"For must not someone of us say something about God, about eternal life, about the majesty of grace in our sanctified being; must not someone of us speak of sin, the judgement and the mercy of God" - Karl Rahner
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| St. Peter's - Eagle Harbor, Michigan |
My counselor thought I should take a sabbatical from organized religion. So I did.
I had been "dis-appointed" by the performance of the Episcopal church and my friends at Good Shepherd as I headed out the door. (Which is a nice way of saying I was angry and depressed and feeling old.) So she said, "look, you've never been a big fan of the institution. If you were, you wouldn't have left the priesthood. So just take a sabbatical from all that and then see how you feel."
Given COVID, that wasn't too hard. I wasn't a fan of ZOOM church. In 2020 there was no need for my old fashioned summer supply work at St.Peter's in Eagle Harbor. So for 18 months I was "spiritual without being religious." But in the spring of 2021 there was the usual letter from the senior warden lining up clergy for the season.
My heart was strangely warmed.
St Peter's has a funny, ad-hoc organization.
In 1945 the Protestant Episcopal Church restarted services in the Keweenaw in the Knights of Pythias school house in Eagle Harbor. The Very Rev. William Burritt, who was based in Calumet, began inviting clergy from other churches to take some of the Sunday services there during the summer. The worshipers wanted a church. The Norwegian Methodists in Calumet weren't using theirs. So, they traded it to Bishop Herman Page of the Diocese of Northern Michigan for a donated dollar.
Another dollar leased a lot in Eagle Harbor from the Calumet & Hecla Mining Co. The building was trucked to a little rise where Michigan #26 turns east along the harbor beach. St. Peter's-by-the-Sea would become a community chapel serving various faiths, with an Episcopal communion service at 9:00 am and an interdenominational service at 11:00 am.
So it is today. Lutherans and Episcopalians run the place using Episcopal and Lutheran clergy for the 9:00am BCP service. (The president of Finlandia College is a Lutheran pastor and he was up next this year.) A second worship service follows at 10:30 am using the UCC "New Century Hymnal" for the ritual. This one has hymns and an organist. There are about 15 people at each service, with a coffee hour in between. The Bishop visits once a year.
You're not so much appointed to St. Peter's as you audition. You don't so much apply for the job; you're recruited into it. Indy's Canon Sue Reid left for Seattle and her weeks there came open. Retired Reverends Rick Draper and Sherry Mattson thought I ought to succeed her. The folks liked me. I moved from one week in the season to two.
It's not hard work. Mostly its a vacation for Katy and I. (If you squint, Katy is in the middle of the photo below of Great Sand Bay.) Plus the dog. And sometimes our daughter. And her husband.
It's old fashioned. People of some means in the '50's with real leisure time scrounged up a couple of dollars (literally) and built a church. They kept it running. Maybe out of habit. Probably because of intertwined family histories. Perhaps a beautiful place just makes it easier to believe in God and calls for worship. A place where someone will collect wild flowers and put them in hammered copper vases every Sunday morning.
It's bottom up. Let's find someone to talk about God. Let's find someone to break bread and maybe bake something. We'll leave the basement hall open for the AA meeting.
That's it. Forget the incense. Forget the funny clothes. Forget the complaints about colonialism in the hymnal and the undisciplined use of pronouns. Forget about every year's ambitious plan to remake a national church.
I have been "officially" made a priest twice in my life. So, I like Bishops; the servants of the servants of God. But I was trained in an era when your theological education insisted that you see that ministry began as pastoral care. Before there was an office, there was a function.
You weren't assigned a position by the monarch. You weren't appointed to an office. You were called to meet a need. A community needs you to do, in some particular time and place, what you cannot not do.
"To the full extent of my power, because I am a priest, I wish from now on to be the first to become conscious of all that the world loves, pursues, and suffers; I want to be the first to seek, to sympathize, and to suffer; the first to open myself out and sacrifice myself - to become more widely human and more nobly of the earth than any of the world's servants - Teilhard de Chardin
Here are the keys. (They are in a bowl in the priest's cottage.) Open the church up. Gather the people. (St. Peter's has a church bell rescued from an old copper mine school that gets rung each Sunday.) Tell the story. (Tell the story of Jesus and tell the story of this place.) Break the bread. Feed the many. (The last few years the gospel assigned had me preaching on miraculous feedings from a few loaves and fishes.) All of us would like you to do that because we asked around and we think you would be good at that here.
The end of the sabbatical.
I will address a Lutheran adult forum in the fall on the topic of local politics. My thanks to an old campus ministry colleague for the invitation. I was asked to take a summer Sunday service this year at Our Savior Lutheran. I would have loved to, and I really appreciated the pastor's invitation! But I was already committed to take a couple of services at Eagle Harbor; services, which it turns out, were to mark the end of my sabbatical.
