I wasn’t working on April 23 because the pope had just gone home and I was spent.

If I was working, it would have been interesting to cover the Annual William Reed Huntington Sermon, a service in New York City that honors the life and work of a late 19th century Episcopal priest who was an early advocate of ecumenism.

Bishop Mark S. Hanson, presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, presided at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in NYC. And Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori gave the sermon (that’s her).

Huntington served as rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Manhattan from 1883 to 1909.

Afterward, Bishop David Olson, interim bishop for the Metropolitan New York Synod of the ELCA, said:

The lectureship renews joy over age-old separation, but the next generation—some call the odyssey generation—is wresting with whether to believe and what God to trust, not whether to be Lutheran or Episcopal. The sermons and comments were decidedly current and practical, not rehashing of old differences, except in the delightful but respectful way Bishop Jefferts Schori recalled in the days of William Reed Huntington.

She quoted Huntington extensively near the end:

His words seem as timely today as they were in his own world in 1870, fraught with wounds internal and external, all of them needing to be healed:
“If our whole ambition as Anglicans,” he said, “in America be to continue a small, but eminently respectable body of Christians, and to offer a refuge to people of refinement and sensibility, who are shocked by the irreverences they are apt to encounter elsewhere; in a word, if we care to be only a countercheck and not a force in society; then let us say as much in plain terms, and frankly renounce any and all claim to Catholicity. We have only, in such a case, to wrap the robe of our dignity [I’m sure he wasn’t speaking about the rhinestone one] about us, and walk quietly along in seclusion no one will take much trouble to disturb. Thus may we be a Church in name, and a sect in deed.
“But if we aim at something nobler than this, if we would have our Communion become national in very truth, – in other words, if we would bring the Church of Christ into the closest possible sympathy with the throbbing, sorrowing, sinning, repenting, aspiring heart of this great people, – then let us press our reasonable claims to be the reconciler of a divided household, not in a spirit of arrogance, but with affectionate earnestness and an intelligent zeal.” [From his book, The Church Idea, NY, 1870]

So we must love our enemies, build a bridge over the walls of hate that divide us, or we will find ourselves living not in Lake Woebegone, but out beyond its pale, where you can’t even hear the lament, in outer darkness with weeping and gnashing of teeth. If we won’t love our enemies, and feed them when they’re hungry – either with hot dish or hummus – then we too end up in that place with coals heaped on our head by enemies who insist on loving us.