The Feast of All Saints
The Seating of the Bishop in Grace Church Cathedral November 7, 2021 There is a sound I know of my shoes on metal. The metal is textured and thin, welded together with old bolts. The bridge has born many people, and dogs too. Children have raced over it with abandon, with no concern for its apparent fragility. It shakes when I cross it. It is a bridge that does not belong to me, or to my family. For many years it belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Hill. Until they died and the house was sold off and the bridge that went with it. But, before that, in the season when I was a child across the street from the bridge—for all those years—they let us traipse through their backyard without invitation or warning and cross the bridge. That bridge was my crossing to a telling place, a place where heaven and earth met for one small girl. It was a place worlds away, yet just steps from home. Coming up from the metal bridge, I remember the tingle I felt on the grassy slope when I heard the first quack. I remember my first glimpse, time and again, of Belhaven lake. My hand in Mama’s hand, I would laugh with delight and some trepidation as the headstrong ducks who resided there approached, anticipating the bread in our sack, and began nipping at my fingers. I remember the island in the lake where they would sun bathe. I remember watching them glide on the water, propelled by the unseen movement of their webbed feet. And I remember, after time had drifted out of my consciousness, suspended for a while, there came the moment when Mama took my hand and walked me back down the grassy hill, over the metal bridge home. I walked home with Mama, carrying the wisdom of another world with me back across the metal bridge. Jan Richardson wrote a poem about how close we really are, all the time, to unseen worlds that lie just on the other side of all our inventions and distractions. She says: When the wall between the worlds is too firm, too close. When it seems all solidity and sharp edges. When every morning you wake as if flattened against it, its forbidding presence fairly pressing the breath from you all over again. Then may you be given a glimpse of how weak the wall and how strong what stirs on the other side, breathing with you and blessing you still, forever bound to you but freeing you into this living, into this world so much wider than you ever knew. —Jan Richardson from The Cure for Sorrow Today, to my great joy, I am being seated as your bishop in this beautiful and holy cathedral on the feast of All Saints. Thank you, Dean and people of Grace, for being our cathedral. You know, Cathedrals are our family living room. Look around you. On the walls, in the windows, in the floors, in the chancel and sanctuary—everywhere, there are remembrances of the saints who have gone before us. Beautiful images to remind us who we are and what we are meant to do in this world. Every saint is a bridge, a bridge between this home and what lies on the other side of all our prayers—just beyond our reach. The saints we know and love are real folks, ordinary folk, sinners themselves, sometimes with difficult pasts, sometimes shaky, vulnerable, worn—yet able to bear our souls like that metal bridge carried me to the lake for so many years. Teachers, grandparents, gardeners, nurses, clergy, friends, adversaries, spiritual guides, waitresses, mail carriers. These saints show us just how weak the wall is between our world and the world beyond. And that world, the one John writes about in the book of Revelation, is not only a far away reality we meet after death. Rather, it is the world Christ beckons us to build every day when we rise. A world made of those who have come out of the great ordeal—which, finally, before this life is over, will be all of us, each and every one. It is a world where we, the multitude of humanity, truly become one. In that world, we see each other clearly—with sight no longer hindered by hatred, division, or fear. In that world, every child of God knows respect, experiences justice, lives in abundance. That world is no farther from this home we call the church than Belhaven lake was from my childhood home. Cross the street, wander through the neighbor’s backyard and across the worn metal bridge and you are there. The saints in our lives show us this world just beyond our home. Saints like Catherine “Kitty” Springs, a freed slave who gave her earthly goods to found the Church of the Epiphany in Summerville in 1887, saints like Elizabeth Evelyn Wright, who in her early twenties, in spite of betrayals, arson, and threats to her life, in 1897 founded the school we know as Voorhees College, saints like The Rev. A. Toomer Porter of Holy Communion Charleston, who, convicted of the evil of having enslaved people, turned to take a new path, and used his inheritance to educate and lift up those left destitute in the wake of the civil war. Saints like The Rev. Dr. Stephen Mackey, the first Rector of Calvary Episcopal Church, who guided it through the challenges born of injustice with a pastor’s heart and a prophet’s courage when it finally was granted parish status in 1965, saints like Mrs. Ruby Forsythe who founded a school on Pawley’s island that educated a generation of African American children in the low country and her husband, Reverend William E. Forsythe, who guided the spiritual community out of which the school was born and Johanna Brown and Cathcart Smith who moved their vision into a new generation. These saints, and countless others like them, saw another world was possible and brought it home. They have been letting us cross over their lives and legacies like a well worn bridge for years upon years. They remain in our collective consciousness—standing firm, though worn by years, so we can get a glimpse of the world Christ beckons us to bring home—not someday at the end of time—but today. Now. And what about you? You, people of this beloved diocese, who carried prayer books to docks and funeral parlors? You who worship without bricks and mortar, without clergy and vestments? You who fashioned tabernacles and altars of beautiful wood to take into strip malls and bank buildings? And what about you who worship with buildings and altars, inviting those without them to share what you have? What about you who quietly fill backpacks with school supplies, you who march in the street bearing witness to justice? You who insist that all means all, no matter the cost. You who cook for the hungry week after week, you who start flower ministries and get cards to those who are lonely? You who raise up children and youth to lead a new generation? Yes, what about you? You, my beloved ones, have become the bridge that once carried you. By your life, by your witness, born of the saints of old, you reveal how weak the wall truly is between this present world with all of its limitations, and the world to come, in all of its glory. In you, I have seen glimpses of the world to come. I have seen glimpses of home. Home, where the banquet table is laid out lavishly for all who are hungry. Home, where all know they are welcome to feast. Home, where everyone slumbers in peace, taking rest without fear of violence or the storm that comes by night. Home, where people of many languages, tribes and nations become one—not by some being subsumed into the likeness of others, but rather, by each one being fully the person God made that one to be. Home, where we are all fully who God made us to be. Ram Dass once said we are all walking each other home. Perhaps, being Christ’s body looks something like crossing a worn metal bridge on a warm sunny day to get a glimpse of a shimmering lake, to feel the bite of duckling beaks on our fingertips, and then, when time suspended comes back into our awareness, to walk each other home, bringing with us the paradise we have glimpsed—only to discover that, somewhere along the way, we have become the bridges that once carried us. Look around you, Saints of God. Behold who you are. You have become the bridges that once carried you.
0 Comments
Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Good morning! What a joy to be with you today. What an honor. Thank you, Congregation of Calvary and Mother Ann, for having me and for welcoming our guests. I love being a people who follow the lectionary—And then there are days like today… my first sermon as your bishop. And the lectionary hands me divorce. Yesterday was glorious. This morning is glorious! You have created such a beautiful day! And now, the gospel drives us here. To divorce. Isn’t that the way it is in this world? The glory and the agony come together in this life. To contemplate today’s gospel, we must go back to the beginning…the very beginning—the story of the creation of marriage we just heard from Genesis. Marriage is the very first human institution. It was born when God realized there was an absence of a peer for Adam among all the other creatures. Wonderful as those animals were, there was no partner among them who could engage Adam as equal, who could push back, none who—as Presiding Bishop Curry said it to the bishops a week ago—knew his jive. No one who could give him that look and say, “Seriously, Adam? You’re gonna wear those fig leaves to dinner?” Yes, Adam needed someone who could push back. An equal. A peer. So, what does God do? He puts Adam into a deep sleep —that place between worlds where we dream. And from that place, while Adam’s ego needs are taking a rest, while he is simply being, breathing, dreaming, God can do his best work. It’s a sweet, still place where marriage is born. Marriage is the archetype for all our closest relationships. All the other ways we’ve used marriage—to keep people out—to oppress one another based on gender identity, sexual orientation, race, age, religion, class—all are mere aberrations. At its heart, marriage is a way to get love into this world through the power we enact when we come together with another. We are stronger together. When God joins husband and wife, wife and wife, husband and husband—those two want it to last forever. No one begins a marriage wanting divorce. No one plans it. But, as the Pharisees who approach Jesus in today’s gospel knew all too well…Sometimes, it is unavoidable. Sometimes, given our human frailty, it is necessary. There are things you don’t come back from easily, when we are joined together as one—be it as a couple, as a church, as a nation. The causes of divorce comes in many forms. But one thing they have in common—they all tear us asunder. You know a thing or two about that. Schism. Schism, yes… But what about being displaced from your historic sacred church for white folks to get a new neighborhood? What about being told your baptism doesn’t quite suffice to open the doors for your seat, voice and vote in your own church’s diocesan convention until 1965. What about baptismal records that put down with pen and ink the names of white people as “owners” of your ancestors as they were being baptized into a gospel proclaiming freedom and truth? And what about all the ways the diocese, the city, the country has not made reparations to you for all that has been taken? Yes, you know a thing or two about being torn asunder. Mr. Hamilton was good enough to spend some time with me to begin to tell me your story. I listened carefully. He’s a good story teller, as you all know. But more importantly, he gets to the heart of the matter. That visit was a first step. I have much more listening to do. I understand that. You know and have lived in ways I can never know or live, the reality of a divorce so deep one wonders how we as a church, as a nation, as a world can ever come back from it. And I name and respect that you have been disproportionately harmed by the sins born of our racism, which I, as a white Episcopalian—as a white person— have committed and from which I benefit. Divorce of the kind you have known is born of inequality and oppression. And the impact has been grave. Any work we do together must begin with this acknowledgement. So, the Pharisees ask Jesus, is it lawful, this thing called divorce? Is it lawful to tear asunder that which God has joined together? Well, that’s not really the question, is it? The question is not is it lawful. We know the answer to that. The question, rather, is how do we prevent it in the first place? How to we stop killing the dream of God? The Pharisees were squarely focused on the question they had posed—is divorce lawful? Jesus is trying to reframe the question and call them back to love. And then, something happens. Something wonderful happens. These parents off to the side, are trying to move unnoticed around all this heavy conversation to get their children into the presence of Jesus. So in the midst of a conversation about divorce, we can now see a mother lifting up her toddler to Jesus, a child darting between the crowds of towering adults to find Jesus and crawl into his lap, other children drawing near because they sense, as only children can, that this is a grown up they can trust. It is as if the children are conspiring with Jesus to change our frame of reference. Jesus takes the cue. He says: “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them…Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive he kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” The children and Jesus together return us to the dream of God. In this unexpected turn, we see, through the action of children, what we must do. The only way to repair the fabric of our common life is to find our way to Jesus and begin again. We must be born anew. We must begin again. Baptism is where we begin again. Our baptismal vows bring us back. The waters of our baptism run deep. No hurt, no offense, no sin goes deeper than those waters. Grace reaches them all. And grace, of the sort Jesus brings, is not pablum. We preach not just a slight tune-up, not just a little self improvement. No, the gospel assumes divorce of every kind. It assumes the most wretched, unspeakable sin the most untouchable grief, the most entrenched anger and disappointment at human failings. The grace of Jesus is strong. It is true and just. Jesus’ grace restores life. Life where we strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human begin. Life where we seek and serve Christ in all persons. Life where we resist evil, life where, when we fall into sin, we are given space to repent and return to the Lord, life where we proclaim by word and example the good news of God in Christ. The gospel returns us to the dream of God, born in our first sleep. We become in baptism, God’s children again. We become strong enough to disrupt all the divorces in this world that rip us asunder. We did not come all this way across continents and millennia, across crusades and blood stained roads, across soul bearing oceans, across unmarked-graves and stolen sacred spaces—we did NOT come this far by way of a polite, make-nice surface, pale imitation of the good news Jesus came to deliver. No. We came this far by faith. Faith that the grace of God —a grace we do not understand and cannot control, can make us whole and just and strong. The grace of God will lead us places we do not want to go. Through grace, there will be times when you will have to speak truth to me I may not want to hear as I seek my own repentance and our collective repentance as a church, here in South Carolina. Through grace, I as your bishop need to listen with an open mind and an open heart, seeking first to understand. And, sometimes, through grace, I will need to speak difficult things, too. I ask for you to lean in with me—with playfulness, with forgiveness, with curiosity and the will to learn and grow together. We don’t have to get it all right today. Thank God. We simply have to begin. Always, we begin again. Together, you and I begin. My heart is glad. God bless you and keep you. Amen. |
Bishop Ruth Woodliff-StanleyThe Rt. Reverend Ruth Woodliff-Stanley was elected by the Diocese of South Carolina in May 2021, and consecrated as a bishop on October 2, 2021. Archives
April 2024
Categories |