Homily by Sr. Debra, August 18, 2013

Readings: Is. 5:1-7; Ps. 80:1-2, 8-19; Heb. 11:29 – 12:2; Lu. 12:49-56

Sr. Debra 

This morning I am going to reflect upon one verse in our gospel reading. I have used this gospel reading this week in my lectio. This is the verse that I was drawn to over and over again. Jesus said, “Do you think that I came to bring peace to the earth?”

I don't know about you, but I was sure hoping that Jesus came to bring peace to the earth. In fact Jesus did bring peace to the earth. In order for our Lord’s peace to have an effect however, the peace offered needs to be acknowledged, accepted and received. This is not something that just happens once and we’ve got it for all time. I believe that it is important that we ask for Christ’s peace on a regular basis. Sometimes several times in the day. I admit that for sometime now I have forgotten that. Even though we say it daily, I had not taken it in.

In the message translation, Peterson translates this verse with these words, “Do you think I came to smooth things over and make everything nice? Not so. I have come to disrupt and confront.” While I don't find Peterson’s interpretation of this passage much more comforting than the NRSV I do find it more understandable. I learned a long time ago that keeping peace for the sake of keeping peace, ultimately does not lead to peace. In fact this stance, often produces the opposite effect, greater turmoil.

No where is this better understood than with family members and friends of substance abusers. Those addicts who have kept their sobriety have had family members and friends who realized that 'keeping the peace for the sake of keeping the peace often lead both to further substance abuse and relationships that were codependent'. Subsequently the very loved ones who hoped they were helping and protecting the one in trouble were in fact enabling the destructive behavior to continue.

Maintaining the status-quo rarely leads to change when change is what is required. Sometimes it is both necessary and vital to ones health to disrupt and confront. Often the sooner this can happen, the soon­er effective healing can begin. I believe that this is what Jesus was getting at in our gospel reading today.

Having said this, I don’t want to give the impression that everyone should just run out and challenge and confront, willy nilly as a way of effecting change. In order for one to attain the desired life changing outcome, 'confrontation and disruption' takes a lot of genuine empathy and love as well as well thought out strategic planning. Jesus is our best example of how to do this.

Jesus challenged different people at different times. He called different people to accountability for their actions or inaction at different times and in different ways. He used stories and examples that the people he was talking to could relate to. He gave those who came to him and those waiting on the fringes all they needed in order to choose. In the end he also knew that the peace he offered could not and would not come about through force. It had to be by individual free choice.

I have to tell you, this whole issue of individual free choice has been a bit of a problem for me. I think if I had been standing in the crowd and Jesus said, “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth?” In my own desperation for peace in the world and in my desire for those I love also to have Christ's peace, a peace I have known, I might have been bold enough to yell out, “Yes Lord! I thought you came to bring peace, and frankly I need you to have come to bring peace yesterday!”

I expect Jesus might have responded to me compassionately and probably with some firmness, with another question. “Do you know the kind of peace I am talking about for yourself?” “Do you have this peace?” Actually I am pretty sure Jesus would have asked this question of me.

I don't believe we can offer to others what we ourselves either have forgotten or don't yet have. Earlier this week I was recalling a personal incident that may be a good example of what I am getting at. When my twin sister Denise and I turned 40 we decided to take a trip to Disney World in Florida. It was not until we were boarding the airplane that I realized that Denise had never flown before. She looked terrified. What I suspected was confirmed when the stewardess was going over the pre-flight safety instructions. I actually thought Denise might get out and walk when the stewardess spoke about what to do in the case of a water landing. The illustration I am getting at came when the stewardess said, “In case of a drop of air pressure in the cabin masks will be released, put your own mask on first before you try to assist someone else.” I realized that I would first need to look after myself by putting on my own mask if I had any hope of helping Denise put on hers. We were fortunate, the flight both there and back was smooth.

I believe that we are invited daily to acknowledge, accept and receive Christ’s peace. I believe that individual acceptance of Christ's peace will be the forerunner to any kind of world peace. Sometimes we are so frightened, disillusioned and angered by what we see happening in the world around us or by what has happened in our own lives that we fail to pay attention to what God is trying to do within us. If we don’t have peace within we will have a difficult time showing the peace of Christ to others.

I believe this inner gift of Christ’s peace was what that the great cloud of witnesses spoken about in our Epistle reading had. D.L. Moody said, “A great many people are trying to make peace, but that has already been done. God has not left it for us to do; all we have to do is enter into it.”

I believe that this is the one thing that the great cloud of witnesses had in common, they individually had entered into the peace of Christ. It was from their personal acceptance of this peace that they wereable to do the incredible things they did and were able to endure the situations they witnessed. So

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with per severance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfect­er of our faith. May Christ's peace enfold us, all dear to us and all who have no peace. Amen.

Homily at the Requiem for Sr. Constance Murphy, SSJD, St. JamesCathedral, Aug 10, 2013

The Reverend Bill Whitla, Associate SSJD

+In the name of God who made us, who gave Love to us, and who fills us with blessed spirit. Amen.

It is humbling to consider Sr. Constance’s long, long life of love and service in her beloved community. Sister Constance was born in 1904, just three years after the death of Queen Victoria in 1901. Who, we might ask, was the American president when Sr. Constance was born? Well, beginning with Theodore Roosevelt, she has lived through the terms of 19 of the 44 Presidents of the United States. And in her own religious order, the Sisters of Saint John the Divine, she has served through the leadership of five of the six mothers superior—only the Founding Mother Hannah was before her.

Some here, like Sister Beryl, will remember her for some seventy years—Sister Beryl went to Qu’Appelle Diocesan School as a boarder in 1943 when she was just turned a teenager. Sister Constance had joined the community ten years earlier, and had already been at QDS for five years before that youngster, now Sister Beryl, arrived. When she first saw her, Sr. Beryl says, “She was in motion, hurrying somewhere, with her arms full of books and papers.” That’s it —a nun in motion, hurrying here and there, teaching the young, a lifetime and more working on behalf of the elderly. She said so herself: “”And I’m just going to go on. Seize the day, that’s my motto.” Well, didn ‘t she just go on—and talk about seizing the day! I only remember her for a mere fifty-eight years,when I was a server for Father Freeland at the Church Home for the Aged, to which she had come in 1958. And, of course, it was in gerontology that she was a pioneer, making an enduring contribution as a founding member with Dean Charles Fielding of the Canadian Institute of Religion and Gerontology and numerous other associations and organizations where her expertise was asked for and freely and incisively given, and for which she received numerous awards—two honorary doctorates, chosen the senior of the year in Toronto in 1999, awarded the Ontario Senior Citizen’s Achievement award, the Confederation medal, and so on—And not least, a canon of this Cathedral! While still in her wheelchair, she was still going —still seizing the day. But—and this should be stressed equally, she was a praying sister, she lived her life with her sisters, and she died in their midst.

In her Baltimore family it was often the custom to name children with at least one of their names from the Bible. So her father’s middle name was Benjamin. She alone, among her brothers and sisters, so far as I know, had no middle name [though some have more recently told me that she did indeed have a middle name—Elizabeth]. She was just Constance. The word means “Steadfastness, firmness, resolution, faithfulness, fidelity . . . Persistence, and perseverance” (Oxford English Dictionary)—all those she certainly was—along with endurance and fortitude., and with the final and not quite so flattering a connotation, stubbornness. But the word “Constance” or “Constancy” does not occur in the Bible—not in the King James translation, not in the RSV or any of the other standard translations. But I have found one passage from the Bible that names the great virtue of constancy, in an almost unknown translation by the Anglo-Irish Plymouth Brother, John Nelson Darby. Here is Darby’s translation of 1 Thessalonians 1: 3–4. Paul was speaking of Thessalonians, but I am thinking of Sister Constance:

“We give thanks to God always for you all, making mention of you at our prayers, remembering unceasingly your work of faith, and labour of love, and enduring constancy of hope, in our Lord Jesus Christ . . ., brothers and sisters, beloved by God, your election.

I doubt that the Darby translation was available in 1904 in Baltimore, so I wonder if her name came instead from one of the books that the well-read and well-educated Murphy family had nearby, one that their devout religious upbringings at St. James’s Episcopal C hurch Baltimore, would foster under the Rev’d George Freeman Bragg, himself one of the first black priests in the Episcopal Church, and a tireless worker for black education, black voting rights, and black equality. Through him and through their own interest they would have at hand, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. And the word occurs only once there too. In the last chapter of the second book, Mr. Great-Heart says to Mr. Valiant-for-Truth

And did none of these things discourage you?

Valiant-for-Truth: No; they seemed but as so many nothings to me.

Mr. Great-Heart: How came that about?

Valiant-for-Truth: Why, I still believed what Mr. Tell-true had said; and that carried me beyond them all.

Mr. Great-Heart: Then this was your victory, even your faith.

Valiant-for-Truth: It was so. I believed, and therefore came out, got into the way, fought all that set themselves against me, and, by believing, am come to this place [and then they sing this hymn]

Who would true valour see,

let him come hither; 

one here will constant be, [there is the word] 

come wind, come weather; 

there’s no discouragement 

shall make him once relent 

his first avowed intent 

to be a pilgrim.

So I think of Sr. Constance as this constant pilgrim, going through the river with Mr. Valiant-for-Truth . “and all the trumpets sounded for them on the other side.”

She was born in Baltimore into what was known as the Murphy clan—and what a clan it was! Her grandfather and grandmother were both the children of slaves and somehow got an education, enough for her grandfather, John Henry Murphy to establish the Baltimore Afro American, the parent of several highly influential alternative newspapers, including one in Washington, that became the largest black paper on the Eastern seabord. He had ten children, and one of them, Sr. Constance’s father, George Benjamin Murphy, born in 1870, became the principal of Baltimore Elementary School 112 where Sr. Constance and many of her cousins attended. Her father had seven children, and Constance was the third child, the second girl. The family eventually became famous; all five of her brothers and her older sister achieved degrees in higher education, as did she, and so did their numerous cousins. Her oldest brother took over the publishing of the Afro-American. Her youngest brother William became a judge. The brother born next after Constance, George Benjamin Murphy Junior, was an eminent journalist, taking over the editorship of the Washington Afro American, and turning it into a major voice for Black America during the troublesome 1940s and 1950s. He immersed himself in the world of the NAACP and worked all of his life for social justice, against Klan lynchings and other terrible racism. Becoming ever more radicalized, he left the NAACP and joined the National Negro Congress to press for gains in the labour movement and equal rights in all areas of life. He numbered among his close friends Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson and the members of the Kennedy family. His newspapers provided the evidence for a petition to the United Nations, “We Charge Genocide” for the abuse of African Americans. For his work for justice he was brought up before Governor McCarthy’s notorious witch-hunting UnAmerican Affairs Committee, defended by his brother the judge. “Who would true valour see, let him come hither, One here will constant be, come wind come weather. It was in this crucible that Sister Constance was forged at the beginning, and the work of education and care for those neglected—in her long term vision the aged—was the work already assumed by the Sisters of Saint John the Divine and they fit like a hand in glove.

Constance had set her heart on joining the All Saints Sisters of the Poor in Baltimore, but because they would not accept her because of her colour, she came to Canada and was welcomed by the Sisters of St. John. The rest, as they say, is history.

How separated she must have felt —separated from a large and loving and active family, separated from her own country, separated from the community she wanted to join by the colour of her skin. Yet welcomed in Ontario, at what had once been one of the ends of the Underground Railroad, by a new community that made her one of their own.

What Paul in the Letter to the Romans is talking about in that remarkable passage when he was writing to those few—perhaps only a hundred—Christians in Rome, and to the Jews there too, was about similar things—how, even in their far-from-Jerusalem existence, they were not separated; even in being isolated in Rome, in the centre of the Empire because of their faith, they were not isolated. But this part of the letter, the culmination of the first half of Romans, is not really about separation at all. Paul mentions separation—but only to negate it —nothing can separate us, he says—His writing here is really about inclusion —the inclusion of all despite all that seems to separate —the ills of human life, even death –and in the life to come, not even angels —nothing in the present or in the world to come, nothing in time or beyond time —all is inclusion of those who are in the love of God in Christ Jesus —and not only inclusion —but union –Paul is instructing those few Roman Christians about union of of them —all of us—in Christ.

God calling the individual —yes certainly—the individual who is faithful and the individual who is a sinner —that is – each one of us being called into this new relationship of life unified. But also God is calling the Gentiles along with the Jews —all are being incorporated —a community of faith and a community of deliverance.

It is that deliverance that Jesus is talking about in the great Eucharistic dialogues in Chapter 6 of John’s Gospel, when the people stretch out their hands to him asking for the bread that satisfies. Chapter 6 begins with the huge Eucharistic feeding of the 5,000—the crowds have brought no provisions with them, the disciples are totally unprepared and have nothing to offer of their own. Only a boy has the five barley loaves and two small fish for the Eucharistic banquet. The miracle occurs, and the people misread it, or ignore it, and so apparently do the disciples. The crowd wants to crown Jesus king—the last thing he wants—and he escapes by boat. Some follow him, and eventually comes to-day’s reading in which the crowd comes to Jesus and asks him, “Where do we get this bread that satisfies?” It seems they—and we—are never satisfied. We desire more and more, and we catch our desires from each other and pass them on again . It seems, then, that the only way out of this loop of stumbling over one unsatisfied desire after another is to finally find what God desires for us.

That is called vocation, and we all hear it and respond to it however we will—Vocation is having our best desires aligned with what God desires, made visible and tangible in Jesus, in the vocation to follow, and to love, and to serve. “Where do we get this bread that satisfies?” they ask. Jesus declares “I am the bread of life”

[one of seven such declarations: I am (he declares emphatically each time, ego eimi) I am the light of the world, the door of the sheepfold, the good shepherd, the resurrection and the life, the true and living way, and the true vine.]

When Jesus declares that he is the true and living bread, those who hear that vocation stretch out their hands and claim it. —because it is the food that fills, that feeds, that satisfies, not just for now, but bread for life, bread as life, bread as deliverance, bread as unity, bread as community, bread as foretaste and bread as memory. For Constance it was all these things, and now for her, it is the bread of life indeed. As we receive it now, and share it now, there is no separation, but fulfilment, inclusion and union with God and with each other in the bread of hope and the wine of faith, here and now, and still to come. Amen.

The Rev. Bill Whitla

Associate, SSJD

The sermon preached at the Convent by The Reverend Maggie Helwig on August 3, 2013

The  Rev. Maggie Helwig

As some of you know, I'm the parish priest at St Stephen-in-the-Fields, so it is quite meaningful for me to be celebrating the saint with you today. The feast of St Stephen was tradtionally celebrated on December 26, the “feast of Stephen” mentioned in the famous carol, “Good King Wenceslas.” Acknowledging that this is a fairly terrible day to try to get anyone into church, the calendar now allows for the feast to be marked in early August instead; which, as far as getting people into church goes, is not actually all that much better, but there you go.

Stephen was the first martyr of the early church, stoned to death by an angry mob, and the prayers and readings for today focus very much on that, and on the pattern he sets for commitment in the face of, and to the point of, death, without returning violence. But I'd like to look at another aspect of Stephen's story today, because he was not only the first martyr, he was one of the first deacons, and that's something we talk about less and perhaps understand even less well than we do his martyrdom.

It is a striking moment in the very early church, and in its way a troubling one, the point when the apostles decide that they are too busy and important to be feeding poor widows, and create a separate order, the deacons, to deal with all this table-serving business. There was more than just that involved, of course. This was also part of the internal politics of balancing the two main communities in the early church, the native Palestinians from whom the original apostles all probably came, and the diaspora Jews whose native language was Greek – the original deacons all apparently belonged to this second group, and it gave them a place within the emerging structure. But it's clear enough from the story in Acts that the creation of the first deacons was in some part about the apostles judging that service to the vulnerable was not quite worth their very important time and energy. It is one of those moments in Acts when the barely-forming church reveals itself to be a very human community, living out the new life in Christ to the best of its ability but always inclined to slide gently backwards into familiar old ways of understanding.

The word “deacon” comes from a Greek verb, diakonein, to serve. It's quite a common verb, but all through each of the four Gospels, the word is used almost exclusively of women. It is women who serve, who carry out the less prestigious, necessary, life-sustaining humble work of feeding and caring and tending. It is Peter's mother-in-law, raised from sickness so she can serve the apostles their dinner. It is Martha of Bethany. It is the group of women who came with Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem and supported the apostolic mission from their own resources.

Women, I can only think now, very much like the amazing Sister Constance, whose long life of service in this world ended yesterday evening – her birthday into glory, as they say of the saints. Women who, like Constance, got out there and did what needed doing for the sick and the hungry and the aging and the dying, did what had to be done until they could do no more.

Now, I said the word was used “almost” exclusively of women. There is one male person in the Gospels to whom the word diakonein is attached, in fact frequently attached. And that one man is Jesus. In fact, it is the word he uses to summarize the entire meaning of his earthly ministry -- “The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve,” to diakonein. Jesus, the incarnate Word who bends down to wash the feet of Peter and the rest, did not see diakonia as unworthy, did not scorn the work of slaves and women but identified it as the fundamental work by which we should understand his whole earthly life. All of it – healing and teaching and feeding, walking with the poor and the outcast, going voluntarily into the hands of power, death on the cross and resurrection – diakonia. Service. The Bread of Life waits upon all our tables.

The order of deacons in the church has been through a number of vanishings and recoveries, and is understood differently in different denominations, but it's made clear, in the Anglican and Roman Catholic rites for ordaining a deacon, that it is still intended fundamentally as a call to service. Deacons are called to serve the vulnerable, weak and needy, to feed the hungry and visit the sick – and more than that, to speak for the vulnerable when they cannot make their own voices heard. To bring the suffering of the world into the church and make it known, and call us all to be responsible to that suffering, to tend the wounds of the world and to try to create a better one.

Everyone who is ordained a priest is ordained a deacon first, and remains a deacon forever. But, insofar as all Christians are called by baptism to share in the life of Christ, and insofar as Jesus identified diakonia as the meaning of his life, in that sense all Christians are called, fundamentally called, to be deacons. And we see the work of the deacon at the core of all those lives we recognize as showing forth the truth of Christ. Sometimes I think we don't need so much to remind ourselves of the priesthood of all believers as we do of the diaconate of all believers. In some ways, that life of service, that humility, that openness to the world, which is the first necessary basis of all our various vocations.

Oddly enough, that carol I mentioned earlier, that old favourite about the feast of Stephen, that song actually gets it; for it is, after all, about a king who sets out into the snow and storm to bring food and firewood to a poor man. It's not without meaning that it's set on Stephen's traditional feast day. For it tells us that all human status, all worldly importance, is an incidental thing, and that the real calling is to get out there in the wind and do what is needful. Get on our bikes, as Constance did. So let us do, then, on this feast of Stephen and always.


The  Reverend Maggie Helwig was appointed priest-in-charge of St. Stephen- in- the- Fields in Toronto  in May 2013.

Before her ordination, Maggie worked as a writer, editor, arts organizer, and human rights activist. She spent nearly ten years as an organizer of the Friday Out of the Cold/Out of the Heat meal program, which began at St Stephen’s and is now hosted by St Thomas, Huron Street; she also worked as a parish outreach facilitator for York-Credit Valley, and chairs the diocesan Social Justice and Advocacy Committee. She has published twelve books of poetry, essays and fiction, and her most recent novel, Girls Fall Down (which includes scenes set in a slightly fictionalized St Stephen’s), was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award in 2009, and chosen as the Toronto Public Library’s One Book Toronto in 2012. She has been the literary editor of Canadian Forum, the co-coordinator of the Toronto Small Press Fair and the associate director of the Scream Literary Festival. Maggie was ordained priest in the Anglican church in January 2012, and has served as the assistant curate at St Timothy’s, North Toronto. She has lived near St Stephen’s for most of her adult life (currently in the Alexandra Park area, a few minutes to the south) and is very excited to be joining the parish as their priest. She hopes to work with the congregation and the community to revitalize their long tradition of engaged urban ministry in the Catholic tradition at St. Stephen- in- the- Fields in Toronto