wfn.org | [ENS] King's energy 'coursing through the nations,' Griswold affirms

["Matthew Davies" <mdavies@episcopalchurch.org>]

Episcopal News Service
Tuesday, January 17, 2006

King's energy 'coursing through the nations,' Griswold affirms

Presiding Bishop addresses L.A. congregations marking nation's MLK
observance

By Pat McCaughan

ENS 011706-1

[ENS, Los Angeles] Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s life and death "released
an
energy that is still coursing through the nations of the world,"
Presiding
Bishop Frank T. Griswold told the congregation that filled L.A.'s
Cathedral
Center January 16 to mark the national holiday devoted to the slain
civil
rights leader.

That energy "helps us to see Christ in one another," Griswold emphasized
during the gathering, hosted annually by L.A. Bishop Suffragan Chester
Talton, and this year part of the Presiding Bishop's three-day visit to
Los
Angeles.

Griswold challenged his listeners to find more creative and alternative
ways
to effect change, and thanked Bishop Julio Murray of Panama, presenter
for
the annual observance. (A separate ENS story on Murray's presentation
will
follow.)

"What's so important about your being with us is, it reminds us we are
part
of something far larger than the Episcopal Church in the United States,
that
through our baptism we are joined in webs of relationship," Griswold
told
Murray in remarks during the gathering.

Griswold also preached at the principal Sunday service January 15 --
which
would have been King's 77th birthday -- at L.A.'s historic St. John's
Church, located in the West Adams district near the USC campus.

The Presiding Bishop recalled King's "I've Been to the Mountaintop"
speech
while preaching about Dr. King's vocation as a prophet and social
activist.

Griswold underscored the significance of the speech King delivered --
one
day before he was assassinated -- in support of striking sanitation
workers
in Memphis. "King said, 'the question is not, if I stop to help a man in
need what will happen to me? The question is, if I don't stop to help
the
sanitation workers what will happen to them?'

"We might not ever be called to anything as drastic," said Griswold, but
he
challenged about 250 worshippers to consider their own vocations while
remembering King's life and witness.

"Vocation requires multiple dyings and risings in order to enlarge the
self.
God uses all things, including strange circumstances ... tugs and pulls,
hints and guesses, to unsettle, stretch and call us beyond situations,
comfort zones, the circumscribed reality of our lives to respond to the
world."

Griswold recalled panicking, at six years of age, after being cast in a
leading role in a school play. "I said I can't step forward, I can't be
separated from the crowd; it's more than I can do," he recalled.

He was replaced and later realized: "Never again will I say no to
something
out of fear." That hesitation, or fear, is an invitation to step
forward,
not to turn back, he told the gathering.

"It isn't easy. It's a struggle to confront fears, the reluctances in
you,"
he said. "But, if instead of being diminished you increase in personhood
--
if it makes more of you -- it is your vocation."

Following a vocation can take people well beyond what they perceive to
be
their strength or competence, Griswold explained. They are given the
power
to respond to the call, to risk and to do what God most deeply wants
them to
do, he added.

King's leadership of the Montgomery Bus Boycott required "deep, deep
faith
to have the capacity to withstand the hatred, the death threats, the
voices
of expediency, like the Bishop of Alabama who wrote to him saying to be
patient, don't unsettle people so," Griswold said.

The Presiding Bishop was welcomed to St. John's by priest-in-charge Mark
Kowalewski and by Los Angeles Diocesan Bishop J. Jon Bruno, together
with
Talton and assistant bishops Robert Anderson and Sergio Carranza.

The bishops also hosted Griswold January 14 for an ordination service
attended by 1,400 people including some 30 honored interfaith and
ecumenical
guests on the eve of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. (A separate
ENS
story will follow on the events of January 14 -- as will photographs to
be
posted to the ENS website.)

-- The Rev. Patricia McCaughan is senior correspondent for Episcopal
News
Service and associate rector of St. Mary's Church in Laguna Beach,
California.

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