The Chapel of St. James the Fisherman

It was in the late fall of 1965 that the New York metropolitan area experienced a major power failure that resulted in the blackout of much of the Northeast Region of the United States.

While I can’t remember the exact date of the blackout, I do remember clearly where I was when the lights went out.

It was about 5:30 as I left my office and walked to the elevator on the 13th floor of the building where I worked in New York. I pressed the button for the elevator, waited for it to arrive. And then at about the moment when the elevator door should have opened, the elevator light above the doors went out as did the other lights in the waiting area.

Several people joined me and when the lights failed to come on, someone opened the door to the emergency fire exit stairs.

It was completely dark. And as we groped our way down from one floor to the next holding fast to the rail so as not to stumble, there was little talk, as we forgot for the moment about missing trains or getting home late that night.

When we reached the ground level, the streets were full of people, many just standing or walking about, not quite sure of what to do with subways stalled and trains not moving.

No one knew what had happened nor how far-reaching the power failure was. And it would be for some time until we would learn how serious a thing it was, with hundreds trapped in elevators, thousands stalled in subway tunnels leading from Manhattan and many hospitals with life support systems running on auxiliary power or stopped.

We learned in much detail what had gone wrong in the newspapers in the days following the blackout. But there was one story that I particularly remembered.

It was about a little boy in one of our suburbs.

Some several hours after the blackout began, this little fellow - he was about ten - came to his father and mother with a terrifying confession.

He was coming home that afternoon, and as little boys sometimes do, he would pick up a stick or stone now and then and throw it at a tree or some other object. He picked up one stick and threw it with more than usual force at a telephone pole…and just as the stick hit the base of the pole,…… the lights went out.

He knew that he had caused the blackout of the entire Northeast!

Can you imagine that poor little boy - when the stick hit the telephone pole - thinking with utter terror, “Did I do that!”

Of course, all of us have had times, occasions in our lives, when we too have said something like, “Did I do that?”

One of the things we can say about those occasions is that they are often about events and people where we have hardly, if at all, been aware of our influence and affect on others.

This has certainly been true in my life. Our children, for example, seem clearly to have been influenced not by what we sought to teach them, but rather by things that we either failed to do or by things that we were hardly aware of saying or doing in their growing up years.

But this morning’s reading from the Gospel of Matthew - a parable of Jesus of the Great Judgment - suggests that there is also going to come some future eternal moment when we may again say - but with infinitely greater finality, “Did I do that?”

That we may stand one day before God and discover that the influence of our lives has been wholly other than we thought or expected. That what and who we have influenced will not at all be what we thought. And that with a kind of bright surprise or with a kind of horror, we will say, “Did I do that?”

Most of us, I think, go through our lives believing that whatever influence we have is pretty much in areas where we choose to seek to affect others. But that much, if not most, of our life has little if any influence.

But if there is truth to Jesus’ parable, that may be a dangerous delusion. For the parable suggests that we are all some part of an interlocking human family in which every single life matters, and that the influence of our lives matters eternally. That we all have a frightening amount of influence. Influence that affects the lives and conditions of people about whom we may hardly be aware.

But most frightening of all is the implication that we could discover that the effect of our lives has been destructive of the human family. That we could discover that we have used the influence or our lives against God.

That by our neglect of the poor
Our disinterest in the hungry and homeless
Our neglect of those in prison
And our disregard for those in the margins of society

That in all of this we have been persecuting and neglecting Christ himself.

Now that’s truly frightening!

But of course that’s not us. We’re in church every Sunday. Contributing our tithe to the spread of God’s kingdom and committed to the cause of Christ. Episcopalians whose lives and influence could hardly be destructive of the human family.

But you know, one of the things that’s puzzling in this parable is that it’s the “righteous” who are so surprised. It’s the righteous who ask the king: “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food? Or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing?”

Could it be that what is really important in terms of our influence are the things of which we are hardly aware?

And could it be that our lives have such influence that we hardly know when we have most profoundly influenced others? That the good we do is when we are least aware.

One of the courses I took in my final semester in seminary was titled “From Hooker to Temple.” Let me hasten to say, as I had to explain to my oldest daughter, that it was not a course about a change of career, or the conversion of someone from the world’s oldest profession to worship in the temple. No, it was a course about the history of our Anglican communion from the Reformation, beginning in the sixteenth century with our first great theologian, Richard Hooker, who wrote something called “The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity” up through the twentieth century with the writings of Archbishop William Temple. The course was about Anglican theology since the sixteenth century with a parallel reading of English and church history.

Moving through the nineteenth century, on of the minor historical figures we waved at ever so briefly was the Seventh Earl of Shaftsbury, a name that I was vaguely familiar with as a figure associated with the Evangelical movement in the 19th Century….Let me tell you something about the Seventh Earl of Shaftsbury.

Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Seventh Earl of Shaftsbury, was born into tremendous wealth. He could have lived his life comfortably on his great estates in Dorset. But he became instead one of the great Christian social reformers of the 19th century.

In cotton and woolen mills in those days children would labor before the big looms and weaving machines for 15 hours a day. And so he worked for 13 years to gain passage of a ten hours bill to begin to correct the deplorable conditions of child labor in industrialized England.

After this he took upon himself the plight of little children who worked in the mines of England and Wales. If you can imagine this, children of 4 and 5 years old were sent to climb into narrow seams of coal to mine what couldn’t be mined by adults. And so finally he secured passage and creation of a mines Commission.

Then he took on the plight of other little orphans who would be apprenticed out from orphanages - little children - apprenticed to chimney sweeps who had them crawling down narrow chimney flues - often times suffocating or falling and being crippled. And so he secured passage finally of a Children’s Act.

Where did the Seventh Earl of Shaftsbury learn such deep concern for children?

As a little boy, he was cared for by a young woman who had been his mother’s personal maid. She became his nursemaid shortly after his birth. Her name was Mariah Millis. We would not know her name except that the Seventh Earl of Shaftsbury remembered her.

She taught him to say his prayers. Prayers from a book not unlike the book we use in our Episcopal form of worship. Prayers that led him to discover and experience the warm, tender, and loving presence of Christ.

After she died, and she died when he was still quite young, he kept her Bible. And in his adult life he turned to the Bible of Mariah Millis, and learned there of the Christ who identified with the poor, those in need, and especially little children.

Can you imagine that little nursemaid, coming home to Glory? Standing in the presence of God and exclaiming in great bewilderment and delightful surprise: “Lord, did I do that?”

When did I have anything to do with the Ten Hours Bill, or a Mines Commission or a Children’s Act.

“Lord, did I do that?”

We each have influence. Influence that is greater than we can imagine. Influence that can change the world.

And God has put each of us here to do something. Something that perhaps only we can do.

He has given us power and influence beyond our imagination and understanding:

Power to bring light into darkness
Healing where there is hurt
Food where there is hunger
And freedom where there is bondage

May we by the power of God’s Holy Spirit be led into his presence, where we may join him in his great eternal compassion for all the children of need…That we may be vessels of his love, instruments of his reconciliation and channels of his grace.

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