Saint George's Day
Saint George's Day
May 7, 2006, St. George's Day Evensong
St. Paul's Cathedral
Mark 6: 30-44
Come Holy Spirit: Touch our minds and think with them, touch our lips and speak with them and touch our hearts and set them on fire with love for you. AMEN.
I.
As we commemorate St. George on this day, we revel in our English heritage, our Anglican identity, and a liturgical tradition that touches us through our bones and into our souls. The music, the pageantry, all draws closer to God and to the beauty of what we find in our shared story, history, prayer book…all that makes us Anglican.
As a good Anglican, I have always had an affinity for C.S. Lewis and recently purchased his Chronicles of Narnia on tape for my longer drives across our diocese. In this remarkable multi-volume story, Lewis tells the truth of our Christian faith. He rightly portrays the creation of a world in which evil finds its way in at the very beginning. For those who know the story, that evil is personified in the White Witch who rules Narnia in the second volume, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Lewis tells an important Christian truth: evil is present and we are complicit in the work of the evil one.
As I have reflected on our Church, the Episcopal Church and our Anglican Communion, I have found myself keenly aware of the work of the Evil One in our midst. As we fret, argue and attack each other over issues of sexuality and theology, I find myself thinking of another C.S. Lewis masterpiece, The Screwtape Letters; I can almost see Screwtape at his desk with flaming pen in hand,
My dear Wormwood,
I must simply commend you on the work that you are doing with those Episcopalians. How ingenious of you to get them to worry about each other’s sex and to argue this question that only the enemy can answer. I do however wish to caution you for some among them are tiring of this. They are seeing it as taking them away from the Enemy’s son, whose name I shall never mention lest its power be our undoing. Keep them fighting about sex and their theology. Don’t let them talk of the son. And never let them think about the poor and needy. If they, do all our progress will be lost.
Your Uncle,
Screwtape
If I take advantage of C.S. Lewis, I hope he and you will forgive me. But I think it brings closer to the reality that we acknowledge in our baptismal covenant, that evil is real, that we must be willing to “renounce Satan and all of the spiritual forces which draw us from the love of God.” In this time in the life of our Church, I sense the power of Satan. And let me hasten to say that while I easily see it in those who rail against our church and at times at me, I must be clear that I see it in myself as well. Screwtape and his apprentice nephew, Wormwood, are at work in and through us all.
And so I have an idea, let us deny Screwtape and Wormwood their due. Let us do something surprisingly absent in parts of our church life. Let us not talk about walking together or walking apart. Let us walk with Jesus.
And so tonight we go with Jesus in a boat to a place that we hoped would be quiet and deserted, a place of peace, but instead it is a place of crowds. It is a place of disorganization, for they were “like sheep without a shepherd.” In tonight’s second lesson from Mark’s gospel, we are blessed again with the story of the feeding of the multitude.
As the story unfolds remarkable things are revealed about Jesus and about us in the presence of Jesus. Imagine for a moment what this crowd may have looked like. It was not the well-groomed assembly of one the nicely mowed lawn from many a Church School classroom. Imagine a Palestinian “Woodstock.” There would be all sorts and conditions. They were coming to see what this was all about. There were tattoos and tank-tops. There were bikers and beer bellies. There were harlots and hangovers. There were Jews, Gentiles, men, women, children, disabled, employed, unemployed, straight, gay, beautiful, ugly, clean, leper. And in this place, Jesus looks out on them with compassion. And Jesus teaches them many things.
Mark does not record what Jesus taught. Maybe he began as he had at the beginning, “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news.” My guess is that he taught them the good news of a world changing, of things turned up-side-down, where it is “in giving that we receive…in pardoning that we are pardoned…in dying that we are born to eternal life.” What happens as a result of this teaching is that they do a simple yet remarkable thing. They sit down at his biding in companies or groups of hundreds and fifties. In the midst of this vast assembly, he situates them so that strangers can become friends that the unknown can become the well-known. I imagine them in circles where they see each other’s humanity—their brokenness and the blessedness, the sorrows and the sacredness. The place is transformed. He takes bread, blesses, breaks and gives it to the community. And in this first Eucharistic act, communion as the gift of God, happens. All are one as the Father and I are one. The body is connected.
It is a commonality to focus on the multiplication of the loaves and fishes and to see this as the miracle. Rather the meal happening is the miracle, however the abundance occurs. I would imagine that the abundance is a direct result of two things, the presence of Jesus and the people assembled in companies of strangers where they come to inextricably connect their experience of God in Christ with the experience of their neighbor. And as Jesus says, in what we rightly consider the summary of the law, love God and love neighbor.
In the days the stretch out before us, it will be very easy to forget the feeding of the multitudes. It will be too easy to forget that each Sunday’s Eucharist is a moment when we are again with Jesus and the company of strangers and feed. It will be too easy to misunderstand. The tempter will always be showing us how to argue, hurt and destroy. There will always be a pathway open away from communion and community and away from Jesus and the bread of live.
Archbishop Robin Eames, who chaired the Windsor Commission, tells a parable of two Christians walking down the road. In their intense theological debate, they do not see the bone-thin, hollow-eyed child in desperate need. As the pass on by, the child collapses to the ground.
The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion are indeed at a cross roads. Our choice is to continue theological debate about personal behavior and piety as Jesus in the poor child withers beside our path, OR we can spring to our life as those miraculously called together in, as the Archbishop of Canterbury says, in “solidarities not of our own choosing,” and engage the work of touching Jesus in the poor, the hungry, the thirsty, the prisoner, the naked…touch and transform.
In our Diocese, there is much hurt and hope to engage. We have military families separated and experiencing loss because of a war half a world away. We have migrant works that we need and who need us, living in extreme poverty. Housing is too costly for the poor. The mentally ill are on the streets. The children are forgotten. And the elderly are alone. This is the time for us to spring to life as the church of Jesus’ radical love…a church that calls all, all together to be with Jesus, to receive the bread and wine made holy, and to be Jesus’ kingdom bearing presence in our world.
It is not enough to rejoice in a rich Anglican and Episcopal heritage. It is not enough to simply maintain the church of old. It is enough to gather with Jesus, be taught, eat the bread, and go to clam our place in the body of Christ that making all things new. What are we waiting for? Now is the time. Jesus is here.