I will listen to what the LORD God is saying,
for he is speaking peace to his faithful people
and to those who turn their hearts to him. (Psalm 85:8)
Tomorrow, our Trinity choristers will fly back from a week in England, where they have been singing Evensong services and this morning’s Eucharist as well, at an 800-year-old cathedral in the small city of Wells, population around 12,000, at least the last year I could find. It’s located about three hours west of London if you take a train out of Paddington Station (known for its famous bear) and then switch to a bus in Bristol (not Tennessee), which was the route I took (not Tennessee).
I’m happy to report that our musicians were having a wonderful time, and offering a profound and beautiful gift to the cathedral’s centuries of musical tradition. Our senior choristers sang Monday night’s Evensong and our adult choir members sang Tuesday’s and they’ve continued to sing the services since, and I was blessed to be able to sit in the choir of that ancient, ancient church both evenings, praying and listening to their music in that lofty and historic, beautiful space.
During the day, our choirs rehearsed music and shared meals, and had time to get to know Wells and learn about its history. They hiked in the nearby countryside and took day trips to Stonehenge, and Glastonbury, where Queen Guinevere and King Arthur are supposedly, legendarily buried, and to Salisbury. At night, most of us stayed in dorm rooms at the Cathedral School, which was another kind of adventure. In the mornings, some of the youngest ones took noisemakers and ran around the hallways, making sure everyone woke up. I have video – it was pretty amazing.
The cathedral is right in the middle of Wells, with its small streets and cobblestone walks. If you walk a little ways past the cathedral you’ll go through a stone arch built by a bishop in the 1400s as a shelter for people who were begging for alms. On the other side of it, you’re in the town square, where there are cafes and a pub, a bank, a fudge shop, the visitor’s center, an Italian restaurant, and, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, a farmers’ market not unlike the one that we have here in Staunton.
The cathedral itself is home to that school, to a pipe organ built in 1857, a medieval library, the second oldest still-working clock in England, a cafe that serves very good shortbread and tea, and a cat named Basil (the saint, not the herb). I’m told, Basil actually lives at a neighboring house but every morning comes over to the cathedral, finds an window that’s open and spends the entire day there, and they have a bed for him at the information desk.
Wells Cathedral is a beautiful place to wander in, to be quiet in, to contemplate and pray, to study how the ceiling arches far above, read the names and stories etched into the stone floor and walls and effigies that circle the church, that memorialize deans and bishops and priests and townspeople that have been long gone.
There are three altars in Wells Cathedral, and behind the third, is what is called a Lady Chapel, which is dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the sort of chapel one can find in cathedrals elsewhere in England, and also in France and Spain and Italy. Wells Cathedral’s Lady Chapel includes a sort of half circle of stained glass windows set very high in the walls. At the center is the church’s Jesse Window, another feature you’ll find in other cathedrals – it depicts the genealogy of Jesus – his family tree. But for me, the windows on either side of the Jesse Window were the most profound and the most inspiring.
It took several centuries of brokenness until the windows were restored in the 1800s. And they weren’t restored by re-creating the windows as they had looked. Instead, the designer took all of the broken pieces from the windows that had been shattered –they had kept them over those many years – and put them back together to create kaleidoscopes, as the tour guide described them, of color, jumbles of texture and fragment that catch and hold the sunlight, and invite eyes and minds into meditation. It’s an unexpected and beautiful bit of chaos in a building that is otherwise very carefully and symmetrically arranged and built.
Like other old cathedrals in England, Wells was of course Catholic when it was first built. Over the centuries, it was by turns a place of peace and a place of upheaval. During the Protestant Reformation and civil war, political and religious violence affected and in some cases destroyed churches and cathedrals and monasteries. That included Wells, where in the cathedral, sculptures were destroyed, the painted cathedral walls were whitewashed. At one point horses were stabled in the church. And many of the stained glass windows were shattered and broken by soldiers, including windows in the Lady Chapel.
So just a few days before the choir arrived in Wells, I was in London, visiting and revisiting places I haven’t been to in years, and one late afternoon decided to make my way to St. Paul’s Cathedral to hear Evensong there. I took the Underground to the St. Paul’s stop, and when I came above ground I saw first not St. Paul’s Cathedral, but another church, which I hadn’t seen in years, Christchurch Greyfriars – a very British, wonderfully British name – a couple blocks from St. Paul’s.
Both St. Paul’s and Christchurch weathered World War II together. Christchurch fared far worse, and at the end of the war all that was left of it, all that is still left it, were a couple walls and a tower. But instead of tearing Christchurch down, in the 1980s a rose garden was planted there, and the flowers were planted so that you could see where the altar was and where the pews were, this green and blooming oasis in the midst of what is now a noisy and crowded city.
So on this particular evening, I did go to Evensong at St. Paul’s, but first I stopped at Christchurch Greyfriars and walked through that garden, meditating on these places of peace that have survived some of the worst conflict created by humanity.
There is something about being in these ancient cities, where things past and present live side by side together. Everywhere, it feels like, you walk in the timeless spaces of cathedrals made of stone and of roses, whether you’re in a cathedral or you’re on city streets or on bridges over the river, in the halls of museums, over and over stopped in your tracks by the reminder of conflicts that have been here, violence that has left scars – scars that look like broken, brilliant glass or a cacophony of rosebushes.
So – getting to the Gospel, really! – Something in the confusion and chaos of today’s Gospel and its voices trying to make sense of Jesus reminded me of those places where centuries of time, and violence and peace, intersect. In today’s Gospel, we hear a confusion of voices trying to make sense of Jesus Christ, this strange prophet who is sparking a revolution, this peaceful man whose cousin John, an eccentric and noisy prophet, has just been killed by the empire. Loudest among the voices trying to understand Jesus is King Herod, the one responsible for John’s death, who is perhaps now feeling the weight and the fear of that decision, perhaps even guilt, for that act of political violence that was a turning point in the ministry of Jesus and his followers.
This is one of those moments when the arc of the Gospel story doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, and certainly must have been baffling to Jesus’ followers, as we’ve talked about in other weeks: The death of John, that unexpected and uncomfortable prophet, who as an unborn baby leaped for joy in his mother’s womb when he sensed that Mary was there, carrying Jesus, who baptized Jesus himself in living water. And now Jesus is getting louder and outspoken – he’s starting to sound like his cousin, perhaps, teaching strange and uncomfortable ideas, and making the people around him nervous.
And in the end, Jesus too will be killed by empire – but, as we know now, and the faithful knew then, his death, and John’s, is not the end of the story. Jesus’ tomb didn’t stay closed. What seemed hopeless, broken, shattered then was not demolished. Night turned into day and death turned into resurrection.
In this mess that is the Gospel, or the Gospel that is sometimes a mess – the story of a world trying to become new – the light always shines through. In the rubble, flowers are planted, and they grow. From the broken pieces of stained glass is made new art that catches the sun in new ways. In the muddle of voices, in the conflict and violence of our cities, then and now, faith steps in – truth breaks through. And that truth, that hope, needs us to listen for it, to plant the roses, to put the fragments back together again in different ways – in beautiful ways – sometimes beautiful not just in spite of, but because of, their brokenness.
And at the end of the day, we sing in those spaces, we pray in those spaces, where flowers grow among walls left standing, where light shines through broken glass, holding fear and faith, chaos and beauty, together, healing them and making us whole. That was, and is, the promise and the fulfillment of the Gospel.
Amen.
Sermon delivered by The Rev. Cara Ellen Modisett at Trinity Episcopal Church, Staunton, Virginia, on July 14, 2024, the eighth Sunday after Pentecost.
