1 Celebration of New Ministry The Feast of St. Andrew the Apostle The Church of the Ascension, Chicago I have a couple of regular routes for my daily runs. One takes me straight down Clark Street through Andersonville s shops and restaurants and on the other I head east from our house, down Kenmore Avenue to Ardmore and so onto the lakefront path, by far the more scenic of the two ways to go. The scenic route takes me right past the Church of the Atonement. That s where I turn left onto Ardmore to wait forever (it seems sometimes) for the light to change on Sheridan so I can cross on over to the beach and the lake. So a couple of weeks ago I was running that way and as I turned the corner I nearly ran into a man who I gather was just coming out of his building, holding the hand of his little girl. I stopped in my tracks so as not to bowl into them. He was looking up at the cross on the top of the Atonement and with his lips moving in silence I am sure he was praying. Just as I paused on my way, he seemed to finish his prayer and made the sign of the cross. As I started again to run past the two of them, I heard him say to his little one, Come on, we have to catch the bus now. That little street scene, believe it or not, reminded me of the gospel we ve heard tonight. The calling of Peter and Andrew, James and John. Jesus call to them didn t come in a flash of otherworldly glory, it wasn t in the decidedly high church, smokey, blood-spattered rituals of the temple, it didn t dawn at first on them even up there on the top of the mountain of Transfiguration when a good bit of glory did seem to be revealed - and then Jesus told them not to tell anybody about it. No, the call of Jesus to those first friends and followers of his wasn t a spectacle, it didn t happen under particularly remarkable
2 circumstances, it was not designed to blow them away. It was as ordinary, as unremarkable, as easy to miss I suspect as a daddy and his daughter late for the bus. As easy to miss as an encounter with a stranger in need. As unremarkable as a prayer uttered in the midst of a busy day at the office or a difficult conversation at the dinner table or trying to make sense out of the daily news. It was as far away from spectacular as the birth of a baby to a young woman in a borrowed room and just as wondrous. This is the sacramental principle. No matter how elaborate the ritual container may be, how lovingly tended the details, how splendid the music, what we gather to enact in our assemblies, in this place week by week and day by day, is the ordinary, utterly human means by which God has chosen to meet us, to communicate God s very presence to us, with us, among us, in us. Bread and wine, water and oil, the touch of a hand. Sight. Sound. Smell. The ordinary, profoundly mysterious reality of our own bodies. Jesus still seeks us out, calls us to himself, just there. In the middle of our daily work. In the mess and muddle, the joy and the pain of our lives. As the great Russian Orthodox teacher of the spiritual life Anthony Bloom puts it, God is not elsewhere. And this is spectacularly good news. This is news women and men and children in this world are dying to hear. Longing to know. Aching to encounter. And I believe it must be the good news at the heart of this or any other church that wants to claim its heritage in the great sweep of the catholic and apostolic faith. I hear
3 people from time to time tossing around the term Anglo-catholic to describe certain parishes in our church, and as far as I can tell what they are often referring to is a particular style of vesture or that the church in question likes to use incense or that there is a shrine to the Blessed Virgin Mary. But dear friends, let s be careful not to confuse style and substance - it s a dangerous thing to do and it can lead very quickly to a church that s more like a club than anything else. In a recent Facebook posting the Bishop of Fond du Lac quoted someone who is not a particular fan of our church who described us like this: The Episcopal Church is an eccentric sect of liberal catholics who combine high church liturgy with whatever ideas are strongest in the surrounding culture. Well, the proclamation at the heart of biblical and catholic Christianity is nothing more and nothing less than this: God is not elsewhere. God is with us. God is for us. God is in our midst. God longs for us, loves us, calls us to become more than we can imagine. Right now. Right here. With apologies to all those wonderful Victorian paintings depicting Jesus dimwitted disciples staring up at a cloud from which the Lord s two little feet are dangling, the great doctrine for which this parish is named, the doctrine of the Ascension is not a claim that Jesus has gone away. No, the doctrine of the Ascension makes quite the opposite claim. The angels get it right as they lecture his first friends, Why are you staring up at the sky? They ask. He promised to be with us to the end of the ages. And in the resurrection that presence is no longer bound by the constraints of time or geography. Jesus commandment to us to follow in the way he has shown us, to live no longer for ourselves alone but for him who died for us and rose again, the commandment to tend the
4 bodies and souls and hearts and lives of the least of our sisters and brothers, the commandment to break down the barriers that separate and divide us, that commandment is indeed not too hard for us, nor is it too far away. It is very near us; in our mouths and in our hearts. And that is so because Jesus himself is just that near. In his history of the Church of the Ascension, George Giles writes about the 19th century Oxford Movement, that attempt to recover the heart of the catholic tradition in the Church of England and in the Episcopal Church. In a section on how that movement took hold here in the Midwest he writes this, The Oxford Movement was a plea by inspired men and women for personal holiness, love, and discipline. Born of the Romantic Era, he writes, It was an impulse of the heart and the conscience, not an inquiry of the head. (It was) a movement of pastoral and moral care. Now while there is nothing (let me tell you) anti-intellectual about your new rector, I want to affirm for you what you already know - to serve as the seventeenth rector of this parish you have called a priest with a profoundly pastoral heart. I have counted Patrick as a friend and colleague in ministry for a long time and I know first hand how true his heart is. True to Christ, true to his family, and true to the People of God he is called to love and serve. He will lead you. Like the pastor he is, as you have discovered, he will lead you through good times and bad. In season and out of season. He will point you always in the direction of Jesus, the one true shepherd.
5 So dear friends, follow. Follow together with your rector. Follow the call of Christ to you, to us who call this church home. Let the faith of the church be proclaimed here with conviction and flair and fun and without fear of change for God s future. Let that faith be lived with deep joy in your daily lives, in the midst of this beautiful, broken world. Let us become what we receive at this table, what we have become through the birth waters of holy baptism. Let us be - yes, us! - let us be the dying and rising Body of Christ. Jesus is calling us. Listen.