June/July 2008

About one hundred and fifty guests gathered at Rock Point’s outdoor chapel recently, the late afternoon sun filtering through maple trees and glinting off Lake Champlain. We had gathered for a double ceremony: the blessing of a marriage celebrated that morning in Canada, and the baptism of the couple’s baby girl. ‘Canada,’ because these young men could not be married here, and ‘baptism’ because their adopted daughter arrived suddenly in late January, when the wedding plans were already in place. During the ceremony, there didn’t seem to be a time when everyone was not laughing or crying, except perhaps when they were doing both. It was an intense experience of blessing: the natural beauty of a Vermont spring, the strong, enduring love of this couple for one another, their baby audibly cooing as the warm waters of baptism ran over her tiny head, the enveloping support of family and friends, and all of this held in the warm embrace of our church. I have never been more proud of belonging to the Episcopal Diocese of Vermont, never more conscious that God’s kingdom is not only coming, but already making inroads into our world.

During these times of such deep insecurity and division, I think, more than ever, we need to mark and remember these assurances that God’s dream for humanity is still being realized here and now. In the Gospels we read that the kingdom will come as liberation to those who have been shackled, justice for those who have been excluded, welcome for those who have been shunned, homecoming for the exiled, and safety and peace for those who have been rejected and despised. Mary’s Magnificat announces the agenda of the coming kingdom: the displacement of the powerful and the entitled, the lifting up the lowly and negligible; it all sounds like good news, but of course it also represents a thoroughgoing crisis in the way we have structured our society. Little wonder that while we go on praying every day that the kingdom will come, every day our country goes on pouring its resources into keeping that kingdom at bay, ensuring that some prisons doors are never opened, some enemies are never reconciled, some divisions never healed.

Yet despite the best efforts of the powerful and the entitled, despite their influence and resources, despite their law suits and their fear-mongering and their determination, the kingdom is among us. I don’t believe that, I know that, because last Saturday I saw one hundred and fifty people gather on a lake shore and, in one of the most threatening and subversive political acts imaginable, and with undisguised joy and delight, they welcomed the sometimes disturbing, always surprising advent of the reign of love, the reign of justice and reconciliation, the reign of peace and freedom and healing. Isaiah’s vision became, for some of us at least, a reality, “Lo, I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; … there shall always be rejoicing and happiness in what I create …. and none shall hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain.” (Is.66) And if you and I can realize the kingdom of God here, in our time and in our own place, even in some small way, we can go on creating it, until our whole world is under God’s sway.

“The night is almost gone, and the day is near. Therefore let us lay aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light.” (Romans 13:12)

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