The Episcopal Church, USA

The Episcopal Diocese of Chicago




The Church of England

                 Farewell to Marion and Barbara

August 10th, 2003 marked Marion's last Sunday with us as our vicar and priest, and her partner Barbara's last Sunday with us as choir member, lay reader, and chalicer. They have since moved back to Virginia to take on the running of a farm, and to be closer to Marion's mother. We will miss them both very much.

That same week, the Episcopal Church was in the news. Its General Convention was struggling with the decision to approve or disapprove of the election of V. Gene Robinson, a gay man in a committed relationship, as Bishop of New Hampshire. For us here in a small parish in Hoffman Estates, it seemed the larger Episcopal church was finally getting around to an issue that had quickly become a non-issue two years ago in our community of faith. 

The following is the sermon preached that Sunday by our supply priest, The Rev. Richard E. Lundberg.


When I agreed to preach today, Marion's last Sunday with us, it was a few weeks before the meeting of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in Minneapolis. If I knew what I know now I might have said, "You do it yourself, thank you very much." No, I would have done it anyway because it is important for us to think about ourselves, we Anglicans, and to try again to understand who and what we are, today and yesterday and tomorrow.

Some people have asked me, "What does the Church think it's doing, what in the world is it thinking?"

Well, let's go back to the early days of the Anglican Communion to think about it. In those days you were either Roman Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant,  that new group of upstarts on the continent of Europe who were following Martin Luther in Germany, or John Calvin and Huldreich Zwingli in Switzerland. 

And the question for Anglicans was, "Who are you, Catholic or Protestant? Make up your minds." So we thought about it, and argued about it, and wrote about it, and we decided "YES!"

What did we mean, "yes?" That's it - that's who we are; we are both fully Catholic and Protestant both at the same time... that is who we are.

I think from that time on we have been God's experimental Church. We had only started when the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, thought that English-speaking people should be able to worship God in their own language rather than Latin, which was considered by many to be God's own language. To worship in English was thought by many to be sacrilegious, immoral, and disgusting.

In 1549 when the Anglican clergy began to say Mass in English there were those who ran them out of the churches with pitchforks. Then in 1611, to add insult to injury, King James I appointed 70 scholars to translate the Bible into the English language to be read in the church. He decreed that every church should have a copy of the Bible in English, the King James Version, called the Authorized Version on their lectern. The door wasd and the English-speaking people of the world have been re-translating the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer ever since.

Oh, a couple more things; the Church thought the Sacrament of Ordination to the Deaconate, the priesthood and the Episcopate should not preclude the sacrament of Holy Matrimony. They thought priests could, and maybe even should marry! That was a shocking and frightening idea. Propounded and carried out in the new Protestant/Catholic Church, too. What was God thinking to allow such radical changes in the worshipping community?!

Now, if you were to remain in this Protestant/Catholic community of faith it was very important that you be willing to remain in the center and not fall off on either side of the issue of authority: that is who has it, and who is to be the final authority in matters of faith and morals?

On the one side there were the Protestants who tended to say the Bible is IT; what it says in the Bible is the final authority. Admittedly, there were some problems with that; were we to kill witches as it says in Leviticus, or do the same to homosexuals as it says? So there needs to be some interpretation of the words of the Bible.

The Roman Catholics said, "Oh, yes, we have someone who will do that for us; the Pope, when he speaks from his chair in the Vatican - the Pope, the Bishop of Rome, will tell us the infallible truth." Surely God the Holy Spirit would not allow the Church to make any mistakes in such important matters.

These strange Anglicans said "No, each person should be able to make up their own mind about such things using their brains... and new and growing knowledge and continuing revelations of the Holy Spirit of God, and the Bible, and the tradition of the Church each must be taken into account when making such decisions.

However, the matter of final authority must remain in the hands of God, we must continue to be patient until we know what the mind of God is about such things as; "Who God is and who we are, and all that?" Oh, my, the door isagain to change and argument and interpretation.

Now some Episcopalians began to think that perhaps there was no theological reason why half of the human race should be denied ordination because they were women. What a question, where do those Anglicans, now especially those Americans, come up with such ideas? Why can't they leave things alone, we did just fine, in some opinions, by having just male human beings be priests and deacons and Bishops. We already had Deaconesses and Nuns for females. Who could think about parish churches without the Women's Auxiliary? The Bishop of California, James Pike (California, where else?), said when he ordained Phyllis Edwards that he made her a Deacon, not a Deaconess: and there you have it, another transformation in the Protestant/Catholic Church, another cat is out of the bag! Eleven women in Philadelphia grabbed that cat by the tail and the Church began to to ordain women as priests and even bishops, for Heaven's sake... I use the phrase "For Heaven's sake" advisedly.

On each of these historic occasions there were those who proclaimed, "That's it! I can't stand the change from the way it has always been; the tension is too much; I can't hold all that change and tension in my mind, in my theology; I want the answers, and I want them NOW; I can't wait another minute. So I leave and agree with those other Christians: it is the Bible, period; or it is the Pope, or it is Jerry Falwell or it is somebody who will make the decisions about it all for me. I don't want to make another change in my religious life; leave me alone. I cannot wait."

But the question always is, "What does God think and want in all these matters?" I think from time to time God is shaking His head in wonder. But which way is God shaking His head - vertically, in affirmation, or horizontally, in negation? I confess I don't know, and neither do you.

I am called upon as an Anglican to be patient until God's Will is known now as it has always been. I need to and must think about all these things, be diligent in my prayers, keep clearly in mind and heart that it is God whom we worship and it is God to whom we go for guidance and direction. It is as true now as it has always been in the issue of homosexuality, as well as all the other issues that have come before us as Anglican Christians.

Now... look at us, these two parishes joined together this morning to worship God and to bid good-bye to our dear friend and priest and pastor.

All too short a time ago, we were asked to call a new priest to St Columba and to Holy Innocents - a woman. But we never had a woman priest, never thought about a woman priest, even if she was an ex-Marine (if there is such a thing as an ex-Marine).

We were told she was a wonderful preacher and a concerned pastor... she did tend to weep a little during her sermons, but she told such wonderfully poignant stories about her life and her family to illustrate Biblical truth, that a tear was more than appropriate.

Oh yes, then she brought with her a companion who was bright and delightful, and would sing in the choir and read the lessons beautifully and with meaning, and who had a PhD in chemistry; and that was a problem for many of us (not the PhD in chemistry).

And guess what? We don't want her to go, we want both of them to stay. My family voted to keep her here, and so do we all. But circumstances change things; we Anglicans know that all too well, and we learned to love them both and include them in our Church families. We wish them well, the best; and thank them for another lesson in what it means to be an Anglican Christian. We have learned again how fundamentally important is the Incarnation. We will miss them and are grateful to them for the time we have been together.

Amen.