Dedication Sunday

September 11, 2022

1 Kings 8:22-23,27b-30;

+ This past week, has been an exciting week for us here at St. Stephen’s.

Yes, the windows arrived!

And, yes, they look great!

Also, today, we are celebrating our Dedication Sunday.

We are commemorating 66 years of service to God and others.

And something else.

We are really showing that we have moved beyond the pandemic.

Of course, Covid is still with us.

But we are really moving beyond it all and moving forward.

And as a sign that we are, today we are re-dedicating the Children’s Chapel again.

The last time we had Children’s Chapel was in March of 2020.

 Last night when I came over to pray Evening Prayer in the Nave, I saw the chalkboard in the Children’s Chapel and got a little teary.

 So, it so good to have that back again.

 And we are baptizing Trevor!

 And we are welcoming some great new members.

 And we are blessing backpacks.

 It’s all very exciting.

 And I especially love our scripture readings for today.

 I love all this talk of a building being God’s house.

 I think we sometimes forget that fact.

 We forget that this is God’s house.

 God, in a very unique ways, dwells with us here.

 But this is Sunday is more than all these physical things.

 It is about than just a building, and walls, and vestments and paraments.

 It about us being the House of God.

 It is about us being the tabernacles in which God dwells.

 It is about us and our service to God and others.

 And you know what it’s really all about.

 It is about LOVE.  

 Yup, it’s gonna be another love sermon.

 Years ago, I read an amazing biography of the American poet Denise Levertov, I came across this wonderful quote, from another poet, St. John the Cross:

 “In the evening of our lives, we will be judged on love alone.”

 Later I heard a friend of mine comment on that quote by saying

  “we will be judged BY love alone.”

 I love that!

 That quote has been haunting me for years.

 And it certainly has been striking me to my core in these days leading up to our Dedication Sunday celebration.

 If this congregation could have a motto for itself, it would be this.

 “In the evening of our lives, we will be judged on love alone.”

 Because this, throughout all of our 66 year history, is what we are known for at St. Stephen’s.

 Love.

 We are known for the fact that we know, by our words, by our actions, by our faith in God and one another, that it is love that makes the difference.

 And by love we will, ultimately, be judged.

 That’s what the Church—that larger Church—capital “C” Church— should be.

But sometimes we forget what the Church should be.

This morning, there are many people here who have been wounded by that Church—the larger Church.

I stand before you, having been hurt be the larger Church on more than one occasion.

And for those of us who are here, with our wounds still bleeding, it is not an easy thing to keep coming back to church sometimes.

It is not any easy thing to be a part of that Church again.

It is not an easy thing to call one’s self a Christian again, especially now when it seems so many people have essentially highjacked that name and made it into something ugly and terrible.

And, speaking for myself, it’s not easy to be a priest—a uniform-wearing representative of that human-run organization that so often forgets about love being its main purpose.

But, we, here at St. Stephen’s, are obviously doing something right, to make better the wrongs that may have been done on a larger scale.

We, at St. Stephen’s, (I hope) have done a good job over these last 66 years of striving to be a positive example of the wider Church and of service to Christ who, according to Peter’s letter this morning, truly is a “living stone”—the solid foundation from which we grow.

We have truly become a place of love, of radical acceptance.

As God intends the Church to be.

On Friday I posted our announcement of Dedication Sunday and I mentioned in that we are celebrating 66 years of Radical ministry.

Someone asked the question, “please define radical ministry.”

And I refused.

Why? You might ask.

Well, because if I have to define what it is, it’s going to lose something.

I hear so many sermons and talks and conference about Radical ministry, and how to rejuvenate a parish or what have you.

Yes, I know.

I’ve read all the same books as the people who give those talks.

And we talk and talk about it all until we’re blue in the face and our pockets are empty from giving money to these speakers.

But the reality is this.

If you want to see what Radical ministry is, just come here and see it for yourself..

I told the person who asked about it to look at our website and see for herself what it is.

Because guess what?

We’ve been doing it here consistently for 66 years.

And everything we’ve done has run counter to all those conferences, all those books, all those statistics we read about.

Remember during Covid when there were all those articles of gloom and doom about how the Church—capital C—was never going to recover.

I remember one article proclaiming: “They never coming back!”

Well, look around here this morning.

Even during the pandemic, we kept going.

We never missed a Sunday Mass, and we only miss one Wednesday Mass.

Of course, we had only our safe pod of people in the pews.

But droves of people joined us through Livestream, some as far away as Paris and Kenya.

That is just a clue to the amazing way this parish not only survives, but thrives.

Even in the face of all the naysayers and the prophets of gloom who proclaimed their dark messages.

In these last 66 years, this parish has done some amazing things, some truly radical things.

It has been first and foremost in the Diocese of North Dakota in acceptance women in leadership, when women weren’t in leadership, when in fact there was open opposition to women serving as acolytes or Wardens or Lay reader or Deacons and Priests.

It was first and foremost in the Diocese in the acceptance of LGBTQ people, when few churches would acknowledge them, much less welcome them and fully include them.  In fact, we ourselves experienced the backlash not that long ago of all that happens when we stand up and fight for full inclusion of all people in our church.

It was the first parish in this Diocese to do something as simple as changing its liturgy—the words of these service we use to worship God—to use language that address God without referencing God’s gender.

Doing so has been a source of consolation for people who have struggled with the false image of a vengeful, fearsome white male God.

And instead has shown us a truly loving God who is so much bigger than all the images we can put on God, which limit God and make God in our image, rather than us in God’s image. 

How many countless people who have been hurt or abused by the church have spiritually limped through that door and found a home here?

And not just a welcoming home.

But a home that included them, that saw them as one and equal with everyone else here, that not only told them, but showed them that they were truly loved Children of a loving, accepting God.

Certainly in the last few years,  certainly St. Stephen’s has done something not many Episcopal Churches are doing.

It has grown.

In fact, just this year alone, we have welcomed 13 new members.

And that alone is something we should be very grateful to God for on this Dedication Sunday.

On October 1, I will be commemorating 14 years as your priest here at St. Stephen’s.

 I can tell you, they have been the most incredible fourteen years of my life.

 Personally, they have been, of course, some very, very hard years.

 As a priest, they have been years in which I have seen God at work in ways I never have before.

  Seeing all this we need to give the credit where the credit is truly due:

the Holy Spirit.

Here.

Among us.

Growth of this kind can truly be a cause for us to celebrate that Spirit’s Presence among us.

It can help us to realize that this is truly the place in which God’s dwells.

In our reading from First Kings today, we hear Solomon echoing God’s words, “My name shall be there.”

God’s Name dwells here.

As we look around, we too realize that this is truly the home of O God.

We too are able to exclaim, God’s name dwells here!

And, as I said at the beginning of my sermon, by “the home of God”  I don’t mean just this building.

After all—God is truly here, with us, in all that we do together.

The name of God is proclaimed in the ministries we do here.

In the outreach we do.

In the witness we make in the community of Farg0-Moorhead and in the wider Church.

God is here, with us.

God is working through us and in us.

Sometimes, when we are in the midst of it all, when we are doing the work, we sometimes miss that perspective.

We miss that sense of holiness and renewal and life that comes bubbling up from a healthy and vital congregation working together.

We miss the fact that God truly is here.

So, it is good to stop and listen for a moment.

It is good to reorient ourselves.

It is good to refocus and see what ways we can move forward together.

It is good to look around and see how God is working through us.

In a few moments, we will recognize and give thanks for now only our new members but for all our members and the many ministries of this church.

Many of the ministries that happen here at St. Stephen’s go on clandestinely.

They go on behind the scenes, in ways most of us (with exception of God) don’t even see and recognize.

But that is how God works as well.

God works oftentimes clandestinely, through us and around us.

This morning, however, we are seeing very clearly the ways in which God works not so clandestinely.

We see it in the growth of St. Stephen’s.

We see it in the vitality here.

We see it in the love here.

We see it in the tangible things, in our altar, in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, in our scripture readings, in our windows, in the smell of incense in the air, in our service toward each other. In US.

But behind all these incredible things happening now, God has also worked slowly and deliberately and seemingly clandestinely throughout the years.

And for all of this—the past, the present and the future—we are truly thankful.

God truly is in this place.

This is truly the house of God.

WE truly are the house of God.

This is the place in which love is proclaimed and acted out.

So, let us rejoice.

Let us rejoice in where we have been.

Let us rejoice in where we are.

Let us rejoice in where we are going.

And, in our rejoicing, let us truly be God’s own truly loved people.

Let us be God’s people in order that we might proclaim, in love, the mighty and merciful acts of God to those who need to hear them and experience them in their own lives. Amen.