Heads Up!

Now when these things begin to take place, stand up, raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.  (Luke 21:28)

Our space agency, NASA, is at pains to reassure us – if we happen to consult with them – that the world will not end in three years’ time, as several strains of popular thinking assert.  NASA has produced lengthy articles and fact sheets to refute the various theories that set the date for cataclysm on the earth to December 21, 2012, when a particularly long page of an ancient Mayan calendar will be turned.  The Internet has provided a warm incubator for the kinds of minds that learn a little about an ancient culture’s time-keeping, pair it with ill-informed astronomy, and conjure up visions of the end of the world.

NASA doesn’t come right out and say that anyone who believes these predictions is a fool, or that those who make them are kooks.  But that is clearly the underlying message the agency is out to convey.

Many things will happen in 2012.  There will be a total solar eclipse, visible from Australia.  The summer Olympics will be held in London.  Portugal will switch to digital television broadcasting in High Definition.  Queen Elizabeth II will celebrate her Diamond Jubilee.  But no planet or asteroid will collide with the earth.  Nor will the earth begin to rotate on a different axis than it currently does.  A black hole is not likely to devour our solar system that year, or ever, so far as we can predict.

But, as if Jesus doesn’t already strike much of the world as something of a kook, today, on the Sunday we begin the new church year, we hear him making the kinds of predictions that would cause NASA to classify him as such.  Perhaps we would too: There will be signs in the sun and the moon and the stars, he says.  There will be distress among the nations, who will be confused by the roaring of the waves of the sea.  The powers of heaven will be shaken.  And the Son of Man will be coming on a cloud.

Is this helpful?  So often, Jesus has good things to say: the Beatitudes, those are nice; and the Summary of the Law, that you should love God and your neighbor; the parable of the Good Samaritan was a good one.  And today it feels like he ruins all that good stuff with this kookiness about signs and the stars, and the Son of man coming on a cloud, which I would venture to say hardly a single person in this church this morning believes.

So why does Jesus say it?  And why do we keep reading it, if it is just a bunch of kookiness that NASA would refute if only it wouldn’t cause trouble with the religious right?

I think we read it because of this:  Now, when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.  And because Jesus has more wisdom than we often give him credit for.

Kooky predictions aside, our world and our individual lives are full of calamity, horror and pain.  We may or may not faint from it, but there is plenty of fear and foreboding available to us all, and some of us are more susceptible to it than others. 

Jesus knows that in life, pain and calamity and horror are coming – thus has it always been.  Pain and calamity and horror are part of his life, too.  He knows.  He knows not only about the widows and the orphans, but also the refugees, and those who languish in prisons.  He knows about everyone who is losing a house to foreclosure; everyone who is out of work and looking for a job; and everyone who is being buried alive by their own personal debt.  He knows about the child soldiers in Africa, and child prostitutes on too many continents.  He knows about the soldier returning from Afghanistan with a missing limb; the veteran struggling with PTSD, and the parent who has nothing left of her child but the flag that draped his casket.  Jesus hears every difficult conversation when the results of the biopsy are finally in; he knows the face of every child who has been beaten or abused, and he must surely know the name of every child molested by a priest.  He knows of broken marriages, and those that hang on by the barest of threads.  He knows the slow-motion grief of Alzheimer’s, and the split-second horror of gunfire in a school or on the streets.  He knows the families in New Orleans who are still trying to rebuild their homes and their city.  He alone knows the complex isolation of an autistic child; the lopsided survival after a stroke; and the secret suffering that leads to suicide.

What need have we of cosmic calamity?  There is already enough calamity, pain, and horror in the world to go around!  And what need have we of signs?  Another war – what more could it possibly tell us?  For what could we then be prepared that our current wars have ill-prepared us for?

But Jesus’ message is not a message of warning that calamity is about to befall us.  He knows that we have calamity enough.  And most likely, every one of Jesus’ predictions about wars and disasters could be shown to have come true already and will come true again.  Jesus’ predictions are not really predictions about things that may or may not happen in the world; his prediction is about us and what we are destined for, in a world that cannot escape calamity.  Jesus’ message is this: stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.

Your redemption.  Had you been counted as worthless by the world, or those you thought you needed, or by your own self?  Had you been left for dead, or at best for dying?  Had you been written off, or written your own self off?  Did you look out and see only darkness in your life or in the world?  Has hope become little more than a Hallmark slogan?  Love reduced to the sales-pitch of Subaru?  Is your head bowed down, and can you only see the dirt at your feet?  Be on guard! For the kingdom of God is at hand! 

Yes, we have been sick, foolish, beaten, ruined, lost, given up, left for dead.  Yes, the signs of bleakness are about, as they have been all these centuries.  Yes, calamity is very likely on the horizon, one way or another, pain is inevitable, and horror is reported in the news every day.  But even here, even now, the kingdom of God is at hand!

Stand up!  Raise your heads!  Your redemption is drawing near!

We live in a world that seems unable to look forward to anything other than its next paycheck, to aspire to nothing more than the Wall Street year-end bonus, a McMansion, or winning the lottery. 

Have we given up hoping that there might be something stronger than the dollar?  Have we forgotten that we might be redeemed?!  Have we forgotten that we might be delivered from all that fills us with fear and foreboding? Have we forgotten that there might be a new kingdom established right here in the midst of this subtle reign of often low-grade calamity, pain, and horror?

These days the church is often thought of as either a refuge for kooks or a place where you can find hours of uninterrupted silence in an empty, old building, because nothing else much is happening there.  But as the church begins a new year, we are reminded that there is more to being the people who follow Jesus than providing a quiet, dark, empty space.  There is this message to a downcast world; a world bowed down with the weight of so much calamity, pain and horror.  There is this word spoken to those who have been beaten, cheated, denied their dignity, given up hope, left for dead – which means it is a word for anyone at all: Now that these things have begun taking place, stand up!  Raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near!

The Son of Man is coming.  And if he is not yet riding a cloud with power and great glory, then he is at least coming to us again in a manger: a child, susceptible to every horror and pain and calamity the world can dish out…

…which makes him a perfect Savior for a world that has largely lost interest in being saved.

And we believe this is true because we have felt or seen or known – if only once or twice – the transformation of God’s love that comes from allowing his Son to ride into our hearts.  We have known the grace of forgiveness; the strength of holy food given for holy people; the solace at the grave; the hope at the font.  We have seen that a light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not, cannot, will not overcome it.  We have known what it is like to live life with our eyes cast down, with the dirt and the grime and the grave our only prospect; the dump our only horizon.  And then we heard his call:  Stand up!  Raise your heads!  Your redemption is drawing near!

…and we looked up, and he was there, his arms outstretched like an infant’s or a king’s, and he welcomed us, and redeemed us, and everything was made new!

I do not believe for one moment that disaster awaits us in 2012.  But I do believe that Jesus’ warnings of calamity and horror and pain await us almost every day, and somewhere they are fulfilled every day.

And I believe that there is only one hope for deliverance from living our lives imprisoned by such predictions that are bound to come true one way or another.

I believe it because I know, I think, what it is like to live bowed down by fear, anxiety, and sin.  But in the church I have heard the voice of the Son of Man, who calls out at our lowest moments, when the world and all its ills seems certain to prevail:

Stand up!  Raise your heads!  Your redemption is drawing near!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

29 November 2009

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Christ is King

Here we are, at the end of the Christian year, and every year before we begin the year again, on this last Sunday we celebrate that Christ is King of Kings and Lord of Lords.  He is the Omega of all, and here at the end of the year, Christ is King.  Next week we will start again, and begin to prepare ourselves for that little baby “slouching towards Bethlehem” to invert our world and our lives, but today we proclaim what is true, despite all evidence to the contrary – Christ rules as King, now and always.

I say “all evidence to the contrary,” because that is the truth of the matter.  In a world beset by war, violence, all manner of “-isms,” economic disparity and crisis, and genocide, it seems, most often as if Christ is not King.  How could Christ possibly be King, and the world still looks like this?  Indeed, isn't the state of the world the best evidence there is that Christ is not King?

At one of the darkest moments in my life, right after I had returned from the darkness and death of Ground Zero, someone was foolish enough assign me an Ash Wednesday sermon and what I preached that day has haunted me since: that Lent is the abiding reality of life, that although we go through liturgical seasons, and celebrate high feasts, our lives are lived in a kind of perpetual, everlasting Lent, in the dust and ashes of our lives.

Which is not untrue.  We do live in a kind of perpetual slide into the dark, trapped in our own rather messy lives and heads, with our bodies and our loved ones aging and dying, and in a world filled with darkness, fear and suffering.  But it is not the whole truth. 

The message of the Gospel is that we live between the times.  We live in times which look like everlasting lent, but the message of the Gospel, the unseen truth is that there is a glory waiting to be revealed to us: that Christ rules as King, and that however dark the world might be, however lost or hopeless we as people might be, yet still Christ reigns as King and that someday, God willing, we will get out to the place of the visible reign of God.

But Lord knows it is hard to live in that tension with one foot in lent and one foot in the reign of God already begun.  It is hard to live in the messiness of the world, wondering why the reign of God isn’t manifest.

I also find it hard.  I’ve been ruminating, for the past week on the past year.  A year ago I knelt here, just inside the chancel gates and was ordained to the priesthood, and yet ordination didn't perfect me, or bring me up out of that place of lent, not knowing or feeling the reign of God.

Ordination has not removed my angst about my ability as a priest, or taken away the pain and suffering in others which priesthood brings one into constant and perpetual contact with.  Not only is the world a dark place, and the life of the priest a constant vision and interaction with that darkness, but the lives of people are dark and messy, and I know this now, not just because I've interacted with people in dark and messy places for the past year, but because I know that I am a mess, that ordination doesn't make me anything other then the messy person that I was before, and yet still through it all Christ is King.

There is nothing quite like, day in, day out, going to the altar, dragging with you your own darkness and the darkness or pain of the conversation that you have just had.  The liturgy takes on, at times, a decidedly ironic tone: “Lift up your hearts,” and try to keep the ironic smile off your face, or even more poignant, “The Peace of God which passes understanding…”  Indeed it does, here in the Lenten twilight.

There was an old priest I knew who used to say that every time he went up to the altar an atheist and came down again a Christian, and there are days like that, when Lent takes hold.

But through it all, Christ is King.

Only when the grace of God is able to strike me hard enough to remind me of Christ’s Kingship, only then, when I can remember briefly that Christ is King do I know that somehow the messiness, both in the world and in all of us, and most of all in myself is not the eternal, everlasting Lent that it feels, but the moment of waiting for what is already true to be revealed.

Christ is King of my joys and sorrows, king of my failures and my successes, King of my good days, or more likely my bad ones, King no matter how much I fail to remember or just can't let him be.  So I will go up unto the altar of God, as I have done for a year now.  Despite feeling and knowing that I am a mess, unworthy. 

Michael Ramsey, a great archbishop of Canterbury in a complex and wonderful phrase once described ordination as a “walking sacrament”.  For priests journey through life, allowed into the lives of God’s people and as they go, they bless.  They bless and offer up to God the brokenness, the sadness, the messiness of the world around them.  And I wonder if part of that walking sacrament is the full knowledge that I too am broken, foolish, messy, one step from a train wreck.  Through the broken things of earth, God works, through water, bread, wine and human beings, even this foolish human being standing before you today, because Christ is King.

Because the Ancient of Days, the Alpha and Omega is also the broken Jesus, scourged, whipped, mocked, standing before Pilate, soon to be hung on a tree, and cognizant of the irony of the question about his kingship.  Because the crucified and dead Lord is King, because of that, the brokenness of the world and my own brokenness are as nothing. 

Because Christ is King, I can go up to the altar and stumble through my pastoral work.  Because Christ is King, I can go up to the altar and know that my brokenness and the brokenness of bread and wine, and the brokenness of the world are caught up, covered, restored, and redeemed, because Christ himself has been broken.

And through it all, Christ is King.  Through all the births and deaths, the meetings and pastoral counseling, through the Offices and the masses, when I'm feeling thankful or Lenten, or atheistic, through it all Christ is King.

For some day, we will get out into the vision of his reign.  Some day we will see no longer only in part, that glory which is yet hid from us.  Our Lent will be over and our tears turned to songs of joy.  And we will know that secret hid in the midst of our Lenten struggle: Christ is King and rules over all our times, Lenten or happy. 

Until the day when we can see his kingdom, reign on our altars and in our hearts, O King of Glory.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

22 November 2009

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

God is faithful

From time to time people ask me about my cat Leo, who was brought to me as a very small kitten, abandoned in the streets of Philadelphia.  He was maybe two months old, but he had already learned the lessons that seem to have shaped every aspect of his life.  In sum, those lessons are: trust no one, and be very afraid.

For most of his first months Leo hid under the window seat in my office, coming out only at night to eat and use his litter box.  I eventually transferred him upstairs to the third floor of the Rectory where for about two years he spent most of his time hidden behind a sofa, again coming out at night for food and the litter box.  Not long ago Leo decided that he prefers to hide under my bed.  This move does not represent a broadening of his world-view, merely a shift in choice of small, dark, protected places where he can crouch silently and safely, and wait for God knows what.

Leo’s life has always been complicated by the oppressive presence of Baxter the dog, who imagines that the small, black flash of fur he has seen a few times as he catches Leo unawares would be a delightful thing to play with.  The possibility of play seldom enters Leo’s mind.  The possibility that a large, yellow Labrador could be his friend is absurd in the extreme to him.  And so Leo continues to lead a confined existence of his own choosing: always hidden, crouching, frightened, wary, and mostly alone.

I feel guilty about this, because Leo is actually a very nice cat.  He does come out of hiding now and then when the coast is clear and Baxter is not around.  These days he brazenly emerges from under the bed at night, after Baxter, who I must confess to you sleeps on the bed, is asleep.  Leo comes over to my side of the bed and pokes his head up, asking to be stroked.  He purrs loudly, and in his more brazen moments he jumps up on the bed next to me, as if contemplating joining the larger society of our household.  But he quickly returns to the floor and begins his night roamings to the litter box and his food bowl, and, I have reason to suspect, around the few rooms of the Rectory that he feels bold enough to explore under the cover of night.

As I said, I feel guilty about Leo because by taking him in it was my intention to save him from a tragic existence, to give him a warm, safe, happy home where he could bask in the sunlight on windowsills during the day and chase mice at night.  I did not mean for him to live a life of fear, traumatized by a dog, who really wants nothing more than to play with him.  And I worry that what lies ahead for him is a lifetime of hiding, punctuated by short midnight sessions of purring beside the bed while the dog sleeps and I pet him.

Have I lived up to the promise I intended for Leo or have I sentenced him unwittingly to a life of fear and secrecy and mostly unhappiness?  Can Leo ever come confidently out of hiding as long as he must share the house not only with me, but with Baxter, his imagined arch-enemy?  If Leo could ask these questions himself, I wonder what he would conclude?  It is by no means clear to me that he would decide that I have done him any favors by bringing him into a house that is occupied by a large, furry, yellow monster.

Yes, Leo comes to me from time to time out of desperation, perhaps, for a little affection, a few moments of contact, but does he trust me?  Would he willingly put his life in my hands?  I meant to save him from what I suspected would be a hard life and probably an early and unhappy end.  Does he imagine that I have done so?

Lurking somewhere in human consciousness are questions like these that we harbor about God.  If the God who made us loves us, why has he set us in a world so full of hazard?  Why has he allowed us to become experts at war and death?  Why has he allowed so many to go hungry, homeless, and poor, leading meager, unhappy lives?  Why is there so much illness, such a vast menu of cancers to overtake lives that might otherwise be happy?  Why has he set us in a world occupied by all manner of monsters?

We heard today, from the Epistle to the Hebrews, one of the early Christian writers make the claim that “he who has promised is faithful.”  But if we are critical – and aren’t we? – we might stop to ask what exactly these promises are, and has God really been faithful to them?  Because sometimes it seems that our lives are patterned more closely along the lines of Leo’s confined existence than according to any divine plan.

As a teacher, Jesus acknowledged not only that times were hard in his own day, but that they would always be so in this world.  We heard that in the Gospel reading this morning.  In that case, what promises, then, did Jesus make?  And can we really believe that he is faithful?

Search the New Testament and you will find a lot of parables, a lot of teaching on Jesus’ lips, but not a great many promises.  There are two promises he makes, however, that seem to be worth considering.  He promises that he will be with his disciples always, even to the end of the ages.  And he promised that he would send the Holy Spirit into the world.

In some sense, perhaps these promises are one and the same.  If we can believe that God is actively at work in the world and in our lives, how can we know if it is the spirit of the living Christ or the work of the Holy Spirit?  How can we distinguish the work of the various persons of the Trinity, and do we really want to?

More poignantly, we ask, can we believe that God is at work in the world - God with us?  Has God been faithful to his covenant of love that at the very least we should be saved from our enemies and the hand of all that hate us, and that at best the dawn from on high shall break upon us, to shine on those who live in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace?

Is God faithful?

The church – for most of her history – has had some preferred ways of answering this question.  Not with a dissertation on God’s faithfulness, not with a pamphlet or a booklet that explains it, not with an argument or even a story.

The church’s way of showing that God is faithful is by pouring water over a child’s head; by taking bread and wine and offering them to God in thanksgiving; by laying hands on the heads of those coming to maturity of faith and those set aside for ministry; by joining together the hands of two people in love; by pronouncing the assurance of God’s forgiveness; and by anointing with oil those whose lives are moving more nearly toward death.

These are the sacraments of the church: baptism, the Eucharist, confirmation, ordination, marriage, reconciliation, and holy unction.  They are signs of God’s faithfulness.  And we believe that they are gifts given to us to help us see what is otherwise hard to see in the world: that he who promised is faithful.

The sacraments take some ordinary thing – like water, or bread, or the head of a person, or the hands of two lovers – and transform them into signs of God’s faithfulness.  So the water, the bread, the hands, or the head become manifestations of God’s love and faithfulness.

These sacraments are invitations to look more deeply, more prayerfully, at the mystery of God, who sets us in a dangerous world but who wants us to know he is faithful.

Every time a child is baptized it is a commitment of God’s faithfulness.  Every time we bless bread and wine in the Eucharist it is a reassurance that God loves us enough to be born in the world and to die for us.  Every time we join the hands of husband and wife it is a reminder that two people can devote themselves to one another in love.  Every time we hear the announcement of God’s forgiveness it is assurance that our sins and offences do not have to be the defining moments of our lives.  Every time hands are laid on someone to be confirmed or ordained it strengthens the community of faith.  Every time a person sick or near death is anointed with holy oil it is a declaration that a new life, a new health awaits them in the kingdom of God.  These are signs, given during the times of change and transition of our lives, that point to the answer to that vexing question – is God faithful?

And they are given to us precisely because God does not want us to live our lives like so many frightened kittens, uncertain about the world around us, afraid to engage it, threatened by monsters who may be real but may also be of our own imagining.

No one knows why it is that God has made the world the way he made it.  I cannot explain for you its dangers, the wars, the killing, the sickness, the poverty, or the rest of it.  I only know of these signs that have always been a part of my life, that have always pointed to a hope greater than any other.  And that have so clearly been a part of the lives of many generations.

The sacraments are like flash cards to prompt in us the assurance that, yes, he who has promised is faithful.  He is with us always.  His Holy Spirit moves among us to guide us and bring us truth.  And that our lives need not be governed by fear, nor lived out in hiding from any kind of monsters.

For in the Sacraments, God reaches out his hand with these simple signs, and encourages us to purr.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

15 November 2009

Saint Mark’s Church, Phladelphia