Honor. Sustain. Build.
Vol. 57 No. 44 | The Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity | September 27, 2026
Savannah would hardly be Savannah without its trees. The great canopy of live oaks spreading above our streets and squares seems almost timeless. Yet much of the canopy we now inherit is the result of deliberate choices made more than a century ago. After the devastating hurricane of 1893, Savannah established its Park and Tree Commission in 1895 and began the systematic planting of trees throughout the city. Live oaks were particularly well suited to Savannah: beautiful, long-lived, and resilient in the face of future storms. Now many of those trees are nearing the end of their lives. And so the work continues: old trees are carefully tended; those that can no longer flourish are replaced; new live oaks are planted so that a century from now Savannah may still be Savannah.
There is a lesson in that for St. John’s as we begin another season of stewardship. Our theme this year is Honor. Sustain. Build. We honor the past, we sustain the present, we build for the future. But they are not three different tasks: they belong together. They are three dimensions of a single work of stewardship.
We know something about Honor at St. John’s. There is a deep appreciation here for the inheritance we have received: the history and beauty of our worship, buildings, traditions, and the generations of faithful people who went before. But an inheritance is more than a possession to be enjoyed. It is a trust. The inheritance we honor exists because previous generations did more than admire what they had received. They took responsibility for it. They repaired and restored; they taught and served; and they gave generously. Much of what we now call our heritage was once someone else’s act of faith in the future.
That brings us to Sustain. There is a lot of vitality in St John’s right now: energy, imagination, commitment, and generosity. It’s wonderful! But vitality is not self-sustaining. A living thing requires continual care. Nor should we pretend that the future will take care of itself. A generation that has sustained this parish with extraordinary commitment is growing older. As in churches across North America, younger generations are fewer, and habits of church membership that once passed naturally from one generation to another can no longer be taken for granted. That is a reason neither for happy talk nor for doom. It is a summons to stewardship.
We do not sustain Savannah’s tree canopy by leaving it alone. Trees must be tended, declining trees replaced, new ones planted. A living inheritance requires active care. So does a living church. There are bills to pay, buildings to maintain, salaries and programs to support. But these serve something greater: a common Christian life of worship and preaching, music and teaching, pastoral care and friendship, formation and service.
And here there is a reciprocity worth remembering: we sustain these things because they sustain us. Sunday by Sunday we are called out of the preoccupations of our individual lives into the shared worship of God. We hear his Word and receive his grace in the Sacrament. Our children are formed in the faith. In joy we give thanks together; in trouble others pray for us and stand beside us. We find friendships, responsibilities, and opportunities to serve. Often, we scarcely notice how much this common life sustains us until we particularly need it. To sustain St. John’s, then, is to take our place in a living body: to receive its gifts, contribute our own, and keep its common life strong and fruitful.
And that is why Sustain necessarily leads to Build. Building does not mean discarding our inheritance in pursuit of something new. It means making that inheritance fruitful. What we have received was never intended to end with us. That requires special intentionality today. Christian faith and practice are no longer simply absorbed from the surrounding culture. Children must be formed in the faith. Young adults must be invited into serious Christian community. Newcomers must be welcomed and taught. And all of us must discover that belonging to the Body of Christ means not simply attending or consuming but contributing our particular gifts to the good of the whole.
But building is larger even than securing another generation of St. John’s parishioners. It is an act of Christian hope. We teach and give, serve and renew because we believe that what God has given us is worth making fruitful. We do not know precisely what will grow from what we plant. Nor do we need to. The people who planted Savannah’s live oaks more than a century ago could not have known us. They would never sit beneath the great spreading branches that shade our streets today. Yet they planted nonetheless. They accepted responsibility for Savannah in their generation and acted for generations still to come.
So it is with us. We cannot know exactly what St. John’s will look like fifty or a hundred years from now. We are not asked to know. We are asked to be faithful with what has been entrusted to us now. We honor what we have received. We sustain it by taking responsibility for it in our own time. And we build by making it stronger and more fruitful for those who will come after us.
We have inherited the shade. Now it is our turn to plant.