As I’ve mentioned to you before, we often use the calendar for the Church year called Lesser Feasts and Fasts at the Wednesday Eucharist. It’s nice because it teaches or reminds us about people who have been instrumental in the life of the Church in their particular way and in their particular time. Yet I am often amazed about how the readings touch on other things present in my life at the moment. That was true on April 2nd when we remembered a man named James Lloyd Breck. Lesser Feasts and Fasts describes Father Breck as one of the most important missionaries of the Episcopal Church in the nineteenth century, and says he was called “The Apostle of the Wilderness.” Born here in Philadelphia, he and several of his seminary classmates founded what later became Nashota House Seminary in Nashota, Wisconsin which was then on the frontier.
All this is interesting, but I was thinking about Thom. The afternoon before, I received a call from a priest in Florida who said she was calling at Kathi Kelly’s request to tell me that Thom had, just that day, been moved to hospice, and that she really didn’t think it would be long. It wasn’t. He died within eighteen hours of being moved. The call unleashed an avalanche of memories for me…coupled with the realization that many people in the congregation today have no idea of who Thom Kelly was. He was the Accounting Warden when I was called to be rector of the Church of the Advent over twenty years ago, and it was with Thom and George McCrea, also of blessed memory, who was then the Rector’s Warden that I sat down to work out a letter of agreement and a compensation package one hot summer evening in 1987. And it was with Thom and George and numerous other folks who are no longer with us because of death or relocation that I have ministered among you as priest and pastor.
The readings for James Lloyd Breck are I Corinthians 3:4-11 and Mark 4:26-32. Speaking of himself in the Corinthians passage Paul says in part: According to the grace of God given me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building on it. Each builder must choose with care how to build on it. And in the gospel Mark writes: The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how…But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes to it with his sickle, because the harvest has come. The point, of course, is that the result of all that we do as the people of God is God’s doing, not ours. It doesn’t matter whether we are the Rector or the Accounting Warden or the Rector’s Warden or a member of the Vestry or Choir or a Church School teacher or someone who is faithfully present week after week as a part of the worshiping community. If we allow it, God will use us for the building up of the kingdom.
As we attend to the history of the earliest Church in the Acts of the Apostles during this Easter season, I am aware that there is a passion and energy in that beginning which is probably present in most undertakings in which human beings participate. In most institutions, the first generation has a particular kind of dedication and commitment, the fruits of which benefit everyone who comes after them. And every succeeding generation needs planters and waterers and reapers to keep the institution healthy and productive. In God’s Church we are all meant to be both beneficiaries and benefactors.
The gift…and sadness…of twenty plus years is in the memories of saints like Thom and George and many, many others now gone, and the gift of each of you as fellow laborers in God’s field.
+RPM
