This was the homily I preached on August 23rd on poor old Shebna, as described by Isaiah 22: 19-23.
I think one of the coolest rites from the coronation of a Pope, started with Pope Alexander V and lasted all the way through Pope Paul VI. There was the Holy Father, all dressed up in splendiferous gold and silver vestments as he was carried into Saint Peter’s Basilica.
Three tiames they would stop and a cleric, holding a burning piece of flax. And as the flax would quickly burn out, smolder and die, he would cry out:
Sancte Pater, sic transit gloria mundi. (Holy Father, thus passes the glory oft he world.)
We’ve really lost something by eliminating that rite from Papal inaugurations and I even suspect we might all be better off if it could be used at the inauguration of every public official. Sic transit gloria mundi. Timothy understood that, and so did Major Taylor and Shebna.
He was a prisoner of the British for almost a year, commander of the 15th Massachusetts Regiment of the Continental Army, and with Washington at Valley Forge, Monmouth, and Yorktown.
He later served at West Point commanded the arsenal in Springfield, and bought, built and named the city of Montpelier, Vermont. He also has a mountain named after him in Maine.
Yet, after he accomplished all this, in his late 40’s, Timothy got sick and came home to Anna and his six children in Worcester, only to find his household deeply encumbered by debt. Unable to return to blacksmithing, he was sentenced to debtors' prison, where he died a short time later.
He was buried in the old burying grounds on Worcester Common, behind the town hall.
Less than a half century later, the town fathers laid flat all the gravestones and buried the cemetery in dirt. Then they laid railroad tracks over the forgotten cemetery and no one remembered Timothy. Except for an obelisk later erected in memory of the colonial soldier by his grandson, there was no sign that he, nor the bodies of the 400 other Worcester citizens who died between 1730 to 1789 were there.
Indeed, it was not until the City began to erect a reflecting pool in 1968 that their graves were rediscovered.”
Timothy Bigelow was one of the most renowned of Worcester’s citizens for over three decades. Then he fell into poverty, died in a debtor’s prison and was buried in a soon to be forgotten cemetery over which they built a railroad and a reflecting pool. Sic transit gloria mundi.
The teenage “Major” came here in 1895 (he earned the nickname, by the way, doing bicycle tricks in a military uniform as a little kid).
This was a time when Worcester was so into bicycling that we had half a dozen bicycle factories and more than thirty Bicycle stores.
They used to refer to Major as “the Worcester whirlwind” and “the Black Cyclone.” He lived on Hobson Avenue (up near Coe’s Pond) and was described by the New York Times as “the fasted man alive,” winning seven world championships…only the second black athlete in history to achieve a world championship in any sport.
As you can imagine, he faced gross discrimination, barred from most restaurants and hotels in the south. And even in the enlightened Northeast, where they used to throw ice water in his face or nails in the road in front of the tires on his bike. Yet, devoutly religious, he believed, as he once wrote, that “life is too short for any man to hold bitterness in his heart and that is why I have no hard feelings against anybody.” He missed out on several major competitions because they were held on Sunday and, as a devout Baptist, he believe it was wrong to race on Sundays.
Few athletes or great men of his age had accomplished so much. Yet after his retirement he moved to Chicago and lost all his money to unscrupulous con-men, mainly through the printing of his self-published autobiography. Toward the end, he lived in the YMCA in downtown Chicago, where he would try to sell tattered copies of his autobiography in order to get something to eat. After suffering a heart attack he died in the charity ward of the Hospital and was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave. Sic transit gloria mundi.
And finally, there’s poor old Shebna in the passage from Isaiah which Theresa just read to us.
Shebna was the master of the palace, King Hezekiah’s treasurer or comptroller. He was also an accomplished diplomat, sent by the King to negotiate with the Assyrians and he was a great advocate at court for closer relations with the Egyptians. He was really hot stuff, but the problem was he knew it.
In fact he built a great stone monument to serve as his grave, a portion of which has survived to this day and is persevered in the British Museum. He built a monument to himself, it seems, because he was convinced his fame would last forever.
But, inevitably, Shebna’s luster faded and his hubris led the Lord to replace him with Eliakim, a brighter and presumably more humble up and comer. As Isaiah tells us, he was dethroned and replaced, “thrust from his office and pulled down from his station.” Sic transit gloria mundi.
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So the next time we sprain our wrists trying to pat ourselves on the back, convinced what an accomplished celebrity we have made ourselves and how lucky God is to count us among his creatures, perhaps we would do well to remember Colonel Bigelow, Major Taylor, the Renaissance Pope on his sedia gestatoria and poor old Shebna.
For in the end, we are, each one of us, nothing but unworthy servants, poor wretched recipients of God’s mercy and grace.
And all our grand and glorious achievements are really nothing more than God’s gratuitous gifts to us, gifts given to his children for a little while to show us how much he loves them and salve their fragile egos.
For, in reality, there are, as our patron reminds us, only three things that last: Faith, Hope and Love.
Everything else is like a piece of swift burning flax, and thus passes the glory of this world.
