Barbara Brown Taylor Preaches at the Institution of The Rev. Winnie Varghese

0:11 whose heart beats even now in this city and in you. You've entered a grand time machine this afternoon, whether you came in through a big wooden door or the portal of a computer. Bodily presence, always a plus. But there are a lot of people here who aren't here anymore. The cloud of witnesses, Scripture calls them. Matriarchs and patriarchs, saints and martyrs, previous rectors and Sunday school teachers, babies baptized here at the beginning of the last century, and those who were buried from here during the last 18 months. In the Christian imagination, they're all invested in what's happening here this afternoon, especially those who found meaning here, who found sanctuary, who found purpose, who found communion.

1:12 They're watching from their portals, too, cheering this church on as every member of it renews a ministry that has been going on since 1864. This is the fourth building in which that church has met, but flip the dial on the time machine and you can still smell the smoke from the first one on Walton Street, burned to the ground the same year it was built when Sherman's troops burned Atlanta. You can hear the chickens cackling under the floorboards of the third one at Houston and North Pryor Streets. Do we say Houston here? cackling under the floorboards while people were trying to pray upstairs, a problem serious enough to make it into the church records in the 1880s. That was a few years after Adelaide Hammond died in a fire at the second church.

2:10 Her husband donated her wedding silver to the church, one of the first recorded memorials and today it'll be used in our communion service. When the vestry first considered this building site in the early 1900s someone remembered hunting quail here just a few years earlier. Hunting quail here. It wasn't downtown but Atlanta was expanding into the suburbs and St. Luke's needed room to spread out. With 800 members, the congregation was larger than St. Philip's. New Rector had arrived with a head full of new ideas, visions really, about how this church could work with the city of Atlanta to make more justice, more equality between the races here.

3:11 Over the next 24 years, Dr. Wilmer lobbied to end child labor. He defended striking streetcar workers. He defied the Ku Klux Klan during the Atlanta race ride of 1906. He survived their attempt to get him fired. And he did his best, along with his good friend, Rabbi David Marks, to save Leo Frank's life from the anti-Jewish mob who finally lynched him in 1915. Dr. Wilmer also made pastoral calls on a bicycle and was so absent-minded that he once got partway down that aisle before he realized he hadn't put his vestments on. He stopped the procession, he told the congregation to sit down, and he returned as fast as he could. A choir member said he was a fine man, but forgetful. Once he forgot to come to church at all.

4:07 But he's here, in the cloud of witnesses, along with Mrs. Frances Camper and the women who waited tables at St. Luke's Restaurant in the years leading up to the Great Depression. Serving free meals to the hungry and earning enough from paying customers to buy this new marble altar for the church in 1931. And Dr. Hugh Hodgson, who filled in for a fired organist one Sunday in 1928 and stayed for the next 40 years.

4:40 and the members of St. Mary's Sewing Guild, who made thousands of free clothes and shipped boxes of them to foster parents of war children in the 1940s, and Assistant Rector Armistead Boardman, who visited every ward at Grady Hospital every week, delivering nearly a hundred Easter home and hospital communions the week before he was married in 1946. He said, I was so tired, I was not in my best fettle for a honeymoon. I read all 255 pages of St. Luke's history last weekend, not because I had to, but because it was so good. A story not only of this church, but of this city, running on the same circulatory system of human hope and fear, defeat and reinvention.

5:39 reading that book put a stethoscope on the time machine listening carefully to what was happening in this church I could tell what was happening in the city the nation the world the culture the strong pulse here through some years along with the arrhythmia the congestion in others When the book ended in 1975, I said no out loud because the time machine switched off before I got here. Tom Bowers was the rector then and Marianne Shahan was the part-time seminarian on staff. But Tom had not yet hired Barbara Brown. It would be two more years before I stood right there and preached my first sermon from a pew during a poorly attended service during Holy Week. I'm pretty sure there's still DNA in that wood somewhere from my sweat because there was a lot of sweat and I was holding on hard.

6:46 but here's what didn't sink in until i read the history there wasn't a single woman's name among the 18 rectors 30 assisting rectors 45 senior wardens and 62 junior wardens in all those years there wasn't a person of color among them or a person with their own pronouns The 32 presidents of St. Luke's Church women were all women, but only one of them had a first name, as far as I know, Miss. That would be Miss Mary King, 1942 to 1944. The rest were listed by their husbands' names, a mark of honor in those days I know, but what a cloak of invisibility.

7:42 Like the women in the Bible known only as wife or mother of. this was shocking to me since St. Luke's was one of the most egalitarian churches in town when I got here Tom Bowers was a force of nature a holy fool who ushered in a folk mass moved that altar away from the wall turned the parish hall into a soup kitchen and cried freely from this pulpit Tom if you're watching I'll never stop loving you but people could not see what they could not see and what many could not see in this part of the church was anyone who looked like them. Two takeaways from this. One, it's time for someone to write volume two of St. Luke's history. And two, when they do, today will stand out.

8:39 And it will stand out not because the long, brave, open-hearted, city-loving ministry of this congregation has taken some huge turn, but because today it becomes incarnate. in a whole new way. It comes with a new body, a new look, a new sound. When future generations look at the pictures from the fall of 2021, no one will have to tell them that God was doing a new thing. It will be right there in the flesh. This is about your new rector, but it's not only about her. Look around. This tent has gotten a lot bigger, just like Ed Bacon kept saying. The faithful body of this congregation looks different from the faithful body of the past. The trusted voices of these clergy sound different from the trusted voices that came before. The visionary bishop sitting in this chair sees something different from the visionary bishops who came before. The virtues haven't changed, faith and trust and vision, but the bodies have in ways that this church could not imagine 40 years ago. But God did. This new wholeness, all nations, all people, it's as old as the prophets. This new incarnation is rooted in the gospel of Jesus Christ. This fresh wind is the work of the Holy Spirit who loves blowing things around.

10:38 Have these things been a long time coming here? Yes. Are they way overdue? Yes. But their DNA, it's in the wood here too, in the marble, in the organ pipes, in the flesh and blood on the altar and in the pews. The cloud of witnesses are here and they are on their feet because there's something big happening in the grand time machine of this church. Full disclosure, Winnie and I have met one time. She didn't invite me because I'm her old friend. She invited me because I'm an old friend of this church. I've read her, I've listened to her, I've shared dear friends with her, but our only face-to-face was to talk about this service. And Winnie, you should know I lost my notes.

11:34 So this was memorable. I coaxed some stories out of her, but she wasn't keen for me to tell them. She said, they'll be hearing my stories for years. Like she could already see those years rolling ahead and behind as well. Her sense of the continuity of ministry in this place is so strong, along with her sense of belonging to it. She said, I think I'm a lot like my predecessors. The packaging's different. And so is the style. Winnie grew up in churches started and led by laypeople, so she leads with confidence in the ministry of the baptized.

12:21 Recently she wrote, I believe the wisdom is in the pews. The congregation builds the church. Since she and Elizabeth came here from Manhattan, and the flight path of St. Luke's Rectors has more than once run in the opposite direction, I wondered what it was like for her to wake up in a South that is not as new as sometimes advertised. But Winnie knows how to read ads. She also knows how to read people and their landscape. She said, Atlanta has become a place of revelation for me. When her father visited, you'll meet him soon, he said the weather reminded him of Kerala in South India, where it's at least this humid. Winnie even likes the rain.

13:15 When I left her office that day, I read her steady calm as a charism of the Spirit, as the confirmation of her call, She is where she is supposed to be, and she knows it. later when she asked me to choose the readings for the day i tossed the ball back and she caught it so second chronicles psalm 84 the healing story from acts the banquet scene from john's gospel they're all from her i mean who needs tea leaves and tarot cards when you've got that these readings are lenses into your new rector's heart especially the reading from john another John John Philip Newell calls that gospel the gospel of the beloved disciple a mysterious figure mentioned five times in John's gospel but never named except as the one whom Jesus loved as if Jesus only liked the others the beloved disciple doesn't speak up in today's passage but that wasn't his thing that was Peter's thing Thomas's thing his thing his thing was being loved and staying as close to Jesus as he could if we had video of today's reading along with the audio we would see the beloved disciple lying on Jesus at their last meal together, not reclining next to him, as the chicken translators of the NRSV put it, or sitting next to him, or at the table to the right of Jesus in a place of honor, as others have put it, all of them doing their best to avoid the word that is right there in the Greek.

15:07 the beloved disciple was lying on the bosom of Jesus. He was lying with his head on the Lord's breast so that while all the others were talking, talking, talking asking questions about where Jesus was going who was going to betray him what they were going to do without him the disciple whom Jesus loved lay there quietly counting the beats of Jesus' heart. When Jesus started his farewell speech, that's where the beloved disciple heard it from. One earbud turned up, the other pressed down. The teaching above, the heart beat below.

15:53 Love one another as I have loved you, Badum. No longer servants, but friends, Badum. You know everything I know now Badum Go and bear fruit Badum abide in my love that's what he wanted from them and what he wanted for them as well the kind of love that was a resting place in time beyond time a shelter they could return to between shifts as his friends or if they didn't come back having laid down their lives in the greatest act of love of all, then still a meal they could return to, like the one they were at, where anyone could say anything and still get their feet washed before taking Jesus up on the bread and the cup and the bosom to lie upon. It's what shows up in St. Luke's history book over and over again, the going out, the coming in, the lean times, the fat ones, the seasons for building the body and those for calling the body back into action through wars and depressions, lynchings and bombings, through political division and climate change, through civil and human rights movements both past and present and I think ever continuing, yet none of those, none of those with power to shut down this banquet where Jesus' friends lean close to listen for the heartbeat of God.

17:32 Of course it's beating in the city too, but sometimes it's easier to hear here, at least now that the chickens are gone. This banquet is our listening post, our bread line and juice bar, the one that makes all other things possible. It's the real time machine, this banquet, where people have been holding out their hands to God a lot longer than 157 years. It may be the only thing that the cloud of witnesses really envies about those of us who are here today, that we can still reach out with our warm, living hands as they once did with theirs. Then again, maybe not, because the mark of the church is not who are its members, but how it loves, and love never ends.

18:33 Final word from a seasoned pastor. Winnie is not Jesus. that job is filled Winnie is Jesus' friend chosen like every one of you to abide in love and to bear fruit that lasts love her let her love you for that is the birthmark of all Jesus' friends may today be the beginning of a harvest like no other and may all God's people say