Some of you who were here five years ago may remember when last we did a Rogation Procession such as the one we are about to undertake today. Bishop Theuner was here, bedecked in his finest regalia and we marched from here across the Souhegan River bridge, down to the Oval, and back to the church, “beating the bounds.” It was a marvelous procession, and a lovely occasion but it was broken by one unplanned, shall we say, “sideshow.” The man many in Milford knew as “the Mayor” (not his real title by any stretch), stood on the Oval bandstand and watched as the proceedings went by. When he spied Bishop Theuner in his flowing robes, he yelled out at the top of his lungs, “Look! It’s the Pope!”

          Somehow that whole episode came back to mind this week as, first, I began putting together plans for today’s Procession, but also, as with millions of other Americans, I watched the Bishop of Rome, Benedict XVI, make his first Papal visit to the U.S.

          The procession we will soon walk has some interesting origins. Taken from an early practice of chanting and parading around cornfields to ward off bad strains of mildew that would ruin the crops, Christians first adopted the ritual in the 5th century. The English version, “beating the bounds,” emphasized the reality that the Church’s ministry is about more than just what happens inside these walls. It is about the world out there where lives are lived and our livelihoods are made – and where the people we are called to serve are.

          But today I want to take us back to the deeper, original meaning of the day, which can be discerned when we consider the word “rogation.”  It comes from the Latin “rogatio” which means “to ask.” It is a time when we come before God and ask for God’s protection from danger. We appeal to the God “out there” to keep watch, to stem the tide, to cover us with a soft blanket and tuck us in. And yet, as we read our scriptures for this morning, we discover an additional dimension. John, in today’s Gospel, moves us from appealing to the God “out there,” in the way of “rogatio,” to claiming the God “in here.” In our midsts.  In our bones.

          Jesus says to us “I will come to you.” I will not remain “another” or “different.”   What Jesus is saying to his disciples in this teaching, is:  “No matter what, I am in you. You are part of me, and I, through the coming Spirit, will be part of you.”

          God out there. God in here. Theologians and professors at divinity schools call this  the “transcendent” and the “immanent” God.

          In the story from the Acts of the Apostles that we heard, Paul has the same idea of appealing to the “God in here” – the immanent God. He has arrived in Athens and finds himself facing a cosmopolitan, gentile audience. His speech at the Areopagus is a wonderful example of how Paul changes his style to appeal to his audience. To this pagan audience, Paul quotes some of the people’s own poets and philosophers to win them over: “In him we live and move and have our being.”  Those are the words, not of Paul, but of Posidonius, a philosopher of the time. They are beautiful words (we have them preserved in our Collect for Guidance in the Book of Common Prayer), and they bring home Paul’s message:  He tells the Athenians to put aside their golden idols and to turn to the God within them… “In him we live and move and have our being.”… 

          How do we get a sense of a God so near to us, so immanent, that we are one? I suppose that the first and the best thing to do is to simply acknowledge it. Regularly.

          Which brings us back to Rogation.  Rogation reminds us that we cannot stay entirely in one place or the other, with “God out there,” or “God in here.”  As part of God’s created order, we live in a world where we cannot separate the inner spiritual from the outer active, we cannot separate the God within from the God who calls us to move out and be in the world in God’s Name.

          It is my prayer today that, as we “beat the bounds” of the site on which, by God’s grace, God is calling us to gather as a community of faith, we all will let the power and beauty of God encompass us. As we see the beautiful place to which God is calling us, perhaps we will know in the very fiber of our beings, that God calls us to that place to strengthen and empower us not only to deepen our communion with the “God within,” but also to make that “home base” for a ministry that more effectively calls us to the “God without” who dwells where people dwell. We don’t need to march in the cornfields, or beat the bounds… we need only to open ourselves to the One in whom we live and move and have our being. Come, abide in him, and let the Spirit of the living Christ come to you.  Amen.