Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori pronounces the blessing at the June 27 Eucharist at Holy Trinity Cathedral in Auckland. Photo/Anglican Taonga
Katharine Jefferts Schori preached at St Paul’s Cathedral, London, on Sunday 25 July 2010, the feast of St James. The Guardian has published the text of her sermon: The search for dignity. This photo is from her recent trip to New Zealand, where she was permitted to wear her bishop’s hat.
She preached:
Dignity means a sense of worth, suitability, or honour, and it is the state in which God created all that is. The indignities came later. One of the eucharistic prayers in the Episcopal church’s prayer book says that we have been created worthy to stand in God’s presence. When we treat others as less than that, we reject God’s good creation, and in a very real sense, we deny our own dignity.
And:
The other difficulty we all know too well is the human tendency to insist that some are not worthy of respect, that dignity doesn’t apply to the poor, or to immigrants, or to women, or Muslims, or gay and lesbian people. Prophetic work is about challenging human systems that ignore or deny the innate dignity of all of God’s creation. That’s the aspect of prophetic work that’s dangerous, for those systems often respond with violence – the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr, the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela, the disappearance of righteous gentiles who rescued Jews during the Second World War, or the expulsion of a Ugandan bishop because he asked the church to treat the gay and lesbian members of his society with dignity.
Amen!
