Sermon by the Very Rev
David Gillespie
St Philip’s, Tucson, AZ
Epiphany V 7:45 am Sunday, February 6, 2011
If one must speak
and others listen, grant, O God, that your Word may be heard. Amen.
Well, here we are,
tuned up to welcome our Presiding Bishop, a valiant woman, who takes on St
Philip’s from this morning till late tonight: three services, a forum, and a
banquet. What stamina. How privileged we are. I cannot urge you too much to
hear and see her today; she is a true visionary, a light to our world.
Thanks to the miracle of
the internet, I listened to her sermon preached last Sunday in Christ
Cathedral, Dublin, Ireland where she challenged us "to 'show up,' to
present ourselves ready, willing, and able to help heal this broken
world." As she said, “God can’t do it without us.”
She highlighted the
sobering statistics of child mortality in parts of the world – like
Angola, where nearly 20 percent of children die before their first
birthday. Bishop Jefferts Schori’s theme was that healing the world "needs
the participation and leadership of all parts of the body of Christ. It starts
with urgent voices, then changed hearts, then our own conversion and our
challenge to systems that perpetuate all kinds of sickness and death around the
world."
Jefferts Schori
spoke of the brutal murder of Ugandan gay rights activist David Kato, an
Anglican teacher, bludgeoned to death in his home community on Jan. 26.
"His killing deprives his people of a significant and effective voice,”
and she said “we pray that the world may learn from his gentle and quiet
witness, and receive a heart of flesh in place of a heart of stone. May he rest
in peace, and may his work to bring justice and dignity for all God's children continue."
Jefferts Schori was
Dublin, Ireland attending the meeting of Anglican primates. Seven primates
elected to boycott that meeting because of a woman bishop’s presence, and our
Episcopal Church’s support of full inclusion of gay and lesbian people.
Last Fall, when Bishop
Jefferts Shori (with other bishops) visited our border with Mexico, she also
emphasized, "We as a church have an opportunity commit ourselves to being
a part of humanizing our world." "We need to empower our disciples to
enable each and every person who worships in an Episcopal Church to take this
charge, to be vigilant, to be a moral agent -- to do something (for immigration
reform."
And speaking to our
Executive Council last November, Jefferts Schori put it this way: the church
faces a "life-or-death decision," our life as "a renewed
and continually renewing focus on mission," and death as "an
appeal to old ways and to internal focus" which devotes ever-greater
resources to the church institution and its conflicts.
"We need some
structural change across the Episcopal Church," she said. "Almost
everywhere I go I hear how our church structures are handcuffing us from moving
more flexibly into a more open future." "We're in danger of
committing suicide by focusing internally rather than externally," she
said. "Dying organisms pay most attention to survival and not to growth.”
Bishop Jefferts Shori, you
are a light in our world and what you stand-for stirs us here at St
Philip’s.
We are truly
honored by her visit to St. Philip’s. We don’t need to be commended for serving
well in this place for 75 years, but we do need to be challenged, because right
now St Philip’s is in crisis. Last Sunday our rector reminded us that the
Chinese character for crisis may be translated as either death or
opportunity.
St Philip’s challenge
is both to live within our means, and to do God’s work with more sustained
giving. Our challenge is to give ourselves to God’ commission that we heal the
brokenness in Tucson beginning with ourselves.
Jesus challenged
his disciples with two images in today's reading:
"You are the salt of the earth; but
if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?” God makes us
the salt of the earth. Salt,
however, does not exist for its own sake.
No one sits down to eat salt by itself. Salt is a seasoning meant to be
applied to something, it is meant to penetrate and preserve and flavor the food
we eat. We can easily translate that image to our task here at St Philip’s.
And “You are the light
of the world.” In the same way, light is not meant to be looked at, not meant
to be covered over and treasured as an object too precious to let others see.
Light is for people to be able to see around them, to see what God is calling
us to do; it is to penetrate and overcome darkness.
Think about it for a minute
- Jesus says, "You are the salt of
the earth..." And, "You are the light of
the world".
What an incredible thing
image! What an incredible gift!
Somehow - because of who
God has made us,
Somehow - because of our
decision to follow Jesus,
we may become the salt
– the light - for the world.
God has made us partners
in healing the world. God can’t
do it without us. As Desmond
Tutu is fond of saying, when God said feed the hungry, he didn’t mean we should
stand around and wait for pizzas to fall from heaven.
St. Teresa of Avila, the 16th century Spanish mystic, posed the
same challenge this way:
Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours.
Yours are the eyes with which he looks with
compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses the world.
Christ has no body on earth but yours.
It starts right here
with our urgent voices and changed hearts, --our own conversion, our Presiding
Bishop’s challenge to build what is weakened, to make whole what is broken.
I pray for and with you:
“Let our lights shine before others, so that they may see our good works, and
give glory to our Father in heaven.”
Amen.