Colorado Major State Day

Sunday, October 16, 2005
Photography by Lloyd Johnson

Click on the photos for larger version (225 dpi)

Photo 3: The Very Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd III, dean of Washington National Cathedral, delivered the sermon from the historic Canterbury Pulpit, from where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his last Sunday sermon.

Dean Lloyd drew upon the Scripture reading in which God gave assurances to Moses on Mount Sinai, while refusing Moses’ request that He show himself clearly. It is frustrating that God’s intentions often are cloaked in mystery. But such a “permanently uneasy state” is actually a blessing, he said. We humans are unable to see God fully. “This is part of God’s gift to us. If God were utterly clear in all ways, our freedom would be gone. Certitude is a spiritual danger. We would limit God to the shape of our minds. God is beyond us.”

People who profess to know God and his intentions can be dangerously misguided, he added, citing suicide bombers who claim they are doing His will and colonial rulers in South Africa whose policies of repression stemmed from religious interpretations.

Referring to a recent visit to Washington by the Anglican Archbishop of Ireland, Dean Lloyd described the Most Rev. Robert Eames, as “an essential leader who in trying to hold the Anglican Communion in these troubled times, began and ended his recent lectures at Virginia Seminary with an image that he says has haunted him. Think, he said, of a poor, desperately hungry, match-stick-thin child, standing on the scrub landscape of Africa, not knowing where his next meal will come from. And as he stands there, only a few feet away two Anglicans are shouting, Bibles waving in their hands, arguing over the pros and cons of homosexuality, completely ignoring the child and his needs.”

“That, he (Eames) said, is the tragedy of this moment—a communion of Christians around the world so distracted by their fighting that they can’t do the very work of feeding the hungry and the spiritually hungry their Lord called them first to do.”

Dean Lloyd continued, “Can we see God? No, but we can see and follow the one God sent to show us the way. ‘No one has ever seen God,’ the Gospel of John says. ‘It is God the only son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.’ To be a Christian is not to have a list of certainties, but to give our lives, our hearts and souls, to following him.”

“…That calls for vigorous discussion and disagreement. But God help us if we forsake our modesty and civility, our sense of mystery and wonder, our doubts and our loves…Jesus seemed never to care very much whether his followers thought alike. But did they love? Do they love each other now? Which do they love more, their certainties, or that match-stick-thin child?”