“The seventy returned with joy….” (Luke 10:17)
Here in the City of Philadelphia we have an organization known as the Committee of Seventy, whose mission, they will tell you, is to conduct a “permanent campaign to improve the Philadelphia region by demanding ethical conduct of public officials, promoting government efficiency, educating citizens and safeguarding elections.” They are best known, by their own account, as a “watchdog during election time.” The committee includes a lot of lawyers. They are all about the rules.
And it’s fair to say that this city needs someone to keep watch over the rules and the people who are supposed to govern by those rules – more than most cities. The Committee of Seventy is not, as far as I can tell, limited in number to seventy members. Its website cites the Book of Exodus as the source of the name, and while “seventy elders” are sometimes mentioned in Exodus, the actual account of God’s instruction to Moses to gather seventy elders is found in the Book of Numbers. There we find that the seventy are to share Moses’ spirit and assist him in leadership – not keep an eye on him. Nevertheless, it’s nice to think that principles of justice, good ethics and fairplay in this city are somehow rooted in the Scriptures. If someone is going to be a watchdog of the rules that govern the rule-makers, these are good shoes to fill.
Is it a coincidence that in the Gospels we find Jesus appointing seventy helpers to send on ahead of himself as he proceeds with his ministry of teaching and healing? “The harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few… Go your way; behold, I send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves….” And then comes what sounds a lot like a set of rules:
“Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; and salute no one on the road. Whatever house you enter, first say, ‘Peace be to this house!’… eat what is set before you; heal the sick… say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.” And then: “Whenever you enter a town and they do not receive you, go into its streets and say, “Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet , we wipe off against you; nevertheless know this, that the kingdom of God has come near.’” What a set of rules! What a set of rules to follow.
But if we look more closely, will we see that Jesus’ instructions to his seventy are not really a set of rules at all, but a set of promises?
If they are to carry no purse, no bag and not even any sandals, are there not promises embedded in those instructions: that their needs will be provided for, their wants will be met, even the soles of their feet will be protected from the stones on the road, their toes protected from stubbing? Will they glide from town to town on a cushion of air? Is this a secret promise?
If they are to greet no one on the road, is there a promise there of safety, as well as an undercurrent of urgency?
And is the greeting of peace to every house a promise – at the very least of the intention of the greeter, but also of God’s intention that we should know his peace, which passes all understanding?
Eat what is set before you: because I promise you that you will not go hungry.
Is the instruction to heal the sick a promise that there is healing to be had in the Name of the One who sent them out ahead of himself?
“The kingdom of God has come near you!” This, too, is a promise: a promise that what has come near is not to be forever elusive, not forever far away in the skies.
Even the dust from their feet, wiped off in protest in the face of unwelcome carries with it a promise, leaving behind the footprints that lead to the ongoing message of the kingdom of God, which has come near even though it was not welcome.
Jesus has called the seventy to go ahead of him with a mission of promise. And if the writers of the gospels heard in that story the echoes of the seventy with whom God shared the spirit that once rested on Moses alone, then so be it; it is no coincidence.
But remember that in neither case are the seventy sent out to enforce the rules. In neither case are the seventy appointed as the watchdogs of Moses or of Jesus, prowling around to enforce the rules of the rulers. This drift is understandable and, I am sure forgivable, in the Committee of Seventy here in Philadelphia. But it may be less forgivable among latter-day followers of Jesus who take the role of watchdog upon themselves.
The seventy, like the Twelve, were never called to be watchdogs; they were called to be harbingers of promises, forerunners of the dawning of the kingdom of God.
And they went out without their purses; they went out without their bags, without tunics, without staffs to lean on as they went; they went out with no sandals on their feet, those poor, silly men and women who listened to Jesus’ promises, they went out without sandals! And did they glide from town to town on cushions of air?
You know, they might have. Because look what happens: the seventy returned with joy. They returned with joy! What church did they belong to? Have you ever heard of such a thing?! No purses, no bags, no sandals – NO SANDALS! – but they returned from their work proclaiming that the kingdom of God had come near, and they returned WITH JOY! What were they smoking?!?
My brothers in sisters in Christ, there is a lesson for us here today.
First, we are part of a church that is tying itself up in hideous knots – the kind of knots you could strangle yourself with – over rules, when we have paid precious little attention to the promises. Even in Jesus’ wonderful instructions to Go our way, even though we remember that he told us that we were like lambs in the midst of wolves, even though he promised there would be healing. Even though the very footprints we would leave behind when we shake the dust from our feet would proclaim the promise: The kingdom of God has come near! Even though we have inherited all this promise, we are choking on rules.
Second, we can see how easy it is to hear a promise as a rule and to miss the promise altogether, so that we just keep stubbing our un-sandaled toes and never get to glide on the currents of cushions of air.
Third, we are shown that there is something missing if we are not responding to the promises of Christ. Because what ever happened to the joy? The seventy returned with joy! They’d been given nothing to work with, told to leave their gear at home, sent out barefoot, identified as lambs in the midst of wolves, as too few laborers in the face of a plentiful harvest (read: a lot of work)… and yet the seventy returned with joy!
Yes, there is a lesson for us to learn today.
As we come together week by week, we are a community of people called together by God, and also sent out, week by week, in his Name. We, too, are sent to be harbingers of promise and forerunners of the kingdom of God.
We know that the laborers are few, but do we remember that the harvest is plentiful?
We know that it sometimes seems that we have not enough: not enough resources, not enough faith, not enough gear, not even enough to put spiritual sandals on our feet, so to speak. And what does God expect? That we are going to glide through life on cushions of air?
God sent his spirit: to seventy elders who shared it with Moses. He sent his spirit, like cushions of air, if you ask me, to the seventy that Jesus sent out proclaiming the kingdom. He may even have sent his spirit to the Committee of Seventy, for all I know (though it often seems hard to believe this).
And God has sent his spirit to us – more than seventy of us gathered in this place. He is sending his spirit to us day by day to strengthen and encourage us. He will send us cushions of air, if that’s what we need –if only we can hear the promises he makes! The seventy returned with joy saying, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name!” Even the demons! Don’t we have demons we need to quell in this world? Don’t we have plenty of demons? Yes, we are just lambs in the midst of wolves. But we will be carried on cushions of air – not so much as a stubbed toe – if only we can hear the promises: the kingdom of God has come near!
Lately I have been talking with the Vestry and others about several guideposts for our collective ministry here at Saint Mark’s. Some of them are very practical: the need to study the Scriptures, for instance. But one of the guideposts I’ve suggested we need to use in planning and organizing our mission and ministry is the idea that a parish community ought to be a community of irrepressible and inexhaustible joy.
To some people in the world, - especially those who are aware of all the conflict in the church - such a suggestion is as ludicrous as the idea that we should go out to do our work without so much as a pair of sandals on our feet.
But I believe that we can glide on cushions of air that God sends us by his Holy Spirit, if only we can hear the promises every time he tells us to go, go, go out into the world as harbingers of promise and forerunners of his kingdom. If only we realize that it is perfectly alright to be lambs in the midst of wolves, with God beside us and beneath us and above us. If only we can see that God means for his mission to be carried out and nothing will prevent it if we go in faith.
The harvest is plentiful, the laborers are few, which is all the more reason we need to go, confident that it is God’s spirit that will get us where he calls, God’s spirit that will carry us on cushions of air if that’s what it takes, God’s spirit that casts down every demon that threatens his mission of peace in the world.
And it is you and I, my friends, you and I who are sent, week by week, to do his work and to proclaim his promises. And it is you and I who can expect – if only we hear the promises and not just the rules – you and I who can expect to return with joy: irrepressible and inexhaustible joy! As though we had been carried along on cushions of air. Joy that is born not from our careful application and adherence to the rules; not because we are somehow superior to those whose dust we have shaken off our feet; not even because the awful demons of this world have been vanquished in the Name of Jesus. Our irrepressible and inexhaustible joy will be born of the very promise we proclaim: that the kingdom of heaven is very near to us, and the promise that your name and mine – no matter who we are – are written in heaven!
Thanks be to God!
Reached by Fr. Sean E. Mullen
8 July 2007
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia
Freedom
“For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”
Martin Luther once wrote that “the whole Scripture of God is divided into two parts: rules and promises.” By this, he meant, at one level, the division between the Old and New Testaments: the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, if I can put it that way. And while that may be a simplistic way of looking at the Scriptures, it bears some resemblance to the outlook of Saint Paul when he was writing to the new Christian Jews in Galatia, some of whom were demanding adherence to Jewish law, including circumcision.
Paul (and Luther after him) believed that rules – like the requirement of circumcision - had served their purpose by pointing God’s children toward his promises from generation to generation. But with the death and resurrection of Jesus the dawning era of promises-fulfilled became plain. And Jesus had only one rule: love one another as I have loved you.
For Paul each and every other rule was wiped off the slate by the pronunciation of the law of love in Jesus Christ. And to continue to spend time and energy following the old rules could only ever be a distraction from learning how better to live the law of love, and a hindrance to drawing more people into the expanding circle of God’s promise.
Freedom, in this context, was freedom not from some foreign power but from a self-imposed slavery of doing things: keeping the right feasts, avoiding the wrong foods, and the insistence on male circumcision. These were all fine and well in their time, when they kept a good Jew’s heart pointed toward the earthly Jerusalem. “But the Jerusalem above is free,” Paul wrote to the Galatians, “and she is our mother…. For freedom, Christ has set us free.”
No one had been better (in his own humble estimation) at keeping the rules than Paul had been. No one had had his heart set more firmly, so to speak, on the earthly Jerusalem and all that it meant to live as a Jew in God’s promised land. And no one worked harder to enforce those rules than Paul did, making a name for himself, before his conversion, as a persecutor of Christians, who quite clearly were not following the rules.
All of which might begin to suggest that Paul was something of a libertarian encouraging people to live and let live. But this he was not. He was convinced however that it meant something different to live in the midst of promises-fulfilled than in the midst of a system of rules. And this difference he was determined to work out and to teach, because freedom matters.
Freedom matters to anyone who has ever known captivity – which Paul knew was a part of the heritage of every Jew. Others might take freedom for granted, but not those who have lived under the yoke of slavery. In Egypt the Jews had been enslaved to Pharoah. In Babylon they had lived in enforced exile. And in their slavery, in their exile, they had kept the rules as best they could. Kept the rules to keep their hearts pointed toward home: toward Jerusalem.
And in Jerusalem the promises of freedom were born when Jesus set his face toward that city and the drama of God’s promised salvation unfolded.
Jesus himself had been somewhat famously loose with the rules. He had not come to abolish them, he said, but to fulfill them. In him, every rule was transposed into a promise: a trick every child knows seems impossible. Because in Christ the horizon shifted from the possibilities on the ground in Jerusalem – possibilities that would be especially disastrous for him – to the possibilities in the heart of God, in what Saint Paul calls “the Jerusalem above.”
For freedom Christ has set us free. Do not submit again to the yoke of slavery. Paul sees how likely we are to take slavery on ourselves. And in some sense it is just this that Paul is trying to teach the Galatians to avoid: the yoke of slavery that dims the promises of the Jerusalem above.
It’s not that the rules are bad in themselves, it’s just that they keep us rooted in doing this or not doing that. These were the rules that allowed, even encouraged, a priest and a Levite (holy men!) to pass by the bleeding body of man on the side of the road, leaving him to be cared for by a Samaritan (who, by the way, the rules encouraged us to think pretty little of). These are the rules that would have prevented Jesus from eating with sinners and with tax collectors – that would have prevented the physician from visiting his patients. These were the rules that threatened to obscure the promised freedom of new life that had been gained for all people by Jesus when he conquered death. And if the rules got in the way of the promise then clearly the rules would have to go.
Today very few of us stand in danger of obscuring the promise of new life in Christ because of our adherence to kosher laws. But today we are just as likely to submit to a slavery of our own choosing as were those early Christian Jews in Galatia to whom Paul wrote.
Today we readily embrace the laws of the marketplace, for instance, following rules that are designed to make us good consumers. These insidious rules allow us to feel good about everything we have thanks to the global village, while we pass by the bloodied bodies of our neighbors in that village, far over on the other side of the road. We have become expert in our slavery to these rules at waiting for some good Samaritan to come along in our wake.
Or in another manifestation of the phenomenon of our willing submission to slavery, we see how terror tempts us to protect ourselves with more and more layers of rules, making terrorism a doubly effective weapon since it also threatens to shut out the law of love. We can feel the grip of these rules tightening even now, in the uncertainty of threats in Britain, and it is our own hands tightening the grip.
And just days before we celebrate our independence as a nation, as we prepare to revel in our freedom, don’t we have to wonder if we are really free?
For freedom Christ has set us free. Like so much else about Christian faith, we have to learn the paradox of freedom. “For the whole law is fulfilled in one word, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” This is that profound lesson that the Prayer Book puts so concisely when we say that service to God is “perfect freedom.”
For freedom Christ has set us free! This is not some libertarian manifesto, rather it is a declaration of promises and a shout for joy that free people can live differently than those enslaved by rules. Love teaches us to live freely. The rules said we had to avoid that bleeding man in the street (which was a good thing because we wanted to avoid him anyway!) But the law of love compels us to go to him and bind up his wounds, and to discover as we go that by doing it freely we are changed because we are living not by the rules but by the promise.
Freedom matters to us because we know that it is just as disastrous to be slaves or our own selfishness as it is to be slaves to a foreign power.
Freedom matters because it teaches us how to walk by the Spirit and not by the flesh. Ask any recovering addict how much this freedom matters – or ask someone who is reaching for recovery and struggling to get there.
Freedom matters to anyone who has ever been enslaved – which is most of us. Slavery shuts out love – whether it’s old-fashioned economic slavery, or addiction to a substance, or the relentless slavery of economic rationalism, or the slavery to fear that terrorism tries to instill. Slavery shuts out love.
Slavery whispers rules into our hearts that we can often spell with two words that are the enemies of love: Keep Out!
Slavery clouds our vision so that we can hardly see the promises.
Slavery has built a Jerusalem of warfare, violence and bloodshed where the grip of ever tightening rules threatens never to know peace.
Freedom matters to anyone who has ever prayed for the peace of Jerusalem – or peace anywhere in the world.
Freedom begets love – overcoming our worst tendencies to use and abuse one another.
Freedom whispers promises in our ears that make things possible that the rules could never have allowed, spelled out in words of welcome.
Freedom opens our eyes to see the promise that love holds out for us.
And freedom is born of the Jerusalem above who is our mother, and who begs to know – if we want to sing about freedom at this rather awful moment in history – what kind of children we shall be.
Pray, God, make us truly free!
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
1 July 2007
Saint Mark’s Church, Phialdelphia
Celebrating Christ's Body
“God humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna… that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but that man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord.”
If you go to see the beautiful German film, Into Great Silence, about the Carthusian monks of La Grande Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps, be prepared to sit for almost three hours of cinema with very little dialogue, music, or noise of any kind. The monks of Grande Chartreuse lead a drastically simple life characterized by prayer, self-denial and silence. You should see the film – it is three hours well spent.
If you do, you may notice that the filmmakers occasionally provide a close-up moment of still life: a plate drying on a windowsill, a lamp burning in the dark, or a bowl of fruit. And if you have a look at the bowl of fruit, you may notice something that catches your eye – it caught mine. There in the middle of the French Alps, in the cloisters of La Grande Chartreuse, in a the cell of a solitary monk whose life is devoted to simplicity, whose brethren tend the cows and the gardens and chop the vegetables, who must surely bake their own bread, where the food is delivered to a pass-through into each monk’s cell so as not to disturb his prayers… There in the still life, in a bowl of fruit, on the side of an apple (or was it a pear?) was a little oval sticker that would have identified the apple’s country of origin: probably New Zealand or Chile.
I almost gasped when I noticed it. I was certainly shocked. I don’t begrudge the monks their fruit – certainly not in the dead of winter when there is no fruit to be had in the French Alps, to be sure. Nonetheless, I was taken aback not only at the way this piece of fruit in its ordinariness linked my life to the life of the austere monks of La Grande Chartreuse, I was taken aback at how nearly impossible it actually is to escape the world we all live in: the global economy that delivers fruit and veggies from all parts of the world to anyone who can pay for them – even the poor, simple monks of La Grande Chartreuse. I was amazed to begin to realize where that apple had come from, given that these monks had largely rejected all the implications of the global economy in favor of the economy of heaven.
When Moses led the Israelites through the wilderness on their long pilgrimage, it was, Scripture tells us, an exercise in humility and hunger. God humbled them and made them hunger and then sent them manna as an object lesson that man does not live by bread alone – not by the sweat of our own brows, not by our own cleverness, not by the size of our paychecks, not by the bounty stored in our cupboards – but by everything that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord.
But unlike our ancient forebears who grudgingly followed Moses, we are living in another age: when we have to search out places to go to be humbled or hungry. The powers of the global economy even ship ripened fruit to monks who have already embraced poverty, who have accepted a large measure of humility and hunger in their lives.
And you and I? What hunger do we know? What is there that does not lie within arms reach for us if only we want it? We have everything to fill our bellies. And have we forgotten what it is like to be hungry for the things that come only from the mouth of God? Have we become so good at taking everything for granted that we take even this for granted? Have we assumed in our pride that whatever we want from God we will have when we want it – shipped to us by whatever means he employs, with or without little stickers to identify its country of origin?
Today we train our attention on the wonderful and mysterious gift that God has given us in the Body of Christ – this new and living bread which came down from heaven. And this, too, is meant to be an exercise in humility and hunger, because it is all too easy for us to lose both our humility and our hunger in the face of this gift of God, all too easy to disregard what we are given at Mass each week as a scrap of bread, a sip of cheap wine.
Our celebration of the gift of the Body of Christ is an exercise in humility because we are faced with God’s profound humility: the God who sends his only Son (the Prince of Peace and Lord of Life) to live and die among the ordinary, stumbling sinners of a creation gone askew. Christ’s Body – whether it hangs on the Cross, or rests in the tomb, or gets parceled out in little wafers – is the perfect portrait of humility. Here in our hands we hold the transcription of that Word once spoken that brought the universe into being. How can we not be humbled in the face of such humility?
And our celebration of the gift of the Body of Christ is an exercise in hunger because we are reminded that in this sacred meal we are given a diet of love and mercy and forgiveness that we sorely need and that we too easily forget is deeply satisfying. Here in our hands we hold the bread of angels – that perfect food that feeds our souls when words or reason or even the touch of a loved one fail to meet our needs, and we realize that we’ve been left under-nourished by every other diet we’ve ever tried.
Today, as we celebrate the gift of Christ’s Body, we are called to be humble and hungry in the face of the mystery of God’s love. Just as a community of secluded monks hidden away in the mountains can enjoy an apple that is the product of an economy that we thought had passed them by – indeed, which they had tried to allow to pass them by; you and I can enjoy that living Bread that came down from heaven – from an economy that we often believe has passed us by.
It might have seemed that this wondrous communion with God would be reserved only for those who establish a secret economy of silence behind monastery walls, immersed in endless rounds of prayers, and far beyond the reach of people like you and me.
But although it seems somewhat unlikely that God would feed you and me with the living Bread of the Body of his Son, it is, in fact, just precisely as likely as the possibility that a shipment of apples from New Zealand or Chile would find its way into the cells of those remote Carthusian monks of La Grande Chartreuse.
And at the end of Mass today, we’ll indulge ourselves in a kind of still-life moment, which is meant to give us pause, perhaps even cause us to gasp as we have a look at what it is that’s been given to us in the Body of Christ, as we realize where this living Bread has come from.
And will we be left feeling humbled and even hungry for that Bread when, as we consider its unlikely origin, given that we have largely rejected the economy of heaven in favor of our own global economy?
And if we allow ourselves to gaze for a while into the great silence of that living Bread – the silence that is all that stands between us and the Body of Christ – will we hear God’s wisdom as he calls us to be humble and hungry, and to remember that we have never lived by bread alone, but by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord?
Thanks be to God.
Preached by the Rev. Sean E. Mullen
Corpus Christi: 10 June 2007
Saint Mark’s, Philadelphia