Bishop Curry and the blind beggar Bartimaeus ...

The Episcopal Diocese of Iowa has posted during the week past a YouTube version of Presiding Bishop Michael Curry's dynamic sermon a week ago, during the "sending forth" Eucharist that concluded the annual diocesan convention in Des Moines (follow this link to find it). So a few of us church geeks got together at mid-afternoon yesterday to watch it again on the really big screen at St. Andrew's.

Curry used as his text the passage from St. Mark's Gospel (Mark 10:46-52) that tells the story of the blind beggar Bartimaeus, healed because of his faith by Jesus at Jericho. Bartimaeus is one of the few individuals who experienced healing during that long-ago ministry actually named in the gospels and theologians speculate that he was named because he became an active follower thereafter  and his testimony became important to the work of the early church.

The presiding bishop's preaching style differs from that familiar to most Episcopalians, accustomed to 10-15-minute homilies delivered thoughtfully, but not necessarily dynamically. Curry does not consider brevity a virtue and, although a lifelong Episcopalian, his preaching technique would be familiar to people schooled in less sedate denominations.

The focus was decidedly Episcopalian, however --- the need for witnesses to the love of God, rather than to fear-based judgment; the need to reclaim "Christian" as both an adjective and noun from the evangelical right wing with whom it seems now to be most closely identified in the media and society at large.

I was struck by a couple of anecdotes shared by the presiding bishop. One involved his parents, dating in the 1940s; his mother, an Episcopalian; his father, a Baptist seminarian. One of the tipping points toward the senior Mr. Curry's decision to become an Episcopal priest rather than a Baptist preacher occurred when he attended church with her for the first time. Many churches were strictly segregated at the time, almost exclusively so in the South. So he watched when she went forward as the service was ending to receive communion and was amazed to see that in her church, where black faces were few and far between, that all drank from the same cup without regard to color.

As I said, the sermon is a bit long --- roughly 30 minutes; but here it is in case you'd care to watch. The signing in the inset box, by the way, is by Donna Scarfe, the other half of Alan Scarfe, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Iowa.