God Calling

stay tuned, FOX

Christianbook.com/GodCalling-A-J-Russell

The Rev. Gary Jones
St. Stephen’s, Richmond
Jan. 24, 2014-219^th Council

I love our bishops’ exhortations that we can 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

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 church in ways that

should get our attention.

The cover of Time magazine this week was entitled

“The Mindful Revolution,” and it pictures a young woman

dressed in Lu Lu Lemon in a meditation pose. I’ve heard that

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, 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 that

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

part of 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 in

other contemplative groups, yoga classes, Tai Chi, Centering

Prayer groups are popping up all the time. Some of those

people quickly make an association between Centering

Prayer offerings and the 14^th Century Anglican work,

The Cloud of Unknowing, which in all fact is the very

basis for Centering Prayer, maybe who cares if our

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, and in other interesting ways

at St. Stephen’s. One of our largest congregations is that weekly

Farmers Market, attended; people who may not want to have

anything to do with organized religion, but who are serious

about caring for creation and their own bodies. Lots of the

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 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, who feel at home on the church

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’s thinking about opening a “Center for Spirituality”

in his city – a place off campus where people could go to

classes on healthy eating, and so on.But wait a minute,

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 experience

at St. Stephen’s suggests that it’s not too late for us parish churches to become

greater compassion and engagement with God, the world, and themselves.

very Lest I give you the wrong impression, I should be emphasize that at

St. Stephen’s, we experience tremendous vitality in our ancient liturgies.

our of our Sunday services, strictly according to The Book of Common

Prayer, and Daily Morning Prayer every day of the week is sometimes

painfully rubrical. But our experience that if it is reverent, prayerful,

if we are truly spiritually present, God is nowhere more powerfully

alive than in our liturgical tradition.

This past summer, few posts by bloggers in their 20’s and 30’s

caught my attention. A young woman wrote of trouble she

she had had finding a church community. Saying 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. It 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

]community. I missed hymns, historicity, sacraments and aesthetics.

“[Ultimately,] we found an Episcopal church; where every Sunday

morning, watch clergy process up that aisle wearing vestments

and carrying a 6-foot cross. “We take communion from those

ordained priest who held the chalice of blood-red wine and

lays a hand 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 the

Millenials are Leaving the Church,” 32-year-old

Rachel Held Evans wrote: “Many of us, myself

included, 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 so 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 it is

different is the quiet, the laying on of hands, the space to breathe deeply in an environment of

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, 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 a

church, but I think She’d rather do it with us. And we might need open new doors for

them to find us.

August 23 – The Summit

The Lord God is my strength,
and he will make my feet like hinds’
feet, and he will make me to walk upon mine
high places.
Habakkuk 3:1

See not the small trials and vexations of each hour of the day.
See the one purpose and plan to which all are leading. In climbing
a mountain you keep your eyes on each stony or difficult place, as you ascend, seeing only that, how weary and profitless your climb!

But if you think of each step as leading to the summit of achievement, from
which glories and beauties will open out before you, then your climb will
be so different.