Transcript
Today we have some amazing scripture passages: that passage from Isaiah, which was read a little more than eight years ago at my own priestly ordination, “Here I am, send me,” and the passage from the Gospel, “I will make you fishers of people.” But per Bishop Susan’s recommendation, I am not preaching an original sermon. I will be offering you an abridged version of her report.
You see, yesterday was Diocesan Council, the official business meeting of the diocese, and we got to sit and hear reports of all the various ministries in the diocese, as well as Bishop Susan’s official report. I will say I have edited this down quite a bit, taken out several pages. It will still be quite long. I apologize for that, but what I do recommend is you go online to the website, to the Diocese of Southern Virginia’s website, and you can read the full manuscript. I also worked very hard to switch it from the I and me that Susan used to refer to Bishop Susan and she, so bear with me on that.
The Venerable Bede, monk, author and scholar, was one of the greatest teachers and writers of early Middle Ages. At age seven his parents could no longer afford to feed him, so they gave him to the monastery at Jarrow. When he was 12, a plague ravaged and decimated the village and surrounding countryside of Northumbria, devastating the monks as well. One morning Bede arrived in chapel to pray the morning office, and only he and the abbot were left to pray. The other monks had all died or were too sick to participate.
Bede asked his abbot, “What are we to do?” And the Abbot responded by telling Bede that they were going to do what all faithful Christians would do: “We will keep praying. We will care for the sick; we will pray. We will bury the dead; we will pray. We will feed the hungry; we will pray. And then tomorrow we will begin again.” Again: prayer and service, the rhythm of Christian life. Prayer and service — we hear that a lot, don’t we? In fact, don’t we sometimes get tired of hearing that? Don’t we sometimes get tired of doing what we’re think we’re supposed to do without seeing any results?
The prophet Isaiah says, “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?” So you’re doing a new thing, are you, God? You say it springs forth. You ask us if we perceive it, almost with an incredulous tone of voice. Well, to tell you the truth, God, we don’t perceive it. We’re working hard here, and what we’re seeing are basically the same old things. So no, God, we don’t see this new thing, and we’re tired.
Why do we not perceive the new thing God is doing? According to Bishop Susan, the reason is that we have lost the ability to listen deeply to God. We have forgotten how to pray. In his monastic rule, Benedict, St. Benedict, commonly known as the founder of Western monasticism, he counsels the monks to “listen with the ear of the heart.” Ancient spirituality believed that the heart holds the truth, not just in some metaphorical sense; they believ physically the heart held wisdom. So St. Benedict reminds us to listen with the ear ear of the heart. We are to listen in a deeper way than with the actual sense of hearing. With such listening we will discern the movement of the Spirit.
But why is it so hard to listen? Here’s why: the reason we are having such difficulty listening is because we are afraid. Fear prevents the ear of the heart from hearing the voice voice of God, and we have plenty to fear around us. Social media and news providers market fear. Fear is constantly on sale on the internet; fear is ubiquitous. Have you ever heard of the term doom scrolling, when you’re compulsively consuming negative news online, often through social media? You know, when you’re laying on the couch at 2 a.m., still scrolling through Facebook? No? It’s just me that does that?
Our brains crave stimulation, and doom scrolling provides that stimulation. Constant access to information provide stimulation, and if the stimulation is negative, fear is generated, and people engage in actions to reduce that fear. Thomas Keating, monk and priest, credited along with others for pioneering the rebirth of the contemplative movement in the United States — he defines a major human problem as the lack of selfworth. Many in our culture, he says, define self-worth as related to a sense of wealth or lack thereof it, or a sense of success professionally, or the success of our children or grandchildren. And if we are being fed constant negative news that invites us to spend money to protect ourselves, then we are focused inwardly on that need of security.
When we are trapped by fear and focused on spending money to protect ourselves, we become isolated, and this isolations leads to huge problem: loneliness. Loneliness has been described as the biggest disease of the 21st century. Keating says the root of this loneliness is that we lack a sense of being beloved. The antidote is to experience being loved by spending time with the one who absolutely guaranteed loves us.
As we confront the age-old problem of fear and loneliness, we need something new. We need a different, fresh approach. Isaiah says, “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?” How can we access this new thing that God is doing? How can we even notice it? The answer is plain and simple: we must find a way in our comp complicated, chaotic world to spend time with the one who is doing the new thing. We will not notice the new thing unless we know the author of the new thing, and that author is God.
Recently Bishop Susan spent a week in retreat with a few other bishops at a Benedictine retreat center in Nebraska. The retreat was facilitated by Brother James Dow, a Benedictine monk who is on staff at the Diocese of Nebraska as monk in residence. The Benedictine community that Brother James is a part of lives by the rule of life of prayer, service and community. Prayer, service, community. One spends time in prayer getting to know the author of life. As a result, one is then turned outward to offer service to those whom the author of life loves. And this effort of prayer and service is contained within a community that supports and nourishes the members. Prayer, service, community. It’s a simple rule of life that is catching fire in the area and producing new things. In the Diocese of Southern Virginia we are beginning to sense that God is doing a new thing among us, and we want to be a part of it. As I said, you can go online and see more of what is happening.
Bishop Susan mentioned an article she recently read involving the Surgeon General’s declaration that loneliness is the one serious epidemic confronting our world. Now, this is not new news. The Surgeon General first declared this in 2023, and we all experienced it quite intimately at the beginning of this decade when the whole world shut down. This new article, however, was reporting on the Surgeon General’s advisory on the epidemic of loneliness. The Surgeon General had noted that in this era of increased technological advancement, people were more concerned technologically — excuse me, people were more connected technologically than they had ever been before. However, these connections were only superficial; they were not deep, meaningful relationships.
Furthermore, when people experienced loneliness, they turned inward and focused on themselves. They didn’t understand that the answer to loneliness was to look beyond themselves. And so the Surgeon General proposed his own antidote to loneliness: relationships, service, community. Here was the General, the Surgeon General, hundreds of years later, proposing the same rule as St. Benedict. Bishop Susan thought the Benedictine retreat focusing on prayer, service and community as she read this Surgeon General’s exhortation of all of America — in fact, all the world — should live by a rule of relationships, service, community.
Relationships with God and each other, being in prayer, turn us outward to service and propel us into the support and nurture of community. Prayer begins in solitude, and in our current noisy, chaotic world, solitude is grievously lacking. Thomas Merton said, “Society depends for its existence on the inviolable personal solitude of its members. When society is made up of people who know no interior solitude, it can no longer be held together by love, and consequently it is held together by a violent and abuse of authority. But when people have violently deprived of the solitude and freedom which they are due, the society in which they live becomes putrid; it festers with servility, resentment and hate.” That’s from Thomas Merton’s writings in Thoughts in Solitude. Prayer is the activity by which we will change the world.
In 1951, in the Diocese of New Hampshire, Bishop Charles Todd Hall stood up to address the diocesan annual convention. At the time the country was facing the McCarthy Red Scare, the nuclear arms race and the Korean War. Here is what he said, quote: “The world is on trial for its very life. We have so much to give to the life of the Christian church in a baffled world that it hardly behooves us to be either careless or selfish in this call to bring others to Christ. Now, if ever, it can be said a disfigured world demands transfigured lives,” end quote. How do we get transfigured lives? Prayer, by spending time with the creator of our lives.
Solitude and prayer are good, but we cannot remain there. We must include extending ourselves outward in service. The Reverend Dr. Carter Heyward says this: “We cannot enjoy the spirituality that truly is of God unless we are enjoying the struggle for justice, love, compassion, nonviolence and forgiveness in the world, and we cannot stay in the struggle unless we are drawing personal strength from God, whom Jesus loved, however we may experience and imagine this sacred power.” Prayer and service are connected; you cannot have one without the other.
God’s people are desperate for God, and the church has the answer. Our Presiding Bishop, Sean Rowe, is fond of saying, “Friends, this is our lane.” This is where the church can have an impact. Churches can foster communities that connect people to God and connect people to each other. We are mandated now to be the church in fresh ways that address this desperate need. When you ask people who are looking for churches what they are looking for, one of the most frequent answers is that they are looking for communities and which they can make new friends, and they are looking for communities where they can be included.
The diocese has accomplished much in the last year. Again, I invite you to look up on line to see all the many things. And the dicese has forged a viable path that now leads us to consider prayer, service and community. But we have much to do, because the epidemic of loneliness and fear still holds us in its grip.
Bishop Susan proposes the following three things be included in any visioning for the future. One: deepening of spiritual life, prayer and biblical literacy. We all yearn to pray. People frequently ask the bishop how to pray, and she hears of yearning to know, fully know, how the sacred scriptures undergird our faith. People really want to know and understand the Bible. Biblical literacy is one of those signs of a life, a spiritual life. Scripture ought to be embedded in all we do, and if we truly attend to scripture, we will be led to prayer.
Number two: intentional crafting of a plan for diocesan stewardship. This includes budgeting money, land and other resources, including initiatives around creation care, youth and young adult ministries, including Camp Chanco and college ministries, and congregational development. And number three: increased resources for youth and young young adult ministries. There are a lot of youth and young adults who crave for what we the church already have. The dicese encourages us to reach out to them, be present to them.
But I would like to add — here’s my little soap box — we cannot create a population if it doesn’t exist. Instead, I invite us, St. John’s and every church in the dicese, to look around and see which groups are not getting the much craved for community that we offer in our own immediate neighborhood. Maybe it’s the homeless, or the shut-ins, or the brand new parents. Whoever it is, let us focus our intentions on them.
Our world is chaotic and noisy. In many ways we are like the venerable Bede, who arrives in the church to pray only to find find that everything is destroyed. What are we to do? We would do well to remember the Abbott’s words: “We will keep praying. We will care for the sick; we will pray. We will bury the dead; we will pray. We will feed the hungry; we will pray. And then tomorrow we will begin again, again.”
Jesus is standing on the shore of Lake Gennesaret, and the crowd that gathers around him is hungry for guidance about how to navigate ca a chaotic world. The disciples have been fishing all night and caught nothing. They have been doing the same old thing to no avail and are now ready to turn in and give up. And Jesus appears among them and tells them to go deep. In obedience they do as Jesus tells them. They cast their nets wide, and the ensuing abundance overwhelms them.
Jesus stands here with us. We are tired. We too have been fishing all night to no avail, and now Jesus tells us to go deep. “Go deeper than you’ve ever gone before, for the abundance is there. I am pointing you to it,” Jesus says. “I do a new thing; now it springs forth. Do you not perceive it?” Once you go deep, you will need the community around you to help you reel in the abundance. “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” Let us be like those, like those disciples. Let us leave everything and follow him.
Amen. Amen.