[Episcopal Church Office of Public Affairs] Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori preached at the 60th anniversary of St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in Boca Raton, Florida. 

St. Gregory’s, Boca Raton 60^th anniversary
Diocese of Southeast Florida
8 December 2013

The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori
Presiding Bishop and Primate
The Episcopal Church

Do you know why that Advent candle is pink?  Mary wanted a girl.

This season is about wanting and waiting.  It’s about yearning, as any family waiting for the arrival of a new child, or any child waiting for Santa Claus can tell you.  John the Baptist is challenging his hearers about what they’re expecting.  He’s urgent about the coming harvest, and he insists it will be a wrathful reaping unless they turn around and take a different road.

This church sits on a road named Mizner.  That road is named for Addison Mizner, who had a vision for this part of Florida in the 1920s.  Boca Raton wouldn’t exist if not for his yearning.

This church sits on land given by a spiritual descendant of John the Baptist, a Jewish man named A.O. Weissman.  He, too, had a vision, and it was about what an Episcopal church might mean to the life of this community in 1953.[1]

I wondered about your address and went looking for the origins of the name.  It turns out that Mizner is probably rooted in an Eastern European word that means a wet place or swamp, and a reminder of our baptismal identity.  But that name made me think of mitzvah, a Hebrew word that means righteous deeds, acts of obedience to the command to love God and our neighbors as ourselves.  This church sits on that road of mitzvot, and that’s what John the Baptizer was proclaiming:  ‘People of God, take that road, the one toward the kingdom of God.’

This community of St. Gregory was born of dreams and yearning for a community of peace that includes all kinds of neighbors.  You’re here to help people learn to yearn for the kingdom of God, and not only to long for it, but to do and become the reign of God, right here and right now.  The task of this community, like all faithful congregations, is to learn that yearning here inside St. Gregory’s, and then put it to work outwardly, through the peace and justice you build in the wider world.

That dream for a healed world is what we insist God has had in mind from the beginning.  Isaiah’s version reimagines the garden of Eden, where even the animals were vegetarians.  There’s no fear in that vision, because nobody is trying to eat anybody else.  The world’s gnawing and consuming anxiety has been replaced with peace.  What would that look like around here?  Some of the other prophets offer a hint – one talks about streets safe enough for children to play in, where their elders can rest on park benches in peace, sunning themselves and watching their grandchildren play.[2]  We saw a glimpse last night at the beach, with children frolicking in the waves, and Mazie toddling around in the sand.[3]  In that reign of peace Trayvon Martin and his brothers and sisters would not live in fear, and neither would George Zimmerman.  No one around here would be worried about immigrants from Cuba or Haiti or Mexico, or anywhere else, because in that world everyone has meaningful work and enough to eat.  There is no longer any violence because basic needs are satisfied – no one needs to compete for the stuff of life.  And beyond those basic necessities, that right relationship with God means that none of us still thinks we’re the center of the universe – we understand that living in peace with our neighbors means we’ve quit trying to satisfy our ego needs by competing with them and exploiting them.

That’s the kind of world we pray for over and over – ‘your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven;’ ‘give us our daily bread;’ ‘we forgive because we have been forgiven.’  ‘Help us to be instruments of your peaceable kingdom.’  That world is what John the baptizer is thinking of when he says, ‘repent – turn around and take that road of righteousness, not the road to perdition that you wander down so carelessly.’

Advent can seem more than a little bit sour if we only hear John’s words as threats.  Like every prophet, his message has two sides – warning about what’s wrong, and offering a hopeful vision of radically abundant blessing, if only we will turn in another direction.  That hope-filled vision of a healed and holy world is what we’re waiting for so expectantly this Advent.  Like Mary, pregnant with new life and possibility, new hope is growing wherever people gather to dream that dream.  John’s image of that dream is about baptism with fire and spirit that will motivate hope and energize possibility in people who have been mired in dark depression.  He calls us to trade anti-life for abundant life.

That dream is what Mr. Weissman had in mind when he gave the land for this community to gather.  That dream was aided by Roman Catholics and Bible Conference Church members who helped make the early existence of this congregation possible.  That dream transcends the differences between Jew, Christian, and Muslim.  It transcends all the divisions between human beings in order to make God’s creation whole.  That dream hasn’t simply kept this congregation going and growing for 60 years – it continues to draw you into the possibilities of greater and more abundant life – right here and across the world.

That dream of a healed, whole, and holy world leads you to love neighbors here and in Haiti, to do mitzvoth, to do justice and love mercy, and walk humbly in right relationship with God.[4]  We live in hope for that world, and at this season we yearn for the presence among us of one who will lead us into that world of peace.  We remember and rehearse the birth of that deliverer, and if we are faithful, we also discover anew that we, too, are meant to be reborn as builders of that kingdom of peace.

The world is grieving the death of one of those builders of peace.  Nelson Mandela knew his inheritance as a child of the kingdom, both in his family origins and in his spiritual life.  He hoped and worked and strategized and insisted on the reconciliation of a nation, and he kept at it for nearly a century.  The world is a vastly different place because of his witness.

St. Gregory’s and the other communities represented here this morning are meant to be wombs, birthplaces, schools, laboratories, and practice fields that nurture and develop similar repenters – people who will turn around and take the road toward that dream, people who will follow that dream to transform the world, and make it whole.  You’ve only been at this for 60 years – and in that time you’ve helped to start and build similar communities – St. Andrew’s in West Boca, St. Mary’s in Deerfield Beach, St. Laurence Chapel in Pompano Beach.  You keep reminding people of the dream, and of the road toward it – and those new stones on your front porch are a clear sign that the road doesn’t just lead in here, it leads back out into that world yearning for transformation.

You’re 60 years young.  Even in purely human terms, you’ve got decades and perhaps centuries in front of you.  Keep at it!  Keep dreaming, and be bold.  Don’t let anyone tell you the work is too hard, or impossible.  With God, it’s all possible – and your very history ought to give you abundant confidence in that reality.  Be a people who hope and dream and transform, so help you God!