Sermon on the occasion of the commissioning of Thea Bibbs as verger at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Evansville, IN
February 7, 2022
Readings: Exodus 35:4-29, Psalm 84, Ephesians 4:1-6, 11-13, Mark 14:12-16
The sparrow has found her a house, and the swallow a nest where she may lay her young by the side of your altars, O Lord of hosts, my king and my God.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, mother of us all. Amen.
Toward the back of the Book of Common Prayer is our Catechism, a Q&A summary of the basics of Christianity as practiced in The Episcopal Church. In the section on prayer, it defines what we’re about in corporate worship - just what it is we’re doing - on Sundays, and tonight. When we gather for worship, and now I’m quoting, “We unite ourselves with others to acknowledge the holiness of God, to hear God’s word,to offer prayer, and to celebrate the sacraments.”
That’s an accurate, albeit somewhat dry, almost clinical, description of an experience that can, on a good day, take our breath away.
One such experience for me was at the Church of the Advent in Boston a few years back, while I was still in secular employment. I was on a business trip and happened to be in town on the Feast of the Ascension. The Ascension is one of the church’s celebrations that I used to get a little grumpy about. It felt to me like a clunky bit of divine stagecraft to get Jesus out of the picture after the resurrection - a way of explaining away why he doesn’t seem to be around any more.
My perspective changed at Advent that evening. The service began with a solemn procession, the altar party and choir making slow circles around the nave, incense billowing like San Francisco fog, while we sang an ingenious pairing of hymns: Charles Wesley’s “Hail the day that sees him rise,” followed immediately by Isaac Watts’ “Jesus shall reign where’er the sun,” without even a second of silence between them.
Those are hymns 214 and 544 in the Hymnal 1982 if you want to read them later - or better yet, sing them - which I recommend. The first hymn recounts the details of the Ascension itself, interspersed with 16 alleluias across its four verses. The second celebrates Jesus as the ruler of the world “from shore to shore”, throughout all time and space.
And suddenly a bunch of puzzle pieces clicked together in my spirit, as the phrase “he ascended into Heaven,” transformed from just so many words in the Nicene Creed into an understanding that the Ascension is the means by which God the Son moved from the confines of a moment in history into the wider cosmos, where through the Eucharist he becomes the companion not just of the disciples but of a hundred generations past and all those to come, until “moons shall wax and wane no more,” and we all meet him face to face.
We’ve got another three and a half months until the Feast of the Ascension, so I’m a little off topic right now. But I tell you this story of how I learned to love the doctrine of the Ascension not to persuade you to do likewise, but to consider how it happened.
It would have been impossible for anyone involved in that evening’s liturgy to engineer or expect my particular response to it. But careful planning and execution of the service, everything from hymn selection and bulletin preparation, to having someone to control the pace of the procession created the conditions and space for at least one person in the building that night to have a transcendent experience of worship.
The story we heard in this evening’s gospel reading appears not just in Mark, but in Matthew and Luke as well. One place it does not appear is our Sunday lectionary - not even on Palm Sunday. So at least in our denomination I’d wager this is a text few have given a second thought.
On the surface it seems like a few sentences of setup, an essential but slight story about making some dinner reservations. To the extent there’s any obvious meaning we’re to take away from these preparations for the Passover, it’s that Jesus’s foreknowledge of the people the two disciples would encounter as they went into town is one more piece of evidence of Jesus’s divine nature.
But tonight as we prepare to commission Thea Bibbs as verger in this place, let’s allow our attention linger on these two unnamed individuals - one who guided the disciples through the crowded streets of Jerusalem while carrying a heavy jar of water, and one who brought them up some stairs to that first table where Jesus’s followers would hear, “This is my body,” and, “This is my blood.” The same words we’ll hear again in just a little while.
I won’t deny that it’s fun to think about the history of a verger’s mace and imagine Thea wielding it to fend off livestock and unruly worshipers, as her predecessors did in the cathedrals of medieval England. It’s also a welcome state of affairs that the job of verger no longer requires such activity, at least not routinely.
Today, what being a verger looks like is largely leading processions and pointing people to where they’re supposed to stand. Though I’ll tell you that Thea began her work as verger for this evening’s service long before she vested, let alone before any of you arrived. Earlier today I overheard her in the office, making preparations to ensure the entries to the church were free of ice, so that we can all worship not only in good order, but in safety, too.
More important than the externals, the things we see, is the meaning of the verger’s work. If she executes her ministry well, a verger is an unobtrusive part of a church’s scenery. Her ministry is to plan, keep track of details, and remember who needs to be where when, so that we don’t have to, and we can feel at home in the liturgy.
Like the man with the water jar and the owner of the house with the upper room, we might not remember or even notice how she minimizes distractions and creates room for us to see the divine presence in our worship as we make our way down the aisle to encounter our Lord in the Eucharist.
By commissioning Thea tonight, we can’t engineer a particular experience for any of you. I can’t guarantee that one of you will go home this evening, your heart having leapt at some new theological insight. But in this space two or three are gathered, which means the living Christ is also among us.
Thea is called to the ministry of a verger. She’ll use her mace not to clear livestock, but to guide our steps and our hearts always to the altar, where we like the sparrow can shelter in God’s boundless love, and find our everlasting home.
In the name of the one holy and living God. Amen.
