What an incredible celebration we shared
last weekend! In Carthage, we witnessed
the ordination of four new priests including our own Fr. Mike Shaffer. The liturgy was beautiful (especially if you
like incense), and the Holy Spirit’s presence was palpable as Mike and the
others made their vows. Then we were
blessed the next morning to be with Fr. Mike as he presided at Eucharist for
the first time.
Well, what if I told you that we had
ordinations here, at St. Andrew’s, just a couple of weeks ago? And what if I also told you we do that at
least five times a year? And what if I then told you the bishop knows about it
– and approves? In fact, it’s the
bishop’s description of this that I like to steal.
At the Easter Vigil, five people were
ordained to join the ranks of the primary ministers of the Church – baptized Christians. If you look in the Catechism, it makes it
plain: There are four orders of ministry
in the Episcopal Church – lay people, bishops, priests, and deacons. And the order of those orders matters. Baptized people are the first and most
important ministers of the Church. As
Bishop Marty likes to say, others are “further ordained” to the more limited
vocations of bishop, priest, and deacon.
During the ordination rite in Carthage last weekend, Fr. Mike and the
others took vows that will dictate how they live their lives from here on out. And during the baptisms at the Easter Vigil,
the two adult candidates also made life-long promises: to trust, follow, and obey Jesus as Lord; to
continue in the apostles’ teaching, fellowship, and prayers; to repent when
they fall into sin; to proclaim the Good News; to seek and serve Jesus in all
people; and to strive for justice and peace, respecting the dignity of everyone. Those are vows every bit as challenging as
what the clergy promise in their ordinations.
And your living out those vows has the potential to change the world
astronomically more than what the four of us up here could ever hope to do. Every baptized person in this room is
ordained to be a minister, nothing less than an incarnation of Jesus, risen and
alive in the world.
So, as Jesus’ risen presence, as the
Body of Christ known as St. Andrew’s, we’ve spent a lot of time over the past
couple of years discerning how God is calling us to ministry. We’ve asked you, in surveys and listening
sessions, how you hear God leading us to serve our community. Parishioners went out and surveyed our
neighbors, on front porches and at the grocery store, asking how St. Andrew’s
can make a difference in the life of Brookside.
We asked the same questions of community leaders and experts at
UMKC. We asked all of you for your
feedback about what we should do in a campaign to celebrate our centennial, and
200 households responded to the feasibility study.
With all that input, we’ve been on a
journey of discernment, listening for the Holy Spirit’s guidance, praying to hear
what kinds of ministry God wants us to advance, planning how we might live it
out now and in the years to come, and then revising those plans along the way as
God’s direction continues to crystalize. We are blessed with a deep pool of incredibly
talented people leading this effort, especially Blake and Megan Hodges, and
Sean and Sarah Murray, who’ve been doing the heavy lifting of chairing our
Gather and Grow Campaign for new ministry.
But they haven’t borne it alone.
At this point, we have about 80 parishioners carrying out this campaign:
everything from composing prayers, to figuring out how to thank people, to
making phone calls, to discerning how best to steward our building and property
across the street to empower ministry.
In all of it, we can see Jesus’ primary representatives – you – living out those vows we all reaffirm
at every baptism.
In this journey of discernment, we’ve
come to hear some clear direction about our church’s ministry in our second
century. First of all, we know God is
asking us to go out on the road, like the apostles after their Holy Spirit
moment at Pentecost, and reach people in the community around us. Specifically, we hear God leading us to focus
our ministry “across the street” in four broad areas, as I’ve shared with you
before. For us, “E = mc2”: Our mission in our second century involves
these “four E’s” of ministry.
First is Evangelism, by which I mean specifically worship, fellowship, and
formation for people who probably wouldn’t come join us at 8:00 or 10:15 on
Sunday morning. And we’re beginning that now, not just with
Take5 on Saturday nights but with a weekly prayer opportunity at Bella Napoli
coffee shop on Friday mornings. In
addition, we’ll demonstrate a fresh expression of worship two weeks from today as
our 10:15 service, down in the undercroft.
It’ll be Eucharist, but we’ll have very different music, prayers, and
proclamation. And, yes, we’ll even have
words and images projected on the wall rather than a thick bulletin filled with
text. And that’s only a beginning: Look for opportunities for prayer,
conversation, and learning down the street at The Well in the next few months.
Another E is Empowering Young People, both those here and those around us. Starting this month, we’re going to begin the
Fourth Friday Hangout at HJ’s – a chance for young people to talk, play games,
listen to music, and find out they’re really welcome here. And it’s not just for our own youth – we’ll
be inviting kids in the neighborhood, very intentionally.
Another E is Events that Build Community, something we’re pretty good at
already. But we want to open up more,
inviting our neighbors to join us for fun like the Feast of the First
Tomato. In fact, after the meeting this
morning, parishioners will be delivering door hangers to the houses around the
church, inviting our neighbors to a garden party after worship on June 8. We throw a good party – we just need to
expand the guest list.
The last E is one that you may not know
as much about, but I think it’s an incredibly rich opportunity for us to take
Outreach ministry to a new level. That E
is Entrepreneurship for Social Change. And what is that exactly? Well, let me give you a couple of examples – in
the flesh. With us this morning, we have
Natasha Kirsch and John Stamm – would you please stand? They’re social entrepreneurs, people who are
creating businesses whose goals are about social, rather than financial,
profit. Natasha’s venture is called EPEC
– Empower the Parent to Empower the Child.
It builds self-reliance for families in need by providing job training,
life skills, and mentoring to help families break the cycle of poverty. How?
By training the parents for specific, decently paying jobs – at the moment,
that job is dog grooming. Kansas City
has lots of dogs and not enough groomers – who knew? EPEC works with parents to train them and
place them in businesses needing this skilled work. The other example is John Stamm’s business,
Tutorious. Tutorious’ model is to offer
low-cost preparation for college-entrance exams, using college students as the
tutors, and to offer those services to kids and families who can’t afford the
standard, high-cost options for ACT and SAT prep. You can find out more by talking with Natasha
or John after the parish meeting.
They’re also coming to the Fools for Christ’s Sake Dinner tonight, so
you can chat with them then.
So how does all this involve St.
Andrew’s? For years, we’ve been hearing a call to take
Outreach ministry to the next level.
We’ve moved from a model of giving small amounts of money to several
organizations, to allocating a proportion of pledged income to Outreach giving,
to building sweat equity with our Outreach partners, to building relationships
with them. Now the call we’re hearing is
to move from simply a charity model toward work that strives to make real
change in people’s lives – ministry that truly seeks to build justice and
really respects the dignity of people caught in poverty and educational
inequality. One step we can take in that
direction is to offer an incubator for social entrepreneurs like John and
Natasha – offering both physical resources like office space, desks, and Wi-Fi
access, as well as the most important capital: the wisdom and expertise of
people here at St. Andrew’s who know a lot about business, nonprofit work, and
entrepreneurship. It’s a natural fit in
that we have both kinds of resources, and we’re now making space available at
HJ’s to get the relationship started.
And that brings us to HJ’s. You’ll notice I haven’t said anything about a
campaign to build a building across the street.
That’s because the Gather and Grow campaign is, first and foremost, a
campaign for new ministry. But clearly,
we have to steward that building and the land where it sits. Everybody agrees about that. But the question, “What should we do about
HJ’s?” is really shorthand for, “How is God calling us to empower ministry
‘across the street’ as we steward our resource across the street?”
In our meeting after worship, you’ll
hear more about this journey of discernment about our resource across the
street. But what I want you to keep in
mind is this: Jesus shows up in all
kinds of unexpected ways, and in all kinds of unexpected places, as he calls us
to live into our ordinations as his primary ministers in the world. And when he does, what he has to show us can
make us stop short.
Let me end with an example. I got a phone call on Monday, someone looking
for assistance. But this man’s story
wasn’t typical – not the usual request for cash for a bus ticket to go visit a
sick mother. This was an ex-convict, on
parole, who works as a day laborer, but who couldn’t
work for a few days because he was recovering from chemo treatments for brain
cancer. He was calling from Shawnee
Mission Medical Center, and he needed a place to stay for a couple of nights to
get his strength back. So I got that
arranged for him. And in my conversation
with this man, I could see Jesus suddenly breaking into my regular life, just as
he did with the disciples in today’s Gospel: “While they were talking and discussing” –
while they were carrying on with the rest of life – “Jesus himself came near
and went with them…” (Luke 24:13).
I had no trouble imagining it was Jesus
on the other end of the phone. But what
really threw me for a loop was realizing the opposite was also true: For him, I
was Jesus on the other end of the phone.
Even if it was only for a couple of nights, I was bringing him a little
in-breaking of the kingdom of heaven: a
clean bed, a warm shower, a room with a TV.
For this man, I was Jesus. But guess
what? So are you. So are we.
This is the body of Christ, and we each have gifts and callings for
ministry as Jesus’ hands and heart in the world. So take a moment, and look around you – look to
your left, to your right – and know that you’re seeing Jesus. We are the presence of Christ, walking with
the people God brings into our lives.
This congregation, each one of us who helps to make it up – we are the
instruments God fills with the Holy Spirit to bless “[ourselves, our] children
and … all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him” (Acts
2:39). When you go home today, take a
minute and look in the mirror. You’ll
see something amazing. You’ll see a
minister. You’ll see someone ordained to
do God’s work in the world. In fact,
you’ll see the face of the risen Christ.
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