The recent celebration of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday predictably spawned a round of heated debate about the conflict between science and religion. The anniversary prompted the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster (a serious, and I think a wise man) to write in a London paper that “science is a good friend to my faith…. One of the things that mars our culture is the fracture between faith and science. It impoverishes our inquiry into the realities that make up our life and our world. This is a false opposition.” Amen to that!
Last week I heard various people confidently assert that Darwin, the great scientist, was either an ardent and faithful Christian or a confirmed atheist. A cursory check reveals that neither claim is quite true. Darwin, who began his university training for the ministry, seems to have been on a journey, spiritually speaking, in which his thinking changed (let’s not say it evolved). And even when he continued to be attracted to the moral suasion of the New Testament, he seems to have found some biblical claims hard to accept – especially claims of the miraculous. It’s not at all clear, however, that he regarded his own scientific work as a foundation for an argument against the existence of God, in fact it seems unlikely that he did.
But many’s the clever writer with a book deal these days who would build on a foundation Darwin never claims to have laid. That the archbishop of Westminster feels compelled to publicly disavow a conflict between science and faith is more a commentary on the state of public discourse in the twenty-first century than it is a reflection of any new developments in the world of religion. A great many of us already subscribe to the worldview the cardinal claimed. I suppose we might as well be grateful for him putting it so concisely.
If it’s the fantastic and unscientific that you are looking for, today you have come to the right place. First we heard about the prophet Elijah’s magnificent transportation to heaven in a chariot of fire.
And if that is not enough for you, Saint Mark offers his story of the Transfiguration. High on a mountaintop, Peter and James and John are walking with Jesus when, all of a sudden, he is transfigured: which we understand to mean that his whole person shone with God’s glory and his clothes became dazzling white; and the figures of Moses and Elijah appear to be talking with him. And no sooner has this amazing moment passed that a cloud passes over the mountain and overshadows this small party, and a voice is heard from the cloud “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” And then, suddenly, all returns to normal, and Peter and James and John are alone again with Jesus, who suggests that maybe they just keep all this between them for the time being.
Ever since we watched the Wise Men ride up to the stable and lay their gifts at the child’s crib, the church has been taking note of these moments of epiphany – which can be defined as “a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something.” Over these past weeks our Gospel stories have told us of Jesus’ baptism (when a voice from heaven first proclaimed “This is my Son”); of how Jesus calls disciples who follow him, even though they know nothing of him yet; of how Jesus casts out demons (who already know who he is); of how Jesus heals the sick; and now this – this transfiguration on a mountaintop, all this light, this glory, this dark cloud, and this voice that never identifies itself because it need not do so. “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”
All of which presents to the skeptic an opportunity to defy the faithful with two simple words: Prove it! Just try to prove any of it!
And this demand for proof appears to be a problem. What can any of us say to prove these stories, these claims we make about Jesus? How can our certainty about the origin of that voice ever rest on anything more than circumstantial evidence? How can we prove anything about God or about Jesus? I mean, we are Episcopalians – we don’t know the Bible that well (which is where we suspect the proof lies), and you can’t prove anything with a hymnal (which is traditionally the Episcopalian’s favorite religious book).
Those two words – prove it – leave us cowering, or at the very best changing the subject and offering to pour drinks. We don’t know how to prove anything about our faith, which is a bit of a nuisance, and which is why we resort to the rather weak claim that we’d rather not talk about it because faith is personal. (Tell that to the martyrs who suffered and died for their faith.)
But the real problem is not that we have not learned the secret proofs of our faith, locked deep in the pages of the books of the Bible we’d generally opt not to read. The real problem is the demand for proof in the first place: the very notion that something as magnificent and mystical as the transfiguration (or the incarnation, or the resurrection) is awaiting proof. The problem is in thinking that these mysteries are of the type that Encyclopedia Brown, or the Hardy Boys, or Nancy Drew, or Jessica Fletcher or Monk might have solved by simply following all the right clues (most of them hidden in their Bibles). The real problem is that when Moses came running back to his house, out of breath, and with a stubbed toe, his face flushed and warm, and said that God had just spoken to him from a burning bush, and his neighbor looked at him with his hand on his hip, and one raised eyebrow, and said derisively, “Prove it,” there was nothing Moses could do.
The booths that Peter wants to build on the mountaintop are an impulse to give in to that demand – like stringing up yellow crime scene tape through the trees in the clearing on the mountainside to say, “this is where it happened: right here!” Peter wants to be able to prove it, or at the very least identify the spot, come back and look for clues, maybe find some DNA. And as if to underscore the uselessness of this plan, the cloud rolls in, and the voice thunders out: “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”
And all Jesus says to them is that they should say nothing, which is to say that there is nothing to prove.
There is nothing to prove because these moments of epiphany are sudden, intuitive moments of perception of something real: God making himself known in a burning bush, at the Jordan River, by the call to “follow me,” to the demons he casts out, by making a sick mother in law well, and standing transfigured by all the glory of God with his friends and with Moses and Elijah, and that voice declaring: “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him.” What were they going to say, who were standing there and saw the glory, heard the voice? “Prove it”? What is there to prove?
In a wonderful poem, too salty, frankly, for me to quote in its entirety, Wendell Berry addresses the flip side of this challenge, turning the demand for proof around to those who reduce Darwin’s science and the mysteries of the cosmos to a discussion of mere chance:
In the beginning something by chance
existed that would bang and by chance
it banged, obedient to the by-chance
previously existing laws of existence
and banging, from which the rest proceeds
by logic of cause and effect also
previously existing by chance? Well,
when that happened who was there?
Did the chance that made the bang then make
the Bomb, and there was no choice, no help?
Prove to me that chance did ever
make a sycamore tree, a yellow-
throated warbler nesting and singing
high up among white limbs
and the golden leaf-light, and a man
to love the tree, the bird the song
his life long, and by his love to save
them, so far, from all the machines.
By chance? Prove it….
For me, Berry’s defiance makes it easier to see how unnecessary it is to feel defensive in the face of those who say of my faith, “Prove it.” If you and I have been to the mountaintop with Christ (even metaphorically speaking), if we have seen that light, and heard that voice, then what is there for us to prove?
So Jesus calls us, week by week, up this slight mountain of only a step or two, where we hold him in the small clearing of our hands, and our hearts; and the tiny disk of flour and water is transfigured, and the chalice glows with other light. And from the cloud that we hadn’t even noticed, a voice rings silently but distinctly in our ears, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him.”
And there is nothing to prove at all. Either you have seen it or you haven’t; either you hear it or you don’t. Either you will follow when he calls or you won’t because, you say, you never heard a call. OK, fair enough. Either this is real or this isn’t, these moments of epiphany when the light is bright, and all is transfigured, and you know, you just know, that there is nothing to prove.
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
22 February 2009
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia
Touching the leper
I know a priest who was called to the beside of a man who was dying of AIDS, in one of the first cases of AIDS in a western state. The man was the son of parishioners, and he had come home from New York to die. This was during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, and little was known about the transmission of AIDS. She gave him communion, and last rites, and then the man died. She didn’t think much about the fact that there was such tremendous fear and stigma about AIDS at the time, until at her parish the following Sunday, she said mass, and invited the people to communion, and no one came forward to receive. They were afraid. She had been in contact with a man who had died from a new, little understood disease, and there was incredible fear about taking bread and wine from a priest who had been that close to HIV/AIDS. She had to do a great amount of teaching to convince her parishioners that AIDS didn’t spread by the chalice, or touch.
I always think of that fear and stigma when I read the stories about leprosy in the Gospels. Leprosy was the equivalent in the ancient near east. No one had contact with a leper. They were, instantly, removed from every social sphere. They couldn’t worship in the synagogue, they couldn’t live with other people, they couldn’t participate in the economic system of the time; who would take money from a leper?
As so often happens, when we read the stories of the Gospels, we need to be reminded that a great part of their power and shock-value comes from the fact that Jesus is in these settings at all: that he speaks and teaches women, Gentiles, tax collectors, sinners, and yes, lepers.
So listen once again to the story of Jesus and the leper.
The man begging, full of desperation and fear is down on his knees in supplication. “If you choose,” which is a way of saying “If you aren’t a charlatan, or a fraud; if you aren’t like the couple of quacks who would actually consent to talk to me, if you are who you say you are,” you can heal me.
How many times had he been down on his knees, or hoping against hope that this doctor, or that teacher would actually speak to him, this dip into the Dead Sea or the miracle cure would restore him?
The man wasn’t simply ill or in physical distress. His condition was a sentence of social death, of complete isolation and humiliation, of complete stigma and total dehumanization. To have leprosy was to be unclean, to be the living walking equivalent of a dead body, to make anyone who came into contact with you unclean for days. It meant being excluded from the village, from all human touch and conversation, to be utterly and permanently alienated from family, town and tribe.
Indeed, this man had nothing to lose. He’d lost everything already. A friendless corpse, orphaned; permanently having to announce his own demise to those who otherwise might come into contact with him: “Unclean! I am unclean!”
In hopeless and utter desperation, from the edge of insanity and a place of rash and pyrrhic despair, he approaches the new teacher that has been shaking up the countryside. And there are such strange rumors about him, that people are made well, those distressed are made whole, and that his words are words of strange comfort and peace.
“Probably,” the man says to himself, “probably he won’t do anything. Probably his face will just twist with disgust and fear, like everyone else does. Probably nothing can be done and I will go on my way, alone again.”
The Gospel records Jesus’ pity. But the Greek here can also be translated as “anger,” which gives a greater nuance to the story.Jesus is angry, not with the man for approaching him, but at the situation: angry that the man is sick, angry that he is so completely cut off from his friends and family, angry that the man is driven to such desperate straits.
Jesus then does an amazing, stunning act. Not only does he allow the man to approach him, to speak to him, to make him ritually unclean, which might be enough for this poor lonely man, but Jesus doesn’t stop there. He reaches out his hand, in pity and anger, and touches him.
He sets all the cultural fear, horror and revulsion on its ear (and Jesus must have felt some of that horror himself) and not only does his touch bring physical healing to the man, but it is the first human contact that he has had in God knows how long.
I imagine him, kneeling there, the tears creeping out beneath his closed eyelids, completely and utterly stunned at that first touch in so long – not even thinking momentarily about the years of loneliness and desperation.
Is it any wonder then, that the man disregards Jesus? That, instead of finally fulfilling the process that would lead to his restoration into the social fabric of his time, instead of that, he goes out to speak with passion and amazement about this rabbi who not only healed him, but touched him, who not only spoke to him and allowed his approach, but flashed in anger at his plight.
The stories in the Gospels are flashes, brief flashes on our retina of the Incarnation; of what it means that God shares our life with us. The reason that we read the Scriptures ever week is to have these glimpses of God’s work, and to make the narrative of God’s coming into the world part of our own story and narrative, to graft our stories into the story of God’s love and action.
This is the icon that we are given, the image of God-come-down-to-earth that the generations who went before us have handed on to us. God made flesh looks not just to the powerful, wealthy and saintly but to the outcast, the pariah, the sinner. And the icon of Jesus points continually to the shocking ways in which God works.Jesus speaks to foreigners, touches lepers and teaches women. St. Francis, following his God, takes a page from that book and kisses the leper on the mouth.
It isn’t just the leper or the outcast whom Jesus heals, but everyone, children, the aged, all those who come to him in faith, or attempting to have faith, he teaches, touches, welcomes and heals.
Even so, in our own day, Jesus comes into our lives and the lives of the disposed with healing, and his coming is not preconditioned on our getting ourselves together but on his love and mercy, and the flash of anger because of our suffering. And how he heals us: he heals our sadnesses and our hurts, our longings and the woundedness that is at the heart of us. He comes down into our midst every week, scattering his presence like wafers and his compassion like drops of wine.
This story from the Gospel this morning is also a story about what our response to that unbelieveable, luminous touch of the divine in our lives should be. We will want to shout it from the rooftops; we, feeling the glory of our own healing and redemption will be more and more compelled to tell the story of the amazing rabbi, who allowed us to approach, and even spoke with us, and in his compassion and mercy touched us and made us well.
We will want people to know that he has come down to our midst, our God and King, our Savior and Messiah. He works here still, speaking into our hearts and minds, grafting us into the great story of salvation, healing our wounds and whispering to us of the sadnesses and hurts around us. That we may share with those around us the wonder of the teacher who stretches out his hand in compassion and heals.
Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft
St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia
15 February 2009
Control
A couple of years ago, toward the end of his life, the great economist John Kenneth Gailbraith wrote the only book on economics that I have ever read. It is 62 pages long – which explains why I read it. In it, he writes about the delusion of the effectiveness of economic policy dictated by the Federal Reserve. He says:
“That nothing important results [from such policy] is overlooked. The belief that anything as complex, as diverse and by its nature personally important as money can be guided by well-discussed but painless decisions emanating from a pleasant, unobtrusive building in the nation’s capital belongs not to the real world, but to that of hope and imagination. Here our most implausible and most cherished escape from reality.”
I wonder what the old man would say about our current economic jam and its various bailouts, stimuli, and other fixes.
One of the underlying themes of Gailbraith’s short book is the idea that we are kidding ourselves if we think we are in control of things, but that we have come to believe that kidding ourselves about this is a good idea. That this self-deluding posture leads us down many dangerous paths, to some very costly and unwise decisions, does not seem to provoke us to evaluate our presumptions and decisions, or to make better choices – so much do we have invested in our way of thinking, our way of life.
Our human condition is fraught with the struggle for control of ourselves and the world around us. The Bible asserts this in its first chapters as the easy life of paradise is interrupted by the decision to take control of the only few square feet of the garden that God had fenced off. Cain’s murder of his brother is the result of his frustration that he cannot control God. And so on, and so on, and so on.
To be human is to reach for control of the things around us, even if we are over-reaching, and even if these things are fundamentally beyond our control. We even try to control the weather, with methods like seeding clouds to make it rain. And in our current economic crisis it may be that the most painful aspect of it – even more painful than the harsh reality of a hundred thousand newly unemployed people just last week – is the painful fact that despite the billions upon billions of dollars that was have already thrown at the situation, and the billions more that we are preparing to hurl, apparently events are simply out of our control.
Of course the fact of our inability to control economic events is rivaled only by the pain that comes from realizing that we cannot always control our health, or the passage from life to death.
A friend lies very sick with cancer, much too young. And cancer, still scary, is not what it used to be, because we have gotten so good at beating it, or at the very least slowing it down. But cancer is astonishingly disrespectful of our desire to control our bodies, our lives, our destinies. The relentless division of cells doesn’t give a damn about what we want, or hoped, or who we love. Like other diseases, cancer confronts us with our lack of control - and we hardly know what to do when we cannot grab the steering wheel of our lives and determine the direction they take, no matter how hard we wrestle for it.
Nowhere is this struggle more profound than at the end of life, when our practiced control makes it all but impossible to do the one simple thing that needs to be done and just unplug all the mechanisms of control that maintain the delusion that we are in charge.
Now Jesus comes walking into the synagogue. Saint Mark tells us that he taught the people, who were astonished because he taught as one with authority. Frustratingly, Mark does not tell us what Jesus taught. He only tells us that, weirdly, a man with an unclean spirit appears, out of nowhere in their midst. And believe me, this is unsettling because it makes everyone in the synagogue feel as though things are not under control.
I actually know, I think, what this feels like: to have someone who is off his meds, ill-behaving, loud, delusional, and uncooperative show up in church. I would fall short of diagnosing an unclean spirit – but perhaps only just a little short. You are knocked off balance, because you don’t know what he is going to do (it’s almost always a man), and you don’t know what you should do. Things are out of control. And, boy, is that uncomfortable, to say the least. (The best thing that ever happened to the rabbi of that synagogue is that the man with the unclean spirit ignores him. It’s Jesus he wants to confront, and so he does.)
And Jesus takes control. He has authority. He rebukes the unclean spirit and tells it what to do. And the spirit, putting up a fight, relents in the face of one who is actually in control, and is seen no more.
And the people were amazed.
And here is a point of interest in our story. The people were amazed at Jesus.
When was it, I wonder, that we stopped being able to be amazed at Jesus?
I think we would suppose that it was just inevitable, like lost innocence, but I think that’s too simple. I suspect that there has been an inverse relationship between our ability to be amazed at Jesus and our conviction that we are really in control of our own lives, and of the universe. The more confident we become in our own control, the less amazing Jesus is, and the easier it is to dismiss him.
The more we believe we are in control, the more likely we are to assert that a Jesus who can heal the sick, who has power over evil, who can bring redemption to the world by his death on a cross, who could rise from the grave, who lights the way to a resurrection faith, and who gives us even today his Body and his Blood four our spiritual nourishment – the more all this seems to belong, in Gailbraith’s words, “not to the real world, but to that of hope and imagination.”
This is the accusation leveled, is it not? That the Jesus of the Bible - who could perform miracles, and who changed the lives of those who could reach out and touch only the hem of his garment – that this Jesus has no authority beyond the hope and imagination of a deluded and dwindling number of nincompoops. That the control of the universe lies in the hands of a God mysteriously and incomprehensibly known as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – pure hope and imagination!
And since we have enjoyed the increasing sensation that we are, in fact, in control of our lives, our destinies, and the fate of the universe, it has become harder and harder for us nincompoops to mount an argument against this accusation. Especially since it has been some time since we were amazed at Jesus.
Strange prophet though he be, look again at the words of Gailbraith. What lives in the world of “hope and imagination,” by his estimation, is not some religious claim about God or his Son, or the powers of the universe, but the fiercely defended delusion that we – self professed masters of science, and industry, and finance, and all manner of things – that we are in control of anything much at all.
It is the delusion of our control that Gailbraith says belongs not to the real world, but to that of hope and imagination. It is the delusion of our control that the economist says is an escape from reality. And even if he would be an reluctant prophet for my cause, he can now do nothing to prevent me from recruiting him.
Let him help us burst the false image of our control of all things. And when we have begun to let go of this fantasy, then let Jesus come into our midst. According to Mark, Jesus’ teaching – impressive though it may be – will not be what we remember. What we will remember is the way he teaches us: as one with authority.
And let the demons of our lives show up in our midst, out of nowhere, as we are trying to work out what it is about Jesus that has gripped us.
Let anxiety fill the air, as it would if a man possessed were to stand up and start raving right there, where the Gospel is proclaimed. Feel the tension rise, as your throat clenches, and every single one of us begins to look for the nearest door and think about leaving the room. This is the loss of control, we are feeling; the anxiety of knowing that we cannot control events and the best we can hope for is to just get away from here.
And if a crazy person in church can do it to us, we know, do we not, that real worries, like a lost job, a diminished retirement account, like a looming diagnosis, or another round of chemo, or, God forbid, like the awful decision about whether or not to remove life support – we know how these make us feel: that so damned much is out of our control and there is not even a doorway out of which to escape.
Let Jesus walk into these moments. He does not explain himself to us. And if he teaches us anything, we can hardly seem to remember it. But what he does, is take control, because he can. He is the author of life and of salvation – which is to say that all life and all salvation began in his loving mind and flow from his loving heart.
He is in control – whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not. But Jesus will not coerce us into accepting his authority. We are free to reject it and go on struggling to maintain our own delusional state.
And one of the great struggles of human existence – recorded in the first pages of the Bible – is that struggle for control.
Let Jesus walk into that struggle. He does not promise to right every wrong immediately. He does not promise to heal every wound, and cure every illness. He never promises to make anyone rich. He does not say that care and troubles will disappear immediately from the face of the earth.
But at those moments when we have come to the awful realization that everything is spinning out of control and there is nothing whatsoever we can do, and it seems as though, perhaps no one at all is in control of anything… Jesus stands there, where even the demons know who he is.
And somehow, from that spot in a synagogue, he does indeed hold the whole world in his hands. And everything is under control. And yes, the economy is a wreck, and the cancer hasn’t gone, and my beloved still lies near death.
But the God who made us and loves us is actually in control, if only we will let him be. And when we do, it is amazing.
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
1 February 2009
Saint Mark’s, Philadelphia