A Christmas Puppy

This Christmas, there are four additional feet in my house.  Well, there are four additional paws, to be precise.  Just before Thanksgiving I brought a new, eight-week old Yellow Labrador puppy into my house, to add to the seven and a half year-old Lab, Baxter, that I got when I first moved to Philadelphia.  Ozzie, now three months old, is cute as the Dickens: think of the Cottonelle commercial, or the cover of the LL Bean catalog, think Marley, and you will get the idea.  His ears flop around, and he has a little, black button nose, expressive, sad-ish eyes, and he is just now starting to lose his puppy breath.

I had forgotten how much work a puppy is.  I forgot that it would be a couple of weeks before he could sleep through the night without having to go outside.  I forgot that puppies interact with the world using their mouths, and have to chew or lick or otherwise taste everything.  I forgot how sharp a puppy’s teeth are!  I forgot how much puppies enjoy shredding paper, or the fringe of a carpet.  I forgot how tasty every single pair of shoes is, socks, too.  I forgot how high a puppy can jump and how fast he can run on his little legs.

And I forgot that a puppy always has to pee.  I forgot how important it is to control the water input, so you can try to control the output.  But my puppy, Ozzie, loves to slurp up the water in his dish, and thinks nothing of letting go any time, any place, in any posture.  He has left a little puddle behind him while standing, sitting , and lying down – which seems so wrong to me.  But what can you do?

Walking with Ozzie on a leash requires constant corrections – mostly to keep him from grabbing Baxter’s leash in his mouth or nipping at Baxter’s ears as we walk.  Ozzie is interested in every book on my coffee table and every plant in the garden.  He has developed a taste for snow, and loves to walk through Rittenhouse Sqaure helping himself to mouthfulls of snow in different patches.  He likes to remove the bedding from his crate, dragging it out into the room, when given the freedom to come and go.  He cannot be fed in the same room as Baxter, because he will eat Baxter’s food.  Ditto, the cat’s food.

And did I mention how sharp his teeth are?  They have been into every part of me, from my ankles to my nose.

I had gotten used to having an older dog around.  I vaguely remember that Baxter may have behaved in some of these ways, but he has become a very good dog.  His only short-coming is that he will find and devour any food within his grasp that is left unattended.  But other than that he is completely trustworthy, loyal, friendly, and loving.  He generally comes when he is called.  His teeth never sink into anything but his food.  And it has been a long, long, long time since he had an accident in the house.

Baxter is a wonderful dog - not without his problems since he is afflicted with both epilepsy and Addison’s Disease, both of which we treat with medication – but still, he is a dog that requires relatively little of me except that I feed him and take him out for romps, and let him sleep on the bed next to me.  He doesn’t need to be at the center of attention all the time.  He is happy to be a part of the background of every day and every night, and now and then to come to the fore, especially if food is involved.

As the snow fell last weekend, and as Christmas came, it has been very picturesque to have a handsome Labrador puppy around, and his older adopted brother.  It’s given me pause to think of my sister, who is raising twin boys, now four and a half.  How does she do it?  I have no idea!  But she does.  And you have done it, too, most likely.  We manage to raise our puppies and our children – demanding though they may be.  And we celebrate Christmas with them, (if we are lucky, in the snow!)  And we are greeted every year with images of the baby Jesus, tender and mild.  Isn’t that nice?

And it is hard for us to imagine that this baby Jesus requires anything of us.  Hard to imagine that the baby Jesus needs us half as much as my puppy needs me.  After all, Jesus has been around a long time – a lot longer than Baxter, for instance.  We have gotten used to Jesus being in the background of our lives: sometimes as a name to take in vain, sometimes as the inspiration for various kinds of freaks, sometimes at the heart of some extreme religion, sometimes as a source of confusion, and sometimes as the butt of jokes.  We can hardly imagine that Jesus requires very much of us at all, except perhaps to show up at church once and a while.

Speaking for myself (and I am a priest, if you hadn’t noticed), I can only say that it is sometimes hard to imagine that Jesus would require of me as much as my puppy does: the constant attention, waking up in the middle of the night, planning my days around his needs, his habits, his growing up.  But to say that is quite a thing, isn’t it?  To imagine that Jesus requires less of me or of you than a puppy does?  And does it help us see just how backwards we often get it?

Of course Jesus must require something more of me and of you, if we really want to be his people, than my puppy requires of me.  More attention, more devotion, more sacrifice, more waking up in the middle of the night.  And this is where the choice to live a Christian life becomes difficult.  Do we want to get into a relationship with this child Jesus, who will demand so much of us?

The other day I was walking down the street with both dogs on leashes.  Baxter has a red collar and leash, and Ozzie wears blue.  I must have been struggling a bit to keep the little one under control.  And a man looked at me and the dogs quizzically as he passed, and said to me, “That’s why I don’t want a dog!”

To which I replied, “But this is precisely why you should want a dog!”  Because the secret that parents and dog-owners alike know, is that, on balance, it is worth it.  That the joy of allowing a puppy, or better yet, a child, into your life far outweighs the burden of rearing it.

And this is also a secret of the Christian life: that the joy of allowing this demanding child Jesus into our lives far outweighs the burden of letting him grow up in our lives, of discovering how demanding he is.

Mary must have found this out.  Who was ever more burdened by a child than the mother whose child was announced by an angel as Emmanuel, God with us, the Son of God?  What did she think as he grew up, as demanding as any other child?  How did she scold him, with her secret knowledge?  And how did her own life change, as she carried the burden of having said Yes to Gabriel?  All we know is that she did.  And that when the day came that found him nailed to the Cross, she was still there for him, her care among his last concerns.

Every year in December, we are reminded that God asked Mary to say Yes to the child in her life.  And we come together, in the snow if we are lucky, to remember this holy birth, the silent night, the manger, and the angels.  And then as the months roll by, we so easily let Jesus fade into the background of our lives, even more quickly than a puppy grows up and becomes a dog, who is easily left alone for many hours, who is content to be fed, and to steal the occasional roast left out on the counter, (Baxter doesn’t do things by halves, he steals the whole thing), who never has accidents in the house, and becomes as comfortable and easy a part of the background of our lives as can be.  But let a puppy in your life, to paraphrase Henry Higgins, and your serenity is through.

And let this baby Jesus into your life - who, for the moment, no crying he makes, but who is sure to awaken at any moment, ask any mother – and your life will not be the same either.  You may think of letting Jesus into your life – really letting him in - in much the same way that man thought of having a dog when he saw me trying to walk the two of mine at the same time – a nuisance or an inconvenience, or just too demanding.  But this is to miss the point.  It is to fail to see the joy that comes from living not for yourself but for others.  It is to miss the heart-pounding love that would lay down its life for its child, its friend.  It is to be blind to the hope that comes from discovering that what was a struggle yesterday seems a little bit easier today.  And it is to be cut off from the freedom that only comes through the service of God and his people.

It’s very common, I think, to wish that puppies would stay cute and cuddly for ever.  But that would come with a high price that would involve, in my house, a lot of paper towels, among other things.  Better to let the puppy grow up and learn and become a dog.  And I suppose we might wish for a faith that is like Christmas all year long – a kind of Narnia where the snow is always on the ground – and Jesus is always a good little baby, being taken care of by his mother, with nothing required of us.

But the message of the Christmas angels to come and behold him is not intended to stop there, at the window, looking in.  We are meant to welcome the child Jesus into our whole lives, every day, every hour.

Every year after Christmas, animal shelters experience a rush of abandoned dogs, who seemed like such cute Christmas presents when they were fluffy puppies with red bows on their necks.  Often there is a noticeable increase of a particular breed, because of a holiday film.  Last year it was Yellow Labradors, dumped at shelters because it turns out that, in fact, they are at least as much trouble as Marley.

It’s frankly even easier to dump Jesus after Christmas, to decide that he is simply too much trouble to keep in your life.

And, in fact, it’s true, if you keep Jesus around in your life you will find that he is very demanding.  But you will find something else, the more you give yourself over to his demands.  You find that he teaches you to love, that he opens your heart with a spirit of generosity and gratitude.  You find that life is different, better, richer, fuller because you let him in even when you thought you had no room and you had shut the door like a certain inn-keeper we all know about.

Many of us know that this is true of puppies, when we make room for them in our already busy lives, that it is worth it because of the joy and companionship they bring into our lives.   And if finding room for a puppy in your heart, and giving him room to grow can change your life, just imagine what happens when you let the baby Jesus in at Christmas – the Son of God, the Prince of Peace - and ask him to stay, and to grow up in your life, in your heart, and teach you to love

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Christmas Eve 2009

Saint Mark’s Church



Winnowing

A year or so ago, our roofer, John, was finishing up the many months of work he and his crew put in to re-build the gutters that are integral to the roof and walls of this church.  I can tell you, within the secure confines of this service, that the gutters are made of copper – a temptation to thieves, since it has a high resale value.  And to any thieves out there plotting, I can tell you that the gutters are built into the masonry of the church, not just attached to the outside of the building, and, therefore, more or less impossible to steal.

It had never occurred to me that a roofer was a craftsman until I saw John’s work.  I went up onto the scaffolding with him to see how the seams of copper are soldered together.  The copper was new and gleaming, bent into long, shallow, sloping pans, the seams carefully zipped with long, rippled lines of solder.  It is beautiful work and I was amazed to see how lovely a gutter could be.

I was also amazed at the tools John and his men used.  To me, a soldering iron was something from Heathkit or Sears that looked like a miniature curling iron, or an over-heated WaterPik, or an electric meat thermometer.   But John’s tools have no electric cords.  His irons are old ones: smooth, rounded wooden handles, each with a metal shaft leading to a triangular working-end.  These irons are placed in little propane-fired ovens or furnaces that the roofers have on their scaffolding, and heated up to a red glow before being applied to the flux and the solder to make a water-tight seam. 

Up there on the roof with me, John took out one of his irons and held it loosely in his hand, and told me about the man who had owned it before he had, from whom John had learned his craft.  Had it been owned by someone else before that?  I don’t remember.  Was it his father, I don’t think so, but maybe.  The details hardly mattered, it was astonishing to me to discover that these roofers were practicing a craft with old tools, like the ones probably used when Saint Mark’s was built: tools that had been handed down over at least two generations, maybe more.  These kinds of tools you will not find at Home Depot.  And this iron - simple, inelegant, well-used, that really seems to be little more than a glorified ice pick, and which, no doubt, is deeply ineffective in the wrong hands, and which I’m sure could be used to dig holes, or break windows, or in all kinds of inappropriate and damaging ways – was, in the right hands, a thing of a certain beauty.

I’ve asked you to consider this tool, used right here at Saint Mark’s, by a person known to any number of us, and for the benefit of everyone sitting here today, because in today’s Gospel reading we hear John the Baptist talking about one of the tools that Jesus uses.  It is not a hammer or a chisel or any of a carpenter’s tools that we might expect Jesus to have been given by his own adoptive father, Joseph.  In fact it is a tool that Jesus may never actually have picked up in his hands.  But it is a tool that, I am told, would have been well known in his day: the winnowing fork.  This over-sized wooden pitchfork was used to heave lumps of wheat into the air to let the wind carry off the lighter chaff, as the heavy grain fell to the threshing floor. 

Few metaphors have as much staying power as the one of separating the wheat from the chaff, the nourishing from the inedible and indigestible, the good from the bad, the useful from the useless.  And it is that metaphor that John the Baptist uses to describe the impending ministry of Jesus: His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.  He might as well have said that there are two kinds of people in this world – the good and the bad, those who will be blessed and those who will be cursed, for that is the effect of what he seems to be saying.

Now, most of us probably do think it is a good idea to separate the wheat from the chaff.  We expect it to happen in schools, once our kids get out of kindergarten.  We learn about it as children, when dodge-ball teams are chosen and someone has to be left standing there, last to be picked.  Application processes to schools, colleges, and jobs, have the effect, it often feels, of separating the wheat from the chaff.  Most of us don’t mind having the wheat separated from the chaff – as long as we and our kids end up with the wheat!  We expect this winnowing to be a part of the many complex processes of our complicated society, and we put up with it, even if we don’t like it; we learn to play the game, because we know how important it is in life to end up with the wheat and not with the chaff.  So we can tolerate this almost anywhere, from almost anyone – but not from Jesus!

I submit that most of us do not like the idea of Jesus with his winnowing fork separating the wheat from the chaff.  And we certainly detest the notion that the chaff will be burned with unquenchable fire!  How judgmental it sounds!

Anciently the church taught people to sing to Jesus, “We believe that thou shalt come to be our judge.”  But these words don’t trip lightly from our lips anymore.  We can accept the idea that Jesus is our savior – on our better (or worse) days – but not so much that he will be our judge.  As if Christian teaching weren’t passé enough, the idea of the Last Judgment may for some be the last straw.

Unpleasant though it may be for us, however, it is hard to escape the thread of judgment that runs throughout the New Testament, and it is impossible for us to unseat Jesus from his seat as judge – to displace him from his threshing floor.

I suspect we have such a hard time with Jesus as judge because in our own day justice seems far removed from truth; and honesty does not seem to be requisite, admired, or much sought after within our justice system.  And typically, we imagine that what is true on earth must also be true in heaven, as it were.

Add to this picture the blatant and appalling hypocrisy of the church on everything from bloodshed and war, to the amassing of wealth, to the rampant abuse of children by clergy, and outright lying about sexuality, and you can understand why current seekers-after-truth are less and less interested in hearing about judgment from people (especially men) ordained in Jesus’ name.

Who has any moral authority in our world to call anyone else to account?  When even Tiger Woods is guilty of the tawdriest sins, who else is left?

In the moral landscape of our own age we have become dis-inclined to consider our own sins, to accept our own responsibility – individually or in any corporate sense – for failings.  Self-examination is avoided or carried out beyond the limits of judgment, so that no one should be given cause to feel bad about themselves.

What can Jesus possibly do for us with his winnowing fork in his hand?  What use is he making judgments that no one asked for and for which we suspect he has no real enforcement mechanism beyond these threats of eternal fire?  And what difference does it make if most of the world refuses to show up to the threshing floor anyway?

The assumption behind these skepticisms is that Jesus is as inept with a winnowing fork as you and I would be – that his judgment would look something like yours or mine would.  And this assumption is as foolish as the idea that our roofer John’s aptitude with a soldering iron is more or less the same as yours or mine.  When, in fact, the tool isn’t even the same as we imagined it to be.

I don’t know what Jesus’ winnowing fork looks like, but I suspect that it is an instrument of infinitely greater finesse than the wooden-tined forks I find pictures of on the Internet.  And it takes me not more than a second to see the foolishness in supposing that Jesus’ judgment is anything like mine, since I am often enough impulsive, arrogant, and foolish, but he is always patient, powerful, and wise.

From time to time, I feel the tug of justice like an invisible and insistent undertow, in a sea that pretends it is not there.  As more American soldiers are sent to fight a dubious war, I feel it.  As the bonuses are handed out at Goldman Sachs, I detect it.  When I review the statistics of schools in our city and notice the racial makeup of those who are least well served, I notice it.  As the debate about health care drones on, driven by many forces that seem to have little to do with the health and well-being of actual people, I feel it.  When I see the church deeply enmeshed in legal battles but less involved with the lives of the poor and the needy, I wonder about it.

Justice, like truth, seems to stumble in the public square, as the prophets warn.

But this is not just a matter of current affairs, it is also a question of individual lives.  People make choices.  You and I do things that we shouldn’t, and we know better.  Even if we don’t set out to hurt people – though sometimes we do – we have learned patterns of behavior that often come at someone else’s expense.  Often, we couldn’t even pass the simple tests set by Jesus in the Gospel today:

Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none, and whoever has food must do likewise.  A simple enough rule to follow.

How well would the details of our lives and relationships stand up to a closer scrutiny?

And somewhere on his threshing floor stands Jesus.  His winnowing fork is in his hand.  He is interested in separating the wheat from the chaff.  And the mistake we make when we see him there is that we suspect that he would go about this project in more or less the same way we would.  And we suspect that he is more interested in the chaff than the wheat, because we would be.  But of course this is wrong, as it would be for any thresher.  Jesus is really only interested in the wheat.  And there is no reason to believe that he is not immensely more adept at judgment than we would be.

And I believe that his winnowing fork is much more delicate than any we could imagine.  I suspect its tines are soft and supple not stiff and sharp.  And I have supposed that Jesus’ winnowing fork has the power to transform chaff into wheat, making his harvest a greater, more plentiful one than any farmer’s. 

The winnowing fork in Jesus’ hand, is a tool that can accomplish more than we ever knew.  What can his judgment possibly be like?

The bishop I once worked for used to tell a story that suggested a possibility that is the best I have ever heard of how Jesus’ judgment might work.

The bishop is Australian, but was educated in England at Cambridge.  He loves art and flowers and music, and to travel, and a decent glass of wine.  And he once told about a trip to Paris when he visited the Louvre and made his way through the many corridors of that museum to the place where the Mona Lisa hung, with her ambiguous smile.

The usual crowd of people was milling about in front of the painting.  My friend, the bishop, was trying just to drink it in.  And he overheard two women speaking in accents, he reports, that could only have been American. As they paused briefly in front of the masterpiece, one woman said to the other with unmistakable disappointment, “It’s much smaller than I thought it would be.”  And then they quickly moved on to find, I suppose, winged victory and be disappointed that her head has not been replaced.

In that moment in front of the painting, though, my bishop suggested, judgment was made.  The American tourists made theirs about the painting.  And silently, without so much as a twitch of her famous lips, the Mona Lisa made a judgment of those tourists, whose only assessment was disappointment at how small she was.

Perhaps Jesus’ judgment is like that.  Perhaps as we wander through the corridors of our lives making decisions, pronouncements, doing whatever it is we do, Jesus judges us silently, stilly, and certainly, his winnowing fork in his hand, barely ever raised, and able to make a far better end of the business of separating the wheat from the chaff than you or I could imagine, perhaps even better than we deserve.

Or maybe Jesus long ago set down his winnowing fork at his feet – outside the frame of our vision.  And maybe he sits on his throne, hands clasped calmly in front of him, an ambiguous, mysterious smile on his lips, watching as you and I go about our daily business, making the choices we make, living the lives we live, keeping our second coat or giving it away.

Maybe judgment is made every day as we dismiss the magnificent and the beautiful in favor of the immediate and the cheap, the too-big in favor of the disappointingly smaller-than-we-imagined.

And maybe Jesus is smiling with an even more mysterious smile than Mona Lisa, since he knows the truth, winnowing fork or not: there are not two kinds of people in this world; there is only one kind of people in this world – the kind that Jesus loves.  And he wills with all the power of his sacred heart – pierced by those he came to save – that we should stand before him, and love him too.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

13 December 2009

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia



Prophetic voices

One of the certainties of human life is that we need to be reminded, again and again of the truths we know.  They are not inscribed forever, once we first learn them, but we need to be reminded and recalled to their truths again and again as we travel through our lives.

What is true for people is true also for communities.  Speaking truths once is not enough, but we need to repeat them again and again, until over the years they become part of the knowledge of our individual and communal hearts.  That is the purpose of liturgy – to slowly inscribe the grammar of the Scriptures and the story of God’s redemption into our minds and lives, like water dripping onto our stony hearts and slowly wearing away the sharpnesses.

The Scriptures are full of the stories that need to be heard again and again: God’s longing and call to us, our human nature which flees God’s presence and constantly erects idols to stand between us and that loving and intrusive gaze.

Day in, day out, week in, week out, we read the Scriptures to remind ourselves again and again of those stories.  God’s covenant with Abraham and Sarah, God’s salvation through famine, exile, law-giving, wandering in the wilderness, through judges, kings and Diaspora.

There are times, in the year, when we read again some of the most distinctive voices of the Scriptures, the prophets, and Advent is one of those times.

I always like to think of the prophets as the caregivers and therapists in our lives.  They are at the same time comforting and challenging, they are full of judgment and full of compassion.  They point out to us our foibles and blindnesses, and knock over the defenses we have labored to build so that the grammar of God has someplace to sink in.  And when they have broken through the haze of self-deception and egotism, when they have aired our dirty laundry and raised up before us the poor and disposed, and brought home to us the ways that we have ignored God and loved only ourselves, when they have done that, they comfort us.  They speak words of the coming salvation, of the Messiah, the Savior of Israel, who will bring both God’s judgment and God’s salvation to fruition.

God’s judgment and God’s redemption, go hand in hand, the abrasive voices of the prophets teach us:

The main problem, of course, is that we don’t like to talk or think about God’s judgment.  Too often, we have heard from churches, from pastors or priests, from parents or from slightly crazy folk on street corners the story of God’s judgment.  We have heard that God is an angry God, a God who is waiting to tick off our sins on the list which reads “Naughty and Nice” and decide where we are going.  More often than not, we feel as if we are going the wrong direction, and we fear that God’s vengefulness, God’s judgment is waiting to spring, front-loaded against us, and only the super-spiritual, the über-elect, the crème de la crème of the most spiritual will make the cut.  Life is a cosmic game of “Survivor” and every day, every hour someone is getting voted off the island.  God is simple, God is myopic; an angry, vengeful God who is both capricious and horribly predictable.

But the prophets really tell us a far different story.  They tell us that we are foolish, human people.  They remind us that we can just never seem to get ourselves together.  They speak to us of our complacency, of our comfort, of our blandness and our duplicity, in the face of human suffering and the demands of the divine.  They lift a mirror before our faces, and the image that we get back is not as pretty, or as sympathetic as we might like.

The words of the prophets are not fundamentally comfortable words to hear.  They are constantly restless, always probing, words that fester and disturb.  The prophets are like loose teeth that you want to worry with your tongue, or a scab that you want to pick.  They are never settled, always questioning; when you feel home, watch out.

But the prophets are not simply about judgment. Because there are moments when their tone changes, and they can tell that we need not curmudgeon rebuke, but comfort and hope.  We need not simply the possibility of God’s redemption if we straighten ourselves out, and return to God again, but the story beyond the story, the narrative beyond that of God’s anger, the hope of God’s astonishing redemption, whatever our state.

The message of the prophets is both judgment and redemption, and so we are told also about God’s love beyond measure, God’s perpetual forgiveness, the  restoration of God’s chosen people, and the Messiah, long expected who is coming.

And we need both.  We cannot hear about grace without brokenness, sin without redemption; either one or the other, without a myopic vision.  Sin and grace, judgment and redemption, they go hand in hand.  Cheap grace, cheap judgment, both are, in the end, simply cheap.  Either is too little, too late.  Only when we hear both voices is the fully dimensional vision of God apparent.

For God is not myopic.  God is three-dimensional, multi-dimensional, all-dimensional.  God knows both our foolishness and sinfulness, and our hopefulness and our hopelessness, which run full of complexity, in the course of our lives, and the prophets are the stereoscopic vision, the stereo sound of God’s constant unwillingness to let us settle into ennui, and God’s constant unwillingness to let us settle into damnation.  No complacently is too deep to avoid God’s disturbing, and no sin too dark to avoid his redemption.

Yesterday, with the prophets filling my mind, the news flashed around the world that the Diocese of Los Angeles, in electing two suffragon bishops, had elected a woman in a committed same-sex relationship.  Which means that the fighting and rhetoric of 2003 will be brought up again, with the added energy of the debate over women’s ordination. And Anglican Communion will once again teeter on the brink of falling apart, and attempt to decide whether to impale itself on the horn of civility and simply not talking too much, or on the horn of radical justice and inclusion.

And although I have some pretty clear thoughts about full inclusion of women and gay persons in the life of the church, my first thought was one of fear and exhaustion.  Really? Right now at this tension-filled moment?  Really? We are going to spend all this time and energy fighting about this, while poverty, violence, abuse, and disease, run rampant in our streets and around the world?  Really?  With the church shrinking and struggling and with parishes closing, we are going to fight about this?  Really?  After we, hope against hope, managed to preserve a sort of separate peace in the Anglican Communion?  And filled with thoughts of the prophets I thought “Would that there were prophets in our day who could wake us out of our smugness and comfort us in our brokenness!  Would that there were prophets who could treat on this…”

But we have heard the prophets from beginning to end: angry Jeremiah, fearful Jonah, Job, Amos, Micah, all of them, masterful Isaiah, even down to John the Baptist in the Gospel this morning, channeling Isaiah: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”

We have no need of a modern day prophet to harangue us, because we have heard the words of the prophets, and they are still challenging and comforting, for the conundrum that the Episcopal Church finds herself in, and for each and every day of our lives.  We have heard the prophets, and while their message of judgment and redemption are not about the Diocese of Los Angeles, or the Anglican Communion, still they ring out as true and full of challenge and comfort to us.  For this time in the church, the prophets say: There is no smug certainty or complacency, on either the left or the right of this current debate which God will not break us out of, and there is no sin, no rhetoric of anger or hatred, no schism, beyond God’s loving redemption.

And for the other days of our lives they say “Repent your sinfulness, and return again to the Lord.  For the moment is coming when all shall see the salvation of our God.”  We have no need of a modern day prophet to harangue us, because that Word pointed to, and prefigured in the prophets has come among us.  He has come into our lives and hearts with the same message of repentance and salvation that the prophets teach us.  He speaks and says to us:

There is no smugness or arrogance or certainty or complacency that God will not disturb us out of, through the Scriptures and through the circumstances of our lives, and there is no darkness, no isolation, no sinfulness, no living hell beyond the salvation of our God.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

6 December 2009

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia