A love-soaked heart, new growth
And sure intention
Turn sterile seed to
Prayer, song, kindness,
The heart’s invention.
Shoots in Eden’s soil
Raise no glory
Until roots are
Spring-fed
By our redemptive story.
Public benevolence
May yield no blessing,
Spreading the field
Of self-importance,
No Lord confessing.
Prayer, song and kindness
Are a circling vine
Bringing down from heaven
The reign
Of the Divine.
Bill Tucker
I don’t think it is too controversial for me to say that St. Clare’s is a special place. I think we’ve all felt it at various times. For me, I could somehow feel that there was something different about Saint Clare’s the first Sunday we came here. Now, those of you who don’t know me well might not know that I’m not really all that into the whole “feelings” thing, but there is just no other way to describe how this place hit me. I didn’t fully understand it, I still don’t, but I knew I wanted more.
So we came back. It kept feeling good. And I liked the people I met here, and the worship was fantastic, and I had never heard such good sermons in all my life. Now, tell me, does this at all resonate with you? Does some of that sound familiar? All right, then I think we might be on the same page here. See, that initial rush of being new to this place, and new to you all, while fantastic, carried in it an imbalance, something that is just slightly off.
You see, when I was in that initial rush getting to know Saint Clare’s and the Episcopal Church, I was engaging in an act of consumption, I was, essentially, a consumer. I was taking something from it, from you all, but I wasn’t really contributing. I wasn’t helping to make the magic of Saint Clare’s happen. I wasn’t producing. I wasn’t doing my part to help produce the community that is Saint Clare’s.
Now, one of my favorite passages in Bible makes a fairly emphatic point that there is a time for everything on this earth. There is a time for drawing upon this community, for being comforted by it, consoled by it, fed by it. But I cling to this funny notion that Jesus isn’t all about us being warm and cozy. There’s an element of growth, of change, required by the path we’re all choosing and these things can be scary at times.
I think one way we can foster some of this change, this growth, a way we can respond to Christ’s disturbing presence, is through shifting our relationship to the community of Saint Clare’s from one of consumption to one of production. Now, we have many, many fine examples all around us of people who give of their time, talent, and treasure, to help produce this community, and yet they at the same time clearly get something out of this place, simultaneously. These things are not in opposition. But while recognizing that we all are constantly drawing from and contributing to the production of this community, we have to ask if our actions tip the scales towards the production of this community, if we leave it larger, more vibrant than we found it, better able to reach out to the world around us.
I think my use of the word “production” might be misleading. For what we do here is not really the production of a joyful, generous, community but the reproduction of the Saint Clarian community across time. And in doing this, we reproduce the Episcopal Church, the Anglican tradition, and Christianity itself on into the future. It’s no trivial thing then, this place. It isn’t just some funky church in a college town, but a place that has somehow tapped into something that I have trouble defining as anything other than the Spirit. Which means our job is pretty important. We’re tasked with carrying the Spirit forward onto the next generation, and out into the wider world. This production, this reproduction, requires all of us to help build this community by giving generously of our time, talent, and treasure, because it just wouldn’t work, it wouldn’t be the same place, it wouldn’t be Saint Clare’s, if we didn’t.
–Rick Rodems
Stewards in the Hands of a Loving God