Leo in Egypt

Since about mid-August Leo, my cat, has been hiding behind the sofa in the Parlour on the second floor of the Rectory.  This is the fourth time he has found himself a hiding place since he was brought to me from the streets as a kitten – about one every year of his life.  He has lived under a window seat, behind a different sofa on the third floor, under my bed, briefly in a closet, and now behind the sofa in the Parlour.  Leo’s life is ruled by fear, given real shape in the form of my two Labrador Retrievers, Baxter and Ozzie, whose enthusiasm to befriend the cat and play with him, Leo mistakes for threats to his person.  To borrow the image from the Gospel story this morning of the flight of the Holy Family (Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus) out of Bethlehem, Leo is in Egypt.  His most recent flight came in the aftermath of a visit from my two five-year old nephews, who shared a room with Leo.  Their exuberant presence drove him into the closet for four days, but eventually he sought sanctuary on a different story of the house.  It took me several days to locate him in his new Egypt, and then to move his food and water and litter box, so that he could establish himself in that new land.

I would like to think that angels speak to Leo in his dreams, and that his movements are the result, as they were for Joseph, of his confidence in God.  But if that were so, Leo might take flight with the conviction that God cares for him, and has a plan in mind for the universe and even for every kitten under heaven.  But I am certain that Leo has no faith in what we used to call God’s Providence – the certainty that somehow, mysteriously, God is guiding all things by his divine, gracious, and merciful will.  But Leo has no trust in God, no confidence in God, no faith in God.  Leo flees from one Egypt to the next and never gets to Nazareth to grow up and let God’s plan unfold – in which he would learn to be brave enough to spar with Labradors, and in his spare time, sit in my lap or bask in the sunshine on the window sill.

If, on one of his flights to one of his Egypts, Leo were to stop at a resort on the Dead Sea he might learn a funny irony: the Dead Sea is so called because it is so salty nothing can live in it,  but it is also so buoyant as a result of its high salt content that it is almost impossible to drown in it.  Dive in and you will feel yourself pushed up, almost as if by a strong set of arms that will not let you sink.  It is a remarkable feeling, I can tell you.  Or at least, Leo might, on one of his journeys to Egypt, have allowed himself a dip in the Mediterranean, and reminded himself that if you just lie back and relax in the water you will float, but if you are tense and thrash about, you will struggle to stay above water.  But when Leo gazes across the sea to Egypt he never believes he can float – he is sure he will drown.  So he always travels by land, and always at night.

So much for Leo, poor thing.  But the story of the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt is not told as an exercise in kitten welfare, it is told for you and for me, who have been known to flee in fear to our own Egypts.  Angels are not often instructing most of us in our dreams, so it remains a question of faith and confidence and conviction about God’s love and care how we respond when we find ourselves fleeing in fear.  Can you at least identify with Leo a little bit?  Do you know what it feels like to want to hide behind the sofa?  I do.

If the angels are not sent to give us instructions, though, it remains to be seen whether we will model our lives on Leo’s and stay there behind the sofa, until the next threat comes along and we go in search of a new Egypt.  How tiresome this life must be, moving from one exile to another, and never finding the way to Nazareth where we can finally grow up!  Joseph had his angels to bolster the faith that was given to him in his dreams.  It’s not that he was without fear; it’s not that the way was easy, or that the outcome was guaranteed, or that there would be no challenge, no sadness, no losses on the way.  It’s just that Joseph trusted that God was leading him and his little family in the way they had to go, and so he would not let himself be paralyzed by fear, even though there was ample cause to be frightened.

If angels are not sent to you and to me, then we can at least rely on Joseph’s angels, since we have been given the story.  There will always be times in our lives that fear comes creeping or storming into the room.  Now what?  You can take flight, like Leo, and only ever make it from one Egypt to the next.  But will you ever get to Nazareth?  Will you or the child Jesus you have in your care ever grow up?  Another way of asking this is to ask, do you believe that God is guiding you and the whole universe by his divine hand – no matter how remotely?  Do you believe there is a reason to get to Nazareth, that there is something to grow up into?

So many people these days have given up on the idea that God has a desire for the universe, a direction for our lives, a meaning to bestow on us, and a hope the points beyond our fears.  And I understand why it has become harder in the world today to place our trust in God, to see the promise of his providential will.  But I also see that the alternative to trusting in God, is to flee from one Egypt to the next, and maybe never to make it to Nazareth.

But if we follow Joseph and his little family, it may be that we could find a place to live on the same street, and learn to play with the boy next door, who has had such a harrowing and frightening childhood (even after that amazing encounter with sages from the east!), and we would learn from an early age to call Jesus our friend, which is what he calls us, as he teaches us to trust in the divine providence of his Father so that, “with the eyes of our hearts enlightened, we may know what is the hope to which he has called us, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe!”

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

2 January 2011

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Electric Morning

Once there were Christmases

with electric mornings,

as though all the lights on the tree

were plugged in to me,

and their low voltage woke me up

earlier than I would usually wake,

earlier than anyone needed to wake.

You remember those Christmas mornings, too.

They were childish and wonderful.

We had all been up too late –

to sing at the first thought

that Christmas was here

at the Midnight Mass.

And now we were awake again –

the children, anyway –

electrified with the promise

of bulging stockings

and wrapped-up possibilities

beneath the tree

that seemed to belong there,

in the living room.

Is it time or distance,

age or something else,

that dims the tingle

of those electric,

holy mornings?

Have we grown up

only to believe

that the electricity of them

was truly generated by the stockings,

by the gifts wrapped in paper,

lying under the tree,

or the tiny stringed lights

that have only enough power to twinkle,

not to shine, and surely not enough

to wake a boy from his sleep?

Is this the wisdom we have grown up to learn

in the same way we learned

not to worry about Santa,

not to think him real,

not to believe in silly things?

Speaking for me, and for you, I can say

that time and distance have all grown longer,

age and everything else have all advanced.

Even the dimmest tingle –

a shiver up the spine,

pinpricks in your toes or fingers,

what hair you have left

alert on the back of you neck –

would be a welcome sign

of the kind of life

that seemed to lie before us

in our childhood.

What was the solemn age at which

the un-plugging of the Christmas tree

un-plugged something else,

some possibility

inside of us,

access to some other light

that once we believed

shined in the darkness,

though the darkness comprehended it not.

Talk about darkness!

We have evolved

to see in the darkness,

because it surrounds us

day and night.

Do you need me to write up a catalogue

of the shades of darkness we live in?

War, greed, hatred, poverty, fear,

each with its own drop-down menu of options,

its own interactive map of dreadful reality.

It is the same catalogue

that humanity has published age after age:

the bright pages in there, too,

but so easily turned over,

flipped past,

stuck together;

so easily smudged by the blacker ink

of the cruel pages

we are not willing to stop publishing.

And it sometimes feels as though

we have made a quilt

of all the old catalogues of darkness,

and pulled it up over our heads,

as though this was a good idea,

as if this heat from things burning

could keep us warm,

and would not destroy us.

But there is a Christmas light

that has no electric cord,

no lithium ion battery,

no candle wick.

And though it arrives

in the person of a child,

it is not childish.

There is this light that lightens all people:

this light that shines in the darkness.

There is this light, generated by the Word

that was spoken once into darkness long ago.

And in this darkest time of a darkened year

when we remember that the Word was made flesh,

and we try to imagine what that means,

can we be still enough

and silent enough,

can we close our eyes tight enough,

can we reach out with everything we have –

even those tiny hairs on the backs of our necks –

to see if we can feel the pulse

of that magnificent alternating current,

as if made by the beat of angels’ wings,

that could surge through our bodies,

and into our hearts,

and deep in our minds,

and behind the fading retinas of our eyes;

as we receive the only true gift of Christmas?

Is there another electric morning or two

to be had by each of us?

You thought that you were born of blood;

you thought you were born of the will of the flesh;

you thought you were born of the will of man;

and this would account for the darkness,

would it not?

But you were not born of blood;

nor of the will of the flesh;

nor of the will of man,

but of God.

And he has given you power

to become his own child.

You may call him “Abba!  Father!”

since you are no longer a slave to the dark,

but a child of the light;

and if a child, then an heir

to the throne of light

which lightens the whole world.

This is an electric morning!

Lightning struck last night,

and the ground still tingles.

Spread out your toes,

press your soles hard to the floor

and feel the residual power,

(you can feel it even through your shoes)

still buzzing through

whatever will conduct it.

This is an electric morning because

the Word was made flesh

in the beautiful simplicity of childhood,

the kind of childhood

that made it easier for us

to be electrified:

walking Christmas trees

of hope and promise.

This is an electric morning,

and you, who once thought

that only on your best days

could you even hope to twinkle,

(and who can see that your best days

are behind you)…

… you find that on a morning such as this -

an electric Christmas –

you can do better than twinkle,

now that the light is here,

this electric morning,

you can shine!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

26 December 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Christmas in the Basement

Ninety nine years ago – almost to the day (it was actually the 30^th of December, 1911) the great new building that was erected to house John Wanamaker’s department store was dedicated, after seven years of construction.  The building was designed by the famous Chicago architect Daniel Burnham, and was dedicated by President William Howard Taft, who must have been pleased that Wanamaker’s was the first department store in the country to house a restaurant.  That building still stands a few blocks from here, and, although the name of John Wanamaker has been removed from the store for years now, as it has changed hands several times, it still plays host to a light show that continues to be very much a part of Christmas in Philadelphia.  If it’s dazzle you want, you take your kids to the Comcast Center, but if it’s tradition you are after, you go to Macy’s, (and you pretend you are still at Wanamaker’s).

John Wanamaker, the founder and builder of that store was one of the richest and most powerful men in Philadelphia and in the nation.  His son, Rodman, took over the company and is credited for continuing the kind of revolutionizing business practices that his father had been famous for (Wanamaker’s was the first store to give a money-back guarantee if you were unsatisfied with your purchases), and for arranging for the installation of the enormous pipe organ in the Grand Court.  But Rodman, who had a kidney disease, lived only six years longer than his father.

By the time Rodman died in 1928, he had long since buried his wife Fernanda here at Saint Mark’s beneath the altar in the exquisite Lady Chapel he built for that purpose when she died at the turn of the century.  If you have never been here before, I suggest you peek in after mass or on the way back from communion to have a look at the work of beauty for which Mr. Wanamaker is responsible.  Rodman himself is buried in a spectacular way in one of two chapels at the base of a tower that serves as the family mausoleum at the Church of Saint James the Less, five and a half miles up the Schuylkill River from here.  His father, John, is buried in the other chapel.

The rolling hills above the river that were once countryside are now graveyards – there are cemeteries to the south, and to the north and east the city is a sort of graveyard of industry: the Tastycake Bakery building is there, the old Budd plant, and other hulking memorials to an age of industry in Philadelphia that is well and truly dead and buried.  Penn fishing reels are still made in a small factory nearby – but only a few of them: most of the reels are made overseas.

Across the street from the Wanamaker tombs, in the basement of the church hall, five bicycles were recently raffled off to kids from the neighborhood.  They were little kids’ bikes, with training wheels, and brightly colored paint jobs, and heavily padded handlebars.  I don’t think they were especially good or expensive bikes, but I’m sure the question of their quality would hardly matter to the kids who will ride them.  The bikes were donated to be gifts at the Christmas party that was taking place in the basement of that church hall: a Christmas party for the neighbors around the church, many of whom are aware that they are living alongside graveyards.  Those neighbors have seen the bakery and the plants close down, the jobs disappear, the homes foreclosed or abandoned and boarded up.  They can remember when Tastycake was hiring, but it is a distant memory. 

They have seen the drugs and the guys who push them show up on the street corners, where kids who have already failed at school have nothing to do but hang out.  You can see the school from the street corner, and you could be forgiven for thinking it is a prison: it looks a lot like one.  And your chances of learning much there are only a little better than they probably are in prison.

They have even seen the church shut down – five years ago, when after a dispute with the bishop the congregation pulled up stakes and moved away, locking the gates behind them, and bringing to an end the tutoring programs, and other ways they’d reached out to kids in the neighborhood.

With the gates locked and the lights off, and high walls surrounding the place, and a graveyard and the Wanamaker tombs on one side of the street by the church, the other side of the street – where the church hall is located – became another kind of graveyard, to add to the landscape of the dead and dying in the neighborhood.

But now, with a lot of help from Saint Mark’s, an effort is being made to unlock the gates around the old church hall, and to turn that old building and its grounds into a good school for kids from the neighborhood.  There are classrooms there already, with chalkboards and chalk and erasers, that have not been used in years, but which apparently have a longer half-life than some more modern educational tools (all the old computers there are useless!). There are desks and chairs and some books.  There is a chapel and a cross and a bible.   There is a big grassy area to play in.  And there is a big gym in the basement with hoops and some half-inflated basketballs, and where five little bicycles with training wheels were raffled off the other night during a neighborhood Christmas party.

I was supposed to go to that party, but I had two other events here in center city to attend the same evening, and so I missed it.  I didn’t know there were going to be bikes raffled off.  I didn’t know there would be a room full of kids who were happy to receive other presents that night, too.  I didn’t know what I’d be missing; I just missed it.

It’s easy to miss Christmas without even knowing it. And that’s not because of department stores and all the demands of shopping and baking and Christmas parties and everything else.  It’s easy to miss Christmas because we forget what God is like and what his power looks like.  We think that God must be like a slightly larger version of John Wanamaker – a great and distant figure of the past, who had access to whatever he wanted, a grand court to live in, a staff to do his bidding, able to call on the president of the United States when he needed him, as Wanamaker did.  We assume God could hire the best architects to build him the largest and finest buildings – he certainly seems to have done so in days gone by!  And if he was going to put his Son in charge of things, you’d know who he was: he’d carry on the traditions of his father, and build up his legacy, just as Rodman did.

But every Christmas, even as we find ourselves in the Grand Court listening to the carols on the great organ, and watching the lights, and leaning our backs up against the eagle, we remember that even if it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, Jesus is not likely to be found amongst the sweaters and handbags, perfumes, scarves and shoes of Wanamaker’s or any other store  - even with a money-back guarantee.

In fact, even in churches like this one, we have to set up a special place – a manger, where the bedding is straw, and there is room for the animals – because our own surroundings are too grand…

… and because it would be too difficult, or too unseemly, to bring you all into the basement here.  We’d have to stoop down under the pipes that run just by the entrance, reminding the person behind you to “watch your head.”  We’d look for the dingiest corner – the kind of place a mangy old cat might have made a bed for himself if he stole into the basement through an open window.  From there, we’d see where the figures for our manger scene spend most of their year, under a tarp, in a corner of the basement.

But once a year we haul those old figures upstairs and build a crude manger for them with straw in it, to help us remember that in his Son Jesus, God showed himself to be what you might call a basement God: a God who can be found in the dirt and the mud, among the castaway things that we can’t quite decide to throw away yet.  In Jesus, God showed that he was not only willing but interested in being found in places that John Wanamaker might never have stepped foot in.  And in Jesus God showed us a different kind of power – so awesome that the most powerful man of his day, King Herod, tried to recruit spies to find out about it so he could destroy it.

The Christmas story is many things, but it is always a story of the power of weakness.  It is always a correction to our way of thinking that power is force and greatness, and ammunition, and numbers, and kilowatts, and horsepower, and tons, and armor, and wealth, and gold, and frankincense, and myrrh – which don’t seem to have lasted the Holy Family very long, or even paid for Jesus’ college tuition.

The Christmas story reminds us that when we see power gone amok – as we can see every time we open the paper, or flip on the TV, or browse the web – and we wonder about it all…

… the Christmas story reminds us to go have a look in the basement and imagine a baby being born there who would teach the whole world to love one another, and would die in order to teach us what that love might look like.

And if I have one regret this Christmas, it is only that I didn’t make it to a church basement a few miles from here for a Christmas party where five bikes with training wheels were raffled off to five kids who will ride them around a neighborhood that might be nothing but a graveyard, but will seem like heaven to them the first time those training wheels come off and they feel themselves balanced, and flying over the pavement with the wind in their faces.

Because I never made it to the party, I don’t know who donated the five little bicycles.  I don’t know if anyone knows.  I like to think that it may have been the ghost of John Wanamaker, like some Dickensian spirit of Christmases past, present, and to come: a spirit who knows that we are likely to get stuck in the department store he built and never make it down to the basements where Christ is being born year after year because there is never any room at the inn.  I think of his ghost using an old ID card to get into the Macy’s storerooms in the basements of that great old building, and finding a few bicycles to bring up the river to the church nearest his grave, the basement nearest his tomb.   And I think of him pointing to the children who won those silly bikes in the raffle, with smiles on their faces, as if they don’t know they are surrounded by graveyards, surrounded by death in a neighborhood that has seen better days.

And I think old Wanamaker’s ghost looks down into that basement for a moment forgetting that he is already dead and buried, because the possibility of new life seems so real down there in that basement, as though it ought to be a manger lined with straw.

And I think John Wanamaker’s ghost would smile if he could show us that basement and the beaming children and their bikes, and offer it all to us as our Christmas gift, and he’d tell us this is a gift we may certainly return if we are not happy with it, and he’ll give us back every cent we paid for it.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Christmas Eve 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Acceptance

If an angel were to appear to me in a dream, as an angel appeared to Joseph in a dream to tell him it is alright to marry that pregnant girl, Mary, he had been seeing, I think I know how I would react.

If an angel were to swoop in through my window, as the angel Gabriel swooped into Mary’s room, to announce that she would give birth to a son, who would be the Son of God, I have an idea of how I would react.

If angels were to appear in the sky over the fields where I tend my sheep, as they did to the shepherds on that first Christmas to sing of the birth of Jesus, I suspect I can predict how I would react.

In each case, I am almost certain that I would find some time to sit down by myself, or with some help (maybe professional help!) to understand what had happened to me, to understand what I had heard, to understand what God might be doing in the world and in my life.

I say this with some certainty, because although I have never had an angelic encounter that I know of, I have been confronted with the need to try to discern what God is doing in my life and in the world, I have found myself trying to figure out what God wants me to do, how God wants me to act, and, most fundamentally, who God wants me to…  and I have noticed that one of my first reactions is to try to make some sense of the situation: to try to understand. I am, after all, a rational person living in a (more or less) rational age.  I have been taught that knowledge is power – and I value that lesson.  I have seen and known in my life the great benefit of taking the time to understand things, ideas, and people that are not at first easy to comprehend.  The impulse to understand is not only predictable, it is welcome in my life, and in the world around me.

And so I feel confident in asserting that if I were Joseph, and I had decided that the pregnancy of my young fiancée – whom I had not known in the biblical sense - was just cause for me to “put her away privily” (as the King James Version so memorably puts it).  And if I had a dream in which an angel instructed me not to be afraid to marry her because the child she was carrying was from the Holy Spirit: a son, whom we should name Jesus because he would save people from their sins… first thing in the morning I would call my analyst!  And as I laid back on the couch in his office, I would begin to try to understand what was going on in my head and in my heart, and maybe, just maybe, I would try to understand what was going on in the mind of God… if I possibly could.

Perhaps you would react the same way.  It is a perfectly normal reaction to events around us – and in many ways, it is the reaction that makes us who we are (homo sapiens: knowing man), this drive to understand.  And that desire has wrought a great deal of wonderful science, music, art, and literature, among other things.

Making sense of things, reflecting on them and finding meaning, is the great gift of humanity: something to be celebrated, nurtured, and encouraged.  This gift comes, I have no doubt, from God, who made us in his own image, and who must delight when we begin to understand dimensions of ourselves and the world around us that are far beyond the grasp of any of his other creatures.  So with the angels, I am sure it comes as no surprise to God that I would set out to understand all the implications of the visitation, the meaning of their message.

But I would struggle in my mission to understand.

If I were Joseph, I would stumble first, I suspect, on the fundamental unfairness of laying such a burden on Mary, and on me, since both of us are basically ill-suited to the task of bringing a savior into the world.

If I were Mary, I would, as Saint Luke tells us she did, “ponder these things in my heart.”  But I fear my pondering would give me restless nights, not peaceful ones, as I tried to imagine a future for this mystery baby now growing, unbidden, inside my womb.

If I were a shepherd, I think I would stop trying to make sense of the angelic message as soon as I arrived at the manger and saw the hopelessness of the situation.  I would write the whole thing off as a function of the wine I had been sharing with my fellow shepherds that night.

Under any circumstances, I believe I would struggle with trying to understand the angels’ message of the coming of Christ.  And I know from my own life how frustrating the struggle to understand can be.  I know what it feels like to pray repeatedly to God to ask him to help me just to understand why he is doing such and such a thing, why he let such and such a thing happen, why he won’t fix such and such a problem, why he made me the way I am…if only I could understand, I so often feel certain, then I could get on with life, then I would let go of my anger or my grief or my confusion, and I could begin to do the right thing.

But sometimes we have to learn that God is not asking us to understand something, that he is not presenting an event or a reality, or whatever to us as an exercise in understanding to be dissected with our minds, comprehended, and preserved in formaldehyde to be referenced whenever we need it.  Certainly, God is not presenting the birth of his Son to us this way, just as he did not present the news of the birth of his Son to Joseph, or to Mary, or to the shepherds this way.

Sometimes, rather than understanding, what God requires of us is acceptance.

The angelic visits to Mary and Joseph did not require understanding, there was no time for it.  These were not seminars that spelled out the logic of God’s action, only announcements that claimed congruence with the voice of the prophet: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son!”  There was no contract to be initialed and signed, indicating that Mary and Joseph understood what had been told to them, and were accepting full responsibility for whatever should happen next, and the angels could not, under any circumstances, be considered liable for what might happen in the lives of these two people as a result of the news that they’d delivered.  There was not even time to consult with their own families – and to do so, would surely have led them to different conclusions – as soon as Joseph awakes from sleep and recalls his dream, his mind is made up: he takes Mary as his wife and accepts the child that she is bearing in her womb.

The Scriptures suggest that now and then, as Jesus grew up, his parents gained some understanding of who he was, and what his life meant.  And we take it by implication, since Mary was there at his Cross when he died, that she was granted some understanding of the meaning of his death and his resurrection.  But before she was given to understand, she had to accept Jesus, accept what God had in mind, even if she could not understand it.

And the same holds true for each of us.  There is so much of the world that we can understand.  But many of the most painful, difficult questions we will encounter in our lives – questions of life and death – will evade our understanding, even as they interpose themselves in our prayers with the taunting question, “Why?  Why?  Why?”

To that question, and answer is not always given.  And it is vexing that the angels are not dispatched more often to ease the burden of acceptance with their wonderfulness.  Perhaps angelic visitations have slowed to such a trickle because of our dogged insistence to be in control of our lives and the world around us.  We have become so good at enacting the fantasy that we are in control that more often than not we believe this is the truth.  It is only when things go veering out of control – in sickness, disaster, economic collapse, or in the face of death – that we are forced to confront the limits of our control, and our utter dependence on God.  And we do everything we can to avoid such situations.

I’d venture to say that the poor young first-century couple who found angels visiting them in their dreams and in their prayers had less conviction about their own ability to control their lives or the world around them.  They’d have had precious little experience of successfully asserting control in their lives, so maybe it was easier for them to assent to the angels’ instructions.  And for all I know they had neither the inclination nor the facility to reflect much on the meaning of the angels’ message.  But like all of us, they had before them the opportunity either to accept what God was doing or to reject it and do things their own way.  Had they insisted on understanding what was going on, then I guess we might still be waiting for God’s Son to be born.

But Mary and Joseph heard the message of the angels; they must have seen what it meant for them: confusion, difficulty, pain, and sorrow, but not without joy… and they accepted what God had in mind for them.  And the angels rejoiced, and soon we will join them their song!

May God give us all not only minds to inquire and understand, but hearts to accept his divine will, and the birth of his Son, and may our acceptance of God’s will and of his Son give the angels cause for singing.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

19 December 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Last things First

If you paid attention to the readings this morning, you might be confused.  First we heard Saint Paul’s helpful assurance that “we know what time it is.”  Then, minutes later, from the Gospel, we heard Jesus warn, “about that day and hour no one knows…  Keep watch, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”  So by now you might be wondering what the Bible is trying to tell you.  Do we know what time it is, or not?  The answer, of course, is yes, and no.

It is Advent Sunday, the beginning of the church year.  We have begun again to move through the cycle of time that leads us to a baby’s crib in Bethlehem, and then to a Cross on a hill outside of Jerusalem, and to the empty tomb, then to an upper room where the Holy Spirit rushes through, and so on.  This is the wheel of sacred time turning its grand arc, beginning at the beginning and leading us to the end.  So you would think that we begin with first things first.  But we do not.  In the church it is our custom to begin with last things first.  While we are preparing straw to fill the manger, we are also contemplating the end of time, which, it would seem, is when the prophecy of Isaiah will finally come true that we will beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks, for we are surely not there yet.

Sing a hymn in Advent, and you are likely to discover that you are singing not about the excitement of waiting for the baby Jesus, but about the wonder and awe of his second coming: Lo!  He comes with clouds descending, once for our salvation slain.  Here, on the first day of a new church year: last things first.

Traditionally the church has identified the four “last things:” Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell.  These are our points of reflection as we wait for Jesus.  These are the mysteries beyond the veil that Saint John the Divine was shown in his Revelation.  These last things remind us that we only pretend to be waiting for a birth, that we are re-living that ancient story even while we wait for the final chapter when God’s time is fulfilled, when Christ comes again, and when all history culminates in a second big bang of God’s creating and saving power.  So, last things first: Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell.

Start with Death, because we can all agree on that; we can all agree there is such a thing, anyway.  Death is the thing we have most in common with Jesus, and it is the place where we are most tightly bound to him, for it is in his dying that the certainty and fullness of his humanity is known.  Tempting as it is to see him as super-human, we see in Jesus’ death that he is simply (but not only) human.

When we were joined to Jesus in the Sacrament of Baptism, the church told us that we were being baptized into his death.  By this we mean that our journey in life is inextricably linked to his journey through death; that the apple-eating, rule-breaking, take-what-I-want-and-worry-about-the-consequences-later, fig-leaf-wearing-because-all-of-a sudden-I-am-ashamed-of-the-beautiful-creature-lieness-of-the-body-God-made-for-me, crouching-in-fear-because-of-the-sound-of God-walking-in-the-Garden-and-coming-toward-me…

… that every fault I share with our first parents, and some that I have perfected on my own, every one of them can be buried with Christ and left for dead, as we take on the new life he is calling us to lead.

And, of course, we are linked to Christ in death because our earthly lives will end in death as surely as his did.  He does not ask us to go where he has not already gone.  So, last things first.

Next is Judgment where we meet Christ face to face.  In our own time, judging has become a dirty word, since it implies asserting your standards over against mine, as though your standards were demonstrably better than mine, and as though you lived by them yourself, which I deeply suspect you do not, since our culture tends to suspect that any person judging anything is probably a raging hypocrite.

Jesus does assert his standard over against ours, and his standard is love, a demonstrably better standard than all the other alternatives.  His judgment is the rule of love by which our own lives will be measured.  This is why in his ministry he taught us how to love one another: to live our lives not for our own sakes, but for others, caring about the wounded, sick, hungry, naked, homeless, imprisoned, helpless, the beaten man on the side of the road, the child who depends on her elders.  Be prepared to answer for this measure of your life, because in the end (whenever that is) no other measure will matter.

Judgment is often over-looked in the quest for the meaning of life, but without judgment what meaning could there be in life?  If no one cares, and it doesn’t matter whether we help or harm one another then what sort of life have we been called to live?  Last things first.

Heaven is the happiest of the last things.  In the biblical tradition, visions of heaven may begin in the clouds, but they don’t end there.  They take on a familiar form: the shape of a city, the holy city: a new Jerusalem.  God’s eternal home has its counterparts in our own world, its points of comparison.  It is not just a lifestyle choice that heavenly kingdom is a city and not a meadow.  For God always calls his people to be in community, living with one another, and in the world to come this will be true too, we can surmise.

And heaven is the destination of our life’s pilgrimage.  To speak of heaven is to know that God’s people have someplace to go: a promised land where all is peace, a land flowing with milk and honey where the trials of this world are forgotten.  To be a pilgrim is to know that you are not wandering aimlessly, but that you do, in fact, have someplace to go, even if the way is hard.  Whenever we speak of heaven we remind ourselves of this important truth, and we pray we are strengthened for the journey.  Last things first.

Last among the last things is hell.  Hard as it is for us to conceive of, there is room in God’s imagination for a place of fire and torment, weeping and gnashing of teeth. 

It hardly requires us to stretch our own imaginations to think of such places here on earth.  There are people who suffer unthinkable torment in their lives, perhaps it is implausible that such suffering would not be a possibility on the other side of the grave as well.

Biblical teaching about hell is mostly by inference, and these days the church often speaks with only little confidence about hell, except in this: that part of the mission of Jesus during his three days of death was to visit hell and set free the souls in torment there and bring them with him to the path of salvation.  Fantastic as such a story may seem, it tells us that no place – not even the darkest places of imagination – is beyond the saving reach of Christ’s strong hand.  Last things first.

When we take last things first, it is not because we are like over-eager murder-mystery readers who read the last page first.  It is because we are hungry for meaning in our lives, and we know that God has given this gift of a far-sighted vision of the last things, the sight of which colors our understanding of the present things that generally have our attention.

It would appear that God allows us this vision for two reasons: first to give hope, and second to urge us to watchfulness.  Hope and watchfulness are the dual messages of Christ’s tiny parable today: two men will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left.  Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.  Is this literally true?  Is this how God’s salvation works?  Who can say?  But perhaps Jesus uses this image to urge both hope and watchfulness.  Yes, when all the world has fallen to pieces there is hope.  The Second Coming has all the hopefulness of waiting for a bus, which when you think of it is significant, because you are counting on the bus actually arriving. 

This is the difference between wishful thinking and hope.  Wishful thinking leaves you standing and waiting for a bus that will never come, because it probably never left the station, and maybe doesn’t even exist.  But hope is founded on the certainty that one is coming for you.

But if you are not watchful, if you walk away, turn your back, or start to do something else, you may never get on the bus, may never even see it coming, even though it drives right past you.

But even most city buses are not likely to do this; some of them will even stop in mid-block and open their doors for you if they realize they missed you.  If even a Philadelphia city bus will do this, how much more will God do everything he can to bring you and me into his kingdom?

“You know what time it is,” St. Paul says, “now is the moment for you to wake from sleep.”  It hardly matters what the hour is, the alarm of hope, soon to be found on the lips of John the Baptist, is calling us awake: the kingdom of God is at hand, make straight in the desert a highway for our God!  And yet, year after year we find the need to renew our faith, replenish it for another year, strengthen our resolve and relocate our hope.  And it is all too true that we know neither the day nor the hour that God will set the wheel of sacred time spinning for the last time, finally bringing all things to their completion.

And so we are called to live with hope and watchfulness, because while indeed we do not know when our Lord is coming, his advent is more than wishful thinking.  And of course, we do know exactly what time it is, now is the moment to wake from sleep, and be prepared for last things first.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

28 November 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Perfect Memory

About twenty years ago, an Australian priest living and working as an anti-apartheid activist in South Africa received a letter-bomb in the mail that took both his hands off and left him blind in one eye and seriously burned.  As his body recovered, as well as it could, Fr. Michael Lapsley realized that another part of him had been wounded too: his memory, which now carried the indelible story of this violent act against his person.  He began to learn to use the prosthetics at the end of each arm, and to cope with his one-eyed vision.  But what about his memory, which threatened to leave him more permanently wounded than his other, more obvious injuries?

Several years ago, Fr. Lapsley preached a sermon in which he asked this: “Do you know about bicycle theology?  It is when I come and steal your bicycle.  A few months later I come back and ask for forgiveness for stealing the bike.  I am forgiven, but I keep the bike.  Sometimes we reduce forgiveness to saying sorry and we don’t return the bicycle.  Sometimes however, the bicycle cannot be returned.”

He goes on, “As I stand here today, I don’t know who made the bomb [that so injured me], who posted it, and who gave the orders.  I am not full of hatred, and I do not want revenge.  But I have not forgiven anyone, because so far there is no one to forgive.

“Perhaps [some day] the doorbell will ring and a man will tell me: I sent you the letter bomb, please will you forgive me.  Now forgiveness is on the table.  Perhaps I would ask him if he still makes letter bombs.  No, I work at a local hospital, he replies. Yes, I forgive you, and I would prefer that you spend the next fifty years working in that hospital rather than be locked up….

“Dear sisters and brothers,” Fr. Lapsely asks, “do you have bicycles that need to be returned?  Do you carry poison in your heart because you have not yet shared what happened to you, perhaps many years ago?”[i]

One of the most commonly dispensed prescriptions in life is the instruction to forgive and forget: an approach that seems to be born of a near-total lack of understanding of either forgiveness or forgetting, both of which can be very difficult.

Forgiveness and memory are both on the table when a criminal (I think of him as a young man), hangs dying on his own cross beside Jesus, and says to him, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”  Forgiveness and memory. 

We are living in a world full of memories that are in desperate need of healing – because we have littered the world with the limbs we have blown off each other, the lives that have been destroyed, the carelessness with which we treat our neighbors, the injustices we tolerate on a daily basis, the hatreds we allow to fester.  Some of us have stolen bicycles, others of us have had our bikes stolen, and generally the landscape is strewn with the spare parts that are left scattered around, and the poison is still carried in too many hearts.  So what are we to make of a criminal who turns to Jesus and says, “remember me when you come into your kingdom.  Jesus, remember me.”

Do you think that Jesus remembers you?  As you come to church and offer your prayers, carrying with you the memory of the bicycles that have been stolen from you, or that you have stolen and never returned, do you think Jesus knows who you are, recognizes your face, remembers your crimes, holds them against you, feels your pain, cares enough to ease it, sees your memories, wants to forgive you, wants you to forgive, thinks you can forget?  Do you think Jesus remembers you?

With such wounded memories, it can be hard for us to believe that God regards us very much at all.  And when we think of God enthroned in the heavens, or of Christ the King, as the church invites us to do today, we can easily be misled: we can easily begin to imagine that we are mere spectators who have gathered on the parade route to whatever royal event it is that Jesus makes his way to in a horse-drawn carriage.  We know we are supposed to be cheering, waving the flag, and just be happy to catch a glimpse of this sight, so we can tell our grandchildren that once we watched the king pass by and felt our heart swell with national pride.

But the poison in our hearts – that has seeped out of our bleeding memories - makes it hard to cheer as loudly as we think we ought to; hard to swell with much pride at all.  After all, how could Jesus remember me?  How could he even see me in this crowd?  How could Jesus remember me?  And what could he do for me if he did remember me?

When we say that Christ is king, we are not affording him a royal retinue and resigning ourselves to a place on the sidelines of his occasional grand parades through the city.  When we say that Christ is king, we are adding to our hearts the memory of his kingdom, which is the antidote for the poison that has been seeping there.  And Christ is not king because he is the mightiest warrior or the triumphant leader, he is king because he alone has a perfect memory.

This is to say that Jesus remembers you and me perfectly.  He remembers the hurts we have inflicted, and the hurts that have been visited on us.  And he remembers the imprint of God that was given to each of us as we were made.  He remembers how our memories have been wounded, and he wants us to allow his perfect memory to heal those wounds, by allowing him to carry them in his memory, rather than for ourselves, since they are really too heavy for us to bear.

We live in a society that too often thinks it can say whatever it wants, utter any lie, inflict any pain, invade any space, disrupt any peace, violate any loyalty, steal any bicycle if only we think we can get away with it.  And often this proves to be true: often we can get away with murder or lesser crimes.  But do we realize what we are doing to our memories as we shape them with such poison?

Two men hang on their crosses beside the dying Jesus: one of them refuses to confront his memory, but the other cannot escape his even at this last hour, especially at this last hour.  And that man turns and asks, Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.

We often suppose that our worship of God is an act of our willful remembering of Jesus, as we tell his story, repeat his words, eat and drink the Sacrament of his Body and Blood.  And, in some small way we are remembering Jesus this way.  But more importantly, Jesus is remembering us when we gather around him.  He remembers each of us perfectly, down to the number of hairs on our heads.  He remembers the things we cannot remember any more, and wish we could.  He remembers the things we wish we could forget.  He remembers our pain, our suffering, and our sins.  He remembers our joys and our delights.  He remembers our happiest days and our saddest ones.  He remembers our best selves and the worst possible versions of ourselves.  He remembers every bit of us perfectly as he makes his communion with us.  He remembers the bicycles that have been stolen – who they were stolen from and who did the stealing.  He remembers the lost limbs, the scar tissue, the burns, the blindness.  And he remembers the poison that still lingers in our hearts.

He knows that we wonder whether or not he will remember us.  He hears us whenever we call out, Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.  And it delights him to hear that even in our distress we have remembered his kingdom: that there is a holy realm, sometimes near at hand, where he is king, and where his perfect memory has healed the battered memories of countless souls; where it has displaced the poison that we tried to carry around as if it wouldn’t kill us.

Dear sisters and brothers, do you have bicycles that need to be returned?  Do you carry poison in your heart because you have not yet shared what happened to you, perhaps many years ago?

You can begin to heal your memory by telling this to Jesus today, as you make your way to his altar, to receive the gift of his Body and Blood, and discover that the poisonous memories that have been making you sick to your stomach (or worse) are healed by the memory of a kingdom yet to come where Jesus is King of kings and Lord of lords, and he remembers that you are his most precious child, and he wants you to inherit the kingdom.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

21 November 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

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[i] From a sermon preached by Fr. Michael Lapsley, SSM at Evensong, Westminster Abbey, 5 November 2006, text found on www.healingofmemories.co.za

A Safe Head of Hair

Next Friday evening, if you care to see a minor spectacle, you can come out to see me ride on horseback through the city with the First Troop Philadelphia City Cavalry, whom I serve as Assistant Chaplain.  It is quite a thing to see the Troop riding in formation – with their braided and buttoned tunics and epaulets, their high black boots, and their helmets topped with a swoop of bear fur.  I, however, will be wearing basic black.

It will be hard to tell on Friday that many of the men you see have recently served with the National Guard in deployments in Bosnia, Iraq, and Egypt, and their next deployment will probably be to Kuwait or Afghanistan in 2012.  They will appear to be playing the part of soldiers from a bygone age, when in fact, many of them are real soldiers, at least one weekend a month.

I was reminded of this fact recently when at a gathering of some of the men, we heard recounted again the story of the most recent Purple Heart awarded to a Trooper during the deployment in Iraq.  That story (a harrowing one to my ears) is told, among this set, with some laughter and barely concealed admiration.  And, perhaps for obvious reasons, this morning’s gospel reading put me in mind of it, in a more serious way.  “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom,” Jesus warns, as he warns, too, about earthquake, famine, and plague, and personal betrayal, as time moves toward the fulfillment of God’s intentions and a new era of the reign of his kingdom.

Many Christians – probably many of us – do not really know what to make of these kinds of warnings, or what to think about what God’s intentions for the future time might be.  But we hear a crazed insurrectionist note in what Jesus says this morning that puts us on edge.  And we may worry that it has become all too easy to interpret the various lunatic wars we are part of or can read about as a part of God’s plan.

But to my ears the single most important part of Jesus’ warning is this: “But not a hair of your head will perish.”  How can this possibly be?  Amongst all the violence and catastrophe Jesus predicts, can all his disciples expect to be kept safe?

That is a question I do not know the answer to.  But what I hear in what Jesus teaches is the assurance of two things: first, that the violence of the world we live in is to be expected before God’s will takes a more perfect hold on us all.  And second, that God’s children will be protected when God’s time is fulfilled.

I think about the story of that Purple Heart, and the man I ride with, to whom it was awarded.  And I think about the tens of thousands of wounded soldiers that have returned home from Iraq and Afghanistan in the past eight years, and about the thousands who only came home to be buried.  And I want to know why all the hairs of their heads were not kept safe.  I want to know why they were not protected from harm, why their lives were cut so tragically short.  To what end?  I want to know.

But the answer to that question eludes me.  And I am able to reach only one conclusion: that none of this warfare is part of God’s plan.  Jesus’ accurate prediction of wars and catastrophe does not mean that the violence they wreak is part of his plan.  For God’s plan is that not a hair of our heads should perish.

It brings me a feeling of shame to think that good men and women – thousands and thousands of them – have been asked to fight in wars that most Americans do not believe in and would not fight in, indeed that most of our leaders do not believe in and would not fight in.  And when I ride beside men who have been called to take up arms, and who will be called to do so again, it is with a singular intention: so that I can pray, sometimes audibly, that God’s will may some day come to fruition, and not a hair of their heads will perish.

May God protect all his children in every place where wars and disasters threaten them. 

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

14 November 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

The Unknown Island

The great Portuguese writer, Jose Saramago, once wrote a little story about a man who goes to see the king to ask him for a favor:

“Give me a boat,” [the man] said….

“And may one know what you want this boat for?” [the king asked]….

“To go in search of the unknown island,” relied the man.

“What unknown island?” asked the king, suppressing his laughter, as if he had before him one of those utter madmen obsessed with sea voyages, whom it would be as well not to cross, at least not straight away.

“The unknown island,” the man said again.

“Nonsense,” [the king asserted,] "there are no more unknown islands."

“Who told you, sir, that there are no more unknown islands?” [from the man.]

“They are all on the maps,” [this from the king.]

“Only the known islands are on the maps,” [said the man.]

The king: “And what is this unknown island you want to go in search of?”

“If I could tell you that,”[the man replied,] “it wouldn’t be unknown….”

“And you came here to ask me for a boat?”

“Yes, I came here to ask you for a boat,” [said the man.]

“And who are you that I should give you a boat?”

After a bit more cross-examination, the king finally relented and agreed to give the man a boat.  So he sent him down to the harbormaster with a note.  And this is what the note said: “'Give the bearer a boat, it doesn’t have to be a large boat, but it should be a safe, seaworthy boat, I don’t want to have him on my conscience if things should go wrong.'  When the man looked up, this time, one imagines, in order to say thank you for the gift, the king had already withdrawn."[i]

Many of us came to church today expecting that the message would be all about money; after all it is Commitment Sunday, when we ask you to make your commitment of financial support to the work and ministry of this parish.  And since we live in a society that has a somewhat unhealthy relationship to money – in which its hoarding and unjust distribution is looked upon as a great virtue – it would be reasonable to spend fifteen minutes or so examining our attitudes about money.  And next year I may very well ask you to do that!  But this year it seems to me that we might see ourselves more like the man in the story who goes to ask the king for a boat.

And if I told you that we were asking for that boat in order to go in search of the unknown island, would you think of me as one of those madmen obsessed with sea voyages whom it would be as well not to cross, at least not straight away?  Would you fire back at me that this is nonsense, that there are no more unknown islands, that all the islands are on the maps?  Would you begin to think twice about whether or not we really need a boat?

Because a boat, as anyone who has ever owned one knows, is a hole in the water down which you throw large sums of money, and watch that money sink away into the wet darkness.  You must pay for a mooring, and you have to cover the costs of crew and provisioning.  There is lots of maintenance on a boat, which is always succumbing to the corrosive effect of the water.  Plus there is fuel and other supplies.  And there are always repairs on a boat, lots of repairs.

If I told you we had come here to ask the king for a boat, would you ask me if I had really thought this through carefully?  And would you ask me to explain to you again about this unknown island?  How can I be so sure that there is an unknown island out there to be discovered?  Aren’t all the islands already on the map?  But of course I will assert to you that only the known islands are on the map.

Jesus always called his disciples to go with him to an unknown island.  Even when he assured them that they knew the way, the destination was always something of an unknown island.  And the Christian journey is, in many ways, a voyage in search of the unknown island.

For some the journey gets off to an easy start, as it does for the fishermen, who are used to boats anyway and find it easy to answer Jesus’ call to “follow me.”

For most of us, it is a voyage that leads, at some stage through the narrow straits of repentance, when we try to turn from our old sins, and live the new life of searching for the unknown island.

For some it leads through forgiveness of others, and acceptance of things we cannot change, which is also a lesson that needs to be learned by those whose search requires them to give up old habits, fight destructive addiction, and learn a new way of living.

For many of us the search for the unknown island requires us to learn how to give thanks, to learn humility, and to be willing to serve others.

For some, the journey is aided immensely by selling what you have and giving the money to the poor.

For others it is a painful journey that leads through sickness and suffering.  And we don’t know why this is so, any more than we know why one day sees clear sailing, and the next day we are buffeted by storms that make us wonder if we should have ever left port.

But always, always in the Christian life we are searching for the unknown island, which is to say that we are confronting our conviction that there is at least one unknown island left for us to discover.  And some days this seems more likely than others.

Every day in this parish we stand before God and ask him for a boat in order to go in search of the unknown island.  Unlike the king in story, God already knows where all the unknown islands are, but these are the secrets of God’s heart.  We cannot expect him to divulge them.  But we can and we do expect him to give us a boat.  For he already knows the answer to another question the king in the story asked, “Who are you that I should give you a boat?’  He knows you are the work of his own fingers, a beloved child, made in his own image, and brought back to redemption with the precious blood of his Son Jesus. 

God always gives us a boat.  He has given us this magnificent church to worship in.  He has given us a mission to care for the poor and the hungry.  He has given us one another, in a wonderful community of love.  He has given us work to do at Saint James the Less, and in our mission trips abroad.  And he has given us a song of faith to sing day by day by day.

In our enlightened world, we are often told that there are no more unknown islands left; that all the islands are already on the maps.  That such searches are, in fact the undertakings of fools who have been taken in by an old superstition.  We might as well be chasing a white whale.

But we see every day a world that yearns for justice, freedom, peace, forgiveness, healing, and love.  In such a world, if there are not unknown islands left to be found, then we are living without hope.

And many people believe that giving money to the church is as foolish as financing a boat to go after that whale: very much like throwing it down a hole in the water, where it sinks into the wet darkness.  But I suspect that these are those who do not believe in the unknown island, and who prefer to cling to their money though it brings little hope or peace or joy into the world.

You might think that the Tale of the Unknown Island is an adventure story, but Saramago’s version is actually a love story.  And I believe that God’s version of this story is also a love story.  He calls his people – no matter how broken, poor, sick, or unworthy we may be – to follow the way to the unknown island, where he promises we will at last find peace, mercy, healing, forgiveness, hope, and love.

Every day, I ask God for a boat, for me and for this parish family, and every day God answers that prayer one way or another.  God is always willing to give us the boat, and show us the way.  There is always need, however, for the rest of us to give our share for the journey.  And I suppose we do a better job of that if we have a greater faith that there is an unknown island of God’s love to be found.

Speaking for myself, I’d have to say that from this vantage point on Locust Street, I’ve always thought that it is easy to look out over the vast, spiritually empty miles that surround us, and see land that looks a lot like what was, until now, an unknown island.  For while this parish is not the final destination to which God calls us, I feel certain that you can see it from here!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

7 November 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

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[i] Jose Saramago, The Tale of the Unknown Island, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa.  London, The Harville Press, 1999

Two Brothers

An old story, told by the rabbis, is still told today:

A long time ago, in the place that is now Jerusalem, but long before that holy city’s streets were laid, there lived two brothers who had inherited a farm from their father.  Each had built a house to live in and a barn in which to store wheat, on opposite sides of a hill in the middle of the land they shared and tilled together.  The older brother was single and lived alone.  The younger brother had a wife and children living with him in his house.  The brothers loved each other dearly and did not want to divide the fields between them.  So together they plowed and planted and harvested the same crop in the same fields.  After they cut the wheat, they shared equally in the produce of their labor, and each stored his half in his own barn.

One year at harvest time, this time of year, the two brothers, each in his own home, beside his own barn, on opposite sides of the hill, found themselves lying awake at night, thinking.

“Here I am,” the older brother thought to himself, “all alone with no wife and no children.  I don’t need to feed or clothe anyone.  But my brother has a family to raise.  Is it right to share our harvest equally?  After all, he has greater need than I do.”  So at midnight he arose and took a bundle of wheat from his barn and carried it to his brother’s barn and left it there. Then he returned to his bed and slept in peace.  And he did this night after night, during harvest time.

Also troubled in his sleep, his younger brother thought to himself, “Here I am, my wife looks after me, and when I grow old my children will take care of me.  But what will happen to my brother in his old age?  Who will take care of him?  He has greater need than I do.  It isn’t right to share the harvest equally.”  So shortly after midnight he arose and took a bundle of wheat from his barn and carried it to his brother’s barn and left it there. Then he returned to his bed and slept in peace.  He, too, did this night after night during harvest time.

For years, every harvest time, each brother would consider the other’s needs, and would wake night after night in the small hours to carry some wheat from his barn into his brother’s barn.  And for many years neither brother knew of the other’s generosity.

One year, on a clear and starry night, around this time of year, the two brothers met each other coming over the hillside, with sheaves of wheat bundled in each other’s arms.  When they realized what they had been doing all these years, they dropped their sheaves, held out their arms and embraced.

Long after the brothers were gone to heaven, and their children had sold the land and subdivided it, as Jerusalem was built up around it, the story continued to be told about the two brothers, and the spot on the hill was remembered as the place where they met and discovered the gift of their generous love toward each other.  And the rabbis say that that is the place where King Solomon decided to build the Temple, for it was fitting that the holiest place of the holiest city should be a place that had long been remembered for extraordinary generosity and grace between brothers.

It is now almost harvest time here at Saint Mark’s.  It’s time for us to lie in bed and think at night about one another, and about our brothers and sisters who are not a part of this family yet, or who have no place at all to build a house or a barn, who don’t even know how to find their way to the hillside.  Its time to be troubled in our thoughts as we try to fall asleep and to wonder if it’s right to keep so much of the harvest for ourselves since we know so many whose needs are greater than ours.  It is a beautiful thing to be kept awake at night by the thought that you might be able to do something for someone you love; that all you have to do is get up and carry a bundle of wheat in your arms and deliver it in secret, sharing what you have with someone whose need is great.

When Saint Mark’s was built, it was one of the first buildings on this side of Broad Street, the city had not yet grown up around it.  Quickly the streets were filled in and the city of brotherly love made its way here.  We’re not in the exact middle of the city here, but we are close; and there is no hilltop here, but I think, I hope, I pray that we occupy something like the space where those two brothers met, before Jerusalem was builded, so long ago.  I hope we are a place where brothers and sisters, kept awake by their consciences – by their love – bring their gifts for each other, and for the brothers and sisters who have yet to join our number, or who simply need our care.  It might even be that like Zacchaeus we’d like to give half of all that we have to those who have greater need than we do – believe it or not there are people in this world even now who do just that.

We are the vibrant, happy, lively and faithful community we are because generations of brothers and sisters before us left their sheaves here, while they were living and when they died.  And although Philadelphia may not quite be a holy city, we are standing on holy ground, consecrated by the prayers of God’s people over more than 160 years, and by the care of God’s children, and by the visitation of the Holy Spirit.

We are so many more than just two brothers, who have been so abundantly blessed in our many ways.  And we come here week by week, from our various edges of the fields we work in.  And when we get here, do we realize that no matter what we do for a living, in God’s eyes we are all tilling the same soil, tending the same crop?  Have we begun to suspect in the small hours of the night that it would be good for us to share what we have with someone whose need is greater than our own?

And I believe I see you coming over the brow of the hill toward me, carrying something in your arms, and I have something in mine.

Let us decide to leave it here, where an altar has already been built.  And may future generations know why this temple stands here at a place on Locust Street: a place of extraordinary generosity and grace, where brothers and sisters lay down our offerings, and spread our arms wide to embrace.

Thanks be to God!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

31 October 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Facebook Lepers

Naaman, the commander of the army of the king of Aram, was a great man and in high favor with his master, but he was not on Facebook.  Neither was he on Twitter.  He was hopelessly disconnected from the great big world out there, and he may have been a technophobe. And to make things even worse (as if…) he had leprosy.

But the Arameans had taken a young Israeli girl captive, who had been secretly keeping up with the news with an app on her iPhone.  And she received regular tweets about a hot young prophet, Elisha, who had inherited the mantle of Elijah.  Recent tweets reported that Elisha had raised from the dead the little son of a Shunammite woman by getting him to sneeze seven times (which is a story, frankly, difficult to convey in 140 characters or less).  And she told her mistress that “if only Naaman were with the prophet in Samaria, he would cure him of his leprosy.”

So Naaman got the king of Aram to send a letter to the king of Israel: hand-written and hand-delivered (not even snail mail!).  And the letter is all, “Oh king of Israel, when this hand-written, hand-delivered letter finally reaches you, please cure my great general Naaman of his leprosy.”

But the king of Israel is all, “What are you talking about?!  Am I God, to cure people of leprosy?  What are you trying to start here, anyway, a fight?  And, look, I seem to have torn my clothes, thanks to you!”

But someone in the court of the king of Israel must have changed his Facebook status to “Stressed out because of tense words between king and Naaman the general/leper; anyone got any ideas?”

Now, Elisha had just been posting some cool video of the Shunammite boy sneezing seven times and coming back to life, which was extra-cool because it was shot in HD on his Flip digital recorder, and much better than the grainy footage he got on his iPhone of Elijah being carried up to heaven in a whirlwind, escorted by chariots of fire, and which was barely distinguishable from Bigfoot footage shot by a Super-8, or that old VHS recording still floating around the Internet of Moses standing by a supposedly burning bush. 

And Elisha’s messenger saw the post from a Facebook friend in the king of Israel’s court about the tension between the king and the general/leper, Naaman, and of course he told the prophet what was going on.

Now the healing of lepers is not something to fool around with.  This is serious business, and Naaman was a serious man, and so was Elisha.  This was not going to be accomplished by merely instructing Naaman to change his Facebook status from “leper”, to “healed” and waiting to see what happened.  After all, Naaman had come a long way, and gone to a lot of trouble.  So, you heard how the story goes: Elisha sends his messenger to tell Naaman to wash seven times in the Jordan River.  Naaman thinks this is stupid, since there are plenty of rivers in Damascus he could have washed in, and why didn’t the prophet at least come outside and wave his arms around, etc., etc.  But Naaman’s servants have been watching the video of the boy of the seven sneezes, and they think maybe there is a connection, since the messenger of the prophet told Naaman to wash seven times, and they convince him that, hey, no harm: no foul.

So Naaman dips himself in the Jordan seven times, and his flesh was restored like the flesh of a young boy, and he was clean.  And he instructed his IT people to get the word out ASAP, which they did by updating the status of the Aramean Army Facebook page to: “No God but in Israel!”  And sending out tweets to that effect.

Now, the healing of lepers is not something to fool around with.  Jesus must have known that it is a serious business – especially serious when ten lepers are heading your way, shouting, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”

Jesus, famously, never carried a cell phone, and the tablet computers of his day were crude and clunky (the iPad had not yet been introduced).  Although he was capable of attracting flash mobs wherever he went, they formed at their own behest, not his.   And he preferred to teach from a boat, a little ways out in the water, to let his voice carry across it, or from an elevated place on a mountain or even a slight rise on a plain, rather than using Power Point presentations, which he had reason to believe the Pharisees were constantly using.

The people who heard about Jesus often found out about him because their friends texted them, and posted their stories and photos on Facebook, and blogged about him.  There was a viral video circulating of Jesus healing a woman who had been crippled for 18 years, so you could see where the lepers got ideas; and although they, being lepers, didn’t have smart phones or laptops of their own, they had heard about Jesus on NPR.  So they are shouting at him, and begging him for mercy.

This was a serious business, and Jesus is a serious man.  He wastes no time: “Go,” he says, “and show yourselves to the priests,” who are also serious men.  And as the ten lepers turn to go, their leprosy is healed, and they are made clean.

Now, there is no evidence that any of the lepers ever made it to the priests.  We can assume that several of them blogged about their healing, a few might have appeared on Oprah, and a couple of them could have published ghost-written autobiographical books that chronicled the horrendous conditions at the leper colony and their miraculous healing, one of which was made into a movie that went straight to DVD.

But one leper stopped, as he was going on his way, realizing that he had already been healed.  And he alone turned back, and raised a song of praise to God from his lips, and fell down at Jesus’ feet to worship him and to say, “Thank you, thank you, thank you, Lord Jesus, Son of God, for the mercy you have shown to me this day!  Thank you!”  And he was a Samaritan, not a Jew, not a son of Abraham, not a child of the covenant, not, supposedly, among God’s chosen people.

And Jesus asked, “Were not ten made clean?  Where are the other nine?  Would not any of them return to praise God, except this foreigner?”

And when the tenth leper went home and signed onto Facebook, he listed his Hometown as Samaria.  And because of his privacy settings we don’t know what he put as his Religious Views.  And under Relationship Status, he selected “It’s complicated.”  And his favorite quotation was this” “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.”

And, of course, you would think that the moral of these stories is the importance of staying connected: how good it was that even though Naaman was a Luddite and resisted online social networking to his own peril, he had servants who used technology to great effect.  And how unfortunate it is to be a leper, without any Internet access, and only NPR to rely on, which means you are doomed to listen to its left-wing propaganda all the time, but that if healed, you too can share in the joys of social networking, where, by the way, you never have to touch anyone anyway.

But that is not the moral of these stories, for these stories are not morality tales.  But they show us that the healing of lepers is not something to fool around with; it is a serious business.  And no matter what the preoccupations of the day may be, God is about the serious business of healing lives that are sick, broken, out of whack, or going down the tubes.

And in his prophet, we see a man totally worth blogging about: who by inducing seven sneezes, or instructing a great general to wash seven times in eth Jordan, can bring about the power of God.

And what about Jesus?  After the day of his healing, the tenth leper, the Samaritan, must have followed the progress of Jesus, must have known that he continued on his way to Jerusalem where he would be hung on a Cross to die at the hands of angry, jealous, threatened men.  He must have heard and seen that he was more than a prophet; must have received the centurion’s tweet that truly, this was the Son of God.  Maybe the tenth leper even followed Jesus, and saw history unfold with his own eyes, felt the awful power as the earth shook that dark Friday afternoon.  How his life had changed since he’d been healed of his leprosy!  He was connected now to society, he was dating a great girl, who sent him flirty texts and posted smiling photos of the two of them on her Facebook wall, and ticked the “In a Relationship” status on her profile.

But the tenth leper realized that Jesus had never texted him, hadn’t friended him on Facebook (and probably wasn’t even on Facebook!), didn’t write a blog, and in fact only ever wrote one thing in the sand, which got blown away by the wind.  And looking back over his life, he could see that the best thing he ever did was to turn around on that fateful day, when Jesus healed him, and to fall at his feet and thank him.  Because of the many things he could not figure out in life, he was sure of this: that he was a beloved child of God, and that he would never stop thanking God for sending Jesus, his Son, into the world.

In our own day and age leprosy is not so much of a problem as it once was, and yet we know this: you don’t have to be a leper to feel like one.  This is the too-frequent experience of adolescent kids who begin to suspect that they are different because their hearts flutter in the presence of other kids of the same gender, which, when you are 13 or 14 or 15 and trying to fit in, feels an awful lot like leprosy, and you pray just as hard as you can that you can keep that part of you covered up, unexposed, because what would be worse than being known to be a leper, being known to be gay, when you are just a kid trying to fit in, and the wrong glance, the wrong word, the wrong move will send this rumor about you buzzing through space faster than you could ever control it, before you have even figured out how you are feeling, and before you have ever even felt what a kiss on the lips feels like, but the whole world knows, thanks to Facebook or Twitter, or whatever, that you yearn for lips you should not be yearning for: you are a leper.

And since this is the world we live in, by the grace of God such a kid might end up in front of a computer, not reading the idiotic, taunting, and unintentionally but nevertheless cruel posts of his or her peers, but watching instead the several videos that have been floating around this week of celebrities and normal people who very much want that troubled kid - who is feeling so low and so anguished, and so much like he or she can never be accepted by family or friends or the world at large, because he or she is just such a leper – to know that it gets better.

And wouldn’t it be wonderful if one of those videos featured a plain looking person, who grew up in Samaria, and who looked earnestly and sweetly into his camera and said something like this:

“I know what it feels like to feel like a leper, because I was one.  I know what it feels like to be laughed at, ridiculed, taunted, and disliked for something you never asked for and couldn’t do anything about.  I know what it feels like to want things to change, to yearn to be accepted, to be afraid that people everywhere will always know that you are less than you should be, sick, warped, broken, not right.  I know what it feels like to be compared to an animal and to be treated like one.

“But one day in my life – a life in which I had always hoped that things would get better, but they never did – I met Jesus.  I had heard all kinds of things about him, and I can tell you now that what I heard about him was more wrong than right.

“And on the day I met him, I just yelled out, from a safe distance, ‘Jesus, have mercy on me!’  I didn’t know what I was saying.  And I didn’t know what he was saying when he said nothing more than ‘Go and show yourselves to the priests,’ which hardly seemed like a good idea since priests are often known to be not very kind to lepers.  But before I took two steps, I looked down, and I was healed, so I turned back and ran to Jesus and praised his name, and fell at his feet to thank him.

“My young friend, you are not a leper.  Nothing in you needs to be healed except your tortured heart, which has been so hurt that it has fantasized about leaping off of bridges.  This alone needs to be healed in you – this idea that there is no other path that will work, no other option that is good, no other way to escape the pain you keep so carefully hidden inside of you, so no one can see it, and no one will know who you really are.

“But Jesus already knows who you really are.  He made you, and he loves you.  And he wants you to live.

“Turn around, my friend, and see him standing there, ready to do anything for you, ready to die for you.  And hear him promise, with me: It gets better.”

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

10 October 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia



Angels' Secrets

Secrets, I recall from the days when I used to work on Capital Hill, are part of the currency of Washington.  Some secrets are guarded carefully, others are widely known.  Knowing how to keep a secret here is almost as important as knowing when to reveal a secret.  The keeping and telling of secrets is a powerful business.

God has many secrets.  Among God’s secrets there are big ones, like what is the number of the planets and the stars, and there are little secrets like what has been happening to all the honeybees.  There are even nano secrets like how to understand the wave-particle duality of matter.  And there are confounding secrets like the age-old question of why bad things happen to good people.  There are secrets at the bottom of the sea, still too dark and cold for us to lay eyes on, and secrets locked in the earth, still too hot and deep to access.  God has woven many secrets into our minds and bodies that science has yet to discover.  And of course there are many secrets of the heart.  And there remain secrets about what God is doing in the world: about the status of earth in the universe, about the limits of time and space.  God has many secrets.  Some he allows to be found out, and some he guards jealously.

God’s secrets are, of course, objects of great curiosity and inquiry and there are those who would stop at nothing to wrest God’s secrets from his bosom.  For God, too, the keeping and telling of secrets is a powerful business.  And so God recruited the angels (themselves a secret order of his creation) to be the guardians of his secrets, to dwell someplace between heaven and earth, between God’s throne and the rest of the universe, forever vigilant for the forces that would steal God’s secrets if they could.

Of course, just like in Washington, among the angels, proximity to God’s secrets brings a certain knowledge of them, too.  And God allows the angels to know many, if not all, of his secrets and their meaning.  And because the angels already know many of the secrets of God, and already exist in a habitat someplace between heaven and earth, between God’s throne and the rest of the universe, they are convenient messengers of the secrets of God, ready to be dispatched whenever God chooses to reveal a secret.

So it is that the angels convince Jacob that he is merely dreaming when they bring to him the memory of the secret once given to Abraham: that his offspring would be blessed, and that they would be his people, and he would be their God.  This is a secret that God wants out of the bag, leaked again to Jacob with the deliberate intention that it should spread.

But for a long time the greatest of God’s secrets, hidden deep in his heart, was the secret of his Son: unseen among the details revealed in the various creation stories of Genesis; obscured by the wings of the Spirit hovering over the face of the waters; a top-secret Word pronounced among the syllables of all the “let there be”s; present but unrecognized from before the beginning of time – God’s deepest, most beautiful, and most mysterious secret.

The secret of Jesus is the secret that unleashes the angels in a new and marvelous way, piercing the veil between heaven and earth like a meteor shower.  Having kept the secret so long, how the angels must have rejoiced to be allowed at last to bring it to earth.

Gabriel the archangel, of course, was first, bringing the word to Mary of that holy thing that would be born of her: that God would work in secret through her.  But we hear throughout the Christmas story the songs of angel choruses too delighted to keep the stillness of that silent night, too exuberant to prevent the shepherds from hearing their song.

The angels, silenced for a while, as Jesus grew, are on the scene with him again as he begins his ministry of teaching and preaching that will lead him to the Cross.  They minister to him after his temptation in the desert to repeat in his ears the secrets he has always known: that the way of the Cross lies ahead, his passion, death, and also his resurrection.

Was it angels who tore the curtain of the Temple in two at the dark hour of Christ’s death, unveiling again the secret significance of this moment, and beginning to uncover the way of salvation?

There were angels waiting in his empty tomb when the women came, to give them the first look at the secret about to be unleashed: that he is risen!

We learn from the Revelation to Saint John the Divine that angels are the soldiers of God who will lead the advance in the last days before the establishment of his kingdom, once and for all.  Michael the Archangel provokes this unfolding with his defeat of the ancient foe.  And angel after angel then delivers to the cosmos the instruments that advance the cause of God’s righteousness, and bring about the desire of his heart: the dawning of the new heaven, the new Jerusalem where all things are made new, and where the river of the water of life flows through the middle of the street of the city.

Meanwhile, back on earth, we live in an age that can hardly tolerate secrets.  We find it hard to put our trust in God, partly because of his secrets.  We find it hard to imagine why God cannot trust us with all his secrets, why he would keep anything from us.  And because we prefer to think of angels like fairies who sprinkle happy-dust on children, we often miss their ministrations to us when the secrets of God are whispered again in our own ears.  As with Jacob, these secrets are not necessarily things we have never heard before, but secrets that clearly need to be re-told and re-heard.

There is the effusive secret of Emanuel, God-with-us – that reminder that Jesus was born, that God sent his Son to live among us, as one of us, to know our suffering, and to let his be known, so that all people might come within the reach of his saving embrace.

Whenever we catch a glimpse of a reminder of God’s holy presence with us, we can assume the presence of angels: at the bedside of a mother with her newborn child; in the wilderness where beauty stretches out before us; at the groaning board of plenty we enjoy so easily in many of our lives; at the bedside of a dying parent given the dignity of a happy, peaceful death…

…we can be assured of God’s angels bringing to us the secret of God’s presence.

But of course the angels remember, too, the secrets of the Cross that we so easily forget: that it is foolishness to so many, but to us it is the power of God.  And so isn’t it the work of angels when we find the strength to endure the challenges God sets before us; to not give up in the face of a hard diagnosis; to work to forgive him, since you said you were together till death do you part; to take your drunken self to that meeting and admit at last that you can’t live like this but have no power to find a new way to live…

… couldn’t it be the angels who join us on the way to help carry our crosses, as even Jesus was given help?

And the angels know the secrets of life and death.  They see past the mist of time that obscures the light of the next life from our eyes, which is to say that they know what hope is, which is why they so often begin their message with these words: Fear not!  The angels know the secrets of the passage from this life to the next, which we can only ever guess at, but they allow us to guess for our own sakes, and because there is nothing lost in imagining the details of path that is real but we will only ever travel once.  And when we finally give up on the anxieties of clinging to life in this world, it’s the angels who whisper subliminally that all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well.

But most poignant for the church is the ministry of angels in places like this: here in the midst of a busy and troubled city – just like my own parish in the midst of another busy and troubled city.  For if the angels really are the keepers and revealers of God’s secrets, then we have reason to believe that their ministry is intense whenever we gather in our twos and threes or more for the sublime secrecy of the Blessed Sacrament to be shown to us.  The secret of God’s presence in Jesus’ life and in his death.  The secret of God’s salvation in Christ’s resurrection.  And the secret hope that God will at last establish his reign of justice and peace when his kingdom at last has come. (Christ has died.  Christ is risen.  Christ will come again.)

And the beautiful secret of a night like tonight is that it has nothing to do with winged fairies sprinkling happy-dust on everyone; it is that the angels bring us again the secrets that God so much wants us to remember: That he is here.  That he loves us.  That he died for us.  And that his kingdom will be established, and that justice and peace will be known.  All of this transmitted with a scarp of bread and a sip of wine.

And if the weather is too still and sticky for us to feel the breeze from the angels’ wings, and if our own boisterous Sanctus should drown out their eternal song, and if the cloud of our incense seems to over-power the gentle fragrance of theirs, then it is only because in our self-centered and self-important way, we have become adept at missing the evidence of the angels’ ministry altogether.  Which hardly matters, as long as we are open to hearing again their wonderful secret:

Christ has died.  Christ is risen.  Christ will come again!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Michaelmas, 2010

Saint Paul’s Church, K Street, Washington, DC



A Great Gulf

A few weeks ago I stopped into a little shop on the Main Line that had been recommended to me as a place to find a natty bowtie.  This is the type of place that sells men’s shirts for $135, ladies sweaters for $200. So I thought the bowties at $45 were a steal – and the selection was very handsome indeed!  I was the only person in the small shop, and I suspected that, since they sold exclusively things that nobody needs, the effects of the rotten economy might be taking their toll.

“How has business been?” I asked the preppy, pretty, blonde saleswoman.

“Oh,” she replied, “Not bad at all.  In fact, sales are up this year!”  I assume that many shoppers must have walked out with more than a single bowtie, which seemed like quite a splurge to me.  (But I must say it is very sharp!)

My purchase and the shop it came from were still in my mind when I read in the news that 44 million Americans live in poverty.  That means a family of four living on $22,000!  I am paid close to four times that and have only two dogs and a cat to support, and many months seem tight to me.  Not so tight, however, as to prevent me from purchasing the odd bowtie.

Leave aside for a moment the unsettling teaching of Saint Paul that “those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.”  Because we already know that this kind of moralistic teaching falls on deaf ears.  We are experts at rationalizing it.  We can easily say that we are not the rich ones, don’t want to be rich anyway, have no hope of becoming rich, etc.  Even Paul gives us an out just a few lines later when he gives instructions to those who happen to be rich – instructions far more sympathetic to their situation than, for instance, the suggestion that they should sell what they have and give it to the poor – but then Paul had probably never read that story.

But think about the story Jesus tells of the poor man Lazarus, stinking and covered with sores that the dogs lick, begging at the gate of the house of a rich man.  We don’t know why Lazarus is poor, but it does not seem to be the fault of the Obama administration.  We know only that Lazarus longed to feast on the scraps from the rich man’s table.

Now, I am stopped dead in my tracks already to think of the scraps that are chucked into the trash from my table.  I am a little assaulted by this story already.  I can too easily picture myself cleaning out the fridge of old, wasted leftovers, while I’m wearing my new bowtie (which happens to be pink with subtle white pattern).

But the crux of the story does not take place in this life; it happens in the next life, after both Lazarus and the rich man are dead and have gone to their reward: Lazarus, carried by angels to the bosom of Abraham in heaven, and the rich man (perhaps because of the way he obtained his riches?) to the flames of Hades.  From there, you recall, the rich man calls out to Father Abraham, begging him to allow Lazarus to “dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.”  But Abraham replies that this is not possible because a great chasm is fixed (or, as the KJV puts it, a great “gulf”) between the rich man suffering in Hades and Lazarus, being comforted in heaven.

If you want to be argumentative, we could talk about various biblical attitudes toward the afterlife.  We could wrangle the theological implications of heaven and hell.  We could question the motives of a loving God who allows this rich man to suffer so in hell, and whether or not there is any truth to this arrangement in the afterlife.  But to do so would be to miss the point of the story.  For although he promises us life in the world to come, Jesus is almost always more concerned with that piece of the kingdom of God that is already near at hand – in this world.  There is nothing that can be done, he says, about the gulf that is fixed between Lazarus and the rich man in the next life; but there is something to be done about the gulf fixed between rich and poor in this life.

Jesus is really only concerned to teach about the torments or ecstasies of the next life in so much as they provide a point of reflection for choices we make in this life.  Whether these represent the truth about life in the next world or a teaching device that spoke powerfully to his audience is hard for us to say.  What is easier to say is that Jesus regularly contrasts the hope of the rich (which he sees as bleak) to the hope of the poor (for whom he holds out great promise).  His message is shaped to be more easily heard by beggars in the street than by shoppers looking for bowties.

And the gulf that he tells us is fixed between Lazarus in heaven and the rich man in Hades, is nothing more than a mirror image of the gulf that separated them on earth, even though they lived their lives within steps of each other.  Such a chasm, a gulf, exists today between rich and poor, and that gulf is growing ever bigger in America.  Splashy gifts of $100 million here and there (announced with fanfare on Oprah, but representing barley more than scraps from a billionaire’s table) do almost nothing to narrow the gap between rich and poor that is now wider in America than it has been since the Roaring Twenties.  And the point of Jesus’ story is to ask us to worry about the gulf, about the chasm that yawns ever larger between the poor and the rich.

In America we have often tried to assert that poverty is the result of the moral failings of the poor: their laziness, stupidity, or mental illness (as if that was their fault too).  But Jesus strongly suggests to us that poverty is a result of the moral failings of the rich: our greediness, indifference, and cruelty.

And as Jesus sees the chasm between rich and poor growing wider and wider, he pushes us to consider whether it must be so, whether we really want it to be so, and he’s telling us that if we want to align our wills with God’s will, we need to think about crossing the gulf, or at least narrowing it.

Most of you know, of course, that at Saint Mark’s we try to cross the gulf every week here with the Food Cupboard and the Saturday Soup Bowl.  By doing so we acknowledge that we are rich men and women with poor people sitting more or less at our gates who deserve more than scraps from our tables.  While these ministries allow us to cross the gulf, they do nothing at all to narrow it.  They treat the symptom (hunger) not the disease (poverty).

To my knowledge, only one solution has ever meaningful addressed the reality of poverty and the forces that allow it to persist and grow, and that solution is education.  Our work to start a school for poor kids at Saint James the Less is nothing less than an effort, not only to cross the chasm between rich and poor, but to narrow that gulf, at least a little bit.

It is a travesty that in the nation that invented the system of free public education we now have more than 14% of our population living in poverty, and an even great travesty that the release of this information is not cause for widespread outrage.  44 million Lazaruses do not seem to be a troubling reality for many in this country; I can only suppose this is because Lazarus is powerless and unlikely to vote.

But Jesus is trying to teach us to pay attention to Lazarus.  He is trying to show us how great a gulf is already fixed between us.  And he is asking us to worry about the gulf, to bother to cross it, and to do what we can to narrow this great chasm between rich and poor, because not to do so is soul-destroying to the rich, who can well afford to do something to help.

And part of the challenge, of course, is to know who you are in this story.  Part of the challenge is to stop for a moment at the counter, with a natty, new bowtie in your hand, and wonder whether this might mean that there is a great gulf fixed between you and 44 million Lazaruses.  At which point it doesn’t really matter what you believe about heaven and hell.  All that matters is what you intend to do about the gulf that is already spread out before you.

So far there is little good news to be heard in this analysis of either the Gospel or our national scandal of poverty, so let me try to show you where the good news in all this is.

From time to time rich men (and women) do look down as we pass through our gates, bowties fluttering in the breeze, and notice Lazarus sitting there, his sores of interest to the dogs that follow in our wake.  And from time to time it occurs to us to do something for this poor soul, to go back to the fridge and pile some leftovers on a paper plate, and bring it out wrapped in foil, with a plastic fork and a paper towel for a napkin and give it to poor Lazarus.  Or we might give $100 million dollars to the Newark School District.  Or something in between – like making soup, or traveling to Honduras, or opening a school.

And when we do this, when we yield to this curious urge to pay attention to the poor among us, we almost always begin with the benevolent thought that poor Lazarus will be better off when we have done our good deed.  Maybe it makes us feel good to have provided Lazarus with a meal, so we determine to do it again next week.  And maybe this even becomes a habit, this small gesture to improve the sorry lot of Lazarus’s existence, if only for a meal a week.  And maybe Lazarus’s life is changed in some way, big or small, as a result of at least one good meal a week, one act of kindness in a world that has lorded its greediness, indifference and cruelty over his supposed laziness, stupidity, and mental illness.

But if the rich men (and women) stick with it, week after week, meal after meal, what may happen is, that the angels of God begin to cinch together the cords of the gulf that once divided us, and bring us closer together.  And we may discover that while we think possibly we may have done Lazarus some good, we know that we have been changed as our lives move more closely in contact with those who before consorted only with our dogs as they licked the infected wounds of the poor.

And will we choose to do this because we are afraid that otherwise we’ll burn in hell?  I doubt it.  We’ll do it because the great gulf fixed between rich and poor grows so great that it begins to disgust us.  We’ll do it not because we are making decisions about what kind of world we want to live in in the next life, but because of what kind of world we want to live in in this life.

And should that lead us to a greater joy in the world to come, to a neighborhood of bliss in the vicinity of Lazarus and Abraham, then praise to be to God for such a wonder!  But I hope we shall not wait to hear news from those long departed to tell us whether or not this is so.  After all, we have Moses and the prophets, and the teachings of the Lord of love.  And their word is good enough for me.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

26 September 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia



Hooves in the Mud

For five days in July I had the glorious experience of riding a horse along the lanes and beaches and country tracks of County Sligo in northwestern Ireland.  As a novice rider, I can tell you it was an adventure, and I was glad to have my old friend and experienced horseman, Joe, along with me.  It was Joe who reassured me, just as my horse was about to gallop as fast as I have ever moved on a horse, that I could manage it and wouldn’t fall off.  It was Joe who led the way through terrain our horses were not sure they wanted to cover – and convinced them (and me) that everything was perfectly alright, never mind that cliff to your right.  It was Joe, who convinced me that it if I was the one to open all gates and knock on all doors, I’d get a lot of needed practice mounting my horse from the ground, without a mounting block.

Joe’s experience and good humor were invaluable on the trip – three days of which saw just the two of us and our big Irish hunters riding from B&B to B&B, all our things stuffed into saddlebags.  The horses were amazing; they managed to walk over rocky coastline, navigate a peat bog, gallop over mussel-strewn beaches, climb up sand dunes, wade across a tidal pool, stroll in the surf, and canter along country lanes.

One afternoon, we were heading up a wooded hillside along a very wet and muddy narrow trail.  The further we got into the woods the deeper the mud became, and we could hear the horses’ hooves slurping as they pulled them out of the mud one step at a time.  For a few yards at least it seemed the mud must be up to the horses’ knees, and they were moving slowly, gingerly, a little hesitatingly.  Worried for the horses in this deep mud, I turned to ask Joe, “Should we dismount?”

“Are you kidding me?” he said  “We can’t dismount; we couldn’t possibly make our way through this mud.  Stick with the horses!”  Sure enough, our horses, Diamond, and Garry Finn, steadily plodded along without ever seriously stumbling or losing a shoe in the deep mud.

Heading up a hillside along a very wet and muddy narrow trail – this could be a description of what some days in our lives feel like.  It could be a description for the unemployment rate – or some other aspects of our economy at the moment.  It could be a description of the war in Afghanistan.  Except that mud doesn’t seem to apply in the desert, it could be a description of the work that faces our 50,000 non-combat troops in Iraq, who are curiously still being given combat pay (and rightly, so, I have no doubt). 

Heading up a hillside along a very wet and muddy narrow trail.  It could be a description of life in the church – in this diocese and beyond as we struggle with our various issues.  It could describe the way our 7 million American Muslim brothers and sisters feel as they endure outrageous insult after insult from various political leaders, media outlets, church pastors, and probably neighbors, too.

Heading up a hillside along a very wet and muddy narrow trail.

Back on my Irish hillside, atop my Irish horse, I can tell you, that it never really occurred to me that I might be in trouble, that things could go wrong.  Our horses had managed every obstacle so superbly.  And what did I know about horses and mud.  In fact, when I suggested that we dismount, I thought I was only doing the noble thing: being kind on a wet, uphill stretch of trail, to this wonderful beast who had carried me so confidently and gracefully.  It was only when I turned to Joe, with what I thought was a beneficent suggestion that the light dawned.  “Are you kidding me?  We can’t dismount; we couldn’t possibly make our way through this mud!”

For many of us, who lead relatively comfortable middle-class lives, life is often like this.  We fell relatively confident.  Things get muddy, but we don’t imagine there is real trouble lurking; we suspect we could just dismount and walk the rest of the way, leading our horses by the reins.  But lately, as the mud has gotten deeper, perhaps we feel a knot in our stomachs.   The mortgage is harder to pay, the job you are looking for is harder to find, the insurance company still won’t pay that bill, you discovered another lump, his meds aren’t working so well, it’s harder to fall asleep every night, the anger isn’t subsiding, the cigarettes or the booze or whatever is harder to quit than you thought, the silences at home are growing longer and more unbearable, mother doesn’t always recognize you anymore, the pain just won’t go away, the ache of grief can still cripple you nine years later… heading up a hillside along a very wet and muddy narrow trail.

And it turns out that faith looks very much like this: like heading up a hillside along a very wet and muddy narrow trail; finding cause to wonder whether or not you can make it; considering the possibility that you should continue the rest of the way on foot; and realizing, “Are you kidding? You can’t possibly make it through this mud!”

Of course, the first step of faith is to realize that you have been riding a horse all along!

Back in what increasingly looks like the old days to me, we used to hear these words from today’s Epistle reading every Sunday: “This is a true saying, and worthy of all men to be received, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.”  They were part of a tiny collection of verses called the “Comfortable Words” that the priest recited just after the confession of sin.

Today they are uncomfortable for us to hear, because we think the phrase is talking about us: sinners?!?  Why must the church always be so negative!?  Why this insistent focus on sin?!  It’s so un-contemporary, so not what people are looking for!  But of course, those words are not primarily about us; they are primarily about Jesus and his ministry of forgiveness and salvation.  They are Saint Paul’s way of saying, “Are you kidding me?  We couldn’t possibly make our way through this mud!”

And, of course, Saint Paul knows that a lot of the mud in our lives is not the result of exterior forces acting on us without our participation, like a heavy rainfall.  Much of the mud we get stuck in comes from within, through some interior leak in our spiritual plumbing, which is why you can get stuck in the mud in the middle of the desert.  He just calls that “sin.”

Back in Ireland, the muddy trail that Joe and I were riding along was sheltered by trees, and my focus, after I realized that this entire journey was really up to the horse, was down: watching his front hooves as best I could; listening to the slow, steady slurps of his progress, one step at a time.  It wasn’t long - maybe ten or fifteen minutes – till we came out of the muddy patch and into a dry clearing where we could turn and look behind us.  We discovered we had travelled much higher than we imagined we were going.  The green checkerboard of the Irish countryside spread out beneath us, and a short distance beyond that, the sea.  We consulted our map, and found that it was just for this that we had slogged up the hillside – this beautiful view, toward which we didn’t even realize we were headed - now we were heading down a paved path, back to the long, flat expanses of sandy coastline where our horses would run again, faster than I thought possible.

This is a true saying, and worthy of all men to be receive, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners – of whom I might as well be the foremost.  Put it another way: we are heading up a hillside along a very wet and muddy narrow trail.  Chances are good that we got ourselves on this hillside out of sheer willfulness, selfishness, greed, or some set of mixed motives.  And by the time it occurs to us to get at all worried about the footing…  Are you kidding me?!

But the good news is that you are riding a horse who is surefooted and knows the terrain.  And you are headed for a clearing where you may well discover that you have travelled much further uphill, much higher than you realized or imagined.

And the view is grand, as they would say in Ireland.  And the way that leads back down the hillside is easier.  And it leads to the sea, and the broad flat beaches, where you can run as fast as you like, as long as you can stay on your horse!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

12 September 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia



Friend, Go Up Higher

Forty-seven years ago, on the steps beneath Lincoln,

was a man, and a speech, and a wonderful dream,

about the country we live in, and the way he’d been thinkin’

of our freedom, our values, and that sort of theme.

It was moving to hear, or so I’ve been told;

it was stirring, the crowd quite a sight to behold,

they were black, they were white, they were pink, they were brown.

As they gathered to talk and to sing and to pray

for the marvelous, wonderful, glorious day

when God’s merciful spirit would come down.

For it seems that back then there would be no objection

if a person were beaten or shot at and killed

on the basis of naught but his darker complexion.

And I think I’m not wrong that blood was thus spilled.

This seems crazy to me, it seems clearly so wrong,

which is why they were gathered in that long-ago throng,

in the multiple shades of our own melting pot

to sing “Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty,”

which to some of the world must seem somewhat flighty,

but which may be the only real hope that we’ve got.

Now it’s all these years later and we’re gathered in church,

and hatred we know, just has not been abolished,

and we hear in the Gospel of how someone’s perch

tells you something about just exactly how polished

will be the crown on their head at the end of their days,

when they’re called on to answer for all of their ways,

and they’re asked by St. Peter, who stands at the door,

“Were you kind, were you humble, did you do your darn’d best;

do you know how you get to be here with the blest?

Just how much did you care for the sick and the poor?”

Now to some this is just a ridiculous question

it’s thought of by lefties and commies and pinkos

too stupid or lazy to get rich in professions,

and who run to the government teat for their drink.  Oh,

yes we’ve become, it would seem, such a nation,

where it’s riches for some, but for others starvation,

or nearly.  I assure you this approach takes its toll,

not just on people of color – of brown, beige and black –

it comes at a cost to every Tom, Dick, and Jack,

just ask all our workers at the Saturday Soup Bowl.

So Jesus reminds us when he tells us a story

of a man who goes to a party and sits

in the worst seat, clearly a place of no glory

at all.  But he sees all the people of glitz

tripping over themselves to get the best seats,

as if this were somehow indicative of feats

of worthiness, noblesse oblige, or perhaps honor.

But their host had a guest for that seat well in mind,

and sends the swells packing, other places to find,

and ponder a future as nothings and goners.

When you go to a party, our Lord recommends,

don’t take the best seat, take a place that is lower,

and as others go past you, even your friends,

don’t worry, be happy, don’t grimace or glower.

It’s a good thing when you and I choose to be humble;

it’s really no cause to bristle or grumble.

Not everyone here can sing in the choir;

not all of us need to be close to the altar;

there’s a motto we’ll hear that’s not found in the Psalter,

when your host takes your hand and says, “Friend, go up higher.”

It was five years ago, in a storm called Katrina

that set the great city of New Orleans afloat.

It was awful; there was chaos, even at the arena

where many gathered in hopes that they’d soon find a boat

to take them to safety; to find higher ground;

though sadly so many good souls out there drowned

in the waters that flooded the city that week.

A group from this church went to help not long after;

to try to bring some small relief from disaster.

And the sight left us gaping, with few words to speak.

And still to this day that great city’s a mess,

with houses and businesses and lives un-rebuilt.

You’d think with the power and wealth we possess

we’d prevent this neglect, this occasion for guilt.

You’d think that from where all the powerful sit

they could see this is where all our national grit

is required to help a whole city in need.

You’d think that from way up on high, in DC,

there’d be help on the way, without much of a plea.

But you’d be mistaken, misguided indeed.

Where you stand on an issue, I’ve been told once or twice,

depends largely on where your posterior’s placed.

Which is why Jesus long ago gave us advice

to be careful in choosing a vantage point graced

with a lower perspective, since your whole P.O.V.

will be shaped by what people and things you can see.

Down low with the poor and the sick and the ailing

is where Jesus said we would find the right view;

it’s where he makes all that’s become old  brand new;

it’s where divine grace is the power prevailing.

It reminds us that when we are sailing through life,

and we realize we’ve money and privilege and health,

there are many more others with little but strife,

who’d be much better off with just a bit of the wealth

that’s been given to us, with which we are blest,

as though we were somehow better or best.

But search through the Bible to see if your riches

are a sign of a blessing from God on his throne,

or if maybe people of wealth are more prone

to be found, in the end, in hell’s lowest ditches.

Now, the Gospel is funny, it makes its demands,

and it’s full of these stories to help make us good.

It instructs us in how to use hearts, heads, and hands;

though so often its lessons are misunderstood.

Some strive to be orthodox, righteous, or pure,

as though entrance to heaven these goals would ensure.

But if entry to Paradise is what we desire

then day in and day out we could all do much worse

than to learn to repeat and to live out this verse,

when we see someone coming, to say, “Friend, go up higher.”

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

29 August 2010

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Magnificat

Just a couple of months ago, about the time I turned 43, I noticed something unusual in church.  I was having trouble reading the Bible.  This was not a spiritual crisis; more specifically, the Bible I usually read from at Morning and Evening Prayer was becoming harder to read.  Now, Saint Mark’s is not exactly flooded with light, and the print in this particular Bible is quite small, so anyone, I reasoned, might have difficulty from time to time seeing such fine print in such poor light.  Time passed, but not much, and I began to look to see whether or not a light bulb had burned out somewhere in my vicinity, because the Bible was now growing noticeably harder to read.  What circumstances around me could be changing to produce this strange effect, I wondered.

I deployed the only reasonable defense I could think of to battle this optical challenge – I brought the Bible up closer to my face in order to see the small print more clearly – but I realized that this tactic was not working.  So, by chance I tried a different approach, something counter-intuitive: I pushed the Bible a little further away from my eyes than usual, extending my arm at some distance, and then the most extraordinary thing happened: lo and behold, the words of Scripture came into focus!  A miracle!

Today we are celebrating Mary, the Mother of Jesus.  And we are doing it in some style, since devotion to Mary has long been a hallmark of Saint Mark’s, and the catholic-minded movement from which this parish sprang 163 years ago.  To some Christians, such devotion to Mary has seemed very much like the act of pushing the Bible away from you – because much of what the catholic tradition has said about Mary cannot be found in the pages of Scripture: that she was conceived without the stain of original sin (her immaculate conception); that she was carried bodily up into heaven at the end of her life (her assumption); that she shares with Jesus the ministry of salvation (she is co-redemptrix); that she has special access to Jesus’ ear in heaven (she is mediatrix); and that she is the Queen of Heaven.  And I list all these without even getting into the issue of her virginity (perpetual or not)!

With this kind of thinking going on so close to Rittenhouse Square in the 1840s and 50s, is it any wonder, really, that our neighbors soon organized to build a low church across the square on Walnut Street where the Bible could be expounded upon with deliberate clarity, rather than obscured by Marian folderol?

Mary has been seen by some in the church as a problem, a distraction, an opportunity for indulging the worst excesses of liturgical and theological foolishness.  And it is true that she has had to bear the misguided exploits of the church over the years, the object of all kinds of projection and other neuroses of the church and her leaders.  But like many a Jewish mother, she has borne her burden gracefully, and without complaint.

And of course, Mary is not absent from the pages of Holy Writ; she is very much a presence there.  What other reports have we in such detail of angelic encounter as the annunciation that Gabriel makes to Mary?  Who else is so close to the Cross on Good Friday, and so much on Jesus’ mind? 

And who else has given the church such a song of beauty to sing as Mary?  “My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my savior!”  These words of the Magnificat are said or sung in churches every day at Evening Prayer or Vespers; they are recited here at Saint Mark’s every day, to be sure.  Mary’s song has been on the lips of the church since the days we first re-covered the memory of it, when Saint Luke wrote it down in his gospel.

My soul doth magnify the Lord!  It’s a funny thing to sing or to say – after all, what does it mean?  Our English translation borrows the Latin word “magnify” that itself came from an old French word that means to praise or extol.  It can also imply that something is made more exciting, more exaggerated, or to seem larger than it is.  Or, it can mean that something is actually enlarged, made bigger.

Mary’s soul magnified the Lord.  In a sense this is literally true since the embryo that developed in her womb grew to become the child she delivered into the world.  But I think there is more to Mary’s magnifying than that.  Because I know how hard it can be to see Jesus and to know him for who he is.  I know how hard it is to find faith in this world of ours that a man who spoke in parables; and who was killed on a cross two thousand years ago; whose followers wrote almost nothing down and were not especially good community organizers; whose name has been used to invoke all kinds of horrendousness; whose church so easily becomes a shambles – that this man is the Savior of the world.  Yes, it can be hard to see this.

Jesus has been so miniaturized in our society, shrunk down to such insignificance.  Even his Cross is often preferred these days without his body on it.  In can be hard to see Jesus at work in the world.  But Mary, saw something all those centuries ago when Gabriel came to visit and brought her word that she was highly favored and that the fruit of her womb would be blessed by God in a special way.  Somehow Mary saw the story of salvation, spread out before her, and the place her Son would play in it, before she could even feel that her belly had begun to swell.  And then she magnified the Lord.

And when she did, what did she see?  She saw that lowliness was not a condemnation from God, but, more likely, a sign of his favor.  And that pride would be scattered by God as easily as ashes from a spent fire.  She saw that real power does not reside in the thrones of kings or the offices of presidents, but in the weakness of the lowly and meek.  She saw that riches pass away, but that the hungry can and will be fed by God’s providence.  And she saw that God’s promises, made so long ago, like his mercy, do not fade away.  This is what she saw, when she looked closely, to magnify what God was doing through her in the world.  And when she saw that God was at work in her, she knew that it was the Lord who was magnified, not her.

So many have missed this truth about Mary – that her soul magnifies the Lord – as though that couldn’t possibly do any good.  But in a world with poor vision it is extremely helpful to have someone magnify the Lord, who can be elusive, small, and hard to see.

The folderol (on display most prominently in our hymns this morning) is, or course, un-necessary, as folderol always is.  And the church has occasionally gotten carried away with this folderol where Mary is concerned, if you ask me.

But here at Saint Mark’s, I think we know what it feels like to be inspired by Mary, to think that our souls might some day magnify the Lord, too.  That we might see Jesus somewhere before anyone else does, and that we might lift up our voices in song to help magnify him so that others can see him too.

Most of us know, I dare say, what it is like to squint in the dim light and look for Jesus, and see nothing but a blur, at best.  Most of us know the feelings of disappointment, despair, loneliness, failure, and hopelessness that lead us to suspect that the Scriptures are not true, that wars have not ended, peace is not accomplished, sickness has not been healed, fear, hatred, and racism still hold too much sway, the rich still seem to get richer, and the poor get poorer, and most of us remain stuck somewhere in the middle, not moving much at all even though it seems like we have been working awfully hard to catch up.  Can we be blamed for feeling at times as though Jesus is hard to find, and for suspecting this means that he is not really here?

And can we take the church seriously when – with Scripture apparently at arms length – we indulge in fantasies about Our Lady?  But isn’t it just at times like this - when things that used to be clear to us have grown blurry, that certainties of life begin to seem so uncertain, that mystery begins to become so much more present, and the light seems to be dimmer than once it was – that we do something counter-intuitive, since squinting and looking closer didn’t seem to be getting us anywhere.

And if in stretching our arms out, we appear to be pushing Scripture away, then this is only an optical illusion.  For there is a song in our ears, and (God willing) on our lips, as we do what we never had to do before – we reach our arms out, further, and behold, at last we can see!

And if we are to celebrate Mary, it is not, I think, because we have gotten carried away with a silly old tradition, and thrown away the Bible.  It is because we want to see Jesus more clearly; we want to make him more visible to the rest of the world; we want to heighten the importance of his ministry to the poor, the lowly, the meek, and all who suffer unjustly at the hands of power.  It is because we want to magnify the Lord, and we can think of no way to do it better than to sing with the one whose soul first magnified him, whose womb brought him into the world, whose wisdom taught him to pray, whose feet followed him to the cross, and whose heart first gave his sacred heart its beat.

My soul doth magnify the Lord, and with Mary, my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior!

Thanks be to God!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

The Feast of Saint Mary the Virgin

15 August 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Not So BIg

About a decade ago, an architect named Sarah Susanka realized that she was being called on again and again to help people who had just bought new houses but were unhappy in them.  More likely than not, the house was newly built and large – what you might call a McMansion: lined up in a treeless cul de sac, with a soaring, glaringly white, double-height foyer, a great room with a wall of windows and cathedral ceilings (whatever that might be), and lots of very large rooms.  Her clients, thought they had bought their dream houses, and had mortgaged themselves to the hilt to do so, but were having trouble living in these houses, making them comfortable, making them feel like home, but they couldn’t quite figure out why.

Sarah, the architect, thought she knew why: the houses were simply too big.  The scale of them was out of proportion to the lives of the people living in them.  And rather than feeling at home in these too-big houses, their owners felt lost. 

Sarah Susanka published a book addressing these problems in a culture that continues to find status and supposed happiness in bigger and bigger houses.  Her book is called The Not So Big House.  “We are all searching for a home,” she writes, “but we are trying to find it by building more rooms and more space.”  She goes on to write that “while you might be able to afford a 6,000-sq-ft house, you may find that building a 3,000-sq-ft house that fits your lifestyle actually gives you more space to live in.”

Now, I watch enough HG TV to know that this way of thinking is very dangerous.  It is not the American way to opt for less if you can afford more, or to consciously decide for a smaller house when a bigger one is available and within your grasp.  For American society, bigger is better, and now that we are being shamed out of humongous cars, we have nowhere else to go but to our houses to realize this American dream of more, and more, and more.  There is a property ladder, and you want to be moving up the ladder, not down, any fool knows this.

Unfortunately, the Gospel sometimes forces us to consider what we are doing on a ladder in the first place.  Today’s Gospel passage is a perfect example of it, for we hear Jesus tell a crowd of people, “Take care!  Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”

Now, you hardly need me to explain what Jesus means when he says this; his meaning is perfectly clear.  But it may be that you need me to encourage you to stop and think about whether Jesus has anything at all to say to you this morning.  For you and I do not think we are greedy, but we are kidding ourselves, because we live in a greedy society, and by and large we have been shaped by that society, by that greed.  We may have developed our own defenses and prejudices, but still …  so I may feel that my Volvo wagon is modest compared to the Hummers and the Lexuses I see, but you might say that a Vovlo wagon is still more than enough, for instance.

The parable that Jesus tells this morning is one of the least often repeated that I can think of:

"The land of a rich man produced abundantly.  And he thought to himself, `What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?' Then he said, `I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, `Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.'  But God said to him, `You fool!  This very night your life is being demanded of you.  And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?'”

We don’t teach this parable to our kids, because we don’t really believe in it.  We teach our kids the value of compound interest (which I admit sounds quaint today) or of diversifying investment portfolios.

Do you remember the question that prompts Jesus to tell this parable?  Someone in the crowd shouts out to him, "Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me."  It seems a perfectly reasonable thing to ask, and the answer we would have liked to hear would be about the importance of sharing, about fairness, and about how nice it is that your parents left you something in the first place.  But that is not what we get.  You fool! we hear, this very night your life is being demanded of you.  And the things you have prepared – all that allowed you to eat, drink, and be merry – whose will they be?

One of the clever things about Sarah Susanka’s approach in writing her book was that she did not take a polarizing position; she didn’t call it The Small House, or The Smaller House, or The Smallest House.  She must have known that no one would buy such a book.  No one is looking for a small house; no one believes there is much virtue in a small house; even people looking for a smaller house, generally are not looking for a small one.  She was clever to title the book the Not So Big House, because it is possible that people would read such a book.

Jesus is not so clever.  He does not tailor his message in a way that makes it easier for us to hear.  The man in the parable – who does exactly what you or I would have done, exactly what we think is virtuous and good and wise – this man is called a fool by God.  And although you don’t need me to help you understand this passage from the Gospel, you may need me to help you pay attention to it.

And I think one way for us to pay attention to Jesus’ teaching today is to think of the Not So Big House.  Saint Luke is clear with us that Jesus is not teaching about the proper ways of storing grain, or the virtues of small-versus-big, or whether or not there is wisdom in saving and planning for the future.  Saint Luke tells us that Jesus is warning against greed.  And this is a warning we need to hear.  It is certainly a warning I need to hear.  Because I still suspect that I have problems that would be solved if I just had more money, and I bet you suspect this too.  I still hold on to that American prejudice that bigger might actually be better.  I would probably trade in my Volvo for an SUV if I thought I could afford to fill the tank with gas, and if I could find some way, any way, to justify it.

But more to the point, I could share my relative wealth more widely than I do, without trying very hard.  I could go out to eat less, or at less expensive places, I could spend less on wine, I could give up my membership at the Racquet Club, I could shop less at DiBruno Brothers.  As I list these things, I must admit that I am not sure I am ready to do any of them.  But I need to get them at least on the radar, because I need to consider whether or not I would be happier living a Not So Big Life, eating Not So Much Food and drinking Not So Much Wine.  And I’m guessing that if there are ways I could make my life Not So Big, there might be ways you could make yours Not So Big too.

The question that Jesus never puts to us, but that Sarah Susanka does, is whether or not we mightn’t be happier living with less.  And this is such an astonishing proposition that we hardly know what to do with it.  We have tended to believe that it is one or the other – that you can be happy or holy, but not both.  And we hear this kind of teaching from Jesus, and we think that is what he is telling us: give up, let go, throw away; abandon all that you thought was valuable, and trade it in for a shack, and learn to live with the grim unhappiness that follows.

But the secret of living in the Not So Big House is that you are happier living there.  It’s easier to clean, there is still room for everyone, it doesn’t need so much maintenance, and you actually feel like you have a home.

And the secret to the Not So Big Life that Jesus is advocating here, is the same – that you can be happy living a Not So Big Life, and that you might actually be happier than you were before.

Jesus knows that greed, like its cousin anger, traps us.  It disguises itself as virtue and makes us think that we are both superior and happier the more we have.  But it isn’t just that it traps us in a web of debt and expense that becomes a self-fulfilling requirement of daily life; it traps us in a world of meaninglessness.  After your first billion, it’s hard to keep track, after all.

Most of us are not outraged at the greedy society we live in and which continues to reward greed long after Michael Douglas made it a cliché, because most of us are not convinced that we don’t really want or need an investment banker’s bonus.  The reason we do not storm Goldman Sachs with pitchforks at outrage over the kind of money people are making there for no apparent reason, is because we are not sure we wouldn’t happily trade places with them for a bonus of a million or two or more.

Jesus knows that we have not yet become uncomfortable in the too-big houses of our lives, so he tells this parable to try to help us see just how uncomfortable we can be.

What if God called you to account, he asks, what if God required your life of you this night?  What if to do so means to stand before God and be held accountable for our choices, our debts, our savings, our investments, and what we have been willing to give away?  How would we fare, you and I?  Would we look like fools before God?

Jesus wants to spare us this unhappy judgment.  He wants us to consider building our own Not So Big Life not because smaller is better, but because to do so gives us real freedom: the kind of freedom that comes only when you know that you can and do give away part of what you could easily keep for yourself.

This means packing Not So Many Boxes into a Not So Big Truck, and watching the treeless landscape disappear behind you as you move away from all that was so much bigger, into a Not So Big Life with Not So Many Things, and your find that you are free to do what God has always wanted you to do: you are free to live.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

1 August 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Phialdelphia



Sitting at the feet of the rabbi

The story of Martha and Mary has always seemed to me like something of a homiletic minefield. I am made uncomfortable, first, by the gender roles in the passage, by the fact that the men are being waited on by the women; and then I am made uncomfortable by the men, who are eating or about to eat, telling the woman who has just produced a meal, that her sister, who sits listening “has chosen the better part.” It seems to me to be that most Anglican of sins, impoliteness.

There are other reasons that I am uncomfortable with the story of Martha and Mary. The story seems to me to be on one level a story about different personalities, different ways of being in the world. And those personality differences can be seen in Christian theology and spirituality: the divide between action and contemplation, between deep involvement with the world, and deep silence within the cell. There are examples of these differences: St. Francis within the world, and desert monasticism, far removed from it. St. Theresa of Avila planting monasteries and scolding kings, and Dame Julian of Norwich, walled into her cell, with her prayer holding the world upon its axis. Indeed, some people of faith struggle deeply with both the Martha and the Mary within them: torn between activity and silence.

So doubtless, there are personality differences at play in the Gospel this morning and who am I to decide which personality is better, which way of being in the world closer?

And of course, through time the story of Martha and Mary has been used to justify all sorts of nonsense: prelates and monastics lazying about, while growing fat and wealthy on the backs of the poor, active people, who haven't chosen the better part but are required to sustain those who have.

But I think the main reason that I am uncomfortable with this story is that it is a story that is massively colored by gender.

I was talking to a friend of mine who is a mother and she said whenever she read this story, especially around the holidays, she always feels the story with a special intensity. Because she would go to church, and hear again the message, told to her by men, to keep one's priorities straight during the holiday season, like Mary, and so she would spend large amounts of time feeling guilty if she was being Martha-like, and worrying about food making it to the table, etc. On the other hand, she felt guilty because the societal expectation was that she make everything perfect for her family, the perfect turkey and stuffing, the perfect presents, that she give them a perfect holiday experience, and so she felt damned if she did, and damned if she didn't. She was either failing religiously or failing her family.

And she was telling me this story, it struck me suddenly that part of the energy of this story of Martha and Mary has to do specifically with being a woman. I would never have imagined being caught in that kind of catch-22 that my friend was. And I thought, what if you tried to translate this story into maleness? It just doesn't really translate. If you were to retell this story about two brothers, one sitting at the feet of Jesus and one not, one who is active and one who is contemplative, it isn't the same story, it doesn't have the same emotional charge that it does when you tell the story about women and service.

And so I am uncomfortable with the passage because the role of gender seems quite significant. This is a passage that has a great deal to do with being a woman, with negotiating one's role as a woman in the world, with coming to grips with patriarchy and societal expectations. And I am loathe to attempt to interpret a passage that is so linked to being a woman, lest I fall into that perennial error of the clergy: speaking with authority about things that one has neither experienced nor understood.

This is most certainly a loaded story. It is a complex story, and in reading and understanding it as loaded and complex, I am not alone. This story has a lively history of interpretation throughout the life of the Church.

The standard interpretation of this story would suggest that Mary has chosen the important thing, listening to Jesus, whereas Martha has mistaken service as a substitute for sitting at the feet of the master. Of course, the history of the Church is in part a history of the failure to understand this story, because for most of its history, the Church has told women to be Marthas and not Marys.

But the fact that this story is colored massively with gender does not mean that it is a story only for women. There is, I think, a great deal to be gained from this story whoever you are, because we all live to some extent under the kind of societal and cultural expectations that both Martha and Mary do.

When I read this complex story, I always like to read it with one of the slightly sharp stories of the desert fathers next to it. Here's one of the sayings of the desert monastics about this story:

A brother came to visit Abba Silvanus at Mount Sinai. When he saw the brothers working hard, he said to the old man: Do not work for the food that perishes. For Mary has chosen the good part. Then the old man called his disciple: Zachary, give this brother a book and put him in an empty cell. Now, when it was three o'clock, the brother kept looking out the door, to see whether someone would come to call him for the meal. But nobody called him, so he got up, went to see the old man, and asked: Abba, didn't the brothers eat today? The old man said: Of course we did. Then he said: Why didn't you call me? The old man replied: You are a spiritual person and do not need that kind of food, but since we are earthly, we want to eat, and that's why we work. Indeed, you have chosen the good part, reading all day long, and not wanting to eat earthly food. When the brother heard this, he repented and said: Forgive me, Abba. Then the old man said to him: Mary certainly needed Martha, and it is really by Martha's help that Mary is praised.

And I wonder if that doesn't give us a better way into the passage, rather then simply saying it is more important to learn then to help. The saying speaks to the interrelatedness of Martha and Mary, and despite their tension, the way that Martha allows Mary to be herself, and the way that Mary gives meaning to Martha.

The implication, I think, is that Martha and Mary need each other desperately. Martha needs Mary to keep reminding her that there are contemplative things out there. Because of course, for the Marthas, for the helpers, the easiest thing in the world is to get too involved in helping, too focused on the helping, and not the reason one is helping.

The temptation of Mary, I always like to think of as the “surfer” temptation. Mary just wants to hang loose, to ride the wave of this “like totally amazing teaching”. She just wants to be in this moment, with her rabbi sharing his amazing new teaching, and Mary seems relatively devoid of the sense that the table doesn't lay itself, the food doesn't cook itself, and that even surfers must eat, and learners, and contemplatives.

The aspect of the gloss by the desert fathers that I love so much is the humility that comes through it. Mary indeed may have chosen the better part, but here for us “goats”, those of us who aren't lucky to be sheep, we need to worry about the lesser parts, the things like food and clothing. Mary may have chosen the better part, but we are all of us Marthas.

And so, instead of finding this passage to be only for women, or a source of guilt, of wondering if I've got my priorities straight, when I read about Martha and Mary, I always think: “Maybe Mary has chosen the greater part, but here below, I need to worry about things like food and clothing. Someday, maybe, I'll get my priorities together enough to be Mary-like, but until then, I'm in good company with Abba Silvanus and his brothers, with all the Marthas throughout the ages who have thought about food and clothing, who have lived under societal or cultural or familial expectations. Someday, I may get myself together enough to sit at the feet of my rabbi, and listen to his teaching. But for now, I'm going to run around like a chicken with my head cut off, and trust that even if is isn't the better part, my work will still serve my God.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

18 July 2010

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Martha and Mary

     Jesus had set his face toward Jerusalem…..we know what Luke means to say – Jesus will not be deterred from his mission, but first, a stopover with very dear friends at that sheltered place called Bethany; we know its name from John’s Gospel.

     Bethany is a small town, perhaps a dozen rectangular shaped,white-washed dwellings, built onto the Eastern slope of the Mount of Olives, only 1 and 5/8^th miles from Jerusalem, the same distance from here to Washington Square.

     Jesus and his disciples could see the homes of Bethany as they approached the town, because those homes stood out in contrast to the dry, rocky soil of the hillside and the few cedar trees among the homes, standing tall against the cloudless sky. Orchards of fig, olive and almond trees were arranged in tiers on the slope of the hill, with tidy stone walls separating the levels to aid in irrigation when the rainy season arrives. . .

     No wonder Bethany was a favorite place for Jesus: familiar, quiet, restful, lovely to behold and hospitable.

     Jesus made this journey to Bethany on many, many occasions and always stopped at the home of Martha, Mary and their brother, Lazarus. Martha’s generous hospitality was well known.

     Martha, Mary and Lazarus were three of Jesus’ closest and dearest friends. He had probably known them from his childhood; his family had most likely stayed over in Bethany and then went up with them to the High Holydays in Jerusalem.     

     On this particular day, the day we hear of in our Gospel, Martha stood at the front door of her home and beheld Jesus coming along the road, up the hill, with his disciples, raising a dust cloud as he slowly made his way to her home. Martha set to work, immediately, filling the water jugs to wash his feet and towels to dry them – this was Mary’s task in their household and she performed this act of hospitality with great care and love and respect for the Teacher.    

     But, on this day, something very extraordinary occurred: Jesus invited Mary to sit at his feet and listen to his teaching – this invitation was quite contrary to custom – a woman sitting at the feet of The Teacher? A woman welcomed and encouraged as a Disciple? Equal to the male disciples!? . . . . And, Mary, being the introvert, the contemplative type, was pleased, although somewhat shy, to sit in that front room with Jesus, that front room cooled in the shade of the cedars, yet, so full of light. What deep joy!

     Lazarus was most likely there, also, because as soon as he was told that Jesus had arrived, he came in from their carefully tended orchard, where for generations, his family kept fig, olive and almond trees. . .

     So, there they were, Jesus, with Mary and Lazarus, in a very intimate teaching time, while the other disciples sat out of doors, in circles, in the shade of the orchard trees, and . . . .      

     All this time, Martha labored in the rear room, the place for the cooking fire. Martha was preparing a very special meal for her very special guest: grain pilaf, with special additions of lamb and succulent vegetables. Martha enjoyed making these welcoming meals for Jesus; Martha relished the moments with Jesus in her home. But……

     Many of us here, today, can imagine how Martha may have felt, having no company in the kitchen to assist her in the meal preparation. Not only was she overwhelmed, perhaps, with the details of the meal preparation, but, perhaps, she was also feeling left out – surely, she could hear the low voice of The Teacher as he explained the wonderful truth of the Creator’s love. And, she was not there in that select group!

     Like many high energy, ‘management oriented’ people, she could not put her complicated meal preparation aside and just go into the front room and sit with Mary, listen at The Teacher’s feet. Who but herself was going to prepare the meal? And prepare it to her high expectations? Only Mary was capable of working with Martha in their kitchen, only Mary knew Martha’s ways and only Mary could be the ‘second woman’ in that kitchen!

     Finally, after much head shaking and heightening resentment, we hear of Martha’s next movement. She places her mixing bowl down on the low table in the cooking room, probably with some agitation, and enters the front room in a bit of a huff.

     “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.”  . . . . .

     Silence in the room, all eyes on Martha. Then, Jesus softly chides Martha: “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things: there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”   . . . . .

      Was Jesus suggesting that Martha prepare a less elaborate pilaf? That he would be very content with a simpler meal? Yes, most probably, but there is something more to this.

     Jesus invites Martha (and here, today, invites us also) into a more balanced spirituality, a more complete holiness, a more intimate relationship with God. Jesus invites Martha, and us, also, to notice our need to be well nourished with the Word of God.

     Martha and everyone in that room (and everyone in this sacred space) has the words of Deuteronomy 8 written on the wall of our hearts: “(Neither men nor women nor children) can live on bread, alone, but from every Word that comes from the mouth of God.” Moreover, Jesus knows Martha’s heart (and, Jesus knows our hearts!), and invites Martha (and each of us) to desire Jesus’ indwelling and to make room, each day, for a ‘resting time with the Lord’.

     Truth is, in Martha’s life, and in each of our lives, our servant-hood issues from our love for God, our intimacy with Holy Spirit and our oneness with Jesus. This is a most important truth, hear this again: our servant-hood issues from our love for God, our intimacy with Holy Spirit and our oneness with Jesus.   . . . . 

     In one of his most recent books, Marcus Borg, a noteworthy and highly respected Scripture scholar of our own day, makes this observation about our lives as Christians: “…The goal of the Christian life is participating in the passion of God, as disclosed in the Bible and Jesus. God’s passion is that we center more deeply in God (‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength’) and (that we center more deeply in) the world – a world of justice and peace. These are the inner and outer dimensions of the Christian life – union with God’s passion.” (Putting Away Childish Things, page 133.)

    Dear People of God, Jesus is our ‘Spiritual Director’ this morning, like Mary (and, eventually, Martha) we sit at Jesus’ feet and listen most intently for his wisdom to take root in our hearts. After all, Jesus is Way, Truth and Life.

     On a practical note: I imagine that if we were to ask any of the generous people who prepare the soup for our Saturday Soup Bowl, each would note that a part of each day is spent in quiet listening to Jesus, who speaks of his love in their hearts and that the soup preparation happens in a prayerful manner – and, perhaps, with a sip of the fruit of the vine and holy company?

    Friends, let us be full of joy and gratitude that Jesus invites each of us here, today, to sit at his feet, to know and experience, first hand, his deep, profoundly deep and complete love for each of us, his longing to be with us, always, in his word and sacrament and in each other. In the words of a favorite hymn: I come with joy to meet our Lord……

     Let us do that now……

Preached by Mother Marie Swayze

18 July 2010

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

The Parable of the Good Samaratan

How many times in the course of a lifetime of slightly more than three quarters of a century have I read,  either publicly or privately, the Parable of the Good Samaritan?  I do not know, nor have I any way of even roughly estimating.  I do know, however, that in recent years it has more and more put me in mind of a nursery rhyme which Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations ascribes to that most prolific or authors : Anonymous. In other words, it is part of the common heritage of the English speaking world. “As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives, Each wife had seven sacks, Each sack had seven cats, Each cat had seven kits: Kits, cats sacks, and wives. How many were there going to S. Ives?”  This, of course, is not about a resort town on the north coast of Cornwall; nor is it a bit of proselytizing for the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints; neither is it an humanitarian plea to have one’s pets spayed or neutered. It is a riddle. “A question or statement testing ingenuity in divining its answer or meaning.”  Now for those of you who are still trying to reckon up wives, sacks, cats and kits on your fingers, I won’t leave you hanging. Only one was going to St. Ives, “As I was going to St. Ives, I met …” this bizarre multitude coming the other way. And so, the Parable of the Good Samaritan is a riddle as well – a question testing our ingenuity. Or rather, it is what our parents and teachers told us never to do. It is the answering of question with another question. From our perspective an exercise in rudeness, but with plenty of Rabbinic precedence. The initial question comes in response to what we know as the Summary of the Law, the two great commandments of Hebrew scripture to love God with one’s whole being, and to love one’s neighbor as one’s self. And that’s good, but, the questioner wants to know, how far? Give us some limits, give us some boundaries, Reb Jesuit! Who is my neighbor? And Jesus responded, and responds by saying “You’re asking the wrong question. You should be asking ‘What constitutes neighborliness?’ A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho.”

 Now I am constrained to tell you a story from my own experience of parochial ministry. I do this with some hesitancy, since there are some elements of this story which would tend to cast me in the role of Good Samaritan, but that would be unjustified. You see I find myself, as I suspect most of us do, guided by two apparently conflicting attitudes, apparently conflicting, but in reality comfortable coexisting. “Charity begins at home” we proclaim; followed by, “But not in my backyard.” And armed with those two mottos, when confronted with the man mugged on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, I find myself identified with my clerical colleagues, the priest and the Levite who after all, had they been going to Jerusalem, rather than from it, might have had at least a dim excuse for ignoring the victim by the side of the road. Had they been on their way to the Temple to exercise their ministry, they might have run the risk of defilement, rendering them ritually unable to perform their duties. But as it was, they were on their way to Jericho, where a salubrious climate offered its comforts for off-duty and well-to-do members of the Temple staff. So the risks of pollution constituted only a minor inconvenience. The priest and the Levite just plain didn’t want to be bothered. No, in this story I am about to tell you, the role of the Good Samaritan is best played by the third person of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit, than by me, or anyone else. It was New Year’s Day, 1990 (the date is significant). The previous week had been very busy, and I arrived home from a family luncheon in the late afternoon, wanting to do nothing more than to take a nap, but feeling impelled to check the phone first. And there it was: the answering machine insistently winking at me. Having pushed the right buttons, I began to listen to what proved to a life-changing message. Neither the voice nor the name was known to me, but the message went on and on. Its burden was that the caller was a member of another communion, but he had been told that Episcopalians were more compassionate, and he therefore wanted to become an Episcopalian. About the time I began praying for him to wind it up (I was afraid the answering machine would run out of tape), he concluded with the words “And by the way, I’m dying.” Yes, you’re right. This was a case of AIDS. In 1990 AIDS was still an urban disease. People in old, stable, even stagnant, decayed industrial boroughs in Southeastern Pennsylvania, towns with strong ethnic communities, didn’t have AIDS. But my caller had lived in the big city, and, finding himself suffering from a disease which pharmacy had not learned to control, had come home to his mother to die. Over the next few months I learned how ill prepared both intellectually and emotionally I was to deal with this disease. With the advice and support of the then bishop of Pennsylvania I saw to it that my caller was duly enrolled as a communicant member of my parish. He died a week before Palm Sunday, the undertaker telling me that it was one of the most peaceful deaths we had ever seen. His Requiem was celebrated in the church, with the interment of his ashes in the parish cemetery. During the service, at his request, I read that prayer attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, which you probably know well enough to repeat along with me, at least under your breath.

“Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love, where there is injury, pardon, where there is doubt, faith, where there is despair, hope, where there is darkness, light, and where there is sadness, joy. O, divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console, to be understood, as to understand, to be loved, as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”

I still look back on those three months from the Holy Name of Jesus, New Year’s Day to the fifth week of Lent 1990, as one of the most demanding periods of my active ministry.

A few weeks after Easter that year I was waited upon one morning in my office by an elderly priest, recently retired as rector of a nearby parish. I had secured his services as a supply priest while I was to be away that summer. He was a crusty old party, never popular with his parishioners, and regarded as a joke by his colleagues, just the sort of person to get as a summer supply. It makes your own parishioners happy to have you back. At any rate, his visit was the first chance I had had to discuss these experiences with a fellow priest. And I remember saying that I had never even asked how my New Years’ caller had contracted his disease. It was a dumb thing to say, but not the first dumb thing I’ve ever said. My colleague almost jumped out of his chair. “Of course you didn’t,” he said. “You heard someone in need, and you responded.” Jesus said, “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers? The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesus said, “Go and do likewise.”       

Preached by the Rev. Nicholas Phelps

11 July 2010

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

As you sow...

You reap whatever you sow.  Or, from an older translation: As you sow, so shall you reap.  (Gal 6:7)

This simple teaching from Saint Paul used to be a familiar aphorism in American culture; a statement whose meaning is so clear and so concise that it became a cliché, the type of thing you’d see cross-stitched into a sampler.  But then who cross-stitches samplers anymore?  And who worries about reaping what he or she sows any more?

Fifteen years ago, the great chef, Alice Waters, may or may not have been motivated by this rule of life – that as you sow, so shall you reap – when she helped turn an acre of asphalt-covered land into a vegetable garden at a middle school in Berkeley, California.  That garden and the movement it began is called the Edible Schoolyard.  “When children are encouraged to grow and cook and enjoy wholesome, delicious food all together, from the seed to the table and back again, in an atmosphere of caring and beauty, they fall in love with its lessons,” she wrote.  “It’s a way of making sure that children grow up feeling the soil with their own fingers, harvesting its bounty in the American sunshine, and watching their own hands make the kind of beautiful, inexpensive food that can nourish the body and the spirit.”

Waters tells the story of a small boy who one day came into the kitchen classroom connected to the garden.    “[He] was hungry – truly hungry, as in badly needing food.  So when class was over, [Esther, the teacher,] asked him very quietly what he’d had for breakfast that day.  He hadn’t eaten breakfast; he never ate breakfast.  Esther taught him right then and there to take eggs from the refrigerator and cook them for himself.  She told him to do this every single day before school, without ever asking.  Just come and do it.”  As you sow, so shall you reap.

All last week middle school children, and kids a little older and a little younger, ran around our mission parish during City Camp.  Many of you were there to help them and their high-school counselors.  For the second year of City Camp, once again Saint Mark’s volunteers were a major force in bringing this urban camp to life for kids who often do not have enough.  Bible stories were taught each day, songs were sung, prayers were said, meals were served, games were played, scrapes were bandaged, noses were blown, a few tears were shed, and a garden was even planted out back, behind the Rectory, where, before the church was abandoned the rector’s wife had tended vegetables and flowers.  I saw basil and some other herbs, some squash, and maybe even zucchini getting a late start, and lettuce of some variety.  It is late in the summer to be planting a garden, but better late than never.  As you sow, so shall you reap.

Here at Saint Mark’s, it is a blessing that our founders had the sense to leave green space around this urban church.  Thousands of commuters pass by here every day, and I know from chatting with enough of them that the beauty of our gardens is a gift to them and to this city.  I think of the roses silently singing the Gospel to all those people on their way to work.  And the garden here thrives because of Libby and Todd and Bob and Claire and Ed and Aaron and Isabelle and Aileen, and a few others who care to sow in it.  As you sow, so shall you reap.

In the church at large, you have to wonder whether or not we have remembered this lesson.  We are obsessed with squabbles over property and sexuality, and the place of women in the church.  As we battle for power amongst Anglicans, we see the pathetic slow-motion drama of our Roman brothers trying to come to terms with a history of sin that is glaringly obvious to the rest of the world, not least to other churches who have our own fair share of sins to own up to.  We see churches emptying and struggling to stay open, at least in part for failure, I contend, to teach and to learn this basic calculus: as you sow, so shall you reap.

On our national birthday we might do well to reclaim this cliché, this little aphorism of Saint Paul’s.

What are we sowing, as a nation, in the vast monoculture fields of industrialized agriculture?  And if it is so good for us, why is it making us fat, sick, and unhappy?

What are we sowing in the too-big, under-funded public schools of our cities where children are falling behind rather than catching up?

What are we sowing for the lives of immigrants who came to this country, like our own ancestors, in search of a better life, and who sustain our way of life by doing the work no one with a green card or better would deign to do in America?

What are we sowing in the villages of Afghanistan, and the cities of Iraq as our still ill-defined mission there drags on an on?

What are we sowing in the lives of our service men and women who suffer the consequences of those wars on our behalf, at the expense of their lives, their limbs, and their happiness?

What are we sowing behind the barbed wire of Guantanamo Bay?

What are we sowing when we allow our justice system to take an eye for an eye, as it were, in the execution chambers of our states?

What are we sowing in the Gulf of Mexico, and on the oil-stained shores of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida?

What are we sowing as the argument about abortion enters a new decade of shouting and posturing, and we remain so ineffective at helping prevent unwanted pregnancies in the first place?

What are we sowing with the gun violence that takes so many lives in this city and across our nation?

As you sow, so shall you reap.

And still Jesus reminds us that the harvest is plentiful.

As Americans, even in tough years, like this one, we do well to remember that the harvest is plentiful.  But it cannot be taken for granted, and the laborers are few.

As you sow, so shall you reap.  It is a double-sided truth that allows for either bounty or famine, strength or starvation.  And it lays out for us choices to make every day.

The Fourth of July would be a good day for making resolutions.  And this Fourth of July would be a good day for resolving to remember that as we sow, so shall we reap.

If we cross-stitched that motto onto our hearts what would we sow in our lives, in the church, and in the world?

In our own lives, would we pray more fervently and carefully and frequently?  Would we practice forgiveness more and better?  Would we learn how to offer hospitality at the drop of a hat even when it is inconvenient?  My life would be improved by those choices, I know.

In the church, would we learn from the edible schoolyard that a diversified farm is healthier than a monoculture.  The one is self-sustaining precisely because of its diversity, and the other requires scads of artificial chemical fertilizer just to revive the depleted soil every year?  And one resembles the kind of garden God first planted far more than the other, anyway.

In the world, would we learn that peace is not accomplished when the Nobel committee hands out an award, but by sowing the seeds of peace; and that very few people in uniform seem to have been adept at that task since General Marshall; and perhaps we should be looking for other avenues to peace, particularly in areas of the world that have proven themselves resistant to the armed intervention of supposedly superior powers?

As you sow, so shall you reap.

I dearly hope and pray that as a community, we at Saint Mark’s will hold fast to this little motto, that as we sow, so shall we reap.  I hope we learn as individuals and as a community to make choices on the basis of this small cliché,

And on this Fourth of July, I hope it might be helpful to us to reflect on words written by one of the sixth-graders who learned in the Edible Schoolyard garden in California; words that seem to show the results of reaping what you sow: “The bees, the spiders, the ants, the rolly-pollies, the bugs, the sound, the sky, the birds, the clouds, the yellow leaves… the leaves rustle with hidden secrets that even the laziest man would be dying to know.  And the bees gracefully floating from flower to flower, sing of flowers and gnomes and fairies who never seem to show themselves to anything but the bees, the birds, and the trees.  I smell fresh air… I see beautiful white flowers… and figs.  I wonder, when are the figs ready to eat?”*

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

4 July 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

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* All quotations from Alice Waters, Edible Schoolyard: A Universal Idea, San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 2008