So It Goes.

Whether you come to church next week or not, you will be spared hearing the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, which the authorities in the church have deemed it better for us not to read aloud in church these days.  They might be correct on this matter.

Today, though, we heard the pre-amble to God’s judgment on these two cities of the Plain, in the charming, if somewhat tedious, bargaining session that Abraham engages in with the Lord, on behalf of Sodom, in order to try to get God to think, I guess, in terms of proportionate response.  “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?” Abraham asks God, when he learns of the Lord’s plan of doom for Sodom and Gomorrah, because of their very grave sin.  “Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city; will you then sweep away the place and not forgive it for the fifty righteous who are in it?”

You heard what ensued, as Abraham appeals to God’s mercy, even more than to his sense of fairness.  What about 45 - would you spare the city for 45 righteous?  Do I hear forty?  Thirty?  Twenty?  Ten?  Going once, going twice…!  Having agreed that for the sake of ten righteous people God would spare the cities their destruction, then the Lord went his way, and Abraham went his way.  But in the end things did not go well for Sodom and Gomorrah.  We are left to conclude that ten righteous people could not be found there - only Lot and his family.  And for them, a warning to flee would have to suffice.

With apologies to places like Mosul, Fallujah, Ramadi, Ghazni, and Aleppo, when I think of a city destroyed, my mind turns toward the bombing of Dresden in February of 1945.  I have been powerfully influenced in this point of view, I admit, by Kurt Vonnegut’s acerbic novel, Slaughterhouse Five*, which the author used as a way to reflect on his own experience of surviving the bombing of that city, and his witness of the aftermath of the destruction.

You won’t find much modern writing that holds up as well after fifty years as this remarkable book.  In it, Vonnegut explicitly engages Christian theology several times.  About midway through, he describes a “visitor from outer space [making] a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be so cruel…. He [the visitor from outer space] supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.

“But the Gospels actually taught this: Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected.  So it goes.” (p. 108-109)

Lest this passage lead you to presume that Vonnegut is fundamentally anti-Christian, remember that the novel is introduced with a verse from “Away in a Manger” as its epigraph.  And toward the end of the book, as they make their escape from the burning devastation of Dresden, the hero and his companions are given shelter by an inn-keeper who tells them they can stay in a stable for the night.  (You get the allusion?)

Earlier in the novel, there is a scene that takes place in the middle of the night, when the hero, Billy Pilgrim, cannot sleep, so he goes downstairs to watch the late movie on TV.  He turns it on to find “a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them.”  Billy Pilgrim has the unusual ability to watch the movie both backwards and forwards, which seems to be  little more than a conceit to allow the author to describe in reverse the narrative of a bombing sortie.  This backwards narrative unfolds in three paragraphs of eloquent, imaginative prose.  This is how it goes:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England.  Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen.  They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. 

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks.  The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new. 

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again. (p. 74-75)

Earlier in the book, Vonnegut, explicitly references God’s destruction of Sodom with brimstone and fire.  His perspective on the episode is not charitable toward God.  The writer’s sympathies lie with Lot’s wife, who, he reminds us, “was told not to look back where all those people and all their homes had been.  But she did look back,” he writes, “and I love her for that, because it was so human.  But she was turned to a pillar of salt.   So it goes.”   (p. 21-22)

If Billy Pilgrim could watch the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in reverse, I think it would look something like this:

Lot and his two daughters walk backwards out of the hills above the city of Zoar.  They go past the city where the Plain stretches out before them and they see billows of smoke and tongues of flame being sucked into the windows, doorways, and basements of the houses, and into the ground beneath the trees, dry brush, and fields around the cities of the Plain, as if a giant vacuum is it work there.  

The clouds above exert a miraculous magnetism from above, that shrinks the fires below, and, by some unimaginable force of mercy, retracts showers of brimstone and bolts of fire, gathering them up into dark clouds that grow ever lighter, as the sky brightens above.  

Beyond the clouds, the fire and the brimstone, are carefully packed away separately to avoid just this sort of disaster ever taking place again.  And the wrath of God, horribly palpable only moments ago, now dissipates across the clear blue sky.

At the same time, the corpses and wounded bodies from one end of the city to the other are uncovered from piles of rubble, their burns healed, their broken limbs mended, breath filling their lungs, as the rubble is righted and repaired by a remarkable feat of gravity in reverse, and the people get up and go about their day.

With apprehension, Lot and his girls, still moving backwards, approach a pillar of salt, standing incongruously in the midst of the Plain.  Unwilling or unable to turn their heads toward the pillar of salt and the city beyond, Lot and his daughters seem unaware that they are headed straight for it.  And yet they are all crying as they draw closer.  Just as they approach the pillar of salt, backwards, with looks of grief and terror on their faces, miraculously, there is movement from within the pillar, and as their backward footsteps carry them past it, the pillar of salt is brought to life, and from its grainy contours emerges the figure of the girls’ mother, Lot’s wife.

His family restored, Lot, once beset by anxieties and fears about his future, finds that his mind is now settled and at ease, confident in what lies before him and his family, which, still they approach moving backwards more swiftly than you would have thought possible.

On arriving at Sodom, they can at last turn around, and there they are greeted by two angels - handsome men, so striking that they turn the heads of everyone in town.  And yet, no one gets fresh.  Lot puts his girls to sleep in their comfortable home, and a throng of the men of Sodom arrives to greet the family.  Realizing that the commotion created by such a large crowd might disturb Lot’s sleeping daughters, the men disperse, and tiptoe quietly home, taking care that Lot, his family, and his angelic guests, are all safe and sound for the night.  Eventually, the two angels take their leave of Lot and his family, leaving with them word that their report to their superiors will clearly indicate that the people of the city, if they ever were wicked, have now made amends for their past ways, and appear to be paragons of civic and religious virtue.

A rainbow unfolds, stretching from the streets of Sodom to the main square of Gomorrah, bringing joy to one and all, and reassuring them that God had promised that this would be the sign he’d use to remind himself not to destroy his people ever again, even when they try his patience sorely.

Who knew there was such a lovely story to be found about Sodom and Gomorrah?  If only we tell it backwards!

According to archaeologists, neither Sodom nor Gomorrah seems to have been a real place.  It may be that the value of telling the story of their destruction is mostly didactic; maybe we have to be able to tell the story forward, in order to then learn how to tell such awful stories backwards.

Most of the destruction of actual cities that I am familiar with - in places like Dresden, Mosul, Fallujah, Ramadi, Ghazni, and Aleppo, which is to say, destruction in places where we cannot just tell the story backwards and make everything alright - has been delivered not by the hand of God, but from the human impulse to destroy one another.  So it goes.  And when we allow this fact to dawn on us, it begins to make sense of the story of Abraham bargaining with God for Sodom to be spared, if only ten righteous people could be found there.   If only.

We live in an age in which many people tend to think more highly of themselves, their own abilities, judgment, and desires, than they do of God’s ability, judgment, and will.  Such attitudes prepare people to reject God on the basis of the story of the destruction of two imaginary cities, but to place their trust in human nature, which has wreaked more havoc in more cities than the Bible could ever account for.  So it goes.

But if we take the lessons of Scripture seriously, we might learn that bargaining with God on the basis of a proportionate response, or any other economic measure, is not a winning proposition.  God’s great hope for us, it would seem, is not that we should improve our negotiating skills.  It’s far more likely that God’s great hope for his people is that we should learn to tell stories of death and destruction backwards, to make them stories of life and hope.  More to the point, God’s great hope for his people, is that we should learn to live this way - which is to say that we should live in a way that will often feel backwards in a world that seems capable only of veering ever closer to destruction, disaster, and death.

If only we could fashion for ourselves factories that operated night and day, dismantling the hatreds and resentments, and dreams of power that we have transformed into missiles, rifles, and bombs.  Workers in those factories would separate the dangerous contents into less-dangerous materials. (And it might well be mainly women who are able to do this work.)  The ingredients of our destruction could then be shipped to specialists in remote areas.  And it will be their business to put those ingredients into the ground, and hide them cleverly, so we’ll never hurt each other ever again.

I believe this may be what Jesus had in mind when he taught his disciples to pray, addressing our Father with these words; “thy kingdom come, they will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.”

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

*All non-scriptural quotations from Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, Dell Publishing, New York City, 1968

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

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

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