The Resurrection Parish

And the altar call my pastor can't make.

Cassidy Steele Dale forecasts and contextualizes the present to equip us to make a better, kinder future…

… and one of those ways to tell you about a group of people who will not lay down and die.

So he and his board canceled the The Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, DC’s concert at the Kennedy Center that was scheduled for this spring so we invited them to perform that concert in our sanctuary instead. I won’t be there because we only seat 800, I expect the place to be full and that somebody will need my seat, and I don’t need any more inspiration to defy the dark: I already have my resolve.

• The concert will be at 6pm on May 25. I’ll say more when I know more.

• We’re The Falls Church Episcopal. We’re at 115 East Fairfax Street in Falls Church, Virginia.

I figure I should explain who and what The Falls Church is and why we’ve done this. Or I should try to explain from the outside because I’m not the holder of the actual truth of any of what follows. I wasn’t there for the decision and I wasn’t there for the offer. I’m not in leadership. I’m not qualified or authorized to say anything on our behalf or to issue invitations because I’m just a random member in the pews.

But — because I’m in the pews — I already know why.

I know I should not represent any part of us but I’m going to anyway.

My pastor wouldn’t do it this way because he’s Southern and he’s genteel and he’s kind. And because I sometimes throw a bit of righteous out there and because do a bit of cussing. And because sometimes I say things that are too big and bombastic and too much and not nearly enough. Sometimes I say things too absurd to accept and too early to believe.

Which is why I didn’t quite exactly tell him ahead of time what I was gonna say now. I sorta told my wife yesterday but maybe I actually hid the ball.

This is just my experience of us. What I’m about to say isn’t official; it’s just true.

Here is why we did it.

Other clergy, when they’re alone amongst themselves and only in whispered tones, call us “the resurrection parish” because something happened to us a few years ago that should have killed our church but God would not let us die. I’ll tell you that story in a minute.

What those clergy don’t know is that we’ve come back from the dead more than once. Because our history is long and no one knows the half of it.

The Falls Church is older than the republic. The Falls Church — originally the unnamed church “near the falls” of the Potomac River — was established in 1732 and got its first rector (pastor) on the recommendation of Augustine Washington, George Washington’s father. George Washington and George Mason were on our vestry (church leadership council). Our church was built on the top of a rise, a city grew up around it, and that’s how Falls Church, Virginia came to be.

• The Historic Church — our first building was made of sticks, this is our second — was built in 1769, is on the Historic Register, and is one of the oldest church structures in the United States. People who tour the Historic Church often ask about alterations we made to it over the centuries and we have to explain that it’s not a museum; it’s a working, living church. (We now have two sanctuaries: one in the Historic Church meant to call down lightning and another modern one designed to seat 800 and to deliver thunder.)

The Falls Church has borne witness to American history and been party of and victim to it. The history is the worldly part of who we are.

Local lore holds that one of the public readings of the Declaration of Independence was from our front steps. We know we were a recruiting station for the Fairfax Militia which later became part of George Washington’s Continental Army.

The first time The Falls Church almost died was over principle. The Falls Church supported the American Revolution and its call for freedom of religion knowing that would mean the disestablishment of its own parent (the Church of England) as the state church of Virginia. In 1784, the disestablishment happened and over the next decade the congregation dwindled to almost nothing until it was revived by Francis Scott Key, Henry Fairfax (of whose family Fairfax County is named), and a few others.

The second time The Falls Church almost died was because it was the site of war. During the Civil War the congregation fled because the Union Army took the Historic Church and used it first as a hospital and then as a stable.

• Union soldiers tore out windows — and the bricks beneath — built ramps, and moved the horses in and out through the holes. After the war the United States Army’s quartermaster sent some soldiers to re-brick the holes as an apology and those guys did the best 19th-century Army-quality work they could do. You can still see the scars of the Civil War in the brickwork from the outside.

After the war the congregation returned to worship again and to care for more of the dead. Our church grounds are a cemetery and that cemetery is full of the young and the old and the civilian and the military. Our ground has held the dead of both the Confederacy and the Union and we are their custodians and caretakers and we do it in the literal shadow of a church building that was wounded by war.

And on slavery: The Falls Church has cruelty in our history. We have done harm. Virginia was a slave state and some of our rectors and vestry held slaves and the Historic Church’s bricks were laid by slave hands. Now we have begun the hard research to find out what our forebears did. So far we’ve determined that over the course of more than a century we held about 750 people in bondage. Our first report is here. It will not be our last. It will not be the last account or our last reckoning of ourselves.

We admit that to say this: We will not hide the truth of who we were any more than we will hide the truths of those who are in our pews today.

I’ll come back to that in a minute.

The most recent time we almost died made national news. In 2006, 90+% of the 3,000 members of The Falls Church voted to disaffiliate from the Episcopal Church of the United States of America and to affiliate instead with the more theologically conservative Nigerian Anglican Union over the Episcopal Church’s acceptance of homosexuality and what they considered the Episcopal Church’s unacceptably leftward leanings. They claimed ownership of the building and grounds but The Episcopal Diocese of Virginia — the actual owner — objected. After several years of court battles in 2014 the Virginia Supreme Court ordered the now-Anglican congregation to hand the building and grounds over to the 40-60 members who had originally voted to remain Episcopalian and who worshiped together in exile and who called themselves — and were recognized by the diocese as — The Falls Church Episcopal.

• The Anglican congregation moved a couple of miles away and established themselves as The Falls Church Anglican. When Vice President Mike Pence attended church locally when he was in office he worshiped there.

• We are The Falls Church Episcopal. Or more precisely, we are now again The Falls Church. We are an Episcopal congregation. Our new-again core when we got the keys back a dozen years ago was only 40 or 60 scrappers. We’re almost ten times that now and growing.

Do we still think about or talk about that near-death experience? No, we don’t because almost our entire membership now post-dates that wound and because we’re too busy to look back. We are doing the Lord’s work.

But that should have killed us. Should have killed us dead.

Our numbers have ebbed and flowed for nearly 300 years but God won’t let this parish die because it is still needed.

Here’s the thing:

We are not any of them from our past. We are not them. Good and bad, they’re dead and gone and now we make the rules. We returned to the Bible and to the parts our forebears left unread. We listen to God differently.

So who are we now?

Here’s what we say about ourselves and what we do:

To fulfill our congregation’s mission and vision within this historical moment, we discern that God calls The Falls Church to:

• Provide, as Jesus does, radical welcome, sanctuary, healing, care, and spiritual community to all: the whole, the wounded, the searching, and to those often disinvited and who suffer bigotry, especially the poor, refugees and immigrants, and racial, sexual, and gender minorities. Serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves.

• Nurture and form rising generations into faithful and compassionate disciples of Jesus Christ, to build the Kingdom of God, including using lessons from our congregation’s long and imperfect history. Share the grace-filled mercy that is Jesus.

• Offer our facility and grounds as a spiritual homeplace, a center for the community, and a launch pad for nascent ministries.

• Transform, with God’s help, the agents of injustice, wounding, bigotry, and disinvitation, respecting the dignity of every human being and striving for justice and peace among all people.

• Reclaim Christianity from misappropriation, offering healing to those who have suffered harm in the name of faith.

And that last bit is better and gentler than what I originally suggested for it: That we want to Reclaim Christianity from the cruel.

But that’s only half of who we really are. Really:

We are straight, queer, trans, male, female, and black and white. We’re every kind of dog and cat in the shelter.

We are young and old and everything in between. Our youngest have little feets-eses and our oldest is a Baptist minister who knew Martin Luther King, Sr. better than he knew Jr. and who got fired from his job from the ethics arm of the Southern Baptist Convention because he recommended the SBC join the Civil Rights Movement and he was one of the founders of the United States Institute of Peace and we are in awe of him and he’s 100 years old and he’s clear of mind and heart and he’s reading this here with you right now.

We’re not shiny little pennies. We’re not clueless pretty Christians. We’re not respectable and we’re not cute. We are not moral cowards who are just trying to get to heaven safely. We’ve seen a lot of life and a lot of The Bad. We’re ten miles of bad road who won’t crumble away. We’ve been through it. Yes, we know what it’s like.

We are not cool. At any level. We don’t have a praise band. We don’t have any of the schtick. We’re old school — from back before all of this shit.

We are trying to raise our children well and safely. And to be good. And to do good. And to be better than we are.

Most of us are formers — former Catholics, former Baptists, and former nothings-at-all. We are refugees. Some of us just couldn’t stay where we were. Some of us were shunned and were told to go. Some of us never belonged anywhere to begin with. Some of us just needed a new place to start. And that’s how we got here.

We are the impossible. We are the ones who should not be here. By all measures and for all reasons none of us should be here or anywhere at all.

• Sometimes when I sit among them I think they’re not The Last of the Good; they’re The First of The Next even though they can’t see it yet. But sometimes I think things it’s too early to believe.

• Other times I think If we are possible, then what else is?

We know we’re ridiculous and a bit of a mess. Some days we can’t find our car keys. Some days we can’t get ourselves out the door. Some days we’re nothing more than a chimpanzee-tricycle-wheelie spiritual goat rodeo. One of us is scrambled-eggs some Sunday mornings and can barely hold himself together because each blast from the organ reminds him of a bomb.

We want to know God. We want to make Earth as it is in heaven. Rather than leave it whatever the hell this is. We want to do God’s Will.

We’re scared shitless but we’re unafraid. We know danger is real and we know it is close.

We are the ones who were beaten up and we’re the ones who were abused but that abuse did not make us cruel; it made us kind. And because of that we know that to fuck with the cruel is to fuck with their cruelty. We know our job isn’t to defeat them; it’s to convert them to kindness and to faith. To break their cruelty by removing what’s damaged their compassion. Our job is to take the weapons out of their minds and the sharp things out of their hearts.

• Nothing turns the heart of the cruel faster than showing them terrified people who hide in a basement from them. And showing them that the size of their strength and the size of their smirk is the size of their spiritual failure. That they aren’t strong rescuers of anyone; that they are the danger. And that God sides not with the great or the right; God sides with those left to the mercy of the danger and everyone left out in the cold. And that was everything Jesus ever said.

We are of the lineage of the Christ-and-clergy-led Civil Rights Movement and we believe in finishing unfinished business.

We look like nothing at all.

We don’t want your money. No, wait — we sorta do. We’ve made a safe space for people who are in danger and we’ve made a place for people who need to heal and grow and we’ve made a spiritual home and a place to learn and we’ve made a base from which to do good and we want to keep it. And a roof repair from a century ago is finally starting to fail and part of our sound system needs an exorcism by an electrician. And we want to host more choral concerts by the shunned. And we want to make a place for you to sit.

Our bust of George Washington — none of us know where it came from; we think we inherited it — isn’t up in the sanctuary, it’s where it should be and where George Washington himself would say any bust of him should be: it’s in the lightwell downstairs. He is in reflected, refracted faraway light down below beneath leaky windows because he knows Providence was degrees-and-echoes-away and above from he. He was our first President but he was still a slaveholder. His failure all the way through, though, was that he did not know any of us were ahead. He could not imagine us. He could not imagine you. He was a man of unreasonable belief and unreasonable action and unreasonable faith whose faith was incomplete because his imagination failed. Our forebears’ theology was insufficient and because it was they failed to inspire him to be unreasonable to his full capability.

If he could have seen who we are now, you and we — if he’d fallen asleep and been transported to today for a night and seen us and seen Obama — he would have woken up a changed man. All of the Founders would have been. Then there would have been no Civil War nor a need for a Civil Rights Movement. America would have become at its birth what it should have been all along rather than what it is still trying to become.

A quiet part of our mission is to tell revolutionaries that more is possible than what they can currently imagine. That the future can be better. That the future can be bigger than what they believe. Big enough that they’d laugh at it out of disbelief. We and you — all of us — are what the Founders would have laughed out out of disbelief. Until they stopped laughing and got further to work.

We are keepers of the dead and keepers of a dream and we are fingers pointing toward heaven and toward the better.

A last piece before my last thing:

Our leaders since the reboot have been — and are — male and female, straight and gay. They are who God calls. Regardless of whether that Call from God is one the world can accept.

Our original rector John Ohmer was a spiritual entrepreneur for whom this impossible church reboot was too small a task. Our original associate rector Kelly Moughty was a prophet and a truth teller who, while gentle, didn’t hit the ball for distance; she hit it for damage. Our previous Associate Rector Matthew Machowski? I’m convinced he took off his shining armor to put on the collar. Burl Salmon, our pastor now, is the one who prevails.

He now pastors the church who once would not have had him or Father Matthew as a member or Mother Kelly as a voice of God.

Oh — also: Our children’s minister is a Valkyrie and our youth minister is a Viking. And there’s too many other stories about our leaders to tell.

We didn’t hire them — any of them — because we’re liberal; we didn’t hire them because we’re woke. We hired them because we still know a miracle when we see one.

Which brings me to you.

I don’t care whether you believe in God or not. I don’t care how strong or how wounded or how scared you are.

You are a miracle. No matter what anyone else might have told you, no matter what anyone else has said. You are here for a reason and you cannot be replaced. I’ve never been writing to you like you’re mere readers; I’ve been writing to you as miracles who have forgotten who you are.

You may not see yourself as a child of God but we will treat you that way.

Which is The Why.

That’s why the first Sunday after the election, Father Burl told us:

Our responsibility as followers of the Prince of Peace is clear. We have work to do, you and I who call ourselves Christians. So hear this:

To be a follower of Jesus is to embody justice…

To be disciples of Jesus requires us to reject deceit and dishonesty and immorality.

To be disciples of Jesus requires us to speak the truth and to call out the lies even when those lies are belligerent, loud, and really close to home.

To be disciples of Jesus requires that we are clear that the Kingdom of God is marked by justice and equity and that our commitment to justice and equity is resolute, it is unflinching, and it is non-negotiable.

What this means for us, my siblings, is that in the season that seems to be coming upon us your rector and your church will work directly to respect the dignity of every child of God, seeking and serving Christ in all persons regardless of their residency status, their gender expression, their biology, no matter whatever other quality society demands that we assign and then becomes a political target — it doesn’t matter.

And while we will work to influence law and policy we will also work directly to aid the vulnerable. Sometimes our work will be visible. And sometimes our work will be below the radar.

We will put our faith in action and our bodies in motion. This parish will do literally and physically what we need to do to build the Kingdom as we are able: protecting the innocent and ministering to those on the margins.

Our actions will likely attract attention — Jesus’ certainly did. And that attention may include denunciation by powers of empire. But that attention will also attract those committed to doing the work alongside us.

This Call isn’t his; it’s ours. It’s God’s. It always ever was. He just gave voice to it. He just gave voice to our Calling such that we could find our way out of the bumbling dark. The Lord God and His Son Jesus Christ has been screaming that selfsame thing deep into us our entire lives all along.

So — you now — hear me:

We are proof positive that Americans can be trusted and that Americans, well-informed and wise, will do good. And that all should be free from oppression and bigotry and danger and fear. And that all means all. All are children of God, not just some.

We know what happened in America and what’s wrong today. We are the ones who suffered from the shortfalls. And we are the ancestors of the shortfall. We are its living reminders.

We are the ones who look at the world and how bad it is and how bad it’s about to be and we say No and we say Nevertheless and we say Yet still.

We are the chewed up and the spit out. We’re the whole and the broken. We’re the ones no one wanted. We are the shunned. We are The Wronged who won’t let others be. We’re the ones who have seen so much evil that not a single one of us should believe in God or in anything else.

But we just won’t give up. We’re the Wounded Faithful who show up despite the damage. We are the ones who won’t lay down and die because God keeps telling us to get the hell up and beat the hell out of the world and says to be unreasonable in your belief and in your behavior and in your hope and in your resolve. We are the Resurrection parish because we are resurrected people.

This congregation was spared from death and resurrected by God. To be this kind of servant and this sort of church and this sort of help. And we have a holy mission.

But there’s not enough of us yet to do all the work God calls us to.

We’re looking for more people like us. Or people who want to be. Or people who just want to help.

And you may be one.

So. Look at me. Lean in here real close:

If you…

Or if you…

And if you…

And if you yet still…

We will see you on Sunday.