Sermon by the Rt Revd George R. Sumner for the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, July 19, 2026

The Rt Revd George R. Sumner was Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas from 2015 to 2025.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

In the name of God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Why, I have believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast, said the white queen to Alice in through the looking glass. When Alice complained that one cannot believe impossible things. In this sermon I won't get to six, but I will do the Queen one better. Based mostly on our epistle reading, I mean to render three things that we are accustomed to hearing and saying to be seen as impossibly miraculous miracles beyond all human comprehension. When the Anglican missionaries first got to Uganda and preached the gospel, it was not the incarnation of God's own Son here on earth that startled them, as one might have supposed. Of the strange activities of divine creatures they had often heard. No, they were shocked by the news of the Father. They already believed in a high God, but they assumed he was a being so great and utterly self-sufficient as not to get messed up in a world like this. There in the highest heaven, his was a life at ease, even indolent. And so the news that such a god was intimately involved and should put his own son at risk was a great surprise. And it rearranged their assumptions about the world. But really, an ocean and a century and a half away, how different are we? Do we not often assume in our daily lives that God is occupied in some distant realm, leaving us to fend for ourselves as best we can? And so, the first jolt, the impossible good news in Romans 8, a few verses earlier, about praying to Abba Father. The first jolt is for us who often live on this far side of abandonment and fear, to hear that we have such a Father, for whom we are his adopted sons and daughters, so that we could earlier in Romans 8 say in our prayers, Abba Father, the name taught to us by Jesus Himself. Behind it all, and after death, we believe that there is not nothing, nor an infinite void, nor raw power alone, nor karma, but God Almighty, who is the Father to whom our hearts are made and taught to cry out. Impossibly good news, number one, of the Father. Paul does more. He describes the new territory we then inhabit. He tells us that the requirements of the law are holy, now fulfilled in Jesus Christ. For us who have been held down many centuries by chains of self-condemnation from our original disaster. And as a result, you and I are relocated into a new chapter of that same ancient story. We as individuals are part as part of the whole human race. Now you and I are invited and enabled to look forward where we are going already, whence shine peace and new life back at us. Though it only shines on us now in the form of promise and of gift. But contrary to how we would have it feel ourselves, we are on a road, exiles, pilgrims, walking in the middle of a story we have inherited and into whose new chapter you and I are put. We who are in between are not to live once more as if life were pointless, sound and fury, the mere play of egos and defined by death. Paul calls that old life slavery, falling back into fear, life as our own jailers. But Paul doesn't just warn us, he describes how God has already changed our situation, which is to say our location. And this gets us to the second angle by which you and I can hear the gospel in this reading. We have been made even now to be co-heirs with Christ. You and I have been relocated inside the risen and ascended Jesus, and you and I are enabled to co-inhabit his own place and time. This aligns well with the language we hear in Romans 8 about adoption. That infinitely mysterious God of eternity, we hear, is the Father first of all of Jesus Christ, and so of his adopted sons and daughters, you and me. He has invited us, compatriots though we be guilty, into his space and time occupied by his new life. And all that is sheer gift. It is what the New Testament means by the word grace. You then have been endowed first with a new story which structures your reality, sometimes in spite of ourselves, and you have received a new status. You are the adopted son or daughter of your heavenly father in Jesus Christ. And that is the second thing, the second language, of which we have become accustomed, though it be a stupendous miracle coming home to each of us of the sun. At this point, I want to take a short personal detour. A relative of mine came from the New York advertising world described in the TV show Mad Men. Funny, sardonic. He had rejected Christianity, which he associated with his too stern father. And he smoked and drank too much, and was when I last visited him dying of emphysema. Then something surprising happened. He had a vision, almost palpable, of what he called the great hope. And let me tell you, he was the most unlikely of prophets I knew. His children insisted that the vision was not reducible to the effect of his medication. And its scope was far wider than just his fate. For a few days before he died, he said that he could see all of it in God's hand, like that vision of Dame Julian, all of it with a far wider compass, not doomed as it would be on its own, as we often feel ourselves to be, but all of it bound for some transformation which he wasn't looking for or expecting. Now, to what my cousin had an inkling of, Paul gives us more definition. The apostle tells us in Romans 8 that the whole world, whether it knows it or not, is actually groaning toward what is coming, its destiny. The world as a whole struggles toward a birth it can never reach on its own. And Paul, in this same vein, will use the word birth pang, the travail, to describe what lies ahead. Our faith in the church itself a harbinger of where the world is bound. We too can only perceive green shoots of that promise as if in early spring. Think of what John has to say. We do not know what we shall be, but we know that we shall be like him. So when Paul says that sometimes the best that you and I can manage as we try to pray is groaning. That internal groan is similar, even aligned to the great groaning of the world. All of that in Romans 8. This vocation of co-groaning with the world is as if we were some small section of a far vaster chorus of Mongolian throat singers with those incredibly deep baritone registers. And we have this calling, in spite of all our flaws, and the churches, in spite of the church being what Augustine called a mixed body, of words derived from today's gospel. For you and I, we by grace are defined by our goal, the kingdom of which we receive this morning a taste, a kindness to fellow groaners, a suggestion of the great welcome home. That prayer should turn out to have this gift of vast dimension, that that should be what we are groaning toward, too, is a miracle of the Holy Spirit with the kingdom's brightness in his wings. So before I finish, I want to settle accounts with the White Queen, and I bring to my side of the ledger a famous verse of a song, you know the song, originally from the Shakers in my native western Massachusetts. Turn, turn shall be our delight, until turning, turning, we come round right. By grace, you and I are given a glimpse of things as if from the end where we are bound, seeing for a moment backward. And in that light, three we are victim to taking as impossible turn out to be miracles on our behalf, surpassing human understanding. The Father, work of the Father, Son, and Spirit, to my aid those three who are one, three miracles, divine and uncountably valuable. And so to him, three and yet one, who makes all things by grace alone miraculously to hang together in our lives, says Paul. To him from all of us, a meritless thank you, all of us who shall too, for no merit of ours, have prices. Amen.