An Address Given to St. Stephen’s Annual
Parish Meeting, Feb. 26, 2006 by the Rev. Cork Tarplee
This Sunday! It’s a
sacramental showdown at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in south side! See the
St. Andrew’s drill team amaze the crowd with feats of liturgical
acrobatics! Feel the overwhelming
tsunami of love during the passing of the Peace! And witness giant sin-crushing loaves of
bread along with monster vats of wine wash away all your sins during the
Eucharist….
--Radio advertisement for St. Andrew’s, Birmingham , Alabama
That bit of liturgical advertising
came to me a few days ago from Matthew Price.
It is a good reminder that the church enterprise has mythic proportions. What we do here is a sacramental showdown, a
colossal massing of choirs, a marathon of education for children and adults,
with death-defying acts of pastoral care and the miraculous appearance each
year of loaves and fishes to feed the hungry and make life O.K. for kids whose
lives are tough. Today is the day we
take out snapshots of all the stuff St. Stephen’s does, when we take a look at
the showdown—the colossal—the marathon—the death-defying—and the miraculous—what
the Book of Common Prayer calls, in words that almost sound like radio hype,
“that wonderful and sacred mystery [the Church].
Like a perpetual miracle of the
loaves and fishes, we get a tremendous amount done with a few faithful people
and very little money. To make matters
more miraculous, we do whatever we do in the competitive and highly charged
atmosphere of the New York
metropolitan area. People
here have busy lives and incredibly demanding jobs—even getting your kids to
all the things they are supposed to do after school is enough to exhaust the
strongest among us. Let me offer, as examples, just three of the people who
make up the elected and appointed leadership of St. Stephen’s. They are joined in the ministry they do for
St. Stephen’s by nine other Vestry members and a heavenly host of others, all
of them volunteers, who do the work that gets done around here. But these three prepared much of the annual
report that we are going to examine in a moment, always giving credit to
others, so let me mention our two wardens, John Mulgrew
and Eric Thoroman
, and our Treasurer, James Doona. They are typical of the leadership of this
parish in that they have incredibly demanding jobs—like most of you, when they
come to church meetings at 8 p.m. on a weeknight, they come directly from work
and usually without stopping for supper.
They also have spouses to whom they are devoted and young families they
are raising. They also participate in
the civic life of their communities.
So St. Stephen’s is not a place of
ivory tower spirituality. Our religious
life is, to borrow a phrase from writer Joan Chittister,
“contemplation in the eye of chaos.” Ours is prayer, song, study, nurture and
service accomplished in the midst of busy lives. Perhaps it has always been this way for
Christians who practice their faith while holding down jobs and raising
families.
St. Paul wrote to one of the
earliest groups of Christians in the world, the Church in Corinth . Corinth
was like our own area in many ways—a metropolitan center of trade
and commerce, a tossed salad of cultures and religions, a place of economic
striving and social cruelty. I’m pretty sure the business people and trades
people who made up this congregation had demanding jobs, and growing families
who had to be taken to music and athletic lessons. They, too, had to find the time to keep the
ministry of the Church growing. In his second letter to this congregation, Paul
wrote about the value of the Church’s ministry.
He reminds the Corinthians that what they do for the Church changes them:
“And all of us…seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror,
are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to
another.” But this transformation, he
reminds the Church, does not happen only for their own sake, but also for the
sake of those around them: “For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of
darkness’ who has shone in our hearts to give the
light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”
I think it is important that the
Church in Northern New Jersey, like the Church in Corinth
remember that what we do here is sacred. In some respects, the demands of the Church
are just additional pressures added to a stressed-out life, but in an important
way, the work of the Church is THE primary work we all have to do. We need the Church to find the inner peace to
face the chaos of our lives, we need the Church to point us to the values that
will make our children’s lives worth living and not just an endless series of
demands, we need the Church to help us stand up for decency and respect for the
dignity of every human being that give our society some humanity. I heard yesterday that one of the volunteers
from another congregation—and from another denomination—who was here to work
with the homeless family living with us this week voiced the sentiment that we
should not be helping these people but should be helping “our own people.” I’m not sure whether she meant by this that
we should be helping white people like herself or people whose families
immigrated a generation ago as her own family did, or if she perhaps she meant
we should be helping suburban people.
This I do know: her contact with St. Stephen’s was one that encouraged
her to wrestle with the Gospel, made her wonder who her neighbor is and
stretched her to love in a way that did not come easily for her. For her, St.
Stephen’s was a place in which light shone out of the darkness—even if the
light hurt her eyes.
I, for one, believe we shine a lot of light
together. It might be a little hype to
suggest that we produce “sin-crushing loaves of bread.” But I challenge you to read the reports of
all we have done here this year--the expansion of the preschool, the extension
of our social ministry to deliver over $100,000 worth of services, the
enrichment of our church school program, the flowering of our musical life—did
you notice that we had over two dozen choir members singing on Christmas
Eve?--, our preservation of our buildings—I challenge you to contemplate these
things and NOT for a moment feel that we HAVE done something of mythic
importance. We have achieved “contemplation in the face of chaos.” May our
light continue to shine in the darkness. And let all the people of God who are this
Church say, AMEN.