St. Luke's Episcopal Church
Cleveland, Tennessee

All Saints Sunday
November 1, 2009
The Rev. Deacon Art Bass

Ripples of Grace

How many of you remember your very first day of school? I remember mine very well.

In Winchester, Tennessee, where I grew up, in the early 1950's there were no preschools or kindergartens as there are now. My first day of school was in a first grade classroom at Mary Sharp Primary School.

My family lived on a small farm about five miles outside of town, and the Episcopal Church in Winchester, which we attended, was not very large. There were children in the parish, but none exactly my age.

So here I was on the first day of school, and I didn't know anyone. In those days in a town like Winchester, separation of church and state was a thing unknown in the public schools. The teacher began class by reading a Bible story, and then she asked us all to stand and sing “Jesus Loves Me.” The children all stood and sang loudly, except one.

Having noticed that I hadn't been singing with the others, the teacher asked me why. Embarrassed, I explained that I didn't know the words - - that I had never heard the song before.

The teacher asked me if I went to church, and I told her that I went to the Episcopal Church with my parents. So the teacher asked if I had any songs from my church that I could sing.

“I sing a song of the saints of God, patient and brave and true, who toiled and fought and lived and died for the Lord they loved and knew.”

Trust me, soon after that, I learned the words to “Jesus Loves Me,” and I have never forgotten them.

However, looking back on it now, I really think my song had the better theology. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying anything against the Bible. I love scripture, and it does tell us about God's love - - how he loves us and everyone else in the world.

But the Bible is not “how” I know that Jesus loves me.

I know that my God loves me because of you and people like you. I know that Jesus loves me because of the way my life has been touched by the lives of the saints around me. It is through saints that we personally know and experience God's love and grace. That is what saints do - - they freely share the love and grace of God which has been given to them with everyone around them.

This is what you do. It is what you do for me; it is what you do for one another; and it is what I do, with God's help, each and every day. We are the saints, broken and sinful people that we are, God has chosen us, he has called us through Christ to be living instruments of his grace.

Some saints have their names and deeds recorded in scripture; some have their names on the church calendar with a day set aside in their honor; and some are included in a little book which our church has published, known as Lesser Feasts and Fasts . Other saints, however, may only be remembered locally or perhaps only through the memory of a few friends and family.

Many saints have passed from memory altogether; even their names are gone. But the grace and love of God, which they through their lives have imparted to the world, stands as their legacy, and that will never go away or be extinguished. That love, that grace, that sense of God's presence, which they shared with everyone from the core of their being, just keeps growing and spreading from one generation to the next.

It is like when a child throws a stone into the center of a pond. There is that initial splash from the stone, but that one splash sets up ripples, and those ripples start spreading out in all directions, and they just keep coming, one after another. They keep going out in ever widening circles, seemingly without end.

To illustrate what I'm talking about, I'm going to tell you a story.

In 1878 a group of Episcopal nuns, Sisters of St. Mary, arrived in Memphis, Tennessee. There were six of them, Sister Superior Constance and five companions, who had come from New York with the intention of starting a school for girls. But shortly after they came to Memphis, their mission changed.

An epidemic of yellow fever broke out that year in Memphis, the worst in the city's history. Those who could, almost 30,000, fled the city. Those who couldn't, some 20,000, remained behind to face the pestilence. An estimated ninety percent of those 20,000 who stayed in Memphis contracted yellow fever.

Many of the city's health care providers and clergy were among those who had left, but those six Episcopal nuns had elected to stay. Around the clock they did what they could to tend to the sick and dying and to ease their pain.

When the epidemic finally abated later that year, over 5000 people had died, including Sister Constance and three of the other nuns. Constance and her companions became known as the Martyrs of Memphis. Even today a major street in Memphis bears the name, Martyrs' Street, and September 9 th has been set aside on the Episcopal Church calendar as the Feast Day, the Saints' Day, of Constance and her Companions.

But my story is just getting started. Two of the nuns survived the yellow fever epidemic. So, in December of 1878, two exhausted, but very determined Episcopal Sisters of St. Mary came to Sewanee Mountain to carry out their original mission and start a girl's school. It was not the grand school they had planned for Memphis, but in 1879 they opened a training school to educate impoverished local girls, young women from Sewanee Mountain and the surrounding area who had no access to public education.

The school had been in operation for about fifteen years when the sisters admitted a young girl from Roark's Cove just below the mountain. Her name was Patricia Crownover, but everyone at St. Mary's School called her “Patsy.”

Patsy Crownover used the education the sisters gave her to enter college, from which she graduated. A woman with a college degree in Tennessee was a rare person in the early decades of the 1900's.

What did Patsy do with her college degree? She returned to the coves beneath Sewanee Mountain. In a county that couldn't afford to pay her, she became a public school teacher in a one room schoolhouse that had originally been built as a barn. Using her Sewanee connections, Patsy also saw to it that on Sundays, that barn schoolhouse doubled as an Episcopal mission.

Patsy married and had two sons. They, like Patsy, have passed on now, but both of them also dedicated their lives to service of others through public education.

Patsy Crownover doesn't have a day on the church calendar, but I know her part of this story because she was my grandmother. Like Sister Constance and the Martyrs - - like you and like me - - Patsy Crownover was a saint. This is how it works: ripples - - ever expanding ripples of God's grace. Grace upon grace, continuously shared passed on by God's saints.

Patsy Crownover was just one of hundreds of underprivileged girls who went through St. Mary's Training School before it finally closed in 1926. I wonder how many other stories there are like hers? Stories of grace being passed on and shared.

Think of our church. Think of all the outreach ministry here now, and think of all the ministry which has been done in and from this place by the saints who have gone before us.

Every baptized Christian is a new saint. It is no mere coincidence that All Saints Sunday is one of the days on which we all renew together our Baptismal Covenant.

Ripples - - it is as if that font down there were constantly overflowing. . . and it is! Not with water, but overflowing with grace, because saints take the grace of their baptism, and they share it with the world. They pass it on, and they keep it flowing.

Ripples, and ripples can always be traced back to that first splash, from which they all started.

Likewise, the love and grace which we, as God's saints, share with each other and with the world can be traced back also. You can trace it back through two thousand years of church history, the history of the saints. You can trace it all the way back to Christ Jesus, and to a cross, in Jerusalem.