Jesus said, “ Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” (Mt 10:34)
When Solomon became king of Israel, second in David’s line, long before Jesus was born, he prayed to God, and asked for one thing: “Give me,” he asked God, “an understanding mind… that I may discern between good and evil.” This prayer pleased God no end. Discerning good from evil, after all, was a gift that Solomon’s father, David, had sometimes lacked. It also struck God as a good thing that the king of his chosen people had not asked for a long life, or riches, or the defeat of his enemies. He had asked for wisdom. So God tells Solomon that he will give him not only wisdom – not only the thing Solomon asked for – but also the things that Solomon had not asked for: riches, and honor and long life, as well.
And within hours of this prayer, (only one verse in the Bible), Solomon is confronted with two harlots fighting over a baby. How the harlots made it in to see the king I don’t know, but there they stand in his presence. And you probably remember the story. One woman’s son died in the night, and the woman with the dead son took the living child from the other woman’s bed and left her with the dead child. They are screaming at one another in the king’s chamber: “The living child is mine!” “No, the dead child is yours,” and so on.
And in the inaugural demonstration of his wisdom, Solomon calls to his minions, “Bring me a sword!” You remember his threat to divide the living child in two, and how one of the harlots shrieks in horror, “Don’t do it!” But the other woman is willing to accept the compromise. And Solomon, in his wisdom discerns that the woman who protested the child’s slaughter is the true mother.
Bring me a sword. This command on the lips of the king, in the presence of two harlots and one bastard child, is terrifying. The implication of these four words – bring me a sword – is brutal. What was Solomon going to do with the sword?
You have to wonder if the underling who went to get the heavy sword slowed his steps as he went, wondering, himself, if it was such a good idea to heed the new king’s first command. Was this how Solomon’s reign would begin – with the blood of a child on his hands, or a prostitute or two, or perhaps all three? And when it becomes clear that the king is willing to slice this child in two – right down the middle – was there anyone whispering in his ear a word of caution, nervously suggesting a different solution to what is after all, a matter of little importance to the king?
But the wisdom of Solomon is displayed here not so much in discerning whose child the baby was, rather his wisdom is displayed in knowing how to wield the sword. He knows how to use his power, without drawing a single drop of blood, so that the good prevails.
His father David’s reign had begun in violence – with the defeat of the threatening Goliath – and his years on the throne were soaked with blood. But Solomon was a different kind of king, until his own weakness for the fairer sex would cause his downfall – but that’s another story.
It is jarring, to say the least, to hear on Jesus’ lips much of what we heard in today’s reading from the gospel. “A man’s foes will be those of his own household,” he says. But to my ears, even more so than his anti-family-values stance, nothing is more jarring than Jesus’ statement that he has not come to bring peace on earth (which is after all what the angels sang at his birth – were they wrong?). Nothing is more upsetting to me than his apparent threat that he has not come to bring peace, but a sword.
It is almost as if Jesus has stood up in our midst and commanded to his minion (which I suppose would be me), “Bring me a sword!” And yes, it fills me with dread. There are children here, after all. Is Jesus really going to have blood on his hands? I would like to whisper some nervous words of caution in Jesus’ ear. This cannot be a good idea. The implications of his words are too brutal for the Lord of love.
The evangelists who wrote down Jesus’ story were at pains to show how Jesus was descended from David’s line, in fulfillment of the prophets’ testimony. Would he be fighter like David? And some hoped for a warrior-messiah, the might of whose sword would establish again the hegemony of a unified Israel. Would they get what they wanted?
And here, less than half-way in to the first book of the New Testament do we begin to hear the rattling of sabers on Jesus’ lips? Bring me a sword! This qualifies as what scholars have called the “hard sayings” of Jesus. That is, the words are hard to ratify with our expectations of him, or with the song of the angels who promised peace on earth to the shepherds who were called to his manger. I suppose it was a hard saying of Solomon, when he called for a sword, too.
And so, it is important for us to see Jesus for who he actually is, and to hear his words for what they actually are, just as Solomon’s potentially terrifying words proved to be a demonstration of wisdom.
It is noteworthy that with the beginning of the Gospels there comes an end to the stories of warfare that so permeate earlier pages of Scripture. We will not hear of war again until the very last book of the Bible, when St. John has a vision of the war in heaven (a war with, perhaps, more symbolic meaning than historic precedent).
The gospels themselves, are fairly bloodless, except for the spilling of Jesus’ own blood in his un-contested crucifixion. The one time Jesus seems ready to start a fight – when he overturns the tables of the money-changers – nothing comes of it, which suggests to me that he was not perceived as much of a threat at the moment. And the only time one of his disciples actually draws a sword, Jesus tells him to put it away (and then heals the injury that it caused).
And so when we hear these hard sayings of Jesus – I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword – we have to stop for a moment and be a little wise ourselves. We have to be able to discern what amounts to a teaching moment from what might have been a manifesto. We have to remember that Jesus is a rabbi, raised by a proper Jewish mother, and perhaps prone to a bit of hyperbole.
Jesus is not laying out, in these few paragraphs of discussion, a manifesto for a violent uprising of faith. He is not, in fact, calling for a sword. And even if he were, I have no doubt that in his hands it would remain as bloodless as the sword that Solomon called for.
Jesus is talking to his followers about what would be called centuries later, the “cost of discipleship.” And this cost, he is teaching his disciples, is high. It could cost you everything. And if you think that life as Jesus’ follower is going to be a love-in (Woodstock, without the music (which sounds boring anyway)), then you are sadly mistaken. If you think you are going to “find yourself” as a member of a biblical ashram, then you are wrong. If you think it will make your parents happy for you to lose your life for his sake – to give up your career and your earning potential, or even just your Sunday mornings - then you are kidding yourself. Do you really think your Jewish mothers want you running around preaching the gospel instead of going to medical school? This is what Jesus is saying.
Remember, he has just told his disciples that he is sending them out as sheep in the midst of wolves to preach his message of hope for the poor, to bring healing to the sick, and to cast out demons, to declare that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. They will be laughed at and ridiculed, turned away at many doors. Their faith will be sorely tested, their motives questioned. They will have cause to shake much dust off their feet as they move from house to house, town to town.
Is this pauper-king really worth it? Is he really the messiah? Is he truly a Son of David – anointed to bring about the Lord’s desire for his people and all the nations? Would he even know how to handle a sword if it were brought to him? Has he half the wisdom of Solomon? Or will things end badly, as they did for David, as they did for Solomon, as they did for Israel?
Bring him a sword, if we must. Put it in his hands. Ascribe to this carpenter-preacher the power to discern right from wrong, good from evil, life from death. Put everything on the line: your job, your house, your family, your reputation.
We have read all the stories – learned most of them in Sunday School. But have we yet given our lives to him? Have we been willing to hand over the power to him? To trust him with the sword which we would rather hold ourselves? Are we ready, willing, and able to be sheep amongst a world of wolves? This is no way to “find” ourselves! Will we give up our lives to his service?
It would be easier if he knew how to cut with the sword. We would find it easier to follow a warrior-messiah, who at least speaks our language. But see how awkward it is when Jesus even tries – I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.
Thanks be to God that in Jesus’ hands the edges of the sword remain bloodless, that he uses it to point to justice, to right over wrong, good over evil.
Bring him a sword, and by all means keep it out of our own hands. Let him bend its blade to his will. Greater than Solomon, greater than David, Jesus will never, in fact, pick up a sword and yet he will wield more power over the destiny of the world than any warrior-king ever did.
And if we are willing to be steeled by his assurance, if we are brave enough to take up his challenge, if we are faithful enough to risk losing our lives by taking up our cross and following him, what victory will be unknown to us? What corner of heaven will not be opened to us? What despair will remain un-transformed by hope? What wrong will not be defeated by right? What evil will not be conquered by good? What death will not be re-claimed by life?
Bring him a sword! For his hand is the only hand that can be trusted to wield the power of life and death. His wisdom is the only wisdom that trumps our cleverness. His love is the only love that surpasses all understanding and casts out fear.
Oh, bring him a sword, and let us see him beat it into a plowshare on the anvil of his justice!
And let it cost us everything. Let us be ready to lose our lives for his sake, let us learn how to take up our crosses and follow him. Let us be willing to disappoint our families, and our friends, to become aliens in this land of wolves. And let us follow him for the simple reason that though we have until now been willing to arm almost anyone who asked for a weapon, he is the only One who knows how to use the sword without shedding a single drop of blood…
… except his own; which he has poured out already, for the salvation of the world. In a wonderful mystery of love, shared day by day, and week by week with me, and with you.
Thanks be to God.
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
22 June 2008
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia
Our Imaginary Friend
Theology, a professor of mine used to say, can be defined as loving God with the mind. This is a lovely idea, and one that commends the academic pursuit of a systematic way of engaging the various questions, mysteries, revelations and commandments of religion. And while it is a very good thing to have people in seminaries and universities, and even in parish churches, attending to theological pursuits, the truth of the matter is that most of us are not too concerned with theology – and we are happy to know that someone else is doing it. For many of us, theology is to our daily faith as the food from Le Bec Fin is to what we produce in our own kitchens. There is a relationship between the two, even some of the same ingredients used; but one is a highly specialized and refined version of the other.
As it happens, the Christian faith does not have its roots in theology, as the story we hear today about Abraham reminds us. The Lord said to Abram, “Go!” So Abram went. And when Abram gets to an oak at Moreh, the Lord appears to Abram and says, “To your descendants I will give this land.” This was not an invitation to move in, (the Canaanites were already living there), so Abram marks the spot with an altar - a pile of stones – and keeps moving. This is not an account of theology. Abram, was not using his head – just ask his wife Sarai – he was not loving God with his mind. He was doing what he was told, engaged in some kind of relationship with the Lord, who, in a few chapters from where we left off, will change Abram’s name and bring him into a covenant of promise. Abraham’s faith is not born in his mind: it comes from an encounter with the living God.
Many modern critics of Christian faith would find this assessment of Abraham’s faith right on target – that it is mindless. How could you build your faith on the kind of God who would call you up a mountain to kill your only son? How could you think your way to faith in a God who would lead you through the desert without telling you where you are going? How could you wrap your mind around a God who will allow his own people to be enslaved? How can you love with your mind a God who allows holocausts, and cyclones, and earthquakes, and warfare? How can you even think about a God whose supposed salvation is achieved by the death of an innocent man by crucifixion? A mind, these critics might suggest to us, is a terrible thing to waste on a God such as this.
The most charitable of these critics must see Christians like a group of perpetual pre-adolescents, who have found in Jesus a very lovely imaginary friend, who looks particularly nice in stained glass pictures. But when you grow up you cannot continue to love this imaginary friend. Your mind rebels at the uselessness of it. Your mind invites you into greater maturity: into the real world. Your mind encourages you to consider the outlandishness of the claims, the impossibility of the miracles, not to mention the absolute mess that the church has made of this “faith” she professes to teach. Your mind beckons you to a different kind of love – of this world and its many pleasures, its many things. Your mind shows you its own magnificent power and suggests you should place your trust in that. Your mind unmasks the foolishness of faith when you are a mere teenager – if you will only allow it to, if you will cast away your imaginary friend, if you are not afraid to do so.
Any number of the most eloquent critics of faith these days are eager to point out that they saw through the foolishness of faith as mere children – so fragile is the gossamer curtain between reason and faith, even a child can see right through it.
Saint Paul, himself, describes the faith of Abraham as “hoping against hope” – a phrase we have come to understand expresses very long odds.
You know, of course, that our imaginary friend ate with tax collectors and sinners: a rather tawdry bunch. This was a puzzlement to the Pharisees, who were learned of the law, and who themselves loved God with their minds. “Those who are well have no need, of a physician,” Jesus said to them, “but those who are sick.”
“Somebody around here sure is sick,” they must have thought. “Sick in the head!”
And suddenly a leader of the synagogue runs to Jesus in desperation. “My daughter has just died, but you lay your hand on her and she will live!” His imagination is running wild. He is not using his head. He has lost it, poor man.
And now a woman, who has had chronic bleeding for twelve years, just wants to touch the hem of his garment, in the wild imagination that some magic power will flow from him to her. She is not using her head.
Now he is at the ruler’s house. The flute players are there – they have been hired by the undertakers, who know their business, know the difference between a dead girl and a sleeping child. They laughed at him: they were using their heads.
Why this child, and not all the other children taken too soon from their parents? Why that woman and her fibroids, and not all the other suffering souls who battle illness every day? Why are these given such lavish gifts of healing? And how can we even imagine that Jesus is our friend if he has passed us by? What has become of the power that was to flow from him to us, even from the hem of his garment? If we will just stop and think about this – if we will use our minds – will we not see that this faith of ours has been placed in an unreliable imaginary friend; that we are hoping against hope?
Theology – loving God with the mind – is a wonderful thing. But it is not the first order of business in faith. First we must encounter the living God, more or less face-to-face. First we must come to know our imaginary friend, Jesus, and decide whether or not he is real. First we must hear a call so simple even a child could hear it: “Go,” it might say, or, “Follow me.” And first we must decide that we have enough imagination to go, or to follow where Jesus calls, even though he could be nothing more than an imaginary friend.
These stories of miracles, of healing, of dead children brought back to life; these friendships forged with tax collectors and sinners are not the building blocks of a systematic theology. They are signs that point to the way of the Cross, which is a way of suffering and salvation, a way that is not left to the imagination.
And churches are built to house these signs, to configure them in such a way as to draw our attention to that Cross, and to see who it is who hangs there. Churches are built so the signs can lead us to the table where our imaginary friend is given real form: his Body and his Blood really given for us, shared with everyone who will sit at his table, no matter how tawdry we may be.
God knows how challenging is the life of faith, he knows what it means to hope against hope. Perhaps that’s why he so often kindles that faith in rather small groups: Abraham’s family, a group of twelve, a hundred or so in church.
First, God calls us into a living encounter with him. He asks us to open our minds to the possibility that these signs do not point to an imaginary friend, but to the living Lord, his Son Jesus. He does not promise an end to all our woes, a cure for every disease, an end to infant mortality, the calming of every storm, or the staying of every disaster. What he promises is hope against hope. Which is to say that in his time, by his hand, all things will be redeemed, all things made new, that there will be light where we see only darkness, and life where we see only death.
And he asks you and me to allow him to be our imaginary friend long enough to show us that he is alive in us and in the world. He asks us to see if he does not lead us to places we could not have gone on our own. He asks us to look for forgiveness we never thought we could find. He asks us to trust that our lives are not just nasty, brutish and short, and finally headed nowhere. He asks us to believe that despair can be transformed into joy, that the poor can be lifted up, that the hungry will be fed, that the meek will inherit the earth. He asks us to be brave enough, faithful enough, hopeful enough to imagine the possibility of these unlikely promises.
And in time, he even asks us to love him with our minds – to try as hard as we can to wrap our minds around his many questions, mysteries, revelations, and commandments. And to discover what a wonderful way this is to love him, too.
But first, he asks us to look at ourselves closely, to see what a tawdry bunch we are, to come, sit at his table, and get to know him and the hope he promises against hope.
And we find that he has stepped out of our imaginations and into the real world, and he has opened our minds, and let us love.
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
8 June 2008
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia
Bread of Life
When the price of wheat on the global market doubles in the course of six months, as it has over the last six months; in a world where perhaps as many as 3 billion people (or almost half the world population) live on less than $2 a day, you have to be careful about what you say about a piece of bread. You and I may be worrying about how we will fill our gas tanks this Memorial Day weekend, but many millions of people in the world must seriously wonder how they will fill their bellies and the bellies of the children.
It has been easy for us to more or less ignore the food crisis around the globe since, as Time magazine put it a few months ago, “no one is starving in rich countries.” Even here in Philadelphia, where we have an appallingly high level of poverty, there is much to eat.
On this feast of Corpus Christi – the Body of Christ – we find it easy to think of Jesus’ language as ‘just symbolic’ when he says “I am the bread of life,” because it is also easy for us to think of bread as ‘just symbolic.’ But to so many in the world, a dry little disc of bread is much more than a symbol; it could be the difference between life and death.
And this morning the church invites us to snap out of our easy complacency about both things: about the ready availability of a piece of bread, and the cheap symbolism of the Body of Christ. This morning the church reminds us that both things are of immensely more value than we generally recognize: that as symbols go, a piece of bread actually has a very high value indeed, since it could be the difference between life and death.
We easily forget that most of the people who listened to Jesus and who followed him lived closer to poverty than we do. His followers were not the well-to-do, well-heeled, or well-educated. They were more or less poor, simple men and women who would have noticed if the price of wheat had doubled in six months. It would have mattered to them. And it mattered to them when Jesus told them he is the bread of life. They remembered what the Scriptures said: that “man does not live by bread alone.” But they also remembered that God, nevertheless, fed his people in the wilderness with manna – he sent them bread from heaven.
So we are treading on dangerous ground when we try to say anything about what Jesus might have meant when he said, “I am the bread of life.” And we are treading on yet more dangerous ground when we take a piece of bread and call it the Body of Christ without truly considering the possibility that this Bread could be the difference between life and death. We take so much for granted in America that we find it as easy to take Jesus for granted as it is to take a loaf of bread for granted.
The Feast of Corpus Christi is actually uncomfortable for many because it seems a little weird to make such a fuss over these scraps of bread. It is hard for us to see the value of God’s gift in a little wafer of bread. But this is a failure of our imaginations, and a distinct lack of empathy for much of the world, who could easily recognize that there is nothing ‘just symbolic’ about piece of bread. It is nothing to be taken for granted. It could be the difference between life and death.
More than once in the gospels are we told that when facing a hungry crowd Jesus takes bread, blesses it, breaks it and shares it with those who are hungry. More than once are we assured that in Jesus’ hands a few insufficient loaves become enough to feed a crowd of many thousands. More than once does Jesus satisfy real hunger with what we might have dismissed as a ‘merely symbolic’ gesture: asking for bread, taking it, blessing it, breaking it, and sharing it.
And so in the church it is never ‘just a symbol’ when we talk about bread, when it is carried in its silver container from you to this altar, when it is placed here on clean linen, when – on your behalf – I take bread, bless it, break it, and share it with everyone here. It is a hopeful thing to take a piece of bread and ask God to bless it. It is a bold thing to break it with the intention of sharing it. It is a dangerous thing to put it in a monstrance and look at it, if it is indeed the Bread of Life.
For this morsel of bread is the measure of every other mouthful. This Bread deman ds to know whether or not we are content to parade around inside our beautiful church; whether our conviction that it brings new life stops at the doors to Locust Street; whether our commitment to the Bread of Life will end when it is locked up behind a golden door; whether we have begun to see how slender is the margin of difference in this world between life and death.
People in this world are clamoring to be fed. In the past six months – just the past six months – it has become measurably harder for millions of people to come by a loaf of bread, and the margin of difference between life and death has become more slender still. Have we any bread to give them?
We share the bread of life here every single day – most days at 7:30 in the morning and 12:10 in the afternoon – when we offer our prayers to God for a hungry world.
We share the Bread of Life every Saturday morning when we feed the homeless and hungry of our city.
We share the Bread of life four days a week in the Food Cupboard that provides staples to 200 families a month.
We share the bread of life when we ship hundreds of pounds of medical supplies to Honduras, as PJ Prest did earlier this week.
We share the bread of life when PJ leads a group of 13 people from Saint Mark’s and the Pennsylvania College of Osteopathic Medicine on a medical mission to Honduras in two weeks.
We can share the Bread of Life without even leaving home. By going to the parish website where you will find a link to the ONE campaign – which shares the Millennium Development Goal of eradicating extreme poverty in the world – those who live on less than $1 a day. There you will find ways of contributing or otherwise getting involved.
The Bread of Life is not ‘just’ a symbol. In the church we know that symbols have more meaning, deeper meaning than ordinary words, that they point us beyond ourselves to the places God would lead us. And because the Bread we share today is a symbol of the margin of difference between life and death, we are challenged to see if in sharing it we are changed by this Bread, by this Body.
And we are challenged to decide if we believe this Bread, this Body of Christ, was broken only for us, who feast so richly. For if Christ gave his Body for the salvation of the whole world, to feed us all, to give the whole world the holy food that is the difference between life and death, then who is going to carry it – in one of its several forms - to those in need if not you and me?
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
25 May 2008
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia