The Rev. Amy Morehous was this year’s featured preacher for the 2024 Convention Eucharist. The service was a celebration of St. Scholastica, the sister of Saint Benedict, on the eve of her feast day. This year’s convention theme was “Here We Are: Heeding God’s Call Again and Again” and the Rev. Morehous’ sermon touched on the exploration of discernment and call.
Homily Text
Eve of St. Scholastica
Diocese of East Tennessee
The Rev. Amy Morehous
Knoxville – St. John’s Cathedral
February 9, 2024
I am fortunate to work together with the good people on the Commission on Ministry. Our task is to accompany people on their journey of discernment in ministry. And, yes – that does make us one of the few church committees whose job is to be quiet. We pray together, we listen deeply, and we seek the will of God in community in this time and place. It is a weighty thing to do, and not something anyone on the Commission takes lightly. Accompanying people who are listening deeply for where God is leading them is a gift, and a privilege, and I am deeply thankful every year for the people with whom I serve and pray and laugh and seek.
All of us gathered here have spent time trying to discern God’s will – for ourselves, for the communities we love. If we hadn’t, we wouldn’t be here on a Friday night worshiping together when we could be doing any number of other things with our time. A year or so ago, I was talking to a young person who was a postulant for holy orders, and they were more than a little disappointed to hear that we never stop asking “where is God leading us?” kinds of questions. I think they were hoping we would just arrive, someday, at one concrete answer, as if discerning our path were a one big game of final Jeopardy to which we write down our best guess before time runs out, and fling down our pen and we’re done. But we all know – that isn’t the way it works.
Tomorrow, we will be conducting our diocesan business on the feast day of St. Scholastica. Scholastica was the sister of St. Benedict, and as Benedict founded the Benedictine monastic order, Scholastica did the same for Benedictine nuns. The most famous (well, the only) story about St. Scholastica comes to us from the Dialogues of Gregory the Great.
Apparently it was a custom for Benedict to come visit his sister once a year, and they would spend their time over meals and in conversation, religious debate, prayer and worship. As evening came, Benedict made ready to go, and Scholastica said, “Could you please stay a bit longer, brother?” And Benedict said, “Sister, you know that would be against the monastic rules I have established. I must return to my cell by a certain hour.” Scholastica laid her hands on the table, and then laid her head on her hands, in what must have looked like quiet resignation. Benedict and his companions prepared to leave, when outside, a sudden and fierce storm arose, with wind and rain and terrible lightning. Scholastica raised her head up again, looking untroubled.
Benedict looked outside at the deluge, and then looked back to his sister, and said, “Sister, what have YOU done?” In what may be one of the more classic sibling clapbacks of all time, Scholastica said, “Well, I asked you and you would not listen, so I asked my God, and he DID listen. So now, go off, and leave me if you can and return to your monastery.” Benedict, realizing he had been overruled, or certainly, outprayed, remained, and the two siblings stayed together all night, discussing their spiritual lives until morning.
“I asked you and you would not listen, so I asked my God and he DID listen.”
Here we all are, together, heeding God’s call again and again, seeking to listen for the next right step in the path that is before us. Asking God, trusting that he is listening. That speaks not only to our faithfulness and desire to listen to where God might be calling us, but it also assumes our trust in God’s persistence in speaking for and with us, if we could but hear above the roar of the storms outside.
We know what those storms might be. The human brutality of multiple wars, the ways we wound one another in conflicts large and small, election years that make us all tense, fear and xenophobia, racism, sexism, nationalism, homophobia, transphobia – you name it, we can find all the ways that exist to hurt and divide ourselves up in ways that must truly grieve the heart of God.
And yet – God still keeps us company through our storms and our long nights. God is still listening to us, to our prayers and our fears, and our soul-deep yearning to be reconciled to God and to one another. We arrive from God, and we spend our lives seeking out and returning to God, in ways even we don’t understand. What that speaks to is our deep and abiding hope that there is something ahead – something we can’t see but that is still promised to us as followers of Jesus Christ. Scholastica had hope that God was with her, was listening to her, even when her request seemed unlikely. As a Commission on Ministry, as a diocese, as followers of Christ, we are called to step forward in hope, trusting that whatever future we are stepping into, God is already there to meet us.
Along with hope, Scholastica also had the gift of imagination. She suggested that a different possibility existed ahead, one of conversation and concord. The answer she got from her brother was essentially, “You know, that’s not the way we do things around here.” How many of us have suggested a new ministry, or a new way of doing something only to hear, “Well, we’ve never done it THAT way before?” Scholastica could imagine a different possibility for deeper community, one that might have seemed improbable, and she sought God’s counsel and support in helping it happen. The Commission on Ministry is called to imagine people in new ministries, and new roles, sometimes in ministries that might not even exist yet. All of us who serve in our own communities, in diocesan ministries, we bear the burden and the privilege of imagining new ways to serve God and our neighbor. The congregations in this diocese, in the years ahead are going to be called to dream new possibilities into being, to discern different ways of being the body of Christ, together. Those possibilities will ask something of us – they will ask us to persist in hope, and to be fierce in imagination, so that we live more deeply into resurrection lives following Jesus Christ in our own communities.
How are we to do that all on our own? We can’t. Miraculously, God gives us the gift of one another, here and now, right now, so that we can learn from one another, so we can practice hope and imagination, reconciliation and prayer right where we are. So that we can try new things, and trip and fall, and help one another up. Our work of discernment is informed by our trust in God, our hope in Christ, and our imagination sustained by the Holy Spirit. We are called to sift through new ideas and possibilities in community; to do that, we listen deeply for where God is leading us, individually AND as a community. God gifts us with his Son, who walked among us, and the Holy Spirit that moves and breathes in us. God draws us together, all of us, just as we are, over and over and over again, so that we can practice hope as the body of Christ in this world. Because hope IS an active practice, it is something we choose, with God’s help. Imagination is the gift of asking “What if…?” and knowing that the Holy Spirit is present in the question, in the prayerful and playful contemplation of possibilities together.
In this world, cynicism and despair will tempt us to let go of hope, to let it slide between our fingers like so much sand. Exhaustion and burnout are so, so real right now for so many of us, until we feel as if there is no space for imagination, that we can only grasp onto what is already tired and past and gone. Imagination is only for kids. Hope is so quaint and old-fashioned. So yesterday. But we know from scripture that hope is not only today AND tomorrow, but all the days to come. Imagination is the restoring gift of the Holy Spirit, so that people of all ages can know what it is for God’s people to dream restored, reconciled lives into being.
So what are we to do in these days in which we’re living? Jesus’s words in today’s Gospel remind us that we can pray, even prayer without many words. We’re all tired of hearing about ‘thoughts and prayers’ – they sound old and stale and ineffectual, especially when they are only words offered as a panacea, a lukewarm “we really care, mean it!” with no corresponding repentance or change of heart or direction. But our time with God, both together as the body of Christ, and alone in a quiet place, is the water our thirsty souls need. It is as necessary as food and rest for our bodies, and laughter and companionship for our hearts. Sometimes prayer sustains us through the storm – sometimes prayer brings on the storm that disrupts the everyday order of things to make space for something new to grow.
We pray SO THAT we may be able together to imagine the path that lies before us. SO THAT we can see and serve our neighbors. SO THAT we re-member that we are part of the body of Christ in this world. SO THAT we can do the continuing work of discernment that God calls us to do, together.
The discerning question I challenge you to ask when you wake up every morning is “God, how would you have us love like Jesus today? How would you have ME love like Jesus – today?” Not the sentimental stuff, but participating in the deep and powerful love of Christ for all God’s people, with hope and imagination. And yes, in the name of love, we will try new things, and we will make mistakes. And we will fall down, and we will fall short. We will forget to love, and we will hurt one another. And we will remember that God calls us, over and over again, to be faithful in community – not to be ‘successful’, or even ‘right’. God calls us to imagine new possibilities together, to love and to hope as we follow Jesus faithfully, to discern the path of the Spirit working in and through us. We will do all those things today, with God’s help, and then tomorrow morning, we will pray and we will ask and we will listen, all over again.
God of deep and abiding love – how would you have US love one another, and this glorious, suffering, grace-filled, broken world today, in the name of Jesus Christ? Set us to prayer, set us to dreaming, set us to doing, set us to listening, set us to loving as you would have us love: in the name of the living God.
Amen.