get it.But our experience at St. Stephen’s suggests that it’s not too late for us parish churches to become what we really are, centers for life-changing spirituality that leads people to lives of greater compassion and engagement with God, the world, and themselves.
And lest I give you the wrong impression, I should emphasize that at St. Stephen’s, we experience tremendous vitality in our ancient liturgies.Four of our six Sunday services are strictly according to the Book of Common Prayer, and Daily Morning Prayer every day of the week is sometimes painfully rubrical.But our experience is that if it is reverent and prayerful, if we are truly spiritually present, God is nowhere more powerfully alive than in our liturgical tradition.
This past summer, a couple of posts by bloggers in their 20’s and 30’s caught my attention.One young woman wrote about the trouble she had had finding a church community.She said she and her husband wanted to find an anti-institutional church, something that looked less like a church and more like a hip coffee house.This led them to a worshiping community full of people their age, a church called Praxis.“It was the kind of church where the young, hip pastor hoisted an infant into his arms and said with sincerity, ‘Dude, I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.’
“But after two years at Praxis,” she wrote, “the coffee tasted thin.”
“I felt homeless in heart. I missed intergenerational community. I missed hymns and historicity, sacraments and old aesthetics.
“[Ultimately,] we found an Episcopal church where every Sunday morning we now watch clergy process up the aisle wearing white vestments and carrying a 6-foot cross.
“We take communion from an ordained priest who holds a chalice of blood-red wine and lays a hand of blessing on our children. We sing the Lord’s Prayer and recite from the Book of Common Prayer -- in which not once … does the word ‘dude’ ever appear.”
In another post that went viral entitled, “Why Millenials are Leaving the Church,” 32-year-old Rachel Held Evans wrote:"Many of us, myself included, are finding ourselves increasingly drawn to high church traditions – [like] the Episcopal Church, etc. – precisely because the ancient forms of liturgy seem so unpretentious, so unconcerned with being ‘cool,’ and we find that refreshingly authentic.
“What millennials really want from the church is not a change in style but a change in substance.You can’t hand us a latte and then go about business as usual and expect us to stick around. We’re not leaving the church because we don’t find the cool factor there; we’re leaving the church because we don’t find Jesus there."
I think we are finding something similar at St. Stephen’s Church here in Richmond.We are trying to offer worship, education and ministry opportunities that are deeply rooted in ancient tradition. Our evening Celtic service might sound like an attempt to be hip, but the classical instrumentation and liturgy say otherwise.What is different is the quiet, the laying on of hands, the space to breathe deeply in an environment of prayer, and most important, the requirement we have that, if you are going to serve as a reader or chalice bearer or in any other leadership role in that service, you have to arrive one hour before the service to prepare and pray silently with us, so that you are centered in holiness yourself and thus able to be with others, especially strangers, in the way God is present to you.
I do think the Holy Spirit is going to reach and care for people with or without the church, but I think She’d rather do it with us.And we might need to open some new doors for them to find us.
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