Episcopalians don’t like to talk about conversion experiences or personal relationships with God through Jesus Christ. Part of the reason is cultural. Episcopalians just haven’t talked about such stuff in the United States since at least the early 19th century. Most card carrying Episcopalians (you do have your membership card don’t you?) would no sooner talk about their relationship with God than explain their latest income tax filing at a dinner party. Most clergy are no different. Episcopal priests and deacons do not talk about their faith I suspect because one of their colleagues will label them a closet Baptist. Another reason is that our Sunday schools and adult Christian formation programs in general have not done an adequate job of forming people in age appropriate ways as part of the body of Christ. In short, most of us lack the basic knowledge and vocabulary about our faith to share it with others.

A third reason for our corporate reticence moves up the hierarchy to the bishop’s office. Most dioceses, (granted NOT all) have never emphasized mission or evangelism so the need for ordinary people to share their faith has been minimal across the country. Fortunately, all of these things are changing now out of necessity.

Our hesitance to verbalize our faith has not always been so. English clergy of the 16th century left us with some of the best poetry and devotional material ever written. In the English country side of the 16th century, church bells were used to convey all kinds of information to people in the “parish” (A parish is actually a set of geographic boundaries defining what people attend each church.). Church bells rang to indicate Sunday services and they rang again to indicate when the sermon started and finished. The latter bell might have been more joyous than the former. Church bells rang for weddings and baptisms, special rings for Easter, Ascension Day and Pentecost. Of course the bells tolled in a mournful pattern for a death as well as the funeral that followed. People knew the bell ringing patterns and could tell whether a young male child died or an older adult woman died.

Given how the bells were used in England, listen to what the Anglican priest and poet, John Donne says in his “Meditation 17.” Donne was known as “the country parson” because he served all his life at a small church in rural England.

The church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does, belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that head which is my head too, and ingraffed into that body, whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me; all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, …

No man is an island. entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

These verses were written fifty years after the first English prayer book. The King may have been the political head of the church in England but John Donne describes the intimacy and the unity of all of us in the church as the Body of Christ. This poem, and I encourage you to study all of it, expresses his relationship to God and to members of the church and his faith in language that moves us today four hundred years later.

Fast forward to the late 1700s, early 1800s. The United States is a brand new country. There are very few Anglican or Episcopal clergy on the North American continent (a problem that has persisted to this day), and lay people in the Church of England are filled with the fervor of their strong faith and their desire to make a difference in English society. In less than sixty years, evangelical Anglican lay people (yes today it sounds like an oxymoron) sparked sweeping social reforms that remain as some of the pillars of our society today. This list is long including: prison reform, child welfare reform, meals programs for the poor, child labor laws, enactment of a 6 day work week, removal of women and children from working in mines, public education especially for the poor, adult education in factory schools taught by Anglican lay people, and finally abolition of slavery.

This is part of the heritage of our Anglican-Episcopal tradition. This is what happens when lay people begin to experience that relationship with God in their guts and they desire to make a difference as a result. Especially in these Midwestern parts you hear a lot of talk about “personal relationship with Jesus Christ” and I agree, all baptized Christians must have a strong, intimate, working, walking, talking relationship with the risen Christ. However talking about that relationship and trying to strong armothers to our point of view is not how Episcopalians and Anglicans grow in faith individually nor is it how we bring others to the faith.

As modern Christians we find ourselves in the perfect storm of busy lives, a church hierarchy that has been complacent far too long, and a rapidly changing world around us. We look at the problems in our community and the world around us and for the most part we lack the ability to connect our faith to God’s call for US to make a difference right here and now. In 1780, English philanthropist Robert Raikes wanted to do something about crime as a result of his connection with the courts. He thought that vice was better prevented than cured so he started a school for boys in the slums. Later girls would attend as well. Since they worked six days a week, their school day was Sunday. This was both the beginning of Sunday school as well as public education in England and the United States. It started with one faithful person who wanted to make a difference.

My job is to light a fire under the faith you already have. My job is to get you to connect the dots not with verbal proclamations like the Nicene Creed but between what you feel here and those unique things God is calling you to do. We will move our worship in a dignified and a more emotional direction. I want you to really start to “get it.” Jesus calls you. He says to you what he said to the disciples. “Receive the Holy Spirit.” When you do, there is nothing you cannot change or do.