Episcopal Wisdom on Death, Trinity, and Church Architecture

In the past few weeks, we've had some memorable insights presented during sermons by our two clergymen at St. James Episcopal Church, Marietta.

[Photo: Jesus Asleep in the Boat, painted by Jules Joseph Meynier, 1826-1903]

Father Roger Allen drew our close attention to the theme of death in the readings for today's service. After pointing out myriad ways that our culture both distances us from death and shows morbid fascination with death in entertainments and news media, Fr. Roger drew highlights from the texts.

A reading from the apocryphal book The Wisdom of Solomon tells us "God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living" for "he created all things that they might exist, and the generative forces of the world are wholesome" (Wisdom 1.13-14). The creator made us "in the image of his own eternity" and only those who belong to "the party" of "the devil" experience it (Wisdom 2:23-24).

Bringing out the details of the story of Jesus raising Jairus's daughter (Mark 5, especially v.41-43), Fr. Roger paused to acknowledge the continuing pain of parents in our congregation whose children have died.

He remarked how rare it is now for congregants to walk through the parish cemetery to enter the church, and how that used to be a meaningful arrangement.

He also shared the epitaph of a feisty woman who in 1847 pushed for the founding of the worship center where he went on retreat this past week. Her headstone tells us her name, her dates, and the words, "Demure at last." When we laughed, Fr. Roger told us that it's good for us to laugh at death.

He also pushed us to our own catechism for an answer to the question "Why do Episcopalians pray for the dead?" The elegantly phrased answer is both psychologically sensitive and scripturally sound:

We pray for them, because we still hold them in our love, and because we trust that in God's presence those who have chosen to serve him will grow in his love, until they see him as he is. (Book of Common Prayer 862)

Though I've not read that before, it strikes me as coming close to the essence of what makes the Episcopal Church so appealing to me from all the other approaches to faith that I've encountered.

Remarkably, COVID never came up.

Plus Some Memorable Bits from Sermons in June Our associate rector Fr. Daron Vroon had a little fun with us on Trinity Sunday by turning upside down the Christians' assumption that the Trinity is something we came to understand only after Pentecost. He gave a quick run-down of numerous places in the Hebrew Scriptures such "the spirit over the waters" in Creation, the burning bush, the human presence who met with Moses in the tabernacle "like a friend." The trinitarian understanding of God was already bubbling up in the Hebrew faith long before Jesus.

Then last week, Fr. Daron looked at the story of the apostles' during a storm at sea waking Jesus up in the hold of the boat. Without seeing the story as "just" metaphor, he helped us to see metaphor in the story. The boat, he said, is a common symbol of salvation (as the sea was a symbol of chaos and death). Then he gestured to the walls of our church: That's why the room where we take in teachings and the sacraments, called "the nave," related to navy, is laid out long and narrow like a ship.