sermon

Annual Meeting – Sermon from December 8, 2019

December 12, 2019 by St. George's Leave a Comment

Sermon from the Rev. Joseph H. Hensley, Jr., Rector, St. George’s Episcopal Church
Fredericksburg, VA | The Second Sunday of Advent Year A: December 8, 2019

To view the Treasurer’s Report by Tom Meredith, click here.

Please pray with me. Gracious God, put into my mouth the words you would have me to speak and put into our hearts the words you would have us to hear. In Your Holy name we pray. Amen.

The prophet Isaiah describes a vision a vision of the coming of the Messiah when the whole creation will be changed. The wolf will live with the lamb. A child will play over the whole of the snake. So, I look out at this gathering today, and I see Isaiah’s vision lived out. People of all stripes and personalities and dispositions somehow, someway dwelling together in Christ’s name. Now I’m not going to say who’s the wolf and who’s the lamb. You all can figure that out. Or sometimes we might be both the wolf and the lamb, depends on the day. But it is a joy, it’s just a joy to look out and see this parish in all its variety. It’s a joy to look up here in the gallery and to see all of our music ensembles and all of your wonderful variety showing us how we can somehow come together in harmony. [baby crying] Thank you. So, in that spirit, just turn to your neighbor this morning and say, “welcome in the name of Christ,” just “welcome in Christ’s name,” just welcome each other.

Because it’s Christ who brings us together, and today this second Sunday of Advent we are waiting for Christ to return. During this season we focus on what is really, just for a few weeks we’re focusing on something that is a year-round reality that we are always preparing and waiting for God to be embodied with us. Waiting is not something many of us like to do. It’s an in-between place, but in the waiting and in the in-between is often where God likes to work, and that’s where the prophets tend to show up.

Today we heard from the prophet Isaiah and from John the Baptist, and they are stepping into the gap between what has been promised and what has yet to be fulfilled. They announce that things will need to change and things are going to change. And they also proclaim that this time in the middle, this threshold time, is an opportunity for growth, an opportunity to go deeper in our faith. So, we are gathered today in this annual meeting of St. George’s parish, and in many ways our parish is in a threshold time, standing at the threshold. We’re on the threshold of a watershed 300th anniversary of the founding of this parish, but we’re not quite there yet. We’re on the threshold of developing a master plan for our space that is more accessible to all, as well as additional and improved space for ministry, but we don’t have the plan yet. We still need your feedback about that, by the way. Go to our website and look at the plans that we are putting out there. Give us your feedback so we’ll know better about which way we need to go.

Beyond our parish, we see thresholds in our world. We see religious institutions at the threshold as they watch attendance decline. We see the culture at large standing at thresholds when it comes to climate change or the widening political divides. We’re waiting at a lot of thresholds wondering what is coming next. We’re in a full-time Advent, and it’s not easy. And in times like this the world’s advice is often to hunker down, store up supplies, make plans for your personal survival. The prophets, on the other hand, call us to venture out, to be vulnerable, to go into the wilderness, to wade into the waters of chaos, open our hearts and listen for God’s guidance as we take the risk of being in community together.

John the Baptist appears not in the streets of Jerusalem. He doesn’t baptize in the courtyards of the temple. No, he appears in the wilderness by the river Jordan. He draws the people out from behind their gates, from behind their walls to enter a threshold territory, to take a risk. So, you might remember that the river Jordan was the boundary that the ancient Israelites crossed over after they had been wondering in the wilderness for forty years. They crossed the river Jordan into the promised land. By baptizing in that river, John recalls a time before there were temples in Jerusalem, before there were synagogues, a time when the Israelites were strangers in the land of their ancestors. And he’s calling them to stand at that threshold again and to repent and re-enter the promised land with a new vision.

So, as we approach the 300th anniversary of the founding of the parish of St. George’s, we too are called to repent, to examine ourselves, and renew our vision so that we might continue to bear the good fruit. And it might help us to remember that there was a time before this building ever existed, a time when this parish was founded when there are hardly anything at all, and from that came centuries of ministry. During our anniversary we will tell the stories of our historic past, stories of glory, and stories that remind us of our ongoing need to repent, and we will also celebrate the ministry of the present. For a few weeks now, we’ve had brochures in the pew that talk about our 300th anniversary and the ways that you can get involved in it. Our Communications Commission worked hard this year to create a beautiful calendar to help us mark the next eighteen months, beginning in January, and on the cover is this painting by St. Georgian Elizabeth Seaver. Many of you have wondered about this, what’s this bird doing on the church? In some ways, this bird represents sort of the Holy Spirit, sort of the wings of the Spirit covering God’s people, inviting everyone into this space. As I’ve meditated on this image, part of what has come to me is that part of what the mother bird does is kick the young ones out of the next. So maybe part of what’s going on here is that the Spirit is also sending us out into the world to cross the thresholds again. So, during this celebration we will also pray and talk about our future.

What is our mission, and how is God pushing us out into the neighborhood? Because we can’t rest on the legacy of our ancestors, we can’t just assume that because people know our steeple and recognize the bell chiming out the hours of the day that they will recognize the love of God in Christ that we show. We can’t assume that just because the founders of the city sleep in our graveyard that the citizens today are coming to know the love of God in Christ through us. We do make a big impact in Fredericksburg, St. George’s does, but it’s still a good time to listen with fresh ears to the voices of our neighbors, maybe the neighbors we don’t know yet, asking where is the Holy Spirit sending us next? This is part of the work of our young adult missioner David Casey, Pastor David, as he is going out to the college campuses and connecting with young adults in our community who are yearning to make a difference and have a lot to say. In your bulletin today, don’t look now. I know you’re tempted to get it out and start reading it during the sermon, but there is an insert that lists just a few of the ministry highlights of the past year. This is just a small sample of the many ways both welcoming inward and going outward that we are about our mission.

So many things going on, and as we live into this threshold time, we also might see ourselves standing on the threshing room floor. John the Baptist warns that the Messiah is coming who will clear his threshing floor and gather the wheat into the granary. Like many of you, I’m not a farmer so I had to learn more about what the threshing floor actually meant. The threshing floor is the place where the farmer would beat the protective outer chaff apart from the inner kernels of wheat, and then the farmer would toss it all into the air with this winnowing fork so the chaff would blow away in the wind. So, what are the aspects of our parish life that continue to be the wheat, the kernels of our life? And what might be the chaff which has had its use, but now we can let go of it? During my sabbatical this summer I thought a lot about what’s wheat and what’s chaff, what’s essential, and what could I let go of. While I was away our clergy and church staff also wrestled with these questions of how much there is to do, and what’s essential, and how can we let go of some things. In that process there were new people who were involved in ministry, particularly pastoral care. Thanks be to God for the many ways our parish thrived during my and John’s sabbaticals over the summer. Thanks again to everyone who took on additional roles. I’m particularly grateful to Pastor Areeta who took on many of my roles, and it is a joy to share in the priestly ministry of this place with her. She’s blessing us with her considerable gifts.

So, what is wheat, and what is chaff? This may be a question you’ve asked in your own lives. It’s not always an easy discernment. Last February we revealed our new St. George’s branding, a new logo and bulletin and web formats. The purpose of this work has been and continues to be making it easier for people to recognize our message, to receive it, and to share it. So, in that re-design of our bulletin we looked for ways that we might simplify, and we took out the list of the weekly worship servers and the staff and the vestry, which took up a lot of room. I thought it might be something we could let go of. We got a lot of feedback from people who use that list as a way to connect with those who are serving and learn their names and talk to them after the service. I actually got a written petition from the Episcopal Church Women about this. When you get a written petition from women in their 70s and 80s, yeah. It’s hard in a congregation our size to know each other. So, we have heard you, we have listened, and we’ve added a new insert to the bulletin with the servers and the staff and the vestry. And I especially want to thank Laurel Loch, our parish administrator and communications director, for the amazing amount of work she has done to bring us into this rebranding process to clarify and enhance our communications and help us transition to these new formats with a lot of grace. So many of you wanted that bulletin insert to know each other better, and, yes, we need to know each other better. This is one of the main challenges we face, and we know each other better not just so that we can say hi on the street, and that’s important, but it helps you so the ministry doesn’t have to be from the top down but can be from the bottom up. And so I challenge us to reach out across the pews and across the aisles, across the services and get to know each other and tell us what you need to help you get to know each other.

Here’s an example of what can happen when people get to know each other. There is a new ministry in our community called SAWS Virginia, and it was born in St. George’s in many ways from members who were nurtured and nourished through this church and supported by our staff and ministry leaders, and who are now building wheelchair ramps for home-bound disabled persons in our community. And it doesn’t say St. George’s on it, but it is an amazing example of how people can connect in a place like this and go out and do amazing things in Jesus’ name beyond the church walls.

So, that bulletin insert, it also teaches us something about stewardship. Although it may not seem like much, it’s just a small sheet of paper, the cost of the staff time spent producing it, the additional materials, and the copying costs we calculated come to about $50 a Sunday, $2,600 per year. Or you can break it down the other way and say roughly 12 cents a person on an average Sunday. As we stand at the threshold of our church growing, we do need to be more transparent about the resources that we need to support our mission. Thanks be to God for all the ways that you all are giving of your resources to support that mission, the ways you give that support the large and the small details of our ministry together. Your financial generosity has allowed us to grow.

Over the five years that I have been your rector, you have grown in your giving, and our staff has grown too. The work they do has grown. I think you all know, but we have an amazing staff. I wish I could tell a personal story about every one of them, our two full-time clergy, our two part-time clergy, our four full-time lay staff, and nine part-time lay staff, including two that work almost full-time on a non-stipendiary basis. And add to that our nursery care givers and our preschool teachers. And yet we often find ourselves feeling stretched thin. The reality is that for a big church we are operating on a medium-sized budget. So, for our 2020 budget, the personnel committee of the vestry studied our staffing and listened to the voices of ministry teams and is proposing some additional staff positions that I want to tell you about.

One is a part-time communications assistant who will help with all the additional communications that are going to be a part of the 300th anniversary. Another is a part-time Grace in Action coordinator to help organize the volunteers and the resources for The Table and the community dinners and other ministries with our neighbors on the margins. Another is a full-time facility director to oversee the care of our buildings and grounds from top to bottom as they’re used seven days a week, often from morning until night, and the extensive maintenance that comes along with having an older building. We have tons of volunteers that I’m going to talk about in a minute. And our volunteers, they want and they need our staff, the support of our staff. In a time when many organizations are leaning on the same people and overworking people to do more with less, I want to be an organization that strives to work sustainably with the right amount of volunteers, the right amount of staff, to model an organization with faithful balance. So, in order to do this, we are going to need to continue to grow in our giving. And the vestry has hired a consultant who will help us over the next year to better connect with our supporters to communicate our thanks and tell the story of our ministries, and that consultant will guide us as we look ahead to next fall when we will have a capital campaign to fund our long-term infrastructure improvements.

I’m going to say two additional quick things about the stewardship. One is we currently have a deficit for this year, and we can close it by all of our folks who are currently pledging giving of their offerings before the end of the year. And the second is that if you are able to increase your pledge for 2020, that growth will help our ministry grow toward balance and sustainability. We need you to let us know soon if you’re able to do that as we are planning the budget for next year, and we want to balance the budget next year.

So, let’s talk about volunteers who really are signs of God’s grace in action in this place. Thanks be to God for the many people giving of their time and their talents in small ways, in great ways. I wish I could thank all of you by name because you are the primary ministers of this place. You are. We’re just here to help. I do want to name a few individuals whose ministry has crossed a threshold, who are stepping back after years of dedicated service. Many of us saw Linda Carter, Linda Miller, and Chris Cook, otherwise known as the LLC, they were featured in the Free Lance Stars as difference makers in our community. They have been champions of our weekly feeding ministry known as The Table for years. Linda Carter and Chris Cook are both taking a step back from their roles that sometimes have had them here full-time. We thank them. Many of you don’t know Dot Morris, but Dot is one of our altar guild members who’s stepping back after many years of faithful service supporting our Wednesday noon Eucharist. I got permission to tell you this, by the way. It’s hart for her to step back, but it’s just time. And hers is an example of the kind of humble ministry that so many quietly and faithfully contribute toward the mission of sharing the love of God in Christ.

Later in the service we will elect four new vestry members and thank the four members of our vestry who are ending their terms. And I give thanks to the vestry volunteers for their continuing service overseeing the stewardship of our resources, connecting with all of our ministry groups, and discerning where God is calling us. I have to especially thank Marilyn Farrington, this year’s senior warden, who is also crossing the threshold as she ends her service. Marilyn supported our staff and the parish this summer significantly while I was away on sabbatical. As she ends her service, she’s still chairing, along with Lisa Durham, the 300th anniversary committee. She’s been a champion of champions in recruiting others to help. There are so many others that I wish that I could name. I will draw your attention to the Stephen Ministry little flyer in your pew this Sunday as an example of those quiet but powerful volunteers at work. There are so many others I wish I had time to name. Thank you and thanks be to God for your offering.

If you’re wondering to yourself, how do I get more involved? Just ask, and sometimes you might have to ask a second time. We’re trying to clarify the process by which people go from being newcomers to offering their gifts in ministry, and I want to thank Pastor Bob for offering an important workshop in spiritual gifts discernment two times this year that has resulted in people finding joyful ways to offer themselves in God’s service.

So, as I’m getting ready to close, I promise I’m getting ready to close, let me say that this threshold space, this waiting space, this Advent space, this is Holy space. This is where God works in our lives as a community and in our individual lives. As I said, you might be facing a threshold in your life. Well, now’s the time to claim that as Holy time, a Holy opportunity. So, as we prepare to cross the threshold into a fourth century of ministry in this community, now is the time for us to renew our commitment to being God’s Holy people. So, I want you to start thinking now about what you’re going to do during the 300th anniversary to ground those celebrations in faith. I’m putting out the challenge, putting out the challenge that we would read the entire Bible over the course of the 300th anniversary. It can be done in roughly 300 minutes a month, 10 minutes a day. We’ll be sharing more about that challenge. What is the challenge that will make a difference for you as we live into this Advent threshold time?

In the coming year between now and next November when we’ll cross another threshold, I want to claim this Holy space, this is Holy space, where we cannot allow the bitterness of politics to disintegrate our bonds of affection for each other and distract us from our mission. Our primary allegiance is to Christ, and that means if we disagree, and that’s okay if we do, we can do so with kindness and with care. We can listen to each other with love. We will continue to pursue justice and truth, and we may not always agree on how we pursue that, but we can do that with the love of Christ because in this Holy place, it is more important to reveal Christ to each other than to prove we are right. And if you are ever concerned about messages that you hear in this place, please say something. Too often I hear of people quietly upset. I want to invite us to share our concerns, to take the risk of opening our hearts so that we can grow in our understanding and so that we can practice loving each other. Our doors are open. We want to listen.

The hymn we sang at the beginning of this service says, “On Jordan’s bank, the Baptist’s cry announces that the Lord is nigh.” Someone told me after the 7:45 this is like a Baptist sermon, it was getting on pretty long, so I am bringing it to a close. Christ is coming. We stand on the threshold of that return. We are an Advent people, waiting to see how Christ will lead us into a new creation, preparing for the mission God has for us here and now, a mission that we have already been on for a long time but that is being revealed to us in new ways. As we wait, as we watch, as we hope together, may we with the prophets of old proclaim the good and the challenging news that the kingdom of heaven is coming near.

Beautiful Proportion – Sermon from September 29, 2019

October 3, 2019 by St. George's Leave a Comment

Sermon from the Rev. Joseph H. Hensley, Jr., Rector, St. George’s Episcopal Church
Fredericksburg, VA | The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost Year C: September 29, 2019

In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells a story, a parable, a teaching story, and this story is told to the Pharisees and to his disciples about a rich man and a poor man. Parables are supposed to be mysterious, so I don’t want to try to wrap it all up and tell you exactly what it means. But I do want one thing to be abundantly clear, and that is that God is always coming to our assistance, helping us to live the life that really is life, a life of wholeness and beautiful proportion.

Why does Jesus tell this parable, this story? After he tells the parable of the unjust steward which we heard last week, Jesus is ridiculed by the Pharisees, the Jewish teachers and law experts, and the text of Luke tells us that they were lovers of money. So Jesus is telling these stories about money, and they are immediately criticizing him. In response to their criticism, Jesus really calls them out. He says, “You try to justify yourselves in the sight of others, but God knows your hearts. For what is prized in the sight of human beings is detestable before God,” and he’s talking about money. Then he goes on to remind them of the enduring truth of the scriptures, of all the law and the prophets, and then he tells the story of this rich man and this poor man named Lazarus. Notice the rich man is not given a name. The rich man is disproportionately wealthy. He wears the finest clothes of purple and linen every day, and he is feasting every day as if it were a holiday every day. The poor man Lazarus is disproportionately poor. He has absolutely nothing and is disproportionately ignored by the rich man. Only the dogs notice his suffering and come to lick his wounds.

Now the Pharisees would have been surprised by the turn the story takes. Because it was often thought, as Bob told us in his sermon last week, that people who suffered in their earthly life were being punished by God for their sins or for the sins of their forebearers. Likewise, people who prospered in the world were seen as blessed by God and being rewarded for something. But Jesus reverses the order when he says that Lazarus when he died was carried by the angels themselves to be with father Abraham, the faithful ancestor of the Jewish people, whereas the rich man suffered in Hades, the land of the dead. Jesus dramatically shows the gap between the rich man and the poor man, and this probably shocked the Pharisees. I think this is why Jesus tells the parable.

Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine has described parables as bombs thrown into our status quo, bombs thrown into our status quo to explode our understanding, and so while we might wonder is Jesus saying that the rich people go to the bad place, and the poor people go to the good place, is this what heaven and hell are going to be like? I think that the purpose of the story is not to predict what will happen, not to paint a definitive picture of what heaven is like, or the afterlife. But it is to surprise the hearers, to explode their understanding such that they might wonder in some new ways. I think Jesus tells the parable to the Pharisees so that they, and us, may take a hard look at our own disproportions and do something about them. And that we might consider that our disproportions in this life have spiritual consequences for us now and in the life to come.

I don’t think I need to spend a disproportionate amount of time in this sermon talking about the disproportionate way our world has become in terms of wealth and poverty, but I’ll just say a couple things. Just as in Jesus’ time, we have people who are so rich, who have so much it is obscene. And we have people just as in Jesus’ time who have so little it is sickening, and we have ignorance of the needs of the poor now just as there has always been. Just as in Jesus’ time, there are self-righteous persons who justify their abundance and who maybe give a little bit here or a little bit there, but in their hearts there is only the impoverished love of money.

Now I think most of us are somewhere in the middle, somewhere on the spectrum. We might be at the high end of the spectrum, in the middle, or at the low. Most of us are not obscenely rich, nor are we desperately poor. And we may not even love money, but we feel like we have to give a disproportionate amount of our time and our energy worrying about it. We may feel trapped because money and the system of money rules our lives. The funny thing is that compared with most of the world and compared with humanity through most of human history, we, most of us in this room, have so much more than we need, and yet we worry that all it will take will be a turn in the markets or a crisis in our life, and we will be, we will not have enough. Such disproportions in life are not what God wants for us individually and us as a community.

So, what bomb does this parable drop into our status quo? How might this parable challenge us to look at our disproportions, to look in the ways in which we are out of balance, in which some parts of our lives take up way too much room and other parts do not have enough room? I can’t answer that question for you, you’re going to have to wrestle with that yourselves because I don’t know your individual circumstances, but I wonder if this parable also invites us to ask about the proportions we would like to see. How can our lives be proportioned such that it shows wholeness and the life that really is life?

Several years ago, my wife Sarah and I got together with four other couples for some dinners and some conversations in each other’s homes around the topic of Sabbath economics. We got together to explore and imagine how our lives might more proportionately reflect the Biblical values of Sabbath. Sabbath is not just taking one day off a week for rest. Sabbath is a way of living that is centered around the fact that God is God, and we are not, and that God provides what we need, and that everyone is invited to share in rest and abundance. So, as couples we talked with each other frankly about the reality of living in a world that worships money and how hard it is when we would like to order our lives differently but it’s difficult to see how. We talked about the joys of giving and sometimes the challenges of not feeling like we can give as much as we wanted to or the invitation to live more simply and yet how difficult it can be to live in such a complicated world. Like the parable, some of these conversations were a bomb dropped into our status quo, they really blew our minds open. I think that everyone who participated ended up doing something differently as a result. None of us changed our lives dramatically overnight. It certainly wasn’t enough, but it was a start, it was a start.

We’re entering as a parish into this time of year that we often call stewardship season, a time of praying about our sacred financial offerings, our gifts that we give back to God through the church in gratitude for the wonder in all that God has done. I think many of us feel like we wish we could give more. We’re not sure how to start. We’re talking about money after all, and money is one of the most difficult topics, especially in church, and as Paul reminds us, the love of money is the root of many kinds of evil, that is not money itself but the love of it that gets us into trouble. Maybe it’s time for a bomb in our status quo. This year as you consider what you might give back to God in the form of financial offerings here at St. George’s that you discern whether you can commit to that, your offerings in the coming year and let us know what those are in the coming weeks on your pledge card. The invitation may be not just to consider what you can do but to consider the proportions of your life. And not to start with what’s realistic, but to start with what you’d like to see, what proportion of your time and energy would you like to give to the people and the things you care about most? What proportion of your income, what percentage of your income would be a fitting offering to God in thanks for all that God has given you? Where would you like to be? If you really want to throw a bomb in the status quo, find some people that you trust and talk with them about it. It might open your eyes in some new ways. Start with the right proportions and then work back to what you think you might be able to do to make those proportions more a part of your reality. Dream audaciously, and then see how those proportions might start to come into balance.

This idea of proportionate giving is thinking of your giving as a percentage of your overall income, so the Bible gives us the tithe of the ten percent as one standard. That may not be where you are but thinking of those gifts not in terms of the amount but in terms of the proportion of the whole. This way of thinking also though kind of invites us to think of our lives not as fragmented pieces that are fighting with one another but our lives as one whole that fits together. One of the things I’ve said after my sabbatical is I don’t want to try to fit my life in around my work anymore. I want my work to be a part of the whole of my life, and I want my giving to be part of a greater whole of how I take care of what God has given me. How is God inviting us to live lives of wholeness and beautiful proportion? Maybe your pledge this year to give one part in ten or one part in twenty or one part in a hundred, whatever it is, maybe it will be a stretch, maybe you can make it a stretch for you, not just as a sign of what you’ll give but as a sign of your desire to live a life of wholeness and proportion.

If you figure out how to do this, please let us know because we’d love to hear your wisdom. Most of us feel daunted by this in some way, shape, or form. So the good news from the parable today is that the poor man in the parable is named Lazarus, and Lazarus in Hebrew means my God has helped, and God has always and will always help the poor, and that includes, thanks be to God, the poor in imagination, the poor in courage, the poor in resolve. When we turn our hearts from seeking the things of this world to seeking the things of God, God will give us a disproportionate measure of grace because that’s how God’s economy works, and possibly God might give us a bomb in our status quo because that’s also how God often works. So, watch out for that. God has helped, God is helping, God will help us to live lives of beautiful proportion. Thanks be to God.

Annual Meeting and Combined Worship Service

December 18, 2018 by St. George's Leave a Comment

Sermon for the St. George’s annual meeting December 9, 2018. The Rev. Joseph H. Hensley, Jr.

Let me quote the apostle Paul as he wrote to the Philippians in the reading we heard earlier: “I thank my God every time I remember you.” Good morning beloved St. Georgians. I thank our God when I remember you and when I remember all the ways that God is at work in our midst. And I say with Paul, “I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion.” God is up to some good work at St. George’s. Thanks be to God. Thanks be to you, beloved parishioners, for all the ways you are cooperating and participating with God in this place. It’s been almost four years since I began my work here as your rector, and still, I thank my God every time I remember our community and our ministry. It’s good to be here. Can you turn to your neighbor and tell them, “It’s good to be here?”

The text that I would like to focus on this morning is a text from both Luke’s Gospel and the prophet Isaiah.As Luke describes the appearance of John the Baptist who is preparing the way for Jesus, Luke quotes the prophet Isaiah writing several centuries earlier: “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord.” Prepare the way of the Lord. We are in the season of Advent, the four Sundays leading up to the feast of Christ’s incarnation, God becoming human. We often say that it is a season of waiting. Waiting for Christmas. Waiting for Christ to enter the world. Waiting. We also say that Advent is a season of preparing the way.Note that several of our music selections today include the phrase: “prepare the way.” This is our season, as we are waiting, to also be preparing.

Since this is the annual meeting Sunday, I have a few things to say about the parish. I am preparing to do that!And so let me get there by talking about preparing the way for God. This time of the year, we talk a lot about preparing for the holidays. Are you prepared for Christmas? I’m not even fully prepared for Advent and it started last Sunday. The answer really is “no,” I am not prepared. Because when people say,“are you prepared,” what they really mean is “are you ready? Are all your plans in place?” Let’s just say I’m planning to get my plans in place. But let’s go back to Isaiah for a moment.

The word in Hebrew that Isaiah uses to say “prepare” has a different meaning from “get ready.” The word has more of a meaning of clearing. Clear the way. Prepare the path by clearing it of obstacles, smoothing the rough spots, filling in the potholes. So there is,perhaps, a difference between preparing and planning. Planning is buying presents and putting up decorations and making food. Preparing is clearing sometime in the calendar just to sit in God’s presence. Planning is putting things in place. Preparing is making space. Planning involves stocking up. Preparing involves cleaning out. Planning is important, don’t get me wrong. But I think the call of Isaiah is to clear the way, to prepare for the coming of God by making time and making room for God to enter our world. So during this Advent season, we take care not to let our planning overshadow our preparing. For it is when we prepare, when we clear room for God, that God can show us things we could never begin to plan for.

So now I would like to shift into talking about the parish, and I want to talk about St. George’s both in terms of planning and preparing. Both are essential. Let me begin by saying that we do not have enough time in this sermon or in one annual meeting to tell the story of everything we have done in the past year and everything that we are looking ahead to. The vestry and I are “planning” to offer a more complete annual report of 2018 early in the new year, once this year is complete. Be prepared for it!

Planning and preparing. We planned in our budget at the beginning of 2018 to hire three staff members, one new position and two expanded roles. We ended up hiring seven people. Our initial plans did not involve our associate rector, Gay Rahn, retiring or our director of children’s formation and outreach, Carey Connors, going to seminary. Nor did we foresee the opportunity to partner with Christ Lutheran and Trinity Episcopal to hire a young adult missioner. But we were prepared for these opportunities, because we had made some room, both materially and spiritually, for God to do some new work. So, in order of their arrival this year, we welcomed Parish Administrator, Laurel Loch, Parish Secretary, Barbara Miller-Richards, Facility Manager, Riley Mullins, Table administrator, Katie Wendt, Young adult missioner, the Rev. David Casey, Associate Rector, the Rev. Areeta Bridgemohan, and Director of Children’s and Youth Formation, Hecti Musa. Thanks be to God we have an incredible staff of 15 that works so hard and so well to support our ministries and to empower our parishioners to focus on their ministries. As another way to help parishioners plan and prepare for their own ministry, the vestry also put into place a new commission this year,the “connections commission” whose mission is to help connect parishioners who want to get involved with ministries that can use their gifts. As you prepare to get more involved, see the “help wanted” page on our website, and look for upcoming invitations from the connections commission. Part of our preparing and planning in the coming year is going to be calling some new leaders so that current leaders who are ready for a break can step back while they still have energy to give. Although we have a beautiful building and facility, it is the people who gather and minister, work and worship here every day that make St.George’s a church where we can grow and then share God’s love. It’s the people who are the church.

A church with the amount of people and activities that St. George’s has needs a dedicated and skilled staff to provide consistency and stability so that volunteers can have what they need to succeed. To be transparent, staff costs are the majority of our budget expenses. This year, we managed to minimize a deficit budget by reducing staff expenses during some significant gaps of time when positions were unfilled. We plan to begin 2019 with our full staff and will not have that same wiggle room.

We are able to hire this wonderful staff and fund all our ministries through the generous support of parishioners. I often say that the finance meeting is one of my favorite meetings because it reminds me of your generosity. The spreadsheet numbers represent your faithful and consistent gifts. Finance is often a “planning”meeting for sure, but it is also a preparation meeting. In those meetings we often have to remember to clear away our negative thinking and prepare a way for God to show us what is possible. Your gifts, gathered together, have showed us what is possible, over and over again. We have grown since I arrived in 2015.At some point, we might say, “haven’t we gotten big enough?” But then more and more people want to join our parish. Our amazing volunteer leaders hear God calling us to respond to more needs in the world. We want to prepare for what God is going to do next right here. To be frank, growing in ministry means growing in giving. Back in September, Bishop Bob Ilhoff asked some of us to think about giving not until it hurts but until it feels good. Give until it feels good. Part of how we prepare the way of God is by clearing away our hesitancy and offering as much as we can with joy. I believe our parishioners together have the resources to fully fund and even to exceed our needs for the coming years.I know many are already giving a very joyful proportion of their gifts to St. George’s. Many of us, though, could consider offering to God a more joyful proportion. This would enable us to even more joyfully share the ministries of this place, to share the welcoming love of God.

There’s more to say, and my time is growing short. As I said, we plan to offer a complete picture of 2018 early next year, from pastoral care to Christian formation, from home communion visits to forums about wholeness, from grace in action locally to mission around the country and world, from the Table in Fredericksburg to Notre Dame in Haiti, from worship and music to fellowship and hospitality, from deaf ministry to newcomers, buildings and grounds to finance and stewardship, from care for God’s creation to time, talent, and treasure; from St. George’s preschool to St. George’s Catechesis of the Good Shepherd to St. George’s youth, from Youth in Global to Glory Ridge, from young adult community ministry to ecumenical and interfaith partnerships, from racial reconciliation to evangelism, from our first annual “round up” storytelling event to our 300^th anniversary in 2020-2021. For now, I want to share one last thing about our planning and preparing.St. George’s is planning and preparing for me to take a sabbatical break next summer. My departing Sunday will be the parish picnic on June 2 and my returning Sunday will be the rally for service Sunday September 8. The theme of my sabbatical is “rooted in wholeness” which was our theme for the Shrine Mont parish weekend in October and for our adult forums this fall and next spring. I am excited to share that I received a generous funding grant from the Lilly Foundation to support some travel and retreat for me and my family and also to support St. George’s in several ways during my absence. I truly hope this time will be a time of preparing the way of the Lord, of clearing away obstacles and smoothing out rough edges. In this season of Advent, I hope each of us can find some mini-sabbaticals, some times to rest, slow down, and listen so that we can prepare to receive God who is coming into the world.

In a few minutes we will cast ballots to elect four new vestry members. As I bring this message to a close, I ask us to set aside our plans for a moment and simply prepare. Prepare our hearts to listen for God’s guidance. God is already at work: in our parish, in our neighborhood, in the world. How is God inviting us to be part of that wonderful work of love and welcome, of grace in action, of giving and receiving? Now is a time in the life of our parish not only to plan but to prepare. Prepare the way.

All Saints’ Sunday

November 8, 2018 by St. George's Leave a Comment

Sermon from the Rev. Joseph H. Hensley, Jr., Rector, St. George’s Episcopal Church
Fredericksburg, VA | All Saints’ Sunday Year B: November 4, 2018

Today we celebrate All Saints Sunday. It is one of the major feasts of the church year, right up there with Christmas and Easter. In some places the celebration begins on the night before, on the eve of the feast. You may be familiar with the name for the night before All Saints Day…All Hallows Eve. I will say that Halloween is one of my favorite nights of the year, because it is the one night when neighbors go knocking on each others doors and are greeted with grins and sweets. The dead come to life. People walk the streets and can be whoever they want to be. It’s a beautiful thing. All Hallows Eve, the eve of the feast of all the hallowed ones, all the holy ones, all the saints of God.

Last night, on the eve of this All Saints Sunday, the Fredericksburg community had a different kind of All Hallows Eve as we gathered in the Beth Sholom Synagogue for an interfaith vigil to remember the victims of the Tree of Life massacre a week ago in Pittsburgh. It was a gathering of the holy ones of God, the saints of many faiths, not only to remember victims but to share hope for the future. Rabbi Jennifer Weiner, the new rabbi at the synagogue, asked ministers of the wider community to light eleven candles, one for each of the slain at Tree of Life. She wanted our presence there to be a sign of unity. I was asked to say a few words on behalf of the interfaith community. Since the summer of 2015, I have been helping to organize a monthly gathering of interfaith leaders where we discuss and respond to the concerns of the community. Because that group has been meeting for over three years now, when the call came from the new rabbi to come and support her congregation in their time of grief and vulnerability, we were ready. Last night we filled the synagogue almost to its capacity. The president of the synagogue said he had never seen that many people in that space before, not even for their high and holy celebrations. It was a beautiful thing for all of us. I wanted to share with you what I said last night, on your behalf.

I began by saying: “I recently heard a wise minister say this: ‘You have to do the work in the good times to be prepared for the bad times.’

The fact that so many of us are gathered here tonight is a testimony to the work we have done in the good times to prepare us for a time such as this where we must come together. We must come together to mourn the dead. We must come together to lament the loss. We must come together to reassure each other that we are still here. We do not crumble and dis-integrate when crisis strikes. We re-integrate. We further integrate.

Rabbi Weiner asked me to say a few words tonight, as a representative of many Fredericksburg area faith communities. We are here tonight to stand in grief and support, to stand also in hope with our Jewish sisters and brothers. I use family terms intentionally. We stand with our neighbors to whom we are related by virtue of being children of one God. We may have our theologically nuanced ways of understanding our relationship, but we ARE related. And as kin, we share many values in common including the affirmation of love and the renunciation of evil which corrupts and destroys the creatures of God. Although some in our various faiths at times have targeted and in some places still do target Jewish people and communities, we come here tonight firmly opposed to anyone who would use faith of any kind as a reason to kill. We come here tonight firmly in favor of a clear position – that love wins. Hatred in any form is not a path to the peace which we seek. The word, “peace,” in Hebrew, “Shalom” and in Arabic, “Salaam” can also be expressed as “wholeness,” “completeness.” We come here tonight, because we believe that it is only by being together, being the whole community, that we will overcome the haters and seek the peace and wholeness of the city in which we dwell. May God bless us all as we do this work together in a difficult time with the hope of better times and with the hope that in time, we will be better.”

At the end of the vigil, the congregation was invited to join in what is called, in Jewish tradition, the kaddish prayer. It is a prayer recited by mourners during the bereavement period. But is not a prayer to remember the dead. It is a prayer of praise to God. The word, “kaddish” means holy. And it struck me that we also say a kaddish each and every Sunday, and we invite our kaddish with these words: “Now let us join with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven who forever sing this hymn to proclaim the glory of your name: “Holy Holy Holy.”

This is the song of the communion of saints, Holy Holy Holy, because God is holy and so are we. And whether we gather in good times or in bad times, we sing our song. At the beginning of my remarks last night, I referenced a wise minister who said, “You have to do the work in the good times to be prepared for the bad times.” That minister is an Episcopal priest named Cass Bailey. He’s the rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Charlottesville. I heard him speak those words last Friday at our Diocesan convention in Richmond. He was reflecting on how the community in Charlottesville had been able to come together recently around their Jewish neighbors, because they had been in the practice of coming together since the white supremacist rally in August 2017. They had already done the work to build relationships. We saints have to do the work in good times to be prepared for the bad times. We nurture relationship with God and with our neighbors in the good times so that when hard times come, we can sing together by heart. We can receive God’s grace so abundantly provided. We are here today, celebrating all the saints, in this good time, and we baptize a new saint into the household of God this morning. We celebrate the holy women and men of God who knew and lived out this truth. We celebrate them today so that when we need their support, we will remember that we are joined with all the company of heaven.

Today’s scripture lessons are all readings that remind us both of death and the possibility of new life. They are often read at funerals. We the saints know that death and tragedy are real. Today we will read the necrology of those who have died in the last year. And we will keep in our hearts those who died at Tree of Life in Fredericksburg, those who were killed at a grocery story by racist violence in Louisville, Kentucky, as well as those who were killed at a yoga studio in Tallahassee just a couple of days ago. Tomorrow, who knows what horrible news may come. We grieve. We mourn. But even at the grave we make our song, holy holy holy, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. We recite our kaddish, gathered as God’s holy people, and in so doing we are reminded that death is not the end. Hatred, bitterness, and enmity are not the last words. They are not the last work, because we are still here, with all the saints. May God bless all the saints as we work together in difficult times with the hope of better times and with the hope that in God’s good time and by God’s good grace, we will be better.

We Are Free

June 19, 2016 by St. George's

Sermon from the Rev. Joe Hensley, Rector, St. George’s Episcopal Church
Fredericksburg, VA | The fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Year C, June 19, 2016

June 19, 1865. Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was read to African American slaves in Galveston, Texas. Union General Gordon Granger issued an order stating that “The People of Texas are informed that in accordance with the Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” It was two and a half years after the original proclamation of emancipation on January 1, 1863. June 19 has become a day of celebration over the past century and a half. It’s called Juneteenth. In many places it is a celebration not only of liberation from slavery, but a celebration of diversity, a celebration of community, of the gifts that we all bring.

Today’s reading from Paul’s letter to the Galatians has echoes of this. Paul writes these famous words, “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ, there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” The words of the hymn say it so wonderfully, “In Christ there is no East or West, in Him no South or North, but one great fellowship of love throughout the whole wide earth.” We’re going to sing that one at the end of the service. As today is June 19, we remember the delayed freedom of the slaves in Texas, 151 years later, we remember that freedom is still delayed for many in our nation, many in our world. We remember that the one great fellowship of love throughout the whole wide earth is still a dream into which we are called to live, but which has not come to its full fruition. In Christ we are all one, but in these days we are reminded that we are still so divided. These divisions have been brought into sharp focus this past week as we respond to another horrible tragedy, a massacre, an unspeakable thing. I say unspeakable because I will not speak of the details. I know we have young ears among us. We can remember what happened last Sunday in Orlando, and we must remember without having to remember the specific events. Many of us have been tuned in and it’s been very difficult, very painful to hear.

Almost exactly a year ago I stood here, in the aftermath of another massacre in Charleston, South Carolina, and as I said then I will say now because it bears repeating: God was there. God was active and involved. God was loving those who were suffering, God loved those who died. This was not an act of God, but God was active. God was there in many ways that we will never know. That is worth repeating, and knowing, and remembering. The question that was on my mind that I know I raised last year was, “Where was God.” The question I’ve been hearing a lot this past week is, “Where were we?” Where did we fail to show up somehow that this would happen again? There’s been a lot of finger pointing and blaming, a lot of desire to know who failed, who messed up, who should have done something sooner so that this would not have happened, who can we pin this on. That’s been the response, repeatedly in our country, that we look for someone else who can take responsibility so that maybe we don’t have to.

We all know that we bear a collective responsibility that we all are to blame in some way, we have all failed in some way to address the problems that we face and the challenges and divisions which are made manifest in acts of chaos and destruction. It feels like we are possessed, that our society is somehow possessed, like the man in the Gospel story, by a power that keeps us out of our right minds, that keeps us wandering in places of death as a society and world. Jesus encounters this man in the Gospel, he’s totally possessed and for a long time, it says, he’s been out of his right mind. For a long time, he’s been seized at times by this unclean spirit that would drive him out into the wild places. I think we have been seized yet again by something that is bent on chaos, that is bent on turning us against one another. This is not unique to our time and place. It has happened over and over at many places in many times, but we need to name it as such. We are acting as if a people that has been possessed by something that has taken us out of our best selves. The question we all have is what do we do about it? How do we proceed? How do we face the sense of dread that so many of us have that we’re stuck, and maybe we won’t get unstuck, we just aren’t sure what’s going to happen and how are we going to come together. That sense that we are all staring into this abyss, because it’s not like Jesus is going to come down from heaven and cast out the demon.

Wouldn’t that be nice? Wouldn’t it be nice if Jesus could come and put us back into our right collective mind and clothe us with love and sing the song, “In Christ there is no East or West.” Wouldn’t it be nice for Jesus to say, “In me there is no Democrat or Republican. In me there is no Jew or Greek, there is no immigrant or native born, there is no slave or free, there is no male or female, no transgender in me, no gay or straight or bisexual in me. We ask Christ to whisper to us, we are all one. You are all one even though you are all different, and those differences are beautiful and wonderful, but what brings you together in me is something greater, something more profound. Wouldn’t it be nice if Jesus could come down and just say those words to us and fix it? Of course Jesus won’t wrap it up neatly in a bow for us, but I actually do believe that Jesus can still cast out demons. I believe Jesus is doing it right here, right now, in this very room. We say we are the body of Christ, and if we say that and if that is true and because that is true, then we are empowered, we are sent out to cast out the evil that enslaves us, to declare freedom to all who are held in bondage, and even if that Emancipation Proclamation is coming too slow and later than we would like, we are to proclaim it. The man who Jesus saved from the demon, he wanted to go with Jesus. But Jesus said no. I don’t think Jesus was sending him away. It says he sent him away as you’re not worthy or something. No, he was sending him as a missionary. He said go to your people and tell them all that God has done for you. Go to your people who were afraid of healing. Remember it said in the story that they were afraid when Jesus came and put the man back in his right mind. They were afraid of change, they were afraid of healing and wholeness. So Jesus said you’ve got to go to your people and tell them what God has done for you. And where do we begin? Maybe we begin by declaring what God has done for us. What God can do and what God will do in us and with us and through us.

I’m getting ready to leave this morning on a trip to Glory Ridge camp down in the mountains of North Carolina. At the 7:45 service we commissioned our group of youth and adults and they’re already on the road, and I’m going to confess to you, I’m going to leave at the peace because it’s a long drive to get down there and I need to be there at a certain time, but I wanted to be there with you all this morning for this part of the service, so I hope you’ll forgive me for scooting out a little early. We are going to Glory Ridge to work alongside some neighbors in the mountains of North Carolina and I hope we’ll be of some help. We’re doing some digging and some scraping and some roof painting and whatever it is they’ve got for us to do down there. But the real reason we’re going is to study up on what God can do with us. What God can do with a rag tag bunch of teenagers and adults who hopefully know their way around a hammer, but not much more than that. What can God do with us? With strangers that we will meet along the way. What can God do with us? What will God do for us? We’re going to study up on that. We’re going to study up on what it means to live as one community, to be clothed in Christ. We’re going to study up on what it means to be able to be returned to our right minds, to be really alive in the Spirit. We’re going to study up and listen, like Elijah did for the sound of the still, small voice, the sound of sheer silence in which God speaks with a fine whisper. We’re going to this place so that we can have some good news to share. So that we, in accordance with the proclamation through the almighty God through Jesus Christ, can say we are all free. We are all free. Even at a time where many of us are targeted because we are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered. Even at a time many of us are targeted because of our race, or because of our country, or because of our religion. At a time when we cry out with the Psalmist, why oh my soul are you are disquieted within me? Why are you cast down? Even at such a time, we are still called to proclaim that we are free. We are called to proclaim that in Christ there is no East or West, in Him no South or North. We are called to offer that one great fellowship of love throughout the whole wide earth and to proclaim what God can and will and has done in us and with us and through us. That work of declaring freedom, of being and staying free it’s hard work, it’s long work, and it is blessed work.