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 

People who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking homeland.  If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return.  But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one.  Therefore, God… has prepared a city for them. (Heb. 11:15-16)


Almost six years ago a word entered common usage that had not previously been part of our everyday lexicon: we began speaking in America about the “homeland.”  Before the terrorist attacks of 9-11 I think we would have been more prosaic, referring perhaps to things that happen “on US soil.”  But from our national tragedy there sprung up (I guess) a need to define our space with an idea rather than an area: a home land; the home land.  And, of course, the need for homeland security.

I have never been comfortable with this new-ish word, or with how quickly it became a part of our regular usage.  I love this country, and I have seen a lot of it – from sea to shining sea – knowing something of its breadth and magnificence makes it all the more absurd to think of it as my homeland or yours.  We are an extraordinarily blessed nation in all the beauty and resources that have been entrusted to us.  But I have difficulty thinking about the vast region of this continent as a homeland.  What could that mean?

For a long time I suspected that my dis-ease with the word “homeland” was basically political.  It just sounds too right-wing to me, too paternalistic, too politically charged, too ready to be invoked as a cry to arms, too good a reason to want to stand up and declare yourself proud to be an American, too reminiscent of the dangerous nationalism of another time and place.  

But now I realize that there is something in the word that I respond to as a Christian – something about the term that wants to appeal to a deeper longing in my heart.  There is something about the idea of the homeland that seems to require a religious zeal – just as it requires protection at all costs and a federal Department to look after that protection.

And I hope I do not sound unpatriotic when I say that my heart resists the tugging of the strings of the homeland.  My ears find the tones of its anthems (sung by security guards at airport x-ray machines) hollow and even annoying.  I have a home in this land, and I pray that I will for as long as I live.  But can this ever be the homeland for me or for you?

Somewhere in the heart of the Christian there is meant to be a journey; somewhere deeply rooted in our lives there is a sojourn through wilderness.  Our story is a story of wanderings and wanderers who responded time and time again to the call from God to “Go” somewhere – often without knowing where.  Our hope has been in a promise declared to generations.  But long ago we stopped connecting that promise to a patch of land.

Instead, we have heard in God’s insistent call to go from here to there the rudiments of our faith.  What is Christian faith if not the conviction that God has someplace for us to go and that he will lead us there no matter how unlikely it seems?

Faith has gotten a bad name these days.  If you do something “by faith” you are a fool because you are doing it not only against all odds, but against reason.  We are said to take “on faith” truths that no reasonable person would subscribe to and that science has disproved – like a literal biblical explanation for the creation of the universe.  To be a person of faith is a sign of a weak intellect and quite possibly a mental deficiency.  Faith is pre-scientific, pre-historic, and mostly the domain of previous generations.

But these are caricatures of faith: cartoon versions of a silly kind of faith that sounds like willful ignorance.  Faith is actually something altogether different.  It is the thread that has tied generation after generation of wanderers together, leading in a single, specific, and puposeful direction.  

The writer of the biblical letter to the Hebrews sees it connecting the first children – Cain and Abel – to Noah and his clan in the ark.  Then on to Abraham, the father of faith and to Sarah his once childless wife.  The thread was not broken, as it seemed it might be, when Abraham led his son Isaac up to the mountain.  From Isaac it passed to Jacob then to Joseph and into Egypt.  In faith Moses took up the thread to lead Israel out of Egypt and across the red Sea and from there the story goes on: wandering, wandering through desert lands, clinging to a promise.

This is what faith looks like: you pack your bags and you get up and go somewhere.  Faith is a journey of promise.  And long ago we stopped connecting that promise to a patch of land.

Which brings me back to the homeland.

Because for now, it is clear that Christians have no homeland in this world.  Our wanderings to a promised land ceased long ago to be connected to real estate and we fixed our hopes (when Jesus taught us) on the kingdom of heaven, where the true Christian homeland lies.  

If we are, in the words of the writer of Hebrews, “thinking of that land from which [we] had gone out, [we]… have opportunity to return.”  But maybe the awful fate of Lot’s wife (remember her), who was turned to a pillar of salt when she looked back toward Sodom, was meant as a sign after all: a warning against the desire to turn back.  After all, Jesus tells his disciples that whoever puts his hand to the plow and then turns back is not fit for the kingdom.

And that is the challenge of faith in our own day and age, as it has ever been: to fix our hopes on citizenship in heaven, to desire a better country: one of God’s design.

The proof of our faith will never be found in the map of a homeland that stretches from Atlantic to Pacific, from Canada to Mexico.  And in fact, when we adopt the idea of this kind of homeland in our hearts, we are, in a sense, looking back.  We are crowding out the space that God has meant for faith to fill with a yearning for his promises.  And we have been warned of the danger of looking back.

Here in this land, it might be that God asks us to express our faith not by constructing and alternative homeland, but by building small models of that better country that we believe he has prepared for us.  This is why it is an act of faith to struggle for justice and to work for peace, to reach out to another in need, to visit the shut-in or the imprisoned, or to help out a child in need.  These are little expeditions in faith when we journey beyond our present reality to live for a moment or two in the kind of country we imagine God has prepared for us.

In an excellent book the Scottish writer, Rory Stewart chronicles his own expedition: a walk across Afghanistan, just weeks after the American-led invasion and the fall of the Taliban.  Afghanistan is a country that seems to constitutionally resist nationhood.  There are many homelands in Afghanistan, but it os nobody’s homeland.

Stewart writes of a conversation he has as he asks for directions from and old Afghan who has probably never traveled more than a few kilometers from his own village.

“’Forget the road,’ he said, ‘because you don’t want to go [that way] at all…  it will add two days to your journey at least.’

‘Have you walked this route,’ [Stewart] asked.

‘Not all of it, but I was told about it by my father.’   

…’Can you give me the names of the big men in that valley?’” Stewart asks.  

And the man and his friends begin to recite the names of men they have heard of in towns they have never been to and never will go, but which provide a useful map of village after village, that will save two days of walking.

“Mir Ali Hussein Beg is the greatest man in the Sar Jungal valley….  He is three days beyond Dualatyar.  In a day you could get to Mukhtar, the place of Mizra Beg, and then to Charasiab, home of Abdul Rezak Khan….  Then Mir Ali Hussein Beg at Katlish….   Then Ghulam Haider Khan at Shahi Murri, …one day and then you are at Yakawlang.”

Stewart calls this kind of a map a song-of-the-places-in-between.  It is precisely the same kind of map that the writer to the Hebrews is using when he traces the thread of faith from Cain and Abel to Noah and Abraham and Sarah and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph, to Moses, and then to Gideon and Samuel and David and the prophets and countless others who carried the thread of faith forward.

And it is the kind of map that is not much in use in these days of global positioning systems, and Homeland Security, and Google maps that can show you a satellite photo of almost anywhere you care to look and even let you zoom in.  

The map of the places-in-between is an assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of things unseen.  And it can never outline the contours of a homeland.

And you and I, my brothers and sisters, have been given such a map in the story of our faith.  Which means that we have been called by God to live, as our forebears did, in the places-in-between.  God calls us, day after day to go out on expeditions of faith building models of that better country that he has promised us and looking for the dawning of the day when the kingdom shall be established in full-scale.

And God has given us a map that includes such points of interest as the place where Sarah laughed, and the spot where Abraham almost did in Isaac, the hard-to-see pillar of salt that once was Lot’s wife.  But there are countless other markers on the map of the places-in-between: crazy Francis stripping down to his birthday suit, Patrick preaching about shamrocks, monks and kings and princesses and paupers; there is the dream of a preacher in Alabama, and the way my grandmother prayed her rosary.  All of these full of meaning and direction on the map of places-in-between.  

This is the map of our faith.  Forget the road, because you don’t want to go that way at all, who knows how many days it will add to your journey.

And if you are thinking of that land from which we have been sent out – if you are thinking of the homeland, as though you should stand up and be proud about it – there is always the opportunity to return.  But how will you ever know what you have missed?  How will you ever know about those things that you have hoped for and about all the promises of God that are things yet unseen?  

And how will we ever discover that better country, where God has prepared for us a city if we have fooled ourselves that the homeland is right here where we already are?

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
12 August 2007
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Most of us have probably experienced that potentially awkward moment when the check arrives at a restaurant and no one at the table reaches for it.  This is not so unsettling if you are with a group (just like in Monopoly, eventually someone will be designated the banker and will have to work out the tip).  But at a table for two it can induce a little anxiety.  Especially if you know your wallet is empty and you are not quite sure how far below maximum your credit card is.

Do you begin to think through the details of the arrangements?  Who invited whom?  Isn’t it obvious this is supposed to be her treat?!  He chose this restaurant, he can’t possibly think I’m going to pay for it!

If the check sits there long enough it will become awkward indeed, when we realize that something is required of us that we never expected.

If this has been a date, it is a bad portent, not least because confusion about expectations is not a healthy thing in a relationship.  Of course in our relationship with God we are often confused about the expectations and seldom more so than when the check arrives, so to speak.  That is, when we discover that something is expected of us and it just might include cash!

Today we hear Jesus teaching about expectations that God has of us.  And it is somewhat startling to hear him talk this way.  “Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?”  It feels a little like the check has arrived and Jesus has pushed it over to our side of the table.  Didn’t you know that something was required of you?  Two things, Jesus teaches, are required, two things: your treasure and your soul.  Put it another way: your money and your life.

Many of us do not first come to church because we are looking for something to do with our money and our lives.  Many of us come to church as shoppers, looking to see if there is anything we want.  Or to extend my earlier metaphor, we come to church as potential diners, checking the menu to see if there is anything we want.  What do I feel like for Sunday brunch this week?  And in many ways this is fine.  Jesus was perfectly accustomed to people coming up to him to see if he offered what they needed or wanted.  And if it was OK with Jesus it should be OK with us too, since we, the church, are working for him now.

But isn’t it chilling to hear him remind us that the check does come?  Isn’t it unsettling to be told that if we expect to dine at this particular table, we had better be prepared to pay the price?

This goes against so much of what I want to say about the Gospel.  God’s grace is FREE by definition!  I want to cry out.  Come as you are: fall into the loving arms of Christ and be washed in the soothing rain of his mercy, forgiveness and love.  All of which is true – but it is not the whole truth.

You fool, Jesus says, don’t realize that this very night your soul is required of you?

God wants our money and our lives… which would be entirely unreasonable if it were not based on the assumption that everything we have (our money and our lives) came from God in the first place.

Let’s start with our lives.  Although most of us feel perfectly free to talk about the “soul” there is not exactly universal agreement about what is meant by this term.  And in the typical posturing of our time, the argument is regularly made these days that belief in a human soul is nothing more than superstition, now that science has taught us how the brain works.  But in this parish, we have not been fooled, thank God, by the artificial argument that you can believe in either science or God, but not both.  So we ask about the soul without turning our backs on science.

What is the soul? Will it float out of your body or through your nostrils when you die?  Does it linger in the universe like a radio wave?  Is it waiting in some netherworld to be united at the last judgment to your re-constructed body?  Most definitions are clear that the soul is what makes us distinctly who we are.  Our souls, like our bodies, are gifts from God that carry our spiritual fingerprints, our more mystical DNA.

It is our souls that respond to the awareness of God in the world and in our lives – often before our bodies do – because our souls recognize their authorship in God.  It is our souls that lean toward God if all is well with our souls, or away from God if we have become spiritually unhealthy.  And it seems to be our souls that reach out to the souls of others, sounding the depths of another person’s life and finding that the echoes resonate powerfully in the depths of our own lives, sometimes joining us to a mate.  If our bodies are tissue and fiber and water and electrical impulses and proteins and acids all organized in a magnificent way, then our souls are everything about us that can’t be accounted for with those tissues and fibers and water and electricity and proteins and acids.  

It was the soul of a young man, earlier this week, that caused him – quite beyond his own intentions or willfulness, he reported – to save the lives of children on a school bus dangling over the Mississippi River on the edge of that collapsed bridge.  It is his soul that accounts for the movement of his hands and his feet (which he himself could not account for) as he snatched each child from their dangerous perch and lifted them to safety.  He could not account for his own movements, his own bravery, his own gracefulness. It was his soul - his unique and deep-seated identity as God’s child, created by love for love – that animated the most important day of that young man’s life, and of the children’s whose lives he saved.

In our society, very little corrupts the soul so easily and so often as money, since money and power are intimately linked in American society.  Very little prevents our souls from flourishing so easily as money.  This is a perverse irony since there is very little in this world that drives our ambitions, our actions, our imaginations, our hopes and our dreams, as powerfully as money does.  Who wants to be a millionaire?  Only those who have not yet decided that they want to be a billionaire.  Money – which is perfectly useful in running a society, even Jesus taught this – easily becomes a force in our lives that eclipses God’s purposes for us.  

To point to a distant example, money is powerfully at work in the corrupt society of Zimbabwe, where president Robert Mugabe has amassed enormous fortunes for himself and a coterie of the favored, at the expense of the welfare of everyone else in the nation.  He has quite literally built larger barns to store the cars and the cash and the goods he has amassed.  While his countrymen struggle and starve, he can eat, drink and be merry.  The corruption of Zimbabwe as a society seems, tragically, to find its perfect expression in the soul of its president.

Closer to home, in American society, we have noticed how a very few people are amassing enormous fortunes.  And we read with interested curiosity about the hedge fund managers who draw ever more and more money and goods into their barns (just to choose one category of the ultra rich).  We should be horrified by this trend in America to concentrate great wealth in the hands of a relatively few people.  

We might be worried for the souls of those who take so much more than they could ever possibly need, just because they can take it.  But mostly we are fascinated because we are envious.  Who wants to be a billionaire?  We do.  Who doesn’t want to be a billionaire?  If only we could eat, drink, and be merry the way the rich and famous can.  But since we know that we can’t all be hedge fund managers, the fondest hopes of many an American can be summed up in two simple words: Power Ball.  What barns we could build and fill up with things!  Oh how we would eat, drink, and be merry if we won the lottery!

The people who first followed Jesus were not wealthy people.  They had little, and what they had they shared (even if it was only a few loaves and fishes).  And in the New Testament you will find many warnings about wealth: it makes it hard to enter the kingdom of God.  This is not because money is bad, it is because we have given it the power to corrupt our souls.

And so Jesus keeps inviting us back to his table.  He brings us into communion with him so that from time to time we can have this conversation.  From time to time, he can remind us about our souls.  He reminds us who made us and why we were made (that we were made by love for love).  And from time to time as we sit with Jesus, we realize that there is a check on the table.  Jesus is not awkward about this.  He does not let it sit there silently as we try to work out who’s going to pick up the tab.  Looking us straight in the eye, he pushes it over to us.

And we might think, Who is this guy?  And who invited whom here, anyway?  Doesn’t he realize this is all supposed to be his treat?  He can’t possibly imagine that I’m going to pay for this!

This is an awkward moment in our relationship with Jesus.  But does he really need to say anything?  Does he need to explain that long ago he bought our lives with his life, bought our freedom with his death and resurrection?

Does he really need to remind us that we were not actually made to be billionaires and that as hopes and dreams go, the amassing of fortunes is woefully unimaginative?

Does he really need to teach us how caring for all our things so easily gets in the way of caring for one another?

Does he really have to show us that we are creatures of God, made with a soul that bears the unmistakable hallmark of God’s workmanship?

Perhaps he does.  Which is why he has been trying to teach us how to love.  Because he knows that a person in love will do things they might not otherwise do.  A person in love will reach for the check before you can even feign to reach for your wallet.  A person in love will give her money and her life to another.  A person in love sees that something is required of him.  And a person in love is happy to give it.

You and I, my friends, were made by love for love.  We have been given everything by God, the One who made us, including our souls, that make us who we are and that one day God will gather into nearer communion with him.  But for now, God is trying to teach us that something is required of us in this relationship: our money and our lives.  Not because he needs it, but because we are never more like God (who made us to be like him) than when we are giving.

Our awkwardness with God comes not just out of confusion, but from the realization that God is in love with us.  He sent his Son to love us and to teach us to love.  And ever since then he has been wondering if we are also in love with him.  Which sometimes we can’t just say with our lips, we have to practice it and show it forth in our lives.

And the check sits on the table.

Tragedy, by virtue of its scale, has a way underscoring more present and mundane realities of our daily lives.  And the two tragedies I mentioned earlier – one on the Mississippi River and in on ongoing in Zimbabwe – have something to teach us.

On the one hand, there are scores and hundreds of school buses full of children who are in danger in this city, and thousands more throughout our nation, who desperately need someone to help them.  And on the other hand, there is our temptation to build larger barns, and store our luxury cars in them, and surround them with gates, and live like kings.

What if this very night our souls should be required of us?  What if God wanted us to account for who we are, for the gifts of grace that he has poured into our lives?  What if God wanted to account for the love with which he made us?  What has become of that love?

What if we should realize that Jesus has quietly and deliberately pushed the check over to our side of the table?

We could always just get up and leave the table, leaving the check to him.   It’s OK, it has happened before, and he can handle it.

Or we could learn from him and take the check, and reach into our hearts and into our wallets and do our best to give, do our best to love.  And see what happens.


Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
5 August 2007
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia