Always the Wrong Time

I know I’m supposed to want an open-plan kitchen, but the truth is I don’t.  You know the kind of kitchen I mean? The kind that looks out onto the living room and/or the dining area so that the whole thing is just one big space.  It suggests a marvelous breezy style of life in which cooking is not a chore.  I guess you’re meant to pop open a bottle of wine, toss a salad, and waft over to the table to wow your dinner guests with whatever it is you’ve happened to throw together.  No big deal.  Effortless perfection.

Now, I think open kitchens are beautiful but I’m not sure I would do well cooking in one.  Nearly every dinner party I give involves a bit of panic, or at least a sense of urgency.  Our kitchen isn’t wide open.  It just has a kind of pass-through window, and I’ve always been grateful for that fact.  There are just enough walls in our kitchen, I hope, to hide the piles of dishes and the cookbook covered in flour and butter and the cat and dog underfoot.  In our kitchen, fortunately, you can duck behind the refrigerator long enough to swear when you burn your hand on a hot pan.  But you can still smile bravely when you pass by the window that looks out onto the living room.  There is a chance, in our kitchen, of hiding the fact that cooking is labor.  I love to cook, I love having people over, but work must be done.

I’m sure Martha in today’s gospel would back me up on that.  She knows that the time for sitting and listening attentively to your guests is not the time when you are trying to get dinner on the table.

But here’s where Martha and I might get ourselves into some trouble.  It turns out that dinner itself is not a great time for listening, either.  There is always something to jump up and get.  There are glasses to be filled, and second courses to prepare.  Dishes to be cleared away, dessert to be sliced and served.  After dinner?  Well maybe.  It could be that when everyone is well fed and the glasses have been filled to everyone’s limit, there will be time to linger over conversation.  That’s the hope. But often that’s when guests start to look at their watches and make noises about going.  No, if you ask me, the best time to talk is when the party is over and you are sitting on the couch with your feet up, basking in the glow of the evening and nibbling on leftovers.  But of course everyone’s gone by then.  And anyway, aren’t you supposed to be doing the dishes? 

You see the dilemma: if we aren’t careful, every moment of a dinner party becomes the wrong time for getting together with the actual people we’ve invited.  I’m sure Martha would never have put it that way, but it sounds like that’s how she’s actually thinking: “I’ll have time for Jesus after he’s gone, when the dishes are done.” 

We would never speak of our lives of discipleship in that way either, but if we don’t watch out, that’s exactly how we’ll live.  We all want our churches to be filled with ardent disciples, for instance, but if you were to ask around the larger church about who those disciples should be—take a survey, or something--I bet you would hear the following implicit logic.

We might set up the questions this way: what’s the right age for encountering God in the Church?  Who should be on fire with the Gospel? Who should be an ardent disciple?

Should young children encounter God in church? Well, not really, because they don’t understand what they are hearing.  What we need to give them is something softer and more pleasing that helps them grow up and get along in the world.  We should give them some kind of grounding in religion but our expectations should be low.  Sunday school, sure, but mostly that should be fun.  We just need to keep them coming back.

Should it be teenagers then?  No, most teenagers have a lot of trouble reconciling faith with the world around them.  They are busy getting close to their friends.  They have to get into good schools and develop skills.  Youth ministry, sure, but mostly that should be fun and it should keep them out of trouble.  We just need to keep them coming back.

College students?  Heavens no.  They are too busy getting an education, and anyway their professors are just filling their heads with atheist notions.  We all know college is a time for doubt and existential angst. We should make religion available to them but mostly that should be a social thing.  We’re lucky if they hang on through college. 

Well then, young working-age people?  No way.  They can’t be ardent disciples.  They have to work long hours. They have to establish themselves.   They might get married.  They might start having families.  And families with children should be busy nesting and attending to extra-curricular activities.  And after that, middle aged and older people are tired and don’t have the energy, and they are stuck in their ways.  And anyway, they can’t relate to what’s going on in young people’s lives.  We should look to young people to be the future of the church.  Although, of course, as we’ve just said, younger people aren’t the right ones for ardent discipleship either.

Do you see how this works?  It’s just like a dinner party.  If we aren’t careful we will define each moment of life as the wrong time to sit at the feet of Jesus.  Each moment in our lives will be the wrong moment for God to command our attention and our interest, our ardent love.  Everything we say about what’s important to us and other people will be about pushing God away.  There never is that golden moment when the dishes are put away and it’s easy to imagine talking to God.

That’s one of the reasons we gather for worship on a Sunday morning, even when it’s hot.  We remind ourselves, week after week, that it’s actually better to drop everything and sit at the feet of Jesus for a while, no matter what big ideas we have about what we should be doing.

We remind ourselves that, like Mary, we might have to risk looking wrong, selfish, misguided, or useless.  In dinner party terms, we may in fact need to open the kitchen walls a bit, dispense with the fantasy of effortless perfection, and talk to Jesus our guest even while the sink is filling with dishes.  Maybe dessert can be served later.  Maybe we need to admit that we are throwing this party, not for the beauty of our own cooking, but for the beauty of true communion.

Maybe we need to face, as I see people in this parish do so well, the need to communicate the love of God to everyone: children, the aged, even teenagers.  Maybe the flame of love for God is just waiting to be ignited at all sorts of impractical moments.  Maybe that’s half the joy of following Jesus: seeing love spring up where we never knew it could.

Sometimes I wish this story about Martha and Mary didn’t feel quite so much like an either/or proposition, but in truth there are choices that have to be made.  There is no way to spend time in prayer without not doing something else we could be doing.  There is no way to be a parish full of people without deciding that people are meant to live their whole lives in the full light of the glory of God. 

And heaven knows that the world needs our action but it also desperately needs our capacity to pay attention with ardent love.  Heaven knows the capacity to show God reverence is related to the capacity to have respect for, let’s say, asylum seekers.  We need to know how to drop our agendas and turn to God when God calls us.

I’m not good at making those choices, putting God first, and maybe you aren’t either.  Maybe we all have agendas that don’t include God.  But I know that I want to hear Jesus say of me and of you what he says about Mary: she has chosen well and it shall not be taken from her.

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
21 July 2019
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Posted on July 25, 2019 .

A Summary of the Law

One of the problems with the Parable of the Good Samaritan is that everyone always assumes that they have already learned the lesson it’s meant to convey.  What is that lesson?  Of course, it is the answer to the question that the lawyer asked Jesus: Who is my neighbor?  And the answer, as everyone knows, is that you need to learn to see the other as your neighbor - even someone who is very different from you, and especially when that person is in need.  Easy-peasy.  What could be simpler?  Can we move on to the Creed, please, and get out of church early today?

Now, the need to see the other as our neighbor is not a bad lesson, and it would be very good for us to learn it.  It is a particularly tempting lesson to want to apply to all sorts of issues in American life at just the moment.  But strictly speaking, it is not the lesson that Jesus was teaching when he told the parable of the Good Samaritan.  The parable, when interpreted this way, easily becomes an exercise in perception of the world around us, as if the important thing to do is to be able to look out at a sea of humanity and identify the neighbor among many competing possibilities.  Such an exercise can be practiced in a number of imaginative ways, including, for instance, on a firing range - like the type that exist in movies when someone is being trained for military or police service, and targets pop up on a firing range, and you have to take out the terrorist, but leave the old lady crossing the street unharmed, as well as the little girl walking her dog.  You can see how such an exercise could answer the question, Who is my neighbor?  But pairing that question with the question “whom should I shoot?” is probably not what Jesus had in mind.

Although it sounds as though Jesus might be holding up a viewfinder to the lawyer, and asking him to “find the neighbor,” I do not think that is actually what is happening here.  Yes, there is a choice to be made, in the way Jesus tells the story, there is discernment to be done.  There’s a priest, a Levite, and a Samaritan, and there is no question that Jesus is asking the lawyer to choose one.  “Which one of these three,” he asks, “do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers.”

The answer is obvious to nearly everyone... and of course it is obvious to the lawyer, who rightly answers, “The one who showed him mercy.”

And it is what Jesus says next that shows us how easily we miss his point, because we think we already know the point of this parable.  Jesus, says to the lawyer, “Go and do likewise.”  And with those few words, he shows the lawyer that this was never an exercise about picking out the neighbor from among a pool of options.  It was never a matter of looking through a viewfinder in order to make the correct choice.  It wasn’t even a matter of the Samaritan perceiving the injured man to be his neighbor.

Image of the Arizona desert from Border Angels

Image of the Arizona desert from Border Angels

Because Jesus wasn’t holding up a viewfinder for the lawyer to peer through, so to speak, and then to find the neighbor.  No, Jesus was holding up a mirror.  The issue at hand was not whether or not the lawyer could find the neighbor, it was about whether or not the lawyer was prepared to be the neighbor.  And the parable should probably read the same way for each of us.  

It’s as easy to use this parable to indict some un-neighborly person for failing to do his or her duty, as it to round up illegal immigrants at the border.  And it is absolutely the case that this parable has a lot to say about what’s happening at our borders these days, borders we have become obsessed with “securing” as though that task has a clear meaning and is an unmitigated good.

But no society can enforce all the laws all the time - you have to make choices.  And it’s telling that there are some laws being zealously enforced at this time in our nation that are holding people accountable for their actions, keeping in check many people who have no money and even less power.  While other laws are paid mere lip service, allowing free rein and wide berth to the rich and the powerful.  This is not a new pattern in America, but the pattern is being honed in this nation at this time in a way that’s noticeable.

It’s not a coincidence that the word used to describe Jesus’ interlocutor in this episode is rendered as “lawyer” even though the person in question is a religious authority, and not what you and I fist think of when we think of a lawyer.  It’s his interest and his business to attend to the laws of the faith - a faith that defines itself in laws.  And it’s no coincidence that the lawyer chose his words carefully, when he answered Jesus’ question: Which one of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?

It was the one who showed him mercy.  Mercy always stands apart from the law.  Mercy might not suspend the law entirely, but mercy feels free to relax the law, to bend the law, and to seek the spirit that sometimes gets crushed by the letter of the law.  Sometimes, mercy even shows us how to change the law.

There is no argument to be made that the priest and the Levite failed in their responsibilities to the letter of the law.  The parable, as Jesus tells it, assumes that we know that the choices of the priest and the Levite were entirely defensible (by, say, a lawyer), that these two were, by some definition, faithful to the law, keeping its precepts for the sake of their own cleanliness, and readiness to present themselves to God.  But they had forgotten the second part of the call to faith that is always appended to the first commandment that thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.  And the second commandment is like unto it: thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.

The priest and the Levite had forgotten that on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.  And even though the lawyer knows this, perhaps he was ready to forget this too.  So Jesus teaches him a lesson in mercy, which is also a lesson in how to keep the law.  And the key to that lesson is not that the lawyer needs to learn a new way to see the world, rather that he needs to remember an old way of seeing himself.  It is a call for the lawyer to remember how to be a neighbor, which is also a call to show mercy in the way he approaches the law.

Now, it’s a fool’s errand on many levels to apply a sermon like this to the furore that has been kicked up around immigration policy, and the way it’s being conducted along our souther border.  But as a child who grew up with grandparents who spoke with thick Slavish accents, I can’t quite leave the errand alone.

The pulpit is not normally the place to argue for or against a particular public policy, and I don’t want to use this pulpit in that way.  But I do want to recall the story of Scott Warren, whose trial on federal conspiracy charges, and felony charges of harboring illegal immigrants ended recently in a mistrial, when a jury could not reach an agreement about the implications of his actions.

To my knowledge the facts of the case are not disputed: that Mr. Warren, a 36 year-old geography teacher, provided aid and assistance to a pair of Central American immigrants who entered this country illegally, and arrived tired, dehydrated, and with blistered feet.  It seems obvious that Mr Warren put himself in a place where he intended to encounter such migrants.  It seems clear that Mr. Warren knew that such attempts to enter this country are illegal.

The government says that “this case is not about humanitarian aid, or anyone in medical distress,” but that it is about “whether Mr. Warren attempted to ‘shield’ two undocumented immigrants from law enforcement for several days.”

Mr. Warren’s lawyer painted a different picture, claiming that “Mr. Warren had not committed a crime by helping the migrants, even if what he did might have allowed them to stay out of sight of law enforcement agents. ‘Scott Warren is a law-abiding, life-giving good Samaritan,’ he told the jury.”*

And here, we see the problem in assuming that we knew what this parable was all about.  We thought that it was all about looking out over the Rio Grande and deciding whether or those struggling, suffering, dehydrated, blistered souls trying to escape hopelessness count as our neighbors.  I can’t answer that question for you, or anyone else.  And actually, I guess, neither can Scott Warren.  But his lawyer seems to have understood the way that Jesus really told this parable, as a mirror for ourselves, as a way to judge what kind of decisions we make when faced with someone over there, on the other side of the street, who’s been left for dead.

This is not a parable that tells us very much that we didn’t already know about the plight of the poor, injured party, to whose rescue no one has come.  It does however, tell us a lot about ourselves, when we ask which of the three was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers.

The obvious answer is that it was the one who showed him mercy.  And the moral of the story is this: Go and do likewise.

*from the Miriam Jordan in NY Times, June 11, 2019

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
14 July 2019
Saint Mark’s Church Philadelphia

Posted on July 14, 2019 .

Freedom in the Gardens

The last time I was in Spain I had the opportunity to see two paintings that I’d known about for a long time, but never seen in person.

The first one, I wasn’t looking for, but I could hardly avoid it, as it was on special exhibition at its home, El Prado.  It is The Garden of Earthly Delights, painted around the turn of the 16th century by the Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch.  The work is probably meant to be read from left to right, but I’ll take the panels out of order, to start.  

The central panel of this large triptych famously depicts a kind of phantasmagorical scene of men and women “cavorting with abandon,” surrounded by creatures real and imagined, some of whom are getting in on the fun.  Dozens upon dozens of nude figures in every conceivable grouping are enjoying themselves in ways that are erotically suggestive, but never quite explicit.  Over-sized birds and giant fish are involved, among other things.  The people are enjoying themselves on land, and in the water, and in a number of pavilions that look as though they could have been designed by Salvador Dalí.  The scene is clearly presented as an extension of the Garden of Eden.  But it is hard to say at first glance whether it is supposed to represent a perversion of paradise or a fulfillment of it.

To the right is an equally wild depiction of what must be the torments of hell, most of which are not suitable for description from a pulpit.  The background is dark.  Pain, injury, and molestation of all kinds are taking place.  And fires burn in a city from which hordes are fleeing.

from The Garden of Earthly Delights

from The Garden of Earthly Delights

The left-hand panel, which must be Eden, is much calmer and more sedate than the other parts of the work.  Only three figures occupy the scene, in contrast to the hundreds teeming in the other two sections.  Here Bosch has painted God presenting Eve to Adam.  God is portrayed as a young man, perhaps the pre-incarnate Christ, complete with blond hair.  He is robed in a flowing rose-colored gown, clasped at the neck with some sort of morse or brooch.  His bare toes are only just visible, peeking out from beneath his ample garment.  He is grasping Eve’s right wrist with his left hand, almost as if he is confirming that she has a pulse.

Eve is naked, with long golden tresses, her eyes modestly cast down, half-kneeling (like an Episcopalian) on a little hillock.  The divine grasp of her wrist allows her to extend her hand, opened, toward Adam.

Adam, also naked, is sitting on the ground on the other side of the Lord, supporting himself, quite naturally, with his right arm.  It’s hard to tell if his gaze is directed more toward the Lord or the woman; it would seem that he is trying to figure out what to make of this moment.

Adam is doing the most adorable thing, in a very large painting that includes almost nothing adorable.  As he sits there gazing up, he is extending his feet toward the Lord and reaching out to grab the hem of the Lord’s robe between the big toes of his two feet in a sort of playful way.  You can barely see that Adam’s left foot has come into contact with God’s right foot beneath the fabric of his gown.  It is a delightfully childish gesture, in which the first man seems to be grasping for the security of his creator, faced with the recognition that creation is not all about him.

Of the two first humans, Adam and Eve, one of them is clearly more ready than the other for what lies ahead.

Two last details about this section of the painting.  God’s right hand is raised in blessing.  And his gaze is directed unambiguously toward the viewer.

Guernica

Guernica

The second painting I saw was the great scene of destruction made by Picasso on his enormous canvas, Guernica.  All in black and white and greys, the painting has been called the “emblem for all the devastating tragedies of modern society.” *

If Bosch’s triptych is intended to be read from left to right, from paradise to perdition, then I suppose you can think of Guernica as an extension of the right-hand panel’s vision of the torments of hell.  In this case, hell on earth.  A mother wails with grief as she carries the body of her dead child in her arms.  A soldier lies dismembered on the ground.  Another woman reaches to the heavens as her home burns around her.  A horse, impaled, brays its death throes.  Another woman strains on one knee to make her escape.  All is chaos and terror, fire and blood.  And a divine eye looks down and sees it all.

Shift gears for a moment to the passage from Galatians in which we heard St. Paul tell us that “for freedom Christ has set us free.”  And then we heard him go on in a highly dualistic way about the contrast between the works of the flesh and the fruits of the spirit.

Lovely though it is to hear of the fruits of the spirit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control,” we are less self-conscious, I think, than people used to be about the works of the flesh: “fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these.”  Indeed, it is clear which set of behaviors is predominant in the public sphere in America these days.

In many ways, it is just this kind of dualistic thinking that so many modern people have rejected, finding it moralizing and judgy.  And since the church is often characterized as nothing more than a hotbed of hypocrisy, and St. Paul is thought to have been in need of a bit of therapy, it has become almost reflexive to respond to this teaching with that contemporary expression of timeless complaint: You’re not the boss of me!  Which is why it is so helpful to be able to stand in front of paintings like The Garden of Earthly delights and Guernica, and let God speak to us there.  And I hope you will go and look at these images later on.

It’s helpful for me not to begin in the beginning, and, instead, to read these paintings backward, from right to left (like Hebrew), beginning with Guernica, painted in 1937 in both the aftermath and on the brink of war.  The scene includes that crucial element that is missing completely from Bosch’s painting: a child.  Rather, the body of a child: the collateral damage of our grown up ways.  The torments of Bosch’s hell seem almost quaint once you have paused at the left hand edge of Picasso’s painting, where the child’s mother cries out in despair.  Nevertheless, those torments are perverse, imaginative, and plentiful.

Continuing past to the left, we face the large panel depicting the Garden of Earthly Delights.  It’s a little like a billboard for a high-end swingers’ resort in the Poconos.  Part of the great value of the painting is the ambiguity of this scene.  Is this the kind of freedom God will permit in a paradise regained?  Or is it nothing more than our own perversion of the freedom God gave us in Eden?  The artist has not made his own judgment clear, and scholars are a bit divided on the question.

But keep reading backwards, to get back to the Garden of Eden, where the Lord of Life is giving us our freedom.  Put aside for a moment the patriarchal and cis-gendered normative assumptions of the image (it was the turn of the 16th century, after all).  What the painting shows is God making us happy and free.  All three of the figures remain physically connected.  Eve is connected because the divine hand has not yet let go of her.  And Adam is connected because he still reaches out with his big toes to grasp his Lord, maybe knowing that he is not ready to handle so much freedom, so much happiness.  You are free to see yourself in either of these two persons, I suppose.

“For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another.  For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’  If, however, you you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.”  Complicated though living the Christian life may sometimes be, sometimes it is not so complicated at all.  Paul, taking up Jesus’ teaching, tries, actually, to make it simple: “the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”

But, of course, we get caught up when we hear him say “what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other.”  And so we keep walking the wrong way through the freedom God has given us: leaving paradise for the gardens of whatever earthly delights we choose, and heading, over and over again into warfare, tragedy, injustice, and corruption.

Most likely, we don’t believe it when we hear Paul say that for freedom Christ has set us free.  Because we have spent our lifetimes walking away from freedom toward Guernica, certain that warfare and misery are someone else’s fault, and that our demand for cheap TVs, bananas, and beef (just to choose a few things) has nothing to do with it.

If the church sometimes seems old fashioned, retrograde, and stuck in the mud, it may be because we can also see the wisdom in walking the other way toward freedom, and toward a memory of a time when we could offer ourselves with open hands to one another, but still reach out for God with our toes, and stay connected both to God and to one another.  That was paradise.  That was freedom.  What was there before us that we couldn’t do?!?

The astonishing gift of Christ’s ministry is to open again the way to freedom; to promise that the gates of paradise are not locked to us; and to bring us again into that lovely, simple, physical connection to our Lord, who, on the one hand hasn’t let go of us yet, and on the other, is perfectly happy to let us reach out and grab him with our toes.

Look, you can call it a Garden of Earthly Delights, but if all it brings is fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these, then what good is it to us?  Don’t we see exactly what it looks like when that garden gets overgrown?

When we turn around and move the other way toward freedom, we soon find that Christ has been looking for us, looking at us, all along, and that his hand has been raised in blessing - a blessing meant for us - all along.  And we find that we are confronted by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control.

Considering the world we live in now, I think I’d like to walk that way toward freedom; wouldn’t you?  

In fact, I feel as though I’d like to sit down on the ground, take off my shoes and socks, and reach with my toes to see if I can’t catch the hem of Christ’s garment between my toes… and find his feet there, and rejoice that we are still connected!  And I believe we always will be!  Thanks be to God!

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


*Paloma Esteban Leal, for the Museo Reina Sofia

Posted on June 30, 2019 .