Sermon preached by The Reverend Dr. Harold T. Lewis

SERMON PREACHED BY THE REVEREND HAROLD T. LEWIS, Ph.D. RECTOR, CALVARY EPISCOPAL CHURCH, PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA AT A SERVICE FOR THE CONFERRAL OF HONORARY DEGREES IN MARQUAND CHAPEL, YALE DIVINITY SCHOOL NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT WEDNESDAY 10 OCTOBER 2007


"No one puts a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; for the patch pulls away from the garment, and the tear is made worse." (Matthew 9:16)


When it comes to the conferral of honorary degrees at the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, I have no new worlds to conquer. For most of the nine years that I served on the Board, I was the chair of the honorary degrees committee, and it fell to me to make recommendations of potential recipients to the Board, to write the honorees' citations, and finally to drape hoods over their grateful shoulders. Then, Dean Jim Annand, of blessed memory, leaked a rumor that if Harold Lewis would only retire from the board, he could get an honorary degree of his own. I rose to the bait, submitted my resignation, and voila! --- in 1991, received the degree of Doctor of Divinity, honoris causa! Today, we have come full circle, and I cannot tell you what a joy it is to return to this chapel to preach at this historic convocation, as we confer degrees on three women who have distinguished themselves for their stellar contributions to church and society; and I express my gratitude to Dean Joseph Britton and the Board for affording me this privilege.

This may well be the first time that all the honorary degree recipients have been women. And if so, it's high time. We are indebted to people like Mary Donovan, Peter Gomes, and a host of others, who have chronicled for us how women have been, to use the words of an old Negro spiritual, "'buked and scorned" in the life of the church, even while being the backbone of their communities. If only they had been given a chance earlier to prove their mettle, the church might be in better shape today. Indeed, one theologian has opined that Christian history might well have taken a different course had the Wise Men been Wise Women. They would, it is universally believed, have asked for directions, arrived on time, helped deliver the baby, cleaned the stable, made a casserole, and brought practical gifts.

Today, we celebrate and honor the practical gifts of Martha Horne, who, for thirteen years as dean and president of our sister seminary in Alexandria, did much to enrich and diversify that venerable institution; of Amy Domini, the peerless guru of socially responsible investing who has proved that lucre need not be filthy; and of Jane Williams, who, although she lives in a palace, is no ivory tower theologian.

To assist us in our celebration this evening, I ask that you meditate with me briefly on the sixteenth verse of the ninth chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel: "No one puts a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; for the patch pulls away from the garment, and the tear is made worse." The passage begins with the disciples of John the Baptist coming to ask Jesus a question. Perhaps because their leader had been imprisoned, they were not in the best of moods. They were given to fasting, and their fasting was accompanied, it would appear, by a spirit of mourning and sadness. Moreover, they were indignant that Jesus' disciples did not fast and did not look in the least bit mournful. In fact, Jesus' disciples were seen to be feasting and celebrating. Jesus explains to John's disciples that since he was still with them, there was no need for his disciples to be mournful, but, in a not-too-veiled prophecy of his Passion, he explains that the time for their fasting and mourning would come soon enough.

Now if there is anything that characterizes Jesus' teaching style, it is that he always peels back the onion and examines the inner layers. Like a good therapist, he zeroes in on what is really on people's minds. He rightly senses that there is a deeper issue here. He perceives that the questioners are actually casting aspersions on his disciples, raising questions about their religious authenticity because they didn't seem to observe the pious custom of fasting. Jesus tries to explain to them that he had come into the world to bring about something new, a newness he had just mapped out in the Sermon on the Mount, but that some people, like John's disciples, were struggling because they were trying to make the new things that Jesus was introducing fit into their old outdated patterns. They just weren't getting with the program! Jesus drove the point home that he came to give an entirely new gospel. Certainly, his message depended on Jewish traditions and history, (he came to fulfill the Law, as he says elsewhere, not to abolish it) but Jesus' gospel was nevertheless characterized by freedom and newness.

But in attempting to impart this truth, Jesus doesn't give a lecture about the Old Covenant vs. the New. No, as always, he tells the people a parable. (One of the two things I remember from my confirmation class in 1960 at St. Philip's, Brooklyn, was that a parable is an earthly story with a heavenly meaning --- the other, for the record, was that a sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.) The parable expresses theological truths in terms of everyday occurrences in the lives of those listening to it --- fishing, plowing, sweeping a house, or in this case, sewing. This is not rocket science. People in first century Palestine did not have the luxury of buying "pre-shrunk" garments at Wal-Mart. Cloth was guaranteed to shrink once it was washed. You fall in the field while tending sheep. You rip a big hole in your robe. When Mother sews on a patch, she doesn't use a new piece of unshrunk cloth, because when the whole garment is washed, the unshrunk cloth will --- duh --- shrink. It will then stretch the old cloth damaging it and making the tear worse.

But wait, there's more! In writing this parable down, Matthew uses two important words, words with double meanings. The word for "patch" is pleroma, which means "fullness" And the word for "tear" (I, of course, am partial to the quaint KJV word "rent") is skisma, which, as Mr. Mount, my Greek professor at Berkeley would say, comes from our word "schism." Let's review the bidding. The patch, though small compared to the garment onto which it is sewn (look how small the New Testament is compared with the Old) represents the fullness of salvation history, the Kingdom of God. If care is not taken when it is incorporated with traditional religious beliefs, schism will result.

My sisters and brothers in Christ, is this not a parable for our times? Samuel John Stone wrote his famous him, "The Church's one foundation" in response to the Colenso scandal. John William Colenso, bishop of Natal, South Africa had the temerity to believe, among other things, that Moses didn't write the Pentateuch and that Zulus were not soulless heathen. He was deposed, reinstated by the Privy Council in London and returned to South Africa to find that his successor had been elected, consecrated and enthroned. Undaunted, he set up shop in a cathedral across town. It was in an attempt to sort out this situation that the first Lambeth Conference took place. These were the schisms by which the church was rent asunder; these were the heresies that distressed the church, in the middle of the 19th century.

But today, as porous dioceses and provinces, predicated on ideology instead of geography are being spawned on a regular basis, and bishops are being consecrated in one part of the world to be sent like intercontinental ballistic missiles to other parts of the world, rival bishops vying over turf is not a concept relegated to Victorian obscurity. While most people, even across theological divides, agree that the Parter of the Red Sea did not take quill in hand to jot down every word of the Torah, the church finds herself divided nonetheless between the soi-disant Biblically orthodox and those who take hermeneutics seriously. And while we are somewhat more enlightened in the field of missiology, in a church whose most serious divisions were, not too long ago, among the low and lazy, the broad and hazy and the high and crazy, people who profess and call themselves Christians nowadays call each other apostates, heretics and infidels, and hurl such epithets at each other with what we used to call gay abandon.

Someone commented recently on the difference between the European Church and the American Church. In Europe, as Benedict XVI has discovered, people who feel alienated from the Church --- the Roman Catholic Church --- just stop going. In America, people who fall out of favor with church start another one. I have it on the best authority, for example, that foot-washing Baptists split over a debate as to whether the foot-washer should also dry feet, or if drying should be done by another disciple.

Such a practice of bifurcation seems to be affecting American Anglicanism. Look, for example at the website for the Anglican Province in America (I didn't even know it existed until I saw them listed among the attendees at the recently convened Common Cause Partnership, chaired by my bishop, Robert Duncan). The Anglican Province claims to teach and uphold the fullness of the catholic faith "once delivered to the saints," yet, they say in plain Aramaic that they trace their beginnings to their disaffection with the civil rights movement, which, last I looked, was a movement to make the church more catholic!

Could it be that today's church is characterized by two groups? There are the unshrunk cloth folk who perhaps in their well-intentioned efforts to share their Gospel insights of freedom and newness and liberation with fellow Christians did not take enough care to treat their patch to ensure that it could be woven into the old. Then there are the old garment folk who are quite content to walk around with their torn clothing --- perhaps in denial that it is at all damaged, and who believe therefore that no patch is necessary. It is no wonder, then, as various factions become more and more entrenched, that Anglicanism runs the risk of ceasing to be, in the words of a 16th century divine, "an inn where all are received joyfully," becoming, instead, "a cottage where some few friends of the family may be received."

I would like to think that the women whom we honor tonight have been chosen because they are accomplished, haute couture seamstresses. Each in her own way has deftly sewn a patch onto an old garment. Seamstress Martha has woven into the fabric of theological education fresh insights to equip a new generation of church leaders. Seamstress Amy has dared to intertwine the threads of two cloths which many believed to be incompatible --- God and mammon. And Seamstress Jane has introduced bright strands into such traditionally drab cloths (like sin and salvation) and made them come alive. These are the practical gifts which these Wise Women have brought to the Manger where, we hope and pray, we may witness the rebirth of Christ's Body, the Church.

Let us pray: O Christ, your seamless robe is rent In shreds through sin and pride. Help us to weave a shrunken patch Sufficient, strong and wide To mend the tear, to heal the rift, Your children bring together. O Jesus, you make all things new! Tie us in living tether. Amen.