Dear St. Paul’s family,
It’s Homecoming Sunday! Welcome home.
Every year we designate a Sunday in the fall as homecoming Sunday. Usually it is homecoming because the summer often brings a different routine. Whether it is vacation, sleeping in, a break from school, finding cool places to avoid the heat, or just the lazy days of summer, sometimes our church lives tend to slow down as well.
Lots of churches call this day in the fall “Rally Day” to rally us all back to our common cause in Christ; rally us out of the slowness of summer and into the more active academic year. A few churches call it homecoming, as if we all had left for the summer and are now returning from a long absence. My sense is that at the cathedral, it is more metaphoric than anything, because I hardly think we ever slow down!
This year, we are celebrating a very special Homecoming. It is our 150th birthday! Each service will have special food to celebrate our sesquicentennial. We will have a seated lunch after our 10:30 service, where we will welcome parishioners who have been with St. Paul’s for many years and those just starting their journey here. We will hear a little bit about this exceptional journey of people that we are all now a part of.
In the next weeks, you will hear more about how we will celebrate the anniversary of the cathedral’s civic legacy: we will have a grand gala in December for our proper anniversary; a fitting tribute for the Cathedral for the City. It will be a grand event and help us launch fundraising efforts for a new and important initiative the dean will tell you about very soon.
But today, let’s celebrate our cathedral family. We celebrate 150 years of people coming through the cathedral doors to find friendship and fellowship and be embraced by each other and by God. We celebrate the mantle we inherit as the current generation whose great joy and responsibility it is to be a part of this wonderful cathedral community. We celebrate being home.
Blessings,
Jeff
