Sermon preached by the Reverend Nicholas Lang, Rector

St. Paul’s on the Green, Norwalk, Connecticut

6^th Sunday of Easter, May 13, 2007

Father Murphy walks into a pub in Donegal, and says to the first man sitting at the bar, “Do you want to go to heaven?” The man said, “I do Father.” “Then stand over there against the wall.”

Then he said to the very next man at the bar, “Do you want to go to heaven?” “Certainly, Father,” was the man’s reply.” Then stand over there against the wall,” said the priest.

Then he walked up to O’Toole who was busy sipping his pint and said, “Do you want to go to
heaven? O’Toole answered “No, I don’t Father. The priest couldn’t believe it. “You mean to tell me that when you die you don’t want to go to heaven?” O’Toole said, “Oh, when I die, sure. I thought you were getting a group together to go right now.”

I’m sure we all can relate. Heaven is a wonderful place to be but not just yet, thank you very much. We are attached to the life we know here on planet earth and, as bad as things get – and they do get pretty ghastly at times – most of us, like O’Toole, aren’t ready to ascend any time too soon.

You will find a bit of a dissonance between the lessons today and the hymns. The Gospel is in advance of the feast of the Ascension which occurs this Thursday, the day when Jesus ascended back into heaven. Even though it is a part of the long discourse Jesus gave to his disciples on the night before he died, it is notification for them that he will be leaving them and will send the Holy Spirit to guide and support them when he is gone. Hence the paradoxical line “I am going away, and I am coming to you.”

The music that permeates the liturgy today, however, is all about the bounty and abundance of God in so many ways. The hymns and anthems are richly full of the imagery of all the blessings with which the earth has been endowed by the Creator. That’s because today is also “Rogation Sunday.” Rogation comes from the Latin “roared” which means to beseech and it was on this day that the church asked God’s blessing for the seed, for the soil, for those who labor in the fields and for all of God’s creation. I would like to talk a little this morning about some folks who toil in this field, the parish of St. Paul’s – namely, the members of our staff – both ordained and lay members, full and part-time, paid and unpaid.

On Friday, March 23, the vestry spent an overnight in Lenox, Massachusetts, retreating from the routine of our lives and examining essential areas of our parish life – specifically, our staffing needs in the wake of ongoing growth and our vision for mission and ministry over the next five years. We looked at the responsibilities and tasks attached to each of three full and six part-time staff positions. They were printed on enlarged newsprint and the vestry spent a fair amount of time reviewing them. Their reaction to all of this infromation was unanimous: how does our staff manage to do all this given the limited number of people involved and the hours for which they are paid?

The Vestry then adopted a resolution offering its deep respect, appreciation, and affection for each staff member and the individual as well as the common gifts and talents they bring to the community that comprises St. Paul’s on the Green and made the decision that as of September, the position of Associate Rector needs to become full-time and the number of hours allocated for the position of Associate for New Member Ministry should be increased.

But this is just the beginning of an ongoing staff assessment and we will review other staffing needs as well. Additionally, a task force was formed to address the potential for burn out in all of our staff because of the many extras most of them have attached to their regular duties. These same job descriptions are posted in the parish hall this morning and I encourage you to take a look at them at the coffee hour. Notice the number of hours to assigned to each position, the actual hours each person works, and the list of responsibilities for each position.

In January I had a wake up call with the unexpected discovery that I had high blood pressure and not long after the news that I had failed a routine stress test and required angioplasty. How much of that was related to stress I am not sure but I do know that it was a poignant reminder that we have to take care of ourselves if we are going to take care of others.

So my appeal to you this morning is one that comes from a personal experience and that appeal is to help us your staff to take better care of you by giving us the means to increase our time and availability so that we are not so stretched by the exciting demands of the growth we experience as a congregation.

Increasing the staff hours as the Vestry has recommended increases the budget. How can we address that? If you have not made a pledge this year to support this church community and its ministry, please do that today. There are yellow pledge cards in the vestibule and at the coffee hour. A pledge is different from just putting something in the collection. It is your commitment to regular, generous giving even when you cannot physically be present. It is what puts energy and life into everything we do here at St. Paul’s. If you have pledged this year, might you consider increasing that amount – even modestly – to help us meet our staff needs or will you give serious consideration to what you might do in 2008?

The theme of Rogation Sunday and its emphasis on the bounty and beauty with which our earth and our lives have been blessed tells us that God’s economy as one of abundance, not scarcity. St. Paul’s is a place where radical generosity has been evident and for which I am profoundly grateful. I know you to be a caring, genuinely welcoming, supportive community of people but I also know that you are an intelligent congregation and will recognize the needs that I have outlined today and what you glean from looking at the staff job descriptions the implications for ministry here and respond with good cheer.

Now how does all this fit into the picture of what we are about to do in just a few minutes – welcoming two young children into Christ’s Church in Baptism? Well, for starters, everything we do here begins at and is related to that baptismal font. Whether we were baptized years ago and someplace far away from St. Paul’s, whether in the Episcopal Church or not, whether a child or adult, it’s all about the journey we are on and all about finding our way to the Kingdom of God – both here on earth and in the life of the world to come.

It’s all about our faith and our doubts, our dreams and disappointments, our hopes and our fears, our questions and our struggles, our laughter and our tears, our blessings and our losses and it’s all about who walks the journey with us and those with whom we travel. And, in all of it, there is this funny and quirky, wonderfully human and at the same time profoundly holy, usually revitalizing, sometimes frustrating entity we know as the church, one of the last places on the planet where I believe it is possible to find and experience an authentic sense of community. It is through our ministry together as God’s people that we receive the strength to walk the journey and it is our staff that encourages, nurtures, and feeds us on the way.

Wayne Teasdale, writing in The Mystic Hours says, “The world is divided enough by religions, culture, languages, ethnicities, tribes and nations. Even more profound are divisions between the haves and have nots, the educated and the uneducated, those whose hearts are open and those whose hearts are closed. These crushing divisions seek to isolate people and rob the world of peace. The challenge is to realize our essential interdependence, our fundamental need for one another. The key to social peace and community, indeed the key to the spiritual life, is remembrance: of God, ourselves, one another. Only when we remember our inescapable relatedness to one another will peace become a reality.” Christian community is a grace of the Spirit.

So today we remember. We remember that Jesus wants to bring us a peace that the world cannot give and that most often it is here within this sacred space and in the midst of our community of faith that we find at least a modicum of that peace.

We remember that we are intrinsically related to one another as God’s beloved ones and that each of us is a blessing for the other. We remember that God’s gracious abundance supports and sustains our lives and that in gratitude for that gift God asks us to give generously to the cause of building God’s kingdom in the world.

We remember that we as a community have been fortunate to have a staff that works feverishly to keep in motion the kind of amazing and rich life we have found in this place.

And we remember that God is ever abiding with us, that God has moved in with us. The great preacher Barbara Brown Taylor says, “I am a little fuzzy on the details, as is John in his Gospel, but this abiding seems to involve becoming part of a large extended family, and a holy one at that. When God and Jesus move in with us, apparently, they make lots of keys – keys for the Holy Spirit, keys for the other disciples, keys for all kinds of indwelling cousins in Christ. Coming and going, we learn to recognize each other, and to call upon each other for everything that people who live together do.”

Now we’re about to pass on a set of those keys to Jayne Alexia Massad and Kathyn Gwen Morris who will be welcomed into the very household of God. I invite you to join us at the font where we will get another glimpse of what God’s world is like – in all its splendid diversity – that grace of the Spirit we know as Christian community.