Haiti Trip Post 5 -- Blocks, Card Games, and Lobster

Another quick report, given the hour….

We offered the first part of Carolyn Kroh’s teacher-education seminar today.  This is part of the work that had impressed the Haitian bishop and canon for education, and it seemed to go over well with the teachers and headmasters, who came from all the Episcopal schools in the southern district.  The training seeks to enhance the first- and second-grade classes by making the learning more student-centered.  So we demonstrated ideas for making math, science, and language arts more interactive through games and manipulatives, experiments, and creative ways of reading to kids.  Actually, just reading aloud to kids is an innovation in the very traditional, rote-response model of education Haiti inherited from the French.  Anyway, the teachers seemed to be having fun playing the games and doing the experiments, so that might imply good things for the students’ experience, too.

Part of our group also visited the local electric company today to investigate what it would take to bring electricity to the school.  There is quite a process involved – not surprising, given the endemic institutional bureaucracy in Haiti – and the official wouldn’t hazard even a ballpark estimate of the potential cost.  In addition to that, we need to step back, process all that we’re learning on this trip, get more input from our Haitian partners, and make come careful decisions about priorities.  New construction, electricity, sound systems and instruments….  We need to work carefully on a long-term plan.

After the seminar, we drove out to the beach at Port Salud to see the sunset and feast at a little restaurant Stan Shaffer knew.  We enjoyed outstanding French cuisine with a Haitian flare – lobster, crab, and fish dishes in wonderful sauces; and bananas flambé for dessert.  Yes, there are some real advantages to mission trips in beautiful locations…. 

And now, the not-so-advantageous part:  A cold shower, followed by a coating of 100% DEET insect repellent before climbing into bed.

Haiti Trip Post 4 -- Relationship, Relationship, Relationship

A short post tonight.  I’m exhausted, as are many of us.  It’s a good kind of exhaustion, but exhaustion nonetheless.

We worked in three teams today:  One toured a couple of other Episcopal school sites to check on the work of a contractor for a possible building project at our school; one met with the government education minister for the southern district of Haiti; and one spent the day at the school in Maniche.  All the visits were about building relationship, even the first one.  Our interest in this contractor comes not just from his high-quality finished work but from the model he uses.  For projects like this, the community partner (in this case, St. Augustin’s Church and School) is expected to contribute significantly to the building project, most often manifested as sweat equity – thousands of hours of work.  That’s relationship with flesh and bones on it.

I was on the team that stayed in Maniche all day, and one reason why is that we had our first-ever meeting with parish leaders from St. Augustin’s Church.  What remains with me (as I fall asleep typing) is a new awareness of the unity of the Body of Christ, regardless of context.  St. Andrew’s and St. Augustin’s are about as different from each other as you can imagine.  And yet, here are the top concerns from the meeting, and I’ll let you guess which parish’s representatives expressed them:  getting a sound system and new instruments so they can update worship music, attracting younger people from the area around the church, and encouraging children and youth to be more involved in the life of the church.  It’s a trick question because the answer is, “Both.”  We all are one in the Body of Christ – even to the extent of sharing the same challenges and the same priorities for addressing them.  So we talked with St. Augustin’s vestry members about a way to collaborate in finding, obtaining, and paying for a new sound system and instruments for Maniche.  But I drew the line at letting them have our new director of music.

Haiti Trip Post 3 -- Reaching Outside Ourselves

We made it to the school on our first try this year, contrary to last year’s experience.  The river was down, making the crossing relatively easy.  However, the mud from several days’ light rain left the “road” in interesting shape.  We never really were at risk of being marooned in the water this time, but getting out and pushing through nasty mud was a real possibility.

The group divided into several teams to work on different projects.  Carolyn Kroh and Rebekah Hyer observed classroom teaching to get a snapshot of the quality of instruction; another team took photos of kids and interviewed them for the Advent cards we’ll sell at St. Andrew’s; another team met with community leaders (a judicial officer and the mayor of Maniche) to explore how the school and church might develop better relationships with the community and become a more integral part of it.  Among other things, we learned from the two city leaders that St. Augustin School is regarded as one of the four best in the district – that parents are choosing our school not just based on proximity but based on quality.  We received a clear affirmation of that fact on a home visit later in the afternoon.  We walked home with several students in order to meet their parents and get their feedback about the school.  After a 45-minute walk through mud and along rough rock roads, we came to the home of one young girl, Samantha.  As we approached her home, we saw the sign a few yards away for Notre Dame Elementary School – literally a stone’s throw from Samantha’s house.  After our walk, in the rain, we asked why the family didn’t send Samantha to the school next door.  The answer: Because St. Augustin offers much better education.  It was heartening to hear.

The discussions with local officials also revealed a fascinating parallel between conversations at St. Andrew’s and at St. Augustin.  In both cases, we’re asking the community around us how we can connect with it more deeply.  That happens most effectively in one-on-one encounters, but it also happens through programming and capital-planning decisions.  When we asked the mayor how St. Augustin Church and School could build connections with the people of Maniche, he suggested building a basketball court and a football (soccer) field.  Back home, as we discuss the future of St. Andrew’s youth center, we’ve heard from some of our neighbors about the need for recreational space, including basketball courts.  Perhaps the partnership between St. Andrew’s and St. Augustin is even more timely than we imagined, given that both parishes are discerning how to live into God’s call for the Church to reach beyond itself and take its community seriously, seeking to exist for the benefit of those who are not its members (paraphrasing Archbishop William Temple, whose feast day is today).  Both parishes are seeking to become the mission outposts that God has in mind for them to be.  Maybe building basketball courts is an unexpectedly common step.

In our time today, I had the joy of talking with a seminarian from the Diocese of Haiti, whose first name is Guillian.  (I didn’t get her last name, and I’ve probably misspelled her first name.)  Guillian served as one of our translators today.  She has attended Virginia Theological Seminary and is currently doing field education in Haiti with our partner priest, Fr. Colbert Estil.  Guillian is on a track to be the fourth woman ordained a priest in Haiti, and she has walked a brave path to get there.  Of course, she has endured the roadblocks of prejudice related to gender; and she has had to persevere, in ways I can only begin to imagine, simply to say “yes” to God’s incredibly difficult call on her life.  On top of all that – not to put too fine a point on it – she grew up in rural Haiti, raised in a mountain village in the southeast.  As we walked with our students this afternoon to visit their homes, Guillian offhandedly said she used to walk 3 hours, one way, to get to school.  I stopped and checked to ensure I hadn’t misunderstood.  Yes:  Every day, from kindergarten through 12^th grade, she walked three hours to school, attended class for 6 hours or so, and walked home another 3 hours before doing homework and chores to support the life of a family practicing subsistence agriculture.  “My brothers and sister stopped going to school,” Guillian said.  “But I was determined to make a better life.”  Absolutely.  And, with her life now being directed toward building the lives of Haitian people through priestly ministry, Guillian will be “making a better life” in more ways than she can yet imagine. 

The next time I have a 7 p.m. meeting and an early-morning meeting the next day, or get behind in sermon prep, or miss yet another day off, I will bring Guillian’s smiling face to mind.

Haiti Trip Post 2 -- Sent South

We left the Palm Inn about 9 a.m., the tops of our vans crammed with duffels; and we made two stops in Port au Prince before getting on the highway for the four-hour trek south to Les Cayes.

Our first stop was St. Vincent’s Episcopal School and Orphanage.  I don’t have the official history, but the story Stan Shaffer told was this.  An Episcopal religious (a nun) in the Order of St. Margaret decided to sit under a tree and teach children with disabilities.  She did such a wonderful job that people wanted to build her a school.  She made a commitment to serve the children of Port au Prince who wouldn’t be served otherwise – those with no place to go.  Thus was born St. Vincent’s.  Today, there are more than 300 kids with disabilities living there.  God knows where they’d be otherwise.  The school was destroyed in the 2010 earthquake and is partially rebuilt now.  For them, it’s a Godsend.  I spoke briefly with one young man – Samuel, who looks to be in his early 20s.  He has twisted legs and gets around in a wheelchair, and he’s been at St. Vincent’s since childhood.  He said simply, “This is my home.”

Stan also told a story of touring the school once, on a previous trip, and seeing different kids at work.  The deaf kids were making braces for the physically disabled kids to use – a very loud task with lots of metallic banging.  The physically disabled kids were leading blind kids around the school grounds.  The blind kids were stamping Communion wafers for the school to sell.  And there you have it:  The deaf, the lame, and the blind – all sorts and conditions of people – comprising God’s family, with the many members using their various gifts to be the Body of Christ, even providing the bread for the Eucharistic feast – the Body by which the Body would be fed.  Again, we were graced to see an in-breaking of God’s kingdom as we walked among the kids, sharing photos with them and glimpsing their joy.

The second stop was at a supplier of solar-powered lights, gifts for the teachers and staff at the school in Maniche.  In a place where electricity is a sometime thing (and an absent thing at the school), these should help out.  And they’ll provide an outward and visible reminder of how the school’s staff shines Christ’s light into the darkness of poverty every day.  Thanks very much to St. Andrew’s parishioner Frank Julian for finding the supplier for these lights.

The drive south was blessedly uneventful, despite a few opportunities for driving events we’re all grateful to have avoided. 

After dinner, the group gathered for reflection time – a regular part of these trips when we explore what we’ve experienced that day and our own identities as God’s people sent into relationship with others.  Several of us struggle with the term “missionary.”  It comes with a lot of baggage, at least for me.  It’s helpful to remember what the word really means, in an apostolic sense.  Like every Christian, the 13 of us are sent by God.  And that’s what mission is – the assignment on which God sends us.  That sending most likely has nothing to do with fixing people, or solving their problems, or even solving our own.  It has to do with coming to know and love others more deeply, a participative interaction that leaves everybody changed as a result.  In other words, mission is about relationship.

Tomorrow, we’ll head up the mountain to visit our partner school in Maniche, St. Augustin’s.  Some of us will take photos and interview kids so we can offer their faces and stories to the people of St. Andrew’s.  Some of us will go into the community and try to talk with local leaders about the school and how it might serve the community better.  Some of us will read to schoolchildren or interview teachers.  I feel certain that all of us will love the people we encounter – and be changed as a result.

Haiti Trip Post 1 -- Holy Spirit Synergy

The secular world calls it synergy.  Jesus calls it what happens when two or three are gathered together.  "I will be in the midst of you," he promises.  And when that happens, we can expect the Holy Spirit to start stirring.

 

Several of us began our day in Port au Prince driving directly from the airport to a meeting with the Rt. Rev. Zache Duracin, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Haiti.  We brought him the materials that Carolyn Kroh and her team had assembled for the seminar we'll be offering in a few days for the 1st and 2nd grade teachers at several Episcopal schools near Les Cayes.  This is the third year that Carolyn has led this effort to model an alternate approach to Haitian early-childhood education -- one that honors kids' different learning styles and makes learning interactive, which has not been the Haitian model.  The workshops in the past two years focused on preschool kids; now the effort is being extended up the grade levels.  In addition, Carolyn and her team have compiled curricula for the various preschool levels (Haitian schools have no common preschool curricula), and they've documented kid-focused teaching strategies to align with Haiti's existing curricula for 1st and 2nd grade.  So we presented all this to the bishop, hoping to gain at least his willingness to let this creep into other Episcopal schools.  Instead, his canon told us later, he embraced it heartily.  He wants to introduce it as a standard for the nation's Episcopal schools, and he's considering recommending it to the national education minister as a standard for all Haitian preschools.  Not bad work, apparently.

 

Then came the Spirit's next move.  One of the potential issues in implementing one of these curricula is the need for manipulatives, especially blocks -- blocks that can be moved and connected to teach math concepts.  There was some discussion about the hassle and cost of bringing blocks from the States into Haiti.  (Shipping is a constant headache in missionary work here because functionally there is no mail or package-delivery service, at least in the country outside Port au Prince.)  So what you want your school to have, you have to bring ... or not.  As Steve Rock pointed out, one of the fundamental roadblocks to prosperity here is the absence of a middle class.  So why not create a business opportunity for some folks in Maniche (or somewhere else nearby) to make wooden blocks for all the Episcopal schools in Haiti -- maybe for all the schools in Haiti.  Identifying the right people in Maniche would be a great job for the vestry at our partner parish, St. Augustin, and give them a new stake in their parish's educational mission.  We sat around a table enjoying a late-afternoon drink with the bishop's canon as a cooling rain began falling.  And the Holy Spirit smiled as the kingdom of God broke into our day.

 

There were also the smaller (or not so much smaller) miracles of this good day.  First of all, 13 people from St. Andrew's invested their time, talent, and treasure to leave Kansas City yesterday and come to Haiti, easily the largest Haiti mission trip I've known.  We arrived with no problem, with all our duffel bags of supplies, and with very little drama.  With the post-earthquake renovations finished at the airport, security and baggage claim were quick and easy.  We spent our day in Port au Prince having productive meetings and running errands in the most beautiful part of the city, Petionville.  We saw people working their jobs and connecting with friends and neighbors in the teeming streets.  We saw a much cleaner Port au Prince than what we'd seen before.  

 

None of this is to deny the lingering sorrow and grief from the earthquake, which you can still hear.  Nor does it ignore the poverty and hunger that bind people just down the mountain from more prosperous Petionville.  But it does recognize that beauty lives and miracles happen here, every day.

At the Feet of Jesus, on the Reservation

[Sermon from Sunday, July 21, 2013]

Two weeks ago today, five of our youth, Dr. Terri Long, and I met behind HJ’s Youth Center while the good people on the other side of the street were getting ready for the 8:00 service.  We piled into a rental van and drove 10 hours across the prairie in order to spend a week on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota.  Now, you may be wondering, “Why in the name of God would you want to do that?”  And after 10 hours in the van and coming to a place of huge social problems, we might have been wondering the same thing. 

I’d like to take a shot at answering that question and share with you a few things I learned from our time together.  The real treat comes next Sunday – reflections about the experience from the youth who made the trip.  (They’re finishing up another mission experience, Missionpalooza, this morning.)

Terri and I had both done our homework, reading up on the Rosebud Reservation.  We’d reminded ourselves of the terrible history of the intersection between the U.S. government and native peoples as European Americans spread west.  We’d done a little reading specifically about the Lakota, or Sioux, peoples on the Great Plains – how they’d defeated U.S. forces in 1868 and negotiated a settlement that gave them half of what’s now South Dakota, everything west of the Missouri River.  Over time, particularly with the discovery of gold in the sacred Black Hills, that original reservation was whittled down to smaller and smaller parcels of land – land from which the buffalo, the key to their way of life, had been nearly wiped out.  We talked a little with the kids about this difficult history during that 10-hour drive across the Plains, and we described in abstract terms what we knew we were heading into: a place of serious poverty where we hoped we might be able to make a difference through our mission trip. 

As usually happens with mission trips, most of us in the van had a sense that we were going to the Rosebud to help people and fix things.  That certainly seemed to be the plan.  The group organizing this trip, YouthWorks, had scheduled two kinds of activities across the four working days:  The kids would spend two days in hands-on work to build or clean or fix things, and they’d spend two days working with reservation kids, putting on a vacation Bible school for them.  So the seven of us made our way to the Rosebud ready to be useful in improving people’s lives, albeit in the small chunks of work you can do in a short amount of time.

And the work got done.  We painted the community center in the village of St. Francis, and we did a fair amount of cleaning and painting in the St. Francis elementary school, where the 60 youth and adults stayed.  And the youth planned and put on a vacation Bible school.  So what we did mattered.  The community-center painting was done so well that one of the tribal leaders asked a YouthWorks staffer to come and be recognized at a tribal council meeting.  And the VBS was a welcome moment of fun, love, and hope for the reservation kids.  So, in the context of the Gospel reading we heard this morning, the Martha in each of us was feeling pretty good, having worked hard and gotten our hands dirty.  It’s the same feeling we came away with yesterday from the workday at Southwest High School.

But as it turned out, we really weren’t in South Dakota to satisfy the Martha in each of us.  Oddly enough, the mission trip was much more of a Mary experience.  And as Jesus says, the time when we weren’t “worried and distracted” by our many tasks was actually the richest part of our trip there – definitely the “one thing” he wants us to focus on, the “better part” he asks us to choose (Luke 10:41-42).

That “better part” of our trip had begun long before we got there.  It began years ago, when the people from YouthWorks came to the Rosebud and began getting to know the community.  YouthWorks has been hosting mission trips to the Rosebud for more than a decade; so when a bunch of white kids show up on the reservation, the Lakota people know why they’re there.  In addition, earlier this summer, the four 20-somethings who ran the mission experience spent time themselves getting to know people in the community.  In fact, the young man in charge this summer is a teacher at the St. Francis high school, so he’s there year-round.  That “one thing,” that “better part” Jesus mentions in the Gospel reading, is what we were really on the Rosebud to do: to begin building relationships with the people there and, through them, deepening our relationship with Christ. 

That was the subtext of everything we did on this trip, but it was especially evident one day.  On the second workday for our group, after we’d painted the community center, we traveled 20 miles to the village of Mission.  There, we spent the day in a fascinating place, a combination restaurant and youth center called Buffalo Jump.  This operation is run by a woman named Noella Red Hawk.  Noella is a true entrepreneur, both in terms of her restaurant (I didn’t expect to find a coffee bar with Italian ices on the reservation) and especially in terms of being what’s called a social entrepreneur.  Buffalo Jump offers reservation youth a place they can experience a contrast reality to the despair they see all around them.  The Rosebud is an incredibly difficult place to live.  The unemployment rate there is 83 percent.¹  Alcoholism is rampant, estimated by people on the ground to run at about 80 percent of adults.  There is little hope in this environment; and as a result, the Rosebud has literally the highest rate of teen suicide in the nation.²  This is a place where it’s unbelievably hard to grow up.

So Noella Red Hawk – when she isn’t raising her daughter or running her restaurant – runs the Sicangu Lakota Youth Center at Buffalo Jump, her own 501(c)(3).³  There she provides suicide intervention.  She offers tutoring with school work and help in getting youth ready to enter the workforce.  She provides a “free teen store” where young people can pick up necessities like clothes and toilet paper and toothpaste – things our kids would never imagine going without at home.  And she offers programs to preserve the Lakota culture among the youth.  The day we were there, we helped prepare the supplies kids would need for a week-long horse camp that she and her husband, Shane, were about to put on for local kids, teaching them about the Lakota people’s connection to the land and the way of life they knew for centuries. 

So seven Marthas headed out across the Plains two weeks ago looking for work.  Instead, what we really found was relationship.  The best part of the trip was sitting at the feet of Jesus, in the person of this Lakota powerhouse named Noella, and learning the “one thing” that Mary chose in the Gospel reading – relationship that changes lives.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise.  Every time we go to Haiti, we live out the same truth.  As Chris Nazar said in a testimony one Sunday a few months ago, he doesn’t go to Maniche every year just to paint the school or take pictures of kids for the Advent cards.  He goes because the teachers, the headmaster, and our partner priest have become his friends. 

It’s the same truth we remembered in an outward and visible way yesterday, at Southwest High School.  It’s great to go paint and clean and garden, getting the place ready for the new school year.  But what really matters is that St. Andrew’s people gather every month with people from other neighborhood churches and people from the school as the Southwest Faith-Based Coalition, finding ways to support the teachers and staff, and trying to enhance learning for the students.  What really matters is that our people know people there, and that the principal, Ed Richardson, isn’t just a colleague but a friend – and a parishioner.

You’ll hear more about the trip to South Dakota next Sunday from the rest of the group, and I’ll be as interested as you are to hear what the youth took away from the experience.  But you’ll also be hearing more about this as the year goes on, because I think it’s a pretty safe bet that our youth will continue to build a relationship with Noella and the Sicangu Lakota Youth Center.  I think that may well be why God sent us to the Rosebud this summer.  Just as we have partners in Haiti, I think the youth may have found a partner on the reservation. 

I am very proud of our kids.  They went to a place where it would have been easy to become worried and distracted by the many things that need to be done.  But instead, they’ve chosen the better part – not just being volunteer tourists but being sent into a partner relationship.  And sitting with Mary at the feet of our Lord and Savior, I would dare to say:  That makes Jesus smile.

1.  U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs.  “Rosebud Agency.”  Available at: http://www.bia.gov/WhoWeAre/RegionalOffices/GreatPlains/WeAre/Agencies/Rosebud/index.htm.  Accessed July 18, 2013.
2.  “Suicide Rate Among Tribal Youth Twice National Average.”  U.S. Medicine: The Voice of Federal Medicine, April 2009.  Available at:  http://www.usmedicine.com/articles/suicide-rate-among-tribal-youth-twice-national-average-.html#.UeZ95qMo6mQ.  Accessed July 18, 2013.
3.  “Sicangu Lakota Youth Center – Commitment to our youth!”  Available at: http://buffalojump.webs.com/aboutus.htm.  Accessed July 18, 2013.

What the Worship Space Tells Us

[Sermon from June 2, 2013, celebrating the return of St. Andrew's to its renovated worship space.]

Well, let me say, “Welcome home.”  This place cleans up pretty nicely.  Just glancing around, you may not get the full scope of the last two months’ work, so let me list some of the highlights:  The flooring in the nave has been replaced, so it all matches.  The broken pews have been fixed.  The walls and ceiling have been painted, and what would be the keel and the ribs of the “ship” of the nave have been stained to match the rest of the wood.  The lighting is much brighter.  The sound system and speakers have been replaced.  And the work was completed within budget and on time. 

We’re pleased to have representatives from Pearce Construction, as well as some of the subcontractors with us here this morning.  Thank you for your holy work to renew this holy space.  And to the members of the Facilities Commission and Interiors Committee, and to the staff – and particularly to Mary Heausler, our stunning junior warden – thank you, thank you, thank you.  You all have served admirably as stewards of the household of God.  As Jesus says in one of his parables, “Well done, good and faithful servant; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.” (Matt 25:23)  After this experience, you may not want to be in charge of anything else, but I think the point is how much God appreciates your work.

So we’ve spent the past two months worshipping in the Undercroft – sitting in a semicircle around the altar and pulpit, much closer to the action than usual, singing some different music with different instruments, and hearing responses from you after the sermons (at the 10:15 service).  It was a chance to experiment, so we did.  And as you know, over the past three weeks, we asked for your feedback about these changes through a quick survey.  Even someone with my level of expertise in statistics can interpret the results for three of the questions on the survey.  Overwhelmingly, people enjoyed the different music, the different instruments, and being closer to “the action” and to each other.  About inviting parishioners to respond to the sermons, the survey results were a little less clear – a bimodal distribution at both ends of the curve, if you remember your stats class.  A plurality of you really liked the sermons done that way – and coming in second were those of you who never want to see it again.  Welcome to the Episcopal Church. 

So what did we learn from worshipping in the undercroft?  If nothing else, we learned that space matters.  Space doesn’t just have utilitarian value; it has theological content.  You may like one space better than another, and the reason why might well have something to do with how you relate to God.

The comments from the survey captured a lot about what the worship space downstairs communicated theologically.  This was my favorite comment:  “It feels so good [in the Undercroft], like everyone loving each other. When we go back upstairs to the nave, I hope we’ll keep this spirit alive.”  With all its challenges, our worship downstairs did a great job of reflecting the immanence, the intimacy, of God’s presence.  One of the things that differentiates Christians from people of other faiths is that we put a lot of stock in the doctrine of the Incarnation: the idea that the sovereign Lord of the universe “became flesh and lived among us” in Jesus Christ (John 1:14).  God came to save and redeem humanity from the inside out, enabling God to experience our life and sanctify it directly.  We could feel this in the Undercroft, being close to the preacher breaking open the Word, close to the Altar where bread and wine became Christ’s Body and Blood, close to each other – even able to look into each other’s eyes as we worshipped.  It was a beautiful experience of the immanent presence of God.

And here we are, in a space that communicates something different about the divine.  Here, the arches and vaulted ceiling and stained-glass windows draw your perspective up, always up.  The three main sections are on three different levels:  First you have the nave, the ship of the faithful for your voyage of discipleship.  It’s at street level, welcoming everyone aboard.  Then you have the chancel or the choir, where the clergy and musicians lead our prayers and praise.  It’s raised slightly and separated from the nave by this little wall, seeming to imply that somehow holier work happens up here.  And finally, up another step, through the gate, and past the rail, we have the sanctuary, the holy of holies where the Body and Blood of Christ are consecrated.  In the old days, as some of you will remember, only ordained people and acolytes could even enter the sanctuary – well, and the Altar Guild, who were really in charge.  My point isn’t to critique the architecture of this beautiful space but simply to observe that it communicates something other than the immanent, personal presence of God.  This space gives us an experience of transcendence, of God’s divine otherness – beautiful and majestic and set apart from the day-to-day-ness of our lives.  Here in this amazing space, we know who’s in charge.  And it’s not us.

We proclaimed it in the psalm this morning, the perfect psalm for this Sunday when we’ve come back into the temple of the Lord:  “[G]reat is the Lord and greatly to be praised; he is more to be feared than all gods….  Oh, the majesty and magnificence of his presence!  Oh, the power and the splendor of his sanctuary! …  Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness; let the whole earth tremble before him.  Tell it out among the nations, ‘The Lord is King!’” (Psalm 96:4,6,9-10 BCP)  You come into this space, and hear this organ, and see the light streaming through these windows, and feel yourself drawn into the presence of the risen Christ towering over the high altar – how can you not know that God is King?  “Let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth be glad; let the sea thunder, and all that is in it,” for God is God, and I am not (Psalm 96:11 BCP).  Many of us, if pressed, would have to say this realization isn’t as self-evident as we might hope.  In fact, we might have to admit it comes as a surprising relief to say that God is God, and I am not.

In our worship here, we enact mysteries that seek to capture ultimate mystery:  that the God who’s always been king, who created the heavens and the earth – this eternal sovereign is enthroned again and again, right here in this space.  Every week, we remember the timeless reality that God’s rule is both constant and constantly new, both forever and forever surprising to us.  The people of ancient Israel had no trouble wrapping their minds around this mystery of a God who was, and is, and is to come.  We remind ourselves of the same truth here as we consecrate the bread and wine, remembering out loud that “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.”  Every week in our worship here, the Word and the prayers and the sacrament remind us that God was, and is, and will be God, no matter what. 

So why do it?  Why do we enact this truth, week after week after week?  It’s not because God needs the reminder.  It’s for our own benefit – and thereby, for the benefit of this world God loves so much.  Gathered in this place of transcendent beauty, performing rites handed down across the centuries, we enthrone God in our own hearts, over and over again.  And in our hearts, the Lord of all creation takes on flesh and dwells in the world once again.  You and I become the incarnation of divine majesty, the Body of Christ given for the world God has made.  We look into each other’s faces, and we love the people we see.  We look into the faces of people we don’t know, and we reach out hands and hearts to them.  We look across the street and see a neighborhood of people who can’t name the spiritual home they need.  We look down the street to Southwest High School or Gordon Parks Elementary – or we look across the sea to our partner school in Haiti – and we see children of God who need healing in ways that, miraculously, we can help bring about.  When our hearts are formed and reformed here to honor the majesty of our divine king, we are made into nothing less than Jesus’ own body, broken for each other and for those we don’t yet know. 

So, as we go forth from this glorious space today – fed by Christ and with Christ to be Christ in the world – let me offer you one small challenge.  Estimating generously, when we come to church on a Sunday, we spend half a day in the kind of transformative worship I’ve been describing.  What would happen if we worshipped God that way the other six and a half days of the week?  I don’t mean spending all your time at church – just the opposite.  I mean bringing church into all of your time.  What if, every day, we praised the Lord, and blessed God’s name, and declared God’s wonders among the peoples? (Psalm 96:1-3)  What if, just once every day, we actually spoke of the fact that God is God, and we are not?  It might start with simply saying grace around your dinner table.  It might grow into saying grace when the waiter brings you lunch at a restaurant.  It might be simply observing that God did a great job with the sunset that day.  It might be a quick “Praise God!” when someone tells you good news.  It might be “I’ll pray for you” when the news is not so good.

These small acts might not seem to matter a bit, in the greater scheme of things.  But when we’re tempted to think this way, that’s when this beautiful space whispers to us and reminds us of the lesson it never ceases to teach:  that we’re called to “tell it out among the nations:  the Lord is king!” (Psalm 96:10 BCP).