Most churches, no matter what the denomination, possess, I would guess, in some closet, or stored under the parish hall stage, or stacked against a wall, a folding table of a certain age, the legs of which have become loose: the screws that hold their brackets to the plywood having pulled away, one by one, with years of steady use. Or it may be that the locking mechanism of the legs has slipped, and never quite catches right. Whatever the cause, it is my contention that almost every church will own, someplace, a table, the legs of which are steady and stable enough to support its own weight but which is certain to collapse when it is laden with one too many casseroles, or a too-heavy stack of Vestry minutes.
These tables are a menace! I have personally carried one such a table out of the parish house and heaved it into the dumpster out back. But I know that the persistent prevalence of such tables is bigger than me, and somewhere nearby the screws or locking mechanism of the legs of the replacement table for the one I threw away are quietly and secretly un-doing themselves so that some day when we least expect it the table will go crashing to the floor.
Is it possible that such tables carry with them the memory of the tables that once stood in the courtyard of the great Temple, where the money-changers sat, making a tidy profit as they converted currencies from various parts of the Roman empire into the only coin whose use was permitted for the payment of the temple tax: a coin from Tyre that was valued at a half a shekel. The tax was required of every Jewish male over the age of twenty, imposed by Moses in the Book of Exodus, it was used to cover the costs of operating the Temple. Elsewhere in the New Testament testimony is supplied that Jesus paid the Temple tax. His outburst of anger (which is reported in all four of the gospels) does not appear to be a protest against this tax.
There are, of course, also the dealers of sheep and cattle and doves (which were needed for the sacrificial offerings) that Jesus drove out of the Temple precincts. But nothing gets our attention these days like money, and it’s the spirit of those overturned tables of the money-changers that I think still haunts the tables of our churches today.
Of course it feels as though money-changing tables are being upset around us at an alarming rate as we watch the economy contort and the banks writhe. The numbers we wish would go up keep going down; the numbers we want to see drop are on a steady rise. And tables that once had good-sized piles of money on them – like retirement accounts, investment portfolios, and like this parish’s endowment – seem to be collapsing and crashing to the floor. To be sure there is still money to be gathered up and stacked back into neat piles, but the system has been upset. Every church I know that depends on money-changers (that is, on investments, as we do) has been impacted, or is bracing for the impact of these tables that have been knocked over, right out from under us.
And I suppose, if I am going to suspect these tables of harboring the memory of those ancient tables in the Temple courtyard, the question is, does Jesus have something to do with upsetting them? Is Jesus in any way involved with the anxious worry that has been brought upon us by these overturned tables?
Well, I don’t believe that Jesus is responsible for the global economic downturn. And I don’t believe that Jesus, reigning as he does at the right hand of God, spends his time worrying about the fluctuations of the stock markets, per se. But I do believe that Jesus incites occasions of upset when the smug complacency of our lives draws our attention away from the things that matter. And I do believe that these occasions often feel very much as though the tables around us go smashing to the floor.
If you follow Jesus (through John’s Gospel) past the chaos he has just caused, out of the Temple gates, into the streets of Jerusalem, you will come upon him next in conversation with a man named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews, John tells us, who surely had heard about the scene Jesus caused with the money-changers. But Jesus and Nicodemus are not talking now about that now, or about the sheep or the cattle or the doves; now they are talking about the kingdom of God: “Truly, truly I say to you, unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
Having caused a commotion that certainly draws attention to him, Jesus is ready to re-direct the conversation. And it is not about the economy of this world that he wants to talk, it is about God’s kingdom – about the economy of heaven, about new birth, new hope, new life in God, when our old lives have become defined by the forces of things like death and taxes.
So, back to our own tables. Our endowments in this parish – upon which we relay for about half of our operating expenses – have been seriously knocked about. This is not to say that there aren’t still some piles of money around, but those piles are significantly smaller than they used to be, the table having been pretty seriously upset.
And, of course, there are the personal realities of each of us who rely on the tables of our jobs, or our 401-ks, or the value of our homes, all of which have been sitting on tables that also seem to have those annoyingly loose legs.
Could it be that Jesus has something to do with all this? Is he involved in any way with the anxious worry that’s been brought upon us by these overturned tables?
It’s possible, I believe, that Jesus has grown impatient with our fixation on money. And perhaps Jesus is using this disruption to change the subject – to dislodge our preoccupation with money and turn our attention more fully to a discussion of the kingdom of God. Because, while there is no question that money (and more of it) can and will be useful in the building up of God’s kingdom, it is not the crucial ingredient. But many churches operate more or less on the principle that our ability to build up the kingdom is directly proportionate to the balance of our bank accounts; that is, directly related to the money that sits on our figurative tables.
And when these tables – perhaps still haunted by the memory of those money-changers’ tables – fall to the floor, upsetting our dependence on them, then we are forced to consider not just what we are going to do about the money, but what we are going to do about God’s kingdom.
And the truth of the matter is that God’s kingdom requires no venture capital; the kingdom is not waiting for more money before it can be built up; and Jesus is not looking for investors. Jesus is calling disciples who are willing to take up the ministry of being sent into the world to change lives: this is the mission of his Gospel. And this mission of transformation is not the work of the clergy, or of monks, or of religious fanatics, it is the work of every Christian who can hear the call of Jesus, in any way, shape, or form.
Of course, Jesus knows how likely we are to get stuck by the tables of the money-changers. He knows how attractive it has become to us to think that we can make our lives, our careers, our future, and even our kingdoms right there in the court of the Temple where there is undoubtedly a profit to be made, without ever stepping foot inside the actual precincts of God’s house.
Is it because of this that he seems to have rigged the tables of our money-changers to collapse like an old table in a church hall? Of course this is too fanciful, really. It seems unlikely that the Lord of lords and King of kings, that the God of love should operate like this – causing a commotion with such real and painful consequences for so many people. And I would not attribute our current economic reality to either the mind or the hand of God.
But I do believe that it is hard to see the kingdom of God from behind a money table. The money distracts us, especially when we actually have a little bit of it– how could it not?
And if those tables carry within the fibers of plywood, or the cellular structure of their metal legs, or the various moving parts that might operate more or less effectively – if these tables possess the mystical memory of tables long ago that were overturned as Jesus began to change the subject and to tell about the mystery of the three days of re-creation that was about to come, then no wonder every church has a table that is so prone to collapse and crash to the floor. It is as if the tables know, - having borne the weight of fortunes before, and seen them come and go; and having witnessed the transforming power of the gospel of hope that relies on no treasure but the love which is crucified for our salvation – it is as if the tables themselves would cry out for the sake of the kingdom of God!
And the fact remains that it is pretty deeply upsetting that so many tables out there in the court of the temple have been overturned. The fact remains that this economic reality is imposing real hardship, pain and loss on people’s lives. And I don’t for one minute believe that it is God’s doing.
But tables have a way of collapsing right out from underneath us – every church knows this, because we all have one of those annoying tables somewhere whose legs are getting too loose, so it comes as no great surprise. And if our own memories fail to remind us during times like these that Jesus did not go to the money-changers to finance the kingdom of God, then let the tables themselves remind us.
Let us see and hear how Jesus keeps trying to change the subject and teach us about his kingdom. Let us remember how it is he taught that we must all be born anew by the spirit of God.
And let us not be fooled into thinking that when the tables have been overturned that our work for the kingdom of God is in any real way imperiled. Even the tables themselves remember that when they came crashing to the floor the work of the kingdom was only just beginning, and yes, there is the Cross to go to, but in just three short days from that dark day, there is Easter, and the rising of the king…
…which of course seems impossible for us to believe. See how long it took us to build up this church, these pledges, our endowment: years and years! And he would re-build it in three days? Can we really believe this?
Oh yes, we can: that, and so much more, and so much more. Thanks be to God!
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
15 March 2009
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia
Petting the Alley Cat
I received the latest copy of The New Yorker on Thursday, and, as I’ve read it over the last few days, I’ve been struck by the various articles. They seemed to have a distinct theme to them. There is a brief blurb about steroids in baseball, and a discussion of the growing list of athletes who are being revealed as users of performance enhancing drugs. There is a long story about Robert Allen Stanford, the billionaire who lives in St. Croix and took a page from Bernie Madoff’s book. Nothing major, just eight billion dollars unaccounted for, amidst a life of jets and boats in the Caribbean. That essay is followed immediately by an essay about Iceland, the collapse of its three major banks, and the greed of a handful of oligarchs that brought about the destruction of a too small, albeit first-world financial system. The next essay is rather a sad one, about David Foster Wallace, a young brilliant novelist, who committed suicide recently. His novels are technical and wordy creations, but the goal of his writing, the theme and center of his novels, is to demonstrate to his readers and maybe to himself the importance of a fulfilled, meaningful life, despite the fact that modern and post-modern thought has seemed to close off the reality of the supernatural and numinous for so many people.
However diverse these topics are, they are not without connections. It cannot be incidental that the discussion which is going on in our culture and society today has as its major theme disappointment.Disappointment with the cult of hero worship which surrounds professional athletics, with the narcissistic excesses of a few greedy people which have caused many deep economic harm and emotional distress, and disappointment with the attempt to live some sort of fulfilled life without any sort of religious or cultural connections, in the midst of a culture which is jaded, cynical, fickle and diffuse. It cannot be incidental because all those stories rooted in disappointment, all those moments of failure, shock and sadness surround what we as a culture and a society value highly: the grace and athleticism of the professional athlete, the American dream of wealth through hard work, the pipedream of a financial system which makes easy money for its people, and the dreamy thoughtful youth who tries to write about a life worth living, all evidence to the contrary. These are the stories that our culture has come to worship. And despite the fact that we know the Madoffs and Stanfords are a dime a dozen, or at least a few billion dollars every other decade or so, and that professional athletes perennially disappoint, and that economies go up and come down, yet still we are fascinated by these disappointments because they are concerned with what is deeply believe, the myths that lie at the heart of our culture. These myths are about what we as a people, what we as a culture and society, value, praise, adore and organize our lives around. These myths are about what we worship.
We are human, and our purpose, our goal; that for which we were created and built is to worship. And we will worship the things of earth or the things of heaven. There is nothing else to worship. We will worship athletes, or money, or ideas, or science, or beauty, or social change, or the living and true God, but worship we will.
The whole message and story of Lent, what all the lectionary readings point to is our failure to worship the true and living God. Sometimes it is couched as the idolatry of the Golden Calf, but it might as well be the idolatries of our own day. The worship of billions of dollars, of hundreds of RBIs and yards rushed, of stocks and bonds, or the fulfilled life according to the faith of the modern intellectual bourgeois. We will worship whatever it is that comes to hand.
Which is precisely the problem that Simon Peter gets into in the Gospel this morning. We don’t quite know what he is worshipping in Jesus, but whatever it is, he is wrong. Perhaps he thinks that Jesus is the great political messiah, come to solve all problems with his teachings and savvy. We certainly wouldn’t ever treat a politician like a messiah, would we? Perhaps he thinks that life itself is a good above all else, and that Jesus really needs to keep teaching and preaching long into his dotage. Perhaps Peter just doesn’t like all that negative energy and morbidity that Jesus is putting out by talking about crucifixion and death.
Whatever motivates Peter, he tries to remonstrate with Jesus, and Jesus slams the door on him pretty hard, because his kingdom is not of this world, and the only way forward, is not to preserve your life but to sacrifice it, to give it up for the life of the world and the lives of others.
Either we will lose our life, or we will lose our life. Those are the choices that Jesus lays out to his disciples and to us. That is the choice that is set before us today, and every day. Either we will lose our life in the pursuit of, in the worship of the wrong things: money, power, position, etc. Or we will lose it by entering into the life of faith, into the life of relationship with the one and true God. And lest you think that can’t be costly, think of the martyrs and the saints; or better yet, think of all those who thought, “I’ll just have a social relationship with God,” and ended up at the world’s end, or facing the angry mob, or heading to the showers in Auschwitz.
Anne Lamott is a fascinating and rather raw writer, and in one essay about coming to faith, she describes God, not so much as the hound of heaven, but as the alley cat of heaven. You feed him a couple of times, and pet him a little, and before you know it he is sleeping on your bed and running the household, and that is when you realize that you are in deep, deep trouble. She uses a rather more descriptive four letter word to describe the trouble, which I think that I won’t use in this setting, but the point is that you don’t start off thinking that you are going to lose your life in the divine life of God. Just like you don’t start of thinking that you are going to steal billions of dollars, or make thousands of people jobless.
But what you worship has everything to do with what you will become. If you worship money, you will become greedy. If you worship food you will become a glutton. Sex, a lecher, and so on. If you worship God, you will lose your life. For our God is a jealous God, a consuming fire and the cost of worship is our lives.
It will start small, this life of losing life in God. You will come to Sunday mass, and enjoy the liturgy and the music. And then you might even start to listen to the preaching, and before long you might think about serving soup to the homeless, or giving of your money and your gifts to support the ministry of the parish, or spending time in prayer or on retreat. That is where the real danger is. Because if the poor are around us and we are called to care for them, if God begins to become part of our financial lives, or part of the time that we spend during the week, if God begins to demand our time, our resources and our worship, then our lives and our resources are no longer our own, to worship as we see fit, but owed, constantly, perpetually to those around us.
“What,” the Gospel asks rhetorically, “will it profit those who desperately hold onto their life to gain the whole world?” Stanford may go to jail, A-Rod will have a tarnished reputation, the group of super wealthy oligarchs in Iceland will have to tighten their belts. It will profit them nothing, of course. A few years of very comfortable living. Fifteen minutes of fame or infamy. A blip on the radar of history, a footnote, then nothing.
Pet the alley cat of heaven, then if you dare. Feed him, if you must. Watch out though, for that is a dangerous road to go down, and you might lose your life. But you will lose it anyways. It was not long ago that Ash Wednesday came, with its message that there is nothing we can do to escape that final lot in life: “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” We are all going to lose our lives. No one here gets out alive. The only question is how: enslaved to the things of earth or pouring out your life like a gift to those around you, lost in the joy and sacrifice of the Divine life. That is the choice that is before us today. And try not to listen too closely, I think I hear a scratching at the door.
Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft
8 March 2009
Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia
Operation Migration
Lead me in your truth and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; in you have I trusted all the day long. (Ps. 25:4)
It is possible, I suppose, that on the ark with Noah there was a pair of whooping cranes that, with the receding of the flood waters, made their way to North America, where, for a while, they were fruitful and multiplied. But today the whooping crane is an endangered species, most of its habitat having been lost to the encroachment of human development. In 1941 there were only 21 whooping cranes known to be living in the wild; today their population numbers 265.
Whooping cranes are migratory birds. The magazine section of a major daily newspaper recently ran a story on the effort to increase the numbers of the birds living in the wild, which includes an elaborate sort of avian orienteering project known as “Operation Migration” to teach the bids their 1,285-mile-long migratory route from Wisconsin to Florida. In the words of one of the organizers, for the cranes, “the instinct to migrate is natural, but the route is learned.”
Operation Migration teaches the birds that route, but it tries hard not to let the birds become acclimated to human contact. So they put on crane costumes when they work with their charges, they don’t speak around the birds, and they lead the birds on their route south with ultralight airplanes playing an MP3 of a whooping crane call through a loudspeaker attached to the rear axle. All it takes is one trip and the birds have learned the route and will remember it the rest of their lives.
However, there are still a lot of obstacles in the way of establishing a healthy population of wild whooping cranes – several previous approaches have failed. The cranes’ difficulty in adapting to living so close to human civilization has led scientists to label them a “conservation reliant species,” which is to say that without human intervention – even dressed up in crane costumes – the cranes are not likely to make it in the long run. A 1946 article in the New York Times “blamed the crane’s ‘lack of cooperation’ for its looming extinction.”
Lent leaves me thinking about migration: about our regular return to a place we need to go. And this first Sunday in Lent, when the Choir and clergy walk around the church singing our litany in formation, leaves me feeling a bit like a participant in some project to teach cranes how to fly south for the winter. (This analogy puts you in the role of the crane, but fear not, we are all flying to the same place.)
If this is the beginning of a migration, it must be, in some sense, a migration back to the heart of God that we are on. And I wonder if what is true of those cranes may also be true for us: that the instinct to migrate is natural but the route is learned. If so, and if the church is to be trusted, then this route leads us through a season of penitence when we find the nerve to say to God and to one another that we have been selfish, inconsiderate, brutish fools at least some of the time (and some of us more than others).
This kind of thing does not come easily to us, which may be why at some point the church set the whole thing to music, to encourage us to sing it, and in the singing to be surprised by the poignant accuracy of the confession. (From all blindness of heart; from pride, vainglory, and hypocrisy; from envy, hatred, and malice; and from all want of charity, good Lord deliver us.)
The simple assumption of the church is that we humans are, in fact migratory creatures; that we have a need to set out (at least once a year) to find again the warmer regions of God’s love that we cling to in a deep memory of paradise, and from which we realize, from time to time, we have become estranged. How did we get so greedy, so self-centered, so adept at ruining things, so willing to despise others, so forgetful of God, so comfortable with killing each other? These questions prompt an old stirring in us to take wing and seek again the refuge of God’s love. But we find, so often, that having noticed the desire to know God better and to be more attuned to his loving kindness, we do not know how to find him, how to talk with him, how to listen to him, or how to serve him.
The migration back to God begins with the humble act of confessing our sins: of acknowledging that we have failed to use the gifts God’s given us and fallen short of being our best selves. I put this generally in this group discussion, but my migration gets off to a better start when I am much more specific with God in my prayers about the ways I have sinned; and your migration will benefit from specifics, too.
And God means for us to rest and stop along the way by coming to his altar to be spiritually fed by his Body and Blood in the mass, and to be nourished by the support and love of his community in the church. We are not expected to make this journey on our own, or in one fell swoop.
The flight back to God’s heart is aided by the reminder God gives us that we have someplace to go: a better, freer, happier life in this world when we escape the cold barrens of our sins. Perhaps that’s why we began our readings today with the story of the rainbow as the sign of God’s covenant of love: a regular reminder that God has someplace for us to go.
These simple tactics - being honest in our confession of sins, stopping to rest and be fed by Christ’s love, and remembering that God has someplace good to lead us to – provide a reasonable plan for a long migration back to God, for us, who have wandered.
If we are honest about it, it seems to me that we humans may actually be a “conservation reliant species.” Which is to say that without God’s intervention we are not likely to make it in the long run. Left to our own devices we tend toward the destructive, which is finally self-destructive. But God turns out to be even more committed to us – creatures of his own making – than those bird-lovers are to the whooping cranes they lead on their migration in ultralight airplanes.
And while the crane people have to put on crane “costumes” to fit in and teach the young cranes what to do, God had only to send us his Son: a human in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, who got his disciples started on their migration just by calling, “follow me!” And so Christ intervenes in our lives over and over again: calling us to follow him, teaching us to love one another as he loves us; showing us his mercy for those who are lost by their sins, feeding us with bread and fish and wine even when it appears there is not enough to go around.
A cynic might suggest as the Times did 50-odd years ago about the whooping cranes, that our own “lack of cooperation” is largely to blame for our own demise – if you see (as a cynic would) the human condition in a state of decline.
But I think if a whooping crane can be taught to follow an ultralight airplane along the route of its migration from Wisconsin to Florida, then there is an awful lot of hope for you and me, that we can be taught by Christ and his church the way to make the journey back to the heart of God’s love. (Although unlike the cranes, we seem to need to learn the route over and over again.)
And as we embark with a song of penitence whooping in our throats, we are reminded already that there are plenty of chances to stop and rest and be fed. And from time to time we may even look out from the flight pattern of our migration and see in the distance the rainbow sign of the covenant of God’s love – that never again will we be cut off from his love – which serves as a useful reminder that we have someplace to go: a warmer region of God’s love to which he calls us to return again and again and again, no matter how often we fly away.
Thanks be to God.
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
1 March 2009
Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia