This is a true and relatively unremarkable story that I nevertheless hope is worth sharing on Easter morning.
Yesterday was a lovely, ordinary, early spring day in Philadelphia. I was on my way to Trader Joe’s just after 8, to buy some racks of lamb I’d noticed they had earlier in the week. Felix was with me, and we were walking west on Market Street beneath the crisp, blue sky, when I happened to glance across the street and noticed a person lying in the street, more or less in front of bus shelter.
Now, one of the painful realities of life in Center City Philadelphia, is that you encounter your neighbors - other human beings - stretched out on the sidewalk in some state of want more often than you should. It happens often enough that the sight of a prone body on the ground is not an immediate signal that help should be summoned. To make such a statement from the pulpit sounds amazing and sad, but I offer it as both a confession and an assertion of the state of affairs in our city.
There’s a spot by steps to the coffee shop down the street that is warmed by a vent, and so, is often occupied at night and in the mornings by a person lying down before its warmth. There are manhole covers at 18th and Walnut that provide warm spots where persons may often be found stretched out on the sidewalk. More than one tired body regularly finds a resting place here in our our garden where there are a few reasonably safe and sheltered spots to lie down for the night. So, to see a person lying on the ground here in the city does not raise an instant alarm.
But the person I saw yesterday morning wasn’t on the sidewalk. They were in the street. I did not see how the person came to be lying there. I noticed no commotion. I did not hear the person cry out. I did not detect any movement from the person. I noticed, from across the street, that the person was missing one shoe, and I had already noted that the morning was more than chilly: it was cold. What I’m trying to tell you is that it took a few long moments for me to calculate whether or not this was a situation where my help was needed and possibly wanted.
Two details caused me to cross the street and check. First, the missing shoe, which I noticed was actually just a couple of yards away from the person, on the sidewalk. Second, the fact that this person was not lying down on the sidewalk, but in the street, where a bus might pull up. Cars were, in fact, driving past. Perhaps, I thought, a Good Samaritan was, indeed, required.
Let me assure you that the story gets no more dramatic than this. A woman had tripped and fallen into the street, losing her left shoe in the process. When I reached her, I asked the obvious: Do you need help?
Yes! she needed help! She’d tripped, and injured her shoulder; she was afraid it was broken, and she couldn’t get up. Up close, I could see that the woman was in pain, and either frightened or unable to move. Probably both. And cold. I knelt beside her to reassure her as I dialed 911. I asked her her name (Rashida) and I told her mine. And I repeated that everything would be alright, the ambulance would be there in no time. And it was, in less than two minutes. And they put Rashida’s shoe on her foot, and they helped her up. And I collected her keys and her phone, that had fallen to the street, and handed them to the EMT. And off they went to the hospital.
Obviously this is no heroic tale. It’s the kind of thing that happens in the city. Absolutely the only noteworthy aspect of this story for me was the calculus I had to do to decide to cross the street. You understand that the calculation was not whether or not I wanted to help someone in distress - I’d like to think I’d have leapt over traffic if I’d seen Rashida fall. The question wasn’t even whether or not that person lying there in the street needed help. Of course she needed help! The person on the manhole cover needs help. The person sleeping in the garden needs help. But such is the state of our social contract in America that in such cases, very often help is not available, help is not offered, and also very often help is not accepted. For me, yesterday morning, the calculation was this: does that person lying in the street want help... and is there anything that I can do to provide it?
A few minutes after the ambulance carried Rashida off, I was inside Trader Joe’s discovering that they did not, in fact, have any racks of lamb, not even first thing in the morning. “We’ll have them tomorrow,” they told me.
“That’s what they told me yesterday, too,” I said. And as Felix and I walked back home, lamb-less, I couldn’t have cared less that I was still without a crucial ingredient for Easter dinner. I was just glad that I had decided to cross that street to help that person lying there. And I knew that there was a decent chance that I might not have done so. Because I might have thought that it was just one more shoeless person lying facedown in the street. (Again, it sounds a little sick to say such a thing: I know.)
Now, I don’t want to make too much of this little episode. And I certainly don’t want to portray myself as an unsung hero because I bothered to cross the street and help someone who’d tripped and fallen. Remember, the point of telling you the story is that I might very easily have run the calculation differently in my head, and failed to cross the street.
Here’s another simple story I want to tell you. This one isn’t my story, it’s the story of an old and dear friend of mine who happened to be at a meeting at Trinity, Wall Street, just blocks away from the World Trade Center, on the morning of September 11, 2001. The details are worth knowing, some time, of my friend’s escape (if I can call it that) from Ground Zero, and then her swift return there within days (a day?) in order to serve the firemen, and policemen, and EMTs, and the workmen, and the family members, and co-workers, and the coroners, and the grief-stricken, and the horrified, and the mourning, and the bereft, and anyone at all who had reason to be there at that ash-covered, apocalyptic site; but I won’t rehearse that all here with you now.
I want to share with you an observation that someone else shared with my friend, as the first spring after 9/11 approached - and therefore the first Easter. There, at Ground Zero that spring, they looked up and saw that there was still debris from the fallen towers, and from the offices and business that once inhabited those buildings, strewn in the branches of the trees, after all those months. (Paper, fabric, metal? I don’t know: it was debris.). And how it weighed their hearts, as they tried and tried to bring some love and mercy into those devastated streets, and into the lives of those who had to be there... how it pained them to see the wreckage of that act of murderous cruelty still hanging in the branches of the trees, even as the trees were budding with spring’s new green. How it made them wonder if we would all ever recover from this collective injury; if there was a way out of the pain and suffering that had hung in the air there, and floated like ash across the globe, and was, perhaps, even still caught in the branches of the trees.
But then, someone noticed the chirping of birds. And when the birds were observed more closely, they were seen to be busy making nests. And to make their nests, the birds, as it happens, were collecting bits and pieces of that dreadful debris that hung in the trees, and using the debris of 9/11 in order to build nests for themselves, where, as the Psalmist says, they may lay their young.
That the birds might take the wreckage of death and destruction and use it to build nests for their young seemed to perfectly encapsulate the Easter Gospel that God’s gift of life triumphs over death, and that it always will. And there, under those boughs still hung with the debris of death, resurrection began to seem possible.
We have a tendency to see the Resurrection as something, on the one hand, that happened a long time ago in history; or, on the other hand, as some future hope that lies beyond a set of pearly gates in heaven. But the tendency to see the Resurrection in either the distant past or the distant future that means that we have a lot of trouble with resurrection in the here and now. And if we are going to see the power of the Resurrection in the here and now, we need to see it at work, not only for the birds, but in our own lives, too. The birds don’t need a savior; but we do.
And the church is surprisingly inept at proclaiming the Good News that resurrection happens all the time: that between the memory of Jesus’ resurrection in the past, and the hope of some general resurrection of the dead in the future, there is resurrection life unfolding all around us, where that which had been cast down is being raised up, that which had grown old is being made new, and where that which had been left for dead is given new life in the here and now!
Now, look: Rashida, had not been left for dead. I know that. (I’m back on Market Street, now, on the way to Trader Joe’s.) But, you know, not every body that’s lying on the street gets up and makes it to safety... and especially not every black body.
Some version of the calculation I described, in determining whether or not to cross the street yesterday morning, takes place all the time, including in situations that are a lot more fraught than the situation I encountered yesterday morning. And the mere juxtaposition at the moment, of a white man on his knee in the street beside a black person in trouble is, at this moment in time, complicated, fraught, and by no means a sign that points to something good.
So, the resurrection moment wasn’t to be found in anything I did to bring aid to Rashida yesterday morning.
And the resurrection moment wasn’t when the EMTs arrived and took her to the hospital.
The resurrection moment was when God moved me to cross the street, to overcome the several forces that might easily have kept me on my side of the street.
The resurrection moment came when it was clear that I would not pass by on the other side; so that some small fragment of good could come between two people who might easily have always been on opposite sides of the street from one another.
Or maybe the resurrection moment came when I left Trader Joe’s empty handed, but realized that my errand had been fruitful anyway.
Just to be perfectly clear: the way I see it, I was the one receiving the gift of resurrection in these moments, since God was teaching me how to live beyond my own selfishness. Someone was going to help Rashida yesterday morning, I assume. The only question for me was: would it be me. And I am telling you that the answer could have very easily been, No.
My friend from New York recently urged me to consider what there might be of the wreckage of the past year of pandemic that might yet prove to be transforming, life-giving. She was asking what debris there might be, so to speak, caught in the branches of the trees from which nests might yet be built.
My God, it’s been an awful year! But maybe, just maybe, from all the terrible-ness of this year, some of us are learning to look for resurrection, to expect resurrection, to believe in resurrection, which might just mean that we are learning how to calculate the way we respond to our neighbors - being ever more ready to do so with mercy, care, and love. Which is precisely what Jesus taught us to do, before he showed us with his own life exactly what resurrection looks like.
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
Easter Day, 2021
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia
