Some secrets, when they are told, the cat let out of the bag, have the strange power to say a great deal without saying very much at all, and still leave much unsaid. I can tell you that I saw so-and-so and so-and-so holding hands in Rittenhouse Square last night. And, saying very little, I have suggested much more. And yet there is a great deal that neither one of us knows.
Speaking of the Sacred Trinity – the mystery of the one true God’s identity in three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit – is a bit like telling a secret, letting the mysterious cat out of the bag. We seem to have suggested a great deal about God without saying very much at all. And yet it seems clear that there remains a great deal to be said about God that none of us knows.
The Church is like a gossip who delights to spill the beans about the God whose secret she has learned. And on this Sunday – set apart to reflect on the mystery of what we call God’s triune nature – we are simply blabbing as much as we can about the tiny bit we know. It’s possible that, like any gossip, we even embellish the little bit we know to make it seem as though we know more than we do.
It is difficult for us to admit that when we have said that God is three persons, we have said almost nothing about God and certainly very little that we could explain to an innocent passerby. When we have said that God is three persons, we can only join the six-winged seraphim who hovered in Isaiah’s vision, and even they were reduced to stuttering as they cry to one another, careening about the heavenly throne:
Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory!
The prophet Isaiah, who heard the angels’ anthem, has seen more of the living God than most of us, has stood closer – if only in his vision – than most of us ever will. He would also become a much more effective gossip than most of us ever could: spilling the beans about God in exquisite poetry that shed light on the truth of God’s work in the world:
…the Lord hath anointed me
to preach good tidings unto the meek;
he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and the opening of prison to them that are bound;
to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord,
and the day of vengeance of our God;
to comfort all who mourn….
This from a man whose first reaction to the secret he learned of God was to say, “Woe is me, I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”
How different is Isaiah’s reaction from the kind of gossip we hear about God these days. For one thing, we have been told that Isaiah’s vision of God is a delusion, since God is a delusion of the pathetic masses who are prone to believe this kind of silly gossip just because it has been repeated so much over the years.
And we have been led to believe that a prophet who could write, “Woe is me, I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips” must have gone to Catholic schools if he is still carrying around that kind of guilt so far into adulthood.
And we have been encouraged to think that sleeping in, reading the Times, and going to brunch are far better ways to spend a Sunday morning than coming to church to repeat the three-fold “Holies” of the seraphim, with bells ringing as we do, as though it all means something.
Three important lessons, however, could be gleaned from the vision that Isaiah tells us about.
To begin with, the seraphim give us that word – Holy – to describe the unspeakable attributes of the God of glory. It is a useful word, not only for Sundays, when we gather in organized praise, but for moments of grace for which we have no other word:
… in the delivery room when the tiny body of your newborn is placed in your arms for the first time.
… at the top of a mountain where the beauty of God’s creation is seen with new clarity.
… in the dark quiet of the bedroom when you realize that the breathing of the one beside you is the sound of someone you still love after thirty or forty or fifty years.
What can be said about any of these blessings, or a thousand more I could catalogue here without even trying? Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts!
Next, there is Isaiah’s recognition of his own sinfulness, his own unworthiness: “I am a man of unclean lips.” Yes! And indeed we are a people of unclean lips. To say this is a statement of fact, not an accusation of guilt. The recognition of our unworthiness is a mature outcome of self-reflection and examination. It is not, however, a condemnation; it’s an honest evaluation. We humans are creatures prone to cheating, murder, lust, envy, and greed every bit as much as we are prone to care, generosity, helpfulness and love. It’s childish of us to believe that only half of that assessment is true and it’s dangerous when we forget our faults because it leads us to use our power in the wrong ways. So, yes, we are a people of unclean lips, but still God invites us into his presence. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts!
And then there is that beautiful moment when the voice of the Lord – which the psalmist has told us is a powerful voice; it breaks the cedars of Lebanon; splits the flames of fire; shakes the wilderness, makes the oak trees writhe, and strips the forests bare – this voice is heard by the prophet in clear tones, asking, “Whom shall I send; and who will go for us?” And without knowing where he will be going or what he must do Isaiah hears himself answer: “Here am I; send me!” Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts!
It was not to a rumor of holiness that Isaiah supplies his answer. It was not to mere gossip that he responded with that easy answer, Here am I; send me. It was to the living God, who knew perfectly well that Isaiah was just a man of unclean lips, living among a people of unclean lips.
And the real gossip that the Church has to share, is not just the mystery, let out of the bag, that the God who sits upon the throne of glory is a three-personed God known as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The real dish is that the thunderous voice of that God, the voice that makes the oak trees writhe, has never stopped asking, “Whom shall I send; and who will go for us?”
The fact is that God has given us so much more to gossip about. In John’s gospel we hear Jesus sum up the gossip he is planting in the ear of the church with the kind of brevity and lack of specificity that are both so typical of good gossip: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him."
What are these famous lines other than good gossip for us to spread? In only a few words they suggest so much, but leave a great deal unsaid, unclear, unknown to us. They give us a wonderful rumor of hope to spread in the world.
And that rumor of hope will be spread if people like you and like me are clear about three things:
That God, the Lord of hosts, is holy, holy, holy, and the whole earth is full of his glory.
That although we are a people of unclean lips, God can use our lips to speak his words of love and salvation.
That the thunderous voice of God still calls out, “Whom shall I send; and who will go for us.” He does not say where he is sending people or what they must do.
But he has supplied the gossip: that this three-personed God gave his only begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life; not t condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
And although our mothers always told us that we should never gossip; this rumor has the ring of truth about it. So much so that through the ages hundreds of thousands of people – men and women, all of them with unclean lips – have borrowed the words of the prophet to answer that question in a way that would change their lives: Here am I; send me!
God has many secrets. But some of them he has revealed to us – even though they only confuse us. But since God does not wish, himself, to be a secret to us, he has shown us that he is one and three - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
And although the truth of this secret is more or less beyond our imagination, it has certainly given us something to talk about, some gossip on God. To which God says, “Go ahead and talk about me all you like! In fact, whom shall I send; and who will go for us to spread this word?”
Who, indeed?
Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory!
Hosanna in the highest!
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
Trinity Sunday, 7 June 2009
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia
Crash helmets
When I was in my first attempt at seminary, at Yale, there was a wonderful man who I'll call Bob who did most of the maintenance and ground work at the seminary. He loved the seminarians and the seminary, but he was a little dubious about the quality of prayer that the starry-eyed, seminarians engaged in. The quantity was fine, you understand, but he was relatively certain that there was a certain spirit lacking in our prayer lives. And he had, for many years, undertaken a campaign to correct this lack. He would pick a seminarian coming out of Morning or Evening prayer, a seminarian with a certain look. The look that says, “I'm thinking about the 200 pages of Barth's Dogmatics that have to be navigated by lunchtime”, or “the latest committee to be tackled in the ordination process,” and Bob would say, quite innocently “Have you been praying this morning?” The seminarian would inevitably respond “Yes.”
“You sure you've been praying?”
“Yes.”
And then Bob would spring the trap: “How come it doesn't feel like you've been praying?”
∞
There is a certain formality and reserve to worship in the Episcopal Church, especially very high catholic worship which seems too many people to be at odds with the free-flowing coming and movement of the Holy Spirit described in the readings for today. You can see it not only in our worship but in our iconography. In the Lady Chapel, the center panel on the reredos of the altar is a depiction of Pentecost, the descent of the Spirit upon the disciples. As I stand there, week in and week out, I have spent a good deal of time looking at that panel. It seems to me somehow very tame and proper. The disciples are all sitting rather stiffly and demurely, and the Spirit, depicted by a dove is radiating power out into their midst. Perhaps it is the setting or the medium but that depiction of Pentecost always seems a little staid to me, a little too tame. There is, for instance, no sense that you might mistake the disciples for rowdy drunks, as some of the bystanders did.
∞
Some of my favorite modern writing on the Holy Spirit is not from a theologian, but from the writer Annie Dillard, and at one point, writing about formality and the Holy Spirit she says this:
The higher Christian churches come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they were doing, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God. I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed. In the high churches they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a strand of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked.
We, certainly would be shocked if the roof was shattered and the Spirit descended. And we do tend to be professional in our approach to God, and we are also certainly uncomfortable with the more visceral expressions of the Spirit's power, that you might see in charismatic church, with speaking in tongues and waving of hands. We much prefer the benign summoning of the Spirit and the quiet expectation that it will somehow descend in a dignified manner during those sacramental moments of baptism, Eucharist and the other rites.
Yet if we know anything, we know that the wind of the Spirit blows where it wills, we know that there is nothing that we can do to predict or restrict the movement of the Spirit, and that God is good, but not safe, and certainly not predictable. The litany of interactions between the human race and God are a litany of surprises, of Damascus roads, of burning bushes and of God choosing to work through flawed, or dubious people to bring about the fulfilling of his purposes.
Which makes our professionalism, our intentional lack of awareness when it comes to the Spirit so amusing. Elsewhere in her writing, Annie Dillard speculates about the manner in which we should approach this Sunday morning hour:
On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.
Wouldn't you think twice about coming in the Fiske Doors if an usher was there, with a crash helmet to hand you. “Sometimes,” the usher might whisper to you, “the Spirit gets a little rowdy in here.”
Wouldn't we be shocked and stunned if our doughty servers suddenly began speaking in tongues, or collapsed around the altar slain in the Spirit?
Wouldn't it be a sobering experience for the priests here at St. Mark's, if, as we were vesting for mass, we also tied on a rope, like the high priests of Israel did before entering the Holy of Holies, just in case we suddenly expired because of our unworthiness or our close proximity to the jealous and dangerous Holy?
What the disciples discovered that first Pentecost, what Annie Dillard is pointing out is a simple truism: it is daylight-madness to expect to interact with the Living God, and get away unscathed.
∞
Despite sauntering through the liturgy, despite all evidence to the contrary, do we indeed believe a word of it? Do we believe a word of this Pentecost story? Do we think that the Spirit will still move in our midst with power, inspiring us to change the world and lose our lives in God? Do we go into each service expecting the Spirit to burst into our midst or are we more likely to wander through the liturgy without thinking about what we are doing and saying, without expecting the explosive out-breaking of the Spirit’s power?
I have a creeping sense that perhaps I am not the only one who feels a sense of entropy, as if the gifts of the Spirit are well nigh spent. There are times when it feels like the power which came upon the first disciples with such force is lost to us, or has slowly, over generations and generations been diluted. Where is the gift of prophesy, I wonder, when governments make immoral decisions and when the Church comes to backbiting and near-blows over what seem to be foolish things? Where are those spiritual gifts, when the Church seems tired, staid, declining? Where is the gift of healing when someone close to me sickens? There are times, and this is just me personally, when I stand at the altar and wonder if ordination is really only a method of ensuring that I’m at the very epicenter of the kill zone, when God wakes up and wonders just who that miserable priest is who is calling the Holy Spirit to descend upon those gifts.
All of which is to say that the Holy Spirit is high mystery, and as much as we would like to, we cannot describe or explain or even ever fully recognize the movement of that Spirit within our lives, our churches or the world.
But the Spirit is moving. Even when we cannot see it, even when it seems as if the power of the Spirit has left us, we know that the Spirit is moving. We know because the hungry are fed and the poor cared for, we know because the Spirit still draws people into our midst, to journey with us as a community, as it did fifty and a hundred years ago.
And we know because there is just somewhere in us the needling little fear that Spirit might indeed disrupt our well-rehearsed worship, our certainties and formalities. That the TNT we’ve been mixing this morning might actually go off. That just at the moments when we are sure that we have figured out God, that we have a theological system to capture and describe the Divine one, when we are sure of our correctness in thinking about God’s actions in the Scriptures, or God’s nature, or God’s likes and dislikes; just at that moment, when we are proud and certain, we know enough reach for our crash helmets, or grab for one of those nice ropes for reserving pews, and begin to lashing ourselves down. We know that the Spirit is moving because we know that in our pride and arrogance, the Spirit will be there, waiting to blow our birettas off, and roll us vestments and all, helter skelter down the aisle, to fetch up at the soup kitchen, or at our mission parish, St. James the Less, or at the ends of the earth. When our eyes have cleared from the explosion, and we have dusted the Damascus road off ourselves, and settled into something resembling composure, that same Spirit will begin to speak in and through us, telling the story of what God has done for us. As the Spirit has done in generations before us, and in the generations yet to come, until the end of the ages.
Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft
St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia
Pentecost, 31 May 2009
Rememberers
Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one. (Jn. 17:11)
4,962 is the number for tomorrow. At least it was the number yesterday of American servicemen and women who have died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last six years. And tomorrow is Memorial Day: a day for remembering our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines.
Remembering should come naturally to us in the church, since we are meant to be a community of rememberers. Not only is it our daily work to follow our Lord’s command to “do this in remembrance of me,” we also remember all kinds of people (their needs, wants, shortcomings, accomplishments, and thanksgivings) in prayer every day here and in churches everywhere. And from time to time we also manage to fulfill another meaning of the term “re-member” when we help put something back together again that had broken or fallen apart, be it a relationship, a person’s broken heart, or a building in need of repair – all of which have come within the purview of the church from time to time.
As a society, America is not so good at remembering any more. The first Memorial Day was called for in 1868 by a veterans’ organization of the Union Army with the intention that soldiers’ graves should be strewn with flowers. So much needed remembering in those years after the Civil War. Not just the sacrifice of that horde of dead soldiers, blue and grey, but the nation itself, the ruined South, the lives of the survivors. So much had been dis-membered. So much re-membering had to be done. And that awful war had surely left no one without important things to remember. In our own parish was the commanding general of the Battle of Gettysburg - George Meade, who lived nearby on 19th Street. How difficult must his remembering have been.
But these days the number of our dead is not so vast and our connections to those souls, in general, far more distant. We take note of the number, thank God we are not among them, and get on with our three day weekend.
Is it the case that we have gotten more comfortable with dismembering that with remembering? We seem to be experts at it. Look at our political processes, our communities, the racial divide in cities like ours. Look at our churches, no, look at our Episcopal church where we have decided to become experts at the legal mechanisms for dis-membering one another, led by our bishops, whose chief work this has often become. No wonder America struggles to remember the fallen on Memorial Day. No wonder the church struggles to put back together anything anymore that has broken or fallen apart. How can we become communities of remembering when we spend our time and energy dis-membering so much?
It would seem that Jesus anticipated his disciples’ predilection for dis-membering, and knew that they would struggle to be rememberers, and knew that this struggle would put them in peril.
He prayed: “Protect them… so that they may be one, as we are one…. While I was with them, I protected them… I guarded them, and not one of them was lost….”
Jesus knows how likely his disciples are to become dismembered from one another without him around; how likely they are to go their separate ways, fight their separate battles, form their separate churches. And he was right.
And so, as he is preparing to make his way to the Cross and to his death, he prays, and asks God the Father to make them re-memberers.
I have made your name known to them, whom you gave to me: make them rememberers.
They know that everything I have came from you, and I gave it to them: make them rememberers.
While I was with them I protected them: make them rememberers.
I have given them your word: make them rememberers.
The world hates them because they do not belong to the world: make them rememberers.
Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth: make them rememberers.
As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world: make them rememberers.
Jesus not only prayed his prayer, he also left it to the collective mind of the church as a means to remember. But our deftness at dismembering still outpaces our willingness or ability to remember.
So we come to a glorious weekend of sunshine and breezes, good beach days and barbecue weather… and a number: 4,962.
4, 962 lives to remember. The sad irony being that it is our ineptitude as rememberers that brings us the necessity of setting aside a day for remembering the lives that have been dismembered in our name, for our sake.
Perhaps our facility to dismember will always outpace our ability as rememberers. But for a day or two, it’s good to stop and join our prayers to Jesus’ prayer that we all might be one: remembered and rememberers. After all, what else could possibly prevent that terrible number from climbing too much higher?
Let us pray. O Almighty God, who canst bring good out of evil and makest even the wrath of men to turn to thy praise: We give thee humble thanks for the memory and good example of those who have laid down their lives in the service of our country. Accept their sacrifice in the cause of righteousness. Teach us to live together in charity and peace; and grant, we beseech thee, that the nations of the world may henceforth be united in a firmer fellowship for the promotion of thy glory and the good of all mankind; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
24 May 2009
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia