wfn.org | Sermon at the Service of Investiture of the XXV Presiding Bish

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January 15, 1998
Episcopal News Service
Jim Solheim, Director
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98-2069
Sermon at the Service of Investiture of the XXV Presiding Bishop

Washington National Cathedral
January 10, 1998
The Most Rev. Frank Tracy Griswold, III

     Grace and peace to those of you who are present in this sacred
space representing the Episcopal Church, our worldwide Anglican
Communion, the ancient churches of the East and West, the churches of
the Reformation, and the two other faith communities--Judaism and
Islam--who, together with us, call Abraham our father in faith. And
grace and peace to those of you who are far off, participating in this
liturgy by means of electronic communication at various sites around the
country. Think of where ever you are as a chapel, an extension of this
vast cathedral church, and of yourselves as members of this worshiping
assembly.
     (As some of you are aware, today is the commemoration of
William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury: a Primate of the 17th Century
whose views ecclesiastical and political, not to mention what we might
call his leadership style, led to his being beheaded. Upon reflection I
decided that it might be somewhat inauspicious to do more than include
him discreetly among the saints and worthies in the eucharistic prayer.)
     I want to begin our new life together with a story. It is a story
about myself, but it is also a story about us, the people of God. 
     Well before the General Convention of last July and the election
of a new Presiding Bishop, I accepted an invitation to participate in a
conference in Italy sponsored by the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, an
international program of spiritual formation which profoundly honors the
religious intuitions and experience of children. The fact that the gathering
was to be held in Assisi, the city of Francis and Clare, made the
invitation all the more attractive. Once it became clear that I was to be a
nominee, I looked forward to the conference, which was to take place in
September after the election, figuring that it would either be a
consolation, or a respite before the beginning of a new chapter.
     "Let Assisi be your atrium," we were advised upon arrival.
"Atrium," in the parlance of the Catechesis, is the classroom, or more
accurately the environment, the space, which serves to foster and support
encounter with the sacred mystery of God. "Let Assisi be your atrium," I
said quietly to myself that first evening as I set out from my hotel for the
Church of Sta. Chiara only a short distance away.
     Entering the church, I saw a sign over a doorway in the south
wall. It read: "The crucifix that spoke to St. Francis." "Ah, yes," I
thought. "Of course. The crucifix from the Church of San Damiano
where Francis prayed at the beginning of his conversion. The icon cross
which has been reproduced over and over again. I have a copy of it on
my desk at home."
     Moved more by curiosity than devotion, I passed through the door
and entered a darkened chapel. There the crucifix was, larger than I had
imagined, illuminated by a single spotlight. As I sat in the darkness
contemplating the figure of Jesus as one might a work of art that one has
read about and is seeing at last, I found myself drawn to the cross as
though it were a magnet. I moved from observer to participant, and from
a pew to a prie-dieu at the foot of the cross. After some moments I
looked down and saw that a prayer in four languages had been affixed to
the top of the kneeling desk. It was, as I later learned, a prayer written
by Francis himself before this very cross. Having been drawn to the
cross, I now found myself drawn into the prayer: "Most high, glorious
God, enlighten the darkness of my heart and give me, Lord, a right faith,
a certain hope, a perfect charity.  Give me, Lord, wisdom and
discernment, so that I may carry out your true and holy will. Amen."
     In the silence of the chapel, the prayer spoke to me about what
lay ahead:       It begins with the plea that God enlighten and purify our
hearts. It says that right faith, certain hope and perfect charity are not the
result of our own psychological effort or active imagination, but the fruit
of a transformed and undefended heart, a heart of stone which has
become a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 36:26).  It asks God to search out the
secret places where fear and bias, anger and judgement lurk
unacknowledged and unrecognized. It is only by such a radical act of
God's piercing mercy that authentic faith, hope and love can be born. 
     Each morning of the conference I got up early and made my way
to the cross. Without explanation, I simply had to be there and pray the
prayer. Part way through the week I found myself wondering, "What did
the crucifix say to Francis?" Though I had read an account years before,
I could not remember what the figure of Christ had said.  Then one
afternoon I wandered by chance into a small square and noticed a plaque
on a nearby wall. As I read it, there was the answer to my question.
Christ had said, "Francesco, va ripara la mia chiesa...Francis, go rebuild
my Church." I was overcome and found myself in tears...tears of
recognition that this was the call, the invitation, the strange attraction of
a 12th Century crucifix.
     At the same time I was skeptical. How like my romantic soul to
create a moment of high drama and emotion. Did it come from an
overwrought Frank Griswold who had too much Assisi, or did it come
from the Spirit?
     Later that evening I began to share what had happened with a
Roman Catholic nun. I got no further than saying, "I was praying in
front of the San Damiano crucifix," when she pointed at me and
declared, "That's it; that's what your vocation is all about. Repair my
Church." Hers was the confirming word I needed before I was able to
allow Christ's words to Francis to find a home in me.
     As the words from the cross took hold of me I found myself
overwhelmed. Me rebuild the church? What arrogance, what an
unbearable burden, what an impossibility, what an invitation to fantastical
projections and unrealizable expectations.  I wanted to confine Christ's
daunting declaration to the life of St. Francis where it properly belonged. 
But then I have learned over the years that moments of resistance and
unsettlement are almost always invitations to deeper prayer and greater
availability to the Spirit. And so I gave the words to Francis freedom to
be addressed to me, "Francis(Frank), go rebuild my Church." What I
heard this time was a voice that said, "This task is not yours alone, it
belongs to everyone who has been baptized into my death and
resurrection. You are all called to rebuild my church."
     Why have I told you this story?  Because, as I said earlier, it is
about us. Because it speaks of what we are to do together, and of what
we are to be together.
     What does it mean to rebuild the Church? There are, of course,
many possible answers. What has become most clear to me is that the
Church is not an object or an institution to be fixed or a building to be
repaired as Francis himself thought at first. Instead the Church is a
relationship to be lived: a relationship of communion established by God
through Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit which finds expression
and is made incarnate--is earthed and given flesh--in our communion, our
fellowship, with one another. As such, the Church is always, in every
age, being rebuilt and reformed out of the struggles and witness and
compromised fidelity of its members. The same is true now and the same
will be true at the end of nine years.
     Baptism, which is the ground of today's Liturgy, is about
communion, our being related to Christ after the manner of limbs and
organs to a body. Each of us has been given some gift or manifestation
of Christ's fullness which contributes to the building up of the body, to
our growth as one body to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of
the risen Christ (Ephesians 4:13). What more dynamic or intimate or
essential relationship can there be than that, than growing together
through the gifts of one another into the fullness of who, only in Christ
and only together, we can become?  
     Or again, through baptism we become living stones (1 Peter 2:4ff)
integral to the building up of a spiritual temple not according to our own
whims and fancies, but according to God's ever active and boundless
imagination which, like the peace of God, passes all understanding. 
     This communion, this spiritual fellowship, also makes us
permeable to truth: truth which is discovered in a living way through the
sharing of the truth which is embodied in each of us, in what might be
called the scripture of our own lives. Each one of us is a bundle of agony
and idiocy, of grace and truth caught up into Christ. Who I am by the
mercy of God is the gift I have to share, is my unique contribution to the
ever expanding mystery of communion.  "My brother (my sister) is my
life" , observed one of the desert monastics of the 4th Century, which is
to say that it is not by accident but by divine intention, and it would
seem at times by divine humor, that we, in a phrase from Bishop Rowan
Williams, have been "caught up" by baptism "in solidarities we have not
chosen."  
     Communion is not a human construction but a divine gift that is
not always easy to accept. Because of our sinfulness we find all sorts of
ways, often noble and high sounding ways, to stand against it. 
Communion is realized only through a costly and excruciating process of
conversion and a radical transformation of consciousness. "Be
transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern
what is the will of God," Paul tells us in the Letter to the Romans
(12:2). 
     This renewing of the mind is largely a communal enterprise
whereby your truth and my truth address one another and give room to
one another. In the process something happens between us which
enlarges the truth each of us previously held.  Such is the nature of that
sacred enterprise we innocently call conversation which carries within it
the possibility of conversion, of being turned in a new direction by the
word, the truth, of the other. 
     What would happen if instead of leading with our opinions fully
formed and our conclusions smartly arrayed, we addressed one another
as brothers and sisters in the body of Christ, knit together by one Lord,
one Faith, one Baptism; one God and Father of all?  What would happen
if instead of defensively declaring where we stand, we asked questions of
one another such as, "Who is Christ for you?"  "What does the church
mean to you?  "How have you been challenged to live the Gospel?"  Are
we afraid that if we asked such questions we might have to modify our
position and make room for the ambiguity and paradox another person's
truth might represent? 
     And yet, a capacity for ambiguity and paradox is part of the glory
and frustration of the Anglican way. Richard Hooker, possibly the
greatest theologian in the history of Anglicanism observed, as Paul Avis
reminds us, that though we long for "the most infallible certainty which
the nature of things can yield," we proceed, in actual fact, by way of
"probable persuasions."  
     The Anglican Tradition because of its "graced pragmatism" --- its
reasonableness formed by Scripture and Tradition--- possesses a unique
capacity for diversity, and the ability to discern and welcome truth in its
various forms.  Through the subtle yet exacting rhythms of our common
prayer the diverse and the disparate, the contradictory and the
paradoxical are woven together in the risen Christ through the ever
unfolding and always challenging mystery of communion. As a result,
different dimensions of truth, different experiences of grace, can meet
together, embrace one another, and share the Bread of life.
     What we as the Episcopal Church shall be as we look to the
future has yet to be revealed. I for one am immensely hopeful. Hopeful
because of the good will and generosity of spirit which meets me almost
everywhere I go; hopeful because of the vitality and faithfulness of
congregations large and small; hopeful because of the deep desire on all
sides to move beyond threat and accusation to a place of conversation,
conversion, communion and truth: truth as is discovered in and through
and with one another, truth as it is in Christ, who is himself the truth
(John 14:6).
     I spoke earlier of the need for a purified and transformed heart if
our faith and hope and love are to be real, our communion authentic, and
the continuing work of rebuilding the Church, which involves us all, is to
go forward.
     What is a purified and transformed heart? St. Isaac of Nineveh, a
witness from the 7th Century, gives us this answer: "It is a heart that
burns with love for the whole of creation --- for humankind, for the
birds, for the beasts, for the demons, for every creature...for the reptiles
too...". It is a heart from which "a great compassion...rises up
endlessly." In more contemporary terms, it is a heart open the paradoxes
and contradictions of life; it is a heart that can embrace and reconcile the
birds and the beasts, as well as reptiles and demons, however we might
define them. A transformed heart is a heart that has been cracked open
by God's love: it is a heart willing to have its tendency toward accusation
and judgement overruled by the same voice Jesus heard at his baptism, a
voice that speaks to each one of us and says, "You are my daughter, my
Son, my Child, my Beloved, my Chosen One in whom I delight, in
whom I rejoice, with whom I am well pleased simply because you are.
Live on in my love; enter into my joy; abide in my peace. "
     A transformed heart is therefore compassionate in the strength of
God's own compassion, which was made manifest in Jesus the
Compassionate One, and is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit
(Romans 5:5).
     A compassionate heart is a baptized, born again heart, a purified
and transformed and discerning heart open to everyone and everything, a
heart of communion that can embrace all sorts and conditions of
humanity and the world around us, a heart that burns with God's own
love for the whole mix and muddle of the world. It is a faithful heart
capable of rebuilding the Church in the service of the Gospel for the sake
of the world, over and over and over again. 
     May we, as a community of faith, as a church, be given the grace
of such a heart. In a few moments we will give thanks over water to
recall the mystery of our baptism. We will then renew our baptismal
promises, our willingness to be caught up as limbs into Christ's risen
body, built up as living stones into a spiritual house, the dwelling place
of a compassionate heart. 
     At the end of his life, as Francis looked back over all that had
been accomplished by the Order he had brought into being, he cried out,
"My brothers, we must begin to serve our Lord and God. Until now we
have done very little. Let us begin again."
     My dear sisters and brothers, in communion with one another and
sustained by our Anglican way, let us begin again, with the joy and
courage of a transformed heart, to serve our Lord and God. Amen.