Making Jesus Real for our World

May 18, 2025 - The Fifth Sunday of Easter

Happy Easter yet again, Church of the Epiphany! If you are a guest here this morning, no, I am not the Reverend Beckett Leclaire, as it says in your bulletin. I’m Father John. Deacon Beck is sick and at home with his family about four hours north of here; we’ll be sure to get him and Kay and Audrey back here to town, sometime this summer.

I have been out of town myself recently, Pastor Bob filled in for me last week, because I was in Sewanee, Tennessee, graduating (for the final time I hope), from the School of Theology at the University of the South. Sewanee is the best of the eight Episcopal seminaries (right Jim? Jeff? A little rivalry there.), and it was our home for a year while we discerned my call to the priesthood. The girls loved seeing old friends, Abbey and I loved visiting that beautiful town in the mountains. The School of Theology’s Chapel of the Apostles, where we had morning and evening prayer each day, is one of my spiritual landmarks, spiritual homes. It’s a “thin place” for me, a place where I feel like that line between heaven and earth seems especially thin, where God feels closer, somehow. I was close to the chapel two Thursdays ago, eating lunch at the school’s massive cross that overlooks the Tennessee valley to the west, when Deacon Beck messaged our group chat to say that there was white smoke in Rome, that a new pope had been elected. I watched CNN’s coverage of Pope Leo XIV’s first appearance on my phone while eating my sandwich. I have already shared in our newsletter that it was a particularly hopeful and poignant moment for me. I’m curious to hear if you all have similar or different reactions.

Now, I am not Roman Catholic, never have been, even though we do as Episcopalians claim to be lower-case “catholic,” which means universal. (A visitor recently asked me if we were a Catholic church thanks to that word in the Nicene Creed, and I had to explain the difference. We do believe in the catholic church.) Whether you’re Roman Catholic or not, the Pope stands as a public face of Christianity to the world; a bad pope could be really harmful for every church’s witness, a good pope can only help us all “make Christ real for the world to see,” one of the mottos of the Canterbury Cathedral in England, something I’ll come back to in a minute. “Making Christ real for the world to see.”

I’m starting with the Pope this morning, with my personal experience in Sewanee, because my choice of reading for what was supposed to be two weeks off from preaching felt somehow God-directed after hearing the news of Cardinal Robert Prevost’s election. Earlier that Thursday morning, I had been thinking about my first sermon in seminary in Sewanee, in that Chapel of the Apostles, where I preached a little too long for an “A.” In that sermon, I told the story of another Chicago-born Roman Catholic, Ms. Dorothy Day. Let me explain this connection a bit... Pope Leo XIV, we are told, chose his name in part because of its connection to Leo XIII, the 19th century Pope who laid the foundation for Catholic Social Teaching, which is the area of Roman Catholic doctrine concerned with human dignity and the common good. It says the church must have answers for oppression, for the role of the state, social justice, and wealth distribution. Pope Leo XIII laid the foundations there during the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s, and from early statements already, this Pope Leo is deeply concerned about the poor (and really about the whole world) during what could be considered the Digital Revolution, speaking up just yesterday about the dangers of social media, of fake news, of widespread division.

Sandwiched between these two popes, between the Industrial and Digital Revolution, this other Chicago-born Catholic, Dorothy Day, she made her own significant impact on the world through her witness, her life of service and love. I have been reading her “Spiritual Writings” collection this last week, in part because of her connection to these popes, but mostly because of the way she actually did “make Christ real for the world to see.” If you aren’t familiar with her, Day founded the Catholic Worker in 1933, a publication that became a movement, providing coverage of strikes and working conditions in New York throughout the twentieth century, famously speaking out against war when it was unpopular to do so. She was born Episcopalian actually, in Chicago, but found the Catholic Sisters of Charity in New York so inspiring that she devoted her life to the church, to caring for the poor, to practicing works of mercy. Her work began during the Great Depression and continued through the war in Vietnam, she spent time with Mother Teresa in the 1970s, and she became a world-renown activist, author, and public speaker. She was not a priest, she was not ordained in any way, but she spent her life holding up the abundant love of Christ as the basis for a new world, the kingdom of God, where mourning and crying and pain will be no more. She is being considered for sainthood. Her spiritual writings and her daily attendance at mass show this life was built on a reservoir of deep relationship with God; her deep spiritual life produced abundant fruit.

The connection between Chicago-born Dorothy Day and the lectionary this morning is strongest with our second reading, from Revelation 21. This is my former priest’s favorite passage in the whole Bible: there is something incredible about John’s imagery of a new heaven and a new earth, where God will dwell with us, where death and mourning and crying and pain will be no more, where all things are made new.

We have a taste of that new earth sometimes, that kingdom of God here on earth. We don’t only experience it in church, but I do experience it here quite a bit. I think our weekly brunch is a taste of the kingdom of God, of the new heaven and the new earth, a place where we feed and care for each other without hesitation, where we know we will be welcome and loved no matter what is going on in our lives. Our sacraments are another example of the presence of God with us: all are welcome to be baptized here, and the communion meal unites us all as a different sort of community with a unique sense of purpose, abundant love and welcome. Our service work at Pullman and with We Care and at Open Door, among others; in each of these places we see glimpses of the new heaven and the new earth, like in Dorothy Day’s work, which helped to build this new creation in the present. She did not wait for it to fall out of heaven as some Christians do, but she strived to create a new world aligned with God’s vision for humanity, one built on a spiritual foundation, on the fruit of love. I want more of that for us, for all of us, more spiritual depth, more love in action, more striving to build something fair and just for everyone, using our gifts and talents to “make Christ real for the world to see.” 

This is the call for every Christian, for every church, for the body of Christ, to “make Christ real for the world to see.” But we’re human, right? It’s hard to do. Thank God for grace, because we mess up all the time, often in heartbreaking ways. The Roman Catholic church has a terrible track record of mistakes, it has caused so much pain around the world, throughout history and in some of your lives. Some of you are likely nodding, but know Protestant churches aren’t any better; the number of “nones” and “exvangelicals” is constantly climbing, people hurt by or just done with the church they grew up in. Loved ones in my own life have turned away from church because it is too often a place of judgment rather than love, of cliques rather than welcome, of privilege rather than service. This “Christ we have made real for the world to see” rarely looks like Jesus.

Thankfully, we have a simple charge in our very short gospel reading today, one that Jesus gave the disciples at the last supper: “Love one another... by this, everyone will know you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Jesus talks a lot about love, we all know this: love God, love your neighbor, love your enemies. Commentators agree though that this section, this is a church-focused and specific command here in John 13. It does not negate the other loves, it is not ordered above or beneath those loves, but it is still one of his commands, a new commandment. “Disciples, love each other.” Jesus commands us, those who believe in him, to love one another here in the church because it is our example, the church’s – it is Epiphany’s example, friends – that makes Christ real for the world to see. It is in us, in how we treat each other, that the body of Christ is made manifest, where Jesus Christ is resurrected yesterday, today, and tomorrow. And the world will recognize him, will recognize Jesus, through our love.

We may not have the global platform of the Pope... even though he is American, I doubt any of us are in line to succeed him. We may not even have the reach of Chicago-born Dorothy Day, though we may aspire to such. But what we do have is each other. We love each other well here, in this building, making Christ real for the world to see here. And then with the bread and wine sustaining us and the Holy Spirit helping us all along the way, we must go out and make Christ real for the world to see outside these walls, loving God, loving our neighbor, loving our enemy, and building that new earth where all are loved and welcome at the table, where God is making all things new.

Amen.