Bearing with one another in love

Bishop Charles Henry Brent

Rev. Molly F. James, PhD
DFMS Noonday Prayer on Zoom
March 27, 2020
Commemoration of Bishop Charles Henry Brent


May God’s Word be spoken. May God’s Word be heard. May that point us to the living Word who is Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 

Oh my friends, somehow God and the lectionary committee know just what we need to hear. Just what we need and the world needs. “Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and every sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them . . .” I needed a story of healing and compassion today. I needed to be reminded that Jesus is here with us. That our God is a God of grace, a God of healing, and compassion.

Now I think first it is worth addressing the bit about healing. I think we can often think of healing as complete erasure of disease, as though it never happened. Now we already know that is not possible in these circumstances. Not everyone is going to make a miraculous recovery. In these circumstances, I find it helpful to remember that the resurrected Christ still had his wounds. We are not going to come through this crisis unscathed, as individuals or as communities. We are going to be wounded. And yet, even in the midst of all the suffering and the challenges, God’s healing love is at work in our hearts and in the world. We can trust in God’s abiding presence. We can trust that new life and new possibilities will come. We can trust that hope and transformation are real. We can be on the lookout for signs of grace and compassion each and every day. They are there, if we look.

And we can also be a sign of grace and compassion for each other. We are called to be a people of compassion. Here we are at the end of another week. For many of us this has been a week of adjustment. This working, parenting, living, doing everything at home thing has shifted from something temporary that we figured we might do for a few weeks to something we are going to likely be doing for months. I don’t know about you all, but I am tired. There is a heaviness in my heart and my soul. We are a people grieving so many losses. We are grieving deaths of people near and dear. We are grieving for the ever rising death toll around the world. We are grieving the loss of freedom. We are grieving the loss of how we used to live our daily lives. We are grieving the inability to be in the same room and touch people who mean the world to us, which makes us grieve the fact that we cannot do our grieving together. We are also grieving the loss of dreams, of hopes, of plans for our future. We are grieving so much. We know that when this is all over the world is going to look so very different.

We are grieving so much, in so many ways. First and foremost we need to have compassion for ourselves. Let us be gentle with ourselves in these days. We will not be able to do everything we want to do, and we will not be able to do it to the standard we normally set for ourselves. That is okay. Today is a day for us to allow good enough to be good enough.

It is also a day to have compassion with our family and our friends. My husband, our two kids and our dog are all in our house together all the time now. We love each other a great deal. We have space. We have plenty of food. We can go out for walks. And we are not used to being all together all the time while also trying to do work and school and worrying about the state of the world. Getting on each other’s nerves is inevitable in this time. So we need to be compassionate with each other as well.

And we all need to be compassionate with each other in this time. It is important to remember that “compassion” literally means “feeling with.” We need to feel and understand the myriad of new challenges we are all facing at this moment. We need to remember that we are in this together, and we have so many examples to follow among the ancestors of our faith. Bishop Brent, who we remember today, is certainly one. He became Bishop of Western New York, after a long tenure as the Missionary Bishop of the Philippines, in 1918. Just in time to lead that diocese through the Spanish Flu Pandemic. In the Philippines Brent had been active in combating the scourge of opium addiction, from that holy work and from a prayer he wrote, we get a sense of what kind of a leader Brent was. He was one of compassion and care. His prayer is one of the prayers for Mission that we pray in Morning Prayer. Brent wrote:

“Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace: So clothe us in your Spirit that we, reaching forth our hands in love, may bring those who do not know you to the knowledge and love of you; for the honor of your Name. Amen.”

Indeed we are called to reach forth our hands in love. Or as our passage for today from Ephesians says, we are called to “lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love.” My friends, we are indeed called to bear with one another in love. There is much to bear today, and there will be more tomorrow. Let us hold fast to our conviction that the way through this is to reach forth our hands in love, to have compassion for ourselves and for each other. We can get through this, together. AMEN.