Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsy

S.I.J. Schereschewsky is one of my favorite saints. I preached this sermon on his feast day a few years ago. It tells his amazing, humbling story.




“Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day…preparing us for an eternal weight of glory”

There are few saints whose lives I have found as poignant as Joseph Schereschewsky.

One article stated about him that he was the last person one might have expected to end his life working for Jesus from a wheelchair.

He was born to a Jewish family in Lithuania,
and converted to Christianity while he was in rabbinical school.

He came to the United States to study,
became an Episcopalian, and ended up at General Seminary.

He never actually graduated from General,
because Bishop Boone took him and ordained him and sent him to be a missionary to China.

I assume that young Joseph was a good priest.
He was certainly much beloved by the people in his care.

But his one outstanding gift,
the thing for which he is remembered
a hundred and more years later,
is his gift for languages.

He learned one Chinese dialect on the ship on his way to China, and by the time his ministry was over,
he had translated either parts or the whole of the Bible into five different Oriental dialects.

Along the way he got married to Susan Mary Waring,
and together they ministered to the people of China and Japan.

He was made bishop of Shanghai in 1877,
a post he didn’t really want,
but he took for the sake of his beloved people and beloved church.

That same year he founded St. John’s University,
so that Chinese Christians would have place to go and learn.

“Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day...preparing us for an eternal weight of glory.”

Unfortunately, he wasn’t bishop for very long.
After six years in that office, he developed a disease,
which some say was Parkinson’s,
but could have been some other disease,
which resulted in him being largely paralyzed.
He resigned as bishop.

Now I don’t know what he was thinking at this point.

He was a world-renowned expert on Oriental culture and languages.

He was a world-traveled missionary bishop with a passion for the word of God.

He was at home with people the rest of the world didn’t give much thought to.

His life to that point was full of active, assertive verbs:
He founded and built and opened and taught and gave.

He resigned as Bishop and went back to the United States, and as I understand it took up residence in a little house just over the hill there, right here in Sewanee.

But I can’t really say he went back home to the United States, because it’s very clear his home was no longer on this side of the Pacific.

I imagine, though, that he returned to the US because he thought he was coming home to die.

He was paralyzed and sick and unable to do the things he was in the Orient to do.
He and his wife came back to prepare for his death.

“Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day...preparing us for an eternal weight of glory.”

But, as it happens,
while he did remain sick and paralyzed,
while he remained in a wheelchair unable to go out among his people and to his school,
he did not die.

And if you are not going to die, you have to find something to do. And there was one thing Joseph knew he could do.

He could translate.

So he and Susan returned to Shanghai and then to Tokyo.

Toward the end of his life,
Joseph said the thing for which he is most famous.

He said,
“I have sat in this chair for over twenty years.
It seemed very hard at first.
But God knew best.
He kept me for the work for which I am best fitted.”

That one line, “It seemed very hard at first,”
just about breaks my heart.

It seemed very hard at first.
Most of us can probably only imagine how hard it really was.

But even illness and paralysis could not keep this man from doing what God had given him to do.

He could translate,
he could make sure that people had access to God’s revelation in the Scriptures,
and that is what he did.

With what Lesser Feasts and Fasts calls “heroic perseverance,” Joseph completed his last translation of the Bible,
typing over 2000 pages
with the middle finger of his partially crippled hand.

And after 20 years of that,
of sitting bound to a wheelchair typing away in Wenli,
yet another Chinese dialect,
he was able to say,
“God knew best.
He kept me for the work for which I am best fitted.”

“Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day…preparing us for an eternal weight of glory”

If any life of any Christian could be said to demonstrate this verse from Second Corinthians, it’s Joseph Schereschewsky’s.

For over two decades, his outer life wasted away,
and day by day his inner nature was renewed.

Saint Paul says that as our outer nature wastes away,
our inner nature is being renewed as preparation for the eternal weight of glory.

By the time Joseph died in 1906,
the eternal weight of glory was shining through him,
through his obedience,
through his work,
through his perseverance,
through his love,
so that he was a nearly transparent vehicle of God’s
power made perfect in weakness.
The eternal weight of glory.

This kind of sainthood is humbling and
somewhat frightening for the rest of us.

It has some ramifications for us a hundred years later.

It means we’ve got no right to complain,
and no excuse for anything less than heroic perseverance.

It means that everything else can waste away,
including our very bodies,
but we are still to be renewed inside ourselves,
in the dwelling place of Christ.

We are being prepared for an eternal weight of glory,
and in the face of Joseph Schereschewsky’s
extraordinary example,
we’ve got no excuse in the world,
no reason at all that that glory shouldn’t shine in us as well.