"To a Known God" - Sermon for the 6th Sunday of Easter, 5-10-26

† San Franciscans, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. As I went through your city and looked carefully at your objects of worship – ballet, opera and symphony halls; galleries of fine and modern arts; athletic stadia with shrines to the greater deities of ball; stages for the theater, popular music, and drag shows; opulent gardens and verdant parks; chic cafes with small portions, short pours, and staggering prices; gated mansions and guarded stores; streets clogged with white chariots studded with sensors, invisible horsemen holding the reins – I found among them an altar with the inscription, “To an unknown god.” – Or maybe it read “To a formerly-known God.”

It is no secret that we live in a secular city. The City of Saint Francis has plenty of sacred places of worship. When open, however, seldom are they visited, much less feted and filled to capacity. I have seen pew prayerbooks, hymnals, and bibles threateningly stamped “DO NOT REMOVE FROM THE CHURCH.” Our mother-house atop Nob Hill charges weekday admission for those curious enough to want to wander inside. More often than not, our lights are off, our gates are shut, and our doors are locked.

Saint Paul might have approved, for he said to the Athenians, identifying their god-unknown, “The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands.”

True enough, but God certainly visits our sacred shrines whenever two or more are gathered, and we Anglo-Catholics might have something to say to Saint Paul about the regular residence of the Real Presence of our Lord in the communion elements reserved in the tabernacle. Like Motel 6, Jesus leaves a light on for us.

From across this secular city named for a saint, you have come here today. Thank you. This means a lot to me and to the people sitting with you. We miss you when you are not here. The Body-of-Christ is less-than when you are away.

When you show up, especially when you show up with open hearts and hands and voices, you join Christ’s liturgy-already-in-progress. The eternal celebration that worships God, who “gives to all mortals life and breath and all things;” a sensory, sense-able segment which God, in God’s great love, gives to us today.

Your priestly participation in this liturgy, which is the sacrificial offering of your entire selves, your souls and your substance, your time and your treasure, began at the saving waters in the baptismal font. In Holy Baptism, you were ordained into the priesthood of Jesus’s death and resurrection. And with Holy Communion you meet Jesus again and again, as his birth and ascension bend time and space and his body and blood finds us in bread and wine made holy.

“I will not leave you orphaned,” Jesus said on the night before he died. “I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.”

Until the lamps of our eyes are refueled and our lenses corrected by this trinitarian inter-penetration of Christian liturgy, we will fail to see the world in the way that God desires us to see it. We may apprehend the superficial beauty of the world’s objects of worship, but just as the world no longer sees Jesus, we will not see Jesus in the world. He becomes to us the formerly-known god – just as he is the unknown god to the remainder of the San Franciscans who grope for what their secular shrines purport to offer but ultimately are unable to give.

Let me put it another way: If you wish to appreciate more fully what this city has to offer, capacitate your senses to take it all in by feeding them first with what God gives you in Christian liturgy. Let the Risen Lord, who is True Beauty, help you see creation’s beauty truthfully. And let the Crucified Lord, who suffered true pain, help you see creation’s pain truthfully.

When you start to see creation’s beauty and pain truthfully, you will start to see your own beauty and pain truthfully – and to offer all these to God as a more perfect sacrifice when you come to worship the God who wants to be known by you. †

Father Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP

Sixth after Easter A – May 10, 2026

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco

“To a Known God”