St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church, Owings Mills MD
September 17, 2023
The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost – Renewal Sunday
For the Mission of the Church I
Isaiah 2:2-4
Psalm 96:1-7
Ephesians 2:13-22
Luke 10:1-9
Re-Membering
I think I once admitted to you that, back when St. Thomas’ and Sue and I were discerning if we would come here and serve and live beside all of you, back when we were listening carefully to the Holy Spirit, we made a secret, clandestine visit to Owings Mills.
We wanted to see this community for ourselves and try to imagine ourselves living and working here.
So, on Friday, December 11, 2020 (I looked it up!), I picked up Sue after school and we drove down 95 and, for the first of many times, we exited onto the Beltway and made our way here – or, actually, to the Owings Mills Holiday Inn, to be precise.
The next morning – on what turned out to be a bleak and gray day - we were up and out early.
We went to Starbucks – yes, the old hole-in-the-wall one over in the shopping plaza on Reisterstown Road. We sat outside as we sipped our coffee, watching the people coming and going. Living in a place where there were lots of different kinds of people is important to us and so were glad to see the beautiful diversity of Owings Mills on early morning display.
And then, we headed over toward St. Thomas Lane. As we drove up this now oh-so-familiar road, we spotted the rectory and decided to take a chance and turned up the driveway for a closer look.
Could we imagine ourselves living in such a grand place, surrounded by what sure looked like our own personal park?
And then we continued our journey here, to church.
Fortunately, nobody was around that morning – we had the campus to ourselves.
I saw the Advent wreaths on the church door, with the pretty blue ribbons.
I didn’t know it, but Sue took a picture of me as I peered through those old clear windows, gazing into the empty church, seeing the bright, whitewashed walls, the quaint pews with their little doors, the monuments on the walls, etched and erected in loving memory of those who had gone before.
I tried to imagine my story becoming part of the St. Thomas’ story – the St. Thomas’ story becoming part of my story.
As we walked around the churchyard – Sam Shoemaker’s grave was much easier to find than I expected – as we walked around, we saw that this is a place of remembering.
A place of remembering.
Remembering means recalling the past, of course, but there’s another, less familiar, deeper meaning that I love.
Remembering can also mean re-membering.
When people or things have been broken, re-membering is gathering and reassembling the broken pieces.
Where there is division, re-membering is renewing – restoring – unity.
Re-membering.
You know, regardless of our particular beliefs, I think there is a human intuition that things are not the way they were meant to be.
Some Jewish mystics offered a vision of how everything seemed to go wrong, right from the first moment of creation.
These mystics suggest that God’s creative light was too strong for the vessels meant to carry it – so strong that, in the first moment, those vessels shattered, leaving sparks of God’s light scattered all over the broken creation.
And these mystics teach that our task is to gather up these sparks of divine light – to re-member – to reassemble the shattered creation, which we do through love and forgiveness, through good works – aiming to restore things to the way they were always meant to be, while recognizing that the cracks of the past will always remain.
In the Bible, of course, things go wrong practically from the start, too – when Adam and Eve mess up and things are never again the way they were meant to be.
But God doesn’t give up on us, doesn’t forget us. God goes right on remembering and re-membering us, until finally God comes among us in and through Jesus.
And, Jesus’ mission is all about re-membering, drawing the whole world to himself, transforming division into oneness.
In Christ, there is no longer Jew or Greek, no longer slave or free, no longer male or female – in Christ there is no East or West, in him no South or North, but one great fellowship of love throughout the whole wide earth.
And so, St. Thomas’ is not only a place of remembering, not just a church that recalls the past – but we are also called to be a place of re-membering - Christ working through us to reassemble what has been broken, to reunite what has been divided – journeying together to the Kingdom of God, to the way things were always meant to be.
Now, I could stand up here all day and talk about the many ways that, with God’s help, we have been re-membering:
Greeting people who have been away from our community for a while, and welcoming people as they step over that well-worn threshold for the first time.
Rebuilding our programs for children and youth and young adults, signaling that they are of infinite value to God and us, and so very loved.
Being even more of a servant church, giving so generously to our Afghan friends, the guests at the Community Crisis Center and Paul’s Place, and supporting our neighbors at Owings Mills Elementary School.
Truly, this is a place of remembering and re-membering.
And now, I believe that God is calling us to a challenging and also beautiful task of remembering and re-membering.
For several years, a couple of parishioners wondered about the handful of gravestones that are located north of the churchyard wall – the monuments that many of us pass on our way from the parking lot to the church and back again.
After asking around about these graves and getting a variety of uncertain answers, they discovered the truth. It’s right there on page 321 in the official history of our church: that strip of land, north of the churchyard wall, had been used as what was called the “Colored Cemetery” – a burial ground for enslaved people and their descendants, especially the Breckinridge family.
In fact, Mary Breckinridge was the last person to be buried out there.
In 2012.
For the past year or more, the wardens, vestry, and I have spent a lot of time learning about, and reflecting on, what we’ve been calling the North Cemetery.
The vestry voted unanimously to commission a brilliant researcher and genealogist named Malissa Ruffner to learn as much as she could about the history of that piece of land and the people who are buried there.
She produced a fascinating report that tells a complex tale of interconnected families and the division and distribution of parcels of land.
It seems clear that this particular piece of land was chosen for burials because of its proximity to the sacred space of St. Thomas’. But, one of the biggest surprises was that the North Cemetery did not come into the church’s possession until quite late – it was offered as gift in 1931 but, for whatever reason, not accepted until 1954.
In addition to commissioning Malissa Ruffner’s report, the vestry also unanimously voted to create a committee to formulate a plan for how we might respond to what we have learned.
How might we remember this part of our story?
And how might we re-member the North Cemetery and the people buried there?
And so the members of what we call the Cemetery Unity Committee – parishioners Betsy Baetjer, Annette Brown, Shyla Cadogan, Bob Kenyon, Cassandra Naylor, Frances Rockwell, Tuck Washburne, Senior Warden Jesse VanGeison, and I – have been meeting and have begun formulating a proposal – a plan that will enclose the North Cemetery, treating it as the sacred space it has always been, and using design elements that will unite it to the rest of the cemetery.
There will also be a memorial listing the names of the additional people we have learned are buried there, and acknowledging that there are others whose names will remain unknown to us, though never forgotten by the God who remembers us all.
Our aim is to remember – and to re-member.
In Malissa Ruffner’s report there is passing mention of the fact that one of my predecessors hired out an enslaved man named Nick. Nick’s owner got the money, not Nick, of course.
Not shocking, but I found it painful to read and hard to accept.
But, here’s the thing: I’m not guilty of anything done by my predecessors.
And we are not guilty of anything done by our spiritual ancestors - or even our literal ancestors.
But we – you and I - are responsible for what we do here and now.
As you would guess, I have spent a lot of time thinking and praying about all of this.
Some people who knew what was coming have asked me if I was nervous to speak with you today.
And while I have certainly felt the weight of trying to find the right words, I haven’t been nervous - because what I dared to imagine nearly three years ago on a gray December morning has come to pass.
Just like you, my story has become part of the story of this place – this old and holy church, filled with so many sacred hearts - this old and holy church, built on the sure foundation of Christ.
Our stories have been woven together.
And now, God calls us as God has always called us – to remember the past – to re-member the broken and divided pieces of creation – and to renew our little corner of God’s world.
Amen.
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