Wisconsin Major State Day

Sunday, February 11, 2007
Photography by Charlie Archambault

Click on the photos for larger version (225 dpi)

Photo 4: The Rev. Canon Howard Anderson, warden of the Cathedral College, delivered the sermon, based on the Gospel passage of St. Luke that recounts the Sermon on the Plain where Jesus preached to multitudes that the poor shall inherit the kingdom of God.

Anderson said the gospel showed that Christ’s message was almost revolutionary, “offering a way for common people to experience God” at a time when they were regarded with disdain by the higher classes.

“His way is not just for the fulltime professionals, or the intellectuals or the professionally religious, or even for the particularly pious,” Anderson said. “It was for everybody, particularly those who did not think they had a chance—the tax collectors, the publicans, the Roman centurions and those whom life had beaten down.

“And that is true no matter how beat down we are, how depressed we are, how without hope, how absolutely uninspired or common we are,” he said. “God always seems to find a way to reach us, to be close to us, to touch our hearts.”

“If we lack the courage or the will to reach out to touch the Christ like the people in today’s gospel did, the God whom Christ came to reveal will find a way to touch us. The Christian mystic and saint, Catherine of Sienna wrote this poem in the 14th century. For me, it expresses the nature of our relationship with the Holy One. “I won’t take no for an answer, God began to say to me, when he opened his arms each night, wanting to dance.”

“Yes, our God is wholly unlike anything the world has ever seen before. This is a God who might just choose one of us, flawed as we are, or a child, or one the world has rejected, as it rejected Jesus, to do the work of the Kingdom of God. Strange as it seems, that is how God works in this world. So let us dance!”