But there is a topic not covered in the questions that I feel it is important to discuss, and which compels me to give to the couple the only piece of advice that I give about marriage.  The topic is forgiveness.

I know couples whose basic position about forgiveness is this: that they can forgive the other almost anything, except….  The “except” is big: a line in the sand that must not be crossed.  And if a couple has thought about this (although I suspect that many don’t really think about it until after the wedding day) that exception is one thing and one thing only: infidelity.

As I said, most couples don’t come to me looking for advice, and I am not inclined to give it about marriage.  But on the topic of forgiveness, I am not inclined to keep silent.

And although love-besotted brides and grooms probably pay me little mind when they hear me say it, my advice to them is to begin their married life with no line in the sand; no exception established in either’s mind from the outset for which forgiveness could not be sought and offered in return.  Not even if there is infidelity.  No exceptions at all.  This is not to say that I believe there are never circumstances in which a marriage could and should rightly end in divorce, sad though that would be.  I am only saying that couples should not begin their married lives knowing that there is something the marriage could not survive, for lack of forgiveness.

My rationale for this piece of advice is found in what I believe and know about God: that there is no exception to God’s forgiveness.  And that even in the simple prayer Jesus taught us to pray we ask God to “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us,” and I think husbands and wives and partners ought to mean that when they say it – or at least try.

Brides and grooms-to-be have to sit and listen to my only piece of advice, which is premised on a lesson about God.  But almost no one else has to hear it – except of course a captive congregation who finds themselves sitting through a sermon!  And you may or may not need to hear advice about forgiving your spouse, your partner, your friend, or perhaps your enemy.  But if you are anything like me, you do need to be reminded the lesson about God.  Because many of us have somehow absorbed the idea that ours is a God who has drawn lines in the sand.  Our shorthand for this is to remember that we once heard it said that God is an angry and a jealous God.

To us, this sounds like a God who has all kinds of boundaries that may not, must not, cannot be crossed, or else….  And indeed we have lots of images of such an angry and jealous God who fills the skies with thunder clouds and lightning bolts as he prepares to wreak his vengeance on those who cross him.

But today Jesus has advice for those of us who believe this about God.

"A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none.  So he said to the gardener, 'See here!  For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none.  Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?'  He replied, 'Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it.  If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.'"

If I could only take one parable of the Scriptures with me to a desert island this would be it.  Because the fig tree, of course, is me (or you, if you care to put yourself in the story).  It requires no real stretch of my imagination to see that I have not been the person I could be; that I have not done all that I could with the gifts God’s given me; that in so many ways I have failed to bear the fruit of good works and kindness and love that God has made me for and calls me to.

Maybe you could say this about yourself as well.  The season of Lent is in some measure given to us to reflect on the ways we resemble the fig tree in this parable.  Notice that we do not even have to get to the things we have done wrong (although I believe we are free to remember those) it is enough to think about what we have failed to do – those things we have left undone, as we say.  Have I been faithful to God in prayer?  Have I been merciful to those who need my help?  Generous to those who deserve my largesse?  Kind to those who seek my fellowship?  Have I been available to those who need me and can rightly lay claim to that need?  Have I been gracious to those who just happen to find themselves in my sphere? 

Sometimes we have such low expectations of ourselves that we do pretty well by these measures, until we begin to expand our focus and see more of the world around us, the people we normally ignore, or have already shut out, those beyond the immediate company of our family and friends.  But God’s expectations of us are not low at all.  He has always called his people to be welcoming to strangers; to care for those who are needy not because we know them, but just because they are in need; to love not only those whom it’s easy for us to like, but even to love our enemies.  If this is the kind of fruit we are to bear in our lives, how are we doing?

Now, in the cartoon version of life that has become the common picture for many these days, I am supposed to rail at you from the pulpit about your many failings in these ways.  I am supposed to encourage your shame, identify you as sinners, affix a scarlet letter to your clothes, condemn you to a life of guilt, and threaten you with the fires of hell.  In this cartoon world, dour nuns wield stiff rulers to whack children’s hands; hypocritical priests hurl accusations at the innocent, suffering poor; and a greedy church takes from you what you can ill afford to give in order to fill her hallways with extravagance.  And no doubt the church has been guilty of all these cartoon crimes at one time or another.

But there is still the matter of the fig tree, which has failed to bear fruit year after year.  No one has guilted the fig tree about anything.  No one berated it in Catholic school when it was young.  No one took from it what was rightfully the tree’s and deprived it the chance to produce figs.  The tree was just planted and left to grow and do what fig trees do: to grow figs, which are sweet and wonderful and delicious.

But year after year the tree gives no figs.

The owner of the tree remembers that he heard once that ours is an angry and a jealous God; and he remembers too that he is made in God’s image (his is a selective memory).  A fig tree ought to produce figs; its owner has every right to expect them, he thinks.  What is the point of a fig-less fig tree, after all?  So cut that tree down and teach it a lesson – a lesson that will no doubt be noticed by all the other fig trees too!  Where is that ax?

But there is also a gardener – or at least someone who we think is the gardener, though he looks a little familiar to me, come to think of it.  This gardener is not the type to draw lines in the sand.  Is he disappointed by a fig tree that bears no figs?  Perhaps.  Is prepared to give up on it and cut it down?  No, he is not.  Does he believe a good strong dose of guilt or haranguing, or the threat of eternal damnation will induce the tree to grow figs?  It would appear not.

But the gardener has a pile of manure – which is neither expensive or exotic.  And he has time.  And he has a way with the owner of the tree.  “Sir,” he says, “let it alone one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it.  If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not…” well, you know….

In my cartoon world, on my desert island, where this is the only parable I have to tell, it is told over and over, year after year.  The exasperated owner remembers that this is the third, no fourth, no fifth, no twentieth year in a row he has had this conversation with the gardener.  But always he relents, neither as angry or as jealous as he had at first seemed.

And in my cartoon world, there is an endless supply of manure to be heaped on this fig tree by the gardener, to help it grow, help it thrive, help it bear much fruit.

And of course in my cartoon world, I am the fig tree, peering out from beneath my leafy, but so far fig-less branches.  And I have heard the demands of the owner year after year, I have remembered that he sounds so much like a jealous and an angry God, but I notice that he always heeds the gardener.  And I am grateful that there is a pile of manure for me, because it is so hard to draw a line in a pile of manure, to define the limits of what the gardener will tolerate, what he will put up with, what he will forgive.  Indeed, to me, he seems to have no limit, no line that cannot be crossed.  He seems to me to have nothing but patience and plenty of manure to try to keep me humble, and to coax my limbs to finally bring forth fruit, and offer the first figs to him.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

7 March 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

In the Times, Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote about the wonder of being pulled on a sled by a team of dogs: “They don’t run for a reward or toward a goal — the greyhound’s mechanical rabbit. They get yelled at when they chew on the gangline and petted when the run is over. They don’t catch or flee anything. They would keep running if the musher fell off his sled.”[i] 

And he wonders, “Why do sled dogs run?” which they do with such un-restrained zeal.  He can only think of one-word answers: “love, joy, duty, obedience.”

I have friends in suburban Philadelphia with a Husky who corroborate this assessment of a sled dog: he lives to run.  They are very cautious not to let him run in unconfined areas or off the leash, they tell me, because once he starts running it is hard to get him to stop.

Most of us do not approach Lent with the zeal of a sled dog straining at his harness to begin a race.  We have devised Lent as a dreary time, when we tell ourselves that we are restrained, harnessed as it were to some unfortunate discipline.  Certainly we devise the rituals of our worship to underscore this idea.  The old fashioned prayers we sometimes say here, go on and on about our bodily fasting.

But, while I grew up in a house where we were very likely to be given Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks on a Friday in Lent, I doubt my parents are as scrupulous about the observance of meatless Fridays these days as they used to be, and I know that I am often careless in the observance.  I am guessing that perhaps your Lenten disciplines do not cramp your style too much.  And I know there is a city out there, and beyond, that would merely giggle at such thoughts.

The Gospel today invites us to consider temptations, but we are mostly so accustomed to yielding to our desires – because we can – that we hardly even know what temptation is any more, other than the occasional wish to consume more chocolate or more ice cream than we should.  Besides, Jesus’ temptation by Satan is of such a particular and scripted variety that it can seem to have little to do with us.

So I could enjoin you to be strict on your fasting, or whatever it is you have given up for Lent (if anything); and I could warn you against the power of Satan to tempt you.  But I doubt I would be getting very far or sound very compelling.  And since I normally preach to myself, I can tell you that I know I wouldn’t be making much headway with myself!

Which brings me back to the sled dogs, and that interesting comment: “They would keep running if the musher fell off his sled.”  This is not how I thought of a team of animals pulling a heavy sled.  I rather imagined that there was a whip involved, and a great deal of demanding, ordering, coercing, maybe even some denial of food – to keep the dogs hungry.  It’s hard for me to imagine the dogs enjoying being harnessed, longing for the run, the cold, the ice, the snow, the panting.  Very hard for me to imagine them simply wanting to run when it is not even required of them – for what?  The love, the joy, the duty, the obedience of it?  Can it be that there are creatures like this?  I confess I am not at all sure I see these traits in my own dogs.  But then, they were not made for it.

And what of you and me?  What were we made for?  This is a question so many of us struggle with, and many feel doomed to spend their whole lives wandering, not knowing the answer, since we are certain that it must have something to do with what we used to call our occupation, but now we imagine must be our passion.

During Lent, the Church suggests that whatever your occupation, you try living like a sled dog.  Which is to say, try living in the harness; listening for the call to go where you are instructed, rather than wherever you please; running hard, part of a team that is also harnessed; doing it not for the benefit of a reward, nor because of a whip that threatens you, but for the love of it, the joy of it, the duty of it, even the obedience of it.

This might mean taking something on during Lent, or giving something up.  It might mean doing something you have been avoiding, but that you know will be good for you or for those you love.  It clearly means testing a life that is different than the one we have been living.  Unlike a sled dog, it depends on each of us taking the time to think about what should or could be different, better in our lives, how we could become the better selves that we suspect lurk somewhere under the more selfish selves we see most often.

Would that involve a diet?  Fewer cigarettes?  A decision to go to an AA meeting for the first time?  Would it mean treating your partner or your spouse differently?  Calling your mother for the first time since who knows when?  Could it mean coming to church more often, or saying your prayers at home every day?  Might you decide to give some of your time to a cause or another person who needs you?  Is it possible it will cost you money as you learn to be more generous with others?  Only you will know, if you take the time to be honest with yourself.

And if you do, you may consider the possibility of changing your life with a certain dread, a wistfulness for giving up whatever ease, or indulgence, or habit, or wastefulness you are loathe to let go of.  It may seem to you that life could only be darker, smaller, less delightful if you are strapped into a harness and called on to run.

But it may be that you discover how wonderful it is to feel the cold air in your lungs, and your heart beating fast and strong, and the scenery whizzing by, and your team mates around you running hard and happily too.  Not because we are forced too, or because we are late, or because we are trying to catch or flee anything... but just for the love, joy, duty, and, yes, the obedience of living life more nearly to the way God made us to live it – with a bit less of us and a bit more of him.

And wouldn’t it be something if people saw the way you and I live our lives – with less of ourselves, and more of God – and wondered why; why do they run like that?  Would they suspect that it is because we have submitted to the whippings of an angry, demanding, and coercive God?

And wouldn’t it be wonderful to show that we could choose to live this way – making better choices, being our better selves – even when Lent is over?  Wouldn’t it be wonderful to discover that we could run just for the love, joy, duty, and obedience of it; that we would run even if the musher fell off his sled?

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

21 February 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

[i] Klinkenborg, Verlyn.  “Why Do Sled Dogs Run?”  In The New York Times. 13 February 2010

I was reading recently a history of how people in different times and places have interacted and reacted to space, which may sound rather abstract but is actually quite fascinating. Throughout history, people have generally seemed to find a similar awe and amazement in different spaces. The magnificence of Chartres Cathedral has been experienced by people for 800 years without much reservation, but there are some notable exceptions. One of the most interesting examples of people responding very differently in a time and place was the response of people during the 18^th century to the Alps. There was, apparently, no awe or astonishment at the beauty of the Matterhorn; instead people found the Alps rather terrifying, and the practice if one was forced to undergo the trial of crossing the Alps was to travel in a closed carriage so that one would not have to experience the terror of the Alps.

Which I would find incomprehensible except that I think those two emotions, awe and terror are not too far removed from each other, and perhaps go very much hand in hand.

Awe is one of the glories of human emotion – to feel astonished and overwhelmed by wonder at a glorious sunset over the ocean, or the space of a cathedral, or the silence of an old growth forest.

Beyond the awe that we feel at the natural world is the awe that we feel when we encounter the transcendent, indeed sometimes it is the glory of nature that leads us to that encounter with God. Encountering the mystery of the Divine is always awe inspiring, often unexpected, and it is not unusual to have a feeling of unworthiness, of smallness, even of terror in the face of the God who is wholly powerful and other. Like the Alps, we may encounter the majesty of God with terror, with a wish to withdraw and block out the vastness and majesty of that sight.

We have that sense of awe and of unworthiness expressed both in the reading from Isaiah and in the Gospel this morning. The prophet has a vision of the Lord glorious and enthroned and it is the kind of experience that leaves him blind and groping, deeply aware of his own unworthiness in the face of the heavenly court crying “Holy,” shaking the hinges of the Temple with their voices. “Woe is me!” he says, “for I am a man of unclean lips and live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”

Simon Peter has a similar experience in the Gospel. After a night of fruitless fishing, as he is washing his nets, Jesus gets into his boat to teach, and once he's finished teaching, he tells Peter to let down his nets on the other side of the boat. Despite how ridiculous the request is, Peter tries it, and ends up swamping both the boats with a massive catch of fish. And like the prophet, Peter is brought up short by an awareness of his own limitation and sinfulness. Falling to his knees he says “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.”

However we encounter the Divine, it can be a sobering experience that brings home to us our finitude and our own very real lack of perfection, before a God whose worship shakes the doors of the Temple.

And that is not an inappropriate emotion – however much we encounter God in the small things of life, in quiet moments and kind words, or however much we encounter God in the person of Jesus, speaking to us through the Scriptures, God is both encountered in small things, and in the moments of glorious holiness and terror: worth of the adoration of seraphs, glorious and majestic.

It is, I suppose, out of fashion to speak about the overwhelming side of God. Generally we are told that this God is experienced by people as unapproachable, as too reminiscent of the sometimes difficult and judgmental images of God that some of us learned in childhood. Moreover, we are told that God enthroned as King is a difficult image, for most of us have no experience of kings and how can we possibly related to God as an extra-large monarch, with all the trappings of royalty?

Which I suppose is all true in a way, but is also somewhat sad, because if the God of glory and terror is downplayed, or fails to make it into our teaching, preaching and thinking about God, the awe tends to go away as well.

As, of course, does the framework for interacting with God's majesty and power. If you look at both passages that we hear read today, the goal of the vision of God's majesty or the power expressed by the God who is enfleshed is not to make us feel guilty or unworthy, although that might be an unintended effect, but because God simply IS. Powerful and infinite. I am that I am. Glorious, magnificent. Worthy of eye covering worship. Worthy of having the Temple filled with smoke, whether the choir likes it or not. Worthy of that perpetual chant of “Holy, Holy, Holy.”

And rather than our finitude and unworthiness being the occasion for God's wrath or judgment, in both these passages they are instead the beginning of our healing and calling.

The prophet finds himself cleansed and purified, and then when the God of terrible majesty asks for volunteers, the prophet finds himself offering to go “Here I am; send me!”

And rather than Jesus agreeing with Simon Peter that he is unworthy, Jesus simply tells him not to be afraid. We may encounter God's holiness with terror, but we do encounter it, and it changes us forever.

The majesty and wonder of the God of glory is not the terror of judgment. It is the awe that the God whose worship shakes the doors of the Temple, the hem of whose majestic robe fills the Temple, that same God also is available to us in quiet, is present with us in bread and wine, can compact the vastness of that robe down into the frame of a tiny child, and comes to us despite our sinfulness and foolishness, asking “Who shall I send?”

To encounter the God of majesty and power is to come to terms with our smallness before his glory, and our vocation to speak to the peoples, to fish for people, to work as God wills, despite our smallness and sinfulness. Not because we are cowed by his majesty or frightened at his glory, but because the vision of the God of glory brings up in us the deepest awe and wonder, and the will to worship God ceaselessly. “Holy, holy, holy.”

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

7 February 2010

Sometimes the Scriptures give us complex parables to untangle, or esoteric passages nearly illegible with the passage of time, and the preacher must perform feats of extreme hermeneutical acrobatics to come to some sort of explanation. Sometimes the Scriptures give us stories that are obvious, and it is the duty of the preacher to soften the hardness of the teaching, if only a little bit. And sometimes in the Scriptures, there is simply an image, so laden with symbolism and historical import that the preacher gets to simply hold the image up, and slowly turn it for all to see. Simeon, that old man of faith, waiting on God’s messiah and holding the infant Jesus is that kind of image: laden and poignant.

There is, all the way through the Hebrew Scriptures a kind of sad and silent waiting for God. God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, of Sarah, and Leah and Rachel, the God who chose his people, and made a covenant with them, and led them from exile and through the wilderness, and gave the law, that God, despite the years of prophets, judges and kings, that God is silent, and the people of Israel wait for God’s movement, for God’s salvation with a longing and a hunger of the deepest sort.

For it seems as if God has abandoned his people. As if he has left them, finally, to their idolatry and sinfulness. They couldn’t keep focused on God for the time it took Moses to climb the mountain to receive the law. How could they possibly keep God central to their lives, surrounded by other tribes, by distractions and by the cares of life lived now in the land that they had long awaited?

“Turn again to God” the prophets warned the people of Israel, and they did not. Again and again God sent prophets to call them home, and punished Israel with battle and exile, and begged, pleaded and thundered, and still the people of Israel, the chosen people, did not return, did not repent.

And so Jerusalem was overcome and the Temple was destroyed, most of her people were carried into exile, and what was perhaps worse than all of that was the terrible silence which descended, and God no longer spoke to his people. Even when he fought with them and punished them, God was at least speaking to them, but now a silence has come down, and there are no words from God, there are no messengers and no prophets.

And the people of Israel are left waiting, in silence. Waiting is something that they are good at, something that they have learned to do through the long years of their interaction with God. They waited in Egypt and they waited in the wilderness; they waited for a king, and then they waited for a decent king. They waited to come back from Babylon and now they are waiting to see what happens with the Roman Empire.

They are getting good at waiting, or at least resigned to waiting. And what they wait is the savior who is promised again and again through all their interactions with God, the one that can restore Israel again.

All of that is there in the background, as Simeon stands there in the Temple, holding a forty day old child. Simeon is an image of disparate pieces at the very moment of intersection, the place between the longing and waiting of the people of Israel throughout the years, and the advent of God’s savior and messiah, at the moment when prophesy moves from possible to actual and dreams turn into reality. He stands there, right on the cusp of waiting being transformed into joy, and longing coming to satiety, desire to completeness.

So laden is the moment, so poignant the vision of God’s salvation in the frame of a tiny child that Simeon bursts into song. It matters not that death is near, for God’s savior is here, and he has held him in his arms.

It is a glorious image and symbol, an old man and an infant, a man who has lived in hope for God’s action, and a child whose potential will shake the foundations of the world. And Simeon, death near him, breaks out in a song of praise to the God who has been silent for so long, but is now working: “Mine eyes have seen thy salvation which though has prepared for all the world to see, a light to enlighten the nations and the glory of your people Israel.”

And because he stands there, holding the savior of the world, an image and sign of God’s redemption, Simeon is a better answer to the questions about God’s silence and God’s absence, that constantly arise.

For those questions are constant from year to year and age to age. Where is God when his people are in bondage to a foreign empire? Where now is God in Haiti, where in Iraq? Why is God silent when the planet is being ravished, and millions live in abject poverty? Why is God absent when my life seems to be falling apart?

Simeon holding Jesus is far better than a theological or a philosophical answer to the question of God’s absence, in 1^st century Palestine, or quake-ravished Haiti. The answer to our questions is cradled in an old man’s arms. The tiny child offers no theological answer, no philosophical defense of God’s absence and silence. All that he offers is himself, a tiny frame, a wisp of hair, and miniature fist.

Simeon doesn’t claim that this is God’s messiah. He does nothing except hold the child, and praise God. Nothing need be said, for God’s absence and God’s silence is not undone by human words, but by the child who is the savior of the world: into the silence of the world a word has been spoken and the Logos has come down to be God with us.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

2 February 2010

The Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord in the Temple: Candlemas

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Of course, I do drive a car with that little switch on the bottom of the mirror, called, I am told by my Owner’s Manual, the “Day/Night” switch, which, the manual assures me, is there to “make driving more comfortable.  And indeed, it is vastly more comfortable to drive at night with the switch flipped (is it up or down?) so that the glare of those magnificent headlights you probably have on your car does not blind me.  With the switch flipped, as you know, the road behind me appears as a 10” by 2” rectangle of darkness, salted with white dots of light.  It may be more comfortable driving, but it is a limited perspective.

It is precisely this limited view that Saint Paul is describing when he writes in his most famous passage “for now we see in a mirror dimly,” or in the older version, “in a glass darkly.”  You all know this phrase – you have heard it read at weddings.  And there may be some value to assessing whether or not it matters if now we see only in a glass darkly.

Because if we do, we see only what is behind us, what is chasing us, or what is falling away from us, and even then we see it only dimly, its contours and shape obscured.  What we do not see, Saint Paul implies is the road ahead of us.

We are infatuated with the road behind us, receding into the darkness.  And we tend to lead our lives this way – with our eyes glued to the rearview mirror, in its “Night” position, fixated on what’s behind us, what’s already past.  We do not see our lives, as he says, “face to face.”  We do not see fully.   And so, we do not live life as God intends us to live.  And we have hardly a clue of the beauty and glory that lies ahead of us.
In his letter, which Paul thought he was writing to the Christians in Corinth, but we know he was really writing to us, Paul is suggesting what he calls, “ a still more excellent way” of seeing the world, and therefore living life.  Paul writes of what he knows.  For he had been an expert on the laws of Jewish faith, and he was a man of unswerving and unerring faith.  He knew the laws of Moses, lived by them, and he encouraged (shall we say) others to live by them too.  OK, let’s say he encouraged Jews to do so by force.
At no time in his life that we know of did Paul’s faith ever waver or fail.  Many of us know what it is like to live with uncertain or undeveloped or uninformed faith, but this was not Paul’s story.  Even his conversion from following the laws of Moses to following Jesus was not the result of a crisis of faith.  It was the result of a crisis of vision.  He was struck blind for several days, something like a fish’s scales obscuring his eyes, until they fell from his eyes and he found a new vision.  The view, when the scales fell from Paul’s eyes, was a different view of the world than he had ever seen.  And that view would not only change his life, it would change the world.

He saw that life was not made better, perfect, or holy by following the 613 commandments of Jewish law, the task he had devoted his life to.  He even saw that faith – which he had in bucketsful – was not all you needed to live a good life.  He saw that only one thing made the difference between looking at life through the rearview mirror with the Night switch on, and seeing the life that lies ahead of us in all its vibrant light and color.  And that one thing is love.

And so Paul wrote his famous love song, his ode, within his first letter to the Corinthians.  “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.” Does it sound to you as though perhaps Paul is describing an earlier version of himself: impatient, unkind, envious, boastful, arrogant, and rude?
Love “does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth.  [Love] bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  Love never ends.”

Love is the vision of the road that stretches out before us when we stop seeing life through the rearview mirror, with the Night switch on; when we stop seeing life through a glass darkly.
And what Paul says, is that most of us have been trying to drive while looking only through the rearview mirror in the dark, with the Night switch on.  Have you ever tried to navigate your car this way?  Has it ever seemed to you that you were trying to navigate your life this way?

None of us here, that I know of, is constrained by an effort to live by the 613 commandments of the laws of Moses, but many of us, most of us, are living lives defined by a much narrower set of constrictions: the need to pay the bills, the need to get through the work day (just get through it); the struggle to find some joy in your time with your spouse; the difficulty in sleeping without pills (or even with them); the sense that you are missing out on life, that you gave up options because of choices you made long ago; the frustration that your children have not turned out the way you hoped they would.  All these are visions of life through a glass darkly: little spots of white zooming one way or another in a small rectangle of darkness.  No wonder faith seems like a struggle under the circumstances; it’s all we have to go on while trying move forward and seeing only the world behind us through a glass darkly.

But there is a road ahead of us.  And that road beckons us with love.  It calls us to be patient, kind, and humble.  The road of love invites us to yield to others, making way for them because, after all, there is room enough.  The road ahead is way-marked by good choices: choosing the right over the wrong, the truth over falsehood.  The road has challenges, to be sure, but there are no warnings that it cannot bear heavy loads: the road of love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

St. Paul did not write his love song to be read at weddings, and it is not a reflection on marital bliss.  It is meant to provide a different view, to jolt us into looking straight ahead and seeing what God has prepared for us.  And the thing is, that there is not some great test to be passed, there are no rules that must be followed, there are no hoops to be jumped through.  There is just this call to look and see.  There is the encouragement to rub our eyes vigorously if the scales have not fallen from them on their own.  There is the recognition to be made that we have been driving while looking through a glass darkly and seeing mostly only what is behind us.  There is this possibility of love, which is greater even than faith or hope, since both faith and hope are built on it.

It may be true that the road behind you has been dark.  It may be the case that it has seemed the best you could do is avoid a collision, keep the darting spots of light in the rearview mirror at bay, stay in your own lane, and maybe even slow down to prevent disaster.  But from the radio comes an old song that sounds familiar.  You have heard it before, but has it ever spoken to you?

Love is patient;
love is kind;
love is not envious or boastful
or arrogant or rude.
It does not insist on its own way;
it is not irritable or resentful;
it does not rejoice in wrongdoing,
but rejoices in the truth.
It bears all things,
believes all things,
hopes all things,
endures all things.
Love never ends.

As the song plays, can you feel the tension in your neck relax, as you tear your eyes from the rearview mirror, and you begin to realize that you have been driving all night, but now the dawn has come, and the sun is rising, and a golden light shines on the road that leads ahead of you and stretches on and on, anywhere you can imagine or dream, and beyond that, too.

And there is no speed limit, no rules of the road even, because they are not necessary, no danger of being caught, because you are doing nothing wrong.  There is only this beautiful, smooth road before you, and an inexplicably gentle, cool breeze.  There is only love.  It is a view we had only dreamed about, but never seen before.  But it is real, and it is a more excellent way than any other on earth.  Thanks be to God.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
31 January 2010
Saint Mark’s, Philadelphia


There was a time in my life when I regretted that I have been baptized as an infant. Perhaps “regret” is the wrong word. I was angry that I had been baptized as a child. This was a time in my life when I was full of anger at the intrusiveness of God in my life. I was about to pull a Jonah and run, if not to Tarshish, than at least to Arizona to escape priesthood. And I found the fact that I had been baptized, that my parents had made promises for me, and had caused this monumental sacramental act to happen to me to feel as if I were trapped, as if there was not any place to which I could run to be free of God and of those promises made at baptism.

The Church has long taught that baptism, as of the other sacraments, is indelible, there is a quality to baptism which can never be repeated or undone. The metaphor that John uses in the Gospel this morning is that of “fire.” John baptizes with water, but Jesus who is coming will baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire. And if Christian baptism is with “fire,” as the Gospel says this morning, than baptism leaves one scarred, burned forever, and even if I were to run to Arizona or Tarshish, even if I were to never darken the door of a church again, the burn scars of that day, ever so long ago, would stay with me forever. T. S. Eliot has a phrase which I always think of, when I think of baptism: “The intolerable shirt of flame / Which human power cannot remove.” There are times when the life of faith, or occasional faith, or the wish to have faith feels like a shirt of flame, a kind of flammable hair shirt that burns, and hurts, and which “human power cannot remove.”

That, at least, was how I felt. Which is perhaps not a very happy way to think about baptism, but it is not entirely uncorrect either.

Often baptism is taken rather lightly, as a normal cultural and social event. Baby is born, baby takes first steps, baby says first word, and baby is baptized. It is all of a piece.

But if baptism is what the Church teaches, than baptism is very dangerous, and we are almost unbelievably arrogant when we baptize, especially children. We are playing with fire which is not of our making, and risking a great deal, every time we step to the font with another soon-to-be Christian.

Baptism is permanent and it does scar us and takes us into place and times that are unpleasant. Vows are made at baptism that bind us to a life of service and selflessness, to seeking justice, to a life of repentance, and resistance to evil. Baptism makes us citizens of another kingdom, which in turn means that we are aliens and wanderers here, and have a sense of never quite being home. Baptism makes us hungry for the bread of heaven, with a hunger that the stuff of earth can never satisfy. And baptism calls us to make some pretty serious sacrifices: our lives, our money, and our comfort.

But this day we are remembering not all baptism, but specifically Jesus' baptism in the Jordan River by his cousin John the Baptist. And I always find Jesus' baptism to be slightly unusual, slightly strange. I know why I need the shirt of flame of baptism, that slow purgative process that one day, God willing, will make me ready for the Feast of the Lamb, but why would God's messiah, why would the eternal Word need baptism? I may struggle, complain and resist that burn of baptism, but why would Jesus even need it?

In the parallel passage from Matthew's Gospel, John himself protests that Jesus has come for baptism. “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” And Jesus responds that it is somehow proper that John baptize him.

Beyond being indelible, the Church teaches another great truth about baptism: that baptism is the root of our Christian identity, the canvas on which all the other aspects of our Christian life are painted. Some Christians will be ordained, or married, or confirmed, but those sacraments all presuppose baptism. They are all variations on a theme of baptism.. Baptism is the context in which our entire conversation and struggle with God takes place. Baptism, that fire that is set in us, is the way that we learn to love God and our neighbors. Slowly, haltingly over time, the fire of baptism can burn away the brokenness of our hearts, the ways in which we are selfish, self-deceptive and prone to sin. We experience baptism as a shirt of flame because we are yet far off from the perfection which God has planned for us.

I wonder if that doesn't explain the properness of Jesus' baptism by John. Jesus doesn't need baptism like we do. He doesn't need to be rooted in God, bound in covenant with God, and made an adoptive heir to the Kingdom. Jesus is God, very God of very God; Jesus is already rooted and one with God. Jesus wouldn't experience baptism as a shirt of flame because he is perfectly attuned to God, loving as he should.

But in his coming to live as a human being, he shows us the way home. He is born and baptized, he lives and dies. It is proper that he be baptized because he shows us the model, the example, of how we are to be. He goes before us like a beacon in the dark, flaming with God's love, and because he has bidden us to, we set a fire in those who come to us, children and adults, and we give them the light of Christ as a candle to carry into the darkness of the world.

All of us struggle with the hardness of baptism, I would imagine. Must I give of my time, my money, my energy, my life? Must I struggle and suffer through this Lenten time? Must I be an alien and a wanderer here? Does God have to call me into these difficult places and times?

As I think about my regret that I had been baptized, I realize that what was wrong was not my sense that this powerful, scary sacramental moment had been done to me without my choice, but the feeling that God was somehow out to get me, that God was somehow punishing me, or asking too much of me.

The verse from which the phrase “shirt of flame” is taken are these, and they seem to me simply true:

Who then devised the torment? Love.

Love is the unfamiliar Name

Behind the hands that wove

The intolerable shirt of flame

Which human power cannot remove.

     We only live, only suspire

     Consumed by either fire or fire.

The scar of baptism, the permanence of the covenant that we make with God in baptism, is rooted in an unbending love. Love devised that shirt of flame, Love binds us with it, Love will never remove it, and Love wills us flame with divine fire.

For this is what we were created for: to flame with the fire of God's love, and to burn forever in his presence. And the shirt of flame which is baptism is how we are prepared to flame with his fire. Our Lord, in his baptism, is our guide and example.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

The First Sunday after Epiphany: The Baptism of Our Lord

“The “magic” was that, unbeknown to me, as I happily pulled the cement mixer behind me, the mixer’s main cylinder or drum… rotated, went around and around on its horizontal axis, just as the drum on a real cement mixer does.  It did this, my mother said, only when the mixer was being pulled by me and only, she stressed, when I wasn’t looking.”

Of course this suggestion prompts the boy to try to catch the cement mixer mixing, doing its thing, turning on its axis; to see the magic at work.

“Evidence bore out what they had told me: turning my head obviously and unsubtly around always stopped the rotation of the drum.  I also tried sudden whirls.  I tried having someone else pull the cement mixer.  I tried incremental turns of the head while pulling (“incremental” meaning turning my head at roughly the rate of a clock’s minute hand).  I tried peering through a keyhole as someone else pulled the cement mixer. Even turning my head at the rate of the hour hand. I never doubted—it didn’t occur to me. The magic was that the mixer seemed always to know. I tried mirrors—first pulling the cement mixer straight toward a mirror, then through rooms that had mirrors at the periphery of my vision, then past mirrors hidden such that there was little chance that the cement mixer could even “know” that there was a mirror in the room. My strategies became very involved….  I begged my mother to take photographs as I pulled the mixer, staring with fraudulent intensity straight ahead. I placed a piece of masking tape on the drum and reasoned that if the tape appeared in one photo and not in the other this would provide proof of the drum’s rotation. (Video cameras had not yet been invented.)”

But none of his tests are successful – or unsuccessful, as the case may be.  Nothing yields the result that he catches the cement mixer in the act of turning its mixer.

Again, the boy tells us:

“I never found a way to observe the drum’s rotation without stopping that rotation.  It never once occurred to me that my parents might have been putting me on.  Nor did it ever bother me that the striped drum itself was glued or nailed to the orange chassis of the cement mixer and could not be rotated (or even budged) by hand….  And, in fact, the free rotation of an unpowered and securely fastened drum was not the “magic” that drove me. The magic was the way it knew to stop the instant I tried to see it.  The magic was how it could not, not ever, be trapped or outsmarted. Though my obsession with the toy cement mixer had ended by the next Christmas, I have never forgotten it, or the feeling in my chest and midsection whenever yet another, even more involved attempt to trap the toy’s magic met with failure—a mix of crushing disappointment and ecstatic reverence. This was the year, at five or six, that I learned the meaning of “reverence,” which, as I understand it, is the natural attitude to take toward magical, unverifiable phenomena….”

Tonight is a night of gifts, and of magic, and of reverence.  It is fashionable these days to point out that the Scriptures don’t tell us that there were actually three wise men.  It is common to hear in pulpits that if any sages from the east came to visit the child Jesus it took much longer than twelve days for them to get there – maybe a matter of years.  It is quite usual to be presented with the various explanations that the star was a  predictable celestial phenomenon.  It is normal to dismiss tonight as little more than an excuse to make a king cake and let someone find the prize in it.  But I hope tonight we can resist these urges, because to give in to them is to miss the point of the gift, the magic, and the reverence.

Over there in that crèche we placed, twelve days ago, a baby Jesus who resembles, more than anything else, a toy cement mixer.  He is made of wood.  He has no moving parts (not even a string to drag him around).  One of his hands regularly falls off and has to be re-glued every year before Christmas Eve.

To much of the world our elaborate ceremony of traipsing around the church in fancy vestments, singing “O come, all ye faithful” (twelve days ago) and “We three kings” (tonight) on our way to the manger, placing the statue in it, and blessing it with holy water and incense is nothing but foolishness – a belief in some outmoded magic that is thought to be vested not only in carved, wooden babies, but in the very likely darker-skinned baby that all the carved baby Jesuses are supposed to be modeled on.  Nothing but magic.

And such is the state of the world, that we may be tempted too, after the candlelight and the singing of Christmas Eve, to drift toward the suspicion that although it is a nice tradition, in the end, it is just a wooden Jesus, with no moving parts, nothing spinning, no heart.  We could drag him all over the city at the end of a yellow rope, and what good would it do?

There would appear to be much evidence to support this point of view.  Poverty, injustice, and racism are still very much a part of our society.  We have not yet beaten our swords into plowshares.  We agonize about how to feed ourselves with healthy food, how to take care of ourselves when we are sick, and how not to send the planet spiraling gradually toward overheating. 

More personally, we have not figured out how to prevent so many marriages from ending up in divorce, we have not learned the secret to preventing our children’s lives from going to pieces, our lives are so easily surrendered to drugs or alcohol, we have not found a prescription to avoid tragic illnesses, to cure cancer, and we have not learned how to staunch the grief of loss when we lose even someone of great faith to death.

No wonder that to many people these days, Jesus amounts to little more than a toy cement mixer: his Cross little more than an accessory that is quite preferred without his Body on it.  No wonder there are so few epiphanies on Epiphany, since we have reduced it to a feast of toys: a magical star leading costumed kings, who carry their prop gold and frankincense and myrrh to a wooden Jesus.  We might as well drag a toy cement mixer behind us in our procession!

But we could learn something valuable from the wise men.  We could remember that when they reached the manger, Jesus did not do anything amazing, he may not even have woken up from his nap.  But they knew! 

They knew when they encountered him and his mother that God was at work here.  Did they marvel at the magic that God could accomplish something great without even appearing to lift a finger?  Did they wonder at the perfection of God’s work wrought so secretly that no trap of even the great king Herod could capture it?  Did they gush to his mother that this child appeared to be so very like every other child?  Did they think of their reverence to him as “the natural attitude to take toward magical, unverifiable phenomena…” since they had no way of verifying what was so manifestly true to them – that here was the very Son of God?

And is it possible that the faith that God has called us to is a faith something like this: that he has given us the gift of his Son as the object of our faith.  He knows that this gift can sometimes seem like little more than a toy cement mixer: childish, clunky, unpowered, stuck in one position, etc.  But does he call to us, at least once a year, to remember that this gift is operating in our lives all the time, when we can’t see it: spinning, turning, building, growing, blessing, forgiving, transforming?

And maybe it is the nature of this gift that we can never – or at least almost never - see it at work.  So often we discover the effects of Jesus in our lives, we realize the grace that comes of faith, after the fact, when his work has already been accomplished, his blessing conferred, his transformation made.

And perhaps all our ministries are, in part, our efforts to catch a sight of the invisible and elusive God at work in the world, in our lives.  When you make soup every week, as some of you do, or wake up every Saturday morning to serve that soup to the hungry and homeless; when you teach a group of children their Bible story in Sunday School; when you study the Scriptures yourself in Bible Study or on your own; when you come to serve at the altar; or when you serve coffee at coffee hour; when you sing in the choir; when you rake the leaves at Saint James the Less, or clean the church there, or the bathrooms….

…are these some of the ways we try to catch God spinning in our lives?  Are these he mirrors we look in from various angles, the keyholes we peep through, the abrupt or slow turns we make to catch him unawares?  Are we looking for the God who has called us but who stays so mundanely hidden, so apparently unwilling to be caught in the act of changing our lives, changing the world?

I suspect it may be so because, like that little boy, I am amazed at the magic of how God’s grace and mercy cannot ever be trapped or outsmarted, cannot be stopped, even though I realize how difficult it is to observe it directly sometimes.

And I suspect it may be so, because I have seen the evidence of the grace of God all around a world that would just as soon destroy it. 

And like that boy, I have known something like the feeling in my chest and midsection whenever the attempts to ruin God’s grace meet with failure—a mix of crushing disappointment and ecstatic reverence – disappointment that like the sun or quantum physics, God’s grace, his spinning, turning, working, forgiving, transforming cannot often be observed directly; and ecstatic reverence because that grace, that spinning, turning, working, forgiving, transforming love is so manifestly true!

And if I were a wise man, I would bring my gift, whatever it was – gold, frankincense, myrrh, or whatever.  But I am content to know that God has given the gift of his Son – who might be nothing more than a wooden doll, a toy…

… who is himself willing to be dragged around behind us on a yellow rope, if that is the only way we will have him in our lives…

…but who cannot be stopped from spinning, turning, working, blessing, forgiving, transforming; who often, so often, cannot be seen to be doing any of this either; whose magic mostly cannot be observed; who cannot be stopped from being born!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

The Feast of the Epiphany, 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

[i] David Foster Wallace, “All That”, published in The New Yorker, December 14, 2009