Good morning.

This morning as we gather for our Annual Meeting and to hear the State of the Parish Report our hearts are heavy with news from around the world. We have been shocked by events in Paris France, and, although somehow our media has not given them equal coverage, by similar events in Beirut Lebanon and Baghdad Iraq.

We have business, mandated by our by laws, to which we must attend this morning but before we do that we need to take a moment to attend to our true vocation as the church.

The Lord be with you.

And also with you

Let us pray.

A prayer for Paris, Beirut, and Baghdad

November 13, 2015 by Presbyterian News Service Leave a Comment

God of mercy, whose presence sustains us in every circumstance,
in the midst of unfolding violence and the aftermath of terror and loss,
we seek the grounding power of your love and compassion.

In these days of fearful danger and division, we need to believe somehow that your kingdom of peace in which all nations and tribes and languages dwell together in peace is still a possibility.

Give us hope and courage that we may not yield our humanity to fear..,
even in these endless days of dwelling in the valley of the shadow of death.

We pray for neighbors in Paris, in Beirut, in Baghdad, who, in the midst of the grace of ordinary life–while at work, or at play, have been violently assaulted, their lives cut off without mercy.

We are hostages of fear, caught in an escalating cycle of violence whose end can not be seen.

We open our hearts in anger, sorrow and hope: that those who have been spared as well as those whose lives are changed forever may find solace, sustenance, and strength in the days of recovery and reflection that come. We give thanks for strangers who comfort the wounded and who welcome stranded strangers, for first responders who run toward the sound of gunfire and into the smoke and fire of bombing sites.

Once again, Holy One, we cry, how long, O Lord? We seek forgiveness for the ways in which we have tolerated enmity and endured cultures of violence with weary resignation. We grieve the continued erosion of the fabric of our common life, the reality of fear that warps the common good. We pray in grief, remembering the lives that have been lost and maimed, in body or spirit.

We ask for sustaining courage for those who are suffering; wisdom and diligence among global and national agencies and individuals assessing threat and directing relief efforts; and for our anger and sorrow to unite in service to the establishment of a reign of peace, where the lion and the lamb may dwell together, and terror will not hold sway over our common life.

In these days of shock and sorrow, open our eyes, our hearts, and our hands to the movements of your Spirit, who flows in us like the river whose streams makes glad the city of God, and the hearts of all who dwell in it, and in You.

In the name of Christ, our healer and our Light, we pray, Amen.

by Laurie Ann Kraus
Coordinator, Presbyterian Disaster Assistance

This is the ninth time that I have had the great pleasure and privilege of standing before you to offer the State of the Parish Report, to call out our achievements and strengths, to name our challenges, and to articulate a vision and goals for our future. I really do love this moment because, if we look beyond the requisite numbers and statistics, the State of the Parish Report is an opportunity for me to tell our story, the story of “We.”

I am going to offer some numbers and statistics in the next few minutes, but standing here in the pulpit, as we prepare to celebrate the Eucharist, it is the story that I want to share. The numbers will have to wait for a just a bit.

It’s awfully tempting to be anxious. The Barna and Pew Research Groups, trusting polling firms, have told us that the mainline is on the decline. Fewer people declare affiliation with the church every year, attendance and membership are on the decline, churches are closing their doors and selling their property all across the country.   But I wonder… Numbers are useful but they can be deceiving. How you ask the questions, how you present the results can have a big impact on the story that those numbers tell.

I wonder if across the church people aren’t doing what we have done over the last several years, trying to make those numbers more useful we have tried to be more honest about who is here and who is not; removing from our active roster folks who haven’t been here for a long time, adult children of parishioners who are married and living out of state, people who have drifted away and haven’t been seen for the last three years. We still have those names in our books but we list them as inactive. Our membership numbers seem to have declined but the truth is that they are just more accurate. Our core membership numbers remain remarkably constant.

Average Sunday attendance is another number that gets a lot of attention but which needs some interpretation. Is ASA really a measure of vitality and membership? It used to be that regular church attendance meant showing up every Sunday. It was almost obligatory in our culture and society that you be in church on Sunday morning. What we know about ourselves is that “regular” attendance means something different today than it use to. Even our most committed and involved members find it hard to be here every Sunday. Kids sports take place on Sunday morning, families are spread across greater distance and we have to travel to be together. “Regular” Sunday attendance for many of us is now once or twice a month. So is Average Sunday Attendance really a measure of church vitality and strength.

The pollsters will tell us that fewer people are claiming affiliation with the church an that the number of people who do make that claim are at dangerously low levels. But we know that if all of the people who used to claim that they were affiliated with a church, if all of the people who told the pollsters that they were “regular” church attenders, actually showed up on a Sunday morning parishes across the country would need to set up overflow seating in their parish halls and parking lots.

Numbers can be useful but they can also be misleading. A better measure of congregational vitality, of the health of a church can be found in their story. Here is the story that we have to tell about ourselves.

For the last year we have gathered to celebrate. A parish in its one-hundredth year on the near west side of Madison we invited the community to celebrate with us: Special events, concerts, beautiful original settings of the mass, parties, and a picnic marked the joy and the love we share in this place.

In that year of celebration we came together to help secure our future. Dreaming if what we might be, of the ways that God might use us in our second century we raised close to 1.4 million dollars to renovate, repair, and restore our campus. Faced with some difficult choices, the need to prioritize our needs, interests and dreams we engaged in a process that was transparent, open, collaborative, and fair. That process led to a remarkable moment. The Vestry, after months of prayerful listening found came to consensus around the scope and cost of a project that will allow us, and those who come after us, to continue God’s work here at 1833 Regent Street for the next one hundred years.

This is a challenging time for the church. The context in which the church pursues its mission to share the good news of God in Jesus Christ is changing at a remarkable pace. There are those who believe that we cannot survive, but looking around me I have to say that the reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated!

This is my ninth state of the Parish Report, my ninth opportunity to tell the story of “We,” my ninth opportunity to call out our achievements and strengths, to name our challenges, and to articulate a vision and goals for our future.

So here is another story that needs to be told this morning.

Fifteen years ago, when Patrick Raymond was in his third year as Rector of Saint Andrew’s, he and the Vestry knew that one full time ordained person could not support all of the ministry, programming, worship, and community that this congregation needed and wanted. The Rev. Pat Size joined the staff in 2001 and helped to establish and manage a Pastoral Care Ministry, a Healing Prayer Ministry, and created an Adult Formation Program called Journey in Discipleship.

When Pat left Saint Andrew’s at the end of 2003 to become the Missioner to the Hispanic Congregation at Grace Church Saint Andrew’s turned to the Rev. Deacon Susan Mueller for help. Susan had come to Saint Andrew’s as a Deacon in 2001 and in 2003 she joined the staff as a part time Pastoral Associate.

Susan retired from her position at Saint Andrew’s in 2010 after nine years of ministry among us, seven of them as a member of the staff. We were very concerned about our ability to lure a candidate with those qualities and skills to Madison for a part time position. Fortunately we didn’t have to look very far to find the right person.

Leigh Vicens graduated from Virginia Seminary in 2009 and returned to Madison to finish her PhD in Philosophy. Ordained a Deacon that spring Leigh came to Saint Andrew’s as a part time intern, paid a nominal stipend by the Diocese of Milwaukee in July of 2009. When Susan Mueller retired Leigh joined the Saint Andrew’s Staff as part time Pastoral Associate.

Leigh finished her doctoral degree and accepted a  teaching position at Augustana College in Sioux Falls S.D. in 2012. We bade her farewell in June of that year. We were once again faced with the prospect of looking for someone with very special personal circumstances that would allow them to come to Madison and join us for a position that was only half time.

Our concern was compounded by the fact that we were losing two members of our staff that June. Kate McKey, who had served as our part time Youth Minister for the past three years, was also leaving.

After prayerful consideration and deliberation we decided to roll both the half time associate position and the Youth Minister position into a single, full time, clergy position. We wanted to be able to draw gifted and qualified candidates to Madison to join our staff. We understood that a full time clergy person would be in a position to fully invest in the people in, and the life of, our community. And we wanted to create a position that would allow the right candidate to become a long term member of our community allowing them to form and nurture deep and effective relationships with the community and people of Saint Andrew’s. We knew that this change would be a financial stretch for the parish but we were convinced that this was the right strategy for our future together.

I had met Dorota Pruski as a member of the Diocesan Commission on Ministry in 2009 when she came before us for her final interviews in the discernment process. I remember remarking to my colleagues on the commission that, in four years when she finished her seminary training, some parish was going to be very lucky to have her serving among them. When I ran into her in Indianapolis at the 2012 General Convention I was again impressed by her poise, her thoughtfulness and now by her understanding and articulation of the complex issues facing the Episcopal Church and the broader Anglican Communion. Dorota was just finishing her second year at Virginia Theological Seminary and I jokingly asked her if there was any way that she could graduate a year early. She laughed, said no, and then asked why I was asking. I told her that I was looking for full time help “now.” She laughingly replied by asking if I could wait a year and I said, “I could but I would be dead!” The Rev. Shannon Kelly, a mutual friend and former Chaplain at Saint Francis House was part of the conversation and she laughed and asked, “Why don’t you just get some interim help for a year?” Later that day I forwarded the job description to Dorota saying that if she was interested I would love to have a conversation.

A conversation over lunch led to a conversation with the Bishop and with our Diocesan Deployment Officer. Those conversations led to conversations with the Vestry. Dorota came to visit Saint Andrew’s that August, worshiping with us, meeting with the Vestry, having lunch, dinner and breakfast with leaders of the parish, members of the Youth Group and their parents and finally on Monday afternoon another lunch with me. That fall Dorota was the only member of her seminary class to begin their senior year with a signed letter of agreement, a parish having called and anxiously awaiting her arrival!

Three years later we see the wisdom and the fruits of the decisions that we made in 2012. I told Dorota when we first talked at that General Convention in in Indianapolis that I wasn’t looking for an employee. I was looking for a partner in ministry, someone who would share fully in the exercise of priestly ministry and in the life of the community. The unique partnership that we share is a powerful manifestation of character and ethos of this place. We are a collegial and collaborative community, working together to support one another as we discover our individual and corporate gifts, callings, and vocations. People who experience Saint Andrew’s for the first time often marvel to me at the genuine care and affection that we have for one another, that this is a congregation of people that truly like one another. They feel the depth of our connection and they want to be a part of the communion that they feel here. None of that happens by accident!

Having Mother Dorota with us, a second full time priest, allows us to do and be more than we could be if I was the only full time member of the staff.  We have more hours to devote to the many and varied programs and ministries that bring us together in fellowship as we work to live out our vocation.  We have more hours available for pastoral care, to visit people in the hospital, to take communion to people in their homes, to sit together listening and caring deeply for one another as we journey together.  Having two full time priests on staff means that we have double the hours to meet with parishioners, forming and nurturing relationships, and to recognize and facilitate potential relationships between members of the community who may not realize that they have dreams, concerns or vocations in common. Having two full time Priests means that we have double the hours to meet with ecumenical partners and leaders in the larger Madison Community, with the Diocese of Milwaukee and with the Episcopal Church at large.

Having two full time Priests, one from column A (look deferentially at Dorota) and one from column B (gesture towards self), means that we have a priestly presence at the altar and in the pulpit that reflects and represents the diversity of our life, our parish, and of creation. That diversity at the altar and in the pulpit, the affirmation that it offers to the people who walk through our doors is an important symbol of who we are, what we believe, and how we care for one another in this place. That diversity of voices at the altar and pulpit also makes each of our voices stronger – Dorota and I learn from one another and make each other better. So the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

It is clear that the decisions that we made in 2012, to call a second full time priest to join us, to wait a year while Dorota finished her seminary training, to invest in someone who could then invest in us were the right decisions.  We are today more than we could have been without her.  There is an important lesson in all of this.  When faced with difficult questions we consistently make good decisions for the life, vitality and future of this community.  We have another decision to make and we need to make it now.

We knew when we called Dorota that adding a second full time priest to our staff was a financial stretch.  Combining our half time Pastoral Associate and our part time Youth Minister positions left us $36,000 short of funding a full time Priest.  The Diocese of Milwaukee’s program for underwriting the salary of newly ordained clergy softened that blow to the budget by $12,000 a year for the first two years, but we knew when we adopted this strategy that we needed to grow our revenues in order to support this new position on the staff.  Since deciding to add a second full time priest in 2012 our pledges have increased by about $15,000. We are growing our revenues but we are, as the cost of maintaining our programs, our building and our staff increases, falling further behind.  We are projecting that we will end 2015 with a deficit for the third year in a row.  The Vestry has worked very hard to be responsible stewards of the gifts that we receive.  We have cut programming and maintenance budgets each of the last three years, trimming costs to the point that there is nowhere left to cut but the human resource line.  So now, waiting for the final pledges for 2016 to come in, working to develop a budget for next year, we are once again, faced with some very difficult decisions.

The draft budget being presented today projects yet another year-end deficit. It allows us to fund our Associate Priest position for all of 2016. The Executive Committee of the Vestry: the clergy, Junior and Senior Wardens, and Treasurer, will be urging the Vestry to adopt this budget, buying us another year to grow into the strategy we adopted in 2012, to stabilize our current staffing model, and to keep our current clergy team here at Saint Andrew’s.

The Stewardship Committee asked us all to prayerfully consider increasing our giving to Saint Andrew’s this year by at least 5%. A 5% increase would allow us to fund next year’s budget at this year’s funding level. That will help but we all know that everything will cost more tomorrow than it does today. That is why the Stewardship Committee asked those of us who can to prayerfully consider increasing our giving by 20%. That level of increase will help us to restore some of the cuts we have made to our program budget and to begin to restore the financial reserves that we have used to cover our expenses for the last several years.

We made the right decision in 2012, committing to a second full time Priest in our community and to waiting for Mother Dorota to finish her seminary training. Today we can do and be more than we could have without her. Today we are faced with another decision. Increasing our giving will represent a decision to continue with the strategy for growth that we adopted in 2012, to do and be more than we could be with a single full time priest on staff. Not increasing our giving will represent a different decision.

Given our history, I am confident that in the year ahead we will make the right decision for the life, vitality, and future of this community.

Amen.

A fabulous sermon by Presiding Katherine Jefferts Schori is even better when you know a little back story. For the last three days people have been wearing purple scarves in solidarity with a movement at convention called “Breaking the Episcopal Glass Ceiling.”

In the 26 years since Barbara Harris, the first woman consecrated Bishop in the Episcopal Church, was consecrated we have consecrated 254 Bishops in the Episcopal Church. Only 21 of them were women.

Those purple scarves where around our necks, in our hearts, and in our minds, and I hope that now they are in yours, when you read the Presiding Bishop’s translation of the words Jesus’ speaks to the little girl he had raised form the dead – “Talitha cum.”

Here is the link to Bishop Katherine’s sermon

This State of the Parish Report was offered in place of the sermon on November 16, 2014 at Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church.

The Gospel reading referred to in the text is the reading assigned for Proper 28 in Year A of the Revised Common Lectionary.  You can find that reading here.

I want to begin with another story this morning. It’s a story that many of us have heard before, but today, as we begin the state of the parish report in our 100^th year as the Body of Christ here in this place, it is worth hearing again…

“It began with the women.

 

During the last decade of the nineteenth century, the city of Madison outgrew the boundaries established by its founders. It extended west beyond the university and the railroad yards of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St Paul Railroad, and passed the Civil War-era military encampment, Camp Randall, which the university acquired in April 1893 for an athletic and drill field.

 

The High Ground overlooking the field was platted that year as University Heights. William T. Fish began developing the area on Lake Wingra between Monroe Street and the city limits in 1890 as Wingra park. In 1896, university official Edward Riley acquired the land between Wingra Park and Regent Street from the railroad, and called it Oakland Heights. About the same time, Henry Adams turned his West Lawn Farm into the Westlawn subdivision.   These four communities were incorporated into the city of Madison in July 1903. Two streetcar lines connected them to the downtown area.

 

While the inhabitants of the city’s new western suburbs were not poor, neither were they wealthy. They were largely university staff, with a strong admixture of business and professional people, many of them state employees. At least fifty families were Episcopalians who worshiped at Grace Church on Capitol Square. By 1913, these families were starting to realize that their location, over two miles from downtown, was keeping them from participating fully in Parish Life” (Anne Beiser Allen, Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church: The First 95 Years 1914-2009, p 1-2).

In 1914 successfully petitioned the Rev. A.A. Ewing, Rector of Grace Church, and Bishop William Webb for permission to establish a new parish in Wingra Park and on November 30^th of that same year they broke ground on the original St. Andrews just a few blocks from here on Stockton Court.

Take a moment to imagine their excitement. One hundred years ago today those thirty families, many of whose names are represented on that plaque on the back wall of the nave, were preparing to celebrate a new adventure in Christ with a ground breaking ceremony, building for their children’s future and their own.

Less than three months later, on February 14^th, Valentines Day of 1915, the building was ready for it’s first celebration of the Eucharist!

By 1926 the congregation at Saint Andrew’s had outgrown that original single room building. Now a Quaker Meeting House, the building was originally designed as the Parish Hall in a larger campus plan that included a large chancel, parish hall, and a bell tower. A building campaign raised $14,000 and the parish prepared to break ground once again.

“However, when the Vestry submitted its plans to the City Zoning Board, it got a shock. The board rules the plans not in compliance with zoning regulations. There was also an outcry from some of the neighbors, who felt that the enlarged church would overpower their small cul-de-sac of Stockton Court. A troubled Vestry met to discuss redesigning the plans.

 

Then Vestryman W.H. Konrad suggested building a completely new church on another site. He told them there was a property for sale on the corner of Regent and Roby Streets that might be suitable. ‘It meant to abandon the theory of a village church… and to assume a much more ambitions status of a City Church on a principal thoroughfare,’ Arthur Peabody observed. But St. Andrew’s was ready for a change” (Allen p. 11).

In 1928 this building, a city church on a principal thoroughfare, constructed at a cost of $46,270, was dedicated by Bishop Benjamin Ivans.

In 1957, because the Sunday School had grown and this building could no longer comfortably house and support the rich and varied life of the parish, the education wing was added at a cost of $38,500 and in 1966, continuing our expansion to the East, the parish took out a mortgage and purchased the “Newell House” at 1825 Regent Street.

If you haven’t read it already I would like to commend Anne Allen’s excellent book, “Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church: The First 95 Years 1914 – 2009.” We have copies downstairs and we also have Anne’s addendum that tells the story of the five years since her book was published, the five years that have brought us to our centennial.

In the pages of this account, from which I have quoted heavily this morning, you will read the rest of the story. You will learn how the international banking crisis created by World War I almost scuttled the plans to build the original church on Stockton Court. You will read how the New York stock market crash of 1929 impacted the life of the parish and how we almost lost the building to foreclosure proceedings in the 1940s. You will also read about the people who rallied to pay down the mortgages, about the period in the 1960s when over 250 children attended Sunday School in this building, about the preschool that used this space for 37 years. You will read about The Rev. Bob Shaw, the sixth Rector of Saint Andrew’s, who used his substantial inheritance to underwrite significant outreach ministries around Madison, and who paid off the mortgage on the Newell House and gave the property to the church in 1975.

It’s that “rest of the story” stuff that is so important to us today as we celebrate 100 years on the near west side of Madison because it’s in those details that we understand the context in which this parish has lived, moved and had its being. Knowing those details helps us to know who we are, where we have been, and to see for ourselves a future that is filled with promise and hope.

So let’s talk about the “rest of the story” that creates the context in which we live and move and have our being. We live in a fast paced, changing culture that at times seems to have left us behind. Thirty years ago no one would have scheduled travel soccer games on a Sunday morning. Fifty years ago you would have had a hard time finding a place to buy groceries on a Sunday morning. Not very long ago church attendance on a Sunday morning was a cultural expectation. You didn’t stand on the soccer field or go to Walmart and Target on a Sunday morning because you were in church.

Not very long ago our children might have wandered away from the church in their teens or early adulthood but we could count on them coming back when they got married and had children. We could count on seeing them again when their kids got old enough to attend Sunday School…

Not very long ago we were working to reach out to the “unchurched.” We began to realize that there were people in our communities who had not wandered away from the church in their teens and early adulthood. We began to recognize that there were people in our communities who had no experience of the church at all because their parents had wandered away from the church and had never returned. Now we know that there are people in our communities who are “second generation unchurched.” It isn’t that their parents wandered away and so never took them to church when they were in their “formative years.” There are more and more people in our communities who have no experience of church and who are children of folks who have no experience of church.

The reasons for this turn away from the church have been written about and debated at great length and it is safe to assume that the debate will go on for a long, long time but the impact of this turn is clear and undeniable.

All across the country mainline denominations are reporting a decline in membership and attendance. The Lutherans, Methodists, the Presbyterians… the list goes on and on and we, the Episcopal Church are no different.

In the last five years the domestic dioceses of the Episcopal Church have reported an 8.6% decline in attendance.   Right here at home the parishes of the Diocese of Milwaukee have reported a decline in average Sunday attendance of 15%. Now Average Sunday Attendance isn’t a perfect measure of a parish’s health and vitality. In a culture where church attendance was expected, and folks wen to church almost every Sunday, average attendance was a pretty good indicator of the size and strength of a congregation. We operate in a different paradigm today. People are overbooked, overscheduled and exhausted. There are other demands and other options on Sunday morning so many of our members only attend church once or twice a month. As we lose the oldest members of our communities, the people who grew up with an every Sunday expectation, their spots in the pews are filled by people who have a different understanding of and expectation about church attendance. So in many places total membership numbers remain flat or go up while paradoxically, Sunday attendance numbers fall.

So with that “rest of the story,” that context in mind we turn our attention to the state of this parish as we celebrate our centennial.

Every spring we file a document with the national church called the Parochial Report. That report lists membership and attendance. It details our income and expenses, the number of pledges we have received, and a good accounting of our financial health.

The Parochial Report for 2012 listed 403 active members. The report for 2013 listed 387. So we had a drop in active membership of 16 people.   Digging deeper we see that we actually lost 42 folks. Six families moved out of state. One family ran off and joined the Presbyterians, attending a church they could easily walk to from their house, and I finally, though begrudgingly, removed five members of the Fleischman family from our roster since Don is the Rector of Saint Barnabas in Richland Center. Three folks died in 2013. One person left to be the organist at Saint Luke’s. We removed one person from the roster because we haven’t seen or heard from her since 2010 and we took another person off the list who had somehow found their way into the data base without anyone knowing who they were…

Forty-two names came off of our active membership roster in 2013 but in that same year we added twenty-six new people to our community. Now six families moving out of state and taking twenty-five people with them is on the high side but this was a pretty typical year for us. Some years we lose more people than we add. In other years we add more than we lose. For the last several years our “active member” count has held at right around 390 people from 185 households.

What about Sunday attendance? A few minutes ago I listed some statistics about the broader church that were pretty disheartening. An 8.6% drop in the national church and a 15% drop in the Diocese of Milwaukee. Our attendance over that same time period, the last five years, is 5%. From 2009 to 2013 our average Sunday attendance has gone from 164 to 156. If you average the figures over that five year period our “average” average Sunday attendance is 159. Our attendance has been remarkably consistent given the “rest of the story” and the context in which we live.

Where else might we look to assess the “state of the parish”?

Our annual total revenues offer another interesting insight. In 2009 we had 140 pledges and our total revenues were $405,190. In 2013 we had 123 pledges for $413,205. Seventeen fewer pledges for an additional $8,000. Over the last five years our total revenues have fallen within a range of $9,500 and have averaged $412,205. This year we are projecting total revenues of $418,000, our highest revenues in six years and $6,000 above our five-year average. Again… remarkably stable given the “rest of the story” and the context in which we live.

So we are holding our own… stable… safe…

But is that who, is that where we are called to be?

How many years have we been talking about the buildings that house our community? Our parish hall isn’t large enough for us to comfortably gather in fellowship for a meeting or a meal. We are not very accessible and the members of our community who have mobility challenges have a hard time participating in the life of the parish. Our narthex is small, cramped and dark. It isn’t conducive to greeting and welcoming new people. It’s hard to engage when you are creating a bottleneck in the traffic flow. The folks who founded this parish did so because they were experiencing a barrier to “participating fully in parish life.” The parish moved to this location because they had outgrown their original building. We added the Education wing on the east side of the church because the building they constructed in 1928 was inhibiting the pursuit of our mission as a parish.

In 1927, when the community that is Saint Andrew’s moved from Stockton Court to Regent Street they knew that, “‘It meant to abandon the theory of a village church… and to assume a much more ambitions status of a City Church on a principal thoroughfare…’ But St. Andrew’s was ready for a change” (Allen, p. 11).

For the last several years we have been talking about our readiness or a change in this place. We have been looking back at our history; celebrating where we have been, remembering who we are. We are planning to grow as we move into our second 100 years in this place. We’ve talked about the building. We are talking about a potential capital campaign. But we’ve been planning and working at this growth thing, this change thing for much longer than that. Two and one half years ago when Leigh Vicens left us to go be a professor of philosophy at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Kate McKee left her position here as our youth minister and followed her fiancé to Boston this parish decided that the next step in our growth would be to call a second full-time priest to this parish. We did that. We stretched ourselves and we made that move becoming only the second parish in the diocese of Milwaukee to have two full-time clergy on staff. We have made moves and decisions as a vestry to streamline our processes, to work together in ways that help to make us grow, to introduce us to the neighborhood, to raise our profile in this community, and to be that city church on a principal thoroughfare that the people who gave us this parish dreamed about in 1928 when they moved to this spot.   In our Gospel reading today we hear about three servants who are given a great gift by their master: five talents, two talents, one talent… The master give those gifts to his servants expecting that they will grow, that the servants to whom he has given those gifts will take risks, will try hard, and will produce more than what they have been given.

A little earlier this morning I asked you all to stop for a moment and imagine the excitement that the people must have felt as they prepared to break ground on November 30, 1914 just a few blocks from here, great excitement. But we need to admit that it’s likely that they also felt some real anxiety. Having been given the gift of permission to establish a new parish, having raised money, having people signed on… they were about to step out on a new adventure in Christ. They could not have known how would end up. Any time a community embarks on change, works to grow, works to become more vital, people will become nervous. I think that we have a right to feel some anxiety in this moment as we work together to grow into the parish that God is calling us to be. A building proposal that has stretched our imaginations, a possible capital campaign that will stretch our resources, all of these things lie before us. Making this a time of great venture and excitement in the life of this place.

I’ve heard people asked the question as we move through this process together, “why now? Why are we embarking on this adventure? Why are we taking this on in this moment?” There are lots of possible answers to that question but I think the best answer is “why not now?” We’ve been having these conversations, we’ve been asking these questions, we’ve been working together for several years to find a way forward. And with the help of the Holy Spirit we are moving: the fourth largest parish in the diocese of Milwaukee, a light to our brothers and sisters here in Madison and to the parishes to the west of us that are struggling. We are a parish that is on the move and we have a mission together: to become that city church on a principal thoroughfare, a light to this community, a light to the diocese, people with gifts to be grown to be given.

It is with great pride and pleasure and some sense of awe that I stand before you this morning as we celebrate our centennial. It is a privilege to be here and I am looking forward to the conversations that we will have when we convene downstairs for our annual meeting and as we move through this process, moving into the future together. It is an exciting time to be an Episcopalian and it is an exciting time to be a member St. Andrews Episcopal Church, the body of Christ gathered 833 Regent St. in Madison Wisconsin

This sermon is based on the readings assigned for Proper 20 Year A of the Revised Common Lectionary.

You can find those readings here

I’m tempted… I’d like to say that this is a universal experience… but that might not be true. It may be that some of us here today don’t know what it’s like to be sorted, to be sifted, to be evaluated, and to be found wanting, to be sorted out.

I remember my first foray into official, organized sports. I was 11 years old in 1971, sitting on the concrete bleachers at the boys club overlooking the baseball field.   There must’ve been 200 boys sitting there on those steps and a dozen baseball coaches standing there looking up at us. This was our first gathering together and the day that we would be assigned to teams, and the schedule would be organized, and the season would begin. So those coaches standing up there looking at all of us started pointing at kids, one at a time, and calling them down out of the stands to stand behind them as part of their team. I think about three rounds into this sorting process one of the coaches smiled and asked us all to stand up, and then to turn, around and face them again. All the other coaches laughed. They said, “Aw, you’re cheating!”   But they didn’t ask us to sit back down. And so one by one these coaches repeated this ritual, and selected kids to come down and join their teams. I don’t know what they were looking for that day. They were looking I’m sure for the tallest, the largest, maybe people with a particular twinkle in their eyes… but I do know that I was one of the last to be chosen for a team. Now that turned out to be okay. We didn’t know it yet but I really needed glasses! And so standing there in the batter’s box as the pitcher hurled a ball at me that I couldn’t see was not an easy thing for me to do.   But I stung. That sorting process hurt and I carry that with me for that whole season. It is with that in mind that I enter into today’s gospel reading…

So let’s flesh today’s story out a little bit. A landowner goes into the marketplace to look for laborers to work in his vineyard. Now the marketplace would be the spot where people who needed to earn a day’s wages, day laborers, would come and hope to be selected by one of the many landowners who would come out in the morning gathering people to come and help work their crops. These are people who don’t always get to work, don’t always earn that day’s wages, don’t always get to feed their families at the end of the day. So there is some real anxiety here as the sorting, sifting, and the evaluation process begins. I’m sure that those landowners came in to the marketplace and they selected the people with whom they had a history, people whom they knew, people who had worked for them in the past. They would also make sure that they picked the largest, the strongest, the most agile, maybe people who have a certain air about them that they knew what they were doing. Whatever their criterion was by the time they finished they would take those workers off to their fields and others would be left behind; people who in that sifting and sorting and evaluation process had been sorted out.

It’s that group of people who are still standing there in the marketplace when the owner of our vineyard returns. He finds these people standing idle, there on the margins, sitting on the bench, and he invites more of them to come join him working in the vineyard. He comes back again at noon. He comes back again at three. And each time he comes back he gathers more of these people who had been sorted out and he takes them into the vineyard with him. Then at 5 o’clock so no more than an hour left in the working day, he comes back to the marketplace and he finds more people who have been sorted out. I think the exchange that happens between the landowner and these workers is key to our understanding of the story.

He says, “Why are you standing here idle all day?” Their response is, “Because no one has hired us.” Not because, “Well we got here late and we missed the first call.” Not, because “We just didn’t really feel like working today and so we didn’t put ourselves out there. We didn’t put ourselves forward.”   They are still standing there in the marketplace without the opportunity to earn what they need to feed their families for that day because no one has hired them.

The next scene in our Gospel story today is, I think, the place where we spend most of our time and most of our energy because it rubs us the wrong way. These people who have worked less than an hour get paid the same wages as those who started the day in the vineyard early in the morning.   But I have to ask this question… Do we really believe… because Jesus has said the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner goes through this process… do we really believe that God’s grace and love are doled out in different measures because of our merit or because of something that we’ve done. I don’t think that’s even on the table for us. I think we understand and know that God loves each and every one of us equally and that we are all beloved in God’s sight. So if you take a piece off the table then the real key to this story is God’s affection for the marginalized, those who have been sorted out, those who have been left on the margins, or on the bench. The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who returns again and again and welcomes everyone into the vineyard!

On Facebook this week there’s this video that’s been making the rounds and in fact I posted it to the church is Facebook page this morning with a little teaser that I would be featuring it in the sermon this morning. I don’t know if any of you have seen this video yet. It’s a series of short vignettes and in the first one there’s a young man sitting on sort of the circular sofa. It looks like maybe he’s in an airport or shopping mall. He has several bags and it looks like he’s about to eat lunch. Another young man who looks very different from the first, clearly a different ethnicity, comes and sits on that same sofa. Suddenly beside the person who was there first is this sort of vaguely threatening, vaguely dangerous looking guy with long unkempt hair and haggard face and he whispers into the young man’s ears, “You’re not going to stay there are you?” and he gets up and leaves. The young man who was sitting on the sofa first moves a little further away from the man who has joined him. The man who arrived on the couch second looks up and notices, sort of raises his eyebrows for a moment, and then goes on with his business.

In the next vignette there is a person who is standing behind a cash register in a convenience store when someone walks in the door who looks very different from the proprietor.   As she’s walking to the coolers in the back of the convenience store suddenly this threatening, dangerous looking person is standing next to the proprietor and he says, “I wonder what she’s really up to.” The proprietor looks at her again and when she gets her milk out of the cooler and walks back she knows by the look on that man’s face that she has been sorted, sifted, and evaluated… and sorted out. You can see the pain on her face when she recognizes that’s what’s happened.

In the next vignette a professional woman, well-dressed, sitting in a very modern office with big windows behind her at a nice clean table, a sheet of paper in her hands, is talking to a person who is clearly a job applicant. The applicant looks very different from the interviewer. This time that strange, threatening, dangerous looking person pops up out of nowhere next to the interviewer and says, “Can you really depend on her?” The interviewer’s smile turns to a frown. She closes all the papers into a neat pile, places her hand on top of them, and the young woman who’s hoping to get that job knows without a doubt that she has been sorted out.

In the last vignette; a crowded bus, a young woman gets on, walking down the center aisle. A man of color is sitting far down the bus. He picks up his laptop case and puts it on his lap so that she will have a place to sit. The dangerous character shows up again and whispers in her ear, “Don’t make eye contact.” She stops, turns her back on him, and holds onto one of the rails.

I think that the key for us in today’s gospel passage is that the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who goes into the vineyard and isn’t afraid to invite into that vineyard people who are different, people who might not normally get the first call. The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who returns again and again and without bias or prejudice invites everyone to join him in that space. I think that this gospel passage today is calling us look deep within ourselves and recognize those places where we unconsciously flinch, turn away, refuse to make eye contact, slide a little further down the couch, and let the person in our presence know, sometimes in subtle and sometimes in not-so-subtle ways, that we have sorted them out.

The videotape that I’ve been watching on Facebook this week is sponsored by the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience, a group of folks who work with high school students and with college students giving them mentors of their own ethnicity, their own nationality, who can help them to overcome the impact of having been constantly and consistently sorted out. The last words in this video… A narrator’s voice comes over the screen and says, “Discrimination leads to depression and anxiety in indigenous Australians. No one should be made to feel like crap just for being who they are.” The three words appear: Stop, Think, Respect. If we want to help realize God’s vision and dream for creation, if we want the vineyard to be here and now, then we need to be like that land owner. We need to look deep within ourselves and find those places where we turn away, where we don’t make eye contact, where we slide down the couch, and we need to acknowledge them and learn to resist. We need to return again and again to the marketplace because the people whom we have sorted out and left on the sidelines, on the margins, are not able to earn the daily wages that they need to feed themselves and to feed their families and God’s children are going unfed. We need to be sure that everyone in the marketplace, everyone in the vineyard, is loved, respected, and upheld because we are all brothers and sisters in Christ, children of the loving God who has created us in God’s image, Stop. Think. Respect.

Amen

The video referenced in this sermon can be found here

Learn more about the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience here