Introduction
St. Mark’s on the Campus Episcopal Church, Lincoln, Neb., celebrates the Holy Eucharist on Tuesdays at 12:30 p.m. The parish’s practice is to observe commemorations at this service.
The parish’s rector, Father Jerry Thompson, asked me to lead worship on Tuesday, March 22, 2011. This date is also the day on which Jonathan Edwards, Teacher and Missionary to the Native Americans, died in 1758.
Readings
Isaiah 6:1–8
Psalm 119: 89–96
John 17:6–10
Homily
Born in East Windsor, Connecticut in 1703, Jonathan Edwards was the fifth of eleven children. He had ten sisters. His father was a pastor in the Congregational Church. Jonathan was homeschooled, enrolled at Yale when he was thirteen, and graduated when he was seventeen. He studied theology, earning a master’s degree when he twenty, and was ordained when he was twenty-three. He got married five months later, and he and his wife had eleven children.
He was what we would call an intellectual, working in epistemology and psychology and theology. He also underwent mystical experiences as an adult.
His preaching inspired waves of revivals of the faith in New England that led to the Great Awakening of 1740 to 1742. He grew famous and that led to strains with his congregation. Eventually he was dismissed in 1750. He moved to the frontier, way out west in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and became a missionary to the Native Americans. He continued to write treatises on the freedom of the will and original sin. In 1757 he became president of the College of New Jersey, which later became Princeton University. He was inoculated against smallpox during an outbreak, but succumbed to a secondary infection in 1758, and died on March 22.
What strikes me about his life isn’t so much all of the academics, but the fact that he was open and receptive to the mystical side of the faith. It reminds me a little of Isaiah’s experience from our first reading (Isaiah 6:1–8). We can get so bogged down by the grinding details of our daily lives that we forget the wonder and mystery—even the strangeness—of God and how he changes our lives when we are open to him.
Jonathan Edwards wrote a Personal Narrative. In it, he said,
As I was walking [in my father’s pasture] and looking up on the sky and clouds, there came to my mind so sweet a sense of the glorious majesty and grace of God, that I know not how to express. I seemed to see them both in a sweet conjunction; majesty and meekness joined together; it was a gentle, and holy majesty; and also a majestic meekness; a high, great, and holy gentleness. (From New Book of Festivals and Commemorations, Phillip Pfatteicher, Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2008 p. 137)
Majesty and grace in sweet conjunction. That’s not a bad way to speak of Jesus Christ, God himself in our midst. He’s gentle and holy, majestic and meek.
And the great gift is that he comes to us in the Bread of Heaven and the Cup of Salvation. Wine becomes blood and bread becomes flesh. That is grace and majesty in sweet conjunction, given for you and for me, given to forgive our sins, to strengthen us for daily living, and to preserve us until the day we gather around the LORD’s “high and lofty throne” an join with the seraphim and sing, “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts! All the earth is filled with his glory” (Isaiah 6:1,3, NAB). Amen.