The Jailer's Kindness

A few years ago, an unusual copy of The Importance of Being Earnest came up for sale at an auction.  This particular copy of the play had been inscribed by its author, Oscar Wilde.  Wilde was infamously imprisoned from late May of 1895 till late May of 1897 for having committed “gross indecency.”  Reflecting on his imprisonment, he wrote:

“While I was in... prison I longed to die. It was my one desire... I determined to commit suicide on the very day on which I left prison. After a time that evil mood passed away, and I made up my mind to live, but to wear gloom as a king wears purple: never to smile again: to turn whatever house I entered into a house of mourning: to make my friends walk slowly in sadness with me: to teach them that melancholy is the true secret of life: to maim them with an alien sorrow: to mar them with my own pain.”*

(Well, he is a playwright, after all: drama is his thing.)

It’s remarkable, considering the depths of despair that his imprisonment caused him, that the copy of the play that was up for sale was inscribed to the man who was effectively his jailer, the Governor of the Reading Gaol, Major James Nelson.  Nelson stepped into his post after Wilde had already been remanded to the prison and had encountered its dire isolation.  But the new Governor relaxed the rules of Wilde’s incarceration when he took over the prison, and he not only allowed Wilde access to books, he also provided him with pen, ink, and paper so that he could write.  Wilde would later refer to Nelson as “the most Christlike man I ever met.”**

The inscription he penned, opposite the title page of the play reads, “To Major Nelson from the author.  A trivial recognition of great and noble kindness.”  These are not the kinds of words one expects a prisoner to write to his jailer.

Twice in the Acts of the Apostles we encounter jailers - both times in trying circumstances.  The first is when St. Peter, “bound with two chains” has been thrown in jail.  But an angel comes in the night while Peter is sleeping in between two guards, and the angel looses Peter from his chains and guides him safely out of the prison.  Saint Luke tells us that Herod later had the two guards “put to death” because of their failure to keep their prisoner.

So the implications are clear when Paul and Silas are apprehended by the authorities who “threw them into prison and ordered the jailer to keep them securely.  Following these instructions he put them in the innermost cell and fastened their feet in the stocks.”

This time it was not an angel, but an earthquake that shook the very foundations of the prison, and “all the doors were opened and everyone’s chains were unfastened.”

Perhaps knowing what had befallen the last jailers who had failed at keeping Jesus’ disciple under lock and key, the jailer, when he came to, was beside himself.  St. Luke tells us that “he drew his sword and was about to kill himself.”  But unexpectedly, Paul and Silas had not yet made their escape, and they must have seen what was happening.  Paul called out to the jailer, “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.”

And in a moment of remarkable conversion, the jailer immediately brought the apostles outside and asked them, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”

“Believe on the Lord Jesus,” comes the answer, “and you will be saved.”  On the spot, the apostles baptized the jailer and his entire household, who washed the prisoners’ wounds, and set out a meal for them.

In the morning, before any of these events could be accounted for, while they were all sipping coffee together, the magistrates ordered the release of Paul and Silas, making any excuses or further punishment for the jailer beside the point.

“While I was in prison, I longed to die.”  The experience of Oscar Wilde, was, in a sense, the mirror image of what happened to Paul and Silas.  For Wilde, it was his jailer whose kindness showed him the image of Christ, who is himself the image of love, and the way of salvation.  All those centuries ago, it was the other way around, when the prisoners themselves - whose crime was their faith in Jesus - called out to prevent the awful suicide the jailer was about to commit.  “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here!”

Do not harm yourself, for we are all here!  ... and the sword rattles to the floor as the jailer heaves a sigh of relief that things are not as bad as he thought they were, and there must be some hope in the world after all.

And here, what should I say?  Should I name the twelve people who were killed on Friday in Virginia Beach in the latest episode of American gunfire?

Should I reflect, at the outset of Pride month, on the cognitive dissonance that many who call themselves Christians would count as “gross indecency” the lives of men and women who have kept this parish alive and faithful for many decades?

Should I pause to recall that we still have troops in Afghanistan, eighteen years into this endless war?

Should I bring to mind the ongoing crises of addiction all around us: whether it’s opioids, or heroin, or meth, or booze?

Should I comment on the weather?  Repeat again the poverty rate in our city?  Ruminate on the mass incarceration that we now take for granted in this country?  Should I even ask about the water in Flint?

If you want reasons for despair, I think I could prepare an illustrated catalog.

From his cell, in his despair, Oscar Wilde wrote of how hard it was for him to hope in anything, let alone to hope in Christ.

“I feel as if I would like to found an order for those who CANNOT believe:” he wrote, “the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine.”

It sometimes feels to me as if we live in a world that is ready for just such a religion.  In fact, I sometimes suspect that many of my friends and neighbors would vastly prefer such an empty religion - that requires nothing, and claims nothing, and promises nothing - to the kind of religion we practice in this church.

Toward the middle of the long letter Wilde wrote from Reading Gaol, he says this, “Christ, like all fascinating personalities, had the power of not merely saying beautiful things himself, but of making other people say beautiful things to him.”  Wilde wasn’t thinking of the jailer who was about to take his own life, and whose encounter (on the face of it, at least) wasn’t with Jesus, but with his apostles, Silas and Paul.  But I think the assertion holds, since I think there is a distinct beauty in the exchange that interrupts the jailer’s awful intent to take his own life.

“Do not harm yourself, for we are all here,” comes the cry from Paul.  And doesn’t it count as an example of Christ making others say beautiful things to him, when the jailer drops the instrument of his own suicide, and responds, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”  This is a moment of blissful relief, when the man, who could see only despair, only doom, only darkness in his future, only disappointment, judgment, and death, and whose self-assessment was so clear and so dismal, whose catalog of misery was so richly illustrated that he was about to take his own life, but is interrupted, and finds himself able to ask, “what must I do to be saved?”

He cannot have thought that the answer would be easy or short.  And both Paul and Silas could have been forgiven for needing to stop for a moment and think through this complicated pastoral situation.  Surely, they would have suggested a course of therapy to begin with.  And yet, unexpectedly, they, too, have something beautiful, concise, and easy to say.  “Believe on the Lord Jesus,” they tell their jailer,  “and you will be saved!”

Earlier in his letter, Oscar Wilde wrote that “where there is sorrow there is holy ground.”  If he was right, then I suppose in some ways we are walking over ever-holier ground in this nation, and across the world.  I could illustrate my catalog of sorrow; you could illustrate yours.  And whenever we ran out of ideas, the New York Times would fill them in for us.  And yet, surprisingly, Christ still has the power of not merely saying beautiful things himself, but of making other people say beautiful things to him.  And this is why we have been called together this morning.  Because each and every one of us has been walking our own holy ground, marked, inevitably, by sorrow.

But Christ has something beautiful to say to each and every one of us.  To some, his words may be as clear and direct as this, “Do not harm yourself!  For we are all here!”  Oh, how I hope that those who need to hear such a cry will hear it from someone’s lips.  And if they have no one else to cry out to them, I hope they will hear it from mine.  Do not harm yourself, for we are all here!

And when I hear the words, I realize that I do not know whether or not they are beautiful words that Jesus is saying to us, or whether they amount to the beautiful words he is making us say to him, if we are saying them to one whose sword is already drawn.  And it hardly matters.  I hope and pray that as we tread the holy ground of sorrow together in this life, we will find ourselves similarly unsure about whether Christ is speaking to us, or we are speaking to him.  I hope and pray that we will be so guided by his spirit that it will not matter.

I hope that we will never stop asking one another, “what must I do to be saved?”  And that, maybe unexpectedly, we will have something beautiful, concise, and easy to say in reply to one another: “Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved!”

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
2 June 2019
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

**Oscar Wilde, De profundis, 1897, first published in English in 1905

** Richard Ellman in Oscar Wilde, Knopf Doubleday Publishing, 1988, p 476

Fuel in the Bus

If you want to see evidence of spring, just look outside in the Saint Mark’s garden. As the weather gets warmer and summer clearly approaches, I can’t help but feel a bit nostalgic. This time of year always reminds me of departures and transitions. Maybe it’s the subtle smell in the air. Maybe it’s the warmth of encroaching summer. Maybe it’s seeing all the recent graduates walking around in academic robes.

Graduating high school students are ready to embark on college journeys. College graduates, if they’re lucky, have one foot in the job market. And transitions are inevitably a little poignant, aren’t they? Friends part for opposite ends of the country. Beloved professors say goodbye to prized students. Dorm rooms are vacated for a long, lonely summer.

Universities vie for their favorite candidates for commencement speakers. And the usual famous faces make their rounds among America’s prestigious universities, doling out the predictable string of somewhat meaningless accolades and clichés. In theory, these speakers are empowering graduates who are listening with bated breath.

 “You can do anything.”

“Go and change the world.”

“Live your dreams!”

But what can these well-intentioned words really accomplish for the graduates who are facing so many hurdles ahead in an uncertain and unstable world?

I suppose there was one recent exception to the typical trite commencement address. Philanthropist Robert Smith, in speaking to Morehouse College graduates, put a little meat on his commendatory words when he announced that he would pay off the student loan debt of the entire class of 2019. “We’re going to put a little fuel in your bus,”[1] he told elated students. Fuel indeed.

But let’s face it: the average college graduate, a month or two after the fervor of graduation day, is probably feeling saddled with significant student loan debt and the intimidating prospect of finding a job in an unpredictable market. When the rubber hits the road, the momentary encouraging words of a commencement speaker are probably forgotten, because ultimately those words are doing very little to take away the ever-increasing awareness of the real world’s challenges. With the exception of Robert Smith, very few commencement speakers are going to change the tangible reality of a graduate’s life situation. Very few are going to put fuel in the bus.

 Do we sometimes receive Jesus’s words of encouragement and comfort from Scripture as if they are the shallow words of a commencement speaker, words that fail to put any fuel in the bus? Rather than carrying the hope of the Gospel, do they instead seem like empty promises that have failed to come true, like the gift of a shiny new car with no gas in the tank?

We’ve heard Jesus’s words of comfort.

“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.”

“Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”

These words are from Jesus’s Farewell Discourse to his disciples on the eve of his death, and they are meant to be expressions of encouragement.

They are, in some ways, like a commencement address. Jesus’s disciples have been through the rigorous school of ministry with him. They have heard Christ’s teaching. They have seen him working miracles and performing signs. And now, their teacher is announcing that he will be leaving them. It is a distressing, lonely transition to a new life situation for these disciples. They will be on their own, in the world, just like recent graduates, seemingly without any fuel in the bus.

The Farewell Discourse is even more wistful when considered in the larger context of John’s Gospel. This Gospel is all about Christ as the Incarnate Word of God, made flesh and visible on the earth. But what does the impending absence of this tangible presence mean? The flesh and blood reality of Christ’s earthly presence, which his disciples had come to know and treasure, will depart from them.

And difficulty lies ahead. Jesus is clear that the world that the disciples inhabit is filled with darkness and with powers that oppose God. I would guess that Jesus’s followers probably had some trouble grasping the profound hope in his parting words to them. I would bet that Jesus’s commencement address to his disciples rang a bit hollow in hindsight, in the immediate aftermath of his crucifixion.

Do those same words sound irrelevant to us in our time and place, nearly two thousand years later? Do they seem of little encouragement to those confronting the realities of the harsh, chaotic world in which we currently live?

How can anyone on the verge of losing a home honestly not be afraid? How can any of us, reading about the unfathomable human abuses in Syria not have a troubled heart? How can we on Locust Street not feel agitated in spirit by the opioid epidemic destroying people’s lives in this city?

After all, are troubled hearts really so bad? Don’t you imagine that the pioneers in the civil rights movement had troubled hearts, hearts that were stirred up to take action, to play some human part in affirming the dignity of others? And even today, Christ’s disciples are constantly being agitated into loving response to those in need and thereby accomplishing much for their benefit. Troubled spirits or hearts stirred up over injustice and evil are hearts revealing that they are, in some sense, spiritually alive.

We know, too, that Jesus himself was troubled in his heart on several occasions. He was “greatly disturbed in spirit” at his friend Lazarus’s death. His soul was troubled on the eve of his passion. His spirit was restless when he declared at the Last Supper that Judas would betray him.

So maybe the problem is not with troubled hearts per se, but with the way we interpret Jesus’s commands. When we hear Christ telling us not to be troubled or afraid, do we believe that there is some action we are to take to find for ourselves the peace that only God gives? If we just tried hard enough, we could have untroubled hearts, right?

But is it really up to us to ease our troubled hearts? Instead, what if we view Jesus’s imperatives as performative words? What if these words themselves, by their very utterance, create a new dimension of reality? What if they effect what they say?

When Jesus says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not let them be afraid,” he is ushering in a new creation. Remember what God did at the beginning of creation? God said, “Let there be light!” and there was light, expressed in Scripture in just two powerful Hebrew words. Can you picture it: God speaking creation into existence? So, too, with Jesus’s command—“Let not your hearts be troubled!” Jesus is causing God’s power to break into this world and to change it forever. He is making our hearts whole again in peace by speaking those words. Speak the word only, and our souls shall be healed! Jesus knows that our hearts will be troubled, and so he is doing something mysterious but so effective, something that will ultimately not let our hearts stay in such a state of agitation.

And yet it is still easy to despair, isn’t it? We can look around us at a country so shamefully divided and at places that never seem to have any peace. We can question whether Christ will ever come again to us as he promised. We might be tempted to see Christ’s farewell earthly words as the fanciful concoction of yet another commencement speaker.

But, oh, how easy it is to forget that Christ’s gift of God’s peace is not some sentimental notion of everyone getting along or an absence of conflict. God’s peace, God’s shalom, is not some pollyanish human vision of what a nice world looks like. Christ’s peace is God’s real gift to us, and it is not as the world gives. It is not defined in the depths of our fallible imaginations. It is truly the peace that passes all understanding. Just because we don’t see the peace of God right here and right now as we expect it to be, doesn’t mean it isn’t starting to happen. It has already been granted to us when Christ uttered those words to his disciples in his final days on earth.

Unlike the typical commencement speaker who pronounces well-meaning but perhaps meaningless words of encouragement to thousands of graduates, Jesus’s words put fuel in the bus for the journey ahead. Jesus keeps his promises, for as he said he would rise from the dead, so he did.

The peace we long for is God’s; it’s not human-made. The ability to move from troubled hearts and fear to a place of wholeness and healing is not ours to achieve by our own merits. It is for God to work in us. And that work is being accomplished in ways we cannot even begin to understand. It surpasses our understanding.

There are still troubled hearts; there is still fear. The glorious vision of hearts untroubled and unafraid is still yet to be completely revealed. But one thing is sure: God keeps his promises. He has put fuel in our bus, and he continues to put fuel in our bus, to keep us moving in hope towards that eternal and glorious day when there will be no night. He presses us on toward that place where there are no troubled waters, where there is neither sighing nor sorrow but life everlasting. Because God keeps his promises.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/19/education/morehouse-college-robert-f-smith.html\

Preached by Father Kyle Babin
May 26, 2019
Saint Mark’s Church , Philadelphia

A Lesson from Fox 8

Toward the end of the most recent story from my favorite author, George Saunders, the title character of the story, who is also the first-person narrator, and also happens to be a fox (the kind with a bushy tail), asks a poignant rhetorical question that is born of his recent interactions with humans.  “Why did [God] do it so rong,” he asks, “making the groop with the gratest skils the meenest?”

The fox in question, is known as Fox 8.  Fox 8 is a dreamer, whose dreams have been augmented by his close observations of humans.  But at this moment of despair he has just related what happened when he spent a day exploring a mall with his good friend Fox 7.  Forgetting for a moment that the construction of the mall had resulted in the loss of the foxes’ habitat, polluted their river, killed the fish, and flattened the hilltops from which the foxes could previously see all of creation, Fox 8 and his pal Fox 7 had been enthralled by the mall and its wonders:  a floor like glass, fake rocks, real trees, the Gap, a carousel, and best of all, a Food Court!

Fox 8 reflected on the experience: “Never had Yumans seemed so cul.  We were sarounded by splender no fox could curate.  Hense, we were fild with respek.  Cud a Fox do this?  Bild a Mawl?  Fat chanse!  The best we can do is dig are Dens.”

But on leaving the mall, the two foxes encounter humans in a way that changes everything: a pair of workmen wearing hard hats, who, quickly decide that the foxes are unwelcome pests that must be dealt with.  On seeing the foxes, one of the workman removes his hard hat, takes aim, and throws it at the foxes, but misses.  But the second man has a better eye.  He takes off his hard hat and hurls it at the pair of foxes, hitting Fox 7 “skware in his face,” with horrible consequences.

“…suddenly,” Fox 8 tells of his friend’s demise, “his nees go week, and he gives me one last fond look, and drops over on his side, with blud trikling out his snout... and what cud I do but flee?”  Why did God do it so wrong, making the group with the greatest skills the meanest?

Today in church we encounter a sublime moment of simplicity with Jesus and his closest friends still together at the conclusion of the Last Supper.  This is Jesus’ last opportunity to teach his friends, and to instill in them what all his teaching and ministry have meant, and what his death and resurrection will imply.

You don’t need me to add colorful dimension to the irony of Jesus’ sole commandment to his disciples (and hence to us) to love one another.  “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”  How can we try to answer any questions about life and the human condition by resorting to scripture, when we have been so generally woefully unable to live by this sole commandment of the Gospel of our Lord?  How can any believer in Jesus ever hurl a Bible verse at another, when we have not been able to even squeeze the juice out of this one verse?  Why is it so hard for us to love one another?  Oh, why, why did God make the group with the greatest skills the meanest?

Sometimes, as a preacher these days, it seems easier to ask the hard questions than to find the good news.  One of the reasons I am such a fan of George Saunders’s writing is that he is very comfortable with the hard questions, but he seldom leaves me feeling as if there is no good news.

And the world needs such story tellers.  The church ought to be full of such story tellers.  

We ought never to stop reciting to one another the stories of the Creation, and of the Fall; of the Flood, and of the Rainbow.  We should know by heart why it was that the children of Israel needed to get out of Egypt, and how it happened.    

We should be able to recount the story of the passover, and the lamb, and the Red Sea.  Just as we also need to remember David slaying Goliath, and recall how ruinous he was as a king.

We should tell the story of Job to each other over and over again, and moan with inner horror at everything that befalls this good man.  We should remember that in the forty-two chapters of the book, no good explanation is ever provided for why all this happened to him.  But we should always know what’s coming on the last page, when we hear that “God restored the fortunes of Job.”

We should try to out-do one another in describing what it was like when the breath of God filled the valley of dry bones, and those old bones came to life, remembering which bone the hip bone’s connected to, and the elbow, and the ankle, and what is the answer to the question of whether these dry bones could live.

We ought to allow the prophetic call for “justice to roll down like waters, and righteousness like and ever-flowing stream” to permeate our preaching, overtake our dreams, and inform our politics.

We should recount to one another again and again what happened when Mary told them to “do whatever he tells you.”  

We ought to aim to have hearts like a widow with only two pennies to rub together; and gratefulness as ready as the tenth leper’s; and faith as strong as a centurion’s.  

We should discuss those few steps that Peter took on the churning water, and remember why Jesus turned to look at him.

Everyone should know how many baskets of leftovers there were after the five thousand were fed, and what you do if you have a hundred sheep and one of them goes missing.

We should worry less about Samaritans and more about just trying to be good.  And we need to remind one another about that father who watched night and day for his prodigal son to come home.

Children should be told that the earth quaked at the decisive moment of salvation, and the sky went dark.  

And if we readily recall that once there was a battle in heaven with Michael and all his angels arrayed against the powers of darkness, then we should also sing as often as we can about the new Jerusalem coming down from heaven, especially when every last thing seems rotten to the core, and we are faced with crying, and pain, and death, and we are in danger of forgetting the promise of the risen and glorified Christ that “I am making all things new!”

And we need to ask ourselves, in light of all these stories, why, oh why, did God do it so wrong, making the group with the greatest skills the meanest?

Immediately after asking that question, Fox 8 finds himself in a forest “the like of which I had never seen before, so deep and green and grate-smelling it made those holes in my nose go super wide with sheer delite.  O, the lite threw the Trees!  The moving shadows when the wind wud blow!  The millyun grate smells, such as water not far away!  The wind in the hi part of the Trees, and sometimes a branch will crak!”

There, in that forest, having been lost for days, or weeks, or more, and separated from his old fox friends who had been displaced by the mall, Fox 8 meets a new skulk of foxes.  These new foxes are healthy and kind, and they still have a forest to live in.  They befriend Fox 8.

And soon Fox 8 is dreaming about going out to find his lost, old, displaced friends, to bring them from their vanished habitat into this new paradise.  He imagines that on the way he would show his old friends the mall, and its fake rocks, and the Gap, etc., but he would urge them on: “If one was skared I wud say: Don’t be skared.  And make a joke.  If one was slow I wud give a push from behind with an enkeraging snout.  If one was looking around all freeked out, I wud calm lee go: Fokus, fokus.  If one was old... I wud carry him or her on my bak.”

You see why we need such stories, don’t you?  Especially if we are going to tell each other that by this everyone will know that we are his disciples, if we have love for one another.

Although he wouldn’t say it, and he might not think it’s true when I do, George Saunders is writing about Jesus when he writes about a savior who wants to lead his friends out of a lost past and into a new and hopeful future.  Moses did it once, for a chosen few.  But Jesus has done it once and for all.

And even if it is part of a story about a fox, we still need to tell and to know such stories, that might encourage us to love one another.  We need such stories like an encouraging snout.  And sometimes - when we are beginning to suspect that there is no good news left in the world - we need such stories to carry us on their backs.

We also need to remember that sometimes being a Christian is not as hard as we make it out to be.  It is possible that sometimes we over-think things.  For instance, we are not clear what it means “to have love for one another.”  And being uncertain of such a thing is a sure sign that we are over-thinking it.  We could start by not wanting to shoot each other so much.

Sometimes you can learn a lot from a fox - at least a fictional one with bad spelling, but a strong sense of the divine purpose.  At the end of his missive to humans, relating the loss of his habitat, his family, and his dear friend, as well as his adoption into a new community and a new home, Fox 8 says this this:

“If you Yumans wud take one bit of advise from a meer Fox?  By now I know that you Yumans like your Storys to end hapy?

“If you want your Storys to end happy, try being niser.”

Or, as Jesus said to his disciples, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
19 May 2019
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

* All non-biblical quotations are from “Fox 8” by George Saunders, Random House, 2015. N.B. that Fox 8 is not a good speller.