“No man is an island unto himself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”
Anglican priest and poet, John Donne, Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London where the Epiphany choir has sung, wrote these words in 1624 while in bed getting over a fever.
And then a bell tolled. Someone in the city had died, and Donne continued: “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
The bell tolls for thee; for me; for all of us.
Today, after 115 years, our Chapel will have in its belfry for the first time, a bell, an ancient technology of calling, of invitation, of announcement that God is here. The toll of this bell is an audible signal of who we, Epiphany, have become: a significant and enduring spiritual center of gravity in the Pacific Northwest.
When I arrived in 2008 that legacy was not a foregone conclusion. Today it is undeniable because over these past 18 years you have said “yes” to the clarion call of the Holy Spirit to be a place of worship and a place that talks about and teaches about and follows the patterns of Jesus. We are Christians in the Pacific Northwest, today, unapologetically.
Our spiritual presence has resonated all over the place. People from 62 zip codes call Epiphany their church. Our Average Sunday Attendance has gone from 120 to 400, and from 2 services to 5. Our choir has grown from 8 to 63. Our weekly Evensong podcast is ranked by Google as the #1 most listened to online Evensong – heard in 94 countries around the world. 320 of you have gone on pilgrimage. And then there are the classes and forums and Sunday school taught by staff and laypeople alike.
To accommodate all this our annual budget has increased 329% and our balance sheet 420%. And we have given away a lot of money. Since 2010 we have distributed $3.8M to service and outreach partners all over the world.
Those stats reflect the words engraved on the plaque where the bell rope will hang in the Chapel today. Under the name Robert Barnes (1970-2025) it reads: “Remaining Faithfully in the Kingdom of God.”
For those who didn’t know Bob, he was on the Vestry when I arrived. My first day at work Bob wandered into my office to help me unpack. Bob died last year of an unexpected heartattack, and at Bob’s funeral, as at all funerals, I read these words:
“We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s possession.”
These words come from the Apostle Paul we heard today in the letter to the Romans. Paul continues: “For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.”
Paul is writing to a fractured community. People arguing about food rules, about holy days, about the calendar, about who is in and who is out. People pulling in different directions, suspicious of each other, convinced their way is the right way. Some things never change. Everyone wants their own island.
Everyone wants to be the king of their kingdom. And yet, no matter what, in truth, we are all part of the main. The bell tolls for thee; for me; for all of us.
And now, it will do so audibly from the corner of Denny and 38th, here in Madrona, a neighborhood in the city of Seattle, part of the Pacific Northwest. Here is where our buildings stand. Their presence however is not a foregone conclusion. It is not inevitable. Every generation, every congregation has to concur. They have to say yes, together!
In 2016, 306 people did so, and we renovated the chapel and the church and the Great Hall and refreshed the grounds.
And time passes. Things change. People have moved. People lose their faith. And many, like Bob, go to glory.
Now, 10 years have brought us to today, and we have been asked, again, to preserve and enhance our spiritual home.
This time 395 of you have said yes, together! And of those 395, 236 of you, that is 60%, weren’t here to give to the capital campaign of 2016.
That is a number worth noting. Churches are dynamic, living communities who choose to be connected to a place to practice faithfully living together in the Kingdom of God.
I asked some parishioners the other day what our capital campaign theme was. They unanimously responded: 100% participation. It’s actually: Preserve and Enhance our Spiritual Home.
But their answer spoke the real truth about who we are. When the call went out for money to fund this capital campaign, you responded not because you had all the information, or even because you liked everything that was going to be done, but because each of you decided to say “yes,” as they did before us, and will be able to do after us because we said “yes” right now.
Together we pooled our money and raised $8.5 million since March. And because we have a team of hardworking volunteers and a staff capable of stretching their job descriptions (because nothing else stops at a church just because you’re doing a capital campaign) we spent less than $8,250 to raise this $8.5 million. Nice work. That should be enough to preserve and enhance our spiritual home this time around.
Not all churches respond this way. The bell we are hoisting into the belfry today came from St. James, Sedro-Woolley, in the Skagit Valley. It was built in 1907, four years before our Chapel was built. In 2010 St. James was shuttered and the building condemned. There was just too much deferred maintenance; things that hadn’t been cared for over the past 100 years – roofs and walls and foundations.
Why was that the case? I don’t really know. But it didn’t happen all at once. It happened because, over time, people said “no” rather than “yes,” to the point at which when people wanted to say “yes” they were too overwhelmed by what that meant.
And so their bell arrives here for us to ring. At the end of this service we will hoist it onto our shoulders and, in the ancient tradition of the church, walk the bounds of this parish.
We will process the edges of our property as the Israelites did when they entered the Promised Land, carrying the Ark of the Covenant. We will put feet upon the earth together and walk what God has given us to care for.
Then to the Chapel belfry, where the bell will be installed and rung. As we wait for that moment, we will gather in the Christie House courtyard for a photo. This is what families do.
There will be young people who pose with us today who in 50+ years will look at that photo and say: “there I am.” And I know this because I have seen it before with people who sit in our midst today: Susan Moseley, Clyde Summerville, Caroline Normann, Bobby Spaeth, Sally Clark, Margaret King… others? (raise your hand if you were here 75 years ago). These are the people who recall the adults who said “yes” in 1951 to the construction of this church we currently sit in.
They were the people who said “yes,” so that we could say “yes,” so that the young people here will see and remember and say “yes” when their time comes, and it will.
This is not the last capital campaign, nor the last time we will talk about money. (If you don’t like that give more then we won’t have to ask as often.) Every year we have an annual appeal to keep this place running, and we will do so again this October.
But for now, we walk the bounds, tracing our little corner of the cosmic landscape of the Kingdom of God. We will bend our knees, and lift our voices joining the living and the dead to praise our God, together. For we are not islands, we are part of the main, and now we have a bell to invite us, to remind us – that God is here.
We arrive on this continent we call Epiphany, as the bell tolls for thee, for me, for all of us who say “yes” to this spiritual center of gravity, wherever we are on our spiritual journey.
We are the community that Paul described 2000 years ago, living in continuity with the living and with the dead, together remaining faithfully in the Kingdom of God, an unapologetic Christian community thriving in the Pacific Northwest.