A sermon given during the Profession Eucharist of the Company of Jesus, October 11, 2008 at the Davis-Cain Cabin, Lexington, VA. Third of a series of three talks.
Tonight we come to receive two new vocations into the Company of Jesus. We describe ourselves as a Third Order Franciscan and Benedictine Community. We come from many different places and from many different backgrounds. Because we are so spread out, we are mostly a ‘virtual’ community. Our emails and phone calls go a long way towards helping us know each other, but it’s not and can never be the same as living together in a cloister, or even in the same town or attending the same church. These profession retreats and services are a partial attempt to mitigate the distance that separates us, helping us to continue to forge relationships ‘electronically’ between our face to face meetings.
Our calling in the Company of Jesus is monastic – essentially alone, even if we are married and have families. Because there are not many of us in any one place, we have to walk out our calling mostly alone. That’s how it was when I first became a Benedictine. There wasn’t another CoJ member within 400 miles of me. But it didn’t matter because I knew what God had built into my spirit and what he was calling me to, regardless of what anyone else did.
But after a while, a funny thing began to happen. God brought Mark Goldman alongside me and we started walking out this life together. Mark and Brenda and Cindy and I began to meet for dinner, conversation and prayer on a monthly basis. We began to have a sense of Community together, and this was tremendously encouraging. Later, God also brought a Franciscan, Sr. Connie Mershon, and another Benedictine, Ryan Connor to walk with us – Ryan and his wife Shannon joined our monthly dinners and things were going swimmingly for us as a CoJ ‘Chapter” - until October 1, 2006 - when we started All Saints – and soon afterward bought Hope House - and that’s when our schedules began to get really complicated and our monthly meetings became quarterly, and if it keeps up, probably semi-annually! Our sense of community has taken a hit.
We live in a paradoxical world. Because of the Internet and phone service, I know some of you who live 400 miles away better than my next door neighbor. Because we live so close to each other in cities, we put distance between ourselves emotionally. We know intimate details about each other via Facebook, but not that our next door neighbor is having major personal problems. When it comes to our church life, it’s sometimes not a whole lot better. Unless we have a small group structure where we can come to know one another, it’s very possible to go to church with someone for years without ever really knowing them personally or spiritually. We have to work intentionally to build community.
One of the things that was so impressive about the very early Christians was that they were living a life of close community. They were seeking God through prayer and they were taking care of one another –Loving God and loving their neighbors.
Tonight, I believe that God is bringing together The Company of Jesus and All Saints Anglican Church into a new interaction a new expression of Christian Community – one that has a lot to do with our Mission of loving our neighbors as ourselves.
I’ve said before what a powerful impact the 8th Day Life Center had on me personally, and I’ve always wondered if God wouldn’t somehow bring that ministry back around in a new form. Back in the ‘Day’ Fr. David and I dreamed about having a religious order close by St. Luke’s Church to pray and to support the 8th Day ministry as an ‘apostlate’ (as the Roman Catholics would say).
Now, I believe God is doing something similar with Hope House as the Center.
Historically, the monastic pattern as been that a group of (voluntarily) poor monks go to a desert or waste place and set up a monastery. Through their continual prayer and work (ora et labora) the monks begin to produce agricultural surpluses, which they use to help feed the poor in their area. As a result, the whole region is built up and stabilized, allowing for civilization to flourish. Material blessings come to the people surrounding the monastic house as a result of the blessings overflowing from a worshipping community, and many are drawn to follow the Lord. In short, the community is transformed.
BUB
To a much smaller extent, we’ve seen this sort of pattern with Hope House. Every since November of 2006, we’ve been meeting on Friday afternoons for “None”. We pray for the families of the slain teenagers and then “prayerwalk’ around the block and pick up trash. We frequently meet and talk to our neighbors, sometimes we pray for them directly. We’ve begun to know our neighbors – most notably the new managers of a gas station convenience store on the corner, where another murder occurred several years ago. For several weeks, we’ve been picking trash there at the station and getting to know Abe – a Muslim, and Christo, an Orthodox Christian.
One of our All Saints ministries is what we call Bless Ur Biz – BUB – in which we go to businesses and pray a blessing over them. This past Saturday, Abe and Christo allowed us to come and bless their business. By God’s grace He gave us favor with them, and they welcomed us very warmly. It’s been very gratifying to see this kind of reception, and I believe we are bringing the Life of Christ to the world through this work. We are creating community with our neighbors through expressions of care, concern and divine blessing.
Another recent event took place that made a big impression on me. Thursday evening, September 25, about 30 people gathered at Hope House for a candlelight service to mark National Day of Remembrance for Murder Victims. Those gathered included members of All Saints, family members of the murdered teens, the Mayor, Police Chief and Treasurer of the City of Huntington – and several press people from TV and newspaper outlets.
That night, in the midst of a dark, unfinished construction site, I caught a vision for people gathering there at Hope House to pray the daily offices, seeking God in the darkness in order to bring the Light of Christ to the community. I could envision Company of Jesus members relocating to this struggling, ‘desert’ of Huntington, living in apartments close by Hope House, working in secular jobs, or even industries yet to be conceived through the Neighboring Initiative, praying the offices at Hope House – creating Christian community in order to bring blessing and transformation to our larger community.
What we’re talking about is like the concentric rings created by dropping a pebble into a pond. Hope House is a ministry taken on by a small community of believers, but it has touched both the community of suffering families, as well as the larger community of Huntington and the surrounding region. Our slogan for Hope House is: Turning Tragedy into Triumph. It seems to me that the Lord has indeed done that. Through media coverage, there is almost no one in the Tri-State region who doesn’t know what is happening at Hope House – and I believe it has been a great blessing to everyone – even in its smallness and unfinished state.
But there is an even bigger task to take on – praying for revival.
On September 21, in my Chapter Talk, I related how Cindy and I heard Rhonda Hughey speak at a local church in Huntington. David and Carol Ann were there as well. Rhonda is one of the leaders of the “International House of Prayer” in Kansas City. Its mission is to lift up 24/7 prayer and intercession, and indeed, hundreds of people have been doing this continual prayer for nine years now. Rhonda also is very involved in the “Transformation” movement which encourages people to pray earnestly for God to visit our communities and to dwell with us in a manifestly glorious way. Ms. Hughey had just returned from visiting Fiji, where hundreds of villages have experienced mind-boggling divine transformations.
In her talk, Hughey related a typical scenario, in which village leaders recognize that their lands and waters have become barren and that their communities are dying. Drug abuse, suicide, murder and ecological degradation all flourish and nothing seems to slow down the decay. However, when the people realize that they have turned from God and pursued their own wicked ways, and then repent as a community, God visits them, heals them spiritually and physically – even restoring their lands and healing their waters. Dead Coral reefs begin to grow overnight, polluted rivers are cleansed suddenly, and fish return immediately to places they had abandoned. Again, all of this is God’s response to the people recognizing their sin, repenting, and asking Him to come and be Lord of their community.
The people of Fiji have seen 200 villages in a row transformed when the people began calling out to the Lord en masse. They devoted themselves to prayer – morning and evening for hours at a time, abandoning all else because of their desperation for God.
In every case, the key to transformation was prayer.
I believe that we, the Company of Jesus and All Saints Anglican Church, are also being called to pray for such a revival. That’s what monastics are called to par excellence – to pray continually, seeking union with God in the spirit of humility. In places where monks have sought God with such humility, community transformation has always followed in its wake.
Impact of Order upon church.
Kurt Nielson was pastor of a flagging Episcopal church in Oregon. He went on a pilgrimage to Scotland and Ireland and came back very impressed with the Celtic pattern of doing church – in which the monastery was really the spiritual hub of the parish.
“What if,” wondered Nielson, “the focus of the community was not maintenance, but mission and nurturing the passion of pilgrims? …What if, like the traditional Celtic communities which included people of many states of life, there were various opportunities to live a committed and passionate path within the parish bounds…What if we broke through the walls separating church from neighborhood, and from other churches? What if we were to truly be a place where the poor and the most abused could find refuge? What if the future flowed from the gifts of our members, the gifts of which God is so lavish in giving, and we followed those gifts and let those gifts determine our plan?” (Urban Iona, pg. 148).
This is what I think God is calling us to do: To create a Christian community in which All Saints Anglican Church and the Company of Jesus find common ground in continual prayer, which becomes the basis for Community Transformation.
The physical location for this would be Hope House, but community members would live close by, and work day jobs but commit themselves to living out the ‘Eighth Day Life’ exemplified by the early church.
Of course, not everyone is called to living in such physical proximity. This will be a sovereign call of God upon certain individuals. But in this vision, the monastic disciplines and lifestyle become the wellspring of spirituality for the local church, while the Third Order folks also receive help and community from church members.
Since this notion of Eighth Day Life is central to this vision, I am proposing that we in All Saints adopt the name for our small groups. Instead of saying All Saints East, West or Central, we would call these “Eighth Day Life Groups” and perhaps adopt a patron – Benedict, Francis, Patrick, Brendan, etc. The object is to equip our members to live the Life themselves and to take it out to others.
For those in the Company of Jesus, I would like to propose that each member seriously ask themselves whether or not God may be calling him or her to relocate to the ‘mother community of the Order, Huntington, WV – always realizing that this is a very special ‘missionary’ calling, only to be considered in the same spirit as one discerns a call to Third Order monasticism.
Regardless of where we live, each member of the Company of Jesus should devote themselves to practicing the monastic disciplines, to pray especially for this Community effort in Huntington, and to be open to forming Eighth Day Life Groups in their own areas and to presenting seminars in local churches based on these ideas.
Tonight, after this service I am going to hand out a packet of information called The Four Practices for Eighth Day Life. This packet was inspired by some work done by Fr. Peter Matthews at St. Patrick’s Anglican Church in Lexington, KY. While the packet is designed to be used as the basis for discipleship at All Saints, it can also be adapted for use by the Company of Jesus, or for any other local church.
Tomorrow, as part of our Morning Prayer, I would like each of us to fill out the Spiritual Plan worksheet in the packet and then eventually review it with myself – or Father Mark. I know we won’t be able to do it all tomorrow, but I would like for us to get a good start on it and to eventually use this process as the basis for our new members and discipleship instruction.
I am very excited about what God will do through this vision and look forward to how individuals will walk it out. I thank God for these new vocations we celebrate tonight and for all that he is doing through All Saints Anglican Church and Hope House.
May God be Glorified. Pray for me, a sinner. Amen.
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