The Eternal Now
A Sermon by The Reverend Shearon Sykes Williams on The Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany, February 13th, 2022.
“Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.” Luke 6:21
What a glorious week-end this has been! Our organ dedication recital on Friday night was absolutely incredible. Our nave was packed with 350 people and there were 700 people on-line, parishioners as well as people from across the region. And Saturday morning there was a group of 50 people here, children and their parents who came for a concert and organ demonstration. The organist (who will remain unnamed) even played in a dinosaur costume. We have pictures. ☺ And finally, and best of all, this morning we will dedicate our new pipe organ to the glory of God. What a joyful, joyful occasion.
Our organ is the culmination of a vision that Saint Georgians cast 10 years ago. And we have all worked so hard to bring that vision to life, with the Holy Spirit’s inspiration and guidance. You have all given very generously and sacrificially of your time, your talent and your treasure. It began with the planning for our 2016 nave renovation. The goal was to have a worship space that maintained the architectural integrity of the original Neo-Gothic design, while also making it look and function in a way that represents our understanding of God today and how we understand ourselves in relation to God and to each other today. We believe that everyone is created in God’s image and that Jesus came to restore us to that image, so we wanted our worship space to reflect that. Coming together in the liturgy each week is one of the main ways that God restores us. Liturgy means “the work of the people” and our renovation has most definitely been a major work of the people of Saint George’s.
We called the 2016 campaign “Making a Space for All”. We were trying to create an inclusive space, a connected place, because we want to be inclusive of everyone and more connected to each other. We brought the Altar closer to the congregation as a way of embodying the reality of God’s presence in our midst, the closeness of God to each of us. And now we can gather around the Altar platform, just as the people in today’s Gospel gathered around Jesus. We receive communion to receive the healing that Jesus offers. Everyone can come whatever their physical circumstances. “Making a Space For All.”
Moving the Altar closer to the congregation also served the function of creating more space for the choir. And back in 2016, we hoped that one day, some time in the distant future, we would be able to commission a new pipe organ because our old organ was in a very bad state of disrepair. Well, God often works in surprising ways and that “one day”, “sometime in the future” came a lot sooner than we thought when we received a generous bequest from the estate of Lew and Valerie Gulick that enabled us to get started on the second phase of the renovation. The vestry took a leap of faith and trusted in the incredible generosity of our community to bring it to fullness. We commissioned Martin Pasi’s Opus 28 that you see before us this morning and we also finished some of the work that still needed to be done from the 2016 renovation, lighting, preparation of the organ chamber, acoustical work and the repair of our beloved stained-glass windows. Our largest window, the beautiful Transfiguration window over the Nelson Street door, was in danger of shattering with the next big storm, (Jesus’ chest was really bulging) so it was meticulously taken down, section by section, placed on a truck and sent to a stained-glass studio in Iowa, repaired, and then brought back and reinstalled piece by piece. All the while, Martin Pasi was hard at work building our new pipe organ in Washington state. And all of this creativity was happening during a world-wide pandemic that kept us away from worshipping in-person for over a year.
When we returned in May almost all of the 2021 renovation work had been done and then on the first Sunday in October, the pipe organ finally arrived and many of you unpacked the truck and brought in over 500,000 pipes and pieces. We watched and heard it come together over several months and the installation was finally complete on Christmas Eve. We lifted our voices as we sang Christmas hymns heralding the birth of our Savior, signaling not an end, but a new beginning, a new awareness of our mission of “Growing in God’s love to promote justice, healing and reconciliation.”
The people in our Gospel story came seeking Jesus. They wanted to be with him, to touch him, because when they touched him they felt the power of God. People came to be healed, healed of their physical and mental illnesses. They were hungry for what Jesus had to offer. They knew if they just touched him, that power would come out of him and their spirits would be restored. “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.” We need Jesus to fill us with good things. Our world is hurting, deeply, deeply hurting. We come together, Sunday after Sunday, to be filled, to touch Jesus, to be restored, and to claim hope for ourselves, for the people we love and for the world. Each of us needs the healing that only Jesus can give. And we come together to receive it so that we can offer it to others.
That’s why we did both of our renovations. That is why we have a new pipe organ. That is why we restored our stained-glass windows. They are a means to an end. They give us a glimpse of heaven now. Beauty is a doorway to holiness. We come into this beautiful space to worship, to glorify God and to be remade into the people calls us to be, a people called to grow in God’s love to promote justice, healing and reconciliation. We have created this beauty so that we can become more beautiful and so that the world may become more beautiful.
Luke’s telling of the Sermon on the Plain is beautiful. It is much simpler than the one that the Gospel of Matthew tells of Jesus preaching the Sermon on the Mount. Luke’s setting on a plain is important. Everyone is equal when they come seeking Jesus. Ragtag people from all over, people of every station in life, people like you and me. And Jesus lifts them out of their sorrows so that they can claim the joy of the Kingdom of God, not a kingdom that is far off, not just a place that we inherit one day in the future, but a kingdom that is all around us if we have eyes to see and ears to hear, the “Eternal Now” that theologian Paul Tillich talked about.
We come into this space each week to get in touch with the beauty of the Eternal Now. God being with us no matter what the circumstances and calling us to be very present to what is happening all around us and to see that God is with us in the midst of the chaos, creating the beauty of connection between human beings, the beauty of the peace that passes all understanding , the splendor of creation.
We can become aware of the Eternal Now anytime and anywhere. But we get in touch with it most profoundly when we are gathered in this sacred space on Sunday mornings, offering prayers, listening to Scripture, remembering Jesus and lifting our voices in song.
“Jesus came down with his disciples and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people. They had come to hear him and be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all of the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.” Luke 6:17-19.