Eccentric fisher folk

It is ordination season, and the last of my seminary classmates are being ordained to the priesthood before Lent. I went down yesterday to Maryland for an ordination, the first where I got to lay hands upon one of my friends as a priest in the Church.

To say that this ordination was different from my own, here at St. Mark’s, would be an understatement. The church was built in 1989, rather than 1849. The choir was not as talented as our own choir (I will leave it at that). The ordinand was wearing Ferrari red three inch stiletto heels. There was a praise band in addition to the choir, and all the children had red ribbons to wave to symbolize the Holy Spirit that we were going to call down upon the ordinand. The procession was led in with a big Dove kite, and I haven’t seen that used here yet, but Pentecost is coming...

There were other little idiosyncrasies that I found amusing.After we processed in, I sat down in one of the front pews and realized that a child had left a ping-pong ball on the kneeler at the communion rail which he proceeded to retreive in the middle of the bishop's sermon.  After the clergy in my row went to the altar to receive communion, we returned to our row and I was greeted with the amusing sight of a dryer sheet lying on the ground in our pew. I’m sure that it had been inside someone’s robe and during the energetic singing (dare I say dancing) had worked its way down to the floor.“At least,” I thought, “we know that someone in this pew is wearing a clean robe.”

There were all sorts of little moments and gems of strangeness that kept hitting me, and I thought, how wonderful, how glorious that God calls us all, despite the little idiosyncrasies that we carry around with us: genuflecting and ping-pong balls, Dove kites and monstrances, praise bands and Aeolian-Skinner organs.

The first disciples were equally as eccentric, I have no doubt. They were fishermen and fishermen, then as now are a strange breed. Modern day fishing is a bit like a religion and a bit like a mania, and in some people can be both. But somehow I never imagine those disciples as modern fishermen – slightly obsessed and with poor fashion sense, I’ve always thought that fishing in Galilee during the time of the Gospels was less like fishing as we know it now, and more like working construction: manly men’s work – not for the faint of heart or body. And I have always imagined that some of the roughness from the long hours of physical labor remained with the disciples throughout their lives and comes out of the Gospels in little strange places. Think of some of the inane sentences that come out of Peter mouth, or his knee-jerk response in chopping off the high priest’s servant’s ear, or John rushing off to escape arrest with Jesus, having someone grab his robe, and streaking off through the garden, naked as the day he was born.

They were tough men, those fishermen, rough, brawny, full of laughter and slightly off-color jokes.They are the kind of men that you would like on your side in a bar fight, and perhaps they were in a few scrapes together, before they met Jesus. And what must they have thought when Jesus came up to them, and called them to follow him?What must Zebedee, that old tough fisherman have thought, or perhaps said and perhaps punctuated with some pretty choice words when his two sons dropped the nets they were fixing and rushed off to follow that Messiah and left him standing there?

There are several lessons in the Gospel this morning. The first is that, even though Jesus begins his ministry alone, almost immediately he begins to assemble a group of disciples. Fishing for people which is ministry, mission, the growth and spread of the Gospel, is communal work, rather like net fishing from a boat. It isn’t something that you can do very well, or very safely by yourself. You might, in point of fact, end up in deep water. Jesus begins to call his disciples, and he calls some interesting characters. Rough fisherman, a tax collector, a couple of fellows with some pretty radical, even revolutionary political views, women with dubious backgrounds, later even the zealously anti-Christian Saul; they all come to join the Rabbi as he trolled the alleys and plains of Palestine for people to reel in.

The second lesson that comes from the Gospel this morning has to do with the goal and purpose of fishing for people: the point is to catch more people. It isn’t to join the select few, the club of like-minded, homogenous people, but to find yourself in the pew next to the wildly idiosyncratic, the strange, the crazy. I always think about the story, still told, of the poet W. H. Auden, who was very faithful in going to mass in New York, at a church rather similar to St. Mark’s. I don’t know if he regularly didn’t get up in time, or if in some bohemian way he just preferred not to dress in a suit, but Auden would to mass in his dressing gown. As far as I know, no one ever said anything about his garb. Perhaps some of you will be inspired to try the same some Sunday...

Can you imagine those first gatherings of the followers of Jesus and the conversations around the fires that these “catches” of Jesus must have had? The tax collector, the sign and symbol of Roman oppression and the Zealots, anxious to cast off the Roman oppressors, eyeing each other from opposite sides of the ring of people. The sons of Zebedee, wondering how their aging father was making out on his own. The women who followed Jesus, risking disgrace or worse because they had left the protection of male family members and followed this Messiah.Strange and idiosyncratic. God’s rag-tag army of fisher-folk. The pews here are no different. They are filled with the incongruous and the slightly eccentric.

The third lesson is that Jesus, in calling his disciples is also calling his successors. He is calling those who will carry on the work, who will carry the nets to the far corners of the known world, will cast their nets into the ponds of the powerful, and poverty stricken, into the synagogues and into the land of Samaria; they will snare emperors and kings, courtesans and ladies-in-waiting, farmers, ironsmiths, stockbrokers, professors, the homeless, the needy, those who mourn. All of them will wiggle like fish out of the water, caught in a net of divine craftiness, and those caught will themselves go out, to cast nets into the pools of all the world.

It is not just the first disciples that Jesus calls and lands. We ourselves have been hooked. And the instructions of Jesus, to catch people, are not just for Peter and Andrew, James and John, they are words for us today.

For to be caught in that net is also to know that our calling, our journey has at its heart the need to speak about how we have been trapped. How the Divine fisherman has caught and snared us, how we have been brought to bay in the rapids after a long fight, or hauled up sharply by a wide net; and how, having been trapped, we seek also to ensnare those whom we encounter with that sweet knowledge that God actively hunts and pursues us, that divine nets are constantly set to catch us and that the Hound of Heaven is bellowing on our trail.

For the last lesson is equally good news. The work of “fishing for people” is something that Jesus teaches us to do. “I will teach you to fish for people.” “I will teach you.”This is not something that we do on our own, or with any special talents.It is not work that we need to flog ourselves into doing, or feel guilty about being unable to do. It is not work that we can aspire to do unless the great fisherman traps us. But trap us he does, and he traps us in all our glorious foibles and idiosyncrasies. He traps us, women and men of dubious faith, he traps burly fishermen and rough construction workers, poets in bathrobes, bankers, doctors, lawyers, and revolutionaries. He catches us in nets of long history, of family, of culture, of intellect and of emotion.

He catches and looks at us gasping there upon the beach, out of our element, straining to breath in this rarified air, and says simply“Follow me and I will make you fish for people.”

Go therefore, and fish for people. Tell them how you have been landed, stranded, hooked. And may our casts be wide and varied, may we haul in many a fish of all different shapes and sizes, and may we never lose sight of the glorious eccentric body, those of us who are the followers of the Way, who gather around altars everywhere to praise the One who has caught us in his divine net.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft
25 January 2009
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

God Calling

One of the hardest parts of being in love is waiting for the phone to ring. When love is fresh and new, you count the days or hours or minutes until she calls again. In long relationships, the waiting for the phone to ring might just as easily be about annoyance as anticipation - he was supposed to have called home by now. And at the end of life, as often as not it is a phone call that brings you news of a fall that you hoped he would not suffer, or the final word of her diagnosis, or, at last, a summons to the hospital bedside.

Waiting for the phone to ring – waiting for that call (whatever it is) – is a hard part of being in love. And you don’t even need to really be in love to know the hard part of waiting for the call. A crush, the mere possibility of love, is enough to keep you checking your cell phone every minute or so. Wondering if the call will come at all. Surely it will. How long will it be? Why is he waiting so long? Is it too soon for me to call? At least now, with cell phones, you don’t have to sit at home any more and wait by the phone… just in case!

There still exists in the world today the possibility that people like you and me have at some point in our lives fallen in love with God. Although we are extraordinarily shy about it, I think it is safe to take it for granted, in the privacy of our own church – that at some point, some how, in some measure, most of us have at least had a crush on God. And for some of us it has gone further.

But whether your love affair with God is in its first throes or its last, or someplace in between, perhaps you have had the frustration of waiting for the phone to ring, so to speak: wondering if God is going to call, if he will speak to you, or at the very least send you a sign from time to time.

And I think one reason some of us remain comfortable with the use of the male pronoun to speak of God is because, just like a man, he sometimes seems to have a bad track record of communication. Why doesn’t he call more often… just to talk?!

It is often assumed that the clergy do not suffer from a lack of communication with God. I am often asked, for instance, what my “call” was like – for that, indeed, is the word we like to use when we speak of the way God seems to have reached out to us to bring us into ordained ministry.

For better or worse, the story of my own call includes no fantastic dreams, no voices in the night, not a single instance of being struck blind on the roadside. But I can tell you that for a long time I wished that it had!

And the bald truth of the matter is that the clergy do not necessarily enjoy more open channels of communication with God than others do, even though we have been given the time to make ourselves available. Just because we wear the collar does not mean we are less likely to find ourselves waiting, and waiting, and waiting for the spiritual phone to ring, and wondering, when will he call?

The unmistakable theme of the readings today is the message, in the stories of Samuel and of Philip and Nathaniel, that God calls. We hear the marvelous account of Samuel’s dream - that reminds us that even though we might hear God calling, we often have trouble recognizing the call for what it is and figuring out how to respond. And we hear about Jesus gathering his disciples by calling out to them, “Follow me!” and by making the truth about who he is plainly evident even before thy have seen what he can do.

God calls. And every time this assertion is made – in the Bible or from the pulpit or anywhere else – it is paired with a challenge to respond. But I suspect that many of us never really bother to listen much to the challenge because we get hung up on its premise. Oh yes, we believe there was a time when God used to call. Yes, we believe that there were people God called. And we may even believe that for the especially holy (or at least those with enough time on their hands to sit around and wait) God may still occasionally call.

But the assertion that every preacher will want to make – that God calls you and you and you and you to follow him, to be disciples of his Son, to take a role in the work of building up his kingdom – this seems obligatory for the preacher and unlikely to the congregant. After all, you have been sitting faithfully in your pews – some of you in the same darn pews for an awfully long time; you have been waiting patiently, it’s not like you have been hard to find. If God calls, how come you have never heard the phone ring?

It is interesting to me that both of the stories of calls that we heard today involve intermediaries. Young Samuel has Eli, and although Philip hears Jesus call out to him directly, it is Philip who first beings word of Jesus to Nathaniel. True, Nathaniel is skeptical, but he would have no questions to be answered had Philip not sought him out and brought him word of Jesus. The fact of these intermediaries in hearing God’s call is a reminder that hearing is not always as easy as we think it is, and it sometimes requires help, and a process of discernment.

The circumstances of my own conviction of God’s call involved not just one intermediary but many, over a span of some years. And I could name for you at least a dozen people who I relied on, as Samuel relied on Eli, to convince me that I should pay attention to what I thought I might be hearing, and that eventually I should learn to pray, like Samuel, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”

And I know from experience that most of us need help discerning the sound of God’s call to us. It is seldom as obvious as a ringing telephone – (it’s more like having your phone set on “vibrate”). But why should it surprise us or put us off that we might need help in discerning God’s call? I would need help just to discern a birdcall, were I to stop and listen. Even if I were to go out to the woods just to hear the birds, without help I wouldn’t know what I was listening to. Why would it be easier to discern the call of God than it is to know what the birds are singing about?

Notice however, in our two biblical stories, that neither Eli nor Philip serves as interpreter. It is not up to these intermediaries to decipher messages from God. It is enough that they should help their charges turn their attention in the right direction, to learn how to ask the right question, to be in the right place at the right time.

And this morning, I get the sense that this is my task – as your priest and fellow pilgrim in faith, and as one who has himself fallen in love with God, but also known the utter frustration of waiting for the phone to ring, wondering why he does not call more often, counting the minutes, hours, and days since I last heard from him – that my task is to help you to discern: to turn your attention in the right direction, to know how to ask the right questions, and to know how to be in the right place at the right time to hear the call of God when it comes.

And my advice is simple – three things: Pray. Shut up. Go to church.

Prayer is our participation in the ongoing conversation that God has with his people. If you have something to say to God, you say it in prayer, whether it’s whispered or shouted. Put time aside to pray every day, even if it’s just a few minutes before you go to bed and you commend to God’s care the people you love and give thanks for the blessings of the day or complain about its annoyances. Pray.

Prayer is a two way street, and if you are going to learn to discern God’s call you will also want to learn how to shut up and listen. This is the hard part of prayer, when we try to keep our minds from wandering and learn how to listen for God. Learning how to meditate is a good way to learn to shut up and listen. But you can begin by just finding a quiet place and concentrating on breathing deeply and listening, listening, listening. And if you should fall asleep, don’t worry, perhaps God wants to talk to you in your dreams anyway. But by all means, shut up and listen.

Of course it sounds self-serving to say that you should go to church, and a bit beside the point, since you are obviously here. But sometimes we need to be reminded why it’s important that we are here. This parish community is founded on the notion that God has called people to gather together in this spot on Locust Street, to sing and pray and praise his name. The stones are stacked into walls here and the glass painted with pictures because of the conviction of successive generations that God has something to say and to do among the people who gather here. And it makes sense to come together in a place where God seems reliably to be found – especially in a community that carries out like clockwork every day Christ’s command to break bread together.

It’s certainly not impossible to hear God call if you don’t go to church, but at our best we are meant to be a community of those who have practiced listening for God’s call; to help one another through the waiting times, and to teach each other how to discern the sound or the feel of God’s voice. Go to church.

Pray. Shut up. Go to church. That’s my advice if you want to hear God’s call.

And the assurance I give you is this: that God does call, that he is already calling and will never stop calling you or me. Jesus’ call to follow him is a call to daily conversion, learning how to love one another as he loved us. And it is a call that never stops.

And the truth about our anxiety, when we fall in love, about waiting for the phone to ring, often has very little to do with the message of the call itself, and more to do with its latent meaning, normally some variant of, “Does he love me too?” Early on we fear that our love may be unrequited. Throughout the middle of life we fear that love has grown so stale that it’s beyond hope. And late in life we fear that first dementia and then death will rob us of the one thing that can’t be replaced in life. In all these stages of life we worry that our love will be met by nothing at all in the one we love so much.

So it is scary to think of falling in love with God, who has a history of sometimes being inscrutable. If I love him, will he love me too? And how will I know.

And the irony is that we know how much God loves us because he never stops calling us to his side, never stops beckoning us to take up our work in the building of his kingdom. He never forgets our names, or loses track of us, and he never forgets to call.

And although we live in a world where even the simple things we can do to better discern God’s call have become challenges, it remains the fact that these are pretty easy things to do: Pray. Shut up. Go to church.

And if you should happen to feel – even just for a moment – that maybe God is trying to get to you, to whisper softly in your ear, try this, just say to him, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
18 January 2009
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Guarding Jesus

If I had a pocket watch I would hold it up for you to look at, and I would begin to swing it slowly back and forth. If I could, I would put you in a trance, or better yet, I would put you to sleep, so that, like an angel of the Lord, I could speak to you in your dreams. But then, I am a preacher in a pulpit! Of course I can put you to sleep… if I just keep talking, and talking, and talking. And I can already sense you getting sleepy, oh so sleepy. Your eyelids are feeling heavy, and you want to go to sleep, sleep, sleep.

I have come to speak to you in your dreams in order to bring you a warning, like the angel did for Joseph. You must take the Child, Jesus – at whose birth we have just rejoiced - and you must flee, for there are those who are about to search for this child to destroy him. And you must guard him; you must keep him safe.

This is a jarring dream, I know, because it had seemed all along that once Christmas had come and gone you would leave Jesus here – right there in his patch of straw, behind these strong walls and these locked doors. There are men in black here to protect the child: we are paid well enough and housed nearby in order to look after him while you are away. We are here to keep him safe. Why should you be saddled with this responsibility? And really, why are angels always causing such drama? (Gloria! Fear not! You must flee!) What is there to be frightened of? Surely Jesus is safe and sound in the world?

But the dream reminds us that Jesus is never safe. And I have come to warn you in your dreams.

At least three things threaten Jesus every day. Fear. Injustice. Selfishness.

It was fear that caused Herod the king to strike a deal with the Wise Men to bring him word about Jesus. And it was fear (when those Wise Men saw through him and did not return with the information he wanted) that sent Herod into a rage that left all the male babies in Bethlehem dead by his orders. What was he afraid of? The same thing we are afraid of: losing control. (As if we are always really in control.)

Fear reached its recent apex on a September morning seven years ago, attacked by another fear (masquerading again as rage), and it has cowed us into decisions that perhaps we shall some day regret.

It is fear that drives members of the same church (like our Episcopal Church) to look for conflict where there need be none, and to create it when they cannot find it. It’s the fog of fear that makes walking away from your brother or sister in Christ look like a better idea than simply disagreeing with him or her.

It’s fear that keeps us glued to the financial news; fear that thinks keeping a handgun in the house (loaded) for safety’s sake is good idea; fear that is still awkwardly, if silently, uncomfortable in the face of someone who looks different or darker than you.

Fear insists that it is always right and will tolerate no back-talk. Fear is jealous, and green with envy, too.

Fear cannot rear a child and could never produce milk to feed it; it crushes things that need to be cradled in warm arms. Fear wants no part of the baby Jesus, whose tiny hands and little heart have no idea how to instill it in others. And since this child comes to us again and again as a baby, year after year, threatening to undermine fear, fear would gladly find this baby and destroy him. But you must keep him safe.

Fear often leads to injustice. In our society, injustice is not so much a problem in the courthouse as it is in the statehouse, or the schoolhouse, or the hospital, or the street corner.

Injustice roams the halls of the statehouse when I assert that your rights can only come at the expense of mine and then I attempt to legislate this zero sum game.

Injustice roams the halls of the schoolhouse when countless kids in this city (and may others) are subjected to a pitiful education that is still separated from a diverse society, and entirely unequal to the needs of the child or the challenges she will face in the world.

Injustice roams the halls of the hospitals when the ER becomes the clinic of last resort for millions of uninsured – a disservice both to those who need care and those who give it. It lingers on the margins of irrational cost structures, and with the stigma of a pre-existing condition, driven by an insurance industry whose mission is not to ensure the best possible care.

Injustice hangs out on street corners wherever young boys (and girls) are coerced or cajoled into joining gangs; where drugs are pushed, and used; and where the mentally ill – with no place else to go and no one else to look after them – keep warm over the steam vents.

Injustice despises a child, whose patent innocence reveals the disfigured visage of injustice for what it is: ugly and cruel. But you must keep the baby safe.

Fear and injustice thrive in the company of rank selfishness. For it is selfishness that helps us rationalize them both. After all, what’s in my best interest, is in my best interest. Should my best interest require killing all the babies in Bethlehem, I ought to at least be allowed to consider the possibility.

But mostly selfishness is so much more mundane. That purchase, that drink, that puff – none of which has done me any good, but which I wanted and enjoyed, dammit!

Selfishness delights in stinginess and calls it thrift – whether it’s money or affection, it’s parceled out oh so carefully. Selfishness dresses up greed as its just desert, when there is nothing just about it. Selfishness disregards the other for no other reason than, well, it is not me, and let every man fend for himself, and then calls this self-centered stature some kind of liberty.

Selfishness resents babies, who start out this life entirely self-centered, but who so regularly grow in respect, care and concern for others. But you must protect the child.

And I am here in your dream to warn you. These three, at least – fear, injustice, selfishness - have heard that a child was born in Bethlehem. And they would like to find him to destroy him. Because this baby’s cries bring to our ears echoes of the antidotes for fear, injustice, and selfishness: Compassion. Justice. Love.

This little baby will grow up to teach that God’s righteousness is always tempered by his mercy; that his anger is nothing compared to his loving kindness. He will grow up to embody the Golden Rule by actually doing unto others as he would have them do unto him – even if they are tax collectors or sinners or harlots or worse.

His compassion is known when the sick are made well, the poor are given cause to rejoice, the lame are able to walk, the blind receive their sight, and even when the wine runs out at a wedding. Jesus brings compassion not just to those who deserve it, but to any who ask for it by truly seeking forgiveness of past wrongs. And he must be guarded against those who would come for him.

This baby’s cries for justice ring out in every statehouse, schoolhouse, hospital, or street corner, or anywhere that ugly cruelty threatens to prevail. His innocence is a rebuke to those who abuse power for their own gain, to the wealthy who exploit the needs of the poor, to the privileged who simply don’t care about those who have less than they have.

His justice is not blind; it is eagle-eyed in its search for the poor, the needy, the hungry and those in want, to whom justice is so often denied. He must be kept safe from those who would come for him.

This baby’s love disperses the gloom of selfishness the way the rainbow fills grey heavens with light. It promises to overcome selfish despair. It looks beyond its own needs and prejudice to the one who lies bleeding in the road and it sees a neighbor there. His greater love willingly lays down his life for his friends.

His love is not jealous or boastful, not arrogant or rude, not irritable or resentful; it does not selfishly insist on its own way. Jesus’ love rejoices in the right; it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. His love never ends – but he is still just a baby, and his love depends on you and on me to be protected from the tyranny of selfishness.

So now, while you are sleeping, listen carefully. You must take the child with you when you leave this place. You must wrap him warm and tight; cradle him in your arms.

If you believe me, if you remember this dream when you awake you will do everything you can to guard this child Jesus, which means that you will not leave him here: you must take him with you when you go.

Because how can you know that he is safe otherwise? Fear, injustice, and selfishness have been known to seep even under the cracks of the doors of the church. And the fact of the matter is that the care of this child cannot be delegated only to the men (and women) in black (who have also been known to fall down on the job, it must be said).

Can you see and hear, in your dreaming, why this baby needs you to care for him, to hold him, protect him, keep him safe? Do you realize that lives depend on it?

And will you heed the warning of this dream the way Joseph did?

You do not have to look far to see the forces of fear, injustice and selfishness in the world. You can hear them scurrying around like mice in the night, and roaring past your window like heavy traffic in the daytime.

But you may not have realized how they conspire against this child whose birth brought joy to the world.

And you may not realize that his mission of compassion, justice and love depends a lot on you and me. You may not realize that this baby could easily be left right there in his manger to suffer the consequences of the fates of fear, injustice and selfishness. You may not realize that every time you hold him he strengthens you for the ministry of compassion, justice, and love.

Which is why I have put you to sleep: so I can speak to you in your dreams with this warning. You must take the child with you and go. You must keep him safe, guard and protect him for the sake of God.

And when you awaken, you must remember this dream, when I snap my fingers, you must recall what is at stake. And you must take the child with you. And go.

[SNAP]

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
4 January 2009
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia