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A Matter of Life and Death

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The Rt. Rev. Frank S. Logue gave this sermon for the clergy renewal of vows and Chrism Mass at Annunciation in Vidalia and Trinity in Cochran on April 14-15, 2025.

A Matter of Life and Death
A Sermon for the Renewal of Vows for Clergy
John 12:1-11 and John 12:20-36

“Lazarus, come out!”

Jesus, the Word made flesh, cries out this command at the grave of his friend with the tracks of the tears still evident in the dust clinging to his face from the long walk to Bethany.

John recalls the incident that marked the beginning of the end for his friend and Rabbi, “The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’”

The Beloved Disciple knew Jesus’ cruciform life shaped the warp and woof of the cosmos. John tells us, “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.”

Just as when the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, the words, “Let there be light!” called all life into being, so the cry “Lazarus, come out!” marked the beginning of the end of the reign of sin and death.

The Fourth Gospel makes this clear in our reading for Monday in Holy Week where we learn that the crowds that flocked to Bethany, “came not only because of Jesus but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead.” Then in our reading for Tuesday in Holy Week, some Greeks seek out “Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, ‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus.’”

Jesus can read the signs. He knows the Chronos of the Passover for this year will align with the Kairos of his sacrificial death. He says, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

Jesus calling Lazarus out from the tomb is the turning point. The Beloved Disciple slows down the steady pace he had maintained. John used ten chapters to propel us from the Word being made flesh through almost all of Jesus’ years of active ministry. The remaining eleven chapters of the Gospel describe the little more than two weeks that passed between Lazarus coming out of the grave and Jesus cooking breakfast on the beach for his disciples.

Four chapters alone are given to Jesus’ last words on the night before he died. Jesus taught us that he is the vine and we are the branches. He prayed for his followers and added, “I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”

So that the world may believe.

This is John’s sole purpose in writing his Gospel: to bring people to faith in Jesus. John writes, “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”

John knew the synoptic Gospels but longed to tell the Good News from the cosmic, more mystical dimension he had come to understand, and in the process to emphasize that knowing Jesus is a matter of life and death. Knowing Jesus remains a matter of life and death.

You know this. Ministry offers moments when God shows up in ways that take your breath away. Those moments do not come as often as I wish and there is so much of life in the church from one of these experiences to the next that it is all too easy to despair. We preach from the depths of our being, sharing the Gospel as we know it, only to see parishioners hurting one another, lashing out at us or worse, our families, while others who have faithfully shown up seem to have nothing to draw from when tragedy strikes. There is so much one faces in leading a church. The people of God can be exhausting even on their best days.

Yet, I can’t quit this life of service as I have experienced God showing up in my life and in the lives or others, not always how and when I wish, but with a dependability that has led me to put my trust in God and to encourage others to do the same. This is, of course, not about faith that works solely in the easy times in life. Our faith in Jesus speaks to chaos and darkness so that even at the grave we can sing God’s praises. I know this from sitting at the bedside of those dying in Hospice Care or more painfully standing by parents in the Emergency Room as their child’s life slips away and have also been the father with my daughter’s life hanging in the balance.

I have seen people move from death back to life in ways that fill me with awe. I have prayed with a Mom across years as her son clawed his way back to the light from the deep darkness of a heroin addiction. This was a rocky path, with a series of fits and starts, rehab and relapse, rehab and relapse, desperation, crime, and arrest. Then rehab and relapse, rehab and relapse, until he could find his way back to life. The danger of falling back always remains, but he is now years sober. When this man names the living God brought him back from the dead, I can only agree and give thanks.

The wider view that John offers in his Gospel, beginning with the Word made flesh living among us fits with the Apostle Paul seeing the cosmic battle we face in proclaiming that “Our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12).

The principalities of this present darkness put the Son of God to death on a cross. God brought Jesus from the grave, not resuscitated as Lazarus who would die again, but in a resurrection in which life conquered death. Jesus rose to never die again in order to show us that love defeats hate. The powers of this present age are still trying to convince us that we need to get what we can however we can, while also whispering in our ear that we are not enough, we will never measure up. This is not the path of life, but the way of a world turned from God.

We serve in a time of decline with a rebound from the pandemic that still falls short of our previous heights. It would be easy to simply manage the decline. Yet we serve in communities filled with people who need to know the life-giving Good News. They know churches. They know lots of Christians. They know of Jesus. But many of our neighbors do not know that there is an escape route form the cycle of shame and fear. They need to know they can enjoy the grace of forgiveness and healing. They need to experience the surpassing joy that comes from feeling in their marrow that they matter to the maker of heaven and earth. They need to be unbound and set free from sin and death.

The church needs to be set free as well. For the church isn’t dying, we are killing when we allow our concern to be for preserving an institution rather than being the Body of Christ in the times we are given to serve. Our call is not to save the Church. Our call is to serve as witnesses to the Truth of Jesus. In fractured times, the world needs people who point to the deeper reality that what unites us matters more than what separates us as every human is made in the image and likeness of God.

Without your witness, and the witness of those in your congregation, some of our neighbors would continue to be lost, left out, or marginalized. Your call matters all the more as our communities are so very divided while everyone on each side of the political divide and those caught in the middle all so desperately need the words of love and life rather than hatred and death. Your call as a deacon or priest is of eternal significance.

The same Word of God that said, “Let there be light!” called Lazarus from the grave, and continues to speak life to all on the path that leads to death. This week and every week, our call is not to save the world or even the church. Our call is to faithfully point beyond ourselves to Jesus so that the world may believe. 

Amen.

Presiding Bishop-Elect Sean Rowe

By Bishop Frank Logue

In a first-ballot election among a slate of five well-qualified candidates, the bishops of the Episcopal Church elected the Rt. Rev. Sean Rowe to become the next Presiding Bishop. At 49, he is the youngest person chosen to lead our church. I met Sean in the fall of 1997 when we both arrived at Virginia Theological Seminary. At 22, he was the youngest person in our class of more than forty seminarians. He would go on to be the youngest bishop in the Anglican Communion for many years after being elected on the first ballot at the age of 32 from a slate of four well-qualified candidates seeking to be the Bishop of the Diocese of Northwest Pennsylvania. When you get to know Sean, the pattern is not surprising.

He is the one so many of us in the House of Bishops go to for counsel. By the time of his installation as Presiding Bishop, he will have served for 17 years in this unique call. He has a pastor’s heart and knows the role well. He loves our church and yet sees how we must change to respond to the challenges of decreased membership, giving, and attendance. Yet, he is not interested at all in the institution for its own sake, but for the sake people who need to know Jesus.

In seminary, I immediately came to respect his keen intellect, deep faith in Jesus, and his often surprising sense of humor. In a homiletics class, we each found our very different voices as preachers alongside one another. While there is only one Bishop Michael Curry, Sean will always seriously engage with scripture in a sermon that challenges you or challenges our church. The sermon he preached for the closing Eucharist of the 81st General Convention is a perfect example of his seeking to put faith into practice: Sermon for Closing Eucharist

Sean said, “And finally, what about our idolatry of structures and practices that exclude and diminish our witness? We have to get it together. That’s going to mean laying some things down.” By the end of the day, an announcement went out to the church that our Presiding Bishop-Elect canceled the big, expensive installation at Washington National Cathedral opting for a small service in the chapel of our Episcopal Church Center that will be broadcast to the church online.

The bishops discerned this call and it was a surprising one for outside observers, but the spiritual discernment we did led us to see Bishop Sean Rowe as the right Presiding Bishop for the nine years ahead. He is signaling bold leadership saying “God is calling the Episcopal Church into a new future.” What you can know about our new Presiding Bishop is that he is a good man, a faithful pastor, and a devoted follower of Jesus who appreciates what our church can offer a lost and hurting world too much to let us languish.

Commencement Sermon – School of Theology

The Rt. Rev. Frank S. Logue preached this sermon for the St. Luke School of Theology Commencement at Sewanee: The University of the South in All Saints’ Chapel on May 10, 2024.

Working Together
1 Corinthians 3:5-11 and John 4:31-38


The hours of lectures, reading, and taking tests are so very long.

The days can also pass slowly as you toil into the night studying, researching, and writing. 

Yet, the years of working toward an advanced degree are surprisingly short. 

After what feels like a very long time, that somehow passed quickly, you discover that all the other lemmings have jumped off the cliff and your turn is up. The DMin thesis has been defended or the GOEs are done or, in whatever way applies to you, every box has been checked and you need only pick up your degree to move forward in a new season of ministry enriched by your time on The Mountain.

You, the School of Theology Class of 2024, have been gifted with a very different experience than many fellow alumni. Your decision to pursue ordination or advanced studies was made in the midst of a global pandemic. For those of you who are MDiv students, unlike the classes immediately before you, you were permitted to worship in the Chapel of the Apostles in your junior year. Masking precautions remained and while you were living into the EQB ideal of “how good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity” you did so without sharing the chalice in the Eucharist.

You have not only learned of how the experience of the Babylonian Exile formed the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, you also experienced exile from Hamilton Hall for the past year and a half. Because of, or in spite of, these challenges, you have relied on each other, your professors, and others in your circle of support which has given you a key to ministry: teamwork. You know this well as you have supported one another. 

As we read in the first letter to the Christians in Corinth, “we are God’s servants, working together.” Ministry is inherently teamwork where we work alongside others and build on their work. More importantly, even the team of people does not work alone as “neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.”

Jesus puts it this way in our reading from John’s Gospel, “‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labour. Others have laboured, and you have entered into their labour.”

The gift nestled in our propers for this commencement is clarity that while we long to see lives changed by the Good News of Jesus, that metanoia does not depend on us alone or even on us primarily. Everything that needs to be done has already been done by Jesus. The grace of someone experiencing a conversion of heart and mind depends neither on dazzling homiletical prowess nor on gorgeous liturgies. The metamorphosis we long for people to experience is Holy Spirit work. You can’t earn it. You can’t deserve it. But you do get the immense joy of sharing this love of God with others.

This overwhelming, audacious Good News is life-giving. Those with whom you minister have been fed a steady diet teaching them that they are not enough. Casual cruelty on the elementary school playground or betrayal by friends in our teen years, and all the experiences of a lifetime when others see us with harsh judgment, can shake anyone. Many people know the feeling of never having measured up. You and I know that as well in our own lives. But we also know the loving care of the Holy Trinity. We know that while there is much we can do to amend our lives, no one needs to be taller, thinner, prettier, funnier, fitter, smarter, younger, more mature, or anything other than the person God made them to be in order to be loved by the creator of the Cosmos. If this awareness feels beside the point in a world on fire, remember that failure to see every other person as a sibling is at the root of all the pain and suffering we do see. 

This is not to do away with our knowledge of sin and our need for redemption. I am not sweeping aside the need for repentance and amendment of life. Instead, I want to remind you that your ministry is in communities where so many people need the grace, mercy, and compassion we have found in Jesus as much as a thirsty person needs water.

Yet, we are not immune to the cult of earning and deserving. If your goal is to be successful in ministry, know that this is a never-ending race set at an unsustainable pace. Someone will always seem to be effortlessly thriving in ministry. Another will get an amazing call to some plum position. Life, especially life in the church, can become yet another place where we feel we never measure up. The antidote to this poison of perfectionism is coming to know deep in your bones that only God can give the growth.

If neither Apollos nor Paul are anything, who are we to seek to be the greatest of lay leaders, deacons, priests, and bishops. The church has suffered much from those who want to be a Great Bishop and no less from those who want to make their mark as a scholar or a pastor, priest, and teacher. This is why the word from scripture about working together matters. We work together with lay leaders, clergy colleagues, and most importantly the Holy Spirit. Your ministry is not now, nor will it ever be, about you. Our common call is not to achieve great things for God. Our common call is to faithfully follow Jesus. In any key decisions in ministry, ask the question of what faithfulness to Jesus looks like in this moment. Respond as well as you can with what you know at that time and trust God with the rest. This is the life of faith and so it is the life of ministry.

To this call to faithfulness, I need to add counter-intuitive wisdom from G.K. Chesterton, “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”

I say this to describe what fidelity looks like in the real day-to-day work of serving God through the church: “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” There is much in ministry that is worth doing and doing well including prayer, reading scripture, teaching classes, leading Bible studies, planning liturgies, giving sermons, visiting the sick and shuts ins, being with those at the end of their life, then caring for their families after a death, not to mention stewardship campaigns and budget meetings. All of these and so much more need you to do them to the best of your ability. But if they are worth doing well, they are also worth doing poorly.

For example, you must have spiritual disciplines which you maintain in order to nourish you from the deep springs of living water which they offer. But when you have two funerals during the week and Sunday is coming fast while you are trying to finish preparing the confirmands for the Bishop’s visit, it is okay if morning devotions replace Morning Prayer, or you intercede for those on your prayer list as you drive to the funeral home. Be gentle on yourself, not everything can be done equally well every day. Sermons need more time than seems possible, and sometimes you simply won’t be able to give them all they need. As your liturgics professor has taught you, “Done is better than good.” The Holy Spirit will bless what you can do that week. Faithfulness is the goal, not greatness. Don’t let your idea of the perfect prevent the possible.

The church has suffered enough from narcissists with a messianic complex. You and I have been wounded and we have experienced healing, but we are not The Healer. Those of us who want to do this work over the long haul without getting close to that narcissistic terrain need people with whom we can share our real struggles. Get a WhatsApp, GroupMe, or private Facebook group for your sake and the sake of the church. A therapist, a spiritual director, a colleague group, activities and friends not connected with the church—these are essentials rather than options—as are spiritual disciplines that nourish your faith day-by-day.

Being gentle on yourself is not an excuse to drop your private prayers and devotions and leave the reading of scripture to sermon prep alone. That is not what steadfast devotion looks like. Yet the ebb and flow of ministry means doing all things well will always be beyond your grasp.

“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly,” also, quite surprisingly, applies to love. The most important part of serving God in the Church is to love your people, those in your congregation and those in the community around your church. This is at the heart of any call to follow Jesus who distilled all the Law and the Prophets to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.” 

Loving your neighbor includes everyone made in the image and likeness of God, so it certainly includes the person who is chairing the parking lot conversations that have turned far less than charitable. Loving your people is everything, and it is, therefore, worth doing badly on the days when you can’t love them perfectly. Love is an act of will, so choose to love them even when it is hardest to see the image of God within them. Jesus gave his life for the salvation of the person making your life difficult. You will find a way back to loving him or her if you decide to do so and ask God to give you the grace to love. The person most difficult to love can also be yourself. You are also in need of the grace and mercy you want for others. You too need this loving kindness. This matters because the Gospel is not “get your act together and God could possibly come to love you.” The wonderfully Good News we get the joy to share is that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. 

The fate of the church does not depend on you, or even on all of us together. Yet our faithfulness does matter. The deepest center of our call is to fall in love with the God who made us and loves us again and again and again and in so doing remain steadfast in servant ministry, knowing that God is the one to give the growth. When you can manage this balancing act of ministry well, do so delighting in the knowledge that God is doing more than you could ever accomplish on your own. 

And on all the days when this call seems much too heavy, remember that the church is not yours to save and, “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” Pray. Read the Bible. Reflect with your spiritual director. Share your sorrows with your colleagues. Muddle through as best you can and occasionally pause and take note of the ways the Holy Spirit keeps showing up in your life. The hours and days can be so very long, but the years will pass quickly as God works in, through, and around you, and all those on your team, to build up the Body of Christ. In this there is great joy.

Amen.

An Easter Message from Bishop Logue

Easter 2024
The Rt. Rev. Frank S. Logue
Bishop, Episcopal Diocese of Georgia

One April morning while hiking on the Appalachian Trail in Tennessee, Victoria and I endured hypothermic conditions in an unexpected snowstorm. It had been raining when we ducked into an old barn that served as a trail shelter. During the night, the temperature dropped. Pelting rain turned to heavy snow with the official snowfall count at 13 inches.

We hunkered down in our sleeping bags all day hoping for better weather in the morning. We were not properly geared up for a winter backcountry trip as we had packed to hike the whole AT in a single hike. The next day brought more wind and cold. Victoria and I left the sheltered confines of the barn as the wind drove through our insufficient layers of clothes.

Finding our way was a serious issue. The Appalachian Trail is marked by an unbroken chain of two-inch by six-inch white paint marks which are the common thread that holds together the 2,150-mile path from Georgia to Maine. This system of paint marks is the perfect solution to marking a trail until you are thigh deep in snow and every tree is powder coated with snow blown by wind. The gusts that day were reported to exceed 35 miles per hour.

This was the most difficult time we faced in terms of making sure we were on the path, but it was far from the only time. What you do when you realize you have lost your way is to find the last clear white paint blaze and look for signs of where to go next.  

The Gospels record many of the incidents when Jesus’ first followers came to see that their Rabbi was not just a great teacher, but truly the Messiah, the Son of God. But the whole trajectory of the Jesus Movement as they understood it up until then, came grinding to a halt when one of their own betrayed their teacher. Most everyone scattered into the night. The next day, the unimaginable happened. The one they knew to be God made man was put to death on a cross. And so, in the face of their own pain and fear, they went back to the last white paint blaze. They gathered back in the Upper Room where the previous night’s Passover must have seemed so long ago.

The resurrected Jesus would, of course, reveal himself to them all, even rounding up the lost sheep, like Thomas, who missed his first appearance in the Upper Room. In the years that followed, they followed the way of Jesus in the face of persecution and even death. And when they were uncertain, or afraid, they could always return to the places they had last seen God show up as confirmation that they remained on The Way of Jesus.

That bitter cold April morning on the Appalachian Trail in Tennessee, Victoria and I set out unsure of how the hike would go with the markers covered in snow. The oddest thing happened. A hunting dog that had clearly been waiting out the storm in the shelter below us now proceeded to lead us as if it were our pet out for a hike, running up ahead and then coming back to us. The hunting dog was adept at working its way around and over the drifted snow. The snow was usually calf deep, with occasional drifts that were thigh deep for me and hip deep for Victoria, when it was at its worst.

As we hiked in the bone-numbing cold of a driving wind, we came to see that the dog unerringly knew the path as from time to time we did find another white paint blaze. While crossing over a grass-topped mountain, the dog cut down hard to the left off the mountain while the well-worn trail, though covered in snow, clearly continued straight ahead. We trusted that the dog knew the way, so we descended steeply from the ridge into ever-deepening snow. At the tree line, we saw it. A white paint blaze showed through the mostly snow-blasted bark on a tree. That odd encounter with a dog became not a coincidence, but a God-incident, in which we saw we should remain on the Appalachian Trail to the end.

These God moments are meaningful, but they are not ever present. Each day or even every week will not give you an incontrovertible sign of God’s presence. When I hit a time where I want God to show up but fail to feel the Spirit’s presence, I look back on recent occasions when I have seen the Holy Spirit showing off and I know I remain on the right path. I trust that if I venture in the wrong direction, that God will reveal that as well.

How did God last show up in your life? Look for the signs of God’s presence in the weeks to come. Treasure the times in which God has been real for you as the risen Jesus is with you during this season of Easter, through the times when you don’t feel it and in the moments when you do. God’s presence and power are with you always, even to the end of the age.

May the Lord bless you and keep you; make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you and give you peace. Amen.

+Frank

The Rt. Rev. Frank S. Logue
Bishop, Episcopal Diocese of Georgia
Easter 2024

Waking from the Nightmare

A sermon from the Rt. Rev. Frank S. Logue for the reaffirmation of ordination vows
Trinity Episcopal Church in Statesboro, Georgia on March 25, 2024
St. Anne’s Episcopal Church in Tifton, Georgia on March 26, 2024


Waking from the Nightmare
A Homily for the Reaffirmation of Ordination Vows
Philippians 2:3–11

Saul lies in the dust on the road to Damascus. Stopped in his angry tracks by a light from heaven that flashes around him, he hears a voice saying, 

“Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”

“Who are you, Lord?”

“I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.”

Saul now knows that everything he once knew with certainty was an illusion. He thought he was fighting the heretics on behalf of a vengeful God. His self-righteous quest was designed to both appease an angry God and propel him into the religious elite. His rigid religiosity left him blinded to the grace of God found in Jesus.

Then God speaks to Ananias in a vision to send him to Saul. When Ananias lays hands on him, Saul has something like scales fall from his eyes. Saul awakens from the nightmare to see the world anew.

In a carefully crafted passage in his Letter to the Philippians, the one-time persecutor of those on The Way writes, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.”

Paul is writing about metanoia, which literally means to have an “after mind” or your mind after being reconfigured in a metamorphosis like the one he experienced on the road to Damascus. We describe this type of transformation as a change of heart and mind. Translators like to opt for the most economical way of conveying a concept with a single word standing in for another single word. So that the word “repent” stood in for a change in how someone sees the world and their place in it. Jesus began his public ministry with the brief proclamation: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” 

The word repent is metanoia in the Greek, which encompasses repentance, but means so much more. The aftermind or converted or transformed mind refers to seeing everything in a completely new way. This is more like waking from a nightmare to see the world rightly. This change of heart was perhaps best captured in a Neil Diamond song made into a hit by The Monkeys. It became a hit again thanks to the greatest movie credits of all time at the end of Shrek. You know the words:

I thought love was only true in fairy tales
Meant for someone else, but not for me
Love was out to get me
That’s the way it seemed
Disappointment haunted all my dreams

This is a description of the Before Mind. Our thinking pattern before the metamorphosis. Then a moment in time causes the singer to have their perceptions of the world changed forever. This After Mind is described in this unforgettable chorus:

 Then I saw her face, now I’m a believer
Not a trace of doubt in my mind
I’m in love
I’m a believer, I couldn’t leave her if I tried

This same transformation happens to Saul when he encounters Jesus, comes to know him for who he is, and falls in love. This change of heart and mind is what happens to Andrew, Simon Peter, James, and John that has them walk away from their nets. This moment of recognition of the truth of the Good News of Jesus changes the heart of Mary Magdalene, who becomes the apostle to the apostles after Jesus’ resurrection. This change in seeing the world causes the first followers of Jesus to face persecution and even death for the love of God they had found in their savior. Down through the centuries, we see saints in every age in whose lives we find a metanoia, a revolution, that takes over their hearts and minds after which life is never, ever the same.

This right view of the world is not the dominant perspective. We serve communities where people made in the image and likeness of God are trapped in a nightmare. The evidence is there with addictions of every kind, not just to alcohol and drugs both legal and illegal, but in people whose justifying stories are found in work, romance, exercise, parenting, and more. In his book Seculosity, David Zahl details how with organized religion declining, people fill the void in their lives by making other everyday pursuits into a form of worship. As everyone is entranced by the same illusion of self-sufficiency and a need to control, this can be difficult to see, but through our Gospel lenses, we know the truth that we don’t have to earn or deserve the love of God we have found in Jesus. We don’t have to prove ourselves to be enough, as Jesus is enough.

This is where Saul, the promising young man who wanted to be successful as a religious leader, can lend a hand. In the chapter after our reading, Paul would tell the church in Philippi, “Whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”

Compared to knowing Jesus, Paul came to see that everything he had achieved was “rubbish.” That’s the cleanest word the NRSV translators could come up with. The venerable King James Version didn’t mince words as Paul tells it like it is, “I have suffered the loss of all things and count them but dung.” 

This is Paul with the after-mind that followed his conversion seeing that he was addicted to the esteem of others. The reality is that if we decide that what matters is to be successful, then we jump on a never-ending treadmill. Someone always has more and has it better. Life, even life in the church, becomes a contest, and we find ourselves never measuring up. Paul describes that way of life with a poop emoji. Compared to the surpassing grace of God, striving for success is a load of crap.

We know that love is not only true in fairy tales. It is not just for someone else, but for you. The surpassing knowledge of the love of God found in the face of Jesus is yours now. 

The grace is that others coming to experience this same conversion of heart and mind does not depend on dazzling homiletical prowess or stunning liturgies that make the Gospel real. There is, of course, nothing wrong with good preaching and beautiful liturgies as long as we know that everything that needs to be done has already been done by Jesus. The metamorphosis we long for people to experience is Holy Spirit work. You can’t earn it. You can’t deserve it. But you can share this love of God with others. They need to awaken from the nightmare of the endless treadmill of deserving. They need to awaken to experience the reality of God’s love.

Our common call is not to achieve great things for God. Our common call is to faithfully follow Jesus. This call we are gathered today to renew is a call to fall in love over and over and over again. For we have seen the love of God in the face of Jesus and we couldn’t leave that love if we tried.

Amen. 

Testify to the Light – A Mass of the Resurrection sermon for Louise Shipps

Louise Huntington Shipps

The Rt. Rev. Frank S. Logue gave this sermon at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Clemson, South Carolina on March 9, 2024.

Testify to the Light
A Sermon for the Mass of the Resurrection for Louise Huntington Shipps
Revelation 21:1-17 and John 1:1-14

We begin in the dark.

“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.”

Formless. Dark. Then comes the spark of creation and God calls light out of the darkness in these first three verses of sacred scripture.

Our Gospel reading echoes this ancient theme in the luminous prologue of John’s Gospel which retells the story of creation, starting in the same place as Genesis, “In the beginning.” 

The evangelist writes, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

He goes on to tell us, “What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

In the moment of creation, light shines in the darkness.

We gather to give thanks to God for the life of Louise Huntington Shipps, who through her art, as through her whole life of selfless service, testified to the light of the glory of God shining in the face of Jesus. The moment of creation is such an apt text for Louise. Trained as a commercial artist, graduating cum laude from Boston University, she knew how to bring life to a blank canvas. Across decades she created drawings, paintings, and collages that gave a window into her perspective on life. She would teach others to nurture that same creative spark at St. Pius X High School in Savannah, the Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art in Augusta, and in hands on workshops at Kaunga, a Episcopal Conference Center in the mountains of western North Carolina. Her reverence of God and love of art were further inspired by her travels around the world bringing Louise to focus solely on the highly structured process of writing icons in the Greek and Russian Orthodox style. 

Beginning in 1987, she took a series of trips to Russia where she learned of theology written in paint in a series of definite steps. She studied for five years with a Russian iconographer who lived in New York, learning to write the images beginning with the darkest tones, working toward the light. 

In 2006, Louise told a reporter from the Savannah Morning News, “When you get involved in Eastern iconography you study church history, art, spirituality and theology. It’s a step-by-step process of enlightenment and inner illumination.”

Enlightenment. This move from darkness to light is wired into creation from its first moments. 

In our reading from Revelation, we move to the new heaven and the new earth. In this text, we find embedded, a different shift from dark to light as the grief we know in our earthly lives is met with the presence and power of the Holy Trinity. We read of the age to come:

God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.

We gather in mourning for the loss of a dear friend, mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. She lived a very long and extraordinarily full life and yet there is the pain of grief.

After her recent fall, when doctors and nurses were working to return her to health and it became clear that might not be the path this time, I was reminded of an email I received from Bishop Harry Shipps in 2016 as he learned his lungs were riddled with cancer cells from asbestos. He had been a steady correspondent with me for 19 years on the day he sent the email telling me that this would likely end his life. I wrote to Louise’s daughter, Rebecca, who had been a steady daily presence at her side with my recollection of this email. I said, “I recall your father saying something to the effect of given what they are telling me, it is time to turn toward the sunset.”

I was right about Harry trusting in the sure and certain hope he held in Jesus Christ, but I had the image reversed. Harry was married to an iconographer, who knew well that we don’t walk toward darkness, but toward the light. I found his email this week. He wrote of the issues that bear on his remaining time as being, “Quality of life for me and also for dear Louise.” He said, 

“If either deteriorates too far, I will end treatment and walk proudly into this glorious sunrise. 90 plus wonderful years have been given me and 63 years of delight with dear Louise.”

Harry knew death not as darkness, but as light.
Not a sunset, but a glorious sunrise.

This is the theology that supported every icon Louise ever wrote. Shadows moving toward light. Chaos moving toward order. Grief moving toward the enlightenment that comes from knowing that nothing can or ever will separate us from the love of God. This is the rock on which Harry and Louise Shipps anchored their hope.

Here I need to confess, that Bishop Shipps did not like the way I preach at funerals. In many years of sharing sermons, he was not unkind even as he was crystal clear. He said I preach funerals with too much said about the person who has died rather than focusing on the purpose of a sermon in a Mass of the Resurrection, which is to point to the light of the glory of God that we find in Jesus. My words to you today are to be a straightforward proclamation of the Gospel with a slight nod to Louise while the emphasis is on the salvation we find in Jesus and the trust we can have that what we now see is not all that there is. The same God who called light out of the darkness, will wipe every tear from our eyes.

But we gather to mourn his dear Louise and I trust he will forgive me this indulgence of seeing the mark of the creator in the soul of an artist. For in our illuminating glimpse of the Good News offered in our Gospel reading, we see how John the Baptist was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. We are to do this as well. And through Louise’ years of faithful service as a wife, mother, and lay minister, we see how she testified to the light. In her steadfast, loving support of Harry as priest and bishop, she testified to the light of Christ as in her loving care for Ruth, Susan, Rebecca, and David, and their children and grandchildren. In tutoring at-risk kids and volunteering at Emmaus House and many thousands of hours of serving others as if serving Jesus, she testified to the light of Christ.

Louise found a wonderful home here in Clemson – and most especially here at Holy Trinity—when she moved here after her husband’s death to be closer to her daughter. Rebecca tells me you opened your arms to her, and she became one of your own. She also grew especially fond of St. Paul’s, your “mother church” in Pendleton, where she often attended Sunday evenings services. 

And even here, she dedicated space in her apartment for a studio as she continued to create as long as she could, icons that begin with finely ground red clay as a basecoat, covered with layer on layer, seven layers deep until heaven touches earth in 23-carat gold, burnished to shine. 

We gather in grief even as we celebrate a life well lived. But we do so knowing that God will wipe every tear from our eyes. For “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

Louise has turned toward the light of the glorious sunrise. In every time of grief and loss and pain, we too can have that inner illumination that comes from faith in Jesus. For we know that the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we too have seen his glory, full of grace and truth. 

We begin in the dark. By the grace of God, we end in the light.

Amen. 

A Ministering Community

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A Ministering Community

The Rt. Rev. Frank S. Logue gave this sermon at Trinity Episcopal Church in Cochran, Georgia on May 20, 2023.

A Ministering Community
A sermon for the ordination of Shayna Warren Cranford to the Sacred Order of Deacons
2 Corinthians 4:1-6

“It is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” In this verse from our reading from the 2nd Letter to the Christians in Corinth, the moment of creation as God called forth light in the darkness fuses with what the Holy Trinity does in baptism making all things new. If we continued reading the epistle it would make this plain in adding in the next chapter, “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:17-18).

God is making all things new in Jesus and for those of us who are baptized Christians, we are each called to the ministry of reconciliation until all humanity is reconciled with God and one another. The grace, mercy, and love we have found in Jesus is for everyone. You have never met a single person who was not fearfully and wonderfully made in the image and likeness of God. You have not known anyone who God does not know fully and love completely, even as God wants better for each of us than the mess we can make of our lives. This is great and glorious Good News. And yet, we can still find that our friends and neighbors find this hard to believe as what they have encountered in church is something far less than Amazing Grace.

Given Shayna’s first experiences of church, it is a wonder we have arrived at this day. Growing up in the community of Cary, church is never far away. For Shayna, it was in her backyard at Mount Calvary Church. Shayna wanted to go to church and yet there in Sunday School she met that wonderful and sacred mystery – the Body of Christ, that is the church –embodied in mean little boys jumping off the table and trying to kick her.

The teacher passed out envelopes of all the “Christian” things you had done that week, such as whether you read your Sunday School lesson, brought your Bible to church, and placed money in the envelope. She had nothing to check, but the boys who kicked her had checked every box, and were on the chart showing perfect attendance, and they knew the answers to every question about Bible stories.

I am not bashing the Baptists here. We all know people who show up to church each Sunday with Bible (or Book of Common Prayer) in hand whose lives don’t seem to shine with the light of the glory of God. There is a reason why in a world that so needs to experience the love of God, people around us are sure the one place they won’t find the answers to our broken and hurting world is in a Christian church.

There are more twists and turns to Shayna’s journey to this day but suffice to say they included moments when the church assured her of judgment, without sharing the same assuredness of forgiveness and mercy offered in Jesus. God’s will sounded cruel, heartless…as mean as boys kicking you in Sunday School.

After meeting Dave at college, falling in love and marrying, the two tried to find a church home only to discover that they were miserable sinners as they had their feet metaphorically dangled over the flames of hell. While raising kids, they took a break from church. That is when Shayna’s old softball coach’s pleas to go to church with him broke through. Dale Jones persistent invitation finally reached the point where she could not keep turning him down. Shayna says of coming into this beautiful church, “I remember that first visit so well. Yes, we were a little overwhelmed with keeping up with the prayer book, and the kneeling and standing. But, [she added] we felt the love, the genuine spirit of the people, the closeness of God. I truly felt the spirit of Jesus.”

Within weeks, their kids were acolytes and as I have heard Dave say it on multiple occasions, “We have been Episcopalian our entire life and didn’t know it.”

They had arrived not in any Episcopal Church, but here at Trinity. The recent history of this church offers an important context for today’s ordination. Shayna is being raised up from Trinity to be first a deacon and then a priest in the midst of this same community. That is not the usual path for priests in the Episcopal Church, but it began with a bold experiment by Bishop Henry Louttit, who served as the Bishop of the Diocese of Georgia from 1995-2010. Bishop Louttit was very much involved directly in the process of Liturgical Renewal that gave us the 1979 Book of Common Prayer with its strong emphasis on baptism. His convention addresses and his preaching focused on evangelism and church growth, as he lifted up “the ministry of all the baptized” and “mutual ministry”.

Mutual Ministry was an approach he learned from the Diocese of Northern Michigan. In this way of being church, the congregation is not seen as a community headed by a minister, but a ministering community that encourages all baptized Christians to use their gifts both in the church and in the community. The worship of the church certainly matters, but the main focus of ministry is seen as daily life. Every baptized person is empowered by the Holy Spirit to serve where they are deployed in their family, with their group of friends, and among their co-workers as Christ’s agent in the world.

Bishop Louttit could immediately see how this could benefit Episcopalians in South Georgia. 27 years ago, he asked a delegation to travel to The UP – the Upper Penisula of Michigan, to learn more firsthand. That group of four included two Episcopal priests together with Joy Fisher, then a lay member of the diocesan Standing Committee, and Dr. John Pasto who were both from here at Trinity.

At the next diocesan convention, held in 1997, Bishop Louttit invited Bishop Thomas Ray of Northern Michigan to address the clergy and delegates to share this concept of a community of ministers. In his bishop’s address that year, Bishop Louttit said, “In many, if not all places, we have got to learn that the parish ministry cannot be done by paid staff.

We have to use the gifts of all our members, in both the nurturing and priestly ministry to the members of the congregation, and in the diaconal service of the congregation in Christ’s name to those in desperate need in our counties.”

The next year, he told the convention that Trinity in Cochran was ready to take the next step. In time, Joy Fisher, George Porter, and Vernon Wiggins would discern calls to the priesthood and be formed locally and ordained together. During their time of formation, Bishop Louttit told the 2001 convention, “Trinity Church, Cochran has shown amazing imagination, commitment, and a willingness to risk and try new ways of being the church in order for the church that is so valuable in their own lives to be healthy in their community.”

This church would still later raise up Shayna’s old softball coach, Dale Jones, for ordination during Bishop Scott Benhase’s episcopacy. Shayna arrives here on this day of her ordination to the Sacred Order of Deacons having come to know the Episcopal Church very well, but she has only been a member in a church where every priest she has known was lifted up by Trinity to serve this church. She is called to be a minister in this community of ministers.

What Shayna brings to her ministry is a deep knowledge of Bleckley County and a longing to share the love of God as found in Jesus. In her heart of hearts, she longs to feed the members of this church in word and sacrament so that each one can serve Christ through serving others with the gifts God has given them. She is called to be a priest in this place, rooted in the soil of this corner of the Vineyard that she knows so well. So, why then did I ask you earlier if it is your will that Shayna be ordained as a deacon, and you all said, “It is!” as if you don’t really want her to be ordained a priest, right now?

That is because serving as a deacon is the essential next step in her becoming a priest and we want that next step for her. This time of being a deacon in preparation for the priesthood is no less than six months. My intention, with the endorsement of the Commission on Ministry and the consent of the Standing Committee will be to ordain Shayna a priest in December.

We ordain her a deacon as the Church, in its wisdom, doesn’t trust anyone to be a priest who has not spent time living into serving others, particularly the poor, the weak, the sick, and the lonely. That is why centuries of practice among the many millions of Christians in not just our Anglican Communion, but also the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran and other churches ordain a priest in training as a deacon first. We don’t intend this to diminish the Sacred Order of Deacons, but to show how vitally important servant ministry is to every follower of Jesus in any Christian community.

The work of real deacons is the work of a lifetime. Shayna will serve as a deacon during this time of further preparation for the priesthood. This is not just in line with church tradition, but also with the example of our Lord. Our Gospel reading for this day recounts a dispute arising among Jesus’ disciples as to which of them was to be regarded as the greatest. Jesus reminded them that they are not to look to the example of the world. He said, “Rather the greatest among you must become like the youngest, and the leader like one who serves.” Then he brought this home in saying, “I am among you as one who serves.”

Yet here at Trinity with its history of Mutual Ministry, we all know in our bones that Shayna is not to serve others on behalf of or instead of us. Trinity is a ministering community encouraging all baptized Christians to use their gifts both here in the church and as importantly in the community. Every one of us is to care for all in need and that need is vast. Shayna has a particular role, but everyone shares the call to the ministry of reconciliation.

There are still kids growing up right here on the buckle of the Bible Belt hearing plenty of judgment who need to know that God knows them fully and loves them completely. There are plenty of adults beat up by the fear of God who need to rediscover the grace of God. For God is still bringing forth light in the darkness and calling us to speak love to hate. “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.” When the baptized each make this ministry their own, nothing can stop God’s love.

Amen.

From the Cradle to the Grave and Beyond

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The Rt. Rev. Frank S. Logue gave this sermon at Calvary Episcopal Church in Americus, Georgia on January 9, 2023.

From the cradle to the grave and beyond

A sermon for the funeral of the Rev. John Lane
Revelation 21:2-7 and John 14:1-6

We gather as a people who mourn, in the confidence that our friend and brother, Deacon Johnny Lane, is with Jesus.

Our reading from the Book of Revelation tells of a coming time when God “will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.”

We are not to that time of the Kingdom of God. Now we still mourn. It hurts so bad to get news of a cancer diagnosis and then so quickly, John is taken from us. But Deacon John was not taken from Jesus. He has passed through death to the life eternal, where he is with his savior. In his dying days, his faith did not dim. We can be strengthened by John’s faith.

This was faith he learned in the cradle. Born at home, in the little Central Florida settlement of Clay Sink, the entire population were his family by blood and marriage. He was at birth added to the cradle roll of Clay Sink Baptist Church. While his family would move around the Lakeland area, church was a constant for his parents, for Johnny, and his four brothers and three sisters. He was a steady presence in Sunday School, sang in the youth choir, and took part in all the activities for youth. He made his public confession of faith at the church in Kathleen, Florida, where four generations of his family are buried.

His family was oriented to their community and their country as well. During the Second World, his parents placed three blue stars in the front window, giving thanks when all returned home with the blue star being replaced with a gold one.

This idea of service to a great good was significant for John, who saw in the parable where Jesus took a coin in the Temple and told those questioning him about whether they had to pay taxes something I had not seen before. Jesus said render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and what unto God what is God’s. John saw in this, his savior teaching citizenship. We are to be good citizen of the Kingdom of God and a good citizen of this world in which we live.

Life changed when his father died in 1948. John was the only one still at home. His mother went to work and, on graduating from high school, John joined the Navy. He chased the American Dream and after four years in the Navy, he married, earned an Electrical Engineering degree from the University of Florida and landed a job with Western Electric. To know and love John Lane is to appreciate his engineering brain. Very loving and caring, he could seem stoic when his brain that was so adept at problem-solving would have him working to solve a problem in logical steps. But then there is also his quick wit and his big smile.

Work went well. He moved around a bit, serving the Navy again, now as a contractor. During this time, he and his wife adopted Ricky and a few years later, Tricia. They joined a Baptist Church, but travel for work prevented him from connecting there. In time, his first marriage came apart at the seams and ended in divorce. God does not create the tragedies in our lives, but God does use what happens in our life to enter in. God works all things together for the good for those who love the Lord and are called according to His purpose. God used the divorce to bring John closer.

In time, he met Beth. As they decided to marry, John said they more importantly committed to each other that Christ and the Church were going to become permanent members of their life together. They have not missed many services in the 45 years since that decision. With five children in their blended family and grandchildren on their way, life was good.

John had been a faithful Baptist. He became an Episcopalian the old fashioned way, just like I did. He married one. John said that he told Beth, “It doesn’t matter to me where we go to church as long as we go.” Beth told him, “It does matter to me. I’m a cradle Episcopalian. We will go to the Episcopal Church.” We are all most appreciative Beth!

They found their church home right here at Calvary where Bishop Paul Reeves confirmed John in 1980. Beth sang in the choir, served on the Altar Guild, and was active in the Episcopal Church Women. John became a lay reader and a lay eucharistic minister. Never having lost his community-oriented upbringing, John also worked in the food pantry and with the soup kitchen. He said he worked with the children from the barely potty trained to preschool. The next thing you know, his heart for servant ministry had John taking the Eucharist to shut-ins and helping to organize a chaplaincy program at Sumter Regional Hospital. Feeling called to the ministry of a deacon, he entered discernment and then formation and was ordained here on November 11, 1990.

Across the next decades of servant ministry, John continued to faithfully take the church out into the world and to bring the needs he saw in the communities he served to the attention of the church. He served here at Calvary and then for a year at St.  Stephens in Leesburg. Next, he went to St. John and St. Mark in Albany, where worked in the food pantry, taught Sunday School, and worked with the acolytes.

He went back to St. Stephens to assist Father Bill Stewart as he worked on the steps to faithfully close that church, before going to Christ Church in Cordele. There he served as the Deacon in Charge of Worship on the Water, their summer outreach ministry. I loved serving with John on the resort dock on Lake Blackshear. He was always so passionate about that ministry and so grateful for assistance. To speak of John’s ministry is to also speak of how John and Beth have been a team. He was living his best life when he and Beth were helping other to get set up for Worship on the Water. In a Hawaiian shirt clergy shirt greeting the congregation arriving by boat.

John reflected in 2010 on what was then more than 30 years of ministry, writing that his ministry reminded him of the scene with Jesus on the beach with Peter. This was after Peter’s denied he even knew Jesus. On the other side of the cross and the resurrection, Jesus asks him three times, “Do you love me.” Three times, Peter says “Yes Lord, I love you.” Each time, Jesus told Peter, “Then feed my sheep.” John looking back on years of serving the need through organizing and managing food pantries and soup kitchens. Years of working on providing low-cost housing. Years of being a servant to those who would otherwise, be lost and left out. In all these ways, Deacon John faithfully fed the sheep that the Holy Spirit sent his way.

In our Gospel reading we hear Jesus telling his first followers, “Do not let your hearts be trouble.” He goes on to say, “I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”

John has been with Jesus from the cradle to the grave and now is with Jesus beyond this life, into the life eternal. We mourn, because we have lost him, but we mourn as those with the same sure and certain hope that he held on to even in his last days. We pray for Beth, his beloved wife and partner in life and ministry; and we pray for his children, Steve, Rebecca, David, and Tricia; and we pray for all of us who mourn.

As we mourn John, we can honor him in a way befitting a deacon. When you miss him, pick up some food to drop by a food pantry or volunteer to serve in a soup kitchen. Not only will these actions honor Deacon John Lane, these steps to assist those in need will continue his servant ministry as you feed the sheep as Jesus taught us to do.

Amen.

Elegant. Exquisite. Refined. Rare. – A sermon for Virginia Maxwell’s funeral

The Rt. Rev. Frank S. Logue preached this sermon at Christ Church in Savannah, Georgia on December 16, 2022.

Elegant. Exquisite. Refined. Rare.
A sermon for Virginia Maxwell’s Funeral
Wisdom 3:1-5,9; Psalm 139:1-11; Romans 8:14-39; and John 10:11-16

Elegant. Exquisite. Refined. Rare.

If you did not know Virginia Maxwell and you heard those of us who knew her and love her talking, it would be easy to see the surface of the words and miss the fullness of their meaning. Of course, no one could describe Virginia without saying elegant or gracious. If someone tried, we would know they had never met her. After all, George, her husband of 62 years loved to say, “Ginny has more grace in her little finger than I have in my whole body.” And we knew he didn’t have that much grace either.

Yet this fails to capture the liveliness of a woman of great depth. With a playful spirit and a great sense of humor, you just never knew what she was going to say. Of George’s call to ministry coming after he had settled well into the family’s furniture business, she said, “We were convinced it was a call from God, because we would have never thought of it.”

She and George were a dynamic duo. The Reverend Cynthia Taylor recalled the lasting impact the Maxwells made on her parents and her family when they arrived at Holy Comforter in Sumter, South Carolina, in the mid-1960s. The low church parish did not know what to do with a Father Maxwell, much less a priest who would show up for a New Year’s Eve Party in a black clergy suit acting as if he did not have a party hat perched on his head. Beside him, Ginny dazzled in the perfect cocktail dress for the occasion. During that time, the Maxwells made a principled, Gospel-based stand, for integration as they took the implications of their faith seriously. Reflecting on the difference they made in her parent’s lives, Cynthia said of the Maxwells, that they paid attention to their lives and the lives of others. They gave you permission to look at your life, which tended to lead to people changing for the better.

Ordination gives one an entrée into someone’s life in important moments. I sat with Virginia after Father Maxwell’s fall, and we talked a long while as it seemed he was leaving the hospital for his heavenly home rather than returning to their house on Calhoun Square. Being with her then revealed to me what y’all know so well, Virginia had a living faith in a risen Lord.

Our reading from Wisdom tells us that, “the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God…In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died…but they are at peace.” Ginny knew that her beloved husband belonged to God and whether he lived or he died, he would be with Jesus.

As Paul wrote to the church in Rome, “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?”

Paul knew both God’s love and persecution. We know of five occasions when Paul was given 39 lashes with a whip, which was the harshest sentence minus one. Three times Paul was beaten with rods. He was stoned once and shipwrecked three times in his travels. And out of experiencing God’s love in the midst of this, the Apostle wrote that none of these things could separate us from the love of Christ.

“No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Virginia could sit by the beside of her husband of 62 years, not with vague wishful thinking, but with a sure and certain hope founded on a lifetime of prayer, reading scripture, and putting her faith into action. Experience taught her that the Gospel is true—death is real and so is resurrection. For followers of Jesus live not as people without hope, but as those who have in this life glimpsed God’s faithfulness so many times, we know we can trust no matter the circumstances.

Virginia enjoyed the support of a small prayer group that met faithfully for more than 40 years, usually in the home of Bill and Liz Sprague. Neither Ginny nor Liz were from Savannah and so they shared that perspective. The group would sit in four chairs facing one another, drink coffee, talk about what was going on in their lives, often with their children. And Mrs. Sprague told me something I will share just with you, as long as you promise not to tell anyone. They would also share a little gossip cloaked in concern and prayer.

Perhaps no small prayer group has faced division like this one as they found themselves on opposite sides of a fault line that would divide this church. Even as Ginny and Liz’ husbands held to positions that would be adjudicated by the Georgia Supreme Court, the women gathered still. What held them together, their love for each other and faith in Jesus, was stronger than what might have separated them.

And what did Liz see in a friend with whom she shared everything in difficult times? She said Virginia was unselfish. She would do anything she could for you to a greater degree than most of us. And importantly, Virginia made everything more fun.

But her life was not without trials. Virginia’s last years were difficult as they are for any of us whose memories fade. Even when you can meet your beloved daughter as if for the first time, not one of us can be lost as our whole loves are held in the heart of the God who made us and knows us so well. As the Psalmist writes,

LORD, you have searched me out and known me;
you know my sitting down and my rising up;
you discern my thoughts from afar.

You trace my journeys and my resting-places
and are acquainted with all my ways.

Indeed, there is not a word on my lips,
but you, O LORD, know it altogether (Psalm 139:1-3)

Not all is lost. It can’t be as our whole lives live in the memories of God. I join the Apostle Paul in the conviction “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

This faith in the resurrection is not just about some glad morning when this life is o’er when we fly away to heaven. Not being separated from the love of God will be evident then. The bedrock trust that Jesus is with us always matters most in the here and now when we face adversity. Christians do not have a Get-out-of-trouble-free card. We are as likely to end up facing tragedy as much as anyone else. What we have is a living faith in a risen Lord. We have the knowledge of who we are because we have come to know whose we are. And knowing that, we know we can never be lost.

George said his Mom became more fully herself in some ways in recent years as with the loss of a filter, she was much funnier more often, as the humor she always saw, but sometimes held back, came flooding out. As so much was lost, Virginia remained.

Jesus said, “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep.”

“I know my own.” Jesus knew Ginny well. She who could see the good in everybody was seeing Jesus in those around her, just as we all saw Jesus in her.

“And my own know me.” Ginny knew Jesus. Her active faith had her pursuing her savior her whole life not just intellectually, but also with her heart in serving him through caring for others. She was, of course, not perfect, but she was willing to be perfected by Christ as she did her best to put her beliefs into practice, usually behind the scenes, not taking a lead role, but making every group she was a part of more effective.

In all this, she had a mature understanding of God through reflecting on how the Holy Spirit had been present with her and those around her. And even as her memories faded, her daughter Anne said, of course she still knew the Good Shepherd who was ever with her.

Virginia Maxwell was and remains Christ’s own, a sheep of his own fold, a lamb of his own flock, a sinner of his own redeeming. And Jesus has received her into the arms of his mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light. We know this as we saw in her life, a trust in Jesus that in its simplicity and depth was and ever shall be a faith that is:

Elegant. Exquisite. Refined. Rare.

Amen.

Going Home from Lambeth

In every congregation of the Diocese of Georgia, I know people who disagree with each other profoundly on politics (and sports which is even more difficult) who are grateful to worship together and miss one another if someone is not in church. I value this so much. We differ in many ways, but we all know that we need Jesus and we need each other. I have seen this writ large in gathering with more than 650 bishops from 165 countries at the Lambeth Conference.

One reminder that kept popping up throughout the Conference is the Five Marks of Mission, which are a common framework for Anglicans from the Melanesian Islands to Angola to Brazil but virtually never referenced in the Episcopal Church. The content will not surprise you:

The mission of the Church is the mission of Christ

  • Tell: To proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom
  • Teach: To teach, baptise and nurture new believers.
  • Tend: To respond to human need by loving service.
  • Transform: To seek to transform unjust structures of society, to challenge violence of every kind and to pursue peace and reconciliation.
  • Treasure: To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth .

And this is what binds us when unanimity fails: one Lord, one faith, one baptism. We are all reformed and catholic, we love the scriptures and the sacraments and at our best we love one another.

When we gathered here, Archbishop Welby said, “You are the shepherds of your flock as I am the shepherd of the flock that I serve. Let us not act in a way that disgraces our witness. Speak frankly, but in love.”

I know we have been candid with one another. I know deep division remains. Yet, we spoke in love and honored our witness to that first proclamation, “Jesus is Lord.” While on retreat in Canterbury Cathedral, I saw graves and monuments all around, the site where an Archbishop of Canterbury was martyred and a king repented. I found myself contemplating the differences that must have existed between all the people those monuments honor. What came to mind was the praise song, “Jesus, Jesus, there is something about that name. Kings and kingdoms shall all pass away, but there is something about that name.”

Last evening, in a bit of serendipity, I came back to the dorm from the Eucharist walking, holding hands, and talking with the Archbishop of South Sudan, on a lovely late evening in Kent with Canterbury Cathedral at our backs and a return home in front of us. Two bishops from very different contexts with different views of a Jesus shaped life, but with the most important thing in common: we are both beloved children of God, united by one Lord, one faith, one baptism.

The Anglican Communion and the Lambeth Conference are contingent, temporary. As is our Diocese of Georgia. The degree to which we keep Jesus at the center determines the eternal significance of what we do. This time away has me longing to be with y’all as we continue following Jesus in this Anglican way that connects us to siblings around the globe.

pax et bonum,
+Frank

A Report from the Lambeth Conference

“Like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house” —1 Peter 2:5a

I am at the Lambeth Conference of Bishops of the Anglican Communion with more than 650 bishops and more than 460 spouses from 165 countries. Our time together includes a deep dive into the First Letter of Peter led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. This week Bishop Hosam Rafa Naoum, the Bishop of Jerusalem and the Middle East, who I met at his church in 2018 before either of us were elected as bishops, told me then and repeated again to a gathering this week that people go to the Holy Land to see the stones, but need to meet the living stones, the Christians of the Holy Land. Now here at Canterbury Cathedral, an ancient site of pilgrimage, I have enjoyed this historic place, but am being transformed by the living stones, the bishops and spouses from around the world.

I am in a small group Bible Study like no other as the Archbishop of Canterbury, who as an evangelical places a very high priority for scripture, opens up a passage for us. Then I gather with a group facilitated by a bishop from Kenya and meet with bishops from Northern India, South Sudan, Zimbabwe, and England. You get a passage to consider and soon you are hearing about a group of people faced with: how can we forgive the people who killed our families as we think God is calling us to do? Or how do I navigate my role as President of the Council of Churches with a Dictator who does not want to hear the truth, but my role is to speak it? There are so many more transformative conversations I have enjoyed in my time here. Like Sunday evening when I had a long talk with a 21-year old man from Sri Lanka who is a cradle member of our Church of South India, and learned of the ways his faith has been tested and yet he hears the Holy Spirit calling him to reach those hurt by the church who struggle with the same questions he encountered.

I am finding this time so humbling. The problems we face in Central and South Georgia are put into perspective by dedicated followers of Jesus who love Word and Sacrament as we do and face daily challenges we can not imagine. This is the 15th Lambeth Conference since the first in 1867. While the provinces of the Anglican Communion, such as our Episcopal Church, are independent, we are also deeply interdependent and while this conference has no authority over us, the moral authority over time makes a difference.

I have so enjoyed seeing people around our church, like Bishop Lloyd Allen of Honduras who is part of the Episcopal Church. I enjoyed serving with him on Executive Council and we both have daughters in Vet School. And then there is Bishop Mark Strange the Primus of Scotland who was in my Zoom small group in the lead up to this conference and who took part some in our pilgrimage to Scotland before Lambeth. I have also been amazed by the providence of finding myself in line for the procession on Sunday alongside a bishop to whom I introduced myself. I learned he is an assisting bishop in Kibondo, Tanzania, where I served as an intern while in seminary in 1998. We have never met and yet we know so many of the same people! What a delight.

I am here because you elected me as your bishop and I represent you here in a worldwide gathering. I remember Bishop Harry Shipps talking glowingly of meeting colleagues from around the world and coming home to share his joy in being a member of the Anglican Communion. I remember Bishop Henry and Jan Louttit being here in 2008 for the last Lambeth Conference on our behalf. (The Lambeth Conference was not held during Bishop Scott Benhase’s episcopacy).

Know that you are connected to millions of followers of Jesus around the globe who get what it is to be Prayer Book people. They face hardships we don’t have to endure and are supported by the same Jesus we know and love. This is such a comfort, a gift, and a sign of grace.

pax et bonum,
+Frank

The Logues represent Georgia at the Lambeth Conference

As the Bishops of the Anglican Communion meet together for the first time since 2008, Bishop Frank and Victoria Logue are representing the Diocese of Georgia at the historic meeting. First convened by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1867, these conferences are an essential part of establishing and maintaining connections with Anglicans around the world. With the theme of ‘God’s Church for God’s World – walking, listening and witnessing together,’ the conference will explore what it means for the Anglican Communion to be responsive to the needs of a 21st Century world.

The conference takes place across venues at the University of Kent, Canterbury Cathedral, and Lambeth Palace from July 26 through August 8. The more than 650 bishops and 460 spouses represent dioceses from around 165 countries of the Anglican Communion – one of the largest Christian communities in the world.

Victoria is on the leadership team for the “House of Spouse” as the spouses of the House of Bishops are known. She will take part in a variety of events at Lambeth that will include any of the spouses of the Episcopal Church who will be present for the conference as well as spouses from around the Communion. The spouse gatherings are an important part of the meeting.

Bishops of Georgia have made the trip since our second bishop, the Rt. Rev. John W. Beckwith (1831-1890) attended two Lambeth Conferences. Bishop Logue began his preparation last August when he started meeting online monthly with a group of 15 bishops from northern India to the Yukon, including the primates of the churches of Scotland and Canada. This week, that group will meet in person for a Bible Study and then a retreat within Canterbury Cathedral to begin the meeting.

The announced goal of the conference is to resource, inspire, and encourage Bishops in their local ministries; supporting their pastoral and leadership roles in church life and mission as we all follow Jesus. In an unexpected move, the Archbishop of Canterbury sent out a 58-page document to affirm as a body. The text is problematic as it asks for clear stands together where there are deeply held differences. Most notably, it initially asked those in attendance to reaffirm Lambeth resolution I.10, from 1998, which is against extending all of the sacraments to all baptized Christians. The concerns many bishops raised, including Bishop Logue, led to a revision, which itself may be the subject of further debate. This late change is shifting the character of the meeting even as bishops are checking in on site for the conference. Please hold the Logues in prayer as they worship and discern alongside their colleagues from around the world a faithful way to continue to walk together given these differences, while honoring the dignity of all God’s children.

+Frank
The Rt. Rev. Frank S. Logue, Bishop of Georgia

The Logues renew an historic connection to Aberdeen

This week, Bishop Frank and Victoria Logue travel to the Diocese of Aberdeen and Orkney in Scotland as part of a journey to further renew an historic connection. This trip is thanks to his ordination and consecration as bishop being significantly downsized to prevent spreading COVID-19.

In the spring of 2020, Presiding Bishop Michael Curry saw how the pandemic led to history was repeating itself when planning was underway to consecrate a handful of bishops with only the minimal people present as required by canons. He was reminded of the Scottish Episcopal Church’s cathedral in Aberdeen where a small gathering consecrated Samuel Seabury as the first American Bishop in November 1784. Bishop Curry referred to the liturgies in pandemic as “Aberdeen Consecrations.” When Bishop Logue became the first person made a bishop with a congregation largely online, the image was even clearer as Communications Manager Liz Williams’ photo of the moment with just three bishops laying on hands looked more like a stained glass window in Aberdeen than any consecration in memory.

Today, Seabury is better know as being a rival to Alexander Hamilton thanks to a Broadway Musical, but his consecration in Scotland became a catalyst for the interconnectedness we see Anglicanism developing in the centuries. Seabury had been duly elected Bishop of Connecticut, but when he went to England seeking consecration, he was told he would have to pledge allegiance to the King of the consecration to go forward. This was a non-starter for a bishop of the new nation. The independent streak that runs deep in Scotland, made it natural for the bishops there who had refused to swear and oath to William and Mary to consecrate a bishop with no such requirement. The Scottish Episcopal Church and the Episcopal Church in American forged close ties in the 18th century that have remained.

To honor this history and further renew the connection, Bishop Logue, together with Bishop Deon Johnson of Missouri, Bishop Glenda Curry of Alabama, and Bishop Craig Loya of Minnesota will travel this week to Scotland for a series of visits in the Diocese of Aberdeen and Orkney. Bishop Logue will preach at St. Andrew’s in Alford this coming Sunday as a part of this visit.

From Scotland, the Logues will travel south to England to represent the Diocese of Georgia at the Lambeth Conference, a gathering more than 650 Anglican bishops from around the world. Bishop Henry and Jan Louttit attended the most recent Lambeth meeting in 2008. We will share more on the Lambeth Conference in next week.

Holy Week 1961 – Maundy Thursday

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A sermon by the Rt. Rev. Albert Rhett Stuart, Bishop of Georgia

In the beginning God in love created the world and man. It is His initiative. Man rejects the love of God and separates himself from God. God takes the initiative and seeks to restore man to the purpose of His creation. This is the long story of Moses and the prophets. Finally, God still with the initiative “Made Himself of no reputation and took upon Him the form of a servant and was made in the likeness of man: and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled Himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross.”

The work of our redemption which the Lord Christ accomplished on the Cross this week is made available to us through His church. He established the Church for this purpose. It is a divine organism established by His love directed toward us for our salvation.

It is from God to us. We seem to get confused about this and think of the Church as our creation directed toward God. We are so accustomed to forming clubs and societies that we confuse the Church with this sort of thing. When we do, we are really saying that we can save ourselves. We think and act toward the Church just as we do toward any human club that we contract to organize. We are prior to it, create it, control it just as we do a garden club or service club. We can then determine its standards and decide who can belong to it. The sacraments become customs and sentimental traditions. Baptism is a pretty service where we dedicate our children to Christian ideals, which seems desirable but not really essential. Communion is a memorial or reminder of the historic event of the Crucifixion and, like Memorial Day when we annually remember those who died for their country, it is proper and fitting to do this once a year.

The Church is the Body of Christ into which we are incorporated by Baptism—it is an organism like the family which is prior to us. We are born into it by Baptism in which we are given new life in Christ. It is a means for present identification of our lives with Jesus Christ and His Victory over sin.

Ever since man has been conscious of God, he has longed to identify himself with God, but he has also been conscious of his sinfulness and unworthiness which has separated him from God. He has tried every conceivable kind of gift and sacrifice, including the willingness to sacrifice his own life, to bridge the gap. But always he has realized that nothing he could give could ever really be acceptable because his gift was spoiled by the very sin for which he was trying to atone. A sinful creature could never hope to give a perfect sacrifice for sin. For countless ages man has known this. When Jesus, the perfect man, died on the Cross, the perfect sacrifice was offered. At last, the way was open for man to offer the perfect sacrifice. In the Holy Communion we participate in the perfect sacrifice and the way of atonement with God is open to us. We join our imperfect offerings to Christ’s perfect offering and ours are acceptable and sufficient because of His.

 

“There was no other good enough
To pay the price of sin.
He only could unlock the gate
Of Heaven to let us in.”

 

In our meditation on the sacrifice of Christ on our behalf we have noted that the essence of the sacrifice was the devotion of His will to God the Father manifested in the obedience of His life and the suffering of His death. From His first recorded words—“Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” to the high water mark on the Cross—“Father unto Thy hands I commend my spirit”—there was complete and perfect obedience of life to the will of God. If we are to participate in that victory, this sacrifice of obedience has to be reproduced in our lives. The task of the Christian is to learn to live in the service and love of God as Christ did.

The Christian life is a life of sacrifice or self-giving to God and of obedience to His will. This has been made possible by our incorporation in the body of Christ, the Church, and by the operation of His grace through the sacraments of the Church. The Holy Communion is an act of obedience. We offer to God ourselves—“Here we offer and present unto Thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls, and bodies to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice.” Humbly we lay down beside Christ’s perfect offering our own poor imperfect offering, ourselves, that it may be accepted in Him and made sufficient by His offering. Then we receive from Him the power of His resurrection that it may be possible for us in our own lives to fulfill the meaning and promise of our offering.

Here is the link between the Christian’s worship and the Christian’s life. Our worship and our life are not two different things—they are one and the same viewed from different aspects. A Christian life is a God-ward life. It is a life of faith in God and of self-offering to God. Our worship expresses the inward principle of our life. That which is expressed in our Eucharist, the attitude of prayer and faith, and self-oblation—that is to be the attitude of our life in the world. The meaning of the Eucharist is worked out in our daily life and the meaning of our daily life is focused and expressed in the Eucharist—it is all an offering to God. We lift up before God the one, true, pure sacrifice—the life and death of Jesus Christ, perfect obedience in the service of God and man. We lay down beside this spotless offering, the stained and impure offering of ourselves that it may be accepted in Him and then we go forth and spend our lives in the service of God and man.

Holy Week 1961 – Wednesday

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A sermon by the Rt. Rev. Albert Rhett Stuart, Bishop of Georgia

“There is a green hill far away
Without a city wall,
Where the dear Lord was crucified
Who died to save us all.”

 

How did He by dying save us all? The Cross is a symbol of victory. What is it in the death on the Cross that makes it a victory? What is meant by saying Christ on the Cross is “the power of God unto salvation?” The Cross, we have been saying this week, is the encounter of human sin and divine love. More than that, it is the greatest victory ever won. This is a great mystery and yet we must try once more to deepen our understanding of it. How did He by dying save us? How is the Cross a victory?

Jesus’ death on the Cross was neither accidental nor unfortunate. It was a divine necessity freely and willingly undertaken. Why the necessity? Why insist that there can be no forgiveness of the sins I commit apart from the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ? After all we ourselves treat those who do us wrong with an easy-going tolerance that we expect from God—“That’s all right,” we say, “I’ll forgive you—Let’s forget about it.” In the same way many people take divine forgiveness for granted.

Let’s think about that for a moment. Whenever I do anything wrong, others besides myself are involved—my family, my school, my profession, my country, my fellow Christians. If a bank clerk forges the books and embezzles funds, the bank must express its disapproval and disown the act at once by punishing the offender—otherwise it will lose its own good name. Here lies the primary necessity for all punishment. It is the means by which a community disowns certain acts done by its members in order to vindicate and maintain its standards. When we sin, God is implicated for we are all His children and His workmanship and depend on Him for every breath we draw. Whenever we use the power He gives us wrongly and commit sin with that power God Himself is involved in our sin and responsible for it unless He disowns it by some clear and definite act of disapproval. This means that sin must be punished. It cannot be ignored by a God of righteousness if He is to remain righteous. He who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity cannot just say, “That’s all right—I forgive you.” If God is to remain good, He must disown the bad we do and bad we are.

Whatever else forgiveness means it cannot mean failing to punish sin. The Cross is sin receiving its terrible punishment. There on the green hill far away we see the wrath of God against sin. It can never afterwards be said that God ignores sin or condones it. Nor can there ever afterwards be any excuse for us to ignore or make light of sin. When the last laugh about sin has died away and the last ounces of pleasure has been extracted from it, one fact still remains—the fact of Jesus hanging on the Cross.

Sin cannot be ignored by a God of righteousness. Sinners cannot be abandoned by a God of love. So, God solves the problem by coming to the rescue Himself. “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself.” In order to vindicate His righteousness and uphold the Standard of eternal Goodness, God wills that sin shall be punished. But He will also that He Himself shall bear the punishment. Punisher and Punished are one. We must constantly remember that the Father and the Son are one, acting with one mind and one will. He who knew no sin was “made to be sin on your behalf”. This is the bold way the New Testament expresses the trust that Jesus felt the burden of human sin as though it were His own. “Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows—He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities—and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” Jesus deliberately accepts the suffering and the burden of human guilt, and He staggers beneath the weight of it.

There can be no forgiveness until God has been delivered from all complicity in the sin He forgives. But even then, forgiveness is impossible until the power of evil has been broken, and the poisonous infection it sets up has been cauterized and prevented from spreading. Left to itself evil breeds further evil. Whenever we do wrong, we create an evil infection which passes beyond our control. What has been the effect of my sins in other peoples’ lives? Some have been led to sin by my example. In others the wrong I did them has borne fruit in bitterness and resentment, in others it has led to cynicism and disillusionment. Suppose I have a friend who loves me very greatly and is truly good. When I do him some wrong, he will not pretend it does not matter. He hates the sinful thing in me. He accepts the pain of the injury and bears it without allowing it to embitter him or make any difference in his love to me. Then the power of evil I initiated is absorbed and neutralized and destroyed because it is brought up against something stronger than itself which it cannot overcome and on which it has no effect, and which takes away the power to do further evil.

All our sins whoever else may be involved are ultimately sins against God. Forgiveness is solely possible if we can be assured that our sins have failed to have any effect on the divine goodness by separating Him from us. This is exactly what Christ shows us on the Cross—“Forgive them, they know not what they do”. There He bears the injury we do Him in such a way that the power of evil is neutralized, absorbed, prevented from spreading further. Throughout His Passion there was never a trace of resentment, anger, or thought of revenge. “When he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not.” Love went on loving in spite of all the hatred. Goodness continued to be good in spite of all the assault of evil. That is the victory of the Cross. Evil was conquered when instead of cursing His enemies He prayed for their forgiveness.

For the first time since man first sinned, evil failed to find any response in man. Never for a split second did the power of evil move the Christ one hair’s breadth from the Father’s will. The Cross is the crowning act of a life of undefeated goodness. The Cross is not a defeat needing the Resurrection to reverse it. It is a victory so decisive and permanent that the Resurrection follows inevitably to seal and confirm it. The shout of triumph from the Cross is “It is accomplished”—man’s forgiveness, restoration, salvation—accomplished.

The Christian Faith unhesitatingly asserts that as a result of the mighty work accomplished by Christ on the Cross, the relationship in which we stand to God has been radically and permanently changed. On the Cross, God who was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself found the means of forgiving us completely. This is the incredibly Good News. A general pardon, free and complete is granted to all who have sinned—not for anything we have done or could do to deserve it but simply of God’s love and at His own cost. He paid the price, and His free pardon is waiting for all who will accept it.

 

“There was no other good enough
To pay the price of sin
He only could unlock the gate
Of heaven to let us in.”

 

Most ethical religions make righteousness the condition of any approach to God. There can be no divine welcome for the sinner until he has ceased to be a sinner. But the Lord Christ receives us and reconciles us first in order to reform us afterwards. He welcomes us as we are for “God commendeth his love towards us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us” to transform us from sinners into Sons.

 

Holy Week 1961 – Tuesday

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A sermon by the Rt. Rev. Albert Rhett Stuart, Bishop of Georgia

The Cross of Jesus Christ is a present reality and will be until human sin is no more.

 

“There is a green hill far away
Without a city wall
Where the dear Lord was crucified
Who died to save us all.”

 

Human sin and divine love come face to face not only once on a green hill far away. All through human history they are face to face because God is love and man is sinful.

We are fond of labelling ourselves and classifying our neighbors. We divide people into groups, classes, races, nations. The Church knows only one class – sinners by thought, word and deed. The Church takes us all in – the preacher in the pulpit, the worshipper in the pew, the man in the street 0 “there is no health in us.” If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.

We are set in a space age with fast changing horizons and social patterns. Our needs are tremendous but none is so great as the need to face the reality of our sinfulness. Unless we face this need the Cross of Jesus Christ is meaningless to us.

It is not fashionable or in good taste to many today, even in the Church, to talk about sin. We find defensive rationalizations and thought patterns in psychology to dull our sense of sin and insulate us from facing this grim reality.

One of these rationalizations has to do with the relation of sin to violation of conscience. It is far from true to say that sin means going contrary to one’s conscience.  Conscience is the product of training and social custom and cannot be an infallible guide. To be conscientious is not enough, for conscience depends upon the standard in which one has been trained. Phillip the Second was very conscientious when he introduced the Spanish Inquisition into the Netherlands. There is good reason to believe that Bloody Mary and other religious persecutors were likewise conscientious. I suppose that Hitler and his Master Race theory and his liquidation of the Jews or the fanatical prejudice that bombs a Negro home are examples of conscientiousness. To let your conscience be your guide and feel that you are living an exemplary life is dubious practice. We may be guilty of grievous sin by neglecting the plain duty of educating conscience, or we may disregard conscience so consistently that our standards may have change unconsciously, or we may have developed a selective conscience which conveniently starts and stops. A conscience to be trusted must be checked with reference to some infallible moral standard. That standard for the Christian is the mind of Jesus Christ which reveals the holy will and righteous character of Almighty God. Deliberately to do violence to the mind and spirit of Jesus Christ is sin, however we much we protest that our conscience is clear.

Another realization that blinds us to the fact of sin is the way we think of the Moral Code. The word Moral comes from a Latin root which means custom or tradition. Morals are customs which have come to be considered unbreakable. It is not necessarily sinful to defy or break custom or depart from tradition. Sometimes it may be sinful no to do. It is dangerous to identify sin with violation of the Moral Code which a particular society says ought to be obeyed. St. Paul long ago made clear that legalism alone cannot justify or condemn a man. A Moral Code is a trustworthy guide only when the principles which underlie it are based on Jesus Christ – when what it bids me to do or refrain from doing jelps me to become like Jesus Christ.

The Christian has but one means whereby he can determine beyond question whether lying, cheating, envy, malice, greed, sensuality, prejudice, and sinful. If we say they are sins because moral custom says they are, it is easy to reply that fashions in conduct are no more binding than fashions in food or dress. If we say they are sins because the conscience of man condemns them, it is easy to reply that the conscience of man once approved of human sacrifice and slavery. By means of one test only may I pass judgment – will these attitudes and practices make me such a personality as revealed in Jesus Christ. Sin is anything and every thing that prevents me or, thru me, any one else from realizing in life the holy and loving purpose of Almighty God revealed in Jesus Christ.

Another rationalization which dulls our sense of sin is the relation of sin to moral choice. I suppose all of us realize that we possess a measure of freedom and that deliberate misuse of freedom is son. But it is a mistake to confine sin to the region of free moral choice. The most fatal sins are those which lie deep in our souls to which we are not ordinarily sensitive and with which we are no longer struggling. A man may be scrupulous in what he believes to be his duty but that is not sufficient. He must believe to be his duty all that actually is his duty and that more basic question he may never have truly faced. It is sin to be disloyal to such truth as one possesses, but it is also sin to permit oneself to live in such a state of intellectual and spiritual smugness that one feels no desire to possess more and higher truth. It is sin to turn one’s back on God – it is sin also and a deeper one to live so content with the Standard of the world as to feel no need of God. To be conscious of the magnetism of goodness and to resist it is sin. It is far more subtle and greater sin to live in the presence of goodness, surrounded by goodness, undergirded by goodness and never recognize it.

You are I are sinners. This self-centeredness which is the essence of sin may not have put us in the headlines of the Press as it has some of our less fortunate brethren, but there is within each of us attitudes, habits, prejudices, antipathies, resentments, jealousies, fears which are utterly opposed to the will of holy God and the blessed mind of Christ, and there is no health in us.

Sometimes cause does not seem to produce effect. Sometimes the seed may not sprout, but the surest harvest in creation is the harvest of sin. “Sin when it has conceived bringest forth death.” We may think we are a special case but there are no special cases – “The wages of sin is death.”

The universal cry of the human heart is voice by St. Paul: “O, wretched man that I am – who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” The answer to this cry of humanity, of your heart and mind is the Cross of Jesus Christ –

 

“Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world.”
“he died that we might be forgiven
He died to make us good
That we might to at last to heaven
Save by his precious blood.”

 

Holy Week 1961 – Monday

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A sermon by the Rt. Rev. Albert Rhett Stuart, Bishop of Georgia

“There is a green hill far away
Without a city wall
Where the dear Lord was crucified
Who died to save us all.”

Ever since you learned to sing this hymn for children written over 100 years ago in Ireland to explain the Passion or Suffering of our Lord, you have wondered, I am sure, as I have about the meaning of the Cross of Jesus Christ. Every year in Passiontide the Church asks us to stop and think again upon the suffering and death of Jesus Christ, knowing that the full meaning of the Cross is beyond our reach, and yet knowing that the Cross means our salvation.

Did you ever read a biography of some famous man in which no less than a third of the space is devoted to a detailed narrative of his death? So far as I know there is only one such biography. It is the Gospel Story of Jesus Christ. In most cases we read pages of a man’s achievements and in the last chapter we have a few pages about the man’s death.

Not so with the Gospel. One third of the narrative is concerned with His death. It is obvious that from the very first Christians regarded the death of Christ as of utmost importance. In our day the world acknowledges Christ as the greatest and best teacher the world has ever known. But the early Christian writings – the Acts and the Epistles – have very little about His teaching, while there are references to His death on every page.

These references sound no note of sorrow or regret. There is no suggestion of how much was lost to the world by the early death of Jesus of Nazareth. Normally when a great personality dies we think of the loss to the world and of how much might have been accomplished if he lived longer. No New Testament writer ever implies “If Jesus had lived longer He would have transformed the world.” Instead the New Testament glories in His death – never doubts that He accomplished the work which He came to do and that His death was essential to His work. He came to save mankind and He accomplished it by dying on the Cross. His dying words “It is finished” do not mean “It is ended” but “It is accomplished”.

The whole Gospel Message centers on the Cross. St. Paul summed it up by saying “We preach Christ crucified.” Missionaries went out to the world proclaiming not Christ the teacher, but Christ the Crucified Savior. By His death He won for mankind salvation and redemption. What was it in Christ’s death that made it the power of God unto Salvation? The truth is that the full meaning of the death of Jesus cannot be explained any more than any of the great truths of the Christian religion can be completely understood or explained. We can do a lot of thinking about them and we can make some advance in grasping what they mean for us but we cannot understand them completely – How God became Man in Jesus, Son of Mary – how bread and wine becomes the Blessed Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ, how Christ dying on the Cross brought our redemption – these are blessed truths of the Christian religion. We can understand parts of these truths, but the whole truth us more than any human mind can grasp or express.

 

“We may not know, we cannot tell
What pains he had to bear
But we believe it was for us
He hung and suffered there.”

 

The crucifixion of Jesus Christ outside a city wall is a fact of history. It happened on a Friday some nineteen hundred and thirty years ago. It is a manifestation on earth of certain truths which are eternal. Chief among these truths are the nature of God and the nature of sin. God is love not only today but eternally. God’s love for His creatures is always poured forth as it was in the life and death of Jesus. The incarnate life was not a unique instance of Divine love. It was a unique showing forth of that love in history. When we see the love of God in Jesus we know what the love of God means always.

But the Cross reveals also the nature of sin. People talk lightly about sin as they talk lightly about the love of God. It is supposed that sin means doing evil things or at least things that cause harm and suffering. But sin is something much deeper than any outward action. It lies within ourselves. It is putting self before God. It means choosing our won way instead of God’s way. Sin is self-will. The Cross shows the real nature of sin. It shows what sun will do when brought face to face with God. Sin found Jesus standing right in its path. He would make no terms with it. So sin tried to destroy Him by nailing Him to the Cross. Sin, therefore, is something inherently hostile to God. In the Crucifixion, behind the particular sins of particular men, there was the underlying selfishness and self-will which is the essence of sin and which is rooted deep in the human heart. All the ordinary sins of ordinary men spring from this root – greed, hatred, malice, ill-will, unkindness, slander, lust, and all the rest have their source in self-will, self-pleasing, self-love. The sin that is in ordinary reputable human nature found itself face to face with the love of God in Jesus Christ and the result was the Cross.

Human sin and Divine love came face to face not once only on a green hill far away. All through human history they are face to face. And always something must happen of which the Cross is the symbol. The least part of the pain of the Cross was the physical suffering. The horror of the rejection of God’s love was the agony of the Cross. And this helps us to understand in a small way what men’s sins always mean to God. The historical fact of the Crucifixion is a symbol of what is eternally true. All men, when they sin, “crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh.” In a very real sense the Cross of Jesus Christ is a present reality and will be until human sin is no more.


“O dearly, dearly has he loved!
And we must love him too
And trust in his redeeming blood
And try His works to do.”

Hope for those in deep water

Bishop Frank Logue preached this sermon at Christ Church Episcopal in Savannah, Georgia, on February 6, 2022.

Hope for those in deep water
Luke 5:1-11

For those who are stretched thin, stressed out, over-committed, and really struggling, there is some very Good News in our scripture readings. These texts offer a lifeline for those who are in too deep from the perspective of people who don’t wonder if they measure up, they each know they are not enough for what they face.

Here is the quick recap: The Prophet Isaiah starts us off by saying, “Woe is me! I am lost.” He finds himself in God’s presence and knows he is unworthy. Then Paul describes himself at “Unfit” for the work before him.

Simon Peter hasn’t had the best of nights either. He tells Jesus, “We have worked all night long but have caught nothing,” only to have the Rabbi Messiah-splain fishing to a guy who has done nothing else for a living. Then after a miraculous catch, he falls at Jesus’ feet saying, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!”

Nothing sounded like Good News to me until I looked at the Gospel passage from below, well below the waters of the Sea of Galilee, seeing a net descending. Okay, I know, a story of nets bursting with fish may not sound like Good News for the fish, but there is something deeper going on here. I stumbled into grace and love when I realized what Jesus did not say.

I thought Jesus was going to tell the fisher folk, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” That is not what Jesus said. Instead, as Deacon Patti read, Jesus says, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” I looked it up in the original Greek and found that there is even more nuance in the ancient text which says, “you will be catching people alive.”

For those of us who have often heard the phrase “Fishers of men,” fear not. That is in the Bible. In telling this story, Matthew and Mark both use that same play on words, of fishing for humans. It is in the Bible. But the Gospel writer in the physician Luke and he diagnoses what is going on here differently. At the start of his Gospel he told us that others have written the story of Jesus, but he interviewed people who were there in the beginning and is writing an orderly account of Jesus’ whole life and ministry. Luke knew Jesus to be the Good Shepherd who would leave the safe and sound 99 sheep to rescue the one left out in the night alone.

Luke saw how Jesus treated the many people who had gotten themselves in too deep—from Matthew and Zaccheus who found the tax racket unfulfilling, to a woman about to be put to death for adultery, and the thief dying next to him on a Roman cross. Luke knew that Jesus went to the lepers shunned by others and prayed for them. Jesus stopped by a well in Samaria and encountered a woman seeing herself through the eyes of a judgmental community so that she would not get water when others would be there.

Luke looked ahead to the time when these followers of Jesus would be preaching and teaching long after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension. He didn’t see a boat full of dying fish, but a church full of people scooped up to safety after having found themselves lost in the chaos of the deep. Luke emphasized the good news by saying the followers of Jesus would bring people up from the depths alive.

There is no us and them here—Us, the people who are okay, and them, the people who don’t have their lives in order. I used to think that there were two times in life—the times when I had my act together and the times when life was suddenly spinning out of control. But we all come to see that control is an illusion. For people who feel like they have everything under control and life is just perfect will come to the day when they can’t hold it together and that is not the end. For followers of Jesus, when our carefully maintained façade crumbles, God is there, loving the person behind the persona.

Christians, dare I say, even Episcopalians, don’t have inherently easier lives with no rough spots. Following Jesus, won’t keep us out of a car wreck or health crisis. We end up in the emergency room or ICU like anyone else. And we too can put our hope in good grades, the perfect school, the right spouse or house or car or career—not bad in themselves, actually quite good, these are still no safety net. So we can end up like Simon Peter in the Gospel who he has been working hard with nothing that lasts to show for it.

Yet, what we do have as followers of Jesus is a relationship with the God who is working to redeem our world one wild and precious life at a time. What we have is the knowledge that everything we now see and experience is not all there is. The creator of the cosmos knows you by name, has always loved you, will never give up on you, and wants better for you. We have the hope in the God who goes to the depths of human existence to love, truly love, those who see themselves as lost, unfit, and sinful. God is always offering a chance for a clean slate, a fresh start, and will never leave you to the chaos that threatens to consume you. God will send a net.

This passage of a call to follow Jesus also serves as a reminder that the love of God is not supposed to be like a pocket warmer, that keeps you warm while leaving others out in the cold. Jesus did not teach us to just love God and love ourselves, though that is two thirds of what he said. Jesus also taught us to love out neighbors as ourselves. Each one of us comes into contact with people every day who don’t know how they are going to make it through the next 24 hours, much less the week ahead. We are surrounded by people are masking deep pain with prescription drugs, alcohol, workaholism, people pleasing to the point of destroying their lives, and a host of other self-defeating behaviors.

This is why I find youth ministry to be the front lines of ministry. It is a miracle people get out of middle school and high school with any shred of self asteem and that was true before the pandemic. Most people sometime between the age of 10 and 25 pick up emotional wounds that will remain festering and seeping poison into their psyches unless they can find healing.

At 40, they remember the name of the bully in sixth grade and at 50, they recall the friend who gossiped and betrayed them. Any of us can fall into replaying tapes in our heads of the harsh and cruel things others have said and see ourselves through their eyes. If you take those messages to heart, you are not seeing yourself as God sees you. God sees you as beloved.

For hurting people, the good news of Jesus is not about getting into heaven, though it is about that. The Gospel is as much about getting people out of the hell they are in now. And we can be a part of how God accomplishes this. You and I can offer listening ear, a kind word, or even (dare I say it in pandemic), a hug. We get to be a part of stopping the cycle of pain and abuse as we share love and compassion with our friends, co-workers, and family, those we are connected with closely who find life spinning out of control.

When the Holy Spirit reaches out to those who feel lost and abandoned, God uses people like you and me to make the love of God real.

We will reaffirm in just a moment, that as baptized Christians, we all share a common call to proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ as we seek and serve Christ in all persons and respect the dignity of every human being. For none of us can be truly free until we are all free. We cannot be truly at liberty while another beloved child of God is lost in the depths. Far from being a chore, showing love and compassion to someone who is hurting is how God blesses us with that same love.

Amen.

 

Eulogy for Bishop Henry I. Louttit, Jr.

The video above is set to start 38 minutes in when the liturgy begins. The sermon starts at 59:20.

A Eulogy for the funeral of the Rt. Rev. Henry I. Louttit, Jr. offered by the Rev. Lonnie Lacy at Christ Church, Savannah, on December 29, 2021.

Isaiah 11:1-9, Psalm 148, Revelation 21:2-7, and John 14:1-6

In the Episcopal Church,
our funerals force us to find Easter—
to celebrate it,
yearn for it,
hope for it—
to declare boldly the resurrection
no matter the season or the circumstance.

Even if today were Good Friday,
still, we would pull out the gold vestments,
light up the Paschal candle,
and make our song
“Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!”
because what we know, dear friends,
is that nothing can ever or will ever
overshadow the glory of Easter
and the promise of the resurrection.

But today is not Good Friday.
Instead, we find ourselves
holding an Easter liturgy
in the middle of Christmastide.

Christmas and Easter.
Incarnation and Resurrection.
Poinsettias, the Paschal Candle,
and the Real Presence of Christ
all in one place.

This, y’all, is the liturgical jackpot . . .
and Henry Louttit would be so pleased.

Here today
between the crèche and the cross
we see the whole story of the One
who was born for us,
who died for us,
who rose for us,
and who has promised to come again
to gather us, judge us, and love us
for all eternity.

Days like today—
in all their unintended intersection
and accidental beauty—
give us a vision
of the whole of God’s plan
and of the Bridge he has built for us
between this life
and the life of the world to come.

What better day could there be
to celebrate and remember our
bishop,
priest,
husband,
father,
grandfather,
brother,
uncle,
and friend
Henry Irving Louttit, Jr.?

Of course, we are not the first
to have a mystic vision
of the fulness of God’s plan
or if that Bridge that stands
between this world and the next.

As we just heard,
Isaiah had that vision, too.
So did David.
So did John.

For Isaiah it was that old stump of Jesse
springing back to life,
pointing to a day when
the wolf will lie with the lamb,
the lion will graze with the ox,
and a little child will lead them all
in a kingdom filled with peace.

For David, it was the vision
of all creation belting out God’s glory:
from the angels of the highest heaven
to the sea-monsters of the deep,
everything pouring forth
God’s eternal praise.

And for John?
For John it was that city
sparkling in the sky:
a new Jerusalem for you and me,
adorned like a bride
coming down the aisle
to meet her beloved groom.

If this collection of readings
tells us anything,
it tells us that
to see the Kingdom of God
requires imagination,
a certain kind of whimsy,
a spiritual make-believe
or mysticism.

To see the Bridge God has made
between the world as it is
and the world as it will one day be
requires a unique kind of vision.

This was the vision
our friend Henry
carried in his heart.

* * *

I imagine if I asked today,
“When was a moment in your life
when Henry Louttit showed you
the Kingdom of God
or the Bridge between
this world and the next?”
the thought-bubbles over our heads
would astonish and delight us,
make us laugh and make us cry,
and number in the thousands.

Henry Louttit saw the Kingdom of God,
and in his unique, gentle, creative way,
he pointed us to it as often as he could.

Henry saw the Kingdom of God,
and he believed it to be a place
of gentleness and peace.

Someone recently told me
of a moment at Christ Church Valdosta
when an angry neighbor of the church
came barging into Henry’s office,
yelling about something
they believed was wrong
“because God said so!”

Henry never lost his cool,
never raised his voice,
never flinched.

He just said—quietly but firmly—
“Well, I’m glad you heard
God say that so clearly.
God has not said that to me yet, though,
so for now we’re going to keep going.”

Some have said
Henry did not like confrontation,
which may be true,
but the greater truth is that he
willingly, purposely, and repeatedly
aligned himself with
the Prince of Peace.

He also had that disarming way
of speaking in the third person.

As a young priest I would get angry
and complain about this person or that,
hoping he—as my bishop—
would take my side.

Inevitably he would sit patiently,
grin, and say, “Now now.
Henry and Lonnie have known
many wonderful human beings,
and Lonnie must remember
that God loves all his children,
even when Lonnie
is frustrated with them.”

Every time!
With gentleness and peace
the voice of God would come through,
and gentleness and peace
would win every time.

Henry saw the Kingdom of God,
and he also believed it to be a place 
where everyone matters,
everyone needs each other,
and everyone has gifts to bring.

As a shy, studious introvert,
he hated church camp as a child
where everything was centered on sports,
so as an adult he helped to create
a whole new way of doing camp where
the scholars, artists, and poets among us
could also find a place,
and know themselves to be loved
and valued by the Lord Jesus
in community.

The crown jewel of his camp vision
was Camp St. Gregory,
a music camp where
kids could learn to sing
and explore their gifts for music.
The lucky ones got to take recorder lessons
with Father Louttit, and that continued
even after he became bishop.

In the 80’s and 90’s at Christ Church
he raised up women for leadership—
lay and ordained—
when others had not yet
had the courage to do so.

He cultivated teens and college students
to exercise their spiritual gifts.

As the rector of the only
Episcopal church in Valdosta,
he could have been territorial,
but instead he wholeheartedly supported
starting St. Barnabas across town,
and he welcomed with open arms
a young Stan White
and his pentecostal church
into the Episcopal fold.
And the Episcopal Church in Valdosta grew.

As our current bishop
is fond of mentioning,
when Henry became bishop
he did the unthinkable:
he put us at round tables at Convention!
With people we did not know!
And forced us to talk, and pray,
and come to know one another!

He taught us to value each other’s gifts.
He taught us to love one another.
He took what once was
a competitive ecclesiastical meeting
and turned it into our annual
diocesan family reunion.

Henry saw the Kingdom of God,
and he believed it to be a place
where worship brings
heaven and earth together
and where every altar
becomes the throne of God.

As a priest he was a phenomenal liturgist.
This is something those of you
who only ever knew him as bishop
never really got to see in full force,
but as a priest he celebrated
the fullness of the prayer book
with that characteristic whimsy of his,
putting cacti in the windows during Lent
to immerse us in the wilderness,
and baptizing people by full immersion.
(In the Episcopal Church!
Who’d’ve thought?)

He made Jesus come to life for us,
and the way he grafted the life of Jesus
onto the lives of his parishioners
permanently transformed
generations of us in Valdosta.

He taught children to hold the prayer book
and how to officiate the evening offices.

He filled dark places with candlelight
and helped us to know and believe
the mystery and majesty of God.

He gathered people together.
He truly said his prayers.
He taught us to pray, too.

And finally,
Henry saw the Kingdom of God,
and he believed it to be a place of joy.

Probably no one knew this better
than those four women
lucky enough to live with him.

We all knew Henry in one way or another,
but I suspect the most wonderful version
was the silly, joyful husband and father:

who would pretend to dance ballet
with his girls in the living room;

who once brought a bunny home
because its fur had a white band
around its neck like a clergy collar,
and taught it to use a litter box
and walk on a leash;

who played Old Maid
and wore a doily on his head
any time he lost;

who took his family on nature walks
in the mountains
and marshes
and beaches
and taught them to marvel
at God’s creation;

who instilled in Amy the librarian
his love of
literature,
learning,
and words;

in Katie the teacher
his love of
people,
empowerment,
and instruction;

and in Susan the priest
his love for the Christ’s Body the Church;

and who loved Jan:
beautiful, wonderful Jan,
who loved him back fiercely;

Jan, whom he’d encountered
plenty of times as a child
on his father’s visitations to her church
but had always been too quiet,
too shy to say hello;

Jan, whom he promised his
college friend he would “look after”
because his college friend
was dating her at the time
but had to go overseas;
(apparently Henry did an excellent job);

Jan, whom Henry adored
with a love, a gentleness, and a joy
that taught others of us
how to love our spouses, too,
and that rivaled John’s vision
of that bride and that groom
at that heavenly banquet
in the new Jerusalem.

Henry saw the Kingdom,
and he knew it to be a place
of peace and gentleness,
of unity, worship, and joy.

* * *

Somehow, ever since I was a child
I always associated Henry with C.S. Lewis.

Maybe it’s because he loved Lewis
and taught me to love him, too.

Maybe it’s because Henry’s brand
of whimsy and mysticism
often had a lot in common with Lewis’.

Or maybe it’s just because
the guy’s license plate
said “Aslan” for all those years.

But I close with a quote from the end
of Voyage of the Dawn Treader,
in which the great lion Aslan
tells Lucy and Edmund
they are now too old to return to Narnia
and must remain in our own world.

“Oh Aslan!” Lucy says.
“How can we live
never meeting you again?”

“But you shall meet me, dear one,”
said Aslan.

“Are-are you [in our world] too, Sir?”
said Edmund.

“I am,” said Aslan.
“But there I have another name.
You must learn to know me by that name.”

“Oh, Aslan,” said Lucy.
“Will you tell us how
to get into your country
from our world?”

“I shall be telling you all the time,”
said Aslan.
“But I will not tell you
how long or short the way will be;
only that it lies across a river.
But do not fear that,
for I am the great Bridge Builder.”

Brothers and sisters,
we have seen and know
the great Bridge Builder.

In our world,
he is the One
between the crèche and the cross,
who was born for us,
lived for us,
died for us,
rose for us,
and will come again for us.

He is the One
who goes before us
to prepare a place for us.

We know him by his name.

He is Jesus:
the alpha and the omega,
the way,
the truth,
and the life. 

He is both
the Bridge Builder 
AND the Bridge.

He is the One to whom
the mystics have all been pointing
all this whole time:

Isaiah with his peaceable kingdom;
David with his joyful creation;
John with his new Jerusalem;

and Henry—our beloved Henry—
with his candles and music,
with his liturgies and prayers,
with his vision of unity and
fellowship despite our divisions,
with gentleness and joy,
with whimsy and make believe,
with faith, and hope, and love.

We know Jesus better—
we see the Bridge better
and the Kingdom more clearly—
because Henry helped
to point the way.

So on this day
as Christmas and Easter collide
and we celebrate with joy
the fullness of our redemption,
rejoice . . .

Rejoice, my friends,
for today our
bishop,
priest,
husband,
father,
grandfather,
brother,
uncle,
and friend
has crossed that Bridge
and entered into Aslan’s true country.

And looking now from that distant shore,
with saints and angels
and all the company of heaven,
he forever makes his song,
“Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.”

Amen.

Good News in the Middle of the Night

A Christmas message from the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia
by the Rt. Rev. Frank S. Logue
December 25, 2021

In the middle of the night, fears rise and worries rule. Staring at the clock at three in the morning only to bargain with an anxious brain about how much sleep you can get if you fall back to sleep (right now!) only feeds the insomnia.

The search giant Google’s trend data on more than 3.5 billion searches every day worldwide offers illuminating insight into the concerns that disquiet our minds in the midnight hours. For example, “soulmate” was searched for globally more in 2021 than in any previous year. How to “maintain mental health” was searched for in much bigger numbers, which is not surprising as we were also Googling “What day is it?”

This window on the concerns that span the globe is most remarkable. In Malaysia, top searches this year show a longing for a return to normalcy amidst burnout and exhaustion. The search for affirmation by people needing to hear that they are worthy and loved has risen sharply, and is highest in Kazakhstan. Searches seeking body positivity have been more ubiquitous in 2021 than ever before. Some patterns abide, such as searches for the meaning of life which for years have risen on Sunday into Monday, as the work week looms, with a spike at 4 am.

Christmas is the story of human hopes and fears met in the night by the maker of heaven and earth coming to live as one of us. We invariably tell of Jesus’ birth as a night story. It need not be so as the Gospel writer Luke said of Joseph and Mary’s stay in Bethlehem for the census, “While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child.” Meanwhile Matthew writes of Joseph having a dream and waking to resolve to wed Mary and that after she bore a son, he named him Jesus. At right is Bishop Logue’s graffiti-style image of The Holy Family, which he painted last weekend on plywood, using spray paint and a hand-cut stencil he designed.

The birth itself need not have come in the night. I think there is an instinct that the longings of our sleepless nights are answered by a loving creator who does not stand back as righteous judge but enters into creation to reweave from within the tattered tapestry of a world turned from God. As Zechariah proclaims after the birth of his son, who we will know as John the Baptist, “In the tender compassion of our God the dawn from on high shall break upon us, to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

Through the Holy Trinity that existed before time, not staying apart, but entering creation, dawn breaks for those who feel trapped in the night. This fits with Luke, who did add the detail that the shepherds were keeping their flocks by night. Angels appeared to them, sending them searching Bethlehem for a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger, a feed box for livestock. I always see in the angels outside Bethlehem as God being revealed as a sentimental softy. For God loved the famously fallible King David, who tended sheep as a boy on these very same hills. Jesus is born in the City of David with the messengers of God are sent to shepherds.

I see it this way because the choice of revealing God’s plan to a group of shepherds made no sense in human terms. Shepherds were, along with tax collectors and some other occupations, regarded by the law of the time as little better than thieves. As they tended flocks well away from the owners of the herd, who could know how many lambs were born in a given year? It was not uncommon for shepherds to sell off some lambs and pocket the money. Shepherds were not permitted to appear in court as a witness as they were considered so unreliable. It was pure foolishness to give the greatest news of all to a group that the very people no one would believe.

The Apostle Paul would later write to the church in Corinth, “But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God” (1 Corinthians 1:27-29). God decided that becoming human meant siding with the oppressed and the outcasts and showed it by coming first to poor, lowly, and even despised people. That’s not how anyone thought a god would act. Yet God the Holy Trinity broke all the rules to fulfill a love story that was centuries in the making.

I need you to know that this is not stained glass talk from a church leader, but the reflections of a son who has spent sleepless nights this fall into winter. My Mom’s physician diagnosed her with dementia this summer. She has seen two of her seven siblings face diminishing cognitive capacity. She cared for a sister dealing with daily sundowning issues, when her sister could not recall where and when she was. I have watched how my mom bravely faces this situation she knows all too well.

I have worked with my siblings to assist our mother in keeping the life she wants as long as we can and I find myself waking in the night, worrying over the imperfect decisions and questioning the path we are on. I wonder about Google search trends as I have been among them as my own fears rise and worries try to rule my nights. I do not say this to seek sympathy as so many of us face problems we confront all day as faithfully as we can, only to find insecurities rising in the wee hours. I offer instead the empathy of a fellow worrier in the night.

What I see so clearly, even in the anxious hours, is that Christmas reveals that we are not the only ones searching in the night. In angels coming unbidden to the shepherds we see God’s longing to bring joy. Decades later, the Jewish leader Nicodemus will come to Jesus at night seeking answers. Jesus will tell him that light has come into the world and that “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

The great saint and teacher of the church, Augustine of Hippo wrote in his Confessions, “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” God is the seeker who sought to save us. God is the one who is restless, literally up with us in the night, until in a kingdom yet to come, we all find our rest in God.

As the nights grow longer, as uncertainties linger, and 2021 draws to a close, we find humans still facing their fears, looking for affirmation and for meaning and purpose all around the globe. And the joyful news of Jesus’ birth is that God did not stand back as a judge seeking to condemn. God seeks us. God entered the cosmos to offer love as a vulnerable child.

We also see that as Magi—wise ones from the East—sought a sign in the night sky, they were given one. The Magi were seekers. Their methods were unorthodox from the Jewish perspective. Yet, God called out to the Magi from the heavens leading them to Jesus. God, not the Magi, initiated their quest for a destination unknown. God guided them. The Magi played their part, of course. They did not simply stay home admiring the star in the sky. Yet all of their actions came second. It was God who was the seeker. God initiated their journey. The new star shone so brightly that they were drawn to its dawning. In this we see how our longings in the night are met by the God who made us out of love for love and still longs to connect with us in the midst of sleepless nights.

The Good News of Christmas is that this same God came and lived among us in Jesus and so knows what it is to be human. God is with my Mom as sundowning brings confusion and with me and my siblings as we wonder in the night whether we are getting it right. God is with you in the  anxieties you face even as God is with those seeking affirmation in Kazakhstan and a return to normalcy in Malaysia. Whether you are wondering what day it is or finding ways to maintain your mental health, the creator of the cosmos sees you as a beloved child, knows you by name, and is with you always.