Things are looking up!

"Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?"

- Acts 1:11

Johnny T

As do many of you, I live in New York City, a place that is more often than not, overrun with tourists.  And the summer season is soon upon us when as many of us as can escape to quieter venues and our beloved town becomes overrun with what often appear to us as aliens from a strange place.  They wear shorts and fanny packs, sunglasses and aromatic sun screen…many of them underestimate the brutality that can be summer in the city; they carry cameras and I-phones and are constantly looking up. 
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8a8it_the-lovin-spoonful-summer-in-the-ci_music
 One of my adult children works in the downtown financial district and is oftimes heard complaining of the folks from out of town who randomly stop on Fulton or Wall Street pointing cameras and fingers up to the sky to admire and photograph for posterity a significant, at least to them, signpost they wish to forever remember. She, on the other hand, in the words of “Johnny T” (that eclectic NYC tourist guide of You-Tube fame),   just wants them to “GET OUTTA THE WAY.”

http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Johnny+T+and+You+tube&FORM=VIRE1#view=detail&mid=F5C932D31936C0EE97A2F5C932D31936C0EE97A2

Interior Canterbury Cathedral

But sometimes it is nice to look up, as when I recently took a trans-Atlantic cruise to Europe and got to see some wonderful sunrises and sunsets as I walked on the deck.  Or when we stopped in England, we took a side trip to Canterbury and its magnificent cathedral viewing its spires as they rose above the city and admiring the vaulted gothic ceiling with its slender criss-crossing ribs that give it a look of intricately woven lace.

I often love to watch the moon rise over Brooklyn from the balcony of my new condo in St. George.  The way the moon rays just sort of glisten and dapple on the moving water of the bay is a delight to the eye and a calming influence upon any restless spirit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJRbw_bUnJs

But, as with the apostles of long ago, it is also important for us as members of the Church to stop looking up and start looking out.  And what can we see if we do that?  Perhaps different ways of being church.

Well, if you look over in Brooklyn there are several interesting ways that folks are dong “church”.  St Lydia’s is a Dinner Church in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn.  It is a contemporary congregation with ties to both the Evangelical Lutheran Church’s Metropolitan Synod and the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island.  They meet on Sunday and Monday evenings for a shared

Eucharistic meal. They are, in their own words: “… people who tell the story of Christ's dying and rising, and through it, uncover the daily dyings and risings that comprise our lives.” Not a bad way to live one’s life.

 http://www.stlydias.org/

Travel further along the BQE and you will stumble upon Bushwick Abbey, another congregation supported by the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island located in a bar on Wycoff Avenue meeting on Sundays at noon, they describe themselves as:”… Christian community celebrating faith, art, and justice on the L line in Brooklyn…” Their mission statement includes these words: “We believe that the truth of the universe is love incarnate. Our response to that love is to live lives of holy curiosity, generosity and creativity with grace in gratitude.” Who could argue with that?

http://www.bushwickabbey.org/

 

And in our own Diocese there are three unhoused congregations in Manhattan under the umbrella of Ecclessia/NY that met on Sunday afternoons in three locations in Manhattan: Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, Madison Square Park in 23^rd Street and Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem. Each of these caters to a distinct homeless community providing a caring spiritual community that offers a shared meal each week and much needed spiritual direction and referrals to social agencies when appropriate. http://ecclesiany.org/

So what does this all mean for us, for those of us in comfortably traditional houses of worship?  It gives us insight into different ways different folks are embracing the saving grace of Christ; the same grace that we know gives us both strength and comfort as we live our lives.  This is the same grace that is working in different ways in different faith communities throughout His wondrous Church. And it is wonderful to see.