“Life as Offering”

This sermon was given at Trinity Cathedral in Porland, Oregon on Wednesday, January 31, 2024 on the Feast of Marcella of Rome,

 Lessons:

I Kings 17: 8-16

Mark 12: 41-44

Thirty-four years ago on this very night—the 31st of January—Portland’s streets were covered with a treacherous sheet of ice which added to an earlier snowfall as a group of brave souls found their way to the then Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Baptist on the Oregon Episcopal School campus for a service of ordination.

As the person being ordained that night, I had just completed a long journey of discernment, preparation and testing and was about to begin a new chapter of life as an Episcopal priest.

Now it was common at the time to select a date for an ordination service associated with one of the saints of the church but since this particular service involved two Episcopal bishops and a Jewish rabbi, selecting a date for the service was simply a matter of when three schedules could be aligned, and the church calendar had no saint listed for this day, the chosen day.

It was years later that Marcella of Rome, a monastic and scholar, was added to our Episcopal calendar of feast days and, according to Catholic tradition, was assigned to the 31st of January.

Saint Marcella

As I have come to know Marcella, I couldn’t have found a more compelling saint to claim.

By all accounts Marcella was a remarkable figure in the patriarchal world of fourth century Rome.

Born into nobility, she was an accomplished student who was particularly drawn to the lives of the holy monastics and especially to a book, Life of St. Anthony written by Athanasius of Alexandria who she had studied with as a child.

She was widowed as a young woman and then, inspired by the monastic life of St. Anthony, decided to change the direction of her life.

Marcella cast aside her luxurious clothing and adopted a simple brown dress.

She turned her home on Rome’s Aventine Hill into a refuge, a monastery where devout virgins and widows came to join with her to serve the poor.

Her estate became a community center.

Like the widow in today’s Gospel from Mark, Marcella gave up all she had to live for the sake of her calling.

With the sacking of Rome in 410, her home was pillaged by the Visigoths seeking her fortune. But it was nowhere to be found. She had long ago given it away to charity or as one commentator put it, “to fill the bellies of the poor.”

Since that day, Marcella has become known as the Mother of Roman monasticism, placing her at the forefront of a stream of what over the centuries has become thousands of devout women religious who have followed in the monastic way.

Sister Mechtilde

Earlier today I stood at the gravesite of one of those women, Sister Mechtilde, who I had come to know and work with a number of years ago, frequently drawing upon her wisdom and uplifted by her gracious spirit. Her motto was: “I can try, God willing.”

Joining with her Benedictine sisters, her family, and friends gathered at that Willamette Valley monastery graveyard as her casket descended into the earth, we each recalled in silence her life as a faithful follower of Jesus, someone who gave all that she had to serve others.

At the time of her death at age 93, she had been a Benedictine sister for 74 years.

Something to Ponder

Now Saint Marcella of Rome and Sister Mechtilde of Mount Angel may seem to have led lives far different from our own.

But I wonder.

I wonder if there isn’t something here that we might ponder.

For central to the lives of each of these women was the commitment to live their life, like that widow Jesus praised in the Gospel, as an offering to God.

Is that not something we are invited to do as well, in our own way, in the varied social settings and circumstances of our lives?

In the end this is not finally about what we do with our money or our property, where or with whom we live, but it concerns what is that higher purpose that we are living for?

What is the holy center around which our lives are organized?

What would it be like if we could come to see our life as an offering?

And then could that moment each Sunday morning in the middle of the service when we’re invited to make our offering to God, might that be an offering not only of our treasure—our money—but of our time, our talent, our whole selves as well—an offering of body, mind, and spirit to the one who created us in love and who calls us to share that love through word and deed with our world.

A Prayer

On that wintry ordination night 34 years ago, there was an extra hymn following communion listed in the bulletin that was passed over—not needed—because so many could not travel to the service given the snow and the ice.

Perhaps one of the verses from that beautiful hymn of John Wesley can be a concluding prayer this night for each of us:

Jesus confirm my heart's desire

to work and speak and think for thee;

still let me guard the holy fire

and still stir up the gift in me.