Omitted from last Sunday's sermon for reasons of brevity...

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. John 13:34

I OMITTED ABOUT 1/3 of what I had intended to say in last Sunday’s sermon. The sermon was plenty long as it was, but I liked what I had prepared, so here it is…

NANCY and I watch network TV shows like NCIS, Hawaii 5/0, and Criminal Minds. The shows are formulaic, violent, and (in the case of Criminal Minds) depict sadistic cruelty to an extent that can’t be healthy to watch. So why do we watch it? In our case it is because we are drawn by the relationships among the principle characters, and in all of these action/crime dramas there is a “team” that routinely places its collective self in harm’s way in defense of the common good. The characters have damaged or nonexistent personal lives, and are living examples of John 15:13, “no one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” When one of the regular cast members leaves a series, it causes us grief, and connects us to the experiences of loss that have marked our own lives.  We miss Ziva and Warrick, and regret (and resent) Gil’s resistance to intimacy.  

OF AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT SORT is the British drama shown on PBS, “Call the Midwife.”  There is no gun play in this series, but it is more realistic, gritty, and believable than those aforementioned programs. The stories are set in a poor part of London in the 1950’s and 60’s, and involve a community of Anglican nuns and their lay associates. The nuns are devout but flawed: one is plain crazy; another is plain grouchy; and another, their leader, fits my definition of a saint. The many crises, tragedies, and reconciliations that occur are depicted with an accompanying soundtrack of the sisters in their chapel, chanting the (to me) familiar psalms of the monastic office. “Whosoever dwells under the defense of the most high * abides under the shadow of the almighty.”

For these nuns, the “shadow” under which they abide is a love that motivates all they do, and even more all that they find themselves unable to do. Love is the alpha and omega of their lives: love for the innocent and helpless; love for the unloved and unloveable. They are deeply traditional, yet reluctant to judge and open to change. In other words, Anglican, at least in the forms I have encountered in 60 years as an Episcopalian.