Transcript
This transcript was generated by YouTube AI and further edited by AI for readability.
May only truth be spoken here and only truth be heard. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Please be seated.
Today is the feast day of our patron saint. I’m going down to the middle of the aisle. I’ve got to show people something.
So, St. James of Jerusalem, James the Just. This is his window. If you can’t see it now, take a look later. From the altar, it’s the third window down, right here in the middle of the church on the south side. It’s dedicated to the Reverend Gordon Kidd, who was rector of this parish from 1946, one year after FDR died, up through 1966, and who was famously the pastor to Eleanor Roosevelt and officiated at her burial service.
Many of you know that this church burned down in 1984, but that couldn’t stop us. All of the windows in the church, which had been there from 1840 to 1984, were destroyed. The church was founded in 1811, by the way, but it had to be rebuilt in the 1840s. Every window in the church, except for one tiny window behind the altar, was blown out by the fire.
This window of James the Just, James of Jerusalem, is a modified replica of the window that used to be over the altar. When the leaders of the church in the ’80s rebuilt, they thought, “Well, maybe we should put Jesus there, front and center.” But it tells you how important a parish’s patron saint is, right?
A patron saint tells us something about who we intend to be, who we desire to be, and who we believe God calls us to be. A patron saint is a lot like a mentor.
I’ve been talking to a few different members of the congregation over the past couple of weeks about mentors, and remembering my own mentors, some of whom have gone on to greater glory and some, thank God, who are still with us. I got to see one last week. I talked to a congregation member who shared with me the beautiful eulogy they had written for one of their own mentors who passed away.
Most of us have mentors in different parts of our lives, right? Maybe you have a professional mentor or a teacher. Maybe, if you’re in a recovery program, you have a sponsor, a mentor who helps you work the steps of your recovery. And of course we have mentors in the faith. Today we have two baptisms, and there are sponsors. There are godparents.
The role of the godparent or the sponsor is to see that the child is raised in the Christian faith and life, and to show adults and children alike, by word and example, by who we are and what we say, what it means to live that faith. And that’s very important, especially for St. James, who said that faith without works is a dead faith. St. James said that we believe it. So by what we do, by what we say, and by who we are, we teach one another how to walk this life of faith and how to be disciples.
So what does it say that St. James is our mentor? The prayer at the beginning says, “Grant that, following the example of your servant James, the just brother of our Lord, your church may give itself continually to prayer and to the reconciliation of all who are at variance and enmity.” Variance and enmity. There’s some of that, right? And what does it say about us? That we are called to be reconcilers.
St. James, our mentor, our patron saint, was famous for two things: his prayer and his desire to hold it together. You may have seen in our newsletter that he was called “the camel,” because he spent so much time on his knees in prayer that, tradition says, he had huge calluses on his knees, like a camel. Have you ever seen a camel? They have big, gross calluses on their knees.
It shows up in the Acts of the Apostles, the reading that Russell read for us today. Look at that first line: “All the apostles and elders kept silence and listened to the signs and wonders that were being done everywhere in the world by the people who followed the risen Christ.”
It is hard for us to understand or imagine how deep and intractable the conflict in the council that we’re reading about in Acts was. We don’t fight about whether you need to be circumcised to be a Christian anymore, but people sure were fighting about that within a generation of Jesus’ death. People who wanted to follow Christ, and mind you, they were adults, were being told by other people who wanted to follow Christ that they had to follow certain rules. There was extreme contention among the followers of Jesus, and real fear that it was not possible to follow Jesus except in accordance with the rules and the laws that had governed God’s people since the time God said to Abraham, “Leave your people and your homeland, and I will make of you a great nation.”
There was bickering. There was probably shouting. There was probably crying. There was an uproar.
But there came a moment in this council where there was silence, where people probably let go of all the smart retorts they were planning to say, and where they listened and prayed. And James, who was the president of the council, listened and prayed.
Now, for me, when I’m in a conflict, I’m thinking about what I’m going to say next, right? How I’m going to show them, and what I’m going to do that’s more clever. The Holy Spirit told James to let it fall away. He prayed and he listened.
And out of that listening, he produced a compromise which we don’t really understand, and which probably means very little to you when you read about it. “Just tell them to abstain from this, this, and this. Those are doable things.” It doesn’t matter so much what the compromise was. What matters is that by his holy and faithful listening to the Spirit, and to the testimony of the people all around him who were filled with the Spirit, he was able to offer something that everybody could accept. This was a turning point for the church of God, which could very well at that moment have fallen apart forever. But it was James, in his prayer, who held it together.
And that is the other thing he teaches us. It is our calling, which is the mission of the church and has been all along: to reconcile all people to God and to one another, to bring people together, to help everybody recognize their own family. We are all children of the same parent, as we sang in verse two: “Praise for the Lord’s own brother, James of Jerusalem.”
He recognized his Savior and put his faith in him, presiding at the council that set the Gentiles free, where everybody was welcome. He welcomed them as kindred, on equal terms, not just “come in and do it like us and do what I tell you to do.” He reconciled people to God and to one another by seeing the power he had and giving it away. And the people he welcomed in, he said, “Come in and change this place, and change this body, and show us more clearly who our risen Savior would have us be.” And that is the example we follow: not only to pray, but from our listening to understand our true calling to welcome, and to understand that welcoming means reconciliation. Holding together what would tend to fall apart, what wants to fall apart. And to recognize that who we welcome transforms us more and more into the image of God.
So I want you today to think about your mentors, your saints. I want you to say thank you, because they have made you who you are. As St. Paul says, “By the grace of God, I am who I am, and God’s grace to me has not been in vain.” You will say that at the end of your life. You will say that now.
If you recognize your mentors, your teachers, the ones who loved you, as God’s grace toward you, and then if you further recognize that God’s grace toward me will not have been in vain, because it is my calling too to be a mentor, to be a sponsor, to be a godparent, to show somebody what it means to live, to be a person of prayer, to be a person of deep listening, to be a person who joins in that sacred mission of reconciling all people to God and to one another.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.