Sermon for 8/19/2007

One paradox in good liturgy is the way old practices make things stunningly new. Songs, spoken words and actions buoy our restless spirits and channel our distractions into contemplation, sending us like streams into a great river toward new knowledge, toward the unknown. Among their metaphors for worship, Quakers talk about entering a stream, tapping into a source, which then carries us forward. Even when we haven’t truly been to that river in years, the grace we encounter in worship can always be found in the same places, if we’re open and patient, and through a million cities and woods it only travels one way. All grace takes us toward a deeper knowledge of the beautiful, the good and the true, though without mastery. 

God is somehow the ground of all goodness, beauty and truth, especially in our most private estimation of those things. Cultivating our sense of ‘sweetness and light,’ as these things used to be called, is a sacred practice. But so therefore is stumbling on what’s wrong, boring, and false. Our aspirations to be open-minded can obscure the truth that we do, in fact, think some things are just wrong. The waterlike force of deep contemplation takes us through rough terrain as contemplation of the good sometimes forces contemplation of the worst. You could say the grace we encounter in worship is divisive in that way, though without the connotation of meaningless antagonism we usually hear in words like division and divisiveness.  At its most extreme, you could say that grace is even violent: not physically, but intellectually, for instance in a moment of painful realization. But there is violence and division for the sake of violence and division, and then on the other hand there is constructive criticism, temporary divisiveness for the sake of wholeness, and the struggle for lasting peace.

"Did you think that I came to bring peace on earth?" Jesus asks. "No, I tell you, but rather a sword." And yet Jesus is never tries to harm another person, meanwhile recommending such non-violence in the Gospels. And the earliest Christian theology (also non-violent) calls this same man the gateway to peace that passes understanding. But in practice, it seems, that gateway tends not to open its doors to such things as peace without agreement, peace without honesty, peace without love. The only way not to become enduringly violent is not to accept its terms or become supple in its hands; one has to challenge it.

This challenging divisiveness is the opposite of staid divisiveness; Jesus works in the opposite way of something like pro wrestling. Pro (meaning fake) wrestling, we remember, is violent for the sake of keeping us watching. There's a hierarchy to the wrestling calendar, laying out a sort of progress, as all the minor weekend events prefigure a huge yearly cage match, with 10 or 20 leotards living the dream. That sort of ridiculous, aggressive chaos is roughly what one of my friends pictured when she first read that Jesus came not to bring peace, but a sword on the earth. In the text, though, his “sword” has just the opposite effect.

Jesus is looking ahead to his own crucifixion when he says speaks of bringing division to the earth, and without that context his words are also falsely confusing. He’s very afraid, and speaking to his closest friends. He’s done some arguably criminal deeds, saying revolutionary things that could be spun by a good attorney as a challenge the pagan imperial state. At the root of that state and all oppression there are thousands around him relaxing from the effort of loving God and each other, and Jesus had also tried to disturb that relaxation. Now he’s about to pay for all this, and he’s scared. He’s shaken by faith in this love for the world as it might be, because that love is about to get him killed by the world as it is. Dorothy Day liked to quote Dostoyevsky’s about this: "Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams."(1) This is the context in which division presents itself as a necessity.

Wherever a forced, contractual peace has been propped up to enable illusions or cover lies, wherever peace is not guided by love, and wherever there are knowing or unknowing supporters of that forced peace, Jesus says we need to follow our consciences against the grain. In reality, wind against grain will mean mother against daughter, brother against brother, in more than the usual adolescent way. As the rest of his teaching bears out, the peace he wants to disrupt was never capable of enduring. This is not peace from free agreement but the always tentative peace of repressed hostility, obscuring a deeper unrest. That unrest cries out to be tapped into and healed, a process which will be like a stream leading through brambles and rocks into a wider, stronger river. In the life of Christ as well, grace travels toward beauty, goodness and truth by a singularly narrow, uncomfortable route.

But comfort isn’t the immediate goal when a fractured bone has to be re-set. Is grace taking us in similar rocky places these days, en route to unseen sweetness and light? There are surely arenas in our lives and our world where a superficial peace needs to be broken, for real healing to take place. What relationships do we need to flood with new care even if it'll make things unpredictable? If you’ve messed up like I have in the past, you know what a poorly constructed peace feels like. What, then, can be done about it? This is one of the things the mass, if fact, forces us to consider, by knocking us in various ways out of the fog of rationalization and back to reason. Faith itself can return us to reason, if we’re talking about faith in the right things.

I know it's been a few years, but this subject reminds me of Sgt. Joseph Darby and the way he was treated after blowing the whistle on a particularly egregious form of so-called peace and order, namely the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Four years ago Darby was still on good terms with his fellow soldiers, family and friends back in the Allegheny mountains of his home. But for letting light shine on the things going on in that prison, he's since been shunned by many in his home town, his Army division, and even some in his family. Members of Darby's community were recorded saying he didn't deserve a hero's welcome at home, but that he'd better ‘sneak in through the back door at midnight’ to escape what he had coming. He was called a "rat." One of the only voices of praise the newspapers could dig up among his neighbors was: "That boy's got a lot of courage, but when you go against your fellow man like that… I don't know. Some people won't like it."(2) Once upon a time Darby could have just dropped the issue entirely, allowing the torture to continue. Life would have gone on, and life back home wouldn't have changed much. Instead he "went against his fellow man." It's odd to put it like that, of course, as if the Iraqi detainees weren’t his fellow men. Although abuse was still being reported at Abu Ghraib just last year, the cases have apparently stopped at the moment, and it's likely that men who would otherwise still have been tortured or killed have been spared. That’s because Sgt Darby went against some of his fellow men, again to use his neighbor’s words. That's the sort of division the Messiah provokes. Some crooked situations make division unavoidable if any path is to be made straight. "Love in action is a harsh thing compared to love in dreams."

There are dire situations like that where a poorly-working peace blocks the possibility of free and lasting peace. There are also many smaller blind spots in our lives, little blindnesses we’ve allowed ourselves not to question, which hold us back. There's a dull sort of peace that comes with leaving things unexamined for months or years on end. But there's good news there, too, because if we feel that dullness, it means there’s new freedom and peace waiting for us. It means we’ve discovered a rock covering a spring. Even if it's messy at first, breaking things open allows light to fill the cracks, showing us back to the depth and spontaneity we remember from earlier days. That’s our goal, where the river meets the sea. 

If division itself were the goal, pro wrestling would be a lot more telling of God than a High Mass. Instead this mass leads us to a different sort of wrestling, by way of the stream where Jacob wrestled, the stream where through struggle he learned his true name and its meaning. Well, guess what? There’s hidden meaning and truth in us as well, waiting to be named. We can learn these things, we can go these new ways, not by ‘learning’ to love struggle, but by struggling instead to love, even when it hurts. Let the match begin.

(1) The Brothers Karamozov, ch.4

(2) Rosin, Hanna, "When Joseph Comes Marching Home," Washington Post, 5/17/2004.

By the Rev. Paul Francke, 19 August 2007

Homeland Security

People who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking homeland.  If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return.  But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one.  Therefore, God… has prepared a city for them. (Heb. 11:15-16)


Almost six years ago a word entered common usage that had not previously been part of our everyday lexicon: we began speaking in America about the “homeland.”  Before the terrorist attacks of 9-11 I think we would have been more prosaic, referring perhaps to things that happen “on US soil.”  But from our national tragedy there sprung up (I guess) a need to define our space with an idea rather than an area: a home land; the home land.  And, of course, the need for homeland security.

I have never been comfortable with this new-ish word, or with how quickly it became a part of our regular usage.  I love this country, and I have seen a lot of it – from sea to shining sea – knowing something of its breadth and magnificence makes it all the more absurd to think of it as my homeland or yours.  We are an extraordinarily blessed nation in all the beauty and resources that have been entrusted to us.  But I have difficulty thinking about the vast region of this continent as a homeland.  What could that mean?

For a long time I suspected that my dis-ease with the word “homeland” was basically political.  It just sounds too right-wing to me, too paternalistic, too politically charged, too ready to be invoked as a cry to arms, too good a reason to want to stand up and declare yourself proud to be an American, too reminiscent of the dangerous nationalism of another time and place.  

But now I realize that there is something in the word that I respond to as a Christian – something about the term that wants to appeal to a deeper longing in my heart.  There is something about the idea of the homeland that seems to require a religious zeal – just as it requires protection at all costs and a federal Department to look after that protection.

And I hope I do not sound unpatriotic when I say that my heart resists the tugging of the strings of the homeland.  My ears find the tones of its anthems (sung by security guards at airport x-ray machines) hollow and even annoying.  I have a home in this land, and I pray that I will for as long as I live.  But can this ever be the homeland for me or for you?

Somewhere in the heart of the Christian there is meant to be a journey; somewhere deeply rooted in our lives there is a sojourn through wilderness.  Our story is a story of wanderings and wanderers who responded time and time again to the call from God to “Go” somewhere – often without knowing where.  Our hope has been in a promise declared to generations.  But long ago we stopped connecting that promise to a patch of land.

Instead, we have heard in God’s insistent call to go from here to there the rudiments of our faith.  What is Christian faith if not the conviction that God has someplace for us to go and that he will lead us there no matter how unlikely it seems?

Faith has gotten a bad name these days.  If you do something “by faith” you are a fool because you are doing it not only against all odds, but against reason.  We are said to take “on faith” truths that no reasonable person would subscribe to and that science has disproved – like a literal biblical explanation for the creation of the universe.  To be a person of faith is a sign of a weak intellect and quite possibly a mental deficiency.  Faith is pre-scientific, pre-historic, and mostly the domain of previous generations.

But these are caricatures of faith: cartoon versions of a silly kind of faith that sounds like willful ignorance.  Faith is actually something altogether different.  It is the thread that has tied generation after generation of wanderers together, leading in a single, specific, and puposeful direction.  

The writer of the biblical letter to the Hebrews sees it connecting the first children – Cain and Abel – to Noah and his clan in the ark.  Then on to Abraham, the father of faith and to Sarah his once childless wife.  The thread was not broken, as it seemed it might be, when Abraham led his son Isaac up to the mountain.  From Isaac it passed to Jacob then to Joseph and into Egypt.  In faith Moses took up the thread to lead Israel out of Egypt and across the red Sea and from there the story goes on: wandering, wandering through desert lands, clinging to a promise.

This is what faith looks like: you pack your bags and you get up and go somewhere.  Faith is a journey of promise.  And long ago we stopped connecting that promise to a patch of land.

Which brings me back to the homeland.

Because for now, it is clear that Christians have no homeland in this world.  Our wanderings to a promised land ceased long ago to be connected to real estate and we fixed our hopes (when Jesus taught us) on the kingdom of heaven, where the true Christian homeland lies.  

If we are, in the words of the writer of Hebrews, “thinking of that land from which [we] had gone out, [we]… have opportunity to return.”  But maybe the awful fate of Lot’s wife (remember her), who was turned to a pillar of salt when she looked back toward Sodom, was meant as a sign after all: a warning against the desire to turn back.  After all, Jesus tells his disciples that whoever puts his hand to the plow and then turns back is not fit for the kingdom.

And that is the challenge of faith in our own day and age, as it has ever been: to fix our hopes on citizenship in heaven, to desire a better country: one of God’s design.

The proof of our faith will never be found in the map of a homeland that stretches from Atlantic to Pacific, from Canada to Mexico.  And in fact, when we adopt the idea of this kind of homeland in our hearts, we are, in a sense, looking back.  We are crowding out the space that God has meant for faith to fill with a yearning for his promises.  And we have been warned of the danger of looking back.

Here in this land, it might be that God asks us to express our faith not by constructing and alternative homeland, but by building small models of that better country that we believe he has prepared for us.  This is why it is an act of faith to struggle for justice and to work for peace, to reach out to another in need, to visit the shut-in or the imprisoned, or to help out a child in need.  These are little expeditions in faith when we journey beyond our present reality to live for a moment or two in the kind of country we imagine God has prepared for us.

In an excellent book the Scottish writer, Rory Stewart chronicles his own expedition: a walk across Afghanistan, just weeks after the American-led invasion and the fall of the Taliban.  Afghanistan is a country that seems to constitutionally resist nationhood.  There are many homelands in Afghanistan, but it os nobody’s homeland.

Stewart writes of a conversation he has as he asks for directions from and old Afghan who has probably never traveled more than a few kilometers from his own village.

“’Forget the road,’ he said, ‘because you don’t want to go [that way] at all…  it will add two days to your journey at least.’

‘Have you walked this route,’ [Stewart] asked.

‘Not all of it, but I was told about it by my father.’   

…’Can you give me the names of the big men in that valley?’” Stewart asks.  

And the man and his friends begin to recite the names of men they have heard of in towns they have never been to and never will go, but which provide a useful map of village after village, that will save two days of walking.

“Mir Ali Hussein Beg is the greatest man in the Sar Jungal valley….  He is three days beyond Dualatyar.  In a day you could get to Mukhtar, the place of Mizra Beg, and then to Charasiab, home of Abdul Rezak Khan….  Then Mir Ali Hussein Beg at Katlish….   Then Ghulam Haider Khan at Shahi Murri, …one day and then you are at Yakawlang.”

Stewart calls this kind of a map a song-of-the-places-in-between.  It is precisely the same kind of map that the writer to the Hebrews is using when he traces the thread of faith from Cain and Abel to Noah and Abraham and Sarah and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph, to Moses, and then to Gideon and Samuel and David and the prophets and countless others who carried the thread of faith forward.

And it is the kind of map that is not much in use in these days of global positioning systems, and Homeland Security, and Google maps that can show you a satellite photo of almost anywhere you care to look and even let you zoom in.  

The map of the places-in-between is an assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of things unseen.  And it can never outline the contours of a homeland.

And you and I, my brothers and sisters, have been given such a map in the story of our faith.  Which means that we have been called by God to live, as our forebears did, in the places-in-between.  God calls us, day after day to go out on expeditions of faith building models of that better country that he has promised us and looking for the dawning of the day when the kingdom shall be established in full-scale.

And God has given us a map that includes such points of interest as the place where Sarah laughed, and the spot where Abraham almost did in Isaac, the hard-to-see pillar of salt that once was Lot’s wife.  But there are countless other markers on the map of the places-in-between: crazy Francis stripping down to his birthday suit, Patrick preaching about shamrocks, monks and kings and princesses and paupers; there is the dream of a preacher in Alabama, and the way my grandmother prayed her rosary.  All of these full of meaning and direction on the map of places-in-between.  

This is the map of our faith.  Forget the road, because you don’t want to go that way at all, who knows how many days it will add to your journey.

And if you are thinking of that land from which we have been sent out – if you are thinking of the homeland, as though you should stand up and be proud about it – there is always the opportunity to return.  But how will you ever know what you have missed?  How will you ever know about those things that you have hoped for and about all the promises of God that are things yet unseen?  

And how will we ever discover that better country, where God has prepared for us a city if we have fooled ourselves that the homeland is right here where we already are?

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
12 August 2007
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Your Money and Your Life

Most of us have probably experienced that potentially awkward moment when the check arrives at a restaurant and no one at the table reaches for it.  This is not so unsettling if you are with a group (just like in Monopoly, eventually someone will be designated the banker and will have to work out the tip).  But at a table for two it can induce a little anxiety.  Especially if you know your wallet is empty and you are not quite sure how far below maximum your credit card is.

Do you begin to think through the details of the arrangements?  Who invited whom?  Isn’t it obvious this is supposed to be her treat?!  He chose this restaurant, he can’t possibly think I’m going to pay for it!

If the check sits there long enough it will become awkward indeed, when we realize that something is required of us that we never expected.

If this has been a date, it is a bad portent, not least because confusion about expectations is not a healthy thing in a relationship.  Of course in our relationship with God we are often confused about the expectations and seldom more so than when the check arrives, so to speak.  That is, when we discover that something is expected of us and it just might include cash!

Today we hear Jesus teaching about expectations that God has of us.  And it is somewhat startling to hear him talk this way.  “Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?”  It feels a little like the check has arrived and Jesus has pushed it over to our side of the table.  Didn’t you know that something was required of you?  Two things, Jesus teaches, are required, two things: your treasure and your soul.  Put it another way: your money and your life.

Many of us do not first come to church because we are looking for something to do with our money and our lives.  Many of us come to church as shoppers, looking to see if there is anything we want.  Or to extend my earlier metaphor, we come to church as potential diners, checking the menu to see if there is anything we want.  What do I feel like for Sunday brunch this week?  And in many ways this is fine.  Jesus was perfectly accustomed to people coming up to him to see if he offered what they needed or wanted.  And if it was OK with Jesus it should be OK with us too, since we, the church, are working for him now.

But isn’t it chilling to hear him remind us that the check does come?  Isn’t it unsettling to be told that if we expect to dine at this particular table, we had better be prepared to pay the price?

This goes against so much of what I want to say about the Gospel.  God’s grace is FREE by definition!  I want to cry out.  Come as you are: fall into the loving arms of Christ and be washed in the soothing rain of his mercy, forgiveness and love.  All of which is true – but it is not the whole truth.

You fool, Jesus says, don’t realize that this very night your soul is required of you?

God wants our money and our lives… which would be entirely unreasonable if it were not based on the assumption that everything we have (our money and our lives) came from God in the first place.

Let’s start with our lives.  Although most of us feel perfectly free to talk about the “soul” there is not exactly universal agreement about what is meant by this term.  And in the typical posturing of our time, the argument is regularly made these days that belief in a human soul is nothing more than superstition, now that science has taught us how the brain works.  But in this parish, we have not been fooled, thank God, by the artificial argument that you can believe in either science or God, but not both.  So we ask about the soul without turning our backs on science.

What is the soul? Will it float out of your body or through your nostrils when you die?  Does it linger in the universe like a radio wave?  Is it waiting in some netherworld to be united at the last judgment to your re-constructed body?  Most definitions are clear that the soul is what makes us distinctly who we are.  Our souls, like our bodies, are gifts from God that carry our spiritual fingerprints, our more mystical DNA.

It is our souls that respond to the awareness of God in the world and in our lives – often before our bodies do – because our souls recognize their authorship in God.  It is our souls that lean toward God if all is well with our souls, or away from God if we have become spiritually unhealthy.  And it seems to be our souls that reach out to the souls of others, sounding the depths of another person’s life and finding that the echoes resonate powerfully in the depths of our own lives, sometimes joining us to a mate.  If our bodies are tissue and fiber and water and electrical impulses and proteins and acids all organized in a magnificent way, then our souls are everything about us that can’t be accounted for with those tissues and fibers and water and electricity and proteins and acids.  

It was the soul of a young man, earlier this week, that caused him – quite beyond his own intentions or willfulness, he reported – to save the lives of children on a school bus dangling over the Mississippi River on the edge of that collapsed bridge.  It is his soul that accounts for the movement of his hands and his feet (which he himself could not account for) as he snatched each child from their dangerous perch and lifted them to safety.  He could not account for his own movements, his own bravery, his own gracefulness. It was his soul - his unique and deep-seated identity as God’s child, created by love for love – that animated the most important day of that young man’s life, and of the children’s whose lives he saved.

In our society, very little corrupts the soul so easily and so often as money, since money and power are intimately linked in American society.  Very little prevents our souls from flourishing so easily as money.  This is a perverse irony since there is very little in this world that drives our ambitions, our actions, our imaginations, our hopes and our dreams, as powerfully as money does.  Who wants to be a millionaire?  Only those who have not yet decided that they want to be a billionaire.  Money – which is perfectly useful in running a society, even Jesus taught this – easily becomes a force in our lives that eclipses God’s purposes for us.  

To point to a distant example, money is powerfully at work in the corrupt society of Zimbabwe, where president Robert Mugabe has amassed enormous fortunes for himself and a coterie of the favored, at the expense of the welfare of everyone else in the nation.  He has quite literally built larger barns to store the cars and the cash and the goods he has amassed.  While his countrymen struggle and starve, he can eat, drink and be merry.  The corruption of Zimbabwe as a society seems, tragically, to find its perfect expression in the soul of its president.

Closer to home, in American society, we have noticed how a very few people are amassing enormous fortunes.  And we read with interested curiosity about the hedge fund managers who draw ever more and more money and goods into their barns (just to choose one category of the ultra rich).  We should be horrified by this trend in America to concentrate great wealth in the hands of a relatively few people.  

We might be worried for the souls of those who take so much more than they could ever possibly need, just because they can take it.  But mostly we are fascinated because we are envious.  Who wants to be a billionaire?  We do.  Who doesn’t want to be a billionaire?  If only we could eat, drink, and be merry the way the rich and famous can.  But since we know that we can’t all be hedge fund managers, the fondest hopes of many an American can be summed up in two simple words: Power Ball.  What barns we could build and fill up with things!  Oh how we would eat, drink, and be merry if we won the lottery!

The people who first followed Jesus were not wealthy people.  They had little, and what they had they shared (even if it was only a few loaves and fishes).  And in the New Testament you will find many warnings about wealth: it makes it hard to enter the kingdom of God.  This is not because money is bad, it is because we have given it the power to corrupt our souls.

And so Jesus keeps inviting us back to his table.  He brings us into communion with him so that from time to time we can have this conversation.  From time to time, he can remind us about our souls.  He reminds us who made us and why we were made (that we were made by love for love).  And from time to time as we sit with Jesus, we realize that there is a check on the table.  Jesus is not awkward about this.  He does not let it sit there silently as we try to work out who’s going to pick up the tab.  Looking us straight in the eye, he pushes it over to us.

And we might think, Who is this guy?  And who invited whom here, anyway?  Doesn’t he realize this is all supposed to be his treat?  He can’t possibly imagine that I’m going to pay for this!

This is an awkward moment in our relationship with Jesus.  But does he really need to say anything?  Does he need to explain that long ago he bought our lives with his life, bought our freedom with his death and resurrection?

Does he really need to remind us that we were not actually made to be billionaires and that as hopes and dreams go, the amassing of fortunes is woefully unimaginative?

Does he really need to teach us how caring for all our things so easily gets in the way of caring for one another?

Does he really have to show us that we are creatures of God, made with a soul that bears the unmistakable hallmark of God’s workmanship?

Perhaps he does.  Which is why he has been trying to teach us how to love.  Because he knows that a person in love will do things they might not otherwise do.  A person in love will reach for the check before you can even feign to reach for your wallet.  A person in love will give her money and her life to another.  A person in love sees that something is required of him.  And a person in love is happy to give it.

You and I, my friends, were made by love for love.  We have been given everything by God, the One who made us, including our souls, that make us who we are and that one day God will gather into nearer communion with him.  But for now, God is trying to teach us that something is required of us in this relationship: our money and our lives.  Not because he needs it, but because we are never more like God (who made us to be like him) than when we are giving.

Our awkwardness with God comes not just out of confusion, but from the realization that God is in love with us.  He sent his Son to love us and to teach us to love.  And ever since then he has been wondering if we are also in love with him.  Which sometimes we can’t just say with our lips, we have to practice it and show it forth in our lives.

And the check sits on the table.

Tragedy, by virtue of its scale, has a way underscoring more present and mundane realities of our daily lives.  And the two tragedies I mentioned earlier – one on the Mississippi River and in on ongoing in Zimbabwe – have something to teach us.

On the one hand, there are scores and hundreds of school buses full of children who are in danger in this city, and thousands more throughout our nation, who desperately need someone to help them.  And on the other hand, there is our temptation to build larger barns, and store our luxury cars in them, and surround them with gates, and live like kings.

What if this very night our souls should be required of us?  What if God wanted us to account for who we are, for the gifts of grace that he has poured into our lives?  What if God wanted to account for the love with which he made us?  What has become of that love?

What if we should realize that Jesus has quietly and deliberately pushed the check over to our side of the table?

We could always just get up and leave the table, leaving the check to him.   It’s OK, it has happened before, and he can handle it.

Or we could learn from him and take the check, and reach into our hearts and into our wallets and do our best to give, do our best to love.  And see what happens.


Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
5 August 2007
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia