History minute #2 – The Oldest Continuous Episcopal Church in Massachusetts

Dec 192010
 

St. Paul’s has the distinction of being the oldest continuous Episcopal parish in Massachusetts, and indeed one of the oldest in the country.  As you probably know it was founded in 1711 during the reign of Queen Anne of Great Britain under the tutelage of the Anglican missionary society with the long, tongue twisting name of The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, the foreign parts in this case being British America.  St. Paul’s founding was preceded by 25 years by King’s Chapel in Boston near the Common in 1686, the first Anglican parish in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  King’s Chapel, like St. Paul’s, had a tough time getting established due to the hostility of the surrounding puritan population who wanted no part of a “heretical” orthodox church from which they had come here to escape. These conflicts, social, economic and theological in nature, are a story in themselves for a later time. They confirm, as if we did not know it already, that the Christian family is no stranger to heated, sometimes ugly, conflict.

 

King’s Chapel, like so many churches in New England, adopted the ideals of Unitarianism after the game changing success of the War of Independence and the introduction of a democratically elected government by the people, casting off the enigmatic mysteries of the trinity and the supernatural divinity of Christ in favor of a theology based more solely on reason, conscience and moral character.  The distinction of the oldest continuous Episcopal parish passed to St. Paul’s. Although, in fairness, we should acknowledge we have competition. Christ Church Quincy in Quincy, Massachusetts was gathered in 1689 and organized as a parish in 1704, seven years before us. It too survived fires, relocation and persecution by the surrounding Puritans as did St. Paul’s. To complicate matters, their parish was divided into multiple entities whole ours remained whole. During the Revolutionary War its loyalist rector was suddenly lost while the faithful Rev. Bass continued to hold services throughout the conflict, albeit with the modification of no mention of the King, British government or the Royal Family, giving us some ground to claim an unbroken history of continuous service and operation. No doubt this gentlemanly diocesan debate will continue.

 

However, whatever distinction we hold, we might ask what accounts for our historic longevity?  What is it that made our parish forefathers and mothers remain faithful to this tradition of belief and worship?  What led our rector to maintain a path of comprise to keep our mission of faith alive?   What enduring values make us faithful to this day?

 

Bronson de Stadler

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Sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent, Dec 5, 2010

Dec 052010
 

2 Advent, Year A          December 5, 2010

I want to begin this morning by sharing something I read recently by writer Shelley Douglas, a member of the Sojourners community in Washington, DC, about hope that got her through a tough time when she was a child. She wrote this:

“When I was about 9, living in Switzerland with my parents and attending local schools, I used to make-believe to lessen my homesickness.  Walking home from school every day, I would tell myself that when I rounded the last corner I would see in the distance my grandparents old black Chevy parked in from of our Swiss apartment building.

Every day I would turn that corner more than half-expectant that the car would be there and with it my grandparents and the restoration of our family community.  The car was never there; my grandparents didn’t make the trip. But I’ve never forgotten that heart-stopping sense of anticipation that any day they MIGHT be there.  I would like to have that sense of the possible in my yearning for the coming of God’s kingdom. (Living the Word, p. 7)

It is just this sort of tremendous anticipation that saturates our readings on this second Sunday of Advent. These readings call out for what people in every generation have longed for – a time when we will live in love of God and each other – when all creation will be reconciled.  When, as the Prophet Isaiah puts it,  “They will not hurt of destroy on all my holy mountain.” Those words, along with the beautiful description of the peaceable kingdom of God that precede them seem all the more powerful when we realize that they were spoken as a gift of hope by the prophet to the people of the Northern kingdom of Israel who were being besieged by the Assyrians who would eventually take them away into a long a painful exile.

Those of us who gathered for our Advent day of refreshment yesterday mused together about how we can hear in this story of Israel’s exiled waiting, something of our own stories.  When we embrace the invitation of Advent to slow down a bit and reflect on our lives, we come face to face with the incompleteness of our lives and an ancient longing reemerges in us.  Then we sing “O come, O come Emmanuel and ransom captive Israel” we are not just echoing the past, but also pleading out of our own experiences of exile.

And self imposed exile is at least part of what Advent is about – to remove ourselves a little from our usual mode of living.  To step back and find daily moments in which we let go of the frenzy of these days and instead listen in silence.  When we find our best ways of doing this we can recognize our deep longing for and need of God’s presence and healing in our lives and we can begin again to stoke the flames of that longing.  Then when we come together for worship, study and fellowship we can let the words of the liturgy and the loving words of each other ignite that longing into hopeful expectation.

Those of us gathered together yesterday also had the lavish experience of listening together to parts of Handel’s Messiah.  We were  moved by the way the words taken from the Prophet Isaiah combined with the composer’s musical interpretation of them lifted us to a higher plane of hopefulness even as we were acknowledging the exile experiences of our lives.  As Viki Pretti, Vicar of West Newbury, noted, the day was special because it opened for us two doorways onto the realm of God – scripture and music.

The powerful effect that music has on the spirit clearly was not lost on St. Paul.  In the passage we heard from the Letter to the Romans this morning, there is much musicality.  He admonishes the Romans, “Live in harmony”, “with one voice glorify…God.”, “sing praises”. In a recent issue of The Christian Century Magazine D. Brent Laytham, a professor of theology and ethics, writes this about this passage:

“Note the correlation here between harmony and holiness.  As diverse voices turn to song and tune to one another, they bring forth one harmonious sound. Likewise, as by the Spirit’s power diverse selves are turned toward God and tuned in love, they become Christ’s harmonious body….

… When we sing, time changes from the sequential progression of tick-tock to the complex layerings of meter, beat, rhythm and movement.  Experientially, we are not enduring the song’s duration but participating in its anticipation of glory…

…Christian singing harmonizes and hopes in conformity with Christ – and joyfully receives the gift of time, the ‘not yet’ becoming our ‘already’, the future freeing our present.” (Christian Century Magazine, Nov. 30, 2010, p. 20)

Well I for one felt that yesterday as our small group sat together in the upper room of St. John’s Parish hall and let Handle’s Messiah wash over us and lead us into deep sharing of self and faith.  Similarly, I have felt the same on a good number of occasions recently here in this blessed sanctuary as music has moved us to what feels like a place just outside the normal parameters of time – a place of harmony not unlike what the prophet Isaiah describes, where it seems it might just be possible for wolves and lambs, and leopards and kids, and lions and fatlings to coexist peacefully.  A place where those at war might just be able to turn spears into pruning hooks. A place where the unruly pieces of my own being might just relax into a state of contentment.  Have you felt it too through some to the music we have shared?

To round out his article in Christian Century, D. Brent Laytham writes:    “What all song does, Advent singing does more of: it fills us with joy that we may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” I hope this will be true for us over these next weeks. And I pray our shared music and song will be one of the corners around which we anticipate God’s glory will be visible to us, until the full restoration of creation comes.

In Christ’s name.  Amen+

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Sermon for Advent 1 2010

Nov 282010
 

Texts: Matthew 24:36-44 Isaiah 2:1-5 Psalm 122

Grace to you and peace from God our creator and the Lord Jesus Christ.  Amen.

I’d like to begin today by making a couple of remarks on our Gospel text. Jesus was talking about “the coming of the Son of Man.”  He said,  “Two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.”  What can it mean to be taken, or to be left?  On the surface it seems quite black-and-white: the righteous shall be taken up – raptured – into heaven, and the rest of us left behind to fight with each other and suffer.  Entire denominations of our fellow followers of Jesus have this theology of rapture as their foundation.  It’s served as the basis of a tremendous publishing empire. At the book fair a couple of weeks ago, we had some books from the famous Left Behind series. They were nicely printed and bound; the covers said “over 40 million copies in print.  They sold quickly.

So is this what Jesus intended to say? At the time of his coming in glory is the earth going to suffer the same kind of cataclysm it suffered at the time of Noah? Are the righteous going to get front-row seats in heaven while the rest of us suffer?

First of all, no.  This Gospel passage is not about a repeat of the flood.  Any student of Genesis can read the Lord’s promise of mercy and tolerance in  chapter 8:

‘I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done.

As long as the earth endures,  seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night,  shall not cease.’

Never. again.  No mistaking those words.  Jesus is not talking about destroying all flesh.

Secondly, there’s genuine doubt about what the words “taken” and “left” actually mean.   The Greek word that’s here translated as “left” is translated “forgiven” elsewhere in the Gospels.  In Luke’s gospel, the woman with the alabaster jar, because of her great love, has her sins left / forgiven.     So, our Gospel language is ambiguous, intentionally ambiguous.  Is it better to be taken or left? In truth there’s a holy mystery at the heart of this passage.

If you can build a publishing fortune (the Left Behind books) by claiming to know the certain answer to this deep mystery, more power to you, I guess!  Just, please, don’t claim that there’s no room for mystery in God’s relationship with humankind. Please, please, don’t insist on taming all the mysteries of God. Please let’s not take away all our hope for things unseen in our zeal to be perfectly sure Jesus won’t forget us.

It’s tempting to want to clear up all the mysteries of life.  It’s tempting to want to reduce everything in our lives to certainty.  I know I’m tempted that way, and I suspect you are. But we’re called instead, to live with mysteries and contradictions.

Living with mystery.  It’s a particular challenge in this season of the year.  This is the time of year that’s darkest, but we still call Advent the season of light.  This is the season of living with astonishment.  Listen to our reading from Isaiah – it’s God’s promise that Jerusalem will be a place of peace and global harmony, and that war will cease. From our perspective 2750 years later, that’s an astonishing claim.  That day doesn’t seem any nearer now than it did back in Isaiah’s day when the Assyrian army was at the gates.  But can we hear it as the truth when we listen with the ears of faith.  Let’s never stop hoping so.

It’s just as astonishing that the long-ago pregnancy of a homeless woman will result in the birth of the long-promised Messiah, the light that shines into our darkness.  We know his birth will be celebrated by a crowd of shepherds, and honored by wise strangers who traveled a long way with the faith that they would see him.  The fact that our God – our God! — can be carried for nine months by a poor teenager and born surrounded by livestock is one of the greatest mysteries of our walk of faith.

Many of us have become accustomed to that central mystery, because we’ve heard it repeated every year ever since we can remember. I daresay we even try to tame the mystery a little bit. Here’s a model stable, being made ready for the ikons we’ll use in a few weeks to remember that amazing birth. (sniff the stable) It’s tame, for sure. It doesn’t smell like a working stable. But that’s OK.  The way we retell the story cannot tame the truth of it, and cannot rob us of our astonishment.

Here’s another part of the mystery. We are swept up in an economy that, for better or worse, celebrates this astonishing divine birth by spending lots of money to buy stuff to give one another. Does Jesus grumble to his disciples that we celebrate his birthday by “eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage?” Maybe he does.   But the fact remains that we’ve organized our economy so that our collective well-being depends on at least some of us to get up before dawn on the Friday after Thanksgiving and buy stuff in the “doorbuster” sales.

Personally, I struggle with this part of the mystery of faith. Maybe you do too. I don’t like Christmas commercialism.  Sometimes I’m tempted by the Puritan way of taming the mystery: If we outlawed the celebrating of Christmas, we’d be done with Black Friday and all the rest.  If only it were so easy.

One of my daughters works in a shop in a mall.  She tells me this yearly opening day of the Advent season is a day the shopworkers both hope for and dread. They know the shops need the business; they know their customers are driven by a spirit of generosity, but they also know that their hours are long, their pay isn’t very good, and tempers can get short.  They know this season of light is a struggle for them, and for their customers, but they do their human best to get through it.  Some of them strive to deal with it as part of their walk of faith, and a chance to brighten somebody’s day.

I wonder if the people Jesus mentioned in the Gospel reading had similar ways of maintaining their faith in the face of contradiction and mystery.  Life was, in fact, very bad for the people who first heard St. Matthew’s Gospel.  He wrote it in a time when the Romans were wrecking Jerusalem and the communities around it.  Thievery and random kidnappings were common.

The people Jesus spoke about – men in the field, women at the mill – were doing their daily work.  It’s the work of putting bread on their tables.  It’s a work of love for their families, something they did while enjoying each others’ company.  It’s work that the Lord promised – seedtime and harvest – would always be there to sustain life on earth.    It was the work of showing forth the Lord’s promise.  But still, everything could change without notice. In Matthew’s time they had to do their with the possibility that they might not survive if soldiers turned up.

There are plenty of people in today’s world who live with threats like that.  I have a friend who cares for her children and does her job every day without knowing when the sheriff will come to evict them from the house they call home. Shop workers never know when somebody they serve will be rude or violent.  Like the people in the Gospel, many of us go to work without knowing whether we will be able to keep the job and co-workers we have. When we travel, anything could go wrong.  And not one of those threats to our peace and security is a sign of the kingdom of God.

Here are the signs of God’s kingdom. We continue through thousands of years to prayerfully hope beyond hope for the peace of Jerusalem. We wait for the coming of a helpless infant whose holy power changes everything.  We are both swept along in the path of Jesus, AND forgiven and set free. We are both taken up AND left behind.   We live each day in that mystery. In this dangerous, messy, and perverse world, you and I live with the mystery that God’s kingdom is already here.  The great gift of this Gospel lesson is to open our hearts to that mystery, and invite us into the wonder of God’s ways.

In these hectic days of this season of light, I pray that each of us may live into the mystery of faith.  As we prepare for the coming of Jesus, as we buy and sell, harvest and cook, eat and drink, may we treat each person we meet as the one working next to us at the mill or in the field.   It’s my prayer that we may cherish each person we meet.  For they too have been both taken up and left behind, both swept along and forgiven.  Theirs is the face of that helpless baby we’re waiting for.

These things I say to you in Jesus’s name.

 Sermon for Advent 1 2010  Posted by on Sun, 28-Nov-10 Sermons Comments Off

300th Anniversary — Rededication of the building.

Nov 222010
 

On Nov. 21st, 2010, as part of our year of celebration for the 300th anniversary of St. Paul’s Church, we rededicated the current church building, first dedicated November 28, 1923.

 300th Anniversary — Rededication of the building.  Posted by on Mon, 22-Nov-10 Events, History, News Comments Off

History Minute #1 – The Architect of St. Paul’s Church

Nov 212010
 

As we sit in this beautiful light filled sanctuary, surrounded by its brilliant white, neoclassical interior, and we reflect on our 300th Anniversary theme Living Stones, Living Spirit we might also reflect on St. Paul’s architect, …the earthly architect that is, not the heavenly.  His name was William Graves Perry.  Born in Boston into a wealthy family and raised in Newburyport in a High Street mansion, he graduated from Harvard, MIT and the Paris L’Ecole des Beaux Arts by 1913.  He started his own architectural firm in 1922 after being approached to design a new St. Paul’s Church.  He already had a reputation behind him as a fine designer of private school, college and commercial buildings.  You can see his work at Phillips Andover, Harvard and Brown University among others.

 

For the new church he chose to retain the original shape and the structural exterior design of the 1800 church, only covered in granite to match the chapel and set back much farther from the road.  He kept the box pews only more compact, shortened the original wrap around balcony to the back wall so the windows could be enlarged to allow a flood of natural light.  He moved the original modest, low pulpit to the other side and created a grand wine glass affair that set the priest high above the congregation.

 

After St. Paul’s, he went on to be chosen in 1927 as an architect in Williamsburg, Virginia where the Rockefellers were about to undertake perhaps the largest historic restoration project in America.  Perry stayed on as an architect at Colonial Williamsburg until 1953, recreating many of its lost colonial era buildings.  He reappeared in Newburyport in the 1970s when the downtown was threatened with demolition.  He lent his name, his talents and his prestige to the cause of its survival and eventual restoration.

 

We can thank him and many others for this light, ethereal place where we come together to experience the living spirit.

 

Bronson de Stadler

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Concerts at St. Paul’s

Nov 212010
 

Music is one of God’s greatest gifts to humanity, and a gift we can return to God.  At St. Paul’s we are blessed to have a building with good acoustics, and we’re delighted to provide performance space where people can gather to enjoy this gift of music.

We host the Newburyport Chamber Music Festival, for their August concert series and occasional events throughout the year.

We host the Cantemus Chamber Chorus of Ipswich for several performances each year.

If you are interested in using St. Paul’s worship for music performance, please don’t hesitate to contact us and ask about making arrangements for your event.

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Sermon for 300th Anniversary and Christ the King Sunday

Nov 212010
 

Texts: Colossians 1:11-20 and Luke 23:33-43

Today is the beginning of a year of celebrating this parish being spiritual home to thousands of faithful for 300 years.   Our theme for this year is living stones, living spirit – reminding us that we are not celebrating the past, but rather we are celebrating what we have inherited from the generations that have gone before and what we are stewards of until it is our turn to hand the parish on to coming generations.

Today we start this journey of celebration and reflection by focusing in on how this parish rose from the ashes of the fire in 1920 to lay the cornerstone in 1923for this structure that we so enjoy and call home.   And today we give abundant thanks for the ministry in Christ’s name that has taken place here in the intervening 80+ years.

Josiah Welch leads the litany

Josiah Welch Leads the Litany Rededicating the Buildling

I learned something interesting in doing some research about the early days of this present building.  I learned that before consecration of this building took place with much pomp and ceremony on November 27, 1923, another service took place here.  It was a wedding service 3 months earlier on August 23rd.  The bride was Miss Helen Pauline Hale, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Josiah Little Hale and the groom was Richard Edwin Welch, son of Mr. and Mrs. George H. Welch.  This was the first service of any kind to be held in the new church, which was still in an unfinished state.

Writer Carl Sandberg once quipped, “A baby is God’s opinion that life should go on.” And go on it did here at St. Paul’s – that young couple, Mr. & Mrs. Richard Welch, went on to have children and one of them is among us this morning, sitting right here in front in the pew his parents always sat in, Mr. Josiah Welch.  I point this out today as a reminder that our lives are still closely woven together with those that went before in this place.   Over these first 300 years of life as a parish, 4 buildings have housed this us, but the body of the church – the flesh and blood faithful – have gone on in an uninterrupted way, from generation to generation.

Leading the procession

Young People Leading the Procession

And so it will be into God’s future – and that is why we asked our children and newest members of our parish to lead us in procession this morning.  And that is why some of our young people have read our scriptures to us this morning – to symbolize the way forward – to embody for us God’s opinion that life should go on in this place and that ministry in the name of Christ should flourish.

And into the midst of this celebratory gathering comes the Gospel reading for this morning, assigned by the lectionary to be read on this last Sunday of the church year that is known as Christ the King Sunday.  Now at first read, it might seem that this Gospel, which tells us the story of the crucifixion, is out of sync with our festivities.  But upon deeper reflection, we might hear how it resonates on a deep level.  For in this passage we come face to face with the One whose self spending love gave birth to this faith, which is surely our most precious inheritance as members of this parish.

As, through this Gospel, we stand once again at the foot of the cross, we are once again struck by our Lord’s words in those moments of bloody agony – he cried out:

“Father, forgive them for they know not what they do”

and

“Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

On a day like today when we are considering what has been and what is to come in this our holy of holies, it is good to hear these sacred words again.  It is good to be reminded that forgiveness lies at the heart of our relationship to God through Christ.  It is good to know that the divine love, fully present in Jesus, runs so much deeper than the worst we could possibly do to him, or each other.  It is humbling to think that such love is ours just for the asking and is always looking to find a way into humanity’s hardened and hampered hearts.  It is good to let that loving forgiveness wash over us and spill onto others through the ways we live and move in this world.

And on a day like today it is also good to remember our crucified Lord’s promise to the repentant thief – “today you will be with me in paradise”.  What a load of fear and dread these words can remove from a troubled heart – how grace filled a moment it is when we cry out to Christ, as that fellow sufferer did, and hear that same promise whispered in our souls.  And what a blessing it is to get glimpses of that paradise as the coming together of our collective spiritual energy in worship becomes something powerful enough to lift aside the veil between here and eternity, even just for a moment.

Each generation of this parish since 1711 has heard a call from God to live a common life here that is a faithful expression of Christian faith in their particular moments in time and history.  We give thanks this day for the glories and struggles that have marked all the chapters so far, and especially for the grace that has sustained all of it.

The question for us today is: “What is the call for us in our day and into God’s future?”  What if the coincidence of hearing this Gospel passage on this celebration day is more than just coincidence? What if it is a signal that our call going forward is to embody the radical forgiveness of the cross in all that we are as a parish?  And what if it is a call to worship and serve in ways that reveal that the realm of God is close at hand and longing to be made evident?

Consciously holding forgiveness as central to who we are in an age of polarization, strife and contention could be an amazing blessing we could offer our world.  Finding creative ways to show the abundant realm of God close at hand in an age like ours that has largely lost such a sense could combat the hopelessness that abounds around us.  Not easy vision to fulfill – in fact powerfully challenging visions when one thinks about how to live them out!  Yet potentially grace – filled visions for our future together.

Our reading from the letter to the Colossians hints that the faithful will need great strength to endure many things.  All we have to do is look back over 300 years in this parish to hear the ring of truth in those words.  May the bold hopefulness of those who have gone before us spur us to ruthless trust in the One who died for us, rose again, and is already ahead of us, out there in our future. Christ Jesus our Lord.  Amen+

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November 14, 2010

Nov 142010
 

Proper 28 C                  November 14, 2010

In one week’s time, we will come together for a very special worship service.  Next Sunday we will let go of our normal schedule of services at 8 & 10:15 and combine for a service at 9 am in which we will remember the dedication of this building which took place back in November of 1923.  And we will celebrate the life and ministry that has flourished in this place since that time.  I hope that all of you will be here along with many others who are interested in this first event celebrating our 300th year as a parish.

I had this all in mind this week as I read our gospel lesson, and  Jesus’ words to his followers as they stood in the shadow of their holiest of holies, the temple in Jerusalem. His words about a future in which not one precious stone of that place would remain connected to another must have been jolting.  All, he ominously predicted would be thrown down.  Reading those words, I began to wonder what it must have been like to be a member of St. Paul’s, Newburyport in 1920, when their holiest of holies, which had housed the life and ministry of this parish for 120 years was  unexpectedly consumed by fire in the middle of the night.  Articles written at the time of that fire report this:

“The first viewing by the parishioners produced open mouth astonishment as they gazed at the shell of the lower Stories and part of the square tower at the front of the church.”

“On April 28, 1920 state building inspector, Mr. Cobb, declared ‘the steeple is unsafe and must be removed immediately’. On May 8, 1920 an article in the Newburyport News sported the headlines: ‘Ruins of the Burned St. Paul’s Episcopal Church to be Removed at Once’.”

Can you imagine?  We ourselves have dealt with serious water incursion and basement flooding this year, in this our spiritual home, but to have the building totally demolished would be a cataclysmic loss.  Heaven forbid!

Yet in our Gospel this morning Jesus speaks of cataclysmic changes of the end time, which will not just bring down the Temple in Jerusalem, but will also change the entire face of reality as we know it now.  We don’t have to work hard in the wake of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the Indian Ocean Tsunami, and just this year, the devastating earthquake in Haiti and flooding in Pakistan, to evoke images of what cataclysm might mean on a large scale. Jesus doesn’t soft pedal or minimize the suffering that he knows his beloved will encounter and have to endure.  In fact he describes it all in graphic terms:

He said to them, “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.” (Luke 21:10-11)

In a strange way this end times description Jesus gave to his followers that day reminds me of the graphic descriptions of labor and delivery that Marco and I got in our birthing class when we were awaiting Marcella’s arrival.  As she gave us the blow by blow of what to expect, our birthing instructor also showed us numerous photos of beautiful newborns, so that we would not lose sight of what it was all for – the glory of what the outcome would be.  Jesus does the same for his followers.  He holds up for us the new foundation that the new reality will be built upon – a foundation more sturdy than any built by human hands – the foundation of hope in Gods everlasting and abundant goodness.

Several years ago I was at a clergy conference with a priest who had 6 months before become the rector of a small church in Texas.  He told me that the day before the service in which he was to be installed as rector; their church building took a direct hit from a tornado.  All that was left afterward was a pile of rubble.  He told me that once the shock and initial grief had passed, his people began to speak words to each other that, before the tragedy they had also spoken, but which now for the first time they really believed and understood.  They said to each other whenever they could that the church was not the building but rather the people gathered inside.  He told me, “We’ve really discovered that the church is us – we are the living stones, and though we still grieve the loss of our building, we have discovered that we treasure each other and the faith we share more than we could ever treasure a physical structure.

I am sure the same was true for the people of St. Paul’s Newburyport in the early years of the 1920’s.  The news reports give us this glimpse:  “After days of grieving, the parishioners began the process of cleanup and rebuilding. On a Thursday afternoon, August 17, 1922 the cornerstone of the new church was laid.” It seems their devotion and steadfastness was refined in the flames that had claimed their building but which paradoxically seemed to strengthen their hope in what God could do through them as church.

One Bible commentator has said this about such hope: “Christian hope is not a simple hope.  It is neither nihilistic despair about tomorrow, nor is it simple-minded optimism.  It is born out of the conviction that whatever the future holds, God holds the future.”

That is the hope that Jesus holds up, even as he describes the challenges that are the birth-pangs of the new creation to come.  Hope is the focal point he wants his followers to keep their eyes on as they ride out those waves of change – for the God who holds the future, will surely be there to catch us as we are birthed into that newness.

Our first lesson, from the prophecy of Isaiah holds out that hope when in beautiful poetry it describes a world in which the partial and the scarce no longer exist. What is to come will be about balance and harmony.  All that we recognize as God’s blessings in this world are a foretaste of what is to come.

I want to close with some words from our catechism, or outline of faith, which is found toward the back of our prayer book.  Under the heading of The Christian Hope this question and answer appear:

Q. What is the Christian hope?

A. The Christian hope is to live with confidence in newness and fullness of life, and to await the coming of Christ in glory and the completion of God’s purpose for the world.

May we more and more, be living stones, possessed by that hope.

Amen+

 November 14, 2010  Posted by on Sun, 14-Nov-10 Sermons Comments Off

300th Anniversary Year Celebrations

Nov 062010
 

St. Paul’s was founded in 1711 by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. We have been in continuous ministry to the people of Newburyport since then.  We’re celebrating our 300th anniversary with lots of events this coming year.  Take a look at our St. Paul’s 300th Anniversary Schedule of Events.. (pdf).

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