Waiting in silence for God

Sometimes the Scriptures give us complex parables to untangle, or esoteric passages nearly illegible with the passage of time, and the preacher must perform feats of extreme hermeneutical acrobatics to come to some sort of explanation. Sometimes the Scriptures give us stories that are obvious, and it is the duty of the preacher to soften the hardness of the teaching, if only a little bit. And sometimes in the Scriptures, there is simply an image, so laden with symbolism and historical import that the preacher gets to simply hold the image up, and slowly turn it for all to see. Simeon, that old man of faith, waiting on God’s messiah and holding the infant Jesus is that kind of image: laden and poignant.

There is, all the way through the Hebrew Scriptures a kind of sad and silent waiting for God. God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, of Sarah, and Leah and Rachel, the God who chose his people, and made a covenant with them, and led them from exile and through the wilderness, and gave the law, that God, despite the years of prophets, judges and kings, that God is silent, and the people of Israel wait for God’s movement, for God’s salvation with a longing and a hunger of the deepest sort.

For it seems as if God has abandoned his people. As if he has left them, finally, to their idolatry and sinfulness. They couldn’t keep focused on God for the time it took Moses to climb the mountain to receive the law. How could they possibly keep God central to their lives, surrounded by other tribes, by distractions and by the cares of life lived now in the land that they had long awaited?

“Turn again to God” the prophets warned the people of Israel, and they did not. Again and again God sent prophets to call them home, and punished Israel with battle and exile, and begged, pleaded and thundered, and still the people of Israel, the chosen people, did not return, did not repent.

And so Jerusalem was overcome and the Temple was destroyed, most of her people were carried into exile, and what was perhaps worse than all of that was the terrible silence which descended, and God no longer spoke to his people. Even when he fought with them and punished them, God was at least speaking to them, but now a silence has come down, and there are no words from God, there are no messengers and no prophets.

And the people of Israel are left waiting, in silence. Waiting is something that they are good at, something that they have learned to do through the long years of their interaction with God. They waited in Egypt and they waited in the wilderness; they waited for a king, and then they waited for a decent king. They waited to come back from Babylon and now they are waiting to see what happens with the Roman Empire.

They are getting good at waiting, or at least resigned to waiting. And what they wait is the savior who is promised again and again through all their interactions with God, the one that can restore Israel again.

All of that is there in the background, as Simeon stands there in the Temple, holding a forty day old child. Simeon is an image of disparate pieces at the very moment of intersection, the place between the longing and waiting of the people of Israel throughout the years, and the advent of God’s savior and messiah, at the moment when prophesy moves from possible to actual and dreams turn into reality. He stands there, right on the cusp of waiting being transformed into joy, and longing coming to satiety, desire to completeness.

So laden is the moment, so poignant the vision of God’s salvation in the frame of a tiny child that Simeon bursts into song. It matters not that death is near, for God’s savior is here, and he has held him in his arms.

It is a glorious image and symbol, an old man and an infant, a man who has lived in hope for God’s action, and a child whose potential will shake the foundations of the world. And Simeon, death near him, breaks out in a song of praise to the God who has been silent for so long, but is now working: “Mine eyes have seen thy salvation which though has prepared for all the world to see, a light to enlighten the nations and the glory of your people Israel.”

And because he stands there, holding the savior of the world, an image and sign of God’s redemption, Simeon is a better answer to the questions about God’s silence and God’s absence, that constantly arise.

For those questions are constant from year to year and age to age. Where is God when his people are in bondage to a foreign empire? Where now is God in Haiti, where in Iraq? Why is God silent when the planet is being ravished, and millions live in abject poverty? Why is God absent when my life seems to be falling apart?

Simeon holding Jesus is far better than a theological or a philosophical answer to the question of God’s absence, in 1^st century Palestine, or quake-ravished Haiti. The answer to our questions is cradled in an old man’s arms. The tiny child offers no theological answer, no philosophical defense of God’s absence and silence. All that he offers is himself, a tiny frame, a wisp of hair, and miniature fist.

Simeon doesn’t claim that this is God’s messiah. He does nothing except hold the child, and praise God. Nothing need be said, for God’s absence and God’s silence is not undone by human words, but by the child who is the savior of the world: into the silence of the world a word has been spoken and the Logos has come down to be God with us.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

2 February 2010

The Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord in the Temple: Candlemas

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia

A More Excellent Way

Never in my life have I owned or regularly driven a new car.  Among the other implications this condition may have for me, there is the fact that I am normally surrounded, when I drive at night, by cars with fabulously bright halogen headlights – or whatever else is now producing that bright, blue-tinted, Star Trek light that is beamed into my rearview mirror.

Of course, I do drive a car with that little switch on the bottom of the mirror, called, I am told by my Owner’s Manual, the “Day/Night” switch, which, the manual assures me, is there to “make driving more comfortable.  And indeed, it is vastly more comfortable to drive at night with the switch flipped (is it up or down?) so that the glare of those magnificent headlights you probably have on your car does not blind me.  With the switch flipped, as you know, the road behind me appears as a 10” by 2” rectangle of darkness, salted with white dots of light.  It may be more comfortable driving, but it is a limited perspective.

It is precisely this limited view that Saint Paul is describing when he writes in his most famous passage “for now we see in a mirror dimly,” or in the older version, “in a glass darkly.”  You all know this phrase – you have heard it read at weddings.  And there may be some value to assessing whether or not it matters if now we see only in a glass darkly.

Because if we do, we see only what is behind us, what is chasing us, or what is falling away from us, and even then we see it only dimly, its contours and shape obscured.  What we do not see, Saint Paul implies is the road ahead of us.

We are infatuated with the road behind us, receding into the darkness.  And we tend to lead our lives this way – with our eyes glued to the rearview mirror, in its “Night” position, fixated on what’s behind us, what’s already past.  We do not see our lives, as he says, “face to face.”  We do not see fully.   And so, we do not live life as God intends us to live.  And we have hardly a clue of the beauty and glory that lies ahead of us.
In his letter, which Paul thought he was writing to the Christians in Corinth, but we know he was really writing to us, Paul is suggesting what he calls, “ a still more excellent way” of seeing the world, and therefore living life.  Paul writes of what he knows.  For he had been an expert on the laws of Jewish faith, and he was a man of unswerving and unerring faith.  He knew the laws of Moses, lived by them, and he encouraged (shall we say) others to live by them too.  OK, let’s say he encouraged Jews to do so by force.
At no time in his life that we know of did Paul’s faith ever waver or fail.  Many of us know what it is like to live with uncertain or undeveloped or uninformed faith, but this was not Paul’s story.  Even his conversion from following the laws of Moses to following Jesus was not the result of a crisis of faith.  It was the result of a crisis of vision.  He was struck blind for several days, something like a fish’s scales obscuring his eyes, until they fell from his eyes and he found a new vision.  The view, when the scales fell from Paul’s eyes, was a different view of the world than he had ever seen.  And that view would not only change his life, it would change the world.

He saw that life was not made better, perfect, or holy by following the 613 commandments of Jewish law, the task he had devoted his life to.  He even saw that faith – which he had in bucketsful – was not all you needed to live a good life.  He saw that only one thing made the difference between looking at life through the rearview mirror with the Night switch on, and seeing the life that lies ahead of us in all its vibrant light and color.  And that one thing is love.

And so Paul wrote his famous love song, his ode, within his first letter to the Corinthians.  “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.” Does it sound to you as though perhaps Paul is describing an earlier version of himself: impatient, unkind, envious, boastful, arrogant, and rude?
Love “does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth.  [Love] bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  Love never ends.”

Love is the vision of the road that stretches out before us when we stop seeing life through the rearview mirror, with the Night switch on; when we stop seeing life through a glass darkly.
And what Paul says, is that most of us have been trying to drive while looking only through the rearview mirror in the dark, with the Night switch on.  Have you ever tried to navigate your car this way?  Has it ever seemed to you that you were trying to navigate your life this way?

None of us here, that I know of, is constrained by an effort to live by the 613 commandments of the laws of Moses, but many of us, most of us, are living lives defined by a much narrower set of constrictions: the need to pay the bills, the need to get through the work day (just get through it); the struggle to find some joy in your time with your spouse; the difficulty in sleeping without pills (or even with them); the sense that you are missing out on life, that you gave up options because of choices you made long ago; the frustration that your children have not turned out the way you hoped they would.  All these are visions of life through a glass darkly: little spots of white zooming one way or another in a small rectangle of darkness.  No wonder faith seems like a struggle under the circumstances; it’s all we have to go on while trying move forward and seeing only the world behind us through a glass darkly.

But there is a road ahead of us.  And that road beckons us with love.  It calls us to be patient, kind, and humble.  The road of love invites us to yield to others, making way for them because, after all, there is room enough.  The road ahead is way-marked by good choices: choosing the right over the wrong, the truth over falsehood.  The road has challenges, to be sure, but there are no warnings that it cannot bear heavy loads: the road of love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

St. Paul did not write his love song to be read at weddings, and it is not a reflection on marital bliss.  It is meant to provide a different view, to jolt us into looking straight ahead and seeing what God has prepared for us.  And the thing is, that there is not some great test to be passed, there are no rules that must be followed, there are no hoops to be jumped through.  There is just this call to look and see.  There is the encouragement to rub our eyes vigorously if the scales have not fallen from them on their own.  There is the recognition to be made that we have been driving while looking through a glass darkly and seeing mostly only what is behind us.  There is this possibility of love, which is greater even than faith or hope, since both faith and hope are built on it.

It may be true that the road behind you has been dark.  It may be the case that it has seemed the best you could do is avoid a collision, keep the darting spots of light in the rearview mirror at bay, stay in your own lane, and maybe even slow down to prevent disaster.  But from the radio comes an old song that sounds familiar.  You have heard it before, but has it ever spoken to you?

Love is patient;
love is kind;
love is not envious or boastful
or arrogant or rude.
It does not insist on its own way;
it is not irritable or resentful;
it does not rejoice in wrongdoing,
but rejoices in the truth.
It bears all things,
believes all things,
hopes all things,
endures all things.
Love never ends.

As the song plays, can you feel the tension in your neck relax, as you tear your eyes from the rearview mirror, and you begin to realize that you have been driving all night, but now the dawn has come, and the sun is rising, and a golden light shines on the road that leads ahead of you and stretches on and on, anywhere you can imagine or dream, and beyond that, too.

And there is no speed limit, no rules of the road even, because they are not necessary, no danger of being caught, because you are doing nothing wrong.  There is only this beautiful, smooth road before you, and an inexplicably gentle, cool breeze.  There is only love.  It is a view we had only dreamed about, but never seen before.  But it is real, and it is a more excellent way than any other on earth.  Thanks be to God.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
31 January 2010
Saint Mark’s, Philadelphia


Standing by Stone Jars

No story from the New Testament seems as ready-made for a laugh as the story of Jesus at the wedding of Cana.  The best of these laughs, I can tell you, normally come at the expense of the clergy.  A collar on your neck is a passport to a lifetime of being challenged to turn water into wine.  Behind the joke, I suspect, lurks the conviction of absurdity – the absurdity that Jesus ever actually turned six great stone jugs of water into wine, and the absurdity of ministry in his name, with the attendant absurdity that such ministry could change the world, let alone so much as a thimbleful of water into wine.

There is almost always something absurd in the suggestion that we can do anything that Jesus did.  That’s why the next best joke in the book is walking on water.  Most clergy are not so sure they want to walk on water, but would actually like to be able to turn water into wine, so there’s the rub.  So far, however, it is a trick that has eluded me – which comes as a disappointment, I am sure, not only to all of you but to many of my friends who do not go to church. 

Saint John tells us that Jesus performed this miracle as the first of a series of signs that began to reveal his identity, his glory, to those around him in Galilee.  Very well, there is no doubt that this episode is all about Jesus.  But the person who interests me in the story is actually his mother, Mary.  She is older now than the young girl who gave birth to that special baby.  She is middle-aged, I guess.  She has seen a thing or two.  Saint John leaves open for us the possibility that Mary and Jesus came to the wedding at Cana separately – Jesus was with his disciples, perhaps Mary was there with Joseph.  I’d like to think she and Joseph danced together.

It may be that when Mary comes up to Jesus, this is the first time they have spoken that day, maybe the first time in a while.  We normally take it for granted that Mary goes up to Jesus with intent, asking him to do something about the lack of wine.  But maybe it is more of a snarky comment, a sotto voce criticism of the bridal party or their parents, “Can you believe it, they have no wine!”

Whatever the case, Jesus does not take it well.  Had he and his mother been fighting recently?  Had she been pressuring him to spend more time at home?  Maybe pressuring him to find a bride of his own?  (There’s no time like a wedding to meet someone!)  Perhaps there is a backstory that explains his impatience with his mother, we don’t know.  But whatever her purpose was in first going over to her son, Mary now sees something, she sees it before Jesus does.  She sees that there is something for him to do, a miracle to be wrought, a sign to be shown. 

Left to his own devices, Jesus seems inclined to hang out with his disciples at the bachelors’ table and talk theology.  But Mary knows that there is more to be done.  It is Mary who orchestrates this miracle.  It is she who provokes Jesus about the wine in the first place, whatever her intent; it is she who puts up with his terse response.  And it is she who tells the servants to do whatever he tells them. 

Up until now, it did not appear that Jesus was going to tell them to do anything.  But Mary has opened the door, so to speak, and she does so, having picked her spot, right beside six large stone jars that are standing nearby.  No, Mary does no get the water or work the miracle of changing it into wine.  But if not for her, Jesus might not have done it either.

It is precisely because Jesus did not teach any of his disciples how to do the trick, and precisely because they do not teach you how to do it in seminary, that it makes sense for us to notice Mary in this well-known story.  Because if there is to be anything like a re-enactment this miracle in the world today, neither you nor I will ever get to be Jesus, and turn water into wine.  But we can be like Mary.  We need no special circumstances, not even a wedding reception, to orchestrate the context for Jesus’ miracles in the world today.

Every day of our lives brings an opportunity to provoke Jesus with our prayers – whether we have spoken with him recently or not, even if we’ve been angry with him.

Every day brings opportunities to see ways to show signs of Jesus’ glory – even ways that he might not have been looking for himself.

Every day brings opportunities to encourage others to do as Jesus instructs, and see, just see, if things don’t change.

Recently, the Fox News anchor, Brit Hume did just this, by opining about repentance and forgiveness in Jesus’ name on the air.  At the time, I was quite taken aback, mostly because I naturally recoil at the idea of anything meaningful, or sacred being discussed on Fox News, and because I find TV news in general an unlikely and inappropriate place for a journalist to express such views.

But the fact of the matter is that Christian faith does have a lot to say about the need for repentance and forgiveness, about transformation.   Whether or not Brit Hume chose the right time and place to say it, he was right that our faith makes claims about these things that other faiths do not. His mistake was to say the right thing at the wrong time and in the wrong place.

But you and I are not bound by the same restrictions that Brit Hume is, or ought to be bound by.  Yet we are so often as tongue-tied about our faith as we are confounded by the trick of turning water into wine.  We can have none of the confidence of Mary, if we lack even the conviction of Brit Hume.  And we live in a society that would prefer to make jokes about turning water into wine than to take seriously any suggestions about repentance and forgiveness, about the real possibility of transformation.

But at a wedding in Cana, Mary shows us that she not only made room for Jesus in her own life by saying yes to the angel Gabriel all those years ago, but that she helped others make room for him in their lives, by seeing that there is something for him to do, by provoking him in the way that only a mother can, and by positioning herself conveniently beside six stone jars.  This is a model for ministry that anyone can follow; we don’t need to be TV news anchors, in fact it’s better that we are not.

A few days ago I learned that a young man I know happened to be in Haiti on a missionary trip with his church when the devastating earthquake hit the island.  I’d had no idea the young man, who is a National Guardsman in the First City Troop that I serve as a chaplain, was in any way inclined to make such a journey to do missionary work, and I was impressed to discover this, even as I worried for his safety.

Missionary work – going out to care for the poor and those in need – is almost always an occasion to follow Mary’s model, almost always a way of standing by six stone jars, knowing that if you can get them filled, Jesus will do something wonderful with them.  Think of this parish’s mission trips to Mississippi after Katrina, to Honduras to run a medical clinic, and to our mission parish of Saint James the Less in North Philadelphia to run City Camp, and, we pray, to open a school there.

Mercifully, it did not take too long for word to reach his family and others that my young friend and his group were OK.  But of course the mere thought of Haiti at this time, five days after the quake, is a reminder of the need for a real miracle of transformation.  We are already seeing what a gift any amount of water could be in the context of such suffering; how six stone jars full could become so much more than they appear to be.

And since you and I cannot go there and fill jars of water ourselves, we can at least help to pay for it.  We can let our contributions to a special collection we will take up this week and next serve as our conviction that Jesus, using the hearts and hands and contributions of thousands of people can and will work miracles in that poverty-ridden country; that hope is not gone.

Let us use our prayers to provoke Jesus, as if he needs it.  Forget the wine, they have no water!  Let us find ways to encourage and support those in positions to help to do all they can.  And let us find the stone jars that need to be filled.  In this case it would appear that our own collection plates will do nicely.

We live in a world that remains desperately in need of the transforming miracles of Jesus.  Haiti is simply the most obvious example of that need at the moment.  But it may help us to see why we cannot take Jesus’ power for granted; why it is no joke that Jesus can change things: water into wine, despair into hope; suffering into survival; and an island of death, we pray, into a place of new life.

And you and I and every Christian person has a ministry, modeled by Mary, to be a part of this transformation.  We have always to bring our prayers to Jesus.  We have always to pave the way for him, to share with others the great joy to be had in doing as he instructs us.  And we have always to find the stone jars that can be filled with water and turned into wine.  Sometimes it will be enough for us to locate the jars.  Sometimes we will have to fill them ourselves.  But always, always, the miracle is wrought by Jesus.

Can we believe that this is no joke?  Can we have confidence that Jesus will work wonders in our lives and in the world?  Or does it seem absurd to us, as it does to so much of the world?

The world I see – from the destruction in Haiti to the landscape of my own life – is a world that depends on the merciful power of a loving God to change things from the way they are to the way they can be.

We cannot possibly find the stone jars fast enough, we cannot possibly fill them with too much water, and we cannot possibly hope for something better than that Jesus will take the stone jars we manage to have filled, and change our water into wine, our despair into hope, change the way things are into the way things can be, change our death into life.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
17 January 2010
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia


Shirt of flame

There was a time in my life when I regretted that I have been baptized as an infant. Perhaps “regret” is the wrong word. I was angry that I had been baptized as a child. This was a time in my life when I was full of anger at the intrusiveness of God in my life. I was about to pull a Jonah and run, if not to Tarshish, than at least to Arizona to escape priesthood. And I found the fact that I had been baptized, that my parents had made promises for me, and had caused this monumental sacramental act to happen to me to feel as if I were trapped, as if there was not any place to which I could run to be free of God and of those promises made at baptism.

The Church has long taught that baptism, as of the other sacraments, is indelible, there is a quality to baptism which can never be repeated or undone. The metaphor that John uses in the Gospel this morning is that of “fire.” John baptizes with water, but Jesus who is coming will baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire. And if Christian baptism is with “fire,” as the Gospel says this morning, than baptism leaves one scarred, burned forever, and even if I were to run to Arizona or Tarshish, even if I were to never darken the door of a church again, the burn scars of that day, ever so long ago, would stay with me forever. T. S. Eliot has a phrase which I always think of, when I think of baptism: “The intolerable shirt of flame / Which human power cannot remove.” There are times when the life of faith, or occasional faith, or the wish to have faith feels like a shirt of flame, a kind of flammable hair shirt that burns, and hurts, and which “human power cannot remove.”

That, at least, was how I felt. Which is perhaps not a very happy way to think about baptism, but it is not entirely uncorrect either.

Often baptism is taken rather lightly, as a normal cultural and social event. Baby is born, baby takes first steps, baby says first word, and baby is baptized. It is all of a piece.

But if baptism is what the Church teaches, than baptism is very dangerous, and we are almost unbelievably arrogant when we baptize, especially children. We are playing with fire which is not of our making, and risking a great deal, every time we step to the font with another soon-to-be Christian.

Baptism is permanent and it does scar us and takes us into place and times that are unpleasant. Vows are made at baptism that bind us to a life of service and selflessness, to seeking justice, to a life of repentance, and resistance to evil. Baptism makes us citizens of another kingdom, which in turn means that we are aliens and wanderers here, and have a sense of never quite being home. Baptism makes us hungry for the bread of heaven, with a hunger that the stuff of earth can never satisfy. And baptism calls us to make some pretty serious sacrifices: our lives, our money, and our comfort.

But this day we are remembering not all baptism, but specifically Jesus' baptism in the Jordan River by his cousin John the Baptist. And I always find Jesus' baptism to be slightly unusual, slightly strange. I know why I need the shirt of flame of baptism, that slow purgative process that one day, God willing, will make me ready for the Feast of the Lamb, but why would God's messiah, why would the eternal Word need baptism? I may struggle, complain and resist that burn of baptism, but why would Jesus even need it?

In the parallel passage from Matthew's Gospel, John himself protests that Jesus has come for baptism. “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” And Jesus responds that it is somehow proper that John baptize him.

Beyond being indelible, the Church teaches another great truth about baptism: that baptism is the root of our Christian identity, the canvas on which all the other aspects of our Christian life are painted. Some Christians will be ordained, or married, or confirmed, but those sacraments all presuppose baptism. They are all variations on a theme of baptism.. Baptism is the context in which our entire conversation and struggle with God takes place. Baptism, that fire that is set in us, is the way that we learn to love God and our neighbors. Slowly, haltingly over time, the fire of baptism can burn away the brokenness of our hearts, the ways in which we are selfish, self-deceptive and prone to sin. We experience baptism as a shirt of flame because we are yet far off from the perfection which God has planned for us.

I wonder if that doesn't explain the properness of Jesus' baptism by John. Jesus doesn't need baptism like we do. He doesn't need to be rooted in God, bound in covenant with God, and made an adoptive heir to the Kingdom. Jesus is God, very God of very God; Jesus is already rooted and one with God. Jesus wouldn't experience baptism as a shirt of flame because he is perfectly attuned to God, loving as he should.

But in his coming to live as a human being, he shows us the way home. He is born and baptized, he lives and dies. It is proper that he be baptized because he shows us the model, the example, of how we are to be. He goes before us like a beacon in the dark, flaming with God's love, and because he has bidden us to, we set a fire in those who come to us, children and adults, and we give them the light of Christ as a candle to carry into the darkness of the world.

All of us struggle with the hardness of baptism, I would imagine. Must I give of my time, my money, my energy, my life? Must I struggle and suffer through this Lenten time? Must I be an alien and a wanderer here? Does God have to call me into these difficult places and times?

As I think about my regret that I had been baptized, I realize that what was wrong was not my sense that this powerful, scary sacramental moment had been done to me without my choice, but the feeling that God was somehow out to get me, that God was somehow punishing me, or asking too much of me.

The verse from which the phrase “shirt of flame” is taken are these, and they seem to me simply true:

Who then devised the torment? Love.

Love is the unfamiliar Name

Behind the hands that wove

The intolerable shirt of flame

Which human power cannot remove.

     We only live, only suspire

     Consumed by either fire or fire.

The scar of baptism, the permanence of the covenant that we make with God in baptism, is rooted in an unbending love. Love devised that shirt of flame, Love binds us with it, Love will never remove it, and Love wills us flame with divine fire.

For this is what we were created for: to flame with the fire of God's love, and to burn forever in his presence. And the shirt of flame which is baptism is how we are prepared to flame with his fire. Our Lord, in his baptism, is our guide and example.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

The First Sunday after Epiphany: The Baptism of Our Lord

Reverence

In a short story published recently and posthumously, the writer David Foster Wallace introduces to us a boy who has received a Christmas present.[i]  It is a toy cement mixer: wooden except for the axles and for a yellow rope handle attached to the front bumper by which the boy could pull the cement mixer around behind him.  The boy, who narrates the story, loves to play with the cement mixer, and one day his parents casually tell him that it is a magic cement mixer.  The boy reports:

“The “magic” was that, unbeknown to me, as I happily pulled the cement mixer behind me, the mixer’s main cylinder or drum… rotated, went around and around on its horizontal axis, just as the drum on a real cement mixer does.  It did this, my mother said, only when the mixer was being pulled by me and only, she stressed, when I wasn’t looking.”

Of course this suggestion prompts the boy to try to catch the cement mixer mixing, doing its thing, turning on its axis; to see the magic at work.

“Evidence bore out what they had told me: turning my head obviously and unsubtly around always stopped the rotation of the drum.  I also tried sudden whirls.  I tried having someone else pull the cement mixer.  I tried incremental turns of the head while pulling (“incremental” meaning turning my head at roughly the rate of a clock’s minute hand).  I tried peering through a keyhole as someone else pulled the cement mixer. Even turning my head at the rate of the hour hand. I never doubted—it didn’t occur to me. The magic was that the mixer seemed always to know. I tried mirrors—first pulling the cement mixer straight toward a mirror, then through rooms that had mirrors at the periphery of my vision, then past mirrors hidden such that there was little chance that the cement mixer could even “know” that there was a mirror in the room. My strategies became very involved….  I begged my mother to take photographs as I pulled the mixer, staring with fraudulent intensity straight ahead. I placed a piece of masking tape on the drum and reasoned that if the tape appeared in one photo and not in the other this would provide proof of the drum’s rotation. (Video cameras had not yet been invented.)”

But none of his tests are successful – or unsuccessful, as the case may be.  Nothing yields the result that he catches the cement mixer in the act of turning its mixer.

Again, the boy tells us:

“I never found a way to observe the drum’s rotation without stopping that rotation.  It never once occurred to me that my parents might have been putting me on.  Nor did it ever bother me that the striped drum itself was glued or nailed to the orange chassis of the cement mixer and could not be rotated (or even budged) by hand….  And, in fact, the free rotation of an unpowered and securely fastened drum was not the “magic” that drove me. The magic was the way it knew to stop the instant I tried to see it.  The magic was how it could not, not ever, be trapped or outsmarted. Though my obsession with the toy cement mixer had ended by the next Christmas, I have never forgotten it, or the feeling in my chest and midsection whenever yet another, even more involved attempt to trap the toy’s magic met with failure—a mix of crushing disappointment and ecstatic reverence. This was the year, at five or six, that I learned the meaning of “reverence,” which, as I understand it, is the natural attitude to take toward magical, unverifiable phenomena….”

Tonight is a night of gifts, and of magic, and of reverence.  It is fashionable these days to point out that the Scriptures don’t tell us that there were actually three wise men.  It is common to hear in pulpits that if any sages from the east came to visit the child Jesus it took much longer than twelve days for them to get there – maybe a matter of years.  It is quite usual to be presented with the various explanations that the star was a  predictable celestial phenomenon.  It is normal to dismiss tonight as little more than an excuse to make a king cake and let someone find the prize in it.  But I hope tonight we can resist these urges, because to give in to them is to miss the point of the gift, the magic, and the reverence.

Over there in that crèche we placed, twelve days ago, a baby Jesus who resembles, more than anything else, a toy cement mixer.  He is made of wood.  He has no moving parts (not even a string to drag him around).  One of his hands regularly falls off and has to be re-glued every year before Christmas Eve.

To much of the world our elaborate ceremony of traipsing around the church in fancy vestments, singing “O come, all ye faithful” (twelve days ago) and “We three kings” (tonight) on our way to the manger, placing the statue in it, and blessing it with holy water and incense is nothing but foolishness – a belief in some outmoded magic that is thought to be vested not only in carved, wooden babies, but in the very likely darker-skinned baby that all the carved baby Jesuses are supposed to be modeled on.  Nothing but magic.

And such is the state of the world, that we may be tempted too, after the candlelight and the singing of Christmas Eve, to drift toward the suspicion that although it is a nice tradition, in the end, it is just a wooden Jesus, with no moving parts, nothing spinning, no heart.  We could drag him all over the city at the end of a yellow rope, and what good would it do?

There would appear to be much evidence to support this point of view.  Poverty, injustice, and racism are still very much a part of our society.  We have not yet beaten our swords into plowshares.  We agonize about how to feed ourselves with healthy food, how to take care of ourselves when we are sick, and how not to send the planet spiraling gradually toward overheating. 

More personally, we have not figured out how to prevent so many marriages from ending up in divorce, we have not learned the secret to preventing our children’s lives from going to pieces, our lives are so easily surrendered to drugs or alcohol, we have not found a prescription to avoid tragic illnesses, to cure cancer, and we have not learned how to staunch the grief of loss when we lose even someone of great faith to death.

No wonder that to many people these days, Jesus amounts to little more than a toy cement mixer: his Cross little more than an accessory that is quite preferred without his Body on it.  No wonder there are so few epiphanies on Epiphany, since we have reduced it to a feast of toys: a magical star leading costumed kings, who carry their prop gold and frankincense and myrrh to a wooden Jesus.  We might as well drag a toy cement mixer behind us in our procession!

But we could learn something valuable from the wise men.  We could remember that when they reached the manger, Jesus did not do anything amazing, he may not even have woken up from his nap.  But they knew! 

They knew when they encountered him and his mother that God was at work here.  Did they marvel at the magic that God could accomplish something great without even appearing to lift a finger?  Did they wonder at the perfection of God’s work wrought so secretly that no trap of even the great king Herod could capture it?  Did they gush to his mother that this child appeared to be so very like every other child?  Did they think of their reverence to him as “the natural attitude to take toward magical, unverifiable phenomena…” since they had no way of verifying what was so manifestly true to them – that here was the very Son of God?

And is it possible that the faith that God has called us to is a faith something like this: that he has given us the gift of his Son as the object of our faith.  He knows that this gift can sometimes seem like little more than a toy cement mixer: childish, clunky, unpowered, stuck in one position, etc.  But does he call to us, at least once a year, to remember that this gift is operating in our lives all the time, when we can’t see it: spinning, turning, building, growing, blessing, forgiving, transforming?

And maybe it is the nature of this gift that we can never – or at least almost never - see it at work.  So often we discover the effects of Jesus in our lives, we realize the grace that comes of faith, after the fact, when his work has already been accomplished, his blessing conferred, his transformation made.

And perhaps all our ministries are, in part, our efforts to catch a sight of the invisible and elusive God at work in the world, in our lives.  When you make soup every week, as some of you do, or wake up every Saturday morning to serve that soup to the hungry and homeless; when you teach a group of children their Bible story in Sunday School; when you study the Scriptures yourself in Bible Study or on your own; when you come to serve at the altar; or when you serve coffee at coffee hour; when you sing in the choir; when you rake the leaves at Saint James the Less, or clean the church there, or the bathrooms….

…are these some of the ways we try to catch God spinning in our lives?  Are these he mirrors we look in from various angles, the keyholes we peep through, the abrupt or slow turns we make to catch him unawares?  Are we looking for the God who has called us but who stays so mundanely hidden, so apparently unwilling to be caught in the act of changing our lives, changing the world?

I suspect it may be so because, like that little boy, I am amazed at the magic of how God’s grace and mercy cannot ever be trapped or outsmarted, cannot be stopped, even though I realize how difficult it is to observe it directly sometimes.

And I suspect it may be so, because I have seen the evidence of the grace of God all around a world that would just as soon destroy it. 

And like that boy, I have known something like the feeling in my chest and midsection whenever the attempts to ruin God’s grace meet with failure—a mix of crushing disappointment and ecstatic reverence – disappointment that like the sun or quantum physics, God’s grace, his spinning, turning, working, forgiving, transforming cannot often be observed directly; and ecstatic reverence because that grace, that spinning, turning, working, forgiving, transforming love is so manifestly true!

And if I were a wise man, I would bring my gift, whatever it was – gold, frankincense, myrrh, or whatever.  But I am content to know that God has given the gift of his Son – who might be nothing more than a wooden doll, a toy…

… who is himself willing to be dragged around behind us on a yellow rope, if that is the only way we will have him in our lives…

…but who cannot be stopped from spinning, turning, working, blessing, forgiving, transforming; who often, so often, cannot be seen to be doing any of this either; whose magic mostly cannot be observed; who cannot be stopped from being born!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

The Feast of the Epiphany, 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

---

[i] David Foster Wallace, “All That”, published in The New Yorker, December 14, 2009



The Word (II)

In the beginning the stars were not yet shining.

In the beginning the silver wings of the Spirit

sliced through the mist

that hung over the face of the waters:

the vaporous breath of God, from which all things

came to be.

All the planets were contained

in a hazelnut, or less.

The mountains were collapsed

into a pebble, or less.

The seas were carefully hidden

beneath the surface of the waters,

themselves obscured

beneath the blurred horizon of the mist.

The rivers swirled in tiny vortices,

waiting to be unfurled,

that would fit in a demitasse, or less.

The trees of all the forests were packed tight,

in the space of a single seed, or less.

The birds’ wings were folded;

their feathers un-fluffed.

The fishes’ scales stacked away,

in poker chip piles too small to see, or less.

Every living creature waited

in the miniscule wings of creation;

in a minute green room,

or something less.

The first man, first woman

curled up in the so-far un-realized basinet

of God’s imagination.

And the Spirit’s silver wings beat silently,

and the waters rippled

beneath his glide,

in the long and ageless moments

before the beginning,

and the stars were not yet shining.

Into this silence a Word

was spoken,

breathed,

announced.

Before the “let there be”s,

before the Light;

in the beginning was the Word.

May I speak of the things that were

before I was, or any of us?

May I presume to know something

about what it sounded like,

emanating from the mind and mouth of God,

hanging in the mist,

and dropping into the waters

to stir them,

and loose the whole creation?

I may.  Only because

I have been told, as you have been,

that it was so in the beginning.

And because, like you,

I have been allowed to imagine

what that Word sounds like,

what it looks like,

how it’s spelled.

I have, in fact, been invited

to try to spell it myself;

to live every day

perfecting my penmanship

so that I can write the Word

in my own life;

pronouncing it in the mirror,

so that I can master its vowels,

and include all its consonants.

And so have you.

To do this would mean to shape every day

of our lives by the contours of this Word:

faith, hope, love,

there may be others,

but these three abide,

enough for us to try to wrangle,

especially the greatest of them.

May I sing of this Word

in a long and melismatic melody,

worthy of the Word?

May I stretch out my song

as the Word reached out

the long arms of its letters

through every aeon of time?

May I delight to shout

the Good News

that I myself have encountered this Word

in the fold of my family,

around my own dinner table,

on a mountain in the northwest,

in disc of bread and a sip of wine,

and on the way to Santiago,

to name a few places?

I may.  Only because

if I did not the stones themselves

would cry out,

as these carved ones have been trained to do.

And once you have trained a stone,

it is very, very good

at doing what you have trained it to do,

over and over.

But I rejoice

that though I am less steadfast

than the stones,

I have more modes to sing in

than they do.

And so do you.

I can sing of the stars,

I can sing of the angels,

I can sing of the shepherds,

I can sing of Mary and of Joseph,

I can sing of the inn-keeper, if I want,

and make them all syllables of the Word.

For they all help to spell out the Word,

and the mystery

of how the Word became flesh

and dwelt among us.

I can sing of the beginning

of all things,

and of what was

before the beginning,

wound tight in a tiny ball of string theory,

or less.

I can sing, because

in the beginning,

when the Word echoed across the waters,

the blessed Son of God held all things

in the space of his infant hand, or less;

even you and me.

And when the mist rang out

with the “let there be”s,

the Spirit’s mighty wings

towing them across the waters,

the Word flung open its tiny hand,

unleashing the forces of creation,

and lit the stars, so they could shine

with awesome candle-power.

And more amazing than the trick

of lighting up the sky with stars was this:

he made the likes of you and me.

And for a long time,

it was as though we were failed stars,

flung out, but crashed and burned,

on this one planet;

so much unrealized potential.

And sometimes it still feels this way:

like we are lumps of primordial carbon

that never bust into starlight.

There is still so much darkness,

that feels like the darkness that must have surrounded the un-lit stars,

like deep caverns

where they may have been stored

before being cast aloft.

In our deep caverns of darkness

there is the sound of gunfire,

there are slogans of ethnic hatred,

there is hunger in a land of plenty,

there are schools that could be built,

but no one who is willing to build them,

there are addictions

of the most exotic and mundane varieties,

there is a narrow pride

that would rather be self-righteous than sorry,

and a thousand other shades of black

that makes for such alluring darkness.

Have we lived long enough

in the darkness?

Have our eyes become so accustomed to it

that we did not notice the Light shining

in the darkness,

and that the darkness has not overcome it?

To us, in our darkness,

was sent the Word made flesh,

spoken with the soft gurgles of an infant,

written in the pinks and baby blues

of a nursery,

armored with nothing

but the soft skin,

as soft as any other baby’s bottom.

And all we have to do

is receive him;

is believe on his Name,

and in return we are given power

by the one who lit the un-lit stars in heaven:

power to become

the un-gendered sons of God.

In the beginning the stars were not yet shining.

And the Word had been spoken,

but was, as yet, un-born.

But now the stars are brightly shining,

and the Word is made flesh

and dwells among us.

And if we attend, if we listen, and pray

we can behold his glory,

we can know his grace, his truth;

from his fullness we can all receive

grace upon grace…

…and we can hardly know what that means,

until we open our mouths

with the stars of the morning,

and all the sons of heaven,

and sing!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

27 December 2009

Saint Mark’s, Philadelphia



God's flesh

I do not think that it is too much of an overstatement to say that of the truths that the Church teaches, the Incarnation (God taking on flesh and human nature), is the most radical and the sticking point for most.  Oh, there are other concepts that are difficult: the Trinity, the Resurrection, Heaven, the real presence of Christ in bread and wine, those are all complicated and hard to understand, but the Incarnation is the most radical, the hardest somehow to understand and to accept.

Certainly the Incarnation was the hardest for the peoples of the Ancient Near East to understand: they were used to the plethora of mythic cults, to the Pantheon of the Greco-Roman gods, to the religious foibles of odd groups and cultures, but God becoming flesh?  Gods and goddesses might walk around looking like humans, or dallying with them, or deceiving them, but that the gods should become human seemed to them ridiculous: why would one give up omnipotence or power to live a human life?  Flesh and matter were base, lower than the spiritual and ethereal.

The Church through the ages has struggled with the same conception of the material as base, and because of that has not been quite comfortable with God’s flesh.  Often, in theology and in art, the sense is of an effort to contain and limit the radicalness of Christ’s flesh.  Jesus, while grudgingly human, is still other than human: he is too beautiful, or too formal, or too much like a human light bulb.  He is not really like us, how could he be?  He is human we say with our lips, but our doubt or discomfort is revealed in the images that we make of him or the way that we talk about him.

The long and the short of this discomfort with matter is that we, in our own culture, don’t have a much better relationship with bodies and flesh.  Certainly there is little that I can think of in our culture that is more complex, more heavily charged than bodies and flesh.  We worship the image of the beautiful body, made present to us in the celluloid of movie starts and super athletes.  We live in a culture that idealizes, or at least objectifies the perfect and naked body, and yet few of us are close to the standards we are bombarded with every day.  We are a culture enmeshed in some of the strangest interactions with flesh imaginable.  Just think about our relationship with food, or with sexuality, or with exercise or with health care.  And for all of this obsession with flesh, we are a culture and a people vastly uncomfortable within our own skins.

Is there indeed anything closer to us, and yet more alien than our flesh?  Our flesh can seem so natural that we can forget that we live in it, and we can also feel entirely not at home in our own skin, and horribly trapped.  And why would God choose that?  Why would God choose to suffer flesh, and suffer all that comes with flesh: weakness, sickness, aging and death.  Why would God suffer himself to suffer puberty or middle school gym class, for heaven’s sake?

Not only does the Incarnation not make sense, it is as the people in the ancient Near East saw, radically offensive, radically iconoclastic.  It is, in many ways the most lunatic, the most offensive of all the claims that the Church makes about Jesus – that God himself lived among us – that the frailty of our bodies and our inability to escape the flesh – was shared by God.

For we are indeed fleshly beings.  For all the efforts of our minds to feel removed from flesh, for all the illusions of eternity and survival, all the defenses that we erect to defend us from our frailty, our mortality, our aging, and our raw and latent physicality, all of that is mere illusion.  We live now at the whim of a phenomenally complicated system of muscles, blood vessels, bones, and fluids that often surprises not by its occasional failure, but by the fact that more doesn’t go wrong more often.

If you are like me, and feel the strangeness of this flesh that I live in, you might feel the wrongness of God experiencing what we do.  It is too base, too vulgar, too intimate that God should feel this bounded and this limitation that we feel.

There is, in the claim of the Incarnation, a radical discomfort, a breathless immediacy, a suffocating closeness.  And I, at least, am not sure that I like that closeness!  God should be in his heaven, and all well on earth; I would prefer the Divine to remain at a distance, the Holy of Holies to remain veiled: I want God to remain both holy and wholly other.  I do not want to think about God knowing the experience of flesh, or eating, or sleeping or being sick.

But if the Word became flesh, no longer is there any distance between the heavens and the earth.  If God has become flesh there will be little relief from the immediacy of the experience of God with us in the flesh.

Which means that the Incarnation is radical indeed: the Incarnation is like an avalanche, cascading down the mountain and changing everything in its path.  If God has taken flesh, that says something about all flesh.  If God has lived a human life, that says a great deal about the seemingly inane parts of human life.  If God has walked among us as matter, that says a great deal about the material world around us.

In the Incarnation God glorifies the world.  First, God glories in our flesh, because he has taken on our flesh.  Then he glories in the things of the world that sustain our flesh: this fish, this bread, this wine, have fed the God of heaven, and thus are blessed.  And then he glories in all matter: blessed be the fields that grew the grain he’s eaten, blessed be the waters that held the fish that he has caught, blessed be the air that he has breathed and the dust that he has tramped in, blessed be the stars and planets and the atoms and quarks in their dancing, blessed be all.

The Incarnation makes of our flesh, our lives and of this world a sacrament, for God glories in the material.  Matter is not base, for God has grown up here, walked here, slept here, eaten here, laughed here and died here.  Whatever our culture might say, whatever some people of faith might say our flesh in not lesser, not incidental, not base.  For the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and made of our flesh and of our world and immeasurable glory.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

Christmas Day 2009

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia

A Christmas Puppy

This Christmas, there are four additional feet in my house.  Well, there are four additional paws, to be precise.  Just before Thanksgiving I brought a new, eight-week old Yellow Labrador puppy into my house, to add to the seven and a half year-old Lab, Baxter, that I got when I first moved to Philadelphia.  Ozzie, now three months old, is cute as the Dickens: think of the Cottonelle commercial, or the cover of the LL Bean catalog, think Marley, and you will get the idea.  His ears flop around, and he has a little, black button nose, expressive, sad-ish eyes, and he is just now starting to lose his puppy breath.

I had forgotten how much work a puppy is.  I forgot that it would be a couple of weeks before he could sleep through the night without having to go outside.  I forgot that puppies interact with the world using their mouths, and have to chew or lick or otherwise taste everything.  I forgot how sharp a puppy’s teeth are!  I forgot how much puppies enjoy shredding paper, or the fringe of a carpet.  I forgot how tasty every single pair of shoes is, socks, too.  I forgot how high a puppy can jump and how fast he can run on his little legs.

And I forgot that a puppy always has to pee.  I forgot how important it is to control the water input, so you can try to control the output.  But my puppy, Ozzie, loves to slurp up the water in his dish, and thinks nothing of letting go any time, any place, in any posture.  He has left a little puddle behind him while standing, sitting , and lying down – which seems so wrong to me.  But what can you do?

Walking with Ozzie on a leash requires constant corrections – mostly to keep him from grabbing Baxter’s leash in his mouth or nipping at Baxter’s ears as we walk.  Ozzie is interested in every book on my coffee table and every plant in the garden.  He has developed a taste for snow, and loves to walk through Rittenhouse Sqaure helping himself to mouthfulls of snow in different patches.  He likes to remove the bedding from his crate, dragging it out into the room, when given the freedom to come and go.  He cannot be fed in the same room as Baxter, because he will eat Baxter’s food.  Ditto, the cat’s food.

And did I mention how sharp his teeth are?  They have been into every part of me, from my ankles to my nose.

I had gotten used to having an older dog around.  I vaguely remember that Baxter may have behaved in some of these ways, but he has become a very good dog.  His only short-coming is that he will find and devour any food within his grasp that is left unattended.  But other than that he is completely trustworthy, loyal, friendly, and loving.  He generally comes when he is called.  His teeth never sink into anything but his food.  And it has been a long, long, long time since he had an accident in the house.

Baxter is a wonderful dog - not without his problems since he is afflicted with both epilepsy and Addison’s Disease, both of which we treat with medication – but still, he is a dog that requires relatively little of me except that I feed him and take him out for romps, and let him sleep on the bed next to me.  He doesn’t need to be at the center of attention all the time.  He is happy to be a part of the background of every day and every night, and now and then to come to the fore, especially if food is involved.

As the snow fell last weekend, and as Christmas came, it has been very picturesque to have a handsome Labrador puppy around, and his older adopted brother.  It’s given me pause to think of my sister, who is raising twin boys, now four and a half.  How does she do it?  I have no idea!  But she does.  And you have done it, too, most likely.  We manage to raise our puppies and our children – demanding though they may be.  And we celebrate Christmas with them, (if we are lucky, in the snow!)  And we are greeted every year with images of the baby Jesus, tender and mild.  Isn’t that nice?

And it is hard for us to imagine that this baby Jesus requires anything of us.  Hard to imagine that the baby Jesus needs us half as much as my puppy needs me.  After all, Jesus has been around a long time – a lot longer than Baxter, for instance.  We have gotten used to Jesus being in the background of our lives: sometimes as a name to take in vain, sometimes as the inspiration for various kinds of freaks, sometimes at the heart of some extreme religion, sometimes as a source of confusion, and sometimes as the butt of jokes.  We can hardly imagine that Jesus requires very much of us at all, except perhaps to show up at church once and a while.

Speaking for myself (and I am a priest, if you hadn’t noticed), I can only say that it is sometimes hard to imagine that Jesus would require of me as much as my puppy does: the constant attention, waking up in the middle of the night, planning my days around his needs, his habits, his growing up.  But to say that is quite a thing, isn’t it?  To imagine that Jesus requires less of me or of you than a puppy does?  And does it help us see just how backwards we often get it?

Of course Jesus must require something more of me and of you, if we really want to be his people, than my puppy requires of me.  More attention, more devotion, more sacrifice, more waking up in the middle of the night.  And this is where the choice to live a Christian life becomes difficult.  Do we want to get into a relationship with this child Jesus, who will demand so much of us?

The other day I was walking down the street with both dogs on leashes.  Baxter has a red collar and leash, and Ozzie wears blue.  I must have been struggling a bit to keep the little one under control.  And a man looked at me and the dogs quizzically as he passed, and said to me, “That’s why I don’t want a dog!”

To which I replied, “But this is precisely why you should want a dog!”  Because the secret that parents and dog-owners alike know, is that, on balance, it is worth it.  That the joy of allowing a puppy, or better yet, a child, into your life far outweighs the burden of rearing it.

And this is also a secret of the Christian life: that the joy of allowing this demanding child Jesus into our lives far outweighs the burden of letting him grow up in our lives, of discovering how demanding he is.

Mary must have found this out.  Who was ever more burdened by a child than the mother whose child was announced by an angel as Emmanuel, God with us, the Son of God?  What did she think as he grew up, as demanding as any other child?  How did she scold him, with her secret knowledge?  And how did her own life change, as she carried the burden of having said Yes to Gabriel?  All we know is that she did.  And that when the day came that found him nailed to the Cross, she was still there for him, her care among his last concerns.

Every year in December, we are reminded that God asked Mary to say Yes to the child in her life.  And we come together, in the snow if we are lucky, to remember this holy birth, the silent night, the manger, and the angels.  And then as the months roll by, we so easily let Jesus fade into the background of our lives, even more quickly than a puppy grows up and becomes a dog, who is easily left alone for many hours, who is content to be fed, and to steal the occasional roast left out on the counter, (Baxter doesn’t do things by halves, he steals the whole thing), who never has accidents in the house, and becomes as comfortable and easy a part of the background of our lives as can be.  But let a puppy in your life, to paraphrase Henry Higgins, and your serenity is through.

And let this baby Jesus into your life - who, for the moment, no crying he makes, but who is sure to awaken at any moment, ask any mother – and your life will not be the same either.  You may think of letting Jesus into your life – really letting him in - in much the same way that man thought of having a dog when he saw me trying to walk the two of mine at the same time – a nuisance or an inconvenience, or just too demanding.  But this is to miss the point.  It is to fail to see the joy that comes from living not for yourself but for others.  It is to miss the heart-pounding love that would lay down its life for its child, its friend.  It is to be blind to the hope that comes from discovering that what was a struggle yesterday seems a little bit easier today.  And it is to be cut off from the freedom that only comes through the service of God and his people.

It’s very common, I think, to wish that puppies would stay cute and cuddly for ever.  But that would come with a high price that would involve, in my house, a lot of paper towels, among other things.  Better to let the puppy grow up and learn and become a dog.  And I suppose we might wish for a faith that is like Christmas all year long – a kind of Narnia where the snow is always on the ground – and Jesus is always a good little baby, being taken care of by his mother, with nothing required of us.

But the message of the Christmas angels to come and behold him is not intended to stop there, at the window, looking in.  We are meant to welcome the child Jesus into our whole lives, every day, every hour.

Every year after Christmas, animal shelters experience a rush of abandoned dogs, who seemed like such cute Christmas presents when they were fluffy puppies with red bows on their necks.  Often there is a noticeable increase of a particular breed, because of a holiday film.  Last year it was Yellow Labradors, dumped at shelters because it turns out that, in fact, they are at least as much trouble as Marley.

It’s frankly even easier to dump Jesus after Christmas, to decide that he is simply too much trouble to keep in your life.

And, in fact, it’s true, if you keep Jesus around in your life you will find that he is very demanding.  But you will find something else, the more you give yourself over to his demands.  You find that he teaches you to love, that he opens your heart with a spirit of generosity and gratitude.  You find that life is different, better, richer, fuller because you let him in even when you thought you had no room and you had shut the door like a certain inn-keeper we all know about.

Many of us know that this is true of puppies, when we make room for them in our already busy lives, that it is worth it because of the joy and companionship they bring into our lives.   And if finding room for a puppy in your heart, and giving him room to grow can change your life, just imagine what happens when you let the baby Jesus in at Christmas – the Son of God, the Prince of Peace - and ask him to stay, and to grow up in your life, in your heart, and teach you to love

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Christmas Eve 2009

Saint Mark’s Church



Winnowing

A year or so ago, our roofer, John, was finishing up the many months of work he and his crew put in to re-build the gutters that are integral to the roof and walls of this church.  I can tell you, within the secure confines of this service, that the gutters are made of copper – a temptation to thieves, since it has a high resale value.  And to any thieves out there plotting, I can tell you that the gutters are built into the masonry of the church, not just attached to the outside of the building, and, therefore, more or less impossible to steal.

It had never occurred to me that a roofer was a craftsman until I saw John’s work.  I went up onto the scaffolding with him to see how the seams of copper are soldered together.  The copper was new and gleaming, bent into long, shallow, sloping pans, the seams carefully zipped with long, rippled lines of solder.  It is beautiful work and I was amazed to see how lovely a gutter could be.

I was also amazed at the tools John and his men used.  To me, a soldering iron was something from Heathkit or Sears that looked like a miniature curling iron, or an over-heated WaterPik, or an electric meat thermometer.   But John’s tools have no electric cords.  His irons are old ones: smooth, rounded wooden handles, each with a metal shaft leading to a triangular working-end.  These irons are placed in little propane-fired ovens or furnaces that the roofers have on their scaffolding, and heated up to a red glow before being applied to the flux and the solder to make a water-tight seam. 

Up there on the roof with me, John took out one of his irons and held it loosely in his hand, and told me about the man who had owned it before he had, from whom John had learned his craft.  Had it been owned by someone else before that?  I don’t remember.  Was it his father, I don’t think so, but maybe.  The details hardly mattered, it was astonishing to me to discover that these roofers were practicing a craft with old tools, like the ones probably used when Saint Mark’s was built: tools that had been handed down over at least two generations, maybe more.  These kinds of tools you will not find at Home Depot.  And this iron - simple, inelegant, well-used, that really seems to be little more than a glorified ice pick, and which, no doubt, is deeply ineffective in the wrong hands, and which I’m sure could be used to dig holes, or break windows, or in all kinds of inappropriate and damaging ways – was, in the right hands, a thing of a certain beauty.

I’ve asked you to consider this tool, used right here at Saint Mark’s, by a person known to any number of us, and for the benefit of everyone sitting here today, because in today’s Gospel reading we hear John the Baptist talking about one of the tools that Jesus uses.  It is not a hammer or a chisel or any of a carpenter’s tools that we might expect Jesus to have been given by his own adoptive father, Joseph.  In fact it is a tool that Jesus may never actually have picked up in his hands.  But it is a tool that, I am told, would have been well known in his day: the winnowing fork.  This over-sized wooden pitchfork was used to heave lumps of wheat into the air to let the wind carry off the lighter chaff, as the heavy grain fell to the threshing floor. 

Few metaphors have as much staying power as the one of separating the wheat from the chaff, the nourishing from the inedible and indigestible, the good from the bad, the useful from the useless.  And it is that metaphor that John the Baptist uses to describe the impending ministry of Jesus: His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.  He might as well have said that there are two kinds of people in this world – the good and the bad, those who will be blessed and those who will be cursed, for that is the effect of what he seems to be saying.

Now, most of us probably do think it is a good idea to separate the wheat from the chaff.  We expect it to happen in schools, once our kids get out of kindergarten.  We learn about it as children, when dodge-ball teams are chosen and someone has to be left standing there, last to be picked.  Application processes to schools, colleges, and jobs, have the effect, it often feels, of separating the wheat from the chaff.  Most of us don’t mind having the wheat separated from the chaff – as long as we and our kids end up with the wheat!  We expect this winnowing to be a part of the many complex processes of our complicated society, and we put up with it, even if we don’t like it; we learn to play the game, because we know how important it is in life to end up with the wheat and not with the chaff.  So we can tolerate this almost anywhere, from almost anyone – but not from Jesus!

I submit that most of us do not like the idea of Jesus with his winnowing fork separating the wheat from the chaff.  And we certainly detest the notion that the chaff will be burned with unquenchable fire!  How judgmental it sounds!

Anciently the church taught people to sing to Jesus, “We believe that thou shalt come to be our judge.”  But these words don’t trip lightly from our lips anymore.  We can accept the idea that Jesus is our savior – on our better (or worse) days – but not so much that he will be our judge.  As if Christian teaching weren’t passé enough, the idea of the Last Judgment may for some be the last straw.

Unpleasant though it may be for us, however, it is hard to escape the thread of judgment that runs throughout the New Testament, and it is impossible for us to unseat Jesus from his seat as judge – to displace him from his threshing floor.

I suspect we have such a hard time with Jesus as judge because in our own day justice seems far removed from truth; and honesty does not seem to be requisite, admired, or much sought after within our justice system.  And typically, we imagine that what is true on earth must also be true in heaven, as it were.

Add to this picture the blatant and appalling hypocrisy of the church on everything from bloodshed and war, to the amassing of wealth, to the rampant abuse of children by clergy, and outright lying about sexuality, and you can understand why current seekers-after-truth are less and less interested in hearing about judgment from people (especially men) ordained in Jesus’ name.

Who has any moral authority in our world to call anyone else to account?  When even Tiger Woods is guilty of the tawdriest sins, who else is left?

In the moral landscape of our own age we have become dis-inclined to consider our own sins, to accept our own responsibility – individually or in any corporate sense – for failings.  Self-examination is avoided or carried out beyond the limits of judgment, so that no one should be given cause to feel bad about themselves.

What can Jesus possibly do for us with his winnowing fork in his hand?  What use is he making judgments that no one asked for and for which we suspect he has no real enforcement mechanism beyond these threats of eternal fire?  And what difference does it make if most of the world refuses to show up to the threshing floor anyway?

The assumption behind these skepticisms is that Jesus is as inept with a winnowing fork as you and I would be – that his judgment would look something like yours or mine would.  And this assumption is as foolish as the idea that our roofer John’s aptitude with a soldering iron is more or less the same as yours or mine.  When, in fact, the tool isn’t even the same as we imagined it to be.

I don’t know what Jesus’ winnowing fork looks like, but I suspect that it is an instrument of infinitely greater finesse than the wooden-tined forks I find pictures of on the Internet.  And it takes me not more than a second to see the foolishness in supposing that Jesus’ judgment is anything like mine, since I am often enough impulsive, arrogant, and foolish, but he is always patient, powerful, and wise.

From time to time, I feel the tug of justice like an invisible and insistent undertow, in a sea that pretends it is not there.  As more American soldiers are sent to fight a dubious war, I feel it.  As the bonuses are handed out at Goldman Sachs, I detect it.  When I review the statistics of schools in our city and notice the racial makeup of those who are least well served, I notice it.  As the debate about health care drones on, driven by many forces that seem to have little to do with the health and well-being of actual people, I feel it.  When I see the church deeply enmeshed in legal battles but less involved with the lives of the poor and the needy, I wonder about it.

Justice, like truth, seems to stumble in the public square, as the prophets warn.

But this is not just a matter of current affairs, it is also a question of individual lives.  People make choices.  You and I do things that we shouldn’t, and we know better.  Even if we don’t set out to hurt people – though sometimes we do – we have learned patterns of behavior that often come at someone else’s expense.  Often, we couldn’t even pass the simple tests set by Jesus in the Gospel today:

Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none, and whoever has food must do likewise.  A simple enough rule to follow.

How well would the details of our lives and relationships stand up to a closer scrutiny?

And somewhere on his threshing floor stands Jesus.  His winnowing fork is in his hand.  He is interested in separating the wheat from the chaff.  And the mistake we make when we see him there is that we suspect that he would go about this project in more or less the same way we would.  And we suspect that he is more interested in the chaff than the wheat, because we would be.  But of course this is wrong, as it would be for any thresher.  Jesus is really only interested in the wheat.  And there is no reason to believe that he is not immensely more adept at judgment than we would be.

And I believe that his winnowing fork is much more delicate than any we could imagine.  I suspect its tines are soft and supple not stiff and sharp.  And I have supposed that Jesus’ winnowing fork has the power to transform chaff into wheat, making his harvest a greater, more plentiful one than any farmer’s. 

The winnowing fork in Jesus’ hand, is a tool that can accomplish more than we ever knew.  What can his judgment possibly be like?

The bishop I once worked for used to tell a story that suggested a possibility that is the best I have ever heard of how Jesus’ judgment might work.

The bishop is Australian, but was educated in England at Cambridge.  He loves art and flowers and music, and to travel, and a decent glass of wine.  And he once told about a trip to Paris when he visited the Louvre and made his way through the many corridors of that museum to the place where the Mona Lisa hung, with her ambiguous smile.

The usual crowd of people was milling about in front of the painting.  My friend, the bishop, was trying just to drink it in.  And he overheard two women speaking in accents, he reports, that could only have been American. As they paused briefly in front of the masterpiece, one woman said to the other with unmistakable disappointment, “It’s much smaller than I thought it would be.”  And then they quickly moved on to find, I suppose, winged victory and be disappointed that her head has not been replaced.

In that moment in front of the painting, though, my bishop suggested, judgment was made.  The American tourists made theirs about the painting.  And silently, without so much as a twitch of her famous lips, the Mona Lisa made a judgment of those tourists, whose only assessment was disappointment at how small she was.

Perhaps Jesus’ judgment is like that.  Perhaps as we wander through the corridors of our lives making decisions, pronouncements, doing whatever it is we do, Jesus judges us silently, stilly, and certainly, his winnowing fork in his hand, barely ever raised, and able to make a far better end of the business of separating the wheat from the chaff than you or I could imagine, perhaps even better than we deserve.

Or maybe Jesus long ago set down his winnowing fork at his feet – outside the frame of our vision.  And maybe he sits on his throne, hands clasped calmly in front of him, an ambiguous, mysterious smile on his lips, watching as you and I go about our daily business, making the choices we make, living the lives we live, keeping our second coat or giving it away.

Maybe judgment is made every day as we dismiss the magnificent and the beautiful in favor of the immediate and the cheap, the too-big in favor of the disappointingly smaller-than-we-imagined.

And maybe Jesus is smiling with an even more mysterious smile than Mona Lisa, since he knows the truth, winnowing fork or not: there are not two kinds of people in this world; there is only one kind of people in this world – the kind that Jesus loves.  And he wills with all the power of his sacred heart – pierced by those he came to save – that we should stand before him, and love him too.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

13 December 2009

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia



Prophetic voices

One of the certainties of human life is that we need to be reminded, again and again of the truths we know.  They are not inscribed forever, once we first learn them, but we need to be reminded and recalled to their truths again and again as we travel through our lives.

What is true for people is true also for communities.  Speaking truths once is not enough, but we need to repeat them again and again, until over the years they become part of the knowledge of our individual and communal hearts.  That is the purpose of liturgy – to slowly inscribe the grammar of the Scriptures and the story of God’s redemption into our minds and lives, like water dripping onto our stony hearts and slowly wearing away the sharpnesses.

The Scriptures are full of the stories that need to be heard again and again: God’s longing and call to us, our human nature which flees God’s presence and constantly erects idols to stand between us and that loving and intrusive gaze.

Day in, day out, week in, week out, we read the Scriptures to remind ourselves again and again of those stories.  God’s covenant with Abraham and Sarah, God’s salvation through famine, exile, law-giving, wandering in the wilderness, through judges, kings and Diaspora.

There are times, in the year, when we read again some of the most distinctive voices of the Scriptures, the prophets, and Advent is one of those times.

I always like to think of the prophets as the caregivers and therapists in our lives.  They are at the same time comforting and challenging, they are full of judgment and full of compassion.  They point out to us our foibles and blindnesses, and knock over the defenses we have labored to build so that the grammar of God has someplace to sink in.  And when they have broken through the haze of self-deception and egotism, when they have aired our dirty laundry and raised up before us the poor and disposed, and brought home to us the ways that we have ignored God and loved only ourselves, when they have done that, they comfort us.  They speak words of the coming salvation, of the Messiah, the Savior of Israel, who will bring both God’s judgment and God’s salvation to fruition.

God’s judgment and God’s redemption, go hand in hand, the abrasive voices of the prophets teach us:

The main problem, of course, is that we don’t like to talk or think about God’s judgment.  Too often, we have heard from churches, from pastors or priests, from parents or from slightly crazy folk on street corners the story of God’s judgment.  We have heard that God is an angry God, a God who is waiting to tick off our sins on the list which reads “Naughty and Nice” and decide where we are going.  More often than not, we feel as if we are going the wrong direction, and we fear that God’s vengefulness, God’s judgment is waiting to spring, front-loaded against us, and only the super-spiritual, the über-elect, the crème de la crème of the most spiritual will make the cut.  Life is a cosmic game of “Survivor” and every day, every hour someone is getting voted off the island.  God is simple, God is myopic; an angry, vengeful God who is both capricious and horribly predictable.

But the prophets really tell us a far different story.  They tell us that we are foolish, human people.  They remind us that we can just never seem to get ourselves together.  They speak to us of our complacency, of our comfort, of our blandness and our duplicity, in the face of human suffering and the demands of the divine.  They lift a mirror before our faces, and the image that we get back is not as pretty, or as sympathetic as we might like.

The words of the prophets are not fundamentally comfortable words to hear.  They are constantly restless, always probing, words that fester and disturb.  The prophets are like loose teeth that you want to worry with your tongue, or a scab that you want to pick.  They are never settled, always questioning; when you feel home, watch out.

But the prophets are not simply about judgment. Because there are moments when their tone changes, and they can tell that we need not curmudgeon rebuke, but comfort and hope.  We need not simply the possibility of God’s redemption if we straighten ourselves out, and return to God again, but the story beyond the story, the narrative beyond that of God’s anger, the hope of God’s astonishing redemption, whatever our state.

The message of the prophets is both judgment and redemption, and so we are told also about God’s love beyond measure, God’s perpetual forgiveness, the  restoration of God’s chosen people, and the Messiah, long expected who is coming.

And we need both.  We cannot hear about grace without brokenness, sin without redemption; either one or the other, without a myopic vision.  Sin and grace, judgment and redemption, they go hand in hand.  Cheap grace, cheap judgment, both are, in the end, simply cheap.  Either is too little, too late.  Only when we hear both voices is the fully dimensional vision of God apparent.

For God is not myopic.  God is three-dimensional, multi-dimensional, all-dimensional.  God knows both our foolishness and sinfulness, and our hopefulness and our hopelessness, which run full of complexity, in the course of our lives, and the prophets are the stereoscopic vision, the stereo sound of God’s constant unwillingness to let us settle into ennui, and God’s constant unwillingness to let us settle into damnation.  No complacently is too deep to avoid God’s disturbing, and no sin too dark to avoid his redemption.

Yesterday, with the prophets filling my mind, the news flashed around the world that the Diocese of Los Angeles, in electing two suffragon bishops, had elected a woman in a committed same-sex relationship.  Which means that the fighting and rhetoric of 2003 will be brought up again, with the added energy of the debate over women’s ordination. And Anglican Communion will once again teeter on the brink of falling apart, and attempt to decide whether to impale itself on the horn of civility and simply not talking too much, or on the horn of radical justice and inclusion.

And although I have some pretty clear thoughts about full inclusion of women and gay persons in the life of the church, my first thought was one of fear and exhaustion.  Really? Right now at this tension-filled moment?  Really? We are going to spend all this time and energy fighting about this, while poverty, violence, abuse, and disease, run rampant in our streets and around the world?  Really?  With the church shrinking and struggling and with parishes closing, we are going to fight about this?  Really?  After we, hope against hope, managed to preserve a sort of separate peace in the Anglican Communion?  And filled with thoughts of the prophets I thought “Would that there were prophets in our day who could wake us out of our smugness and comfort us in our brokenness!  Would that there were prophets who could treat on this…”

But we have heard the prophets from beginning to end: angry Jeremiah, fearful Jonah, Job, Amos, Micah, all of them, masterful Isaiah, even down to John the Baptist in the Gospel this morning, channeling Isaiah: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”

We have no need of a modern day prophet to harangue us, because we have heard the words of the prophets, and they are still challenging and comforting, for the conundrum that the Episcopal Church finds herself in, and for each and every day of our lives.  We have heard the prophets, and while their message of judgment and redemption are not about the Diocese of Los Angeles, or the Anglican Communion, still they ring out as true and full of challenge and comfort to us.  For this time in the church, the prophets say: There is no smug certainty or complacency, on either the left or the right of this current debate which God will not break us out of, and there is no sin, no rhetoric of anger or hatred, no schism, beyond God’s loving redemption.

And for the other days of our lives they say “Repent your sinfulness, and return again to the Lord.  For the moment is coming when all shall see the salvation of our God.”  We have no need of a modern day prophet to harangue us, because that Word pointed to, and prefigured in the prophets has come among us.  He has come into our lives and hearts with the same message of repentance and salvation that the prophets teach us.  He speaks and says to us:

There is no smugness or arrogance or certainty or complacency that God will not disturb us out of, through the Scriptures and through the circumstances of our lives, and there is no darkness, no isolation, no sinfulness, no living hell beyond the salvation of our God.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

6 December 2009

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Heads Up!

Now when these things begin to take place, stand up, raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.  (Luke 21:28)

Our space agency, NASA, is at pains to reassure us – if we happen to consult with them – that the world will not end in three years’ time, as several strains of popular thinking assert.  NASA has produced lengthy articles and fact sheets to refute the various theories that set the date for cataclysm on the earth to December 21, 2012, when a particularly long page of an ancient Mayan calendar will be turned.  The Internet has provided a warm incubator for the kinds of minds that learn a little about an ancient culture’s time-keeping, pair it with ill-informed astronomy, and conjure up visions of the end of the world.

NASA doesn’t come right out and say that anyone who believes these predictions is a fool, or that those who make them are kooks.  But that is clearly the underlying message the agency is out to convey.

Many things will happen in 2012.  There will be a total solar eclipse, visible from Australia.  The summer Olympics will be held in London.  Portugal will switch to digital television broadcasting in High Definition.  Queen Elizabeth II will celebrate her Diamond Jubilee.  But no planet or asteroid will collide with the earth.  Nor will the earth begin to rotate on a different axis than it currently does.  A black hole is not likely to devour our solar system that year, or ever, so far as we can predict.

But, as if Jesus doesn’t already strike much of the world as something of a kook, today, on the Sunday we begin the new church year, we hear him making the kinds of predictions that would cause NASA to classify him as such.  Perhaps we would too: There will be signs in the sun and the moon and the stars, he says.  There will be distress among the nations, who will be confused by the roaring of the waves of the sea.  The powers of heaven will be shaken.  And the Son of Man will be coming on a cloud.

Is this helpful?  So often, Jesus has good things to say: the Beatitudes, those are nice; and the Summary of the Law, that you should love God and your neighbor; the parable of the Good Samaritan was a good one.  And today it feels like he ruins all that good stuff with this kookiness about signs and the stars, and the Son of man coming on a cloud, which I would venture to say hardly a single person in this church this morning believes.

So why does Jesus say it?  And why do we keep reading it, if it is just a bunch of kookiness that NASA would refute if only it wouldn’t cause trouble with the religious right?

I think we read it because of this:  Now, when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.  And because Jesus has more wisdom than we often give him credit for.

Kooky predictions aside, our world and our individual lives are full of calamity, horror and pain.  We may or may not faint from it, but there is plenty of fear and foreboding available to us all, and some of us are more susceptible to it than others. 

Jesus knows that in life, pain and calamity and horror are coming – thus has it always been.  Pain and calamity and horror are part of his life, too.  He knows.  He knows not only about the widows and the orphans, but also the refugees, and those who languish in prisons.  He knows about everyone who is losing a house to foreclosure; everyone who is out of work and looking for a job; and everyone who is being buried alive by their own personal debt.  He knows about the child soldiers in Africa, and child prostitutes on too many continents.  He knows about the soldier returning from Afghanistan with a missing limb; the veteran struggling with PTSD, and the parent who has nothing left of her child but the flag that draped his casket.  Jesus hears every difficult conversation when the results of the biopsy are finally in; he knows the face of every child who has been beaten or abused, and he must surely know the name of every child molested by a priest.  He knows of broken marriages, and those that hang on by the barest of threads.  He knows the slow-motion grief of Alzheimer’s, and the split-second horror of gunfire in a school or on the streets.  He knows the families in New Orleans who are still trying to rebuild their homes and their city.  He alone knows the complex isolation of an autistic child; the lopsided survival after a stroke; and the secret suffering that leads to suicide.

What need have we of cosmic calamity?  There is already enough calamity, pain, and horror in the world to go around!  And what need have we of signs?  Another war – what more could it possibly tell us?  For what could we then be prepared that our current wars have ill-prepared us for?

But Jesus’ message is not a message of warning that calamity is about to befall us.  He knows that we have calamity enough.  And most likely, every one of Jesus’ predictions about wars and disasters could be shown to have come true already and will come true again.  Jesus’ predictions are not really predictions about things that may or may not happen in the world; his prediction is about us and what we are destined for, in a world that cannot escape calamity.  Jesus’ message is this: stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.

Your redemption.  Had you been counted as worthless by the world, or those you thought you needed, or by your own self?  Had you been left for dead, or at best for dying?  Had you been written off, or written your own self off?  Did you look out and see only darkness in your life or in the world?  Has hope become little more than a Hallmark slogan?  Love reduced to the sales-pitch of Subaru?  Is your head bowed down, and can you only see the dirt at your feet?  Be on guard! For the kingdom of God is at hand! 

Yes, we have been sick, foolish, beaten, ruined, lost, given up, left for dead.  Yes, the signs of bleakness are about, as they have been all these centuries.  Yes, calamity is very likely on the horizon, one way or another, pain is inevitable, and horror is reported in the news every day.  But even here, even now, the kingdom of God is at hand!

Stand up!  Raise your heads!  Your redemption is drawing near!

We live in a world that seems unable to look forward to anything other than its next paycheck, to aspire to nothing more than the Wall Street year-end bonus, a McMansion, or winning the lottery. 

Have we given up hoping that there might be something stronger than the dollar?  Have we forgotten that we might be redeemed?!  Have we forgotten that we might be delivered from all that fills us with fear and foreboding? Have we forgotten that there might be a new kingdom established right here in the midst of this subtle reign of often low-grade calamity, pain, and horror?

These days the church is often thought of as either a refuge for kooks or a place where you can find hours of uninterrupted silence in an empty, old building, because nothing else much is happening there.  But as the church begins a new year, we are reminded that there is more to being the people who follow Jesus than providing a quiet, dark, empty space.  There is this message to a downcast world; a world bowed down with the weight of so much calamity, pain and horror.  There is this word spoken to those who have been beaten, cheated, denied their dignity, given up hope, left for dead – which means it is a word for anyone at all: Now that these things have begun taking place, stand up!  Raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near!

The Son of Man is coming.  And if he is not yet riding a cloud with power and great glory, then he is at least coming to us again in a manger: a child, susceptible to every horror and pain and calamity the world can dish out…

…which makes him a perfect Savior for a world that has largely lost interest in being saved.

And we believe this is true because we have felt or seen or known – if only once or twice – the transformation of God’s love that comes from allowing his Son to ride into our hearts.  We have known the grace of forgiveness; the strength of holy food given for holy people; the solace at the grave; the hope at the font.  We have seen that a light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not, cannot, will not overcome it.  We have known what it is like to live life with our eyes cast down, with the dirt and the grime and the grave our only prospect; the dump our only horizon.  And then we heard his call:  Stand up!  Raise your heads!  Your redemption is drawing near!

…and we looked up, and he was there, his arms outstretched like an infant’s or a king’s, and he welcomed us, and redeemed us, and everything was made new!

I do not believe for one moment that disaster awaits us in 2012.  But I do believe that Jesus’ warnings of calamity and horror and pain await us almost every day, and somewhere they are fulfilled every day.

And I believe that there is only one hope for deliverance from living our lives imprisoned by such predictions that are bound to come true one way or another.

I believe it because I know, I think, what it is like to live bowed down by fear, anxiety, and sin.  But in the church I have heard the voice of the Son of Man, who calls out at our lowest moments, when the world and all its ills seems certain to prevail:

Stand up!  Raise your heads!  Your redemption is drawing near!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

29 November 2009

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Christ is King

Here we are, at the end of the Christian year, and every year before we begin the year again, on this last Sunday we celebrate that Christ is King of Kings and Lord of Lords.  He is the Omega of all, and here at the end of the year, Christ is King.  Next week we will start again, and begin to prepare ourselves for that little baby “slouching towards Bethlehem” to invert our world and our lives, but today we proclaim what is true, despite all evidence to the contrary – Christ rules as King, now and always.

I say “all evidence to the contrary,” because that is the truth of the matter.  In a world beset by war, violence, all manner of “-isms,” economic disparity and crisis, and genocide, it seems, most often as if Christ is not King.  How could Christ possibly be King, and the world still looks like this?  Indeed, isn't the state of the world the best evidence there is that Christ is not King?

At one of the darkest moments in my life, right after I had returned from the darkness and death of Ground Zero, someone was foolish enough assign me an Ash Wednesday sermon and what I preached that day has haunted me since: that Lent is the abiding reality of life, that although we go through liturgical seasons, and celebrate high feasts, our lives are lived in a kind of perpetual, everlasting Lent, in the dust and ashes of our lives.

Which is not untrue.  We do live in a kind of perpetual slide into the dark, trapped in our own rather messy lives and heads, with our bodies and our loved ones aging and dying, and in a world filled with darkness, fear and suffering.  But it is not the whole truth. 

The message of the Gospel is that we live between the times.  We live in times which look like everlasting lent, but the message of the Gospel, the unseen truth is that there is a glory waiting to be revealed to us: that Christ rules as King, and that however dark the world might be, however lost or hopeless we as people might be, yet still Christ reigns as King and that someday, God willing, we will get out to the place of the visible reign of God.

But Lord knows it is hard to live in that tension with one foot in lent and one foot in the reign of God already begun.  It is hard to live in the messiness of the world, wondering why the reign of God isn’t manifest.

I also find it hard.  I’ve been ruminating, for the past week on the past year.  A year ago I knelt here, just inside the chancel gates and was ordained to the priesthood, and yet ordination didn't perfect me, or bring me up out of that place of lent, not knowing or feeling the reign of God.

Ordination has not removed my angst about my ability as a priest, or taken away the pain and suffering in others which priesthood brings one into constant and perpetual contact with.  Not only is the world a dark place, and the life of the priest a constant vision and interaction with that darkness, but the lives of people are dark and messy, and I know this now, not just because I've interacted with people in dark and messy places for the past year, but because I know that I am a mess, that ordination doesn't make me anything other then the messy person that I was before, and yet still through it all Christ is King.

There is nothing quite like, day in, day out, going to the altar, dragging with you your own darkness and the darkness or pain of the conversation that you have just had.  The liturgy takes on, at times, a decidedly ironic tone: “Lift up your hearts,” and try to keep the ironic smile off your face, or even more poignant, “The Peace of God which passes understanding…”  Indeed it does, here in the Lenten twilight.

There was an old priest I knew who used to say that every time he went up to the altar an atheist and came down again a Christian, and there are days like that, when Lent takes hold.

But through it all, Christ is King.

Only when the grace of God is able to strike me hard enough to remind me of Christ’s Kingship, only then, when I can remember briefly that Christ is King do I know that somehow the messiness, both in the world and in all of us, and most of all in myself is not the eternal, everlasting Lent that it feels, but the moment of waiting for what is already true to be revealed.

Christ is King of my joys and sorrows, king of my failures and my successes, King of my good days, or more likely my bad ones, King no matter how much I fail to remember or just can't let him be.  So I will go up unto the altar of God, as I have done for a year now.  Despite feeling and knowing that I am a mess, unworthy. 

Michael Ramsey, a great archbishop of Canterbury in a complex and wonderful phrase once described ordination as a “walking sacrament”.  For priests journey through life, allowed into the lives of God’s people and as they go, they bless.  They bless and offer up to God the brokenness, the sadness, the messiness of the world around them.  And I wonder if part of that walking sacrament is the full knowledge that I too am broken, foolish, messy, one step from a train wreck.  Through the broken things of earth, God works, through water, bread, wine and human beings, even this foolish human being standing before you today, because Christ is King.

Because the Ancient of Days, the Alpha and Omega is also the broken Jesus, scourged, whipped, mocked, standing before Pilate, soon to be hung on a tree, and cognizant of the irony of the question about his kingship.  Because the crucified and dead Lord is King, because of that, the brokenness of the world and my own brokenness are as nothing. 

Because Christ is King, I can go up to the altar and stumble through my pastoral work.  Because Christ is King, I can go up to the altar and know that my brokenness and the brokenness of bread and wine, and the brokenness of the world are caught up, covered, restored, and redeemed, because Christ himself has been broken.

And through it all, Christ is King.  Through all the births and deaths, the meetings and pastoral counseling, through the Offices and the masses, when I'm feeling thankful or Lenten, or atheistic, through it all Christ is King.

For some day, we will get out into the vision of his reign.  Some day we will see no longer only in part, that glory which is yet hid from us.  Our Lent will be over and our tears turned to songs of joy.  And we will know that secret hid in the midst of our Lenten struggle: Christ is King and rules over all our times, Lenten or happy. 

Until the day when we can see his kingdom, reign on our altars and in our hearts, O King of Glory.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

22 November 2009

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

God is faithful

From time to time people ask me about my cat Leo, who was brought to me as a very small kitten, abandoned in the streets of Philadelphia.  He was maybe two months old, but he had already learned the lessons that seem to have shaped every aspect of his life.  In sum, those lessons are: trust no one, and be very afraid.

For most of his first months Leo hid under the window seat in my office, coming out only at night to eat and use his litter box.  I eventually transferred him upstairs to the third floor of the Rectory where for about two years he spent most of his time hidden behind a sofa, again coming out at night for food and the litter box.  Not long ago Leo decided that he prefers to hide under my bed.  This move does not represent a broadening of his world-view, merely a shift in choice of small, dark, protected places where he can crouch silently and safely, and wait for God knows what.

Leo’s life has always been complicated by the oppressive presence of Baxter the dog, who imagines that the small, black flash of fur he has seen a few times as he catches Leo unawares would be a delightful thing to play with.  The possibility of play seldom enters Leo’s mind.  The possibility that a large, yellow Labrador could be his friend is absurd in the extreme to him.  And so Leo continues to lead a confined existence of his own choosing: always hidden, crouching, frightened, wary, and mostly alone.

I feel guilty about this, because Leo is actually a very nice cat.  He does come out of hiding now and then when the coast is clear and Baxter is not around.  These days he brazenly emerges from under the bed at night, after Baxter, who I must confess to you sleeps on the bed, is asleep.  Leo comes over to my side of the bed and pokes his head up, asking to be stroked.  He purrs loudly, and in his more brazen moments he jumps up on the bed next to me, as if contemplating joining the larger society of our household.  But he quickly returns to the floor and begins his night roamings to the litter box and his food bowl, and, I have reason to suspect, around the few rooms of the Rectory that he feels bold enough to explore under the cover of night.

As I said, I feel guilty about Leo because by taking him in it was my intention to save him from a tragic existence, to give him a warm, safe, happy home where he could bask in the sunlight on windowsills during the day and chase mice at night.  I did not mean for him to live a life of fear, traumatized by a dog, who really wants nothing more than to play with him.  And I worry that what lies ahead for him is a lifetime of hiding, punctuated by short midnight sessions of purring beside the bed while the dog sleeps and I pet him.

Have I lived up to the promise I intended for Leo or have I sentenced him unwittingly to a life of fear and secrecy and mostly unhappiness?  Can Leo ever come confidently out of hiding as long as he must share the house not only with me, but with Baxter, his imagined arch-enemy?  If Leo could ask these questions himself, I wonder what he would conclude?  It is by no means clear to me that he would decide that I have done him any favors by bringing him into a house that is occupied by a large, furry, yellow monster.

Yes, Leo comes to me from time to time out of desperation, perhaps, for a little affection, a few moments of contact, but does he trust me?  Would he willingly put his life in my hands?  I meant to save him from what I suspected would be a hard life and probably an early and unhappy end.  Does he imagine that I have done so?

Lurking somewhere in human consciousness are questions like these that we harbor about God.  If the God who made us loves us, why has he set us in a world so full of hazard?  Why has he allowed us to become experts at war and death?  Why has he allowed so many to go hungry, homeless, and poor, leading meager, unhappy lives?  Why is there so much illness, such a vast menu of cancers to overtake lives that might otherwise be happy?  Why has he set us in a world occupied by all manner of monsters?

We heard today, from the Epistle to the Hebrews, one of the early Christian writers make the claim that “he who has promised is faithful.”  But if we are critical – and aren’t we? – we might stop to ask what exactly these promises are, and has God really been faithful to them?  Because sometimes it seems that our lives are patterned more closely along the lines of Leo’s confined existence than according to any divine plan.

As a teacher, Jesus acknowledged not only that times were hard in his own day, but that they would always be so in this world.  We heard that in the Gospel reading this morning.  In that case, what promises, then, did Jesus make?  And can we really believe that he is faithful?

Search the New Testament and you will find a lot of parables, a lot of teaching on Jesus’ lips, but not a great many promises.  There are two promises he makes, however, that seem to be worth considering.  He promises that he will be with his disciples always, even to the end of the ages.  And he promised that he would send the Holy Spirit into the world.

In some sense, perhaps these promises are one and the same.  If we can believe that God is actively at work in the world and in our lives, how can we know if it is the spirit of the living Christ or the work of the Holy Spirit?  How can we distinguish the work of the various persons of the Trinity, and do we really want to?

More poignantly, we ask, can we believe that God is at work in the world - God with us?  Has God been faithful to his covenant of love that at the very least we should be saved from our enemies and the hand of all that hate us, and that at best the dawn from on high shall break upon us, to shine on those who live in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace?

Is God faithful?

The church – for most of her history – has had some preferred ways of answering this question.  Not with a dissertation on God’s faithfulness, not with a pamphlet or a booklet that explains it, not with an argument or even a story.

The church’s way of showing that God is faithful is by pouring water over a child’s head; by taking bread and wine and offering them to God in thanksgiving; by laying hands on the heads of those coming to maturity of faith and those set aside for ministry; by joining together the hands of two people in love; by pronouncing the assurance of God’s forgiveness; and by anointing with oil those whose lives are moving more nearly toward death.

These are the sacraments of the church: baptism, the Eucharist, confirmation, ordination, marriage, reconciliation, and holy unction.  They are signs of God’s faithfulness.  And we believe that they are gifts given to us to help us see what is otherwise hard to see in the world: that he who promised is faithful.

The sacraments take some ordinary thing – like water, or bread, or the head of a person, or the hands of two lovers – and transform them into signs of God’s faithfulness.  So the water, the bread, the hands, or the head become manifestations of God’s love and faithfulness.

These sacraments are invitations to look more deeply, more prayerfully, at the mystery of God, who sets us in a dangerous world but who wants us to know he is faithful.

Every time a child is baptized it is a commitment of God’s faithfulness.  Every time we bless bread and wine in the Eucharist it is a reassurance that God loves us enough to be born in the world and to die for us.  Every time we join the hands of husband and wife it is a reminder that two people can devote themselves to one another in love.  Every time we hear the announcement of God’s forgiveness it is assurance that our sins and offences do not have to be the defining moments of our lives.  Every time hands are laid on someone to be confirmed or ordained it strengthens the community of faith.  Every time a person sick or near death is anointed with holy oil it is a declaration that a new life, a new health awaits them in the kingdom of God.  These are signs, given during the times of change and transition of our lives, that point to the answer to that vexing question – is God faithful?

And they are given to us precisely because God does not want us to live our lives like so many frightened kittens, uncertain about the world around us, afraid to engage it, threatened by monsters who may be real but may also be of our own imagining.

No one knows why it is that God has made the world the way he made it.  I cannot explain for you its dangers, the wars, the killing, the sickness, the poverty, or the rest of it.  I only know of these signs that have always been a part of my life, that have always pointed to a hope greater than any other.  And that have so clearly been a part of the lives of many generations.

The sacraments are like flash cards to prompt in us the assurance that, yes, he who has promised is faithful.  He is with us always.  His Holy Spirit moves among us to guide us and bring us truth.  And that our lives need not be governed by fear, nor lived out in hiding from any kind of monsters.

For in the Sacraments, God reaches out his hand with these simple signs, and encourages us to purr.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

15 November 2009

Saint Mark’s Church, Phladelphia

 

No one else

It always pleases me when the Gospel cooperates with my ulterior motives.  Today, I am blessed, more or less, with such a scenario.   You think you heard a story about Bartimeaus, the blind beggar, who talks with Jesus and is given his sight by him.  But, as usual, my friends, you have missed an important detail.  The important detail plays right into my hand!  Bartimeaus and Jesus are not the only two characters in this story.  There are others – mostly there are the disciples.  The disciples do two things in this story.  First, they try to shut Bartimaeus up, get him to be quiet as Jesus is passing by with, they suppose, more important things on his mind.  And second, the disciples do as Jesus tells them to when he directs them to “Call him here.”

This is not exciting stuff.  If we were to stage this story in a kind of Sunday School pageant, being a disciple would be roughly equivalent to being a shepherd, or a sheep.  Anyone could get this part.  You could get this part.  (I would get to play Jesus, don’t you think?)

So there is Bartimaeus calling to Jesus in his beggarly blindness, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”  And they “shush!” him; maybe they smack him on the back of the head as they do.  Who knows?

But he cries out all the more, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”

And Jesus hears him and stops.  But he does not answer Bartimaeus.  Instead he talks to his disciples; the ones who have been “shush-ing” Bartimeaus; the one who slapped him on the back of the head.  And Jesus says, “Call him here.”

Which they do.

You know what happens next: a brief interview:

Jesus: What do you want.

Bartimeaus: I want to see

Jesus: Go, your faith has made you well.

Actually, as miracle stories go, the only interesting thing in this one is the important detail about the disciples who try to shut Bartimaeus up, and who call him when told to by Jesus.  It is no surprise that Jesus gives the blind man his sight.  Within the narrative thrust of the Gospels, this is to be expected.  And in this case, he has not argued with the Pharisees, he does not spit in the dirt to make mud, he does not forgive Bartimaeus his sins, or do anything very interesting.

Except… that when he hears Bartimaeus and stops, it is not the blind man to whom he speaks; it is to his own followers: “Call him here.”

Do you realize how often it occurs in the Gospels, that you would think Jesus could very well do something on his own, and yet he relies on his disciples to do it – even something as basic as calling a blind beggar to him?  There is a reason Jesus does this.  He is trying to teach his disciples (while he is still with them) that no one else is going to do the things he calls them to do, and if they don’t do them, they won’t get done. 

No one else was going to get that blind beggar to Jesus.  Now, they didn’t even think that that was a task worth doing, so the lesson is a two-tiered one for them.  Yes, Jesus could have done it himself, but time and time again we see him rely on his disciples.  Because soon enough he will not be with them, and who will do it then?

We are ramping up, here at Saint Mark’s, for Commitment Sunday in two weeks.  That is the day that we ask everyone to make a pledge – a promise – of how much money you are going to give to the church for ministry in the coming year.  There are at least three reasons we do this every year: 

We do it because it is good for you and for me.  It’s good for us to think through our commitment to the church, her work and mission, and how much we want to support that work.  And we very much hope that it is a matter of wanting to do it for everyone who does.

We do it because it is helpful in our budgeting to know what we can count on coming in next year; and the discipline of making a promise helps most of us stay consistent, more or less, in our giving.

And we do it, whether we realize it or not, because no one else is going to.  No one else is going to make the precise commitment you make; no one else is going to keep it in the same way; no one else’s money is going to accomplish what your dollars are going to accomplish at Saint Mark’s.

This is a lesson not just about giving, but about all ministry, about just being a part of the church.  No one else could possibly occupy the pew you are occupying this morning.  No one else’s voice can sing the hymns as your voice can, no one else’s prayers carry the specific weight of your prayers, the special intentions of your heart.

If you are an usher and you greet someone at the door with a smile and an earnest welcome, no one else was going to do that, actually.  Quite possibly, no one else was going to read the readings this morning.  There are those of you who serve at the altar, and those who iron the linens who know perfectly well that no one else is going to do what you do, because if you don’t do it, it doesn’t get done.

No one else is going to feed the hungry who come to us on Saturday mornings.  They would simply go hungry.

No one else is providing staples every month for the clients of the Food Cupboard.

No one else is going to spend an hour together studying the Scriptures the way you do at Bible Study.  No one else is going to pray for peace during Evening Prayer.  No one else is going to show up at 7:30 in the morning to kneel in the Presence of God and lift up their hearts.

No one else, we know this, no one else was going to unlock the gates of Saint James the Less and try to revive the message of the Gospel there.  No one else was going to implore the Holy Spirit to come down and sweep through those gravestones again.  No one else was going to care about the kids of that neighborhood the way we have tried to care.  No one else.

This is the thing about discipleship.  No one else is going to do it if you don’t.  No one else.  But Jesus relies on his disciples for almost everything – even the littlest things!

And this year the Stewardship Committee came to me and said, We want to challenge everyone in the parish to give 5% of their after-tax income to Saint Mark’s.

Oh!  I said.  I am not good at math, but I know that giving away 5% of your money is not something a lot of people do.  How many people on the committee are willing to do it?  I asked.  Good question, I thought.  Good question, they said.

They talked.  And I hope they prayed.  And they came back to me and said, Every one of us will pledge to do it or try to do it, to try to get to 5% in the next 2-3years.  Oh, I said.  And, they said, If we do it, we think the Vestry should do it too.   Well, I said, you will have to ask them.  No one else is going to.

So they sent their chairman, Bruce Nichols, to talk with the Vestry and ask them to pledge this year to give 5% of their after-tax income to Saint Mark’s.

Oh!  the Vestry said.  And then they said, OK!  Every one of them said they would do it or set it as a goal for the next 2-3 years.  Five percent.

And, one of them said, if you are already giving 5% or more, then you should aim for 10%!  I like that kind of thinking!  Even though it means I have to now aim for 10% myself.  Yes, I like it.

Now why would you give 5% (or 10%) of your money to this church?  There are many reasons you might.  But as I have tried to suggest, a more fundamental reason you might give 5% is because you know that every single cent you give to this place is a cent that someone else wasn’t going to give, and will accomplish goals that might not otherwise be achieved.

You might give because you know that this looks like a church with a lot of money, only because it used to be a church with a lot of money, back when we had parishioners with a lot of money.  Oh, where have they all gone!?!?   Yes, we have an endowment.  It’s smaller than it used to be.  It pays certain bills (thank God).  And your dollars don’t have to do the things our endowment dollars do, because the things your dollars do, no one else’s dollars are going to do!  Do you follow me?

Now remember that story from the Gospel.  Jesus and his disciples are walking along.  And Bartimaeus calls out to Jesus, “Son of David, have mercy on me!”

And the disciples are “shush-ing” him and he is calling out all the more.  And Jesus stops in his tracks.  And says nothing to the blind man.  Instead he says, to his disciples, “Do something for me that no one else is going to do,” (that part was implied), “call him to me.”  And with the help of the disciples – who did something they didn’t even think needed to be done – that blind beggar gets his sight.

Now, my brothers and sisters, we have been walking with Jesus.  And Lord knows what we have been doing, what kind of foolishness we have been up to on the way.  But Jesus has stopped in his tracks. There is something Jesus wants to do in the world.  Maybe he just wants some nice person given a warm welcome at the doors of a church on Locust Street.

Maybe there are some hungry people he wants to feed.

Maybe there is a lovely old church that has been shut down that he wants to open and fill with kids who need a school.

Maybe there is someone blind who he wants to give sight to.

We have been walking with him.  Maybe only since this morning, but anyway, here we are.  And Jesus has stopped and stopped us in our tracks.

Who else is going to do the things that Jesus is calling us to do, calling you to do, me to do?  No one else!  No one else is anywhere near as good at doing the things that you can do for Jesus as you are.  And no one else is going to give – for the sake of Jesus and his Gospel – what you are going to give.  No one else.

You have five percent (or maybe this year it is only four and a half); you have a gift to make to this church – you have several gifts, in fact, of your time and your talent and your money – that no one else can or will make.  No one else can make the difference that you can.  No one else can be the disciple that you can be.  No one else can answer Jesus like you can when he stops in his tracks and says, I can’t do this without you.  No one else.

There is a certain beauty in our willingness to do for Jesus what no one else can or will do, since Jesus did for us what no one else could or would do: he lived his life and gave it on the Cross for our sakes, the forgiveness of our sins; and he forged for us the path to new life in the world to come where he waits for us in glory.  No one else could have won the victory that Jesus won for all the world.

With thanks to him for doing what no one else could do, will you and I do what we can when he stops and asks us to do what no one else will do?

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

25 October 2009

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

 

Of chalices and calluses

I met a young priest once, years ago, who was struggling with his first parish placement.  He couldn’t seem to get anything done on time, he was often late or absent, and no one could really figure out if he was just lazy, or if there was something else going on.  Finally, I overheard him say in an offhanded way “These hands were made for chalices, not for calluses.”  Suddenly, I thought, “Aha,” here’s the heart of the matter, a fundamental misunderstanding about what the work of the Gospel is.

I will admit to you, that there are times in the past year when the phrase has flashed through my own head.  When we were out chipping ice off the sidewalk during rush hour after a sudden snowstorm, or up to my elbows in macaroni salad at City Camp at our mission parish of St. James-the-Less, I would think [sigh] “Wouldn’t it be nice if it were true?  Wouldn’t it be nice if these hands were made for chalices and not calluses.”  But it is inescapable: Christian life, ordained or not, is a life of getting calluses.  “Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant.  For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.”

Once again, the disciples fail to understand what Jesus is teaching.  James and John come to Jesus because they want positions of power and authority.  They want to sit at his right and left in his kingdom.  They want to be the high chamberlains or chiefs of staff who control access and whose advice is prized above all else.

In response to their request, Jesus asks them a question: “Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?”  Jesus here, as his answer to their simple “Yes,” makes clear is not asking them about a cup or about the baptism that he received from John, but about the cup that he is going to Jerusalem to drink, and the baptism of the cross.  And surely his response to them is one of the more subtly terrifying ones that we hear Jesus make: “The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized.”  In short, Jesus is saying, “Indeed, you will follow the way of the cross that I pursue, and you will know that baptism of blood which I am going to.  This life that you have chosen, and that I have chosen you for will be the death of you.”

And then once again, because they don’t understand, because they don’t comprehend what he is teaching, what he is preaching, what he is preparing to inscribe into his own life, Jesus calls them together.  The other disciples are annoyed at James and John.  They are perhaps not annoyed so much by James and John’s failure to understand Jesus’ teaching as they are by the fact that James and John got their request in first.

Look at what Jesus says to those disciples jockeying for position and power. “Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant.  For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.”

The message of the Gospel this morning is the message that is also the message of Jesus’ life and death.  It is the utter reversal and complete inversion that God brings into the world in Jesus.  Greatness comes, not from position, not from authority, not from job title or money.  Greatness comes only from service.  To be great you must serve, to be first you must be a slave.  To get anywhere in the Christian life, you must give up trying to gain position or authority or power.

The way of the world is a way of the glorification and worship of those with power and authority.  It is the cynical subservience of the sycophant before the powerbroker.  It is about what I can get and hold for myself by whatever means necessary.

But that is not the way that Jesus goes.  That is not the way of the cross.  His way is the opposite.  His way is the complete opposite: serving rather than being served.

One of the ways that we can hear how stunning this inversion that Jesus preaches is, is when we lay the passage from the Gospel this morning next to the reading from the Hebrew Scriptures.  The Book of Job is rather like courtroom drama, in which we get to hear from all sorts of different characters.  God allows Job to be tested, and all manner of calamities befall him, and there are long speeches from Job’s friends and from Job about how God could allow this to happen.  Then finally, unthinkably, the character that everyone would like to hear speak, and no one expects to, God, opens his mouth and God’s defense of the suffering and calamities that Job suffered is so overwhelming, so majestic, that there is really little else to be said.  “Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you and you shall declare to me.  Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?  Tell me, if you have understanding.  Who determined its measurements – surely you know!”  And on and on, the hammering home of God’s absolute power and sovereignty, of God’s total mystery and of God’s otherness from the human condition and mind.

“Who are you to question me?” God says.  “Who are you to even attempt to understand me, when I feed the raven and the lions and tilt the water skins of heaven.” 

And that is where I think we can see the absolute wonder and mystery of the inversion that is Jesus.  The assertion of the Christian faith is that the same God who laid the foundations of the earth became human, and came not for power, not for authority, but to serve.  The same God who is majestic, sovereign and mysterious beyond measure, inverts the way that “things should be,” and instead of coming as a king or president, comes to live the life of a carpenter-preacher in rural Palestine.  He came, not to garner as much power and authority as possible, but to heal, to serve and eventually to die.  That is the model that he leaves us.  “Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant.”

I think about that young priest that I knew sometimes.  His life has not been easy since he entered the priesthood.  He has hopped around to different jobs often, trying to find a place where he doesn’t have to engage in getting his hands too dirty.  I feel sad, often when I think about him.  About the fundamental misconception that he is laboring under.  The reality is this: “Because these hands were made for chalices, they were made for calluses.”  And not just priestly hands, of course.  Christian hands were made for calluses.  After all, I’m pretty sure that he who laid the foundations of the world and became a carpenter in Palestine, developed some pretty significant calluses of his own.  If calluses are good enough for our Lord, I hope that they are good enough for me and for you.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

18 October 2009

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Pew Rent

It came as a surprise to me to learn recently that the bottoms of Saint Mark’s parishioners were, once upon a time, nestled more comfortably in cushions that padded the hard seats of the pews you are now sitting in.  I’d never known that a softer aesthetic once reigned out there in the pews!  But in the Vestry minutes for the meeting on September 7 of 1951, there is an entry that tells much:

“The Secretary brought to the attention of the Vestry that some of the cushions in the pews were in a deplorable condition.  On motion… it was unanimously agreed that the Secretary was to write a tactful letter to the parishioners concerned.”

Salacious as this revelation about shabby cushions is, the remedy – to contact (tactfully) the parishioners who occupied the pews – points to an even more important revelation: pews at Saint Mark’s were available to rent for many decades.  The practice of renting - and in some cases, buying – pews was typical in several denominations throughout much of the 19^th century and well into the 20^th.  Members paid an annual fee for the right to occupy a particular pew week after week. The pews up front were typically more expensive.  While this guaranteed a better view and better sound, it’s hard to believe that there was not also a certain element of social one-up-man-ship involved. 

Of course there are those who simply like to feel at home in the same pew week after week.  I had a parishioner in Virginia once who offered to double her pledge if she could be guaranteed the same pew every week.  She absolutely hated it when “strangers” arrived before she did and sat in “her pew”!

At Saint Mark’s, pews that were not rented were available to anyone to sit in – though I cannot say with certainty that all the un-rented pews had cushions.  Minutes from an earlier Vestry meeting - April 8, 1947 – show us that it was a different time, indeed.

“The Rector reported that several unpleasant incidents had occurred recently and suggested that the system of straps on rented pews be more generally enforced, recommending that an announcement regarding the privileges of pew holders should be made.  In the case of persistent offenders he felt a letter should be written reminding them that pews are rented with the understanding that on Festivals and special occasions the pews should be available to all.  Should they not be willing to adhere to these terms, the privilege of renting a pew ought to be withdrawn he felt.”

I must admit that I have spent some time trying to imagine what the “system of straps” was like and what it was meant to accomplish.  Did these straps restrict access to the pews?  If so, by what ingenious design?  For I have never come across a relic of this system to my knowledge, even in the deepest recesses of the undercroft.  Nevertheless the straps –and the pew-renters who used them - were a problem.  And the distinction – between those who had paid for the privilege of a front row seat and those who had not – was clearly chafing a bit.

It is telling that Saint Mark’s ever allowed the rental of pews.  Many churches founded in the Anglo-catholic revival, like Saint Mary the Virgin in New York and Saint James the Less here in Philadelphia, were founded as free churches, where no seats could be rented or owned, in a direct affront to those with money, power, and influence.  But at Saint Mark’s you could rent a pew.  And apparently, if you were not attentive, the cushion in your pew could become tattered and ragged: a disgrace that might bring you a tactful reminder from the Vestry that some cushion maintenance was in order.

Around these pews and their occupants, has floated for more than 160 years the Gospel.  Pew-renters and “strangers” alike have heard the cautionary words of Jesus: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”  Saint Mark tells us that the disciples were “greatly astounded” at this, and wondered amongst themselves. “Then who can be saved?”

It would seem that then, as now, the assumption was that wealth was often perceived to be a sign of benediction from above, an affirmation of character, and a guarantee of smooth passage through many barriers, be they in this world or the next.  But in this infamous passage, Jesus lowers the ratings of the wealthy, telling one man that the way to eternal life was to sell everything he has and give the money to the poor.  It’s a remark that most of us are familiar with, but often try to forget!

The man whom Jesus told to impoverish himself left the scene shocked and grieving at the suggestion.  I’d contend that the only reason we don’t leave here today with the same reaction is because we have already decided to ignore Jesus on this one. OK, maybe it will be hard to enter into the kingdom of God if we are rich, but we’ll cross that bridge (or not) when we come to it.

Of course, as we keep reading, we discover that Jesus promises rewards in this life and the next for those who give up their wealth and risk their lives for his sake.  But there is not much evidence that the disciples were especially convinced of this.  The question was still troubling to them: Who can be saved?  Who will find entry into the kingdom of God?  And the central teaching of Jesus on the question is this: “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.”

Do you remember what the angel Gabriel said when Mary asked him how it could be that she, a virgin, would give birth to a son?  “For with God, nothing will be impossible.”

At it’s meeting on January 8, 1957, the Vestry of Saint Mark’s adopted a change in the by-laws (Article X, Section 1) that read, “Beginning January 1, 1957, no person may thereafter acquire from the Vestry the right to hold permanent sittings in St. Mark’s Church.  All pews not then so rented shall be free and open to use by any member of the congregation.”

I suppose there were those who were shocked and grieved at this change.  Although provision was made for those who had rented pews for decades earlier to keep them, one had only to miss their payments for a single six-month period and the new by-laws empowered the Vestry to cancel their pew subscription, thereby freeing the pew for anyone who wished to sit in it.

Was the Vestry conscious, I wonder, of taking steps to impose the Gospel on the parish, freeing those who had much of at least a little of the baggage that might make it difficult to pass through the eye of a needle?  Did the leadership of this parish, built, it must be said, with noticeable wealth, now, under the rectorship of Fr. Paige, begin to see a connection between the call to voluntarily give up one’s money and possessions, even one’s pew, and the profound love of God in sending his son to be born among us, in that both illustrate that for God all things are possible?

Is it too much of a stretch to suggest this connection?  That when we begin to learn to give up what the world has told us we must in no wise let go of (our money and our things) we are brushing up the same vast possibility of the mystery of the Incarnation, God with us?  Are we thus learning that all things are possible with God, even the things we believe we cannot afford?

I must admit a certain nostalgia for the idea that a letter could be written (tactfully) to the holder of a pew to remind him of the obligations that accompanied his rights in occupying the pew, and telling him that it was time to cough up for a new cushion.  But on balance, I suppose it is harder, still, to pass through the eye of a needle if you are sitting on a cushion, especially a new one.

I cannot tell from the minutes of the Vestry meetings what the reaction in the parish was to the elimination of pew rents.  I don’t know how much shock or grief there actually was.  But I suspect that for at least some people – and maybe for the Vestry, which had become accustomed to counting on that income – it felt a lot like giving something up that you’d have preferred to keep for yourself.

But I also suspect that Fr. Paige and others saw that renting pews was looking more and more like trying to ride a camel through the eye of a needle – an unlikely way into the kingdom of God.  And while giving up money is never easy for us humans to do, thankfully, with God, all things are possible!

And of course as a history lesson my musings about the pew rents at Saint Mark’s may be mildly interesting and amusing.  But is there something to be learned, I wonder, from the church giving up this practice, her disenfranchisement, in some small way, of the wealthy in favor of anyone at all who wished to sit in a particular pew?  And with the democratization of the pews, has there come also a democratization of the responsibility to care for – and pay for – not only the pews (alas, not the cushions) but for the work and ministry that this church carries out in order to build up the kingdom of God?

Every fall we confront the question of how much of our own money we are willing to give to the church for this work.  Next month we’ll be asking everyone to make a pledge for the coming year.  Sometimes it feels as though we are asking ourselves what a seat in the pews is worth.  But the real question is whether or not we believe that we are engaged in the building up of God’s kingdom, and how much we can spare for that work.

And it would seem that there is never enough to do all the work God calls us to do.  For us it is impossible.  But for God, all things are possible.  Thanks be to God!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

11 October 2009

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Cable

A few nights ago the sound of jackhammers was echoing down Locust Street, once again.  With construction on the block and around the corner this is hardly unusual.  But when I went outside, I noticed that in addition to the jackhammer across the street on the corner of 17^th Street, there was a crew working just in front of the Rectory.  They were from Comcast, the cable company.

Now, I happen to know that years ago, long before the Comcast Center (the tallest building in the city) was built just five blocks down 17^th Street from us, at least ten years ago, maybe more, in the course of some unspecified street repair or maintenance, the cable that provides the Comcast feed to our side of Locust Street was accidentally cut, and had never been repaired.  We have become accustomed, on this side of the street, to living in the shadow of a huge corporation whose services are widely advertised but completely unavailable to us.

So when I heard the jackhammer and saw the Comcast crew, I began to put 2 and 2 together.  I asked one of the workers what they were doing, just to be sure.  “We’re repairing the cable to this side of the street,” he told me, adding that it had been cut years ago.  What, I asked, had prompted the repair after all these years?  “We have a long To-Do list,” he said, “and we finally got around to it.”

It is a dangerous, and perhaps a silly thing to provide an analogy that compares Comcast in any way, shape, or form to God, so please, let us try to avoid that.

But I do think that the situation as it stood here on Locust Street resembles the way many people feel about God.  You may believe that God exists.  You may even live down the street from his headquarters (or at least not far from a church).  You know there was a time, long past, when God seemed to be at work in the world, when communication flowed between God and his people.  But for reasons unknown, the cable, so to speak, has been cut; you have no access to God, who seems to have nothing to say to you anyway; and so you have become accustomed to getting on without him.

I can’t speak for the entire block, but Saint Mark’s does take up about two-thirds of this side of the street, so for most of us, I can say that we have learned to live quite well without cable.  There are alternatives, after all.  We have a satellite dish on the Rectory roof.  And if there have been benefits of being Comcast customers besides being able to watch the BBC and the Food Network (which the satellite also provides) we are blissfully unaware of and unconcerned by them.

So too, perhaps, with those of us who have become accustomed to living without an intimate relationship with God.  There are plenty of alternative ways to spend our time, especially our Sunday mornings.  And whatever benefits we may be missing out on, go largely un-noticed anyway.

Not so for the children of Israel as they wandered with Moses in the desert.  Having begged for food when there was none, God rained down manna – what the Scriptures call the bread of angels – but this did not erase the memory of delicacies they had enjoyed during their slavery in Egypt.  “We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now… there is nothing at all but this manna to look at,” they complain.

They are, of course, confused.  They are not really even thinking about God and whether or not he is looking after them.  They are simply whining.  They have forgotten that when they had fish and cucumbers and melon and onions and garlic, they were slaves who also had to gather the straw to make bricks.  But they feel as though there was a time, now past, when things were different, better: a time before some cable was cut and there was an easier relationship with God, who at this point has led them into the desert with nothing but the bread of angels to eat, and no other alternatives.

Still, they share with us that sense that there was a time when things were different, better, easier.  A time before the heat of the desert had dried up the cable, and God was more clearly on their side.

The other night, as I briefly watched the cable guys do their work, I noticed that there was, just outside my office window, beside the little pit in the ground where the cable connections are made, a barrel with a coil of blue rope in it that was being pulled through a pipe underneath Locust Street and across 17^th Street to the southwest corner where the jackhammer had opened up a hole in the street.  And I knew that that rope would soon be pulled back through the pipe, with the cable tied to it, to make the connections that are hooked up in the little pit outside my window.  How simple it seems.

And the Scriptures hold out for us this morning two possibilities for re-making the connection to God that we suspect has been severed deep underground where we cannot reach it.

The first is in the Letter of James who reminds the church that in times of distress, suffering, sickness – those times when we feel most certainly and anxiously that the cable to God has been cut – the prescription is prayer.  Prayer is the blue rope that we feed through the pipe to God, snaking it underground, across the street, where God asks us to trust that he picks up his end even if he has to jackhammer the pavement to get to it.  And like the blue rope, prayer moves in two directions.  Once fed across the street, it comes back to us, if we listen carefully, faithfully, attentively enough, if we care to spend the time reeling it gently back to discover that God has tied a cable to it so that we can re-establish our connection to him.

James has a simple and beautiful way of saying this: “The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective,” he says.  Which means that the blue rope makes its way across the street, and that the cable is always attached when we pull it back through to our side.  The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective.

The second possibility is harder to spot, because we are easily distracted by Jesus’ exaggerated teaching, in which he seems to be suggesting self-mutilation as the appropriate response to failure.  “If your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off…  And if your eye cause you to stumble, tear it out…” etc.  We become so troubled by these words that we miss the point Jesus was making.  His disciples were complaining that someone outside their group was casting out demons in Jesus’ name. 

But Jesus says, “Whoever is not against us is for us.”  Don’t you dare, he goes on to say, don’t you dare put a stumbling block in the way of someone who believes in me, just because they are not a part of your group.  “For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward.”

And there, right there, is another blue rope, but you have to look for it: the cup of water, extended by anyone just because you bear the name of Christ.  Hospitality, kindness, generosity, care extended by anyone – a Muslim, a Jew, an atheist? - and received in Christ’s name is another way of feeding the blue rope through the pipe and under the streets, and then reeling it back to re-establish the connection with God.  How uncanny and unlikely!

And Jesus suggests that we will not always know such opportunities when we see them, so it is better to work on the assumption that whoever is not against us is for us; whoever is not tearing the blue rope from your hands is actually helping to feed it across the street, and back again.

The burden of Jesus’ teaching, like the burden of James’s teaching, is that it’s all about the blue rope.  It’s all about seeking to remain in the kind of relationship with God that allows him to tie his cable of mercy and love and forgiveness and hope to our blue ropes, then tug on them in an effort to get us to reel the thing in, back over to our side of the street.  If your hands or your feet or your eyes are preventing you from tending to the rope, to unraveling it and paying it out, to coax it under the dark recesses of whatever it is that’s under the streets, then do something about it!  Do something drastic!  Don’t just sit there, and complain that there used to be cable, but now we have to settle for satellite.  You might as well be whining for cucumbers and melons and leeks and onions and garlic.

Meanwhile God continues to rain down the bread of angels.

To the best of my knowledge (I have not tested this yet) cable has been restored to this side of Locust Street.  Sadly this does not mean that I can now watch re-runs of Mary Tyler Moore or The Odd Couple, whenever I want, any more than I can count on God giving me the answers I want to my prayers just because they are the answers that I want.

But the fact is that when we imagine that God has a long To-Do list and that we must be very far down the list, if we are even on the list at all, we are probably mistaken.  Because God is really not anything at all like Comcast.  He has never ceased wanting to be in relationship with us.  But we have paved over the streets of prayer and sacrifice that he once used because we have found other things to do with the space he once took up in our lives.  We have – usually with our carelessness, but sometimes out of anger or resentment – severed the cables that connected us to God.

And so he bids us turn again to prayer – a blue rope let out to God’s reach.  Or, at least see the hand reached out to us with a cup of water: the hand of a neighbor, who, if not against us, may well be for us.  God will work, you see, with almost anything; he needs very little.

And from time to time we may feel a tugging in our consciences, our hearts, that place where perfect love seeks to cast out fear.  It is like the hand of God tugging on his end of a blue rope, letting us know that the cable of his love has been tied to it, ready for us to reel it back over to our side of the street, to re-connect, and to love again.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

27 September 2009

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Welcoming the child

When I was in seminary, one of the requirements was a course in systematic theology, and we had to read hundreds of pages from the work of Karl Barth, a famous 20^th century theologian, whose massive theological work, Church Dogmatics, runs to like 20 volumes. It is an incredibly convoluted and dense work. I thought of bringing a selection to read to you, but I’m hoping that you will actually listen to me for a little bit of time and I’m rather sure that thirty seconds of Barth would discourage that. After our class had spent weeks wrestling with Barth’s difficult style and Teutonic prose, the professor told us a story about Barth. At one point, a cheeky reporter had asked him to sum up his million word theological tome in a sentence or two. Barth thought about it for a moment and quoted a children’s song to the reporter: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

There was, the professor was telling all us serious and earnest seminarians, a simplicity to the Christian faith. We could get wrapped in the minutiae of Barth’s neo-orthodox theology, or spend inordinate amounts of time reading about the interrelation between the different persons of the Trinity, but even Barth himself was not foolish enough to think that his writing was anything but an attempt to flesh out the heart of the Christian message, a message of stunning simplicity which a child could understand.

Which is aptly illustrated in the Gospel this morning. Sometimes Jesus teaches in complex parables, but sometimes he says exactly and precisely what he means. The disciples often don’t get it, but Jesus is speaking simply about what is going to happen: he is going to suffer, die and rise again. I find it particularly challenging to preach about the obvious passages: where is the nuance, where the need for scholarly study or clever explanation, when Jesus describing what simply is, like Barth summing his work in the lines of the children’s song: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

He tells his disciples that he must be betrayed, killed and rise again, and they are afraid to ask him what he means. They’ve heard this message before, and when Peter tried to argue with him, Jesus slammed the door on Peter pretty hard. The disciples don’t understand that Jesus is saying simply what he means.

They apparently don’t understand the simple words that he has been teaching them again and again: “Whoever wants to be first must be last and a servant of all.” The disciples don’t understand that the hierarchy of God’s kingdom is a race to the bottom, a race into nothingness, to emptying the selfishness out of yourself as fast as you possibly can, until there is room for God in the space that you’ve fought to clear in your heart. The disciples are looking for power, position, maybe even riches, but not only is that not the way that Jesus operates, but he has plainly told them again and again, in simple language, that the end of his journey, the end of their journey if they follow him is death, death of self, even physical death.

To make the message clear, Jesus draws a child from the crowd. The child doesn’t know anything about theology or whatever the current debates are. The child only knows about the joy of curiousity and discovery; about the brute feelings of love, fear and hunger.

The child becomes the symbol, the illustration to the disciples of their distance from what Jesus is teaching: arguing about position or role, they cannot see the forest for the trees, the wonder in the world around them, or the glory of an innocent, simple child. The child becomes the touchstone of their distance from welcoming God into their lives.

I’d bet that a child would become a touchstone for us as well. Let’s turn the situation around, let’s pluck a child up from our culture and time to use as a measure of our welcome of Jesus. What are the odds, do you suppose, that if we plucked a child from somewhere around Philadelphia, that child would be hungry, or lonely, or living in squalor, or barely literate? What are the odds that the child would have experienced violence or abuse? What are the odds that the child would have health insurance or adequate access to health care? What are the odds the child would survive to adulthood?

To which you might say, “But the living standards of this hypothetical child have nothing to do with welcoming them.” But we have heard the simple message of the Gospel on that too recently: to care only for the spiritual needs of a person is to fail them utterly.

No, my friends, this is the simple truth that Jesus is teaching us this morning: the measure of our welcome of the least of these is the measure of our welcome of God into our lives. Because Jesus comes to lose his life, to pour himself out as a sacrifice, to squeeze the Divine Word down into the form of a child, and if we cannot make room for a child in our lives, we cannot makes the space for God.

Like all the birds of the air and the flowers of the field, God’s compassion is for the little things, the small, that which is ignored or passed over. The orphan, the alien, the widow, the child; unless we welcome and care for them we welcome not God.

Like the disciples, I think we are being reminded of how far from the kingdom we might be. Like the disciples, we are far from grasping the simplicity that Jesus is teaching: position matters naught, shameful death matters naught; whoever wants to be first must be last and become a servant to all.

The truth that Jesus is teaching is remarkably simple. It is like the child’s song. The practice of that truth, there is where the hardness and complexity comes from. But we have here again given to us in the Gospel this morning, the gift that Jesus so often gives us of symbols which we can use to begrudgingly begin again the never-ending process of prying open our hearts: welcome the child as you would welcome God. A simple message, the practicalities of which are a lifetime’s work.

Friends, we are surrounded by children in need, children in squalor, children in dire straights. There are more then enough children in need of welcome to pry open all our hearts to God’s love and grace.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia

20 September 2009

More of Jesus, Less of Me

Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.

Only in America, I suspect, could there have developed the Christian weight-loss industry, which has flourished for the past few decades.  I first heard of it years ago when I was captivated by the names of the programs, the titles of books on this topic:  Bod 4 God, Thin Within, Rebuilding the Temple, What Would Jesus Eat, and The Lord’s Table: a biblical approach to weight loss, for instance.   You can buy, if you like, the “Stop the Devil from Laughing when you Diet Journal” which promises to help you “combine your diet with the ability to resist temptation and achieve lasting weight loss.”

But my favorite is the little book, now more than 30 years old, called “More of Jesus Less of Me.”  The obvious biblical text for that weight-loss guide is the insight of Saint John the Baptist who said of Jesus, “He must increase, and I must decrease.”  But I think it’s unlikely that John the Baptist was very pudgy, and therefore not much inspiration to dieters.

Today, however, I want to think with you about what Jesus meant when he said, “Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”  Because this teaching of Jesus’ is very near the center of his message.  And it is very much like asking whether or not I want more of Jesus in my life, and less of me.

Jesus asks his disciples today, “What will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?”  Which neatly articulates precisely the question that most business schools have taught their graduates to explore, and about which the rest of us are extremely curious.  But for those who would follow him, Jesus does not even try to disguise the degree of difficulty: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”  Anyone here really interested in that?  More of Jesus, less of you?

As many of you know, I have my own preference for a Christian weight-loss program.  It involves carrying a pack on your back and walking across northwestern Spain to the old city of Santiago de Compostela.  The 400 miles of the pilgrim’s route that I walked last month took at least 16 pounds off me, which means that I really should go back for another 400 miles.

At the risk of sounding self-righteous, may I suggest that there is something life-losing about the decision to live for a month or more out of a backpack?  Sleeping in bunk beds, surrounded by snoring, smelly people, but never in the same place for more than one night, in country whose language you do not speak, with few options to exercise each day except the decision to keep walking or not.   There are other ways, I suppose, to lose your life for a month and still be able to reclaim it, but this is the one that has worked for me.  It is as close as I am able to get (so far) to losing my life for the sake of the gospel.  And I have to say, it is a most wonderful and remarkable experience.

I walked last month with people in their teens and people in their sixties.  I walked beside the sea, and up mountains.  I walked with people who woke up early and walked fast, and those who dawdled in the morning and liked to go slow.  No one that I know of found it easy.  Never was there a day without its challenges.  No one was without their blisters, or sore knees, or tired feet, or pain of one kind or another.  Those who had packed too much in their bags found it was better to leave things behind, or send them home.  Some had to adjust their shoes, some their sleeping or eating habits, others their expectations.  Especially in the first week or so, you discover what the dimensions of this life-losing will be.  And every morning, before 8, you start walking, and walking, and walking.

For me this is helpful because I am stubborn and a slow learner.  It is helpful to me to be able to pound out my prayers, step by step, mile by mile.  And while sometimes my prayers had a more specific shape, in general you could sum them up in six words: More of Jesus, less of me.  More of Jesus, less of me: not a bad prayer to tread into the ground, step by step.

And although some weight-loss is a happy by-product of that prayer, it is, of course, about so much more than that.  It is about letting Christ’s perfect love cast out the many fears that can be defining features of our lives.  It is about learning how to care as much or more about someone else as I care about me.  It is about being open to going where Jesus calls in life, doing what Christ asks.    And it is about rejecting the search for the answer to the question: what would it profit me to gain the whole world, or at least as much of it as I can possibly gather up for myself?

More of Jesus, less of me?  Now that I am back in Philadelphia – only a week now – I can already sense how much harder it is to make this my prayer.  So many more ways to make it all about me here; to get what I want to have, do what I want to do.  Less of Jesus, more of me.

On the day that I arrived in Santiago – having walked for twenty-six days to cover a distance that it would take me eleven hours to retrace by train on the way home – my fellow pilgrims and I spent a great deal of time just hanging out beneath the shadow of the cathedral.  Standing and talking, sitting in silence, some even having a siesta there on the cobblestones in the plaza.  We were not waiting for anything; we all had other places we could have been.  But we somehow knew that this was where we belonged, beneath the façade of this magnificent church, within her gaze and embrace.  And it was as if we knew that once we left, we’d be trading our lives back in, regaining the lives we’d given up for a time.  Not an unappealing prospect, mind you, but not nearly so welcome as you’d expect.

Could I already sense, I wonder, that I was no longer so well poised to invite more of Jesus into my life and less of me?  And that now that I would not be walking every day I’d have to begin to watch my diet again if I want there to be less of me?

Being a follower of Jesus isn’t an easy thing to be, and it never has been.  To believe otherwise is to ignore the many different ways Jesus taught this lesson: Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.  And it’s part of my job, I think, to be able to share with you not only what I think Jesus means by this teaching, but to actually try it on, see what it feels like, to have some firsthand knowledge about the experience of losing one’s life for the gospel.

And the assurance that God gave me on my twenty-six days of pilgrimage was the sense of overwhelming gratitude for the gifts that he poured into my life; even when it was a life lived out of backpack, sleeping on bunks, conversing in broken Spanish.  These gifts include not only the marvelous baroque embrace of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.  They include also the long shadow of a brownstone tower on Locust Street, and a community of people here, who I hope and believe want to be pilgrims too, each in her own way.

And I hope that whether we lose any weight together as we go or not, we may together become more adept at this prayer, and at accepting God’s responses to it: More of Jesus in my life, please God, and less of me.  More of Jesus, less of me.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

13 September 2009

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Thermoclines

Sometimes in life we find ourselves in places uncomfortable, places that don't feel like “home.” Living in Arizona was that for me. Here I was, a nice WASP-y boy who grew up in the Midwest, suddenly living in the Southwest – it was a rough transition. I had never imagined that there would be such economic disparity – that immigration could be such a divisive issue – that, and this was one of my favorite moments – you might need to make public service announcements to warn people not to shoot their guns in the air on New Years' Eve.

When I needed to flee the heat, or the culture shocks, or forget that I was a sojourner in a strange land, I would drive twenty minutes north, out from the chaos and bustle of one of the fastest growing cities in the nation, out from the triple degree heat, out from the suburban sprawl and the Scottsdale McMansions, out into the unadulterated desert, full of scrub and Saguaro cacti. I loved the silence and peace, but I also loved the drive because twenty minutes into it, the cacti suddenly were gone. It was like an invisible line drawn across the desert, a curtain beyond which those emblems of desert life could not go.

What happened was that driving north I had gently climbed up to the rim of the Valley of the Sun and the invisible line was the frost line, the thermocline, the temperature inversion line beyond which Arizona was not desert and cactus, but scrub and pinõn pines. Phoenix is in a large round valley, and all the heat and pollution collect in the valley, backing the hard earth, but when you come to the crest, you are no longer in the blast furnace of the desert, which means that the frosts come, and the cacti that are almost entirely water cannot survive freezing and thawing.

When I was in college I came across another thermocline when I was being certified as a scuba diver. The college thought that it would be a good idea to have us do the required ocean dives on May 1^st, in the waters of the North Shore of Boston. I lived in Minnesota for many years and I can’t remember being as cold as I was that morning. The waters off Massachusetts are always cold, but because of variables which I don’t understand, the depth of the dives required us to spend most of our time under the thermocline, and even though the surface temperature of the water was a balmy forty-five degrees, forty or fifty feet down it was a uniform, mind-numbing thirty five degrees, all the way to the bottom of the ocean. There was a line in the water, a visible opaque shimmer of water, where in a sudden foot or two all the warmth drained away and it became unbelievably cold. [It was so cold that, when we came to one of the required skill sections where you have to remove your mask, replace it and clear it of water, when I took my mask off I got an instant ice cream headache from the sea water cooling whatever blood was still flowing to my head.

It is always disorienting to cross a thermocline. Suddenly to change thirty degrees, to change climate, to see all signs of the desert disappear, or suddenly to have the ocean stealing the warmth from your body until you shiver and shake. It is the sudden line of demarcation between comfort and discomfort, between intelligible and confused. Which is how I feel when I read Isaiah and the Gospel this morning. Isaiah has been in rare form these last few weeks, railing at the people Israel and skewering them for their idolatry, their lack of faith, and their failure to care for the widow and orphans. He has been equally unkind to the nations around Israel, excoriating them for their idolatry, their bloodthirstiness, their assaults upon God's chosen people. The picture he has been painting is a world in which everyone’s motives are dark, in which justice is dead and gone, and in which everyone takes whatever they can get, and keeps it by their own strength. It is the kind of world that I resonate with, that feels strangely similar to me, despite the thousands of miles and years separating our culture from Isaiah’s. We too fail to care for the widow and orphan, and prize the taking and holding by brute force or raw political strength. We too are cynical, jaded, with so few prophetic voices to rouse us to action and repentance. Isaiah has been playing the slightly cracked desert prophet, and suddenly he breaks into this hymn, this ode to God’s sudden, unexpected salvation: “Say to those who are of a fearful heart, ‘Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God. He will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense. He will come and save you.’ Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy. For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water.”

Which seems to me like coming to the crest of the valley, and looking out into a brave new world. Yes, our world is a dark, and often hopeless place, but, Isaiah is saying, something is coming, a moment of God’s total and complete in-breaking and action, which completely overthrows the current order and situation, and make of the desert a garden place. It is news of unforeseen hope, of justice for the dispossessed; God’s terrible coming will restore that which is wrong, and make the place we live now, the desert place of want into a garden of unexpected richness and greenness. When that salvation comes we will recognize God’s action because the lame will walk and the blind see.

Isaiah’s prophecy is fulfilled in Jesus, the lame walk, the blind see, and the all are given a glimpse of the compassion of our God.

Which is where I’m tempted to end, to wrap up my sermon into a neat package with Jesus’ healing the deaf man, fulfilling the prophecies of Isaiah, and inaugurating the reign of God’s justice: the Isaiah’s vision of God’s redemption, in the midst of his harangue against Israel, the thermocline, the radical demarcation glimpsed in prophecy but finally realized in Jesus. But as so often happens with the Scriptures, we have a nagging problem that prevents the neat homiletic windup: the story of the Syrophoenician woman. What are we to make of this little story? This, surely, is the Jesus who said, “Blessed are those who are not offended at me,” because he seems to be remarkably offensive in this story. He initially rejects the Gentile woman who comes to him begging for her child because his mission is first to Israel, and ultimately it is her witty riposte to his open insult that causes him to give in to her request. What is going on here? Is this the fully human part of Christ, fully inculturated, struggling to come to terms with the femaleness and Gentileness of this supplicant?

Unfortunately, I don’t think we can argue that, because we have many stories of Jesus interacting with lepers, Gentiles and women in the Scriptures. More importantly, I’m not sure that we want to go too far down the road of separating the human and the divine in Jesus: that way lies complexity and heresy.

So many of the stories in the Scriptures, especially the stories in the Gospels are preserved in their complexity as teaching moments, as riddles which need to be wrestled with before they will yield up their blessing. They are like Zen koans or the teachings of the Desert fathers and mothers, which one has to live with for years, or lifetimes. They cannot be mined instantly, or cracked with post-modern, post-structuralist, deconstruction of language. They are hard sayings that resist both our culture and our impatience.

I keep coming back to Isaiah and his vision of God’s redemption, the complete and utter change in climate and season that he prophesies to Israel.

The Syrophoenician woman, the Gentiles and women that Jesus speaks to and welcomes are proof of the absolute overabundance of the vision of God’s redemption that Isaiah sees. Jesus comes not to herald the replacement of the Jewish people as the chosen people, but symbolic of how extensive the redemption of God is: even the dogs gather the crumbs under the table, even the foreigners and women participate in God’s salvation, God’s redemption. Israel is the epicenter of explosive abounding grace, which overflows out even into the tribes around God’s chosen people.

Which is indeed a drastic climate change, a distant and unseen future beyond the vision or imagination even of Isaiah, who prophesied to the nations their destruction. The redemption of God even to the Gentiles is indeed racy stuff, like the desert become garden and the wilderness flowing with streams. And so we may say “even the dogs” and mean it, for the redemption of God, his fulfillment of his promises to Israel, his lawgiving and covenant is our now ours by dint of grace and God’s abundance. Even we who are Gentiles, foreigners, women and outcasts are fed by God’s grace and see, as if in the distance the thermocline God’s grace. For the desert of this current place, the desert of poverty, destitution, Machiavellian politics, brute force, economic disparity, that desert is not forever. Our God will come with terrible recompense, to save, to heal, to redeem. In that glorious moment, so extensive will God's salvation and redemption be that even the dogs will gather the crumbs of grace, the deserts explode with water, and all will know the salvation of our God.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

6 September 2009

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia