Sermon: Mt. 18:21-35
St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, 9-11-11
It is good to get away. At the very least it provides some fresh sermon material. This trip certainly did that. While the main objective of our recent trip was to have a quality week with grandbabies (oh, and their parents, too), Cheryl and I had three days to explore southeast Virginia before the family rendezvous on the Outer Banks. I had been wanting to do this for some time. God must have been in agreement with the plans because we travelled in the aftermath of hurricane Emily and were not in the least inconvenienced by her. Airports opened up just in time; roads were cleared ahead of us; the power was turned back on in motels and restaurants even though the staff frequently were without power at their homes and had been for several days.
I wanted to visit that part of the country because of its connection with the early history of our country and with the origins of the U.S. Episcopal Church. That we got to do. We were at the site on the James River which in 1607 was the first English settlement in the new world that endured. There had been an Anglican Church there, but the building did not survive. A few miles up the road, though, is Williamsburg, which was the capital of the Virginia Colony when Thomas Jefferson was governor. Many of those buildings have survived and been restored into what is known as Colonial Williamsburg. The church known as Bruton Parish Church in use since 1715 not only has survived but is the functioning parish church for modern Williamsburg. We were fortunate to be admitted there on the first day Colonial Williamsburg was open after Emily and to come along just in time to celebrate Holy Communion with the Wed. morning congregation. You think St. Stephens' pews are uncomfortable; you should try kneeling in theirs. I felt like I was trespassing because they had historic names inscribed on them, names like T. Jefferson and G. Washington. The priest-celebrant that day told me not to be concerned because he doubted those guys every really spent much time in those pews.
A few more miles down the road is Yorktown, made famous by George Washington’s defeat in 1781 of the British under Cornwallis, with a lot of help from the French army and fleet. The national park there gives one a vivid understanding of just how the battle was fought and how the colonists for all practical purposes won the Revolutionary War. In York Town itself we visited Grace Episcopal Church, which has stood on the same site since 1642, and spent some time with the rector and associate rector. It is famous for being the site of the first Episcopal Confirmation in the thirteen colonies.
To add icing to the cake, the place where we met the family on the Outer Banks in North Carolina is near Kitty Hawk where Orville and Wilbur Wright, two bicycles makers from Dayton, Ohio, manufactured and flew the first airplane. That was over three hundred years from the landing at Jamestown but those brothers were pioneers in their own right.
I had the feeling several times on the trip that I was walking on sacred ground, ground hallowed by ancestors, all of whom came to this fertile and promising new land, bringing their religion with them and hoping for a better and freer life for their themselves and their descendants. We are the descendants, both genetically and spiritually, of those immigrants. We occaionally need to be reminded how hard our ancestors worked and sometimes fought to establish a country here and to win and keep its freedom. That freedom of opportunity allowed two brothers from Ohio to go to the sands of the Outer Banks and make history. We want our children and our children’s children to have the same chance to make history.
Ten years ago to the day, our complacency was jolted to the core when we saw those Twin Towers, symbols of international trade, come crashing down. For the first time since the Civil War, 1865, the killing impact of war came to this land. Many people showed heroism that day and in the days to come: the men who brought that plane down over the wilderness in Pennsylvania, giving up their own lives in order to save many other lives, and the firefighters and rescue workers both at the Pentagon in Washington and the Financial District in New York. St. Paul’s Chapel near the Twin Towers, by the way, was a haven for the rescue workers during those mournful days that followed the disaster. It is an Episcopal church where George Washington worshipped.
We honor those heroic people today, just as we have honored those who fought in the Revolutionary War and the many wars that followed. We mourn our dead as well as the dead from other countries who were killed innocently as a result of the tragedies of 9/11 We pray for the families who survived but have been indelibly affected by the departure of a mother or father. We pray also for our service men and women who have given their lives or suffer the results, and their families along with them, of too many deployments overseas.
We pray especially in thanksgiving for that grace to forgive about which Jesus speaks in today’s gospel, the grace to forgive but never to forget.
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