Cable

A few nights ago the sound of jackhammers was echoing down Locust Street, once again.  With construction on the block and around the corner this is hardly unusual.  But when I went outside, I noticed that in addition to the jackhammer across the street on the corner of 17^th Street, there was a crew working just in front of the Rectory.  They were from Comcast, the cable company.

Now, I happen to know that years ago, long before the Comcast Center (the tallest building in the city) was built just five blocks down 17^th Street from us, at least ten years ago, maybe more, in the course of some unspecified street repair or maintenance, the cable that provides the Comcast feed to our side of Locust Street was accidentally cut, and had never been repaired.  We have become accustomed, on this side of the street, to living in the shadow of a huge corporation whose services are widely advertised but completely unavailable to us.

So when I heard the jackhammer and saw the Comcast crew, I began to put 2 and 2 together.  I asked one of the workers what they were doing, just to be sure.  “We’re repairing the cable to this side of the street,” he told me, adding that it had been cut years ago.  What, I asked, had prompted the repair after all these years?  “We have a long To-Do list,” he said, “and we finally got around to it.”

It is a dangerous, and perhaps a silly thing to provide an analogy that compares Comcast in any way, shape, or form to God, so please, let us try to avoid that.

But I do think that the situation as it stood here on Locust Street resembles the way many people feel about God.  You may believe that God exists.  You may even live down the street from his headquarters (or at least not far from a church).  You know there was a time, long past, when God seemed to be at work in the world, when communication flowed between God and his people.  But for reasons unknown, the cable, so to speak, has been cut; you have no access to God, who seems to have nothing to say to you anyway; and so you have become accustomed to getting on without him.

I can’t speak for the entire block, but Saint Mark’s does take up about two-thirds of this side of the street, so for most of us, I can say that we have learned to live quite well without cable.  There are alternatives, after all.  We have a satellite dish on the Rectory roof.  And if there have been benefits of being Comcast customers besides being able to watch the BBC and the Food Network (which the satellite also provides) we are blissfully unaware of and unconcerned by them.

So too, perhaps, with those of us who have become accustomed to living without an intimate relationship with God.  There are plenty of alternative ways to spend our time, especially our Sunday mornings.  And whatever benefits we may be missing out on, go largely un-noticed anyway.

Not so for the children of Israel as they wandered with Moses in the desert.  Having begged for food when there was none, God rained down manna – what the Scriptures call the bread of angels – but this did not erase the memory of delicacies they had enjoyed during their slavery in Egypt.  “We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now… there is nothing at all but this manna to look at,” they complain.

They are, of course, confused.  They are not really even thinking about God and whether or not he is looking after them.  They are simply whining.  They have forgotten that when they had fish and cucumbers and melon and onions and garlic, they were slaves who also had to gather the straw to make bricks.  But they feel as though there was a time, now past, when things were different, better: a time before some cable was cut and there was an easier relationship with God, who at this point has led them into the desert with nothing but the bread of angels to eat, and no other alternatives.

Still, they share with us that sense that there was a time when things were different, better, easier.  A time before the heat of the desert had dried up the cable, and God was more clearly on their side.

The other night, as I briefly watched the cable guys do their work, I noticed that there was, just outside my office window, beside the little pit in the ground where the cable connections are made, a barrel with a coil of blue rope in it that was being pulled through a pipe underneath Locust Street and across 17^th Street to the southwest corner where the jackhammer had opened up a hole in the street.  And I knew that that rope would soon be pulled back through the pipe, with the cable tied to it, to make the connections that are hooked up in the little pit outside my window.  How simple it seems.

And the Scriptures hold out for us this morning two possibilities for re-making the connection to God that we suspect has been severed deep underground where we cannot reach it.

The first is in the Letter of James who reminds the church that in times of distress, suffering, sickness – those times when we feel most certainly and anxiously that the cable to God has been cut – the prescription is prayer.  Prayer is the blue rope that we feed through the pipe to God, snaking it underground, across the street, where God asks us to trust that he picks up his end even if he has to jackhammer the pavement to get to it.  And like the blue rope, prayer moves in two directions.  Once fed across the street, it comes back to us, if we listen carefully, faithfully, attentively enough, if we care to spend the time reeling it gently back to discover that God has tied a cable to it so that we can re-establish our connection to him.

James has a simple and beautiful way of saying this: “The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective,” he says.  Which means that the blue rope makes its way across the street, and that the cable is always attached when we pull it back through to our side.  The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective.

The second possibility is harder to spot, because we are easily distracted by Jesus’ exaggerated teaching, in which he seems to be suggesting self-mutilation as the appropriate response to failure.  “If your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off…  And if your eye cause you to stumble, tear it out…” etc.  We become so troubled by these words that we miss the point Jesus was making.  His disciples were complaining that someone outside their group was casting out demons in Jesus’ name. 

But Jesus says, “Whoever is not against us is for us.”  Don’t you dare, he goes on to say, don’t you dare put a stumbling block in the way of someone who believes in me, just because they are not a part of your group.  “For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward.”

And there, right there, is another blue rope, but you have to look for it: the cup of water, extended by anyone just because you bear the name of Christ.  Hospitality, kindness, generosity, care extended by anyone – a Muslim, a Jew, an atheist? - and received in Christ’s name is another way of feeding the blue rope through the pipe and under the streets, and then reeling it back to re-establish the connection with God.  How uncanny and unlikely!

And Jesus suggests that we will not always know such opportunities when we see them, so it is better to work on the assumption that whoever is not against us is for us; whoever is not tearing the blue rope from your hands is actually helping to feed it across the street, and back again.

The burden of Jesus’ teaching, like the burden of James’s teaching, is that it’s all about the blue rope.  It’s all about seeking to remain in the kind of relationship with God that allows him to tie his cable of mercy and love and forgiveness and hope to our blue ropes, then tug on them in an effort to get us to reel the thing in, back over to our side of the street.  If your hands or your feet or your eyes are preventing you from tending to the rope, to unraveling it and paying it out, to coax it under the dark recesses of whatever it is that’s under the streets, then do something about it!  Do something drastic!  Don’t just sit there, and complain that there used to be cable, but now we have to settle for satellite.  You might as well be whining for cucumbers and melons and leeks and onions and garlic.

Meanwhile God continues to rain down the bread of angels.

To the best of my knowledge (I have not tested this yet) cable has been restored to this side of Locust Street.  Sadly this does not mean that I can now watch re-runs of Mary Tyler Moore or The Odd Couple, whenever I want, any more than I can count on God giving me the answers I want to my prayers just because they are the answers that I want.

But the fact is that when we imagine that God has a long To-Do list and that we must be very far down the list, if we are even on the list at all, we are probably mistaken.  Because God is really not anything at all like Comcast.  He has never ceased wanting to be in relationship with us.  But we have paved over the streets of prayer and sacrifice that he once used because we have found other things to do with the space he once took up in our lives.  We have – usually with our carelessness, but sometimes out of anger or resentment – severed the cables that connected us to God.

And so he bids us turn again to prayer – a blue rope let out to God’s reach.  Or, at least see the hand reached out to us with a cup of water: the hand of a neighbor, who, if not against us, may well be for us.  God will work, you see, with almost anything; he needs very little.

And from time to time we may feel a tugging in our consciences, our hearts, that place where perfect love seeks to cast out fear.  It is like the hand of God tugging on his end of a blue rope, letting us know that the cable of his love has been tied to it, ready for us to reel it back over to our side of the street, to re-connect, and to love again.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

27 September 2009

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Welcoming the child

When I was in seminary, one of the requirements was a course in systematic theology, and we had to read hundreds of pages from the work of Karl Barth, a famous 20^th century theologian, whose massive theological work, Church Dogmatics, runs to like 20 volumes. It is an incredibly convoluted and dense work. I thought of bringing a selection to read to you, but I’m hoping that you will actually listen to me for a little bit of time and I’m rather sure that thirty seconds of Barth would discourage that. After our class had spent weeks wrestling with Barth’s difficult style and Teutonic prose, the professor told us a story about Barth. At one point, a cheeky reporter had asked him to sum up his million word theological tome in a sentence or two. Barth thought about it for a moment and quoted a children’s song to the reporter: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

There was, the professor was telling all us serious and earnest seminarians, a simplicity to the Christian faith. We could get wrapped in the minutiae of Barth’s neo-orthodox theology, or spend inordinate amounts of time reading about the interrelation between the different persons of the Trinity, but even Barth himself was not foolish enough to think that his writing was anything but an attempt to flesh out the heart of the Christian message, a message of stunning simplicity which a child could understand.

Which is aptly illustrated in the Gospel this morning. Sometimes Jesus teaches in complex parables, but sometimes he says exactly and precisely what he means. The disciples often don’t get it, but Jesus is speaking simply about what is going to happen: he is going to suffer, die and rise again. I find it particularly challenging to preach about the obvious passages: where is the nuance, where the need for scholarly study or clever explanation, when Jesus describing what simply is, like Barth summing his work in the lines of the children’s song: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

He tells his disciples that he must be betrayed, killed and rise again, and they are afraid to ask him what he means. They’ve heard this message before, and when Peter tried to argue with him, Jesus slammed the door on Peter pretty hard. The disciples don’t understand that Jesus is saying simply what he means.

They apparently don’t understand the simple words that he has been teaching them again and again: “Whoever wants to be first must be last and a servant of all.” The disciples don’t understand that the hierarchy of God’s kingdom is a race to the bottom, a race into nothingness, to emptying the selfishness out of yourself as fast as you possibly can, until there is room for God in the space that you’ve fought to clear in your heart. The disciples are looking for power, position, maybe even riches, but not only is that not the way that Jesus operates, but he has plainly told them again and again, in simple language, that the end of his journey, the end of their journey if they follow him is death, death of self, even physical death.

To make the message clear, Jesus draws a child from the crowd. The child doesn’t know anything about theology or whatever the current debates are. The child only knows about the joy of curiousity and discovery; about the brute feelings of love, fear and hunger.

The child becomes the symbol, the illustration to the disciples of their distance from what Jesus is teaching: arguing about position or role, they cannot see the forest for the trees, the wonder in the world around them, or the glory of an innocent, simple child. The child becomes the touchstone of their distance from welcoming God into their lives.

I’d bet that a child would become a touchstone for us as well. Let’s turn the situation around, let’s pluck a child up from our culture and time to use as a measure of our welcome of Jesus. What are the odds, do you suppose, that if we plucked a child from somewhere around Philadelphia, that child would be hungry, or lonely, or living in squalor, or barely literate? What are the odds that the child would have experienced violence or abuse? What are the odds that the child would have health insurance or adequate access to health care? What are the odds the child would survive to adulthood?

To which you might say, “But the living standards of this hypothetical child have nothing to do with welcoming them.” But we have heard the simple message of the Gospel on that too recently: to care only for the spiritual needs of a person is to fail them utterly.

No, my friends, this is the simple truth that Jesus is teaching us this morning: the measure of our welcome of the least of these is the measure of our welcome of God into our lives. Because Jesus comes to lose his life, to pour himself out as a sacrifice, to squeeze the Divine Word down into the form of a child, and if we cannot make room for a child in our lives, we cannot makes the space for God.

Like all the birds of the air and the flowers of the field, God’s compassion is for the little things, the small, that which is ignored or passed over. The orphan, the alien, the widow, the child; unless we welcome and care for them we welcome not God.

Like the disciples, I think we are being reminded of how far from the kingdom we might be. Like the disciples, we are far from grasping the simplicity that Jesus is teaching: position matters naught, shameful death matters naught; whoever wants to be first must be last and become a servant to all.

The truth that Jesus is teaching is remarkably simple. It is like the child’s song. The practice of that truth, there is where the hardness and complexity comes from. But we have here again given to us in the Gospel this morning, the gift that Jesus so often gives us of symbols which we can use to begrudgingly begin again the never-ending process of prying open our hearts: welcome the child as you would welcome God. A simple message, the practicalities of which are a lifetime’s work.

Friends, we are surrounded by children in need, children in squalor, children in dire straights. There are more then enough children in need of welcome to pry open all our hearts to God’s love and grace.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia

20 September 2009

More of Jesus, Less of Me

Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.

Only in America, I suspect, could there have developed the Christian weight-loss industry, which has flourished for the past few decades.  I first heard of it years ago when I was captivated by the names of the programs, the titles of books on this topic:  Bod 4 God, Thin Within, Rebuilding the Temple, What Would Jesus Eat, and The Lord’s Table: a biblical approach to weight loss, for instance.   You can buy, if you like, the “Stop the Devil from Laughing when you Diet Journal” which promises to help you “combine your diet with the ability to resist temptation and achieve lasting weight loss.”

But my favorite is the little book, now more than 30 years old, called “More of Jesus Less of Me.”  The obvious biblical text for that weight-loss guide is the insight of Saint John the Baptist who said of Jesus, “He must increase, and I must decrease.”  But I think it’s unlikely that John the Baptist was very pudgy, and therefore not much inspiration to dieters.

Today, however, I want to think with you about what Jesus meant when he said, “Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”  Because this teaching of Jesus’ is very near the center of his message.  And it is very much like asking whether or not I want more of Jesus in my life, and less of me.

Jesus asks his disciples today, “What will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?”  Which neatly articulates precisely the question that most business schools have taught their graduates to explore, and about which the rest of us are extremely curious.  But for those who would follow him, Jesus does not even try to disguise the degree of difficulty: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”  Anyone here really interested in that?  More of Jesus, less of you?

As many of you know, I have my own preference for a Christian weight-loss program.  It involves carrying a pack on your back and walking across northwestern Spain to the old city of Santiago de Compostela.  The 400 miles of the pilgrim’s route that I walked last month took at least 16 pounds off me, which means that I really should go back for another 400 miles.

At the risk of sounding self-righteous, may I suggest that there is something life-losing about the decision to live for a month or more out of a backpack?  Sleeping in bunk beds, surrounded by snoring, smelly people, but never in the same place for more than one night, in country whose language you do not speak, with few options to exercise each day except the decision to keep walking or not.   There are other ways, I suppose, to lose your life for a month and still be able to reclaim it, but this is the one that has worked for me.  It is as close as I am able to get (so far) to losing my life for the sake of the gospel.  And I have to say, it is a most wonderful and remarkable experience.

I walked last month with people in their teens and people in their sixties.  I walked beside the sea, and up mountains.  I walked with people who woke up early and walked fast, and those who dawdled in the morning and liked to go slow.  No one that I know of found it easy.  Never was there a day without its challenges.  No one was without their blisters, or sore knees, or tired feet, or pain of one kind or another.  Those who had packed too much in their bags found it was better to leave things behind, or send them home.  Some had to adjust their shoes, some their sleeping or eating habits, others their expectations.  Especially in the first week or so, you discover what the dimensions of this life-losing will be.  And every morning, before 8, you start walking, and walking, and walking.

For me this is helpful because I am stubborn and a slow learner.  It is helpful to me to be able to pound out my prayers, step by step, mile by mile.  And while sometimes my prayers had a more specific shape, in general you could sum them up in six words: More of Jesus, less of me.  More of Jesus, less of me: not a bad prayer to tread into the ground, step by step.

And although some weight-loss is a happy by-product of that prayer, it is, of course, about so much more than that.  It is about letting Christ’s perfect love cast out the many fears that can be defining features of our lives.  It is about learning how to care as much or more about someone else as I care about me.  It is about being open to going where Jesus calls in life, doing what Christ asks.    And it is about rejecting the search for the answer to the question: what would it profit me to gain the whole world, or at least as much of it as I can possibly gather up for myself?

More of Jesus, less of me?  Now that I am back in Philadelphia – only a week now – I can already sense how much harder it is to make this my prayer.  So many more ways to make it all about me here; to get what I want to have, do what I want to do.  Less of Jesus, more of me.

On the day that I arrived in Santiago – having walked for twenty-six days to cover a distance that it would take me eleven hours to retrace by train on the way home – my fellow pilgrims and I spent a great deal of time just hanging out beneath the shadow of the cathedral.  Standing and talking, sitting in silence, some even having a siesta there on the cobblestones in the plaza.  We were not waiting for anything; we all had other places we could have been.  But we somehow knew that this was where we belonged, beneath the façade of this magnificent church, within her gaze and embrace.  And it was as if we knew that once we left, we’d be trading our lives back in, regaining the lives we’d given up for a time.  Not an unappealing prospect, mind you, but not nearly so welcome as you’d expect.

Could I already sense, I wonder, that I was no longer so well poised to invite more of Jesus into my life and less of me?  And that now that I would not be walking every day I’d have to begin to watch my diet again if I want there to be less of me?

Being a follower of Jesus isn’t an easy thing to be, and it never has been.  To believe otherwise is to ignore the many different ways Jesus taught this lesson: Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.  And it’s part of my job, I think, to be able to share with you not only what I think Jesus means by this teaching, but to actually try it on, see what it feels like, to have some firsthand knowledge about the experience of losing one’s life for the gospel.

And the assurance that God gave me on my twenty-six days of pilgrimage was the sense of overwhelming gratitude for the gifts that he poured into my life; even when it was a life lived out of backpack, sleeping on bunks, conversing in broken Spanish.  These gifts include not only the marvelous baroque embrace of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.  They include also the long shadow of a brownstone tower on Locust Street, and a community of people here, who I hope and believe want to be pilgrims too, each in her own way.

And I hope that whether we lose any weight together as we go or not, we may together become more adept at this prayer, and at accepting God’s responses to it: More of Jesus in my life, please God, and less of me.  More of Jesus, less of me.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

13 September 2009

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia