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Today we set aside the Scripture readings appointed for what would otherwise be the 21st Sunday after Pentecost, to remember, to celebrate, to give thanks to God for, the life of, St. Luke the Evangelist, and one of the patron saints of this church.   According to Christian tradition, St. Luke was a physician.   In those days, physicians were men or women who acquired knowledge of potions and practices that were supposed to cure illness or injury, either from those who practiced those arts, or from their own study of said potions and practices, and the observations they made as they experimented with such methods. Our reading from the Apocrypha today mentions favorably those persons.   

However, Luke the Physician, is Saint Luke, not because he was a great physician (though he might have been so), but because he could write!  We don’t interrupt our lectionary cycle to celebrate “St. Luke the Physician,” but rather to celebrate, declare a feast day in honor of, St. Luke the Author.  More to the point we celebrate the life and influence in Christian tradition of St. Luke the Evangelist, i.e. the “writer of Good News,” the author of a Gospel, “The Good News of Jesus Christ, according to Luke”.   He was not an author of fiction, but of history.   Think Stephen Ambrose, not Stephen King.  He didn’t make stuff up. He researched it and wrote down what he found.  The Christian movement, the “Jesus Movement,” was sweeping the Mediterranean, and the leaders of it and those who were eyewitnesses to the life, death, and –amazingly, resurrection!—of the person who started it all, weren’t getting any younger.  It was turning the world upside down and Dr. Luke wanted to make sure there was a record of why it was happening.   When it was finally published, it was in two volumes.   Vol 1, a Gospel, telling the story of one Jesus of Nazareth, and Vol II, a narrative of “The Acts of the Apostles” through the actions of those who birthed what became known as the Early Church.

This is not dry history.  Luke could not only research stories, he could tell stories.  He wrote in the colloquial Greek, the “universal language” of the time, so that it could be read by about anybody in that part of the world who could read. (Though scholars also note that he could, and did, write in classical Greek as well, as well as the Semitic Greek in which the Jewish Scriptures of the time were translated.)  The preface to his Gospel in the New Oxford Annotated Bible, note that he “was a gifted literary artist” that “produced what has been justly described as ‘the most beautiful book in the world.”  It is a tapestry of stories.  Luke’s Gospel shares stories in common with the other Gospels:  Matthew and Mark, and John whose writers also wanted to tell the stories and teachings of Jesus.  However, it contains other stories that these Gospels, and The Gospel of John, do not: 
 
For instance, the birth of John the Baptist, the annunciation to Mary, her song in response—the great Magnificat-- and her visit to Elizabeth (John the Baptist’s mother); 

the angels and shepherds of the Nativity;

the story of the priest Simeon when he held the infant Jesus—his response is what we call the Nunc dimittis, “The Song of Simeon”, -“Lord, now letest thou thy servant depart in peace . . . for my eyes have seen thy salvation”-- found in our services of Evening Prayer and Compline.

In addition, Luke’s Gospel also contains the stories of six miracles and eighteen parables not recorded in the other Gospels, including the parables of “The Prodigal Son” and “The Good Samaritan.” 

He is the only writer to tell the story of the earliest Church, the conversions and missionary journeys of St. Paul, the coming of the Holy Spirit, and examples of the earliest Christian preaching, known as the Apostolic Preaching.   Its format could be summarized as “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again.”  Sound familiar? 

In other words, we would be poorer in our understanding of who we are, or are to be, as Christians and as the Church without these writings of Luke.

As I said, Luke didn’t make this stuff up!  It boggles my mind to think of what he might have had to do to find and collect all of these stories, teachings, and parables, from those who were eye-witnesses, and ear-witnesses to Jesus and events within the early Church.   He didn’t have the world wide web, he couldn’t Google the information he needed, he couldn’t interview people by Zoom, or even over a phone!  There were some common written accounts of Jesus that the writers of Mark and Matthew had access to that were familiar to Luke, as well, though it is doubtful he ever saw either of those finished Gospels in writing.  But he had to have done a lot or original research to come up with material unique to his Gospel.   I can imagine him haunting local libraries, such as they were, for scrolls containing the DNA of this world-changing movement that he was a part of.   Maybe he even had research assistants that went back to Palestine to dig up the information he needed!   I can imagine him hanging out with his traveling companions as he followed Paul around the Mediterranean to Rome.  Sitting with them at the end of the day, or walking on the road, or sailing on a ship, as they told stories about Jesus that had been passed down to them by an aunt or uncle, or grandfather, or by a friend, or a friend, of a friend. For stories and information were still largely passed on orally in those days.  And please note, if you don’t know this already:  it was a hallmark of the practice of the oral tradition that the stories and teachings passed on suffered very little from being passed from one person to another over a span of years.   

These teachings and stories of Luke, like those of the other Gospel writers, aren’t just dry histories, unlinked to our own time and place.   St. Luke knew that these words he had seen and heard and written down had transformed the lives of the people he kept company with, and had transformed his life as well.  They had opened him up to “a God whose property is always to have mercy,” who loved His people and His creation so much that He had settled into our midst see us through the eyes of Jesus, a Jewish carpenter in the backwater of the Roman Empire.  Luke must have been rendered both heartbroken by the excruciating story of this Jesus’ death and astonished by his mind-blowing resurrection.   He had seen the lives of many others changed, given new hope, courage, and purpose by the words said by and about this man who claimed God as His Father.  He had seen first-hand the truth of the words written about Jesus and the Holy Spirit confirmed in the self-less and self-giving acts of those who had been transformed by those words both written and spoken to them by others.   His life was changed, and he wanted others to experience the same words that had transformed him and took it upon himself to collect all of these stories he could and write them down so that others might be transformed too.

All of the saints we honor as Episcopalian Christians—“The Episcopal Branch of the Jesus Movement” as Presiding Bishop Michael Curry puts it, bear witness to someone who has been changed by these words, whether by reading them, or having someone speak them, or someone who enacted them as someone who accepted them and included them when they were a shunned Prodigal Son or who ministered to them like a Good Samaritan when they lay wounded in one of life’s ditches.  And they, in turn, represent countless others through the ages who have been so moved by the stories Luke (and others) told and re-told.  For these words have a way of being re-enacted in the actions towards others of those who have heard and been changed by those words.    Those persons who founded St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in 1854, here in Kansas City MO, the forerunner of our present St. Mary’s, were among them!

“Re-enactment” is word often used to refer to a situation in which a time or a situation from the past is acted out, by “re-enactors", as in those who populate a replica of a Colonial village, or an Old West town, or a Civil War army bivouac.   It helps us see how “those folks lived.”  As part of the modern day “Jesus Movement”, we don’t don bathrobes and sandals and build a first century village for the tourists. We take the Biblical stories and teachings spoken and written millennia ago, and by the timeless power of God, make them come alive in our time and place by our actions towards others in the here and now.   That process of passing on to others the love of God that we know, believe, and experience, has a place in our baptismal vows, as the question is asked of us “Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?”

The Good News of Jesus becomes the Mighty Acts of the Apostles because that is the way that God works, and the way that God works through us even today.  Here is something for all of us to think about:  Are we are here because we once upon a time we read these words of Luke, of Matthew, of John, of St. Paul?  Or heard them read by someone.  Or had the words unspoken, but rather put into an act of kindness or hope or rescue by someone whose life had been changed and/or molded by these words, then, in turn, passed them. by word or action, on to us, resulting in our own transformation in some degree or another? 

This “passing of the Good News” is called “Evangelism,” because Evangel literally means Good News!   Unfortunately, it is a word that might have negative associations for us because of certain traditions that self-identify as “evangelicals.”    
It might help some of us, therefore, to “re-associate” the word with St. Luke, and his work of gathering stories about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and the mighty acts of God in the early Church, so that they would be remembered, and re-enacted in time of those who heard and read them.
   
He even tells us a story about Jesus that illustrates this.  You heard it this morning.

Jesus begins his formal ministry by showing up in his hometown synagogue, and reading a familiar piece of Scripture by Isaiah.  He read: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and the recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”   He rolled up the scroll.  He looked at his listeners.  They looked at him.   Then he said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”  

It was fulfilled because he was there to enact it.  And, by the power of God, he did.

How might we, in turn, re-enact, this passage from Luke, again by the power of God, in our lives this week, or the next?

Be prepared to find out!

-The Rev. Larry Parrish

Proper 23 Manuscript - Year A 10/15/23
Matthew 22:1-14
Postulant Brandon Smee

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
There was a boy who lived in a far-off country which had grown just
wealthy enough to invest in science. So, he learned about carbon. Science
lessons typically passed him by like Boy Scouts, leaving no trace. But not
carbon: atomic number 6, symbol C, capable of up to four covalent bonds.
As the PowerPoint said, carbon didn’t come from just anywhere; it was
made in the hearts of stars. There, supercharged alpha particles zipped
around so fast that three of them could collide in a window so short the
blink of an eye would seem an eon by comparison. In that collision, carbon
was born. The stars seeded the galaxy with it, including the little cloud that
formed Earth, where it became diamonds, pencils, and the fundamental
building block of life.
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The boy’s mind exploded: every living thing was carbon! That meant
everyone came from stars. The galaxies were his grandparents and
everybody his cousins. This epiphany grasped his imagination, then his
words, actions, and habits, until it was simply him. Carbon just kept
nudging him, pointing him through tough spots.

And there were tough spots. Over time, the economy faltered. The
lowlands flooded. The highlands burned. The skies and seas were choked.
Fear was epidemic, and the people empowered those who frightened them
most, a power felt first as a rumor, then as a presence, and then as the
absence of dissent.

So, one night, the boy, now grown, heard pounding on his door. He
found a breathless, wide-eyed young man pleading, “I heard you help
people.” Sharp voices approached. Fear struck, thick and sudden. But he
looked up through a passing break in the clouds to a single star. He brought
him in but didn’t foresee the consequences since, in time, helping a
stranger led to aiding countless more, a single rebellion against fear to
everyday resistance, and one star-blessed offer of brotherhood to a
boundless, revolutionary kinship. He was there when they filled the streets
as dense and bonded as carbon and the soldiers laid down their guns. When
the fireworks cleared, he looked up again to the stars. They seemed to sing
over everyone everywhere, “Behold, our children, our beloved, in whom we
are well-pleased.”
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Elsewhere, there was a mother who bore a daughter, and holding her,
she looked into her searching eyes and said, without reservation, “I love
you.” And she gave her everything. Day by day, she fed her and changed
her. She washed and dressed her even when she struggled, and she
comforted her when she cried out in the night’s most lonesome hours.
Resolving to give her a good life, she released the dreams she’d held since
girlhood to free her hands. She worked until her daughter lacked almost
nothing. But the daughter watched the years wear her mother down until
she who’d been so tall, full, and present seemed distant and small. At the
edge of adulthood, she vowed to transcend the woman who raised her.
So she went to college and, graduating, took a job at which she
excelled. She found a partner, and together they raised a family. The years
were happy, and she lacked almost nothing. But then she sent her eldest to
college, and soon the others, and with the children gone, she and her
partner found they’d grown different, too different to continue. So she
worked until no work could be found and retired to an empty home, and,
one night, washing dishes, she saw her reflection in the window and
thought of her mother.

Not long after, she got a call. Her mother was sick and wouldn’t get
better, so she took her in. It was awkward – yet as natural as breathing.
They laughed, fought, and cried together. But eventually, laughter yielded
to fighting and fighting to crying and crying to groans too deep for words.
As the illness advanced, the daughter resolved to give her mother a good
life. And she gave her everything. Day by day, she fed her and changed her.
She washed and dressed her, even when she struggled. She comforted her
when she cried out in the night’s most lonesome hours. And at the last, as
she held her, the daughter looked into her mother’s searching eyes and
said, without reservation, “I love you.”

You can trace these stories to an ancient source. For ages ago, the
wise told of a Father and a Son and their Love. They had no records from
before their Love, nor evidence it ended. They found no way to measure it
since time couldn’t endure it, and space would shatter trying to hold it. It
seemed their Love was before both and was thus the source of everything.
And they debated sharply since if Love was truly from forever, then it
wasn’t something the Father or the Son adopted or produced. But, ever as
they lived, they were being love, and where the life of their being embraced,
Love too was alive. And the wise who entered in found that it was so, and
they confessed the Father, the Son, and the Living Love and Love itself as
the history of everything.

But this story branched into various versions. In one, the Father is the
hope of a woman who hears the word of the Living Love and enters the
shadow of its joy so boldly she bears the Son through sheer love alone, and
when she loses him, she cries the word spoken through angels and
prophets, and her hope gives birth to life. In another, the Father is the
liberation a young man fights for until he’s captured and hung up to die,
and the Living Love is the freedom he glimpses in the Son dying beside him
and, praying the Son to free him in memory, they both that day are freed.
And recently, the Father is an unsearchable darkness over a trembling
world, the Living Love a voice calling its people, and the Son the kernel and
fruit of their toil, and as the people lift up the bread and wine of their lives,
they are lifted into the Father and behold not the fear of darkness but its
beauty.

All this brings us back to the story Fr. Sean read just minutes ago, the
story Jesus told. It’s terrifying. Jesus portrays the kingdom of heaven as a
raging, enslaving king who kills and destroys any who deny him, a tyrant
who doesn’t neglect to punish a choice of clothing. If this is what heaven’s
like, do I want to go? I could get to the throne, realize I left my pants on
earth, and be tossed by an angel into the outer darkness.

But there’s another way to hear this story. If you discover the origin of
carbon, or journey with a parent and child, or fathom the endless depths of
the Living Love, you’ll see that the terrifying king in Jesus’s story is a father.
His law is loving his son. Preparing a celebration for him, he welcomes
everyone who’d join but reproves anyone who spits on his child. So what
would this king do should someone come to his son’s wedding reception
wearing business attire to sell the king shares, or fatigues to wage his wars,
or holy vestments to be appointed his chief priest? He’d banish them. It’s
not about honor; it’s not about edicts and rules. The king wants one thing:
that everyone enter into his love.

Like a tangent touches a circle in just one spot, the gospel touches this
parable precisely where a parent loves a child. What makes heaven’s reign
unlike any other is the love at its center. There, we find our Lord Jesus
Christ, within his Father’s glory and the Holy Spirit’s embrace. And down
here, when the Virgin gave birth to her son, the Three-in-One invited
everything into the primordial story of love. This parable tells part of that
story: the wideness of love’s invitation and its surprising ferocity toward
those who reject it. You could endlessly adapt the story, telling it through a
kaleidoscope of human lives, but only Jesus, with this parable and divine
power, could transform the eternal story into an invitation we must accept
or reject.

Jesus invites everything to enter where the Holy Spirit abides, within
the story of Father and Son. Their love echoes in every story worth telling,
whether we narrate the interplay of star and carbon, mother and daughter,
lover and beloved, or the immeasurable web of creation and us. Even so,
Jesus says, “Many are called, but few are chosen.” Despite love’s
unbounded invitation, we can pursue other narratives. For money, fame,
pleasure, or power, we can carve our resentment on obelisks of stone and
produce feature-length projections of our heroism, or that of our family,
church, nation, race, or pet ideologies, as if to replace the eternal story with
self-gratifying fan-fiction, as if to conquer all worlds with fabrications more
compelling than Reality itself. No, the one word of God in Christ Jesus is
love. Everything else is just shadows cast on a fading world before the
dawn. But love remains, the love of the children of God. Will we enter the
story? Amen.

The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 24, 2023
Fr. Larry Parrish

I keep calling attention to my age, but do any of you remember the old tv series, “Mission Impossible”? That was loooong before Tom Cruise and the current movie franchise! Remember that it always started with one of the characters receiving a tape—as in reel to reel audio tape (are you still with me?) When played the tape would voice, “Your Mission, should you desire to accept it, is . . .” Then the message, “This tape will self destruct in 10 seconds . . .” and “Poof!”

Jonah received such a message. There was no “if you accept it”—God was the voice on the tape. “Your mission is to get on a boat, land on the beach of a country that hates your country, walk inland to its major city, and tell people that they are evil and that if they don’t repent they are toast.” And when the tape ended, Jonah almost self-destructed! He immediately bought passage on a boat—going the opposite direction! For the country was Assyria and the city was “that wicked city” Nineveh. Let’s not be too hard on Jonah. If God appeared to us in some unmistakable way and said, “I want you to go to Moscow, and when you get there, walk into the city until you get to the Kremlin, then stand at its entrance and say, All of you people are doomed! God said so!” We would be buying a plane ticket to Sydney!

Well, you probably know the rest of the story. Jonah fled, was thrown overboard by the ship’s crew, was swallowed by a large fish, was thrown up by the fish after three days onto the shore of Assyria and walked to and into Nineveh.

When he got not the middle of the city, he pronounced his message—perhaps as quietly as he could, to avoid being noticed: (whispered) “Repent or you are doomed.” And to his surprise—and chagrin—the whole city repented, its King repented, and even all of the animals repented! Jonah should have been elated. Instead he became angry with God, and went into a major sulk. “I knew it!” he says to God, I knew you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. I’m so angry at you that I could just die!” I endure an ocean storm, almost drown, spend three days in the belly of a stinkin’ fish, and risk my life in a hostile country, and you FORGIVE these people without making them pay for what their foreign policy has done to MY country! I KNEW you were going to be merciful!”

What?

I can easily get why Jonah didn’t want to go to Nineveh. I have faced situations where there was such hostility that I would eagerly have taken ship in the opposite direction if I were able. What I have trouble fathoming is why Jonah is angry that God made his mission successful. The people of Nineveh did not jail him or stone him to death. They heard the call to repent and did. They and all their animals! Most people would have been ecstatic that things worked out as they did. But Jonah wasn’t. He was angry. He had stepped up—probably forgetting he had been thrown up—by a fish—onto an Assyrian beach after reluctantly agreeing to act like a prophet—and said what God told him to say, though probably not very loudly and not very long, and he had 100% results. And he was angry at God for not destroying every last person in Nineveh!

Well, maybe I do understand. It sometimes makes me cranky to hear of someone on the lecture or TV interview circuit that has done illegal, maybe even awful, things and then repented of it and amended their life, and are now getting appearance fees and book royalties—and worse yet, public acclaim!—for their turned-around new lives! I have been reasonably moral, and faithful, and reliable, all my life, and I never received a book deal! Or someone I know who I expect the worst from, surprises me with a great act of kindness, or an apology. Instead of being delighted, I want to go on disliking them, and I find myself justifying why I can do so!

But the Jonah story is about more than just human behavior, it is about who God is and how He works. It is an Old Testament mirror image of Jesus’ parable in our Gospel reading for today.

Jesus tells the story of a landowner who needed grape harvestors and went to the unemployment office in the town and hired some guys at the beginning of the day to work in his vineyard. He made an offer of fair wages for the day, saying that he “would pay them whatever is right.” By 9:00, he needed more workers, so he went back downtown and signed up more. At Noon, same thing. He needed still more at 3:00, so he hired them. Finally, with the sun getting low in the sky, and the job still not finished, he went back at 5:00 that afternoon and employed another group. Those who came to work closest to sunset were paid first: a full day’s wages. All of the other shifts got the same amount. Including the guys that had been working hard in the hot sun all day! And they were livid about it! The landowner shrugged his shoulders. “I paid you going daily wage. That’s what you agreed to. I chose to give everyone who came to work today the same amount. Can I not choose what to do with what belongs to me? Are you envious because I am generous?”

“Are you envious because I am generous?” Exactly. Jonah was. He wanted to be on a different standing with God than those folks from “the Wicked City.” In a world filled with pagan gods, he had worshipped the True God. The God of Abraham and Isaac, etc. He had even endured hardships to do his will (forgetting that he would have avoided those hardships if he hadn’t been running in the opposite direction from where God wanted him to go!) But these people who had scoffed at God and even did bad things to Jonah’s people now had the same standing just because they turned their hearts to God—and in response to the threat of extinction even! It just wasn’t FAIR!

So while he was outside of Nineveh sulking in the hot sun, God gave caused a bush to grow up over him to give him precious shade. Jonah was thankful. Then the next day, God caused the plant to die. Jonah was angry again! Angry enough to die! So God said, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?” “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?” Any question about who the landowner in the parable represents?

The parables of Jesus—and many of the Old Testament stories-- can’t be made to represent humanity’s “business as usual.” We can’t box them in, anymore than we can box Jesus in, or God, WHO Jesus is the human face of. We can’t build a tidy ethical system from them in the complications of our world. We can’t build an economic system from them, or a system of government from them. We can only stand before God without status, without standing, without merit, and let Him/Her love us as we are, and usually in spite of who we are—and to admit that He loves all people (and all of his creatures?) just as much as he loves us.

The parables not only unravel our preconceptions about God and ourselves, they leave us with questions we can spend the rest of our lives struggling to answer. This parable does not say that good works are fruitless, that we cannot disappoint God, that there is not evil in the world and in others. It does not say that because we are equally loved by God we can do whatever we feel like doing, or that we can suck our thumbs and do nothing. We have a mission from God and St. Paul hints at the shape of it.

St. Paul, speaks of “fruitful labor,” but the work he speaks of Christians doing is not keeping busy, but living “in Christ” and striving “for the faith of the gospel,” which is the recognition by us and telling others that God loves us dearly and steadfastly, and loves everybody else in the same way. Loves us so much that He was willing to come in our shape and form and die on a cross to prove it. It is our mission, it is the Church’s mission, it is St. Mary’s mission. It might seem to be our “mission impossible.” However, is work that God will do in us and through us: through His Holy Spirit; through the Sacrament of His Body and Blood in which “we dwell in Him, and He in us.”; and through the company of the saints, and the company of each other. It won’t be through our power alone. It won’t be without struggle. Life will continue to happen. We will encounter people who don’t want to be loved by God, or by anyone else. We will get in our own way, and in God’s way.

I can only promise you that you won’t be swallowed by a big fish and that God won’t abandon you. And while I can’t promise it 100%, I believe that you will find joy.

Pentecost XVI
Matthew 18: 21-35
St. Mary’s Episcopal Church
Sean C. Kim
17, September 2023

The Gospels are filled with difficult passages. And today’s reading from Matthew is one of them. Sometimes, the difficulty lies in trying to understand what Jesus meant. We’re separated from Jesus by more than 2,000 years and vast cultural and social differences, never mind the challenges of translation. But the problem with today’s text isn’t about understanding what Jesus meant; rather, the difficulty lies in following what Jesus tells us to do. And what is that message? Forgive.

Peter comes to Jesus with the question: “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus responds: “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times (Matthew 18:21-22). He follows this up with a parable. A king forgives a servant who owes him a huge sum of money, but then that same servant fails to forgive a fellow servant who owes him a much smaller sum of money. The point of the parable is clear and simple: forgive as you have been forgiven. But this is so much easier said than done.

Practicing forgiveness is hard, and, at least for me, preaching on forgiveness is also hard. But, fortunately for today, I had some great outside help. The last time I preached on forgiveness, one of our parishioners sent me a kind email that provided a wonderful summary and commentary on my sermon. And, quite frankly, her feedback was more lucid and eloquent than my sermon. So, in preparing today’s sermon, I dug up that email and used it to help organize my thoughts. I don’t want to put that person on the spot, so I won’t mention her name, but thank you for the help!

Forgiveness is hard because it runs counter to our nature. When we are wronged, we want to seek revenge and restitution. Think of when we watch a movie or read a novel. There is something deeply satisfying about the villain getting his just desserts at the end of the story. Forgiveness, on the other hand, requires us to abandon the idea of getting even. It requires us to rise above our self-interest and even risk vulnerability and rejection.

But, no matter how difficult it is, Jesus commands us to forgive. Moreover, he has personally set the supreme example of forgiveness. As he hung on the cross, he prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). And throughout Christian history, the faithful have turned to Jesus as the example and inspiration for forgiveness.

As many of you know, I was born and raised in the Korean Christian tradition. Our family used to attend a small Korean Presbyterian church on the corner of 81st and Holmes in south Kansas City. The Presbyterians don’t commemorate the saints in the same way that Anglo-Catholics do, but they do have their own unofficial saints whom they remember and honor.

One of the Korean saints that has left a deep impression on me is Pastor Son Yang-won. Almost every Korean Protestant has probably heard of Pastor Son, and he is remembered by the Church for an act of radical forgiveness. Pastor Son was a Presbyterian minister who lived through the turbulent history of Korea under Japanese colonial rule and then the painful division of the country into North and South Korea. In 1948, a couple of years before the Korean War, a communist insurgency took over his town. The rebels descended on his family, attacking them for their Christian faith. During the persecution, one of the insurgents, a young man named Chae-son, shot and killed two of his sons. When the government restored order in the town a week later, Chae-son was apprehended and found guilty of murder. But before the sentence of execution could be carried out, Pastor Son intervened and pleaded for Chae-son’s life. And he also made a surprising and unusual request. He asked the court for the prisoner’s release so that he could be adopted as his son. The court granted the request. Chae-son was released and adopted by Pastor Son, who cared for him as his own son and taught him the Christian faith. Later in life, Chae-son himself became a Christian minister. Tragically for Pastor Son, he was killed by the communists during the Korean War, becoming one of countless martyrs who died for the faith.

Not many of us can practice the kind of radical forgiveness that Pastor Son exemplified. He is remembered precisely because what he did lies beyond the reach of most people. But, even if we don’t attain to the spiritual heights of Pastor Son and other saints, we are still under the same command to forgive.

To return to today’s reading from Matthew, at the end of the passage, Jesus tells his disciples to “forgive your brother or sister from your heart (Matthew 18:35). To forgive with our heart is the start of the process of forgiving. When we forgive with our heart, we make the choice to set aside the desire for getting even and commit to restoring the relationship. It involves the intention to follow Christ’s command and example to forgive. What comes next, however, may often be beyond our control.
At one of the churches where I’ve previously served, I knew a saintly woman who embodied Christ’s love and was a faithful member of the parish. Kind and compassionate, she gave generously of her time and money to the church and the community. Everyone respected and admired her. I was surprised one day during a small group meeting when she shared that she had been estranged from her son for several years. In spite of her attempts to reconcile, they had not talked for a very long time. And soon others shared their stories of unresolved conflicts in their lives.

An idea that we encounter in our culture as well as in church is that once you forgive, everyone lives happily ever after. It’s seen as a kind of on-off switch. Just do it, and everything will be fine. But, of course, life is not that simple. Forgiveness is not that simple. Yes, it involves making the choice to forgive, but in following through, we may encounter struggles and challenges. In fact, there may be situations in which the only thing left to do is to leave it to God and pray for reconciliation. Forgiveness can be a long, messy process. Forgiveness is hard work.

But, as followers of the Lord Jesus Christ, forgiveness is not optional for us. It’s an integral part of our faith commitment. Soon, as we gather at the altar, we will join together in the Lord’s Prayer, in which we pray that God “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Each time we pray the Lord’s Prayer, at the Eucharist, or in our private devotions, we are not only reminding ourselves but making the resolve, the intention, to forgive.

But, of course, it does not stop there. The hard work of forgiveness takes place in the messiness of our daily lives. Who among us is immune from slights, grudges, and grievances? And confronted with difficult situations, we may not always succeed in our efforts to forgive. But Christ calls us to try over and over again – even if it means seventy-seven times.

Pentecost XV 
Matthew 18:15-20 
St. Mary’s Episcopal Church 
Sean C. Kim 
10, September 2023 
 
 
As many of you know, the head of our national church, Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, is ill. Hospitalized twice this year for internal bleeding, he was scheduled to have surgery this past Friday, September 8, but that has been postponed to September 20. Please keep him in your prayers. 


Bishop Curry was elected Presiding Bishop and Primate of the Episcopal Church in 2015, the first African American to hold the position. The Presiding Bishop serves as the Chief Pastor, President, and Chief Executive Officer of our denomination for a term of nine years.  


Since his election, Bishop Curry’s tenure has been marked by one simple message: love. Wherever he has gone, he has preached the Christian faith as the “Way of Love.” He points out that before Christians came to be called “Christians,” the movement that Jesus began was called “the Way,” and that it was “a community of people whose lives were centered on Jesus Christ and committed to living the way of God’s unconditional, unselfish, sacrificial, and redemptive love.”[1]  


Some of you may have seen Bishop Curry on TV, preaching at Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding in 2018. I had the privilege of seeing him preach in person right in the middle of the Power and Light District on his Visitation to Kansas City in May of 2017. He is a powerful and inspiring preacher. If you haven’t seen him preach, I would recommend looking him up on YouTube. In addition to his preaching, Bishop Curry has also written books on the subject of love and developed a rule of life centered on the practice of love. Bishop Curry is, in short, a modern apostle of love. 


In today’s Epistle, we find the Apostle Paul preaching love. We read in Romans: “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments…are summed up in this word, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law” (Romans 13:8-10). There are many passages on love in the Gospels and other parts of Scripture, but what I find striking about today’s text is the word “owe”: “Owe no one anything, except to love one another.” Love is, in other words, an obligation, something we owe others. 
Paul’s injunction to owe no one anything is, of course, impossible to follow, except perhaps for monastics. For the rest of us, I don’t think it’s meant to be taken literally. Our lives are filled with various forms of obligations. We have financial obligations to pay our mortgage on our homes or cars. We have professional obligations at our jobs, tasked with specific responsibilities and duties. We have social obligations. If someone does a favor for us, then the proper thing to do is reciprocate or at least send a thank you note.  


So, to owe no one anything is unreasonable. And I think Paul here intends it as hyperbole to make the point that love is the ultimate obligation. All other obligations are secondary and unimportant in the light of the supreme obligation to love.  
Paul’s view of love as an obligation is rooted in Jesus’ command to love. In the Gospel of John, at the Last Supper, Jesus tells his disciples, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another” (John 13:34). This verse is the origin of our commemoration of Maundy Thursday during Holy Week. The term “maundy” is Middle English for the Latin word, mandatum, commandment. 


You may be asking at this point: why do we have to be commanded to love? Why is love an obligation? Shouldn’t love come naturally? Well, love does, of course, come naturally to us for some people, such as family and friends. But Christ commands us to love not just those close to us and those whom we like but everyone, including the stranger and the enemy. Now, that doesn’t come naturally.  


Throughout the pages of Christian history, Jesus’ command to love everyone has inspired the faithful to extraordinary acts of courage and compassion. On the Episcopal Calendar of Saints, yesterday was the feast day of Constance and Her Companions. Constance was an Episcopal nun, belonging to the Sisterhood of St. Mary. In 1873, she and other sisters in the order went to Memphis, Tennessee to establish a school for girls. The city was soon struck by a yellow fever epidemic. While others fled the city, the sisters remained to care for the sick, and Constance and several of the sisters died from the disease. What motivated them to minister to sick strangers even at the cost of their lives? Jesus’ command to love. On the Roman Catholic calendar, yesterday was the feast of St. Peter Claver, a Jesuit missionary to Latin America in the seventeenth century. Peter ministered in the slave ships that arrived in Colombia. Under the horrific conditions in the slaves ships, he spent most of his waking hours burying the dead, transporting the sick to hospitals, and preaching the Gospel to all who would hear him. When he wasn’t ministering to the slaves, he labored in a nearby leper colony. Why did he do the work that no one else wanted to do? Jesus’ command to love. 


We may not be called to the same kinds of heroic self-sacrifice that we read about in the annals of the saints. But we are all called to obey the same command to love everyone. So, the next time you see the homeless on the street corner, you might remember Jesus’ command to love. The next time you are cut off on the road by a reckless driver, you might remember Jesus’ command to love. The next time you have to deal with the annoying colleague at work, you might remember Jesus’ command to love. 


This past week, I came across a shocking statistic. During one of the meetings at church, I learned that sixty percent of nursing home residents do not have outside visitors. And many die alone. A few of us have begun to discuss how we as a church might address this crisis and develop a ministry. We owe the aged and the lonely our love. Jesus commands us. 


But, the fact is, it’s one thing to have good intentions. To actually carry out Jesus’ command to love all, is no easy task. Our egos and self-interest get in the way. In fact, we cannot fulfill our obligation to love on our own. We need God’s help. At the end of our passage from Romans, Paul addresses this need for outside, divine help. After listing the various ways in which our egos and selfish desires lead us astray, he proposes a solution: “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 13:14).  


In a moment, we will approach the altar for Holy Communion. And it is there that we will not only be reminded but empowered to fulfill our obligation to love. For it is in the mystery of the Blessed Sacrament that we are united with Christ. We die to ourselves and rise to new life in Christ. Or to put it another way, we take off our old clothes, stained by selfish desires, and we put on new clothes, the armor of light that is Christ. When we put on the Lord Jesus Christ, we will find the courage and strength that we need to love. So, dear sisters and brothers, come. Come to the altar to receive the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, our holy food. And, when the service is ended, let us go forth into the world to be Christ to one another and to the world, proclaiming the Way of Love.   

Pentecost XIV
Matthew 16: 21-28
St. Mary’s Episcopal Church
Sean C. Kim
3, September 2023
 
 
 In last Sunday’s Gospel reading, we found the Apostle Peter in an exalted state. He had been blessed by Jesus for his bold confession of faith. While the other disciples were silent, Peter responded to Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I am?” with the resounding proclamation: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:13-16). Jesus praised Peter, saying: “you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church” (Matthew 16:18). But in today’s Gospel reading, we find a dramatic turn of events. Ironically for Peter, following the praise comes condemnation. When Jesus foretells of his impending suffering, death, and resurrection, Peter takes him aside and rebukes him: “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” Jesus turns to Peter and tells him: “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things” (Matthew 16:21-23).

Peter must have been stunned by this sudden reversal of fortune. One moment he is the rock on which Jesus will build his church. The next moment he is a big obstacle to Jesus, compared with none other than Satan himself.

What just happened? Well, it looks like Peter didn’t quite get Jesus’ true identity after all. He seems to be still clinging on to traditional Jewish expectations of the Messiah. Grounded in the historical experience of the Israelites, the Messiah was believed to be the deliverer to come. As Moses led his people out of their bondage in Egypt to the Promised Land and as King David drove out the Philistines and established his kingdom, the Messiah was supposed to deliver the Jews from Roman occupation and oppression, and usher in a new and glorious age for God’s people. But, far from such hope of deliverance and restoration, power and glory, here we have Jesus talking doom and gloom. He informs his followers that he will undergo great suffering, be killed, and on the third day be raised. Although Jesus here mentions the resurrection, Peter and the disciples don’t seem to even notice. What has caught their attention is the part about suffering and death.

If we might read a bit into Peter’s psychology, it’s not just concern for Jesus’ well-being that leads to his vehement protest. Peter loves and cares for his Lord, but he must also have been wondering what’s going to happen to him now. Yes, this movement that Jesus started is not about Peter; it’s about Jesus. But Peter didn’t leave everything behind to join Jesus so that the movement would end with the leader’s death and execution. And what would then happen to him and the other disciples? Peter had been hoping to share in the power and glory that would come with being part of Messiah’s inner circle. Imagine becoming Jesus’ lieutenant. Moses’ right-hand man, his lieutenant, was Joshua. And look what happened to him. Joshua succeeded Moses and took charge of the Israelites to carry out the conquest of the Promised Land. He brought himself and the Israelites wealth and power. When Jesus promised Peter that he would be rock on which he would build his church, Peter must have been heady with visions of grandeur of being the Messiah’s right-hand man.

But before Peter has had time to fully enjoy his fantasies, Jesus utters something strange and disturbing. He is going to suffer and die soon. We can understand why Peter reacts the way he does: “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you” (Matthew 16:22). What kind of Messiah suffers and dies at the hands of his enemies?

Jesus presents a radically different vision of the Messiah than what the Jews had believed. As he explains to Peter, “you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things” (Matthew 16:23). What are these human things with which Peter is preoccupied? Simply put, power and glory.[1] Jesus’ chastisement of Peter finds a parallel with his rebuke of Satan earlier in the Gospel of Matthew during his temptation in the wilderness.[2] Satan takes Jesus to a high mountain and shows him the kingdoms of the world in all their power and glory, and he makes an offer: “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Jesus responds: “Away with you, Satan! For it is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him’” (Matthew 4:8-10). Jesus’ rebuke of Peter “Get behind me, Satan!” is a direct allusion to “Away with you, Satan!” It isn’t that Peter has actually become Satan; Peter is expressing Satan’s opposition to God’s will. Or to put it another way, Peter would have been happy with Jesus the Messiah taking possession of all the kingdoms in the world.

The kingdoms of the world stand on the foundations of power and glory. They rely on mechanisms of domination and coercion, and make war on each other. But the reign of the Messiah, as preached by Jesus, rests on a different foundation. The great theologian Saint Augustine, whose feast day we just commemorated this past Monday, wrote a book in the fifth century titled The City of God. He composed it soon after the city of Rome was overrun and sacked by Germanic tribes in the year 410. In the book Augustine juxtaposes two different visions, an earthly city and the City of God. Here is a brief excerpt: “Two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by love of self, even to the contempt of God, the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. The earthly city glories in itself, the heavenly city glories in the Lord. . . . In the one, the princes, and the nations it subdues, are ruled by the love of ruling; in the other, the princes and the subjects serve one another in love.”[3]

The City of God, for Augustine, is the city based on the love of God and love of one another, in opposition to the earthly city, based on love of self and power and glory. And it is to that City of God that we aspire.
To go back to the parallel between Jesus’ rebuke of Satan and his rebuke of Peter, there is one crucial difference. To Satan Jesus says “Away from me!” but to Peter, Jesus says “Get behind me!” In spite of his rebuke, Jesus still wants Peter to follow him. The Greek word here is, in fact, the same one that Jesus used when he first called Peter to be his disciple” – get behind me (Matthew 4:19).[4]

Just as Jesus invited Peter to “get behind him,” to follow him, he extends that same invitation of a life of faithful discipleship to us. He calls us away from setting our minds on the human things – power and glory – and to focus on the divine things – self-denying love and service. He invites us to become citizens of the City of God, where love reigns supreme.
 
[1]Audrey West,“Commentary on Matthew 16:21-28,”  Working Preacher. https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=4565.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Augustine, On the City of God Against the Pagans, Book XIV, Chapter 28.
[4] West.

Fr. Larry Parrish
August 27, 2023
St. Mary's Episcopal Church

Jesus’s disciples had been with him awhile when the story told in our Gospel text begins.  They had listened to his teaching and tried to understand what they were hearing.  They had witnessed miracles at His hands and tried to understand what they meant, too: miracles of healing, a couple of major miracles involving feeding a rock concert sized crowd using somebody’s lunch and had witnessed him walking across the water of Lake Galilee in a storm and then stilling that storm in an instant.   Now their teacher had given them a pop quiz.  He suddenly asked them, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?”  --referring to Himself.  The disciples, who had stood in crowds gathered to see Jesus and had been listening to people talk, came quickly back with some answers: “Well, some say John the Baptist; some say Elijah; Some say Jeremiah . . .or one of the prophets.” “But who do you say that I am?”  Peter, who had the inclination, that some of us today share, of putting his mouth in gear before his brain was fully engaged, blurted out, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.”   Playing with this passage—which by the way is a perfectly acceptable way of studying a story from Scripture—I can see the disciples doing eye rolls—“Ah! Peter just put his foot in his mouth again!”   But this time ..Peter was right.   Jesus (maybe hugging Peter) exclaims, ”Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah!  For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in Heaven.   And I tell you, you are Peter, (Greek for “rock—his Jewish name was Simon, which means “rock”) and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.”

The thing about Scripture is that it is a living document.  When Jesus talks to his disciples in a Gospel story we can’t keep him at a 2000 year’s arm reach back in time, he is talking to us who say we belong to His Church today.  When Paul writes a letter to the Church at Rome, he is writing to St. Mary’s, 13th and Holmes.

Jesus asks us both the question, “Who do others say that I am?” and “Who do YOU say that I am?”  The answer matters, and it matters whether or not we answer both of these questions, and how we answer them.

The figure of Jesus looms so large in world history and people have been trying to make sense of the impact of his personality and actions, as well as His crucifixion and resurrection for the past two millennia.   In fact, He is the reason we talk about two millennia, as it has been said, “He has split our calendar,” so that we talk about B.C. or A.D.  Before Christ, or Year of our Lord.  Pre-Christian Era and Post-Christian Era.  He cannot be easily categorized, and there are some ways He cannot be categorized at all. 

And even those who claim to be Christian and call Jesus “Lord and God,” cannot truly say just anything they want about him.  Throughout history, well-meaning people, and not-well-meaning people have tried to superimpose on Jesus their own ideology and agenda.  His Name has been invoked to reinforce the power of leaders of religious cults and personality cults.  He and His movement have been invoked to subjugate anyone who isn’t white, straight, and male, justify slavery, and overturn governments with force or chicanery.

Throughout recorded history, It has been a human characteristic to define God as an extension of ourselves, and, accordingly, Jesus, as the human face of God, as well.   It is not a new phenomena.  As a wise priest I know, and am fond of quoting*once said, “God created us in His image, and we have been trying to return the favor ever since!”   -Fr. Robert Layne.

It was an issue in the early days of the Christian movement, as Paul wrote his letters and mailed them to the new Christian community in Rome.   He was reminding them that they might be Roman citizens, but that they weren’t to adopt Roman attitudes, ethics, and religious values as the way of Christ.  In the letter read from today, he pleads with them, and us, to “not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of our minds, so that we may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.   What we THINK is important.  We are to give our bodies, i.e. our hands, feet, talents, abilities, to God so that we might love others as God has loved us, and that includes our minds, our intellects and our discernments, too.    We are to THINK, really think—not blindly assume—about who God is and who we are in relationship with Him doing the best we can—“by the mercies—grace—of God” “according to the measure of faith” that God gives us.  We are not alone.   We are not without resources in doing this.

A good many of the resources are at hand every time we gather for worship. The reading of Scripture, the Church’s Book, is one.  I think that the Sunday morning study here on the texts for Sunday is very beneficial to those participating.  I think you have noticed that we are printing the texts of the readings in the service leaflet now.   I like that, even though you can now more easily question me on what I didn’t say or whether you can’t see how I got what I said from what was written!  I welcome after-sermon conversations!

 Every Sunday after the sermon we stand and recite the Nicene Creed.  It is a compilation of hard thought and hard fought- -for answers to Jesus’s question, “Who do you say that I am.”  It keeps us from reinventing the theological wheel each Sunday.   The same wise Episcopal priest I quoted earlier once said, “We say the creed right after the sermon, because no matter what the preacher just said, we still “believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty . . . etc”!  It centers us in the faith we proclaim.  That doesn’t mean we have to understand every word of it—questioning and honest doubt are part of the thought processes that God has created in us to come to a deeper faith.

United Methodist Bishop, Preacher and Teacher of Pastors, (and, I think, closet Episcopalian!) Will Willimon tells the story of a time he invited an Orthodox Catholic bishop to speak to a class on basic Christianity he taught at Duke University.  One of his students told the Bishop that he couldn’t recite the creed because he didn’t understand or believe all the parts of it.   The Bishop told him, “Young man, it is not YOUR creed. It is the Church’s creed. You keep saying it until you come to understanding and belief!”

Then there are the stories and collects we find in our Lesser Feasts and Fasts book told and prayed at the weekday Masses here.  We get acquainted with those who knew God and how they lived out of that relationship.

In the Mass, our souls are fed and our minds renewed by the Body and Blood of Christ that digests within us and courses through our veins.  This is another great mystery that I have given up trying to understand and instead let myself experience.  I learned a long time ago that there are some things that are true that can’t be shaken up in a test tube or proved by calculus.

This is a good place to mention an Anglican tradition of discerning who God is and who we are in His life: It’s an image of a “Three Legged Stool”.  One of the legs is Scripture and another is Tradition.  The third one is Reason.  We are to apply our reasoning and what we know about what is true in the world, to interpreting both Scripture and Tradition for exploring who God is and who we are. Anglican priest and unintentional founder of Methodist, John Wesley, added a fourth leg, Experience. We use our life experiences and those experiences of God that seem to come from “outside” of our experience and yet manifest themselves “within” us, (Wesley’s “Heart strangely warmed” experience of grace and the love of God, for instance.)  That is sometimes called Revelation. Jesus’ response to Peter’s blurted out affirmation was “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah!  For flesh and blood have not revealed this to you, but my Father in Heaven.

There is another great resource for continuing to think through, and continuing to affirm who Jesus Christ is for us, and we all sit in the midst of it this morning:

In the passage from Paul’s letter this morning, he goes on to describe the community of faith, the Church, as a body, as “one body in Christ and individually we are members one of another,” in which “all members do not have the same function” but each of us have a gift or gifts—abilities or talents—to share with others.   Taken in the context of “the renewing of our minds” earlier in the passage, and further in the context of Jesus asking for responses to his question of ALL of his disciples, I see an extension of the usual definition of this image beyond pooling our talents and abilities to make the church “work” for God and others:  I see it also as an affirmation that in any gathering of Christians, the members not only have abilities to share, but thoughts, insights, learnings and experiences of how God has become real in their lives, and how they experience what it means to be in Christ.   I see this especially true about this church, St. Mary’s KCMO, and all of you who are a part of it.   You not only have multiple abilities and gifts to share in the ongoing operation of this church, you also have knowledge and thoughts to share about the nature of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and how you have experienced the reality of His presence and the power of His love in your lives.  All of the rest of then, can be gifted with your insights!
 
Who do I say that Jesus is? (Remember, “no matter what the preacher just said” I still believe . . . ! –and all insights need to be tested by Scripture and Tradition). I say that the Jesus of the Gospels is not just the Jesus of History, but God in Three Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The one who appeared in our shape and form to inhabit our humanity so that we could share in His divinity. As part of His shape and form we are His body, in this location here at 13th and Holmes, (but not limited by this location, this parish, or this denomination), to show forth His love and power, and the reality of His presence in the lives of those of us who proclaim him Lord, to others that are not only still struggling to answer the question, but to those who have yet to hear the question!

In the name of The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

The Feast of St. Mary the Virgin
Sean C. Kim
St. Mary’s Episcopal Church
20 August, 2023



This past July Fourth is one that I will never forget. I received the phone call that I had been dreading. Fr. Charles Everson called to inform me that he would be leaving St. Mary’s. I responded with mixed emotions. On the one hand, I was happy and excited for my colleague and friend for his new ministry in Chicago, but, at the same time, I was seized by panic: “What will happen to St. Mary’s now?” I could not imagine St. Mary’s without Fr. Charles. He had hired me as his assistant priest four years ago, and we had worked closely together. He had guided the Church through the many challenges, including Covid, and placed us on a firm foundation. His departure would create a huge vacuum in the life of our church.


After Fr. Charles made the announcement of his resignation to the congregation the following Sunday, my good friend and fellow historian, Dr. Bill Stockton, came up to me and said, “You must be feeling like Harry Truman when he took over from FDR.” To say that Franklin Roosevelt left big shoes to fill would be an understatement. FDR was a beloved leader who had served an unprecedented four terms as president – 16 years, guiding the nation through the Great Depression. And when he died, the nation was in the middle of World War II. I think Truman probably sensed some panic when he heard the news that he would be taking over. So, it’s an appropriate analogy to our situation now, when we are worried by the uncertainties of what might come next.


But, actually, when I think about it, I rather like the comparison. As some of you know, I grew up in Independence, Missouri, Harry Truman’s hometown, and even graduated from Truman High School, and hence there’s the personal connection. But, more importantly, Truman turned out to be a great president, providing decisive leadership not only for the United States but for the world during World War II and the Cold War. So, Truman has become a kind of inspiration for me during this time of major transition for our Church.


Another source – a much greater source – of inspiration and strength for me these days is the Blessed Virgin Mary, Our Patroness, whose feast day we observe today. Mary knew something about change. She knew what it was like to be suddenly faced with a momentous responsibility. Mary was a teenage girl, recently engaged to Joseph, when one day the angel Gabriel appeared to her and announced that she was to bear the Son of God (Luke 1:26-38). And how did she respond to this extraordinary news that would change her life and the life of the world forever? She could have responded like Moses with a litany of excuses. I’m not the right person for leading your people out of Egypt. The leaders of Israel aren’t going to listen to me. I’m not a good speaker. At one point, Moses flat out told God: “Please send someone else” (Exodus 3 and 4). Or Mary could have responded like Jonah. When God called Jonah to go to Nineveh with the message of repentance, what did he do? He fled, ending up in the belly of the whale while trying to avoid God. No, Mary did not come up with excuses or try to flee. On the contrary, she responded with the words: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Be it unto me according to Thy word” (Luke 1:26-38). And with Mary’s act of humble obedience to God’s will began the history of our salvation.


Be it unto me according to Thy word. I pray these words every day when I pray the Angelus as part of the Daily Office. The prayer reminds me to set aside my anxieties and worries and leave it all to God. It calls me to turn away from my ego and self-centeredness to focus on God’s will, not my own. Of course, this is much easier said than done. It is a daily, perpetual struggle.
Well, you’ll be glad to know that the initial panic has subsided, but the hard work of the transition has begun. Fortunately, my job as Priest-in-Charge has been made a lot easier by everyone who has stepped up. From the Clergy and Vestry to the Staff and Volunteers, many have rolled up their sleeves and committed themselves anew to maintaining and growing the rich and vibrant life of our Church.


St. Mary’s is special in so many ways. To begin with, we are only one of a handful of Anglo-Catholic Churches in the entire country. And here in the Midwest, we are the only Anglo-Catholic parish in a multi-state area. It is rare to find the kind of glorious traditional worship and piety that you find here, and I’m not aware of many Episcopal Churches that have the devotion we have here to the Virgin Mary. Moreover, located in the heart of downtown Kansas City, there are opportunities for service here to the poor and needy that you won’t find in suburban churches. We are a beacon of hope and love in our community.


Let me share with you an example. This past Friday afternoon at church, I witnessed Fr. Larry and Mary Parrish, and Raja Reed, our Parish Administrator, ministering to a young homeless person, a victim of abuse. Not only did we provide him with food and other necessities; we purchased a long-distance bus ticket for him to get back home, and the Parrishes even provided a ride to the Greyhound station. The most moving part of the experience for me was when we all held hands in our Church office, and Fr. Larry prayed for God’s protection and guidance. What a beautiful and holy moment. This is what our faith is about. This is what Our Lord Jesus Christ calls us to do.


It is truly an honor and privilege to be your Priest-in-Charge at St. Mary’s. I do, however, have a complaint. I don’t like my title – more specifically, the phrase “in charge.” The fact is, I’m not in charge here. I’m just part of the team – yes, with a leadership role but nonetheless still part of the team. God is the one in charge of St. Mary’s. It is God who will lead us through this transition. It is to God to whom we should turn for guidance and inspiration.


And it is God who is calling you today. How will you step up? In what way is God calling you to serve? Perhaps you are being called to assist us in our worship by reading Scripture or serving at the altar. Perhaps you are being called to serve behind the scenes to help with reception and hospitality. Or perhaps you are being called to one of our many outreach ministries. This past week’s newsletter featured the Blessing Bag ministry, and we have distributed hundreds of bags filled with food and other necessities to our homeless neighbors. We will be featuring other ministries in our newsletter in the weeks to come.
​

Dear sisters and brothers, the Church needs your help. You are part of the team. I pray that you will open your hearts and minds to God’s calling. And whatever God is calling you to do, I invite all of you to join me in your daily prayers to offer to God the prayer of Our Blessed Mother: Be it unto me according to Thy word. Amen.