We're entering "the dog days of summer" and what is named, "ordinary time" in our Episcopal calendar. Yet the past month has been anything but ordinary.

• While North Korea rattles its nuclear saber at its southern neighbor, the tragedy of Gaza erupts into a slaughter aboard a humanitarian shipload of supplies;
• Oil continues to gush into the Gulf of Mexico, killing wildlife, fouling marshes and beaches, and threatening to permanently destroy the livelihood of shrimp and oyster fishermen, while the governor of Louisiana pleads with the federal government not to curtail exploratory drilling off the coast of his state because of the economic impact;
• The Archbishop of Canterbury has begun to exclude supporters of GLBT inclusion from full participation in the life of the Anglican Communion, provoking the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church to engage him in an uncharacteristic public theological dueling match in the media;
• And SE Washington, DC, still reels from the shootings that left three teenagers dead in retaliation for a lost piece of costume jewelry, providing ample fodder for gun-control advocates and death-penalty opponents alike.

So it was not without irony that my time away in Arizona at the Episcopal Church's CREDO conference took its theological focus from the current work of Episcopal theologian Michael Battle's humbling work on forgiveness and reconciliation. Combined with the stunning desert architecture of stone, sand and stars, as well as the examples of leaders like The Very Rev. Martha Horne, retired Dean of Virginia Theological Seminary, sent me back into our political- global landscape refocused on my identity as priest.

• I came home to sit by the side of yet one more young, bright 30-year old, and to share the fears and despair driven by having been just given a diagnosis of terminal cancer; 
• I came home to walk the walk with a friend whose infant son died unexpectedly, while I've been struggling at the same time with a family member of my own who is pregnant and unmarried;
• I came home to bask in sharing in the learning, worship - and kick ball fever - experienced by twenty five of you on our parish retreat;
• I came home to put together in one short week the services for three upcoming wedding's, to listen to the fatigue and frustration of exhausted church volunteers, and to engage in premarital counseling with a couple struggling with the decline of budgets that supply medication to those with AIDS;
• I came home also, to celebrate as more members of St. Thomas' contribute to our GROW WITH US / Sanctuary First mission so that today we've surpassed the $600K mark in our internal fundraising campaign! 
• Last night Wayne and I attended a going-away party for a colleague and friend who is about to take on an exciting new position as rector of an Episcopal Parish in California; 
• And in a week I leave for Albuquerque, New Mexico, to serve as chaplain for fifty-three 9th graders from the Episcopal High School in Jacksonville, Fla. (The alma mater of our own Hardee Mahoney). Along with seven other adult chaperones, I will get to live with them as the Body of Christ on the Navajo reservation in southern Utah for a week doing house painting and teaching vacation bible school as a mission project.

This is the world you and I live in, share, and where we're called daily to be Christ's Body in the world.

You barely have to pay attention to notice that whatever words you use to describe the times of our lives these days they're anything but "ordinary". Your Facebook pages, as well as your pastoral appointments tell me that on any given day, you may awake barely holding your lives together, and yet before the day is out, sharing with someone else in need a glimpse of new life and hope, living out your baptismal vows. At the end of the day when I say prayers, I give thanks to God that this is my life. I rejoice and am glad in it. But it isn't ordinary.

And yet I suspect that in God's eyes it is. The biblical story is an account of the ways that God has been bringing new life into the middle of human brokenness and pain -- from the days of the prophet Elijah in today's lesson from Kings, to Jesus' raising to life again of a widow's only son. But because the world's news reports shrouds over the Good News of life in Christ with human news of death, destruction, and pain, it becomes more pressing with each passing day that we let our lights shine in the darkness, that we offer witness to another story that transcends the stories in daily news that can suck the goodness out of us.

This is why it's so important for the world to see that God is up to something transformative and redemptive at St. Thomas' Parish. The new sanctuary provides a visionary image of what the physical space occupied by St. Thomas' Parish might look like in the not too distant future. And yet we're not waiting until then to open our doors to the world for worship and pastoral care, to nurture babies that are being born, to provide outreach to the homeless. Weeds still need to be pulled up in the gardens, cracks in walls need to be mended, and leaks in the existing building repaired.

We need to remember, however, that whether housed in our existing building or a new place of worship, we exist here in Dupont Circle to be hosts for God's reign here on earth as it is in heaven. This is what under girds our commitment to Radical Hospitality-a God-bare hospitality that does not mean "anything goes on here"- it is a hospitality at the very center and heart of our mission designed to provide a place where people in our world can receive God's love and be immersed in the life-giving and healing power of God as Holy Spirit, as we pray, worship, meditate on Scripture, and learn to minister to each other and to our neighbor. We gather to be hosts for God who wants nothing less than our hearts, souls, minds, and strength, for ministry in places of great darkness and need. And we bring nothing less than the Good News of new life, filling places of despair with light and celebration.

When we know who we are as the Body of Christ, and doing with our hands and feet the work God's calling us to do, we're doing what the church has always done at it's best. Radical hospitality is connecting people with Jesus, who welcomes all to the Table where Jesus is host and feeds us for living. Whether we're studying the Bible in Kerygma class, setting up and cleaning up our coffee hour, or walking with people in their troubles, whether we're part of an EFM group like the one John Carter is starting this fall or out on Capitol Hill advocating for those without the voices or resources to do so themselves, we're the Body of Christ - we're helping others to meet Jesus.

Our particular calling at St. Thomas' Parish to be a community of Radical Hospitality gets expressed in our longing to see people from the margins, which includes our own places of marginalization, raised up as leaders for God's work in the world. As Jesus was a friend of ordinary persons, calling fishermen, tax collectors, and zealots from backwater Galilee, so we seek to be a community where anyone can discern their calling, clarify their gifts, and join a movement that announces and makes visible the Reign of God.

Our calling as a parish is to take part in Christ's mission of bringing together divergent people and movements that are separated, on behalf of those who count the least in the eyes of our society. We seek to connect the margins with the mainstream, the poor with the privileged, believers with evangelical backgrounds with those who come to us from other religious traditions or none at all. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes the whole body of Christ to get a glimpse of God breaking through at the most extreme places and moments of our lives. The Good News is to boldly claim, one by one, our calling to be Christ's Body - taken, blessed, broken, and given for the world.

The headlines in the newspaper won't change, but with the encouragement of one another we can begin to hear them as invitations for mission rather than signposts of despair, as opportunities for deepening our discipleship rather than reasons to lose hope. I received just such a message of encouragement this past Thursday, in response to an invitation to serve on our Building Advisory Committee supporting our quest to enlarge our beacon of hope and healing for generations to come. The letter said: "Nancy Lee, I am delighted to be asked to serve on the Building Advisory Committee. YES! I will be happy for you to use my name (for whatever that's worth!) and to help in any way I can. I will be spending a little more time in DC, now that I've been named a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, and that will expand somewhat in my retirement (whenever THAT is!). St. Thomas' has been my church home away from home, and will continue to be. So, it will give me great pleasure to help out in this way. FYI, I will be in Washington next Monday and Tuesday. In fact, I'll be having lunch with John Johnson. Maybe we can find some time to talk further about this. I'm excited to hear the plans! Signed: Bishop Gene Robinson.

I hope for you that this gesture of affirmation and commitment from Bishop Robinson is music to your soul, for he has named you -- St. Thomas' Parish as his church family away from home-and believes in and supports our mission to build a new sanctuary! Bishop Robinson has hung out with us often enough to have seen us at our most joyous as well as when we're at the end of our ropes of patience and fatigue. And he knows that in all these things we're the body of Christ, with a calling to reconciliation and forgiveness and the spiritual formation of God's people.

As the Body of Christ, St. Thomas', I invite you into ever-deepening community, as we journey together to find and be found by the God we see in Jesus Christ, by whose Holy Spirit we share in God's power to reconcile, heal, liberate, and transform the world we share. May our building campaign, along with the renewal of all of our efforts of faithful giving, enable us to make more visible the signs of God's reign. May those who pass by our doors, as well as those who enter in, see faith found and renewed, strangers welcomed, addicts recovering, prisoners of violence and hatred set free, the sick and broken healed, ordinary people empowered for ministry in the extraordinary times in which we live. At the end of the day when you say your prayers, may you give thanks to God that this is your life. May you rejoice and be glad in it. And by the grace of God may your life in Christ never be ordinary at all...may it be the most challenging and faithful way in which to live life together, in community, with God at the center of all we are and all we do.