Upcoming Events

Tuesday, Sept. 9:        Commissions, 6:30 PM; Vestry, 7:30 PM

Saturday, Sept. 13:     Clean-up Day 

Saturday, Sept. 27:     Feed the Homeless, 9:30 AM

Sunday, Sept. 28:        Odeon Concert, 4:00 PM

Birthdays

September 

1   Felix Spinelli

1  MyChi Haan

4   Laura Kennedy

8   Lucille Selby

8   Nghia Dao

10   Rachel Burgess

11   Oanh Phan

13   Debbie Clark

13   Doan Huynh Tucker

13   Michael Knowles

14   Thanh Nguyen

18   Pauline Leonard

23   Hannah Knowles

24   Deani Coker

24  Margot Deanna Miller

28   William Houston

29   Justice Lebo

30   Michael Spinelli

Our Prayer List

We remember in our prayer:

Cathy Anderson, Dee Bailey, Kari Boeskov, Brandon, Rachel Burgess, Jane Chapman, Marie Cosimano, Tim Clary, Dorothy Connelly, John Davis, Michael Dickinson, Loretta Dougherty, Steve Escobar, Nance Finegan, Luis Garay, Carolyn Gawarecki, Louise Gibney, Jean Graham, Katherine Hafele, Margaret Ellis Harris, Alek Hensley, Leslie Hogan, Cindy Hogman, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Michael Horn,  Lindsay Johns, Gray Johnson, Jamie Kaplon, Laura Kennedy, Iona Kiger, Quinn Kimball, Alice King, Michael Knowles, Ashley Kolitz, Peter Kosutic, Susan Lawrence, Thai Lee, Bruce Lineker, Evelyn Morgan, Danielle Morgan, Que Nguyen, Chick Nixon, Mary Esther Obremskey, Tom Olander, Olive Oliver, Jim Owens, Gary Owens, Valerie Parkhouse, William Ross, Fern Shuck, Irene Skowron, Josh Smithers, Inez Stanton, Candi Stewart, Patrick Stefl, Barbara Stefl, Kara Stryker, Walter Sushko, George Thomas, Elizabeth Trigg, Tammy Vanphung, Michael Weekes, Warren Weinstein, The Crowley Family, The Westfall Family, Meredith Wiech, Bernard Williams, Rev. Letha Wilson-Barnard, Rudy Zimpel.

               ____ 

Note: If you have a loved one or friend who needs prayer please call the church and leave a message at 703-532-5656, or write to Winnie Lebo at

thelebos@verizon.net  or call her at 703-536-2075.  Also, should a name need be removed from the list, please let Winnie know promptly, and give the reason.  

Saint Patrick's Ministers 

The Ministers of Saint Patrick's Church are the People of this Parish

We serve our Lord as part of the Diocese of Virginia

led by

our chief pastors

The Rt. Rev. Shannon Sherwood Johnston, Bishop

The Rt. Rev. Susan Goff

Bishop Suffragan 

and  

The Rt. Rev. Ted Gulick,

Assistant Bishop 

The Vision of St. Patrick's

Saint Patrick's Episcopal Church is a community of care, called to be Christ-centered and multicultural in worship, Christian education and action to proclaim  Christ's love to the world.

St. Patrick's Organized for Missions and Ministry 

SAINT PATRICK'S ORGANIZED

FOR MISSIONS AND MINISTRY

Other members of the Vestry:   Elisabeth Nguyen, Milton Thomas, Victoria Kennedy, Ann Nelson. 

GROUPS AND ACTIVITIES

The Propers 

Given by The Rev.Dr. Richard J. Jones

August 31, 2014

Thinking About Work

There is something in each of us that desires to be in control of the world, to have the world listen to us.

But the world resists us. The world doesn't want our control. And in response to the world's uncooperativeness, we are tempted to back off, to resign, or to set the whole place on fire.

Somewhere deep in the order and disorder of our lives, somewhere below the surface of our social institutions, there is something else. If we listen, we can get echoes of a stable floor underneath our ocean that may make us brave enough to keep on navigating.

Explore with me where this ocean floor lies that offers us a bearable balance between total control and total chaos.

In the family of my first wife, who made their home in Alabama, they like to tell the story of chatterbox Mary. Today in her 70's Mary is still a splendid conversationalist and the life of the party. But when Mary was three, she was insufferable. She delivered monologues. The others found her a bit of a tyrant. One day the mother suggested to the other children a little trick.   "At lunch today, I want all the rest of you to keep quiet. Just let Mary talk." And that is what happened. May told about what she seen in the yard. Mary talked about how much she liked the biscuits. Glasses were refilled. Mary talked about how much she wanted a puppy. No one interrupted. Mary chattered on. Finally, when she was ready to get out of her chair, Mary declared: "That was the best lunch ever!" Only then did the others point out why.

There is some of Mary in all of us. We have ideas, and the world should pay attention. We feel that the world should be under control, and it would be best if the world were under our control.

Three-year-olds believe that. Empires, from ancient Egypt and modern Britain down to the would-be Islamic State of Syria and the Levant believe it. Every group from Mothers Against Drunk Driving to the National Rifle Association believes that the world would be orderly if only they could be in control.

The trouble with all these dreams of control is that the world resists. Vassal states of ancient Egypt rose up and fractured those stable kingdoms. Strains of microscopic organisms display the same stubbornness. We learn how to eradicate an infectious disease, and then the organism mutates and resurges. Our civic leaders build thoughtful, long-term systems so no student will be left behind, no ethnic minority will be abused, no economic group be exploited - and over time so many social variables shift, or refuse to shift, that the old systems are defeated by new realities.

The task to make order and justice prevail in the world is an impossible task. People burn out. They go on cruises. They decide to let the squirrels and the weeds have their way. The three-year-old's brief delight in a biddable world gives way to adolescent dyspepsia and old-age depression. Division, disorder, and decline appear to where we are headed.

Last Thursday at Morning Prayer at St. Luke's Church near Mount Vernon, the rector told a story about water leaks in their forty-year-old building. They had a longstanding problem with a wet ceiling in the basement bathrooms. The ceiling tiles were replaced, but mold reappeared. Someone explored deeper into the floor above and found a leaking pipe, which they replaced. But the wet came back, and now mushrooms began growing. Years went by, and some repair was needed up on the roof. During the roof repair, workers found water seeping down and running along a second-floor joist. None of the little fixes to the basement problem had worked, because no one had grasped the whole structure of roof drains, load-bearing supports, and pipes carrying water under pressure. While humans puzzled, the water kept finding its way.

Are human beings then to give up hoping for order? Is the world to be a watery waste, or a smoldering pile of rubble, a habitat beyond the reach of wisdom? Must we despair of doing justice and achieving a happy equilibrium here on earth?

If order and justice are to emerge on earth, they will emerge only because Someone besides us has been at work from the beginning to infuse into the world both justice and order.

Before Moses, a prince of ancient Egypt, knew the God of Israel, God had already been at work choosing one particular human being named Abraham to know him and to go where he was sent. Moses came along many generations after Abraham and did not know Abraham's story. Moses was raised in the Egyptian emperor's court, and yet Moses identified himself with his mother's people, the enslaved laborers called Israelites. One day Moses saw an Egyptian overseer kill a Hebrew laborer, so Moses killed the Egyptian and hid his body in the sand. But the Hebrew slaves were not inclined to follow Moses and rise up. So Moses left his people, left stable, powerful, orderly Egypt, and settled among a desert tribe. He was keeping a flock of sheep for his father-in-law beyond the wilderness.

Then one day something caught Moses's attention - something he could not understand. Something was happening in that place - off the grid, off the map, not predicted by any theory of government or any human wisdom. A bush was burning. That would not have been so strange - lightning strikes, campfires spread. But this burning bush did not burn out. Moses looked, and the bush kept burning. It was not consumed. Something was happening that could not be ascribed to human agency or human control. Moses, said, "I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up."

When Moses stopped and looked, he also listened.

Here was a capable and well-placed man who had run away from a slave revolt when the slaves failed to rise up. Here was a man who had left behind the mechanisms of empire, because its injustice was impossible to get hold of and to correct. This alien, off beyond the wilderness, stopped. He looked at the inexplicable bush that would not stop burning. And then he heard his own name.

"Moses, Moses!"

The voice continued: "I am the God of your father, even if you never knew your father. I am the God of Abraham, you father's father's father's father - the one I once called out of all the people on earth to be my friend. I am the God of Abraham, the one I told to go to a place I had prepared for him. I've taken a good, long look at the affliction of my people in Egypt. I've heard their moans and shouts. I know all about their pain. I wasn't waiting for an action plan from you. I have come down to help them, get them out of that country, and bring them to a good land with wide-open spaces, a land lush with milk and honey. Now I am sending you to make this happen. Go tell old Pharaoh to let my people go."

Where we have been unsuccessful in enforcing our just order on the world, God already is aware of what is needed. In places we turned our backs on because of their stubbornness or unmanageability, God keeps listening. God bends his ear close. God comes down to help.

Down at our level, and even at depths where we cannot see or reach, something unpredictable may come to us. In places where all we can do is stop and stare and listen, we may be met by Someone who was designing order before we were ever born. We are met by the One who first created out of chaos an orderly world of light and dark, a world of seasons and life forms, of male and female in their connectedness.

And it turns out that this Creator is also the Reorderer. He has in mind a lush place for all who are willing to be led. He has a plan and the means to rebalance an unjustly disordered world. He was not waiting for Moses, or us, to impose order. He is already on the job. God's rebalancing may disturb some bad habits we had fallen into. The means he has chosen may not be the means we would have preferred. But just like water, God will find his way

How then shall we live, if we hear this voice of God calling our name? What are we to do in the face of a system too big for us to figure out, or a system that has enslaved us along with others?

If in the stillness of the night we hear our name called, if something catches our attention that we never expected to encounter, we can suspect, and with Moses and all the listeners down through the centuries can trust, that the task being dropped in our lap is indeed a task meant for us.

We need not expect full control of the operation. We know that won't happen. We do not have to expect a perfect outcome. We know that is beyond our abilities. Yet we can respond with Moses and say, "Yes. I'm right here. I'm available. I can do something about it."

There is an old story about a Clerk of the Works making his rounds during the construction of one of the great cathedrals of Europe. The clerk climbed up to where three stonemasons were putting the final touches on a pinnacle on one of the tall towers. The clerk engaged the nearest workmen in conversation by asking, "What are you doing today?" The man answered, "I'm earning my wage. I'm doing my job." The clerk climbed a little higher, where another mason was completing a detail on a carved stone block, and asked this man what he was doing. "I'm making this block a perfect match for the others." Finally the clerk got up to where the third mason was setting the tip of the pinnacle on its base, and he asked him what he was doing. The third man answered, "I'm building a cathedral that points to God."

We would like to be in control, but we are not. We are tempted to lose heart for our work, but we cannot. What sustains us is the assurance that before we ever went to work, the God of just order was at work. The world is his. Our work is to point.

Thanks be to God.