St Margaret’s Day – SMH New Hartford, NY
Jeremiah 15:15-21; Ps. 31; I Peter 4:12-19; Matthew 13:44-52
It is a privilege to be the preacher today. This house, this chapel, these sisters, the Society of St. Margaret are an important part of my spiritual life. So thank you Sister Mary Gabriel for giving me this opportunity to preach.
Every two years my church generously grants me a month of sabbatical leave for which I am very grateful. The sole purpose of the month is for rest and renewal. So in May, all by myself, I got into my little VW Jetta and with my favorite CDs, lap top computer and camera I took a 3000 mile road trip south to visit family and friends. From New York I traveled down through Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, to Georgia and back up with various stops along the way.
I really roughed it too—staying in quaint inns and charming B&Bs, taking long walks on country roads, dining in gourmet restaurants, stopping for coffee at every Starbucks I could find, journaling to my heart’s content, reading for days and taking naps. With a full tank of gas and an empty bladder I was good to go for miles and miles and miles.
Having said all that there really was a serious side to this sabbatical.
I created a study project to explore the topic of “Family, Faith and Formation” and along with visiting a number of churches that were part of my faith formation as a child, young adult, not so young adult and seminarian I read several books on this topic. The book that gave me the greatest insights was Secularity and the Gospel by Ronald Rolheiser.
In this book Rolheiser states: “It is no secret that we, as Christians, are having trouble passing the faith on to our children.” What’s needed states Rolheiser is that we become missionaries—within our own culture, among our own children. As a mom with two grown sons who don’t go to church (unless I’m in town visiting) and two grandchildren who have yet to be baptized I couldn’t agree more. And as a priest, I am not only concerned about the church but burdened by its future.
With rare exception our churches are graying. Attendance is declining.
We do not know how to get young people (including those of our own families) to come through our doors, nor have we figured out, should they venture in, how to get them to stay.
I wonder if the few of us in the pews on Sunday morning have somehow lost the passion, the hunger, the quest for an intimate relationship with God and have too easily become content in simply “doing church”—showing up to say our prayers but then comfortably settling back into our humdrum secular lives. What seems to be lacking in our churches today is fire, romance, beauty, wonder, passion, meaning, creativity, life!
Rolheiser contends that what needs to be inflamed today inside the church is a romantic imagination that enables people to fall in love with God all over again. What’s needed is imagination which can inflame the hearts of both the churched and the unchurched with the beauty of God and the passion of faith.
Granted this will not be easy.
But what if, like Abraham and Sarah who had a baby when he was a hundred and she was ninety, the church were to get pregnant again by the Holy Spirit and in joy and wonder of that that “grey-haired ecclesial pregnancy” give birth to a new child, a new church—a church that cherishes the old and ushers in the new with excitement and expectancy? What if we were to mirror the ways of St. Margaret (who is by the way the Patron saint of pregnancy) with her steadfast witness, her boldness, her vision, her courage, her prayers and her love for Christ and give birth to new life in the church—a church filled with beauty, romance, passion and commitment.
Which brings us to our gospel reading. These parables about the Kingdom of God are addressed to us—the people of God, the church—persons who have encountered and know the active presence of God in our lives. Like finding a hidden treasure we already know something of the surprises and joys of God’s Kingdom. Like a discovering a pearl of great value we already recognize the priceless value of God’s gracious working in our lives. And like a fishnet cast into the sea we know there is abundance and variety in the kingdom of heaven.
But what we may not know is that the Kingdom of God is worth everything we have—all-out investment, radical obedience, and whole-hearted commitment to faithfulness.
In this gospel reading each one of us is being called upon to preserve the best of the old—the treasures of our tradition and the joys of the gospel story but also to help a new generation begin their own traditions, begin something new, hear God’s voice fresh in their own lives. And the call to do so is urgent.
After handing over to them these images of the Kingdom of God, Jesus asks his disciples, “Have you understood all this?” “Are you starting to get a handle on all this?” “Yes” they answer. “Yes, we do understand both the new and the old are necessary, essential, wonderful.
Jesus asks the same thing of us…”Are you starting to get a handle on all this—that the Kingdom of God is worth everything you have—all-out investment, radical obedience, and whole-hearted commitment to faithfulness. “Yes” we want to answer.
But as Beverly Gaventa puts it we have a deadly phobia of change that makes us cling to prayers we cannot pronounce without stumbling over our thee’s and thou’s”. The slightest shift in worship startles and unnerves us. We like the way things are and thoughts of doing anything new or being anything new as church scares us to death. But both the new and the old are to serve the church.
Both the new and the old are to reflect the gospel.
The church is a beautiful heritage worth preserving, worth renewing. But the church, as we love her, is graying and emptying. And so to give birth in our old age, the church must, out of the depths of our tradition, take hold of what we have as the church. On the other hand, in making the church relevant today we must realize that people go where they are fed and to be a church that welcomes all to the Table we must re-present the gospel and the sacraments as God’s gifts for all. We need to be gentle with the holiness in people’s lives, to recover the mystical, respect the depth of intellect and heal the split between faith and the culture. To do so we need to pray, minister and live out our spirituality with more imagination—namely with more originality, more evoking of God’s presence beneath the surface of things, more risk, more commitment to justice, more daring to embrace what’s human and what’s holy. We must go back to listening to our contemplatives: our poets, artists, mystics and yes, our saints.
Nothing certain is known of St. Margaret of Antioch. That she existed and was martyred are probably true. The legend that the cross she wore saved her from being swallowed alive by Satan who appeared in the form of a dragon is probably a tale crafted to speak of her faith and bravery as word of her courage spread. In the Middle Ages it did become the custom in pregnancy to pray to her for safe delivery.
On this feast day of St. Margaret and in this place I pray for the church to become pregnant with new vision, new commitment, new hope and I pray for a safe delivery. May our religious imaginations be ignited and our hearts be inflamed with a desire to become a church that is re-born with justice, welcome, truth, peace, love, compassion, mercy and grace. And may all that we say and do be pleasing to God.
Sermon sources: Secularity and the Gospel by Ronald Rolheiser, 2006 The Crossroad Publishing Company; “Both the New and the Old” article by Beverly Gaventa, Christian Century June/July 1993. p. 669; Exposition on text by Delmar Jacobson, Interpretation 29, 1975 pp. 277-282; Eastertide 2007 “St. Margaret’s Quarterly” article by Adele Marie, SSM on Saint Margaret of Antioch; A Book of Saints first published in 1996 by Lorenz Books, London.