A ship set sail not long ago, laden with a cargo of food destined for people in need. While on this mission of mercy the ship was attacked by pirates, who climbed aboard using ropes, as I suppose pirates have always done.
It hardly seems that a story about pirates could be taken from the pages of today’s newspapers. But this one is, as the whole world knows by now. There are no square-rigged tall ships involved; no one, that I know of, wearing an eye-patch or a tri-cornered hat. But there are the ropes, and the grappling hooks, I suppose. There are no swords, probably no knives gripped between teeth, but there are dangerous weapons. There must have been the ship-deck confrontation. Was there a struggle, a fight fit for the screen?
The latter-day pirates are not interested in the ship’s cargo – what use have they of food bound for hungry people? Their booty is supposed to be a ransom, if not for the cargo, then for the lives of the sailors on board.
Among the several things the pirates must not have counted on was a captain on board who was smart enough to keep his crew un-harmed, and brave enough to offer himself in exchange for their safety. They took him up on his offer, sending him over the rail into a lifeboat with them. And they did not count on that captain being bold enough to dive over the side of the lifeboat in the night in attempt to make his way to freedom.
That’s the moment in this story that makes me catch my breath: when Captain Richard Phillips sees his chance and goes overboard into the Indian Ocean. What was his plan? Were his hands tied? Was there a tussle as he vaulted himself into the water? Did he have a chance of making it to safety? How far did he get before they started shooting at him, and paddled madly after him, and hauled him, soaked, back onto the lifeboat?
It was Good Friday, when the captain hurled himself over the side of the lifeboat, into the dark water of the sea. And today, of course, is Easter. If you want an Easter parable there is one to be found here somewhere. Start with a crew-member of the ship, delivered to port in Kenya last night, facing the hoard of media looking for the story, who put it this bluntly: “We’ve got a man out there in a lifeboat dying so we can live.”
There is death lurking at every corner of this story. The lives of the crew were imperiled when the pirates climbed aboard. The life of the captain now hangs in the balance. The pirates are now surrounded by overwhelming firepower that remains in check as long as their hostage is alive. The Navy is keeping its distance, in part to stay out of firing range of the pirates and keep its sailors safe. And who knows what hungry, maybe desperate mouths have gone hungry while the food shipment went undelivered?
And we’ve got a man out here in a lifeboat dying, so that we can live. In a sentence, that is the story we have been trying to tell here in church over the past week – about a man out there in a lifeboat dying so that we can live. Preachers like me have been piling up words since Palm Sunday trying to say what a sailor put so neatly in a single sentence. We have been trying to imagine or remember what it feels like to know that there is a man out there dying so that we can live. We’ve been trying to get in touch with the significance of a man giving his life as a ransom for many.
We did not imagine that one man’s cross would be a lifeboat in the Indian Ocean; that his Good Friday would see him leap or wriggle over the side of that boat into the sea, rather than being gently lowered into tomb. And how I wish that his Good Friday escape attempt had led him to an early Easter, to safety, to life, to home, and to joy. I have been praying for such an Easter for Richard Phillips. God knows, he deserves it! But his Easter was thwarted, when his captors must have grabbed him by the shoulders of his jacket and pulled him back up into the boat, back onto his cross, dripping wet and out of breath, and his life still hanging in the balance.
It would be cheap of me to talk of Captain Phillips this way – because at this moment his life is quite literally in danger – if Easter were not really and truly about life and death. It would be insulting to a man who has over the past three days shown almost exactly what Jesus meant when he said, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends,” if Jesus’ life and death had not already been lived and died for us. It would be crass of me to mention this if it were not to say that I believe that on Good Friday Captain Phillips did not actually go over the side of the lifeboat and into the sea alone.
He surely knew that those waters could just as easily be his grave as they could be his salvation. Did he know, I wonder, that he was not alone on Good Friday as he faced his own grave? Could he sense that presence beside him that slipped below the surface with him? Did he know that another heart pounded in perfect synchronicity with his pounding heart, and that another pair of hands was reaching out into the water with his hands? Could he feel another set of feet kicking through those treacherous waters with his feet? And did he know, when the gunshots fired, and the pirates slapped their hands onto his shoulders and hauled him back into the boat, that another hostage had escaped unseen, deep beneath the surface of the water: deep as a watery grave?
We’ve got a man out there in a lifeboat. At the risk of diminishing the darkness of his dark hours, do I dare suggest that Richard Phillips is, or could be every one of us?
What pirates have held you hostage this past week, this year, most of your life? For some there is addiction; for others it’s loneliness; or fear. Poverty holds too many people in this city hostage every day, with its band of brother pirates, racisim. A grudge makes a marvelous pirate as it tightens its grip over the months and years and you begin to feel justified in your loathing. Greed is the traditional pirate that has become awfully good at moving into the neighborhood and acting as though it is perfectly normal to need and want so much stuff, and so much more. For some it’s sickness, or a grief that will not let go. These pirates have taken many of us hostage, though we would never let on, not on Easter Day.
But it is because we know, don’t we, what it’s like to be in the boat with the pirates of our lives, that we cheered inside when we heard that Captain Phillips had dared to escape! O Captain! my captain!
But it is also because we know of that other man, that unseen hostage who went over the side of the boat and into the water on Friday, that we dare to cling to hope for Richard Phillips, no matter what happens to him; that we know his life is already won, even if the pirates should try to take it from him again. And having given his life already for the sake of his friends, he must surely know this, too.
Because today, this morning, the empty tomb, in my mind, stands on a shore on the east coast of Africa, where the waters of the Indian Ocean are lapping at the rocks. And that silent swimmer - who was in the boat with Captain Phillips, and has been in the boat with you and with me when ever the pirates have been at hand – that silent swimmer has made it to the shore, when the captain could not, just as we could not.
And every Easter morning tells us that the pirates will never win; there is no ransom left to be paid. And that even though the waters be deep and the shore too distant, and help too far away to do us any good, and death lies close at hand, there is One who went over the side, and into the water. And because he was buried, he appeared to be lost to us.
But he is not dead, he is arisen!
Yes, we had a man out there in a lifeboat dying so that we could live.
And by God, he’s done it. He died, and swam through death, and rose on a Sunday morning all those years ago. (O captain! my captain!) And now, no matter what happens to us, we can live!
Alleluia, Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!
N.B, - At 1:30 pm on April 12 2009, Easter Day, U.S. government sources confirmed that Captain Phillips had been rescued in an operation led by U.S. Navy Seals.
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
Easter Day 2009
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia
Kathmandu
The streets of Kathmandu are the most confusing and disorienting place I have ever been. I think of myself as a sophisticated person, having spent part of my childhood in Manahattan, and I like to think that I cannot easily be flustered by something like a foreign city. But from the moment I landed at the airport in Kathmandu I was a little out of sorts.
I immediately forgot whether the guidebook had said you should by no means walk past the taxi dispatcher at the airport and thereby put yourself at the mercy of the cab drivers that await outside at the curb. Or if the book had said under no circumstances should you stop at the dispatcher’s desk when you could get a much better fare by simply walking outside and hailing a cab for yourself. Either way, I’m sure I grossly over-paid for my cab ride.
I thought I knew something about busy city streets, but my experience of New York, Boston, Washington, LA. Sydney, London, Jersualem, and others had not prepared me for the chaos of the streets of Kathmandu, where order is not exactly imposed on the wall-to-wall traffic of cars, truck, bicycles, rickshaws, and pedestrians, who are not, apparently, beholden to the instruction of traffic lights, lanes, or indicators of any kind.
I made it to my hotel in Thamel, the tourist district, where I was immersed again in the craziness of winding streets and alleys lined with shops whose keepers aggressively angled to lure you in, as well as pan-handlers, and scam artists of every conceivable kind, eager to see a pale, plump, pink-cheeked guy with a backpack looking lost.
I was very happy to be connected, by the end of my first day, to a guide who would steer me and the group I was with through most of our Napali adventure. All told, I probably spent a week or more in Kathmandu, and I can honestly say that every time I left the hotel on my own it felt like a roll of the dice. Would I get where I was going, and how? And how would I get back?
Tonight we are celebrating the institution of the Eucharist: that night when Jesus gathered his disciples together in an upper room and shared with them bread, saying “This is my Body,” and wine, saying, “This is my Blood.” Keeping this ritual (since Jesus said, “whenever you eat or drink this, do it in remembrance of me,”) has become commonplace again throughout most of the church, and was commonplace here at Saint Mark’s (daily mass having begun here in 1884) long before Sunday communions were the norm in most of our neighboring churches.
Being commonplace, we know our way around the eucharist, the mass, holy communion. It is celebrated twice most days in this parish (tonight marks the third time today). And the commonplace can easily becomes that which is taken for granted. But tonight the church asks us to imagine that we have arrived for the first time in the streets of Kathmandu: in the midst of a most exotic, wonderful, and perhaps even confusing place. We are asked to sit at table with Jesus and hear him say again for the first time “This is my Body; this is my Blood.”
We are free to wonder what on earth Jesus can mean by these strange sayings, and to remember that there is nothing commonplace about them; nothing to be taken for granted in the suggestion that Jesus offers his own body, his own blood as a sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins and the salvation of the world.
It is for this reason that here at Saint Mark’s we almost always put on special garments before we say or sing the mass. It is for this that we move deliberately and reverently, bowing, here, genuflecting there, crossing ourselves again, and now, again. It is for this that we burn incense, to create an unusual fragrance. For this we sing things that we could just as easily say. It is because we do not wish to take for granted the gift of himself that Jesus offered for us once so long ago. So think of these aisles as the streets of Kathmandu and of this smoke, this song, these vestments as its exotic trappings if you will, and see how all is intended to keep us from taking anything at all for granted.
And yet, ironically, tonight we are reminded of one more thing: we are reminded that Jesus is not hiding from us amidst these winding, confusing alleys, or behind fancy vesture or beneath a cloud of smoke. We are shown that the Lord who allows himself to be truly present with his people wherever they can scrape together a morsel of bread and a drop of wine, is not aloof, not interested in playing hide-and-seek.
The God of the eucharist is a God who is quite clearly eager to be seen, willing to put up with being paraded around, stared at, handled in rough hands, devoured in what are sometimes filthy mouths. And one of the curiosities of this night of ritual is that he did not leave some secret ritual or magic words. He does not even rely on our wisdom or insight, let alone the powers of our personal spirituality. He does not require it to be done one way or another. He just says to his friends, “Do this, whenever you eat it, whenever your drink it.”
And what is “this”? Simply to take bread, bless, it, break it, and share it. Take wine, bless it, pour it, and share it. Jesus gave such simple instructions for finding our way right to the heart of this exotic city of his heart: the eucharist. And while we are to guard against taking it for granted, he wants us to know our way around the byways of his love, he wants us to become like native sons and daughters of this, the most unusual place we have ever been.
Yes, he wants us to see where his love has led – even to the washing of his disciples’ feet. He wants us to become as familiar as we are able with the nooks and crannies of his gift of himself, like the streets of a strange and wonderful city.
For he has built – on altars, and holy tables, and on rocks by riversides, and on the hood of a pickup truck, and anywhere a hunk of bread and a cup can be balanced – he has built a city of his love, connected by all the hands and hearts across the world that know exactly what to do when given the instruction to “Do this,” even though we do it in different ways.
And knowing that this city will always be a city of mystery because the depths of its love can never be fully known, nevertheless, Jesus wants us to move in to the unusual, confusing and disorienting streets of the city of his self-offering of love, and call it home.
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
Maundy Thursday 2009
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia
Seizure
About a year ago at this time of year – on the night of Good Friday, in fact – my dog, a wonderful Yellow Labrador Retriever named Baxter, was asleep at my feet as I sat on the sofa watching TV. Without any warning, the dog suddenly got up and began to stagger erratically around the room. For about a half a second this strange movement of his was amusing, almost as if he was playing a game. But it quickly became clear to me that there was no game. After 30 seconds or so, I guess, Baxter came to a stop, and keeled over onto his side, losing control of his bladder as he fell.
By now I had jumped up and gone to him. He was lying on his side, furiously paddling his front paws. He’s choking, I thought, but on what I had no idea. Still, there must be a way to give a dog the Heimlich maneuver. So I started pressing on his belly and his rib cage trying to force some phantom blockage out of his windpipe. While he was between my hands like that: one hand steadying his back, while the other searched desperately for the right place to apply the right amount of pressure, the paddling stopped, and Baxter’s body simply went completely stiff, and foam began to drip out of his mouth.
And I thought to myself, I can’t believe my dog is going to die on Good Friday. It was very clear to me that there was no time for me to get Baxter to help. Penn Veterinary Hospital is on the other side of the river. There was no time to get my car. I would never manage to hail a cab with the stiff body of a 70 pound Labrador in my arms, and it would take too long anyway, we would never make it in time. My 5 year-old dog was dying before my eyes, I thought, and there was nothing I could do.
I was screaming by now at the top of my voice, BAXTER!!!! Trying to do what? Call him back from wherever he was going?
And as I pushed again at his rib cage, I heard a little growl, and felt a little movement. And almost as suddenly as he fell, Baxter staggered up to his feet and looked at me with a kind of blank confusion, as I knelt there with tears streaming down my face, gasping for breath myself, and wondering what had just happened, and not quite certain whether my dog was going to live or die.
When I called the Emergency Room at Penn Vet they suggested to me that perhaps Baxter had had a seizure of some kind, which I thought was completely inane, since he has always been a perfectly healthy dog. But he seemed to be unhurt, and the confused look on his face was fading, and he was beginning to respond to me like normal, and the ER vet suggested letting him have a night’s sleep and see how he looked in the morning.
It’s hard, as a single person, to describe the importance of a dog in your life without seeming pathetic or misguided or both. Suffice it to say Baxter spends a lot of time with me. He sits at my feet as I work, sleeps on the bed beside me, has driven around the entire country with me, and has greeted me almost every day of his life with the trademark enthusiastic tail-wagging of a happy Lab. And I had no idea how deeply the fear of losing him could wound me.
It turned out that the ER was right. Baxter was diagnosed with idiopathic epilepsy – which means that he is prone to epileptic seizures for no apparent reason, no underlying cause. He’s been treated with an experimental drug that has shown mixed results so far. And over the course of the past year there have been eight or nine nights (it’s almost always at night) that have been interrupted by the staggering, the keeling over, the pee, the paddling, the stiffened body, the foaming mouth, and finally the disoriented return to consciousness.
I am talking with my vet and with Penn about adjusting his medication or changing it altogether. Although the seizures do not generally put Baxter at great risk, it would be better to prevent them. And each time it happens I kneel at his side and I hold him gently, I stroke his side and murmur reassuring things more to myself, I suppose, than to him. And I sit with him while he goes through that period of disorientation that follows the seizure, and I wait for him to get his bearings again, and return to normal. But I remember each time, all too clearly that Good Friday a year ago, when I was sure my dog was dying and there was nothing I could do except shriek with hysteria and despair.
It’s too silly for words to suggest that Jesus’ death on the cross is anything like my dog’s epileptic seizure, because, of course, it is not. But if there is a similarity here it is this: today, as we recite again the Passion of our Lord, and remember him staggering to Golgotha, enduring the whips and the nails, gasping for his own breath, and finally giving up the ghost; today the church experiences a kind of collective seizure of her own as we recount this horrible narrative.
Because while it is true that we have been through this story before, we have sung it in different keys, read it in different translations, acted it out, painted and sculpted it a hundred thousand times and ways; it’s true that we have become accustomed to the throes of this Passion, beginning today, we set aside a week to remember that first time it really happened, before we knew how it would turn out.
It is as though we induce this seizure again, once or twice a year at this time, to remember the hysterical despair that once actually accompanied this sad story, as a mother watched her son put to death, and his friends stood powerlessly by, and the earth groaned and shook in the darkness, and the Lord of life met a violent end.
Like clockwork every year, we see the seizure coming; we count down the warning signs all through Lent. But in our case, this is no idiopathic seizure: we know exactly what the underlying cause is: a world that has wrapped itself in greed and lust and power, and in which most of us have discarded the idea that we should ever seek forgiveness for the miserable things we do to each other, and in which we have largely forgotten how to forgive one another anyway.
The church uses shorthand to describe all this, calling it simply, sin. But you can see the effects of it in a world that awards the wretched children of Mumbai with a golden statuette for entertaining us, but does nothing whatsoever to improve their plight. Or in nations like ours that will violate any part of the planet to exploit the possibilities of carbon-based energy and then belch out the noxious fumes with a self-satisfied grin. Or in a city like ours that still color-codes prosperity and poverty more or less in terms of black and white, with hardly a whimper for the rolling waters of justice and righteousness. (Just to choose a few more obvious collective examples.)
Indignant that at least once or twice a year we should confront the reality of this, the church stages this seizure of hers, intending that it should remind us of how deeply wounded we have been by all our sin, and how deeply wounded is the man who bears them for us.
And it’s become difficult in our society to talk seriously about the importance of Jesus in our lives without seeming pathetic or misguided or both. But still, a week away from the joys of Easter we kneel here beside the stiff body of Jesus. And we are meant to confront the hard truth that in his case, he is actually dead: this is the real thing. We are meant to remember that at the foot of the Cross there is nothing we can do, frankly, to help Jesus or to help ourselves, nothing we can do but shriek with hysteria and despair.
For we know too well the precise underlying causes that have brought us here, if we will be honest with ourselves. We know the sins that nailed his perfect love to the tree. And, as at any death, it’s not just for him that we cry, but for ourselves, and all that we are losing as we see him go. And if we screamed or moaned his name in our hysteria and despair, what would it be for? To bring him back from where he is going?
But of course, we know where he is going. We know that in his death Jesus will do greater work, even, than he did when he was alive: unlocking the gates of sin and death and hell, so that we will not be imprisoned by them.
We have knelt by this stiff, dead body before, our hands on his sides, helpless to do anything to save him. And we know by now that we must let him go, let him die, so that he can save us.
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
Palm Sunday, 5 April 2009
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia