One of the great developments in Western art was the use of graphic perspective in paintings: an innovation of the Italian Renaissance, starting in the early 15th century. Although I was never much a student of art history, I seem to have fixed in my mind the image of a Renaissance painting with a grid of converging lines superimposed on the picture itself to demonstrate the way perspective works.
In my imagination the painting supporting the perspective grid is a depiction of the Annunciation, perhaps by Botticelli. The Virgin stands, a little awkwardly, having risen from her prayers. Her outer robe is blue, but it is her rose colored gown that discreetly shows womanly hips and maybe even a hint of her already swelling belly. Gabriel kneels before her, lily in hand. The floor is tiled, its broad lines of grout suggesting the grid that my imagination is drawing on it. The angel has manly features but sports elaborate drag and gossamer wings. A window behind Gabriel opens out onto a scenic view that recedes along a river toward a distant city that I imagine must be Florence.
Among the various aspects of genius in a painting like this is the ability – enabled by the use of perspective - to draw the viewer into the scene; to make you feel like you are a part of what is happening, or at the very least an active observer. All those invisible lines of the grid guiding your eye, pulling you in, gluing your attention to this moment, this annunciation. I count two or three Christmas cards on my mantle this week with a view something like this.
And here we are, just days before Christmas, telling ourselves again the story of the Annunciation. Gabriel is a far better harbinger of Christmas for us than John the Baptist – so much less threatening, and better dressed, too. But this story of the angel’s visit to Mary is not just the introduction to the Christmas story that we are, by now, panting to tell and to sing about. The Annunciation has a power all its own that makes it worth stopping to tell and to linger in this moment to watch and to listen.
Up until now, what has Gabriel been doing – or all the other angels and archangels, for that matter? It has been too many generations to count since Jacob wrestled with an angel. And if God’s messengers have been busy, it must have been in rehearsals for Milton’s poem, still to come, because these messengers of God’s work in the world have not been much in evidence, according to the Scriptures. Indeed, the space between the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament invites us to wonder what God was up to. Why this gap in the record of his saving work in the world?
These days we wonder all the time about the gaps in God’s saving work in the world. We scratch our heads, wondering if the gaps aren’t longer than the periods of activity – which may be why people have found it so important to write it down when God seemed to do something wonderful: so much time might pass till the next episode, that everyone knew they would need a reminder of the last one. Many people today have just such low expectations of God: even if we believe in God, we don’t expect him to do anything for us!
It is impossible to know what expectations Mary had of God. I’m not sure that she had any expectations at all. I often imagine that Gabriel was going door to door in Nazareth - knocking and kneeling, lily in hand – and that Mary was the first person to let the angel in.
But here they are together, the angel promising that nothing will be impossible with God, the girl finding eloquence when merely saying “Yes” would have done. The image captured and re-captured by so many artists. And all these lines forcing our perspective into this moment…
Except that maybe the power of the Annunciation is not to be found most profoundly by looking into images of it. Maybe the power of the Annunciation is to be found in its perspective, when we dare to be virtually drawn into the scene; to stand in that space between Mary and the angel – their hands outstretched to one another –to occupy that space where the lines begin to converge, into which they draw us. Maybe the power of the Annunciation is only really shown to us when we dare to walk right into the painting and turn around.
And all of a sudden all those inward-leading lines of convergence are reaching outward. And the perspective is no longer directed in toward the beautiful tile floor, past this holy encounter, through the window and into Florence, or whatever city it is on the horizon; now we are looking out from the Annunciation.
And do we see how the perspective changes everything as the lines of convergence reach out to every corner of the world? Is there any place or any moment into which these lines of our new perspective cannot reach? Any dark secret or moment of despair? Any great triumph or small personal victory?
Do we feel as if perhaps it has not been so important that angels should be flying about doing something spectacular every hour of every day of every year for all time, in light of this one great moment of angelic visitation that reaches beyond its own time and into ours and every time?
Can we believe from this vantage point, as Mary did, that nothing will be impossible with God?
The Annunciation is, in a very real way, our point of view: the perspective from which the whole human story is told from this moment on, when nothing will be impossible with God.
So much of life is, in many ways, a matter of perspective. And after all, what do we have control of in our lives – not much – except the matter of our perspective? We can’t control the stock markets, the weather, or our children, just to name a few examples that might drive us mad if we didn’t adopt an appropriate point of view.
And this wonderful encounter between an angel and a virgin girl named Mary suggests itself to us, time and time again, as the only appropriate point of view for people of faith: a perspective from which nothing is impossible.
In these last few days before Christmas we have so much to do so much to worry about: not only Christmas preparations, shopping, and bills to pay, there are also jobs and houses and fortunes being lost, wars still raging, and new tensions building up between nuclear powers, loved ones who are sick or dying, or who have been recently lost to death, pain and sickness to learn to live with, not to mention disappointment. So much, so far beyond our control.
What better thing could we do to prepare for Christmas than to walk into this Annunciation scene, and turn around, and see what a wonderful point of view it is from here, with Mary’s eloquent Yes and the scent of Gabriel’s lily still hanging in the air. From this perspective even us cynical, modern, disillusioned people might almost believe that nothing will be impossible with God!
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
21 December 2008
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia
Waiting in the desert
Imagine, for a second, that you are standing in the middle of the desert. You’ve been dragged out to this God-forsaken place by your cousin, who is always off following some other itinerant preacher, or trying out the latest diet fad, or ordering what he thinks will be the next great product from the Home Shopping Network to shove into your Christmas stocking. He’s brought you out to see “the latest guy,” a man named John who is preaching and ritually cleansing people in the desert. John is quite a sight. His hair and beard are wild. He smells and he is wearing a camel hair shirt, which is possibly the only thing that smells worse than a real live camel. He lives on locusts and honey, which is certainly not the most complete, balanced diet in the world, and he is flirting with annoying the wrong kind of people with some of his ill-advised comments about King Herod and his new wife.
John is proclaiming what strange preachers often proclaim, the imminent arrival of God’s Messiah, who will right the wrongs of Israel, will finally makes sure that Israel isn’t constantly getting beat up by the bigger bullies all around, or used as a cross-roads between Africa, Asia and Europe. It is what the strange religious types have been yelling about for hundreds and hundreds of years, to anyone who would listen to them, that and sin and repentance, and John is no different in that either.He washes people to remove their sins, and he talks about the need to return again to faithfulness with God.And he draws a crowd, as strange prophet types tend to do. Some are there because they like the spectacle; some are like your cousin, always looking for the next big thing. Some are there because they feel some guilt in their life and would like not to feel it anymore, and sacrificing in the Temple didn’t make them feel any better, so maybe this John character will be able to.
What would you think, looking out on that desert scene? Would you think “John is right. The Messiah is coming soon. I need to prepare myself.” Or would you think what most people probably thought: “This guy has spent a little too long in the desert sun without a hat. He’s got a screw loose.”
John is not different from the other prophets throughout the years that preached to Israel, and were ignored and laughed at and mocked and killed. John is the last of them, but no different. They came to tell Israel about its sin and failure (which everyone loves to have pointed out to them). They came to tell Israel to return to faithful covenant with God, or risk destruction. They came talking about the Messiah long promised, long expected, who never ever seemed to arrive.
Like John they all looked, or at least acted more than a little crazy. And like John they found their mission, their calling excruciating and onerous and dangerous. Not easy, to be the mouthpiece of God. To have your fellow prophets killed, to be the last prophetic voice in the land. To have to declare to a people that you love and belong to (or at least used to belong to until you started prophesying) their sin and the coming wrath. Or even worse, to be sent to preach repentance to your sworn enemies, and then when they repented and God was merciful, to feel bitterly angry that God had not destroyed them. Or to write into your own life and marriage the infidelity of the people of Israel to their covenanted God, to take a harlot as wife, as the kind brutal symbol of God’s relationship with the people that he loved and pursued, and who constantly spurned and were faithless to him. Not easy being a prophet of God and you can tell when we read their words out in the midst of this place. They are simultaneously extremely disturbing and profoundly comforting. When they bring to us words of comfort, they are soft words, words about the end of our sojourn in the wilderness, about the ending of our trial and testing and punishment. They speak words of profound comfort – the restoration of what should be, the putting down of those who oppress us, the binding up of the sick, the lame and the poor.“Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.”
But when they prophesy against us – we feel and justly feel – condemned. For our pride, our faithlessness, our idolatry, our injustice, our greed. And even though their voices come to us out of the dust, and out of the complex politics of ancient near eastern kingdoms and wars, still it is hard not to blanch slightly when we hear them railing.
For they speak not only about injustice and idolatry and greed and sin (which is enough in itself), but about the shortness of our lives and the tininess of our beings before the abundant power and majesty of God.“All the people are grass,” says Isaiah, and “the grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.” And indeed it has proved true. Although Isaiah is long since under earth, and crumbled away to ashes, the words that he spoke, attempting to crystallize in language the compulsion that he felt from God, those words come down to us still.
And they resonate with us.Despite innumerable years and miles, still we feel their condemnation. We are not much different from Israel.Still we are an unclean people, faithless often to our God, full of sin and greed and idolatry and injustice.Spurning the poor, the widows and the orphans, and offering up our sacrifices at altars other than this one.
And still we are in need of God’s comfort, God’s grace, God’s mercy to break into the squalid little messes of our lives and restore us again. “Will you not turn again, O God? Will you not remember your people?” We need the words of comfort which the prophets offer us.
But most of all we need what the prophets spoke of and longed for and knew that they would never see, in their sad poignancy and in their waiting for God to do something, to do anything, to restore Israel; we need a Savior, a Messiah, that One expected from the foundations of the world.
And so John stands in the desert, looking into the distance, the last of a long line of prophets, doing what they have done for so long: waiting. Waiting for God to act.Waiting for the Messiah to arrive.Waiting for the people to get it together. Waiting in the midst of that moment of calm before the storm, of pregnant pause, of held breath and deep anticipation. Waiting for that secret moment, that mystery beyond mysteries, which will redeem all the suffering of the prophets and of Israel, which will restore the fortunes of Zion, make of the desert a garden and gather the lambs in God’s arms.He proclaims what the prophets before him have proclaimed: Repent, turn again to God, there is One coming who is more powerful than I. I am not worthy to untie his sandals.He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.
He says these things wearily, and looking into the haze of the desert, wonders sometimes, about the truth of the words which flow through him. Whether indeed that Messiah will ever come. Whether God will ever redeem his people and turn again to them. Whether the desert and the life of a prophet will get him before Herod does. Whether the waiting will ever end.
Somewhere, just over the horizon, is another man, a God-man coming out to meet John. And the path that John preaches, the path that he is attempting to smooth with harsh words and ritual cleansing, that path will stretch as straight as an arrow, from the moment that the God-man comes up from the water of baptism, directly to Jerusalem and a hill outside it.
John will be gone by then, of course. His head will be on a platter and the agony of being a prophet ended. But his eyes will have seen something that the prophets longed and waited for, against all hope. [The savior of the world, God’s messiah.]
For now, John simply looks out into the distant desert, and hopes and waits, and waits, and waits, for God to bring about his purposes.
Preached by the Rev'd Andrew Ashcroft
7 December 2008
St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia
Apocalypse Now
A man I know was rescued from one of the top floors of the Taj Mahal Hotel some time on Wednesday or Thursday. He is unhurt, according to the report I read in the New York Times, and going by the photo of him surrounded by Indian firefighters that has been circulating among the members of the group we both sing in.
The images of smoke and flames that leapt from the graceful, Indo-Victorian arches of the hotel were frightening enough to me; I can hardly imagine how my friend felt as he barricaded his hotel room door with the bureau. And I must say he looks surprisingly composed in the photo in the Times.
But then we have all gotten better at staying composed during times of crisis, haven’t we? We managed to stay composed enough to shop on the day after Thanksgiving, despite an epochal financial crisis, just as we managed to shop after 9-11. And most of us have been successfully inoculated from two wars that someone else’s children are fighting for us: see how composed we are after more than five years of war.
So composed are we that few people are worried these days by a passage in the Bible that threatens nothing worse than a darkened sun and moon (we’ve all seen eclipses by now), or stars falling from the sky, or the powers of heaven shaken (whatever they may be). In the Gospel we hear Jesus telling about an Apocalypse-Not-Yet, but we have been living with Apocalypse-Now since before the movie even came out. And the fires of the Taj must have amounted to a tiny Apocalypse for my friend and thousands of others, and the hundreds now dead, and the soldiers and firefighters and police who responded.
Today marks the beginning of a new church year. And the church has adopted a curious habit of peering over the horizons of time to the end of all things, as she begins each new year. We have no countdown, no new year’s eve celebrations. For the church’s countdown, we are reminded, is not just to the next page of the calendar, but to the end of all time, the judgment of all things, heaven and earth passing away. And we do not count down, we cannot count down, because we have no idea when it will be. We have tried to read the signs, as Jesus says we ought, but we prove to be inept at it, and frankly, we are skeptical that he knew what he was talking about.
Jesus’ discussions of apocalypse are among the most mystifying passages of the scriptures. But why should they be when a man I know who was singing a show tune with me three weeks ago, was delivered from his own little Apocalypse-Now by the mercies of a Mumbai fire brigade?
The grenades of Afghanistan, the IEDs of Iraq, the riot police of Bangkok, the refugees of the Congo, the Janjaweed of Darfur, the slain policemen of Philadelphia, the foreclosures of so many home-loans, the diagnoses that spell nothing but tears, the devastation of hurricanes, the ravages of forest fires, the melting of arctic ice, the warming of the planet – are these not all little apocalypses: little glimpses beyond the usual horizons of time that seem to signal something bigger and more frightening than just another year gone by?
We hear Jesus saying, “Keep awake!” But we suspect that he did not know how long the night of watching would be. And I know people who cannot sleep because their own little apocalypses keep them awake – and it does not seem to help them to be deprived of sleep.
I wonder if the visions of the prophets kept them awake; if they were scrawled down on scraps of paper in the middle of the night when sleep would not come again, and visions of apocalypse raced across their minds. I wonder if it was a sleepless night when Isaiah pleaded with God – who had showed him so much, but who remained out of sight while Israel suffered in exile:
Oh that you would tear open the heavens and come down! the way you did in olden days to show the world that you were in charge, and the nations would tremble at your presence! Oh that you would just do something!
The prophet wants to be able to read the signs in the sky: the darkened sun and moon, the falling stars, the powers of heaven shaken. These portents would be proof for him at least that God was at work, that some awesome, if frightening, new moment in time was approaching. And as he gazes, wide awake, out into the cosmos, searching for the signs of the almighty hand toying with the universe, he feels instead the gentle pressure of fingertips in the small of his back, or a palm pressing down on his chest hard enough to make him take a deep breath; he feels the stiff muscles of his shoulders kneaded by the hand whose attention seems (at the moment at least) not to be turned to the vast universe, but to him.
“O Lord, you are our Father;
we are the clay, and you are our potter;
we are all the work of your hand.”
What does it feel like to look for the hand of God at work in the awesome expanse of the universe and discover that he is at work on you, that your life is being molded and shaped by God’s hand, that God is deeply involved with and intimately interested in you?
Not to be flip, but I think that if I were barricaded in my hotel room while armed gunmen roamed the halls and flames leapt from the windows, I would be much more interested in a God who would hold me in the palm of his hand than in a God who was rearranging the stars. And the revelation that God’s hand shapes each of our lives is the counterpoint to the expectation that he also directs the forces of the universe; just as fellowship with his incarnate Son is the counterpoint to the worship of a transcendent Lord.
But it is hard for us to accept that we are the clay and God is our potter because that means we have to accept that we are not in control of everything. And it’s hard for us to accept that for the most part we are unfinished work while we live this life, and therefore prone to be re-shaped, refashioned, kneaded, twisted, pounded down, built back up.
Why does God treat us this way? Can the clay really ever know what the potter has in mind for it? Or could it guess what beauty or what usefulness it is destined for while it is being formed?
But clay never has to learn to trust its potter the way we must learn to trust God. And all these little apocalypses of our own lives and of our world put us right on the edge of trust in God – likely to go one way or the other. I imagine it’s hard to be agnostic when your heart is pounding and you are covered in sweat, your back pressed up against the bureau that you have heaved over against the door to keep the gunmen out. I don’t mean to suggest that God arranges these little apocalypses with the purpose of trying our trust in him, but I do think they end up having that effect.
And we have gotten so good at searching for meaning, so adept at understanding big things, so talented at unlocking deep, vast secrets that it is hard for us to see at moments like these that the work of God’s hand may be going on deep inside of us: in the small of our backs, or in the tension of our shoulders, or even in our shortened, shallowed breath, and our weakened, pathetic bodies as we begin to discover that no piece of pottery lasts for ever.
All of which may help explain why it is that we feel so inclined to pray for peace as a new year comes to us, and as we stand on our tippy-toes to peer over the horizons of time to try to see if the end is near – hoping that it is not, but sometimes feeling that the signs are awfully foreboding. We would settle for an inner peace that kept us centered, calm, somehow safe through all the little apocalypses that are going on around us; even as we hope for that greater peace that we suspect only God can accomplish and we wonder why he is so slow about it. Oh that he would take charge again and make something happen!
Scan the heavens, the earth, the pages of the papers for signs of God’s peace coming into the world and our lives. The signs are hard to see and even harder to read. Shout out our prayers for peace, and our frustration when those prayers come echoing back, apparently un-answered. Look across the horizon of time to see if God’s plan is yet view, if his peace is glowing yonder with the light of dawn. By all means, stay awake and watch for this coming, so long promised.
But in your watching, should you grow faint or bored or disillusioned, before you give up, stop and see if there is not the slightest hint of the gentle press of fingers in the small of your back, easing you, ever so slightly, of your burden. Or is there the weight of a hand on your chest, not pushing, just pressing hard enough to feel your heart race, to calm it, and to steady your breath? Or does he have you by the shoulders, stopping you in your tracks and trying, trying to get you to relax, to let go of the tension you insist on carrying in your muscles and in your bones?
And is he trying to re-shape you and me? Is he trying to mold us into people that more closely resemble his original design, his own image? Is he trying to fashion us into that beautiful thing that we can become when we stop trying to control everything?
And is that what we will look like beyond the horizons of time, when he has made all things perfect, all things new?
O Lord, you are our Father;
we are the clay and you are our potter;
we are all the work of your hand.
Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord,
and do not remember iniquity for ever.
Now consider, we are all your people.
We are all your people.
Pray, give us peace, at this moment, in each of our lives, and throughout the world. Give us peace in this new year. We are the clay and you are our potter. We are all your people. We are all your people. We are all you people.
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
Advent Sunday, 30 November 2008
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia