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Sean Rowe Seated as 28th Presiding Bishop

In a sermon during his ceremonial seating at Washington National Cathedral, Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe posed the question of what our lives would be like if we realized that Christ is among us.

“What if we saw Christ in each other? What if we understood what it meant — for real — that Christ is among us? In one of us, all of us, in this kingdom, inverted, turned upside down, and made for the healing, and wholeness of the world,” he said.

“We need to find the face of Christ in the faces of marginalized,” Rowe said, adding that in Christ’s kingdom, “the people at the edge are in the center.”

Acknowledging the nation’s deep partisan divides, revealed in dramatically different responses to the sermon preached by Washington Bishop Mariann Budde in the same pulpit less than two weeks earlier, Rowe said that “we live in a world in which the enemy is bound and determined to sow division among us. God did not come to us as a strong man. God came first as a child.”

“We need to greet with peace those who voted for the candidate we can’t stand; to be in the Communion line alongside people who don’t look like us, live like us, or even love like us,” he said.

Rowe’s sermon was built on the words and actions of Simeon and Anna, who greeted the infant Christ, as recounted in the Gospel reading from Luke 3 for the Feast of the Presentation of our Lord.

We know people like Simeon and Anna, he said, in our congregations. “These are the people that have been around. They’re always around, they’re always there, and they’ve been old your whole life. On this day, they come to tell the stories because these are the people that tell the stories even when no one wants to hear them,” he said.

Adding a bit of humor, Rowe said, “I am sure being told your child is the Savior of the world is a big thing, but you would think they have been catching on by now — you know, after the magi and Egypt.

“In this world order, falling comes before rising,” Rowe said, drawing on a prophecy pronounced by Simeon. “In God’s kingdom, the immigrants and refugees, transgender people, the poor and the marginalized, are at the edges, fearful and alone. They are at the center of the gospel story. The boundaries are not just extended. Those who are considered at the margin, they are at the center. They are the bearers of the salvation of the world. Their struggles reveal to us the kingdom of God.

“In this kingdom,” Rowe said, “modest parents, the woman at the well, the leper in need of healing,” are the center.

General Convention established Washington National Cathedral as the seat of the Presiding Bishop in 1941, just three years after it ruled that a bishop elected to the office must resign the diocesan see. The Most Rev. Henry Knox Sherrill was the first bishop to be ceremonially seated in the cathedral in 1947.

The Presiding Bishop’s formal installation generally has been held at the same time as the seating since then. But Rowe chose shortly after his election last June to have a scaled-down service in the small chapel of the Episcopal Church Center in New York City, a sign of his intention to “begin this ministry in a new way.” That service was held on November 2.

Using his primatial crosier, Rowe knocked three times on the door to the cathedral at the beginning of the service, a tradition drawn from the rite for the consecration of a church.

During the singing of the anthem “Ecce, Sacerdos magnus” (“Behold, a great priest”) by Edward Elgar, Rowe was led to a stall in the north side of the cathedral’s great choir.

The Glastonbury Cathedra, also on the north side of the great choir, is where presiding bishops have sometimes been seated in the past. This Neo-Romanesque throne was constructed early in the 20th century of stones from Glastonbury Abbey, the legendary birthplace of Christianity in Britain. It is inscribed with the four elements of the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral: “Holy Scripture and Apostolic Creed ✜ Holy Sacrament and Apostolic Church.”

At the end of the service, Bishop Budde celebrated Bishop Rowe’s leadership.

“I need to tell you why he was chosen by colleagues on the first ballot,” she said. “He is by far one of the kindest, smartest, caring people who I have ever met, helping our church adapt and expand our witness throughout this country and the world,” she said.

“You need to know he is our very best friend in high places, except for Jesus.”

The Rev. Meredyth Albright is a longtime journalist and rector of St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Rhinelander, Wisconsin.

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