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Homepage >> Ministry >> Worship And Music >> Sermons >> Forty Years On Forty Years On
I want to begin with a word of celebration and a word of
comment. Many congratulations to my colleague Terri Stanford who
walked all 26 miles in the Avon Breast Cancer Walk last weekend. Te Deum
laudamus! And today we begin using the Revised Common Lectionary, the
calendar of Bible readings in worship week-by-week. On the whole, the choices of
Gospel readings remain the same over the three-year cycle. The biggest
difference is the choices of Old Testament readings, what today is marked on the
insert as Track One. We come in on a reading from the story of the prophet
Elijah. The prophets were those who heard the Word of God and spoke it to the
people. Today’s story has in it the great Word of God’s promise of resurrection,
which would be fulfilled in Jesus.
A
recommendation This coming Friday, June 15, and Saturday, June 16, the
Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus, Carlos Kalmer conducting, will be performing
Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah – Mendelssohn’s great setting of the
Biblical story. My own favorite aria comes when Elijah, profoundly discouraged,
says to God, “O that I now might die!” And then Mendelssohn has the contralto
solo, words from Psalm 37 (Mendelssohn does weave in other Biblical material –
hey, working with good material here! The very best!): O rest in the Lord; wait
patiently for him, and he shall give thee thy heart’s desires. The deepest desires of the human heart – our deepest human
desiring and needing is for the love of God, God’s forgiveness and understanding
and presence and friendship, and all that is given from that. God gives that. The Gospel story today is about the compassion of Jesus:
When (Jesus) saw her, he had compassion for her… I believe God gives us the compassion of Jesus to show in
the city by helping people: raising funds for research to fight cancer; having a
barbecue to send a team to help rebuild in the Gulf Coast; welcoming the
newcomer; visiting the sick; welcoming children as Jesus welcomed them, a very
special ministry of this parish. Our Gospel today is about compassion and our
first reading takes place in a drought, and God promises to give sustenance in
the dry time. God will give us the compassion of Jesus even in the driest and
most broken times: “For thus says the Lord, the
God of Israel: The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not
fail until the day that the Lord sends rain on the earth." Eve and I were supposed to attend the ordination of our
seminarian Matthew in Topeka, Kansas, on Saturday but on Friday there was some
computer malfunction and by evening there was chaos at O’Hare. After a long wait
our flight was cancelled and we tried to get on one that was going out, but we
saw finally it was full as they put up a sign “Flight closed.” Eve and I were
very sad to miss Matthew’s ordination and we’ve sent our prayers and affection,
putting it into perspective we are all safe and OK and things happen, but I have
been thinking about that door closing. My late secretary in Massachusetts had a
rather corny, I guess, poster on her wall: “When God closes one door, God opens
another” — actually, a very wise pastoral saying. I think an important work of
compassion is opening doors – not least into the community of the church,
opening doors in walls humans erect between people. Jesus himself is the door
into the resurrection (“I am the resurrection and the life…”) and Jesus is the
door (“I am the gate”) into life with God.
Mementoes in my
office desk My office is pretty neat, but the center drawer of my desk
is always rather cluttered. Amid the clutter of scissors and paper clips and the
most recent letters and whatever, there are some things I keep there. In the
desk there is a service paper from the 1960s from my home parish in Boston,
where I met Eve. It is an Easter service paper, with the then rector, Samuel
Wylie, preaching. One Sunday he had a note in the Sunday bulletin (I wish I had
a copy of that service paper) quietly (in a very reticent Boston way)
congratulating two members of the parish on their election to the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, the poet Robert Lowell and the historian Samuel
Eliot Morison. It seemed to me very important then (and does now) that the
church included them. And there are postcards and photos: a postcard of
snow-covered Mount Hermon towering over the north of Israel; and a very small
plastic viewer that a colleague on the staff brought back for me from Princeton
after a conference there, and one holds it up to the light and there is a photo
of Nassau Hall, the old 18th-century main building. Last Saturday my classmates formed up there for our
fortieth reunion, with the bell ringing above at noontime. I had never taken
part before in the great campus parade they have at reunions. We went back for
my tenth, we were living in New York, but Eve was expecting Addie and was
happier watching from under a tree. Last Saturday Addie came down for the day
from New York to join us. A tip of the rector’s hat to one of my friends in this
parish who went to his own 40th a year ago and said it was great and
that I should go. I did enjoy it. Catching up with people I have known for forty
plus years, and talking with lots of people I did not know, and lots of
laughter. After the parade there was a reception at the eating club I
belonged to – most of my closest friends belonged to. Long long ago Princeton
decided not to have fraternities, and instead these eating clubs grew up, and
they are always a topic of discussion and mentioning them I am not getting into
the pros and cons of them. Like Mount Everest they were there, and junior and
senior year students ate there, and I am glad in current days there are many
more choices. By happy chance, most of my closest friends belonged to the same
one I did. Eve and Addie and my college room mate and his wife and I sat out on
the front porch. In front of the steps right by us some guys my son’s age were
playing with a certain intensity a game that seemed a combination of Frisbee,
bowling, and drinking beer. And I told everyone, a rather serious thought amid
the fun, that forty-three years ago in the spring I came by the club, just
having joined as a sophomore. I was rather shy, and the seniors in the class of
1965 were a very impressive group. My mother had come to visit, and I brought
her by. A fellow named Steve Kelsey and his then girlfriend was sitting out
front on the steps, he was playing the guitar. Steve was in the best way a guy
right out of F. Scott Fitzgerald: a graduate of St. Paul’s School, his dad was
in the Air Force and he spoke French fluently. He and his girl friend welcomed
us there and went out of his way to make me feel at home, and was very kind to
my mother. Well, sitting on those front steps I remembered Steve welcoming me
and told everybody about it, while a goofy game went on. I keep in my cluttered desk a small clipping from the
Princeton Alumni Weekly, from the issue in November of 1967: Steve Kelsey
was killed in action in South Vietnam in early June 1967 (Princeton Alumni
Weekly, November 7, 1967), just when we all graduated forty years ago. When (Jesus) saw her, he had
compassion for her and said to her, "Do not weep." Then he came forward and
touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, "Young man, I say to
you, rise!" (Luke 7:13-14) In a broken world, I believe in the compassion of Jesus.
One of Walter Russell Bowie’s last books, maybe it was his last, about Luke’s
Gospel, written about the time of my graduation was The Compassionate Christ.
That is what I believe in, or better, that is who I believe in, and in the
promise of resurrection in his compassion, and the promise of welcoming and
caring for one another in that compassion.
(This sermon was preached by the
Rev. Raymond Webster, Rector, in St. Chrysostom’s Church, Chicago, Illinois, on
Sunday, June 10, 2007, The Second Sunday after Pentecost.)
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