Bishop Mark Sisk and Dean James Kowalski invited Griswold to be celebrant and preacher for the cathedral's principal Sunday-morning Eucharist as "a very modest opportunity to say a public word of thanks to a man who has led us with steady and calm center through some, if not the most, turbulent times in our Communion's life," Sisk told the congregation.

"There is no way to capture, to summarize, to describe the intellectual resourcefulness, the spiritual depth, the inner fortitude that leadership has required," Sisk added.

Sisk also paid tribute to Phoebe Griswold as a "leader in her own right" and a constant companion and wise counselor to her husband."

The Presiding Bishop began his episcopate March 2, 1985 -- the day he was ordained bishop-coadjutor of the Diocese of Chicago. He was elected to this office while rector of the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Philadelphia, and after more than 20 years of parish ministry in the Diocese of Pennsylvania.

Griswold was then elected Presiding Bishop during the 1997 General Convention and in January 1998 began his nine-year term as chief pastor to the Episcopal Church's 2.3 million members.

In his March 6 sermon at the New York cathedral (full text follows below), Griswold invited listeners to look beyond "blinded sight" in order to "see as God sees" with "clearness and acuity...through the lens of God's own compassion."  

- - - -

The Most Rev. Frank T. Griswold
Sermon preached Sunday, March 6, 2005
The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, New York City

Samuel 16: 1-13
Ephesians 5:1-14
John 9: 1-38

"Come Holy Ghost our souls inspire
And lighten with celestial fire...
Enable with perpetual light
The dullness of our blinded sight." 

There is a phrase in a 9th century hymn to the Holy Spirit, a hymn sung at ordinations of bishops, priests, and deacons:  It runs “Enable with perpetual light, the dullness of our blinded sight.”  Seeing accurately and without distortion, seeing as God sees, is one of the gifts and graces of baptism.  Indeed the ritual washing which serves at the entry point into the community of faith was often described as “enlightenment” implying thereby a transformation of heart and mind a new way of seeing and perceiving oneself and the world. 

Today’s gospel reading, which belongs to a sequence of Lenten readings used in the early church as part of a course of instruction for those being prepared for baptism at the great vigil of Easter, is all about seeing and not seeing. 

The man blind from birth is encountered by Jesus, “the light of the world” who opens the man’s eyes to see what he has never before seen.  Not only does the man see the world around him but he sees Jesus both as the one who healed him, and with the eyes of faith as the Son of Man, Messiah. 

At the same time, the religious experts (the Pharisees) those trained by the law and the prophets to discern and recognize the works and ways of God, see only scandal and affront in what Jesus has done.  By working on the Sabbath – that is by making mud with his saliva and applying it to the blind man’s eyes – Jesus has profaned the Sabbath.  The verdict therefore is given, “This man is not from God for he does not observe the Sabbath.”  Others among them are less sure:  “How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?”  In the end, however, they come together and take refuge in Moses:  “We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.”  And with that they drive the man who was born blind from their presence. 

The very tradition that should have given them the ability to see has, ironically, made them blind.  And the man born blind whom they reject as a sinner is the one who truly sees. 

“Live as children of light,” we are told in today’s second reading, “take no part in the unfaithful works of darkness.”  And yet as St. Paul tell us in his second letter to the Corinthians “Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.”  When we look at the history of the Church we see in addition to moments of light and truth acts of condemnation, violence, oppression and even murder committed with righteous certitude by those who were as intent and self assured as the Pharisees in our gospel were upon defending the truth as they had received it from Moses. 

Certitude is the enemy of truth because God’s truth, which was given human form in Jesus, who declares himself to be the truth, and continues to dwell among us in his risen reality through the agency and driving motion of the Spirit of truth – God’s truth is larger, stranger, wilder and infinitely more paradoxical then anything we can understand or imagine or contain within our tidy notions of righteousness.  Furthermore, God’s truth is always unfolding and being enlarged.  “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now,” Jesus tells his disciples and us, “When the Spirit of truth comes he will guide you into all the truth…he will take what is mine and declare it to you.”  The “many things” to which Jesus refers, embrace the whole of reality and are not restricted to some artificial sphere staked off and declared religious.  God sent his son to save the world, not the church.  The church exists for one purpose and one purpose alone:  to embody and to extend the reconciling and boundary-crossing love of God which is the fundamental energy that gives life to the world and is the still point in which everything lives and moves and has its being. 

God calls us to love, as Guillaume de St. Thierry observed many centuries ago, not because God needs our love, but because we cannot be what we were created to be without loving God.  And to love God is not to fly off into some realm of abstraction but to face into the flesh and blood reality of those whose lives touch our own or call us forth from ourselves into relationships of solidarity which may sometimes threaten or stretch us to the breaking point.  “Those who say, ‘I love God’ and hate their brothers and sisters are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen,” we are told in the first letter of John.

The “many things” that Christ, who is the truth, continues to reveal through the ceaseless outworkings of the Spirit of truth are rooted and grounded in God’s deathless and tenacious love which can be thwarted, abused, denied and misdirected and yet remains constant even in the midst of our inconstancy.   “Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” T.S. Eliot tells us.  And the unbearable reality is the profligate unbounded, all embracing love of God which plays havoc with our all too narrow and self-serving notions of love.  The perpetual light with which we pray the Spirit of truth to enable us is the light of love:  a love that does not find its origin in us but is, as Paul tells us, a love that is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.  It is this illumining and transfiguring love worked into the depths of our being that overcomes “the dullness of our blinded sight” and gives us the grace, the gift, of undistorted vision: a clearness and acuity of seeing that allows us to see all things around us through the lens of God’s own compassion.  Here love and truth converge in a disposition of the heart which allows us to see as God sees. 

This clearness of sight does not, however, come without an incredible cost to our ego and the self constructions, including our religious selves by which we determine our worth and our place in the world.  Here we can draw profit, and at the same time a warning, from the experience of the apostle Paul who had his whole world turned upside down, his piety undermined and underwent what he later described as an existential death to everything that had given his life meaning and purpose.  In the midst of it he discovered that Christ, whom he had feared and persecuted in the person of his followers was in fact the ground and core of his life, moving him to cry out “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”  This life shattering/life changing experience was accompanied by physical blindness from which he was released when a follower of Jesus was sent to lay hands upon him in the name of the One he had persecuted. At which point it was as if scales fell from his eyes and Paul recovers his sight, or more accurately, sees for the first time. 

Lent is a season of repentance, and repentance, William Temple the sometime Archbishop of Canterbury observed in not about thumping our breasts and declaring ourselves miserably wrong and sinful, but rather repentance is about adopting God’s point of view in place of your own.  “There need not be any sorrow about it,” he continues, “In itself, far from being sorrowful, it is the most joyful thing in the world, because when you have done it you have adopted the viewpoint of truth itself, and you have fellowship with God.” 

In other words repentance is a liberation – a liberation from the idolatries and self-righteousness that can belong equally to the ways of seeing and perceiving and therefore acting which may be labeled – often inaccurately – as liberal or conservative. 

“The Lord does not see as mortals see,” God declares to the prophet Samuel as he assesses the sons of Jesse.  It is into an enlargement and transformation of vision which corresponds to God’s point of view that the Spirit of truth and love, who draws continually from the immeasurable niches of Christ, seeks to guide us both personally and as a community of faith. 

Here we need to keep in mind that in order to be delivered from our various personal and corporate blindnesses, in order to embraces God’s point of view, we need mud to be applied to our eyes – we need to be jolted by stark encounters with what is strange and different and other intensely immediate and undeniable, in order to be set free from bias, distortion and fear and all the other impediments to our being able to see as God sees with compassion, truth and love. 

I pray therefore that we, who through baptism have been made members of Christ’s risen body, may be given the gift of clear and undistorted sight not for our own sake, but for the sake of our blind and broken world – its healing, its wholing, and repair. 

"Come Holy Ghost our souls inspire
And lighten with celestial fire...
Enable with perpetual light
The dullness of our blinded sight." 

Amen.