Sermons from St. Martin-in-the-Fields:
Jun 05, 2022 |
Ticks in the Boxwoods
| The Rev. James H. Littrell
Ticks in the Boxwoods
Listen in to the sermon from the Rev. James H. Littrell for the Day of Pentecost, June 5, 2022.
Support the worship and ministry of St. Martin’s by giving online: stmartinec.org/give
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/
Once upon a time, there was an old (ish) retired (sort of) gay (totally) Episcopal priest who arrived, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, at a lovely--idyllic even--Episcopal church sitting in a lovely swath of greenery almost at the apex of the tallest hill in a great and ancient city (ancient by American standards anyway) in a part of the world, relatively temperate and plentifully watered, not too far but far enough from a great ocean, for millennia populated by a great variety of more or less indigenous people, most recently people who called themselves Lenape, and more recently (in human time) settled by a strange group of humans who had crossed that self-same ocean, at some risk to life and limb and, in some cases, fortune. In varying degrees, these new people had left their homes far away in search of, variously, better lives, fuller liberty, greater opportunity and perhaps fortune. Sailing up a great river from the ocean, they eventually landed and began to settle in, made rough homes, dug rough passages from pathways, and then rough streets and roads from these passages, traversed a tributary of the great river, crossed the peninsula created by the two rivers. Therein they made plans for and executed a city of sorts, a city of square parks, interlaced by parallel and perpendicular streets named for lovely green trees. Many of these people were members of a new religious society, a people who styled themselves Friends and who claimed to come in peace, seeking harmony with all God’s holy creation and all God’s creatures. Indeed, right behind me in that window back there, as many of you know, is one notion of the leader of that first settling society. William Penn his name was, and up there he is smoking a pipe of peace with his new Lenape neighbors, a pipe, he and his Society said, was of peace and brotherly love. That, in fact, is what he named the city: Philadelphia.
Like most human aspirations to perfection, the city fairly quickly fell short of its own expressed values. Faith and commerce held hands, and, yes, Indian wrestled, until Friend’s quest for a city based in and living out the loving values it espoused, collapsed under the sheer power of the vast commercial enterprises that inevitably unfolded in the land. So rich was it in abundance and resource that the urge to commerce and the concomitant necessity of ordinance to safeguard the engines of that commerce, and the power necessary to maintain order and law, all combined and simply vanquished the initial impulse to be a city of mutual love, based in the God of love and the love of God.
Time passed. The great city grew and grew and grew. The indigenous people, mutual friends though Friends may have wanted them to be, withered and perished under the onslaught of commerce and trade. There arrived others, too, non-Friends, seizing the handles of burgeoning wealth and opportunity with very little aspiration to brotherly or sisterly love as foundational in their actual lives. Some of the early Friends and then, in greater numbers, the people who arrived a little later, came to the growing city with other dark-hued humans from Africa, humans who were nonetheless numbered and registered right along with sheep and goats and cows and horses as property and as chattel. They too were harnessed, quite literally, to the great engines of commerce.
The city grew yet larger. A great war came with the great king across the ocean who thought the land and commerce and a portion of all its proceeds belonged to him. The war was fought in the name of many things, most often liberty and freedom from foreign oppression. Some said, though, that it was a war mainly about who benefited from the great abundance of the new country and from its growing wealth. The new city and country won the war, but freedom did not come to many, and certainly not to the enslaved humans of the city, who continued to help empower the great civic enterprise for yet quite a long time, even, in one way or another, right up to right now. One of them, or someone’s idea of one of them, a kneeling child, is also pictured in that window behind me, and if you haven’t looked, you perhaps should. I was shown it yesterday, and it quite literally took my breath away. Thank God for the Holy Spirit and its flames of fire!
But back to the city. The city, fueled by a continuing and abundant and growing supply of raw materials and resources arriving from every corner of the known world, continued to grow apace, and a marvelous thing happened: a steam powered engine was invented and before long there arrived in the newly uniting states (though not united until after yet another ferocious war) a thing called a railroad, vast engines and great carrier trolleys ran on steel tracks, enormous and efficient, and the spokes of this vast new thing drove out from every city in the new country into the places around and far beyond them, harvesting ever more of the abundance, and eviscerating almost every single indigenous person who stood in the way of these mighty wheels and the freight they carried.
Philadelphia was no exception. In fact, as many of you may know, the greatest railroad and the largest corporation in the world in its time was born and sustained right here, for almost a century. At the same time, some of those visionary and creative Philadelphians imagined whole new communities linked to the heart of the great city by rail, places where the makers and beneficiaries of commerce could once again have their homes and enjoy their leisure in green and pleasant environs, up in the forested hills and across the rivers’ tributaries, high above but convenient to the business of the now thriving but also very very dirty city. Churches were built in these new communities, indeed purposefully built, because churches, and especially Episcopal churches--and in the case of this particular community--not one but two Episcopal churches--churches were deemed essential in the making and preservation of an ordered and peaceful, green and pleasant and prosperous community. And thus was made the still very green and pleasant community and the church embedded in it, into which the old (ish) priest, sort of retired priest, very gay priest, unexpectedly arrived one day in May in the year 2022, 330 years after William Penn, of the Society of Friends (whom the Episcopalians and others called jeeringly Quakers because of their spirit-filled quaking manner of fervid religious speech while they gathered for worship in their Meeting houses) founded the city of Philadelphia. 330 years later.
The priest was happy, he found, to be called so suddenly out of his pandemic induced retirement (for there had indeed been, indeed still was, a terrible global pandemic, in which millions and millions of humans had and were still dying). He felt relatively safe, being shot full of a new miraculous vaccine and tucked mostly safe behind a good mask, and he was delighted - delighted - to be amongst the people of the community, whom he found to be, in his early days with them, generous of spirit, moderately adventurous, deeply concerned for the fabric and program and spiritual enterprise of their community, and mostly confident in its future.
And so this old priest, who had arrived in this idyllic place quite soon after not one, not two, but three resident priests, all of long standing, had moved on to other callings, one after another, the latest departure having been the senior priest, began to try together to gather themselves up in the bonds of God’s love in these early days. And the old priest and the community of God’s love at St. Martin’s, after a minute or two of mutual sizing one another up, began gingerly and, at least in the priest’s case, tenderly, to try to discern together a path into the future to which they were together called.
And for the old(ish) priest, the enterprise was experienced almost completely as joy, even though in those early days were full of tragedy in the community and in the nation. He was so glad to be again among loving and caring and completely imperfect human beings again. He rejoiced to himself and to his beloved Louis, his companion for lo the last 43 years, who pronounced to the priest that he seemed happy again, which made him, Louis, happy too.
And the newly arrived old(ish) priest, whose name was Jim and who people mostly called Fr. Jim began to have many wonderfully enriching and enlightening conversations, some of them delving deep into his new parishioner’s lives, some hinting at riches yet to come, one conversant even going so far as to thank him for his own imperfections, or, as that person styled them, for his slight bumbling, which they said gave them and the whole community permission to be a little less than perfect too. And that, in this community where so much perfection was often expected and even demanded, and which perhaps too often had little tolerance for the bumble, it seemed, was a little bit of grace. The old(ish) priest, anyway, had long since given up most of his aspirations to perfection and was working hard at just being an honest and helpful and competent priest and pastor as much as he could be in this slightly fraught time. So he thought a little bumbling was fine, and even if it wasn’t fine, it was, as they say, what it was; and he was who he was.
And then there came a day, it was the day before the great Feast of Pentecost: Pentecost, when all the people of God in Christ in all the whole world were to celebrate in thousands of ways and hundreds of tongues, the day long ago when, in a rush as of a violent wind and with tongues as of fire, the Divine Spirit was made manifest and palpable in the human community. The Day of Pentecost, when people of every language and across every single diverse shape and manifestation of humankind, came to know that all things could become new, and ancient hurts dissolved, and resolved, and visions for the future seen and then made real, and dreams dreamed into life, when united in God’s powerful love and filled with God’s mighty Breath, and lit up by the Fire of Christ’s love, when faithful but a little bit bewildered people became drunk on the sheer magnificence of God’s glory, and began to learn again the truth of Jesus’ promised Peace and the urgency of Jesus’ call to do the actual work of Love. And in the doing, to find God’s Peace, the Peace, the Blessed Assurance, that every now and then, abolishes the troubled heart and the fearful soul.
So it was that day, on the eve of Pentecost, when the old (ish) priest sat out there beside the columbarium on a bench surrounded by sage and boxwood for a conversation with another parishioner. And as they delved deeper into the talking, and as they did, the old priest’s companion on the bench, rather suddenly reached toward the priest’s neck, surprising the old man a little, and then asked if he could take something off the priest’s collar. “I think it might be a tick,” he said, and Father Jim said in response, “Definitely! Have at it!” And it was a tick indeed, and then shortly there appeared another on Father’s neck just above the collar, and then another on his sleeve, and then he felt a little creepy crawl up the back of his neck--another tick! And his companion said, “Yep, ticks in the boxwood. Ticks like it in the boxwood.” “Is that so,” said the old priest, rejoicing - rejoicing - that he had yet again learned a new thing, and suggesting they move quickly away from the boxwood, which is what they did.
So this is a parable. In seminary school they teach you that parables have just one main point.
At the risk of insulting your considerable intelligences, let me suggest to you that you think as I did about the history of that boxwood, and of this green and pleasant place, and its ancient boxwood smell, the smell, for me, of old coastal towns in the south, the smell of English gardens, the smell of all that history that brings us to this day, which is in fact Pentecost. And then remember, as all that history, often wondrous and often terrible and frequently painful and, here in this place especially, seeming almost idyllic in its outcomes, all that history unfolds in your minds, to call to mind the ticks that lurk in the boxwood, happily awaiting your company.
Pentecost calls us toward unity of spirit, toward living more fully into God’s compassion, toward being honest and reconciling and forgiving people, toward fuller and more open hearts and lives, and yes, pocketbooks, and most of all, into the activity which is God’s love, not as children unaware, but as fully forming humans, never forgetting that there be ticks in the boxwood, that imperfection is our most perfect state, and that bumbling but fiery Love is the best love of all.
Amen.
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
Support the worship and ministry of St. Martin’s by giving online: stmartinec.org/give
Today's readings are:
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net: https://lectionarypage.net/
Once upon a time, there was an old (ish) retired (sort of) gay (totally) Episcopal priest who arrived, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, at a lovely--idyllic even--Episcopal church sitting in a lovely swath of greenery almost at the apex of the tallest hill in a great and ancient city (ancient by American standards anyway) in a part of the world, relatively temperate and plentifully watered, not too far but far enough from a great ocean, for millennia populated by a great variety of more or less indigenous people, most recently people who called themselves Lenape, and more recently (in human time) settled by a strange group of humans who had crossed that self-same ocean, at some risk to life and limb and, in some cases, fortune. In varying degrees, these new people had left their homes far away in search of, variously, better lives, fuller liberty, greater opportunity and perhaps fortune. Sailing up a great river from the ocean, they eventually landed and began to settle in, made rough homes, dug rough passages from pathways, and then rough streets and roads from these passages, traversed a tributary of the great river, crossed the peninsula created by the two rivers. Therein they made plans for and executed a city of sorts, a city of square parks, interlaced by parallel and perpendicular streets named for lovely green trees. Many of these people were members of a new religious society, a people who styled themselves Friends and who claimed to come in peace, seeking harmony with all God’s holy creation and all God’s creatures. Indeed, right behind me in that window back there, as many of you know, is one notion of the leader of that first settling society. William Penn his name was, and up there he is smoking a pipe of peace with his new Lenape neighbors, a pipe, he and his Society said, was of peace and brotherly love. That, in fact, is what he named the city: Philadelphia.
Like most human aspirations to perfection, the city fairly quickly fell short of its own expressed values. Faith and commerce held hands, and, yes, Indian wrestled, until Friend’s quest for a city based in and living out the loving values it espoused, collapsed under the sheer power of the vast commercial enterprises that inevitably unfolded in the land. So rich was it in abundance and resource that the urge to commerce and the concomitant necessity of ordinance to safeguard the engines of that commerce, and the power necessary to maintain order and law, all combined and simply vanquished the initial impulse to be a city of mutual love, based in the God of love and the love of God.
Time passed. The great city grew and grew and grew. The indigenous people, mutual friends though Friends may have wanted them to be, withered and perished under the onslaught of commerce and trade. There arrived others, too, non-Friends, seizing the handles of burgeoning wealth and opportunity with very little aspiration to brotherly or sisterly love as foundational in their actual lives. Some of the early Friends and then, in greater numbers, the people who arrived a little later, came to the growing city with other dark-hued humans from Africa, humans who were nonetheless numbered and registered right along with sheep and goats and cows and horses as property and as chattel. They too were harnessed, quite literally, to the great engines of commerce.
The city grew yet larger. A great war came with the great king across the ocean who thought the land and commerce and a portion of all its proceeds belonged to him. The war was fought in the name of many things, most often liberty and freedom from foreign oppression. Some said, though, that it was a war mainly about who benefited from the great abundance of the new country and from its growing wealth. The new city and country won the war, but freedom did not come to many, and certainly not to the enslaved humans of the city, who continued to help empower the great civic enterprise for yet quite a long time, even, in one way or another, right up to right now. One of them, or someone’s idea of one of them, a kneeling child, is also pictured in that window behind me, and if you haven’t looked, you perhaps should. I was shown it yesterday, and it quite literally took my breath away. Thank God for the Holy Spirit and its flames of fire!
But back to the city. The city, fueled by a continuing and abundant and growing supply of raw materials and resources arriving from every corner of the known world, continued to grow apace, and a marvelous thing happened: a steam powered engine was invented and before long there arrived in the newly uniting states (though not united until after yet another ferocious war) a thing called a railroad, vast engines and great carrier trolleys ran on steel tracks, enormous and efficient, and the spokes of this vast new thing drove out from every city in the new country into the places around and far beyond them, harvesting ever more of the abundance, and eviscerating almost every single indigenous person who stood in the way of these mighty wheels and the freight they carried.
Philadelphia was no exception. In fact, as many of you may know, the greatest railroad and the largest corporation in the world in its time was born and sustained right here, for almost a century. At the same time, some of those visionary and creative Philadelphians imagined whole new communities linked to the heart of the great city by rail, places where the makers and beneficiaries of commerce could once again have their homes and enjoy their leisure in green and pleasant environs, up in the forested hills and across the rivers’ tributaries, high above but convenient to the business of the now thriving but also very very dirty city. Churches were built in these new communities, indeed purposefully built, because churches, and especially Episcopal churches--and in the case of this particular community--not one but two Episcopal churches--churches were deemed essential in the making and preservation of an ordered and peaceful, green and pleasant and prosperous community. And thus was made the still very green and pleasant community and the church embedded in it, into which the old (ish) priest, sort of retired priest, very gay priest, unexpectedly arrived one day in May in the year 2022, 330 years after William Penn, of the Society of Friends (whom the Episcopalians and others called jeeringly Quakers because of their spirit-filled quaking manner of fervid religious speech while they gathered for worship in their Meeting houses) founded the city of Philadelphia. 330 years later.
The priest was happy, he found, to be called so suddenly out of his pandemic induced retirement (for there had indeed been, indeed still was, a terrible global pandemic, in which millions and millions of humans had and were still dying). He felt relatively safe, being shot full of a new miraculous vaccine and tucked mostly safe behind a good mask, and he was delighted - delighted - to be amongst the people of the community, whom he found to be, in his early days with them, generous of spirit, moderately adventurous, deeply concerned for the fabric and program and spiritual enterprise of their community, and mostly confident in its future.
And so this old priest, who had arrived in this idyllic place quite soon after not one, not two, but three resident priests, all of long standing, had moved on to other callings, one after another, the latest departure having been the senior priest, began to try together to gather themselves up in the bonds of God’s love in these early days. And the old priest and the community of God’s love at St. Martin’s, after a minute or two of mutual sizing one another up, began gingerly and, at least in the priest’s case, tenderly, to try to discern together a path into the future to which they were together called.
And for the old(ish) priest, the enterprise was experienced almost completely as joy, even though in those early days were full of tragedy in the community and in the nation. He was so glad to be again among loving and caring and completely imperfect human beings again. He rejoiced to himself and to his beloved Louis, his companion for lo the last 43 years, who pronounced to the priest that he seemed happy again, which made him, Louis, happy too.
And the newly arrived old(ish) priest, whose name was Jim and who people mostly called Fr. Jim began to have many wonderfully enriching and enlightening conversations, some of them delving deep into his new parishioner’s lives, some hinting at riches yet to come, one conversant even going so far as to thank him for his own imperfections, or, as that person styled them, for his slight bumbling, which they said gave them and the whole community permission to be a little less than perfect too. And that, in this community where so much perfection was often expected and even demanded, and which perhaps too often had little tolerance for the bumble, it seemed, was a little bit of grace. The old(ish) priest, anyway, had long since given up most of his aspirations to perfection and was working hard at just being an honest and helpful and competent priest and pastor as much as he could be in this slightly fraught time. So he thought a little bumbling was fine, and even if it wasn’t fine, it was, as they say, what it was; and he was who he was.
And then there came a day, it was the day before the great Feast of Pentecost: Pentecost, when all the people of God in Christ in all the whole world were to celebrate in thousands of ways and hundreds of tongues, the day long ago when, in a rush as of a violent wind and with tongues as of fire, the Divine Spirit was made manifest and palpable in the human community. The Day of Pentecost, when people of every language and across every single diverse shape and manifestation of humankind, came to know that all things could become new, and ancient hurts dissolved, and resolved, and visions for the future seen and then made real, and dreams dreamed into life, when united in God’s powerful love and filled with God’s mighty Breath, and lit up by the Fire of Christ’s love, when faithful but a little bit bewildered people became drunk on the sheer magnificence of God’s glory, and began to learn again the truth of Jesus’ promised Peace and the urgency of Jesus’ call to do the actual work of Love. And in the doing, to find God’s Peace, the Peace, the Blessed Assurance, that every now and then, abolishes the troubled heart and the fearful soul.
So it was that day, on the eve of Pentecost, when the old (ish) priest sat out there beside the columbarium on a bench surrounded by sage and boxwood for a conversation with another parishioner. And as they delved deeper into the talking, and as they did, the old priest’s companion on the bench, rather suddenly reached toward the priest’s neck, surprising the old man a little, and then asked if he could take something off the priest’s collar. “I think it might be a tick,” he said, and Father Jim said in response, “Definitely! Have at it!” And it was a tick indeed, and then shortly there appeared another on Father’s neck just above the collar, and then another on his sleeve, and then he felt a little creepy crawl up the back of his neck--another tick! And his companion said, “Yep, ticks in the boxwood. Ticks like it in the boxwood.” “Is that so,” said the old priest, rejoicing - rejoicing - that he had yet again learned a new thing, and suggesting they move quickly away from the boxwood, which is what they did.
So this is a parable. In seminary school they teach you that parables have just one main point.
At the risk of insulting your considerable intelligences, let me suggest to you that you think as I did about the history of that boxwood, and of this green and pleasant place, and its ancient boxwood smell, the smell, for me, of old coastal towns in the south, the smell of English gardens, the smell of all that history that brings us to this day, which is in fact Pentecost. And then remember, as all that history, often wondrous and often terrible and frequently painful and, here in this place especially, seeming almost idyllic in its outcomes, all that history unfolds in your minds, to call to mind the ticks that lurk in the boxwood, happily awaiting your company.
Pentecost calls us toward unity of spirit, toward living more fully into God’s compassion, toward being honest and reconciling and forgiving people, toward fuller and more open hearts and lives, and yes, pocketbooks, and most of all, into the activity which is God’s love, not as children unaware, but as fully forming humans, never forgetting that there be ticks in the boxwood, that imperfection is our most perfect state, and that bumbling but fiery Love is the best love of all.
Amen.
Permission to podcast/stream music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187 and CCLI with license #21234241 and #21234234. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
