Washington National Cathedral

At a special Mississippi worship service on May 25, a small band of young people and adults dressed in identical blue shirts marched down the center aisle of Washington National Cathedral representing their church communities in Biloxi. One of them carried the Mississippi flag.

For the pilgrims from Redeemer Episcopal Church and Main Street Missionary Baptist Church—14 youth and 10 chaperones and organizers—their participation in Mississippi Day at the landmark cathedral was but one stop on a larger journey.

The group was headed on to Massachusetts for eight days to perform a volunteerism project, rehabilitating a girls school near Lawrence, Mass. For parishioners who remembered the help that the people of Massachusetts extended after Hurricane Katrina devastated Biloxi almost three years ago, the reverse mission seemed fitting.

“This is in return for so many groups of volunteers who have come down from Massachusetts to Biloxi after Katrina who have done so much for us,” said Dorothy Byrd, a member of Redeemer Episcopal Church. “This mission is a chance for us to give a little bit back. My house was damaged considerably in Katrina and I had numerous volunteers from Massachusetts and many other places who helped me build my home back so this is my chance personally to give something back to them.”

For just about all the young volunteers, the trip to New England would be their first time outside the South.

“The farthest north I have ever been has been North Carolina, up to now,” said Josh Pugh, 12. Brianna Watson, 13, said she planned “to learn new things and to see things I have never seen and to go to places I have never been to.”

Pugh said he volunteered to help the girls school because “my grandma wanted me to do it. It was like a mission trip and I figured God would want me to do it.”

Washington National Cathedral sets aside one Sunday each month, dedicating it to a state and inviting political leaders and clergy and worshipers of all faiths to celebrate. More than 200 visitors from the Magnolia State and natives who live and work in the nation’s capital were in attendance at Mississippi Day.

Mississippians played key roles in the 11:15 a.m. service, which drew a total congregation of 1,202.

The Right Rev. Duncan M. Gray III, the Episcopal bishop of Mississippi, delivered a powerful sermon about Hurricane Katrina’s impact on residents’ sense of well-being.

The Right Rev. Jane Holmes Dixon, retired bishop suffragan of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington and a native of Winona, Miss., presided at the service. The Very Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd III, dean of Washington National Cathedral, who welcomed the visitors, is from Canton, Miss.

Charles Marsh, a University of Virginia professor of religious and theological studies who was guest at the Cathedral’s Sunday Forum program preceding the service, grew up in Laurel, Miss.

Rev. Dixon said worshipers got an excellent sense of Mississippi from the service and particularly from Bishop Gray’s sermon.

“I can’t imagine how they could not.” She said. “His sermon was very descriptive and very powerful.”

Six Episcopal churches in southern Mississippi were destroyed by Katrina, while two were flooded and a half dozen clergy lost their homes, Gray related. At the suggestion of his wife, he planted church flags on the slabs where the structures had stood and the worship services in the weeks that followed tried to address the feeling that God had forsaken those congregations.

Gray placed the hurricane in the context of Mississippi’s “broken and tortured and courageous history.”

“We have been given a cross to bear that is not a cross of our choosing but that very cross that was given to us is the cross of our salvation.” Bishop Gray said. “We live in a state that has been broken many times yet has found grace. We have been broken by poverty, injustice and economic failure. By God’s grace we learned courage and perseverance.

“We have been broken by bigotry and violence and now are able, I believe, better than many to confront our past and speak truth to each other. We have learned to lay down our swords and shields that we had used to carve each other up down by the riverside, or rather down by the seaside.”

“We are finding healing and hope and grace,” the bishop said.

Dean Lloyd moderated a conversation with Charles Marsh, the guest for “The Sunday Forum at Washington National Cathedral: Critical Issues in the Light of Faith,” a program that provides dialogue about the major issues of the day as seen from the Christian perspective.

Marsh is director of the Project on Lived Theology at the University of Virginia, and has studied the ways faith has shaped social justice movements. Growing up in Mississippi, he related how his father wrestled with the question of race in the late 1960s and early 1970s as the minister of a Southern Baptist church in Laurel, which he called the “epicenter of Southern terrorism” as a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan.

“My father was in big part a son of the South, an exuberant wonderful pastor who was cheerily indifferent to the social chaos,” Marsh said. “My father struggled to do the right thing with decades of white supremacy ringing in his ears, to understand what Jesus wanted him to do.”

Marsh said his father eventually delivered a sermon entitled “Amazing Grace for Every Race.”

“He had come a long way. It took him a long time to get there,” Marsh said. “This is not the Hollywood story…Atticus Finch in a Southern Baptist congregation. But it is the story of the more familiar and the more difficult, complex.”

Mississippi guests filled a number of roles at the service.

Tom Allin of Jackson read scripture. He is the grandson of the late John Allin, who was the Episcopal Church’s presiding bishop in Mississippi from 1974 to 1986. Malik Antoine, 13, a member of the Biloxi volunteer group, carried the state flag in the service-opening procession.

Norma Owen of Tunica, the National Cathedral Association’s regional volunteer leader for Mississippi, carried offertory gifts to the altar, along with her grandchildren Davis Owen, 12, and Catherine Owen, 9.

Also delivering offertory oblations were Louise McGee of Clarksdale, Steve McNair of Diamondhead, and Duncan Clark and Shelton Clark, who are nephews to Bishop Gray.

Clergy guests included the Rev. Canon David H. Johnson, Canon to the Ordinary in the Mississippi diocese, and the Rev. Jane Bearden, associate pastor at Church of the Redeemer in Biloxi.

Other parishioners represented St. Andrew’s Episcopal Cathedral in Jackson, Church of the Epiphany in Tunica, and the Church of the Mediator in McComb and the Church of Our Redeemer in Magnolia.

 

SOURCE: Washington National Cathedral