"Peace be Within Thy Walls" at St. James Episcopal, Marietta GA

View from inside St. James's narthex to Church Street, twilight

Psalm 122: "Peace be within your walls"

Our walls at St. James bear stone tablets, so old that some engraved letters have blurred. The stones honor parishioners who worshiped here before these very walls existed, before the train tracks were laid, before Church and Polk were streets. Some of their birth dates reach back more than 150 years.

For those earliest parishioners, candles were an everyday utility, not a lovely enhancement of worship. "All things in heaven" were close by, not light years away; and "things invisible" didn't include bacteria and UV rays. When they prayed for "this nation," they were thinking of twenty-some states east of the Missisippi, not a world power. For them, it was unthinkable to sit in the congregation next to divorced individuals, or people of any background other than Anglo-Saxon. They would not have been familiar with women in positions of leadership in the church or anywhere else, or with anyone who didn't wear a hat in public. As late as 1960, it was scandalous to some when a Roman Catholic of Irish descent went hatless to his own Presidential inauguration.

But cast back another 150 years before our earliest parishioners were born, and find yet another world before steam engines, telegraph wires, and the Constitution. In that world, ten miles was a great distance, aristocracy was esteemed, democracy was disreputable, and judges from the Salem witch trials were still living. Composers of the music that we call classical hadn't been born.

Yet with those parishioners of other centuries, we worship with the same rites, recite prayers in the same way, often using the same phrases. With them, we know Lent, and we  look forward to Easter. We all have heard today's reading from Romans, Paul's rebuke to a church that drew a sharp distinction between Jew and Greek, assuring them that "the same Lord is Lord of all."

There is peace and comfort in realizing that our church walls enclose a community in time as well as in space. Whenever the peace of this community has been disturbed by conflict -- and that has happened regularly for centuries -- there is also peace in remembering what has blurred with time, and what time has not touched.

St. James, the nave, 1918