The Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee



St. Fabian of Rome, January 20, 2012, St. Andrew’s-Sewanee School

“I die every day” (1 Cor. 15:31).

Norman Maclean tells the epic story of the 1949 Mann Gulch Fire in his book, Young Men and Fire. Mann Gulch was a huge disaster in Montana in which thirteen members of the United States Forestry Service lost their lives while fighting the blaze. Maclean has a story to tell about the physics of fire, and also about the esprit de corps of the Forestry Service, whose parachute teams responded at Mann Gulch. He carefully chronicles the missteps that led to the disaster, interviewing survivors and assembling the evidence, but he also has quite a lot to say about the human condition that is universal. It’s clear that these deaths touched Maclean, who was a young man himself at the time, involved on the periphery of the event.

From the placement of the fallen bodies of the firefighters, the evident falling and rising and moving forward only to fall again, Maclean opines, “The evidence, then, is that at the very end beyond thought and beyond fear and beyond even self-compassion and divine bewilderment there remains some firm intention to continue doing forever and ever what we last hoped to do on earth. By this final act they had come about as close as body and spirit can to establishing a unity of themselves with earth, fire, and perhaps the sky.”

Maclean is not unaware of the theological resonance of his story about Mann Gulch; not surprising from the son of a Presbyterian minister. But we too should sit up and take notice, because the picture of courage and intentionality and ultimate transcendence is relevant to our celebration of St. Fabian, bishop and martyr, and to our gathering in Convention today. We know that Fabian was the bishop of Rome, and that he was known as an able administrator who established the system of parishes in his diocese, quite a new idea at the time; he also gathered scribes to preserve the stories of the early martyrs of his Church, so that his community and others could continue to be inspired. But the outstanding fact about Fabian was that he himself became a martyr in the persecution under the Emperor Decius, the first non-local persecution undertaken throughout the Roman world.

Fabian, like the young men of 1949 that Maclean writes about, formed an intention in which he persevered unto death, and even beyond death, following the pattern of his Lord and Savior. What were Maclean’s words? “Beyond thought and beyond fear and beyond even self-compassion and divine bewilderment…”: we could attach those words to any who have given their lives for the sake of the Gospel. Fabian’s intention was to live with Christ, forever and ever, and to continue to do so even beyond the grave and gate of death. The promise of the Gospel is that life is never defeated if we continue to abide in Christ, continue to rise and advance again.

But forming that intention to follow Jesus Christ and to follow through courageously is not restricted to the martyrs. Here is where this form of witness (which is what “martyr” means) connects to every form of discipleship among those who follow the Master. As Paul writes in our second reading today, “I die daily” (1 Cor. 15:31). Christian discipleship is a daily dying to self to discover the life that lies beyond our fear and self-centeredness. We transcend ourselves through God’s grace so that we can discover the future that is prepared for us in Christ, becoming what we are called to be. As Paul says elsewhere in the Second Letter to the Corinthians, “Dying, we live…” (2 Cor. 6:9). “Dying, we live.”

That’s the life that God calls us to, each one of us. It’s the work that God is calling us to do in this Convention. Can we respond to God with the intention of following Christ and continuing to do his will in our mission and ministry in the Diocese of Tennessee? Will we be able to rise again and advance?

One charming part of Fabian’s biography recounts that when it came time to choose a new bishop of Rome, and the electors were gathered together, a dove came and landed on Fabian’s head, making clear who God’s choice was. God doesn’t always make things this clear, but maybe we can learn something from this in Tennessee. This dove-on- head thing is a lot easier than 52 ballots in electing a bishop, but I will point out that my name was only on the last twelve of those ballots. But in any case, whether ballots or birds, what we should learn from Fabian is that God has chosen each of us, assembled in Convention today, to bear our witness in our time, to follow our Lord Jesus Christ through the fire of this world. He’s given us grace to rise again and to continue to advance, doing his will in Middle Tennessee and abiding in him, for this life and the life of the world to come.

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

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