Sermon preached by The Reverend Dr. Harold T. Lewis

SERMON PREACHED BY THE REVEREND DR. HAROLD T. LEWIS, RECTOR
CALVARY EPISCOPAL CHURCH, PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA
AT THE INSTITUTION OF THE VERY REVEREND SPENSER D. SIMRILL
AS DEAN OF SAINT MARK'S CATHEDRAL, MINNEAPOLIS
ON THE FIFTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
23 JUNE 2002





"Rise, take up your pallet and go home." (Mark 2:11)



I cannot begin to tell you what a great pleasure and privilege it is for me to be here this afternoon to worship with you, and to be your preacher, as we celebrate all of your ministries in this place, and as we gather to institute your new friend and my old friend, Spenser Davenport Simrill, as dean of this Cathedral Church of Saint Mark. Having called Spenser to this distinguished office, I just hope and pray that you know what you're getting into. There are many things I could say about Spenser, and even among those fit to be uttered in a pulpit, I shall only share a few. First, Spenser is a man of passion. Spenser cares. He cares about people, and about the church, the people of God. He has a zeal for the Gospel. He is especially passionate about the quality of life of those who have been marginalized by church and society. Let me give you an example of his passion --- and compassion. On more than one occasion, we have broken bread together, at a table full of people, most of whom were unknown to Spenser until we sat down. By the time the salad comes, Spenser has looked those people in the eye, probed the very depths of their beings, elicited confessions they never thought they would utter, and in the end leaves them with good advice. These people are not offended, put off or otherwise out of joint. In fact, they leave dinner having felt loved and cared for.

Second, Spenser is infectious. Even the most stiff-necked people find themselves loosening up after being exposed to Spenser. They find themselves feeling passionate for the first time, obeying that Beatitude, not found in the Gospels, and which well may be a mantra of Spenser's: "Blessed are the flexible for they shall not be bent out of shape."

Third, I understand that Spenser has likened his ministry among you as a dance in which you are all invited to participate. It is altogether fitting and proper, therefore, that I compare him to Dame Margot Fonteyn. This will probably be the first and only time that Spenser will ever be compared to a ballerina! Dame Margot once commented that when she takes the dance seriously, she is capable of rendering an almost flawless performance, but if she ever takes herself seriously, she would fall flat on her face! Spenser takes his ministry seriously. He does not take himself seriously. He is, to use St. Paul's phrase, a "fool for Christ's sake" (I Cor. 4:10) or, a fool --- for Christ's sake --- or haven't you noticed? The fact that he does not take himself seriously means that he will not internalize the pathologies, individual or collective, of this congregation. He will not, and will not allow you to "major in the minors." He sees the big picture. And he is quite capable, as we learned in last week's Gospel, to shake the dust off his feet, and to move right along. You will find it well nigh impossible to put a guilt trip on Spenser, so don't try. Just get out there and boogey! But enough of fulsome praise for your new dean. Let's get to the gospel.

Mark's story about the healing of the paralytic is especially detailed and vivid. Jesus is "at home." His fame has preceded him. The curiosity-seekers come out in droves to see if what they have heard about Jesus is true. The skeptics, including Scribes and Pharisees, quill and parchment in hand, intersperse themselves among the crowd, waiting for yet another opportunity to find fault with the itinerant preacher from Galilee, and declare that he couldn't possibly be the Messiah. But the largest group within the crowd was doubtless made up of the halt, the blind and the lame who throng the house in hope of a cure. And in this group is an especially piteous man, the kind of person your heart goes out to. He is a paralytic. And since he himself is not ambulatory, four of his friends decide to bring him to Jesus on a stretcher. But when they arrive, as the King James Version delightfully describes it, "they could not come nigh unto him for the press," which doesn't mean that reporters from The Living Church and Episcopal Life were there, but that there were just too many people between them and Jesus, making the likelihood of their seeing Jesus somewhere between slim and none.

What are they to do? There were several options. They could have returned home, and given up on their mission. But that wasn't likely, since they had borne their friend over hill and dale in the Palestinian countryside, probably for some distance. They could have waited until some bold soul, with the size and confidence of a fullback, seeing the urgency of their plight, who would take it upon himself to clear a path for them through the crowd. The hapless quartet could also have relayed a message, by whispering a plea to the party in front of them, depending on them to pass it along, or by scribbling a note, in the hopes that it would reach the house. But these options were not likely to meet with success either, since the other sick folk in this huge outdoor waiting room would probably not be disposed to do anything that would hinder their own chances of being seen by the Great Physician. If only they had Jesus' cell phone number, they could have perhaps relayed to him the dire straits in which their friend found himself!

But, as it turns out, they opt for none of the above. Determined as they are that their companion should have the benefit of Jesus' healing touch, they devise an ingenious plan. Abandoning good manners and good taste, and giving no thought to what people might think (thereby making their actions unfathomable to Episcopalians) they proceed to cut a hole in the roof of the house (again the King James is more graphic --- it says that they "broke it up"!) and lower their friend through it! Jesus, moved by their act of faith, heals the man and commands him to take up his pallet and go home.

Now I will let you in on a homiletical secret. In my spare time, I teach preaching, and I tell my students that the most important point of the sermon is what I have dubbed the "pivot," which occurs exactly where we are in this afternoon's homiletic offering. Having retold the story, having done some kind of exegesis, the preacher must then make the story come alive by applying it to the current situation, making the story a parable for our times. And if you, the congregation, are honest, you have been wondering, as you listened, how the preacher will relate this to the installation of Spenser Davenport Simrill as dean of this great cathedral church.

Let me share with you what I will not do. I could (and probably would have in my strict, Father-knows-best Anglo-Catholic days) go in a decidedly clericalist direction. I could say that the people of St. Mark's Cathedral are the collective paralytic in this story, and that the four pallet-bearers are the clergy who bring their people to Jesus. Conversely, inspired by the church's relatively new understanding of the ministry of the laity (new only because of centuries of misreading the New Testament) we could say that the pallet-bearers are in fact representatives of all the people of St. Mark's, and that Spenser is the paralytic who needs to be brought to Jesus. But that would be too easy! My sisters and brothers in Christ, I put to you this afternoon that the pallet-bearers are in fact the clergy and the laity of St. Mark's Cathedral, whose job it is to bring the church itself, in its paralyzed state, into the presence of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. This portion of Christ's holy catholic church, our beloved Episcopal Church, is suffering from paralysis and has been for some time, and if we don't bring the church back to Jesus to be healed, that paralysis will turn into rigor mortis, and then we will have to bring it to Jesus to have it raised from the dead!

Let me say why I think it is that our church is suffering from paralysis --- and my dictionary defines "paralysis" as "loss of function, especially of the feeling or the power of voluntary motion." I am one of those rare folk known as a "cradle Episcopalian." I have had a love affair with the church all of my life. I was baptized, confirmed, married and ordained in this church, and have already written out every word of my requiem mass to ensure that I will be properly buried from this church. In the Church in which I grew up, the most serious divisions among Episcopalians were characterized by three camps, affectionately known as "low and lazy," "broad and hazy," and "high and crazy." (I must confess that I was one of the "high and crazy" ones. I was a born and bred "sacristy rat." How well I remember when friars from the Society of St. Francis visited our parish, St. Philip's, Brooklyn. They explained that the three knots on their cord stood for the three vows they took --- poverty, chastity and obedience. The next morning, I asked the rector what the one knot on the end of his girdle stood for. "Harold," he patiently explained, "that knot stands for the end of the cord!")

In those days, low churchmen might have deemed their high church brethren to be a little eccentric, given to "bells and smells," and the Anglo-Catholics probably thought that their fellow Episcopalians who were closer to the Protestant shore of our bridge church were spiritually anemic, subsisting, as they were, on a diet of Morning Prayer. But despite such disparities, members of the Episcopal Church lived in a spirit of mutual respect and forbearance. The different modes of worship and the theologies they represented were somehow not deemed sufficient to upset the ecclesiastical apple cart. This is because it is precisely such a tension that has traditionally characterized Anglicanism. Otherwise put, Anglicanism has been an umbrella under which adherents of widely divergent views have, historically, been able to find a happy home.

But what has happened lately? The views held by those seeking refuge under the Anglican umbrella, if I may belabor the metaphor, are becoming so divergent, it seems, that some adherents are now claiming that only certain believers have a right to its protection, and believe that others must fend for themselves in the rain. The rain-soaked adherents have, in turn, either found shelter under newer, smaller umbrellas, declaring that those under the larger one are no longer true believers; or they have claimed new turf under the old umbrella, demanding that others subject themselves to the elements. So, at the dawn of this new millennium, Episcopalians are rescuing from obscurity such epithets as "unorthodox," "fundamentalist," "literalist," "revisionist," "apostate" and "heretic" and are hurling them at each other with what we used to call gay abandon. The words that Samuel John Stone wrote more than one hundred years ago seem to aptly describe the Episcopal Church as we see her today:
Though with a scornful wonder men see her sore oppressed,
By schisms rent asunder, by heresies distrest.

My friends, it has been said, only partly in jest, that our nation's founding fathers, having drawn up the Constitution, went across the street to found the Episcopal Church. Being so closely identified with the American Republic, the Episcopal Church found it difficult to challenge the mores of the nation. Instead, it took its lead from the mores of the nation with which it has had a unique, symbiotic relationship. The Church emerged, therefore, as what I call a "non-prophet organization." Somehow, the Church missed the fact that our Lord chose these words from the 61st chapter of the prophet Isaiah as the text for his first sermon, and the blueprint for his ministry: "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord" (Luke 4:18).

My sisters and brothers in Christ, our church needs to be healed, so that it can reclaim its Christ-given role as a champion of the oppressed, and not see itself primarily as a chaplain to the status quo. We must be wary lest we take the easy road, making peace with oppression, thereby running of the risk of selling our birthright for a mess of pottage of rather dubious nutritional value. We must not lose sight of Archbishop William Temple's insight that the church is the only institution that exists primarily for the benefit of those not its members. We must not lose sight of the fact that we have been called to serve the least, the lost and the last in society.

There have been a few promising signs of healing. We have struggled, with some success, to heal the sin of racism in our midst. For much of the Episcopal Church's history, it tacitly accepted and endorsed the prevailing attitudes of a nation in which segregation was the order of the day. It is to our eternal shame that a Presiding Bishop --- and a Yankee, at that! --- at the time of the Civil

War, wrote two books purporting to defend the institution of slavery on Biblical grounds. Until the middle of the Twentieth Century, not only were the church's parishes and schools and camps segregated, there even existed in Southern dioceses the practice of colored convocations, which were, in effect, parallel organizations created so that blacks would not have to mingle with whites at diocesan conventions. (The last one sat in the Diocese of South Carolina in 1955!) But the Civil Rights Movement changed all that. The Church, to use the phrase of church historiographer John Booty, was "jolted out of its complacency" about the inequities in American society. Sit-in demonstrations, urban riots and incidents of unrest during the "long hot summers" of the 1960s, and the murders of civil rights workers (including Episcopal seminarian Jonathan Daniels) forced the church not only to address social issues but also to recognize the deep-seated racial prejudices in its own bosom. In the wake of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954, which mandated the desegregation of public schools, the church began to see how many of its own institutional practices had led to the oppression of racial minorities.

We have struggled, as a church, and again with some success, to heal the sin of sexism. But it has been an arduous and uphill struggle. It comes as a surprise to most church members that legislation allowing the seating of women as deputies to General Convention was enacted in 1970, the same year that the church voted to admit women to the sacred order of deacons. Long influenced and guided by such Pauline passages as the one in I Corinthians (14:34-35) which not only commanded that women keep silence in church but that they find out what they needed to know from their husbands once they get home, the church relegated women to second-class citizenship. It's amazing, isn't it, how church and society gravitated to St. Paul on this matter, while ignoring the consistent example of our Lord in his efforts to challenge the prevailing attitudes of his day toward women? In the fourth chapter of John's Gospel, for example, Jesus the Rabbi speaks to the woman at the well --- a Samaritan at that --- probes the very depths of her troubled soul, and commissions her to be an evangelist.

And now the church finds itself struggling, alas, without much success, to heal the church of homophobia, which some hold to be the last acceptable prejudice. Many church members feel less disposed to think that the truth is evolving on this issue, and that instead the matter was settled for all time at Creation. Discussions over sexuality have become increasingly polarized in recent years, as Episcopalians have divided themselves into opposing and often hostile camps. What is more, one's theological position on the issue is often taken as a litmus test, one way or the other, and, in some circles, as a barometer of one's orthodoxy. While it would be unfair, perhaps, to lay at the door of the sexuality debate the entire blame for the illegal and irregular consecrations of several bishops now affiliated with the Anglican Mission in America, it is certainly true that those bishops would cite new understandings about human sexuality as the major issue which has caused them to part company with those with whom they used to enjoy communion. While the church has been willing to look at Scripture through a different set of lenses when it has come to race and gender relations, seeing some Pauline writings as culturally conditioned, it has been less willing, on the whole, to apply the same kind of hermeneutics to Biblical statements, such as they are, on homosexuality. While the church has been willing to acknowledge scientific discoveries that have nullified previously cherished beliefs about the moral and intellectual inferiority of blacks, or the so-called God-given subservience of women, it has been less likely to recognize breakthroughs in the arena of human sexuality. We have a long way to go before gays and lesbians are looked upon not as statistics, aberrations and anomalies, but as children of God, members of the Body of Christ. The last time I looked, the Baptismal covenant asked that we seek and serve Christ in all people, respecting their dignity and striving always for justice on their behalf.

My friends, as the clergy and people of St. Mark's Cathedral have their work cut out for you --- but you are more than equal to the task. You have a faithful priest, a priest after our Lord's own heart. You have resources ---- and rest assured that Spenser will separate you from more money than you thought you had! (Why do you think the people in Atlanta let him go? They were broke!) You are a priestly and dedicated people, committed to ushering in the Kingdom of God in this place. In bringing the church to Jesus the Reconciler to be healed, they must assist the church in leaving behind its pallet of indifference. Someone once said that the most harmful "ism" in our society is neither racism nor sexism, but somnambulism. We rightly deserve the scorn of those whose paths we cross as we sleepwalk through life, giving no thought whatever to their plight. You will remember the sin for which the rich man was eternally punished was not that he was at all evil, but that he simply gave no thought to the famished Lazarus who begged for scraps from his table.

As you bring the church to Jesus the Physician to be healed, it must leave behind, too, its pallet of ignorance. The Gospel according to Forest Gump has left us with the immortal words, "Stupid is as stupid does." Ignorance has perennially abounded in the councils of the church as it has purported to speak for the poor, or women, or racial or sexual minorities, statements uttered most often without the benefit of their speakers' having ever engaged in conversation with any of the groups on whose behalf they were so articulate..

Finally, as you bring the church to Jesus the Good Shepherd to be healed, see that it leaves behind its pallet of self-righteousness. As today's Epistle reminds us, make sure that the church is clothed with compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength and discipline.

And now may God who has given you the will to do all these things, grant you the grace and power to perform them, +In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, AMEN.