A little excitement to start the day

This was my preaching weekend--on those weekends I get to church early and do the 8:00 service solo, and then the rector and I do the 10:00 service together--he celebrates and I preach. As I usually do, I arrived at church at 7:15 to unlock and make sure everything was ready, but when I walked into the Parish Hall I heard a distinct chirping, not constant but a couple of chirps then a delay and then more.

I've heard this sound before--on Thursday when I arrived for the Eucharist-and-breakfast group that same chirping was going. A little investigation revealed that it was the carbon monoxide detector in the undercroft, near the furnace. Because the chirps were intermittent we figured it was likely just weak batteries, and sure enough, when the maintenance guy changed them, the chirping stopped.

So this morning when I heard the chirps I knew where to look, but was less sure what to do. I thought that if there really was a problem the alarm would be louder and more constant. But I knew it couldn't be the batteries again. So I pushed the reset button just to see what would happen...and the chirps got closer together. Crap. So after checking things out upstairs I called the maintenance guy, and he said, "Call the fire department," which I did.

In the meantime, the boss arrived to set up for an event scheduled for after the service and I let him know what was going on just as the firefighters arrived in all their paraphenalia. It took them about two minutes to declare that we couldn't be in the building. Upstairs I went and quickly ushered everyone out, and over to a meeting room in the office building, grabbing what I needed for the service as I went. Fortunately there were only about half a dozen people in church at that point and we were able to intercept the others who were on their way in.
About a dozen of us gathered in the meeting room for the 8:00 Eucharist. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the firefighters and the rector walking around checking out various parts of the buildings.

When the service was over I went to see what was going on. No way were we going to able to use the building and the meeting room only holds about 20 people. But we are right across the street from the public library, and a few quick phone calls determined that we could have the 10:00 service there. I went back upstairs long enough to pack up a few more supplies for the service and we starting shifting gears to go across the street.

And the service when really well. The library is in a really old house and is a nice space. It was a bit crowded but it worked. I am very much a text based preacher and I like to be in the pulpit, but I knew that I had to do something different, so I took my text and stood in the aisle and I pulled it off with just referring to my text a few times. (Of course it helped that it was the third time I'd preached that sermon). I don't know if it was because we were all closer together than usual or because something like this tends to bring out a community spirit or what but it felt like there was a lot of positive energy in the congregation today, which was really nice.

So all is well, and in a few days we'll have a new furnace. And hopefully we won't have to call the fire department again any time soon!