The Very Worst Sermon Ever...Presiding Bishop Schori Blathers In Venezuela

Just when you think you've seen/heard it all, along comes Presiding Bishop Schori, the captain at the helm of the sinking Episcopal Church here in the US.

Art Buchwald, the great satirist of an earlier day, would despair of his daily task at writing something funnier than what the great-and-good of Washington political life would daily peddle as serious pronouncements. Ron Nessen, Nixon's press secretary, particularly irked him.

Malcolm Muggeridge, as editor of Punch, faced the same problem. He once described the Archbishop of Canterbury attending a performance of Jesus Christ, Superstar. The old fool stood up at the end of the show and exclaimed 'Long live God!'. Muggeridge struggled, clever as he was, to write material funnier than what he observed in real time.

The clergy are a particularly rich source of humor. They don robes, climb into pulpits, and declare the most asinine things, ideas that can't possibly pass the smell or laugh test.

Presiding Bishop Schori, however, does win this year's grand prize with this excerpt:

We live with the continuing tension between holier impulses that encourage us to see the image of God in all human beings and the reality that some of us choose not to see that glimpse of the divine, and instead use other people as means to an end.  We’re seeing something similar right now in the changing attitudes and laws about same-sex relationships, as many people come to recognize that different is not the same thing as wrong.  For many people, it can be difficult to see God at work in the world around us, particularly if God is doing something unexpected.

There are some remarkable examples of that kind of blindness in the readings we heard this morning, and slavery is wrapped up in a lot of it.  Paul is annoyed at the slave girl who keeps pursuing him, telling the world that he and his companions are slaves of God.  She is quite right.  She’s telling the same truth Paul and others claim for themselves.[1]  But Paul is annoyed, perhaps for being put in his place, and he responds by depriving her of her gift of spiritual awareness.  Paul can’t abide something he won’t see as beautiful or holy, so he tries to destroy it.  It gets him thrown in prison.  That’s pretty much where he’s put himself by his own refusal to recognize that she, too, shares in God’s nature, just as much as he does – maybe more so!  The amazing thing is that during that long night in jail he remembers that he might find God there – so he and his cellmates spend the night praying and singing hymns.

An earthquake opens the doors and sets them free, and now Paul and his friends most definitely discern the presence of God.  The jailer doesn’t – he thinks his end is at hand.  This time, Paul remembers who he is and that all his neighbors are reflections of God, and he reaches out to his frightened captor.  This time Paul acts with compassion rather than annoyance, and as a result the company of Jesus’ friends expands to include a whole new household.  It makes me wonder what would have happened to that slave girl if Paul had seen the spirit of God in her.

On the one hand, the account seems innocent and well-meaning, until we remember the real story: The slave girl was, well, a slave girl, owned by pimps. She was at the very least severely mentally ill, in today's terminology, and St. Paul invoked Christ to free her from her bondage. She was liberated from her hell. The pimps, seeing a profit center vaporize in front of them, had Paul and Silas jailed. They stayed up the night, singing hymns in the dark, when the earthquake occurred. The terrified jailer, seeing all the cell doors open, was about to take his own life--in order to spare himself the tortures of Roman 'justice'. Paul intervened, and assured him that there had not been a jailbreak. The jailer asked the crucial question 'What must I do to be saved?'--the question a sane man asks when encountering the transcendent presence of the risen Christ.

And, what of that slave girl? The good bishop would have left her in her hell, the property of her pimps, with her claim that that mental disturbance was 'the presence of God in her'. 

Who let this woman out of seminary, much less handed her a bishopric? 

The entire sermon is here. The responses are rich...