BICENTENNIAL SERMON • SEPT 22, 2024
THE RT. REV. SAMUEL RODMAN OF THE DIOCESE OF NORTH CAROLINA
On this 200th Anniversary of your founding as a church, we begin with your namesake, St. Matthew. We begin with Matthew not only because this celebration coincides with his Saint’s Day on the calendar, yesterday, but because the theme that runs through the readings appointed for his day is one we can embrace: “Go and learn what this means – I desire mercy and not sacrifice. “
Mercy is why we are here today, God’s mercy. Our service began with a solemn remembrance of the members of this congregation who were enslaved persons when they were baptized here. This holy remembrance was not just an honoring of a painful reality embedded in our history, it was an act of contrition, an acknowledgement of the need we all share, for God’s mercy for what we have done wrong. This is the common ground that unites us, as baptized Christians, as followers of Jesus, as members of St. Matthew’s Church in Hillsborough, and as Episcopalians in North Carolina. There’s an African American spiritual that you know well that captures this faithful perspective and intention – “Standin’ in the need of prayer…”
Of course, there is a certain irony in the lyrics to this spiritual. All the verses of the spiritual point to the individual who is singing, as the person in need – “Not my brother, not my sister, not the preacher, not the deacon, not my neighbor, not the stranger… but it's me, O Lord, standin’ in the need of prayer.” Of course, we recognize that when this hymn is sung in unison, as it often is, the “me” becomes “we.” Each one of us singing that spiritual is acknowledging the need we have of prayer, of God’s mercy and forgiveness, and of the opportunity for a new beginning. So when we sing it together we might as well change the words: It’s we, It’s we, It’s we, O Lord, standin’ in the need of prayer. As Malcolm X once put it, “when the ‘I’ turns into ‘we’, illness becomes wellness.” Mercy is the path to wellness, to healing, to wholeness - God’s deepest desire for each of us and for all of us. This is the gospel promise embedded in Jesus’ teaching as he calls Matthew to follow him. “Go and learn what this means.” And the message is not just for Matthew. It’s for the Scribes and the Pharisees. It’s all about mercy.
And, when Paul in his second letter to Timothy writes about the servant of God being thoroughly equipped, he is pointing to God’s mercy. And when the author of Proverbs offers the invitation, “Trust in the Lord with your whole heart, and lean not on your own understanding”, we are being invited to embrace and be embraced by God’s mercy.
The ancient truth, which we all recognize, is that we are not actually good enough to hang out in the presence of God. We mess up, we fall short, we call this sin. But the gospel promise is that God seeks us out anyway. God’s love extends to us and expands to call us back. It’s about God’s goodness, not ours. And mercy is the manifestation of God’s goodness embracing us, even in our sinfulness and then, and this important, sets us free. Free to do things differently. Free to learn from our history. Free to turn from the lessons of the past to embrace a new and different future.
That’s why Jesus is hanging out with sinners in today’s reading. That is why he can call a tax collector, like Matthew, to become his disciple. Matthew was roughly equivalent to a slaveholder in Jesus’ day, in terms of his sinful behavior. That was before he left his old life behind in order to follow Jesus.
And, let me add just a few more words about the connection between God’s mercy and God’s goodness.
My prayers lately have been particularly focused on being “nourished with all goodness” from our collect a few Sundays back. The word goodness itself is rooted in God. God and good have the same etymological root.
Goodness comes from God and is a gift from God to us. Goodness is what strengthens us to build beloved community together. Sometimes when we watch the news or read what is going on around us on Social Media, or listen to the endless election advertisements, it can feel like goodness is in short supply.
But that collect reminds us that goodness is a part of God’s promise to us who follow Jesus. Goodness is both the gift and the evidence of the gift of God’s grace working in us, so that our work will bring forth good fruit.
Goodness is what you might call the “secret sauce” of Christian discipleship.
When I first became Rector at St. Michael’s in Milton, Massachusetts, as Christmas rolled around I was trying to think what gift I would give my staff, and I stumbled across this product called Religious Experience Hot Sauce. It was a product made in Colorado. And the varieties of spiciness were all identified by words like conversion, metanoia, apocalypse, and the hottest of the hot – the wrath. Well, in the Bible, wrath is one type of religious experience, but goodness is another.
Goodness is not always easily defined, but we all know it when we encounter it. And I believe Goodness is like the secret sauce of God’s nurturing grace - to paraphrase the words of the Prophet Micah - goodness is to do works of justice and mercy, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God. Goodness is not only the secret sauce, it is our vocation, our calling.
Which brings us to the collect from two Sundays ago: “Grant us, O Lord, to trust in you with our whole hearts; for, as you always resist the proud who confide in their own strength, so you never forsake those who make their boast of your mercy …”
Mercy is God’s gift of goodness to us when we struggle and even when we fail.
Failure has become a dirty word in our culture, but in the Gospel and in the Biblical narrative failure is actually a constant. It’s an ever-present theme. Our struggles and even our failures are what help us to turn back to God for comfort, for guidance, for mercy and forgiveness, for help and for strength. And this process is one the expressions or experiences of God’s healing power.
Which points us to the collect from Last Sunday: “O God, because without you, we are not able to please you, mercifully grant that your Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts …”
Mercy and goodness and kindness, and walking humbly with our God and with our neighbor is what y’all at St. Matthew’s have been about, in one way or another, for the past 200 years. Today, we celebrate this history in the light and hope of God’s mercy and in the spirit of faithfulness and truth telling which are at the heart of our mission - to become beloved community together.
And today, on the cusp of a new season, we give thanks for your love, your faithfulness, your deep sense of accountability and truth telling, and the grace and mercy and goodness you extended to one another and to the community around you. And on behalf of our Diocese, I thank you for not only doing this work faithfully, but fully. And for being willing to share your experience on this journey with other congregations.
Y’all are familiar with the phrase “each one teach one”? I discovered more recently that that doesn’t just apply to individuals, y’all have helped me see that “each one teach one” applies to congregations. St. Matthew’s was one of the first parishes to respond to the call to serve as a Mentor Congregation to other churches that are embarking on this journey of understanding their history and bringing it to light and telling the truth. And you have been walking with others to show them how this has shaped you for growth in grace and in mercy. What a gift.
Just this week a neighboring Rector said that, in the process of this holy work of resurrecting their history, in order to understand it and then account for it, they realized that their mission and witness as a congregation was in fact, connected to the history, mission and witness of other congregations in this Diocese. She said our salvation is caught up in the salvation of St. Titus, in Durham, and St. Matthew’s, in Hillsborough.
Making these connections is at the heart of the good and faithful vocation we all share as church! And it is at the very center of a theology known as Ubuntu on the African continent. You may be familiar with the concept of Ubuntu, where your wellbeing and safety, your freedom and salvation is connected to mine, and mine to yours. And as a congregational mentor y’all have embodied this principle of connection and of solidarity with other congregations, even as you begin your third century together.
The lessons of history are not just about looking backward. They’re also informing us about how to live life differently as followers of Jesus as we look forward.
That is why it is so appropriate that we are celebrating confirmation and reception with some new members who have joined your community of faith. They are the living reminder that this day is also about what lies ahead, for you and for us, in the Diocese of North Carolina.
So thanks be to God, for you, for your two hundred years and for your willingness to share what you have discovered as part of your journey, looking back and also looking ahead.
Thanks be to God, and thanks be to all y’all for living into this powerful, life changing, gospel promise! AMEN.