I’m still getting caught up from the weeks at General Convention. I was delighted, when I reviewed the sermon I preached on this Gospel three years ago, that it still spoke to me today.

A taste:

For us as Episcopalians, I can not tell you how many times people from other parts of the Anglican Communion, or from other hierarchal churches wonder at the authority we give to our General Convention, where lay people have an equal voice with the ordained. That’s not something that tracks with most of their experience.

It something that began imperfectly with the early United States, as some people were excluded from voting all together because they were indigenous, or enslaved, or women, or just not property owners… but over time, with sometime with bloodshed, we have expanded the circle of wisdom and knowledge and allowed more people to take an larger – though not yet completely equal – role.

Creating a civic order that accounts everyone as having a viewpoint and the duty and right to express it, even the people who live next door to us, even the people who drive us batty in the checkout lines, or on the roads, or in a town meeting, we are saying something about the value of every human being (Or trying too, though we do fall short regularly.)

I wonder if that’s the practical and the spiritual lesson that we should draw from this episode of the Gospel account? People were dismissing their Lord and Savior because they knew him as an everyday bloke – a man they had seen building things with them. To them he was getting too big for his britches. He was putting on airs and behaving as if was something he was not… he was just one of them. Why should he act as if he had something important to say?

You can view the sermon directly here.