I was away from our Sunday services at All Saints this past Sunday preaching and celebrating at our Network mission on Maui, and I will be away next Sunday also preaching at our daughter church-plant in Puna. For a pastor who loves his parish, stretches of weeks like this are incredibly difficult for me, even though I am here during the week between my Sunday absences. The weight of it is heavy.
That heaviness notwithstanding, I am convicted that the work I do on these Network trips and the work you all do in the worship and liturgy (liturgy, after all, means “the work of the people”) and mission, are not dislocated or oppositional. They are one corporate response that our whole parish offers to the God who called us and loves us. You send me to Maui just as I lead you in that sending. I am, in these moments, one form that your support for our sister churches takes. You pray for us and we pray for you. Though I am absent in the flesh, I am with you all in the Spirit.
Nowhere is this “being with you in Spirit” more real than when, in moments like last Sunday, our liturgies come together in The Liturgy and our tables are drawn together in The Table, and our singing cascades into the whelming song of all the eternal panoply of heavenly hosts, “Holy, Holy, Holy Lord Sabaoth… etc.” over which angels and archangels with chaplets of fire hymn descants that lie, for now, beyond our hearing.
To the end of our greater unity amidst bodily absence I want to give you a few updates about what is going-on in Maui and the Big Island and so direct your prayers and increase the degree to which we can share in a spiritual presence with one another and our brothers and sisters across the islands:
Kingsfield Maui is still walking through a transition after the departure and subsequent return of their planting rector. There is a core group of about 20 folks who meet weekly on the Lord’s Day (for communion when I or another priest are able to make it) and evening prayer otherwise. They also meet in smaller gatherings throughout the month. They are discerning what the road ahead looks like and where God is calling them. Pray in particular for two of their key leaders: Justin and Mark (no, not me, another Mark… don’t look surprised, it’s a good name). Pray also that God (1) raises-up more and more leaders in their midst; (2) that God continues to draw the prodigals of Maui to the Good News of Jesus through the ministry of Kingsfield; and (3) that God would raise-up a new rector for Kingsfield and do it swiftly.
Heritage Puna is continuing in its weekly Sunday services, and its different weekly and festal gatherings for prayer, fellowship, and bible study. They are also launching, next week, Queen Emma Hall —an SBH-esque collaborative Christian educational co-op. Pray for (1) God to call and raise up leaders to help Jonathan and Jessica with the work of ministry —they’re doing great but they really need a team around them.to co-labor; (2) the start of the school year at Queen Emma Hall (QEH); (3) for God to transform and disciple Puna with love of Jesus through the life of Heritage and QEH.
I am glad of my life with you all at All Saints, and that sweetness makes my absence all the more severe. But this is not novel, this is a thing the early Christians, our brave mothers and fathers of the first century, regularly encountered. To be a part of the Church has always meant a kind of stretching and giving-up and a laying-down; and a laying-down only to pick back up. Think of St. Paul’s words to his beloved Philippian church “For God is my witness, that I long for all of you with the affection of Christ Jesus” (Phil. 1:8, LEB). And as I long for September 6th, when I will be with you all in the gathered body of our parish assembled before the Lord for Holy Communion, terribly beautiful as an army with banners, I pray for you accordingly: “that your love may abound still more and more in knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is superior, in order that you may be sincere and blameless in the day of Christ, having been filled with the fruit of righteousness which comes through Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of God” (Phil. 1:9-11).
Amen.