My First Sermon

Good morning everyone. My name is Michael Carroccino, and my family and I have been attending St. Paul’s for almost five years now. For those of you who are not familiar with my story, back in March, Bishop Rickel admitted me as a postulant to the priesthood, which means that this fall we will be heading off to seminary, and that eventually I will most likely become a priest in the Episcopal Church. That, in a nutshell, is how I came to have the privilege of standing here in front of you all today.

Before we talk about today’s readings, I’d like to let you in on a little more of my own story. I grew up in a small town in the middle of Alabama, where football is a religion and church is what everyone does on Sunday mornings. When I was young in the South, nearly everyone was either a Southern Baptist or sick of hearing about it. My original denomination is among the most loudly evangelical communities there are. I grew up with a rock-solid and rigidly defined faith that was as simple as it was easy to share. I learned to carry the weight of all the unsaved sinners in the world on my shoulders, and a Bible on my person at all times. If you sat next to me on a bus or in an airplane, you didn’t leave without an altar call! I was a cheer-leader for Jesus, right down to the Christian music and t-shirts.

My story took a predictable turn with my transition to college. Suddenly, I found myself surrounded by people who managed to function quite well in the world; even without their daily “Bible studies” and weekly heartrending calls to repentance. I also began to find my peace and solace in a new and different place – the forested foothills, limestone crags, twisting rivers, and muddy caves of Alabama’s wilderness. Through these major shifts, I developed a pretty motley band of friends: based more along the lines of hiking speed and climbing skill than religious preference and political views. Through these new eyes, I began to see religion and faith in a different light. I found that religion could not be a one-size-fits-all phenomenon: what worked for one person might be downright torture for another. As I began to realize that the most important thing was to simply keep the conversation going, the neat and tidy version of God that I kept in my head had to grow. Pretty soon, he wouldn’t fit in there anymore.

It was around this point that everything I had professed to understand about life suddenly fell apart around me; you see, I got married… After years of ignoring women on the premise that I would only date someone who could keep up with me on the trail, I met someone who could not only hike faster, but with a heavier pack! Kristin and I were married a short six months later. It was marriage that truly set me on the path that landed me where I am today. In having to intentionally share the pursuit of a spiritual life with another, I have learned more about myself – good and bad –than I could have any other way.

Kristin and I have similar backgrounds – we both grew up Evangelical in the South. Yet as we came together and discovered ourselves over many years, we found that what we were missing was a way to express our deep and profound wonder at a Holy God, while still retaining the ability to question and wrestle within a supportive community. It has been in the ritual and strong traditions of the Episcopal Church that we found that middle way. Here, we gather together weekly with a wonderfully rich liturgy – Christians have worshipped in similar ways for thousands of years – that celebrates the deep mystery and joy that is God, and yet we do so within a community that readily acknowledges and examines the kinds of paradox created by our faith in our daily lives. For those of you who have been in the church your whole life, let me tell you as an outsider, this place is something special and worth celebrating.

So this past Thursday we celebrated the Ascension. The fact that our church intentionally makes space to do this is a real delight to me. Growing up, we tended to focus mostly on the words spoken in the Gospels and epistles, rather than the events. We Baptists like things that we can debate, things we can understand. But the Ascension is such an absurdly wonderful and mind-boggling occasion that there is really not much to say. Think about it – the last time any of you saw someone get bodily pulled into the sky it was probably on television and it most likely involved aliens. I thought long and hard about this in the last few weeks, and I finally decided that if I had to resort to Star Trek to make a point in my very first sermon, the future looked pretty bleak. So the idea that we have a feast day especially set aside to remember this profound event in the life of Jesus is truly wonderful to me. It reminds us that our faith is often bigger than words; bigger even than understanding, yet it still must be remembered, explored, and celebrated.

Thankfully, we have a wonderful representation of this very event right here in our own nave to keep us mindful of it the year round. If you look with me over here to the window, you can see Jesus at the very moment he is rising to the sky, surrounded by his beloved disciples with angels looking on. When I look at this picture I can’t help but notice something. Look at the faces of the people below Jesus.

Now, we have the benefit of a few centuries’ space to look back on the Ascension, but imagine how these men and women must have felt as they literally watched it happen. You’ll notice that no one has produced a yellow legal pad to jot down a few last notes as Jesus leaves the scene. I don’t see anybody pulling a laptop from under their robe to begin working on a strategic ministry plan. No, these people are dumbfounded! They have no idea of what they will do in their own lives, much less how they will affect generations of Christians after them. They are simply standing there, staring in what must be pure shock as their one great handhold on the eternal, the very man who introduced them to the invisible God, rises gaily out of sight.

The whole scene brings to mind the first day on a job, when you’ve trained for a while, spent some time thinking about it, you’re a little nervous, and now, well, it’s go-time. I spent a season in Southern Utah guiding canyoneering trips, these are technical day trips with rock-climbing and rappelling, and I’ll never forget the first trip I helped guide. I put my climbing harness on, double checked all the buckles and knots, (you know, all those things that hold me to the rope and keep me from plummeting to my death…) and turned to another guide and said – as I had been trained for years to say—“Will you check me?” He turned and looked me straight in the eye and he said, “You’re a guide now, check YOURSELF!”

There’s this fantastic moment in all of our stories where there is this same exhilarating and terrifying transfer of authority, when all of a sudden we’ve learned what we’re going to learn and it’s time to get out there and DO. In His Ascension, I think Jesus is essentially saying to his disciples, and by extension, to us, “I’ve given you the important stuff. I can’t stick around and walk you through everything that will happen, but I trust that you have the tools now to handle it.”

And then we move ahead to today’s readings, where the apostles are saddled with the weighty task of setting down the very first foundations of what it means to be a follower of The Way. This must have been pretty stressful, if you think about it. Look at Paul in the first reading: we barely get to the end of a paragraph and he is described as “very much annoyed.” And then, before you know it, he’s in prison. I’m sure this is not the kind of pattern he had in mind for a new religious movement, yet by the end of the story we have another family of people celebrating the coming Kingdom of God.

It’s the same today. As we grope our way ahead into a hazy future, with each new turn in world affairs, each new shift in science and culture, we are faced with the same dilemma as Paul: how do we work to bring about God’s Kingdom in this set of circumstances? How do we do church in this new environment? And it is this very question that both haunts and inspires me as I look forward to a life in ministry. The Episcopal Church has a wonderfully rich and valuable heritage to share with upcoming generations, but if you read the statistics, things are looking a little grim. We are faced with a new culture of people who both place value and find meaning in very different places than prior generations and their spiritual needs and desires are often far more diverse and ambiguous than any one institution can hope to address. Yet these very people will be the ones who become the church, if the church is to move forward. My goal in pursuing ministry is to begin to find ways to carry our traditions into new and different communities of people. I want to find those people out there who, like me, are looking for the larger story that our church can call them into, but don’t even know that we Episcopalians exist, and teach them how to consecrate their time and space as sacred and to see and celebrate the joy and abundance of God that surrounds us all.

In August, my family will be packing up and moving to Austin, Texas, where I will be attending school at the Seminary of the Southwest. I will be there for the next three years, and then after that, who knows? But I want you all to know: in the last five years, I have come to love St. Paul’s so much that I hope I can carry some of it with me to share with every church I serve. The amount of friendship and support I’ve come to depend on from all of you as a community will be one of the hardest things to leave behind as I go. I plan to keep you all in my prayers while I am at school (after all, why not? I’ll be in a LOT of worship services in the next few years), and I hope you will do the same for my family. On the tables near the doors you can find a little booklet we’ve put together to tell more of our story – please take one with you. It has our mailing addresses as well as the address of my website where I will try to keep everyone updated on our lives. Also, I hope you can all make it to our celebration dinner on the evening of June twelfth. In keeping with our future, we’ll have some Texas barbeque and some live music – it ought to be a lot of fun.

I have one more piece before I give your ears a rest. As you can imagine if you’ve ever been involved in official church business, I’ve had to fill out quite a lot of paperwork in the last few months. I’ve written essay after essay about who I am and my vision for ministry, and it has been taxing and fun at the same time. Even after all that writing, I think my vision has been surpassed in the reading from Revelation today:
The Spirit and the bride say, “come.”
And let everyone who hears say, “come.”
And let everyone who is thirsty come.
Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.
The one who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.”
Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!
The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints. Amen.