A transcription of the sermon given by Bishop Julia E. Whitworth at Evensong with Seating of the New Bishop on Oct. 20, 2024, at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Boston, appears below.
First of all, it is a joy to be with you this evening as your bishop in our cathedral. It is also a deep relief that I did not break the glass doors!
I'm so very grateful to the Very Rev. Amy McCreath, dean of this cathedral, to the Rev. Dr. Matthew Cadwell, vicar of Old North Church, along with their music directors, Louise Mundinger and Libor Dudas, for creating this service. You see, Old North Church and the Cathedral Church of St. Paul are peculiars of the diocese. As peculiars they have a singular historic relationship with the bishop diocesan. It's different than other congregations and missions of this diocese. We have a different relationship. And so they are perfectly suited for this kind of collaboration. Collaborations which we are always going to be enriched by.
Now, I'll admit to you when Dean Amy asked me in July if I would be today's preacher, I was like, yeah, sure, that sounds good. And I kind of underestimated the impact of yesterday, of this past week, of this past month. Whew! So this might be more of a homily than a sermon, or even maybe a homilette. But I have some thoughts. I have some thoughts about cathedrals, and I have some thoughts about the peculiarity of the church itself. And I'm happy to share some of those thoughts, some scripted, some less so, with you tonight, and we'll use it as a kind of launch pad for our time together as bishop and as diocese. And we'll see, over the course of time, whether the power of the Holy Spirit, which way she might propel us.
First I'll share with you a memory, a memory of my first cathedral. My first cathedral was the Cathedral Shrine of the Transfiguration, in Shrine Mont, which is the camp and conference center of the Diocese of Virginia, or, as they just say down there, "the diocese," as if there are none others. It is in fact another commonwealth. The Cathedral Shrine of the Transfiguration is an open-air cathedral. It was hewn out of rock from the mountain on which it sits. Rock which was pulled down by humans rolling the rocks, sometimes horses, donkeys, to build a shrine near where the longtime bishop, Robert Atkinson Gibson, had had a summer cottage, a beloved place of retreat and prayer. And after his death, his successor saw fit to name that the cathedral, the see for the diocese. It's not in Richmond where the diocesan offices are, where the capital of the state is, but way off the beaten track. A little road which was probably even littler then. A place of refuge and quiet, of natural beauty, a place that also became the summer camp for the diocese. Where children and youth have come closer to God and one another for generations since.
I was a camper at Shrine Mont and then eventually a counselor. Those are some of my richest periods of spiritual awakening. And somehow we knew that because that stone seat, the bishop's seat, was where we spent time, we knew a thing about the priorities of our bishop. It was us. Children. Youth. People who gathered in that shrine every day and shouted their prayers, literally, with joy. We sang all the camp songs you'd know, plus it was the 80s, so some Violent Femmes, too. No joke. And the bishop would come up every year, and he'd spend a week. It was Peter Lee, the bishop who confirmed me. He would show up. His license plate was just: "The Bish" and he would sit in his cathedra, and we knew that he was for us, because where the church puts the seat of power says a word about its values. It says a word about its priorities. And we understood that growing the church through the youngest and most vulnerable, and sometimes most unseen, that was his priority. And it was beautiful. So somehow I've always known that these chairs matter. Even in Virginia, which also is known as a pretty low church, diocese, that these chairs tell us a thing about what counts, what we value.
Now, many of you know that I also have had a close relationship with the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. It was my first congregation when I was a young adult and moved to New York. I went there because I had read Madeleine L'Engle's books and she set one on that close, and that seemed cool. I sang in their choir. I was ordained there, eventually served on staff as a canon. The Cathedral of St. John the Divine is very long, two football fields and a football. And when it was imagined by the leaders of the Episcopal Church in the late 19th century, they wanted to build a cathedral that eclipsed a different cathedral which had been built by the Roman Catholic Church, to show who was most dominant still in the civic order of the city. They had other objectives, and I would hope and pray it was also to show and demonstrate the glory of God.
But humans are humans, and we build things to reflect our values. And they picked a site to the north of the city that at that time was higher than any place else. The idea was that the cathedral could be seen anywhere. It was to be a grand gothic building that reached tall in the air with spires that eclipsed those of Europe. They ran out of money. They ran out of time. They ran out of patience with one another. It's a whole big story that we really won't get into here or really ever. It's their story. And it's our story. What's interesting to me about that cathedral is even as it was being built by those who enjoyed the most power in that society and that moment and that city, they also understood a thing about the city that they were called to serve. And so they created chapels to reflect the immigrant communities of New York City of the time. The Chapels of the Tongues. Chapels that paid honor and homage to folks who likely weren't Episcopalians, from all over the globe, because that's the thing about cities like New York and Boston, is we are richer for our diversity and we always have been, and that is true of every city and every town, by the way. And at our best in the church we work hard to figure out what holds us together, binds us to our deepest tradition, and also a way to open up our doors to be, as we've heard, a house of prayer for all people.
I feel like the Cathedral of St. John the Divine really got its identity clear when it ran out of money. When it ceased to try to be the best and the most perfect. It's lopsided. The towers don't even align, let alone are finished. The Cathedral of St. John the Unfinished, some call it, and I liked that because we build ourselves and our lives, and I pray we're never finished because God is the one who is working on our perfection. And at our best our churches should reflect that hope and dream as well.
And over time, that cathedral, like this one, found its calling to serve those who were not being served in other churches. To serve those who were living and dying of HIV/AIDS in the 80s when no one else would in New York, just as this cathedral did in Boston. We celebrated LGBTQ folks before it was fashionable to go to Pride, or corporately responsible. That was a place where people were talking about creation care when we didn't have language for it. And experimented with the arts and religion. In being forward looking to the concerns of the world, just as this cathedral, with its glass doors to face the State House and the largest public gathering space in the city aims to do as well.
You see, cathedrals are peculiar. They're peculiar because they sit outside of the normative church world of vestries and congregations. We have congregations, we have chapters, we have governance bodies, but I believe that cathedrals are freed up a little to take some risk, to be a little bit less comfortable. And maybe a little more comforting to folks who would not otherwise find their way into some other churches.
Cathedrals stand as beacons for the values of their bishops, of their dioceses, of their chapters, of, at our best, the Lord we serve. They can stand as beacons, beacons just like the lamps of Old North Church. I actually haven't really looked at them yet, but these are, I assume, replicas, but very faithful replicas, I assume, of those lamps raised up to usher our revolutionary country into what has continued to be a slow march towards liberty and justice for all. Lamps that were the beginning. Raised high from one of our churches, which was at its time a church that actually owed its allegiance to the king that eventually we revolted against. Because churches are peculiar.
In churches we follow the one who says the least are those who should be most favored. That the last are first. That children should be brought close to Jesus Christ. And that we should be led by those with whom Jesus sat, because where your leader sits matters. Those who had no place in the temple. Those who had no place in society, widows, outcasts, the sick, the needy, the dispossessed. That's peculiar. We're peculiar. We do these ancient things and we try to stretch ourselves to figure out the ways to do them that nonetheless speaks to the world we live in; responds to the place we find ourselves, whether in Virginia in the 1920s that sought to build a cathedral out of the rocks on which it stood, or St. John the Divine that finally understood that standing at the footsteps of Harlem meant it wasn't called to stand with the robber barons who built it--forgive me, wherever you all might be--but those all around it who were never going to have the money to build a great stone cathedral.
Or this cathedral, which was founded to be a home, as you read, for the lost and lonely people. That's what Bishop Lawrence wrote, that's what he said when he created this peculiar cathedral that is not tall but wide. It doesn't aim to dwarf us--I mean, it does a little bit--but to draw us together. And each subsequent bishop and dean--and Dean Amy has been telling me some of the history--has put their own interpretation of that call, to know Christ and make Christ known, to be a house of prayer for all people, to be a beacon for God's love and justice to our whole city, to our whole world.
You all know, probably better than I, some of you, the ways that this cathedral seeks to do that, by creating a worshiping space for folks who have not felt welcomed in other worshiping spaces, whether it's queer and trans folks, whether it's folks experiencing homelessness, whether it's folks who feel a little different, or read the Bible a little differently because the understand that Jesus was pretty peculiar.
Or whether it's the way we partner with our siblings of other faiths and understand as followers of one God we can be a safe space for our Muslim friends to worship here every Friday. It's extraordinary. There's so much that you all do in your cathedral and so much more we can, because it's not built to dwarf us. Because the chair is not placed among the mightiest of us all, but in the center of the city where people come and go and come through right under us to get where they're going. My prayer is that some will stop here and walk this labyrinth, the circuitous path that we all follow towards the very heart of God. That they'll understand that we are here for everyone, to bring them closer to God.
Our final reading talked about Christ Jesus the cornerstone, this architectural term that seems to be about rooting God in one place. But we know that that's not at all what we're charged to do. We're not charged to worship our buildings. We're tempted to because they're beautiful and they cost a lot of money. But in fact we are invited to create a holy temple for God in our hearts and in our lives and everywhere we choose to sit.
So this day, you have seated me in this chair, in this place. And there are chairs all over this diocese where I will be privileged to sit so that we all might be reminded together that we're called to this work together. That's what Episcopal churches do, we have these silly chairs in every church, or some semblance of them, to be reminded that the work that we do to build the temple of God is never done in isolation, but it's done collectively, imbued by the Holy Spirit so that we may offer ourselves, our souls and bodies to God and to God's creation.
So let's be peculiar. Let's be peculiar together, be an organization that is meant not for its members but for those just outside our doors, to whom we say, all are welcome. Thanks be to God. Amen.