Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany [Proper 4], rcl yr c, 2022
Vestry Charge
1 Corinthians 13:1-13; Psalm 71:1-6; Luke 4:21-30
They will be called oaks of righteousness,
the planting of the Lord, to display his glory.
Isaiah 61.3
It’s a different sort of sermon this morning, perhaps not much of a sermon at all—today is our annual meeting, our vestry, and it’s the time when the rector takes a moment to reflect a bit on where we are as a parish, and where we are heading. So if this is the first time you’re here, this isn’t what we usually do! We will get back to our usual practice next week.
The first thing I will do this morning in my charge is to say what I’ve been saying in one way or another for quite some time now, including in previous charges. And that’s to articulate something of what we already are.
We are a parish where our central identity revolves around two poles: one pole is the worship, and in particular worship in which the arts has a special place, especially the musical arts; the other pole is the centrality of service to one another and service to others in our city. And I’d like to underline once again just how closely related both of these things are—they are not in competition with one another; to take from one is not to give to the other; to give to one is not to take from the other.
This is why I preach on figures like Dorothy Day—a woman who spent her life in service to the poor, and a woman who never missed a broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera, and who wanted, at the end of her life, not to teach students how to make political change but to teach them how to read Dostoyevsky. It’s why I preach about Dietrich Bonhoeffer—a man who died in prison because of his resistance to injustice, and a man loved nice suits, who could have had a career as a concert pianist, and who loved Heinrich Schütz because Schütz’s music best expressed for him the relationship between God and the Christian life of discipleship. It’s why I preach on Flannery O’Connor—a woman who explored the connection between God’s grace and feelings of desolation through her own artistic production in the form of literary short stories. It’s why I preach the Oxford Movement—where attention to the beauty of the liturgy was deeply connected to community service in some of the most economically and socially deprived parts of England.
All of these figures and movements give us opportunities to find others who have done, or are doing, exactly what we are setting out to do: to explore and grow into the connection between God’s beauty especially as it’s expressed in worship, and the service we offer to others in God’s name.
That’s a bit of the big picture, and we will come back to the big picture again. And I won’t say too much about this, partly because I’ve written on it in my Vestry report. But I did want to take a minute and speak to it, if briefly.
I wrote in my report about COVID, and especially about its impact on worship. I’m wary that we are heading towards thinking of “in-person worship” and “on-line worship” as equivalent choices. I go more deeply into the theological reasons for why I don’t think they are equivalent in my report. But if I were to sum it up, I’d express it in terms of my desire that you hear the words preached in person alongside others who are hearing the words preached; and that you would receive the sacrament alongside others receiving the sacrament; because this the closest approximation to worship in God’s heavenly Kingdom as we have here in this earthly life. And that’s because God’s kingdom will be a bodily kingdom, not where we shed our bodies, but where we will have new bodies in a new heaven and a new earth.
I do want to be very clear, though, that I don’t see anything wrong at all with broadcasting worship and recording it so people can watch later. I’m glad that this was an adaptation that nearly all of us were able to take advantage of during lock-down. All I’d say is that this is an adaptation to the norm of worshipping together face-to-face and alongside one another. And it’s a good adaptation, and one I’m really glad we were able to make, and it’s an adaptation that I encourage you to use, whether you’re anxious about being among other people on account of COVID, or if you’re under the weather, or if you just don’t have the energy to get the kids into snowsuits, or if you’re in long-term care—I will leave that discernment to you.
The only thing I’d like for us to recognise is that “in-person” and “on-line” aren’t equivalents; on-line is an adaptation to conditions in life that make our personal presence amongst others, side-by-side and face-to-face, difficult or impossible. And that if you can, my hope is that you would be here to participate in the sermon, and to receive the sacrament, with a strong sense of personal community as it reflects most closely the heavenly liturgy that we will one day take part in bodily.
Ok, so we started with the wide lens—looking at the big picture of our core identity as a parish—that we are a parish that is joyfully exploring the depth of the connection between the beauty of God (especially in worship) and the service of others in God’s name. We pulled in tight to take a close look at how COVID is impacting our understanding of worship, and my hope that we could see on-line offerings of worship as good and worthy adaptations to the norm of worship alongside others, face-to-face.
Now I’m going to pull back a bit to the big picture.
I submitted a report about our five-year plan, and how we are reaching the natural end of one five-year plan, and that we will begin another round of planning. This is a helpful way to keep us accountable to some of the things that are important for us to accomplish. But I’d also like to say that I don’t think a five-year plan is nearly big enough. And that we should also be thinking in terms of a 30-year plan, a multi-generational plan.
There’s a mythic story about New College Oxford, and the fact that the big oak beams in the hall were in need of replacement, and the dismay at the fact that it takes hundreds of years to grow oaks to provide the beams. Where would they get such beams? Only for the college forester to appear and say “I was wondering when you’d ask. Because one of my predecessors planted trees five hundred years ago; he knew that we would come to this very day, five hundred years later, when we would need five-hundred-year-old oaks for beams.”
Now apparently this isn’t a true story, but that doesn’t really matter. It’s still an illustration of something true and important. It’s about foresight, investing in resources for the long-term, and believing in something bigger than you. The foresters in this illustration didn’t think of that college simply in terms of what it gave them; those foresters believed that the college would have something important to offer others long after their own departure.
This is how I’d like for us to see St. John’s—as something so good, and so important to the life of this community, that we would like to see it live a life that far outreaches whatever benefit we get from being here at St. John’s now. This is how I try to manage my time, and my efforts in my work: and that’s according to a 30-year plan, a generational plan that will see St. John’s thrive for a long time to come.
I take my cue from you, really; we care for this building in such a way that it will be a benefit to others for decades to come; we care for one another in such a way that there will be a caring community here for decades to come; we care for others in such a way that there will be people to serve this community for decades to come; we worship God in such a way that there will be a people of God here for decades to come. It’s hard to say just how many of us will actually be here in the decades to come, but we approach things like those foresters, planting trees for a future that we can’t see.
That’s what I mean by the thirty-year plan, the generational plan—that we nurture this community in such a way that it will be a benefit to others who will come along long after we have departed.
And we do so because that is how gracious God is to us: God is so gracious, in our successes and in our failures, with such superabundance of grace that we can’t help but imagine that grace overflowing into the lives of others.
I offer this to you in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, AMEN.
The Reverend Dr. Preston Parsons