The Reverend Betsy Scott, August 17th 2025
SERMON: St George’s Chapel
August 17, 2025
Rev. Betsy Scott
Good morning: How did you feel when hearing the Gospel reading from Luke 12 this morning with Christ saying that he did not come to bring peace in the world but to bring fire and to split families. I was deeply unsettled. Having spent my life bringing families together, this message seemed at odds with Christ’s message of peace.
I started thinking about when this gospel was written and by whom. Elaine Pagels, the distinguished professor of religion at Princeton University’s new book Miracles and Wonder explains: The Romans were persecuting Jews and Christians who rebelled against Roman rule and Roman religion at the time tis was written. They were cruel and mean. They rode into communities, raped women and killed or enslaved the men and children. It was common for the Romans to crucify men who refused to pay allegiance to the Emperor and the Roman gods. Luke was a doctor from Greece who wrote according to scholars about twenty years after the death of Christ. He described what was happening in his own time: seeing families torn apart when someone in the family became a Christian, seeing Christians being tortured for their faith and for their refusal to bend down and worship the Roman emperor or the Roman gods. I imagine we can all think of similar things still happening today.
When I read this Gospel another time, it was the fire of Christ I heard most clearly: it was Christ saying: “I came to set the earth on fire and how I wish it was already kindled. I have a baptism to receive and how distressed I am until it is over.” The interpreters say he is talking about his coming crucifixion and that he knows he must go through with it because of his obedience to his father and radical love for all of us. The fire is his radical transformative love. This kind of love is divisive when it upsets and conflicts with the established order.
The fire of God’s love is a great mystery and is present even in the face of unimaginable tragedy such as we have all witnessed this summer in the lost lives of those little girls in Texas, the murders in New York City and much more around the world, but in God’s mysterious ways, His radical love enters our lives and transforms them over time. It is this love we are called to recognize. I was very taken with the Rev Holly Antolini’s answer to a question earlier in the summer about the tragedy in Texas when she said there is no explanation that satisfies the heart of the suffering of the innocent, but the answer is love.
To further explain God’s transformative love, I feel called to share with you a recent encounter I had with God’s radical love in answer to a great tragedy that happened to my family with the hope my story gives to us all increased faith and hope. This encounter came upon me in a totally unexpected and mysterious way, something I never could have imagined. I think I had this experience both to increase my faith and so I could share it with all of you.
This last June, I went with Shalem, a pilgrim group based here in the United States, to the Monastery of the Incarnation outside the walls of Avila Spain where Teresa of Avila lived in the 16th century cloistered as a nun for many years in a tiny cell with a fireplace above, a desk below where she wrote about a life of simplicity, poverty, prayer and contemplation. She is known as a great mystic who lived in a very troubled time when there were constant wars between the Moslems and the Christians with awful atrocities.
We were taken to the chapel of the monastery by a young ponytailed guide, a recent graduate of Texas A & M, and shown an elaborate reredos at the front of the chapel ornamented with gold leaf which the guide enthused was typical Spanish as she had seen similar altar pieces in Honduras colonized by the Spanish.
Our guide asked us to look up to the back of the chapel, up on the second level behind screens and bars. She told us that we were standing on the spot where Teresa stood when she peered through the screen to the second floor and saw a vision of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin Mary appeared to Teresa on that spot. Her story made me think of my devout Catholic mother-in -law who had always felt close to the Virgin Mary and who had died forty-two years ago.
Next, our guide suggested we each stand in the central spot and look up to see the place where the vision had taken place. When it was my turn, I stood in the spot and looked up, squinting to see through the screen and bars to the lights at the back of the second-floor space, perhaps another chapel. As I stood there peering to see, there to my total surprise stood a vision of my first husband Bob looking at me with his mother at his side, her only child whom she absolutely adored. My first husband Bob Jacks and the father of my children was killed tragically in a car crash, dying instantly, when he was in his fifties, leaving behind our two young children, eleven and fourteen bereft of their father and me a frightened and grieving young widow. He missed their entire growing-up, his grandchildren and so much of life, so it was to my total amazement that there they stood. My insides began to transform as I sensed their showering me with approval, acceptance and total love. I understood they were radiating love. I sensed they knew absolutely everything that had happened to me for the past forty years. I realized it was the unconditional knowing of the Holy Spirit. I felt them saying what a great job I had done since Bob had died with the children and that they were waiting to welcome me with joyful hearts, but not yet. They were thrilled with the children and grandchildren. I felt a great unexpected delight and warmth in experiencing their unconditional love, the divine fire of the Holy Spirit. My beloved second husband Al came up in my mind, the man I married seven and half years after Bob died and with whom I was happily married for over thirty years until he died three years ago. I was somewhat nervous what they would think but instead the thought came to me they had sent him to me, delighted I had had those years with him. I was experiencing unconditional, unselfish divine love, all knowing love. Total knowing, total acceptance, total presence with me. I was absolutely in awe of this divine love. How could this be? There is no rational explanation. It is the mystery of God’s healing, transforming and radical love. It was a mystical experience.
This kind of love is so amazing— it brought total joy in me, even in the face of all my years of struggle with my first husband and his mother--for my relationship with the two of them had sometimes been a challenge—but they understood, had compassion. Bob had told me love was eternal, and he was right. I can’t get over this total love and joy. This is radical transformative love.
This is the love that Holly was talking about that is eternal in the face of great tragedy. We don’t know how it will play out with all those stricken families in Texas, in New York and elsewhere, except our faith tells us that God’s radical unimaginable love, the fire that He brought to this earth, in God’s mysterious ways, will be there with them and for them forever. It is extremely painful, terrible, not understandable these tragedies—and yet God’s radical love is what remains.
I shared this story at lunch during the pilgrimage with a group of women Episcopal priests who told me I had blessed them with my sharing.
I wrote this story to my children, and my son Bob wrote back to me: “That’s beautiful, Mom. Thanks for sharing.” He then said he always said that his dad would be so pleased that Al was with us all those years since he could not be.
The Holy Spirit knows us far more than we know ourselves, is so immense that it is hard for us to take-in.
This is the love that is here now for us all, this is the fire that Christ came to bring to the earth and for which he died, and it is radical.
We all fervently pray that all grieving families in Texas, in New York City and elsewhere, and all of us here in this chapel, will experience the amazing healing love of God in God’s own way and time.
As the Gospel of John states: “The light shines in the darkness, and darkness has not overcome it.”
A recent quote from the Bishop in DC: “Some days we’d be made of stone if we didn’t feel discouraged and deeply saddened by what we see around us. But remember that hope isn’t something we need to conjure on our own. It is grace that God gives, allowing us to face evil and death, and still believe that life-affirming Spirit is always at work within us and around us to bring about good. Dare to believe that seeds of new possibilities, invisible to us now, have already been planted in the soil of our lives, and they are slowly taking root. New life will emerge from the ashes of what is lost.”
We are called by God to have faith, to seek and to recognize the love of God at work in our lives.
Amen