A Sermon for the congregation of St. Saviour Anglican Church, Penticton BC – Sunday, July 13 2025 – The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost – The Very Rev. Ken Gray
Mainstream media has not focused on a very special event that occurred a few days ago in New York City; church media certainly has however. the Very Rev. Winnie Varghese, the 12th Dean of the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, the largest Gothic episcopal cathedral in the world, took to the pulpit for the first time. She’s a woman, and she’s black; she’s brilliant, an author, a preacher, and an activist. The announcement of her appointment in April reads:
“I believe the most important thing we do in the church is to share the good news of Jesus, who connects heaven to earth, and reinscribes the sacredness of all life by his life. As his church, it is our work to bear witness to the God-With-Us in our time.
The church can be an imagination-shaping force, which is critical work today. It is the responsibility and gift of the church to introduce wisdom into the conversation, a gospel urgency, the great arc of history, a global, inclusive, and compassionate view, and an earnest search for justice and beauty to generate Christian imaginations for this time.
“Church” as an imagination-shaping force! I love it! I often wonder what we do as church, especially here in paradise. Do we simply gather to give thanks to God? Gratitude is obviously central to what we do and who we are. If however saying “thank you” is all we do, well, that seems insufficient to me.
In her inaugural sermon last week, Dean-elect Winnie shared her missional vision:
“Here’s how you and I do [things] together— recklessly into the abyss of need and helplessness with the very good news that is our heritage and our deepest knowing: Jesus Christ has come to save, to restore this entire creation to its God-created glory. Let us be fearless in our one single act daily.”
As someone once said to me, “them’s fighting words.” For the new dean, it is not enough simply to provide beautiful and creative worship which they certainly can do in New York. For Christ to be placed in the centre of life, there must be engagement beyond the walls. Such work however will not be easy; it will face resistance; it will require commitment, creativity, a strategic mindset, and resilience.
Today’s parable, of the Good Samaritan is one of scripture’s highlights. A person in need is rebuked by the religious authorities and by those who should have known and acted better. Finally a Samaritan — a most unlikely hero given his low social status — goes well beyond custom and expectation. As they say, the “moral of the story” is that talk and show are cheap; what really counts is imaginative action.
I have long admired the writing of Barbara Kingsolver. From her debut novels The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven, her early non-fiction essay collection High Tide in Tucson, her novel The Poisonwood Bible, and most recently the epic Pulitzer and Women’s prize winning Demon Copperhead I have enjoyed her intelligent and insightful portrayal of life from America to Africa and many places in between.
In a recent feature article by Hannah Marriott in The Guardian she speaks of the “terrifying damage” Trumpians have already done to America and to the world. She wields an important countervailing voice to J D Vance’s memory of growing up in Appalachia (Hillbilly Elegy). Though she doesn’t link the two herself, for Kingsolver, Donald Trump is the polar opposite of the Good Samaritan:
[From The Guardian]
She has no kind words for the man himself. His presidency is, she says, “a circus. That’s too kind a word for it. Circuses make you laugh. This one makes you cry. It’s stunning how much damage one ignorant man can do.”
She points out that Trump’s “so-called Big Beautiful Bill” could be devastating for the [Appalachian] region, with its cuts to the National Park Service, the Weather Service and disaster preparedness – just last year the area was hit by the devastating Hurricane Helene – and cuts to Medicaid, which could cause havoc in an already under-served area.
[She sharpens her focus:] “The damage will be unimaginable. Lots of people will die, lots of wild lands will be destroyed. The damage is terrifying.
[. . .]
She is seethingly angry with the administration “because the Congress people do know the law. Pretty much all of them come from wealthy backgrounds. They know what all this means, and they’re not standing up to him. I just want them to grow a spine.”
So let’s be clear; New York and Appalachia are a long way from here. What happens there may not connect easily with our experience here. So what does a fearless, imaginative church look like for us? I turn for a moment to Dr. Sylvia Keesmaat, a Toronto-based biblical scholar, farmer, and might I add a contributor to my recently published little book. Sylvia writes:
My grandfather was a barber and after the war my grandmother found out that he had been cutting the hair of Jews who were in hiding. When I first heard these stories I was puzzled: in the midst of starvation and death, the priority was haircuts? It wasn’t until I, myself, began to cut the hair of homeless men in Toronto that I realized the importance of being touched with tenderness, the importance of being treated with dignity in a context of exclusion and degradation. The point isn’t the haircuts so much as the need to think about the gifts that we have and press them into service in a way that undermines the exclusion and the rhetoric of hate.
I love Sylvia’s phrase “Touched with tenderness.” It’s lovely; it’s intimate; it’s much in the spirit of the Good Samaritan story; to my mind it’s relevant and in some way achievable in our local context. Sylvia’s husband, Brian Walsh will soon launch an online course titled “A Harvest of Empire: James at the End of Empire.” The course will “explore the epistle of James, written at a time that easily mirrors the violence and exclusion of our own time. What does this epistle have to teach us about how to live with hope and faith in such a context?” Anything that Sylvia and Brian produce is excellent and life-giving.
Of this and other courses Sylvia writes: “Perhaps . . . we will find ways to enter creatively into resistance in the places we find ourselves.”
Perhaps . . . and hopefully . . . we will do this, together.
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Take Note - Reflections on life, music, politics, retirement and more by Ken Gray 
This is beautiful: ““I believe the most important thing we do in the church is to share the good news of Jesus, who connects heaven to earth, and reinscribes the sacredness of all life by his life. As his church, it is our work to bear witness to the God-With-Us in our time.
The church can be an imagination-shaping force, which is critical work today. It is the responsibility and gift of the church to introduce wisdom into the conversation, a gospel urgency, the great arc of history, a global, inclusive, and compassionate view, and an earnest search for justice and beauty to generate Christian imaginations for this time.”
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