I asked Betty and David to style this Rogation Sunday on the bulletin. Not quite kosher (to mix metaphors completely!) You see, this really isn't Rogation Sunday. Not anymore. That was changed years ago, back in those days when we Episcopalians were changing so much. I am not supposed to call today Rogation Sunday. That is old and out. It is the Sixth Sunday of Easter and that's that. At 60, I am no longer so easily intimidated. If you lose Rogation Sunday you risk losing one of the great moments of our liturgical year--a deeply satisfying and deeply challenging reminder that we desperately need. Rogation Sunday celebrates and reminds us that the earth is the Lord's, not ours. The Church feels that we humans have been set apart to be caretakers of God's creation, stewards acting on behalf of God and in accord with his wishes and intentions. Rogation Sunday has not outlived its usefulness. It can and should be revived as an ecological festival of first rank, can easily be the most obvious moment in the Church's life when we pause, go outside, get out of the church building to acknowledge and respect and celebrate the glory of creation, the natural world, and ask God's continuing blessing upon it and re-commit ourselves to another year of faithful, reverent, responsible stewardship of nature. But what is Rogation Sunday? Well, I've dusted off some lighthearted paragraphs of explanation from a sermon four years ago, that I think may still be useful. As David James pointed out in the Angelus article, Rogation Sunday's historic distinguishing feature the Rogation Procession. We will have a slight re-enactment of a remnant of that tradition this morning, as we do each year. Anglicans, Episcopalians have always seemed to have just a bit more fun about being religious then so many people seem to be able to do, and the festivities on an old-fashioned Rogation Sunday were quintessentialy characteristic of us. It was a wonderfully devout and a wonderfully fun day. And that's a mix that causes trouble, confusion, and distress to people who are fiercely determined to be Seriously Religious. Anglicans have never been skilled at that kind of singleminded, adamant religion. The Rogation Procession was a wonderful thing, with a wonderfully endearing messiness about it. The congregation would set out from the church and process hither and yon all around the legal bounds of the parish. If you happened to be passing a pub whilst all this blessing and processing was going on, there really was no shame in stopping in for bit before resuming the procession. Some thought far enough ahead to lug along hampers of food to refresh themselves through all that peripatetic praying. The Church stalwarts would emerge from the pub after a brief stop, and then the procession resumed. Children played along the way, chased each other, got quietly but not very seriously scolded, and were fitted back into the procession, only to have the whole thing to unravel again fairly soon when another child thought up some new antic, or yet another pillar of the church needed another pint of ale to go on, and the clergyman intoned this and that, and people chatted in subdued but friendly voices, most said Amen clearly, people sang well-beloved and well-known hymns. So much for the lightheartedness. Now onto the defensiveness. Some cultures, some traditions, wouldn't recognize any of that as religion. Just cultural folkways, popular corruption of an originally religious event. I wonder. I think something more profound and more devout than that was going on. There are some far more heavy-duty religions out there than we dream of in here. Some of you know that, some of you are refugees from that kind of adamant rigor. There are traditions that foster, encourage, demand a super-human mortification of the flesh and a denial of all simple human pleasantness, and other traditions that seem to insist on an arid, arcane, intellectualism, with no emotion, no human messiness--austere, frigid worship devoid of ornamentation, with a God who must be apprehended from a distance cleanly, cooly, intellectually. No smells, no bells, no fun. And then there is us, who consistently come up with things like Rogation Processions, wherein we once traipsed around the fields and now we sashay through gardens, singing hymns, laughing, smiling, praising God, murmuring slightly self-conscious Amens to beautifully worded prayers all more likely to have been written for us by others than to be our own spontaneous compositions. All of us struggling, hoping, praying, trying our best, sure that we have done wrong and equally sure that God forgives us and genuinely determined to do better next time, and wisely aware that we probably won't. And over and above all the image of a kindly God nodding, smiling, wagging his head, pleased that his children are trying, not surprised that they fail so often. That is not a religion, a Church, an approach to God, to dismiss or deride. It is not just my own miserable self-interest that inclines me to believe that we have caught something right in our image of God. However imperfectly and foolishly, we have understood something critically correct about his nature. Something that many others with their fierce heroics have missed. There is certain sweetness, kindness, gentleness, light-heartedness that is so characteristic, for better or worse, of our Anglican faith and practice. We tend not to suffer and die in large numbers and in gruesome ways for our faith. But on the other hand, we tend not to insist that others, opposed to us, die in large numbers and in gruesome ways. We go on Rogation Processions. We have picnics and potlucks and Solemn High Masses and times for just ordinary living, and fun together and simple prayers and elaborate Processions. A wonderful, unpredictable, variable, messy human response to the immutable workings of divine grace and glory. And fun. Fun. We like to have that too. We think that is part of it, part of what God intends. Happiness, joy ... fun. And throughout all of it we try, try to be people who are faithfully, unremarkably, intermittently, unpretentiously living reasonably good and relatively decent lives and every so often pausing and acknowledging and thanking and worshipping God and asking his assistance and blessing. There are many in our Episcopal heritage and history who have offered courageous witness at great personal sacrifice. But by and large ours is an ordinary religion for ordinary people who are doing the best they can even if that is not spectacular. We are not always consistent, not often rigorous, going on out to our garden singing a hymn in what will end up being something more like a straggle than a Procession, with the acolytes hovering beside me trying, often in vain, to prevent the Priest from making really awful mistakes. And this miscellaneous gathering wanders out into the garden and we ask God to bless us and our roses and we ask him to bless the people who never see roses and can hardly imagine them, and ask him to forgive us when we forget those very people, when we forget the poor and the needy and the hurt and the lonely and then of course we promise God to be as good as we can be, and knowing that that won't be very good after all. Classic Episcopalians, classically muddling through, trusting God, aware of human failing, but always in some fashion seeking what is fair and just and decent, and not accepting as coming from God anything that violates that implicit understanding. The understanding that God is love and life must be made as fair as we can make it, as fair and good and right as God intended at creation. We are not better than anyone else, we are not superior to any other denomination, that is not what I mean to suggest, but what I do honestly believe is that we Episcopalians are very prominently among those who close to understanding the sublime truth of the divine reality. That God rejoices with us that we have at least somewhat glimpsed how much he loves us and understands us and treasures us with a fond and forgiving indulgence. Rogation Sunday reminds us of a precious and irreplaceable teaching of our beloved Episcopal Church: namely, that everything is just a little bit more fun that we dare to imagine, that the world around us is just a little bit better than we fear it is, and that God is just a little more forgiving than we dare to hope, and more infinitely loving than we can ever conceive. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.