Join us for Candlemas, February 2, at 10:30 am or 7 pm
Mon, Tues, Wed Evening Prayer, 4:30pm
Tuesdays Meditation and Bible Study, 7:30pm (Zoom)
Wednesdays Said Mass, 12 noon
Drop-in and dinner on Fridays from 6 pm to 10 pm. Saturday and Sunday community breakfasts between 7 am and 8:30 am every weekend.
Welcome to St. Stephen’s
We are an inclusive and affirming Anglican community in the heart of the city, where we strive to live out God’s mission of compassion and justice for all people, and for all of creation.
We are committed to being a community of solidarity with those who have been pushed to the margins of our society, and to the task of building a better world.
We support and engage with the arts—music, literature, theatre, the visual arts—and welcome collaboration with working artists.
January 26, 2025, Epiphany 3
Mtr. Maggie Helwig, Church of Saint Stephen-in-the-Fields, Toronto
Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10; Psalm 19; 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a; Luke 4:14-21
I talked last week about how Jesus first manifests his identity to the public in the different gospels, with John’s story of the wedding at Cana being, typically for John, the most allusive and symbolic. It is perhaps unsurprising that Luke, who starts his gospel by explaining that he’s going to give us an orderly and organized account – unlike, by implication, those disorganized others – is alone in having Jesus launch his public ministry with a full-scale mission statement, cribbed from a few passages in Third Isaiah. He has come back from the wilderness for this, to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, to let the oppressed go free. Interestingly, and surely deliberately, he omits a line in which Isaiah speaks of God’s vengeance, and reads only the sentence about the year of God’s favour, the jubilee year, the time when debts are forgiven and debt slaves, at least sometimes, freed.
And this week, in the overwhelmingly powerful country to the south of us, a man who claims to have been chosen by God delivered a mission statement that is, in every possible way, the exact opposite. A triumphalist yet bitter, angry speech, filled with blame and hate and promises of suffering, filled with lies and threats and exercises of power for it’s own sake, a speech obsessed with vengeance. A speech delivered with the world’s richest men – and I say men deliberately here – as the most honoured guests, men who hoard personal wealth greater than most countries, and use it only to buy more power, or indulge in massively expensive, climate-destroying toys. One of whom, incredibly, decided to stir up the crowd with a Nazi salute. I do not use the word antichrist lightly; it has been too much abused by too many. But if I have ever in my life seen something like the presence of the antichrist, it was there.
And here we are, in another country but not far away, facing our own powers and principalities, and the threat of a chaotic and unpredictable future, and we are small, and we have only small things we can do. But we are the body of Christ and individually members of it, and this means that we are bound by that proclamation at that small-town synagogue long ago. This is what we must do.
To proclaim good news to the poor is not to say to the poor, “There, there. It’ll be fine.” To proclaim good news to the poor is an act of resistance. And so here is some of what needs to be said at this time: No human being is illegal, and borders are a human invention. Trans and gay and lesbian and all queer people are real and beloved. The climate emergency is real, and becoming rapidly worse, and the poor are bearing most of the cost. It is a sin to amass immeasurable wealth while children starve. Pride and greed and vicious self-interest are sinful. We are all one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of you; and an injury to one is an injury to all. And if Jesus is Lord, then no one else is. No one, no leader, no government, no institution, not even the church. We may form strategic alliances with those who share some of the values of the kingdom of God, but none of them deserve, or can hold, our loyalty. Our loyalty is given wholly to the crucified body.
Even to say some of these things now, in the United States, could be genuinely dangerous. If things go badly enough, it may become dangerous here. It is the preaching of the gospel which got Oscar Romero killed, and it is the preaching of the gospel which now has some people calling for the deportation, or worse, of Bishop Mariann Budde, who challenged Trump to his face, carefully but firmly, from her pulpit in the National Cathedral, in what one watcher called “her refusal to surrender these ancient truths to the latest face of empire.”
Bishop Mariann’s mandate for that service was to preach on “unity” – if you read the full text, you will see that she takes this, and transforms it, by moving the focus from the word “unity”, and its often dubious history of papering over conflict, to “community”, the calling to be one body, the only principle by which we can survive as human souls.
I’m going to quote a few lines from a traditional spiritual, which I often allude to, and which gave the title to a great book by the tremendous James Baldwin, lines which give the lie to the idea that the spirituals of the Black church were ever about pie in the sky consolation: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign/No more water – the fire next time.”
I think about that, and I think also about the wealthy man who, as the Pacific Palisades fire tore through his neighbourhood, posted to Twitter, “Urgent, need private firefighters who can protect my house, will pay any price”, and about the other person who quickly tweeted, “Urgent, need someone to get this camel through the eye of a needle, will pay any price!”
When the fire really comes down, and it is coming down, wealth will not save you. But maybe, perhaps, being embedded in a community, a community of mutual care and support and service, just might. If we need in this time to build a sort of ark, let it be an ark of community and diversity and love and resistance. Most of us will never have an opportunity to preach to the President of the United States. But we are all called to a moment, and must respond. We all have moments when we can speak out, moments when we can take risks to defend those more vulnerable, or even to defend our own vulnerable selves.
And we have moments when we can build, when we can create, when we can carry on the good life of the created world. One of our volunteers this week drew to my attention a wonderful saying from the prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him): “If the Final Hour comes while you have a shoot of a plant in your hands, and it is possible to plant it before the Hour comes, you should plant it.”
And we have moments when we can extend our hand and be safety for someone else. We must be ready to recognize these moments when they come, when another member of the body has need of us. Paul’s line of thought in this letter to the Corinthians is obscured by the need to have digestible-sized readings for the weekly services, but right after he tells his readers to strive for the greater gifts, he says, “But I will show you a yet more excellent way.” More excellent than striving after even the greatest gifts is love.
We are the body, and this is the time; for we have no other bodies, and no other times. This is the year of God’s favour, because we have no other year. This is the place of fulfillment, because we have no other place. It is not a good time or a good place, but it never has been. And we are not equipped to be the body, but we never have been, and it does not change the fact. It is good news, despite it all.