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What a glorious day. Over 50 chapels of the Holy Spirit are being dedicated today and
one chapel, dedicated to God’s glory and in memory of Stephen Davenport, is being
consecrated. I did not misspeak in my first sentence. Paul tells us that we are all temples
of the Holy Spirit. The adults and young folks who are making a mature commitment to
Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit, are among other things promising to be
chapels, meeting places, where folks who encounter these intentional Christians will have
an encounter with the living God who claims us and uses us to go out and baptize and
teach.
As your bishop and preacher it is truly an awesome responsibility to preach on this
occasion. Stephen Davenport was a great Christian priest and in many ways a daunting
personality. I remember vividly a conversation we had towards the end of his life when
he looked me straight in the eye and said, “Theology is getting pretty thin in the
Episcopal Church.” He then went on to complain about the general state of preaching.
Like the disciples in the upper room, I first responded by saying, “Lord is it I!”
This morning in Boone, N. C., one of his disciples will preach the Gospel in the parish
where she is rector. Cyndi Raugh Bank’s theology is not thin. One of the reasons is that
she went on the trip to Canada and it changed her life. Like the young folks here today,
she got confirmed and that led to seminary and then to ordination. There were many
others whose lives and ministry he touched. He began at St. Paul’s in Charlottesville, Va.,
and very quickly became in charge of that large parish and campus ministry when the
rector became a chaplain in World War II. He served parishes in New England,
Tennessee and here in Kentucky. His theology was so thick, so full of the fact that the
Gospel and justice could not be separated, that it took him to the streets of this city to
march and to stand with those marginalized by the sin and strictures of racism. No
relationship with the powerful parishioners he served and loved was more important that
his relationship with the God who teaches us to do mercy and love justice and walk
humbly. Let us dedicate this chapel with joy in his memory but let us also live the costly
gospel he taught!
And now a word to the living temples we dedicate this day. I want to talk to you about
God—the talking God, the God who according to the reading from Genesis speaks a
whole world into reality. “And God said ... and it was good.” The next to the last thing
God made right before God made the Sabbath was us! “Let us make humankind in our
own image.” God is a great talker; perhaps, God wanted something to talk back. It must
be the case because we are the only part of talking God’s creation that has speech.
Walter Bruggerman, a great Christian student of the Hebrew Bible, says that the problem
with Christianity is that we think God is into monologue.
The truth is that the Bible is profoundly dialogical. God gets mad with the Israelites, so
mad that he wants to kill them, and Moses gets into dialogue with God and God changes
his mind. Job suffers terrible calamities and tells God exactly what he thinks of God’s
justice. God sends Gabriel to Mary and asks her to do an amazing thing, and Mary says
to God’s mouth piece, “How can this be” and later “Be it unto me according to your
word.”
Rowan Williams says that everything that Jesus does is God’s word. Jesus is God’s
dialogue with the world fleshed out. When he calls Matthew the money-sucking tax
collector to be one of his closet colleagues, the watchdogs of orthodoxy get furious. He
has a conversation that goes like this: “Go and learn what this means, I desire mercy and
not sacrifice because I came to call not the righteous but sinners.”
When a woman who knew her scripture (and knew, therefore, that bleeding women had
to stay apart) touched his garment, he confronted her. “Who touched me?” Trembling
seized her, for she had suffered from a flow of blood for 12 years. She had broken the
law. She knew what the conversation was going to be. Instead, the first word out of his
mouth was “Daughter, great is your faith!” What a conversation that must have been.
The conversation continued even on the hard wood of the cross and he said, “My God,
My God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus is God, so with us He voices humanity’s
abject despair. Now that is a God who really wants to talk some truth, who risks it all for
conversation. That is a God whose language is costly and thick with meaning and whose
words pour out of a parched throat because he so wants to speak with us!
Beyond the worst, beyond death itself, the conversation begun in creation continues. He
meets them on the mountain in the power of resurrection, and some worship and some
doubted! Whatever the mission of the Church involves, it is certainly not about
perfection! Looking at that very imperfect bunch of doubters and believers, he gives
them their co-mmission. Go, baptize, teach; I am sticking with you!
For those of you being confirmed and for the rest of us: Our life in Jesus is not about
being perfect, or having enough faith; it’s about the willingness to take the first steps in
hope.
We are to celebrate baptism. I have never noticed Matthew’s order – he tells us to
baptize before we teach everything that he commands. Why? It has something to do
with name. Baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. My
name then is Edwin F. Gulick, Jr father, son, and Holy Spirit. My name is grafted into
the very name of the Trinity. I dwell in God; I live in the community of the Trinity. All
that he commands (in Matthew 5, 6 and 7) will never happen unless I so live in God that
I can turn the other cheek, never judge, stop laying up treasure, stop calling my brother a
fool and killing him in the process. If I am going to be poor in Spirit rather than arrogant,
face my sadness and mourn in solidarity with a hurting humanity, then I better be living
in God. If I am to be meek, and hungry for righteousness, and merciful and pure, and a
maker of peace not war and even persecuted, then I must know I belong to God and God
belongs to me.
So we are to make folks belong to God and teach them what this means and, at the end,
what I need more than anything is “Presence.” I am with you always.
Thank God he is with us because the challenges are immense. This world we send you
into is so fragile, so dangerous and so complex. I believe that God is having a
conversation with all of you being confirmed today. I don’t claim to be a prophet, but the
conversation might be going something like this:
This week we Kentuckians heard the great news that we get to build the hybrid Toyota!
Why are we building hybrids? Because our environment is being destroyed and we are
beginning to realize it.
Your church is dividing over issues of sexuality. Based on my reading of this week’s
paper and having heard that the cloning of human embryos is now fact, the decisions your
generation faces are enormous and make the church’s present struggles seem small in
comparison. Your generation will face questions like ... Do we destroy potential human
life to save present suffering? Will we create designer babies so that we will all look like
Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts? If we get into designing humans and we find a gay gene,
would we eliminate it? Would we get rid of all dyslexics? What will the world be like
with a lot of sheep walking around with very human kidneys, livers and hearts? What will
it mean if we put human brain cells in sheep skulls?
Will you take nuclear issues so seriously that you insist that your country lead the way in
the reduction and elimination of these horrible weapons? If your folks give you a car for
your 18th birthday, will it be a hybrid or an SUV? When Raleigh takes you to the
Dominican Republic or rural Kentucky, will you let it change your life? Will you see the
poverty that is there? Will you let it into your soul?
John Taylor and I are going to pray for you. It’s a hard world we are sending you to. We
will pray for strength, for power and for the sustaining presence of Jesus in the power of
his Spirit. He calls us to go. It will be amazingly hard to face the world. Sometimes you
will doubt. But it’s amazing; he trusts you. He will stick with you. And He has named
you his very own.
Amen
09/14/2006
Trinity Sunday A Year 2005
by Rt. Rev. Edwin F. Gulick Jr.
St. Francis in the Fields Church, Harrods Creek
What a glorious day. Over 50 chapels of the Holy Spirit are being dedicated today and
one chapel, dedicated to God’s glory and in memory of Stephen Davenport, is being
consecrated. I did not misspeak in my first sentence. Paul tells us that we are all temples
of the Holy Spirit. The adults and young folks who are making a mature commitment to
Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit, are among other things promising to be
chapels, meeting places, where folks who encounter these intentional Christians will have
an encounter with the living God who claims us and uses us to go out and baptize and
teach.
As your bishop and preacher it is truly an awesome responsibility to preach on this
occasion. Stephen Davenport was a great Christian priest and in many ways a daunting
personality. I remember vividly a conversation we had towards the end of his life when
he looked me straight in the eye and said, “Theology is getting pretty thin in the
Episcopal Church.” He then went on to complain about the general state of preaching.
Like the disciples in the upper room, I first responded by saying, “Lord is it I!”
This morning in Boone, N. C., one of his disciples will preach the Gospel in the parish
where she is rector. Cyndi Raugh Bank’s theology is not thin. One of the reasons is that
she went on the trip to Canada and it changed her life. Like the young folks here today,
she got confirmed and that led to seminary and then to ordination. There were many
others whose lives and ministry he touched. He began at St. Paul’s in Charlottesville, Va.,
and very quickly became in charge of that large parish and campus ministry when the
rector became a chaplain in World War II. He served parishes in New England,
Tennessee and here in Kentucky. His theology was so thick, so full of the fact that the
Gospel and justice could not be separated, that it took him to the streets of this city to
march and to stand with those marginalized by the sin and strictures of racism. No
relationship with the powerful parishioners he served and loved was more important that
his relationship with the God who teaches us to do mercy and love justice and walk
humbly. Let us dedicate this chapel with joy in his memory but let us also live the costly
gospel he taught!
And now a word to the living temples we dedicate this day. I want to talk to you about
God—the talking God, the God who according to the reading from Genesis speaks a
whole world into reality. “And God said ... and it was good.” The next to the last thing
God made right before God made the Sabbath was us! “Let us make humankind in our
own image.” God is a great talker; perhaps, God wanted something to talk back. It must
be the case because we are the only part of talking God’s creation that has speech.
Walter Bruggerman, a great Christian student of the Hebrew Bible, says that the problem
with Christianity is that we think God is into monologue.
The truth is that the Bible is profoundly dialogical. God gets mad with the Israelites, so
mad that he wants to kill them, and Moses gets into dialogue with God and God changes
his mind. Job suffers terrible calamities and tells God exactly what he thinks of God’s
justice. God sends Gabriel to Mary and asks her to do an amazing thing, and Mary says
to God’s mouth piece, “How can this be” and later “Be it unto me according to your
word.”
Rowan Williams says that everything that Jesus does is God’s word. Jesus is God’s
dialogue with the world fleshed out. When he calls Matthew the money-sucking tax
collector to be one of his closet colleagues, the watchdogs of orthodoxy get furious. He
has a conversation that goes like this: “Go and learn what this means, I desire mercy and
not sacrifice because I came to call not the righteous but sinners.”
When a woman who knew her scripture (and knew, therefore, that bleeding women had
to stay apart) touched his garment, he confronted her. “Who touched me?” Trembling
seized her, for she had suffered from a flow of blood for 12 years. She had broken the
law. She knew what the conversation was going to be. Instead, the first word out of his
mouth was “Daughter, great is your faith!” What a conversation that must have been.
The conversation continued even on the hard wood of the cross and he said, “My God,
My God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus is God, so with us He voices humanity’s
abject despair. Now that is a God who really wants to talk some truth, who risks it all for
conversation. That is a God whose language is costly and thick with meaning and whose
words pour out of a parched throat because he so wants to speak with us!
Beyond the worst, beyond death itself, the conversation begun in creation continues. He
meets them on the mountain in the power of resurrection, and some worship and some
doubted! Whatever the mission of the Church involves, it is certainly not about
perfection! Looking at that very imperfect bunch of doubters and believers, he gives
them their co-mmission. Go, baptize, teach; I am sticking with you!
For those of you being confirmed and for the rest of us: Our life in Jesus is not about
being perfect, or having enough faith; it’s about the willingness to take the first steps in
hope.
We are to celebrate baptism. I have never noticed Matthew’s order – he tells us to
baptize before we teach everything that he commands. Why? It has something to do
with name. Baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. My
name then is Edwin F. Gulick, Jr father, son, and Holy Spirit. My name is grafted into
the very name of the Trinity. I dwell in God; I live in the community of the Trinity. All
that he commands (in Matthew 5, 6 and 7) will never happen unless I so live in God that
I can turn the other cheek, never judge, stop laying up treasure, stop calling my brother a
fool and killing him in the process. If I am going to be poor in Spirit rather than arrogant,
face my sadness and mourn in solidarity with a hurting humanity, then I better be living
in God. If I am to be meek, and hungry for righteousness, and merciful and pure, and a
maker of peace not war and even persecuted, then I must know I belong to God and God
belongs to me.
So we are to make folks belong to God and teach them what this means and, at the end,
what I need more than anything is “Presence.” I am with you always.
Thank God he is with us because the challenges are immense. This world we send you
into is so fragile, so dangerous and so complex. I believe that God is having a
conversation with all of you being confirmed today. I don’t claim to be a prophet, but the
conversation might be going something like this:
This week we Kentuckians heard the great news that we get to build the hybrid Toyota!
Why are we building hybrids? Because our environment is being destroyed and we are
beginning to realize it.
Your church is dividing over issues of sexuality. Based on my reading of this week’s
paper and having heard that the cloning of human embryos is now fact, the decisions your
generation faces are enormous and make the church’s present struggles seem small in
comparison. Your generation will face questions like ... Do we destroy potential human
life to save present suffering? Will we create designer babies so that we will all look like
Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts? If we get into designing humans and we find a gay gene,
would we eliminate it? Would we get rid of all dyslexics? What will the world be like
with a lot of sheep walking around with very human kidneys, livers and hearts? What will
it mean if we put human brain cells in sheep skulls?
Will you take nuclear issues so seriously that you insist that your country lead the way in
the reduction and elimination of these horrible weapons? If your folks give you a car for
your 18th birthday, will it be a hybrid or an SUV? When Raleigh takes you to the
Dominican Republic or rural Kentucky, will you let it change your life? Will you see the
poverty that is there? Will you let it into your soul?
John Taylor and I are going to pray for you. It’s a hard world we are sending you to. We
will pray for strength, for power and for the sustaining presence of Jesus in the power of
his Spirit. He calls us to go. It will be amazingly hard to face the world. Sometimes you
will doubt. But it’s amazing; he trusts you. He will stick with you. And He has named
you his very own.
Amen
