Fill My Wounds With Healing
I found myself transfixed by the courage of the Right Reverend Mariann Budde, Bishop of the Washington Diocese of the Episcopal Church as I watched her preach a sermon at the National Cathedral in Washington DC from last week. Given the amount of swirling news coverage of this sermon, I wanted to wait to really get into it, and give myself some time to reflect on it before I said anything.
These days news coverage of most things are reactionary. And there was a lot of reactive energy responding to this sermon—lots of triumphant responses, lots of enraged responses. A congressional representative called for her deportation (she is a citizen), and another submitted a resolution seeking to condemn “the Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde’s distorted message.”
Most of the news coverage was focused on the last few moments of the sermon where she directly addressed our newly inaugurated President who was attending this service and sitting on the front row. She asked for mercy for immigrants in fear of deportation and Queer people fearing oppression. And so much of the energy reacting to this historical moment was focused on her directly addressing the president.
But, she preached an entire sermon before that! A sermon that focused on the importance of praying for unity, “not for agreement, political or otherwise, but for the kind of unity that fosters community across diversity and divison; a unity that serves the common good.”
In my mind, it seems like the most profoundly unbiased, unpolitical, and uncontroversial hope to aim for.
Our own United Methodist Bishop of the Mountain Sky Annual Conference, Rev. Kristin Stoneking, had this to say about this sermon:
“If you only watched the last two minutes, you might have missed that this is a sermon about the call to and importance of unity. Unity is often misunderstood as a bland sameness, but Bishop Mariann Budde nails it when she says that unity has three foundations: 1) honoring the inherent dignity of every person; 2) honesty in all discourse and 3) humility.
Honoring the inherent dignity of all persons. Why in the world is that controversial?”
Bishop Budde recognized that a hope and prayer for unity is mostly aspirational. “Is true unity among us even possible,” she asked? I resonated with Bishop Budde’s observation of an “outrage industrial complex” at work in our society. She recognized the sheer volume of contempt found in our discourse (especially political). Such contempt and easily manipulated outrage makes finding unity seem impossible.
Bishop Budde’s timing with the lectionary that brought us to the story in Luke 4 where Jesus spoke courageously in challening his own hometown synagogue is not lost on me in its poetry. Scripture becomes easier to understand and interpret when we connect what is happening in scripture to what is happening in our very midst.
It’s hard to speak the truth, especially when its challenging, to people close to us or people in power. Luke 4 doesn’t let on about Jesus’ state of mind as he got up to speak in his hometown synagogue in Nazareth. But with technology today we can watch Bishop Budde in the seconds before she ended her sermon with a plea for mercy to the President. And we can see her pause, purse her lips, exhale and speak.
I think that it took a lot of courage to do what she did. And I also think it took a lot of courage for Jesus to confront the people who watched him grow up with a difficult truth as well. Speaking truth is hard. The people in his community felt they and only they deserved the ministry of Jesus’ healing over gentiles and oursiders. And Jesus’ honest rebuttal was a tough pill for them to swallow.
But, just as Bishop Budde reminded us, honesty is a pivotal and necessary part of gaining the unity of the spirit we are striving for as people of faith.
