If there is anyone here today, who did not worship at St. Thomas on the other 3 Sundays of June, you may be surprised by our worship. I gave notice on those 3 Sundays that today we would be joining in the commemoration of the founding of Jamestown 400 years ago, and in particular of the first regular use of the Book of Common Prayer in the Western Hemisphere. Today and during the week to come, our Presiding Bishop and many others, are holding special services, events and lectures. The primary focus is on the religious life of colonial Virginia, with attention to the ways that colonists adapted church life and practice to the realities of the new world, as well as to the early clergy, and to relations with native Americans.

The men who came to Jamestown in 1607, were a mixture of farmers who had been pushed out by the enclosure of grazing land in England, craftsmen, soldiers, and gentlemen-adventurers who hoped to turn a profit from the wealth of the new world. They came largely from the south of England, and were all members of the Church of England. When King James I granted a charter to the Virginia Company in 1606, he also established, in advance, a parish church in Virginia, and appointed the Rev. Richard Hakluyt as rector. This was the beginning of the Anglican Communion: the first Anglican church outside Great Britain.

The rector, being in middle age, appointed a younger man, the Rev. Robert Hunt, to be the vicar, who accompanied the colonists on their voyage across the Atlantic. During that first summer, they worshipped outdoors, attaching a sail to the trees for shade, and nailing a board to two trees for a pulpit. During the fall, they built a barn-like structure for worship, but it burned down in January 1608, and the vicar himself died the following April, along with many others. As it was for the Puritans who came to Plymouth 14 years later, the effort to establish a settlement was risky, and cost many lives. The spiritual strength provided by worship was very important to them.

These colonists would have been the third generation after the church in England began to separate from the Roman Catholic Church, gradually becoming the protestant Church OF England. The break began in 1533, but the big changes in local churches did not occur until 1549, when the Latin Mass was set aside, and worship in English began. The first Book of Common Prayer was both a translation of the Latin Mass, and a simplification of it. It was revised 3 years later; it was cast aside by Queen Mary who restored the Catholic Church for 5 years; and then the Prayerbook was revised a third time under Queen Elizabeth in 1559. The goal of the reformers, was to return to the worship of the ancient church, which took place in languages the people understood, and in which the people actively participated, rather than being spectators.

This goal of participation in worship is still very much at the heart of our worship in the Episcopal Church. Compared to this 1559 liturgy, the congregation has many more responses to make in our 1979 liturgies, and a much bigger role overall, as members of the Altar Guild and the choir, as musicians, readers, intercessors, ushers, acolytes, chalice- bearers and healing ministers. If any of you would like to serve in one of these roles, write your name and the role in which you are interested, on a piece of paper and give it to me at the door, or send me an email.

The other big shift that was set in motion by the Reformation, was an emphasis on learning and understanding. There was a revival of preaching, which went hand in hand with the new access people had to read the Bible in English, and to have their own printed copy of it. In many homes it became common to read a portion of the Bible out loud to the whole household every evening. In the ancient church most people had access to some portion of the New Testament in their own language, but over the centuries this familiarity disappeared, as the Bible was only available in Latin. I am sure you are all aware of how much emphasis we give today to reading the Bible~~every Sunday we have a reading from the Hebrew Scripture, a psalm, a New Testament reading, and a Gospel reading. It is a rare Sunday when the sermon has no interpretation of at least one of those readings.

Behind this emphasis on learning and understanding, is the re-assertion in the protestant churches, that each individual has a direct relationship with God in Christ, which does not need to be mediated by priest, bishop, king, or public official. There was an effort to shift the role of the clergy away from having any authority or control over the lives of the laity, and toward being pastors and teachers. So our operating assumption today, is that each Christian is actively engaged in the journey of faith. This means, that we are reading the Bible at home as well as hearing it at church, and we are consulting friends, and scholars about its meaning. This means, we are praying at home as well as at church; we are seeking to develop our own relationships with God; and, we recognize that the Holy Spirit will call us each to participate in the mission of the church.

So the theme of the Reformation, might be freedom~~freedom from the oppressive structures of the church, freedom from worship which few people could understand, AND, freedom for each person to read the Bible, and to worship in a language they understand, for each to participate in worship, to pursue their own spiritual path, and to live by their own conscience, as it is informed by the Bible. But, you may well ask, what does freedom have to do with the Gospel? Haven’t we commited ourselves to certain baptismal promises as followers of Christ? What does freedom have to do with that?

In our Gospel reading today, Jesus met a deranged man, who believed he was possessed by a legion of demons. Jesus freed the man from their control, sending the demons into a herd of pigs. There are many reasons not to read this story literally: it sounds to me like a much simpler story that has been inflated and embellished. The district where it took place was not Jewish, and the deranged man was a Gentile. The point of the story, originally, was probably that Jesus had command over ALL unclean spirits, whether they inhabited a Jew or a Gentile. In either case, the demons recognized the authority of Jesus, and departed. Although I do not believe in demon possession, I do believe that people get very discouraged by the struggle to survive, that people get disoriented by illness or grief, and that people become mentally ill. I interpret this story to mean that God in Christ intends to set us free from every kind of discouragement, disorientation, and mental illness. When I read this story, I think of all the other occasions of healing ~~some were strictly physical, such as the healing of the man with a withered hand, while others were situations in which some distress of spirit affected the body, as with the paralyzed man let down through a roof. I set Jesus’ ability to heal, in the larger context of God’s plan for each one of us to become whole, to experience abundance of life.

If you think about the ministry of Jesus from this point of view, you will realize that he gave a lot of attention to setting people free from the things that weighed them down. Many were weighed down by their sins and Jesus released them in two ways: sometimes he forgave their sins, and other times he said they were feeling guilty about things that were not sins. Don’t worry about giving a tithe from the herbs you grow in your kitchen garden,he said, and don’t feel guilty about helping a stranger who may be unclean. His great commandment might be paraphrased this way: you don’t have to love God only by keeping the Sabbath and obeying the purity laws; you are free to love God with your whole heart and mind and strength. Likewise you don’t have to keep peace with your neighbor only by observing property boundaries and returning his lost sheep: but you are free to love your neighbor as yourself! Jesus was saying, seek that wholeness and fullness of life by finding your own creative way to love God, and seek that same fullness of life for your neighbor, by caring for him or her in the same was as for yourself.

Our reading from Paul’s letter to the Galatians, makes this point in the context of culture, ethnicity and gender roles. Paul says, “before faith came, we were imprisoned . . . under the law”. Christ has freed us from the prison of the law, and also from the prison of ethnic differences, because we are freed from that distinction between Jew and Greek, as well as all the other distinctions: between citizen and immigrant, between European and African, between Hispanic and Asian. Likewise, Christ has freed us from the prison of cultural differences, because there is no longer slave or free, male or female roles. Paul is saying that in the eyes of God, and in the church, all these human differences are irrelevant, because “you are all one in Christ”, which means, you are all equal in Christ, you all have important gifts to share with the household of God.

In the New Testament, and in the early church, there were several different theologies about what we mean, when we say Jesus saves. The theology which says, Jesus saves us from our sins, has become the primary theology. One of the other theologies, which is just as important, is that Jesus frees us, from everything which limits, distorts, and burdens us. Occasionally, that freedom comes in one dramatic event, as it did for Paul. Most often, it is part of our journey of faith, in which we gradually discover that God’s gracious love for us is unconditional, that our sins are forgiven, that other people’s sins are forgiven, and that we are together invited into “the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Romans 8:21). Most amazing of all, God want us to cooperate in creating the reign of God on earth. Paul says it in just a few words: “brothers and sisters, you are called to freedom!!” (Galatians 5:13)