Saint Mark's Church

May the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts be acceptible in your sight, O Lord, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. 

I love the dramatic side of liturgy, especially a High Mass. The dramatic suggestion of Jesus rising again is all around us in hymns, spoken words and actions. It's supplemented by color, smell, and sound, all preparing us to worship him in the Sacrament. Worship isn't drama, but it is dramatic, and as far as I've read it's been like that for millennia, beginning at least in ancient Greece and leading into the Passion Plays which still prepare us for the Easter mystery.

Moving from the sacred to the profane, there are events I was familiar with growing up which go one step beyond dramatic worship, to include not just the religious and the dramatic, but also the athletic. Religion, theater, and sports all together: if you're from rural America you know I'm talking about Pro Wrestling. Professional - which means fake - Wrestling includes at least a couple spiritually-themed characters and requires a sort of religious devotion from its fans, devotion to the sweaty, leotard-wearing men and women settling scores in the ring every week. There are dramatic orations before each match in which the wrestlers go on about how great they are, or how they've been double-crossed, or how so and so is about to come out of retirement and tag team with them. Perhaps you find it strange that your Curate knows all this. There's a hierarchy to the wrestling year, so that all the minor weekend events prefigure a huge yearly cage match, with 10 or 20 wrestlers going bonkers at once. And that sort of ridiculous, aggressive chaos is roughly what one of my friends pictured when she first read that Jesus came not to bring peace, but division on the earth.

To my non-Christian friend, Jesus' words meant something like total chaos for its own sake, a bunch of people fighting for no good reason. "Did you think that I came to bring peace on earth?" Jesus asks. "No, I tell you, but rather, division." My friend may not be the only one to have assumed that Jesus' words support cultural strife in general, as if that were the whole point. Worse yet, Christians and non-Christians alike have at times assumed that Jesus, whose actions were always resolutely non-violent, and who taught his disciples to imitate him, was suggesting physical violence by these words.

Jesus' words don't suggest division in general, as if we were really not supposed to love our neighbors, as if picking random fights were a good idea, or as if context didn't matter in our struggles. In fact Jesus is looking ahead to his own crucifixion when he says this, so context is crucial to the meaning. In context, there's an imperial, oppressive culture all around him waiting to be challenged. More personally, there are people there and everywhere who have relaxed from the effort of loving God and each other, and Jesus wants to disturb that relaxation. There is the task before him of remaining faithful to God's love for the world even though it will kill him. Dorothy Day liked to quote Dostoyevski's words: "Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams."(1) This is the context in which division presents itself as a necessity. Wherever peace has been propped up to cover lies, wherever peace is not paired with love, and wherever there are communities and families that support that false peace, Jesus suggests, we need to turn the opposite direction socially, though it means turning mother against daughter. In other words, as the rest of his teachings bear out, the peace he means to disrupt is always superficial, always obscuring a deeper unrest crying out to be tapped into and healed.

So we have a reminder that a fractured bone has to be re-set - we can't just let it lay. What are the situations in our lives and our world where a superficial peace needs to be broken, for real healing to take place? In what relationships do we need to take love out of our dreams and put it into our actions, even if it'll make things unpredictable at first? Maybe you know a functional addict of some sort, and you (perhaps only you) can see that finally some kind of intervention has got to happen. Or maye there's a relationship you and someone else have strained. You don't get down to the level of trust and understanding you used to have, because some old, unfinished argument stands in the way. Polite on the surface, reserved underneath. Maybe the same is true of our relationships with God at the moment. It happens to me at some point every other week. Distance develops because there are any number of things I'd have to sort out to make things closer. Whatever the context, you and I both know what false peace looks like. When we realize a relationship needs attention, whether with God or others, Jesus suggests we're not supposed to let things remain inert. If that turns families or friends against each other at first, well, sometimes, there's no other way.

I know it's been a few years, but this subject reminds me a lot of Sgt. Joseph Darby and the way he was treated after blowing the whistle on the abuse at Abu Ghraib. Four years ago Darby was still on good terms with his fellow soldiers, his family, and his community back in the Allegheny mountains. But for letting light shine on the abuse taking place in that prison, he's since been shunned by many in his home town, his Army division, and even his family. Members of Darby's community were interviewed saying he didn't deserve a hero's welcome at home, but that he'd better sneak in through the back door at midnight to escape danger. He was called a "rat." One of the only voices of praise the newspapers could dig up among his neighbors was: "That boy's got a lot of courage, but when you go against your fellow man like that… I don't know. Some people won't like it."(2) When Darby realized he had evidence that could save the minds and bodies of who knows how many prisoners, he still could have just dropped the issue entirely. Life would have gone on, and relationships with friends, family and neighbors wouldn't have been disrupted. Instead he, quote, "went against his fellow man." It's odd to put it like that, of course, as if the Iraqi detainees weren't fellow men. Although abuse was still being reported at Abu Ghraib just last year, the cases have apparently stopped now, and it's likely that men who would have been tortured or killed have been spared because Joseph Darby went against his fellow man. That's the sort of division Jesus means. There are situations where a deeply crooked social reality makes further division unavoidable if the path is to be made straight. "Love in action is a harsh thing compared to love in dreams."

There's an easier side to all this, that's not really so harsh at all. Beyond the most dire situations where superficial 'peace' needs to be overcome, there are smaller blind spots in our lives, little things which hold us back even if we don't recognize it all at once. There's a dull sort of peace that comes with leaving things unexamined for months on end. But there's good news there, too, because if we feel that dullness, it's not something we have to live with. We can look at what's under the surface, introspect, and push our relationships into more open territory, just because it feels good - if not at first, then eventually and enduringly. Even if it's messy, even if it seems a little disruptive at first, breaking things open allows light to fill the cracks, showing us back to the depth and spontaneity we remember from earlier days. It's to that sort of future, surrounded by more honest and open relationships, that all our little and great social struggles should lead. Social division isn't an end in itself, otherwise we could all just get together in the garden after Mass, put on leotards and wrestle our way to Christian maturity. Unless we're wrestling with angels, like Jacob, that isn't going to matter much. Our abiding imperative is love. Love is as strong as death and will continue even when faith and hope are no longer needed. But if we're really going to grow in love and let it spread, we can't be satisfied by love in dreams.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen. 

(1) The Brothers Karamozov, ch.4

(2) Rosin, Hanna, "When Joseph Comes Marching Home," Washington Post, 5/17/2004.

Preached by Deacon Paul Francke

19 August 2007

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia