Sermon 11 Pentecost Year B August 11, 2024
Today’s sermon is a continuation of the sermon from last week about community. Here, Paul writes to us in his Letter to the Ephesians, “Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander…and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.
God created a world of infinite diversity. We live in a pluralistic world in which difference is something imbedded in the created order…it is creations’ beauty and strength. Yet, we can struggle to accept this fact and want things to be simple and uniform. We can tend to want people to see things the same way. People are upset when politicians do not agree.
Our former bishop Ian Douglass was fond of saying that we are in a culture that lives under the tyranny of consensus…. that the highest value is that we agree and see things the same way. This is counterintuitive to the act of creation as plural and infinitely diverse. While it is important to work together for the good of the larger body, whether within the church, our own families, or government at the local, state, national or global level it is not imperative that we agree on how to get there.
These words of St. Paul to the Church in Ephesus are as timely today as they were when they were written. Some theologians believe that this letter was intended to be shared among all the churches. It is no wonder that the content of this letter often feels like it is written for us today, because it is.
The passage we heard tells us a great deal about moral behavior among one another, but it is more than a statement about morals.
It is to remind us that we are members of one another. We constitute one body, whether we recognize it or not, when we create divisions among ourselves, Paul reminds us that we are one in the Body of Christ.
Throughout Paul’s writings he is calling the Jewish followers of Jesus to open their hearts and minds to those different from themselves…the Gentiles. Gentile was the term given to all those who were not followers of Judaism…” the other” … outsiders… those different. The early church increasingly moved from a sect of Judaism to a community consisting of Jews and Gentiles whose lives were transformed by the experience of their life in Jesus Christ…a life that compelled them to live differently than those of the larger society.
Our inability to understand and respect difference and diversity leads to all kind of “isms.” Older people experience ageism…being young, beautiful, and successful places the elderly outside the accepted norm. Racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, ableism, and anti-Semitism are alive and well in our culture and our world. These isms attack the very intention of God in creation and are driven by our fear of difference and loss of the status quo.
The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs report says violent crimes against all minority groups is significantly on the rise. Most shocking was the figure I found for 2022 hate crimes. The FBI reports that 11,634 hate related incidents took place in 2022, the highest number of incidents since they began keeping records, up 37% from the prior year. One of the groups with the largest increase were antisemitic hate crimes. And, with the Israel/Hamas conflict I can only imagine how the numbers will come in for 2024 for both Muslims and Jews. in the Lesbian, Gay, Transgendered and bi-sexual community the Human Rights Campaign described the number of hate crimes on the rise as an epidemic. and that minorities and transgender women were more likely to be targeted. NBC reports that hate crimes against Latinos is at its highest in 11 years.
I bring up these examples because at the heart of it is a lack of tolerance for difference and the celebration of creation as God has made it. We are witnessing unspeakable violence because of a fear of difference and lack of appreciation for the plural world that God created.
In diversity training I’ve had in seminary we talked about four stages of understanding: Intolerance: unwillingness or refusal to tolerate or respect contrary opinions or beliefs, persons of different races or backgrounds, etc.; tolerance: The capacity for or the practice of recognizing and respecting the beliefs or practices of others.; acceptance: the ability to not merely tolerate the existence of difference, but to actual make peace with it, approve, and have favorable reception; and fourth celebration: the ability to actually rejoice in the difference, seeing it as a gift, as adding a positive dimension to the common life of the larger community.
Having personally experienced all four in my lifetime I can tell you I believe the biggest gap is actually between acceptance and celebration.
It is to move from only approval of how things are to actual gratitude for the difference as a way that enhances the life of the whole.
In my previous church we have experienced an example of celebration in in a situation of significant loss.
In 2012 our brothers and sisters at Bishop Seabury Church in Groton vacated the church premises after a long bitter court battle with the Episcopal Church over the property, which the Diocese won, forcing the Seabury Anglican community which broke away from the Episcopal Church to lose their church home.
Beginning in 2004, the leadership of Seabury took the community out of the Episcopal Church over growing differences beginning with the changes made in the 1979 Prayer Book and the ordination of woman. The break was made final after Andrew Smith, Bishop of CT voted for the election of Gene Robinson as the Bishop of NH, Bishop Smith’s willingness to ordain openly gay/partnered gay persons. including me as the first openly gay male ordained in CT followed by election of a woman, Katherine Jeffords Shori as the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in 2006 really sealed the break. Despite repeated efforts bishops seeking reconciliation with Seabury the congregation chose to leave. Our bishops and many of us in the diocese were deeply saddened by their choice.
However, what St. James did in Preston in those years provided a different narrative. We took stewardship of the cremains of the Seabury Church and lovingly reinterred them in Preston at a ceremony in which members of the Seabury Anglican Church were invited and many came.
Later St. James took stewardship of their historic Seabury window and installed it at St. James’ thereby preserving it from loss during the move. Rather than walk away from the Seabury church we invited them in our doors and some came and a few even stayed.
Despite our ability to walk away from one another and the fear we have of those different from us, our scripture invites us to move toward celebration of difference, and to recognize that no matter what we do… we are one in Christ’s Body.
The invitation before us today is to feed on the bread of life and to pray for the grace to move beyond fears that divide us and even bring violence and death. All of us in our personal lives and our communal life are called not to walk away from those different from us, but to celebrate the plurality of difference as how God intends the world to be as God created it as infinitely diverse and wildly different.
Pray with me:
Most holy and gracious Lord, you have created an infinitely diverse universe to reflect your glory. You bring together people of all nations, all backgrounds and of diverse ideas and beliefs into the arms of your embrace. While we do not always agree we remain united in the Body of Christ. When we walk away from each other we break covenant with each other. As the bread of life for the world come Lord Jesus and heal those hurts and wrongs that divide us and hinder us from seeing your divine life in all our brothers and sisters that we might rejoice and celebrate them in your infinitely diverse and wonderful creation. In your name we pray. Amen.