Listening and Paying Attention

A Reflection for All Saints Sunday Thomas E Wilson Guest Celebrant November 2, 2025 St. Luke’s & St Anne’s, Roper; Grace, Plymouth Daniel 7:1-3,15-18 Psalm 149 Ephesians 1:11-23 Luke 6:20-31 Listening and Paying Attention I became an Episcopalian in Rolla, Missouri in 1946. It was not a decision that I made, but it was made by my parents. My Father was raised as a Roman Catholic and my Mother was raised as a Presbyterian. When it came time for the babies, they split the difference and raised the four children as Episcopalians. When I was 12, I was confirmed as an Episcopalian. Every summer, for our parents' sanity, my one year and four day older brother, Paul, and I were palmed off for a month with our Presbyterian grandparents in Pennsylvania and we attended their Presbyterian Church. Every fall, my Roman Catholic Grandmother would visit us in New York State and during her visits, I would accompany her to the Roman Catholic Church Mass, for many years all in Latin. There were certain phrases I memorized, as I tried to fit in. When I was 17, I went off to the University Of North Carolina in Chapel Hill where the whole idea of Christianity seemed inadequate to me and so I took a break from faith. After I graduated I took a job as a Social Worker, working with High School dropouts. I learned how to listen and pay attention to the people I worked with. I did not know it at the time but “Listening and Paying Attention” is what faith is all about. It is what we are doing today when we see Jeff Stroop listening and paying attention to a power greater than himself. Jeff is about the age of my daughter and when my daughter was born, my wife and I started to take the responsibilty of faith seriously and we took her with us to one of the local Episcopal Churches in Wilmington, North Carolina. I went back to the Chapel Hill area for Grad School and then we went to Boone, North Carolina for a job. It was in that area that I started to take my faith seriously. In a couple years, I took a job teaching Social Work in a college in Virginia, but we would always go back to our place in Boone each summer to go deeper into our faith. After talks with my Priest in Boone and the Bishop in Asheville, in 1983, I went to Seminary for three years and when I graduated, I got ordained, I worked in a couple positions in Virginia and then to Georgia and then to the Outer Banks. In the Episcopal Church when Rectors reach the age of 72, for me six years ago, they have to retire. That is how I came from being a Rector, to doing Interim work and then doing the fill in work at churches. Being a Christian has no age limit. All we have to do is to make decisions to return the love God showers upon us. We already know through the life and death of Jesus, that God chooses to love people. The love God shares is not dependent on us earning love; it is a free gift. There is nothing, not anything, we can do to stop God’s love for us. God knows that I have let God, and God’s people, down so many times over the years. Yet, I cling, I hold on to, the passage from the Gospels where Jesus looks at the people who betrayed him and crucified him and asks God to forgive them There is no age limit for being loved by God, or returning God’s love. Thank you my brother Jeff for listening and paying attention to God’s love walking with you. Thank you for choosing to return God’s love and being baptized as an outward and visible sign of your new life. Bless you Jeff for joining this congregation of faith..