St. Mary's, the Theotokos

Sermon for the Installation of the Rev. Dr. Sean Kim
St. Mary's Episcopal Church, Kansas City, MO
Feast of St. Mary the Virgin, Aug. 15, 2024

What a glorious evening!  As we prayed in the Psalm, “Taste and see that the Lord is good!” (34:8 BCP).  But, hey, this is Anglo-Catholic worship, the mass St. Mary’s style – so we don’t have to stop at tasting and seeing.  We can use all the senses:  Taste, and see, and smell, and hear, and feel that the Lord is good on this glorious evening, as St. Mary’s celebrates the ministry of its 22^nd rector, the Rev. Dr. Sean Kim.

The life of this good place is all about bringing the real presence of our Lord Jesus Christ into the here and now, mediated through all our senses.  Since 1854, when a faithful deacon from Trinity, Independence, rode his Missouri mule on a cold November day to lead a few Kansas City Episcopalians in their prayers, you’ve worshiped the Lord in the beauty of holiness here at St. Mary’s – what’s become the diocesan gold standard for being high-church.  Now, as some of you know, that’s not exactly my liturgical gift.  I made sure to ask Fr. Sean a couple of weeks ago specifically what he wanted me to do in this liturgy, so I wouldn’t look like a bumbling first-year seminarian assisting at the altar.  Thankfully, he set the bar low, and it turns out I am able to follow a verger to the pulpit.  We’ll see if I can make it back to my chair without tripping.

But, as you all know better than I do, being Anglo-Catholic isn’t just about incense and birettas and processional umbrellas – although, who isn’t up for a procession with an umbrella, right?  No, being Anglo-Catholic is about much more than a good show.  Being Anglo-Catholic is about bringing heaven to earth.  Yes, you hear that in the music of the angels.  Yes, you taste that in bread and wine that’s become Body and Blood.  Yes, you enact that through daily worship at the throne of grace.  But being Anglo-Catholic, and specifically being St. Mary’s, means being heaven on earth through every breath of the Body of Christ in this place.

In other words, being Anglo-Catholic isn’t just about venerating Christ’s Body sacramentally, or gathering as a body for worship.  It’s about honoring every body – every beloved child God brings into the orbit of this good place.  St. Mary’s has been honoring and serving beloved every-bodies for 170 years – running schools in what’s now the River Market, feeding hungry people laboring in the stockyards of the West Bottoms, creating a hospital to serve those who couldn’t afford care, a hospital we now know as St. Luke’s Health System.  When neighborhoods thrived in this part of downtown, before the freeways pushed people away from their communities, St. Mary’s served the folks around it with worship and fellowship, Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops, social groups and business clubs.  Now this hallowed ground welcomes new neighbors, God’s beloved children returning to downtown and looking for a faith community where honoring God means practicing love, not judgment.  To all who’ve been hurt, to all who’ve been shamed, to all who’ve been lost, the Body of Christ that is St. Mary’s says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest” (Matt 11:28).  No matter who you are, every body has a place here.

And in this incarnation of heaven on earth, God has now raised up the Rev. Dr. Sean Kim as your 22^nd rector.  I’m blessed to say that I’ve known Sean as long as I’ve been in Kansas City because we met at St. Andrew’s in Brookside shortly after I came there as assistant rector.  It was 2005, and St. Andrew’s didn’t exactly have a stellar reputation for its warmth or its welcome.  Bishop Barry Howe used to tell the story of how he and Mary came to St. Andrew’s one Sunday soon after they moved to Kansas City.  Bishop Barry was wearing a coat and tie, not a clerical collar; they were just looking for a place to worship that morning as they got the lay of the land.  Apparently, what they found was less than it might have been.  “Not a single person talked to us,” Bishop Barry used to say. 

It was a sign of the work we had to do.  By the time I got to St. Andrew’s, there were at least a couple of faithful souls, Norm Olson and Connie Hesler, who were inspired to take seriously every body who came through St. Andrew’s doors.  One of them was Dr. Sean Kim, a mild-mannered history professor who happened to be looking for a church.  On the Sunday he visited, Norm and Connie welcomed him, and talked to him, and got him coffee after worship, and invited him to come back.  “That first Sunday,” Fr. Sean told me recently – “That first Sunday, I knew I’d found my home.”

Later that week, a priest called him to say hello and invite him to a class for people wanting to learn more about St. Andrew’s and The Episcopal Church.  Sean came … and suffered heroically through an amateurish presentation on Anglican history.  Later, as the church was forming new small groups, a parishioner invited Sean to join one – and that experience built deep friendships for years to come.  Other parishioners invited Sean to become a Eucharistic minister and a member of the Order of St. Luke.  A priest invited him to come on a mission trip to Haiti.  And eventually, a few years later, a deacon said out loud what others could see, too:  He invited Sean to pray about whether God might be calling him to ordained ministry.

As Fr. Sean said when we talked recently, there’s a key verb that runs through that story: Invite.  Those invitations kept leading Fr. Sean deeper into relationship with God and God’s people, so that he found not just involvement in the church but formation as a disciple.  It was a journey that could easily have gone differently.  Without those invitations, Sean could have been just that brilliant professor who comes to church sometimes.  Instead, he’s that brilliant professor who’s now your rector.

I know the stereotype is that Anglo-Catholic congregations don’t feel comfortable with evangelism.  OK; I’m certainly not going to try to convince you all to become evangelicals, not even in the good and holy and profoundly Episcopalian sense of that term.  But here’s what I will take the risk to say:  The Blessed Virgin Mary is inviting you to live fully as an incarnation of heaven on earth – and to invite others to step into it with you.  Yes, it’s a little presumptuous of me to speak for the Queen of Heaven; I get that.  But listen to her own words:  God “has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant….  His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.  He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.  He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly.  He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.  He has helped his servant … in remembrance” of the mercy promised to all God’s people across the generations.  That’s the vision of heaven that the Blessed Virgin Mary is inviting you to embody, and to share, right here at 13^th and Holmes.

To do so, she’s asking you to draw deeply both from her model of faithfulness and from your own DNA.  St. Mary is magnifying the Lord as she proclaims God’s intention to turn the world’s order upside down.  Where the world raises up the powerful and the privileged, and invites them to lord it over the folks who’ve been shoved to the side, St. Mary magnifies God’s microscopic presence, in her womb and in the world.  Her son, Jesus, the homeless preacher and healer, will take on the empire and win, making the sacrifice that brings us resurrection as a way of life.  It’s the fulfillment of what St. Mary is singing in her canticle tonight – how God scatters the proud, and dethrones the powerful, and lifts up the lowly, and fills the hungry, and sends the rich packing.  For when we worship power and take pride in ourselves, we miss the point of why God brought heaven to earth – to gather, and serve, and heal every body whom God has made.

Tonight, as we welcome Fr. Sean as your new rector, we also celebrate St. Mary’s feast day.  And for you especially, her spiritual namesakes, this is a night to remember who you’ve been and whom God has made you to be.  For just as St. Mary is the theotokos, the God-bearer, so you are St. Mary’s, called to bear God to the world.  Therefore, as a theotokos and with your new rector, make this place a jewel of the Incarnation, with all its facets blazing – the beauty of liturgy, the sacrifice of service, and the blessing of invitation – so that every body who encounters Christ here might say, “Yeah, St. Mary’s … they magnify the Lord!”