The Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee



Jeremy Taylor, Bishop of Down, Connor & Dromore, August 13, 2011, Laymen’s Conference, Dubose Conference Center Monteagle

“If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's. (Rom. 14:8).

Folks here from Nashville may know that our Public Radio station changed a while ago to an “all talk” format during the day: news, interviews, and what not. You won’t be surprised to know that this was controversial, but I guess that marketing surveys told them that this was the way to go. I confess to you that I love the new format, because I love to hear people talk about interesting stuff (even when they don’t know much about it: maybe this is why I’m in church work). So as I travel here and there I’m often tuned in to hear what’s going on.

Yesterday afternoon was no different from usual as I made my way here to the Laymen’s Conference. What was unusual was that a news piece mentioned a rollercoaster, and I was instantly reminded of the last time I rode on one, a long time ago when I was newly ordained as a deacon (still 24 years old, I believe, so that was a while ago, over half a lifetime). I was new in the parish, doing youth ministry, and a longstanding tradition had the curate taking the youth group to Springfield, Massachusetts (about an hour away), to an amusement park for the day. Another confession: I am afraid of heights, and subject to vertigo, but at 24 years old with 16 and 17 year old boys in my youth group I had to step up to the plate, gird up my loins, and climb aboard the rollercoaster.

I’d love to tell you that by stretching myself I overcame my fears, but of course this is a story about the last time I rode a rollercoaster. It was terrifying, requiring just about every shred of moral and physical courage I had! The punch line of the story is that we arrived back at church late that evening having managed to leave one young man at the amusement park, which required my heading back to Springfield to pick him up. I was preaching the following morning so I know how little sleep you need to actually get up and deliver the goods. I don’t recommend it.

So that’s my rollercoaster story. Of course the news piece I was listening to was a story about the stock market, the rollercoaster effect of prices going up and down, and it’s an apt metaphor. We have the dizzying heights, the gut-wrenching lows; the sudden trough which leaves your stomach behind and makes you sick on top of it all. Maybe you’ve had this experience with your stock portfolio over the past week. Even if you haven’t, each of us has a “rollercoaster story”. Each of us knows the “rollercoaster effect”, the dizzying heights and the gut-wrenching lows, that life throws at us. We all know the courage that at times we have to summon up.

That brings me to Jeremy Taylor, our feast day today, a priest of the Church of England in the seventeenth century who became the bishop of three rural Irish dioceses, so small they were bunched together as a job lot. Taylor lived during the English Civil War, a time of religious and political turmoil that overshadowed his ministry. He had a conventional beginning to his life as a priest: a gifted person who began a promising conventional course that was soon overtaken by war. Taylor was a supporter of the King and his party, but unlike many who went into exile with the royal family he remained at his post. This was during a time under Oliver Cromwell when worship according to the Book of Common Prayer was proscribed, it being illegal for any group of people to gather for Prayer Book worship. Taylor continued to lead worship, using prayers he himself composed that differed just enough from the Prayer Book that he remained out of trouble. Some of those prayers eventually made it into our Prayer Book. So Taylor knew the trough experience pretty well, one that was followed by the restoration of the King and a return to the Episcopal ordering of the Church and to Prayer Book worship (there’s the dizzying height), followed for Taylor by consecration as a bishop and removal to Ireland (there of course is the trough again!). With all due respect to the Episcopal order, I’ll bet that he left his stomach behind as he headed across the Irish Sea. Taylor was on a rollercoaster, you see, and he needed every scrap of moral and physical courage to follow through in the ups and downs of an eventful life.

What sustained Jeremy Taylor is what sustains us, and that is the presence of God. Taylor’s well know in pastoral circles for his vivid sense of the Lord’s presence in the Sacrament of the Altar; Anglican’s use the term “the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist”, and one reason we do so is on account of Taylor’s influence. Jeremy Taylor had a vivid sense as he gathered his people for worship in a time when the church he knew was proscribed that when they gathered they would be in the presence of Christ himself.

We too have that same presence as we gather here at this altar to receive Christ’s life, to know that it is Christ who lives in us as we eat and drink his Body and Blood, these sacramental signs of his presence. This is why, as St Paul says, “If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's.” It is Christ who lives in us, as Paul says elsewhere, and we find his presence wherever we go. Whatever journey we are on, whatever rollercoaster we may have boarded, Jesus Christ is with us, supplying what we need, giving us the grace for both the dizzying height and the gut-wrenching low.

- The Rt. Rev’d John Bauerschmidt, Bishop of Tennessee

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