Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori's 8July09 Sermon in text and wordle

Image created by Peter Carey using www.wordle.net

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori's Sermon in text and wordle

General Convention opening
Ubuntu and the Body of Christ – 8 July, 9:15 am
Gift of the Episcopal Church of the Philippines

The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori
Presiding Bishop and Primate

Four and one-half years ago, I had the great privilege to join in the consecration of a new bishop, one who told an amazing story about the journey that had brought us all to that place on a cold night in Seattle. At the end of the service, Victor Rivera father, the retired bishop of San Joaquin, wrapped the new bishop his daughter Nedi, in his cope. Some of you may not know that while Victor Rivera was bishop in San Joaquin, and for many years afterward, he insisted that women should not be ordained. He didn’t go to Nedi’s ordination as a priest, and he had never taken communion from her, over the more than 25 years that she served as priest. I asked Nedi later how he had come to change his mind. She said to me, “He didn’t change his mind; he changed his heart.”

Ezekiel is talking about a changed heart, but in an even more radical sense he means a heart transplant. Ezekiel is speaking to a disheartened body, yearning for home, aching to be reconciled, impatient to end their depressed and heartsick state. Any parallels?

Heart transplants are at least possible in this era of history – brain transplants aren’t yet – but Ezekiel is also talking about a brain transplant. His people understood the heart not as the seat of emotion, but the seat of decision-making, the critical faculty of judgment that we talked about yesterday.

Look at the passage and listen again. Ezekiel says the body will be disinfected (I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean), and then comes the surgery (a new heart I will give you, and a new spirit). This is about a new way of understanding and acting, new life that comes from living in a new way.

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