God's mercy

There is no economy in the Divine mercy, which is as inhuman, as alien and as uncomfortable as we can imagine. "You can't conceive, nor can I, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God," says Graham Greene.

All of which is a fancy way of saying that God is not “fair” or “just”. How can we conceive of a compassion and mercy which sees no distinction between murder and petty theft, between stealing paper clips and genocide? I always feel, when I look over the cliff of God’s mercy, a strange sense of vertigo, of being off-balance.

It is human to long for boundaries, for rules, for order; for all that which defines and makes clear and safe. We want distinctions, levels of sin. We are uncomfortable with the idea of a forgiven Stalin, a reconciled killer. We are unhappy with too much chaos, without answers ready to hand, without structure.

But there is no economy in the divine mercy. It is not enough to forgive seven times. Instead it must be seventy-seven times, or seventy times seven. Regardless, the effect is the same: there is no time when we can cease forgiving. It is hard to imagine even the most Type-A personality, the most obsessive person counting to 490 and then ceasing to forgive, and that is the point.

The kingdom of heaven which has come near is like the king who has the unforgiving servant. The poor slave is in a bad way. He owes his master 10,000 talents, so vast a sum as to be unthinkable. My bible helpfully notes that a talent is worth more than fifteen years of labor. Which means that the poor slave would have to work for more than thousands and thousands of years to pay his debt off. It is another unthinkable, impossible number. And so the king forgives him his unthinkable debt and his reckless stewardship. It is an unforeseen, munificent act which takes no notice of the size of the servant’s sin.

It is impossible however to talk about forgiveness and reconciliation without talking also about sin. And so I’m going to do something slightly risky, because you haven’t known me for very long, and I’m going to preach about sin. If that makes you slightly uncomfortable, it should. The Church has never been very good at teaching or preaching about sin for most of its history. The Church has tended to shame and alienate people, to burden them with vast amounts of guilt, or to use sin as a method of exercising social control. And the Church has been explicitly sexist, racist, and homophobia in what it has label “sin”. People are justified when they start to get skeptical or antsy when the topic of sin comes up in church.

One of the main ways that the Church has failed when it comes to talking about sin is making sin into something which is all about the gossip pages: about actions, about acting wrongly or failing to act; about money, sex and power. Not only is that a minor part of sin, but it makes sin into a completely individualistic state. I sin by doing X. I repent. I am absolved. But sin is communal, it affects our nearest and dearest, our communities, the very fabric of our life together.

Yet we know that sin is present around us. We feel it in our own hearts and minds, and we see it in the world. There is evil in the imagination of our hearts, and when we look in the mirror when we are shaving or doing our makeup, what we see is (according to one theologian) “at least eight parts chicken, phony, slob.” We see it when we walk past the homeless man sleeping in the doorway. We see it when we watch the news and see the unremitting violence and cruelty of humans, one to another. Sin is abundantly real in our lives.

And so when we talk about sin today, I want to preach about sin not as the gossip pages kind: who lost their temper with whom, who is sleeping with whom, etc., but in the wider communal sense.

I want to tell you about a friend I made in Arizona, who taught me a good deal about sin. His name is Francesco, and he lived about a block away from us. He was a Native American man, in his fifties, and his life had been very sad. He was in prison for a time, for violence. He was a raging alcoholic who would get sick if he didn’t have a drink first thing in the morning. He was constantly fighting with his girlfriend and they were perpetually yo-yoing between being together and not. He used to mow our lawn, to earn a few dollars, generally when he wanted to buy a bottle of malt liquor. He’d come round on Saturday morning; I’d be drinking my coffee and he would be drinking a forty. As you might imagine he was not the most reliable gardener. Often he would mow part of the lawn, and then start drinking and half the lawn would go unmowed for another week.

As I got to know Francesco, I became aware of a divide or split as I experienced him. In the middle of his wreck of a life were all sorts of sins that he was living in and desperately needed forgiveness for (his drinking, his temper, his miserable relationship, his lying and stealing). But the context for his sin, the background to his wreck of a life was also sinful and it wasn’t Francesco’s sin: it was my sin and the sin of my culture and of my forebears. Part of the sin which was infecting Francesco’s life began when Columbus landed in North America. Part of the sin was the theft of his ancestors’ land and the destruction of his culture. Part of that sin was the underfunded education and the culture of violence, of alcohol abuse and of poverty that he grew up in. Part of his woundedness was communal and systemic and deep beyond the simple failures of individuals. Francesco is bound and captive to the sins of our age and culture.

Even as Francesco lives in the midst of abiding communal sin, we too live in deep webs and structures of sin and we desperately need God’s forgiveness and reconciliation.

It is sin, for us to make so much money and yet to have a quarter of the population in this country without health insurance.

It is sin, for us to spend vast sums of money for war and destruction, so that we can temporarily sustain a way of life which cannot ultimately survive.

It is sin, to live in a culture of increasing obesity and gluttony while millions around the world starve.

It is a sin, which is almost perfectly lifted out of the Gospel this morning for us to increasingly sink into national debt, while at the same time holding onto the debts of countries in the developing world; debt which is crushing and gut-wrenching, keeps millions in abject poverty and condemns many to premature and preventable deaths.

We are tainted by sin every time we turn on our cars, every time we invest in a company which participates in standard business practices, every time we buy a product. We even sin by eating food, which in this culture is overwhelming raised on vast corporate farms, doused with fertilizers and chemicals which pollute the planet, and harvested by migrant workers who are paid a pittance. When we eat we are feasting on sin, eating and drinking damnation unto ourselves. Our whole way of living is that sin which is ever before God.

We are trapped, as my friend Francesco is trapped; caught and drowning in sin, and the vastness and the systemic nature of our sin seems impossible to change.

But there is no economy in the Divine mercy. Although we owe ten thousand talents, although we go through everyday sinning profusely and unconsciously, yet still God is abundantly merciful and compassionate. The only way that we can avoid that strange, intense mercy and forgiveness is when we are unable to forgive in kind. When we grasp our fellow by the throat and insist on the pennies that we are owed.

Let us therefore go through our lives working for deep systemic change and casting forgiveness all about us. Let us forgive foolishly, recklessly, uneconomically; that our God and King not mistake us for the unforgiving servant but instead pour out upon us that appalling mercy and forgiveness.

Amen.

Preached by the Rev'd Andrew Ashcroft

14 September 2008

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Honeybees and Haagen Dazs

From time to time I like to check in on the honeybees to see how they are doing.

As many of you know, some time within the past year or two a significant proportion of the honeybee population in the US and Canada began to mysteriously disappear.  Scientists are calling the phenomenon Colony Collapse Disorder.  Estimates are that anywhere from 10-35% of bees in this country have died as a result.  Interestingly, in hives that suffer CCD, the Queen Bee is still present, and there is sufficient food on hand to support the colony, but the worker bees simply disappear and the hive cannot be sustained

This summer concern about Colony Collapse Disorder has spread to the UK and other parts of Europe.  Here and abroad there are a lot of theories about the cause of this situation, but no definitive answers.  There are now those predicting doomsday scenarios that are linked to the decline of the honeybee population.  I’d say we have so many potential doomsday scenarios available to our imaginations that you have to be pretty narrow-minded to fixate on the honeybee problem.

But I do see in the colony collapses of the honeybee population a rough parallel of the life of the church.  After all, we know that most churches in western society or declining by at least 10 - 35% – certainly this has been the case for the Episcopal Church.  And I’d suggest that as with the honeybees, our decline has happened not from the top down – not because of the loss of the Queen Bee, if you will – nor because there is not enough food to support us, but because in so many places there simply are not enough worker bees to sustain the church.  Pews are half empty; 20% of the people do 80% of the work; the young are not incorporated meaningfully into the life of the church, and subtle but real collapse occurs.

Because bees live in complex, ordered communities, and because the well-being of the hive depends on each bee doing its part, and because bees produce something as sweet and wonderful as honey, and because their day-to-day activity benefits so many plants and other animals, it is easy to look on the bees with admiration.  Plus, there are no homeless bees, nor do bees go hungry (even in collapsing colonies).  Although they are well armed, as far as I know bees are not a warring species; they live pretty peaceably.  Bees have contributed no dangerous emissions to global climate change.  Their hives are not often plagued by domestic violence or gangs or drugs.  If only we could live like bees – what a wonderful place the world would be!

But the bees seem to be completely unable to do anything to prevent the mysterious collapse of their colonies.  This is probably at least partly true because the bees themselves are in no way responsible for the collapse of their own colonies.

Recently, the Haagen Dazs ice cream company began a campaign to promote awareness of the honeybee situation.  They are concerned because the bees are crucial to the pollination of almonds, pears, cherries, strawberries and other ingredients used in their ice creams.  I take it as a good sign that Haagen Dazs has gotten involved, and I intend to do everything I can to support their program!

To reflect on any similarities we may have with the bees, will ultimately lead us to reflect on our differences from the bees.  And if I may borrow a phrase from Saint Paul, the honeybees do not know what time it is, but we do know what time it is.

That is to say that the honeybees do not know that their lives hold either peril or hope.  They may buzz industriously about the hive and the orchard and the field, but they do so without any sense of destiny.  As far I as I can tell, they are no more able to reflect on their demise than they are able to reflect on the wisdom of their social order.  They may know if it is light out or dark, but they never truly know what time it.

We, on the other hand, have an ominous sense of time.  We measure it, watch, obsess about it, and worry when it grows short or goes by too fast.  And those of us who put our faith in Jesus have been given – whether we realize it or not – an acute sense of time which Saint Paul sums up when he says that the night is far gone, and the day is near.  

It is easy, however, for us to forget this.  It is easy for us – with all the doomsday scenarios available to our imaginations, and with the evidence of the general decline of the church and the world all around – it is easy to be confused about the time, and to think that we have become stuck in a kind of perpetual midnight.

But Saint Paul tells us that salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers.  What does this mean?  It means that God did not call the world into being just to watch its demise.  It means that God did not call his church into being just to watch us collapse.

Listen to a sign of this truth as Jesus teaches his disciples about reconciliation and forgiveness.  See what trouble he wants them to go to in order to learn to seek forgiveness and to give it.  He tells them to talk to one another alone, if that fails to enlist the help of one or two others, if that fails, expand the effort of reconciliation to include the church.  

So many people read this text like lawyers, as though it were intended to be an adversarial process.  (I think it’s entirely likely that a lawyer got his hands on the text before it was handed down to us, because it would have been more like Jesus to tell a parable than to provide bullet points for a multi-phase process.)  Like lawyers we can see the opportunity to win the case – to exclude the one we disagree with as a Gentile and a tax collector, and of no consequence to us.

But Jesus is a rabbi not a lawyer.  So even as he outlines a process of reconciliation that allows for the possibility of failure, he quickly encourages his students to see the benefit of getting along: “if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven.”  He might rather have said to them, “Don’t you know what time it is?  The time for discord is over, the night is far spent, the day is at hand. Where will you be when the sun rises?”

The demise of the honeybees would have been a good parable for him to tell to help us realize what time it is.  For in the church we have been caught up, lawyer-like, in courtroom dramas of our own making involving bishops and international conferences, witnesses and communiqués; schisms and standing committees.  And in the world, we are wallowing in the red/blue divide of the political season, hurling accusations, pitting party against party, claiming the moral high ground for change.  The political conventions may not have resulted in any colony collapse, but they can easily look like a very strange brand of disorder, indeed!  Perhaps the call for change from both parties has such urgency because it has seemed that our own collapse could be near at hand.  Perhaps we have forgotten what time it is; forgotten that our salvation is nearer at hand than it was before.

Here at Saint Mark’s, I believe that God is calling us to be a community that remembers what time it is, a people who know that the night is far spent and the day is at hand.  Which is to say that God expects us to be more than honeybees: to manage to live in an ordered society, to buzz about industriously benefiting others around us, to make something wonderful of our lives like honey – something like love…

… but when we see the tensions and challenges, and just plain scary realities of the world, God expects us to do something other than collapse.  He expects us to prevent our own collapse by gathering in his name – it would take only two or three together, so we are already ahead of the game.

Maybe he even expects us to be a little more like the people at Haagen Dazs – to take the initiative to say that it matters how we live together, to promote concern for the ways we have failed, and to gather together to find ways to agree to do better.

Because although the causes of colony collapse disorder among honeybees remains a mystery to us, the greater mystery is the unfathomable good news that we know what time it is: that our salvation is nearer to us now that when we first believed.  The greater mystery is the mystery of God’s love, displayed for us on an ugly cross as his Son gave up his last breath.

How did this one death conquer the power of death for all of us?  How did his sacrifice seal our fate with the God who made us and who will judge us?  How did those three short days in the grave define the meaning of every hour of our lives as well as the hope of eternal glory?  These are the mysteries of God’s love.  They beckon us to remember what time it is, to wake from a sleep of indifference, and to rejoice that in this very moment, as more than two or three of us are gathered together, Christ is in our midst.

And it is a mystery that if God has made us not simply so virtuous as honeybees, neither has he left us so imperiled as those bees.

I am praying that the honeybees will be restored to their good health, that their populations will increase and that they will continue to buzz around and do all the good work they do for our sake and the sake of the planet.

And I am praying for Haagen Dazs, oh yes, I am praying for Haagen Dazs to continue to do its good work – and oh, yes, to help save the bees!  Because I think we could use another sign to remind us what time it is – that the night is well and truly over and the day is at hand.

And I am praying that every time at least two or three of us are gathered in this place we will know that the risen Christ is among us, strengthening us, filling us with his gifts, and drawing us together by his love, then sending us out into the world as pollinators of that love.

And I am really praying that this parable of the honeybees turns out to be part of a larger parable: maybe it’s the parable of Haagen Dazs.  Because if it is, then we will have learned to reach out beyond ourselves to extend the blessings that God has given us.  Then we will save the bees and all the crops that depend on them.  And then we will not only have wonderful sweet honey from the bees… then we will have ice cream!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
7 September 2008
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

God's foolishness

Sometimes, when I am bored and channel-surfing, I’ll stop on the station which is showing a television evangelist preaching and watch for a few minutes. More often than not, the evangelist is preaching to thousands of people, wearing a $2,000 suit, and generally the message is something like this: “God has a plan for your life, and if only you will follow that plan, you will be happy, you will have good things happen to you, you will have good relationships, and you will probably have enough money, as well.”

It is not a bad message. It sells well. It draws in thousands and thousands of people. There is only one slight problem. The Scriptures are full of examples of people who follow God, who do the works that He sets before them, and their lives are shortened, they are mocked, excoriated, and isolated. Their lives get worse because of what God asks of them.

Which should, if we are being honest with ourselves, make us feel slightly uncomfortable. Somehow it doesn’t seem right, or fair that by being open to God, we get punished. “The way it should be,” we say to ourselves, “is that people should be rewarded for doing the right thing.” That is the way it works in the wider world. Why doesn’t it work that way with God?

There is, it seems, a different system of logic operating when it comes to the divine.

Think about our Gospel this morning. Peter is back to his old trick of attempting to fit both feet into his mouth. He was doing quite well there for a moment. Years of hanging around with Jesus have finally begun to penetrate the block of wood that Peter keeps where his head should be and finally last week we heard Peter get the right answer. After some subtle prodding from Jesus, Peter comes up with the answer that Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ of Israel, the one that they had been expecting for all those long years of bondage and exile. So when Jesus starts to speak to his disciples about what it means to be Messiah, about his coming crucifixion and death and resurrection, Peter in his new role as the head of the class pulls Jesus aside to give him a lecture.

Peter is looking for a political figure, a Messiah who can restore the fortunes of Israel and cast out the Roman overlords. He looking for a leader who can swoop in, restore the balance, right the wrongs, make his people great again.

(If this is sounding vaguely familiar, it should, we are in a charged election year, and Presidential candidates are set up as political, power saviors, much in the way that Peter wants Jesus to be.)

Jesus rejects that vision of Messiah, of Savior, utterly and harshly. He says to Peter fiercely: “You are not on the side of God, but of men.” He does not want to be the King of the Jews. “My kingdom is not of this world,” he proclaims while standing trial for his life, and indeed it is not. In rejecting what Peter and the disciples want for him, Jesus opens up and points to a great divide in the world. There is the way of humankind, the way of political structures, of wheeling-and-dealing, of success rewarded, of brute power and thinly veiled violence, and there is the divine way, the pouring out of innocent blood, the utterly foolish.

If Jesus was operating as a political messiah, he would have gathered a team of savvy advisors (not rough fishermen); he would have put together an exploratory committee composed of members of the Sanhedrin; he would have hired pollsters to take the temperature of the masses. He would have gone around, holding town meetings in the swing towns, not wasting time in that backwater Nazareth. He would have courted the religious leaders and the wealthy, and his sentences would be as subtly vapid and nuanced as ever a politician could make them, rather than the rough, raw rhetoric of “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”

Jesus will have none of running for Messiah. To run for Messiah would be to enter into the logic of the world, and he has not come to enter into that logic, but to destroy it.

There is a divine foolishness which winds through the world. It is not just Jesus, as he sets his face to Jerusalem and goes down to meet his ignoble death. There is a divine foolishness in choosing Israel, in choosing Moses and David, in choosing the prophets who begrudgingly speak God’s words, and all of this is foolish because God chooses the most inefficient and flawed people and families and tribes to bring about His purposes in the world. The divine logic is such that a carpenter becomes the Lord of All, death becomes redemption, failure the only means of triumph, poverty a blessing.

Even here, even today, we can see this divine logic at work. Even here, God chooses the foolishness of this place, of St. Mark’s to bring about that glory which is being revealed to us. It is foolish by the standards of the world to think that by feeding 150 people soup on Saturdays, we as a parish will have any effect on the societal structures which result in poverty, homelessness and hunger. It is foolish to think that what goes on at this altar, in complex and medieval ways, has anything to say into the iPhone, Internet culture which passes so swiftly outside our doors. It is foolish to think that by adopting St. James-the-Less as a mission, we can have any affect on the deep blights of racism, classism and poverty which inhabit areas of our city, our country and the world. It is foolish to think that by preserving this parish for the next generation we will have any effect in stemming the growing secularism which is creeping over our culture.

But we follow a foolish God. We follow a God who works in the small things, the inefficient places, the people who are difficult and unwise, the ludicrous, the pyrric, the more-than-a-little-bit mad. We follow a God who doesn’t take the path of least resistance, but the path of greatest resistance. We follow a God who was foolish enough to pick us and place us here, with all that we need to completely alter our city and our world, and who expects us to be foolish enough, to be mad enough to know that it cannot be done, that the obstacles are almost insurmountable and to radically, powerfully, set about doing it anyways.

Would that I could tell you, like the television evangelist, that we will be happy and wealthy and long-lived for attempting these foolish things that we are called to do. But I think it unlikely. Often, to do the works of God is to become a lightning rod and a stumbling block and an offense to many. Yet still we must do what we are called to, for in the divine logic there are only two options: lose our lives for God, or lose our lives trying to preserve and extend them. Either way, we lose our lives.

God chooses what is foolish to shame the wise; He has scattered the proud, he has exalted the humble and meek, He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away.

Let us be equally as foolish as God, as we work to speak into and bring about the redemption of the world. Amen.

Preached by the Rev'd Andrew Ashcroft

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia

August 31st, 2008

Brownstone

Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were digged…  For the Lord will comfort Zion; he will comfort all her waste places, and will make her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of the Lord.  (Is 51:1-3)


This fall, students from the Historic Preservation program of the University of Pennsylvania will be conducting a close-up examination of the brownstone exterior of our church.  Their professor told me that Saint Mark’s was a good place for the students to learn because our stone has at least one example of anything and everything that can possibly go wrong with brownstone.  I’m so glad we can be of help!

I once asked an architect what she could tell me about the maintenance of churches, like ours, made of brownstone.  “Well” she said, “I can tell you there’s a reason they stopped using brownstone to build buildings!”

Brownstone is soft and porous.  It is susceptible to the punishments of the weather.  It expands and contracts and flakes and scales.  If it isn’t laid properly, it crumbles fairly easily.  Maybe you could say brownstone is a lot like us: its weaknesses are pretty obvious.  And yet, 160 years ago they started building this church with it, and we are still standing.

The prophet Isaiah knew about the weaknesses of God’s people.  “Your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you.  For your hands are defiled with blood and your fingers with iniquity; your lips have spoken lies, your tongue mutters wickedness,” he said.  The prophet will go on to catalog the shortcomings of God’s children – at least one example of anything and everything that can possibly go wrong, it would seem.

Despite our magnificent achievements, we do not seem to be much better off, all these aeons later.  As a society, we are struggling in America not to make a scandal of just putting a roof over people’s heads and keeping it affordable.  We have made an almost catastrophic spectacle of the simple matter of shelter.  Is it any wonder that we have not managed to avoid wars, feed the hungry, educate our children very well, or reach some civilized common understanding about the rights of un-born children?  We are brownstone, at best.

The weaknesses of the church are, by now, so commonplace as to be jokes: - her hypocrisy, her pride, her facility at abuse, her sexism, her homophobia, her unseemly relationship to money.  Perhaps all churches should be built of brownstone – as reminders of who we really are: soft porous, prone to failure; the church can crumble fairly easily, too.

If the church and society can be compared to brownstone, so can each of us in our own lives.  We know our weaknesses and our failures.  We know, too well, how easily we crumble, how susceptible we are, not only to the weather, but to things like easy credit, temptations of infidelity to the ones we love, anger because it makes us feel righteous, cheating as long as we don’t think we will get caught.  In any given congregation, or perhaps on any given block in this city, there must be close to at least one example of anything and everything that can go wrong in a person’s life.  Brownstone.

To which the prophet Isaiah says, “Look to the rock from which you were hewn.”  He is talking about Abraham and Sarah.  They are the first crucial pivots in the story of salvation.  From almost the first pages of scripture – just after the splendor of God’s creation – we see how things are sliding away from God.  Exiled from Eden, Sodom and Gomorrah are not far away.  But with God’s promise to Abraham that he would make him a father of many nations, hope is kindled again.

Catholic minded Christians have heard in the prophet’s words a rallying cry for the papacy and a church that rests on the sure foundation of Peter’s confession of faith, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God!”  To which Jesus famously responds, “Simon, son of Jonah, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.”

For many of us, however, it may not be much consolation to look to either Abraham or to Peter as we contemplate the soft susceptibility of our lives to all that wears us down, and chips away at us from either the inside or the outside.  This, I suspect, is the case, at least in part, because we are largely exiled from the story of our own salvation.  Shaped, as we have been, by a democratic, consumer society, we have gotten good at convincing ourselves that we more or less shape our own lives and our future.  What is salvation to those of us who are masters of the universe – or at least those of us who can get whatever we want at Walmart?  Concern for what happens to us after death ranges from paying for funeral expenses to helping our kids avoid inheritance taxes, to deciding where we want our ashes scattered – and not much further than that.  The idea that we could or should be changed, somehow, in this life or the next, seems odd – unless it is a diet or an exercise plan we are talking about.

We may be soft and porous and susceptible to all kinds of dangerous forces, but we have learned to accept ourselves for who we are, flakes and all; we’ve learned to like ourselves.  Or at least we’ve learned to put up with our selves and our weaknesses.  We’ve learned to stop thinking that God has anything more in store for us than rolling us off the production line and sending us on our way.

And this is a problem.

Because God has more in mind for us than a program of historic preservation.  He can do more for us than halt our decay, repair our cracks, and replace the chunks that fall off.  We may be brownstone, but God hewed us from his own quarry, and it was his hand that first shaped us, no matter what’s become of us since.

And the story of salvation is the story of a God who sees in you and in me the building blocks of a new creation – the kingdom of God - this is why he has called us to be a part of his church.  He knows that with our wars, our weapons, our money-grubbing, our disloyalty, our selfishness, our abuse of one another, our ruination of the earth, and on an on, we have made a wilderness even of Eden, and a desert of what was the garden of the Lord.  And he knows that in our more honest moments we can see this too.  He knows that we are crumbling, flaking, scaling.  He knows how soft is the stone of which we are made – after all he first formed us out of the mud.

But God remembers why he made us – for love’s sake, in his own image, by his own breath, with his own hand.  And he never meant for us to be so worn down by the weather and everything else.  He never meant for us to stray so far from Eden, though he must have known that we would.  Which is why he hewed us from the Rock of his beloved Son – carved, perhaps, out of the same side that would later be carved out by a soldier’s spear.

And our salvation is this: to discover in our weakness the true rock from which we were hewn; to see, as we begin to think that we will crumble to bits, that we have been carved out of rock that is strong when we are weak, that sees light where we are covered in darkness, that brings healing where we can only decay, and that knows life where we could only die.

Look to the rock from which we were hewn, and see that though they beat him he does not crumble, though they kill him, he is not broken, though they lay him in a tomb, he cannot be held there.  And we thought we were brownstone!  Look!  Look to the rock from which you were hewn.  He is the rock that makes of Peter a prince of the church, even though he is brash, and sometimes stupid, and not sufficiently steadfast in his faith.  Look to the rock of Abraham’s faith – the rock on which Sarah finally bore a son, and on which Isaac was not killed.

See how soft and porous we are – you and I!  See how weakly we crumble in so many ways!  And look, look to the rock from which we were hewn, and see that we will be re-made into something better than our old selves.

Look to the rock from which we were hewn, and see how God is already fashioning us into a new people who are stronger than we thought we were.  See how he calls us to build a city within this city where the hungry are fed, where all find a welcome, where hope trumps despair.

Look to the rock from which you were hewn and see Jesus, and know that you are more than you believed you were; that when you crumble and all the kings horses and all the kings men could not put you or me back together again, he still can!

Look to the rock from which you were hewn and see how the church still stands despite her fragile stones.

My brothers and sisters, we are brownstones, it is true.  We are flaking, scaling, crumbling, weak.  To grow up is, in some ways, to learn that this is true.  But it is also true that this is not all we shall ever be.  Just as the brownstones of this church, laid properly and given care form something stronger, better, holier than they could be, so God has built us into a stronger, better, holier people than we could ever be, by calling us together in his church, and reminding us ever to look to the rock from which we were hewn.

God would have good reason to give up trying to build his kingdom with such wearisome stones as us.  But instead he calls us to look to the rock from which we were hewn.

Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were digged.  

Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you; for when he was but one I called him and made him many.

For the Lord will comfort Zion; he will comfort all her waste places, and will make her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the voice of song!

Lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look at the earth beneath; for the heavens will vanish like smoke, the earth will wear out like a garment, and they who dwell in it will die like gnats.

But God’s salvation will be for ever!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
24 August 2008
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Meow-ing at the Door

From time to time people ask me about my cat, Leo, who, as some of you know, was brought to me as a kitten who’d been found on the streets, abandoned by his mother.  To be honest, a year and a half later, I am still much more of a dog person than a cat person.  My dog Baxter hangs around church with me and others all day, every day.  He accompanies me on walks all over the city, and sometimes goes on trips with me.

Leo, on the other hand, although perfectly nice when he is alone with me, is a scaredy-cat.  Whenever Baxter is around, Leo hides behind a sofa for hours at a time, and mostly comes out at night to patrol the Rectory when he knows he is in no danger of running into the sleeping dog, who is behind a door in the bedroom with me.

This summer I have discovered, however, that Leo is not always the archetypically aloof cat.  On the several occasions that I have been away for more than a few days, although Leo is true to form in avoiding Baxter – and so, unable to greet me on my return home – once the lights are out on my first night back, and a door closed between the dog and him, Leo comes to the bedroom door and meows loudly and pathetically for attention.  “Hey! he seems to be calling, What about meee!”  And I realize that I cannot reserve all my affection for the dog.  Even this frightened, ill-socialized cat needs me to come spend some time with him.  He needs his ears scratched and his tummy rubbed, and to walk around me in circles, rubbing his back against me and purring.  And he even allows me to pick him up and hold him in my arms – which is not his usual thing.

When I came home from my recent trip and heard Leo meow-ing loudly outside the bedroom door, I had the story of the Canaanite woman we heard today already in my head.  And though it was late, and I would have liked to go straight to bed, and I had not thought much at all, to be honest, about doing anything for Leo except cleaning his litter box, there was his plaintive cry – “What about meee?!”  And I realized that this is exactly what the Canaanite woman was doing.  She had no reason to expect Jesus to pay much attention to her.  But she believed that he could do for her what she needed – that he could heal her daughter.  And her crying must have been every bit as pathetic as Leo’s meow-ing.  “What about meee?!”

It is a moment of truth for Jesus.  His disciples – his entourage – are asking him to send her away (she’s just someone else encroaching on their time with him).  And Jesus’ initial response, is roughly the equivalent of kicking the cat aside and telling it to go back behind the sofa where it belongs.  But she will not stop meow-ing – this woman – “What about meee?!”

Some parts of the church these days are practicing a faithfulness to the New Testament that seems to begin and end with an imitation of the disciples who quite regularly ask Jesus to get rid of people who bother them.  “Send her away!” the disciples say of the Canaanite woman, just as they did of the 5,000 hungry souls gathered at the lakeshore to hear Jesus teach.  Send them away!  This is another way of saying, “Jesus’ gospel: his forgives, mercy, love and hope – all of which the world desperately needs in every corner – are not for you! Go away!”

Do we doubt that there are quite literally millions of people who believe that this is the message the church is broadcasting?  Many people see in the church too many examples of hypocrisy, abuse, self-interest, arrogance, and a ready willingness to slam the door in people’s faces.  And they are not imagining it; we still have plenty of disciples in the church who think they speak for Jesus when they say of people they don’t approve of, “Send them away!”

And of course, many who see in the church, quite rightly, too many examples of hypocrisy, abuse, self-interest, arrogance, and a ready willingness to slam the door in people’s faces, don’t need to be sent away: they have happily left of their own accord.  It is as though, tired of living behind the sofa and having to beg for attention, my cat Leo decided to pack his things and move out.

But he would still be meow-ing somewhere.  He would still need to have his ears scratched and his tummy rubbed, to walk around someone in circles and rub his back against them and purr.  He would still need to be picked up and cradled in someone’s arms long after he had given up on the possibility that anyone would do it.

So the cry of a Canaanite woman is a reminder to us, like the meow-ing of a needy cat.  And some of us here today may feel more like that woman, more like Leo, than like the disciples.  Or at least we know people who feel that way – excluded, ignored, unwanted by a church that is uninterested in sharing Jesus with them.  “What about meee?!”  While there are still voices crying, let us be clear about the answer.  Just imagine how Jesus must have felt as even he discovered that the answer was more generous than he imagined.  If he had something to learn about the expansiveness of his mission, chances are we do too.

And if we are able to hear in the meow-ing of a cat the need to be tended to, to have at least a little attention paid, and perhaps even to be picked up and cradled in our arms, how much more should we be open to hearing the sometimes subtle cries of a world that fears the church has nothing to say to them but “Go away!”

And would we send them away?  Or has God given us generous hearts and strong arms to find ways to respond to a world that needs more of Jesus not less of him?

And if you happen to be one of those who is feeling a bit uncertain about God, wondering if God knows you, remembers you, cares for you; if you feel like you could practically scream just to get his attention, or at least meow a little at the door; and if you are wondering if it is worth it, if it gets you anywhere, or if you should perhaps just pack your things and move out, because why should you have to live behind the sofa, after all…

… remember that Canaanite woman.  “Great is your faith,” Jesus said to her – which probably came as news to her.  She had no idea that her faith was strong.  But she knew what she needed, and what her daughter needed, and she knew where to go to find it: to the heart of God’s love, from which she simply could not be sent away.

There is apparently room in the many mansions of God’s love for what used to be called “all sorts and conditions” of men and women.  There is mercy and forgiveness and love and hope for all those who seek and – and even for those who are not looking especially hard.

There is an answer to all of us who cry out from time to time, “What about meee?!” when we are feeling desperate, lonely, unloved, beyond hope, excluded, or in pain.

There is a Lord of life who will not be hampered either by his disciples or by any doctrine that limits the reach of his love.  He hears our cry.  

He hears your meow-ing.  And his arms are open, he will let no one get in your way.  You had no idea your faith was strong!  But it has brought you to Jesus’ side, where all things are made new.  Thanks be to God.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
17 August 2008
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Entourage

Chances are, you know about the miracle of the feeding of the 5,000.  Chances are, you know how many loaves there were (five), and how many fish (two).  Chances are, you even know how many baskets of leftovers there were – don’t you?  (Twelve.)  Chances are, you don’t need me to explain to you the miracle of the feeding of the 5,000.

But chances are, you have missed, most of your life, the other miracle described in this story.  Do you see a second miracle in the feeding of the 5,000?  Did anyone ever tell you there was a second miracle, and that the second one may be more important than the first – more important than sending 5,000 happy campers home with bread and fish in their bellies.

Let me tell you the other miracle.

For some time before today’s episode, Jesus has been leading his disciples around teaching them.  He gave them instructions for carrying out missionary work, but Matthew does not report that Jesus ever sends them out to do anything.  He has been telling them parables about the kingdom of God, and they have been listening.  He has given seminars on faith, and they have been listening – or trying to anyway.  He has been healing people, casting out demons, and they have been watching, maybe taking notes.

Jesus has been doing a lot.  And the disciples have been watching, listening, staying close at hand, and doing very little.  It’s alright – he hasn’t asked them to do much but be a good audience, shout A-men at the appropriate time, etc.  He has been their shepherd, and they have been excellent sheep: falling in line, and following where he calls them.

In the 14th chapter of Matthew’s gospel, the disciples continue to follow along.  They get into a boat with him to go to a quiet place.  But a crowd has got wind of his arrival and there is no quiet to be had.  Matthew tells us that Jesus did his thing – he healed the sick.  What did the disciples do?  Watch, maybe.  Crowd control, perhaps.  Grumble among themselves that just when they thought they were going to get some face time with him, he does what he always did: goes to the crowd, and wows them.

So it is no surprise that as evening falls the disciples try to wrestle him back for themselves.   “The day is over,” they say.  “Everyone is hungry and tired.  Tell the crowd to get out of here and go get food for themselves.”  They are his posse, his entourage, they’d like to enjoy it a little.  The disciples are jealous for Jesus’ time.  They want to wallow in his attention, lavished just on them.  They want to enjoy the end-of-the-day beer with him, gathered in a huddle of the inner circle.  They want to bask in the glow of proximity to his power, his popularity.  They want to sit and listen to him some more.  They are definitely not asking Jesus for something to do. After all, he has never given them much to do before.

“Send the crowd away, into the villages to buy something to eat for themselves, and bring this rally to an end,” they say.

But Jesus looks at them and surprises them:  “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.”

The disciples do not seem to know that a miracle is at hand – let alone two miracles.  They may be starting to wonder if they have hitched themselves to the wrong wagon.  “Jesus,” they say, “we have only five loaves and two fish.”  Give us a break!  And the look he must have given them just repeated with his eyes what he had already said with his lips: You give them something to eat.

You know what happens next.  They bring him the bread and the fish.  He takes it, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to the disciples, who seem now to know what to do.  They head out into the crowd and start distributing bread and fish – I’m thinking fish sandwiches, maybe fish tacos.

Did you see the second miracle?  It happened after Jesus has taken the bread, blessed and broken it, and given it to the disciples.  Just then, where normally there would have been nothing for them to do but sit down and watch him work his magic with the crowds, it is Jesus who takes his seat, and the disciples who carry out the miracle he has just set in motion.  They are no long spectators of his ministry: they become partners in it.  They have been transformed from a grumbling posse of hangers-on who have nothing much to do but listen and watch, into active ministers of Christ’s love for the world.  Jesus takes a seat; and they are the ones who feed the people.  

You give them something to eat.  This sounded ridiculous to them.  There was no food, and they wouldn’t have known what to do, or wanted to do it even if there had been.  But now they are feeding people –fish sandwiches! – who moments ago they just wanted to get rid of.

These people – these disciples – are not the same sheep they were when they got out of the boat with Jesus.  Can you imagine how they felt as they walked among the crowd handing out food, reaching into their baskets - not daring to look to see if there is another sandwich there, another taco – and finding that their hands are full?  Can you imagine how they felt as they cleaned up – he even makes them clean up! – and they collect twelve baskets of left-overs.  Cleaning up never felt so good!

This is a miracle: this posse has become more than an entourage, they have become real disciples, partners in ministry, bearers of the gifts of Jesus.  This is not what they thought they were when they got there, you can be sure.


From this vantage point, up here in a pulpit, almost every congregation looks the same, in almost every church.  It’s not that you look like the crowd; there are too many others outside these doors who fill that role well.  Most congregations look a lot like that small group that traveled with Jesus.   You look like his posse, his entourage.  Lined up in your rows of pews, you are prepared, I believe, to listen; you are open to learning; you are happy to hear about the way Jesus heals and casts out demons.  Unflattering though it may be, you are willing to be sheep in the flock of this Good Shepherd, and you may even be determined to be a good sheep, always among the 99, never the one who strays.  And this is alright, especially if the church has not asked anything much more of you.  The church, in fact, has often been happy to keep you in your pens – I mean your pews.  This way we can keep you in line!

And I can take my place at the altar and play at being Jesus: taking bread, blessing it, breaking it, and giving it to you.  And we can all bask in the glow of the miracle that Jesus feeds us with his body and his blood.  Sometimes we like it this way: Jesus does a lot, and we can watch, listen, stay close at hand, but do very little

But not far from here, just beyond the doors to Locust Street, there is a crowded world that is hungry, and often knows it (though it has become good at staving off hunger).  There’s a hunger for justice, a huger for mercy, a hunger for tolerance and respect, a hunger for real food in some places, and for decent schools in others.  There’s a hunger for peace in a world that’s gotten good at war.  There’s a hunger for a healthy planet.  There’s a hunger for good religion that knows humility and lives by the Golden Rule.

We believe, do we not, that Jesus can feed this hungry world.  It is our faith that he gave his body and his blood to do so.  We are confident that by the power of God, the risen and glorified Christ can change the world, giving it the food it needs to feed these hunger pangs.

And do we come here week by week to watch and listen and learn?  Do we want to be told only of how Jesus has done it in times past, in other places?  Do we sit through ceremony and sermon and song just to get to that special moment when we go to the rail and stretch out our hands and have our one, brief, moment alone with Jesus?

There is a hungry world around us.  Would we send them away?  Close the doors behind us so we can have our special time with Jesus?

You give them something to eat, he says to us.  You give them something to eat.

There is a second miracle to be done right here when we hear Jesus say this, and we think to ourselves, “What is he talking about?”  What have we got to work with?  Does it amount to more than five loaves and two fish?  Probably not.  Have we ever been asked to do anything before other than sing the hymns and say “Amen.”  Maybe not.    But Jesus is working a miracle on us when he tells us, You give them something to eat.  He is making us partners with him in his ministry.  He is sitting down and sending us out and telling us we can do more than we ever imagined.

We are afraid that when we reach into the basket there will be nothing there – no more fish tacos.  But so far this church stands as a testimony that it has never happened that way.  In fact this church in its beauty is a testimony to the twelve baskets of left-overs.  At Saint Mark’s we have always had more than enough, thank God!

We have some challenges here.  There is soup to make every week and hungry mouths to be fed every Saturday morning.  There are a couple of hundred families each month who rely on our Food Cupboard for their well-being.  There are our neighbors at Saint Mary’s, and at the Church of the Crucifixion who we help and support.  There were the people of the village of Trindad in Honduras who our medical mission served.  Soon there will be our new mission at Saint James the Less which is as hungry a place as we have ever ministered.

Are we wondering if Jesus can feed all these?  Are we wishing he would just send some of them away?  Do we long to simply bask in the glow of Jesus’ proximity.  Would we be satisfied to be his entourage in the midst of this hungry world?

And is he looking at us now with that look in his eyes that just repeats what he once said already with his lips?

You give them something to eat.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
3 August 2008
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Trust in God's Future

We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him.  (Rom. 8:28)


Let me tell you another parable; the kingdom of heaven is like this:

Over the past several years since my parents retired to southern California, I have gotten in the habit of borrowing their car whenever I visit them, because, of course, to be in southern California is to drive.  And it is a source of relief to me that their car is equipped with a Global Positioning System that provides directions to anywhere I could want to go.  I would find it very easy to get lost on the streets of greater Los Angeles.  But as long as my destination is programmed into the car’s GPS, a clear, benign woman’s voice guides me, turn by turn, to wherever I am going.  “In one mile, turn left,” she’ll say.  Then, “turn left here.”  When you get where you are going she announces, “You have arrived at your destination.”

I have never been tempted to give her a name, but it is easy to personify the disembodied voice that gives me such reliable directions.

More and more of us these days rely on GPS systems to get from here to there.  And while these systems display maps on their screens while you drive, using a guidance system like this is fundamentally different from using a map.  First, you don’t have to figure out how to fold it.  But you also don’t need to take it out before you leave in order to plot your course; you don’t need to know how you will reach your destination.  You can just tell it where you want to go, and let the kindly voice guide you, turn by turn.

And one of the great things about the system is this: should you ignore the voice and take a different route, she will adjust to what you’ve done and either guide you back to the route she’s plotted for you, or she will reconsider (if you’ve strayed far from your original course) and find a new way back to where you are going.

I have found my own way changed by traffic, construction, and distraction of all kinds.  I feel free to take diversions that under other circumstances would leave me pulled over by the side of the road trying to find my location on a map and plot a route back.  But with this system I never have to pull over, never have to fumble with the map.  The woman’s voice knows where I am going and she will let me stray, but she will see to it that I arrive at my destination.

I believe Jesus wants us to have that kind of confidence as we make our way to the kingdom of heaven.

Few phrases in the Bible sound as hard to believe as Saint Paul’s statement that “in everything God works for good with those who love him.”  Or to put it another way, “All things work together for good for those who love God.”  I should think that any one of us could amass a dossier of ample evidence to challenge this claim.  Such a file would include countless examples of sickness, unintended consequences, disappointments, unreliable people, daily indignities, financial strain, racial bias, and plenty of stupidity, among other things.   The point being that for most of us, Saint Paul’s assurance doesn’t seem plausible.  We have seen too much go wrong, we have suffered too much failure, we have lost too much hope to believe that all things work together for good for those who love God.

But Saint Paul - who, having suffered shipwreck and imprisonment, knew what it was like when things went badly – was very clear about something that you and I are probably less certain about.  He believed beyond the shadow of a doubt that the future was in God’s hands.  He was certain that God had a future in mind for him, and for the church, and for all creation.  And he was certain that God’s future would be realized.  And although it was not at all like Paul to simply sit back and assume that God would steer his life by auto-pilot, he felt free to steer himself anywhere he seemed to be called, confident that God would always guide him to the future that he had planned.

It is a measure of our time that we would put ourselves in the hands of a small electronic device on the freeways of Southern California in order to arrive at our destination, but we are not at all sure that we trust God to get us anywhere at all.  But I wonder if learning to trust the GPS system could actually teach us something about learning to trust God.  

Lots of people in the world want to remain map-readers.  These are folks who tend to treat the Bible as though it unerringly maps a course through the confusions of 21st century America if only we will pay attention to it.  Money management, romance, job advice, family tensions, scientific research, war or peace, and of course sex are all to be guided by instructions in the Bible.  And the mastery or memorization of certain texts is a proud accomplishment – just like being able to fold the map properly every time.

Such a perspective of holy scripture conveniently ignores how much interpretation we bring to everything we read.  Even if we are very good at finding our location on a map, for instance, if we are reading the map the wrong way, holding it upside down, we may still never get where we are going.

Another way of reading scripture is to hear in it the long testimony of confidence in God’s care for those who love and trust him; the complicated record of hope that the future lies in God’s hands.

The church, like so many of us, is sometimes prone to forget that God knows where we are going, that the future lies in God’s hands and he has already worked it out for us.

Saint Paul’s way of talking about this was to say that God had predestined the outcome of our lives.  And since we are not Presbyterians, we chafe at this assertion, uncomfortable with the idea that as if by some mystical lottery, God has already decided who will live in paradise and who will burn in hell?

But the entire thrust of Paul’s ministry was to expand the understanding of who might be included among those who love God.  He traveled abroad to carry the Gospel where it hadn’t been heard.  And he argued with other church leaders (and won) for a more expansive understanding of who could be saved.  He had a comprehensive and potentially universal view of the reach of God’s love.

Of course, there are lots of people in the world who don’t worry about the scriptures at all, who don’t worry about God, and who believe that the only future we have is the one we create for ourselves.   To me, this point of view seems a lot like driving aimlessly on the LA freeways until you run out of gas – a pointless journey that offers very little opportunity for happiness.

In my parents’ car the GPS allows you to press a button marked “Home” that calculates a route back to their house from where ever you happen to be, and then guides you there until you reach your destination.  And I think there may be nothing more complex than this to Saint Paul’s idea that in everything God works for good with those who love him.  Paul holds on to the certainty that God has a future for him: a future in this life and in the life to come.  He is free to travel far and wide, to take bold risks, to put his life on the line.  God knows where he is going; the future lies in God’s hands; and God will see to it that he arrives at his destination.

There is, of course, no real way to prove that God’s future for us is real.  And since the ride is often a bumpy one, it can be easy to suspect that the divine GPS is on the blink.  Which is why we call this kind of trust hope – because we cannot see from here the place that God is bringing us to.  And yet we dare to believe that God has a future for us that he has already planned; that that future is a blessing; and that we are in his hands.

So I know how unlikely it seems that all things really do work together for good for those that love God.  And yet I know how willing I am to get in a car without a clue as to where I am going, and just let the car guide me, confident that it knows, has a route plotted out, and will even adjust, if I should deviate from the plan, to get me where I am going.

And if I will put so much trust in the GPS system installed in my parents Prius, how much more trust should I place in the God whose hands made my body, whose Son is my Savior, and whose Spirit gives me life?

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
27 July 2008
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

WALL-E

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us….  For in this hope we were saved.  (Rom 8:18, 24)


It probably never occurred to Saint Paul that we would be reading his letters 2000 years after he wrote them.  Those letters are full of evidence that Paul believed that the world was headed for a fateful moment in history when God’s purposes would be fulfilled and his glory would inhabit the earth and his kingdom would be established: the eager longing of creation would be realized.  This he expected sooner rather than later.

Not so the animators and story-tellers at Disney studios.  The recent animated film WALL-E imagines what will have become of us and the rest of creation 700 years from now.  The earth is literally a wasteland, overwhelmed by the mountains of rubbish generated by a consumer society gone out of control.

Having rendered the planet uninhabitable, humans have evacuated to become refugees in space, living on luxury liner space ships where a single corporation, Buy-N-Large, relentlessly markets the next available meal.  In the description of one film critic, humans have become “ a flabby mass of pea-brained idiots who are literally too fat to walk.”

Back on earth, it appears that the creation long ago ceased its groaning toward a promised blessing.  A single robot remains functioning: WALL-E is its acronym-ed name.  He is one of an army of obsolete robots who piled the trash into mountains.  All alone except for a cockroach he has befriended, WALL-E continues daily in his futile work.

Over the centuries WALL-E has become a collector of things that particularly interest him.  (This is a Disney movie, after all, so the robot has to be lovable.)  And one day he discovers something he has never before come across: a little green shoot with four or five leaves that has inexplicably sprouted amongst the mountains of waste.  This plant becomes a part of WALL-E’s collection of interesting things.

It turns out that probes have been sent from the space ship to search for just such signs of life on earth, in the now-faded hope that some day the planet would be inhabitable again.  WALL-E falls head-over-heels for the sexy probe he encounters, and (this being Disney) romance ensues.  When the probe (whose acronym spells her name, EVE) discovers the plant in WALL-E’s collections, their relationship is threatened as she succumbs to her hard-wired directive to return the plant to the space ship for verification, romance be damned.

Back on the ship it becomes clear that the desire to return to earth was long ago obviated by the convenience of being fed by a corporation that knows what you want and can keep you distracted while it feeds you.  The plant, and the possibility that earth may once again be habitable, is not such a welcome development.  And so the story of WALL-E and EVE’s romance becomes intertwined with the question of whether or not the obese humans will overcome their dependence on Buy-N-Large and actually return to earth.

Despite the romancing robots, as Disney films go, this one has a strange air of plausibility.  It is a caricature that makes features of ourselves, our habits, and our impact on this planet easily recognizable.  The implicit criticisms are only tolerable because it is only a cartoon, after all, and WALL-E and EVE are awfully cute together.

To put a biblical gloss on the story, you might say that the humans have managed to elude the fate they deserve for their selfish piggy-ness.  Rather than face the kind of judgment we hear Jesus describe in the parable of the weeds in the field, where some end up thrown into the furnace of fire, the humans have simply decamped to outer space: fat and happy.  But in escaping their fate, they have left behind hope, and can now look forward to nothing more than their next meal.

And as a symbol of hope, the little sprout of a plant is a useful image.  Like so much hope, it is something that was long ago given up on, forgotten by many.  So effectively have the humans adjusted to their new lives, in fact, that the promise of hope seems even unwelcome now.  Who needs it?  And since it threatens to interfere with the corporate culture (and profits) powerful forces are at work to destroy it once it appears on the scene.

In our own day the idea of Christian hope is often reduced to a cartoonish caricature of wishful thinking.  Belief in a God who promises to establish a kingdom where justice and peace prevail is on a par with the belief that God will help you find a parking space if you only ask him nicely enough.  These are both acts of wishful thinking of a quite deluded sort, the current thinking goes.

But here are the facts.  We are, in fact, covering our planet with mountains of trash, at the same time as we are poisoning the atmosphere, exhausting natural resources, exterminating entire species, and ruining entire eco-systems.  We have even left so much litter in outer space already that you have to be careful where you fly when you head for the stars.

The more sports clubs and gyms we build, the less healthy we seem to be.  The more nutritional information we print on our food packaging, the fatter we get.

We are quite happy to submit to the guidance of corporate America as long as it gives us what we want super-sized and super-cheap.  We will even provide tax breaks to such a corporation so that it can undermine local businesses and treat its own employees miserably.

We spend hundreds of millions of dollars on entertainment to keep ourselves distracted while we wage wars in other places.

These sad realities are not biblical judgments of us and our society, they are the results of our own selfish piggy-ness.  And they help us to forget about hope.

But this is Christian hope: that somewhere in the trash heaps of our lives there is a small green shoot struggling to survive.  That among the landfills of plastic bags, and tires, and old cell phones a little sprout lives.  That from the pile of ashes that is to be our mortal remains, there is new life to be born.  That God has already begun building a kingdom where justice and peace will prevail.

Most of us have become refugees of hope.  We have assumed that hope is really only wishful thinking, and we have booked our tickets for a cruise with Buy-N-Large, because if we can’t have hope, at least we can eat whatever we want and keep ourselves distracted.  And why worry ourselves about hope when even the church herself is such an inept guardian of it?  Better to glide through the heavens in luxuriant obesity, satisfied that we were at least smart enough to get out while the getting was good.

At the end of the Disney film, a decisive struggle takes place between the flabby, weak-willed captain of the space ship and its corporately programmed auto-pilot over whether or not to return to earth.  Will the complacent captain awaken to his own humanity?  Will the corporate plan override latent hope?   Will the plant survive to bring forth seed and propagate new life in a world of trash?

WALL-E the robot has managed to protect the plant.  And as the captain and the auto-pilot fight each other on the bridge, the space ship lists to one side, endangering the humans and their chubby children.  As the opportunity to return to earth seems to be slipping out of reach, it is WALL-E – who has seemed more human than the humans, and who therefore knows what it is like to be desperately in love with EVE – it is WALL-E who sacrifices himself – crushed beneath the machinery of the space ship during the conflict – to save the day.  His sacrifice clinches the victory for the captain and the humans, and ensures their return to their rightful home.  

And of course, it is only a cartoon.  But I believe it is based on a true story; that something green still grows where we would have left behind only wasteland; that there is one who saves us, even when it seems we are beyond being saved; that God has someplace for us to go in this life he has given us.

Was WALL-E’s demise really his end?  Is his small carcass, too, headed for the scrap heap?  I won’t ruin the end of the story for you.  Except to say that I believe it is based on a true story.

There is a green shoot of hope in the world, sprouting several leaves.  And it is more than wishful thinking; it is hope.  And in this hope, we were saved.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
20 July 2008
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Learning to Fetch

For as the rain and snow come down from heaven, and return not thither but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and prosper in the thing for which I sent it.  (Is 55:10-11)


Although you wouldn’t think so to look at him today with a tennis ball or a stick, my dog Baxter needed to be taught to fetch when he was a puppy, as most puppies do.  Since he is a retriever his instruction was meant to unlock the instincts that have already been bred into him.  And today he is liable to bring me a found tennis ball or a stick in Rittenhouse Square and ask me to throw it for him so he can fetch it.  But when he was just a puppy he had to be encouraged to chase after a ball – to “go get it!” – and then to bring it back, where he received a reward for his success.

These days I can throw a stick or a ball for him that lands somewhere he cannot see it; I can tell Baxter to “go find the stick,” or “go find the ball” and he will put his eyes and his nose and all his retriever instincts to work and eventually find it and bring it back to me.  To borrow the phrase from the prophet: the word that goes forth from my mouth does not return to me empty, but it accomplishes that which I purposed, and it prospers in that for which I sent it.  

The prophet imagines that God’s word is as effective in accomplishing God’s purposes as Baxter is at fetching a ball.  As effective as the rain and snow providing water for seeds to grow.  The surety of God’s purposes is as plain a fact to the prophet as is the effect of a healthy rain on the tomato plants in a garden: they accomplish that for which they were purposed; they prosper in that for which they are sent.

Of course, while Baxter is a very good retriever, and responds well when told to “go get the ball,” he is not always as responsive to other commands.  “Come here, Baxter,” gets mixed results.  “Don’t jump up on her, Baxter,” is not foolproof.  “Don’t eat that, Baxter,” falls on completely deaf ears.  The words that go forth from my mouth do not always accomplish that which I purpose, nor do they always prosper in that for which I send them.

It is by no means plain to much of the world, that God’s word is especially effective.  In fact, it is by no means plain to much of the world that what you and I might call “God’s word” means anything at all.  

The church is a proving ground for the confidence of the prophet – where his prophecy is put to the test.  It is the community in which we discover whether or not God’s word is, in fact, to accomplish that which God purposes.  And you and I and every Christian person are crucial to the outcome.  It is here, in the church, that God begins to unlock in us the power of his own image, in which we were made; encouraging us to learn to be the kind of people he made us to be, to do the kinds of things he made us to do, to build the kind of society he made us to build, ushering in the kingdom of heaven.  It is here in the Church that God teaches puppies how to fetch, if you will.

The parable of the sower, which Jesus tells in the reading from Matthew’s Gospel this morning, is his way of describing to his disciples (and to us) what is expected of them (and of us).  It is a way of encouraging them (and us) to learn to “go get the ball,” as it were.  This parable about seeds which either do or do not yield grain is a way of drawing a picture of the prophecy of Isaiah: “so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it will accomplish that which I purpose.”

Of course, in telling the disciples this parable, Jesus is telling them what a crucial role they play in the fulfilling of God’s word.  God’s word will accomplish that which he purposes if they will let it grow in their hearts and unlock the instincts of love and mercy that God planted in our hearts when he first created us and saw that we were good.  But it is possible that God’s word will find in them (and in us) only hard, rocky, or thorny ground where the seeds of his love and mercy will not grow.

And so the question the parable poses to us is this: Do we believe that we hear in it, God encouraging each and every one of us to “go get the ball”?  Do we find that God is encouraging us to do something about his word?  Do we believe that we might have something specific to do in the fulfilling of God’s word?

There are a thousand different ways to respond to this parable.  I see people accomplishing that which God purposes every week when they deliver soup they have made to our Saturday Soup Bowl, or when they show up early Saturday mornings to serve that soup or wash the dishes.  

It happened here during Vacation Bible School when a corps of volunteers from this parish led a group of more than twenty kids in a week of growing and learning.

It happened when our mission team set up a free medical clinic for a week in Honduras.

Some of you respond to God’s encouragement by your commitment to prayer and worship in the church throughout the week, coming to daily mass or joining in morning or evening prayer, or through your participation in weekly Bible study.

Several people here are helping to accomplish that which God purposes (I hope!) by volunteering in the office, or with another church agency.

I am hoping that we will develop a wonderful new field in which to accomplish the purposes of God by adopting Saint James the Less as a mission of this parish.

And of course there are many of you who have ways of accomplishing that which God purposes about which I will never know, through your care for others, or through your commitment to social justice, or your efforts to care for our planet.

It is not actually hard to find ways to be a part of the fulfilling of God’s word, if we believe that God has really called us to this challenge.  But how will the world know of the power of God’s word if we don’t let it grow in our hearts, in our lives?

In telling his parable, Jesus is also reminding his followers, and us, that we have a choice.  We do not have to do what he says, we do not have to go where he calls, we do not have to learn to go get the ball.  We are free to do as we like and to disregard God’s word entirely.  But what seeds will die on the hard, or rocky, or thorny ground of our lives if we make that choice?

It is often said of the men that Jesus gathered as his disciples that they were not an especially astute, brainy, or clever bunch.  (These are not characteristics shared by the women who followed Jesus, however, who were altogether more sensible!)  One evidence of the thick-headedness of the disciples is their need to have a parable like the one we read today explained to them.  Can they really be so slow?  Do they really fail to see that Jesus is showing them that the kingdom of God will grow in their hearts and be built with their hands if they will let it, if they are willing to learn to go get the ball?

And what about us?  Where do we think the kingdom of God has been planted if not in our hearts?  How do we think the kingdom of God will be built if not with our hands?  Can we really be so slow?  Do we really have to have the parable explained to us, too?   Or do we believe already that God’s word shall not return to him empty, but it shall accomplish that which he purposed, and prosper in the thing for which he sent it?  Which is really another way of asking if we are ready to go get the ball, and receive our reward.


Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
13 July 2008
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

How will he know us?

Not long ago I was traveling out of town for a wedding at which I was to preach, in Williamsburg, where I went to college.  I was staying in a hotel that happened to have a lovely, sunny courtyard where I pulled up a chair and reviewed the notes for my sermon and did some reading.  As I sat there, I realized that there was a familiar face at a table on the other side of the courtyard.  I was certain I knew the face but it took me a while to attach it to a name.  But it was not someone I had known in college, so although the face matched perfectly the forensic files in my brain, something didn’t make sense.  This was a high school teacher from Connecticut (wasn’t it?).  What was he doing at a hotel in Virginia?  And how could I be sure that my visual file and name file were properly matched?

I sat there in the sunny courtyard, now only pretending to read, glancing over the top of my book, as I tested the theory over and over in my head.  Is it him?  It can’t be him.  It sure looks like him.  What would he be doing here?  Shouldn’t he look older than he does?  Am I in the right town?

Eventually – and I mean after, like, an hour, not just a few minutes – I decided to take the risk.  I rose from my seat and strode over to him – all casual confidence.  “Aren’t you Bob So-and-so?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, “aren’t you Sean Mullen?”  And by golly, I was!  “You look just the way I remember you,” he said.  (Apparently I wasn’t thin in high school either.)

“So do you,” said I.  (And he had always been thin.)

Since that chance encounter I have seen photos from a high school reunion that I couldn’t attend, and while they were not all photos of my classmates, I can tell you I didn’t see a single face that I recognized, and I’m sure there must have been at least one or two from my vintage – I know there were!

How will I know you when I see you, down the line?  How will you know me when you see me, many years hence?  What if I have lost weight?  What if you have!?!  Will you know me, years from now if our paths should part and then cross again?  Will I know you?  In a subtle way this is the question that Jesus is planting in the minds of his disciples during the tenth chapter of Matthew’s gospel that we have been reading for the past few weeks.  How will you know me many years hence?  How will I know you?  Will my Father in heaven, who has been watching us work and talk and eat together, recognize you as one of my old friends?   You will be different, for sure.   You will be heavier, greyer, bald-er.  Maybe you will be unrecognizable at the gates of heaven.  Maybe Jesus will be different too – maybe he will have shaved his beard, and finally cut his hair.  How will he know us when we come to him?  How will we know him?

I think the reason Jesus plants the seed of this question in the minds of his disciples is because he wants them to start practicing what they will look like when they get to heaven before they get there.  How will we know one another when the time comes, and everything is different, and it’s very, very important that we are recognizable to the one who knows even the number of hairs on our heads?  How will we know him; and how will he know us?

We have to practice what we will look like when we get to the gates of heaven.  In a way, that’s what the tenth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel is all about.  We have been hearing parts of it for the past few weeks as Jesus gives instructions to his disciples for their missionary work.  “Take no gold, nor copper… no bag for your journey, … nor sandals…  Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves….  He who finds his life will lose it….  He who receives you receives me.”  We can think of these as ways of practicing what they will look like when they get to heaven.  

Because it changes you if you travel around doing God’s work with no money, no bag, no sandals.  It changes you if you are willing to be a sheep in the midst of wolves and not put on a wolf’s clothing.  It changes you if you are willing to lose your life for Jesus’ sake.  It changes you if you greet everyone as though they might be the Christ in disguise.  What would we look like if we lived this way; if we practiced what we will look like when we get to heaven?

Of course, this is not a question of standing in front of a mirror, or of ordering the right clothes from a catalog, or of finding bargains on line.  It is a question of hearing Jesus’ call to carry out his mission in the world: this is how he tells his disciples to practice what they will look like when they find him beside the Father’s throne.  And carrying out Christ’s mission is also the way we can practice what we will look like, if we want to be easily recognizable, when we find ourselves reviewing our performance evaluations with St. Peter beside us.

For several years I have been dreaming of a way to practice what we might look like on that day, which I want to share with you:

About five and a half miles from here (which Google maps estimates would takes us 17 minutes to drive in 10 steps, but I’m sure we could eliminate two of them), at an intersection where West Hunting Park Avenue crosses West Clearfield Street, less than a mile from the Tasty Baking Company, overlooking Laurel Hill and Mt. Peace cemeteries, is a little parish church that was founded a year before Saint Mark’s and before even the cemeteries were there.

The parish of St. James the Less is named for the other James mentioned in the New Testament (not the one who is regularly found with Peter and John).  In its graveyard are buried the Wanamaker family (except Fernanda, who is buried here at Saint Mark’s); Catherine Fiske, who gave the beautiful red doors of this church in memory of her husband Louis, who rests there with her; Agnes Irwin, the great educator who founded the school that now bears her name, and who was the first dean of Radcliffe College; and a host of other bishops, soldiers, captains of industry, and luminaries of 19th century Philadelphia.

The beautiful church and its graveyard are surrounded by stone walls.  Across the street stands a rambling old rectory and a large parish house that has been converted to house a school that no longer operates.  No worship has taken place at the church for two years now, since the parish that was there chose to leave the Episcopal Church and was forced, by court order, to abandon the property under the circumstances.  A caretaker keeps the lawn and trees in check, and unlocks the gates for infrequent visitors.  Beyond the churchyard walls there stretch out neighborhoods of Philadelphia that bear little resemblance to the church’s lovely immediate surroundings or to our own parish’s neighborhood.  Poverty, drugs, single-parent households, and lousy schools characterize reality for many, many folks in North Philadelphia.

When I discovered that the Diocese of Pennsylvania was considering leasing out the Rectory and Parish House of Saint James the Less to be converted to artists’ studios, I balked at the notion of this sacred ground being re-purposed for such a mundane use in the midst of a city desperately in need of the mission of the gospel.

“Well, what would you do with it?”  I was asked.  

I answered: I would take up the mission of the Gospel, and use the resources there to let the Gospel change people’s lives.  I would adopt Saint James the Less as a mission parish of Saint Mark’s – after all we have founded missions before, built them from the ground up.  I would do what it takes, by finding partners to share the work.  I would get people praying in the church again, get children learning in the parish house again, and playing on the playground again.  I would put together a team of people who hate to see the resources of the church slide into decay.  I would practice there what I want to look like when I meet Jesus in the day of judgment, and I would help other people practice too.

Now, I said all this in a slightly more detailed way, around a conference table, with stern faces looking at me.  I may have even sounded impatient when I said it to the powers that be.  I said it in writing, and I made presentations.  I copied sermons of mine and handed them out.  I gave them facts and figures about the neighborhood.  I tried a hard sell once, and a soft sell the next time.  And I don’t know that I had much hope, since we happen to be a church that is preoccupied with its own internal scandals, and stumbling over its dysfunction.  But I asked.

And do you know, during this past week, those powers that be called me up and said to me, “OK, if you’re so smart, give it a try.”  And they have agreed to allow Saint Mark’s to adopt the Church of Saint James the Less as a mission of our parish  And so, it would seem that I have committed you, my wonderful brothers and sisters in Christ, to a missionary life.  We have been jolted into that old reality, that it had seemed the church forgot, when a parish church could take on a mission.  (Saint Mark’s founded two or three missions in its earliest decades.)  And now we have been called again to assume the missionary role that this parish wore so well in the 19th century as part of our 21st century heritage.  

We are being sent with no gold or copper or sandals or bag or staff; we are being set loose, like sheep in the midst of wolves.  We are being launched into a great missionary journey of exactly 5.5 miles, as the Google-crow flies.

I have some ideas abut what this journey might look like.  But there will have to be much prayer, much discussion, and many partners gathered before the shape of things to come for this new mission will be known clearly.

But I believe that this is an opportunity for all of us at Saint Mark’s and anyone who wishes to join us (and already I know that there are those who do) to practice what we will look like when we have to look Jesus in the face and account for ourselves.

Because a church without a mission is no church at all.  And a Christian who has never set out on a journey, (who has never been a pilgrim) has never given himself a chance to be changed (and may still be a sheep wearing his wolf’s clothing!).  The missionary life is the church’s life, when she dares to risk her life – to lose her life, so that she may truly find it.

How will God ever know us if we don’t respond to his call, even if it asks a lot of us? How will Christ recognize us as his old friends if we have not worked side by side with him, seeking his face in the face of others?  And how will we know him, if we distance ourselves from his call to serve him by serving others, and the years pass by.

Will Christ stare at us, matching the face to the name, but not at all certain what we are doing there, in front of him, and perhaps suspecting that we are in the wrong place?  Will he wonder why we sheep tried to live our whole lives in wolf’s clothing?  Will he think it's cheeky of us to want to be familiar with him at last only when the day is past and the work is done?

How will God know us if we don’t allow ourselves to be changed, to be shaped by the work he calls us to do, to go where he tells is to go, to work in the vineyard, even if we arrive late, to strip off our wolf’s clothing and be a sheep in the midst of wolves?  

How will God know us if we don’t allow ourselves to be changed into the people he made us to be, by responding to his call, and carrying out his mission, and losing our old lives to take up the new ones that are shaped by his mission?  

And how will we know him, in the end, if we don’t practice what it might be like to stand nearer to him?

Let us dare to take on the mission he calls us to, which is to really allow ourselves to be sheep in the midst of wolves, and to risk our lives for his sake.  Let us dare to practice in a missionary journey of 5.5 miles, what we hope we will look like when Christ is looking for us.  

Let us dream of a city where two churches, just five and half miles away can become a powerful nexus of transformation, where we join together to become the people God made us to be, so that finally, when the day of judgment comes, he will look at us – who have practiced what we might look like on this day, so that we would be known by him – and he will say, “You know, you look just the way I remember you.”


Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
29 June 2008
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Bring Him a Sword

Jesus said, “ Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” (Mt 10:34)


When Solomon became king of Israel, second in David’s line, long before Jesus was born, he prayed to God, and asked for one thing: “Give me,” he asked God, “an understanding mind… that I may discern between good and evil.”  This prayer pleased God no end.  Discerning good from evil, after all, was a gift that Solomon’s father, David, had sometimes lacked.  It also struck God as a good thing that the king of his chosen people had not asked for a long life, or riches, or the defeat of his enemies.  He had asked for wisdom.  So God tells Solomon that he will give him not only wisdom – not only the thing Solomon asked for – but also the things that Solomon had not asked for: riches, and honor and long life, as well.

And within hours of this prayer, (only one verse in the Bible), Solomon is confronted with two harlots fighting over a baby.  How the harlots made it in to see the king I don’t know, but there they stand in his presence.  And you probably remember the story.  One woman’s son died in the night, and the woman with the dead son took the living child from the other woman’s bed and left her with the dead child.  They are screaming at one another in the king’s chamber: “The living child is mine!”  “No, the dead child is yours,” and so on.

And in the inaugural demonstration of his wisdom, Solomon calls to his minions, “Bring me a sword!”  You remember his threat to divide the living child in two, and how one of the harlots shrieks in horror, “Don’t do it!”  But the other woman is willing to accept the compromise.  And Solomon, in his wisdom discerns that the woman who protested the child’s slaughter is the true mother.

Bring me a sword.  This command on the lips of the king, in the presence of two harlots and one bastard child, is terrifying.  The implication of these four words – bring me a sword – is brutal.  What was Solomon going to do with the sword?

You have to wonder if the underling who went to get the heavy sword slowed his steps as he went, wondering, himself, if it was such a good idea to heed the new king’s first command.  Was this how Solomon’s reign would begin – with the blood of a child on his hands, or a prostitute or two, or perhaps all three?  And when it becomes clear that the king is willing to slice this child in two – right down the middle – was there anyone whispering in his ear a word of caution, nervously suggesting a different solution to what is after all, a matter of little importance to the king?

But the wisdom of Solomon is displayed here not so much in discerning whose child the baby was, rather his wisdom is displayed in knowing how to wield the sword.  He knows how to use his power, without drawing a single drop of blood, so that the good prevails.

His father David’s reign had begun in violence – with the defeat of the threatening Goliath – and his years on the throne were soaked with blood.  But Solomon was a different kind of king, until his own weakness for the fairer sex would cause his downfall – but that’s another story.

It is jarring, to say the least, to hear on Jesus’ lips much of what we heard in today’s reading from the gospel.  “A man’s foes will be those of his own household,” he says.  But to my ears, even more so than his anti-family-values stance, nothing is more jarring than Jesus’ statement that he has not come to bring peace on earth (which is after all what the angels sang at his birth – were they wrong?).  Nothing is more upsetting to me than his apparent threat that he has not come to bring peace, but a sword.

It is almost as if Jesus has stood up in our midst and commanded to his minion (which I suppose would be me), “Bring me a sword!”  And yes, it fills me with dread.  There are children here, after all.  Is Jesus really going to have blood on his hands?  I would like to whisper some nervous words of caution in Jesus’ ear.  This cannot be a good idea.  The implications of his words are too brutal for the Lord of love.

The evangelists who wrote down Jesus’ story were at pains to show how Jesus was descended from David’s line, in fulfillment of the prophets’ testimony.  Would he be fighter like David?  And some hoped for a warrior-messiah, the might of whose sword would establish again the hegemony of a unified Israel. Would they get what they wanted?

And here, less than half-way in to the first book of the New Testament do we begin to hear the rattling of sabers on Jesus’ lips?  Bring me a sword!  This qualifies as what scholars have called the “hard sayings” of Jesus.  That is, the words are hard to ratify with our expectations of him, or with the song of the angels who promised peace on earth to the shepherds who were called to his manger.  I suppose it was a hard saying of Solomon, when he called for a sword, too.

And so, it is important for us to see Jesus for who he actually is, and to hear his words for what they actually are, just as Solomon’s potentially terrifying words proved to be a demonstration of wisdom.

It is noteworthy that with the beginning of the Gospels there comes an end to the stories of warfare that so permeate earlier pages of Scripture.  We will not hear of war again until the very last book of the Bible, when St. John has a vision of the war in heaven (a war with, perhaps, more symbolic meaning than historic precedent).  

The gospels themselves, are fairly bloodless, except for the spilling of Jesus’ own blood in his un-contested crucifixion.  The one time Jesus seems ready to start a fight – when he overturns the tables of the money-changers – nothing comes of it, which suggests to me that he was not perceived as much of a threat at the moment.  And the only time one of his disciples actually draws a sword, Jesus tells him to put it away (and then heals the injury that it caused).

And so when we hear these hard sayings of Jesus – I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword – we have to stop for a moment and be a little wise ourselves.  We have to be able to discern what amounts to a teaching moment from what might have been a manifesto.  We have to remember that Jesus is a rabbi, raised by a proper Jewish mother, and perhaps prone to a bit of hyperbole.

Jesus is not laying out, in these few paragraphs of discussion, a manifesto for a violent uprising of faith.  He is not, in fact, calling for a sword.  And even if he were, I have no doubt that in his hands it would remain as bloodless as the sword that Solomon called for.

Jesus is talking to his followers about what would be called centuries later, the “cost of discipleship.”  And this cost, he is teaching his disciples, is high.  It could cost you everything.   And if you think that life as Jesus’ follower is going to be a love-in (Woodstock, without the music (which sounds boring anyway)), then you are sadly mistaken.  If you think you are going to “find yourself” as a member of a biblical ashram, then you are wrong.  If you think it will make your parents happy for you to lose your life for his sake – to give up your career and your earning potential, or even just your Sunday mornings  - then you are kidding yourself.  Do you really think your Jewish mothers want you running around preaching the gospel instead of going to medical school?  This is what Jesus is saying.

Remember, he has just told his disciples that he is sending them out as sheep in the midst of wolves to preach his message of hope for the poor, to bring healing to the sick, and to cast out demons, to declare that the kingdom of heaven is at hand.  They will be laughed at and ridiculed, turned away at many doors.  Their faith will be sorely tested, their motives questioned.  They will have cause to shake much dust off their feet as they move from house to house, town to town.

Is this pauper-king really worth it?  Is he really the messiah?  Is he truly a Son of David – anointed to bring about the Lord’s desire for his people and all the nations?  Would he even know how to handle a sword if it were brought to him?  Has he half the wisdom of Solomon?  Or will things end badly, as they did for David, as they did for Solomon, as they did for Israel?

Bring him a sword, if we must.  Put it in his hands.  Ascribe to this carpenter-preacher the power to discern right from wrong, good from evil, life from death.  Put everything on the line: your job, your house, your family, your reputation.

We have read all the stories – learned most of them in Sunday School.  But have we yet given our lives to him?  Have we been willing to hand over the power to him?  To trust him with the sword which we would rather hold ourselves?  Are we ready, willing, and able to be sheep amongst a world of wolves?  This is no way to “find” ourselves!  Will we give up our lives to his service?

It would be easier if he knew how to cut with the sword.  We would find it easier to follow a warrior-messiah, who at least speaks our language.  But see how awkward it is when Jesus even tries – I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.

Thanks be to God that in Jesus’ hands the edges of the sword remain bloodless, that he uses it to point to justice, to right over wrong, good over evil.

Bring him a sword, and by all means keep it out of our own hands.  Let him bend its blade to his will.  Greater than Solomon, greater than David, Jesus will never, in fact, pick up a sword and yet he will wield more power over the destiny of the world than any warrior-king ever did.

And if we are willing to be steeled by his assurance, if we are brave enough to take up his challenge, if we are faithful enough to risk losing our lives by taking up our cross and following him, what victory will be unknown to us?  What corner of heaven will not be opened to us?  What despair will remain un-transformed by hope?  What wrong will not be defeated by right?  What evil will not be conquered by good?  What death will not be re-claimed by life?

Bring him a sword!  For his hand is the only hand that can be trusted to wield the power of life and death.  His wisdom is the only wisdom that trumps our cleverness.  His love is the only love that surpasses all understanding and casts out fear.

Oh, bring him a sword, and let us see him beat it into a plowshare on the anvil of his justice!

And let it cost us everything.  Let us be ready to lose our lives for his sake, let us learn how to take up our crosses and follow him.  Let us be willing to disappoint our families, and our friends, to become aliens in this land of wolves.  And let us follow him for the simple reason that though we have until now been willing to arm almost anyone who asked for a weapon, he is the only One who knows how to use the sword without shedding a single drop of blood…

… except his own; which he has poured out already, for the salvation of the world. In a wonderful mystery of love, shared day by day, and week by week with me, and with you.

Thanks be to God.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
22 June 2008
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Our Imaginary Friend

Theology, a professor of mine used to say, can be defined as loving God with the mind.  This is a lovely idea, and one that commends the academic pursuit of a systematic way of engaging the various questions, mysteries, revelations and commandments of religion.  And while it is a very good thing to have people in seminaries and universities, and even in parish churches, attending to theological pursuits, the truth of the matter is that most of us are not too concerned with theology – and we are happy to know that someone else is doing it.  For many of us, theology is to our daily faith as the food from Le Bec Fin is to what we produce in our own kitchens.  There is a relationship between the two, even some of the same ingredients used; but one is a highly specialized and refined version of the other.

As it happens, the Christian faith does not have its roots in theology, as the story we hear today about Abraham reminds us.  The Lord said to Abram, “Go!”  So Abram went.  And when Abram gets to an oak at Moreh, the Lord appears to Abram and says, “To your descendants I will give this land.”  This was not an invitation to move in, (the Canaanites were already living there), so Abram marks the spot with an altar - a pile of stones – and keeps moving.  This is not an account of theology.  Abram, was not using his head – just ask his wife Sarai – he was not loving God with his mind.  He was doing what he was told, engaged in some kind of relationship with the Lord, who, in a few chapters from where we left off, will change Abram’s name and bring him into a covenant of promise.  Abraham’s faith is not born in his mind: it comes from an encounter with the living God.

Many modern critics of Christian faith would find this assessment of Abraham’s faith right on target – that it is mindless.  How could you build your faith on the kind of God who would call you up a mountain to kill your only son?  How could you think your way to faith in a God who would lead you through the desert without telling you where you are going?  How could you wrap your mind around a God who will allow his own people to be enslaved?  How can you love with your mind a God who allows holocausts, and cyclones, and earthquakes, and warfare?  How can you even think about a God whose supposed salvation is achieved by the death of an innocent man by crucifixion?  A mind, these critics might suggest to us, is a terrible thing to waste on a God such as this.

The most charitable of these critics must see Christians like a group of perpetual pre-adolescents, who have found in Jesus a very lovely imaginary friend, who looks particularly nice in stained glass pictures.  But when you grow up you cannot continue to love this imaginary friend.  Your mind rebels at the uselessness of it.  Your mind invites you into greater maturity: into the real world.  Your mind encourages you to consider the outlandishness of the claims, the impossibility of the miracles, not to mention the absolute mess that the church has made of this “faith” she professes to teach.  Your mind beckons you to a different kind of love – of this world and its many pleasures, its many things.  Your mind shows you its own magnificent power and suggests you should place your trust in that.  Your mind unmasks the foolishness of faith when you are a mere teenager – if you will only allow it to, if you will cast away your imaginary friend, if you are not afraid to do so.  

Any number of the most eloquent critics of faith these days are eager to point out that they saw through the foolishness of faith as mere children – so fragile is the gossamer curtain between reason and faith, even a child can see right through it.

Saint Paul, himself, describes the faith of Abraham as “hoping against hope” – a phrase we have come to understand expresses very long odds.

You know, of course, that our imaginary friend ate with tax collectors and sinners: a rather tawdry bunch.  This was a puzzlement to the Pharisees, who were learned of the law, and who themselves loved God with their minds.  “Those who are well have no need, of a physician,” Jesus said to them, “but those who are sick.”  

“Somebody around here sure is sick,” they must have thought.  “Sick in the head!”

And suddenly a leader of the synagogue runs to Jesus in desperation.  “My daughter has just died, but you lay your hand on her and she will live!”  His imagination is running wild.  He is not using his head.  He has lost it, poor man.

And now a woman, who has had chronic bleeding for twelve years, just wants to touch the hem of his garment, in the wild imagination that some magic power will flow from him to her.  She is not using her head.

Now he is at the ruler’s house.  The flute players are there – they have been hired by the undertakers, who know their business, know the difference between a dead girl and a sleeping child.  They laughed at him: they were using their heads.

Why this child, and not all the other children taken too soon from their parents?  Why that woman and her fibroids, and not all the other suffering souls who battle illness every day?  Why are these given such lavish gifts of healing?  And how can we even imagine that Jesus is our friend if he has passed us by?  What has become of the power that was to flow from him to us, even from the hem of his garment?  If we will just stop and think about this – if we will use our minds – will we not see that this faith of ours has been placed in an unreliable imaginary friend; that we are hoping against hope?

Theology – loving God with the mind – is a wonderful thing.  But it is not the first order of business in faith.  First we must encounter the living God, more or less face-to-face.  First we must come to know our imaginary friend, Jesus, and decide whether or not he is real.  First we must hear a call so simple even a child could hear it: “Go,” it might say, or, “Follow me.”  And first we must decide that we have enough imagination to go, or to follow where Jesus calls, even though he could be nothing more than an imaginary friend.

These stories of miracles, of healing, of dead children brought back to life; these friendships forged with tax collectors and sinners are not the building blocks of a systematic theology.  They are signs that point to the way of the Cross, which is a way of suffering and salvation, a way that is not left to the imagination.

And churches are built to house these signs, to configure them in such a way as to draw our attention to that Cross, and to see who it is who hangs there.  Churches are built so the signs can lead us to the table where our imaginary friend is given real form: his Body and his Blood really given for us, shared with everyone who will sit at his table, no matter how tawdry we may be.

God knows how challenging is the life of faith, he knows what it means to hope against hope.  Perhaps that’s why he so often kindles that faith in rather small groups: Abraham’s family, a group of twelve, a hundred or so in church.

First, God calls us into a living encounter with him.  He asks us to open our minds to the possibility that these signs do not point to an imaginary friend, but to the living Lord, his Son Jesus.  He does not promise an end to all our woes, a cure for every disease, an end to infant mortality, the calming of every storm, or the staying of every disaster.  What he promises is hope against hope.  Which is to say that in his time, by his hand, all things will be redeemed, all things made new, that there will be light where we see only darkness, and life where we see only death.

And he asks you and me to allow him to be our imaginary friend long enough to show us that he is alive in us and in the world.  He asks us to see if he does not lead us to places we could not have gone on our own.  He asks us to look for forgiveness we never thought we could find.  He asks us to trust that our lives are not just nasty, brutish and short, and finally headed nowhere.  He asks us to believe that despair can be transformed into joy, that the poor can be lifted up, that the hungry will be fed, that the meek will inherit the earth.  He asks us to be brave enough, faithful enough, hopeful enough to imagine the possibility of these unlikely promises.

And in time, he even asks us to love him with our minds – to try as hard as we can to wrap our minds around his many questions, mysteries, revelations, and commandments.  And to discover what a wonderful way this is to love him, too.

But first, he asks us to look at ourselves closely, to see what a tawdry bunch we are, to come, sit at his table, and get to know him and the hope he promises against hope.  

And we find that he has stepped out of our imaginations and into the real world, and he has opened our minds, and let us love.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
8 June 2008
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Bread of Life

When the price of wheat on the global market doubles in the course of six months, as it has over the last six months; in a world where perhaps as many as 3 billion people (or almost half the world population) live on less than $2 a day, you have to be careful about what you say about a piece of bread.  You and I may be worrying about how we will fill our gas tanks this Memorial Day weekend, but many millions of people in the world must seriously wonder how they will fill their bellies and the bellies of the children.

It has been easy for us to more or less ignore the food crisis around the globe since, as Time magazine put it a few months ago, “no one is starving in rich countries.”  Even here in Philadelphia, where we have an appallingly high level of poverty, there is much to eat.

On this feast of Corpus Christi – the Body of Christ – we find it easy to think of Jesus’ language as ‘just symbolic’ when he says “I am the bread of life,” because it is also easy for us to think of bread as ‘just symbolic.’  But to so many in the world, a dry little disc of bread is much more than a symbol; it could be the difference between life and death.

And this morning the church invites us to snap out of our easy complacency about both things: about the ready availability of a piece of bread, and the cheap symbolism of the Body of Christ.  This morning the church reminds us that both things are of immensely more value than we generally recognize: that as symbols go, a piece of bread actually has a very high value indeed, since it could be the difference between life and death.

We easily forget that most of the people who listened to Jesus and who followed him lived closer to poverty than we do.  His followers were not the well-to-do, well-heeled, or well-educated.  They were more or less poor, simple men and women who would have noticed if the price of wheat had doubled in six months.  It would have mattered to them.  And it mattered to them when Jesus told them he is the bread of life.  They remembered what the Scriptures said: that “man does not live by bread alone.”  But they also remembered that God, nevertheless, fed his people in the wilderness with manna – he sent them bread from heaven.

So we are treading on dangerous ground when we try to say anything about what Jesus might have meant when he said, “I am the bread of life.”  And we are treading on yet more dangerous ground when we take a piece of bread and call it the Body of Christ without truly considering the possibility that this Bread could be the difference between life and death.  We take so much for granted in America that we find it as easy to take Jesus for granted as it is to take a loaf of bread for granted.  

The Feast of Corpus Christi is actually uncomfortable for many because it seems a little weird to make such a fuss over these scraps of bread.  It is hard for us to see the value of God’s gift in a little wafer of bread.  But this is a failure of our imaginations, and a distinct lack of empathy for much of the world, who could easily recognize that there is nothing ‘just symbolic’ about piece of bread.  It is nothing to be taken for granted.  It could be the difference between life and death.
More than once in the gospels are we told that when facing a hungry crowd Jesus takes bread, blesses it, breaks it and shares it with those who are hungry.   More than once are we assured that in Jesus’ hands a few insufficient loaves become enough to feed a crowd of many thousands.  More than once does Jesus satisfy real hunger with what we might have dismissed as a ‘merely symbolic’ gesture: asking for bread, taking it, blessing it, breaking it, and sharing it.

And so in the church it is never ‘just a symbol’ when we talk about bread, when it is carried in its silver container from you to this altar, when it is placed here on clean linen, when – on your behalf – I take bread, bless it, break it, and share it with everyone here.  It is a hopeful thing to take a piece of bread and ask God to bless it.  It is a bold thing to break it with the intention of sharing it.  It is a dangerous thing to put it in a monstrance and look at it, if it is indeed the Bread of Life.  

For this morsel of bread is the measure of every other mouthful.  This Bread deman ds to know whether or not we are content to parade around inside our beautiful church; whether our conviction that it brings new life stops at the doors to Locust Street; whether our commitment to the Bread of Life will end when it is locked up behind a golden door; whether we have begun to see how slender is the margin of difference in this world between life and death.

People in this world are clamoring to be fed.  In the past six months – just the past six months – it has become measurably harder for millions of people to come by a loaf of bread, and the margin of difference between life and death has become more slender still.  Have we any bread to give them?

We share the bread of life here every single day – most days at 7:30 in the morning and 12:10 in the afternoon – when we offer our prayers to God for a hungry world.

We share the Bread of Life every Saturday morning when we feed the homeless and hungry of our city.

We share the Bread of life four days a week in the Food Cupboard that provides staples to 200 families a month.

We share the bread of life when we ship hundreds of pounds of medical supplies to Honduras, as PJ Prest did earlier this week.

We share the bread of life when PJ leads a group of 13 people from Saint Mark’s and the Pennsylvania College of Osteopathic Medicine on a medical mission to Honduras in two weeks.

We can share the Bread of Life without even leaving home.  By going to the parish website where you will find a link to the ONE campaign – which shares the Millennium Development Goal of eradicating extreme poverty in the world – those who live on less than $1 a day.  There you will find ways of contributing or otherwise getting involved.

The Bread of Life is not ‘just’ a symbol.  In the church we know that symbols have more meaning, deeper meaning than ordinary words, that they point us beyond ourselves to the places God would lead us.  And because the Bread we share today is a symbol of the margin of difference between life and death, we are challenged to see if in sharing it we are changed by this Bread, by this Body.

And we are challenged to decide if we believe this Bread, this Body of Christ, was broken only for us, who feast so richly.  For if Christ gave his Body for the salvation of the whole world, to feed us all, to give the whole world the holy food that is the difference between life and death, then who is going to carry it – in one of its several forms - to those in need if not you and me?

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
25 May 2008
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Chaotic God

I was never much of a science student, so I did not realize, until recently, that in classic mechanical physics there is a well-known problem called “the Three Body Problem”.  Roughly speaking – very roughly – the issue is the problem of predicting the motion of three mutually attracting bodies, like the Sun, the Earth and the Moon.  Apparently it is not so easy to do!

A short discussion of the Thee Body Problem from the Physics Department at Drexel University tells me that this problem “exhibits all the hallmarks of chaos.”  And if it is the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon we are talking about, this sounds worrisome, since I had rather thought that we had a bit of a grip on understanding the relationship between all three, and that the chances that the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon might veer off course and smash into each other had been more or less ruled out.

It turns out that chaos theory is not quite as chaotic as you or I might think.  This scientific theory does not posit, as I understand it, a state of “utter confusion” – which is the definition we most often think of when we talk about chaos.  In fact, chaos theory does not imagine the simply random interactions of the universe.  Rather, this scientific category encompasses systems that are highly dependent on initial conditions, and yet have somewhat limited predictability.  The well-known question being posed by a physicist in 1972: “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?”

The Three Body Problem seems like an apt metaphor to reach for on Trinity Sunday.  In Christian theology, after all, we have something of a Three Body Problem: we have to account for God’s revelation of himself in the three Persons of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  And many pages have been filled over the centuries with explanations of the relationship and activity of these three apparently mutually attracting persons, that they are three Persons of one God.

And yet, study, ponder, or investigate the relationship of these three as we may, a complete understanding eludes us.  Try as we do to comprehend how it is that a Trinity of Persons is truly the Unity of God, it remains a mystery to us.  And if we are still referring to St. Patrick and his shamrock as a teaching aid for the God who created the universe and all that’s in it, then it would seem we have not traveled very far in our understanding of God!  Which leads me to wonder if perhaps we have to consider the possibility that God as he reveals himself to us is something of a chaotic God.

And here science comes to my aid.  Because I do not mean to suggest that God’s actions are entirely random and his purposes without meaning.  But I do mean to suggest that God’s activity in the universe is of a somewhat limited predictability, and is highly dependent on what we might call “initial conditions.”

And it turns out that a more historic look at the idea of chaos takes us right back to the beginning.  One of the earliest definitions of the word referred directly to “the formless void” that we are told about in the first lines of the first chapter of the first book of the Bible, Genesis.  Here is chaos: the beginning, the initial conditions; God’s Spirit – or his wind – moving, swooping, over the watery face of chaos, with perhaps no more force than the flap of a butterfly’s wings.  And now his voice – which I have always imagined as a booming, thunderous voice, but perhaps it is nothing more than a whisper – he speaks.

We could not have predicted the results of his commands: the wonder of creation.  And we could not have known from the outset, as God knows, that it was good, this creation he has wrought.  But this is our chaotic God, who, with the flap of his wings and the whisper of his voice, brings forth the wonders of the universe!

At least twice in the Bible our imaginations are called back to the beginning.  Here, in Genesis where we encounter God and his Spirit, and in the opening of John’s Gospel, where we are told of God and his eternal Word.  And so, from the beginning, we encounter a Three Body Problem.  Whence this voice?  Whence this Spirit?  Whence this Word?  How are we to understand that they relate to one another?  Are these the persons of a chaotic God?

If we remind ourselves that chaos is not, first and foremost, a state of utter confusion, but rather, that pregnant but still undefined state of limited predictability when God’s Word, carried by his breath, had not yet been spoken over the formless void, is this an image of the God of chaos – since only God brings order from the chaos?

And if those first verses of the first chapter of the first book of the Bible tell us, in the beginning, of the butterfly wings of God setting an ordered course for the chaotic matter of creation, are we free to wonder if the winds that blew in Galilee centuries upon centuries later had been stirred by those wings?

And is there a resemblance, or even an echo, in the voice in Galilee to that first voice that spoke to the chaos?  Is there an inevitable link from the command that brought forth all creation to the command that tells the eleven disciples to “Go” into all the world and make more disciples with the gifts of love by baptizing and teaching in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit?

And did those eleven disciples not flinch at this complicated formula - this Three Body Problem - because somehow they could simply see that it was good?  Were they un-worried because they already knew how Jesus, with his gentle breath, had given them peace in the chaos of the world and of their lives?

Of all people, you would think that we modern (or post-modern) people could appreciate a chaotic God: a God who speaks divine order to chaos with limited predictability, but still spectacular results.  Of all people, you would think that we modern people, who recognize the limits of our ability to understand quite the way the Earth, the Sun, and the Moon interact, we who cannot solve the Three Body Problem for bodies that we can gaze at through a telescope – you would think we would find the mystery of three persons in one God plausible.

Of all people, you would think that we, sophisticated, 21st century Americans, could grasp how it is that the merest flap of God’s butterfly-wings in the beginning of all things has remarkably and mysteriously brought us to this moment – that we could not have predicted – when we hear again that simplest and oft-repeated command of Jesus, “Go,” telling us that like the rest of creation we have something to do in fulfilling the purposes of God, by sharing the teaching and the grace of his love with anyone who will listen.

Of all people, you would think that we, who have adapted brilliantly to the utter confusion that we have made of the world around us,would hear the possibility of beautiful truth in the revelation of a chaotic God who translated order out of chaos in the beginning of time.

And, alone among God’s creation, we can choose to sit stupefied and stymied by our quandary over the Three Body Problem of God who has revealed himself to us in the complex unity of three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Or we can heed his voice, be lifted on the currents of his breath, and animated by the gift of his love; and we can Go into the world to share that love, and see that it is very good.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
18 May 2008
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Cyclone Pentecost

And suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind….  (Acts 2:2)


It was not the flick of the switch of the Large Hadron Collider – a particle accelerator outside of Geneva that has been built in order to smash protons together and that some say could create a small black hole that would swallow the earth – but it was not this, the work of scientists over-stepping their bounds that wreaked havoc with the earth last week.  It was not the hands of men that swirled the winds together in a great turbine and that churned the waters from their depths to wash over the Irrawaddy Delta leaving death and destruction in their wake.

It was what the insurance companies call an “act of God” - in the rush of a mighty wind and its accompanying surge of water – that brought catastrophe to Burma: a country that can hardly afford such a fate.

And today, on Pentecost, when we remember the great rushing wind that first carried the Holy Spirit into the midst of the church, we can be forgiven for wincing at the cruel irony of these parallel stories: the whoosh of great blessing that announced the arrival of the Holy Spirit, and the terrible spinning gusts of Cyclone Nargis that washed over the better part of a nation with it a 12-foot mound of water.

No wonder ancient voices spoke about God’s wrath and his fury – words that today make us squirm but which may ring true when we consider the work of his fingers this past week.  No wonder the Psalmist posits that “the earth shall tremble at the look of him.”  No wonder so many run for cover under the easy platitude that God moves in a mysterious way, and then do their absolute best to avoid or ignore God’s movements altogether.  No wonder the world is confused about God and ready to believe those who forcefully preach that God is not great.

And yet, we could be forgiven for wondering, in the grip of disaster, if God is, in fact, good.  But can we doubt that he is great?  What is a cyclone to God but one of many eddies that he leaves in his majestic wake as he veers across the universe, his mantle of midnight velvet and stars with its white-capped ocean-fringe brushing up against we poor innocents – and few more innocent than the poor, common people of Burma.

Flip the dreaded switch of the Large Hadron Collider and risk the destruction of the world.   This we could understand: our un-doing brought about at our own hands, by our own proud science, in our own relentless need to be masters of everything.  But how can God bring such mayhem to his own creatures on the same winds that once promised hope, and that fanned the tongues of fire that crowned silly disciples?

Is it only at times of disaster that it occurs to us that God is powerful?  Are these incidents of destruction the only acts that we could possibly attribute to God anymore?  Have even we who believe ceased to allow for the possibility that God is, in fact, great?  Are we so impressed with our own human power, our own human creativity, our own human ingenuity that we believe we have left God behind, the divine vestigial relic of a darker age?

And is this our bright age – when still more will die in Burma because of the recklessness of a paranoid junta; when the gunfire in our own streets brings down children or cops without much distinction; when we cannot conceive of an end to a war we thought we were clever enough to control; when we have doused the good earth with poisons we have the gall to call “fertilizers”; when we keep going to the gas pumps to get our fix no matter how high the price of oil climbs – is this our bright age?

And suddenly today comes a sound from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind.

We – bright things - have locked our doors against the wind as though a cyclone were coming straight for us.  We have hunkered down in our self-sufficiency, and our certainty that the world and its fate really rests in our own hands.  We have milk and water and toilet paper in our bunkers.  We still have duct tape and rolls of plastic here too.  I, myself, have helped screw hurricane straps onto new houses in the Gulf Coast to keep them from blowing away.  We know how to protect ourselves when we want to.  We know how to keep the doors locked tight.

And if we know how to keep the wind out and our roofs from blowing off, we also know how to lock the doors to keep God out.  We know where to put weather stripping so not even a draft of him can blow in through the cracks.  And the world today hardly knows the difference between the insurance company’s description of an “act of God” and the real thing, mostly because the world today is not much interested in acts of God.

In my Bible only two pages separate the two different stories of Pentecost: the stories of God’s gift of the Holy Spirit in Acts and in John’s gospel.  But of course there is a sharp contrast.   In Acts, Luke tells us of the rushing, mighty wind, and the tongues of fire.  But in John the doors are locked, and the disciples are hunkered down; but Jesus finds them and comes to them anyway.  And there is no commotion, no wind, there are no tongues of fire.  There is only his greeting of peace, and then his gentle breath on them as he tells them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

John says it happened late on Easter Day, and Luke tells us that it happened fifty days later.  But scholars assure us that although the timing and the circumstances are described differently the stories are about the same thing: about God’s gift of his Holy Spirit to his people after the resurrection of his Son.

If it is true that God moves in a mysterious way – as it manifestly appears to be – then we may have to account for his movements that terrify us, and drive us behind locked doors.  But we also have to account for God’s quiet presence in our midst and the greeting of peace from the lips of his Son Jesus.  

And if it is true that the Holy Spirit of God can and does ride on the violet currents of wind and water that can and do wreak havoc in the world, it is also true that Jesus’ gentle breath bequeathed that same Spirit to us, to bring us peace.

The designers of that particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, quite staunchly defend their work against criticisms that when it is turned on it could create a black hole that would swallow the earth.  Nevertheless, when the suggestion was made, they did agree to double-check, to run the numbers, and they did review Stephen Hawking’s theory that such micro black holes would evaporate if they did just happen to get formed.  They did allow for the possibility, however remote, of phenomena more powerful and dangerous than those built by their own hands and intended to replicate the forces of creation.

If we can imagine our own human capacity to wield such power, why is it so hard for us to conceive of a God who wields yet more power than us?  And why do we find it so hard to believe that the Son of God could harness that power with his own breath and share it with us for the singular purpose of bringing us peace?

And it may be that the great gift of Pentecost is the realization of God’s determination to share with us both his power and his peace.  It may be that the proximity of these two stories of the Holy Spirit – just two pages apart in my Bible – is intended to link them in our imaginations, and to temper the almost un-bridled power of that Spirit, on the one hand, with the un-compromised dictate of peace, on the other.

And it may be that our challenge as mere humans is not so much to hedge against the possibility that we have usurped God’s creative power to the extent that we might unwittingly form black holes – one of the most mysterious features of the universe.  Rather, it may be that our challenge is to accept that the phenomenal power God has given us, by the extraordinary gifts of his Spirit, is intended to bring us peace.

And maybe the reason we think of natural disasters like Cyclone Nargis as “acts of God” is because we can’t help but seeing in these tragedies a projection of ourselves, and our own tendency to mis-use the power God has given us by his Spirit.

We Christians have always believed that despite this reliable tendency of ours (to mis-use the gifts that God has given us), God determined to send us his Son as our neighbor, our brother, our friend.  And in living with us as closely as a neighbor, a brother, a friend, Jesus has always been close enough to breathe on us as he offers us Peace.  

And even now, in this place, he is near enough to breathe on us.  At this very moment, tiny eddies of air, perhaps stirred up by a cyclone on the other side of the globe, are swirling invisibly around us.  They will not ignite in tongues of flame to dance above our heads.  Theses currents of God’s breath are hardly detectable, easily missed or ignored.  Yet, they carry with them the un-matched power of peace, in the echo of Jesus’ resurrection greeting to his friends: a power more awesome than anything the scientists in Geneva or anywhere can replicate.  

And it may be that the flicker of candles is the only potential evidence of that gentle breath floating among us even now, deceptively slight, pregnant with power, promising peace, and waiting only for us to inhale.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
11 May 2008
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

The Unknown God

Saint Paul, who has come in for a lot of criticism over the years, was quite a traveler.  And he seems to have adopted, in his travels, the attitude that when in Athens, one should do as the Greeks do – up to a point.  

Paul is seldom given credit for a sense of humor, but I think we see it on display in this passage related by St. Luke of a speech that Paul gives to a group of Athenians as he stands on the Areopagus, or Mars Hill.  ‘How religious you Athenians are!’ he tells them.  ‘As I walked your streets, I found an altar with the following inscription: To an Unknown God.’  How very religious indeed, to erect a shrine to we know not what – just to be on the safe side.  Paul is being a bit facetious here.

Of course, in our own day and age it has become a popular sport to level a similar observation at people of faith.  How religious we are, are critics cringe.  We gather here week by week and day by day – the thinking goes - to sing our hymns and read our stories and say our prayers and offer our thanks to a God who is virtually unknown to us or to the world, who is figment of our collective imaginations, a God-delusion that makes us feel better about ourselves and the world but which doesn’t even spur us on to good works very often.

In the minds of many people these days (most of whom seem to want to write books about it) we Christians, and people of other faiths, are as deluded as the ancient Athenians who would take seriously an altar to an Unknown God.  And we are no better off.

Considering the world we live in, it is not surprising that many ask whether or not the God we worship is anything more than a delusion.  Considering the state of affairs among nations, and the degradation of the planet, a person could wonder whether the God we praise is any more involved in the world than some Unknown God.

The Unknown God really is the Just-in-case God, who is worshiped in an effort to cover our backsides.  And as such the Unknown God is a largely undemanding God – after all what could he require of us, since we don’t even know who he (or she) is?

And it might be fair to ask whether the Unknown God is worshipped today in many churches.   After all, when in Rome or Athens or America, do as the locals do.  And this is more or less what our parents did, or what the nuns taught us to do.  And don’t worry so much if you begin to wonder that the God we worship is really an Unknown God.  Brunch will be served soon enough.  For many of us, the Unknown God – susceptible as he is to the delusion critique – is still not such a bad God, and maybe just about all the God we want, since, after all he doesn’t require much of our time, money or energy.

But notice what Saint Paul tells the men and women of Athens.  See that he does not denigrate the Unknown God, and he does not even argue against the pantheon of Greek religion.  He doesn’t even write a book!  What Paul says is this: ‘I know who the Unknown God is.  He is the God who made the world and everything in it, the Lord of heaven and earth.  He does not live in shrines made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself give to all men life and breath and everything.  I know who the Unknown God is!’

All these centuries later, and so far from Athens, we live in a world of Unknown Gods.  Half the time we seem almost ready to worship at their altars.  We could almost imagine every single ATM in this city as an altar to Unknown Gods; then we’d know who or what we worship since there is no surer indicator of what’s important to Americans than what we spend our money on.  These Unknown Gods do require very little of us – except our regular visits to their altars of cash dispensation.

But are we left wondering whether or not the atheist book-writers have a point?  Do we sometimes wonder if we are deluding ourselves?  Have we followed this path of faith just-in-case?  Do we live in a world of Unknown Gods because there is no real God to know?

It may be the case that the way to answer this question is the same way Saint Paul answered it.  That is, we may find that there is no way to assure ourselves that God is not a delusion  other than to discover (perhaps to our own surprise) that we know who the Unknown God is.

Perhaps we have come to know this because we see how much has been given into our hands: the blessing of a child, the love of family, the benefits of wealth, even dominion over so much of this planet.  Or perhaps it is because of a sin forgiven – one we thought we could never live down.  Perhaps it is the on-going encounter with beauty that we cannot explain any other way.  Perhaps it is that tiny spark of hope that lifts us out of despair in the face of the death of someone we love.

In all these ways, and countless others, the living God makes himself known to us.  And most profoundly, for us, in something as simple and ordinary as a morsel of bread, and a sip of wine, God is known and among us day by day.

For us, living in a world of Unknown Gods can become a daily exercise in discovering that we know who the Unknown God is!  There is no proof of this, of course.  There is still room for doubt and delusion, for error and uncertainty.  There is only the Way that follows Jesus’ commandment to love one another as he loves us, which means with every ounce of our being, and with all humility, as we wash one another’s feet.  And that Way leads us past many altars: some at which we feel right at home, some to strange Gods, some that spit out cash as long as you have your card and your PIN number, and some to Unknown Gods.

Having walked this Way for some time now, I have been past a lot of altars, and so have you.  And we have seen a lot of evidence of Unknown, Just-in-case Gods, as well as the people who suspect that these are the easy Gods to serve.

And perhaps we should follow the example of Saint Paul.  What is the point in denigrating these Unknown Gods of the world we live in?  What is the point in arguing against the pantheon of secularism?  What is the point of writing a book about it?  As Saint Paul knew, when in Athens, do as the Greeks do, and when in America... what else can we do in this land of Unknown Gods?  

We can only follow the Way of Christ’s commandment of love, which leads past this altar, whose simple offering of bread and wine reminds us that we know who the Unknown God is!  He is the God who made the world and everything in it, the Lord of heaven and earth, who does not live in shrines made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needs anything, since he himself gives to all people life and breath, and everything!  

He is the God who sent his Son into the world to save us from sin and death, that we might have life and have it abundantly.  He is the Lord of Life who died for our sakes and who gives us his body for food and his blood for our salvation.  He is the Light that continually dawns in the east, and the new life that rises up from the grave.

He is the God who knows us each by name, and even the number of hairs on our heads, who once would show nothing more than his back to Moses but who now delights to dwell by his Holy Spirit among us, living, breathing, and working in each and every one of us.

Yes, we live in a land of Unknown Gods, but we rejoice, because we know who the Unknown God is.  Thanks be to God!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
30 April 2008
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

A Mission From God

Those who had been baptized devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers….  Fear came upon every soul; and many wonders and signs were done through the apostles.  (Acts 2:42-43)


Although you probably remember it more for the spectacular car chases and the wonderful soundtrack, the 1980 cult film The Blues Brothers had another important element.  One of the brothers, Jake, has just been released from prison.  He and his brother Elwood, embark on their epic journey in and around Chicago for a purpose: in order to raise $5,000 to pay the Cooke County Tax Assessor the back taxes owed by the orphanage in which the brothers grew up.

The film is a little unclear about why a Roman Catholic orphanage – which would surely have been a tax-exempt organization – owes back taxes.  There is, however, the suggestion that the archdiocese wants to shut down the orphanage and sell the property.  In any case, the nuns who raised the boys refuse to accept ill-gotten money from Jake and Elwood, and the brothers are challenged to redeem their checkered lives by doing the right thing.  And throughout the film, as the Blues Brothers veer from adventure to adventure to put their old band back together and raise the money, their explanation is a simple one: they are on a mission from God.

As it turns out, the Blues Brothers’ mission was a mixed bag: in the end they earned the money honestly to save the orphanage – by putting the band together and giving a benefit concert.   But their several traffic violations in the process land them back in prison by the end of their journey.  A mission from God can be a tricky thing!

The Blues Brothers had something in common with Saint Mark’s, for we, too, are on a mission from God, as every Christian community is and ought to be.  Like the Blues Brothers, we also tend to make a lot of music as we go about our mission.  There, I think the similarities may end.  But it is important that we remind ourselves and others that we are a community with a mission: we are on a mission from God.

The Vestry and the clergy of this parish worked over the course of about five months to find a concise way to articulate that mission.  Here is what we came up with:
Saint Mark’s is a community that gathers in faith, serves in love and proclaims hope, through Jesus Christ.

We are on a mission from God; that mission requires us to gather, to serve, and to proclaim; it grows out of the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and love; and it is anchored in the lordship of our Savior Jesus Christ.

I will not bore you now with a disquisition on this mission statement, which we have now begun to circulate in our newsletter and on our website.  Rather, I want to briefly make the case that in our mission from God we are linked not only to the Blues Brothers but the to very first community of the early Church.

Saint Luke, whose Book of Acts is a second volume to his Gospel, wrote in the early portion of that work that “those who had been baptized devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.”  This sounds great!  Churches often refer to this sentence in Acts because it sounds so familiar.  But read on!  “Fear,” or in another translation, “awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles.”

Many wonders and signs and were being done, many wonders and signs.

Here is the challenge for the church today: Are we satisfied to continue to devote ourselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, the breaking of bread and the prayers?  Are we perfectly happy to stop reading there?  Do we believe that our mission from God can be summed up with such tidiness?  After all, this sounds a lot like the church we know: we gather in fellowship for teaching, for the breaking of bread in the Eucharist, and to maintain our collective life of prayer.

But what have we left unsaid, and what have we left undone, if we forget to read on?  Many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles.

The second volume of Luke’s Gospel is called the Book of the Acts of the Apostles for a reason.  Because they were on a mission from God.  They had been sent – which is the basic reality of anyone on a mission.  Sent by the angels who asked them as they stood watching the ascension of Jesus into heaven, “men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven?”  Sent by the Spirit that Jesus promised would visit them, and which did so in tongues of fire and a rushing wind.  These apostles were sent out to do things they never dreamt they could do: to heal the sick and give new life to those who seemed to be dead; to bring promise and hope where there was none; to work for peace and justice; and to turn the world upside down by following as best they could the singular command that Jesus had given them: that they should love one another as he had loved them.

They were on a mission from God, and what signs and wonders they performed as they gathered together, as they served one another and those in need, and as they proclaimed the Good News of Jesus to anyone who would listen!

They might have stopped at gathering, you know.  They might have formed a club, and collected dues, and drawn up by-laws, and membership eligibility requirements.  They might have devised a secret handshake and a password.  They might have stopped at gathering.  But they didn’t.  They had been sent on a mission from God, and they had signs and wonders to perform that would astonish even themselves!

And the reason that the leadership of this parish bothered to go through the exercise of drafting a mission statement, of discussing it with as many of you as we could, of debating the merits of word choice and punctuation and ideas, is that we could very easily stop at gathering too.

We could be very happy gathering here week by week, singing our music, tending to the apostles’ teaching, breaking the bread in the lovely way we do, and deepening our lives of prayer.  We are within our rights, as a Christian community, to do all these things, and, perhaps, to stop there.  

But where would be the signs and wonders that bring awe upon us?  How would we do the things that transform the lives of men and women and children?  How would we follow that singular commandment to love if we only ever gathered and never cared also to serve and to proclaim?

I find it amusing, in my own silly way, to think that we are connected to the fictitious Blues Brothers by their singular assertion that they were on a mission from God.  But I must say it leaves me almost breathless to think that we are also connected by our mission to those first apostles who gathered amid great uncertainty to pass on Jesus’ teaching, to break bread together, and to pray, and who then went out to do great signs and wonders bringing healing and new life where they confronted sickness and death.  I find it astonishing to think that we, too, are called to gather, to serve and to proclaim; that the virtues of faith, hope, and love could so possess this community that lives are changed by bringing health where there is sickness and the promise of new life where others see only death.

We, my brothers and sisters in Christ, we are on a mission from God!  He calls us here week by week and day by day to form us into his holy people by the apostles’ teaching, the breaking of the bread and the prayers.  And then by his Holy Spirit, he sends us out into the world to serve in love and to proclaim the hope of new life.  There are signs and wonders to be performed by you and by me as we do this.  Do not be deceived by the tyranny of low expectations.

And we can do so much more than the Blues Brothers could!  We can do more than raise enough money to pay the bills.  And we will not end up back where we started, as poor old Elwood did – right back in prison.

I have an ongoing debate with some of the Office Volunteers here about the coffee machine in the Parish Hall.  That machine has one dial, two switches, and a valve to control the flow of coffee.  Its controls are significantly simpler than those on the dashboard of most cars, let alone the control panel of a jet, say, or of anything requiring a degree in rocket science.  And yet from time to time we are thwarted by this simple machine.  We set the dial wrong and the coffee is too weak, or we leave the valve open and coffee pours out all over the floor.  And we are tempted, some of us, to think that this machine is too much to handle, that it should be left to a very few carefully trained people to manage it, or perhaps abandoned altogether in favor of some simpler alternative.

But I believe that God is calling us as a community to do some wonderful things – what you might even call signs and wonders.  I believe God has endowed this community with gifts that far exceed the ability to operate a coffee machine with one dial, two switches, and a valve that might be open or shut.  I believe that we are on a mission from God that changes people’s lives and turns the world upside down.

And so I believe that if we allow ourselves to be thwarted by a coffee machine we will have set our expectations depressingly low!  Because I believe that we can make wonderful coffee!

But I also believe that we can do so much more, if as a community we will gather here in faith, we will serve our neighbors in love – whomever they may be, and we will proclaim hope to those who need to hear it with whatever words we have to use.

For we are on a mission from the God who sent his Son into the world that we might have life and have it abundantly.  And what can stop us now?

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
13 April 2008
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Inside the Tomb, II

As is the case with many holy sites in Jerusalem, there are at least two tombs that are identified as the burial place of Jesus.  It is perhaps the case that the best claim of authenticity can still be made by the tomb that has been enshrined beneath the dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.  

That tomb – identified in the fourth century - has seen empires rise and fall, crusaders come and go, Muslim occupation, Christian schism, warfare, tumult, squabble, earthquake, fire and every kind of upset.  The emperor Constantine built the first structure over it: what amounted to a “little house” that was itself enclosed by a larger church.  That same plan – rebuilt many times – survives today inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.  Beneath the great, grey dome of the church is a smaller building, surrounded by countless burning lamps, and chanting monks of various pedigrees, and tourists of every variety.

This morning, if we will, we are invited to follow Mary Magdalene to this tomb.   See what happens when we get there.

On seeing that the stone is rolled away, (only a fragment of it remains today) she hesitates at first, and runs to get others – Peter and the one known as the beloved disciple.  And now Saint John gives us marvelous details that are absent in the three other gospel accounts of the resurrection.

Peter and the beloved disciple begin to run: racing each other to the mouth of the cave.  I imagine that Mary Magdalene runs too, but she is a girl, and not so fast or so competitive as the boys are.  But all three of them have a single question burning in their minds: Is he dead or alive?

John tells us that the beloved disciple got there first.  He stoops to look in and sees the grave-clothes.  Peter catches up, and, having lost the race to the mouth of the tomb, shoves the beloved disciple aside, lowers his shoulders, bends his head low and, brash as ever, dives inside the tomb of Christ.  There must have been room for the two of them in there.  The beloved disciple follows Peter, lowers his shoulders, bends his head low, and goes inside the tomb, too.

There they find no body.  The details that they notice about the position of the linen cloths – lying undisturbed – are meant to show us that Jesus had not struggled to escape, had not performed some fantastic magic trick.  And the two men – full of excitement - scramble out of the tomb and back to their homes.

But Mary Magdalene stood weeping outside the tomb, confused, uncertain.  Is he dead or alive?  Finally she brings herself to lower her own shoulders and bend her head low and lean in far enough to look inside the tomb, where she, privileged in her grief, and undistracted by the competitive spirit that possessed the two men, sees the two angels sitting where the body of Jesus had lain.

Only in John’s Gospel are we told that anyone actually goes inside the tomb of Jesus.  Only in this last and latest gospel do the disciples lower their shoulders and bend low to get inside.  Only here does Mary Magdalene, too, stoop to get her head and shoulders inside and see the amazing site, which does not stop her weeping, for she does not yet know what it means.  Is he dead or alive?

That tomb was originally hewn out of stone in a hillside, but the hillside is nowhere in evidence.  Journalist Richard Rodriguez wrote of his recent visits to the Holy Sepulchre:  “ A mountain was chipped away from the burial cave, leaving the cave.  Later the cave was destroyed.  What remains is the interior of the cave, which is nothing….  I must lower my shoulders and bend my head [to get in]; I must crawl to pass under the low opening.  I am inside the idea of the tomb of Christ.”

A hillside was chipped away leaving a cave; the cave was destroyed leaving the interior of the cave, which is nothing.  What is left is the idea of the tomb of Christ.

Nothing prevents you and me from lowering our shoulders just now, from bending low, and crawling, ourselves, inside the idea of the tomb of Christ.  And this, after all, is where the church has led us today: into the idea of the tomb of Christ.

Since our imaginations have been shaped by courtroom dramas and forensic police work on TV, we are tempted to experience Easter Day as a particularly old episode of Law and Order.  We want to detain Peter for questioning, and we’d like to know why the beloved disciple won’t give us his name.  We’d like to hold Mary Magdalene in a separate room and see if the stories of these three corroborate.  We doubt that the two men Mary spoke with are angels and we have a few questions for them.  And how can Mary be so sure that it wasn’t the gardener she talked with?  Let’s bring him in for questioning too!  Most importantly, don’t touch anything!  We will send the linen cloths to the lab for testing.  We need some DNA!  We will scour the inside of the tomb for a fibre, a strand of hair, a fragment of fingernail.

But where would that get us?  Will it really tell us whether or not Jesus is dead or alive?  It will surely not get us inside the idea of the tomb of Christ.  Better, on this Easter morning, to lower our shoulders, bend low, and crawl inside the idea of the tomb of Christ.

Two days ago it seemed so different: so dark.  But then, darkness covered the whole land on that Friday.  Isn’t it surprisingly light in here now?  Is it the candles, or is there residual glow from the angel-light?  Is the air sweet with the smell of incense and spices?  Do we have the sense that Jesus was here just a minute ago?  Or can we tell somehow that he did not stay long in this tomb, that he had work to tend to, and got straight to it?  Is it creepy in here, inside the idea of Jesus tomb, in this chamber of death?  Are we frightened?    Could we somehow get stuck in here?  Is the stone rolled back far enough, and held tight?  It won’t roll back across the door and seal us in?  And where is Jesus?  Is he dead or is he alive?

If we pause here, inside the idea of the tomb of Christ, does it occur to us to think about our own death?  Isn’t it a little weird to be inside this grave?  What are we doing in here, inside the idea of this tomb?  And if we pause here for a moment or two longer than Peter stayed, longer than the beloved disciple paused here, do we find that the question begins to shift from him to us?

We thought that we had come here to investigate Jesus.  But inside the idea of his tomb we begin to find the question that we had not thought to ask: do we die or do we live?  We thought  - because the world had tried to convince us – that the question was whether or not Jesus was dead or alive.  We thought that was what brought is to his tomb, looking for evidence, for an argument, for proof.  But here, inside the idea of his tomb, we discover that the question shifts from him to us: will we die, or will we live?

We realize that the world is killing us all day long, one way or another, and the world tells us that if we just keep buying things, everything will be OK.  (Can I interest you in a satin pillow for the inside of that tomb?)  But we know that everything we buy ends up being thrown in the trash and goes to the dump.  And we want to know – is that what will happen to us in our graves?

And while we are inside the idea of his tomb, perhaps we cannot tell.  There are the grave clothes: un-rumpled, no sign of struggle.  It does not appear to be a trick.  But still, we are uncertain.  Is he dead or alive?  Will we die or will we live?

And from in here, we can hear a sound nearby, but from a distant time: Mary Magdalene, stands outside weeping, and we can hear her sobs.  She has poked her head and shoulders in here.  She has seen what we see – and more.  But there she stands weeping.  And who are we to console her?  We have only been inside the idea of Christ’s tomb; she has looked into the real thing.  We have only seen the details that others reported to us; she has spoken with angels.  But still she weeps.  For as long as she does not know if Jesus is dead or alive, she cannot know if she will live or if she will die.   And from in here, inside the idea of Christ’s tomb, can we know either?

This morning, the sound of Mary weeping is enough, I hope, to bring us out of the idea of that tomb.  Although there was that strange light in the tomb, to sunlight is brighter, and we blink in the brightness of it as we draw close to Mary.  As her sobs become louder, I begin to feel that maybe I will join her in her tears, for there is sadness enough in this world, and this tomb is empty, and they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.

And I know somehow that my fate is tied to his fate, and so is yours.  And I know, with Mary, that if he is dead, then perhaps the best thing to do is crawl back inside that tomb and get used to it – because that is what awaits us anyway.

But before I have gotten close enough to put my arm around her, to join my sobs to hers, there is this voice.  And I am certain it is not the gardener, because I am only standing outside the idea of the tomb of Christ, and many centuries have past.  And I have heard the story before (and so have you).  And when I hear him call her name, I remember that the tomb was always going to be empty, could only ever be empty.

And now the tomb doesn’t matter at all, because once it was a hillside that was chipped away leaving a cave; then the cave was destroyed leaving the interior of the cave, which is nothing.  And you and I cannot be trapped inside of nothing – not even for a moment.

And I cannot tell the difference anymore between my sobs and the sobs of Mary Magdalene.  I cannot say how close she is to me, or to you.  But I am sure we are all standing outside of the tomb now.  And I am sure that tomb is nothing but an idea.  And I know that it doesn’t matter any more.  Because I hear a voice, and I think you do, too.  And a moment ago that voice seemed to be calling, “Mary!”  But now I hear my own name, and I know, somehow, that you hear yours.

And now I know that my redeemer liveth!  And once I know that, in a instant, in the twinkling of an eye, I know, too, that every tomb has been chipped away, as his tomb has been, and reduced to nothing, as his tomb is nothing; nothing but an idea.  And I know that Mary’s sobs have been turned into songs of joy, and I can hear myself singing, and you too!  And I know that Christ is alive, and that if he lives then you and I will not die when our mortal bodies are done on this earth, but that we shall live, because he lives, and calls us each by name!  Alleluia!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
Easter Day 2008
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Inside the Tomb, I

As is the case with many holy sites in Jerusalem, there are at least two tombs that are identified as the burial place of Jesus.  It is perhaps the case that the best claim of authenticity can still be made by the tomb that has been enshrined beneath the dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.  

That tomb – identified in the fourth century - has seen empires rise and fall, crusaders come and go, Muslim occupation, Christian schism, warfare, tumult, squabble, earthquake, fire and every kind of upset.  The emperor Constantine built the first structure over it: what amounted to a “little house” that was itself enclosed by a larger church.  That same plan – rebuilt many times – survives today inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.  Beneath the great, grey dome of the church is a smaller building, surrounded by countless burning lamps, and chanting monks of various pedigrees, and tourists of every variety.

The tomb was originally hewn out of stone in a hillside, but the hillside is nowhere in evidence.  Journalist Richard Rodriguez wrote of his recent visits there:  “ A mountain was chipped away from the burial cave, leaving the cave.  Later the cave was destroyed.  What remains is the interior of the cave, which is nothing….  I must lower my shoulders and bend my head [to get in]; I must crawl to pass under the low opening.  I am inside the idea of the tomb of Christ.”

A hillside was chipped away leaving a cave; the cave was destroyed leaving the interior of the cave, which is nothing.  What is left is the idea of the tomb of Christ.

Nothing prevents you and me from lowering our shoulders just now, from bending low, and crawling ourselves inside the idea of the tomb of Christ.  And this, after all, is where the church has led us today: into the idea of the tomb of Christ.

Since our imaginations have been shaped by courtroom dramas and forensic police work on TV, we are tempted to experience Good Friday as a particularly old episode of Law and Order.  We want to analyze Pilate’s motives, interview the soldiers who led Jesus to Golgotha.  We’d like to get a statement on the record from Simon of Cyrene.  It would be helpful if we could cross-examine the centurion.  And of course we long for DNA samples.  We would like to secure the scene and scour the inside of the tomb for a fibre, a strand of hair, a fragment of fingernail.

But where would that get us?  It will surely not take us inside the idea of the tomb of Christ.  Better to lower our shoulders, bend low, and crawl inside the idea of the tomb of Christ, (just for a moment or two if that is all we can tolerate).

Is it dark in here?  Or is there a candle burning already?  Has angel-light already begun to cause the stone to glow?  Does it smell in here yet – the sweet spices have net yet been brought by the women.  Is the air heavy with the scent of blood and sweat and tears?  Is Jesus’ body still; is it cold?  Is he given time to rest in death, regain strength after his ordeal?  Or does he spring to work instantly like an escape artist with limited time to get out of his shroud?

Will he speak to us?  Could we understand him if he did?  Is there anything we can do?  Is he even there?  Or is he gone already?  Of course, he must be gone – we are only inside the idea of his tomb.  And it is centuries later.  But if we are here, what does that say about us?  Are we dead or alive?  Could we get stuck in here?  Is the stone outside propped back?  It won’t roll across the door and seal us in?  No, really?  What are we doing in here?  What good can it do us to come inside the idea of the tomb of Christ?  Why are we here?  Are we dead or alive?

Are we dead or alive?

Here, inside the idea of the tomb of Christ, we find the question that we had not thought to ask: are we dead or alive?  We thought  - because the world had tried to convince us – that the question was whether or not Jesus was dead or alive.  We thought that was what brought is to his tomb, looking for evidence, for an argument, for proof.

But here inside the idea of his tomb, we discover that if we will be buried with him in his death, the question shifts from him to us.

And do we find that here, inside the idea of his tomb the question of the rock, the cave, the hillside that once stood around his actual tomb – these all become immaterial?  Who cares where the precise location of his grave is, if we can be buried in his death without ever having to search for it?  And who cares about anything, really, except the answer to that burning question: are we dead or alive?

Here in the idea of Jesus’ tomb I think it is dark, and very still.  I think that I am lying on the shelf where his body lay.  And I think you are there too, but I am not sure that I can feel you there.  I do not think I can hear you; I am not sure you are breathing.  I am not sure I am.

And I think I am dead, as I think Jesus must have been.

I know I cannot stay here for three days.  It has only been a few minutes, but already it feels like hours.  I think I was frightened for a moment, but now that has passed.  I don’t know if I can feel my feet or wiggle my toes; I don’t know if I can move; I don’t know if I can see or hear.  And I don’t know if you can either – or if you are really there.  Is there room for us all in here?  Yes, it is very dark, and very still in here, inside the idea of Jesus’ tomb.  And I am wondering if I am dead or alive.  And what about you?  I cannot feel or hear my heartbeat.

+ + +

But now, I am sure I hear something like a breath.  It was not mine or yours, but it was a breath.  And I know that I have been buried with Christ inside the idea of his tomb.  And I can hear now.  And my heart is thumping.  And there is air in my lungs.  And the smell is sweet.  And it is still dark, but my eyes are open.  And I cannot tell, but I think I am beginning to see something like light.  And I can feel you there next to me; I can feel you tremble - or is it me who trembles?

And I know I was dead.  Here, in the idea of Jesus’ tomb, I know that I was dead, before I lowered my shoulders, and bent low, and crawled inside this death where Jesus has already been.

And I know I want to get out of here – out of this tomb of death.  And I know that I can; and I know that I will, because I know that this is why Jesus led me here.  Because he has been here himself.  And he made room for me and for you inside the idea of his tomb, so that we could know whether we are dead or alive.

He knows that we are desperate to know this: are we dead or alive?  He knows the world is killing us all day long and telling us that if we just keep buying things it will be OK.  But we know that everything we buy ends up be thrown in the trash and goes to the dump.  And we want to know – is that what will happen to us in our graves.

So Jesus calls us to come and die with him, and lie for a moment or two inside the idea of his tomb, and see.

Are we dead?  or are we alive?


Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
Good Friday 2008
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Punishment Policy

The news last month, from the Pew Charitable Trusts, that more than 1 in a hundred Americans were in prison at the outset of 2008 was upstaged only by the statistic included in the report that 1 of every 9 black men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars in this country.  One shudders to think what the percentage is in Philadelphia.  In our nation, 2.3 million people were in jail at the beginning of this year – 1% of the population.  Even China has imprisoned only 1.5 million of their significantly larger population.

The report tells us that these numbers are a concern for states because of the high costs of incarceration, which naturally deprives other important programs – like education – of funding.  For every dollar spent in Pennsylvania on education, we spend 81 cents on prisons.  What kind of holy experiment is that?

The conclusion of the Pew report says this:

“As a nation, the United States has long anchored its punishment policy in bricks and mortar.  The tangible feel of a jail or prison, with its surefire incapacitation of convicts, has been an unquestioned weapon of choice in our battle against crime....  However… a continual increase in our reliance on incarceration will pay declining dividends in crime prevention.”

This conclusion is happily free of euphemisms for the reality of prisons: like correctional facilities or, more pointedly, penitentiaries, both of which suggest that we have something more in mind than punishment when we lock someone up.  In America, punishment is not just a policy, it’s a growth industry, if not a terribly useful way of dealing with crime, since, according to the report, “more than half of released offenders are back in prison within three years.”

This report makes me almost unspeakably grateful to our friend and neighbor, Fr. Julius Jackson, who with a handful of helpers runs a parish (St. Dismas) within the walls of Graterford Maximum Security Prison, where, on a very few occasions, I have visited the men with him.  But I cannot imagine what Palm Sunday is like in the walls of that prison.  And I wonder if it occurs to us to consider how different God’s punishment policy is from our own.

Very near the beginning of the Bible comes the first story of God’s punishment, which, interestingly, involves locking Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, not locking them up.  Go on, and you will find that the Ten Commandments completely lack sentencing guidelines.  Keep reading the Scriptures from there and you will get to a body of religious law that is complicated but has precious little interest in building correctional facilities.  And while there are plenty of threats breathed against the children of Israel, God’s hand is seldom actually raised.  Their suffering is usually at the hands of worldly opponents.

Eventually we get to Jesus.  His early call to repentance is soon transposed to his preaching of the kingdom of God: a message that he seems to intend for prostitutes and sinners: governors and their harlots, perhaps.  But remember that, with the governor and his call girl, you and I have also been locked out of Eden.  And while our sins have not been chronicled in detail in the press, are we really any less susceptible to the punishment policy of God?

So we might take notice when we hear Saint Paul tell us that “Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, emptied himself, taking the form of a slave… and humbled himself... and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.”

Here on the cross is God’s new code of punishment: foreshadowed by the scapegoats who had long carried the sins of the people out of their midst.

Here is God’s Son, who could very well have rode on, rode on in majesty, (could he not?), but here he is, taking the form of a servant, a slave, even unto death.  Here is the eternal Word of God, nailed to two wooden beams.

Here is God’s new policy of punishment: using the most vulgar form torture available and turning it not to our own destruction but to our salvation.  Here Jesus suffers and dies for us.

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So impressed are we with ourselves in America, because we can buy whatever we like and pay for it with credit, that we have pretended that a liberal democracy that imprisons 1% of its population and more than 10% of its young black men – at the expense of educating the rest of its children - has something to teach the rest of the world.  I’d call that ironic at best.  We are clearly building in this country a hellish kingdom of punishment behind bars, where the smartest thing to do must be to get used to it, since chances are good that those who are banished there, even for a while, are likely to return.

But God’s kingdom is built with the wood of the Cross: with the atoning sacrifice of his Son.  God’s kingdom runs on an economy of forgiveness, mercy and reconciliation.  God’s kingdom is founded in hope not despair.  God’s kingdom doesn’t need bricks and mortar, let alone iron bars.  And the tangible feel of God’s kingdom is the surefire love that stoops to wash the feet of its friends.

Any nation that has committed itself to a punishment policy that gives us an ever-increasing supply of prison cells – and that has no trouble filling those cells - is desperately in need of word of God’s kingdom.

It turns out that God doesn’t have a policy of punishment at all.  His policy of love extends to providing the lamb for the sacrifice.  And while the cost to God must surely be great, this gift of salvation is given to us freely.

Just try to get into Graterford Maximum Security Prison – not an hour away from here – as a visitor from the outside.  It will take months of waiting, even with the Chaplain working on your behalf.  And should you fail to produce the proper identification, on arrival, or should forget to leave your cell phone in the car, or should you be carrying with you a book that seems suspicious, you will be stopped at the inner gate and told to go home.

They do not want you to see more than you have to.  And they do not want to risk that you will infringe on the punishment of surefire incapacitation that is meted out to the men – so many of them black – who are incarcerated there.  This is our country.

But try, if you will, going to the foot of Jesus’ cross.  Go there without my help, or anyone’s.  And you will find that although the way is not easy, there is no one to stop you, nothing to prevent you from standing at the foot of the cross, as we stand here today, marveling at the love of God, who put punishment aside, and instead sent his Son into the world to bear the sins that even the strongest prison cannot contain.

Bring to the foot of the cross not only those things that you fear you could be punished for, but all those things you and I have gotten away with and that live only in the secrets of our hearts.

Lay your sins at the foot of the cross, and I will lay mine there.  Let us go with fear and trembling: God knows what we deserve.

And see that he who hangs there, dies for us; his blood poured out that we might be saved.  And his greater love made plain as he lays down his life for you and for me, and for all the world.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
Palm Sunday, 2008
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia