Michael B. Curry - Reconciliation, Healing, and Hope: Sermons from Washington National Cathedral

Reconciliation,
Healing,
and Hope

S ERMONS F ROM
W ASHINGTON N ATIONAL C ATHEDRAL

Edited by

JAN NAYLOR COPE

Foreword by Jon Meacham

Copyright 2022 by Washington National Cathedral

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Unless otherwise noted, the Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.

Scripture quotations marked (KJV) are taken from the KING JAMES VERSION (KJV): KING JAMES VERSION, public domain.

Reprinted by arrangement with The Heirs to the Estate of Martin Luther King Jr., c/o Writers House as agent for the proprietor New York, NY. Facing the Challenge of a New Age Copyright 1956 by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Renewed 1984 by Coretta Scott King. Strength to Love Copyright 1963 by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Renewed 1991 by Coretta Scott King. Ive Been to the Mountaintop Copyright 1968 by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Renewed 1996 by Coretta Scott King.

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Cover photo by Danielle E. Thomas, Washington National Cathedral
Cover design by Marc Whitaker, MTWdesign
Typeset by Rose Design

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cope, Jan Naylor, editor.

Title: Reconciliation, healing, and hope : sermons from Washington National Cathedral / edited by Jan Naylor Cope.

Description: New York, NY : Morehouse Publishing, [2022]

Identifiers: LCCN 2021041379 (print) | LCCN 2021041380 (ebook) | ISBN 9781640654846 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781640654853 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Sermons, American--21st century. | Washington National Cathedral (Washington, D.C.)

Classification: LCC BV4241 .R435 2022 (print) | LCC BV4241 (ebook) | DDC 252.009/05--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021041379
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021041380

I n the beginning was a question. In the cool of the evening, in the Garden of Eden, we are told that God is seeking Adam and Eve. Where are you? the Lord asks. Where are you? As Canon Kelly Brown Douglas preached from the pulpit of Washington National Cathedral in the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, that query echoes through the ages, from antiquity unto this very hour: Where are we? And there is, of course, a sequential questiona follow-up, in the vernacular of the press corps that dominates so much of the life of our capital city: Where are we going?

This collection of sermons from a season of plague and of pain hazards a few answers to these elemental puzzles. They are answers grounded in the Christian faith, which is itself formed from two essential sources of life and of light: love and remembrance. The gospel is founded on the injunction to love one another; the tradition that sustains us is summed up in perhaps the most-heeded commandment in all of history, which is to Do this in remembrance of Me. That gospel and this tradition are under assault in our time, an assault fueled by grievance and exacerbated, in the time of COVID, by disease and distrust.

The words in these pages are addressed to this broken and not-contrite world. As the worst pandemic in American history in a century swept the land, Michael Curry, the primate of the Episcopal Church, noted that the plague went beyond the physical. We faced, he said, a pandemic of the human spirit, when our lives are focused on ourselves, when the self becomes the center of the world and of the universe. It is a pandemic of self-centeredness. And it may be even more destructive than a virus.

It is surely hardier and more persistent than any medical condition. The sermons here are about the larger pandemic of which Bishop Curry spoke: a pandemic of sin and of selfishness, of self-absorption and the will to power. Such is the lot of a frail and fallen world; and such is the work of the church, to call us to love and to remembrance, for in love and in remembrance lie what Thomas Cranmer called the means of grace and the hope of glory.

Where are we? We are, too often, far from the love and from the call of God. That is in the nature of things; the story the Biblethe story of our livesis of fall and deliverance, captivity and liberation, exile and return. To everything there is a season, we have been told, and we are only now emerging from a time of trial. What saw us through was grace and science, concern and mindfulness, love and hope.

But our work is not done. It is only beginning, always, at least until the final in-breaking of the Holy Spirit and the arrival of that hour when every tear will be wiped away, and death shall be no more. And that is an hour whose coming we cannot know.

In the meantimewhich is where most of life is lived, in the meantimewe are left with the rite of remembrance. I am a historian who tries to make something new and resonant out of the elements of the past. I believe, deeply, that William Faulkner was right when he wrote that the past is never dead; it isnt even past, and that we do in fact live in what G. K. Chesterton called a democracy of the dead. Those who came before us have much to teach us; not everything, perhaps, for history and tradition are not infallible, but we have nowhere else to begin our deliberations about what we should do except with the fact of what we have done.

Remembrancehistorylies at the heart of our common ecclesiastical tradition. From the Song of MosesRemember the days of old; consider the years of many generations; ask thy father, and he will show thee; thy elders, and they will tell theeto the Last Supper, we are commanded to look back in order to summon the strength and the courage to move forward.

A place like Washington National Cathedral dwells in a particular and somewhat precarious place. It is at once sacred and secular; at once out of the world and of the world. Its pulpit and its altar are pivot points. Or, to switch the metaphor, gatewaysgateways from the visible to the invisible, from the temporal to the eternal. The cathedrals message is clear: For the people of God the most important and indeed radical thing we can do is to love and to remember. To keep the feast and say our prayers. To keep the candles lit and the lanterns burning. To read the office and sing the hymns. To preach the word and to heed it. A sacramental tradition will be relevant in direct proportion to how well and how faithfully it is carried forward in the ways it has been through so much storm and strife from Golgotha to twenty-first-century America. And though it may seem conventional, in fact the boldest course we can take is to preach the oldest piece of good news in the Christian story: He is not here, but is risen