There are other reasons that I am uncomfortable with the story of Martha and Mary. The story seems to me to be on one level a story about different personalities, different ways of being in the world. And those personality differences can be seen in Christian theology and spirituality: the divide between action and contemplation, between deep involvement with the world, and deep silence within the cell. There are examples of these differences: St. Francis within the world, and desert monasticism, far removed from it. St. Theresa of Avila planting monasteries and scolding kings, and Dame Julian of Norwich, walled into her cell, with her prayer holding the world upon its axis. Indeed, some people of faith struggle deeply with both the Martha and the Mary within them: torn between activity and silence.

So doubtless, there are personality differences at play in the Gospel this morning and who am I to decide which personality is better, which way of being in the world closer?

And of course, through time the story of Martha and Mary has been used to justify all sorts of nonsense: prelates and monastics lazying about, while growing fat and wealthy on the backs of the poor, active people, who haven't chosen the better part but are required to sustain those who have.

But I think the main reason that I am uncomfortable with this story is that it is a story that is massively colored by gender.

I was talking to a friend of mine who is a mother and she said whenever she read this story, especially around the holidays, she always feels the story with a special intensity. Because she would go to church, and hear again the message, told to her by men, to keep one's priorities straight during the holiday season, like Mary, and so she would spend large amounts of time feeling guilty if she was being Martha-like, and worrying about food making it to the table, etc. On the other hand, she felt guilty because the societal expectation was that she make everything perfect for her family, the perfect turkey and stuffing, the perfect presents, that she give them a perfect holiday experience, and so she felt damned if she did, and damned if she didn't. She was either failing religiously or failing her family.

And she was telling me this story, it struck me suddenly that part of the energy of this story of Martha and Mary has to do specifically with being a woman. I would never have imagined being caught in that kind of catch-22 that my friend was. And I thought, what if you tried to translate this story into maleness? It just doesn't really translate. If you were to retell this story about two brothers, one sitting at the feet of Jesus and one not, one who is active and one who is contemplative, it isn't the same story, it doesn't have the same emotional charge that it does when you tell the story about women and service.

And so I am uncomfortable with the passage because the role of gender seems quite significant. This is a passage that has a great deal to do with being a woman, with negotiating one's role as a woman in the world, with coming to grips with patriarchy and societal expectations. And I am loathe to attempt to interpret a passage that is so linked to being a woman, lest I fall into that perennial error of the clergy: speaking with authority about things that one has neither experienced nor understood.

This is most certainly a loaded story. It is a complex story, and in reading and understanding it as loaded and complex, I am not alone. This story has a lively history of interpretation throughout the life of the Church.

The standard interpretation of this story would suggest that Mary has chosen the important thing, listening to Jesus, whereas Martha has mistaken service as a substitute for sitting at the feet of the master. Of course, the history of the Church is in part a history of the failure to understand this story, because for most of its history, the Church has told women to be Marthas and not Marys.

But the fact that this story is colored massively with gender does not mean that it is a story only for women. There is, I think, a great deal to be gained from this story whoever you are, because we all live to some extent under the kind of societal and cultural expectations that both Martha and Mary do.

When I read this complex story, I always like to read it with one of the slightly sharp stories of the desert fathers next to it. Here's one of the sayings of the desert monastics about this story:

A brother came to visit Abba Silvanus at Mount Sinai. When he saw the brothers working hard, he said to the old man: Do not work for the food that perishes. For Mary has chosen the good part. Then the old man called his disciple: Zachary, give this brother a book and put him in an empty cell. Now, when it was three o'clock, the brother kept looking out the door, to see whether someone would come to call him for the meal. But nobody called him, so he got up, went to see the old man, and asked: Abba, didn't the brothers eat today? The old man said: Of course we did. Then he said: Why didn't you call me? The old man replied: You are a spiritual person and do not need that kind of food, but since we are earthly, we want to eat, and that's why we work. Indeed, you have chosen the good part, reading all day long, and not wanting to eat earthly food. When the brother heard this, he repented and said: Forgive me, Abba. Then the old man said to him: Mary certainly needed Martha, and it is really by Martha's help that Mary is praised.

And I wonder if that doesn't give us a better way into the passage, rather then simply saying it is more important to learn then to help. The saying speaks to the interrelatedness of Martha and Mary, and despite their tension, the way that Martha allows Mary to be herself, and the way that Mary gives meaning to Martha.

The implication, I think, is that Martha and Mary need each other desperately. Martha needs Mary to keep reminding her that there are contemplative things out there. Because of course, for the Marthas, for the helpers, the easiest thing in the world is to get too involved in helping, too focused on the helping, and not the reason one is helping.

The temptation of Mary, I always like to think of as the “surfer” temptation. Mary just wants to hang loose, to ride the wave of this “like totally amazing teaching”. She just wants to be in this moment, with her rabbi sharing his amazing new teaching, and Mary seems relatively devoid of the sense that the table doesn't lay itself, the food doesn't cook itself, and that even surfers must eat, and learners, and contemplatives.

The aspect of the gloss by the desert fathers that I love so much is the humility that comes through it. Mary indeed may have chosen the better part, but here for us “goats”, those of us who aren't lucky to be sheep, we need to worry about the lesser parts, the things like food and clothing. Mary may have chosen the better part, but we are all of us Marthas.

And so, instead of finding this passage to be only for women, or a source of guilt, of wondering if I've got my priorities straight, when I read about Martha and Mary, I always think: “Maybe Mary has chosen the greater part, but here below, I need to worry about things like food and clothing. Someday, maybe, I'll get my priorities together enough to be Mary-like, but until then, I'm in good company with Abba Silvanus and his brothers, with all the Marthas throughout the ages who have thought about food and clothing, who have lived under societal or cultural or familial expectations. Someday, I may get myself together enough to sit at the feet of my rabbi, and listen to his teaching. But for now, I'm going to run around like a chicken with my head cut off, and trust that even if is isn't the better part, my work will still serve my God.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

18 July 2010

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

     Jesus had set his face toward Jerusalem…..we know what Luke means to say – Jesus will not be deterred from his mission, but first, a stopover with very dear friends at that sheltered place called Bethany; we know its name from John’s Gospel.

     Bethany is a small town, perhaps a dozen rectangular shaped,white-washed dwellings, built onto the Eastern slope of the Mount of Olives, only 1 and 5/8^th miles from Jerusalem, the same distance from here to Washington Square.

     Jesus and his disciples could see the homes of Bethany as they approached the town, because those homes stood out in contrast to the dry, rocky soil of the hillside and the few cedar trees among the homes, standing tall against the cloudless sky. Orchards of fig, olive and almond trees were arranged in tiers on the slope of the hill, with tidy stone walls separating the levels to aid in irrigation when the rainy season arrives. . .

     No wonder Bethany was a favorite place for Jesus: familiar, quiet, restful, lovely to behold and hospitable.

     Jesus made this journey to Bethany on many, many occasions and always stopped at the home of Martha, Mary and their brother, Lazarus. Martha’s generous hospitality was well known.

     Martha, Mary and Lazarus were three of Jesus’ closest and dearest friends. He had probably known them from his childhood; his family had most likely stayed over in Bethany and then went up with them to the High Holydays in Jerusalem.     

     On this particular day, the day we hear of in our Gospel, Martha stood at the front door of her home and beheld Jesus coming along the road, up the hill, with his disciples, raising a dust cloud as he slowly made his way to her home. Martha set to work, immediately, filling the water jugs to wash his feet and towels to dry them – this was Mary’s task in their household and she performed this act of hospitality with great care and love and respect for the Teacher.    

     But, on this day, something very extraordinary occurred: Jesus invited Mary to sit at his feet and listen to his teaching – this invitation was quite contrary to custom – a woman sitting at the feet of The Teacher? A woman welcomed and encouraged as a Disciple? Equal to the male disciples!? . . . . And, Mary, being the introvert, the contemplative type, was pleased, although somewhat shy, to sit in that front room with Jesus, that front room cooled in the shade of the cedars, yet, so full of light. What deep joy!

     Lazarus was most likely there, also, because as soon as he was told that Jesus had arrived, he came in from their carefully tended orchard, where for generations, his family kept fig, olive and almond trees. . .

     So, there they were, Jesus, with Mary and Lazarus, in a very intimate teaching time, while the other disciples sat out of doors, in circles, in the shade of the orchard trees, and . . . .      

     All this time, Martha labored in the rear room, the place for the cooking fire. Martha was preparing a very special meal for her very special guest: grain pilaf, with special additions of lamb and succulent vegetables. Martha enjoyed making these welcoming meals for Jesus; Martha relished the moments with Jesus in her home. But……

     Many of us here, today, can imagine how Martha may have felt, having no company in the kitchen to assist her in the meal preparation. Not only was she overwhelmed, perhaps, with the details of the meal preparation, but, perhaps, she was also feeling left out – surely, she could hear the low voice of The Teacher as he explained the wonderful truth of the Creator’s love. And, she was not there in that select group!

     Like many high energy, ‘management oriented’ people, she could not put her complicated meal preparation aside and just go into the front room and sit with Mary, listen at The Teacher’s feet. Who but herself was going to prepare the meal? And prepare it to her high expectations? Only Mary was capable of working with Martha in their kitchen, only Mary knew Martha’s ways and only Mary could be the ‘second woman’ in that kitchen!

     Finally, after much head shaking and heightening resentment, we hear of Martha’s next movement. She places her mixing bowl down on the low table in the cooking room, probably with some agitation, and enters the front room in a bit of a huff.

     “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.”  . . . . .

     Silence in the room, all eyes on Martha. Then, Jesus softly chides Martha: “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things: there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”   . . . . .

      Was Jesus suggesting that Martha prepare a less elaborate pilaf? That he would be very content with a simpler meal? Yes, most probably, but there is something more to this.

     Jesus invites Martha (and here, today, invites us also) into a more balanced spirituality, a more complete holiness, a more intimate relationship with God. Jesus invites Martha, and us, also, to notice our need to be well nourished with the Word of God.

     Martha and everyone in that room (and everyone in this sacred space) has the words of Deuteronomy 8 written on the wall of our hearts: “(Neither men nor women nor children) can live on bread, alone, but from every Word that comes from the mouth of God.” Moreover, Jesus knows Martha’s heart (and, Jesus knows our hearts!), and invites Martha (and each of us) to desire Jesus’ indwelling and to make room, each day, for a ‘resting time with the Lord’.

     Truth is, in Martha’s life, and in each of our lives, our servant-hood issues from our love for God, our intimacy with Holy Spirit and our oneness with Jesus. This is a most important truth, hear this again: our servant-hood issues from our love for God, our intimacy with Holy Spirit and our oneness with Jesus.   . . . . 

     In one of his most recent books, Marcus Borg, a noteworthy and highly respected Scripture scholar of our own day, makes this observation about our lives as Christians: “…The goal of the Christian life is participating in the passion of God, as disclosed in the Bible and Jesus. God’s passion is that we center more deeply in God (‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength’) and (that we center more deeply in) the world – a world of justice and peace. These are the inner and outer dimensions of the Christian life – union with God’s passion.” (Putting Away Childish Things, page 133.)

    Dear People of God, Jesus is our ‘Spiritual Director’ this morning, like Mary (and, eventually, Martha) we sit at Jesus’ feet and listen most intently for his wisdom to take root in our hearts. After all, Jesus is Way, Truth and Life.

     On a practical note: I imagine that if we were to ask any of the generous people who prepare the soup for our Saturday Soup Bowl, each would note that a part of each day is spent in quiet listening to Jesus, who speaks of his love in their hearts and that the soup preparation happens in a prayerful manner – and, perhaps, with a sip of the fruit of the vine and holy company?

    Friends, let us be full of joy and gratitude that Jesus invites each of us here, today, to sit at his feet, to know and experience, first hand, his deep, profoundly deep and complete love for each of us, his longing to be with us, always, in his word and sacrament and in each other. In the words of a favorite hymn: I come with joy to meet our Lord……

     Let us do that now……

Preached by Mother Marie Swayze

18 July 2010

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

This simple teaching from Saint Paul used to be a familiar aphorism in American culture; a statement whose meaning is so clear and so concise that it became a cliché, the type of thing you’d see cross-stitched into a sampler.  But then who cross-stitches samplers anymore?  And who worries about reaping what he or she sows any more?

Fifteen years ago, the great chef, Alice Waters, may or may not have been motivated by this rule of life – that as you sow, so shall you reap – when she helped turn an acre of asphalt-covered land into a vegetable garden at a middle school in Berkeley, California.  That garden and the movement it began is called the Edible Schoolyard.  “When children are encouraged to grow and cook and enjoy wholesome, delicious food all together, from the seed to the table and back again, in an atmosphere of caring and beauty, they fall in love with its lessons,” she wrote.  “It’s a way of making sure that children grow up feeling the soil with their own fingers, harvesting its bounty in the American sunshine, and watching their own hands make the kind of beautiful, inexpensive food that can nourish the body and the spirit.”

Waters tells the story of a small boy who one day came into the kitchen classroom connected to the garden.    “[He] was hungry – truly hungry, as in badly needing food.  So when class was over, [Esther, the teacher,] asked him very quietly what he’d had for breakfast that day.  He hadn’t eaten breakfast; he never ate breakfast.  Esther taught him right then and there to take eggs from the refrigerator and cook them for himself.  She told him to do this every single day before school, without ever asking.  Just come and do it.”  As you sow, so shall you reap.

All last week middle school children, and kids a little older and a little younger, ran around our mission parish during City Camp.  Many of you were there to help them and their high-school counselors.  For the second year of City Camp, once again Saint Mark’s volunteers were a major force in bringing this urban camp to life for kids who often do not have enough.  Bible stories were taught each day, songs were sung, prayers were said, meals were served, games were played, scrapes were bandaged, noses were blown, a few tears were shed, and a garden was even planted out back, behind the Rectory, where, before the church was abandoned the rector’s wife had tended vegetables and flowers.  I saw basil and some other herbs, some squash, and maybe even zucchini getting a late start, and lettuce of some variety.  It is late in the summer to be planting a garden, but better late than never.  As you sow, so shall you reap.

Here at Saint Mark’s, it is a blessing that our founders had the sense to leave green space around this urban church.  Thousands of commuters pass by here every day, and I know from chatting with enough of them that the beauty of our gardens is a gift to them and to this city.  I think of the roses silently singing the Gospel to all those people on their way to work.  And the garden here thrives because of Libby and Todd and Bob and Claire and Ed and Aaron and Isabelle and Aileen, and a few others who care to sow in it.  As you sow, so shall you reap.

In the church at large, you have to wonder whether or not we have remembered this lesson.  We are obsessed with squabbles over property and sexuality, and the place of women in the church.  As we battle for power amongst Anglicans, we see the pathetic slow-motion drama of our Roman brothers trying to come to terms with a history of sin that is glaringly obvious to the rest of the world, not least to other churches who have our own fair share of sins to own up to.  We see churches emptying and struggling to stay open, at least in part for failure, I contend, to teach and to learn this basic calculus: as you sow, so shall you reap.

On our national birthday we might do well to reclaim this cliché, this little aphorism of Saint Paul’s.

What are we sowing, as a nation, in the vast monoculture fields of industrialized agriculture?  And if it is so good for us, why is it making us fat, sick, and unhappy?

What are we sowing in the too-big, under-funded public schools of our cities where children are falling behind rather than catching up?

What are we sowing for the lives of immigrants who came to this country, like our own ancestors, in search of a better life, and who sustain our way of life by doing the work no one with a green card or better would deign to do in America?

What are we sowing in the villages of Afghanistan, and the cities of Iraq as our still ill-defined mission there drags on an on?

What are we sowing in the lives of our service men and women who suffer the consequences of those wars on our behalf, at the expense of their lives, their limbs, and their happiness?

What are we sowing behind the barbed wire of Guantanamo Bay?

What are we sowing when we allow our justice system to take an eye for an eye, as it were, in the execution chambers of our states?

What are we sowing in the Gulf of Mexico, and on the oil-stained shores of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida?

What are we sowing as the argument about abortion enters a new decade of shouting and posturing, and we remain so ineffective at helping prevent unwanted pregnancies in the first place?

What are we sowing with the gun violence that takes so many lives in this city and across our nation?

As you sow, so shall you reap.

And still Jesus reminds us that the harvest is plentiful.

As Americans, even in tough years, like this one, we do well to remember that the harvest is plentiful.  But it cannot be taken for granted, and the laborers are few.

As you sow, so shall you reap.  It is a double-sided truth that allows for either bounty or famine, strength or starvation.  And it lays out for us choices to make every day.

The Fourth of July would be a good day for making resolutions.  And this Fourth of July would be a good day for resolving to remember that as we sow, so shall we reap.

If we cross-stitched that motto onto our hearts what would we sow in our lives, in the church, and in the world?

In our own lives, would we pray more fervently and carefully and frequently?  Would we practice forgiveness more and better?  Would we learn how to offer hospitality at the drop of a hat even when it is inconvenient?  My life would be improved by those choices, I know.

In the church, would we learn from the edible schoolyard that a diversified farm is healthier than a monoculture.  The one is self-sustaining precisely because of its diversity, and the other requires scads of artificial chemical fertilizer just to revive the depleted soil every year?  And one resembles the kind of garden God first planted far more than the other, anyway.

In the world, would we learn that peace is not accomplished when the Nobel committee hands out an award, but by sowing the seeds of peace; and that very few people in uniform seem to have been adept at that task since General Marshall; and perhaps we should be looking for other avenues to peace, particularly in areas of the world that have proven themselves resistant to the armed intervention of supposedly superior powers?

As you sow, so shall you reap.

I dearly hope and pray that as a community, we at Saint Mark’s will hold fast to this little motto, that as we sow, so shall we reap.  I hope we learn as individuals and as a community to make choices on the basis of this small cliché,

And on this Fourth of July, I hope it might be helpful to us to reflect on words written by one of the sixth-graders who learned in the Edible Schoolyard garden in California; words that seem to show the results of reaping what you sow: “The bees, the spiders, the ants, the rolly-pollies, the bugs, the sound, the sky, the birds, the clouds, the yellow leaves… the leaves rustle with hidden secrets that even the laziest man would be dying to know.  And the bees gracefully floating from flower to flower, sing of flowers and gnomes and fairies who never seem to show themselves to anything but the bees, the birds, and the trees.  I smell fresh air… I see beautiful white flowers… and figs.  I wonder, when are the figs ready to eat?”*

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

4 July 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

* All quotations from Alice Waters, Edible Schoolyard: A Universal Idea, San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 2008

Another odd aspect of Williamsburg is that it is a place sort of frozen in an uncertain time, one result being that no one is in charge.  Yes there is a Governor’s mansion, with its impressive displays of colonial arms hung on its walls, but there is no governor. Yes, the House of Burgesses met down the street in the colonial capitol building, but there is no legislature to meet there now.  Yes, the church once wielded some power, but it certainly doesn’t any longer.  There is a courthouse, but no judge to mete out justice.  There are stocks in the public square, and a gaol (spelled with a “g”) but no prisoners to lock up.  There is mock musket fire, but there are no red-coats.  There is no enemy, no villain, no foe, not even a King George III across the Atlantic.

I sometimes wonder if the church has taken on some of the characteristics of Colonial Williamsburg; if, perhaps, we are re-enacting an old story on a true foundation but in a reconstructed and somewhat artificial version of it.  We use a Prayer Book that remembers older versions, but is not the original.  We wear old vestments that link us to ancient times, but of course are highly stylized.  We worship in a building that is meant to evoke the 14^th century even though it was built in the 19^th.  Are we just indulging in a fairy tale version of some ancient thing, like the new Harry Potter theme park at Disney Land?  Have we chosen to freeze ourselves in a moment of beauty that allows us to escape from the realities of a less-beautiful world?

If we go to the heart of this question, I think it has to do with that same troubling aspect of Colonial Williamsburg: is anyone actually in charge?  I do not pose this question in terms of the church hierarchy.  And unlike some Anglicans these days, I do not yearn for a centralized authority within the church that would simplify and clarify power relationships.  I mean to say that there is something about our life of faith that could leave you wondering where God is; whether he hasn’t left the scene quite some time ago; what happened to the Jesus who walked and talked and healed, but who rose to heaven long ago; where is the power of the Holy Spirit that once set the church and the world on fire with possibility, but who seems remote and perhaps unavailable to us nowadays.  Who’s in charge?

If we struggle with this sense that we might be inhabiting the Colonial Williamsburg of faith – a re-enactment built on old foundations, but not quite the real thing, it might be partly because we are sophisticated 21^st century Americans.    For instance, we read the story of the man with demons, and we already know that we are in the midst of a fairy tale, because, of course, we know that demons don’t exist.  We know that the man was probably schizophrenic.  We can diagnose him from our pews, and some of us could probably even fill his prescriptions from our own medicine cabinets.

Saint Luke tells us that the people who came out to see what had happened to the man with the demons were afraid, but there is nothing in this story that scares us, except of course for the loss of a herd of pigs, which spells financial disaster for the herdsmen at the very least (and nothing scares us these days like the loss of income-producing property).  To us this story might as well be played out by actors in period costumes in Colonial Galilee, or whatever.  It is a fairy tale being played out on a re-constructed version of some old religious stage.  And there is no real enemy, no villain, no foe, and therefore, no real trouble that there is no one in charge.

And because it is almost inevitable that we encounter the story this way, it is very hard for us to learn anything from it.  Because this story is not told in order to teach us about the dangers of demons, or to show how handy it can be to have a herd of swine around even if you keep kosher.  This story has a singular and unavoidable point, which is to teach us who is in charge. 

Jesus encounters this man who lives, we are told, not in a house but among the tombs, he is alive, but already doomed, living among the dead.  In his frequent rages he is restrained by the authorities, and chained up for the protection of others, and maybe for his own protection.  He is stark naked, a raving lunatic, and mad-possessed with many demons.  You can imagine that when he emerged from the tombs in his schizophrenic rages the townspeople believed quite strongly that there was an enemy that possessed him, a foe that needed to be vanquished, a villain who had taken his life from him.  They were not so ready to diagnose his problems away, and they had access to fewer pharmaceuticals, anyway.  And when he is around no one can control him, he cannot be restrained, no one is in charge.

Until now.

The demons know this before anyone else does.  They pull the man to the ground, and he cries out, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?”  And the rest of the story unfolds so that everyone else may come to know what the demons saw first: that Jesus is in charge, that he has power to overcome demons, to cast out the enemy, vanquish the foe, deliver justice to the villain.

I do not think that this story begs us to disregard modern psycho-therapeutic ideas and the medical treatment of mental illness.  It does not insist on a suspension of disbelief that allows for the possibility of demons that are waiting to possess you and me.  We psychologized demons decades ago, anyway, but that has not really robbed them of their power; and indeed, it has made it easier for many of us to acknowledge our own “demons” without fearing that we shall be sent to live among the tombs, or locked up in chains.  But what we have not remembered so well is who is in charge.  And so in the spiritual landscape of our lives we inhabit a place where we can see the foundations of an old faith, but we suspect that no one has occupied the governor’s mansion for a long time, that no law has been passed in the House of Burgesses for decades, and that the church remains a pretty place with nice music, but not seat of power any more.

Sitting here with our own, more silent demons – our fears, our neuroses, our obsessions, our deep failings, our hatreds, our bad habits, etc.; you don’t need me to try to catalog them for you, lest I bore you with my rather mundane expectations of your more exotic demons – sitting here, being honest about those things, what we could use is a herd of swine, some unclean vermin onto which we could project all that plagues us, and offer them up and wait and see if Jesus will cast them over a cliff and into the sea, or at least drown them in the Schuylkill.  A demonstration would be nice; a sign that left no doubt as to who is in charge would be helpful.

Not far from Colonial Williamsburg, just a few miles down the road, there is an amusement park with roller coasters and games and rides and all kinds of entertainment.  I suppose it makes the idea of a vacation to Williamsburg palatable to kids who are skeptical of being subjected to the living classroom of the reconstructed colonial town, where the possibility, indeed the expectation of learning something is conspicuous.

And despite its unusual, reconstructed character, despite the gnawing reality that all this has been rebuilt, and now only represents a frozen timelessness where nothing is actually at stake today, the town of Williamsburg finds its identity primarily I think in this: that there is something to be learned there about an old enmity, about the foes that were to be vanquished, and about justice that looks to assert itself over villainy, even if it is not clear anymore who is in charge.

We are surrounded by the forces of a society that would dearly like to entertain us; knowing that nothing gets us to spend money like entertainment.  In the midst of all that entertainment, there is a story to be told of a man who was possessed of demons.  And a question, “What have you to do with me Jesus, Son of the Most High God?”

In a world that too often makes us wonder who is really in charge, this story has been told for generation after generation, not to convince us of the existence of demons, but to help us learn the answer to that vexing question.  For each of us has our own demons.  And in each of our lives there will be enemies to fight, foes that need vanquishing, villains who need to be brought to justice – many, maybe even most of these, will be of our own making.  And we will wonder, some of us already have spent years wondering, if anyone is in charge, if there is any power in the world that can prevail, if there is any god who will come to our aid as we stand in what we have built on the ancient foundations of faith.

Who could have guessed that the question of the demons would be the question that would lead us to what we are meant to learn: What have you to do with me Jesus, Son of the Most High God?  And that the answer is so simple:  Everything, my beloved.  Everything.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

20 June 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

And the real question, as it always is in matters like this, is economic. Who will pay what, to clean up, to make restitution, to pay for what has happened?

Already swimming in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico are the legal sharks who smell the blood in the water, and BP is, I am certain, already planning to mount a massive legal defense to limit as fully as possible their liability for the accident and its ecological implications.

The news stories are constant, about the effects of the spill on tourism and the local economy. The oil spill, in short, is almost entirely viewed in terms of money.

Which is generally when I admit my inherent skepticism of the ability of economic transactions or economic language to deal with the complexity of the Gulf Oil spill, the ethical problems of a corporation like BP or indeed the problems of a society that allows for the rape and pillage of the earth for economic reasons. The spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a ringing indictment of the inability of our society to think or speak correctly. Our language and rhetoric is not sufficient unto the day, or the past nearly sixty days. And it is a disaster of our own making.

Which is why it is interesting that in the Hebrew Scriptures this morning we have a story that is both economic and ecological. It is a story about land and about a conspiracy to take that land from an individual. Naboth refuses to sell his land because he understands it to be his “ancestral inheritance.” He belongs somehow to this specific piece of land, that his ancestors owned and farmed, and there is not a price that can be put on it, per se. Which puts King Ahab, who desires the land, into a bit of a funk. The powerful and the wealthy for time immemorial have always wanted what they cannot obtain easily or buy, and Ahab is no different. His wife Jezebel colludes with the powerful in Naboth's city to falsely accuse him, and execute him to obtain what he will not sell. And, so Elijah the prophet is sent to Ahab with this message “Because you have sold yourself to do what is evil in the sight of the Lord, I will bring disaster on you.”

Which seems like a strange passage to couple in the lectionary with a Gospel passage about forgiveness. There seems to be little forgiveness in the words of the prophet Elijah. And yet, I'm interested not by the contrast of the stories, but by the fact that they both use economic terms. Because you have “sold yourself” says Elijah, and Jesus speaks about debts.

Debt is the metaphor that Jesus uses in the Gospel this morning to deal with forgiveness. The greater the debt forgiven, the larger the gratefulness. Which makes perfect sense in a common-sensical way. And I have no problem applying this to my own life: the greater someone sins against me, or more likely, the greater that I sin against them, the more gratefulness is entailed when forgiveness is given. It is when one starts to talk about systems and corporations and governments that things get a little more complicated. Is there, in fact, the possibility of forgiveness for BP or for Goldman Sachs for causing world-wide economic chaos or for economic systems that destroy people and the earth?

I wonder if that condemnation of Elijah isn't somehow prescient in our own day? It is not a far stretch for me, to read this sentence as a condemnation not just of Ahab, Jezebel and the powerful who enter into a conspiracy with them, but as a kind of condemnation which rings down throughout time: because you have sold yourself to do evil, I will bring disaster.

It would be easy, I suppose, to go the Pat Robertson route and point to the oil spill as a punishment from God, but that's not really how I roll, and I doubt you'd find it very convincing. Or it would be tempting to use that sentence to ring the changes on BP as an evil corporation. But the reality is that BP is only symptomatic, BP is only the current whipping boy, and tomorrow, or next year, or 20 years from now, there will be a new whipping boy for us to point the finger towards (and away from us) and say “You've sold yourself to evil.”

The reality is that we live in a culture, in a world where debt is the fundamental way of life. Debt, but not gratefulness or forgiveness. I was amused recently to read that Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board has warned that “the federal budget appears to be on an unsustainable path,” which is, I think, a dour economist's way of saying “this is a mad house, sell and move to China.” Don't however, move to Greece or Japan, both of which face the kind of debt that as an economic layperson, I find quite unfathomable. How does an entire economic area like the European Union simply implode seemingly overnight? And we've all heard the statistics on individual debt and interest only mortgages in this country, and felt the pinch which has resulted.

Our debt is not simply the “lack of money” kind of debt, it is the debt of borrowing against the future, against the planet. BP is symptomatic not simply of the kind of economic greed which is our own, writ large into a corporation, but of a willingness to refuse to think about the costs beyond our own day, to make a quick buck despite the unsustainability of a system or process, symptomatic of a kind of alienation from creation that allows us to mortgage the future not simply of the human race, but of the whole creation, for money.

The oil spill is an indicator of how deeply sinful, we are as a society, how deep the roots of that sin reach, into the whole structure of our lives and culture, and into our language and speech and thought; and all the ways that we are complicit with BP and Goldman Sachs and all those robber barons in the rape of the earth, and in an economic system that is simply madness. The spill in the Gulf is an indicator of how desperately we need to have our overwhelming and massive debts forgiven.

The wonder of the passage from the Gospels this morning is that it doesn't matter what the woman has done. It doesn't matter how she's sinned. It doesn't matter that the culture she lives in is certainly to blame for some of that sin. It doesn't matter. What matters is that she is contrite, she is sad. She can't possibly pay her debts, which are many, and so she is forgiven without regard to the magnitude of her sins.

I asked earlier if there was forgiveness for BP, and I think that is somehow a pressing question. Not because I think BP is laboring under a heavy load of guilt, but because if BP is somehow symptomatic, then the ability of BP to obtain forgiveness is somehow about my ability to be forgiven. And this unnamed woman, who washed Jesus with tears and anointed him with ointment tells us that there is somehow, somewhere, forgiveness for us, for our complicity in our society, for our final responsibility for a world in which a corporation like BP can exist, for the inability of our language to speak or think correctly, and for our own individual and collective sins and brokenness.

But the message of that forgiveness comes with a warning. The forgiveness that Jesus gives this woman is because she is aware of her sin, and contrite. The Pharisees on the other hand are not aware of their sin, just hers. They are looking for sin in other people, not in themselves.

The oil spill is not a chance for us to point out BP and say “You are evil,” but for us to realize our sinfulness, and to weep maybe a little, and ask that our debts be forgiven, many or few, individual or communal, by the only One who is able to forgive with such munificence and graciousness, God living and true. In the name of that God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

The Third Sunday after Pentecost

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Among the many debatable assertions made in holy Scripture, this one is a doosey: that man does not live by bread alone, but by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord.  The saying comes from Deuteronomy, where it refers back to the memory of the children of Israel wandering in the desert after escaping through the Red Sea from slavery in Egypt.  You remember that they were hungry and complained to Moses, who asked God to do something about it.  In the night, while the people slept, God leaves a sprinkling of this stuff called manna - enough for everyone – which sustains them.  Of course, eventually Moses’ people will complain that all they have is this manna to eat, this food that comes down from heaven each night in the desert, what the Psalmist calls the bread of angels, but this complaining is par for the course.

The writer of Deuteronomy says that God put his people through this ordeal in the desert to test them and to humble them, “that he might make [them] know that man does not live by bread alone, but that man lives by everything that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord.”  This, of course, sounds great, and is easy to recite as though we mean it.  It is a wonderful and well-worn cliché by now.  But you have to ask yourself whether or not you think it is true, and if you do, whether or not there is much evidence that you or I or anyone we know is living as though it was true.

To assess this question, it helps to get back to the desert; to think about what it means to be uprooted, uncertain, homeless, hungry, on the run, and deeply skeptical of your leader, but basically unable to do anything about it since you can’t very well go back to Egypt where you used to be a slave.  You don’t have a lot of options, and you are tired of living on manna.  Are you grateful for it anyway?  And will you remember to thank God for it after you have arrived at a land flowing with milk and honey, and perhaps steak, or at least lamb chops?

To say that we Americans live in a land flowing with milk and honey is a gross understatement.  The fact is that we live in an obscene society.  So much do we have that we fatten our children and the poor on the worst imaginable processed foods.  It is actually costly and inconvenient to eat a healthy diet in this country, or to lead what might be called a healthy lifestyle.  Warfare is so much a part of our lives, that we are basically untroubled that we have been sending soldiers to Afghanistan for almost a decade now, with no end in sight, and our idea of withdrawing from Iraq is to leave a force of only 50,000 troops there.  Who knows what we are planning to do with North Korea – and who will object?  Our disgusting dependence on oil is a helpful distraction from the reality that we have stripped the earth of so many of its resources with little care about the effect this might have on the planet or on us: trees, fish, clean water – all disappearing, just to name the most obvious.  We built a great system of schools to educate our children, but we don’t seem to care much if our children actually learn anything.  We built a great system of prisons, and we don’t seem to care if a million people rot in them, as long as we can’t see it from our house.  And we built a great economy, that after it stopped making anything useful, just found ways to make money for the sake of making money.  And then we decided that those who master that game will be rewarded the most handsomely.  Not just on the order of a few times more generously than anyone else, but with exponentially extravagant sums that allow an exponentially extravagant lifestyle.

But here is the kicker: we are not really unhappy living this way, because most of us look up with more envy than disgust at the investment banker whose annual bonus is a seven-figure number, even after the financial crisis of the past several years, while unemployment still hovers around the double digits.  There is manna and there is money, and given the choice, most of us know which we would take.  If you doubt me, ask yourself how far you would have to walk from here in any direction to buy a lottery ticket – that ludicrous tease (promoted by the government) that you, too, could live like a banker, if you just get a little lucky.  Another way to put this is to say that most of us would happily live on bread alone, as long as the bread is direct-deposited into our bank accounts.

For better or worse, in the midst of this land flowing with milk and money, (no, my computer does not even try to correct me here) there stand churches, like Saint Mark’s.  Every day of the year here, and several times on Sundays, we take some scraps of bread and a few cups of wine and we offer them to God, asking him to bless them, and to bless us, too.  Although it’s hard to picture a desert here in this beautiful church, this is meant to be a place where we connect with the memory of those wanderers all those generations ago.  It is meant to be a place where we see how God calls us out of slavery and into a new freedom.  It is meant to be a place where we rush across the parted waters of a red sea to escape the clutches of those who would exploit us, use us for their own purposes and gain.  It is meant to be a place of humility, where we come to terms with our own limitations, and God’s merciful provision.  It is meant to be a place of testing, to see if we will keep God’s commandment to love him and to love one another.  And it is meant to be a place where we are asked to consider whether or not we really want to live on bread alone.

It is so hard, as fat Americans (I can say this with confidence), to come to church and feel hungry for manna: for the food that comes only from God.  What is this wafer of tasteless bread, and this sip of too-sweet wine?  What point is there to it, what power does it have?  And who needs it anyway?  No one needs it if you are happy to live on bread alone.

But if you begin to become weary with the obscenity of our society, and begin to wonder where there is an antidote for it, you might start by looking for manna.

Once, America thought of itself as a new promised land, because of the freedom we have here, and because of the plentiful resources that could so obviously and so easily be shared by so many.  It did not take us long, as a nation, to find slaves of our own, so that we began to be more like a new Egypt: oppressing others for our own gain, and ready, willing, and able to live on bread alone.  It took a bloody civil war and another hundred years of struggle to cross that red sea. 

But remember that Moses’ followers reminisced fondly about their days of slavery in Egypt, while they wandered the desert.  They longed for cucumbers and leeks and garlic and melons, when all they had to eat was manna, from heaven.  And have we wandered back to Egypt again?  Or are we, at least longing for its cucumbers and melons, which somehow seem more enticing than our freedom and our self-respect?

If it sometimes feels this way to you, as it does to me, then you are in the right place this morning.  For day by day, and Sunday by Sunday, God propels us, when we gather in his name, back into the desert.  He leads us here to help us escape from the obscene fatness and exploitation that we would willingly enslave ourselves to in exchange for cucumbers, melons, leeks; in exchange for bread in our bank accounts.  He leads us here to show us heights of beauty, forgiveness, mercy, truth, and love unknown in the corporate offices of Goldman Sachs, et al.

He leads us here to feed us with a better manna than he gave to his children so long ago  - the bread of heaven, food of angels that renews this life and fortifies us for unending life in the world to come.

There is ample evidence that man can live in this world on bread alone, but it is an obscene and ugly life we end up living that way, and it comes to an unhappy end.

There is another life to be led, in this world and in the world to come.  This is the life of pardon, mercy, wonder, joy, and love.  And there is no way to live it on a diet of bread alone, but by the love of God that comes from the mouth of the Lord.  Today, here, now, God has called again out of Egypt, he is raining down on us the bread of heaven, the food of angels.  Will we not come to his table, and eat?

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Solemnity of Corpus Christi, 7 June 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

The BIG secret that has troubled humanity for as long as we have thought about it is, in the words of a famous book by a famous rabbi: Why do bad things happen to good people?  Lots of books have been written on the topic of this big secret, including an entire book of the Bible (the Book of Job), which ends with God more or less telling Job that it’s a secret, and how dare he, little, puny Job, ask great big God, who, by the way, made the earth and the heavens and set the stars in the sky, to divulge his secrets, in which case they wouldn’t be secrets any longer.

God has many other secrets, like what the songs of the whales mean, how to cure cancer, is there life elsewhere in the universe, what is happening to the honeybees, how to move faster than the speed of light, [and how did Roy Halladay pitch a perfect game last night against the Marlins]?  Some of God’s secrets seem important to us; some seem trivial.  Some we expect him to reveal; some seem unlikely to be uncovered.  Some, like dinosaurs and Stonehenge, are secrets from the past; and some, like peace or the end of the world, are secrets of the future.

People would be upset with God if he only kept secrets, but they would get over it eventually and learn to live with a God who keeps secrets better than anyone else.  What really annoys people is that they suspect God lies.

To begin with, there is the BIG lie: a lurking suspicion that God is not really God; rather, he is a made-up story, being manipulated by men behind curtains in Rome and Lynchburg, and anywhere a church like this stands.  It might be truer to say that people don’t so much think God lies as they think believers lie.  And all the other supposed lies flow from this one:  that God is love, that humans are in the habit of doing something called “sin”, that prayer matters, that our hymns do not fall on deaf ears, that Jesus was the Son of God and came into the world to save us.

More and more these days there is a sense that most religion, and certainly the Christian religion, such as it is, are systems of secrets and lies.  You can see this partly in the way the word “myth” has shifted in meaning.  It used to be understood that a myth was a story, the facts of which might be debatable but the essence of which was a truth so deep that we didn’t have any other way to talk about it, and that religion was the guardian and caretaker of these important stories.  Nowadays, when something is called a “myth” it is usually derided as “just a myth,” meaning it is most fundamentally untrue, and religion is the perpetuator of these lies.

In this rendering, Scripture is no longer a complex quilt of truths to be discerned from ancient stories and texts of various kinds; it is a web of lies that supports the delusions of people who are willing to live with a bunch of secrets.

And so God is a subject of secrets and lies.  That his church has been manifestly shown to be an institution plagued by harmful secrets and willful lies has not helped this situation.

But this reality surely comes as no surprise to God.  One burden of the Scriptures has been to show that thus has it ever been: God’s people, prodigal by nature, constantly disappoint him, as they disappoint themselves, and are called to repent and reform.  That this pattern of human behavior is plainly neither a secret nor a lie, does little in the face of skepticism about God.

The Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures, if you will, shows us early-on God’s assertion of himself: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord.”  And throughout so many of the early stories we see God at work, uncovering this secret for his people and declaring that all other gods, carved as they were in wood and stone, are nothing more than lies.  We Christians have inherited this basic claim, that the Lord our God is one Lord, alone in power and majesty and might and glory.  And into this landscape comes the Christian doctrine that although God is one: the singular, unrivalled divinity in the universe, God is nevertheless known to his people in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.  If this is not confusing to you, then you are clearly ready for the AP course in religion.  Most, of us, however, are at least a little confused by how God can be both three-personed and yet one.  It seems a contradiction in terms.  And the question it seems to beg is this: is this claim about the trinitarian identity of God a secret or a lie?

In either case, one could imagine that somewhere in the Vatican, or in Dan Brown’s study, there is a file cabinet with a locked drawer that contains a folder marked “Trinity” that has drawings, schematics, and at least a few paragraphs of explanation that either unlock the secret or blow the lid off the lie.

But there is another option, and it is this option that the church has long asserted about the truth of God’s triune nature and identity, namely that it is neither a secret nor a lie, but that it is a mystery.  Long before there were detectives whose sole job was to solve them, there were mysteries.  Real mysteries are not puzzles waiting to be solved, they are, rather, a category of truth that is evident to us and yet beyond our comprehension. 

It is a reflection of modern over-self-confidence that we tend to assume that any mystery is either a secret waiting to be unlocked or a lie being perpetuated for somebody’s gain.  Can we really not imagine truth in the universe that is beyond our comprehension?  At the moment we are baffled by a hole that we dug in the bottom of the sea bed in the Gulf of Mexico; if we can’t even figure out how to plug that hole to stop an oil spill of our own making, can we really be so sure that the rest of the universe is available to us to be understood?

Our modern resistance to mystery in the world is paralleled by our confusion about knowledge and wisdom.  We have forgotten that there is a distinction between the two, assuming that a wise person has extensive knowledge of the secrets and lies that assault the truth.  But many more generations have known that real wisdom lies in the acceptance of mystery, and the willingness to live with and reflect upon the mysteries of life without needing to try to solve them.

From the pages of the New Testament, on the lips of Jesus, we hear that God is to be known as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Do we understand this?  We remember that the Holy Spirit brooded over the face of the waters at the beginning of time.  We have no trouble conceiving of the God who made the world, who led his children out of captivity, and to whom Jesus prayed in the garden as a Father (even if we stumble a little on the overly gender-specific language), and we accept the claim of that heavenly voice that Jesus is the beloved Son of God.  We know that Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would come to lead us into all truth.  But none of this means we understand it.

The ancient wisdom of the church was never to de-code or explain the mystery of the Holy Trinity, it was, rather to reflect on it and rejoice in it: to realize that God is fabulously complicated, and that God nevertheless wants us to know him, even if it is hard for us to bear.

In our own day and age, the mysterious truth that our God is one Lord, but three persons, brings an important, ancient reflection back to mind: that God’s very nature, the essence of his being, is communal.  God does not exist in the splendid isolation of a remote heavenly throne room, where he occasionally naps on his throne, when not hurling thunderbolts of judgment down to earth.  God’s nature is to relate, to dialogue, to dance, to commune.  Aloneness is not God’s thing.

Perhaps this is why Adam’s needy demand for a helper does not fall on deaf ears in the Garden of Eden.  Perhaps this is why Noah is told to build a big ark, for all the animals and his family.  Perhaps this is why Moses is allowed to have the help of his brother Aaron.  Perhaps this is why Abraham is not sent on pilgrimage himself, he is told to bring his wife and family with him.  Perhaps this is why Ruth will not leave Naomi’s side.  Perhaps this is why Joseph is restored to the fellowship of his brothers and his father.  Perhaps this is why another Joseph, centuries later, is an essential part of the Holy Family.  Perhaps this is why Jesus tended to call his disciples in pairs, and sent them out two by two.  We are made in God’s image: aloneness is not God’s thing, and when we follow God, it is unlikely to be our thing either.

The truth at the heart of the mystery of the Holy Trinity is that God wants us to know him, even if he knows that he is beyond our comprehension, just as he wanted to show himself to Moses even though he knew it was beyond Moses’ ken to perceive more than the divine backside.

And the crucial thing that God is able to show us is that he is not a lonesome God: he is always relating, always discussing, always dancing, always communing.  Which we infer means that God does not mean any creature that he made in his own image (you and me) to be a lonesome creature, rather he means for us to be in relationships, to be in dialogue, to be dancing, and to be communing with one another.

The truth is that the alternative to showing us his triune self would be to keep it secret, or worse, to lie to us.  And despite the suspicions of our age, and the secrets that God does keep from us, he does not seem to want to be defined by secrets and lies.

God is, however, entirely willing to wrap himself in mystery.  God’s mysteries are not waiting or even available to us to be solved and revealed in a 90- minute TV special.  God’s mysteries, are however available to us to ponder, to think and talk and pray about, to behold in something like the same way that the beauty of the night sky or the scent of honeysuckle remains a mystery to be enjoyed.

May God grant us the wisdom to know the difference between secrets, lies, and mysteries.  May he give us patience with his secrets, confidence that he will never lie to us, and wisdom to ponder the mystery of his triune self, without the need to try to figure him out!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Trinity Sunday 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

I have never been any good at raising plants; even the easiest houseplants seem a burden and a trouble to me.  But I can tell you I would have lavished attention on that little bonsai tree, if anything other than watering had been required of me.  I would have protected it with my life in order to return it to my friend in good health, a symbol of the deep bond that I imagined now joined us together in the raising of this tree.  That it was a tiny tree, with shallow roots going only as deep as its ornamental container would allow did not ruin the symbolism of it for me.  It was a thing of beauty, beloved, I supposed, of my friend, and I was not going to betray the trust, the bond, the layers of unspoken meaning held within that little ceramic tray of soil!

In any case, I returned the tree safely to my friend, never hinting at the meaning I’d invested in its care, which stayed hidden in the scant soil of its container.  My friend moved away, though we are still in touch from time to time.  I have no idea what happened to the bonsai tree.

Bonsai, as an art, I remember looking up at the time, is distinct from the horticultural practice of dwarfing.  A bonsai tree is made from a branch or a cutting of a full-sized tree that is restrained, pruned, trimmed, wired, trained to grow on a smaller scale than it would normally grow.  Creating a dwarf version of a plant is done by successfully and permanently changing its genetic makeup so that the plant and its descendants will always be small.

For some reason the image of the bonsai tree has been on my mind as this feast of Pentecost has approached.  In a kitschy way, Pentecost – the day when the Holy Spirit was first manifested to Jesus’ disciples – is sometimes called the birthday of the church.  This is the idea that Spirit, rushing into that community of people with a thunderous wind and tongues of fire, weaved the band of disciples together into a cohesive and purposeful body - the church – giving birth to this new thing, this community, this organization, this cause, this movement. 

It remained to be seen what all this would mean, what a diverse and disparate band of men and women joined by this almost tacit, certainly mysterious bond would amount to.  If you think in terms of horticulture, it remained to be seen how this new church would grow.  Was it a houseplant?  An oak, or an elm, or a quaking aspen?  Was it a fern, or a rose, or an orchid?  How would this church grow, gathered together by the Holy Spirit and given life?

The story of the church tells us that its growth has been prolific and multiform: an expansive garden with plants and trees and shrubs and flowers and succulents from virtually every culture, growing in all kinds of conditions.  Although it has not always been clear, we believe that this growth has been generally a good thing, that the Spirit’s multiplying power has been a blessing to the world.  A test of this, I would contend, is that wherever Jesus’ commandment to love one another in sacrificial service has been kept, you will find a healthy patch of God’s expansive garden.

All these centuries after that fist Pentecost, that birthday of the church, Christian communities, like us, celebrating the continuing gifts of the Spirit, and he weaves again a band of diverse and disparate people together into a body, a cause, a movement, have to decide what sort of thing will grow in this place where God has planted us.

It would seem to me that in many places communities are opting for a bonsai church: a diminished, miniaturized version of a larger original, that bears a striking resemblance to its parent, and can certainly live a long time, but that is smaller by definition, and kept within the shallow soil of an elegant container.

Smaller congregations,

smaller budgets,

smaller ministries,

smaller voices raised to God’s praise,

smaller prayers being offered for the peace of the world,

smaller promises of a smaller forgiveness,

smaller arms reaching out to a smaller number of people in need,

smaller expectations,

smaller blessings being given or being asked for,

smaller beauties,

smaller hopes for a smaller redemption,

smaller vision to heal a smaller blindness,

smaller steps in a smaller pilgrimage,

a smaller spirit to animate a smaller body,

a smaller song to sing a smaller Alleluia,

a smaller resurrection that leads to a smaller life in smaller heaven.

This is not to say that this smaller bonsai church is not beautiful and faithful, just that it is a smaller, miniaturized version of the church: smaller, I contend, than the church the Holy Spirit breathed life into on that first Pentecost, smaller than the fabric that Spirit began to weave all those centuries ago, smaller than the expansive garden that the saints planted and carried by ship and over land to Asia minor, to north Africa, and to Rome, and beyond.

But here’s the rub for us.  Saint Mark’s is a beautiful container.  And if we wanted to we could grow a beautiful bonsai church here.  We would be justified in doing it as a faithful expression of our crush on God, that has lasted here for more than 160 years.  In fact, it is precisely because our relationship with God is somewhat different from my unspoken crush on my friend with the bonsai tree that we might want to consider whether a bonsai church is what God is asking us to grow here.

God’s love to the people who have gathered here at Saint Mark’s since 1848 has been expansive.  He has sent the thunderous wind of his Holy Spirit to generations here, lighting tongues of flame above us, giving voice to many dialects of faith to hear and to heed his commandment to love one another in sacrificial service.

God gave the founders of this parish a bigger vision for a bigger beauty,

a bigger baptism leading to a bigger life in Christ,

bigger music to proclaim a bigger message,

a bigger call to repentance to pronounce a bigger forgiveness,

a bigger city to ask for bigger ministry,

bigger arms to welcome the weary,

a bigger hearth for a bigger hospitality,

bigger strides for a bigger pilgrimage,

bigger tears to shed for a bigger Passion,

bigger prayers for a bigger peace across this bigger world,

bigger compassion for the bigger suffering we see,

bigger room for a bigger inclusivity,

bigger basins to wash more feet,

a bigger Litany for bigger sins,

a bigger Magnificat of praise,

bigger wreaths of incense,

a bigger mystery of God’s bigger love,

a bigger Gospel for a bigger salvation

a bigger thanksgiving for God’s bigger Presence,

a bigger hope for bigger blessings,

a bigger song with bigger Alleluias to announce

a bigger resurrection to a bigger life in a bigger heaven!

There are some people who believe that the church in our day and age - smaller, weaker, less influential – has been dwarfed: permanently, genetically, unalterably diminished in every way.  But I think we have simply decided to opt for a bonsai church: elegant, beautiful, well-trained, restrained to survive within its container.  But the rushing wind and tongues of fire that come with the Holy Spirit have a way of blowing the lids off containers and shattering their sides.

And so the real question is about our crush on God - yours and mine.  The question is about whether we are willing to allow it to stay just a silly crush: un-talked-about, embarrassing, maybe even inappropriate.  Or have we been open to a real romance with God?  Are we willing to let his Holy Spirit all the way into our lives, to swoop us off our feet, lift us up and set us down in a new and bigger place?  Are we willing to feel the embrace of his spirit, blowing through this space even now, to hear his whispers of courtship in our ears, and to announce in full voice that we are head over heels in love with God?

When we do, we should not be surprised to discover, as generations before us have, that this corner of God’s garden cannot be contained in a small, ceramic pot.  We should not be surprised that God’s church has not, in fact, been dwarfed, that its roots are seeking deep groundwater, its branches are far-reaching, and its leaves provide a commodious shelter.

Perhaps in our romance we shall even discover that having been given what we thought was a bonsai church, we are compelled to take the restrained, carefully potted, perfectly formed tree from its container, and find a bit of good ground, and re-plant it there.

And will we lavish it with the attention it deserves and needs?  Will we protect it with our lives, in order to ensure that we can always offer it back to God healthy and whole?  Will rejoice in the deep bond that has formed between us and God, when we see what happens with this tree planted by his Son and watered by his Holy Spirit?  And will we know that this is what God has wanted all along, that his church should grow?

Come, Holy Spirit, come,

inspire our hearts,

set them on fire with your love,

and let your church grow!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Pentecost 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

What would someone who think who had no experience of professional sports, about the energy that fans burn up on their favorites? They might think that it was a deeply important matter, instead of a game for amusement.

I have come to see this obsession with sports as a function of one of the truisms of human behavior: that we define ourselves in large measure by identification with a group, a franchise, a culture, a clan or a family. It is desperately important to us to belong, to have some roots, I suppose belonging goes some distance to assuaging some of the loneliness which is part of being trapped in our own bodies and heads.

And so fans identify themselves with the Yankees, or the Cowboys, or the Flyers, as a way of belonging. Sports of course, are a lighter example of this identification and belonging, but there are far darker and more dangerous examples of it. Because one of the corollaries of belonging to a culture or group is that groups are often defined over and against other groups. We not only like to belong to a group, but one of the ways that we know we belong to a group is that we don't belong to that other group. There are a plethora of examples of this throughout history: the English and the Irish, (in fact, the English and almost everyone else whom they colonized), the Tutsis and Hutus, Jews and Palestinians, whites and blacks; we define who we are by defining who we are not.

In scientific terms these differences are negligible, of course. The genetic differences between “races” are to all extents and purposes, so minute as to be invisible. Indeed, “race” turns out to be one of those ways that we define ourselves, that we identify and belong.

The question of belonging and group identification has been very much in the news lately, as a state in which I used to live, Arizona, has voted for what I think of as a draconian law designed to discourage illegal immigration. What the law is saying is: we are Americans, they are not. We belong, they do not.

But it is not just Arizona, of course. The Church is involved in a massive debate about who belongs, who is inside the pale and who is not. The debate is about many things: who has legitimate claims to the faith of Augustine, Becket, Cranmer, and Ramsey; who has political power, money and property; whether women and gay persons belong as ordained persons in the Church; in short, who belongs in the Anglican Communion, and who does not, who belongs as the true descendant of the Church of England in these United States.

This is one of the ways that we do business as humans, we locate ourselves in the world, we define the boundaries that give us belonging, and we defend them.

But that way of doing business is alien to the Christian faith. Although it sometimes seems as if becoming a member of the Church is to become a member of yet another exclusive group, one might even say a rapidly shrinking, exclusive gathering, the Gospel this morning teaches us otherwise: the vows of baptism make us members of a body that brooks no boundaries, for all are one in Christ, as Christ is one with God. And this oneness, never quite realized but always underlying the life of the Church begins in the Gospel this morning, as Jesus prays for that nascent little ragtag band of disciples, that they will be one.

The message is that becoming a member of the body of Christ overwhelms all other artificial cultural barriers which separate, and makes us one with as diverse and ragtag a group of people as were those early disciples.

I was talking recently to someone who was here at St. Mark's years ago, and this is the story he told me. A former priest here, wandered into a potluck gathering, very much like we had this past Thursday after the Feast of the Ascension, and this priest wondered out loud where else you would find so unusual and diverse a gathering of people. The only possibility that he could come up with was an air raid shelter.

Look at the body of Christ's people, gathered in this place. People of deep faith, people who would like to have faith, all sorts of ethnic, racial, economic, and other diversities.

Multiply that by all the churches that have been and will be, by all the people that will gather in them, by all who will be united at the altars where Christ will be present from the beginning of the ragtag Church until the Last Trump and you get a sense of the diversity, the absolute mad unity of the life of the Church, which is Christ's body, to which we are called in the magnificent light of his resurrection. And imagine how ragamuffin a band is gathered, mystically, when we become one in the Sacrament of His Body and Blood, and with all that great multitude that none can number.

Which is why, though I shy away from politics in the pulpit, matters like Arizona's immigration law, civil rights, war and peace, genocide, health care, ecology, and economics are not simply political matters, but inherently religious ones.

In the Church, we are called into massive diverse fellowship which brooks no political boundaries. God calls Republicans and Democrats, Whigs, Tories, Liberal Democrats, Socialists, Communists, Ulster Orange men and Sinn Fein; everyone into the unseen unity of oneness with each other in God.

But that does not mean that simply everything is compatible with the vision of oneness that is part of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I or anyone can believe whatever we want about any political matter, but that does not mean that such a belief is compatible with the duty that I owe to my brothers and sisters in Christ, with whom I am one. If we are one in Christ, then I have specific duties and obligations to my brothers and sisters who come from south of the Arizona/Mexico border, or those who are called to ordained ministry who are women or gay people, or those who believe that schism is their only alternative, because we are one with each other, and will be together not just in this haphazard gathering that is the Church temporal, but forever.

C.S. Lewis once preached these words and they speak to the unity of the Body of Christ:

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, (shall we insert sports franchises), arts, civilisations--these are mortal... But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit--immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.”

If all are one in Christ, my actions and your actions always occur against the backdrop that is the oneness of that Body, and the excuses of political, or tribal, or family allegiance do not quell the responsibilities that I have to the whole Body, to the immortals we meet everyday. My actions can heal or wound that Body, seen or unseen.

Which means that we are none of us absolved either from the necessity of struggling to understand and work for political ends which are consonant with the Gospel (which affect the real lives of immortal people that we are united to in Christ), or from the hard, hard work of being one in Christ with people who it is very, very difficult to be one with. That is the kind of “shirt of flame” that oneness in Christ binds us to.

Yesterday, the Diocese of Los Angeles consecrated two bishops suffragon. They were the 16^th and 17^th women to be consecrated as bishops in the Episcopal Church, (the 1044^th and 1045^th bishops in the American succession), but what has garnered so much news is that one of them, Mary Glasspool, is openly gay and has lived for the past 19 years in a committed relationship with another woman.

The election and the consent process by which the Episcopal Church has agreed to now-Bishop Glasspool's consecration, has garnered the usual baleful predictions about the end of the Anglican Communion and the departure of the Episcopal Church from the historic faith.

And, whenever I hear that noise, from the conservative side of the aisle, my knee-jerk inclination is to say “You know what? You don't like it? Don't let the door hit you on the way out. Good riddance!”

But, of course, I owe my beloved brothers and sisters so much more than that. We are one in Christ, whether they like it, or even believe it, and whether I like it or agree with it.

It is a madness, of course, to gather all of us crazy people of faith throughout time into one body. By doing this God is operating with what Dorothy Sayers used to call “His usual outrageous lack of scruple.” But as is often the case with God's lack of scruple, who are we to complain?

So, brothers and sisters, let us glory in the ridiculousness of being one in Christ! Come conservative breakaway Anglicans, come right wing Republican lawmakers in Arizona, come Yankees fans, come terrorists, and people of all colors and strips, come with me to the Supper of the Lamb. It matters not that I cannot understand you and have terrible trouble loving you. I'm sure I'm not that easy to love either. But we are one in Christ. God in his glory and wonder has made us one.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

Easter VII

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Since I spent some formative time studying the spirituality of the Eastern Church, I like to think of these two different realities using the metaphor of icons. Icons often have the heavy golden backdrop, which symbolizes the uncreated Divine light. And the heavy, solemn figures are meant to represent the eternal, immortal figures of saints and angels, as they are upon that other shore, and in that uncreated light.

The effect and the theory is very much that icons are windows, through which the eternal comes close to the temporal, and through which we stare at the mighty figures of the faith and through which they stare back at us.

As we go through the liturgical year, we wander, I think, between those two poles, between the unseen reality of eternity, in which Christ is risen, ascended, and King, and the seen reality of our lives, which often feel very much as if Christ's death was meaningless, faith foolish, and evil very much in the ascendancy.

I think that is why living in liturgical time sometimes feels disjointed to me. There are times when the Church is very much in the stream of earthly time, and there are times when we live in moments of eternity. In Lent and ordinary time we are rooted in the temporal, in the sense of our sinfulness and coming deaths, or in the ordinary life and teachings of Jesus, but there are moments like Eastertide when we live very much upon that other shore, in time that is not our time, when we live in the joy of the risen Christ, that joy that is ours always, whether or not we can see through the veil that shrouds it sometimes. Those moments when we live in the reality of Christ's victory.

As we go through the year with Christ, and celebrate the moments in his life that have import for us, there are some moments when the two different realities, the two different frames get remarkably close to each other, and a window seems to open and we get for an instant, a vision of the mighty and eternal.

The Ascension is just such a feast, I think, and I always feel that way about the Feast of the Transfiguration as well. These moments when we are given a vision of Jesus, not just as the rabbi and Messiah, or even as the Incarnate Word of God walking among us, but as this figure of unbelievable majesty and power eternally glorious.

But it is always slightly confusing to come to terms with those moments when eternity comes near. Often, I feel as if I'm in deep waters, playing a game whose rules have suddenly changed, when Jesus sails up into heaven, or becomes illuminated like some kind of human light bulb. Because the question always becomes, “What does it mean?” I don't have trouble finding meaning in Jesus' healing the sick, or raising the dead, or in teaching the love of God and neighbors. But what does it mean that Jesus ascended. The Church has long held it as momentous, as a great feast of the Church, but what does it mean? What does it mean in the life of Jesus, and what does it mean in the lives of those of us who apprehend him by faith, although he is hid from our sight?

I'm not sure that I can answer either of those questions satisfactorily, but there are several things that occur to me. One of the directions that the Ascension makes my mind wander in is in terms of the resurrected Jesus. I wonder if the Ascension isn't an indicator of how different the resurrected Jesus was, physically.

During Eastertide we've seen the disciples fail to recognize him again and again; we've seen him appear suddenly to the disciples, despite locked door. We've seen him skip around Palestine appearing here, there everywhere. There is clearly something about Jesus risen that is massively different and changed. His body is not like ours, because he has risen glorious from the tomb. He is present to the disciples, but not as he has been.

And yet even resurrected, Jesus is linked to a time and a place. He is changed, but still with his disciples at specific times and places. His wounds are still there, and he eats and walks with them.

I wonder if the collect for today doesn't help to explain to the meaning and importance of the Ascension for us. “Almighty God, whose blessed Son our Savior Jesus Christ ascended far above all heavens that he might fill all things...”

I like to think then, that the Ascension is the moment and perhaps the symbol of the transformation when Christ, even in his resurrected body, moves from being bounded by time and place, and becomes universal, becomes present to all time and all creation.

And that, I think, is the answer to the question of why it matters. Because in many ways the Ascension might feel otherwise like an leaving, like a loss, like being abandoned. We might be tempted to say “Those lucky few disciples got to know him, but now he's gone to some castle in the sky, and I don't get to experience him or know him.”

Christ is ascended and the glory of his very being has gone out into all the world and into all history, and somehow because he is less present to us, face to face, somehow he is more present, more available, more powerful in his might and majesty.

Somehow, because he is ascended, he is present everywhere, on innumerable altars, in hearts throughout the world and times; in prisons and mines, in boardrooms and courtrooms, in tents and shanty towns, to the super wealthy and the abject poor; everywhere and every when, Christ fills all things, redeems all things, sanctifies and blesses all things, draws all things into his resurrected life, and into the very life of the Triune God.

Which is good to remember here, near the end of Eastertide, when we shift back into the life of ordinary time, and the veil that blocks out eternity comes down again.

Christ is ascended and he fills all things with his glory and majesty. He will come again in glory, and is with us unto the ages of the ages.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

The Feast of the Ascension of Our Lord

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia