Honeybees and Haagen Dazs

From time to time I like to check in on the honeybees to see how they are doing.

As many of you know, some time within the past year or two a significant proportion of the honeybee population in the US and Canada began to mysteriously disappear.  Scientists are calling the phenomenon Colony Collapse Disorder.  Estimates are that anywhere from 10-35% of bees in this country have died as a result.  Interestingly, in hives that suffer CCD, the Queen Bee is still present, and there is sufficient food on hand to support the colony, but the worker bees simply disappear and the hive cannot be sustained

This summer concern about Colony Collapse Disorder has spread to the UK and other parts of Europe.  Here and abroad there are a lot of theories about the cause of this situation, but no definitive answers.  There are now those predicting doomsday scenarios that are linked to the decline of the honeybee population.  I’d say we have so many potential doomsday scenarios available to our imaginations that you have to be pretty narrow-minded to fixate on the honeybee problem.

But I do see in the colony collapses of the honeybee population a rough parallel of the life of the church.  After all, we know that most churches in western society or declining by at least 10 - 35% – certainly this has been the case for the Episcopal Church.  And I’d suggest that as with the honeybees, our decline has happened not from the top down – not because of the loss of the Queen Bee, if you will – nor because there is not enough food to support us, but because in so many places there simply are not enough worker bees to sustain the church.  Pews are half empty; 20% of the people do 80% of the work; the young are not incorporated meaningfully into the life of the church, and subtle but real collapse occurs.

Because bees live in complex, ordered communities, and because the well-being of the hive depends on each bee doing its part, and because bees produce something as sweet and wonderful as honey, and because their day-to-day activity benefits so many plants and other animals, it is easy to look on the bees with admiration.  Plus, there are no homeless bees, nor do bees go hungry (even in collapsing colonies).  Although they are well armed, as far as I know bees are not a warring species; they live pretty peaceably.  Bees have contributed no dangerous emissions to global climate change.  Their hives are not often plagued by domestic violence or gangs or drugs.  If only we could live like bees – what a wonderful place the world would be!

But the bees seem to be completely unable to do anything to prevent the mysterious collapse of their colonies.  This is probably at least partly true because the bees themselves are in no way responsible for the collapse of their own colonies.

Recently, the Haagen Dazs ice cream company began a campaign to promote awareness of the honeybee situation.  They are concerned because the bees are crucial to the pollination of almonds, pears, cherries, strawberries and other ingredients used in their ice creams.  I take it as a good sign that Haagen Dazs has gotten involved, and I intend to do everything I can to support their program!

To reflect on any similarities we may have with the bees, will ultimately lead us to reflect on our differences from the bees.  And if I may borrow a phrase from Saint Paul, the honeybees do not know what time it is, but we do know what time it is.

That is to say that the honeybees do not know that their lives hold either peril or hope.  They may buzz industriously about the hive and the orchard and the field, but they do so without any sense of destiny.  As far I as I can tell, they are no more able to reflect on their demise than they are able to reflect on the wisdom of their social order.  They may know if it is light out or dark, but they never truly know what time it.

We, on the other hand, have an ominous sense of time.  We measure it, watch, obsess about it, and worry when it grows short or goes by too fast.  And those of us who put our faith in Jesus have been given – whether we realize it or not – an acute sense of time which Saint Paul sums up when he says that the night is far gone, and the day is near.  

It is easy, however, for us to forget this.  It is easy for us – with all the doomsday scenarios available to our imaginations, and with the evidence of the general decline of the church and the world all around – it is easy to be confused about the time, and to think that we have become stuck in a kind of perpetual midnight.

But Saint Paul tells us that salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers.  What does this mean?  It means that God did not call the world into being just to watch its demise.  It means that God did not call his church into being just to watch us collapse.

Listen to a sign of this truth as Jesus teaches his disciples about reconciliation and forgiveness.  See what trouble he wants them to go to in order to learn to seek forgiveness and to give it.  He tells them to talk to one another alone, if that fails to enlist the help of one or two others, if that fails, expand the effort of reconciliation to include the church.  

So many people read this text like lawyers, as though it were intended to be an adversarial process.  (I think it’s entirely likely that a lawyer got his hands on the text before it was handed down to us, because it would have been more like Jesus to tell a parable than to provide bullet points for a multi-phase process.)  Like lawyers we can see the opportunity to win the case – to exclude the one we disagree with as a Gentile and a tax collector, and of no consequence to us.

But Jesus is a rabbi not a lawyer.  So even as he outlines a process of reconciliation that allows for the possibility of failure, he quickly encourages his students to see the benefit of getting along: “if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven.”  He might rather have said to them, “Don’t you know what time it is?  The time for discord is over, the night is far spent, the day is at hand. Where will you be when the sun rises?”

The demise of the honeybees would have been a good parable for him to tell to help us realize what time it is.  For in the church we have been caught up, lawyer-like, in courtroom dramas of our own making involving bishops and international conferences, witnesses and communiqués; schisms and standing committees.  And in the world, we are wallowing in the red/blue divide of the political season, hurling accusations, pitting party against party, claiming the moral high ground for change.  The political conventions may not have resulted in any colony collapse, but they can easily look like a very strange brand of disorder, indeed!  Perhaps the call for change from both parties has such urgency because it has seemed that our own collapse could be near at hand.  Perhaps we have forgotten what time it is; forgotten that our salvation is nearer at hand than it was before.

Here at Saint Mark’s, I believe that God is calling us to be a community that remembers what time it is, a people who know that the night is far spent and the day is at hand.  Which is to say that God expects us to be more than honeybees: to manage to live in an ordered society, to buzz about industriously benefiting others around us, to make something wonderful of our lives like honey – something like love…

… but when we see the tensions and challenges, and just plain scary realities of the world, God expects us to do something other than collapse.  He expects us to prevent our own collapse by gathering in his name – it would take only two or three together, so we are already ahead of the game.

Maybe he even expects us to be a little more like the people at Haagen Dazs – to take the initiative to say that it matters how we live together, to promote concern for the ways we have failed, and to gather together to find ways to agree to do better.

Because although the causes of colony collapse disorder among honeybees remains a mystery to us, the greater mystery is the unfathomable good news that we know what time it is: that our salvation is nearer to us now that when we first believed.  The greater mystery is the mystery of God’s love, displayed for us on an ugly cross as his Son gave up his last breath.

How did this one death conquer the power of death for all of us?  How did his sacrifice seal our fate with the God who made us and who will judge us?  How did those three short days in the grave define the meaning of every hour of our lives as well as the hope of eternal glory?  These are the mysteries of God’s love.  They beckon us to remember what time it is, to wake from a sleep of indifference, and to rejoice that in this very moment, as more than two or three of us are gathered together, Christ is in our midst.

And it is a mystery that if God has made us not simply so virtuous as honeybees, neither has he left us so imperiled as those bees.

I am praying that the honeybees will be restored to their good health, that their populations will increase and that they will continue to buzz around and do all the good work they do for our sake and the sake of the planet.

And I am praying for Haagen Dazs, oh yes, I am praying for Haagen Dazs to continue to do its good work – and oh, yes, to help save the bees!  Because I think we could use another sign to remind us what time it is – that the night is well and truly over and the day is at hand.

And I am praying that every time at least two or three of us are gathered in this place we will know that the risen Christ is among us, strengthening us, filling us with his gifts, and drawing us together by his love, then sending us out into the world as pollinators of that love.

And I am really praying that this parable of the honeybees turns out to be part of a larger parable: maybe it’s the parable of Haagen Dazs.  Because if it is, then we will have learned to reach out beyond ourselves to extend the blessings that God has given us.  Then we will save the bees and all the crops that depend on them.  And then we will not only have wonderful sweet honey from the bees… then we will have ice cream!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
7 September 2008
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

God's foolishness

Sometimes, when I am bored and channel-surfing, I’ll stop on the station which is showing a television evangelist preaching and watch for a few minutes. More often than not, the evangelist is preaching to thousands of people, wearing a $2,000 suit, and generally the message is something like this: “God has a plan for your life, and if only you will follow that plan, you will be happy, you will have good things happen to you, you will have good relationships, and you will probably have enough money, as well.”

It is not a bad message. It sells well. It draws in thousands and thousands of people. There is only one slight problem. The Scriptures are full of examples of people who follow God, who do the works that He sets before them, and their lives are shortened, they are mocked, excoriated, and isolated. Their lives get worse because of what God asks of them.

Which should, if we are being honest with ourselves, make us feel slightly uncomfortable. Somehow it doesn’t seem right, or fair that by being open to God, we get punished. “The way it should be,” we say to ourselves, “is that people should be rewarded for doing the right thing.” That is the way it works in the wider world. Why doesn’t it work that way with God?

There is, it seems, a different system of logic operating when it comes to the divine.

Think about our Gospel this morning. Peter is back to his old trick of attempting to fit both feet into his mouth. He was doing quite well there for a moment. Years of hanging around with Jesus have finally begun to penetrate the block of wood that Peter keeps where his head should be and finally last week we heard Peter get the right answer. After some subtle prodding from Jesus, Peter comes up with the answer that Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ of Israel, the one that they had been expecting for all those long years of bondage and exile. So when Jesus starts to speak to his disciples about what it means to be Messiah, about his coming crucifixion and death and resurrection, Peter in his new role as the head of the class pulls Jesus aside to give him a lecture.

Peter is looking for a political figure, a Messiah who can restore the fortunes of Israel and cast out the Roman overlords. He looking for a leader who can swoop in, restore the balance, right the wrongs, make his people great again.

(If this is sounding vaguely familiar, it should, we are in a charged election year, and Presidential candidates are set up as political, power saviors, much in the way that Peter wants Jesus to be.)

Jesus rejects that vision of Messiah, of Savior, utterly and harshly. He says to Peter fiercely: “You are not on the side of God, but of men.” He does not want to be the King of the Jews. “My kingdom is not of this world,” he proclaims while standing trial for his life, and indeed it is not. In rejecting what Peter and the disciples want for him, Jesus opens up and points to a great divide in the world. There is the way of humankind, the way of political structures, of wheeling-and-dealing, of success rewarded, of brute power and thinly veiled violence, and there is the divine way, the pouring out of innocent blood, the utterly foolish.

If Jesus was operating as a political messiah, he would have gathered a team of savvy advisors (not rough fishermen); he would have put together an exploratory committee composed of members of the Sanhedrin; he would have hired pollsters to take the temperature of the masses. He would have gone around, holding town meetings in the swing towns, not wasting time in that backwater Nazareth. He would have courted the religious leaders and the wealthy, and his sentences would be as subtly vapid and nuanced as ever a politician could make them, rather than the rough, raw rhetoric of “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”

Jesus will have none of running for Messiah. To run for Messiah would be to enter into the logic of the world, and he has not come to enter into that logic, but to destroy it.

There is a divine foolishness which winds through the world. It is not just Jesus, as he sets his face to Jerusalem and goes down to meet his ignoble death. There is a divine foolishness in choosing Israel, in choosing Moses and David, in choosing the prophets who begrudgingly speak God’s words, and all of this is foolish because God chooses the most inefficient and flawed people and families and tribes to bring about His purposes in the world. The divine logic is such that a carpenter becomes the Lord of All, death becomes redemption, failure the only means of triumph, poverty a blessing.

Even here, even today, we can see this divine logic at work. Even here, God chooses the foolishness of this place, of St. Mark’s to bring about that glory which is being revealed to us. It is foolish by the standards of the world to think that by feeding 150 people soup on Saturdays, we as a parish will have any effect on the societal structures which result in poverty, homelessness and hunger. It is foolish to think that what goes on at this altar, in complex and medieval ways, has anything to say into the iPhone, Internet culture which passes so swiftly outside our doors. It is foolish to think that by adopting St. James-the-Less as a mission, we can have any affect on the deep blights of racism, classism and poverty which inhabit areas of our city, our country and the world. It is foolish to think that by preserving this parish for the next generation we will have any effect in stemming the growing secularism which is creeping over our culture.

But we follow a foolish God. We follow a God who works in the small things, the inefficient places, the people who are difficult and unwise, the ludicrous, the pyrric, the more-than-a-little-bit mad. We follow a God who doesn’t take the path of least resistance, but the path of greatest resistance. We follow a God who was foolish enough to pick us and place us here, with all that we need to completely alter our city and our world, and who expects us to be foolish enough, to be mad enough to know that it cannot be done, that the obstacles are almost insurmountable and to radically, powerfully, set about doing it anyways.

Would that I could tell you, like the television evangelist, that we will be happy and wealthy and long-lived for attempting these foolish things that we are called to do. But I think it unlikely. Often, to do the works of God is to become a lightning rod and a stumbling block and an offense to many. Yet still we must do what we are called to, for in the divine logic there are only two options: lose our lives for God, or lose our lives trying to preserve and extend them. Either way, we lose our lives.

God chooses what is foolish to shame the wise; He has scattered the proud, he has exalted the humble and meek, He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away.

Let us be equally as foolish as God, as we work to speak into and bring about the redemption of the world. Amen.

Preached by the Rev'd Andrew Ashcroft

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia

August 31st, 2008

Brownstone

Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were digged…  For the Lord will comfort Zion; he will comfort all her waste places, and will make her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of the Lord.  (Is 51:1-3)


This fall, students from the Historic Preservation program of the University of Pennsylvania will be conducting a close-up examination of the brownstone exterior of our church.  Their professor told me that Saint Mark’s was a good place for the students to learn because our stone has at least one example of anything and everything that can possibly go wrong with brownstone.  I’m so glad we can be of help!

I once asked an architect what she could tell me about the maintenance of churches, like ours, made of brownstone.  “Well” she said, “I can tell you there’s a reason they stopped using brownstone to build buildings!”

Brownstone is soft and porous.  It is susceptible to the punishments of the weather.  It expands and contracts and flakes and scales.  If it isn’t laid properly, it crumbles fairly easily.  Maybe you could say brownstone is a lot like us: its weaknesses are pretty obvious.  And yet, 160 years ago they started building this church with it, and we are still standing.

The prophet Isaiah knew about the weaknesses of God’s people.  “Your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you.  For your hands are defiled with blood and your fingers with iniquity; your lips have spoken lies, your tongue mutters wickedness,” he said.  The prophet will go on to catalog the shortcomings of God’s children – at least one example of anything and everything that can possibly go wrong, it would seem.

Despite our magnificent achievements, we do not seem to be much better off, all these aeons later.  As a society, we are struggling in America not to make a scandal of just putting a roof over people’s heads and keeping it affordable.  We have made an almost catastrophic spectacle of the simple matter of shelter.  Is it any wonder that we have not managed to avoid wars, feed the hungry, educate our children very well, or reach some civilized common understanding about the rights of un-born children?  We are brownstone, at best.

The weaknesses of the church are, by now, so commonplace as to be jokes: - her hypocrisy, her pride, her facility at abuse, her sexism, her homophobia, her unseemly relationship to money.  Perhaps all churches should be built of brownstone – as reminders of who we really are: soft porous, prone to failure; the church can crumble fairly easily, too.

If the church and society can be compared to brownstone, so can each of us in our own lives.  We know our weaknesses and our failures.  We know, too well, how easily we crumble, how susceptible we are, not only to the weather, but to things like easy credit, temptations of infidelity to the ones we love, anger because it makes us feel righteous, cheating as long as we don’t think we will get caught.  In any given congregation, or perhaps on any given block in this city, there must be close to at least one example of anything and everything that can go wrong in a person’s life.  Brownstone.

To which the prophet Isaiah says, “Look to the rock from which you were hewn.”  He is talking about Abraham and Sarah.  They are the first crucial pivots in the story of salvation.  From almost the first pages of scripture – just after the splendor of God’s creation – we see how things are sliding away from God.  Exiled from Eden, Sodom and Gomorrah are not far away.  But with God’s promise to Abraham that he would make him a father of many nations, hope is kindled again.

Catholic minded Christians have heard in the prophet’s words a rallying cry for the papacy and a church that rests on the sure foundation of Peter’s confession of faith, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God!”  To which Jesus famously responds, “Simon, son of Jonah, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.”

For many of us, however, it may not be much consolation to look to either Abraham or to Peter as we contemplate the soft susceptibility of our lives to all that wears us down, and chips away at us from either the inside or the outside.  This, I suspect, is the case, at least in part, because we are largely exiled from the story of our own salvation.  Shaped, as we have been, by a democratic, consumer society, we have gotten good at convincing ourselves that we more or less shape our own lives and our future.  What is salvation to those of us who are masters of the universe – or at least those of us who can get whatever we want at Walmart?  Concern for what happens to us after death ranges from paying for funeral expenses to helping our kids avoid inheritance taxes, to deciding where we want our ashes scattered – and not much further than that.  The idea that we could or should be changed, somehow, in this life or the next, seems odd – unless it is a diet or an exercise plan we are talking about.

We may be soft and porous and susceptible to all kinds of dangerous forces, but we have learned to accept ourselves for who we are, flakes and all; we’ve learned to like ourselves.  Or at least we’ve learned to put up with our selves and our weaknesses.  We’ve learned to stop thinking that God has anything more in store for us than rolling us off the production line and sending us on our way.

And this is a problem.

Because God has more in mind for us than a program of historic preservation.  He can do more for us than halt our decay, repair our cracks, and replace the chunks that fall off.  We may be brownstone, but God hewed us from his own quarry, and it was his hand that first shaped us, no matter what’s become of us since.

And the story of salvation is the story of a God who sees in you and in me the building blocks of a new creation – the kingdom of God - this is why he has called us to be a part of his church.  He knows that with our wars, our weapons, our money-grubbing, our disloyalty, our selfishness, our abuse of one another, our ruination of the earth, and on an on, we have made a wilderness even of Eden, and a desert of what was the garden of the Lord.  And he knows that in our more honest moments we can see this too.  He knows that we are crumbling, flaking, scaling.  He knows how soft is the stone of which we are made – after all he first formed us out of the mud.

But God remembers why he made us – for love’s sake, in his own image, by his own breath, with his own hand.  And he never meant for us to be so worn down by the weather and everything else.  He never meant for us to stray so far from Eden, though he must have known that we would.  Which is why he hewed us from the Rock of his beloved Son – carved, perhaps, out of the same side that would later be carved out by a soldier’s spear.

And our salvation is this: to discover in our weakness the true rock from which we were hewn; to see, as we begin to think that we will crumble to bits, that we have been carved out of rock that is strong when we are weak, that sees light where we are covered in darkness, that brings healing where we can only decay, and that knows life where we could only die.

Look to the rock from which we were hewn, and see that though they beat him he does not crumble, though they kill him, he is not broken, though they lay him in a tomb, he cannot be held there.  And we thought we were brownstone!  Look!  Look to the rock from which you were hewn.  He is the rock that makes of Peter a prince of the church, even though he is brash, and sometimes stupid, and not sufficiently steadfast in his faith.  Look to the rock of Abraham’s faith – the rock on which Sarah finally bore a son, and on which Isaac was not killed.

See how soft and porous we are – you and I!  See how weakly we crumble in so many ways!  And look, look to the rock from which we were hewn, and see that we will be re-made into something better than our old selves.

Look to the rock from which we were hewn, and see how God is already fashioning us into a new people who are stronger than we thought we were.  See how he calls us to build a city within this city where the hungry are fed, where all find a welcome, where hope trumps despair.

Look to the rock from which you were hewn and see Jesus, and know that you are more than you believed you were; that when you crumble and all the kings horses and all the kings men could not put you or me back together again, he still can!

Look to the rock from which you were hewn and see how the church still stands despite her fragile stones.

My brothers and sisters, we are brownstones, it is true.  We are flaking, scaling, crumbling, weak.  To grow up is, in some ways, to learn that this is true.  But it is also true that this is not all we shall ever be.  Just as the brownstones of this church, laid properly and given care form something stronger, better, holier than they could be, so God has built us into a stronger, better, holier people than we could ever be, by calling us together in his church, and reminding us ever to look to the rock from which we were hewn.

God would have good reason to give up trying to build his kingdom with such wearisome stones as us.  But instead he calls us to look to the rock from which we were hewn.

Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were digged.  

Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you; for when he was but one I called him and made him many.

For the Lord will comfort Zion; he will comfort all her waste places, and will make her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the voice of song!

Lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look at the earth beneath; for the heavens will vanish like smoke, the earth will wear out like a garment, and they who dwell in it will die like gnats.

But God’s salvation will be for ever!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
24 August 2008
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia