From the Pulpit: Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe

The 28th Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church, the Most Rev. Sean Rowe, preached at the Cathedral as he took the seat that is symbolic of his office.

Bishop Rowe preached at the Cathedral as part of the official “seating” of the new Presiding Bishop; the Cathedral has been the designated symbolic home for the leader of The Episcopal Church since the 1940s.

Speaking from the Gospel of Luke, where Jesus is presented by his parents in the Temple, Bishop Rowe called attention to the words of the Prophet Simeon, who said the young boy is “destined for the falling and rising of many.” It was an early glimpse, he said, of Jesus’ upside-down worldview that forms the Kingdom of God.

“Jesus reverses everything that the readers of the Gospel of Luke have known. From now on, the cross comes before resurrection. Dying comes before the rising. The last will be first.

Today, God is still calling us to live in this upside-down world order. And like the sometimes clueless disciples who will get to travel with later in the Gospels, we struggle on how to make sense of what that all means because we are beset by the powers and principalities of the world that don’t see it the way that Jesus does.

We are told by the kings and the rulers of the day that the rich shall be first. That somehow compassion is weakness. That fealty to political parties — and here I mean either one or all of them — is somehow paramount. The differences of race, class, gender identity, human sexuality are all divisions that must somehow separate us and that we should regard migrants and strangers and those among us whom we don’t understand with fear and contempt.

But those divisions are not of God. Those are not the divisions of a kingdom about which Jesus speaks of a kind of reversal, the one that Simeon and Anna foretell.

In that kingdom of God, the meek shall inherit the earth. The last will be first. The merciful shall receive mercy, and the captives go free,\. In this world order, falling comes before rising. In God’s kingdom, immigrants and refugees, transgender people, the poor and the marginalized are not at the edges, fearful and alone. They are at the center of the gospel story.

Those who have been considered at the margins are at the center. They are the bearers of the salvation of the world. Their struggles reveal to us the kingdom of God.”