wfn.org | [ENS] Presiding Bishop affirms 'seeing as God sees' in sermon

["Matthew Davies" <mdavies@mail.epicom.org>]

Tuesday, March 08, 2005

Presiding Bishop affirms 'seeing as God sees' in sermon marking 20 years
of
episcopacy

Griswold honored March 6 by New York's bishop, cathedral

ENS 030805-1

[Episcopal News Service] Light, vision and truth -- themes drawn from
scripture readings appointed for March 6 -- were underscored as the
Bishop
of New York and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine honored Presiding
Bishop Frank Griswold on the 20th anniversary of his ordination to the
episcopate.

Bishop Mark Sisk and Dean James Kowalski invited Griswold to be
celebrant
and preacher for the cathedral's principal Sunday-morning Eucharist as
"a
very modest opportunity to say a public word of thanks to a man who has
led
us with steady and calm center through some, if not the most, turbulent
times in our Communion's life," Sisk told the congregation.

"There is no way to capture, to summarize, to describe the intellectual
resourcefulness, the spiritual depth, the inner fortitude that
leadership
has required," Sisk added.

Sisk also paid tribute to Phoebe Griswold as a "leader in her own right"
and
a constant companion and wise counselor to her husband."

The Presiding Bishop began his episcopate March 2, 1985 -- the day he
was
ordained bishop-coadjutor of the Diocese of Chicago. He was elected to
this
office while rector of the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields,
Philadelphia,
and after more than 20 years of parish ministry in the Diocese of
Philadelphia.

Griswold was then elected Presiding Bishop during the 1997 General
Convention and in January 1998 began his nine-year term as chief pastor
to
the Episcopal Church's 2.3 million members.

In his March 6 sermon at the New York cathedral (full text follows
below),
Griswold invited listeners to look beyond "blinded sight" in order to
"see
as God sees" with "clearness and acuity...through the lens of God's own
compassion."

- - - -

The Most Rev. Frank T. Griswold
Sermon preached Sunday, March 6, 2005
The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, New York City

Samuel 16: 1-13
Ephesians 5:1-14
John 9: 1-38

"Come Holy Ghost our souls inspire
And lighten with celestial fire...
Enable with perpetual light
The dullness of our blinded sight."

There is a phrase in a 9th century hymn to the Holy Spirit, a hymn sung
at
ordinations of bishops, priests, and deacons:  It runs "Enable with
perpetual light, the dullness of our blinded sight."  Seeing accurately
and
without distortion, seeing as God sees, is one of the gifts and graces
of
baptism.  Indeed the ritual washing which serves at the entry point into
the
community of faith was often described as "enlightenment" implying
thereby a
transformation of heart and mind a new way of seeing and perceiving
oneself
and the world.

Today's gospel reading, which belongs to a sequence of Lenten readings
used
in the early church as part of a course of instruction for those being
prepared for baptism at the great vigil of Easter, is all about seeing
and
not seeing.

The man blind from birth is encountered by Jesus, "the light of the
world"
who opens the man's eyes to see what he has never before seen.	Not only
does the man see the world around him but he sees Jesus both as the one
who
healed him, and with the eyes of faith as the Son of Man, Messiah.

At the same time, the religious experts (the Pharisees) those trained by
the
law and the prophets to discern and recognize the works and ways of God,
see
only scandal and affront in what Jesus has done.  By working on the
Sabbath
- that is by making mud with his saliva and applying it to the blind
man's
eyes - Jesus has profaned the Sabbath.	The verdict therefore is given,
"This man is not from God for he does not observe the Sabbath."  Others
among them are less sure:  "How can a man who is a sinner perform such
signs?"  In the end, however, they come together and take refuge in
Moses:
"We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not
know
where he comes from."  And with that they drive the man who was born
blind
from their presence.

The very tradition that should have given them the ability to see has,
ironically, made them blind.  And the man born blind whom they reject as
a
sinner is the one who truly sees.

"Live as children of light," we are told in today's second reading,
"take no
part in the unfaithful works of darkness."  And yet as St. Paul tell us
in
his second letter to the Corinthians "Even Satan disguises himself as an
angel of light."  When we look at the history of the Church we see in
addition to moments of light and truth acts of condemnation, violence,
oppression and even murder committed with righteous certitude by those
who
were as intent and self assured as the Pharisees in our gospel were upon
defending the truth as they had received it from Moses.

Certitude is the enemy of truth because God's truth, which was given
human
form in Jesus, who declares himself to be the truth, and continues to
dwell
among us in his risen reality through the agency and driving motion of
the
Spirit of truth - God's truth is larger, stranger, wilder and infinitely
more paradoxical then anything we can understand or imagine or contain
within our tidy notions of righteousness.  Furthermore, God's truth is
always unfolding and being enlarged.  "I still have many things to say
to
you, but you cannot bear them now," Jesus tells his disciples and us,
"When
the Spirit of truth comes he will guide you into all the truth...he will
take what is mine and declare it to you."  The "many things" to which
Jesus
refers, embrace the whole of reality and are not restricted to some
artificial sphere staked off and declared religious.  God sent his son
to
save the world, not the church.  The church exists for one purpose and
one
purpose alone:	to embody and to e!
xtend the reconciling and boundary-crossing love of God which is the
fundamental energy that gives life to the world and is the still point
in
which everything lives and moves and has its being.

God calls us to love, as Guillaume de St. Thierry observed many
centuries
ago, not because God needs our love, but because we cannot be what we
were
created to be without loving God.  And to love God is not to fly off
into
some realm of abstraction but to face into the flesh and blood reality
of
those whose lives touch our own or call us forth from ourselves into
relationships of solidarity which may sometimes threaten or stretch us
to
the breaking point.  "Those who say, 'I love God' and hate their
brothers
and sisters are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister
whom
they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen," we are told in
the
first letter of John.

The "many things" that Christ, who is the truth, continues to reveal
through
the ceaseless outworkings of the Spirit of truth are rooted and grounded
in
God's deathless and tenacious love which can be thwarted, abused, denied
and
misdirected and yet remains constant even in the midst of our
inconstancy.
"Humankind cannot bear very much reality," T.S. Eliot tells us.  And the
unbearable reality is the profligate unbounded, all embracing love of
God
which plays havoc with our all too narrow and self-serving notions of
love.
The perpetual light with which we pray the Spirit of truth to enable us
is
the light of love:  a love that does not find its origin in us but is,
as
Paul tells us, a love that is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.
 It
is this illumining and transfiguring love worked into the depths of our
being that overcomes "the dullness of our blinded sight" and gives us
the
grace, the gift, of undistorted vision: a clearness and acuity of seeing
that allows u!
s to see all things around us through the lens of God's own compassion.
Here love and truth converge in a disposition of the heart which allows
us
to see as God sees.

This clearness of sight does not, however, come without an incredible
cost
to our ego and the self constructions, including our religious selves by
which we determine our worth and our place in the world.  Here we can
draw
profit, and at the same time a warning, from the experience of the
apostle
Paul who had his whole world turned upside down, his piety undermined
and
underwent what he later described as an existential death to everything
that
had given his life meaning and purpose.  In the midst of it he
discovered
that Christ, whom he had feared and persecuted in the person of his
followers was in fact the ground and core of his life, moving him to cry
out
"It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me."  This life
shattering/life changing experience was accompanied by physical
blindness
from which he was released when a follower of Jesus was sent to lay
hands
upon him in the name of the One he had persecuted. At which point it was
as
if scales fell from his eyes!
 and Paul recovers his sight, or more accurately, sees for the first
time.

Lent is a season of repentance, and repentance, William Temple the
sometime
Archbishop of Canterbury observed in not about thumping our breasts and
declaring ourselves miserably wrong and sinful, but rather repentance is
about adopting God's point of view in place of your own.  "There need
not be
any sorrow about it," he continues, "In itself, far from being
sorrowful, it
is the most joyful thing in the world, because when you have done it you
have adopted the viewpoint of truth itself, and you have fellowship with
God."

In other words repentance is a liberation - a liberation from the
idolatries
and self-righteousness that can belong equally to the ways of seeing and
perceiving and therefore acting which may be labeled - often
inaccurately -
as liberal or conservative.

"The Lord does not see as mortals see," God declares to the prophet
Samuel
as he assesses the sons of Jesse.  It is into an enlargement and
transformation of vision which corresponds to God's point of view that
the
Spirit of truth and love, who draws continually from the immeasurable
niches
of Christ, seeks to guide us both personally and as a community of
faith.

Here we need to keep in mind that in order to be delivered from our
various
personal and corporate blindnesses, in order to embraces God's point of
view, we need mud to be applied to our eyes - we need to be jolted by
stark
encounters with what is strange and different and other intensely
immediate
and undeniable, in order to be set free from bias, distortion and fear
and
all the other impediments to our being able to see as God sees with
compassion, truth and love.

I pray therefore that we, who through baptism have been made members of
Christ's risen body, may be given the gift of clear and undistorted
sight
not for our own sake, but for the sake of our blind and broken world -
its
healing, its wholing, and repair.

"Come Holy Ghost our souls inspire
And lighten with celestial fire...
Enable with perpetual light
The dullness of our blinded sight."

Amen.

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