Living Into Our Name

Today, we celebrate Michaelmas—the feast of St. Michael and All Angels—our patronal feast day.  It wasn’t always our feast day.  We did not start out as St. Michael and All Angels.  When the parish we know today as St. Michael and All Angels was founded, we didn’t even have a patron saint.  We didn’t really have a name.  We were known as “The North Valley Episcopal Mission”—a mission congregation of the Cathedral of St. John.

On days like this—patronal feast days, you wish that our founders had some special insight into the character of the community that would become St. Michael’s.  You wish they had some kind of divine prescience that helped them see the future of that little mission church housed in a storefront on the corner Fourth and Bellrose.  But that was not the case. 

Bishop Stoney, vicar of that little mission congregation, had been consecrated bishop of this diocese at an Episcopal Church in Anniston, Alabama called St. Michael and All Angels.  When it was time for The North Valley Mission to have a proper name, the good bishop suggested “St. Michael and All Angels.”  The rest is history.  It wasn’t a name chosen to fit a community.  It wasn’t a name selected to inspire those who worshipped under its banner.  It wasn’t a saint the people loved or a name they suggested.  And yet....it’s a name, that at our best, I think we live into.

St. Michael and All Angels.  Sometimes we live into the Michael part of the name—standing at the gate, making clear the boundaries between that of God and that of Satan, coming to the aid of those who struggle against forces that corrupt and destroy the people of God (Walter Wink, Unmasking the Powers).  Indeed, that has been an important part of our history as the worshipping community we know as Live at Five and as the congregation of St. Michael’s.

More often we live out the “All Angels” part of the name. 

            *Angels who seek out the lost and forlorn

            *Angels who provide bread to the hungry

            *Angels who offer support and encouragement

            *Angels pleading for mercy

            *Angels speaking out against injustice

            *Angels reassuring the fearful

            *Angels encouraging the despondent.

Angels of promise.  Angels of presence.  Angles of hope.
    Like the angel who encouraged Joseph to take a risk and marry a pregnant woman .
    Like the angel who rolled away the stone opening the way to the empty tomb and a whole new world.
    On days like today, on days when the church is filled with images of angels, I find myself wondering, “Do we really need them?  Do we really need images of angels carved in wood, formed from tin, made of paper?  Are we even looking in the right direction?”
Perhaps we need to be looking to our past.  Looking to those angels who guided our church during the early days. 

            *Angels like the four women who scoured the North Valley for cradle         Episcopalians who might be part of The North Valley Episcopal Mission
*Angels like Juanita Roper who time and again throughout the fifty years she was a member of St. Michael’s reassured her fellow congregants,  “We can do it”
    *Angels who came together to build the first church on this property—bringing 
 with them their hammers and saws and drills and shovels
*Angels who gathered in a darkened nave the morning after an arsonist torched
  the sacristy and did extensive damage to the parish hall coming together to rebuild the church
           *Angels who, when we lost our loan and yet had a new house of worship 
    under way, not only pulled out their checkbooks but also hit the pavement looking            for support
  *Angels who started Casa San Miguel and breakfast at St. Martin’s and dinner at Dismas House
*Angels who served with humility, grace and love.

Perhaps we might even look around us.  Now.  Angels all around us.  Angels in our midst.  Encouraging us.  Comforting us.  Reassuring us.  Calling us to act for justice.  Pointing to those ladders that extend up to heaven and down to earth.  Showing us the way to new life in Christ.  The real angels in our midst are not on the banco.  They’re in the pews.  And in our memories as well.  Standing beside us.  Joining their voices in song.  Bending their knees in prayer.  Living lives that inspire us to live into our name—St. Michael and All Angels. 

From the Shadows into the Light:
A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Susan Allison-Hatch

I've been thinking all week long about Mary Bjorndahl, a girl in my grade school class.  A girl I never really saw.  A person I rarely noticed.  Someone I never really knew.  Mary was different from all the other kids in the class.  More than quiet.  She was timid.  Or was it a quiet strength she had that I just didn’t understand.   Who knows.

I googled her this week.  Not a lot there.  Only a picture of our 7th grade homeroom.  Turns out Mary was in my mid-school homeroom!  Then she disappears from sight.  No trace of her. Except the questions that  still linger in my mind.  

Why was she so quiet?  What was going on with her?  What kept me from asking? After all, we were in school together for nine years.  She lived next door to my good friend's grandmother and across the street from the school.  What kept me from linking my arm in hers and saying, "Let's go play"?  Then I might have found a window into her life.  A window shedding light into the world we both shared.

When I have my dark nights of the soul, my mind often returns to Mary Bjorndahl.  Sometimes I focus on the other kids in the class.  Did they know her better?  Did they, like I, look past her?  Or did they see her and get to know her?  Did they bully her?  Or disparage her?  Or ignore her?  I don’t know.  I probably never will.

On my darkest dark nights I wonder what it was like for Mary.  How did it feel to go school every day with people who didn't even see her? Did she know, deep in her heart, the grace she had?  The gentle goodness?   Was invisibility a cloak we draped over her or was it a strategy she adopted in the face of our indifference? Likely I'll never know.

It's a parable we didn’t hear this afternoon that makes me think of Mary Bjorndahl once again.  A parable known as the parable of Lazurus and Dives, the beggar and the rich man. The way Jesus tells the story, there was a rich man who lived high on the hog.  He had all he needed and more.  There was a beggar named Lazurus who lived by the gates of the rich man's house.  The beggar lived on the crumbs he scavenged at the rich man’s gate. His body was filled with sores that the dogs licked.  One day, the beggar died.  He went to heaven where he was loved and treated tenderly.  The rich man also died. He went to hell where his torment was great.  One day, he looked up to heaven, saw Lazurus there and asked Father Abraham to send Lazurus to him to relieve his suffering.  You can imagine Father Abraham's response.  "No way," said Father Abraham, going on to point out that in their lifetimes Lazurus had plenty of sorrows and the rich man had plenty of comfort.

I bet that rich man never even saw Lazurus begging at his gate.  I bet he passed by him every day never even wondering "Who is this man begging at my gate?"  "How are we connected he and I?"  Just like my classmates and I did to Mary Bjorndahl so many times over so many years.  We didn't see her, so we didn't see the things that made her happy, the things that made her sad, the things that troubled her, the things that gave her joy.  We surely didn’t ask why Mary fell outside our line of sight.  In our blindness, I think we missed a part of her and a part of us as well.  

I suspect those Saint Anthony Park Elementary School kids of so long ago are not so different from folks today—you and me, our neighbors and our friends, our fellow inhabitants of the planet Earth—for we, too, often fail to see the need and pain and wondrous possibilities before our very eyes.

And yet seeing and responding to the need and pain and strength before our eyes lie at the core of what it means to be Christian.  In a few minutes, Jagand will stand before us all for the sacrament of Holy Baptism.  He will make vows and we will together reaffirm our Baptismal vows.  We will all promise to seek and serve Christ in all people, to love our neighbors as ourselves, to strive for justice and peace among all people, and to respect the dignity of every human being.

Doing that is hard work.  It doesn’t come automatically.  It comes with God’s grace and our own sustained practice—practice scanning the horizons of our worlds and the close-at-hand as well in order to see Christ in and respond with loving kindness to people others overlook or ignore.  Practice training our eyes.  Practice training our hearts.

What would life be like for us--as individuals, as Live at Five, as St. Michael's--if we trained our minds and eyes and hearts and ears to be mindful of the people we usually overlook, pass by, ignore?  What would life be like for us and for the Mary Bjorndahls in our lives if we trained our eyes and hearts to focus on the unseen?  What if we together adopted a Mary Bjorndahl practice of going through our days--one in which we not only saw but also included the Mary Bjorndahls in our lives?  Maybe then  the invisible would show us the way to the reign of God.  Maybe then our prayer, “Thy kingdom come on earth”, would take on new gusto not only as a petition but also as a call to action.  A call to live out our baptismal vows.

Shortly before he died, my father wrote a prayer.  Please pray with me:

Our Father, we pray for the qualities which can help build thy kingdom on Earth.  We ask that we may be given the wisdom to see thy will, courage to do it, strength to resist our own desires which might cause us to put our will before thy will, humor that we may be acceptable to others and not foolishly pious, and kindness because we know that thy will must be done through love.  Amen.