The story of Jesus’ ascension into heaven is told every day here at Saint Mark’s. It is, in a sense, a story hiding in plain sight, for the great east window – some 18-20 feet high, I would estimate, right above the altar – is a depiction of the story recounted in the first chapter of the book of Acts. The inscription at the bottom of the window gives us the biblical citation. You see Jesus there, hovering above eleven disciples and Mary, his mother, a heavenly host of angels, cherubim, and seraphim escorting him as he rises into the heavens.
The prominent placement of this image in Saint Mark’s is a slight curiosity since the book of Acts was almost certainly written by the evangelist St. Luke. While some versions of our own evangelist’s gospel include an account of Jesus’ ascension into heaven, many scholars believe that the last eleven verses commonly attached to the end of Mark’s gospel (including the mention of the ascension) are not original to his narrative. Nevertheless, you can pick up most Bibles and find at the end of Mark’s gospel the report that “the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven, and sat down at the right hand of God.”
Perhaps it is a nod to this ending of St. Mark’s gospel that the designer of the window above the altar chose to depict our Lord twice in the stained glass at this end of the building: not only in the scene of his ascension, but again in the uppermost portion of the window, seated in majesty at, we can assume, the right hand of God.
Now here is where things get really interesting. If you look at the window carefully (which I admit it is not always easy to do, for your have several hanging lamps blocking a clear view) you might notice that in the image of Jesus ascending into heaven, when he is still in sight of his apostles on earth, only one of his feet is visible: his right foot. And if you can get close enough to see the upper image of Christ seated in majesty, again, only one of his feet is visible: this time his left foot.
And although it makes me feel a little like Dan Brown to ask this question, I ask it anyway: is this just a coincidence? One foot not quite touching but still in plain sight of the apostles on earth, and the other foot planted firmly on the pavement of heaven’s courts?
What interest, I wonder, did the builders of this church have in placing the image of a story just above the focal point of the entire building, the High Altar, that is not central (or, perhaps even original) to the gospel of our patron evangelist? Why the Ascension, 20 feet high, to look at day in and day out, as long as the sun will shine? And why these feet of Jesus: both present and accounted for, but one almost lingering on earth, the other in heaven?
If you look at the window again, you might begin to suspect, as I did, that none of the figures depicted therein has two feet. Perhaps the artist was saving room, or had a thing about feet. But then you will see that one apostle, who is standing – I can’t say who – over on the left-hand side, does, in fact, have two feet planted firmly on the ground, clearly visible beneath his blue and brown vesture. And another, to his right, down on one knee is also showing two bare feet from beneath his gold robe with giant blue polka dots. (Mary’s feet are demurely and properly out of sight.)
What’s going on here?
Consider again the inscription from Luke’s book of Acts, this time in the King James Version, as it appears in caligraphied lettering at the base of this window: “This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as you have seen him go to heaven”
It’s the inscription that clued me in to what our forebears here were thinking. I suspect that they were not, in fact, preoccupied with the Ascension for it’s own sake. And although they were very happy to assert that, indeed, Jesus does reign in heaven at the right hand of God, this was not their chief concern either.
Here’s what I think they cared about: This same Jesus shall so come in like manner as you have seen him go. The promise of the Ascension is not Christ’s departure, it is his return. This Jesus, his right foot hovering just inches above the altar, his disciples anchored to this earth with both feet, doesn’t just float off to the skies escorted by angels, he also returns – in like manner: cradled by cherubim and seraphim, angels and archangels, one foot fixed by his throne in heaven, but the other now reaching down to touch the earth.
Remember the builders of this church were Victorians with all the wild imaginations that were the result of so much repression. I suspect that they regarded the High Altar as a kind of landing pad where Jesus made his return – not a single, ominous return at the end of all time, but a daily visitation, cloaked crudely but obviously in forms of bread and wine.
This church was founded on the principle that Jesus desires to be in daily communion with his beloved disciples: you and me. Stone was stacked on stone here, and glass lavishly painted to mark out the bounds were a community of Christ’s people would gather to listen for the fluttering of angel-wings, the humming of cherubim and seraphim as they float or fly or freefall from their heavenly climes to this more humid environment, setting down silently and softly, but surely on the targets of a round, silver paten, and a jeweled chalice.
All of which is to say that Saint Mark’s has never, I think, been a community even the slightest bit interested in saying Goodbye to Jesus – which is what we so often tell ourselves this feast of the Ascension is about. This is a community that has been hopelessly infatuated with the idea of saying Hello to Jesus.
And so this window, this constant telling of the story of the Ascension whenever the sun shines in this place, is a kind of embodiment of that mysterious Aramaic prayer of the earliest Christians: Maranatha: O Lord, come!
Come, Lord Christ, right here. Come and touch the earth again by the side of your disciples, as once you did so long ago. Come in the same way as you left: with an entourage of angels. Come, although you are seated at the right hand of God; reach down with your toes – if only of one foot - and be among us. Teach us, help us, heal us, bring us your peace again. Come and be among us with your holy presence and show us the way, show us the truth, show us life again.
For we so easily remember how you went away, we so easily put you out of sight that you are out of mind. We so easily commemorate your departure.
And do we forget that you return in like manner as we saw you go? Have we ceased to believe that a retinue of angels could accompany you on your constant journey to be with us, to come to us, to make yourself known to us in bread and wine? Are we so ready to put the Paschal candle out that we forget that your light can never be extinguished?
Come, Lord, Christ, right here, in like manner as we saw your go. Leave your footprint here – on that altar, in these aisles, and on our hearts… but leave just one, so we may follow the other, one day, to heaven, and to your side.
In the Name of the One he was and is and is to come; the Alpha and the Omega, the Lord of Life, our Savior Jesus Christ, our Master, and our Friend. Amen.
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
The Feast of the Ascension
21 May 2009
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia
Reading 'Us Weekly' with Fear
Reading is one of my favorite hobbies, and as a result of my obsession with reading, we get a number of magazines delivered to our house. There is, however, one magazine to which we subscribe which I am ashamed to confess that I sometimes pick up and read. It isn’t a high-falutin magazine, or anything risqué, but it is, horror of horrors, a gossip rag, Us Weekly. When I do occasionally read Us Weekly, I find it to be inevitably a depressing experience. I’m not overly depressed by the third-grade prose, or the fourth-grade gossip, although those are depressing enough in and of themselves. No, what bothers me is that we live in a culture in which such a magazine could flourish. I’m sure that Us Weekly has a far greater circulation than The New Yorker or The Economist, which means just one simple thing: more people spend their time discovering who is wearing what brand name, or have a romance with whom, or starring in a hot new television show, then they do worrying about the environment, or the economic crisis, or the problems of homelessness, or the possibility of a pandemic. And I occasionally am one of them.
Us Weekly is symbolic somehow for me of everything that I find strange and wrong about our culture and world today: the obsession with stars, the focus on money and appearances, the decline of civility, the slide into ignorance, and a certain unique fascination and excitement over the inevitable failure of whomever is the flavor of the week. It is boring, predictable fluff, designed to sell advertising and with the effect of dulling the senses and the mind.
Behind that entire diatribe which I just made you listen to is fear. I may take it out on Us Weekly, but really I am I am afraid of a culture that lives in the kind of banal malaise that ours seems to. My fear has a new quality to it now, as I come to terms with being a parent. I am afraid to raise my daughter Esme in such a culture, and afraid that she will inherit (or worse) feel comfortable with the vast problems facing our culture and the world. Wendell Berry, the farmer-philosopher has a phrase about children being “hostages given to the future,” and I fear the future to which I will eventually give my daughter. I am, in short, full of fear. Gut wrenching, “wake up in a cold sweat,” dry-mouthed fear.
Which is made worse by the fact that I can never hear the Epistle from this morning without a slight twinge of guilt. How can one not feel guilty hearing: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” I apparently have not yet reached perfection in love, as is clearly demonstrated by my palpable fear, instead of that perfected divine love that should be in me.
My first inclination is almost to laugh at the message from the Epistle. Surely that message sounded as hollow and foolish to those early Christians, as it can to us at first blush today. They were living in an unfriendly Empire beginning to show the first signs of decay. Their society was no less characterized by the pabulum of social spectacle and violence than ours is. They had, I would imagine, a very similar set of fears about the future, about the decline of culture, and for their children. Surely they were as fearful as I am.
But I don’t think the writer of the Epistle that has been read in our midst this morning is making us feel guilty for not having perfect love. I think instead the writer is making a vast and mystical statement about fear and love, and I think that, rather than laughing at that statement, as is my first inclination, there is great wisdom to be gained from listening to what the writer is saying.
Hidden in the passage from 1st John this morning is an absolute gem of an idea: that we do not need to fear, indeed that fear is a complete waste of time and energy, because we are rooted and centered in the love which God Incarnate has for us. Fear is a reflection of my (dare I say “our”) inability to believe and to trust that God loves us, that God is working to bring us out of a corrupt and foolish culture into that heavenly city which we long for.
I’d like to mix metaphors, if I may, between the Gospel and the Epistle. Perhaps it will help you to think about this perfect love. Think of the metaphor of the vine and branches that Jesus uses in the Gospel this morning. The vine feeds the branches, provides nourishment and support, so that the branches can bloom and bring forth fruit. The vine and the branches are intimately connected and linked by the same physiology. The xylem and phloem (if I remember my high-school biology correctly), the veins of the vine and the branches carry the same nutrients and water back and forth between the vine and the branches.
Think of that perfect love that the Epistle writer is referring to, as the sap that flows between the vine and the branches. Jesus is the vine on which we sit and live, and what flows from the vine to the branches and back is love. God’s love flows in our veins, and we love because God loves us first, and cares for us.
The message of the Epistle this morning, the hope that is being shown to us is that all we do is rooted in God Incarnate, and flows up from God into us. We don’t need to flog ourselves into better or more perfect love. The love is God’s, the expression is God’s. God’s love flows in us as our lifeblood, whether we are aware of it or not, and that same love is evident in how we care for those around us, in the fruit that we bear.
It is hard, especially when one is a dull, thick-witted branch like myself to be aware of that divine love flowing in my veins. It is too natural, too normal, too much a part of my life and being. But I can see the fruit beginning to bud and flower. I can see the places where that perfect love is driving out the fear within me.
Which is very good news indeed. I don’t need to somehow find it in myself to squelch my fears about my daughter and modern society. I don’t need to force myself into loving any of the people who grace the pages of Us Weekly. What I need to do is let my brain catch up with that wonderful mystery that already is: God loves them and me, God loves Octo Mom and Lindsey Lohan, and even a foolish, slightly crazy curate at a church in Philadelphia. God loves the hungry and the poor, the rich and the socialites, and that divine love is flowing in and through us, driving out our fears and exploding out into fruit-laden branches.
Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft
St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia
10 May 2009
Trust in the Shepherd
The Lord is my shepherd, therefore can I lack nothing.
Today is the day that we gather in our annual meeting to talk about our plans. We have been planning, studying, estimating and evaluating for well over a year, now. We have hired professionals to inspect the fabric of our buildings, and the Vestry and I have guided discussions and prayer about the workings of the ministries that are housed in and around these buildings. We have been responsible, because you have to be responsible about these things.
We are not done, mind you. We will have to endure feasibility studies and more detailed plans, more meetings, more discussion, more prayer and discernment. No, we are not done. We are being careful.
And when we are (rightly) being so careful, it can be hard, very hard, to trust. But the message of the gospel today is a message of trust. Trust in Christ who cares for us as a shepherd cares for his sheep.
It is hard for us to trust God. If we try to think of people who trusted in God, we feel a little sorry for them. Think of those early Christians who trusted God even in the face of persecution. Think of the pilgrims whose trust in God landed them on the shores of New England where they found a harsher life than they left behind and nearly starved. Think of the Baptists – any Baptist will do – by which I mean those Christians who we imagine as less sophisticated and less toothsome than we are who seem to place their trust in God for the most mundane things – like winning a football game.
It’s hard for us to put our trust in God, because we have come to believe that we should really trust ourselves, our instincts, our knowledge, our sublime ability at anything we choose to do. We can analyze a situation, size up the obstacles, assess our resources, concoct a plan, and accomplish any goal. Man on the moon? You got it! Heart transplant? Every-day procedure! A tiny communications device in every pocket? Please, turn your cell phones to vibrate mode while I’m preaching. What is there that we humans cannot do when we put our minds to it, if only we will trust in our ingenuity and the power of the marketplace? (OK, our confidence in the market is shaken, but do you seriously doubt that it will return?) But trust in God?!? This is a tall order.
There is a reason that the 23rd Psalm is usually heard at funerals: that is, perhaps, the only time that we, knocked off balance by our grief, are open to the idea that we might have to trust in God. The Lord is my shepherd… yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. The Lord is my shepherd, and I am his sheep. Trust, trust, trust in God during this dark hour of death and grief. But eventually the clouds of death disperse, and we must get on with it, and put our trust back where it belongs again: in ourselves.
Churches are not immune to this struggle to trust in God (even Baptist churches). But Episcopalians may be the worst. This is in part because for a long time we Episcopalians were the best at everything else. Exhibit A: The Lady Chapel of this church. Rodman Wanamaker, who built it (or, I should say, who extravagantly paid for it) wasn’t even an Episcopalian. But when he decided to bury his Episcopalian wife in style, nothing was spared, only the best would do. And didn’t that seem perfectly appropriate to the congregation here at the time? They’d done everything else marvelously well.
But, oh, how hard it is to trust in God. (The Lord is my shepherd, therefore can I lack nothing.) I once heard a famous, wonderful Baptist preacher in the pulpit of a small Episcopal church filled with a very well-to-do congregation say to us: “Your problem is that you have such low expectations of God. I know you have low expectations of God because you are Episcopalians!”
How can we trust God when we have such low expectations of him?
Do we stop to consider that the account of what happened among those first followers of Jesus after his death and resurrection is not a theological treatise on the topic but a chronicle of the Acts of the Apostles – what they did in Jesus’ name!? They healed the sick, raised the dead and spread the word against unreasonable odds! The Lord was their shepherd; the Lord is your shepherd; the Lord is my shepherd.
There is a lie being told these days about religion that is told so often you may have begun to believe it: that religion is personal. This lie is told in order to shut down conversation in a country that has become increasingly uncomfortable with religious diversity. Religion may have its personal aspects, but at its heart religion is most definitely not personal: it is communal, social, a group enterprise. The Good Shepherd is shepherd of a flock, not a collection of individuals. And most often when he calls his sheep together it is not so he can help them develop healthy, contemplative inner lives, it is so he can get the sheep to move together in a single direction and do something, go somewhere. (And in that process he allows for the development of good, healthy, contemplative inner lives.) Have you ever been stopped, in your travels, by a flock of sheep crossing a road? What a thing to see all these stupid sheep, baa-ing nose-to-tail as they are cajoled across the road. But get enough of them in one place and they can stop traffic!
We have given you today sheaves of paper, as background for the Master Plan and the Strategic Goals for ministry of this parish. These pages discuss many different areas of our life but they have one subliminal, underlying message: trust us; trust me. And, oh, how I hope you will absorb that message, like good little sheep! (Trust us; trust me.) We have outlined many things but two outcomes will clearly result from them all: some things are going to change, and we are going to have to raise money! (Trust us; trust me.) And no one likes to see things change, or to raise money – well, at least no Episcopalian!
And so I have been telling you this secret that, really, you already know, but which is seldom said out loud in church. It is hard to trust in God – hard for you, and hard for me to trust that God is actually going to help us do the things he has planted in our imaginations as possible and reasonable and good for the life of this parish. It is hard to trust in the Good Shepherd, especially when we have convinced ourselves that we have to trust in ourselves, since, after all, religion is so personal.
Our architects have delivered to me and to the Buildings & Property Committee today a thick book of plans, with lots or words, lots or pictures, and lots of zeros!
The Vestry and I have presented to you two pages of Strategic Goals for ministry, and the news that the Sunday morning schedule is going to change this Fall.
All of this will be deeply disruptive to your personal religion (and mine) and undermine your already faltering ability (and mine) to trust in God, and in his Son Jesus. Easier to leave things alone, leave one another in peace, for God’s sake!
And if the message of all these pages, and of all this talk was to say that we should not worry because we can do it (trust us; trust me), then you would be wise to consider carefully whether or not all this talk has been for naught. And tempting as I find that message, quite frankly, much as I want to reassure you about what we can do as a community of faith and of strength, I know that it is not the message of the Gospel. The Gospel tells us where to place our trust: in that Good Shepherd who is so trustworthy that he laid down his life for us.
I am glad we have been careful in the way we have gone about all the planning, all the conversations that led us to this point in our lives. I am glad we have spent the time in discussion and prayer and evaluation. I’m glad we hired expert professionals to help us. I am glad we have exercised due diligence, and I know we have more due diligence to do.
But I am more profoundly glad that what brings us all to this church, and to this discussion, is not just the musings of our own personal religion and our confidence in ourselves, but a conviction, I pray, that as a community of faith we can do nothing whatsoever unless we put our trust in Christ, the Good Shepherd, and anything at all that we can imagine – and so much more – when we do.
The Lord is my shepherd; the Lord is your shepherd; the Lord is our shepherd. If we put our trust in him – together – I believe we may even stop traffic as people stop to see where God is leading this marvelous flock on Locust Street.
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
3 May 2009
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia