St.
Alban's Episcopal Church
Austin, Texas
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Austin, Texas
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From the Pulpit:
On Thursday evening I went to the installation of the new dean of the seminary. The preacher was Ted Wardlaw, who is the dean of the Presbyterian seminary and just a marvelous preacher. He began by reminding us of a recent column by Garrison Keillor, who is also a marvelous preacher. I’d like to share with you the opening paragraphs: Oct. 17, 2007 | In Baltimore with friends Sunday morning, a splendid fall day under blue skies, we marched off to the nearest church and found ourselves in an old brownstone temple of 1852, wooden box pews, stained glass on all sides, old tiled floor, for a high Anglican-Catholic Mass, a troop of choristers in white, altar boys, bearded priests in medieval vestments, holy water and puffs of smoke and bells and chanting of scripture, precision bowing and genuflecting, all rather exotic for an old fundamentalist like me but deeply moving, and it made me think about my father, whose birthday was Oct. 12, and brought me to tears. It was formal high Mass, none of that "hi and how are we all doing this morning" chumminess, and the homily only summarized the scripture texts about healing, it didn't turn into an essay on healthcare. Ten voices strong and true in the choir and positioned as they were under the great arch of the chancel, their tender polyphonic Kyrie and Gloria infused the whole building with pure kindness. The singing was O my God just heartbreakingly good. There were less than 30 of us in the pews, fewer than the names on the prayer list, and to hear "Behold, how good and joyful it is; brethren, to dwell together in unity" sung so eloquently as the priests swung to their tasks was to be present in a moment of extravagant grace that does not depend on numbers or any other measure of success for its meaning, just as the Grand Canyon does not depend on busloads of tourists to be magnificent. Most of our brethren, bless them, are off enjoying brunch or reading the funnies or lifting weights at the gym, and our faithfulness does not make us better people. We simply happened to walk by and see this vast canyon of God's love and stand looking into it. (1) Keillor is an Episcopalian now, and you can hear how he loves the same things we love, the same things that we cherish about St. Alban’s even though we don’t look much like that old brownstone church in Baltimore with its box pews and chancel arches and its bearded priests. He’s an Episcopalian now, but he grew up in a very fundamentalist sect and spent time in the Lutheran Church, which he parodies with affection in The News from Lake Wobegon. And, like many of us, in the Episcopal Church he has clearly found something that his heart had hungered for long before he could name it. Thanksgiving is the one holiday that I don’t mind for a minute when it begins to show up in the stores weeks before it actually gets here. Even before Halloween, which takes up the candy aisle and fills the store with jack o lanterns and witches while the turkeys have to wait, the cranberry sauce and dressing mixes, the canned sweet potatoes and marshmallows, the green beans and cream of mushroom soup are beginning to be stacked at the ends of the grocery aisles. As I said in my Almanac article, I snatch up the Thanksgiving edition of every cooking magazine I can find, and what’s more, I never throw them away. I’ve been watching the chefs on the cooking channel as they brine their turkeys, roll out their pie crusts, and even anticipate dealing with the leftovers, which seem to me to be at least half of what Thanksgiving is about. No, of course that’s not what it’s about, no matter how good those turkey sandwiches are. On the more serious or reverent side, Thanksgiving seems to me to be about essentially two things. First, it is about recognizing that God is the source of everything we have, which has been given freely and abundantly out of love. It is about stopping our rushing around in the delusion that we’re the ones who are making it all happen, it is about stopping to give God thanks. Last week the children in Sunday school made altar bread. They mixed it and kneaded it and baked it, and were delighted to learn that the Greek word Eucharist simply means Thanksgiving. So when you and your family stop Thursday after next and say grace before you cut into the bird take a moment to realize that that meal is a Eucharist. And the other thing that Thanksgiving is about is our all coming together because we are held by the bonds of relatedness and tradition. Thanksgiving is the most heavily traveled holiday of the year. Even the most dysfunctional of families try to get as many members together as they can, and as we eat pretty much what we eat every year on that day, with the inherited silver on grandmother’s china, we tell the same stories, the ones that make us family. Today we celebrate the twenty-sixth anniversary of the founding of St. Alban’s. Most of you have heard some of those old stories, because we are blessed to have many founding members still among us. There are the stories of the first services held in the beer hall down in Manchaca. There is the story of the gathering at the 19th hole of Onion Creek Country Club where people made their first financial commitments, and of the building of our beautiful sanctuary, and you can’t leave out mention of all the wild critters that have made life interesting, the snake in church one day and most recently the large green lizard on the back of the crucifer’s alb as he made his way towards the altar. There is no question – this is a precious parish and we gather together today to give thanks to God for all the blessings we receive from him and to all the people who have come before us and all of us who are here today to offer our own gifts on the altar so that future generations may worship here and have their lives transformed as we have had ours transformed and are trusting in the transformation that is to come. In Luke’s gospel today it is the Saducees who are baiting Jesus. Now the Saducees were the blue-bloods of the day and their distinctive religious doctrine was that they did not believe in life after death. So there is a trick they are playing in the part of the story we didn’t read. Essentially they give Jesus a situation in which a woman is married to a man, and when he dies she is married to each of his brothers in turn, and in the end they all die, and the question the Saducees ask is whose wife will she be in the heaven whose existence they deny. Well, it’s a no-win for Jesus on the surface. If he says she is the wife of even one of the men, then the Saducees come back with their denial of afterlife. The other obvious option is for Jesus to agree with them, and that’s no good. Either way the Saducees win, but Jesus does not answer the question the way they planned. Jesus tells them they are asking the wrong question. Their suppositions about God are entirely too small. Because the resurrection is the expression of God’s infinite love, all are alive in God and the issue of marriage is an earthly one. In short he is telling them that they cannot see things the way God sees them. And, my dear sisters and brothers, we cannot see things the way God sees them. The founders of this church, when they met in the beer hall and wrote their checks for $100 at the country club had no ability to envision this church up on the hill as it is today, but they gave anyway, and God did. With generous support from the Diocese of Texas they gave themselves and their resources for the sake of something they could not imagine. The veterans whose courage we celebrate today risked and often gave their lives for the sake of a future they could not imagine except for their conviction that it could not unfold without God’s gift of freedom. When we place our pledges on the altar today we give our gifts without being able to imagine how God is going to use them or whose lives will be transformed because we do. Of course we have plans. It’s highly likely that by this time next year we’ll have finished out the upstairs of the Parish Life Building and that we’ll have space to expand Christian Formation, which is absolutely vital to the dream of God for all of us. Once that’s done, we’ll be able to pay off some of the debt that is a drain on our resources, but God can see a bigger picture than we can. When we give our gifts, if we truly give them from the heart, we give them with no strings attached, no personal agenda, and we trust in God to guide us into the future that is God’s own dream. What gave Garrison Keillor the holy shivers in church last month were all the manifestations of tradition, all the precious gifts that have been handed down in our faith tradition through the centuries. We cherish our traditions but must be on our guard against traditionalism, which is the clinging to what no longer fits out of fear. Thanksgiving, whether we are talking the turkey and dressing sort or our own very Holy Eucharist, may be the most traditional of celebrations, but it is truly a thanksgiving only when we are willing to walk faithfully into the future giving it the best of what we have to give in the trust that the God who has given us all good things, who has blessed us beyond our imagining, has a future for us, individually and as a blessed family that is more than we would ever dare to hope for, more than we would ever be able to dream. Thanks be to God. Amen. (1) Garrison Keillor, Salon Magazine, October 11, 2007
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05/16/2008 | ||||||
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The
Rev. Margaret Waters