Today we commemorate the lives and witness of Sergius, an esteemed Russian Orthodox abbot who died on this day in 1392, and Lancelot Andrewes, who died in 1626, and who was among the ablest and most influential of English theologians and preachers in his lifetime. Andrewes was a leading translator of the King James Version of the Bible. He served in important positions, among them dean of Westminster Abbey and later bishop of Westminster. T.S. Elliot famously adapted the beginning of Andrewes’ sermon on the Visit of the Magi for his poem, “The Journey of the Magi.” These are Andrewes’ words from 1622:

Ecclesiastes is one of the very few wisdom books in the Hebrew Bible. The others are Job, Proverbs, and the Song of Songs. There are also a few examples among the psalms.[1] For us, the name of this book, “Ecclesiastes,” is a Latin form of the Greek translation of the Hebrew word used to name the author, Qoheleth.[2] The Hebrew root means assembly or congregation.

As I started to work on today’s gospel lesson, I found myself thinking about the parables in Luke of the lost and the found—the sheep, the coin, and two lost sons.[1] One found his way back to his father’s table. Luke’s Jesus leaves the story with the son who never left hearing these words from his father, who has left the banquet to invite his son inside, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. It was fitting to make merry and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.” I hope this son found his way to his father’s table.

Things were messy for the church in England when Pope Vitalian chose a monk, born in Saint Paul’s birthplace of Tarsus, to be the sixth archbishop of Canterbury. I wasn’t sure what I would discover this morning when I started work on my homily. But I’m glad it’s my turn to be standing here today.

The only reliable source we have for Saint Ninian’s life is the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written about the year 731 by the Venerable Bede, an extraordinary scholar-monk. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church says that he was a careful writer. He named his sources and made an effort to separate fact from “hearsay and tradition”[1]—with respect, I would say fact from fiction.

During Holy Week this year, I came across an explanation why the sign of the cross was not used by early Christians to symbolize their faith. They made use of lambs, a shepherd with a sheep on his shoulders, and often a fish. The Greek letters ΙΧΘΥΣ—iota, chi, theta, upsilon, and sigma—signifying the phrase “Jesus Christ Son of God Savior,” were associated sometimes with a simple drawing of a fish. There is an early third-century funeral monument in the Roman National Museum in Rome with two fish and the words in Greek, “fish of the living.”[1] Christians did not begin to use the cross as a symbol until after Constantine ended crucifixion in the Roman Empire. The gruesome cruelty of crucifixion needed to pass out of living memory for the cross to become more than a sign, not of suffering, but triumph.[2]

On November 9, 1989, East Germans learned that they were free to cross the country’s borders, and they did. And so, to our great surprise, the Cold War came, bit by bit, to an end. A few years after that, this thing called the World Wide Web emerged from the laboratories of the scientists and engineers and began to change things. Walls were coming down. Borders remained, but it seemed as if some of those borders might become more permeable. Many believed that the Internet would promote open, rational discussion across boundaries, free from the oversight of bureaucrats or tyrants, enabling democracy and promoting reconciliation.

John Henry Hobart was among the Episcopal Church’s great leaders in the first decades of the nineteenth century. On September 14, 1775, he was born in Philadelphia and educated at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton. William White, bishop of Pennsylvania, ordained him deacon in 1798 and priest in 1801. Yet a year earlier, in 1800, he became an assistant minister at Trinity Church Wall Street, where the rector was the second bishop of New York, Samuel Provoost.

My friends Jill and Michael Basden were in touch with me this morning. Michael is the retired rector of Trinity-by-the Cove Church in Naples, Florida. In 2001, after dropping off their son for school in Massachusetts, they arrived at the rectory on Sunday evening, September 9. I met Jill and Michael when our paths crossed for a year at Nashotah House Seminary. We were both rectors in the diocese of Northern Indiana when I was called to Saint Mary’s and, a few months later, he was called to Trinity-by-the-Cove.

Because of the COVID-19 epidemic, Father Smith was not able to be present, in person, for the Holy Eucharist at the Convent in Mendham, New Jersey on September 8, 2020. His address was read for him and in his name by Sister Monica Clare, C.S.J.B., Sister Superior of the Community of Saint John Baptist.

My dear Sister Laura Katharine, Sister Monica Clare, Sister Deborah Francis, and all the Sisters of the Community of Saint John Baptist, greetings from the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, Times Square:

I was very much looking forward to being there to celebrate this great day with Sister Laura Katharine and all of you. Though this was not to be, still, I hope you know that I am with you in spirit. Today at Mass at Saint Mary’s, I celebrated the Holy Eucharist for Sister Laura Katharine’s intentions, and we prayed for her and for all of you, giving thanks for Sister’s ministry here at Saint Mary’s and for the ministry of the Community of Saint John Baptist.

Luke the evangelist reorders the sequence of events that he takes from Mark at the beginning of his gospel. In Mark, after Jesus’ baptism and temptation and the arrest of John, Jesus goes to Galilee and preaches “the gospel of God.”[1] By the Sea of Galilee, he sees brothers Simon and Andrew. Mark writes, “And Jesus said to them, ‘Follow me and I will make you become fishes of men and women.’ And immediately they left their nets and followed him.”[2] After also calling brothers James and John to follow him, Jesus and his disciples go to Capernaum. They enter the synagogue There Jesus performs his first act of power: casting out an unclean spirit. He goes from the synagogue to Simon’s house and heals first Simon’s mother-in-law. Then those who were sick or possessed by demons go to Simon’s house and are made whole.[3]

When Augustine and his companions arrived from Rome on the south coast of England in 597, he was welcomed by the pagan king of Kent, who had married a Frankish Christian princess. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church says that Augustine was sent “to refound the Church in England.”[1] But, as historian Diarmaid MacCulloch writes, the church was already there. When Augustine reached Canterbury, Canterbury already had a bishop who ministered to the Frankish colony.[2]

The week before last, Father Jay Smith and I were in the sacristy. He remarked that he would be preaching on the first half of a gospel passage, Peter’s recognition that Jesus was the Christ, last Sunday’s gospel, and that I would be preaching on the rest of the story today. Jay asked, “Why did they do that?” I replied, “So Roman Catholics could hear sermons on the papacy for two Sundays, not just one.” Today we hear Peter rebuked as Jesus had rebuked Satan when Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness. But Jesus doesn’t just say to Peter, “Begone, Satan!”[1] He says, “If any [one] would come after me, let him [or her] deny himself or [herself] and take up his [or her] cross and follow me.”[2]

The 1949 General Convention of the Episcopal Church, meeting in San Francisco, approved the publication of a series of Prayer Book Studies. The first two were published in one thin paperback volume in 1950. The series concluded in 1989 with Prayer Book Studies 30: Supplemental Liturgical Texts.[1] Among the thirty, Prayer Book Studies IX: The Calendar is a favorite for a couple of reasons.[2] First, it kickstarted the process of the American Church rethinking the place of historical saints and martyrs. Second, unlike the studies of the calendar that were to follow, this one had four helpful appendices. Number 3 is unique in this series: “Notes on Certain Rejected Commemorations.

The Dream of Scipio is a novel by Ian Pears, an English novelist, art historian, and journalist.[1] Its central characters are three men and the relationship each had with a woman in a time of change: the collapse of the world in which they lived. The novel is set in what we call southern France, Provence, for first couple in the fifth-century of the Christian Era, for the second, the Middle Age, and for the third, the Second World War.

The First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians is among the seven letters for which there is an almost universal scholarly consensus that they come from Paul’s hand.[1] Our first reading today is the conclusion of the Second Letter of Paul to the Thessalonians. If the commemoration of Saint Barnabas on Monday and Louis, King of France yesterday, had not taken precedence, we would have heard all of this Second Letter at the daily Mass.

“Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, for flesh and blood did not reveal that to you but my father in heaven.”

Today I would like to struggle with you to try to make sense of what it means for us to see—sometimes to see clearly in moments of vision, clarity and insight; and sometimes to try to see, because that’s all we’re able to do, in moments of darkness, uncertainty; and confusion; and sometimes to see paradoxically, upside-down, foolishly, but nonetheless truly: God on the cross, life in the midst of death, dying and yet rising.

In the 1981 movie Chariots of Fire, Eric Liddell, a conservative Scottish Presbyterian, refused to run a race on a Sunday during the 1924 Olympics. Instead, he ran a race on a weekday that he was not expected to win and won.[1] It turns out that I have something of an Eric Liddell in my own family, not a runner, but an Anglican priest who became a congregationalist clergyman, a Puritan. He’s the only eleventh great-grandfather whose name, John Lothrop, that I know.

Today we commemorate two heroes of the Christian faith who died on this day August 20, one in the year 1153 and one in 1965. Bernard was born in 1090. He would become a Benedictine abbot who led a renewal of monasticism, from which the Order of Cistercians developed.[1] We also remember the life and witness of an Episcopal seminarian, Jonathan Myrick Daniels, who was born in on March 20, 1939, in Keene, New Hampshire, where he grew up. He is buried there in a grave that he shares with his parents with these words, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”[2]

In Raymond Brown’s An Introduction to the New Testament, we learn that “Eighty percent of Mark’s [verses] are reproduced in [Matthew] and 65 percent in Luke.”[1] The relationship between Mark, Matthew, and Luke is known as the “Synoptic Problem.” We get the word from Greek. S-Y-N—not S-I-N—means “with” or “together.” “Optic” is from optikos—Greek for “eye.” When you put the three gospels next to each other, you can see that the relationship is written, not oral. How Matthew and Luke use Mark with their other sources allows readers to think about the individual perspective Matthew and Luke bring to their gospels.