Colonial Galilee

For the four years of my college career I lived and went to school within a few steps of Colonial Williamsburg, which is a lovely, if somewhat unusual place.  It is unusual because although it strives to be a living museum, with a very high level of authenticity, it is still not the real thing.  Everything has been rebuilt on the foundations of a colonial town.  Yes, there was a blacksmith’s forge over there, a candle-maker down the street, a tavern around the corner, but everything you see today is a re-construction, more or less a fairy tale version of the real thing.  Even the oldest college buildings, which have been in use for 315 years have been repeatedly rebuilt after fires; and the same goes for Bruton Parish Church down the street.

Another odd aspect of Williamsburg is that it is a place sort of frozen in an uncertain time, one result being that no one is in charge.  Yes there is a Governor’s mansion, with its impressive displays of colonial arms hung on its walls, but there is no governor. Yes, the House of Burgesses met down the street in the colonial capitol building, but there is no legislature to meet there now.  Yes, the church once wielded some power, but it certainly doesn’t any longer.  There is a courthouse, but no judge to mete out justice.  There are stocks in the public square, and a gaol (spelled with a “g”) but no prisoners to lock up.  There is mock musket fire, but there are no red-coats.  There is no enemy, no villain, no foe, not even a King George III across the Atlantic.

I sometimes wonder if the church has taken on some of the characteristics of Colonial Williamsburg; if, perhaps, we are re-enacting an old story on a true foundation but in a reconstructed and somewhat artificial version of it.  We use a Prayer Book that remembers older versions, but is not the original.  We wear old vestments that link us to ancient times, but of course are highly stylized.  We worship in a building that is meant to evoke the 14^th century even though it was built in the 19^th.  Are we just indulging in a fairy tale version of some ancient thing, like the new Harry Potter theme park at Disney Land?  Have we chosen to freeze ourselves in a moment of beauty that allows us to escape from the realities of a less-beautiful world?

If we go to the heart of this question, I think it has to do with that same troubling aspect of Colonial Williamsburg: is anyone actually in charge?  I do not pose this question in terms of the church hierarchy.  And unlike some Anglicans these days, I do not yearn for a centralized authority within the church that would simplify and clarify power relationships.  I mean to say that there is something about our life of faith that could leave you wondering where God is; whether he hasn’t left the scene quite some time ago; what happened to the Jesus who walked and talked and healed, but who rose to heaven long ago; where is the power of the Holy Spirit that once set the church and the world on fire with possibility, but who seems remote and perhaps unavailable to us nowadays.  Who’s in charge?

If we struggle with this sense that we might be inhabiting the Colonial Williamsburg of faith – a re-enactment built on old foundations, but not quite the real thing, it might be partly because we are sophisticated 21^st century Americans.    For instance, we read the story of the man with demons, and we already know that we are in the midst of a fairy tale, because, of course, we know that demons don’t exist.  We know that the man was probably schizophrenic.  We can diagnose him from our pews, and some of us could probably even fill his prescriptions from our own medicine cabinets.

Saint Luke tells us that the people who came out to see what had happened to the man with the demons were afraid, but there is nothing in this story that scares us, except of course for the loss of a herd of pigs, which spells financial disaster for the herdsmen at the very least (and nothing scares us these days like the loss of income-producing property).  To us this story might as well be played out by actors in period costumes in Colonial Galilee, or whatever.  It is a fairy tale being played out on a re-constructed version of some old religious stage.  And there is no real enemy, no villain, no foe, and therefore, no real trouble that there is no one in charge.

And because it is almost inevitable that we encounter the story this way, it is very hard for us to learn anything from it.  Because this story is not told in order to teach us about the dangers of demons, or to show how handy it can be to have a herd of swine around even if you keep kosher.  This story has a singular and unavoidable point, which is to teach us who is in charge. 

Jesus encounters this man who lives, we are told, not in a house but among the tombs, he is alive, but already doomed, living among the dead.  In his frequent rages he is restrained by the authorities, and chained up for the protection of others, and maybe for his own protection.  He is stark naked, a raving lunatic, and mad-possessed with many demons.  You can imagine that when he emerged from the tombs in his schizophrenic rages the townspeople believed quite strongly that there was an enemy that possessed him, a foe that needed to be vanquished, a villain who had taken his life from him.  They were not so ready to diagnose his problems away, and they had access to fewer pharmaceuticals, anyway.  And when he is around no one can control him, he cannot be restrained, no one is in charge.

Until now.

The demons know this before anyone else does.  They pull the man to the ground, and he cries out, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?”  And the rest of the story unfolds so that everyone else may come to know what the demons saw first: that Jesus is in charge, that he has power to overcome demons, to cast out the enemy, vanquish the foe, deliver justice to the villain.

I do not think that this story begs us to disregard modern psycho-therapeutic ideas and the medical treatment of mental illness.  It does not insist on a suspension of disbelief that allows for the possibility of demons that are waiting to possess you and me.  We psychologized demons decades ago, anyway, but that has not really robbed them of their power; and indeed, it has made it easier for many of us to acknowledge our own “demons” without fearing that we shall be sent to live among the tombs, or locked up in chains.  But what we have not remembered so well is who is in charge.  And so in the spiritual landscape of our lives we inhabit a place where we can see the foundations of an old faith, but we suspect that no one has occupied the governor’s mansion for a long time, that no law has been passed in the House of Burgesses for decades, and that the church remains a pretty place with nice music, but not seat of power any more.

Sitting here with our own, more silent demons – our fears, our neuroses, our obsessions, our deep failings, our hatreds, our bad habits, etc.; you don’t need me to try to catalog them for you, lest I bore you with my rather mundane expectations of your more exotic demons – sitting here, being honest about those things, what we could use is a herd of swine, some unclean vermin onto which we could project all that plagues us, and offer them up and wait and see if Jesus will cast them over a cliff and into the sea, or at least drown them in the Schuylkill.  A demonstration would be nice; a sign that left no doubt as to who is in charge would be helpful.

Not far from Colonial Williamsburg, just a few miles down the road, there is an amusement park with roller coasters and games and rides and all kinds of entertainment.  I suppose it makes the idea of a vacation to Williamsburg palatable to kids who are skeptical of being subjected to the living classroom of the reconstructed colonial town, where the possibility, indeed the expectation of learning something is conspicuous.

And despite its unusual, reconstructed character, despite the gnawing reality that all this has been rebuilt, and now only represents a frozen timelessness where nothing is actually at stake today, the town of Williamsburg finds its identity primarily I think in this: that there is something to be learned there about an old enmity, about the foes that were to be vanquished, and about justice that looks to assert itself over villainy, even if it is not clear anymore who is in charge.

We are surrounded by the forces of a society that would dearly like to entertain us; knowing that nothing gets us to spend money like entertainment.  In the midst of all that entertainment, there is a story to be told of a man who was possessed of demons.  And a question, “What have you to do with me Jesus, Son of the Most High God?”

In a world that too often makes us wonder who is really in charge, this story has been told for generation after generation, not to convince us of the existence of demons, but to help us learn the answer to that vexing question.  For each of us has our own demons.  And in each of our lives there will be enemies to fight, foes that need vanquishing, villains who need to be brought to justice – many, maybe even most of these, will be of our own making.  And we will wonder, some of us already have spent years wondering, if anyone is in charge, if there is any power in the world that can prevail, if there is any god who will come to our aid as we stand in what we have built on the ancient foundations of faith.

Who could have guessed that the question of the demons would be the question that would lead us to what we are meant to learn: What have you to do with me Jesus, Son of the Most High God?  And that the answer is so simple:  Everything, my beloved.  Everything.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

20 June 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Borrowing against the future

Attempts continue, down in the Gulf of Mexico, to contain the oil spill and to stop the flow of oil from the ocean floor. Attempts are also being continued by BP to cover their corporate behinds. It is not a pretty picture, all around. Images of dead or dying birds, fish and other animals are interspersed with images of weary-looking PR wonks attempting somehow to spin the worse ecological disaster in this nation's history, a disaster brought about by corporate neglect if not malfeasance.

And the real question, as it always is in matters like this, is economic. Who will pay what, to clean up, to make restitution, to pay for what has happened?

Already swimming in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico are the legal sharks who smell the blood in the water, and BP is, I am certain, already planning to mount a massive legal defense to limit as fully as possible their liability for the accident and its ecological implications.

The news stories are constant, about the effects of the spill on tourism and the local economy. The oil spill, in short, is almost entirely viewed in terms of money.

Which is generally when I admit my inherent skepticism of the ability of economic transactions or economic language to deal with the complexity of the Gulf Oil spill, the ethical problems of a corporation like BP or indeed the problems of a society that allows for the rape and pillage of the earth for economic reasons. The spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a ringing indictment of the inability of our society to think or speak correctly. Our language and rhetoric is not sufficient unto the day, or the past nearly sixty days. And it is a disaster of our own making.

Which is why it is interesting that in the Hebrew Scriptures this morning we have a story that is both economic and ecological. It is a story about land and about a conspiracy to take that land from an individual. Naboth refuses to sell his land because he understands it to be his “ancestral inheritance.” He belongs somehow to this specific piece of land, that his ancestors owned and farmed, and there is not a price that can be put on it, per se. Which puts King Ahab, who desires the land, into a bit of a funk. The powerful and the wealthy for time immemorial have always wanted what they cannot obtain easily or buy, and Ahab is no different. His wife Jezebel colludes with the powerful in Naboth's city to falsely accuse him, and execute him to obtain what he will not sell. And, so Elijah the prophet is sent to Ahab with this message “Because you have sold yourself to do what is evil in the sight of the Lord, I will bring disaster on you.”

Which seems like a strange passage to couple in the lectionary with a Gospel passage about forgiveness. There seems to be little forgiveness in the words of the prophet Elijah. And yet, I'm interested not by the contrast of the stories, but by the fact that they both use economic terms. Because you have “sold yourself” says Elijah, and Jesus speaks about debts.

Debt is the metaphor that Jesus uses in the Gospel this morning to deal with forgiveness. The greater the debt forgiven, the larger the gratefulness. Which makes perfect sense in a common-sensical way. And I have no problem applying this to my own life: the greater someone sins against me, or more likely, the greater that I sin against them, the more gratefulness is entailed when forgiveness is given. It is when one starts to talk about systems and corporations and governments that things get a little more complicated. Is there, in fact, the possibility of forgiveness for BP or for Goldman Sachs for causing world-wide economic chaos or for economic systems that destroy people and the earth?

I wonder if that condemnation of Elijah isn't somehow prescient in our own day? It is not a far stretch for me, to read this sentence as a condemnation not just of Ahab, Jezebel and the powerful who enter into a conspiracy with them, but as a kind of condemnation which rings down throughout time: because you have sold yourself to do evil, I will bring disaster.

It would be easy, I suppose, to go the Pat Robertson route and point to the oil spill as a punishment from God, but that's not really how I roll, and I doubt you'd find it very convincing. Or it would be tempting to use that sentence to ring the changes on BP as an evil corporation. But the reality is that BP is only symptomatic, BP is only the current whipping boy, and tomorrow, or next year, or 20 years from now, there will be a new whipping boy for us to point the finger towards (and away from us) and say “You've sold yourself to evil.”

The reality is that we live in a culture, in a world where debt is the fundamental way of life. Debt, but not gratefulness or forgiveness. I was amused recently to read that Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board has warned that “the federal budget appears to be on an unsustainable path,” which is, I think, a dour economist's way of saying “this is a mad house, sell and move to China.” Don't however, move to Greece or Japan, both of which face the kind of debt that as an economic layperson, I find quite unfathomable. How does an entire economic area like the European Union simply implode seemingly overnight? And we've all heard the statistics on individual debt and interest only mortgages in this country, and felt the pinch which has resulted.

Our debt is not simply the “lack of money” kind of debt, it is the debt of borrowing against the future, against the planet. BP is symptomatic not simply of the kind of economic greed which is our own, writ large into a corporation, but of a willingness to refuse to think about the costs beyond our own day, to make a quick buck despite the unsustainability of a system or process, symptomatic of a kind of alienation from creation that allows us to mortgage the future not simply of the human race, but of the whole creation, for money.

The oil spill is an indicator of how deeply sinful, we are as a society, how deep the roots of that sin reach, into the whole structure of our lives and culture, and into our language and speech and thought; and all the ways that we are complicit with BP and Goldman Sachs and all those robber barons in the rape of the earth, and in an economic system that is simply madness. The spill in the Gulf is an indicator of how desperately we need to have our overwhelming and massive debts forgiven.

The wonder of the passage from the Gospels this morning is that it doesn't matter what the woman has done. It doesn't matter how she's sinned. It doesn't matter that the culture she lives in is certainly to blame for some of that sin. It doesn't matter. What matters is that she is contrite, she is sad. She can't possibly pay her debts, which are many, and so she is forgiven without regard to the magnitude of her sins.

I asked earlier if there was forgiveness for BP, and I think that is somehow a pressing question. Not because I think BP is laboring under a heavy load of guilt, but because if BP is somehow symptomatic, then the ability of BP to obtain forgiveness is somehow about my ability to be forgiven. And this unnamed woman, who washed Jesus with tears and anointed him with ointment tells us that there is somehow, somewhere, forgiveness for us, for our complicity in our society, for our final responsibility for a world in which a corporation like BP can exist, for the inability of our language to speak or think correctly, and for our own individual and collective sins and brokenness.

But the message of that forgiveness comes with a warning. The forgiveness that Jesus gives this woman is because she is aware of her sin, and contrite. The Pharisees on the other hand are not aware of their sin, just hers. They are looking for sin in other people, not in themselves.

The oil spill is not a chance for us to point out BP and say “You are evil,” but for us to realize our sinfulness, and to weep maybe a little, and ask that our debts be forgiven, many or few, individual or communal, by the only One who is able to forgive with such munificence and graciousness, God living and true. In the name of that God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

The Third Sunday after Pentecost

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Bread Alone

Man does not live by bread alone, but by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord.  (Deuteronomy 8:2-3)

Among the many debatable assertions made in holy Scripture, this one is a doosey: that man does not live by bread alone, but by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord.  The saying comes from Deuteronomy, where it refers back to the memory of the children of Israel wandering in the desert after escaping through the Red Sea from slavery in Egypt.  You remember that they were hungry and complained to Moses, who asked God to do something about it.  In the night, while the people slept, God leaves a sprinkling of this stuff called manna - enough for everyone – which sustains them.  Of course, eventually Moses’ people will complain that all they have is this manna to eat, this food that comes down from heaven each night in the desert, what the Psalmist calls the bread of angels, but this complaining is par for the course.

The writer of Deuteronomy says that God put his people through this ordeal in the desert to test them and to humble them, “that he might make [them] know that man does not live by bread alone, but that man lives by everything that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord.”  This, of course, sounds great, and is easy to recite as though we mean it.  It is a wonderful and well-worn cliché by now.  But you have to ask yourself whether or not you think it is true, and if you do, whether or not there is much evidence that you or I or anyone we know is living as though it was true.

To assess this question, it helps to get back to the desert; to think about what it means to be uprooted, uncertain, homeless, hungry, on the run, and deeply skeptical of your leader, but basically unable to do anything about it since you can’t very well go back to Egypt where you used to be a slave.  You don’t have a lot of options, and you are tired of living on manna.  Are you grateful for it anyway?  And will you remember to thank God for it after you have arrived at a land flowing with milk and honey, and perhaps steak, or at least lamb chops?

To say that we Americans live in a land flowing with milk and honey is a gross understatement.  The fact is that we live in an obscene society.  So much do we have that we fatten our children and the poor on the worst imaginable processed foods.  It is actually costly and inconvenient to eat a healthy diet in this country, or to lead what might be called a healthy lifestyle.  Warfare is so much a part of our lives, that we are basically untroubled that we have been sending soldiers to Afghanistan for almost a decade now, with no end in sight, and our idea of withdrawing from Iraq is to leave a force of only 50,000 troops there.  Who knows what we are planning to do with North Korea – and who will object?  Our disgusting dependence on oil is a helpful distraction from the reality that we have stripped the earth of so many of its resources with little care about the effect this might have on the planet or on us: trees, fish, clean water – all disappearing, just to name the most obvious.  We built a great system of schools to educate our children, but we don’t seem to care much if our children actually learn anything.  We built a great system of prisons, and we don’t seem to care if a million people rot in them, as long as we can’t see it from our house.  And we built a great economy, that after it stopped making anything useful, just found ways to make money for the sake of making money.  And then we decided that those who master that game will be rewarded the most handsomely.  Not just on the order of a few times more generously than anyone else, but with exponentially extravagant sums that allow an exponentially extravagant lifestyle.

But here is the kicker: we are not really unhappy living this way, because most of us look up with more envy than disgust at the investment banker whose annual bonus is a seven-figure number, even after the financial crisis of the past several years, while unemployment still hovers around the double digits.  There is manna and there is money, and given the choice, most of us know which we would take.  If you doubt me, ask yourself how far you would have to walk from here in any direction to buy a lottery ticket – that ludicrous tease (promoted by the government) that you, too, could live like a banker, if you just get a little lucky.  Another way to put this is to say that most of us would happily live on bread alone, as long as the bread is direct-deposited into our bank accounts.

For better or worse, in the midst of this land flowing with milk and money, (no, my computer does not even try to correct me here) there stand churches, like Saint Mark’s.  Every day of the year here, and several times on Sundays, we take some scraps of bread and a few cups of wine and we offer them to God, asking him to bless them, and to bless us, too.  Although it’s hard to picture a desert here in this beautiful church, this is meant to be a place where we connect with the memory of those wanderers all those generations ago.  It is meant to be a place where we see how God calls us out of slavery and into a new freedom.  It is meant to be a place where we rush across the parted waters of a red sea to escape the clutches of those who would exploit us, use us for their own purposes and gain.  It is meant to be a place of humility, where we come to terms with our own limitations, and God’s merciful provision.  It is meant to be a place of testing, to see if we will keep God’s commandment to love him and to love one another.  And it is meant to be a place where we are asked to consider whether or not we really want to live on bread alone.

It is so hard, as fat Americans (I can say this with confidence), to come to church and feel hungry for manna: for the food that comes only from God.  What is this wafer of tasteless bread, and this sip of too-sweet wine?  What point is there to it, what power does it have?  And who needs it anyway?  No one needs it if you are happy to live on bread alone.

But if you begin to become weary with the obscenity of our society, and begin to wonder where there is an antidote for it, you might start by looking for manna.

Once, America thought of itself as a new promised land, because of the freedom we have here, and because of the plentiful resources that could so obviously and so easily be shared by so many.  It did not take us long, as a nation, to find slaves of our own, so that we began to be more like a new Egypt: oppressing others for our own gain, and ready, willing, and able to live on bread alone.  It took a bloody civil war and another hundred years of struggle to cross that red sea. 

But remember that Moses’ followers reminisced fondly about their days of slavery in Egypt, while they wandered the desert.  They longed for cucumbers and leeks and garlic and melons, when all they had to eat was manna, from heaven.  And have we wandered back to Egypt again?  Or are we, at least longing for its cucumbers and melons, which somehow seem more enticing than our freedom and our self-respect?

If it sometimes feels this way to you, as it does to me, then you are in the right place this morning.  For day by day, and Sunday by Sunday, God propels us, when we gather in his name, back into the desert.  He leads us here to help us escape from the obscene fatness and exploitation that we would willingly enslave ourselves to in exchange for cucumbers, melons, leeks; in exchange for bread in our bank accounts.  He leads us here to show us heights of beauty, forgiveness, mercy, truth, and love unknown in the corporate offices of Goldman Sachs, et al.

He leads us here to feed us with a better manna than he gave to his children so long ago  - the bread of heaven, food of angels that renews this life and fortifies us for unending life in the world to come.

There is ample evidence that man can live in this world on bread alone, but it is an obscene and ugly life we end up living that way, and it comes to an unhappy end.

There is another life to be led, in this world and in the world to come.  This is the life of pardon, mercy, wonder, joy, and love.  And there is no way to live it on a diet of bread alone, but by the love of God that comes from the mouth of the Lord.  Today, here, now, God has called again out of Egypt, he is raining down on us the bread of heaven, the food of angels.  Will we not come to his table, and eat?

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Solemnity of Corpus Christi, 7 June 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Secrets, Lies, and Mysteries

Many people these days are annoyed with God because he seems to be involved with a lot of secrets and lies.

The BIG secret that has troubled humanity for as long as we have thought about it is, in the words of a famous book by a famous rabbi: Why do bad things happen to good people?  Lots of books have been written on the topic of this big secret, including an entire book of the Bible (the Book of Job), which ends with God more or less telling Job that it’s a secret, and how dare he, little, puny Job, ask great big God, who, by the way, made the earth and the heavens and set the stars in the sky, to divulge his secrets, in which case they wouldn’t be secrets any longer.

God has many other secrets, like what the songs of the whales mean, how to cure cancer, is there life elsewhere in the universe, what is happening to the honeybees, how to move faster than the speed of light, [and how did Roy Halladay pitch a perfect game last night against the Marlins]?  Some of God’s secrets seem important to us; some seem trivial.  Some we expect him to reveal; some seem unlikely to be uncovered.  Some, like dinosaurs and Stonehenge, are secrets from the past; and some, like peace or the end of the world, are secrets of the future.

People would be upset with God if he only kept secrets, but they would get over it eventually and learn to live with a God who keeps secrets better than anyone else.  What really annoys people is that they suspect God lies.

To begin with, there is the BIG lie: a lurking suspicion that God is not really God; rather, he is a made-up story, being manipulated by men behind curtains in Rome and Lynchburg, and anywhere a church like this stands.  It might be truer to say that people don’t so much think God lies as they think believers lie.  And all the other supposed lies flow from this one:  that God is love, that humans are in the habit of doing something called “sin”, that prayer matters, that our hymns do not fall on deaf ears, that Jesus was the Son of God and came into the world to save us.

More and more these days there is a sense that most religion, and certainly the Christian religion, such as it is, are systems of secrets and lies.  You can see this partly in the way the word “myth” has shifted in meaning.  It used to be understood that a myth was a story, the facts of which might be debatable but the essence of which was a truth so deep that we didn’t have any other way to talk about it, and that religion was the guardian and caretaker of these important stories.  Nowadays, when something is called a “myth” it is usually derided as “just a myth,” meaning it is most fundamentally untrue, and religion is the perpetuator of these lies.

In this rendering, Scripture is no longer a complex quilt of truths to be discerned from ancient stories and texts of various kinds; it is a web of lies that supports the delusions of people who are willing to live with a bunch of secrets.

And so God is a subject of secrets and lies.  That his church has been manifestly shown to be an institution plagued by harmful secrets and willful lies has not helped this situation.

But this reality surely comes as no surprise to God.  One burden of the Scriptures has been to show that thus has it ever been: God’s people, prodigal by nature, constantly disappoint him, as they disappoint themselves, and are called to repent and reform.  That this pattern of human behavior is plainly neither a secret nor a lie, does little in the face of skepticism about God.

The Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures, if you will, shows us early-on God’s assertion of himself: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord.”  And throughout so many of the early stories we see God at work, uncovering this secret for his people and declaring that all other gods, carved as they were in wood and stone, are nothing more than lies.  We Christians have inherited this basic claim, that the Lord our God is one Lord, alone in power and majesty and might and glory.  And into this landscape comes the Christian doctrine that although God is one: the singular, unrivalled divinity in the universe, God is nevertheless known to his people in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.  If this is not confusing to you, then you are clearly ready for the AP course in religion.  Most, of us, however, are at least a little confused by how God can be both three-personed and yet one.  It seems a contradiction in terms.  And the question it seems to beg is this: is this claim about the trinitarian identity of God a secret or a lie?

In either case, one could imagine that somewhere in the Vatican, or in Dan Brown’s study, there is a file cabinet with a locked drawer that contains a folder marked “Trinity” that has drawings, schematics, and at least a few paragraphs of explanation that either unlock the secret or blow the lid off the lie.

But there is another option, and it is this option that the church has long asserted about the truth of God’s triune nature and identity, namely that it is neither a secret nor a lie, but that it is a mystery.  Long before there were detectives whose sole job was to solve them, there were mysteries.  Real mysteries are not puzzles waiting to be solved, they are, rather, a category of truth that is evident to us and yet beyond our comprehension. 

It is a reflection of modern over-self-confidence that we tend to assume that any mystery is either a secret waiting to be unlocked or a lie being perpetuated for somebody’s gain.  Can we really not imagine truth in the universe that is beyond our comprehension?  At the moment we are baffled by a hole that we dug in the bottom of the sea bed in the Gulf of Mexico; if we can’t even figure out how to plug that hole to stop an oil spill of our own making, can we really be so sure that the rest of the universe is available to us to be understood?

Our modern resistance to mystery in the world is paralleled by our confusion about knowledge and wisdom.  We have forgotten that there is a distinction between the two, assuming that a wise person has extensive knowledge of the secrets and lies that assault the truth.  But many more generations have known that real wisdom lies in the acceptance of mystery, and the willingness to live with and reflect upon the mysteries of life without needing to try to solve them.

From the pages of the New Testament, on the lips of Jesus, we hear that God is to be known as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Do we understand this?  We remember that the Holy Spirit brooded over the face of the waters at the beginning of time.  We have no trouble conceiving of the God who made the world, who led his children out of captivity, and to whom Jesus prayed in the garden as a Father (even if we stumble a little on the overly gender-specific language), and we accept the claim of that heavenly voice that Jesus is the beloved Son of God.  We know that Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would come to lead us into all truth.  But none of this means we understand it.

The ancient wisdom of the church was never to de-code or explain the mystery of the Holy Trinity, it was, rather to reflect on it and rejoice in it: to realize that God is fabulously complicated, and that God nevertheless wants us to know him, even if it is hard for us to bear.

In our own day and age, the mysterious truth that our God is one Lord, but three persons, brings an important, ancient reflection back to mind: that God’s very nature, the essence of his being, is communal.  God does not exist in the splendid isolation of a remote heavenly throne room, where he occasionally naps on his throne, when not hurling thunderbolts of judgment down to earth.  God’s nature is to relate, to dialogue, to dance, to commune.  Aloneness is not God’s thing.

Perhaps this is why Adam’s needy demand for a helper does not fall on deaf ears in the Garden of Eden.  Perhaps this is why Noah is told to build a big ark, for all the animals and his family.  Perhaps this is why Moses is allowed to have the help of his brother Aaron.  Perhaps this is why Abraham is not sent on pilgrimage himself, he is told to bring his wife and family with him.  Perhaps this is why Ruth will not leave Naomi’s side.  Perhaps this is why Joseph is restored to the fellowship of his brothers and his father.  Perhaps this is why another Joseph, centuries later, is an essential part of the Holy Family.  Perhaps this is why Jesus tended to call his disciples in pairs, and sent them out two by two.  We are made in God’s image: aloneness is not God’s thing, and when we follow God, it is unlikely to be our thing either.

The truth at the heart of the mystery of the Holy Trinity is that God wants us to know him, even if he knows that he is beyond our comprehension, just as he wanted to show himself to Moses even though he knew it was beyond Moses’ ken to perceive more than the divine backside.

And the crucial thing that God is able to show us is that he is not a lonesome God: he is always relating, always discussing, always dancing, always communing.  Which we infer means that God does not mean any creature that he made in his own image (you and me) to be a lonesome creature, rather he means for us to be in relationships, to be in dialogue, to be dancing, and to be communing with one another.

The truth is that the alternative to showing us his triune self would be to keep it secret, or worse, to lie to us.  And despite the suspicions of our age, and the secrets that God does keep from us, he does not seem to want to be defined by secrets and lies.

God is, however, entirely willing to wrap himself in mystery.  God’s mysteries are not waiting or even available to us to be solved and revealed in a 90- minute TV special.  God’s mysteries, are however available to us to ponder, to think and talk and pray about, to behold in something like the same way that the beauty of the night sky or the scent of honeysuckle remains a mystery to be enjoyed.

May God grant us the wisdom to know the difference between secrets, lies, and mysteries.  May he give us patience with his secrets, confidence that he will never lie to us, and wisdom to ponder the mystery of his triune self, without the need to try to figure him out!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Trinity Sunday 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Bonsai Church

Some years ago, a friend who was going away on vacation for a week asked me to take care of a bonsai tree.  My friend had been taking a class in bonsai – the art of growing trees in small containers and miniaturizing their features to mimic full-sized, mature trees.  The tree my friend was growing didn’t need a great deal of care, I certainly wasn’t being asked to do the pruning of the leaves or the training of the branches that produces such elegantly formed little bonsai trees.  All I had to do was keep it watered every day, or every other day, as I recall.  Since I had a sort of a crush on this friend, I was, of course, thrilled to be asked to take care of the bonsai tree.  It seemed to represent some tacit but unmistakable bond between us: a little project we were now involved in together.  Never mind that we had never been on a date, or even contemplated such a thing (well, I had) – now we were raising a bonsai tree together!  What joy!  What rapture!

I have never been any good at raising plants; even the easiest houseplants seem a burden and a trouble to me.  But I can tell you I would have lavished attention on that little bonsai tree, if anything other than watering had been required of me.  I would have protected it with my life in order to return it to my friend in good health, a symbol of the deep bond that I imagined now joined us together in the raising of this tree.  That it was a tiny tree, with shallow roots going only as deep as its ornamental container would allow did not ruin the symbolism of it for me.  It was a thing of beauty, beloved, I supposed, of my friend, and I was not going to betray the trust, the bond, the layers of unspoken meaning held within that little ceramic tray of soil!

In any case, I returned the tree safely to my friend, never hinting at the meaning I’d invested in its care, which stayed hidden in the scant soil of its container.  My friend moved away, though we are still in touch from time to time.  I have no idea what happened to the bonsai tree.

Bonsai, as an art, I remember looking up at the time, is distinct from the horticultural practice of dwarfing.  A bonsai tree is made from a branch or a cutting of a full-sized tree that is restrained, pruned, trimmed, wired, trained to grow on a smaller scale than it would normally grow.  Creating a dwarf version of a plant is done by successfully and permanently changing its genetic makeup so that the plant and its descendants will always be small.

For some reason the image of the bonsai tree has been on my mind as this feast of Pentecost has approached.  In a kitschy way, Pentecost – the day when the Holy Spirit was first manifested to Jesus’ disciples – is sometimes called the birthday of the church.  This is the idea that Spirit, rushing into that community of people with a thunderous wind and tongues of fire, weaved the band of disciples together into a cohesive and purposeful body - the church – giving birth to this new thing, this community, this organization, this cause, this movement. 

It remained to be seen what all this would mean, what a diverse and disparate band of men and women joined by this almost tacit, certainly mysterious bond would amount to.  If you think in terms of horticulture, it remained to be seen how this new church would grow.  Was it a houseplant?  An oak, or an elm, or a quaking aspen?  Was it a fern, or a rose, or an orchid?  How would this church grow, gathered together by the Holy Spirit and given life?

The story of the church tells us that its growth has been prolific and multiform: an expansive garden with plants and trees and shrubs and flowers and succulents from virtually every culture, growing in all kinds of conditions.  Although it has not always been clear, we believe that this growth has been generally a good thing, that the Spirit’s multiplying power has been a blessing to the world.  A test of this, I would contend, is that wherever Jesus’ commandment to love one another in sacrificial service has been kept, you will find a healthy patch of God’s expansive garden.

All these centuries after that fist Pentecost, that birthday of the church, Christian communities, like us, celebrating the continuing gifts of the Spirit, and he weaves again a band of diverse and disparate people together into a body, a cause, a movement, have to decide what sort of thing will grow in this place where God has planted us.

It would seem to me that in many places communities are opting for a bonsai church: a diminished, miniaturized version of a larger original, that bears a striking resemblance to its parent, and can certainly live a long time, but that is smaller by definition, and kept within the shallow soil of an elegant container.

Smaller congregations,

smaller budgets,

smaller ministries,

smaller voices raised to God’s praise,

smaller prayers being offered for the peace of the world,

smaller promises of a smaller forgiveness,

smaller arms reaching out to a smaller number of people in need,

smaller expectations,

smaller blessings being given or being asked for,

smaller beauties,

smaller hopes for a smaller redemption,

smaller vision to heal a smaller blindness,

smaller steps in a smaller pilgrimage,

a smaller spirit to animate a smaller body,

a smaller song to sing a smaller Alleluia,

a smaller resurrection that leads to a smaller life in smaller heaven.

This is not to say that this smaller bonsai church is not beautiful and faithful, just that it is a smaller, miniaturized version of the church: smaller, I contend, than the church the Holy Spirit breathed life into on that first Pentecost, smaller than the fabric that Spirit began to weave all those centuries ago, smaller than the expansive garden that the saints planted and carried by ship and over land to Asia minor, to north Africa, and to Rome, and beyond.

But here’s the rub for us.  Saint Mark’s is a beautiful container.  And if we wanted to we could grow a beautiful bonsai church here.  We would be justified in doing it as a faithful expression of our crush on God, that has lasted here for more than 160 years.  In fact, it is precisely because our relationship with God is somewhat different from my unspoken crush on my friend with the bonsai tree that we might want to consider whether a bonsai church is what God is asking us to grow here.

God’s love to the people who have gathered here at Saint Mark’s since 1848 has been expansive.  He has sent the thunderous wind of his Holy Spirit to generations here, lighting tongues of flame above us, giving voice to many dialects of faith to hear and to heed his commandment to love one another in sacrificial service.

God gave the founders of this parish a bigger vision for a bigger beauty,

a bigger baptism leading to a bigger life in Christ,

bigger music to proclaim a bigger message,

a bigger call to repentance to pronounce a bigger forgiveness,

a bigger city to ask for bigger ministry,

bigger arms to welcome the weary,

a bigger hearth for a bigger hospitality,

bigger strides for a bigger pilgrimage,

bigger tears to shed for a bigger Passion,

bigger prayers for a bigger peace across this bigger world,

bigger compassion for the bigger suffering we see,

bigger room for a bigger inclusivity,

bigger basins to wash more feet,

a bigger Litany for bigger sins,

a bigger Magnificat of praise,

bigger wreaths of incense,

a bigger mystery of God’s bigger love,

a bigger Gospel for a bigger salvation

a bigger thanksgiving for God’s bigger Presence,

a bigger hope for bigger blessings,

a bigger song with bigger Alleluias to announce

a bigger resurrection to a bigger life in a bigger heaven!

There are some people who believe that the church in our day and age - smaller, weaker, less influential – has been dwarfed: permanently, genetically, unalterably diminished in every way.  But I think we have simply decided to opt for a bonsai church: elegant, beautiful, well-trained, restrained to survive within its container.  But the rushing wind and tongues of fire that come with the Holy Spirit have a way of blowing the lids off containers and shattering their sides.

And so the real question is about our crush on God - yours and mine.  The question is about whether we are willing to allow it to stay just a silly crush: un-talked-about, embarrassing, maybe even inappropriate.  Or have we been open to a real romance with God?  Are we willing to let his Holy Spirit all the way into our lives, to swoop us off our feet, lift us up and set us down in a new and bigger place?  Are we willing to feel the embrace of his spirit, blowing through this space even now, to hear his whispers of courtship in our ears, and to announce in full voice that we are head over heels in love with God?

When we do, we should not be surprised to discover, as generations before us have, that this corner of God’s garden cannot be contained in a small, ceramic pot.  We should not be surprised that God’s church has not, in fact, been dwarfed, that its roots are seeking deep groundwater, its branches are far-reaching, and its leaves provide a commodious shelter.

Perhaps in our romance we shall even discover that having been given what we thought was a bonsai church, we are compelled to take the restrained, carefully potted, perfectly formed tree from its container, and find a bit of good ground, and re-plant it there.

And will we lavish it with the attention it deserves and needs?  Will we protect it with our lives, in order to ensure that we can always offer it back to God healthy and whole?  Will rejoice in the deep bond that has formed between us and God, when we see what happens with this tree planted by his Son and watered by his Holy Spirit?  And will we know that this is what God has wanted all along, that his church should grow?

Come, Holy Spirit, come,

inspire our hearts,

set them on fire with your love,

and let your church grow!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Pentecost 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Belonging

There is a phenomenon in American culture that I cannot understand. The fascination, the energy, the money, the vitriol, all of which are expended on professional sports teams.

What would someone who think who had no experience of professional sports, about the energy that fans burn up on their favorites? They might think that it was a deeply important matter, instead of a game for amusement.

I have come to see this obsession with sports as a function of one of the truisms of human behavior: that we define ourselves in large measure by identification with a group, a franchise, a culture, a clan or a family. It is desperately important to us to belong, to have some roots, I suppose belonging goes some distance to assuaging some of the loneliness which is part of being trapped in our own bodies and heads.

And so fans identify themselves with the Yankees, or the Cowboys, or the Flyers, as a way of belonging. Sports of course, are a lighter example of this identification and belonging, but there are far darker and more dangerous examples of it. Because one of the corollaries of belonging to a culture or group is that groups are often defined over and against other groups. We not only like to belong to a group, but one of the ways that we know we belong to a group is that we don't belong to that other group. There are a plethora of examples of this throughout history: the English and the Irish, (in fact, the English and almost everyone else whom they colonized), the Tutsis and Hutus, Jews and Palestinians, whites and blacks; we define who we are by defining who we are not.

In scientific terms these differences are negligible, of course. The genetic differences between “races” are to all extents and purposes, so minute as to be invisible. Indeed, “race” turns out to be one of those ways that we define ourselves, that we identify and belong.

The question of belonging and group identification has been very much in the news lately, as a state in which I used to live, Arizona, has voted for what I think of as a draconian law designed to discourage illegal immigration. What the law is saying is: we are Americans, they are not. We belong, they do not.

But it is not just Arizona, of course. The Church is involved in a massive debate about who belongs, who is inside the pale and who is not. The debate is about many things: who has legitimate claims to the faith of Augustine, Becket, Cranmer, and Ramsey; who has political power, money and property; whether women and gay persons belong as ordained persons in the Church; in short, who belongs in the Anglican Communion, and who does not, who belongs as the true descendant of the Church of England in these United States.

This is one of the ways that we do business as humans, we locate ourselves in the world, we define the boundaries that give us belonging, and we defend them.

But that way of doing business is alien to the Christian faith. Although it sometimes seems as if becoming a member of the Church is to become a member of yet another exclusive group, one might even say a rapidly shrinking, exclusive gathering, the Gospel this morning teaches us otherwise: the vows of baptism make us members of a body that brooks no boundaries, for all are one in Christ, as Christ is one with God. And this oneness, never quite realized but always underlying the life of the Church begins in the Gospel this morning, as Jesus prays for that nascent little ragtag band of disciples, that they will be one.

The message is that becoming a member of the body of Christ overwhelms all other artificial cultural barriers which separate, and makes us one with as diverse and ragtag a group of people as were those early disciples.

I was talking recently to someone who was here at St. Mark's years ago, and this is the story he told me. A former priest here, wandered into a potluck gathering, very much like we had this past Thursday after the Feast of the Ascension, and this priest wondered out loud where else you would find so unusual and diverse a gathering of people. The only possibility that he could come up with was an air raid shelter.

Look at the body of Christ's people, gathered in this place. People of deep faith, people who would like to have faith, all sorts of ethnic, racial, economic, and other diversities.

Multiply that by all the churches that have been and will be, by all the people that will gather in them, by all who will be united at the altars where Christ will be present from the beginning of the ragtag Church until the Last Trump and you get a sense of the diversity, the absolute mad unity of the life of the Church, which is Christ's body, to which we are called in the magnificent light of his resurrection. And imagine how ragamuffin a band is gathered, mystically, when we become one in the Sacrament of His Body and Blood, and with all that great multitude that none can number.

Which is why, though I shy away from politics in the pulpit, matters like Arizona's immigration law, civil rights, war and peace, genocide, health care, ecology, and economics are not simply political matters, but inherently religious ones.

In the Church, we are called into massive diverse fellowship which brooks no political boundaries. God calls Republicans and Democrats, Whigs, Tories, Liberal Democrats, Socialists, Communists, Ulster Orange men and Sinn Fein; everyone into the unseen unity of oneness with each other in God.

But that does not mean that simply everything is compatible with the vision of oneness that is part of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I or anyone can believe whatever we want about any political matter, but that does not mean that such a belief is compatible with the duty that I owe to my brothers and sisters in Christ, with whom I am one. If we are one in Christ, then I have specific duties and obligations to my brothers and sisters who come from south of the Arizona/Mexico border, or those who are called to ordained ministry who are women or gay people, or those who believe that schism is their only alternative, because we are one with each other, and will be together not just in this haphazard gathering that is the Church temporal, but forever.

C.S. Lewis once preached these words and they speak to the unity of the Body of Christ:

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, (shall we insert sports franchises), arts, civilisations--these are mortal... But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit--immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.”

If all are one in Christ, my actions and your actions always occur against the backdrop that is the oneness of that Body, and the excuses of political, or tribal, or family allegiance do not quell the responsibilities that I have to the whole Body, to the immortals we meet everyday. My actions can heal or wound that Body, seen or unseen.

Which means that we are none of us absolved either from the necessity of struggling to understand and work for political ends which are consonant with the Gospel (which affect the real lives of immortal people that we are united to in Christ), or from the hard, hard work of being one in Christ with people who it is very, very difficult to be one with. That is the kind of “shirt of flame” that oneness in Christ binds us to.

Yesterday, the Diocese of Los Angeles consecrated two bishops suffragon. They were the 16^th and 17^th women to be consecrated as bishops in the Episcopal Church, (the 1044^th and 1045^th bishops in the American succession), but what has garnered so much news is that one of them, Mary Glasspool, is openly gay and has lived for the past 19 years in a committed relationship with another woman.

The election and the consent process by which the Episcopal Church has agreed to now-Bishop Glasspool's consecration, has garnered the usual baleful predictions about the end of the Anglican Communion and the departure of the Episcopal Church from the historic faith.

And, whenever I hear that noise, from the conservative side of the aisle, my knee-jerk inclination is to say “You know what? You don't like it? Don't let the door hit you on the way out. Good riddance!”

But, of course, I owe my beloved brothers and sisters so much more than that. We are one in Christ, whether they like it, or even believe it, and whether I like it or agree with it.

It is a madness, of course, to gather all of us crazy people of faith throughout time into one body. By doing this God is operating with what Dorothy Sayers used to call “His usual outrageous lack of scruple.” But as is often the case with God's lack of scruple, who are we to complain?

So, brothers and sisters, let us glory in the ridiculousness of being one in Christ! Come conservative breakaway Anglicans, come right wing Republican lawmakers in Arizona, come Yankees fans, come terrorists, and people of all colors and strips, come with me to the Supper of the Lamb. It matters not that I cannot understand you and have terrible trouble loving you. I'm sure I'm not that easy to love either. But we are one in Christ. God in his glory and wonder has made us one.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

Easter VII

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Seen and unseen

To be a Christian is to be an alien in foreign land, or to be, at least, between the times. To never feel at home, to know that there are two time frames, two realities present: the seen and the unseen, that which we know by sight and that which we know by faith; eternity and our swiftly changing world.

Since I spent some formative time studying the spirituality of the Eastern Church, I like to think of these two different realities using the metaphor of icons. Icons often have the heavy golden backdrop, which symbolizes the uncreated Divine light. And the heavy, solemn figures are meant to represent the eternal, immortal figures of saints and angels, as they are upon that other shore, and in that uncreated light.

The effect and the theory is very much that icons are windows, through which the eternal comes close to the temporal, and through which we stare at the mighty figures of the faith and through which they stare back at us.

As we go through the liturgical year, we wander, I think, between those two poles, between the unseen reality of eternity, in which Christ is risen, ascended, and King, and the seen reality of our lives, which often feel very much as if Christ's death was meaningless, faith foolish, and evil very much in the ascendancy.

I think that is why living in liturgical time sometimes feels disjointed to me. There are times when the Church is very much in the stream of earthly time, and there are times when we live in moments of eternity. In Lent and ordinary time we are rooted in the temporal, in the sense of our sinfulness and coming deaths, or in the ordinary life and teachings of Jesus, but there are moments like Eastertide when we live very much upon that other shore, in time that is not our time, when we live in the joy of the risen Christ, that joy that is ours always, whether or not we can see through the veil that shrouds it sometimes. Those moments when we live in the reality of Christ's victory.

As we go through the year with Christ, and celebrate the moments in his life that have import for us, there are some moments when the two different realities, the two different frames get remarkably close to each other, and a window seems to open and we get for an instant, a vision of the mighty and eternal.

The Ascension is just such a feast, I think, and I always feel that way about the Feast of the Transfiguration as well. These moments when we are given a vision of Jesus, not just as the rabbi and Messiah, or even as the Incarnate Word of God walking among us, but as this figure of unbelievable majesty and power eternally glorious.

But it is always slightly confusing to come to terms with those moments when eternity comes near. Often, I feel as if I'm in deep waters, playing a game whose rules have suddenly changed, when Jesus sails up into heaven, or becomes illuminated like some kind of human light bulb. Because the question always becomes, “What does it mean?” I don't have trouble finding meaning in Jesus' healing the sick, or raising the dead, or in teaching the love of God and neighbors. But what does it mean that Jesus ascended. The Church has long held it as momentous, as a great feast of the Church, but what does it mean? What does it mean in the life of Jesus, and what does it mean in the lives of those of us who apprehend him by faith, although he is hid from our sight?

I'm not sure that I can answer either of those questions satisfactorily, but there are several things that occur to me. One of the directions that the Ascension makes my mind wander in is in terms of the resurrected Jesus. I wonder if the Ascension isn't an indicator of how different the resurrected Jesus was, physically.

During Eastertide we've seen the disciples fail to recognize him again and again; we've seen him appear suddenly to the disciples, despite locked door. We've seen him skip around Palestine appearing here, there everywhere. There is clearly something about Jesus risen that is massively different and changed. His body is not like ours, because he has risen glorious from the tomb. He is present to the disciples, but not as he has been.

And yet even resurrected, Jesus is linked to a time and a place. He is changed, but still with his disciples at specific times and places. His wounds are still there, and he eats and walks with them.

I wonder if the collect for today doesn't help to explain to the meaning and importance of the Ascension for us. “Almighty God, whose blessed Son our Savior Jesus Christ ascended far above all heavens that he might fill all things...”

I like to think then, that the Ascension is the moment and perhaps the symbol of the transformation when Christ, even in his resurrected body, moves from being bounded by time and place, and becomes universal, becomes present to all time and all creation.

And that, I think, is the answer to the question of why it matters. Because in many ways the Ascension might feel otherwise like an leaving, like a loss, like being abandoned. We might be tempted to say “Those lucky few disciples got to know him, but now he's gone to some castle in the sky, and I don't get to experience him or know him.”

Christ is ascended and the glory of his very being has gone out into all the world and into all history, and somehow because he is less present to us, face to face, somehow he is more present, more available, more powerful in his might and majesty.

Somehow, because he is ascended, he is present everywhere, on innumerable altars, in hearts throughout the world and times; in prisons and mines, in boardrooms and courtrooms, in tents and shanty towns, to the super wealthy and the abject poor; everywhere and every when, Christ fills all things, redeems all things, sanctifies and blesses all things, draws all things into his resurrected life, and into the very life of the Triune God.

Which is good to remember here, near the end of Eastertide, when we shift back into the life of ordinary time, and the veil that blocks out eternity comes down again.

Christ is ascended and he fills all things with his glory and majesty. He will come again in glory, and is with us unto the ages of the ages.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

The Feast of the Ascension of Our Lord

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Oil Spill

Everyone knows by now that the huge oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico is getting closer and closer to the Louisiana coast, and in a few places has already made it there.  It’s a dark, spreading menace that floats on the surface after rising up from its deep source.  Unlike the explosion and fire that caused the slick, there’s nothing violent about the encroaching puddle of oil, and yet there is a sense of dread as it expands and becomes harder to contain, and we realize that it is tremendously difficult to shut off at its source.  The danger the oil slick poses is mostly on the surface, as far as I can tell by my reading.  It spews up from the ocean depths, and that is where the leak must be stopped, but it is the expanse of oil on the surface that carries so much threat as it floats and spreads and moves closer to fragile shoreline habitats.

At the risk of sounding flippant, I wonder if there are more and more people these days in American and European society who think about Christianity this way: as a sort of malignant oil spill that sprung up all those generations ago, and for a long time spread like an oil slick, encroaching more and more with the passing years on the nations of Europe, crossing the seas to the Americas and to Africa and India with the help of the British, the Spanish, and the Portuguese.

The cynic will say that the spread of this faith was a menace in its cruel treatment of indigenous peoples in many places where it spread, in the strictures it has sought to impose on societies, in its insistence on the sinfulness of human nature, in the numerous and extravagant failings of its clergy leaders, in its dismal record of abuse, and on, and on.  And such an evaluation of Christian faith might also suggest that the sad thing is that it just floats on the surface of human lives: a superficial but sticky, messy, self-righteous kind of oil slick of faith, with nothing of any substance beneath it, except, perhaps, at its source, once, long ago.

I ask myself all the time about the depth of my own faith, and because I am a priest I wonder about the depth of your faith, too.  I wonder if our Christian identity goes deeper than the surface, or if we just got caught up in this oil slick that has so effectively seeped and floated over our lives.  But if we look below the surface, what would we see?

And then I come across these words of Jesus from John’s Gospel today, which I have read or heard a thousand times, but which always charms me:  “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

But I have to ask myself about this commandment of Jesus and how I encounter it, how you encounter it.  Are we anything more than seagulls who’ve gotten caught in the slick of Jesus’ teaching: covered in it, in a sense, and therefore hampered in getting on with otherwise normal lives, but not really changed inside in any meaningful way?  Is our faith anything more than an accident of having been in the wrong place at the wrong time and more or less unable to escape the ever-encroaching slick?

I have to ask this because of the commandment Jesus gave.  (And generally he was not one for commandments - he was one for provocative questions, for multivalent stories, for probing conversation, and challenging points of view, but not so much one for commandments.)  I have to ask how we Christians demonstrate the truth or falsity of what he asserted: by this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

Lately, the world has been given cause to wonder whether or not the work of the church in spreading the Christian faith could hold up to this standard, whether it mighn’t have been a mistake not to clean up this spill before the oil slick got so big, since beneath the surface there does not appear to be a whole lot of love.

Sticking with my seagull identity for a moment, I am aware that the question has far-flung implications.  I remember flying high, and seeing how big the oil slick of Christianity is.  But in evaluating the reality of the situation I am more likely to take notice of you – the other gulls in my immediate vicinity, in may parish, as it were, if seagulls had parish churches for themselves.

First, I have to decide what I think it might mean to “have love for one another.”  Could we just put on a production of “Hair” and call it quits?  Do we have to make sure that everyone gets married and starts a family?  Or is there more to it than that?  Then I have to see if you and I, my flock of seagulls, are living up to the standard, or if we are just coated in oil.  So, I look around.

I notice first a generosity, because I know better than most that may of you are giving your money away to the church week after week, and many decided to give more away when the economy got rough.  And I know how much you gave when Katrina slammed the Gulf Coast, when the tsunamis devastated the southeast Asian coast, when the earthquake rocked Haiti.  I know that there is generosity here.

I see how many of you in this community care for the poor, the hungry, the homeless.  I know how many of you have been making soup week after week after week for our Saturday Soup bowl.  I know who starts their Saturday mornings at 6 or 6:30 to be here to get things going.  I realize how many hands have stirred and ladled and served that soup.

I realize there is nothing aggrandizing about packing groceries in a bag and handing them to someone who needs them, as people have done in this parish for close to 30 years in the Food Cupboard.

I know that it is generally not self-indulgent to take a pile of linens home from the Sacristy to be washed and ironed and folded just-so, but that a faithful corps of you does that week after week anyway.  I suspect it is not easy to leave your law firm offices before noon on a Tuesday morning so you can serve at the altar for a daily Mass.

It is not always convenient, I’m sure, to prepare to lead a Bible study, or to pick up the phone to check on your ailing neighbor when you have quite enough worries at home. 

I can appreciate that the chores of the parish office – answering the phones, stuffing envelopes, generally putting up with me – are not what you would call exciting.  I know it was not fun to clean bathrooms for teenagers during City Camp.

Having spent many Thursday nights in choir rehearsals myself over the years, I remember that doing so means giving up a night of your week, and that most of us have other things we could be doing with that time.

A once-a–month visit to a nursing home to sing hymns and say prayers and share the Eucharist is not the most convenient way to spend a Saturday morning, I know.

And I know that it is not easy to sit with someone when their spouse, or their partner, or their brother or sister, mother or father has died, and there is nothing really to say, and not even many words available to pray.

But all these things, and so much more, I see you doing in this parish.

As I bob on the surface of these often choppy waters, I can stick my head down underneath and see, below the slick of oil, and I can see what is happening beneath the surface.  And even though I suspect that you, like me, are not really very good at keeping commandments, generally, there is this one commandment that we should love one another as Jesus love us, that you seem to have embraced.

Beneath the surface, I see you giving your lives away: your money, your time, your effort, your affection, your care, your love.  I see you giving it away to those who need it.  And I know that there is a well springing somewhere deep beneath the surface of our lives, but it is not an oil spill.  It is the well of God’s love, that first sprang forth in creation from deep beneath the watery nothingness, and that has spread into every corner of the world.

God’s love – and the power that comes with it – is as susceptible to abuse as every other gift he gives us, (like a garden of paradise where only one tree was off-limits).  But he did send us his Son to teach us, to live and die and rise for us.  And to give us this one commandment: that you love one another.  And when we follow it, we are not covered in a sick, sticky, dirty, oily mess; we are swaddled in the assurance of God’s love for us, we are set free from all that threatens to un-do us, and we can fly!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

2 May 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Casting Nets

They went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing.  (Jn. 21:3)

Shortly after I added a second dog to my household, I realized in no uncertain terms that I had become dependent, not on the company of my dogs (which, of course, I am) but on the help of several people, chief among them, Kent John, known to many of you as the person who is the first to come to work at Saint Mark’s every day, the last to leave, and the lowest paid.  Kent John is also devoted to my dogs, and can be relied upon to look after them when I go away, to walk them if I am at a late meeting, to feed them, coddle them, and generally dote on them in the extreme.  After adding the puppy to the mix last fall, I said to Kent John that I would like to think that I am capable of raising this puppy and taking care of my other dog on my own, but I was awfully glad I didn’t have to find out.

There many things in life, not much more complicated than taking care of a dog, with which we regularly need help.  Around Saint Mark’s, opening the safe or dealing with the copy machine are regular challenges that leave several of us calling for help.  In many homes it’s opening pickle jars or threading needles that constitute simple tasks for which help is almost always required.  In some families it’s getting directions and navigating in the car that are better delegated to someone not in the driver’s seat: help will be required.  None of these things is a complicated task.  It’s not as though a person shouldn’t be able to manage without help, but somehow in our lives we discover that we simply wouldn’t accomplish a number of simple things without help.

Most of Jesus’ well-known disciples were fishermen, but in the New Testament, their most publicized moments at work in their trade are when they are unlucky with their fishing nets.  They need help, as the Gospel reading today shows us.  Now, this would appear to be a problem, since fishing was not just a hobby or a pleasant pastime for these men, it was their livelihood.  It is the first thing we know about Peter and Andrew and James and John, when they are introduced to us: they are fishermen.  And it is one of the very few biographical facts we know about them at all.  Yet throughout the entire New Testament, these disciples – who we see at work several times – are never reported to have caught a single fish without the help of Jesus.  Think of it.  Either they are utter failures, completely inept at their trade… or there is a message here to be learned.

Now I don’t know much about fishing, but I know that this is not Deadliest Catch we are talking about.  This is small time: small boats, small nets, small fish.

And they went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing.

Remember that the scene here is in the days after the resurrection of Jesus, the days after Easter.  Perhaps the disciples are going fishing because life is returning to normal and their checking accounts are running low.  After all, they have been missing a lot of work, what with Passover, and then the trial of Jesus, his crucifixion, their mourning, and now the several, strange appearances he makes to them, in locked rooms, or traveling on the road, and now on the shore.

In any number of the episodes that the risen Jesus shows himself to the disciples they do not recognize him.  And this is one such occasion.  When he tells them to cast the net on the right side of the boat, they are not following the instructions of the Lord of the Universe, recently risen from the dead, they don’t know it’s him; they are taking advice from some guy on the shore, and they are hoping that perhaps he knows something they don’t.

Of course, when they do as he tells them to they catch so many fish that they can barely haul them all in.  Now, it might be that these guys are capable of getting by as fishermen on their own, but it seems an awfully good thing that they don’t have to find out.  When they fail at the work they expected to do on their own, Jesus helps them, and with his help their nets are full.

Well, here we all are in the days after Easter.  Life has returned to normal (it didn’t take long).  There is work to be done, the taxes had to be filed last week.  Lovely as Easter was, we have to get on with our lives, go to work, pay the bills, watch the Phillies lose.  Maybe we had a warm, fuzzy feeling at Easter, but it’s faded now.  And if Jesus seemed like a big part of our lives for a weekend, well, now it’s back to church as usual, if at all.  It’s back to the fishing boats, so to speak.

But remember, in the New Testament, the disciples never catch a single fish without the help of Jesus.

I wonder what you and I are trying to do that we think we ought to be able to do on our own but that we cannot do without the help of Jesus.

I wonder about the work we do every day at Saint Mark’s: from the humdrum work of taking care of these old buildings and ironing the linens, and making copies at the copier, to the more lovely working of offering our prayers and praises to God every day, to the good work of making soup for the hungry and feeding them, to the more challenging work of establishing a school at our mission at Saint James the Less.

And I wonder about my life and about yours: about nurturing meaningful relationships, caring for the people in our families, tending to the elderly and those who are sick, or just to those who are far away.  I wonder about how we deal with what we euphamize as our “inner demons” as though we could not describe them more clearly, even though we know exactly what our personal miseries look like: the depression, the self-loathing, the sleeplessness, the hatred, the anger, the fear, the addiction, etc, etc, etc.  What are we trying to deal with on our own that we cannot manage without the help of Jesus?

Easter, just two weeks away, already seems a distant memory.  The flowers are gone.  Angels have fluttered back to their heavenly coops.  Trumpets have been sent off to other, better-paying gigs till next year.  And it’s back to work in the fishing boats of our lives.

How sad it is to sit in the boat in the cool dark of the last hours of the night with nothing at all in our nets.

But there is a man standing on the shore shouting something: “Children, you have no fish, have you?”

No.  No, we have no fish, we have nothing.

Cast your nets to the right side of the boat.

And you know, of course, what happens next.

You think you can get through life on your own.  You think you are strong, smart, sophisticated.  Or at least you think you are capable enough to get on from day to day.  You think you ought to be able to make your own living, solve your own problems, and determine your own future.  I certainly think all these things about myself, much of the time.  We think that we ought to be able to catch fish on our own.

And does it surprise us how often life leaves us with empty nets strewn around the bottom of the boat?  And how heavily hangs the sorrow in our lives of the repeated trips out in the boat, night after night, giving it everything we’ve got, doing the best we can, and still coming up empty handed?  We don’t let on, how much this hurts us, but it does; it weighs heavily on our souls that we cannot do the things we think we ought to be able to do.  Even though the whole world thinks we are successful, we know the places in our lives that we just fail again and again: no fish, nothing but empty nets.

And I don’t know why you come to church, and it doesn’t really matter to me.  But I do know that if you are here, you are within shouting distance of the shore on which a man is standing, who mostly you and I do not recognize.  He is telling us not to give up.  He is telling us that we can do what we set out to do.  He is telling us that there are fish waiting to be caught.  For all we know he has been calling to the fish, as well, talking to them, guiding them to the right-hand side of the boat.  He knows that we have begun to feel like failures, and certainly to look like failures to much of the rest of the world. 

And it takes some faith to pay attention to him, because he does not seem to us to be the Lord of the Universe, recently risen from the dead.  He is just some guy on the shore shouting to us.  But his voice is carried to our ears on the loveliest breeze, scented with orange blossoms that even overcomes the odor of fish in this boat.  And it seems to us that we should do what he says, though we can’t say why, for sure.  Except that we know, we have read about these experiences that others have had before of not knowing, not recognizing, not seeing.

And there is that gentle, sweet-scented breeze that seems to be stirred up by something we cannot explain.

“Cast your nets,” the voice comes to us, “on the right side of the boat.”

And what have we got to lose?  Who knows but that when we bring them up they might be so full we cannot haul them in?

We would like to think that we could have done it our own.  But if we need help, it is OK.  There is this voice, this gentle breeze to help.  And all we have to do is cast our nets, which is to believe.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

18 April 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Marmite love and hate

There are certain things that, if you learn them early in life, they seem to leave an indelible mark. Those who grew up in the Depression for instance, like my grandmother, who despite forty or fifty years of plenty, has never been quite able to root out the, um, thriftiness, shall we say, when it comes to issues of money. I would certainly never say, “penny pinching” or “cheap” within a mile of my grandmother, but those words have occasionally crossed my mind.

In the same way, in my youth, I was exposed to a product, a yeast product, and have never been able to quite get away from it, and yet I understand that some people find the idea of it noxious, its scent horrible, its taste excruciating, the sight of it something to avoid. I am speaking here of Marmite, that most famous of British exports, short of the Beetles, the British Empire and Anglicanism. Now the cynic might say that the only reason that I like Marmite is because the yeast in it comes from a certain famous brewer in Burton-on-Trent, who brews one of my favorite beers. Those who are not of the elect, who fail to appreciate Marmite appropriately, can certainly say some very cruel things. I met a gentleman in England once, who was from the American South, who described Marmite as “toxic waste in a bottle.” But those of the Marmite persuasion understand the panacea that it is: powerful flavor for the mouth, health for mind and body, strength for arm and a sign of identification with that most significant and sublime of cultures: England. Unfortunately, not everyone is as advanced as I am: Those who love Marmite swear by it, those who do not, swear at it. There is no middle ground, no via media when it comes to Marmite.

There are, of course, lots of things in our lives which are as polarized as love or hatred of Marmite. In American culture today, this polarization runs most clearly as the demarcation between two very voluble extremes. One can only be pro-choice or pro-life; one can be either pro- or anti-gay marriage. One is either pro-drilling or pro-planet.

The way that one recognizes these extremes as issues in the culture wars is by a certain logical inconsistency. To be on the political right in America is to be pro-life as long as one is talking about the unborn, pro-death penalty when it comes to criminals, and agnostic when it comes to the deaths caused by ecological destruction, or poverty except in as much as either interferes with our economy or our American way of life.

And the left doesn't fare significantly better. To be on the left side of the political spectrum in America is to protect free speech (as long as I agree with it), to react against and stereotype those who feel strong emotions about flag and country, or simply fail to live on the coasts, and to scream about the destruction of the planet without worrying about the destruction of lives and livelihood that can result from the closure of coal mines and power plants, tobacco farms, and automotive plants.

And surely no one believes that the Church is in a much better state. Indeed, in the way that the church so often operates, we have simply baptized the wide-ranging debates and rhetoric of our cultures and transformed them into the political and ecclesiastical debates of our day. Which is not to say that the debates of our day are not significant and important, but that in the rhetoric which is flung to and fro between Fort Worth and New York, or the United States and Uganda, there is a great deal which is not actually about human sexuality or the role of women, which is instead about power, and culture, and a difference in linguistic and philosophical frameworks which we cannot truly ever escape. One either, in other words, loves Marmite or hates it.

But after all, you are not simply here to hear me share of my wisdom on the cultural or ecclesiastical debates of the day. You are here to hear me talk about the Gospel, and I started with Marmite, and with things that we have learned and the debates in our church because there seems to me to be an analogy here. I think of this polarization when I think about Thomas. The standard simplistic modern gloss on the passage is to think of it in terms of our own modern alienation from faith and myth, to think of Thomas as the post-Enlightenment skeptic, who is looking for tangible, scientific evidence of the resurrection, before he will make an intellectual assent to Jesus' being raised from the dead. But that is simply a projection of our own modern schizophrenia: of the false dichotomy that we tend to draw between science and faith, and of the modern understanding of belief as an intellectual process that one needs to flog oneself into.

The reality of the passage is more complicated, of course. The way we know that the passage is more complicated is that Thomas has already seen signs and wonders. He's not just your average skeptic, because he says “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” He has lived with and followed Jesus for a couple of years now. He's seen healings and signs and wonders. He may have had a draught or two of miraculous wine. He's not suddenly developed a scientific conscience. Oh no, something else is playing out in this story about Thomas and the Twelve and I have a sense that it is about defensiveness and about feeling hurt. In fact, I have a sense about Thomas generally: that he's sensitive, that when he goes for something, it is 110%, that he makes decisions like falling down a well, and that he gave his heart and soul to something, namely Jesus the Messiah, and he's been pretty bruised by the recent unpleasantness.

Even when his friends and companions in the roller-coaster ride that has been the past week in Jerusalem are telling him that they've seen the risen Jesus, Thomas isn't budging. Oh, he may hide behind the veil of skepticism, that’s the easy way, isn’t it? Who has ever heard of a dead person returning to life? But in reality I’m guessing that Thomas is simply hurt.

The importance of the Gospel this morning is not whether we resonate with Thomas and his defensiveness, or his espoused skepticism, or whether we resonate with the other apostles, but whether we recognize the graciousness of Jesus, to Thomas, to the apostles, to all of us wherever we fall in the polarizations of our lives. Because Jesus comes to the other apostles wherever they are, and he comes to Thomas under the terms that Thomas sets and he comes to all of us, whatever terms we may set for him.

The importance of the passage is not that Thomas should flog himself into belief, or feel guilty for his guardedness, nor that we should feel guilt in moments of doubt, but that Jesus still comes to Thomas and to us. Thomas doesn’t need to have it right, he doesn’t need to prepare himself to receive Jesus – because Jesus is already there, standing before him, showing his wounds.

It is a very human heresy that says we need to be in the right place to receive God's grace. There is no right place, there is no place at all, other than the one that we all find ourselves in: entrenched, guarded like Thomas, hackles up, and God comes to us on our own terms, and bids us see his own woundedness, and yet believe.

Which brings me back to Marmite and the culture wars and everything in our lives that is loved and hated.

Jesus comes to all of us, regardless of where we are. Jesus comes to us, whether we are convinced of the prophetic nature of the election of a certain suffragon in Los Angeles or not; whether we are certain liberal or curmudgeonly conservative, whether we are a garrulous curate or the entrenched bête noire of said curate. Whether we are any of the various ways that we are polarized in life, Jesus comes to all of us and bids us not to doubt but believe.

Believe that God comes even to the liberals and the conservatives; believe that God will bring about his purposes in the messy machinations of the frail Church, believe even that our guarded and defended entrenchments are not the final reality and truth.

Jesus comes to us wherever we are and asks us to believe that those who love Marmite and those who hate it will sit down together, one day, at the Supper of the Lamb. To believe that the judgment of God is not cruel and only for those whom we deem meet for it, but kind and universal, and that in that judgment we will come to be open to judgment and because we are open to God's gentle judgment, we are open also to his grace. For we are none of us, arrived, none of us home, none of us certain. We are all entrenched like Thomas or fled like the other apostles and still Christ comes into our lives, and shows us his very really wounds, and asks us to believe that in his resurrected glory, he is able to bring about unforeseen redemption in our individual lives, in the life of our culture, and in the life of our Church. 

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

11 April 2010

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

An Easter App

The big news of the weekend – some would say the unquestionably good news of the weekend – is the release of the iPad, which went on sale at Apple computer stores yesterday.

Now, I realize that the regular congregation here at Saint Mark’s is more of letter-writing, land-line, rotary-phone, send-a-telegram group of people, who fondly remember party-lines and 6-cent stamps.  So I am counting on you folks who are not always here – you techies who, like me, gave up your land lines years ago, and can vaguely remember what a stamp looks like - to fill in the knowing laughter, and perhaps explain to your befuddled neighbor (who knows exactly when to kneel and when to stand, that’s how you can tell they are regulars here) what in iPad, an iPod, and an iPhone are.  You may also have to explain to them what an app is.

OK, I’ll try.  An app (short for application) is a feature of an electronic device that does something cool – like an alarm clock on your cell phone, or a calculator, or a GPS navigation feature, or a list of all the restaurants that serve Easter brunch within a block of where you are going to church.  You want to know where to go to eat after Mass?  There’s an app for that.

The story is told of an American man who was trapped in the rubble in the earthquake in Haiti who realized he had a First Aid and CPR app on his iPhone, which he used for instructions in treating his wounds, to stop the bleeding.  He also set the alarm on his iPhone to go off repeatedly so he would not fall asleep and go into shock. And he wrote letters to his family on some app or other, lest he should not survive, to tell them he loved them.  The man says that God gave him the tools he needed to survive, which I believe, but some will contend that it was only Steve Jobs.

All this i-excitement got me thinking about whether or not there is an app for Easter.  And I am an iPhone user, so I checked.

There is a Way of the Cross app that guides you through all 14 Stations of the Cross (99 cents).  There is a Good Friday app, which provides devotional material (99 cents).  There is an Easter Egg Painter app (Free) that “allows you to choose any color or size brush to paint a realistic Easter Egg….  When you are finished you can take a screenshot of the egg and send it to friends and family.”  There is the Easter Bunny Tracker app with an “interactive globe and radar map” to “add to the realism as you track the exact whereabouts of the Easter Bunny as he travels thousands of cities the night before Easter.”  It also allows you to “communicate with the Easter Bunny via text” (99 cents).

A search for a Resurrection app turns up nothing very useful – some video games, a Leo Tolstoy novel, something called “The Way to Heaven” which turns out to be a prayer that was revealed to St. Bridget of Sweden and “has 5 promises for those who recite this prayer for 12 years.”  It costs 99 cents, but there must be an app that helps you attain those five promises in less than 12 years, and it’s probably free.

All of which is to say that there is nothing meaningful in the way of an app for Easter.

What would a good Easter app do?

As the women who approached Jesus’ tomb that first Easter morning worried about who would roll away the stone, they might have consoled each other with the assurance that there’s an app for that, though how it works would remain a mystery.

In fact, much of any real Easter app would remain shrouded in a bit of mystery.  It would take time to realize exactly what is going on.  There’d be confusion and uncertainty at first.  There’s be the questions about what happened to Jesus’ body, about who had taken it away and why.  There’d be a scramble to get the men and begin a search.

But then there would be some kind of alert – maybe a “He is Risen” ring tone – that would send Peter and another disciple toward the tomb to see it empty, and the linens lying there, but would leave them unsure, and send them back to their homes to re-think.

A real Easter app would work better for women than men, since the Gospel tells us that they were the first to the tomb, and the ones who were brave enough, even in their confusion, to stay there and try to do something.

And it would have a feature for those who weep, as Mary Magdalene did outside the tomb.  There would be consolation for lost, unhappy, troubled souls like hers, who thought they had found in Jesus some hope, but now began to believe that all that hope was lost, not only buried, but now stolen, too.

There’d be some way it calmed fears, as the angels calmed the fears of the women to whom they appeared, all dazzling.

And there’d be this clear message that turns the world more or less upside down: “Why do you look for the living among the dead.  He is not here, but has risen.”

Why do you look for the living among the dead?  Why do you look for the living among the dead?  (Is there an app for that?)

An Easter app would not only cause spring flowers to bloom, gentle rains to fall at night, and the sun to shine brightly in the daytime.  It would not only bring healing to those who suffer, and strength to those whose healing is not to be given in this life.  It would not only repair broken relationships, bring an end to grudges, and offer forgiveness to hurts inflicted long ago.  It would not only replace the gloom that so easily falls over our hearts, our souls, and all the world with joy…

…  I myself would like to believe that an Easter app would also bring a conviction about the importance of doing something to curb carbon emissions, working to bring an end to warfare, and claiming the right of every American to have affordable health care, but it turns out that’s a White House app!

A meaningful Easter app probably would have some sort of tracking device.  Not to enable us to follow the movements of the Easter Bunny, but to lead us to the graves of every beloved, parent, child, sibling, spouse, and friend.  It would allow us to weep as we made our way there.  But soon there’d be a dazzling light, and the warmth of the sun, and the voices of two men, who frighten us at first but quickly calm our fears, as we dry the tears from our grieving faces, and hear them ask us what they asked Mary Magdalene all those years ago: “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”

This Easter app would leave us confused, stunned, unsure of how to respond.  But then it would speak in a voice unheard before, but strangely known to us.  And it would say your name to you, and mine to me.  You would turn, and I would.  And the app would somehow help us see the risen Jesus standing there, knowing us, and known by us.  That’s what an Easter app would do.

About five months ago, I ditched my old cell phone and got an iPhone.  I had been planning the move for months, since it meant switching from my old perfectly good cell phone company to AT&T, about which the less said the better.  I was so excited to be amongst the glitterati of iPhone users.  I immediately downloaded an app that helps me keep track of where I park my car, another that is a pitch pipe, and another that makes Star Wars light saber noises when I move my phone around.

May I confess to you that my life has not been changed?

And I am willing to bet that as excited as they may be, all those new iPad owners this weekend will soon discover, that wonderful though it may be, the iPad has not really changed their lives either.

A real Easter app would do that.  It would change your life, by giving you strength where you have been weak, healing where you have been sick, hope where you have known only despair, light where you could see only darkness, forgiveness where you could not find it or give it, joy where you knew only sadness, love where you could taste only bitterness, and, yes, life where you could only find death.

But there is, in fact, no app for that. There is only Jesus.

And if any of us came to church this morning uncertain as to why, thinking perhaps that we are only here remembering something that happened a long time ago, but which, historically speaking, is a little hard to prove.  If we came here remembering that the church chose this time of year for Easter because it meshed nicely with Jewish and pagan customs, of which the bunnies and the eggs are also reminders…

… this morning poses a question for you: Why do you seek the living among the dead?

Or were you only looking for an app, something a little cool to make today different?

Is it disappointing to discover that there is no app for Easter?  There is a sermon – which is not quite as cool as an app, and maybe about as useful

But there is no app for changing our lives, making all the things that are wrong right, all the things that are sick well, all the things that are dead restored to new life.

For that there is only Jesus.  And he is not to be found among the dead.  He is to be found among the living, which means here, with us, now. 

Only Jesus, risen from the grave, not among the dead, but among the living.  Calling my name and yours, hoping, expecting to be recognized, known and loved.

No, there is not app for that.  There is only Jesus, and he is not among the dead, he is risen, he is here.  Thanks be to God! 

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Easter Day 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Four Elements

My parents, in a nice haphazard sort of a way exposed me early on to the basic classical literature and ideas that they thought I needed to know. The raciness of some of the Greco-Roman myths was not lost on them, but they thought that perhaps the myths were not much more risqué than the stories that I was likely to encounter in the Scriptures (which is true) and besides, surely it was better to learn about the birds and bees from the Greeks and Romans than from the gossip and innuendo of schoolchildren or the pages of a magazine. My father, being a scientist at heart, thought that it wouldn't be a bad idea to learn about the classical version of science, and so he taught me about the four elements, of which the ancients thought that all material was composed: earth, air, fire and water. All the elements are present in us: the water in our bodies, the earthy fleshiness of us, the air in our lungs and the fire in our minds and hearts.

I did not long remain with the Greeks and Romans, but moved on into Norse mythology and on from there into the stories of other religions, and soon it became relatively clear to me, even to the mind of a child, that there are certain images and themes, certain fears and hopes that cross the lines of faith, culture, and history. The hero with a thousand faces, the primal fear of darkness, of drowning in deep waters, the panic of the woods at night, the fear of death, the gift and danger of fire, these are images and stories that continue with force and power in all ages and cultures and faiths.

I always feel as if the Great Vigil of Easter is that most fundamental of Christian services because it is composed of those basic images: new fire kindled, water in the font, earth over a tomb, and air coming back into the stilled lungs. And the stories that we recollect tonight, the stories of God's great salvation wrought over many long years are stories that are fundamentally about who we are, why we are the way we are, and how God interacts with us.

First, there is the story of creation. God separates the waters, and draws forth land from the waters. God sets the lights in the sky, the fiery sun and stars, and then out of the earth draws trees and creatures and finally sculpts humans out of the earth, filled with the breath of God. The first act of God that we comprehend and know is that God has created, and created order and brought waters, and fire, and earth and air into some kind of miraculous balance, and declared it good.

But, as has always been, and will be until our final healing, human hearts and minds were capable of darkening, and so the waters that were kept in check were poured out upon the earth, but even in his wrath and destruction, God did not abandon his creation, and saved the earth and air that were animals and humans, and wrote in the air of the sky with water the sign and symbol of his covenant.

Ages later, when his covenanted people, those in the long lineage of Noah and Abraham, were enslaved, God sent his servant Moses to free them and lead them from bondage. He went before them in fire and cloud, and parted the waters so that they could walk on dry earth, and protected and saved them.

And although again their hearts and minds were darkened, God fed them in the wilderness and gave them water from the rock. Though they were forced to walk the earth for forty years, yet still God protected and fed them, and at the last brought them into the Promised Land, where they were home.

Even there, even full of the knowledge of God's sustenance and graciousness, brought into the fullness of God's covenant with them, symbolized in the gift of land, their hearts and minds were darkened, and so God sent the prophets to call them repentance, and to declare to them the graciousness of God: the God who gives waters to the thirsty, and rain and snow upon the earth; the God who transforms the skeletal wreck of death into flesh, and breathes upon that flesh, and restores life to it.

Earth and air, water and fire; the great elements that are present tonight in their primal way, that have deep places in the human mind and experience, and that are the signs of God's action and presence in the world throughout the long record of the forging of God's salvation.

Lent began forty days ago, on Ash Wednesday, with the reminder that we are dust and to dust we shall return. As quickly as the grass withers, the air will leave our lungs for the last time, and our loved ones will take our bodies, and cover them with earth, and we will return to the ground from which we and all that lives has been drawn. And so the question of tonight, or perhaps of our lives is a simple one: If after lives of unending struggle against the darkness that constantly invades our human minds and hearts, those hearts will stop beating, and we—you and I—will go down to death , what does the little fire we have kindled together in this night matter?

What does it matter if God is evident in occasional moments, in fire, water, air and earth; where is our salvation?

The question is, “Can these bones live?” My bones and your bones.

Tonight matters because the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us. The Word became earth and air, was washed with the waters of Baptism and flamed with the fire of the Spirit. The God who is evident in the elements, who creates and sustains the creation, did not in the final peak of his salvation simply operate on the creation, on earth and air, fire and water, but became them. He tramped the earth of Palestine, and ate of the earth's bounty, he drank and sailed the waters, and breathed the wind blowing where it will. And his breathe ceased, and his body died, and he was laid under earth, like we all one day will be.

But the story doesn't end there. If it did, tonight might matter little. The air of his lungs dissipated, his flesh cold as the grave, the fire of his spirit extinguished; for three days there is silence. And yet he rises glorious. Here is the great reversal, not simply God's power acting again and again to save his people, and call Israel back and restore creation, but the death of death, the destruction of sinfulness, the freedom from bond and the restoration of our right humanity. For he carries us with him in his resurrection.

Since we have been baptized with Christ into his death, death no longer is terrible. Since we are the same earth and air as him, since we have been washed with the water of baptism, and burned with the fire of the Holy Spirit, the resurrection raises us up from the darkness and death of our lives and hearts and makes our humanity glorious; our flesh like until his own.

The Word became flesh, and gives of the things of earth to sustain us, wheat for bread, water for wine, the stuff of earth become the things of heaven, all of it changed, redeemed, restored, because Christ is risen.

And this is not mere rhetoric. The darkness of our hearts and minds is there still, the darkness of the world still evident all around us. But as the Word has become flesh, as the light of his fire has burned in the darkness, even so the darkness did not overcome it. Christ rises glorious, scattering matter about him like fire, his breathe is warm and moist, the dust of the tomb still on him, breaking the darkness around him. He comes into my darkness, into your darkness, the real inane darknesses in which we often find ourself, and he bids us rise, and follow him. Christ is arisen as he promised, death no longer has dominion; he is present to us always, and makes of our world an endless delight. He fills our mouths with laughter and fills the hungry with his own flesh and blood. Alleluia, alleluia. Christ is risen.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

The Great Vigil of Easter

3 April 2010

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Twilight

Last night, as we remembered the Last Supper, at about the hour the sun was going down, we read the instructions for the first Passover from the book of Exodus.  There we find that an unblemished, year-old male lamb is to be killed for the meal.  The people of Israel are told to wait until the fourteenth day of the month, and then to gather together for the sacrifice of the lamb.  And they are told to “slaughter it at twilight,” and to take some of the blood of the lamb and use it to mark the doorposts and lintels of their homes so that God will know which homes to pass over as he tramples through Egypt, wreaking vengeance on the firstborn children of the oppressors of his chosen people.

Twilight is not only that period of soft, grey, diffuse light between sunset and nighttime, when the sun is already below the horizon, but darkness has not yet fallen; it is also, as any teenage girl could tell you, the title and the theme of the story of Bella Swan and her forbidden love for the vampire, Edward Cullen.  Although I am willing to bet not a single one of us here today has read it, the book has sold more than 17 million copies, and spawned two movies which have grossed hundreds of millions of dollars.  And it represents the latest installment in a series of romantic obsessions with vampires, who are dangerous, of course, because they need to drink your blood.

My little research about the Twilight phenomenon has brought me the discovery that the book begins with a biblical reference, taking as its starting point the forbidden fruit of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden.  However, it would seem that the forbidden fruit of teenage vampire love is the real issue here; any knowledge of Good and Evil takes a back seat.  The twist in the saga of Bella and Edward is that the gallant, hunky vampire actually prevents his beloved from becoming what he is when another vampire bites her.  Edward sucks the vampire venom from Bella’s veins, saving her from his fate of an eternal deathlessness that is not quite living.

The whole premise of the vampire genre always has echoes of the reverse image of the Christian fixation on the blood of Jesus, making it jarring every time we read of Jesus’ instructions that his followers must drink his blood.  These instructions were, of course, given to his disciples at twilight, as they were remembering the slaughter of the Passover lamb at the same hour.  And they were attached to the symbol of the cup of wine he shared with his disciples in such an obvious way that none of them seems to have suspected that he was suggesting some strange new cultish practice with vampiric overtones.  They already knew the symbolic significance of the blood of the lamb; they remembered the blood smeared on the doorposts and the lintels, and the older tradition of the scapegoat sent out into the desert to die, bearing the sins of the people.  And vampires had not yet been invented, anyway. 

What they did not guess, could not see coming, was that twilight would come at noon the next day, as the sky darkened so the Lamb could be slaughtered at the appropriate time, and their Lord was nailed to the Cross and allowed to bleed from his head, his hands, his feet, and his side.

Over on the wall there, at the 12^th Station of the Cross, which depicts the Crucifixion of Jesus, if you were to look closely at the enamel image created by an artist about a century ago, you would see behind the Cross of Jesus a darkened sky, grey-black clouds eclipsing the noonday light to create an early twilight.  On either side of Jesus are the two criminals, and in between each of the criminals and our Lord, there flies a sort of disembodied cherub, clasping a chalice to catch the blood that falls from Jesus’ brow, that sacred head, sore wounded.

Throughout Lent, I have returned to this image week after week in my private devotion.  Because the church is dark, and because the cherubim are clearly not collecting the blood that drained from Jesus’ wounded side (their chalices are held up higher, just below his head), I imagined at first that they were actually gathering Jesus’ tears as he gave up the ghost.  This seemed like a suitably sentimental image for 1928, the year the Stations were given to the church.  And I tend to think that a reflection on the tears of Christ as he offers his life on the Cross for the world would yield some fruit, taking our cue from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, “Is it nothing to you all ye that pass by, behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow.”

We don’t need vivid imaginations to color in the images of Jesus’ sorrow in our own day and age: after a century and more of warfare across the globe; the holy city of Jerusalem still a place of violence and strife; the church plagued by scandal and internecine fighting; a nation that brags about its liberty but cares little for those whose economic status or race or just bad luck leave them with very little freedom at all – certainly unable to break the cycles of poverty and violence; a planet that we continue to destroy as we asphyxiate, cut down, pave over, or drill out, marring its beauty and depleting its resources… just to name a few possible reasons for Jesus’ tears. 

But it turns out the little angels are not collecting Jesus’ tears at all.  It is his blood they are after; patiently waiting for every drop to fall from the thorns of his crown into their chalices.  And I have found myself wondering: what do they intend to do with the blood of Christ they have so carefully harvested at this midday twilight?  Is it to be delivered to his disciples for the doorposts and lintels of their homes, or swallowed in some gruesome ritual after his burial to give his disciples a vampire-like eternal deathlessness that is not quite living?

The Scriptures, of course, never suggest that angels descended from the darkened clouds, or that anyone collected so much as a drop of the blood that drained from Jesus’ veins.  But year after year, for these twenty centuries, twilight has come early every Good Friday, at least in the living memory of the church, and with it comes the remembrance of the Garden where once we lived in happiness, and of the tree, and its forbidden fruit that tempted us with more than teenage angst.  And we know that there is cause for tears as we reflect not only on our human history, but on our own lives, our failings, our diminished hopes and unrealized dreams, the stupid things we’ve done or the good things we ignored doing when we should have.  And we reflect on the pain and the loss in our lives – some of our own making, some of it not. 

And if we think of Jesus on the Cross at all, we might hope that he weeps for us, as much as for himself, if indeed he does weep as he hangs there.

But tears, as any of us who have shed them knows, will only get you so far.  The children of Israel had wept through decades of slavery without relief before God gave them instructions to take a lamb and slaughter it at twilight.

And although the sun is shining brightly on this glorious spring day outside; in here, at this hour, it is twilight.

And in this twilight blood is being spilled.  But the twist in this saga is that by his death, Jesus is not preventing us from becoming what he is: he is helping us become more like him.  He is marking out the way to an eternal life in the world to come by offering forgiveness to us and to the whole world for all the things that cause so many tears to be shed.

“This is my blood,” he said, “which is shed for you and for many, for the forgiveness of sins.”

If angels collected his blood as it spilled from his body, I suppose it must have been in order to bring it to some heavenly dispensary so that it could be distributed one miniscule drop after another over the centuries, to tint the wine in chalices all over the world.  Not so we could be spared living a life like his, but so that we might share in his life and in his death, by which I mean to say not only a life of forgiveness, of grace, and hope and healing and blessing, but also a life that does not end at the grave, but is a new kind of living in the hereafter.

For Bella and Edward, and for so many of us, twilight is a dangerous time, as darkness approaches, and the demons of our lives lurk in shadows, and it becomes safer for them to come out, under the cover of darkness.

And the mystery of God’s love is not only that he supplies the Lamb for the sacrifice he requires (as he always has), not only that he can take spilled blood and use it as a symbol of new life, not only that he forgives us our sins without having to locate a scapegoat year after year. 

The mystery of God’s love is that he makes an early twilight at the middle of the day, when the spilling of his Son’s blood might be a sign of nothing more than the depravity of humankind, and cause for tears…

…but he fills this twilight with a different light that seems to bend around the barriers of our sin and defensiveness, and reaches into the darkest corners of our lives, and gives us hope.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Good Friday, 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

The Stations of the Bus

It is time that I made a confession to you all: namely, that I have almost never taken a bus in the city of Philadelphia.    I would like to explain this pattern of avoidance on a phobia of large, long, loud vehicles, but I cannot.  It is not because I decry mass transit – because I feel perfectly happy to travel on the Broad Street subway line or the High Speed line to New Jersey.  It is true that I have always felt more comfortable on rail-bound mass transit, for its carefully illustrated maps and certain stops, and the assurance that once on rails, you cannot do very much to get lost.  Buses, I have suspected, could leave me almost anywhere, without the benefit of being able to simply cross over to the other side of the tracks and go back the other way, as you can on a subway or a train.

But the darker truth is even worse than this assessment.  For, over time, in a city whose mass transit system consists mostly of buses, I have begun to see myself as someone who simply does not take buses.  I notice people standing and waiting at the bus shelters and I think them quaint.  I hear people tell me of their arrival by bus from what I think of as distant neighborhoods, and I think them adventurous.  I am led to believe that many schoolchildren in this city make their way to and from their daily schooling on city buses at the city’s expense, and I find this extraordinary.

To be honest with you I must confess to a certain snobbery that I have been heretofore unwilling to reveal to you, when it comes to buses.  They are all fine and well for those who can bear to wait for them, for the adventurous, and for school children, and even for the elderly, to whom, I am told, they cost practically nothing to ride.  But I am someone who simply does not ride buses, not that there is anything wrong with it.

Bus routes have come to mind, however, over these past weeks as I have walked with a good number of you the Way of the Cross – or as we used to say more frequently, the Stations of the Cross – each Friday during Lent.  Our little stations – the small plaques you see affixed to the walls with Roman numerals over them – are quite extraordinary.  They are far too small for this building; I think they are even smaller than the size of a bus-stop sign on the street, but close enough to make me think of those signs.  They are hand painted enamel from Limoges, a city quite famous for the art form.  They are not ancient, I think.  If you were to go take a close look at them, you would see that they are quite brightly colored, with lots of iridescent greens and blues and gold accents, although from where you sit they probably appear quite dark and feature-less.  They are full of detail: in the sixth station the cloth with which Veronica has wiped Jesus’ face bears the mirror image of his visage, Turin-like.  By all means, do stop and have a closer look at them after Mass today.

There are fourteen Stations – following the pattern established by the Franciscans in the Holy Land in the 14^th century.  These are like fourteen stops on a bus route through the church.  For most of the year the bus does not even run.  But during these weeks of Lent it has been running quite regularly, leaving at 5:45 or so every Friday and arriving at the foot of the rood – the great cross that hangs above us all - about 45 minutes later.

This bus follows the route of Jesus’ Passion, which we have just sung.  It actually bypasses most of the courtroom drama, and instead begins only when it is absolutely beyond question that Jesus will be making his way to the Cross.

The bus stops several times to pick people up.  Simon of Cyrene gets on and finds himself carrying Jesus’ Cross.  The women of Jerusalem – some of them at least – climb on board, while others wave and weep from the side of the road.

Mary, Jesus’ mother, must be on board, for she is to be found with Jesus at several of the stops.  But she cannot get too close because he is surrounded, of course, by his Roman guards, the centurion, who one expects ride for free.  No doubt the two thieves who will be crucified with Jesus are on there too.

Lurking in the back of the bus may be Peter, certainly John is there, but we cannot be sure how many of Jesus’ other disciples.

And the question that every Palm Sunday poses to everyone who listens to the Passion, who sees this bus coming, watches it begin to pass by, is this: Will you and I get on this bus?

Jesus told his friends that if they really wanted to be his disciples they would have to take up their cross and follow him.  The may not have been absolutely certain what he meant by that, but we have the benefit of better vision.  We know that it means we have to get on the bus that goes to Calvary with him.  Which is to say that to be a follower of Jesus is to choose a hard path, a path that will make demands of you and of me.  It is a path that does not avoid pain, indignity, embarrassment, or failure, because these are unavoidable realities in any life.

It is a path in which justice seems to be perverted from the outset, but which will, eventually set the only true judge on his bench.

It is a path where stumbling and falling, will happen not once or twice, but over and over again.

Strangers will be pressed into work they did not ask for and are not ready for on this path.

Women provide a powerful, if almost silent witness to faith along this path, where men are noticeably absent.

And a bus runs along this path, centuries after Jesus’ blood, sweat and tears were spilled along it, inviting us to take up our cross and follow.

But the truth is that I am not the only one who has begun to see himself as someone who does not ride buses.  This bus to Calvary has fewer and fewer riders every year it seems, even among those of us who are perfectly happy to watch it go by.  It would be too easy to attribute this declining ridership to a phobia of some sort, or to uncertainty about where the route goes, what the fare is, how many stops there are, etc.  Oh, there might be a certain snobbery at work – but this particular bus is really quite nice to ride in, even if the seats are hard (at least we now have brand new kneelers).

And it is not a fear of getting lost that prevents people from riding this bus, because the truth is that we all know exactly where it goes: to the bloody scene of death that marks a turning point for humanity and in our lives, when we confront not only the cruelty of humanity and our own complicity in it, but also the power of darkness, the inevitability of death, and our own convictions about God’s ability and willingness to do something about any of it.

Is this a bus we want to be on? 

The last few stops do not look much like places we want to be: Jesus is being stripped and nailed to the Cross at stops 10 and 11.  Then at stop 12, he is executed and dies.  At the next stop the gruesome scene becomes morose as his body is taken down from the Cross and embraced by his mother.  The last stop, 14, is the site of his burial in a borrowed grave.

This is a hard route to follow.  The church has followed it over the centuries because it is an honest route that has room for everyone, no matter how dismal his or her own condition, no matter how tragic your own story.  There is room on the bus for failures, and stumblers, the unprepared, the depressed, for those whose lament for the dead has not ended.  There is space for every kind of suffering and injustice and indignity.

There is room on the bus for you and for me.

And, of course, the bus has a secret that is not very well hidden.  For it seems to be on an endless loop of sadness, returning again to the same awful stops, the same scenes of misfortune and unhappiness, of despair and hopelessness.  The last stop, after all, is a grave.  But it is that grave which hides the secret: that things do not end here in this vale of tears at Calvary, and no one would ever choose to ride this bus if this was where it really ended.

But that secret is obscured to the proud, the overly self-confident, the snobbish, those who put their trust in riches, and all those who generally see themselves as the types who simply do not ride buses.

Standing in front of the Cross, beholding its sadness and its frightful power, is never about taking a bus to nowhere, and certainly never about going only so far as this bus seems to go: to the grave.  It is about riding into the dark mystery of God’s love for all his children – even and especially the neediest and least promising of us.  It is about refusing to get off the bus at the last stop, at this last hour.  Or maybe it is more about just falling asleep from exhaustion or guilt or despair as the bus nears its last stop.  About not caring if you don’t get off here, and end up riding around another loop…

… but discovering that while you have slept, the route has taken a turn, and there is darkness that looks like it could last for three days or more.  But here you are on the bus, tired, half asleep and resigned now to go wherever it will go.  And hoping for dawn.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Palm Sunday, 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Two brothers

There can be few stories that speak to us like the parable of the prodigal son, from the Scriptures this morning. Who cannot hear the story, and find our way into it through at least one character? Perhaps your way into the story is through the feelings of the father. Perhaps you feel those emotions that parent's experience during the struggles of their children to come to maturity. Perhaps, you see yourself through the father's assent to his son's demands, or through his welcome despite his son's foolishness, or through his pleading with the eldest son to come into the feast for the younger brother. Perhaps those are your ways into the parable this morning.

Or perhaps you find your way into the story through the younger son. Perhaps you have wandered in far off lands, living slightly wildly. Or perhaps, even if you haven't got to actually live as wildly as the younger son, perhaps you've really wanted to. Perhaps you feel the strictures of your current life and long, every once in a while, to break free of them, and to throw caution to the winds and to go a little crazy.

Or perhaps you resonate with the elder son, the responsible one, the one who is constantly doing the “right” thing, and telling everyone who will listen about it. Perhaps you have that sense of responsibility and resentment when it comes to your parents, your work, your parish or your life.

Or perhaps you fall into the silent camp – the character that we don't hear in the parable – the mother. Where is she, the wife of the gracious father, the mother of these two very different sons – dead perhaps, or more likely relegated to the fringe – where wives and mothers have generally been made to sit quietly? What is she saying, during this whole drama – what passes through her heart when her son is wandering and lost, or when her sons are at odds? How much is she agonizing about her husband's graciousness or her youngest son's maturity, or her elder son's sense of duty.

Most sermons, at least that I've heard about this passage, resonate around the father's generosity and grace, giving the younger son a portion of the estate in the first place (which he wasn't obligated to do, and certainly not before his death), and then welcoming him back despite his loose living and poor stewardship, which is, of course, all very interesting and good, (at least it is the first four times you've heard that sermon). There is a great deal to be made of the father figure, but generally, and perhaps this is not true of you, perhaps you are further along the way to becoming an actual Christian, I don't find myself resonating or sympathizing with the father figure. I am not gracious enough, I think, to feel the father's struggle to be gracious and forgiving to his offspring. No, if I'm in the story, I'm there as one of the two brothers, or more likely, as a blend of both – the officious one and the libertine, the repressed and the wanton, the dull and the interesting.

Both of those brothers are a blend in me, and although some days it seems as if one might win out over the other, often they are simply mixed and I'm left dependent on grace either way.

But isn't it interesting that if this is a parable about God's grace, it is also, or perhaps foremost a parable about the human response to grace, and the eldest son doesn't come off at all well. Which at first blush is hard to understand – except there is, in his tone when he speaks to his father, the hot worm of resentment. “Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends.” Which says a great deal about how the elder son wants to live, how he wants to be a little dissolute, how he has wanted to throw some wild parties but hasn't, and how he resents the younger brother for doing or being what he wants to do or be.

So the son who comes of the worst in the parable isn't the wild child, the black sheep, the morally dubious one – it is the resentful one, the perfectionist, the momma and daddy's boy – who wants fairness when it suits him, justice when it fits him and who doesn't need grace, or at least he doesn't think he needs it, because he is doing “the right thing.”

For some reason the elder brother, besides reminding me of my foibles as the oldest child, my passionate sense of justice (or is it just resentment?), my perfectionism (or is it just my need for control?), despite all that, for some reason, the elder brother always reminds me of the religious folk who have it all figured out. You probably know someone like this – who knows the way God thinks – or who know the way that everyone should live, or who know how the Scriptures should be read and interpreted. That person is always only too happy to share with you their knowledge and their certainty, if you give them the least bit of leeway. There is even, of course, a version of this which is Episcopalian, or rather there are several. Perhaps you recognize one or both of them: there is the certainty of the way things should be done (the sense that our way is the best way) and that somehow doing liturgy with a faux British accent, or decently and in due order is the way that God intended it. And lets sing “Jerusalem” while we are at it, to complete the image of Victorian schmaltz. The other version is the certainty that we have about the conflicts of our day. We live in a church of certainty about human sexuality, or about the role of women, indeed a church of two certainties, screaming at each other across a great divide. Aren't we great, we who are keeping to the true faith, or alternatively, we who are wonderfully progressive – look at us, and our the self-congratulation and the self- aggrandizement – and suddenly, ouch, I think I strained a muscle trying to pat myself on the back! Look at us, aren't we great?

And of course the moral, the seed at the heart of this parable is that we aren't great. Whether we are wanton, dissolute hedonists, or aren't but resent the lucky ones who are, we aren't good. The right actions for the wrong reasons are no better than the wrong actions for the honest reasons – in fact, they are perhaps worse, inasmuch as they make us sure of our superiority, our goodness, our correctness – for they remove us from that fundamental position of bowed head, and honest, bare humility – “I am no longer worthy to be called your son.”

The parable of the prodigal son is a parable obviously about grace, but it isn't so much about the abundance and mystery of grace, but rather about the reception of grace; the father is a strange mysterious character and his grace no less so, but our response to that grace, how that plays out in the dissolution or resentment of our lives, that is the focus of the parable and in the same way that the grace in our lives is mysterious, the way that we deny or accept that grace, is mysterious and we find ourselves daily somewhere between the older and younger brother, somewhere between the knowing and acceptance of our folly and the illusion of our arrival in a state of grace. Day in, day out that ever- changing window, between folly and illusion is the extent that we are open to God's grace – and there is nothing in the parable about our progressiveness or our traditionalism, about the way that we should behave, but only the reality that we have not yet arrived, and probably won't, this side of death.

The story ends here, with the father pleading with his elder son to come in to the feast. We don't know whether the son ends up coming to the party or not. If he is at all like me, the odds are about 50/50. He might have given in, and come to the feast and celebrated his brother's return, or he might have stayed outside, stewing in his own righteousness. Perhaps the story remains unfinished because we too are standing in the field, waiting to decide whether we are going into the feast, or living on in our resentment.

The word “feast” for some reason always makes me think Nordic thoughts: high halls, and huge sides of meat, and plenty of beer in the hands of large and jovial men. And somehow, in my mind, I imagine that the celebratory feast, at the end of this parable is taking place in a Norse hall.

I like to imagine that the doorway into the father's hall, where all the sounds of merriment are coming from, is a low doorway. The kind of doorway where one has to stoop down, and bow one's head to get in, and I like to think that going into that hall requires us to have, just for a moment, the posture of that younger son, penitent before his father. “I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.” The stiff necked, the certain righteous, can't get into the hall. And I pray that I, and all of us, may have the grace to bow our heads, and to know that we don't deserve to be called children, and that still our God welcomes us with open arms and rejoicing.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

14 March 2010 

Less of My Manure, More of His

Most couples who come to me to talk about getting married are not looking for advice.  They want to talk about the ceremony – at least the brides do; the grooms are often not sure they want to talk to a priest at all.  But the church requires me to spend some time with every couple I marry, and I would want to do so even if it wasn’t required.  In addition to talking about the ceremony, I always ask couples a series of questions that fall under the heading “Questions Couples Should Ask Before They Marry – Or Wish They Had”.  These questions include asking if they have discussed children, whether their ideas of saving and spending money are in sync, and whether or not they will have a TV in the bedroom.

But there is a topic not covered in the questions that I feel it is important to discuss, and which compels me to give to the couple the only piece of advice that I give about marriage.  The topic is forgiveness.

I know couples whose basic position about forgiveness is this: that they can forgive the other almost anything, except….  The “except” is big: a line in the sand that must not be crossed.  And if a couple has thought about this (although I suspect that many don’t really think about it until after the wedding day) that exception is one thing and one thing only: infidelity.

As I said, most couples don’t come to me looking for advice, and I am not inclined to give it about marriage.  But on the topic of forgiveness, I am not inclined to keep silent.

And although love-besotted brides and grooms probably pay me little mind when they hear me say it, my advice to them is to begin their married life with no line in the sand; no exception established in either’s mind from the outset for which forgiveness could not be sought and offered in return.  Not even if there is infidelity.  No exceptions at all.  This is not to say that I believe there are never circumstances in which a marriage could and should rightly end in divorce, sad though that would be.  I am only saying that couples should not begin their married lives knowing that there is something the marriage could not survive, for lack of forgiveness.

My rationale for this piece of advice is found in what I believe and know about God: that there is no exception to God’s forgiveness.  And that even in the simple prayer Jesus taught us to pray we ask God to “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us,” and I think husbands and wives and partners ought to mean that when they say it – or at least try.

Brides and grooms-to-be have to sit and listen to my only piece of advice, which is premised on a lesson about God.  But almost no one else has to hear it – except of course a captive congregation who finds themselves sitting through a sermon!  And you may or may not need to hear advice about forgiving your spouse, your partner, your friend, or perhaps your enemy.  But if you are anything like me, you do need to be reminded the lesson about God.  Because many of us have somehow absorbed the idea that ours is a God who has drawn lines in the sand.  Our shorthand for this is to remember that we once heard it said that God is an angry and a jealous God.

To us, this sounds like a God who has all kinds of boundaries that may not, must not, cannot be crossed, or else….  And indeed we have lots of images of such an angry and jealous God who fills the skies with thunder clouds and lightning bolts as he prepares to wreak his vengeance on those who cross him.

But today Jesus has advice for those of us who believe this about God.

"A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none.  So he said to the gardener, 'See here!  For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none.  Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?'  He replied, 'Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it.  If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.'"

If I could only take one parable of the Scriptures with me to a desert island this would be it.  Because the fig tree, of course, is me (or you, if you care to put yourself in the story).  It requires no real stretch of my imagination to see that I have not been the person I could be; that I have not done all that I could with the gifts God’s given me; that in so many ways I have failed to bear the fruit of good works and kindness and love that God has made me for and calls me to.

Maybe you could say this about yourself as well.  The season of Lent is in some measure given to us to reflect on the ways we resemble the fig tree in this parable.  Notice that we do not even have to get to the things we have done wrong (although I believe we are free to remember those) it is enough to think about what we have failed to do – those things we have left undone, as we say.  Have I been faithful to God in prayer?  Have I been merciful to those who need my help?  Generous to those who deserve my largesse?  Kind to those who seek my fellowship?  Have I been available to those who need me and can rightly lay claim to that need?  Have I been gracious to those who just happen to find themselves in my sphere? 

Sometimes we have such low expectations of ourselves that we do pretty well by these measures, until we begin to expand our focus and see more of the world around us, the people we normally ignore, or have already shut out, those beyond the immediate company of our family and friends.  But God’s expectations of us are not low at all.  He has always called his people to be welcoming to strangers; to care for those who are needy not because we know them, but just because they are in need; to love not only those whom it’s easy for us to like, but even to love our enemies.  If this is the kind of fruit we are to bear in our lives, how are we doing?

Now, in the cartoon version of life that has become the common picture for many these days, I am supposed to rail at you from the pulpit about your many failings in these ways.  I am supposed to encourage your shame, identify you as sinners, affix a scarlet letter to your clothes, condemn you to a life of guilt, and threaten you with the fires of hell.  In this cartoon world, dour nuns wield stiff rulers to whack children’s hands; hypocritical priests hurl accusations at the innocent, suffering poor; and a greedy church takes from you what you can ill afford to give in order to fill her hallways with extravagance.  And no doubt the church has been guilty of all these cartoon crimes at one time or another.

But there is still the matter of the fig tree, which has failed to bear fruit year after year.  No one has guilted the fig tree about anything.  No one berated it in Catholic school when it was young.  No one took from it what was rightfully the tree’s and deprived it the chance to produce figs.  The tree was just planted and left to grow and do what fig trees do: to grow figs, which are sweet and wonderful and delicious.

But year after year the tree gives no figs.

The owner of the tree remembers that he heard once that ours is an angry and a jealous God; and he remembers too that he is made in God’s image (his is a selective memory).  A fig tree ought to produce figs; its owner has every right to expect them, he thinks.  What is the point of a fig-less fig tree, after all?  So cut that tree down and teach it a lesson – a lesson that will no doubt be noticed by all the other fig trees too!  Where is that ax?

But there is also a gardener – or at least someone who we think is the gardener, though he looks a little familiar to me, come to think of it.  This gardener is not the type to draw lines in the sand.  Is he disappointed by a fig tree that bears no figs?  Perhaps.  Is prepared to give up on it and cut it down?  No, he is not.  Does he believe a good strong dose of guilt or haranguing, or the threat of eternal damnation will induce the tree to grow figs?  It would appear not.

But the gardener has a pile of manure – which is neither expensive or exotic.  And he has time.  And he has a way with the owner of the tree.  “Sir,” he says, “let it alone one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it.  If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not…” well, you know….

In my cartoon world, on my desert island, where this is the only parable I have to tell, it is told over and over, year after year.  The exasperated owner remembers that this is the third, no fourth, no fifth, no twentieth year in a row he has had this conversation with the gardener.  But always he relents, neither as angry or as jealous as he had at first seemed.

And in my cartoon world, there is an endless supply of manure to be heaped on this fig tree by the gardener, to help it grow, help it thrive, help it bear much fruit.

And of course in my cartoon world, I am the fig tree, peering out from beneath my leafy, but so far fig-less branches.  And I have heard the demands of the owner year after year, I have remembered that he sounds so much like a jealous and an angry God, but I notice that he always heeds the gardener.  And I am grateful that there is a pile of manure for me, because it is so hard to draw a line in a pile of manure, to define the limits of what the gardener will tolerate, what he will put up with, what he will forgive.  Indeed, to me, he seems to have no limit, no line that cannot be crossed.  He seems to me to have nothing but patience and plenty of manure to try to keep me humble, and to coax my limbs to finally bring forth fruit, and offer the first figs to him.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

7 March 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Longing and desire

Somewhere near the heart of us is a wrenching longing. We experience it in different ways: as nostalgia, as homesickness, as restlessness, as grief and as mourning. Psychologists tell us that we learn to long from our birth, when we long for mother, to return to the warmth and comfort of the womb, and although we long in increasingly subtle ways, there is still the sense that we long interminably, desperately, at length – throughout our lives. From the beginning to our last breaths.

Sometimes we can put words to our longing – “love,” “friendship,” “beauty,” “home.” Sometimes it is a fundamentally ceaseless condition – a chronic desire that brooks no vocabulary – but perhaps a tune catches us, or a poem, or a sunset, and we know that ache which most haunts artists and those who are a little mad – that gives to the experience of life a poignance and depth, and which makes us restless to the end of our days.

I can never hear the Gospel from this morning without hearing in the words of Jesus a similar longing:

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” “How often have I desired to gather your children together...”

The words grab me somewhere in my guts and twist, and whisper of so much longing – the longing that brings us to the edge of tears. Jesus' deep longing for his people comes through his words. There are in his words hints of the longing of the Israelites for a homeland, for a city of their own in the midst of their enemies, and there are hints of Jesus' own longing for his people that he loves, longs for and wishes to embrace. And there also the deep sadness in that longing, for even as Jesus wishes to embrace his people, he knows that they will not embrace him back, and even as his people long for a Messiah, they will receive Jesus no more than they received the prophets.

The longing, and the sadness and the desire in Jesus' words is maternal, like a mother hen, Jesus longs for his people, desires to gather and protect them. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem” – the longing, the sadness and the desire. This seems, at first blush, a strange little reading for this second Sunday of Lent. Jesus predicts his own death and resurrection, albeit in indirect, riddle-like ways, he scolds Herod, he scolds Jerusalem, and reveals his longing and desire for his people, and that is about it. There is no ethical teaching, no parable, and so I wonder if the longing and desire of Jesus for Jerusalem is not the teaching we are supposed to glean from this reading. I think perhaps the longing of these two sentences is perhaps more important to our Lenten journey than knowing what is to come when Jesus arrives at Jerusalem.

In the midst of this Lenten time when we are mindful of our sinfulness and the degree to which we fail to love God and fail to walk according to his commands – in the midst of this purgative time, when we give up food, or drink, or television (as my household has), we do it because we need to be reminded that Lent is about longing and desire, about an emptiness and a void, a sense of homelessness and a sense of incompleteness. Lent is about longing and desire and the longing and desire of fasting, of purgation, of mourning and desolation bring us again hopefully into the hunger and desire that we have for God. Lent is about what is lacking in our lives, or what is present and distorts our lives. And the longing and

the desire that is somewhere near the very heart of us is a longing and desire for something absent, that we replace with other things: people, or work, or money, or power, or those other little idols. All of which are there to shield us from the ache and the longing that we have for God.

Because we are not, as a culture, very good at living in a place of hunger, of desire, and of longing. We tend to foreclose, to satiate, to substitute, to anesthetize, but Lent and the longing and desire of Lent ask us to simply wait, and hope; to wait in the slow ache and agony of longing and desire for that which we cannot fully name, but which we recognize when we come face to face with it, or recognized reflected in the mirror of creation, or of a human face, or in a quiet sorrow.

The hope of this Lenten place is two-fold. One hope is that if we sit in the longing desirous waiting of Lent for long enough, we might come to recognize that our waiting, our desire, our longing is a reflection of a far greater desire and longing – Jesus looking at Jerusalem and longing for the people whose Messiah he is, and God longing for us like a lover, a mother, the Creator who made us for companionship, in his own image, and whose longing and desire is an infinite echoing cry of which ours is a slight tiny version.

We long, in other words, because God longs. We desire because God desires, and sets in us a similar desire to that which cries out in the Godhead. And so our longing and our desire is not ours alone, but part of the great symphony of the creation, echoed by stars and stones, even haltingly by foolish people.

The other hope of that this Lenten place is not eternal, that we will not have to wait forever in the slow agony of unsatisfied desire, but that someday, we will obtain what we desire, we will seek and find, we will receive “far more than we can ask or imagine.” Someday, we will get home.

For God desires us far more than we desire in our own halting fashion. God longs to welcome us, God longs, in a very real way, to have us, to possess us. And so Lent is not a punishment, but a training, not a mortification without cause, but a fast wherein we learn to taste again the heavenly food and drink, and to recognize our longing for what it is, not about any earthly thing, but a longing for Eden, for walking in the Garden with God, for the Other by which and for which we were created.

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how I long to gather your children...”

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

28 February 2010

Sled Dogs

All the snow that’s fallen on the east coast lately has clearly affected people’s thinking.  For instance, I read in the New York Times recently a piece about dog sledding that would normally seem somewhat esoteric.  But all the recent snowfall, and my pack of two dogs, has got me wondering.

In the Times, Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote about the wonder of being pulled on a sled by a team of dogs: “They don’t run for a reward or toward a goal — the greyhound’s mechanical rabbit. They get yelled at when they chew on the gangline and petted when the run is over. They don’t catch or flee anything. They would keep running if the musher fell off his sled.”[i] 

And he wonders, “Why do sled dogs run?” which they do with such un-restrained zeal.  He can only think of one-word answers: “love, joy, duty, obedience.”

I have friends in suburban Philadelphia with a Husky who corroborate this assessment of a sled dog: he lives to run.  They are very cautious not to let him run in unconfined areas or off the leash, they tell me, because once he starts running it is hard to get him to stop.

Most of us do not approach Lent with the zeal of a sled dog straining at his harness to begin a race.  We have devised Lent as a dreary time, when we tell ourselves that we are restrained, harnessed as it were to some unfortunate discipline.  Certainly we devise the rituals of our worship to underscore this idea.  The old fashioned prayers we sometimes say here, go on and on about our bodily fasting.

But, while I grew up in a house where we were very likely to be given Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks on a Friday in Lent, I doubt my parents are as scrupulous about the observance of meatless Fridays these days as they used to be, and I know that I am often careless in the observance.  I am guessing that perhaps your Lenten disciplines do not cramp your style too much.  And I know there is a city out there, and beyond, that would merely giggle at such thoughts.

The Gospel today invites us to consider temptations, but we are mostly so accustomed to yielding to our desires – because we can – that we hardly even know what temptation is any more, other than the occasional wish to consume more chocolate or more ice cream than we should.  Besides, Jesus’ temptation by Satan is of such a particular and scripted variety that it can seem to have little to do with us.

So I could enjoin you to be strict on your fasting, or whatever it is you have given up for Lent (if anything); and I could warn you against the power of Satan to tempt you.  But I doubt I would be getting very far or sound very compelling.  And since I normally preach to myself, I can tell you that I know I wouldn’t be making much headway with myself!

Which brings me back to the sled dogs, and that interesting comment: “They would keep running if the musher fell off his sled.”  This is not how I thought of a team of animals pulling a heavy sled.  I rather imagined that there was a whip involved, and a great deal of demanding, ordering, coercing, maybe even some denial of food – to keep the dogs hungry.  It’s hard for me to imagine the dogs enjoying being harnessed, longing for the run, the cold, the ice, the snow, the panting.  Very hard for me to imagine them simply wanting to run when it is not even required of them – for what?  The love, the joy, the duty, the obedience of it?  Can it be that there are creatures like this?  I confess I am not at all sure I see these traits in my own dogs.  But then, they were not made for it.

And what of you and me?  What were we made for?  This is a question so many of us struggle with, and many feel doomed to spend their whole lives wandering, not knowing the answer, since we are certain that it must have something to do with what we used to call our occupation, but now we imagine must be our passion.

During Lent, the Church suggests that whatever your occupation, you try living like a sled dog.  Which is to say, try living in the harness; listening for the call to go where you are instructed, rather than wherever you please; running hard, part of a team that is also harnessed; doing it not for the benefit of a reward, nor because of a whip that threatens you, but for the love of it, the joy of it, the duty of it, even the obedience of it.

This might mean taking something on during Lent, or giving something up.  It might mean doing something you have been avoiding, but that you know will be good for you or for those you love.  It clearly means testing a life that is different than the one we have been living.  Unlike a sled dog, it depends on each of us taking the time to think about what should or could be different, better in our lives, how we could become the better selves that we suspect lurk somewhere under the more selfish selves we see most often.

Would that involve a diet?  Fewer cigarettes?  A decision to go to an AA meeting for the first time?  Would it mean treating your partner or your spouse differently?  Calling your mother for the first time since who knows when?  Could it mean coming to church more often, or saying your prayers at home every day?  Might you decide to give some of your time to a cause or another person who needs you?  Is it possible it will cost you money as you learn to be more generous with others?  Only you will know, if you take the time to be honest with yourself.

And if you do, you may consider the possibility of changing your life with a certain dread, a wistfulness for giving up whatever ease, or indulgence, or habit, or wastefulness you are loathe to let go of.  It may seem to you that life could only be darker, smaller, less delightful if you are strapped into a harness and called on to run.

But it may be that you discover how wonderful it is to feel the cold air in your lungs, and your heart beating fast and strong, and the scenery whizzing by, and your team mates around you running hard and happily too.  Not because we are forced too, or because we are late, or because we are trying to catch or flee anything... but just for the love, joy, duty, and, yes, the obedience of living life more nearly to the way God made us to live it – with a bit less of us and a bit more of him.

And wouldn’t it be something if people saw the way you and I live our lives – with less of ourselves, and more of God – and wondered why; why do they run like that?  Would they suspect that it is because we have submitted to the whippings of an angry, demanding, and coercive God?

And wouldn’t it be wonderful to show that we could choose to live this way – making better choices, being our better selves – even when Lent is over?  Wouldn’t it be wonderful to discover that we could run just for the love, joy, duty, and obedience of it; that we would run even if the musher fell off his sled?

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

21 February 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

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[i] Klinkenborg, Verlyn.  “Why Do Sled Dogs Run?”  In The New York Times. 13 February 2010

Identity Theft

These days many of us have learned to worry about becoming the victims of what is called “identity theft.”  The term is something of a misnomer, because the perpetrators of identity theft are not primarily interested in your identity; they are interested in your money, and your credit.  They could care less who you are; what they really want is what you have.

Of course, very little frightens us as much as someone who has access to our stuff, our bank accounts, our credit cards, our treasures.  It is no coincidence that we have all gotten good at remembering various passwords, or that many of us probably have our own document shredders at home.  We don’t want people rifling through our trash, or hacking through our computers to gain access to our money and our credit.  Oh, it’s easy for people to find out our identities – we don’t so much mind that: just look me up on Face Book!  But we don’t want people getting the stuff that really matters: our financial information and assets.

But tonight we have come to get a smudge of ash on our foreheads and be told, “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”  And this custom is something of an affront to our identities.  Is it true that all we are is dust in the wind?  Do our identities mean nothing more than that, not even to God?

Interestingly, many people come to church on Ash Wednesday who don’t normally make it a habit to be in church.  There is something like a homing instinct on this day that leads us to this old ritual, to these ashes, and to this strange declaration that you are dust and to dust you shall return.  And that instinct is not activated because our souls fear that in God’s eyes all we are is dust in the wind.  Quite the contrary; our homing instinct kicks in because we suspect that most of the time we have not been living the lives God means for us to live, we have not grown into the selves we hoped to grow into, and our identities have somehow become confused, lost, or stolen among all the demands of our daily lives: from raising the kids, to paying the bills, to caring for the house, and everything else.

Somewhere deep inside us lurks the suspicion that even though our financial records are in order, we have been the victims of identity theft, and it doesn’t have anything at all to do with our credit or our money.  Somehow we suspect that our identities have become overly entwined with our things, our stuff, our bank accounts, our credit cards, or our social status.  And we may begin to wonder if anybody cares about us not for what we have, but for who we are.

So we home in on church on Ash Wednesday.  We may come for a lot of reasons, or no reason at all, but when we get here, we are going to be confronted with the truth of our identities.  Because most of us have been victims of identity theft: somehow the person we meant to be, tried to be, were raised to be, always knew we could be, is nowhere to be found.  The ideals, and hopes, and talents, and brains, and principles and even the looks we once held onto have slipped away.  Hope has been crowded out by depression.  What’s more, we have developed bad habits, forgotten what it was like to exercise self-discipline, and gotten too accustomed to being selfish.  Look in a mirror, and what do you see?  Is it someone you recognize and like?  Or is it a victim of identity theft?

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.  Like so much else in religion, these words are not as easy to understand as at first they seem.  All we are is not dust in the wind.  It is true that our bodies and all we have (even our credit cards) will return to the ground: dust to dust, ashes to ashes, as the saying goes.  Most of what we guard so carefully in life cannot be saved.  And the church is compelled to remind us of this because we have tended to store up for ourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal.  We have tended to value all those things that are inevitably perishing (including our bodies), and paid no mind at all to our souls.

But we were made to be more than bodies passing through this world for a while; more than the accumulation of our wealth; more than the sum of our credit.  We were made to be citizens of another kingdom: the kingdom of heaven - to which God calls all people.

In the kingdom of heaven our lives take on new meaning; we work for the benefit of others; the poor are not disenfranchised; the rich do not have special privileges.  Justice is accomplished in the kingdom of heaven; the sick are made well without a thought of health insurance.  Peace is the watchword there.  In the kingdom of heaven you are worth more than your credit score!  And in the kingdom of heaven no one can steal your identity, because you are most perfectly and beautifully yourself, your own true identity.

Jesus talked about the moth nibbling away at what does not belong to it and ruining it; about that little trickle of water that causes so much rust over the years and ruins what should rightfully have been yours.  Do we have to name the moths?  Do we have to prove that there is rust?  Isn’t it true?  Is some of it your own fault?  Probably.  Was some of it beyond your control?  Probably, too.

There is a secret about Ash Wednesday that is not at first apparent.  The secret is a white lie in those words: Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.  For, the truth about Ash Wednesday is that God wants you to have your real self back: the lovely, true, and holy identity that could only ever be yours alone.

Have you strayed like lost sheep?  Have thieves broken in and stolen?  Have moth and rust consumed what was not theirs to take?  Have you let them do it?  Have you let your life turn to so many ashes? 

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.  But remember this too: you are more than you seem to be.  Saint Paul saw how easily our true identities are taken from us.  And he reminded his fellow Christians in Corinth about the truth: “we are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see-- we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything!”

Like everyone else who has ever languished in prison, Paul knew what it was like to face losing everything – even your own identity.  And he knew the marvelous truth that when your identity is rooted in Christ, no one can ever take it from you!

Because the kingdom of heaven is not a faraway place or in the distant future.  The kingdom of heaven is at hand – this, Jesus came to teach us.  And you and I were made for that kingdom.  There are treasures of unimaginable bliss to be found there that no one can ever take from you.  And you begin by coming here and believing for a moment that little white lie – that you are dust.  And then you begin to ask God to lead you in a new way, and to give you your identity back.  Which it is his joy and glory to do, since he made you in the first place, and rejoices to see you returned to your rightful, beautiful self.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
Ash Wednesday 2010
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia


Awe and terror

I was reading recently a history of how people in different times and places have interacted and reacted to space, which may sound rather abstract but is actually quite fascinating. Throughout history, people have generally seemed to find a similar awe and amazement in different spaces. The magnificence of Chartres Cathedral has been experienced by people for 800 years without much reservation, but there are some notable exceptions. One of the most interesting examples of people responding very differently in a time and place was the response of people during the 18^th century to the Alps. There was, apparently, no awe or astonishment at the beauty of the Matterhorn; instead people found the Alps rather terrifying, and the practice if one was forced to undergo the trial of crossing the Alps was to travel in a closed carriage so that one would not have to experience the terror of the Alps.

Which I would find incomprehensible except that I think those two emotions, awe and terror are not too far removed from each other, and perhaps go very much hand in hand.

Awe is one of the glories of human emotion – to feel astonished and overwhelmed by wonder at a glorious sunset over the ocean, or the space of a cathedral, or the silence of an old growth forest.

Beyond the awe that we feel at the natural world is the awe that we feel when we encounter the transcendent, indeed sometimes it is the glory of nature that leads us to that encounter with God. Encountering the mystery of the Divine is always awe inspiring, often unexpected, and it is not unusual to have a feeling of unworthiness, of smallness, even of terror in the face of the God who is wholly powerful and other. Like the Alps, we may encounter the majesty of God with terror, with a wish to withdraw and block out the vastness and majesty of that sight.

We have that sense of awe and of unworthiness expressed both in the reading from Isaiah and in the Gospel this morning. The prophet has a vision of the Lord glorious and enthroned and it is the kind of experience that leaves him blind and groping, deeply aware of his own unworthiness in the face of the heavenly court crying “Holy,” shaking the hinges of the Temple with their voices. “Woe is me!” he says, “for I am a man of unclean lips and live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”

Simon Peter has a similar experience in the Gospel. After a night of fruitless fishing, as he is washing his nets, Jesus gets into his boat to teach, and once he's finished teaching, he tells Peter to let down his nets on the other side of the boat. Despite how ridiculous the request is, Peter tries it, and ends up swamping both the boats with a massive catch of fish. And like the prophet, Peter is brought up short by an awareness of his own limitation and sinfulness. Falling to his knees he says “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.”

However we encounter the Divine, it can be a sobering experience that brings home to us our finitude and our own very real lack of perfection, before a God whose worship shakes the doors of the Temple.

And that is not an inappropriate emotion – however much we encounter God in the small things of life, in quiet moments and kind words, or however much we encounter God in the person of Jesus, speaking to us through the Scriptures, God is both encountered in small things, and in the moments of glorious holiness and terror: worth of the adoration of seraphs, glorious and majestic.

It is, I suppose, out of fashion to speak about the overwhelming side of God. Generally we are told that this God is experienced by people as unapproachable, as too reminiscent of the sometimes difficult and judgmental images of God that some of us learned in childhood. Moreover, we are told that God enthroned as King is a difficult image, for most of us have no experience of kings and how can we possibly related to God as an extra-large monarch, with all the trappings of royalty?

Which I suppose is all true in a way, but is also somewhat sad, because if the God of glory and terror is downplayed, or fails to make it into our teaching, preaching and thinking about God, the awe tends to go away as well.

As, of course, does the framework for interacting with God's majesty and power. If you look at both passages that we hear read today, the goal of the vision of God's majesty or the power expressed by the God who is enfleshed is not to make us feel guilty or unworthy, although that might be an unintended effect, but because God simply IS. Powerful and infinite. I am that I am. Glorious, magnificent. Worthy of eye covering worship. Worthy of having the Temple filled with smoke, whether the choir likes it or not. Worthy of that perpetual chant of “Holy, Holy, Holy.”

And rather than our finitude and unworthiness being the occasion for God's wrath or judgment, in both these passages they are instead the beginning of our healing and calling.

The prophet finds himself cleansed and purified, and then when the God of terrible majesty asks for volunteers, the prophet finds himself offering to go “Here I am; send me!”

And rather than Jesus agreeing with Simon Peter that he is unworthy, Jesus simply tells him not to be afraid. We may encounter God's holiness with terror, but we do encounter it, and it changes us forever.

The majesty and wonder of the God of glory is not the terror of judgment. It is the awe that the God whose worship shakes the doors of the Temple, the hem of whose majestic robe fills the Temple, that same God also is available to us in quiet, is present with us in bread and wine, can compact the vastness of that robe down into the frame of a tiny child, and comes to us despite our sinfulness and foolishness, asking “Who shall I send?”

To encounter the God of majesty and power is to come to terms with our smallness before his glory, and our vocation to speak to the peoples, to fish for people, to work as God wills, despite our smallness and sinfulness. Not because we are cowed by his majesty or frightened at his glory, but because the vision of the God of glory brings up in us the deepest awe and wonder, and the will to worship God ceaselessly. “Holy, holy, holy.”

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

7 February 2010