A
Reflection for III Epiphany St.
Andrew’s Church, Nags Head, NC
January 17, 2016 Thomas E.
Wilson, Guest Preacher
St Andrew’s At
All Saints’
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| St. Andrew's in the 1950s making a transition between being a Chapel of Ease to a Church on the Outer Banks |
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Now you are probably wondering why your
Rector, Phil Glick, is not here and I, the Rector of All Saints, Southern
Shores, Tom Wilson, am here today at St. Andrew’s by the Sea in Nags Head to
make with the message - or as the Hebrew Testament lesson for today calls it “give
interpretation to the Word”. Phil is
over at All Saints as part of our 20th Anniversary celebration, to
underline that if it were not for St. Andrew’s and the Diocese of East Carolina
and the Episcopal Church at large, there would be no church in Southern Shores.
We are trying to live into Paul’s idea in the Epistle lesson that we are all
parts of the one body - “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if
one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.”
Please pray with me using the last verse
from the Psalm for today: “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my
heart be acceptable in your sight, *O Lord, my
strength and my redeemer.” A-men
Both of our churches, St. Andrew’s and
All Saints, started the same way, as Chapels of Ease. That is a perfectly good term
in the Anglican tradition used when there is already a Parish in a geographic
unit, but the difficulties of transportation make it problematic for some
people to make it to the Parish church for regular Sunday services.
Parishioners from St. Paul’s Edenton and Elizabeth City would come to the Outer
Banks for the summer to get away from the hustle and bustle and heat and take
advantage of the ocean breezes on these stretches of parcels of sand. The
visitors would take the ferry across and bring all their stuff for their stay.
They would hold Sunday services in summer cottages because it would be too
great a trouble to get back to the parish church. Religious services were like
a public utility for the benefit of the customers who paid for that utility.
They came to services out of a sense of obligation to keep the Sabbath Day holy
with a comfortably-remembered ritual, as a civilizing influence for their
children, as a spiritual exercise to remember that there was a power greater
than themselves from whom they could gather strength and, if there was a
preacher, they could be enlightened on how to save their souls.
Being religious is a good thing, but if
we stop with being religious we miss the point of the incarnation where God
enters into all of our human lives. William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury
during World War II, once said: “I think it is a great mistake to think that
God is chiefly concerned with us being religious.”
Gradually the people chipped in and
built a chapel to be a holy space, and clergy who were from the real parish or
friends or relatives of the vacationers were invited to spend some time on the
beach in exchange of doing the service the “right way”. In Nags Head you had several attempts at a
chapel - the All Saints chapel in 1850, destroyed by the Civil War; the 1916 (a
hundred years ago) St. Andrew’s by the Sea, which was moved to its present
location in 1937; and in 1954 as the year-round population grew, that structure
made the move from being a Chapel of Ease to being year-round church.
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| Duck Methodist Church Gazebo Chapel |
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While the Outer Banks grew in population,
it also grew in numbers of summer visitors and the ferries were replaced with
bridges, but Saturday and Sunday traffic on two lane roads was a nightmare on
the way to the Northern Beach areas. Your Rector at the time, Don Porcher, resurrected
the idea of a Chapel of Ease in the Northern Beaches for the visitors and
members of St. Andrew’s who found it very cumbersome to get here and back for
services. He negotiated an agreement with the Duck Methodist Church for the use
of their chapel for a 7:30 Sunday morning service before the traffic got insane.
This small gem of a gazebo structure
could hold a maximum of 25 people. He called it the Gazebo Ministry, and he and
assistants like Hilary West or visiting and vacationing clergy would preside at
the services.
Under the guidance of your former Rector, Charles Gill, the idea
moved from a Chapel of Ease for the summer to a planted congregation of St.
Andrew’s parishioners in Southern Shores, which started meeting at the Kitty
Hawk School. When that congregation searched for a name, the All Saints Chapel
history came alive and with the new building, the people had a gazebo built as
a reminder of how they had begun the process of being a church.
What is the difference between being a church and a Chapel of Ease? The
purpose of a Chapel of Ease is for us to be religious, and the purpose of a
Church is to transform lives. Pope Francis said in his New Year’s Homily, “Without
the Church, Jesus Christ ends up as an idea, a moral teaching, a feeling.
Without the Church, our relationship with Christ would be at the mercy of our
imagination, our interpretations, our moods.”
This brings us to the lessons for today from the Gospel of Luke, where Jesus
returns to his hometown synagogue in Nazareth. He is invited to read the lesson
and to teach from the lectionary lesson from the Book of the Prophet of Isaiah.
This part of Isaiah is from the last part of that Scroll, sometimes called
Third-Isaiah, written during the time when the exiles have come home from
Babylon and they are wondering what else God is going to do for them. The
writer says, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed
me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the
captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to
proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."
Third Isaiah is saying they once were empty of hope, while in Babylon, poor
in the spirit, and they were now to claim the spirit of God to give hope, Good
News to those who are poor. He says that the people have been brought back in
order to do the work God’s spirit calls them to do. They once were captives and
now they are to claim the Spirit of God and help other captives be released. They
once had no vision; now they are to catch the vision and share it with others
who are spiritually blind. They know what it is like to be oppressed, and it is
now the time to set others free.
Jesus sits down and says that the Scripture has come to pass in their
hearing. Most commentators suggest that Jesus is talking about his ministry
that has already begun. I suggest that Jesus is inviting the people in the
synagogue to live into the old adage “to hear is to obey.” Jesus as a good Jew
would have started off prayer in the morning and ended prayer at night with the
Shema Yisrael
“Hear O Israel” and then a
listing of God’s commandments of loving and serving the one God with all
heart and mind and soul.
I think Jesus is saying that the hearing of Isaiah’s Spirit is the call to
stop pretending to listen but to actually hear and to participate in the
changing of the world into a clearer image of God’s Kingdom, on earth as it is
in Heaven. I think that Jesus was looking at the Synagogue in his hometown as a
place that had turned into a Chapel of Ease, where people looked at the
religious ritual with the expectation that they were to get something out of
it, consumers of God’s gifts for their own ends.
Yet, we are not called to
consume mindlessly; we are called to be nourished and then to go out into the
community and change the world as we are changed. If this is indeed “the year
of the Lord’s favor”, a term for the Year of Jubilee when all debts are
forgiven, then we are to forgive, not grudgingly, but with remembrance of how
extravagantly we have been forgiven.
This action into the world is a gift that St. Andrew’s gives to this
community and to our understanding at All Saints. Look at what you are doing right
now - you are involved in Jail Ministry, in Interfaith Community Outreach, Room
at the Inn, Food For Thought, Ruthie’s Kitchen, the Acolyte Festival for the
youth of the diocese - you name it, you are doing it. This is what we do when
we see God speaking to Isaiah and through Jesus in Nazareth, not just thousands
of years ago but right here and right now. The Kingdom is coming into our
hearing when we hear and obey by word and deed. It is then that we become a
church.
The word Church derives from the Greek word Kyrie, meaning Lord, meaning
that which belongs to the Lord. We don’t own the church to get what we need,
but the Church belongs to God, the Lord, and we are to give our time, talent,
and energy to work through God’s gracious strength to change the world. Again,
going back to William Temple, “The Church is the only society that exists for
the benefit of those who are not its members.”
Thank you St. Andrew’s for hearing with the ears of faith and for teaching
us at All Saints those truths by word and deed.
St. Andrew’s At All Saints (Poem)
Once
upon a time
dirt
roads and ferries were enough
as
visitors came and went,
staying
to taste the Banks
summer
sense of quiet.
The
locals grumble but adapt,
renting
out a room or two to those without family
connection cottage for isolation from rushing
life.
Worships
done at Chapels of Ease
official
and not so much, as
ritual obligations were met
acknowledging deity besides oneself.
Visitor
surges became torrents and St. Andrew’s
becomes
community of solid ground faith
Yet,
visitors keep coming and coming.
The
community of the 1st disciple’s .Don Porcher
arranges
for summer visitors unwilling
to
swim against the incoming tide:
gazebo
northern summer services began.
The
returning visitors, lay and clergy,
return
to new home building, replacing
chapels
of ease with communities of worship,
celebrating
sacred space between God and neighbor
as
living scripture is fulfilled in our hearing
living
into what we hear as spirits nourish
giving
strength to \become what we eat.
