True Religion

Last week was the anniversary of the first time that I stumbled my way through the liturgy here at St. Mark's. I’ve been thinking recently about my own experience of St. Mark’s, and of the process that led to my becoming the curate. I had not planned to become a parish priest when I was finishing seminary. I was planning on staying at seminary, enjoy living in New York City on a pittance, and working occasionally on an advanced degree, (the seminary equivalent of a surf bum) and then an e-mail arrived from Fr. Mullen asking if I would come and visit St. Mark’s. I knew nothing about this community, except that it was a famous and historic Anglo-Catholic parish. If you have any experience with Anglo-Catholic parishes, you know that they can be rather a mixed bag. Anglo-Catholic parishes have had a difficult time making the transition to this culture and this world, and so I was unjustly skeptical in my e-mail to Fr. Mullen, expressing that I love proper, high worship, but not for its own sake, and I not only like, but advocate for the inclusion of women and gay people in the Church.

Not only was Fr. Mullen’s response to my rather reactionary e-mail positive and interesting, but I e-mailed an old Anglo-Catholic priest I know in Wisconsin, of the radical variety, who responded that he hadn’t been to St. Mark’s in years, but he’d visited here during civil rights and the experience had been for him a formative one.

This was the story he told me:

My friend had gone to the rail to receive communion, and in front of him had been a very properly dressed white woman, and in front of her had been a very properly dressed African-American woman. The priest came down the rail, giving out wafers, and as he handed the consecrated bread to the three of them, the African-American woman, the white woman and the wet-behind-the-ears priest, the white woman said to priest, “I won’t drink for the chalice after that [blank],” and she used a word I won’t say, but was a very derogatory word for an African-American person. The priest had just given my friend the wafer, and returned immediately to the white woman, snatched the bread out of her hands and said to her, “You won’t take communion at all. You won’t take communion until you repent and come to confession. Leave immediately.” My friend left the rail, proud and shocked by the radical priest at this Anglo-Catholic parish that he had visited.

If you have been at all aware of the Episcopal Church in the last few decades, or even if you have ever caught the odd news story about the divisiveness in the Church today, you know that there is a massive and complex debate going on. It is billed as a debate about tradition, about Scripture, about social justice. There are all the racy elements that news organizations love: political struggle, lots and lots of money, discussions about sex, and a large quantity of rhetoric and lawsuits flying around. The debate has to do with women and gay people and their role in the Church.

So much of the rhetoric bills this as THE LAST BATTLE (with capital letters), a dispute for the mind and soul of the Church, and depending on which extreme you are listening to at the time, either the fight is about “the faith once for all delivered to the saints,” or about the prejudices which haunt the Church against women and gay people.

And most Anglo-Catholic parishes have moved from being places of radical social witness, to museums prizing a golden past that never existed. Which I hope explains my dubiousness when Fr. Mullen e-mailed me.

That debate in the Church today is exacerbated by a vast rhetorical schism, which says essentially that either you are traditional in faith and worship, sexist and homophobic, or modern in faith and worship, and enlightened, and never the twain should meet, which means that St. Mark's has never been and still maybe isn't in the most comfortable place as churches go, clinging to catholic faith and liturgy, but also welcoming the poor and the oppressed.

And there are such rosy spectacles involved. Depending on who you talk to, thirty years ago was the end of the Church as we know it, before which there was peace, or thirty years ago was the period when the Church began the march into the modern era.

Any historian could tell you, of course, that in each debate or discussion that the Church has undergone since the first disciples, it always seemed to be “the last battle,” and has always been cast in brutally divergent rhetoric, and yet still the Church survives. This is no new phenomenon, but the perpetual discussion about what constitutes “true religion” and right worship.

“Increase in us true religion,” is the phrase from the collect this morning. The implication being that there is a false religion, which has nothing to do with the truth of God, and in the Gospel this morning we are given an indication as to what that “false religion” is: those rough disciples are not living up to the ritual purity laws of the Jewish faith – that complex of laws, set down in the Hebrew Scriptures, the sign and symbol of God's covenant with his people, the “sacrament,” if you like of God's love, inscribed into the daily lives of his people.

The Pharisees and scribes are quick to point this out to Jesus. “How,” they are saying, “can you claim to be Jewish, to be worshiping correctly, if you aren’t keeping the law?”

Jesus answers by quoting that magnificent, tortured prophet from the Hebrew Scriptures, Isaiah: “The people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.”

Isaiah is speaking about God's chosen people, and their inability to have “real” faith. Despite the externals which look religious, despite being “proper" in that religious sense, their hearts are far from true religion and it is for that reason that their worship, the honor rightly and properly due God is “in vain.”

As for the people that Isaiah was preaching to, as for the Pharisees and scribes whom Jesus was debating, so to for us: it is not enough simply to believe, say and do what is right. Right belief and action are important, but what is essential is to have hearts close to God’s heart. “In vain do they worship,” those who only espouse what is correct theologically, or liturgically or socially, if their hearts are far from God’s heart of compassion and love.

Which is where the debates in the Church today, that rhetorical divide where you must be either /or, on the right and the left fall so far short. One side is about proper doctrine and worship and one side about proper action, but in themselves they are only those “human precepts” which make our worship vain. Both sides eschew what Jesus is speaking of in the Gospels today.

As I was thinking and praying about this disparity in the Church this week, someone sent me a copy of an address given to the 1923 Anglo-Catholic Congress in England. In our own day, of course, such a conference would have perhaps six septuagenarian priests, and would garner as much interest as a root-canal, but in those days it was a large, well reported conference, which garnered a large number of Anglo-Catholic churchmen, as they used to be: catholic and radical.

The debates of that day were not women or human sexuality, but the reservation of the Sacrament, and the addition or use of Tabernacles in churches. Which seems alien to us here at St. Mark’s where we have long had the Sacrament reserved in our lovely Tabernacle, but there were vast quantities of energy and rhetoric expended on the issue at the time. The address, given by the then bishop of Zanzibar, a large number of whose people lived in abject poverty, is what I want to quote from:

But I say to you, and I say it with all the earnestness that I have, that if you are prepared to fight for the right of adoring Jesus in his Blessed Sacrament, then you have got to come out from before your Tabernacle and walk, with Christ mystically present in you, out into the streets of this country, and find the same Jesus in the people of your cities and your villages. You cannot claim to worship Jesus in the Tabernacle, if you do not pity Jesus in the slums.

Now mark that -- this is the Gospel truth. If you are prepared to say that the Anglo-Catholic is at perfect liberty to rake in all the money he can get no matter what the wages are that are paid, no matter what the conditions are under which people work; if you say that the Anglo-Catholic has a right to hold his peace while his fellow citizens are living in hovels below the levels of the streets, this I say to you, that you do not yet know the Lord Jesus in his Sacrament.

I am not talking economics, I do not understand them. I am not talking politics, I do not understand them. I am talking the Gospel, and I say to you this: If you are Christians then your Jesus is one and the same: Jesus on the Throne of his glory, Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, Jesus received into your hearts in Communion, Jesus with you mystically as you pray, and Jesus enthroned in the hearts and bodies of his brothers and sisters up and down this country. And it is folly -- it is madness -- to suppose that you can worship Jesus in the Sacraments and Jesus on the Throne of glory, when you are sweating him in the souls and bodies of his children. It cannot be done.

The issues are different for us, but it is essentially the same question: can we worship Jesus without coming face to face with the issues of our world? The answer is a resounding “No.” It is not enough to have right practice, right theology, right worship. We must recognize Jesus in the poor and dispossessed around us. It is not enough to have glorious liturgies and music, to adore Jesus present in bread and wine, if we do not also recognize him in the needy. Nor is it enough simply to have radical outreach to the discriminated, if we do not also long for Christ to be a real presence in peoples’ lives. We must have both.

Just as we cannot receive communion in the state that that poor woman was here during Civil Rights, just as we cannot adore Jesus and ignore his people in the slums, we cannot preach Jesus present on the altar, and ignore the women called to stand there. We cannot preach the radical love of God, the radical love of God for his people Israel, and fail to recognize it in the love and commitment of two people of any sex. We cannot preach God’s justice and ignore the people who are suffering under the yoke of economic disparity, of racial or class prejudice. We cannot preach the peace of God while ignoring the bullets flying in our streets. “It cannot be done!”

We preach the Christ, crucified, risen and present to his people, who commands us to feed the hungry, to cloth the naked, to welcome the outcast and stranger, to pursue injustice wherever it is found.

The divide in our day is about women and gay people. Tomorrow will have a different debate, just as yesterday did, a different discussion, but for today we must echo Isaiah. We cannot preach, as so many on the one side of the debate are saying: right worship, right belief alone, and to hell with the rest of it. Neither can we say that social justice alone is the great good: full inclusion of all God’s people is important, critically important, but not in itself.  Full inclusion is critical because God comes down to be with us in the physical and that physical says to us that it is vitally important how people live. Not just in the next life, but also in this one.

We must have both: right belief and right action, emerging from a heart that is like unto God's heart: brimming with love, longing and compassion.

“Graft in our hearts the love of your Name; increase in us true religion; and bring forth the fruit of good works.”

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

30 August 2009

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Gambling on God

 “To whom else shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

 This past week the Powerball jackpot reached $250 million. (I'll bet you didn’t think I’d start my sermon that way.) There were a number of discussions, in the parish office, about what we would do if one of us won. Promises were made about paltry million dollar gifts to the rest of the staff, and presents to the parish, if one of us were to suddenly be hundreds of millions of dollars richer. A certain director of outreach forbade a priest on staff, I don’t want to say who, from buying a lottery ticket in his clerical collar. Said director of outreach ended up buying a ticket for said priest, to preserve the social standing of the clergy of St. Mark's.

The drawing came on Wednesday, and I am sorry to relate to you that St. Mark’s is not immeasurably richer this week.

The past week the New York Times also ran an interesting story. I like to keep an eye on stories of religious significance and this one was concerning a conference that happened recently in Fort Worth, Texas. The article was about a prosperity gospel conference, headed by Kenneth and Gloria Copeland. You might recognize them from TV: perfectly white teeth, in mouths that are perpetually smiling, with hair perfectly coiffed and immovable. They had a huge conference last week, preaching to thousands the news that if you have sufficient faith in God, if you give sacrificially, and can “claim that blessing,” (whatever that means) God will bless you financially. And to demonstrate the truth of what they were preaching, they told story after story about how God had blessed them with money, and possessions, often sent in by people who listen to their message. There was miraculous story after story about how people have given them money, stocks, plane tickets, even motorcycles, to demonstrate their faith in God and their anxiousness for a blessing. It seemed to me just a little too similar to another story which has been in the news lately: Bernie Madoff and his Ponzi scheme that defrauded thousands of people of billions of dollars. Was this prosperity gospel much different, I wondered? Isn't a Ponzi scheme just a Ponzi scheme, whether it has religious overtones or not? And while I might go down, say on last Wednesday last to purchase a Powerball ticket when the prize hits $250 million, I don't expect that, when the numbers come up I will be that any better off because of my faith, or that God will bless me specially, because of the degree of trust that I have in him.

I understand the attraction of such a message, of course. In this time, when our economy is on such rickety footing and millions are facing unemployment, when we are spending money faster even then we can print it, when health insurance is an increasing and pervasive problem, who indeed doesn’t want certainty: returns on investment, guaranteed by smart investment bankers, or even better by God?

Just as with Bernie Madoff, so with the Copelands: if it seems too good to be true it probably is. God is not simply an ATM machine, who feeds out money if you deposit faith and sacrificial giving.

I am sometimes accused of being melancholic in my preaching, but I often wonder if the reverse is not actually the case: isn't it possible that our lives might be harder, because we know God? Might we not be called into harder and more difficult situations and interactions, because of what we believe?

At the least it is an open and perennial question that we all wrestle with. And in the Gospel this morning some, at least, of those people who have been following Jesus around come to the conclusion that it isn't an open question at all. That life following Jesus as teacher and Messiah is difficult and hard, and they don't want to do it any more. Who of us hasn't asked the same question that they do: “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” Which is another way of asking why the life of faith is hard, why God's doesn't simply bless us with health and wealth, why the life of faith might actually make our lives harder and not easier?

It isn’t just the cannibalism language that Jesus is using in the Gospel that we’ve heard for the past few Sundays, that those followers find so difficult: “I am the bread of life, unless you eat of this bread, you will have no life within you.” It is the whole narrative, the faith entire that he is proclaiming. If religion is a crutch, then people are far more inclined to look for the inevitably disappointing Messiah who doesn't ask for much, rather then the Jesus who makes significant demands. “Maybe,” say those fickle followers, “maybe we need to rethink this whole 'following Jesus' thing.”

Certainly, if we look to the lives of the disciples and the saints throughout the ages, it is hard ti dispute that their lives were made shorter and more unpleasant by their life of faith. Peter, who is perhaps not the sharpest knife in the disciple drawer, but occasionally rises from his confusion to speak words of resounding truth: “Where shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” But I wonder if those words seemed a little strained to him, when he was being crucified upside down?

The martyrs too, throughout the ages, when they were going to their rather gruesome deaths, being gutted, or quartered, or eaten by lions, or griddled or shot with multiple arrows, surely they wondered slightly about this open question, about whether it was fair that God demanded so much, even their very life blood.

Surely the saints, even those ones who made it to peaceful death, surely there were times when they wondered if the cost of God’s friendship was a trifle high, or if instead of the monastic life they wouldn’t rather live a dissolute life. St. Augustine would certainly fall into that camp. Or I think of the story, perhaps apocryphal, of Teresa of Avila, thrown from a cart into the mud, on her way to found a monastic house. “God,” she said, as she shook her fist at the heavens, “if this is the way that you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few of them.” I doubt that she was the first, or will be the last to ask a variation on that question.

The question that I have been circling this morning is our own very private question that I don't doubt we ask sometimes: isn't the faith too difficult, doesn't God ask too much of us, isn't the cost of discipleship just a bit too high?

The Copelands would like you to think that faith is a panacea – financial and otherwise – that to have enough faith is to have certainty. I'm sure it is just incidental that they make millions on such a message. I will not tell you that. I will tell you instead the opposite – that this question of faith is one of the great wagers that we as humans make, a gamble as much as is the lottery. I will tell you that faith is dangerous – that God will ask much of you and if, pertly, you are tempted to ask why you then should believe, I will you give you the answer from the Gospel this morning – because these are the words of eternal life. They are not the words of temporal riches, or the words of earthly happiness. Faith doesn’t explain away the hardness of life, or the intellectual quandaries that we find ourselves in, or the existential angst of life and death, suffering and joy. But these are the words of eternal life, and true words, and once we have heard the truth of them we are indeed trapped.

Which is to say that we are right to fear, even a little bit, the hardness of Jesus teachings. These words of eternal life are hard words – they are hard to understand, words about bread and wine, the water of life, Jesus’ coming death.

But they are also hard, uncomfortable words. They are not the words of ease and comfort that one might want to hear, indeed that many long to hear, and look to prosperity gospel conferences, or financiers or political platforms to provide.

They are the words of cost, the words of sacrifice, the words that we should find a little condemning now and then. For they tell us that it is not enough to be religious in that narrow sense – we must care for people who are hard to care for. They tell us that our lives must be poured out, as Jesus’ poured his life out for us. Those words of life tell us that we must give more than we are willing to, more even then we are sure that we can. That the only sure wager or return on investment is not sure or certain in any of the terms that human wisdom or prudence find compelling – not perhaps as long as the odds on the Powerball, but daunting nevertheless.

But where else can we go? These are the words of eternal life, and having found them, or been found by them, we are caught.

Lord, teach us the words of eternal life. Give us this bread always. Take away our thirst forever. Grant us so to know you that we may gamble away our lives on you – who is our unsure certainty, our hard teaching of comfort, verily even the Word of eternal life. Amen.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia

23 August 2009

Hunger for God

I hope it is not simply my jaded desires, but food seems to be very much on the mind of so many people these days. Fast Food Nation and Food, Inc., documentaries that deal with food, health and the commercial food industry are being released and discussed. Michael Pollan, who has made a name as a writer about food, has written several books about food and the food industry in America, and last week his was the cover article in The New York Times Magazine, discussing the “foodie” culture in this country. “How is it,” Pollan was asking, “that Americans are obsessed with food, with cooking techniques, with culinary vacations and schools, with television programs about cooks and cooking, with the Food Network, and yet we cook less and less at home?”

Nor is Pollan the only person who is asking questions about food and diet. As we debate and begin to get closer to the political and rhetorical discussions which will inevitable occur around the process of attempting to reform health care in this country, food and diet plays an important part. We live in the country in the world with access to far more food than we could ever need, and one can tell by our waistlines, our diabetes rates, our incidence of heart disease. Yet despite our dietary wealth, the hungry throng our streets; our consumption has ramifications elsewhere in our society and the world.

Food is also an ecological issue, and I was ever so thrilled yesterday to hear on the radio that someone has coined the term “cookprint,” (in the same vein as “carbon footprint”) as a way of measuring the ecological ramifications of our cooking and eating habits.

As a culture we are only starting to awaken to the ecological ramifications of food, as we eye our peanut butter for salmonella and our beef for mad cow disease, it is clear that the economies of scale in food production are a two-edged sword, increasing our production, but often decreasing our health.

There are those who take these issues with a deadly seriousness. Those adherents of the faith known as “organic and local,” who worship at the altars of food co-ops and spurn those dens of iniquity, fast-food chains.

And, as if food wasn’t complicated enough, it is clear that food has a deep symbolic and aesthetic hold for most of us. No one can doubt that, picking up an issue of Gourmet magazine, or Food & Wine, and reading the almost literary lauding of food, or the ways that food can be an indicator of our class or our wealth or the ways that individuals can have very strange relationships indeed with food.

When I was in high school, I went with my father to the hospital to visit a friend of mine, and the child of a member of the parish, who had been hospitalized with anorexia nervosa. She was a few years older than me, and yet she weighed ninety pounds. Her skin was yellow as she flirted with jaundice.

I realized, as I spoke with her, that her life had a hole, an emptiness at its center – she was a living walking ball of hunger and desire; I realized that the cold hunger at her core was not about food, or health, or ecology. It was about control, longing and desire.

Here was my friend, living a life of happiness, in a wealthy upper middle-class, white suburban family, with a vast gaping, bottomless hole in the center of her life.

So food, for us, is a complex thing, and we as a culture have a complex relationship with it. We adore food, and hate it sometimes; there is, most certainly, a great deal of emotion connected to food for us. I wonder, as I listen to the focus, the obsession, the mania about food, and where it comes from, and who gets it, if all that energy and focus does really mean that we as a culture, as a society, are desperately, desperately hungry and full of longing.

I wonder if the obsession about food in our culture isn't really the symptom of a rather old story, that “God-shaped hole” which St. Augustine was trying to describe in The Confessions, in that oft quoted phrase “You made us for yourself and our hearts are restless till they rest in thee.”

Which would make what Jesus is saying in the Gospel for this morning rather simple.

“I am the bread of life,” says Jesus, “I come to fill the hunger within you. I am what you are longing for, in whatever way you long.” It is little wonder that the crowd starts to wonder and people start to complain. We would do the same. Who is this teacher, to make claims of that order? Hunger, thirst, longing, desire; those are universal feelings that everyone experiences, that form the bedrock of our human experience. Every infant knows hunger and longing, every adult fears feeling them. And who doesn’t get a little tense, when some strange teacher suggests to us that there is emptiness at the center of us.

Indeed, so much of our culture seems to be an attempt to preserve the myth that the emptiness is not just outside our doors, waiting to spring on us.

Longing, desire, thirst are universal, and what Jesus is saying when he says “I am the bread of life,” or “I am the vine, you are the branches,” or when he speaks of “living waters” is a simple hammering home of the point that nothing, ultimately, will take away that longing and thirst, that hunger at the center of our beings, except the One who created it in our hearts.

Which leaves us in rather an unusual place. We need food, we are built to long for many things in life, but the longing that we have for those necessities, what they remind us of are the longing that we have for the Bread from Heaven, for that food which will sate us forever and ever.

Which some people have take to mean that the Christian faith is about a great deal of self-denial and self-punishment. But notice that Jesus doesn't really seem to be into a great deal of self-denial. So many of the stories about Jesus are him healing, or feeding thousands, or sitting down to a meal with his friends. So many of the images of the Scriptures are images about food and feasting, about the dinner which will ring down the curtain on this life. So many of the stories of Jesus are stories about Jesus interacting with the physical, not as religious prude, or as aesthete, but as someone who sees the good things in life, food, wine, friendship, and silence, and loves them for what they are. Not as symbols, not as something to be hated or feared, or loved overly much, but as manna in the wilderness, bread for the journey, an aperitif to wet the appetites, for that feast and supper which is the true ending of our hungers, our longings and desires: Jesus, Lamb of God, the bread of life.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

9 August 2009

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Signs

You are looking for me not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. (Jn 6:26)

I am preparing to leave, in several days, for a long walk along the Way of Saint James in northern Spain. If all goes according to plan, I will walk 400 miles over the four weeks I am away, from Bilbao to Santiago de Compostela. Many of you have heard me speak of this journey before, or, to be more precise, a similar one I made seven years ago when I walked a different route from the Pyrenees to Santiago, the traditional burial place of the remains of Saint James the Apostle.

Among the many questions that spring to mind when contemplating such a journey is how you know where you are going. I am not bringing maps or even a guide, though I have collected a few notes from pilgrims who have walked the way before and posted tips on the Internet. I am counting on following signs, though I know from what I have read that they will not be as plentiful as they were along the more heavily traveled route I took seven years ago. There, other pilgrims have painted yellow arrows along the way: on roads and tree trunks and the sides of buildings or on rocks along a path. Most times that I was uncertain or confused about how to proceed, I had only to look around and see that a yellow arrow had been painted to show me the way, and I was just fine.

So I am counting on following the signs again. This is an important and obvious metaphor for life. How do we know which way to go in life? We can charge right through it and blaze our own trail and simply make the most out wherever the path we blaze should lead us. Or we can try to look for signs that lead us in a right way, along a path and to a place that God has already imagined for us.

The first way – blazing our own path – is popular in our society, which, like an adolescent, resents the idea of being told where to go.

The second – looking for signs – is rooted to the idea that God calls us all to follow a way that we might not likely choose for ourselves, but promises blessings as we go.

The Christian life presumes that God is calling us to lead lives following a path of his choosing, not our own, but it is up to us to watch for the signs as we go. This practice of looking for signs has gotten difficult because we are confronted with so many actual signs encouraging us to blaze our own path. Most of these signs would lead us to buy something: a car, a house, a cell phone. And since we are a consumer nation this suits us very well. We feel that we are doing what we should be doing when we buy something. And we even tell ourselves that we are blazing our own path, being our own person, when we buy something that a corporation has spent millions of dollars encouraging us to buy. But as long as we get what we want, what difference does it make?

The crowd of 5,000 or so who followed Jesus after he fed them with five loaves and two fish realized that Jesus had given them what they wanted, for free. They knew a good thing when they saw one, and so they went looking for him again. They don’t come right out and ask Jesus to do it again – to feed them for free – but he knows what they are up to.

“You are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves,” he says. In other words, you got what you want, and you have come looking for more. You are consumers, not pilgrims, and I see right through you.

In the church these days we clergy often assume that you people in the pews (and more pointedly, those who are not in the pews) are also consumers, not pilgrims, and that it is in our best interests to give you what you want (even though we don’t really have the foggiest idea what that might be). And I suppose that some of this is natural enough. But it doesn’t actually get you anywhere. Nothing ever changes. Life is not transformed if all we ever do is get what we set out looking for. And no one learns very much; no one grows.

It is remarkable to note the fickleness of the crowd that follows Jesus. Just yesterday they were witnesses and beneficiaries of the miracle of the bread and fish. They ate all they wanted and left enough crumbs to fill twelve baskets, although they must have known that it all came from only five loaves and two fish. And today, here they are asking Jesus, “What sign are you going to give us then, so we may see it and believe you?” But Jesus will not play this game with them. He will not just give them what they want. He tries to teach them how to see the signs.

It is a matter of spiritual maturity to grow beyond the childish desire simply to be given what we already know we want and to learn to look for the signs of God’s calling in our lives. I sometimes refer to this as the shift from asking what I want to asking what God might want of me. And it is not an easy shift to make, since most of the time I am very in touch with what I want, and very interested in getting it.

And because I am quite stubborn, I am also quite blessed that God has given me the time and inclination to go practice looking for signs, along 400 miles or so of walk in northern Spain. But this is not practical for most people and certainly not a realistic starting point. So Jesus helps us to see a sign right in our midst: “The bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world,” he says. “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

It is also a matter of some spiritual maturity to see, in the weekly or daily act of prayer with a disk of bread and a cup of wine, the sign that Jesus is pointing to. When Jesus says, “I am the bread of life,” he is holding up a sign that says, “Follow me.” But it remains to be seen, in that moment, where exactly he is leading each one of us. Because this sign of bread and wine is a beginning that prompts us to make the shift from asking what I want to asking what God wants of me. This tiny nourishment strengthens us for an inner journey that we can make no matter where we are, or how ambulatory we might be.

Saint Paul, who was a great pilgrim, knew what it felt like to shift from asking what he wanted to asking what God wanted of him. He also knew that it was a difficult shift to make. But he saw that when we make that shift we grow up, discovering gifts we never knew we had, being strengthened for work we never knew we could accomplish, finding love that we never knew could be so strong. He called growing up this way (in a slightly older translation of his words) growing into the “measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ,” which is a beautiful phrase, if you ask me.

To grow up into the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ is to become more ad more adept at seeing and following the signs that Jesus plants for us.

To my eyes our work at Saint James the Less is a sign, as is our feeding of the hungry every Saturday. Our worship together – so often joyful, so often connecting us to one another, so often leading us to transcendent moments – is a sign of what God intends for us, where he is calling us. And always, here, day in and day out, the little round signs of God’s love that Christ shares with us as his gives us his Body, the Bread of life, and his Blood of salvation.

And the more we grow up the more we see something like little yellow arrows on those wafers or in the reflection at the bottom of the chalice, as Jesus feeds us, and helps point the way, so that we truly can grow up into the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.

Thanks be to God.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

2 August 2009

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

A thousand darknesses and one Light

When evening came, his disciples went down to the sea, got into a boat, and started across the sea to Capernaum. It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them. (Jn 6:15-17)

It was not very like the disciples of Jesus to do something on their own initiative. And when they did, they often got it wrong. Think of Peter cutting off the ear of a man in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Today we are told by Saint John that when evening came, the sun was setting, and everyone else was stoking the fire and enjoying supper, our friends the disciples decided to put to sea. Jesus has left them after the melee that was prompted by his feeding of five thousand people with five loaves and two fish. He was not about to let the adoring crowd determine his fate (he knows how fickle a crowd is). So he slipped through the bushes and back up the hillside to a secret place, hidden even from his own followers.

What put it into their heads to get in the boat as night was falling? They wanted to get to Capernaum – perhaps they had already discussed with Jesus that this would be his next stop. Some of them were fishermen, and not unfamiliar, I suppose, with handling a boat during the darker hours of the day. Whatever their reasoning, they do not seem to be acting on instructions from Jesus; they are simply making it up as they go along.

And Saint John gives us now one of the most evocative phrases of all scripture, if you ask me: “It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them.”

Start with the dark. We all know that even in broad daylight or with the lights blaring we can be in the dark.

It’s dark if you are one of the millions of Americans who’s lost their jobs lately.

It’s dark if you are counting the months or the weeks or the days till your deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan.

It’s dark if you’ve fallen off the wagon of your sobriety again.

It’s dark if you’ve run out of ways to shuffle your debt.

It’s dark when the sharp pain of a loved one’s death has turned into a dull throb that you fear will never go away.

It’s dark when the chemo doesn’t seem to be doing much good.

It’s dark when you haven’t spoken to a brother or a sister for years and your pride won’t let you break the silence.

It’s dark when you are honest about the things you’ve done wrong, and didn’t have to.

It’s dark when your mother or your father doesn’t recognize you any more.

It’s dark when you wake up in the morning and you can’t think of a reason or find the energy to get out of bed.

You could name other ways that it’s dark in the middle of the day, when despair eclipses hope, options have narrowed, you squint your eyes, but still see no light at the end of the tunnel. The dark is not a time of day, it’s a state of being. And sometimes it seems as though we must constantly adapt to the darkness, so much so that we seem to become adept at being nocturnal creatures, who can operate just fine in the dark.

Why did the disciples get into the boat when it was dark? They do not know where Jesus is. The crowd, who continue to look for Jesus the next day, is confused for a while, because they know that the disciples left without Jesus. Were the disciples forging on ahead, preparing the way for Jesus? Or were they making something of a get-away? Frightened by the power of his signs and his refusal to respond to the awe of the crowds, are they having second thoughts about following this man?

Are they frightened when they see Jesus on the water, at least in part, because he has found them out and caught them as they are making an escape from him? It was dark, after all, and they had thought they could get away with it. Have they decided that they prefer the darkness to the light?

Who knows? But we do know what it feels like to be in the boat in the dark without Jesus. We know what it feels like when the seas become rough because a strong wind is blowing, don’t we? We know that these are not just maritime conditions, but also states of being.

It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them. We know too well what this feels like, too. And it doesn’t really matter whether we are running away of our own accord or if we have simply found ourselves in the boat in rough seas. What matters in the moment is that it is now dark and Jesus has not yet come to us.

Take note that it is not the weather that frightens the disciples – although it is getting rough. It is the appearance of Jesus in the midst of this plan of their own devising that terrifies them. Of course he should not be walking to them on the water, this is unsettling; but they might have been amazed and glad to see their teacher performing such a great sign.

Their fear is a signal (though they do not realize it at the time) that they are in the presence of the living God. “Fear not” is a colloquialism of the Bible for just this reason. But they do not know what their fear signifies. They were impressed, it has to be said, with the bread and the fish, but they do not know what it meant. Perhaps they had been hoping for some time on their own in Capernaum to talk it over among themselves, decide if they really want to follow this Jesus who resists the support of the very crowds he so excites.

It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them. It was not the time of day, it was a state of being. And into that state of being, Jesus strides across the rough surface of the sea. “It is I,” he says, “do not be afraid.”

And Saint John gives us two more wonderful details.

First he tells us that eventually the disciples want to take Jesus in the boat with them. They are willing at last to incorporate Jesus into their plans, to take him with them where they were going. When Matthew and Mark tell this story, the whole point of it is that Jesus gets into the boat with them. It’s a great sermon, and easy one to preach! But here, in John’s gospel, Jesus never gets into the boat. All John tells us is that the disciples eventually decide they would have invited him in.

Second, John tells us, that once they have decided it will be OK to include Jesus in their nighttime excursion, they find themselves delivered immediately to where they were headed, their destination reached, their objective accomplished. Now Jesus can get on with his work.

Saint John knows that none of this is about the weather or the time of day; it is all about a state of being. And he knows that when it is dark, and the seas are rough, a strong wind blowing, many of us are not prepared to let Jesus into the boat, even if he should walk on the water to get to us.

We claim our faith in that moment when we decide we want to take Jesus into the boat with us – for now our state of being has changed, the plan we hatched on our own is turned over to Jesus, the time of day, and the conditions hardly matter, and we find that we have arrived at our destination.

Start with the dark. A thousand darknesses descend on our lives, cloaking our vision in shadows, regardless of the time of day. And we know so well what it feels like when it is dark and Jesus has not yet come to us.

What plans of our own devising are we in the midst of when we realize it is dark? Have we really meant to include Jesus in those plans? Are we going on ahead of him? Or are we really trying to make our escape from this man, who, while admittedly impressive with loaves and fishes, leaves us feeling uneasy. Are we wearing the nametag of a disciple uncomfortably, uncertainly, and do we think, maybe, if we could get away from him for a night and talk it over with one another, we might actually come up with another, easier plan? Or is it just easier for us to move about in the dark? Have we become so adept at it that it seems like the best time to make our move?

Earlier in his gospel, Saint John allows that some of us would just as soon allow the darkness to be our natural habitat. “Light has come into the world,” he writes, “and men loved darkness rather than light.”

It is now dark. We start in the dark. We have plans of our own that so often do not include Jesus, have not considered him and the claim he makes on our lives. And we believe that we can handle the boat even though it’s dark and a strong wind is blowing. And we may even be right about that – some of the time.

But Jesus does come to us, striding across the rough waters of our lives. If it is frightening, we should not be surprised – this is a signal that we are in the presence of the living God.

Maybe Jesus is going to get into the boat with us and calm the storm. It has been known to happen.

But maybe he is waiting for us to decide that we want him with us in the first place. And maybe that’s enough – the words of invitation need never be uttered. All that’s needed is wanting Jesus in the boat, choosing to have him with us, preferring the light to the darkness.

When we make that choice, we should not be surprised that our small goals are easily accomplished, as we arrive immediately at out destination. And we hear Jesus calling us to help him get on with his good work.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

26 July 2009

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia 

A Great Wall

For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.


It is commonly, but apparently incorrectly, asserted that the only man-made structure visible from outer space is the Great Wall of China. Even if the Wall does not stand alone in this regard, it remains in a small category of things that can still be seen with what we might think of as a God’s-eye-view. Which makes it all the more interesting to learn of the discovery recently of an additional 180 miles of the Great Wall that were built during the Ming dynasty but had been covered up by shifting sands over the centuries. This is not the first time new sections of the Wall have been discovered. And it does tease the imagination to wonder how you lose track of something so monumental.

It is a point of reflection that the Great Wall, the construction of which was begun about the time of Jesus’ ministry, was built generally to keep invaders from the north on their side of the wall. I can’t say how effective it was over the millennia, but one imagines that it was less so in the areas where the Wall was lost to the sand.

The propensity of men and women to build walls is itself a perennial point of reflection about more than just the architectural and structural purposes of a wall – just think of Berlin, the Gaza Strip, or Robert Frost. A wall can say a lot about a society and its people. The writer of the letter to the Ephesians is thinking of a wall when he explores the meaning of the inclusion of the Gentiles in the covenant of hope and salvation that is the Christian faith. The early church had struggled with the question of whether salvation was for the Jews alone, or if the gifts of God’s grace were more magnanimously offered in Jesus Christ. “Remember,” the letter says, “that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.”

Strangers and aliens to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world – this is a harsh description to apply to someone else, and even harsher to think of someone who would look in the mirror and believe that it applies to them. Yet it is very much the description that has been so often foisted onto people who we routinely refer to these days by a four-letter code: GLBT. To be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered has often meant to be identified as a stranger and alien to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world, hence the higher rate of suicide amongst teens who discover themselves to be so strange, so alien, so without hope, so without God.

Our Episcopal Church has been tied up knots over the matter of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people, often pitting conservatives against liberals. Last week our church used its General Convention (which is its triennial legislative gathering) to address this matter in a meaningful way. The delegates there (bishops, priests, deacons, and lay people) ended a moratorium on the ordination of any real person whose so-called manner of life might be offensive to some hypothetical person anywhere in the world. This unrealistic standard was never more than a euphemism for a person who was romantically and sexually involved with another person of the same gender. You might even say two such people were in love, but I digress.

The word on the street is now schism – the breaking apart of the church, now that long-exposed fault lines have so clearly fractured. And the debate about who is leaving whom has already begun. And we seem to be waiting to discover whether or not the sky is falling on the Episcopal Church.

It is surely just a coincidence that 2000 years ago or so, when God looked down from heaven he noticed the beginnings of the building of a Great Wall to keep the Mongols to the north from invading China. But did this sight – visible from the heavens because of its monumental ambition – prompt God to sigh about all the other monumental divisions that separated his people? Did he begin to regret, perhaps, the success of his experiment at Babel to keep men from getting too close to heaven? And did he see, with a clarity that only he could have, the carefully fortified and vast networks of the walls of race and tribe and nation that were the fruits of that experiment? Did he lament that after Babel we left off building towers for a while and chose instead to become experts at building walls?

Was it his God’s-eye-view that moved him to send his Son into the world for a ministry of reconciliation – bringing all people closer to each other, binding them in a relationship of service and love, and so, bringing them closer to his own heart?

And did he send his Holy Spirit into the world to use his mighty breath to blow sand over great sections of the walls that divide us – even bringing Jew and Gentile together: his own chosen people joined to those who were strangers and aliens to the covenants of hope?

To imagine this is to indulge in the fantasy that either God thinks like me or that from time to time he allows me to think a little bit like him.

The “issue” of what to do with gay, lesbian, and transgendered people in the church is very much like a section of ancient wall that the church has discovered. And the question of what to do with it begs the question of which fantasy we want to indulge: the idea that God thinks like us, or that from time to time he allows us to think like him.

And what we choose to do with the wall seems to be a reasonable indication of which fantasy we are indulging. Do we believe that it is providential that previous generations built us a wall and that we should not only preserve it but strengthen it? Or does it seem to us a rather good and godly thing that the sands of time have covered up this old division?

It is that image from the Epistle to the Ephesians that gives me confidence in my fantasy: “in his flesh [Christ] has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.”

Remember that Jesus was a carpenter not a mason. He was not skilled at building walls that could last. He was, however, prone to spend time with the unlikely, the unwashed, the unprepared, and the unsuitable. In Ephesians the grace of this propensity of Jesus’ is called “our peace.” It is what reconciles our differences, brings us together, teaches us tolerance, instructs us in love, and knocks down lasting barriers. It is the peace of Christ which passes all understanding. And it is a peace that has held sway in this parish at least for the past 60 years or so, and, I am prepared to believe, for the previous hundred years before that. A peace that comes of letting the broken-down, covered-up, lost walls of our past remain broken-down, covered-up and lost to all but memory.

It seems odd that this peace would be disrupted because of an insistence that we must agree – on pain of schism – with every Anglican around the globe on how to include the people captured by those four letters, GLBT, in the life of the church. Inasmuch as we do not require a universal agreement about the meaning of either the Eucharist or Holy Baptism within and among all Anglicans, why should such a rigorous demand be made of our understanding of the meaning of sexual orientation, erotic expression, and romantic affection?

The early church realized, St. Paul attests, that Gentiles would have to be included in the communion of saints because the Holy Spirit had already visited them, blessed them and made them a part of the Body of Christ. Who were they, St. Paul asked, to second-guess the Holy Spirit when his work and presence were so obvious in those who had once been far off?

Today’s church - at least in America – has increasingly understood that gay men, lesbian women, bi-sexual and transgendered people have already been visited and blessed by the Holy Spirit and made a part of the Body of Christ, for this is what most of us mean when we perform the sacrament of Holy Baptism. (And it has never seemed wise or necessary to stop and ask whether this child at the font might grow up to be a gay boy, a lesbian girl, a bi-sexual teen, or a transgendered adult.) Who are we to second guess the work and presence of the Holy Spirit, made obvious by the faithfulness and fruitfulness of the lives of people we so casually categorize with a letter: G,L,B,T, as though those letters tell us very much at all about the people to whom we affix them?

For at least thirty years in the Episcopal church we have been excavating around this section of some great wall that we have discovered. We have been wondering, praying, thinking, fighting about what to do with it. We have been invited, encouraged, enjoined, threatened and cajoled to build it up, strengthen it, mark it out as a border and a boundary not to be crossed. We have been told, incredibly, that its foundations rest on the consistent biblical record attesting to the sanctity of marriage, that was supposedly established in the Garden of Eden (though I have searched the Book of Genesis in vain for a marriage rite), but which seems to falter when we consider almost all the patriarchs of our faith, beginning with Abraham, and which was rejected for reasons unknown to us by our Lord.

Instead, Jesus went to the Cross, where his blood marked the spot where the cornerstone of his grace was laid. On the cornerstone of his sacrifice he would build, it turned out, not a wall, but a holy temple that knits together all the unlikely lives of all the sinners like me and like you who will go to him when he calls. It is just a fact that Jesus has been as generous with his grace to people who wear the badges G,L,B,T as he has to princes and harlots, rich and poor, black and white, Gentile and Jew.

And he has determined to build with us – whether we agree with one another or not – a dwelling place for God. If this is God’s purpose for us and our vocation in the world, we may find that we fulfill it much more easily and joyfully if we give up our habit of so fixating on the walls we would like to shore up that we never get around to building the temple that God has invited every one of us to be a part of.

“Remember that [we] were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.”

Thanks be to God.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
19 July 2009
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Sufficient Grace

When I became Rector of Saint Mark’s, I will confess to you that my head swelled – just a little. My mother would tell you that I could ill afford such an expansion. Nevertheless, I had been entrusted with the job of leadership – shared by only 13 other men over the last 160 years – of a great and historic parish. This building, its history, ministry, and leaders have been known over the decades as exceptional in many ways. And if Saint Mark’s, Locust Street would be remembered for nothing else by visitors and those beyond the parish, there is the matter of a shining silver altar in the Lady Chapel to catch the outsider’s imagination.

You can imagine, therefore, that I was somewhat deflated not long ago to meet the rector of a very large, well-known parish on the west coast. A parish that has not the historical significance, tradition, or architecture to shine a candle in the presence of Saint Mark’s. A church without any silver altars at all. When I met this colleague in ministry whose church has been known to me for many years, he asked where I was from. “Saint Mark’s, in Philadelphia,” I said, looking to see a hint of wistful envy on his face.

“Oh,” he replied, “what kind of parish is that?”

Well, I mean… How could he know nothing of our architectural pedigree, or that the fourth rector of this parish was one of the greatest churchmen of the 19th century, or the story of ministry and worship that this place has stood for since before his church was even built? And if all else failed, how could he not know about our silver altar?!?  Pride goeth before the fall, as the Good Book more or less says.

The 21st century is not proving to be a heyday, so far, for the Episcopal Church in general, so I suppose we should not feel too bad if we cannot yet claim it as a heyday for Saint Mark’s. There was a time when our pews had more people of greater renown in them, when children were more a part of the life of this place. There was a time when rich benefactors lavished this place with gifts and memorials that lesser parishes could never dream of. There was a time, under the leadership of the great Eugene Augustus Hoffman, the fourth rector of this parish (who was himself a very rich man), that the ministries of this parish were a model of outreach to the city and those in need. There was a time when any rector of a west coast parish might have looked east with sighs of envy at Saint Mark’s.

These days most Episcopal churches are sighing for days gone by when the pews were full, the work was easier, and the church was strong. In this context, it is extraordinary to reflect that a week ago today we were wrapping up, at our mission parish of Saint James the Less, a nine day urban mission project that was an exercise in building community.

30 high school students from around this diocese and beyond, and 8 – 10 adults slept in tents on the grass behind the parish hall. These kids went out into the neighborhood where they cleared overgrown vacant lots, planted flowers, and put up swings and benches. They helped with the renovation of one of the buildings on the church property. And most significantly, they organized a week of Vacation Bible School for the neighborhood that attracted as many as 65 kids at its peak, bringing a measure of life to the church grounds and to the neighborhood that was greatly needed by both.

By my count, more than forty people from Saint Mark’s took part in City Camp 2009 in one way or another: whether in helping to prepare the buildings for the camp, or baking, or manning the grill or the nurse’s station, or leading Vacation Bible School, or organizing the clean-up of a vacant lot, or cleaning bathrooms, or serving meals, or a host of other ways.

City Camp will prove to have been, I am certain, one of the most remarkable mission projects carried out in our diocese all year, and perhaps for many years.  It was the type of project that you would expect to be led by a parish or a diocese in its heyday – by institutions with muscle and money to flex.

Today we heard one of the most perplexing passages of the New Testament, when Saint Paul is writing to the church in Corinth about someone being “caught up in the third heaven.” Scholars believe that he is probably writing about himself, though the reference to the third heaven is obscure and no one has ever figured out what the thorn in Paul's flesh is (“to keep me from being too elated”). Then Saint Paul writes about something most of us can relate to. Three times he appeals to the Lord. Three bouts of prayer on his knees, we can imagine, of lighting candles, three sleepless nights, perhaps of clutching his rosary (if only he’d had a rosary!). Three tearful pleas to be relieved - does it matter from what?

We are meant to understand, I think, that his prayers, at first, go un-answered, his frustration and misery and perhaps despair begin to mount, that despite his religious pedigree, his Roman citizenship, his formidable mind and boundless energy, the saint is confounded and fears, perhaps that he will be undone. Have you ever felt this way? I have.

Saint Paul even begins to think of this thorn in the flesh as a “messenger of Satan to torment [him].” How can he do the work that God is calling him to do if he is thus tormented? How can he go the many places he must go if he is so handicapped? How can he think and pray and work for the Gospel this way?  And in his anguish and frustration, a voice came to him, known to him from the day he first heard it on the road to Damascus: “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.”

Now, my brothers and sisters, perhaps we should lock the door. For here is a great secret of the church that Saint Paul learned and shares with us. When the heyday is past, and we are feeble, unprepared and ill-equipped, hope is not lost. Christ’s grace is sufficient for you, power is made perfect in weakness.

You will not find this advice in The Art of War, or being taught at the Wharton School. Although you may hear it laughed at here and there. Christ’s grace is sufficient for you; for power is made perfect in weakness. See the power of eternal life, hanging on the Cross, being perfected in weakness.

The 21st century has been no heyday for the Episcopal Church, for the Diocese of Pennsylvania, or for Saint Mark’s, so far. What can institutions like these do to advance the kingdom of God? How are we to accomplish great things with so much less than we once had, than we should have, so much less than bigger, richer churches have?  And why did Jesus send his apostles out with so little to do his work – no bread, no bag, no money? Nothing except one another and his authority?

My grace is sufficient for you.

Throughout the church, and certainly here at Saint Mark’s, we know, like Saint Paul, what it is like to be in control, in power, to have many resources and much at our disposal. We know what a heyday feels like. And it is tempting to conclude that the church’s ability to minister has been irreparably hobbled, our mission diminished because the heyday is so clearly over. But a voice comes to us, known to us from our prayers and our time gathered at this altar: My grace is sufficient for you. My grace is sufficient for you.

The Episcopal Church is not the place it once was. The Diocese of Pennsylvania is not the place it once was. Saint Mark’s is not the place it once was. Are we all weaker? I suppose we are. But is not Christ’s grace still sufficient for us?

City Camp was a sign – of which more than forty of you were a marvelous part – a sign of the power of Christ’s grace working through our weakness. It was an important sign, because Jesus is not waiting for us to become strong by the world’s standards to do his work. His business plan does not look like any other. He sends us out deliberately with no bread, no bag, no money! Why? Because his grace is sufficient for you and for me!

And by his grace is everything supplied.


What kind of parish is this? (The question still rings in my ears.)  You might be asked that some day by someone from the west who knows nothing of silver altars. Would it occur to you that this is a parish that is reviving ministry in a church by a graveyard, where just a little more than a week ago almost a hundred young people buzzed around like bees pollinating every inch of the place with new life?

If that’s what comes of our weakness, then I am inclined to trust our Lord who sends us with no bread, no bag, and no money to do this work. Because his grace is sufficient. His grace is sufficient.

Thanks be to God.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
5 July 2009
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Breadcrumbs

If anyone eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.”


Behind me, just beyond the choir stalls, on the other side of the altar rail, in the north wall of the Sanctuary, is a small metal door that most of you seldom see. Only one key exists for it, kept in a special place, itself under lock and key. Inside the small door, made of brass, I think, is a chamber not much more than a cubic foot. On the inside face of the door are set several diamonds from the old days of this parish when people had diamonds to give. The diamonds face the inside of the chamber and so are only seen when the door is left open.

A golden ciborium (which is like a chalice but meant to hold bread, not wine), itself set with diamonds, sapphires and amethysts, sits in the chamber. It is the storage container for the consecrated bread of the Eucharist – the Blessed Sacrament of Christ’s Body - that is not consumed, but reserved to be brought to the sick or those who cannot make it to Mass. We take it out every Sunday, distributing (if we need it) the reserved Sacrament from last week and adding some newly consecrated bread from this week.

The chamber is called an aumbry, but you could call it a bread box, since it holds bread. Or you could call it a grave, since the bread it holds is, we believe, the Body of Christ. In either case it is more than it appears to be.

At the other end of the church, just beneath the two divisions of organ pipes, are two pairs of oak doors. These doors used to open into confessionals, but were converted some decades ago to conceal instead a series of panels that can be opened to allow access to the niches of the columbaria – where the ashes of departed loved ones are placed for their final resting place. These doors, too, open into a kind of grave where the remains of the dead rest and wait.

Death is part of the daily life of faith. Whenever we use the forms of Morning and Evening Prayer from the Prayer Book, we say that we believe in the resurrection of the body, and the life of the world to come. Throughout almost all of our history, we Christians have kept the dead close at hand – or you might say we’ve kept ourselves close to the dead. Because Jesus had much to teach us about living this life, but he came to live and to die and to rise from the dead so that he could show us that life lived in him, does not end at the grave.

And so we have our chambers in this church: the dark, wooden ones at the west end; and the smaller, diamond-studded one in the east.

Between them lies our pilgrim path – a path that unavoidably in this church takes us from west to east. Day by day we come into this place near the resting place of the dead and beat a path to the altar, where nearby rests the Body of the living Christ. And significant questions of our faith depend on whether or not there is any meaning in our journey from west to east, from death in this life to new life in Christ in the world to come.

Another thing we say about Jesus every day in our prayers here is that he descended to the dead. I wonder if we take that language too literally, and if it doesn’t maybe mean that Jesus himself has made the reverse pilgrimage from ours; that he has, by his spirit, slipped out from his be-jewelled chamber, down the aisle, behind the locked doors under the organ, past the panels, and into the niches (some empty, some quite full) where the ashes of the dead are waiting.

It would be too silly to suggest that the Spirit of the living Christ leaves a trail of breadcrumbs for the dead to follow him, a sign of reassurance that he has been where we must all go, and that he has someplace else to lead us in the east. But if it weren’t so silly it might be a good thought. After all, it’s something like a life of following a trail of breadcrumbs that Jesus called us to when he broke the bread and blessed the wine and said, Do this in remembrance of me.

We have been doing it here as often as we can, sometimes with whatever bread, whatever wine happens to be lying around. And is this journey of ours really much more sophisticated than following a very particular trail of breadcrumbs that leads us from west to east?

We believe in the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come. Which is to say that life in this world ends for all of us in darkness. But there is a pilgrimage to be made, very much like the one we make every week from west to east, where we kneel at the altar – the place of remembrance – and we hold that bread in our hands….

… and without even looking we know that the door is open to that place where the Body of Christ has been lying. And it is not dark, for something like diamond-light dazzles us. And we know that we have someplace to go.

Thanks be to God!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
14 June 2009
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Gossip

Some secrets, when they are told, the cat let out of the bag, have the strange power to say a great deal without saying very much at all, and still leave much unsaid. I can tell you that I saw so-and-so and so-and-so holding hands in Rittenhouse Square last night. And, saying very little, I have suggested much more. And yet there is a great deal that neither one of us knows.

Speaking of the Sacred Trinity – the mystery of the one true God’s identity in three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit – is a bit like telling a secret, letting the mysterious cat out of the bag. We seem to have suggested a great deal about God without saying very much at all. And yet it seems clear that there remains a great deal to be said about God that none of us knows.

The Church is like a gossip who delights to spill the beans about the God whose secret she has learned. And on this Sunday – set apart to reflect on the mystery of what we call God’s triune nature – we are simply blabbing as much as we can about the tiny bit we know. It’s possible that, like any gossip, we even embellish the little bit we know to make it seem as though we know more than we do.

It is difficult for us to admit that when we have said that God is three persons, we have said almost nothing about God and certainly very little that we could explain to an innocent passerby. When we have said that God is three persons, we can only join the six-winged seraphim who hovered in Isaiah’s vision, and even they were reduced to stuttering as they cry to one another, careening about the heavenly throne:

Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory!

The prophet Isaiah, who heard the angels’ anthem, has seen more of the living God than most of us, has stood closer – if only in his vision – than most of us ever will. He would also become a much more effective gossip than most of us ever could: spilling the beans about God in exquisite poetry that shed light on the truth of God’s work in the world:

…the Lord hath anointed me
to preach good tidings unto the meek;
he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and the opening of prison to them that are bound;
to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord,
and the day of vengeance of our God;
to comfort all who mourn….

This from a man whose first reaction to the secret he learned of God was to say, “Woe is me, I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”

How different is Isaiah’s reaction from the kind of gossip we hear about God these days. For one thing, we have been told that Isaiah’s vision of God is a delusion, since God is a delusion of the pathetic masses who are prone to believe this kind of silly gossip just because it has been repeated so much over the years.

And we have been led to believe that a prophet who could write, “Woe is me, I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips” must have gone to Catholic schools if he is still carrying around that kind of guilt so far into adulthood.

And we have been encouraged to think that sleeping in, reading the Times, and going to brunch are far better ways to spend a Sunday morning than coming to church to repeat the three-fold “Holies” of the seraphim, with bells ringing as we do, as though it all means something.

Three important lessons, however, could be gleaned from the vision that Isaiah tells us about.

To begin with, the seraphim give us that word – Holy – to describe the unspeakable attributes of the God of glory. It is a useful word, not only for Sundays, when we gather in organized praise, but for moments of grace for which we have no other word:

… in the delivery room when the tiny body of your newborn is placed in your arms for the first time.

… at the top of a mountain where the beauty of God’s creation is seen with new clarity.

… in the dark quiet of the bedroom when you realize that the breathing of the one beside you is the sound of someone you still love after thirty or forty or fifty years.

What can be said about any of these blessings, or a thousand more I could catalogue here without even trying? Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts!

Next, there is Isaiah’s recognition of his own sinfulness, his own unworthiness: “I am a man of unclean lips.” Yes! And indeed we are a people of unclean lips. To say this is a statement of fact, not an accusation of guilt. The recognition of our unworthiness is a mature outcome of self-reflection and examination. It is not, however, a condemnation; it’s an honest evaluation. We humans are creatures prone to cheating, murder, lust, envy, and greed every bit as much as we are prone to care, generosity, helpfulness and love. It’s childish of us to believe that only half of that assessment is true and it’s dangerous when we forget our faults because it leads us to use our power in the wrong ways. So, yes, we are a people of unclean lips, but still God invites us into his presence. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts!

And then there is that beautiful moment when the voice of the Lord – which the psalmist has told us is a powerful voice; it breaks the cedars of Lebanon; splits the flames of fire; shakes the wilderness, makes the oak trees writhe, and strips the forests bare – this voice is heard by the prophet in clear tones, asking, “Whom shall I send; and who will go for us?” And without knowing where he will be going or what he must do Isaiah hears himself answer: “Here am I; send me!” Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts!

It was not to a rumor of holiness that Isaiah supplies his answer. It was not to mere gossip that he responded with that easy answer, Here am I; send me. It was to the living God, who knew perfectly well that Isaiah was just a man of unclean lips, living among a people of unclean lips.

And the real gossip that the Church has to share, is not just the mystery, let out of the bag, that the God who sits upon the throne of glory is a three-personed God known as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The real dish is that the thunderous voice of that God, the voice that makes the oak trees writhe, has never stopped asking, “Whom shall I send; and who will go for us?”

The fact is that God has given us so much more to gossip about. In John’s gospel we hear Jesus sum up the gossip he is planting in the ear of the church with the kind of brevity and lack of specificity that are both so typical of good gossip: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him."

What are these famous lines other than good gossip for us to spread? In only a few words they suggest so much, but leave a great deal unsaid, unclear, unknown to us. They give us a wonderful rumor of hope to spread in the world.

And that rumor of hope will be spread if people like you and like me are clear about three things:

That God, the Lord of hosts, is holy, holy, holy, and the whole earth is full of his glory.

That although we are a people of unclean lips, God can use our lips to speak his words of love and salvation.

That the thunderous voice of God still calls out, “Whom shall I send; and who will go for us.” He does not say where he is sending people or what they must do.

But he has supplied the gossip: that this three-personed God gave his only begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life; not t condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

And although our mothers always told us that we should never gossip; this rumor has the ring of truth about it. So much so that through the ages hundreds of thousands of people – men and women, all of them with unclean lips – have borrowed the words of the prophet to answer that question in a way that would change their lives: Here am I; send me!

God has many secrets. But some of them he has revealed to us – even though they only confuse us. But since God does not wish, himself, to be a secret to us, he has shown us that he is one and three - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And although the truth of this secret is more or less beyond our imagination, it has certainly given us something to talk about, some gossip on God. To which God says, “Go ahead and talk about me all you like! In fact, whom shall I send; and who will go for us to spread this word?”


Who, indeed?


Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory!
Hosanna in the highest!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
Trinity Sunday, 7 June 2009
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Crash helmets

When I was in my first attempt at seminary, at Yale, there was a wonderful man who I'll call Bob who did most of the maintenance and ground work at the seminary. He loved the seminarians and the seminary, but he was a little dubious about the quality of prayer that the starry-eyed, seminarians engaged in. The quantity was fine, you understand, but he was relatively certain that there was a certain spirit lacking in our prayer lives. And he had, for many years, undertaken a campaign to correct this lack. He would pick a seminarian coming out of Morning or Evening prayer, a seminarian with a certain look. The look that says, “I'm thinking about the 200 pages of Barth's Dogmatics that have to be navigated by lunchtime”, or “the latest committee to be tackled in the ordination process,” and Bob would say, quite innocently “Have you been praying this morning?” The seminarian would inevitably respond “Yes.”

“You sure you've been praying?”

“Yes.”

And then Bob would spring the trap: “How come it doesn't feel like you've been praying?”

∞

There is a certain formality and reserve to worship in the Episcopal Church, especially very high catholic worship which seems too many people to be at odds with the free-flowing coming and movement of the Holy Spirit described in the readings for today. You can see it not only in our worship but in our iconography. In the Lady Chapel, the center panel on the reredos of the altar is a depiction of Pentecost, the descent of the Spirit upon the disciples. As I stand there, week in and week out, I have spent a good deal of time looking at that panel. It seems to me somehow very tame and proper. The disciples are all sitting rather stiffly and demurely, and the Spirit, depicted by a dove is radiating power out into their midst. Perhaps it is the setting or the medium but that depiction of Pentecost always seems a little staid to me, a little too tame. There is, for instance, no sense that you might mistake the disciples for rowdy drunks, as some of the bystanders did.

∞

Some of my favorite modern writing on the Holy Spirit is not from a theologian, but from the writer Annie Dillard, and at one point, writing about formality and the Holy Spirit she says this:

The higher Christian churches come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they were doing, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God. I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed. In the high churches they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a strand of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked.

We, certainly would be shocked if the roof was shattered and the Spirit descended. And we do tend to be professional in our approach to God, and we are also certainly uncomfortable with the more visceral expressions of the Spirit's power, that you might see in charismatic church, with speaking in tongues and waving of hands. We much prefer the benign summoning of the Spirit and the quiet expectation that it will somehow descend in a dignified manner during those sacramental moments of baptism, Eucharist and the other rites.

Yet if we know anything, we know that the wind of the Spirit blows where it wills, we know that there is nothing that we can do to predict or restrict the movement of the Spirit, and that God is good, but not safe, and certainly not predictable. The litany of interactions between the human race and God are a litany of surprises, of Damascus roads, of burning bushes and of God choosing to work through flawed, or dubious people to bring about the fulfilling of his purposes.

Which makes our professionalism, our intentional lack of awareness when it comes to the Spirit so amusing. Elsewhere in her writing, Annie Dillard speculates about the manner in which we should approach this Sunday morning hour:

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.

Wouldn't you think twice about coming in the Fiske Doors if an usher was there, with a crash helmet to hand you. “Sometimes,” the usher might whisper to you, “the Spirit gets a little rowdy in here.”

Wouldn't we be shocked and stunned if our doughty servers suddenly began speaking in tongues, or collapsed around the altar slain in the Spirit?

Wouldn't it be a sobering experience for the priests here at St. Mark's, if, as we were vesting for mass, we also tied on a rope, like the high priests of Israel did before entering the Holy of Holies, just in case we suddenly expired because of our unworthiness or our close proximity to the jealous and dangerous Holy?

What the disciples discovered that first Pentecost, what Annie Dillard is pointing out is a simple truism: it is daylight-madness to expect to interact with the Living God, and get away unscathed.

∞

Despite sauntering through the liturgy, despite all evidence to the contrary, do we indeed believe a word of it? Do we believe a word of this Pentecost story? Do we think that the Spirit will still move in our midst with power, inspiring us to change the world and lose our lives in God? Do we go into each service expecting the Spirit to burst into our midst or are we more likely to wander through the liturgy without thinking about what we are doing and saying, without expecting the explosive out-breaking of the Spirit’s power?

I have a creeping sense that perhaps I am not the only one who feels a sense of entropy, as if the gifts of the Spirit are well nigh spent. There are times when it feels like the power which came upon the first disciples with such force is lost to us, or has slowly, over generations and generations been diluted. Where is the gift of prophesy, I wonder, when governments make immoral decisions and when the Church comes to backbiting and near-blows over what seem to be foolish things? Where are those spiritual gifts, when the Church seems tired, staid, declining? Where is the gift of healing when someone close to me sickens? There are times, and this is just me personally, when I stand at the altar and wonder if ordination is really only a method of ensuring that I’m at the very epicenter of the kill zone, when God wakes up and wonders just who that miserable priest is who is calling the Holy Spirit to descend upon those gifts.

All of which is to say that the Holy Spirit is high mystery, and as much as we would like to, we cannot describe or explain or even ever fully recognize the movement of that Spirit within our lives, our churches or the world.

But the Spirit is moving. Even when we cannot see it, even when it seems as if the power of the Spirit has left us, we know that the Spirit is moving. We know because the hungry are fed and the poor cared for, we know because the Spirit still draws people into our midst, to journey with us as a community, as it did fifty and a hundred years ago.

And we know because there is just somewhere in us the needling little fear that Spirit might indeed disrupt our well-rehearsed worship, our certainties and formalities. That the TNT we’ve been mixing this morning might actually go off. That just at the moments when we are sure that we have figured out God, that we have a theological system to capture and describe the Divine one, when we are sure of our correctness in thinking about God’s actions in the Scriptures, or God’s nature, or God’s likes and dislikes; just at that moment, when we are proud and certain, we know enough reach for our crash helmets, or grab for one of those nice ropes for reserving pews, and begin to lashing ourselves down. We know that the Spirit is moving because we know that in our pride and arrogance, the Spirit will be there, waiting to blow our birettas off, and roll us vestments and all, helter skelter down the aisle, to fetch up at the soup kitchen, or at our mission parish, St. James the Less, or at the ends of the earth. When our eyes have cleared from the explosion, and we have dusted the Damascus road off ourselves, and settled into something resembling composure, that same Spirit will begin to speak in and through us, telling the story of what God has done for us. As the Spirit has done in generations before us, and in the generations yet to come, until the end of the ages.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Pentecost, 31 May 2009

Rememberers

Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one. (Jn. 17:11)


4,962 is the number for tomorrow. At least it was the number yesterday of American servicemen and women who have died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last six years. And tomorrow is Memorial Day: a day for remembering our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines.

Remembering should come naturally to us in the church, since we are meant to be a community of rememberers. Not only is it our daily work to follow our Lord’s command to “do this in remembrance of me,” we also remember all kinds of people (their needs, wants, shortcomings, accomplishments, and thanksgivings) in prayer every day here and in churches everywhere. And from time to time we also manage to fulfill another meaning of the term “re-member” when we help put something back together again that had broken or fallen apart, be it a relationship, a person’s broken heart, or a building in need of repair – all of which have come within the purview of the church from time to time.

As a society, America is not so good at remembering any more. The first Memorial Day was called for in 1868 by a veterans’ organization of the Union Army with the intention that soldiers’ graves should be strewn with flowers. So much needed remembering in those years after the Civil War. Not just the sacrifice of that horde of dead soldiers, blue and grey, but the nation itself, the ruined South, the lives of the survivors. So much had been dis-membered. So much re-membering had to be done. And that awful war had surely left no one without important things to remember. In our own parish was the commanding general of the Battle of Gettysburg - George Meade, who lived nearby on 19th Street. How difficult must his remembering have been.

But these days the number of our dead is not so vast and our connections to those souls, in general, far more distant. We take note of the number, thank God we are not among them, and get on with our three day weekend.

Is it the case that we have gotten more comfortable with dismembering that with remembering? We seem to be experts at it. Look at our political processes, our communities, the racial divide in cities like ours. Look at our churches, no, look at our Episcopal church where we have decided to become experts at the legal mechanisms for dis-membering one another, led by our bishops, whose chief work this has often become. No wonder America struggles to remember the fallen on Memorial Day. No wonder the church struggles to put back together anything anymore that has broken or fallen apart. How can we become communities of remembering when we spend our time and energy dis-membering so much?

It would seem that Jesus anticipated his disciples’ predilection for dis-membering, and knew that they would struggle to be rememberers, and knew that this struggle would put them in peril.

He prayed: “Protect them… so that they may be one, as we are one…. While I was with them, I protected them… I guarded them, and not one of them was lost….”

Jesus knows how likely his disciples are to become dismembered from one another without him around; how likely they are to go their separate ways, fight their separate battles, form their separate churches. And he was right.

And so, as he is preparing to make his way to the Cross and to his death, he prays, and asks God the Father to make them re-memberers.

I have made your name known to them, whom you gave to me: make them rememberers.

They know that everything I have came from you, and I gave it to them: make them rememberers.

While I was with them I protected them: make them rememberers.

I have given them your word: make them rememberers.

The world hates them because they do not belong to the world: make them rememberers.

Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth: make them rememberers.

As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world: make them rememberers.

Jesus not only prayed his prayer, he also left it to the collective mind of the church as a means to remember. But our deftness at dismembering still outpaces our willingness or ability to remember.

So we come to a glorious weekend of sunshine and breezes, good beach days and barbecue weather… and a number: 4,962.


4, 962 lives to remember. The sad irony being that it is our ineptitude as rememberers that brings us the necessity of setting aside a day for remembering the lives that have been dismembered in our name, for our sake.

Perhaps our facility to dismember will always outpace our ability as rememberers. But for a day or two, it’s good to stop and join our prayers to Jesus’ prayer that we all might be one: remembered and rememberers. After all, what else could possibly prevent that terrible number from climbing too much higher?

Let us pray. O Almighty God, who canst bring good out of evil and makest even the wrath of men to turn to thy praise: We give thee humble thanks for the memory and good example of those who have laid down their lives in the service of our country. Accept their sacrifice in the cause of righteousness. Teach us to live together in charity and peace; and grant, we beseech thee, that the nations of the world may henceforth be united in a firmer fellowship for the promotion of thy glory and the good of all mankind; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen


Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
24 May 2009
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Footsteps of the Ascension

The story of Jesus’ ascension into heaven is told every day here at Saint Mark’s. It is, in a sense, a story hiding in plain sight, for the great east window – some 18-20 feet high, I would estimate, right above the altar – is a depiction of the story recounted in the first chapter of the book of Acts. The inscription at the bottom of the window gives us the biblical citation. You see Jesus there, hovering above eleven disciples and Mary, his mother, a heavenly host of angels, cherubim, and seraphim escorting him as he rises into the heavens.

The prominent placement of this image in Saint Mark’s is a slight curiosity since the book of Acts was almost certainly written by the evangelist St. Luke. While some versions of our own evangelist’s gospel include an account of Jesus’ ascension into heaven, many scholars believe that the last eleven verses commonly attached to the end of Mark’s gospel (including the mention of the ascension) are not original to his narrative. Nevertheless, you can pick up most Bibles and find at the end of Mark’s gospel the report that “the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven, and sat down at the right hand of God.”

Perhaps it is a nod to this ending of St. Mark’s gospel that the designer of the window above the altar chose to depict our Lord twice in the stained glass at this end of the building: not only in the scene of his ascension, but again in the uppermost portion of the window, seated in majesty at, we can assume, the right hand of God.

Now here is where things get really interesting. If you look at the window carefully (which I admit it is not always easy to do, for your have several hanging lamps blocking a clear view) you might notice that in the image of Jesus ascending into heaven, when he is still in sight of his apostles on earth, only one of his feet is visible: his right foot. And if you can get close enough to see the upper image of Christ seated in majesty, again, only one of his feet is visible: this time his left foot.

And although it makes me feel a little like Dan Brown to ask this question, I ask it anyway: is this just a coincidence? One foot not quite touching but still in plain sight of the apostles on earth, and the other foot planted firmly on the pavement of heaven’s courts?

What interest, I wonder, did the builders of this church have in placing the image of a story just above the focal point of the entire building, the High Altar, that is not central (or, perhaps even original) to the gospel of our patron evangelist? Why the Ascension, 20 feet high, to look at day in and day out, as long as the sun will shine? And why these feet of Jesus: both present and accounted for, but one almost lingering on earth, the other in heaven?

If you look at the window again, you might begin to suspect, as I did, that none of the figures depicted therein has two feet. Perhaps the artist was saving room, or had a thing about feet. But then you will see that one apostle, who is standing – I can’t say who – over on the left-hand side, does, in fact, have two feet planted firmly on the ground, clearly visible beneath his blue and brown vesture. And another, to his right, down on one knee is also showing two bare feet from beneath his gold robe with giant blue polka dots. (Mary’s feet are demurely and properly out of sight.)

What’s going on here?

Consider again the inscription from Luke’s book of Acts, this time in the King James Version, as it appears in caligraphied lettering at the base of this window: “This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as you have seen him go to heaven”

It’s the inscription that clued me in to what our forebears here were thinking. I suspect that they were not, in fact, preoccupied with the Ascension for it’s own sake. And although they were very happy to assert that, indeed, Jesus does reign in heaven at the right hand of God, this was not their chief concern either.

Here’s what I think they cared about: This same Jesus shall so come in like manner as you have seen him go. The promise of the Ascension is not Christ’s departure, it is his return. This Jesus, his right foot hovering just inches above the altar, his disciples anchored to this earth with both feet, doesn’t just float off to the skies escorted by angels, he also returns – in like manner: cradled by cherubim and seraphim, angels and archangels, one foot fixed by his throne in heaven, but the other now reaching down to touch the earth.

Remember the builders of this church were Victorians with all the wild imaginations that were the result of so much repression. I suspect that they regarded the High Altar as a kind of landing pad where Jesus made his return – not a single, ominous return at the end of all time, but a daily visitation, cloaked crudely but obviously in forms of bread and wine.

This church was founded on the principle that Jesus desires to be in daily communion with his beloved disciples: you and me. Stone was stacked on stone here, and glass lavishly painted to mark out the bounds were a community of Christ’s people would gather to listen for the fluttering of angel-wings, the humming of cherubim and seraphim as they float or fly or freefall from their heavenly climes to this more humid environment, setting down silently and softly, but surely on the targets of a round, silver paten, and a jeweled chalice.

All of which is to say that Saint Mark’s has never, I think, been a community even the slightest bit interested in saying Goodbye to Jesus – which is what we so often tell ourselves this feast of the Ascension is about. This is a community that has been hopelessly infatuated with the idea of saying Hello to Jesus.

And so this window, this constant telling of the story of the Ascension whenever the sun shines in this place, is a kind of embodiment of that mysterious Aramaic prayer of the earliest Christians: Maranatha: O Lord, come!

Come, Lord Christ, right here. Come and touch the earth again by the side of your disciples, as once you did so long ago. Come in the same way as you left: with an entourage of angels. Come, although you are seated at the right hand of God; reach down with your toes – if only of one foot - and be among us. Teach us, help us, heal us, bring us your peace again. Come and be among us with your holy presence and show us the way, show us the truth, show us life again.

For we so easily remember how you went away, we so easily put you out of sight that you are out of mind. We so easily commemorate your departure.

And do we forget that you return in like manner as we saw you go? Have we ceased to believe that a retinue of angels could accompany you on your constant journey to be with us, to come to us, to make yourself known to us in bread and wine? Are we so ready to put the Paschal candle out that we forget that your light can never be extinguished?

Come, Lord, Christ, right here, in like manner as we saw your go. Leave your footprint here – on that altar, in these aisles, and on our hearts… but leave just one, so we may follow the other, one day, to heaven, and to your side.

In the Name of the One he was and is and is to come; the Alpha and the Omega, the Lord of Life, our Savior Jesus Christ, our Master, and our Friend. Amen.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
The Feast of the Ascension
21 May 2009
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Reading 'Us Weekly' with Fear

Reading is one of my favorite hobbies, and as a result of my obsession with reading, we get a number of magazines delivered to our house. There is, however, one magazine to which we subscribe which I am ashamed to confess that I sometimes pick up and read. It isn’t a high-falutin magazine, or anything risqué, but it is, horror of horrors, a gossip rag, Us Weekly. When I do occasionally read Us Weekly, I find it to be inevitably a depressing experience. I’m not overly depressed by the third-grade prose, or the fourth-grade gossip, although those are depressing enough in and of themselves. No, what bothers me is that we live in a culture in which such a magazine could flourish. I’m sure that Us Weekly has a far greater circulation than The New Yorker or The Economist, which means just one simple thing: more people spend their time discovering who is wearing what brand name, or have a romance with whom, or starring in a hot new television show, then they do worrying about the environment, or the economic crisis, or the problems of homelessness, or the possibility of a pandemic. And I occasionally am one of them.

Us Weekly is symbolic somehow for me of everything that I find strange and wrong about our culture and world today: the obsession with stars, the focus on money and appearances, the decline of civility, the slide into ignorance, and a certain unique fascination and excitement over the inevitable failure of whomever is the flavor of the week. It is boring, predictable fluff, designed to sell advertising and with the effect of dulling the senses and the mind.

 Behind that entire diatribe which I just made you listen to is fear. I may take it out on Us Weekly, but really I am I am afraid of a culture that lives in the kind of banal malaise that ours seems to. My fear has a new quality to it now, as I come to terms with being a parent. I am afraid to raise my daughter Esme in such a culture, and afraid that she will inherit (or worse) feel comfortable with the vast problems facing our culture and the world. Wendell Berry, the farmer-philosopher has a phrase about children being “hostages given to the future,” and I fear the future to which I will eventually give my daughter. I am, in short, full of fear. Gut wrenching, “wake up in a cold sweat,” dry-mouthed fear.

Which is made worse by the fact that I can never hear the Epistle from this morning without a slight twinge of guilt. How can one not feel guilty hearing: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” I apparently have not yet reached perfection in love, as is clearly demonstrated by my palpable fear, instead of that perfected divine love that should be in me.

My first inclination is almost to laugh at the message from the Epistle. Surely that message sounded as hollow and foolish to those early Christians, as it can to us at first blush today. They were living in an unfriendly Empire beginning to show the first signs of decay. Their society was no less characterized by the pabulum of social spectacle and violence than ours is. They had, I would imagine, a very similar set of fears about the future, about the decline of culture, and for their children. Surely they were as fearful as I am.

But I don’t think the writer of the Epistle that has been read in our midst this morning is making us feel guilty for not having perfect love. I think instead the writer is making a vast and mystical statement about fear and love, and I think that, rather than laughing at that statement, as is my first inclination, there is great wisdom to be gained from listening to what the writer is saying.

Hidden in the passage from 1^st John this morning is an absolute gem of an idea: that we do not need to fear, indeed that fear is a complete waste of time and energy, because we are rooted and centered in the love which God Incarnate has for us. Fear is a reflection of my (dare I say “our”) inability to believe and to trust that God loves us, that God is working to bring us out of a corrupt and foolish culture into that heavenly city which we long for.

I’d like to mix metaphors, if I may, between the Gospel and the Epistle. Perhaps it will help you to think about this perfect love. Think of the metaphor of the vine and branches that Jesus uses in the Gospel this morning. The vine feeds the branches, provides nourishment and support, so that the branches can bloom and bring forth fruit. The vine and the branches are intimately connected and linked by the same physiology. The xylem and phloem (if I remember my high-school biology correctly), the veins of the vine and the branches carry the same nutrients and water back and forth between the vine and the branches.

Think of that perfect love that the Epistle writer is referring to, as the sap that flows between the vine and the branches. Jesus is the vine on which we sit and live, and what flows from the vine to the branches and back is love. God’s love flows in our veins, and we love because God loves us first, and cares for us.

The message of the Epistle this morning, the hope that is being shown to us is that all we do is rooted in God Incarnate, and flows up from God into us. We don’t need to flog ourselves into better or more perfect love. The love is God’s, the expression is God’s. God’s love flows in us as our lifeblood, whether we are aware of it or not, and that same love is evident in how we care for those around us, in the fruit that we bear.

It is hard, especially when one is a dull, thick-witted branch like myself to be aware of that divine love flowing in my veins. It is too natural, too normal, too much a part of my life and being. But I can see the fruit beginning to bud and flower. I can see the places where that perfect love is driving out the fear within me.

 Which is very good news indeed. I don’t need to somehow find it in myself to squelch my fears about my daughter and modern society. I don’t need to force myself into loving any of the people who grace the pages of Us Weekly. What I need to do is let my brain catch up with that wonderful mystery that already is: God loves them and me, God loves Octo Mom and Lindsey Lohan, and even a foolish, slightly crazy curate at a church in Philadelphia. God loves the hungry and the poor, the rich and the socialites, and that divine love is flowing in and through us, driving out our fears and exploding out into fruit-laden branches.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia

10 May 2009

Trust in the Shepherd

The Lord is my shepherd, therefore can I lack nothing.


Today is the day that we gather in our annual meeting to talk about our plans. We have been planning, studying, estimating and evaluating for well over a year, now. We have hired professionals to inspect the fabric of our buildings, and the Vestry and I have guided discussions and prayer about the workings of the ministries that are housed in and around these buildings. We have been responsible, because you have to be responsible about these things.

We are not done, mind you. We will have to endure feasibility studies and more detailed plans, more meetings, more discussion, more prayer and discernment. No, we are not done. We are being careful.

And when we are (rightly) being so careful, it can be hard, very hard, to trust. But the message of the gospel today is a message of trust. Trust in Christ who cares for us as a shepherd cares for his sheep.

It is hard for us to trust God. If we try to think of people who trusted in God, we feel a little sorry for them. Think of those early Christians who trusted God even in the face of persecution. Think of the pilgrims whose trust in God landed them on the shores of New England where they found a harsher life than they left behind and nearly starved. Think of the Baptists – any Baptist will do – by which I mean those Christians who we imagine as less sophisticated and less toothsome than we are who seem to place their trust in God for the most mundane things – like winning a football game.

It’s hard for us to put our trust in God, because we have come to believe that we should really trust ourselves, our instincts, our knowledge, our sublime ability at anything we choose to do. We can analyze a situation, size up the obstacles, assess our resources, concoct a plan, and accomplish any goal. Man on the moon? You got it! Heart transplant? Every-day procedure! A tiny communications device in every pocket? Please, turn your cell phones to vibrate mode while I’m preaching. What is there that we humans cannot do when we put our minds to it, if only we will trust in our ingenuity and the power of the marketplace? (OK, our confidence in the market is shaken, but do you seriously doubt that it will return?) But trust in God?!? This is a tall order.

There is a reason that the 23rd Psalm is usually heard at funerals: that is, perhaps, the only time that we, knocked off balance by our grief, are open to the idea that we might have to trust in God. The Lord is my shepherd… yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. The Lord is my shepherd, and I am his sheep. Trust, trust, trust in God during this dark hour of death and grief. But eventually the clouds of death disperse, and we must get on with it, and put our trust back where it belongs again: in ourselves.

Churches are not immune to this struggle to trust in God (even Baptist churches). But Episcopalians may be the worst. This is in part because for a long time we Episcopalians were the best at everything else. Exhibit A: The Lady Chapel of this church. Rodman Wanamaker, who built it (or, I should say, who extravagantly paid for it) wasn’t even an Episcopalian. But when he decided to bury his Episcopalian wife in style, nothing was spared, only the best would do. And didn’t that seem perfectly appropriate to the congregation here at the time? They’d done everything else marvelously well.

But, oh, how hard it is to trust in God. (The Lord is my shepherd, therefore can I lack nothing.) I once heard a famous, wonderful Baptist preacher in the pulpit of a small Episcopal church filled with a very well-to-do congregation say to us: “Your problem is that you have such low expectations of God. I know you have low expectations of God because you are Episcopalians!”

How can we trust God when we have such low expectations of him?

Do we stop to consider that the account of what happened among those first followers of Jesus after his death and resurrection is not a theological treatise on the topic but a chronicle of the Acts of the Apostles – what they did in Jesus’ name!? They healed the sick, raised the dead and spread the word against unreasonable odds! The Lord was their shepherd; the Lord is your shepherd; the Lord is my shepherd.

There is a lie being told these days about religion that is told so often you may have begun to believe it: that religion is personal. This lie is told in order to shut down conversation in a country that has become increasingly uncomfortable with religious diversity. Religion may have its personal aspects, but at its heart religion is most definitely not personal: it is communal, social, a group enterprise. The Good Shepherd is shepherd of a flock, not a collection of individuals. And most often when he calls his sheep together it is not so he can help them develop healthy, contemplative inner lives, it is so he can get the sheep to move together in a single direction and do something, go somewhere. (And in that process he allows for the development of good, healthy, contemplative inner lives.) Have you ever been stopped, in your travels, by a flock of sheep crossing a road? What a thing to see all these stupid sheep, baa-ing nose-to-tail as they are cajoled across the road. But get enough of them in one place and they can stop traffic!

We have given you today sheaves of paper, as background for the Master Plan and the Strategic Goals for ministry of this parish. These pages discuss many different areas of our life but they have one subliminal, underlying message: trust us; trust me. And, oh, how I hope you will absorb that message, like good little sheep! (Trust us; trust me.) We have outlined many things but two outcomes will clearly result from them all: some things are going to change, and we are going to have to raise money! (Trust us; trust me.) And no one likes to see things change, or to raise money – well, at least no Episcopalian!

And so I have been telling you this secret that, really, you already know, but which is seldom said out loud in church. It is hard to trust in God – hard for you, and hard for me to trust that God is actually going to help us do the things he has planted in our imaginations as possible and reasonable and good for the life of this parish. It is hard to trust in the Good Shepherd, especially when we have convinced ourselves that we have to trust in ourselves, since, after all, religion is so personal.

Our architects have delivered to me and to the Buildings & Property Committee today a thick book of plans, with lots or words, lots or pictures, and lots of zeros!

The Vestry and I have presented to you two pages of Strategic Goals for ministry, and the news that the Sunday morning schedule is going to change this Fall.

All of this will be deeply disruptive to your personal religion (and mine) and undermine your already faltering ability (and mine) to trust in God, and in his Son Jesus. Easier to leave things alone, leave one another in peace, for God’s sake!

And if the message of all these pages, and of all this talk was to say that we should not worry because we can do it (trust us; trust me), then you would be wise to consider carefully whether or not all this talk has been for naught. And tempting as I find that message, quite frankly, much as I want to reassure you about what we can do as a community of faith and of strength, I know that it is not the message of the Gospel. The Gospel tells us where to place our trust: in that Good Shepherd who is so trustworthy that he laid down his life for us.

I am glad we have been careful in the way we have gone about all the planning, all the conversations that led us to this point in our lives. I am glad we have spent the time in discussion and prayer and evaluation. I’m glad we hired expert professionals to help us. I am glad we have exercised due diligence, and I know we have more due diligence to do.

But I am more profoundly glad that what brings us all to this church, and to this discussion, is not just the musings of our own personal religion and our confidence in ourselves, but a conviction, I pray, that as a community of faith we can do nothing whatsoever unless we put our trust in Christ, the Good Shepherd, and anything at all that we can imagine – and so much more – when we do.

The Lord is my shepherd; the Lord is your shepherd; the Lord is our shepherd. If we put our trust in him – together – I believe we may even stop traffic as people stop to see where God is leading this marvelous flock on Locust Street.


Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
3 May 2009
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Pirates of the Indian Ocean, or the Unseen Hostage

A ship set sail not long ago, laden with a cargo of food destined for people in need. While on this mission of mercy the ship was attacked by pirates, who climbed aboard using ropes, as I suppose pirates have always done.

It hardly seems that a story about pirates could be taken from the pages of today’s newspapers. But this one is, as the whole world knows by now. There are no square-rigged tall ships involved; no one, that I know of, wearing an eye-patch or a tri-cornered hat. But there are the ropes, and the grappling hooks, I suppose. There are no swords, probably no knives gripped between teeth, but there are dangerous weapons. There must have been the ship-deck confrontation. Was there a struggle, a fight fit for the screen?

The latter-day pirates are not interested in the ship’s cargo – what use have they of food bound for hungry people? Their booty is supposed to be a ransom, if not for the cargo, then for the lives of the sailors on board.

Among the several things the pirates must not have counted on was a captain on board who was smart enough to keep his crew un-harmed, and brave enough to offer himself in exchange for their safety. They took him up on his offer, sending him over the rail into a lifeboat with them. And they did not count on that captain being bold enough to dive over the side of the lifeboat in the night in attempt to make his way to freedom.

That’s the moment in this story that makes me catch my breath: when Captain Richard Phillips sees his chance and goes overboard into the Indian Ocean. What was his plan? Were his hands tied? Was there a tussle as he vaulted himself into the water? Did he have a chance of making it to safety? How far did he get before they started shooting at him, and paddled madly after him, and hauled him, soaked, back onto the lifeboat?

It was Good Friday, when the captain hurled himself over the side of the lifeboat, into the dark water of the sea. And today, of course, is Easter. If you want an Easter parable there is one to be found here somewhere. Start with a crew-member of the ship, delivered to port in Kenya last night, facing the hoard of media looking for the story, who put it this bluntly: “We’ve got a man out there in a lifeboat dying so we can live.”

There is death lurking at every corner of this story. The lives of the crew were imperiled when the pirates climbed aboard. The life of the captain now hangs in the balance. The pirates are now surrounded by overwhelming firepower that remains in check as long as their hostage is alive. The Navy is keeping its distance, in part to stay out of firing range of the pirates and keep its sailors safe. And who knows what hungry, maybe desperate mouths have gone hungry while the food shipment went undelivered?

And we’ve got a man out here in a lifeboat dying, so that we can live. In a sentence, that is the story we have been trying to tell here in church over the past week – about a man out there in a lifeboat dying so that we can live. Preachers like me have been piling up words since Palm Sunday trying to say what a sailor put so neatly in a single sentence. We have been trying to imagine or remember what it feels like to know that there is a man out there dying so that we can live. We’ve been trying to get in touch with the significance of a man giving his life as a ransom for many.

We did not imagine that one man’s cross would be a lifeboat in the Indian Ocean; that his Good Friday would see him leap or wriggle over the side of that boat into the sea, rather than being gently lowered into tomb. And how I wish that his Good Friday escape attempt had led him to an early Easter, to safety, to life, to home, and to joy. I have been praying for such an Easter for Richard Phillips. God knows, he deserves it! But his Easter was thwarted, when his captors must have grabbed him by the shoulders of his jacket and pulled him back up into the boat, back onto his cross, dripping wet and out of breath, and his life still hanging in the balance.

It would be cheap of me to talk of Captain Phillips this way – because at this moment his life is quite literally in danger – if Easter were not really and truly about life and death. It would be insulting to a man who has over the past three days shown almost exactly what Jesus meant when he said, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends,” if Jesus’ life and death had not already been lived and died for us. It would be crass of me to mention this if it were not to say that I believe that on Good Friday Captain Phillips did not actually go over the side of the lifeboat and into the sea alone.

He surely knew that those waters could just as easily be his grave as they could be his salvation. Did he know, I wonder, that he was not alone on Good Friday as he faced his own grave? Could he sense that presence beside him that slipped below the surface with him? Did he know that another heart pounded in perfect synchronicity with his pounding heart, and that another pair of hands was reaching out into the water with his hands? Could he feel another set of feet kicking through those treacherous waters with his feet? And did he know, when the gunshots fired, and the pirates slapped their hands onto his shoulders and hauled him back into the boat, that another hostage had escaped unseen, deep beneath the surface of the water: deep as a watery grave?

We’ve got a man out there in a lifeboat. At the risk of diminishing the darkness of his dark hours, do I dare suggest that Richard Phillips is, or could be every one of us?

What pirates have held you hostage this past week, this year, most of your life? For some there is addiction; for others it’s loneliness; or fear. Poverty holds too many people in this city hostage every day, with its band of brother pirates, racisim. A grudge makes a marvelous pirate as it tightens its grip over the months and years and you begin to feel justified in your loathing. Greed is the traditional pirate that has become awfully good at moving into the neighborhood and acting as though it is perfectly normal to need and want so much stuff, and so much more. For some it’s sickness, or a grief that will not let go. These pirates have taken many of us hostage, though we would never let on, not on Easter Day.

But it is because we know, don’t we, what it’s like to be in the boat with the pirates of our lives, that we cheered inside when we heard that Captain Phillips had dared to escape! O Captain! my captain!

But it is also because we know of that other man, that unseen hostage who went over the side of the boat and into the water on Friday, that we dare to cling to hope for Richard Phillips, no matter what happens to him; that we know his life is already won, even if the pirates should try to take it from him again. And having given his life already for the sake of his friends, he must surely know this, too.

Because today, this morning, the empty tomb, in my mind, stands on a shore on the east coast of Africa, where the waters of the Indian Ocean are lapping at the rocks. And that silent swimmer - who was in the boat with Captain Phillips, and has been in the boat with you and with me when ever the pirates have been at hand – that silent swimmer has made it to the shore, when the captain could not, just as we could not.

And every Easter morning tells us that the pirates will never win; there is no ransom left to be paid. And that even though the waters be deep and the shore too distant, and help too far away to do us any good, and death lies close at hand, there is One who went over the side, and into the water. And because he was buried, he appeared to be lost to us.

But he is not dead, he is arisen!

Yes, we had a man out there in a lifeboat dying so that we could live.

And by God, he’s done it. He died, and swam through death, and rose on a Sunday morning all those years ago. (O captain! my captain!) And now, no matter what happens to us, we can live!

Alleluia, Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!


N.B, - At 1:30 pm on April 12 2009, Easter Day, U.S. government sources confirmed that Captain Phillips had been rescued in an operation led by U.S. Navy Seals.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
Easter Day 2009
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Kathmandu

The streets of Kathmandu are the most confusing and disorienting place I have ever been. I think of myself as a sophisticated person, having spent part of my childhood in Manahattan, and I like to think that I cannot easily be flustered by something like a foreign city. But from the moment I landed at the airport in Kathmandu I was a little out of sorts.

I immediately forgot whether the guidebook had said you should by no means walk past the taxi dispatcher at the airport and thereby put yourself at the mercy of the cab drivers that await outside at the curb. Or if the book had said under no circumstances should you stop at the dispatcher’s desk when you could get a much better fare by simply walking outside and hailing a cab for yourself. Either way, I’m sure I grossly over-paid for my cab ride.

I thought I knew something about busy city streets, but my experience of New York, Boston, Washington, LA. Sydney, London, Jersualem, and others had not prepared me for the chaos of the streets of Kathmandu, where order is not exactly imposed on the wall-to-wall traffic of cars, truck, bicycles, rickshaws, and pedestrians, who are not, apparently, beholden to the instruction of traffic lights, lanes, or indicators of any kind.

I made it to my hotel in Thamel, the tourist district, where I was immersed again in the craziness of winding streets and alleys lined with shops whose keepers aggressively angled to lure you in, as well as pan-handlers, and scam artists of every conceivable kind, eager to see a pale, plump, pink-cheeked guy with a backpack looking lost.

I was very happy to be connected, by the end of my first day, to a guide who would steer me and the group I was with through most of our Napali adventure. All told, I probably spent a week or more in Kathmandu, and I can honestly say that every time I left the hotel on my own it felt like a roll of the dice. Would I get where I was going, and how? And how would I get back?

Tonight we are celebrating the institution of the Eucharist: that night when Jesus gathered his disciples together in an upper room and shared with them bread, saying “This is my Body,” and wine, saying, “This is my Blood.” Keeping this ritual (since Jesus said, “whenever you eat or drink this, do it in remembrance of me,”) has become commonplace again throughout most of the church, and was commonplace here at Saint Mark’s (daily mass having begun here in 1884) long before Sunday communions were the norm in most of our neighboring churches.

Being commonplace, we know our way around the eucharist, the mass, holy communion. It is celebrated twice most days in this parish (tonight marks the third time today). And the commonplace can easily becomes that which is taken for granted. But tonight the church asks us to imagine that we have arrived for the first time in the streets of Kathmandu: in the midst of a most exotic, wonderful, and perhaps even confusing place. We are asked to sit at table with Jesus and hear him say again for the first time “This is my Body; this is my Blood.”

We are free to wonder what on earth Jesus can mean by these strange sayings, and to remember that there is nothing commonplace about them; nothing to be taken for granted in the suggestion that Jesus offers his own body, his own blood as a sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins and the salvation of the world.

It is for this reason that here at Saint Mark’s we almost always put on special garments before we say or sing the mass. It is for this that we move deliberately and reverently, bowing, here, genuflecting there, crossing ourselves again, and now, again. It is for this that we burn incense, to create an unusual fragrance. For this we sing things that we could just as easily say. It is because we do not wish to take for granted the gift of himself that Jesus offered for us once so long ago. So think of these aisles as the streets of Kathmandu and of this smoke, this song, these vestments as its exotic trappings if you will, and see how all is intended to keep us from taking anything at all for granted.

And yet, ironically, tonight we are reminded of one more thing: we are reminded that Jesus is not hiding from us amidst these winding, confusing alleys, or behind fancy vesture or beneath a cloud of smoke. We are shown that the Lord who allows himself to be truly present with his people wherever they can scrape together a morsel of bread and a drop of wine, is not aloof, not interested in playing hide-and-seek.

The God of the eucharist is a God who is quite clearly eager to be seen, willing to put up with being paraded around, stared at, handled in rough hands, devoured in what are sometimes filthy mouths. And one of the curiosities of this night of ritual is that he did not leave some secret ritual or magic words. He does not even rely on our wisdom or insight, let alone the powers of our personal spirituality. He does not require it to be done one way or another. He just says to his friends, “Do this, whenever you eat it, whenever your drink it.”

And what is “this”? Simply to take bread, bless, it, break it, and share it. Take wine, bless it, pour it, and share it. Jesus gave such simple instructions for finding our way right to the heart of this exotic city of his heart: the eucharist. And while we are to guard against taking it for granted, he wants us to know our way around the byways of his love, he wants us to become like native sons and daughters of this, the most unusual place we have ever been.

Yes, he wants us to see where his love has led – even to the washing of his disciples’ feet. He wants us to become as familiar as we are able with the nooks and crannies of his gift of himself, like the streets of a strange and wonderful city.

For he has built – on altars, and holy tables, and on rocks by riversides, and on the hood of a pickup truck, and anywhere a hunk of bread and a cup can be balanced – he has built a city of his love, connected by all the hands and hearts across the world that know exactly what to do when given the instruction to “Do this,” even though we do it in different ways.

And knowing that this city will always be a city of mystery because the depths of its love can never be fully known, nevertheless, Jesus wants us to move in to the unusual, confusing and disorienting streets of the city of his self-offering of love, and call it home.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
Maundy Thursday 2009
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Seizure

About a year ago at this time of year – on the night of Good Friday, in fact – my dog, a wonderful Yellow Labrador Retriever named Baxter, was asleep at my feet as I sat on the sofa watching TV. Without any warning, the dog suddenly got up and began to stagger erratically around the room. For about a half a second this strange movement of his was amusing, almost as if he was playing a game. But it quickly became clear to me that there was no game. After 30 seconds or so, I guess, Baxter came to a stop, and keeled over onto his side, losing control of his bladder as he fell.

By now I had jumped up and gone to him. He was lying on his side, furiously paddling his front paws. He’s choking, I thought, but on what I had no idea. Still, there must be a way to give a dog the Heimlich maneuver. So I started pressing on his belly and his rib cage trying to force some phantom blockage out of his windpipe. While he was between my hands like that: one hand steadying his back, while the other searched desperately for the right place to apply the right amount of pressure, the paddling stopped, and Baxter’s body simply went completely stiff, and foam began to drip out of his mouth.

And I thought to myself, I can’t believe my dog is going to die on Good Friday. It was very clear to me that there was no time for me to get Baxter to help. Penn Veterinary Hospital is on the other side of the river. There was no time to get my car. I would never manage to hail a cab with the stiff body of a 70 pound Labrador in my arms, and it would take too long anyway, we would never make it in time. My 5 year-old dog was dying before my eyes, I thought, and there was nothing I could do.

I was screaming by now at the top of my voice, BAXTER!!!! Trying to do what? Call him back from wherever he was going?

And as I pushed again at his rib cage, I heard a little growl, and felt a little movement. And almost as suddenly as he fell, Baxter staggered up to his feet and looked at me with a kind of blank confusion, as I knelt there with tears streaming down my face, gasping for breath myself, and wondering what had just happened, and not quite certain whether my dog was going to live or die.

When I called the Emergency Room at Penn Vet they suggested to me that perhaps Baxter had had a seizure of some kind, which I thought was completely inane, since he has always been a perfectly healthy dog. But he seemed to be unhurt, and the confused look on his face was fading, and he was beginning to respond to me like normal, and the ER vet suggested letting him have a night’s sleep and see how he looked in the morning.

It’s hard, as a single person, to describe the importance of a dog in your life without seeming pathetic or misguided or both. Suffice it to say Baxter spends a lot of time with me. He sits at my feet as I work, sleeps on the bed beside me, has driven around the entire country with me, and has greeted me almost every day of his life with the trademark enthusiastic tail-wagging of a happy Lab. And I had no idea how deeply the fear of losing him could wound me.

It turned out that the ER was right. Baxter was diagnosed with idiopathic epilepsy – which means that he is prone to epileptic seizures for no apparent reason, no underlying cause. He’s been treated with an experimental drug that has shown mixed results so far. And over the course of the past year there have been eight or nine nights (it’s almost always at night) that have been interrupted by the staggering, the keeling over, the pee, the paddling, the stiffened body, the foaming mouth, and finally the disoriented return to consciousness.

I am talking with my vet and with Penn about adjusting his medication or changing it altogether. Although the seizures do not generally put Baxter at great risk, it would be better to prevent them. And each time it happens I kneel at his side and I hold him gently, I stroke his side and murmur reassuring things more to myself, I suppose, than to him. And I sit with him while he goes through that period of disorientation that follows the seizure, and I wait for him to get his bearings again, and return to normal. But I remember each time, all too clearly that Good Friday a year ago, when I was sure my dog was dying and there was nothing I could do except shriek with hysteria and despair.

It’s too silly for words to suggest that Jesus’ death on the cross is anything like my dog’s epileptic seizure, because, of course, it is not. But if there is a similarity here it is this: today, as we recite again the Passion of our Lord, and remember him staggering to Golgotha, enduring the whips and the nails, gasping for his own breath, and finally giving up the ghost; today the church experiences a kind of collective seizure of her own as we recount this horrible narrative.

Because while it is true that we have been through this story before, we have sung it in different keys, read it in different translations, acted it out, painted and sculpted it a hundred thousand times and ways; it’s true that we have become accustomed to the throes of this Passion, beginning today, we set aside a week to remember that first time it really happened, before we knew how it would turn out.

It is as though we induce this seizure again, once or twice a year at this time, to remember the hysterical despair that once actually accompanied this sad story, as a mother watched her son put to death, and his friends stood powerlessly by, and the earth groaned and shook in the darkness, and the Lord of life met a violent end.

Like clockwork every year, we see the seizure coming; we count down the warning signs all through Lent. But in our case, this is no idiopathic seizure: we know exactly what the underlying cause is: a world that has wrapped itself in greed and lust and power, and in which most of us have discarded the idea that we should ever seek forgiveness for the miserable things we do to each other, and in which we have largely forgotten how to forgive one another anyway.

The church uses shorthand to describe all this, calling it simply, sin. But you can see the effects of it in a world that awards the wretched children of Mumbai with a golden statuette for entertaining us, but does nothing whatsoever to improve their plight. Or in nations like ours that will violate any part of the planet to exploit the possibilities of carbon-based energy and then belch out the noxious fumes with a self-satisfied grin. Or in a city like ours that still color-codes prosperity and poverty more or less in terms of black and white, with hardly a whimper for the rolling waters of justice and righteousness. (Just to choose a few more obvious collective examples.)

Indignant that at least once or twice a year we should confront the reality of this, the church stages this seizure of hers, intending that it should remind us of how deeply wounded we have been by all our sin, and how deeply wounded is the man who bears them for us.

And it’s become difficult in our society to talk seriously about the importance of Jesus in our lives without seeming pathetic or misguided or both. But still, a week away from the joys of Easter we kneel here beside the stiff body of Jesus. And we are meant to confront the hard truth that in his case, he is actually dead: this is the real thing. We are meant to remember that at the foot of the Cross there is nothing we can do, frankly, to help Jesus or to help ourselves, nothing we can do but shriek with hysteria and despair.

For we know too well the precise underlying causes that have brought us here, if we will be honest with ourselves. We know the sins that nailed his perfect love to the tree. And, as at any death, it’s not just for him that we cry, but for ourselves, and all that we are losing as we see him go. And if we screamed or moaned his name in our hysteria and despair, what would it be for? To bring him back from where he is going?

But of course, we know where he is going. We know that in his death Jesus will do greater work, even, than he did when he was alive: unlocking the gates of sin and death and hell, so that we will not be imprisoned by them.

We have knelt by this stiff, dead body before, our hands on his sides, helpless to do anything to save him. And we know by now that we must let him go, let him die, so that he can save us.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
Palm Sunday, 5 April 2009
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Overturned Tables

Most churches, no matter what the denomination, possess, I would guess, in some closet, or stored under the parish hall stage, or stacked against a wall, a folding table of a certain age, the legs of which have become loose: the screws that hold their brackets to the plywood having pulled away, one by one, with years of steady use. Or it may be that the locking mechanism of the legs has slipped, and never quite catches right. Whatever the cause, it is my contention that almost every church will own, someplace, a table, the legs of which are steady and stable enough to support its own weight but which is certain to collapse when it is laden with one too many casseroles, or a too-heavy stack of Vestry minutes.

These tables are a menace! I have personally carried one such a table out of the parish house and heaved it into the dumpster out back. But I know that the persistent prevalence of such tables is bigger than me, and somewhere nearby the screws or locking mechanism of the legs of the replacement table for the one I threw away are quietly and secretly un-doing themselves so that some day when we least expect it the table will go crashing to the floor.

Is it possible that such tables carry with them the memory of the tables that once stood in the courtyard of the great Temple, where the money-changers sat, making a tidy profit as they converted currencies from various parts of the Roman empire into the only coin whose use was permitted for the payment of the temple tax: a coin from Tyre that was valued at a half a shekel. The tax was required of every Jewish male over the age of twenty, imposed by Moses in the Book of Exodus, it was used to cover the costs of operating the Temple. Elsewhere in the New Testament testimony is supplied that Jesus paid the Temple tax. His outburst of anger (which is reported in all four of the gospels) does not appear to be a protest against this tax.

There are, of course, also the dealers of sheep and cattle and doves (which were needed for the sacrificial offerings) that Jesus drove out of the Temple precincts. But nothing gets our attention these days like money, and it’s the spirit of those overturned tables of the money-changers that I think still haunts the tables of our churches today.

Of course it feels as though money-changing tables are being upset around us at an alarming rate as we watch the economy contort and the banks writhe. The numbers we wish would go up keep going down; the numbers we want to see drop are on a steady rise. And tables that once had good-sized piles of money on them – like retirement accounts, investment portfolios, and like this parish’s endowment – seem to be collapsing and crashing to the floor. To be sure there is still money to be gathered up and stacked back into neat piles, but the system has been upset. Every church I know that depends on money-changers (that is, on investments, as we do) has been impacted, or is bracing for the impact of these tables that have been knocked over, right out from under us.

And I suppose, if I am going to suspect these tables of harboring the memory of those ancient tables in the Temple courtyard, the question is, does Jesus have something to do with upsetting them? Is Jesus in any way involved with the anxious worry that has been brought upon us by these overturned tables?

Well, I don’t believe that Jesus is responsible for the global economic downturn. And I don’t believe that Jesus, reigning as he does at the right hand of God, spends his time worrying about the fluctuations of the stock markets, per se. But I do believe that Jesus incites occasions of upset when the smug complacency of our lives draws our attention away from the things that matter. And I do believe that these occasions often feel very much as though the tables around us go smashing to the floor.

If you follow Jesus (through John’s Gospel) past the chaos he has just caused, out of the Temple gates, into the streets of Jerusalem, you will come upon him next in conversation with a man named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews, John tells us, who surely had heard about the scene Jesus caused with the money-changers. But Jesus and Nicodemus are not talking now about that now, or about the sheep or the cattle or the doves; now they are talking about the kingdom of God: “Truly, truly I say to you, unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

Having caused a commotion that certainly draws attention to him, Jesus is ready to re-direct the conversation. And it is not about the economy of this world that he wants to talk, it is about God’s kingdom – about the economy of heaven, about new birth, new hope, new life in God, when our old lives have become defined by the forces of things like death and taxes.

So, back to our own tables. Our endowments in this parish – upon which we relay for about half of our operating expenses – have been seriously knocked about. This is not to say that there aren’t still some piles of money around, but those piles are significantly smaller than they used to be, the table having been pretty seriously upset.

And, of course, there are the personal realities of each of us who rely on the tables of our jobs, or our 401-ks, or the value of our homes, all of which have been sitting on tables that also seem to have those annoyingly loose legs.

Could it be that Jesus has something to do with all this? Is he involved in any way with the anxious worry that’s been brought upon us by these overturned tables?

It’s possible, I believe, that Jesus has grown impatient with our fixation on money. And perhaps Jesus is using this disruption to change the subject – to dislodge our preoccupation with money and turn our attention more fully to a discussion of the kingdom of God. Because, while there is no question that money (and more of it) can and will be useful in the building up of God’s kingdom, it is not the crucial ingredient. But many churches operate more or less on the principle that our ability to build up the kingdom is directly proportionate to the balance of our bank accounts; that is, directly related to the money that sits on our figurative tables.

And when these tables – perhaps still haunted by the memory of those money-changers’ tables – fall to the floor, upsetting our dependence on them, then we are forced to consider not just what we are going to do about the money, but what we are going to do about God’s kingdom.

And the truth of the matter is that God’s kingdom requires no venture capital; the kingdom is not waiting for more money before it can be built up; and Jesus is not looking for investors. Jesus is calling disciples who are willing to take up the ministry of being sent into the world to change lives: this is the mission of his Gospel. And this mission of transformation is not the work of the clergy, or of monks, or of religious fanatics, it is the work of every Christian who can hear the call of Jesus, in any way, shape, or form.

Of course, Jesus knows how likely we are to get stuck by the tables of the money-changers. He knows how attractive it has become to us to think that we can make our lives, our careers, our future, and even our kingdoms right there in the court of the Temple where there is undoubtedly a profit to be made, without ever stepping foot inside the actual precincts of God’s house.

Is it because of this that he seems to have rigged the tables of our money-changers to collapse like an old table in a church hall? Of course this is too fanciful, really. It seems unlikely that the Lord of lords and King of kings, that the God of love should operate like this – causing a commotion with such real and painful consequences for so many people. And I would not attribute our current economic reality to either the mind or the hand of God.

But I do believe that it is hard to see the kingdom of God from behind a money table. The money distracts us, especially when we actually have a little bit of it– how could it not?

And if those tables carry within the fibers of plywood, or the cellular structure of their metal legs, or the various moving parts that might operate more or less effectively – if these tables possess the mystical memory of tables long ago that were overturned as Jesus began to change the subject and to tell about the mystery of the three days of re-creation that was about to come, then no wonder every church has a table that is so prone to collapse and crash to the floor. It is as if the tables know, - having borne the weight of fortunes before, and seen them come and go; and having witnessed the transforming power of the gospel of hope that relies on no treasure but the love which is crucified for our salvation – it is as if the tables themselves would cry out for the sake of the kingdom of God!

And the fact remains that it is pretty deeply upsetting that so many tables out there in the court of the temple have been overturned. The fact remains that this economic reality is imposing real hardship, pain and loss on people’s lives. And I don’t for one minute believe that it is God’s doing.

But tables have a way of collapsing right out from underneath us – every church knows this, because we all have one of those annoying tables somewhere whose legs are getting too loose, so it comes as no great surprise. And if our own memories fail to remind us during times like these that Jesus did not go to the money-changers to finance the kingdom of God, then let the tables themselves remind us.

Let us see and hear how Jesus keeps trying to change the subject and teach us about his kingdom. Let us remember how it is he taught that we must all be born anew by the spirit of God.

And let us not be fooled into thinking that when the tables have been overturned that our work for the kingdom of God is in any real way imperiled. Even the tables themselves remember that when they came crashing to the floor the work of the kingdom was only just beginning, and yes, there is the Cross to go to, but in just three short days from that dark day, there is Easter, and the rising of the king…

…which of course seems impossible for us to believe. See how long it took us to build up this church, these pledges, our endowment: years and years! And he would re-build it in three days? Can we really believe this?

Oh yes, we can: that, and so much more, and so much more. Thanks be to God!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
15 March 2009
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Petting the Alley Cat

I received the latest copy of The New Yorker on Thursday, and, as I’ve read it over the last few days, I’ve been struck by the various articles. They seemed to have a distinct theme to them. There is a brief blurb about steroids in baseball, and a discussion of the growing list of athletes who are being revealed as users of performance enhancing drugs. There is a long story about Robert Allen Stanford, the billionaire who lives in St. Croix and took a page from Bernie Madoff’s book. Nothing major, just eight billion dollars unaccounted for, amidst a life of jets and boats in the Caribbean. That essay is followed immediately by an essay about Iceland, the collapse of its three major banks, and the greed of a handful of oligarchs that brought about the destruction of a too small, albeit first-world financial system. The next essay is rather a sad one, about David Foster Wallace, a young brilliant novelist, who committed suicide recently. His novels are technical and wordy creations, but the goal of his writing, the theme and center of his novels, is to demonstrate to his readers and maybe to himself the importance of a fulfilled, meaningful life, despite the fact that modern and post-modern thought has seemed to close off the reality of the supernatural and numinous for so many people.

However diverse these topics are, they are not without connections. It cannot be incidental that the discussion which is going on in our culture and society today has as its major theme disappointment.Disappointment with the cult of hero worship which surrounds professional athletics, with the narcissistic excesses of a few greedy people which have caused many deep economic harm and emotional distress, and disappointment with the attempt to live some sort of fulfilled life without any sort of religious or cultural connections, in the midst of a culture which is jaded, cynical, fickle and diffuse. It cannot be incidental because all those stories rooted in disappointment, all those moments of failure, shock and sadness surround what we as a culture and a society value highly: the grace and athleticism of the professional athlete, the American dream of wealth through hard work, the pipedream of a financial system which makes easy money for its people, and the dreamy thoughtful youth who tries to write about a life worth living, all evidence to the contrary. These are the stories that our culture has come to worship. And despite the fact that we know the Madoffs and Stanfords are a dime a dozen, or at least a few billion dollars every other decade or so, and that professional athletes perennially disappoint, and that economies go up and come down, yet still we are fascinated by these disappointments because they are concerned with what is deeply believe, the myths that lie at the heart of our culture. These myths are about what we as a people, what we as a culture and society, value, praise, adore and organize our lives around. These myths are about what we worship.

We are human, and our purpose, our goal; that for which we were created and built is to worship. And we will worship the things of earth or the things of heaven. There is nothing else to worship. We will worship athletes, or money, or ideas, or science, or beauty, or social change, or the living and true God, but worship we will.

The whole message and story of Lent, what all the lectionary readings point to is our failure to worship the true and living God. Sometimes it is couched as the idolatry of the Golden Calf, but it might as well be the idolatries of our own day. The worship of billions of dollars, of hundreds of RBIs and yards rushed, of stocks and bonds, or the fulfilled life according to the faith of the modern intellectual bourgeois. We will worship whatever it is that comes to hand.

Which is precisely the problem that Simon Peter gets into in the Gospel this morning. We don’t quite know what he is worshipping in Jesus, but whatever it is, he is wrong. Perhaps he thinks that Jesus is the great political messiah, come to solve all problems with his teachings and savvy. We certainly wouldn’t ever treat a politician like a messiah, would we? Perhaps he thinks that life itself is a good above all else, and that Jesus really needs to keep teaching and preaching long into his dotage. Perhaps Peter just doesn’t like all that negative energy and morbidity that Jesus is putting out by talking about crucifixion and death.

Whatever motivates Peter, he tries to remonstrate with Jesus, and Jesus slams the door on him pretty hard, because his kingdom is not of this world, and the only way forward, is not to preserve your life but to sacrifice it, to give it up for the life of the world and the lives of others.

Either we will lose our life, or we will lose our life. Those are the choices that Jesus lays out to his disciples and to us. That is the choice that is set before us today, and every day. Either we will lose our life in the pursuit of, in the worship of the wrong things: money, power, position, etc. Or we will lose it by entering into the life of faith, into the life of relationship with the one and true God. And lest you think that can’t be costly, think of the martyrs and the saints; or better yet, think of all those who thought, “I’ll just have a social relationship with God,” and ended up at the world’s end, or facing the angry mob, or heading to the showers in Auschwitz.

Anne Lamott is a fascinating and rather raw writer, and in one essay about coming to faith, she describes God, not so much as the hound of heaven, but as the alley cat of heaven. You feed him a couple of times, and pet him a little, and before you know it he is sleeping on your bed and running the household, and that is when you realize that you are in deep, deep trouble. She uses a rather more descriptive four letter word to describe the trouble, which I think that I won’t use in this setting, but the point is that you don’t start off thinking that you are going to lose your life in the divine life of God. Just like you don’t start of thinking that you are going to steal billions of dollars, or make thousands of people jobless.

But what you worship has everything to do with what you will become. If you worship money, you will become greedy. If you worship food you will become a glutton. Sex, a lecher, and so on. If you worship God, you will lose your life. For our God is a jealous God, a consuming fire and the cost of worship is our lives.

It will start small, this life of losing life in God. You will come to Sunday mass, and enjoy the liturgy and the music. And then you might even start to listen to the preaching, and before long you might think about serving soup to the homeless, or giving of your money and your gifts to support the ministry of the parish, or spending time in prayer or on retreat. That is where the real danger is. Because if the poor are around us and we are called to care for them, if God begins to become part of our financial lives, or part of the time that we spend during the week, if God begins to demand our time, our resources and our worship, then our lives and our resources are no longer our own, to worship as we see fit, but owed, constantly, perpetually to those around us.

“What,” the Gospel asks rhetorically, “will it profit those who desperately hold onto their life to gain the whole world?” Stanford may go to jail, A-Rod will have a tarnished reputation, the group of super wealthy oligarchs in Iceland will have to tighten their belts. It will profit them nothing, of course. A few years of very comfortable living. Fifteen minutes of fame or infamy. A blip on the radar of history, a footnote, then nothing.

Pet the alley cat of heaven, then if you dare. Feed him, if you must. Watch out though, for that is a dangerous road to go down, and you might lose your life. But you will lose it anyways. It was not long ago that Ash Wednesday came, with its message that there is nothing we can do to escape that final lot in life: “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” We are all going to lose our lives. No one here gets out alive. The only question is how: enslaved to the things of earth or pouring out your life like a gift to those around you, lost in the joy and sacrifice of the Divine life. That is the choice that is before us today. And try not to listen too closely, I think I hear a scratching at the door.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

8 March 2009

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Operation Migration

Lead me in your truth and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; in you have I trusted all the day long. (Ps. 25:4)


It is possible, I suppose, that on the ark with Noah there was a pair of whooping cranes that, with the receding of the flood waters, made their way to North America, where, for a while, they were fruitful and multiplied. But today the whooping crane is an endangered species, most of its habitat having been lost to the encroachment of human development. In 1941 there were only 21 whooping cranes known to be living in the wild; today their population numbers 265.

Whooping cranes are migratory birds. The magazine section of a major daily newspaper recently ran a story on the effort to increase the numbers of the birds living in the wild, which includes an elaborate sort of avian orienteering project known as “Operation Migration” to teach the bids their 1,285-mile-long migratory route from Wisconsin to Florida. In the words of one of the organizers, for the cranes, “the instinct to migrate is natural, but the route is learned.”

Operation Migration teaches the birds that route, but it tries hard not to let the birds become acclimated to human contact. So they put on crane costumes when they work with their charges, they don’t speak around the birds, and they lead the birds on their route south with ultralight airplanes playing an MP3 of a whooping crane call through a loudspeaker attached to the rear axle. All it takes is one trip and the birds have learned the route and will remember it the rest of their lives.

However, there are still a lot of obstacles in the way of establishing a healthy population of wild whooping cranes – several previous approaches have failed. The cranes’ difficulty in adapting to living so close to human civilization has led scientists to label them a “conservation reliant species,” which is to say that without human intervention – even dressed up in crane costumes – the cranes are not likely to make it in the long run. A 1946 article in the New York Times “blamed the crane’s ‘lack of cooperation’ for its looming extinction.”

Lent leaves me thinking about migration: about our regular return to a place we need to go. And this first Sunday in Lent, when the Choir and clergy walk around the church singing our litany in formation, leaves me feeling a bit like a participant in some project to teach cranes how to fly south for the winter. (This analogy puts you in the role of the crane, but fear not, we are all flying to the same place.)

If this is the beginning of a migration, it must be, in some sense, a migration back to the heart of God that we are on. And I wonder if what is true of those cranes may also be true for us: that the instinct to migrate is natural but the route is learned. If so, and if the church is to be trusted, then this route leads us through a season of penitence when we find the nerve to say to God and to one another that we have been selfish, inconsiderate, brutish fools at least some of the time (and some of us more than others).

This kind of thing does not come easily to us, which may be why at some point the church set the whole thing to music, to encourage us to sing it, and in the singing to be surprised by the poignant accuracy of the confession. (From all blindness of heart; from pride, vainglory, and hypocrisy; from envy, hatred, and malice; and from all want of charity, good Lord deliver us.)

The simple assumption of the church is that we humans are, in fact migratory creatures; that we have a need to set out (at least once a year) to find again the warmer regions of God’s love that we cling to in a deep memory of paradise, and from which we realize, from time to time, we have become estranged. How did we get so greedy, so self-centered, so adept at ruining things, so willing to despise others, so forgetful of God, so comfortable with killing each other? These questions prompt an old stirring in us to take wing and seek again the refuge of God’s love. But we find, so often, that having noticed the desire to know God better and to be more attuned to his loving kindness, we do not know how to find him, how to talk with him, how to listen to him, or how to serve him.

The migration back to God begins with the humble act of confessing our sins: of acknowledging that we have failed to use the gifts God’s given us and fallen short of being our best selves. I put this generally in this group discussion, but my migration gets off to a better start when I am much more specific with God in my prayers about the ways I have sinned; and your migration will benefit from specifics, too.

And God means for us to rest and stop along the way by coming to his altar to be spiritually fed by his Body and Blood in the mass, and to be nourished by the support and love of his community in the church. We are not expected to make this journey on our own, or in one fell swoop.

The flight back to God’s heart is aided by the reminder God gives us that we have someplace to go: a better, freer, happier life in this world when we escape the cold barrens of our sins. Perhaps that’s why we began our readings today with the story of the rainbow as the sign of God’s covenant of love: a regular reminder that God has someplace for us to go.

These simple tactics - being honest in our confession of sins, stopping to rest and be fed by Christ’s love, and remembering that God has someplace good to lead us to – provide a reasonable plan for a long migration back to God, for us, who have wandered.

If we are honest about it, it seems to me that we humans may actually be a “conservation reliant species.” Which is to say that without God’s intervention we are not likely to make it in the long run. Left to our own devices we tend toward the destructive, which is finally self-destructive. But God turns out to be even more committed to us – creatures of his own making – than those bird-lovers are to the whooping cranes they lead on their migration in ultralight airplanes.

And while the crane people have to put on crane “costumes” to fit in and teach the young cranes what to do, God had only to send us his Son: a human in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, who got his disciples started on their migration just by calling, “follow me!” And so Christ intervenes in our lives over and over again: calling us to follow him, teaching us to love one another as he loves us; showing us his mercy for those who are lost by their sins, feeding us with bread and fish and wine even when it appears there is not enough to go around.

A cynic might suggest as the Times did 50-odd years ago about the whooping cranes, that our own “lack of cooperation” is largely to blame for our own demise – if you see (as a cynic would) the human condition in a state of decline.

But I think if a whooping crane can be taught to follow an ultralight airplane along the route of its migration from Wisconsin to Florida, then there is an awful lot of hope for you and me, that we can be taught by Christ and his church the way to make the journey back to the heart of God’s love. (Although unlike the cranes, we seem to need to learn the route over and over again.)

And as we embark with a song of penitence whooping in our throats, we are reminded already that there are plenty of chances to stop and rest and be fed. And from time to time we may even look out from the flight pattern of our migration and see in the distance the rainbow sign of the covenant of God’s love – that never again will we be cut off from his love – which serves as a useful reminder that we have someplace to go: a warmer region of God’s love to which he calls us to return again and again and again, no matter how often we fly away.

Thanks be to God.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

1 March 2009

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia