On Sunday, February 13, Bishop Scantlebury made his last official Visitation to St. Gregory's before his retirement in June. What follows is my partial reconstruction of his extemporaneous sermon.
The Bishop began by noting that the reading from 1 Corinthians and from the St. Matthew's Gospel were both about brokenness, with words like "jealousy" and "quarreling" describing the Church in Corinth, and words like "anger" and "insult" and "divorce" in the Gospel. He then told this story:
There was a woman who enjoyed baking, and excelled at it. Every morning she would make bread for her family and neighbors, and everyone would remark on how delicious it was. She would also make a special loaf of bread for a homeless and hunchbacked old man, setting it out on her window ledge so he could come by and pick it up.
At first, she had baked that special loaf of bread out of great compassion for his circumstances, and had done so with a glad heart. But she became increasingly frustrated with the old man because he never, ever, said "Thank you." Instead, he would say, "The evil you do remains with you, the good you do comes back to you."
Day after day, she baked her special loaf, hoping for a word of thanks, and day by day he took the bread from her window ledge and said, "The evil you do remains with you, the good you do comes back to you."
And so, day by day, she grew more and more frustrated.
One day, after yet another day without thanks and another day of his now grating refrain of "The evil you do remains with you, the good you do comes back to you," she determined to put an end to him.
The next morning she prepared her special bread, but this time added enough poison to send him to his grave. And yet, as she walked to the window ledge with her poisoned loaf, her hand began to shake. She came to her senses, threw out the bread, and quickly baked a new loaf for the homeless hunchback.
A week later, she heard a knock at her door. Opening it, she looked with dismay at her son, standing before her with disheveled clothes, and looking as thin as a rail. She hadn't seen him in years, not since he'd left home to make his way in the world. Having fallen on hard times, he resolved to return home.
"On my way home, without food or sleep, I became increasingly weak," he told his mother. "And then, about a mile yet to go, I almost fainted from exhaustion and hunger. But then I saw an old, hunchbacked man, and asked him if he had anything to eat. He reached into his shabby coat and brought out a delicious loaf of bread. I devoured it, and it gave me the strength to back it back home."
Of course the woman immediately realized that it was the homeless man who had fed his son with her bread, and how he might well have given her son that poisoned bread.
And now the homeless man's refrain struck home:
"The evil you do remains with you, the good you do comes back to you."
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