Reverence

In a short story published recently and posthumously, the writer David Foster Wallace introduces to us a boy who has received a Christmas present.[i]  It is a toy cement mixer: wooden except for the axles and for a yellow rope handle attached to the front bumper by which the boy could pull the cement mixer around behind him.  The boy, who narrates the story, loves to play with the cement mixer, and one day his parents casually tell him that it is a magic cement mixer.  The boy reports:

“The “magic” was that, unbeknown to me, as I happily pulled the cement mixer behind me, the mixer’s main cylinder or drum… rotated, went around and around on its horizontal axis, just as the drum on a real cement mixer does.  It did this, my mother said, only when the mixer was being pulled by me and only, she stressed, when I wasn’t looking.”

Of course this suggestion prompts the boy to try to catch the cement mixer mixing, doing its thing, turning on its axis; to see the magic at work.

“Evidence bore out what they had told me: turning my head obviously and unsubtly around always stopped the rotation of the drum.  I also tried sudden whirls.  I tried having someone else pull the cement mixer.  I tried incremental turns of the head while pulling (“incremental” meaning turning my head at roughly the rate of a clock’s minute hand).  I tried peering through a keyhole as someone else pulled the cement mixer. Even turning my head at the rate of the hour hand. I never doubted—it didn’t occur to me. The magic was that the mixer seemed always to know. I tried mirrors—first pulling the cement mixer straight toward a mirror, then through rooms that had mirrors at the periphery of my vision, then past mirrors hidden such that there was little chance that the cement mixer could even “know” that there was a mirror in the room. My strategies became very involved….  I begged my mother to take photographs as I pulled the mixer, staring with fraudulent intensity straight ahead. I placed a piece of masking tape on the drum and reasoned that if the tape appeared in one photo and not in the other this would provide proof of the drum’s rotation. (Video cameras had not yet been invented.)”

But none of his tests are successful – or unsuccessful, as the case may be.  Nothing yields the result that he catches the cement mixer in the act of turning its mixer.

Again, the boy tells us:

“I never found a way to observe the drum’s rotation without stopping that rotation.  It never once occurred to me that my parents might have been putting me on.  Nor did it ever bother me that the striped drum itself was glued or nailed to the orange chassis of the cement mixer and could not be rotated (or even budged) by hand….  And, in fact, the free rotation of an unpowered and securely fastened drum was not the “magic” that drove me. The magic was the way it knew to stop the instant I tried to see it.  The magic was how it could not, not ever, be trapped or outsmarted. Though my obsession with the toy cement mixer had ended by the next Christmas, I have never forgotten it, or the feeling in my chest and midsection whenever yet another, even more involved attempt to trap the toy’s magic met with failure—a mix of crushing disappointment and ecstatic reverence. This was the year, at five or six, that I learned the meaning of “reverence,” which, as I understand it, is the natural attitude to take toward magical, unverifiable phenomena….”

Tonight is a night of gifts, and of magic, and of reverence.  It is fashionable these days to point out that the Scriptures don’t tell us that there were actually three wise men.  It is common to hear in pulpits that if any sages from the east came to visit the child Jesus it took much longer than twelve days for them to get there – maybe a matter of years.  It is quite usual to be presented with the various explanations that the star was a  predictable celestial phenomenon.  It is normal to dismiss tonight as little more than an excuse to make a king cake and let someone find the prize in it.  But I hope tonight we can resist these urges, because to give in to them is to miss the point of the gift, the magic, and the reverence.

Over there in that crèche we placed, twelve days ago, a baby Jesus who resembles, more than anything else, a toy cement mixer.  He is made of wood.  He has no moving parts (not even a string to drag him around).  One of his hands regularly falls off and has to be re-glued every year before Christmas Eve.

To much of the world our elaborate ceremony of traipsing around the church in fancy vestments, singing “O come, all ye faithful” (twelve days ago) and “We three kings” (tonight) on our way to the manger, placing the statue in it, and blessing it with holy water and incense is nothing but foolishness – a belief in some outmoded magic that is thought to be vested not only in carved, wooden babies, but in the very likely darker-skinned baby that all the carved baby Jesuses are supposed to be modeled on.  Nothing but magic.

And such is the state of the world, that we may be tempted too, after the candlelight and the singing of Christmas Eve, to drift toward the suspicion that although it is a nice tradition, in the end, it is just a wooden Jesus, with no moving parts, nothing spinning, no heart.  We could drag him all over the city at the end of a yellow rope, and what good would it do?

There would appear to be much evidence to support this point of view.  Poverty, injustice, and racism are still very much a part of our society.  We have not yet beaten our swords into plowshares.  We agonize about how to feed ourselves with healthy food, how to take care of ourselves when we are sick, and how not to send the planet spiraling gradually toward overheating. 

More personally, we have not figured out how to prevent so many marriages from ending up in divorce, we have not learned the secret to preventing our children’s lives from going to pieces, our lives are so easily surrendered to drugs or alcohol, we have not found a prescription to avoid tragic illnesses, to cure cancer, and we have not learned how to staunch the grief of loss when we lose even someone of great faith to death.

No wonder that to many people these days, Jesus amounts to little more than a toy cement mixer: his Cross little more than an accessory that is quite preferred without his Body on it.  No wonder there are so few epiphanies on Epiphany, since we have reduced it to a feast of toys: a magical star leading costumed kings, who carry their prop gold and frankincense and myrrh to a wooden Jesus.  We might as well drag a toy cement mixer behind us in our procession!

But we could learn something valuable from the wise men.  We could remember that when they reached the manger, Jesus did not do anything amazing, he may not even have woken up from his nap.  But they knew! 

They knew when they encountered him and his mother that God was at work here.  Did they marvel at the magic that God could accomplish something great without even appearing to lift a finger?  Did they wonder at the perfection of God’s work wrought so secretly that no trap of even the great king Herod could capture it?  Did they gush to his mother that this child appeared to be so very like every other child?  Did they think of their reverence to him as “the natural attitude to take toward magical, unverifiable phenomena…” since they had no way of verifying what was so manifestly true to them – that here was the very Son of God?

And is it possible that the faith that God has called us to is a faith something like this: that he has given us the gift of his Son as the object of our faith.  He knows that this gift can sometimes seem like little more than a toy cement mixer: childish, clunky, unpowered, stuck in one position, etc.  But does he call to us, at least once a year, to remember that this gift is operating in our lives all the time, when we can’t see it: spinning, turning, building, growing, blessing, forgiving, transforming?

And maybe it is the nature of this gift that we can never – or at least almost never - see it at work.  So often we discover the effects of Jesus in our lives, we realize the grace that comes of faith, after the fact, when his work has already been accomplished, his blessing conferred, his transformation made.

And perhaps all our ministries are, in part, our efforts to catch a sight of the invisible and elusive God at work in the world, in our lives.  When you make soup every week, as some of you do, or wake up every Saturday morning to serve that soup to the hungry and homeless; when you teach a group of children their Bible story in Sunday School; when you study the Scriptures yourself in Bible Study or on your own; when you come to serve at the altar; or when you serve coffee at coffee hour; when you sing in the choir; when you rake the leaves at Saint James the Less, or clean the church there, or the bathrooms….

…are these some of the ways we try to catch God spinning in our lives?  Are these he mirrors we look in from various angles, the keyholes we peep through, the abrupt or slow turns we make to catch him unawares?  Are we looking for the God who has called us but who stays so mundanely hidden, so apparently unwilling to be caught in the act of changing our lives, changing the world?

I suspect it may be so because, like that little boy, I am amazed at the magic of how God’s grace and mercy cannot ever be trapped or outsmarted, cannot be stopped, even though I realize how difficult it is to observe it directly sometimes.

And I suspect it may be so, because I have seen the evidence of the grace of God all around a world that would just as soon destroy it. 

And like that boy, I have known something like the feeling in my chest and midsection whenever the attempts to ruin God’s grace meet with failure—a mix of crushing disappointment and ecstatic reverence – disappointment that like the sun or quantum physics, God’s grace, his spinning, turning, working, forgiving, transforming cannot often be observed directly; and ecstatic reverence because that grace, that spinning, turning, working, forgiving, transforming love is so manifestly true!

And if I were a wise man, I would bring my gift, whatever it was – gold, frankincense, myrrh, or whatever.  But I am content to know that God has given the gift of his Son – who might be nothing more than a wooden doll, a toy…

… who is himself willing to be dragged around behind us on a yellow rope, if that is the only way we will have him in our lives…

…but who cannot be stopped from spinning, turning, working, blessing, forgiving, transforming; who often, so often, cannot be seen to be doing any of this either; whose magic mostly cannot be observed; who cannot be stopped from being born!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

The Feast of the Epiphany, 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

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[i] David Foster Wallace, “All That”, published in The New Yorker, December 14, 2009



The Word (II)

In the beginning the stars were not yet shining.

In the beginning the silver wings of the Spirit

sliced through the mist

that hung over the face of the waters:

the vaporous breath of God, from which all things

came to be.

All the planets were contained

in a hazelnut, or less.

The mountains were collapsed

into a pebble, or less.

The seas were carefully hidden

beneath the surface of the waters,

themselves obscured

beneath the blurred horizon of the mist.

The rivers swirled in tiny vortices,

waiting to be unfurled,

that would fit in a demitasse, or less.

The trees of all the forests were packed tight,

in the space of a single seed, or less.

The birds’ wings were folded;

their feathers un-fluffed.

The fishes’ scales stacked away,

in poker chip piles too small to see, or less.

Every living creature waited

in the miniscule wings of creation;

in a minute green room,

or something less.

The first man, first woman

curled up in the so-far un-realized basinet

of God’s imagination.

And the Spirit’s silver wings beat silently,

and the waters rippled

beneath his glide,

in the long and ageless moments

before the beginning,

and the stars were not yet shining.

Into this silence a Word

was spoken,

breathed,

announced.

Before the “let there be”s,

before the Light;

in the beginning was the Word.

May I speak of the things that were

before I was, or any of us?

May I presume to know something

about what it sounded like,

emanating from the mind and mouth of God,

hanging in the mist,

and dropping into the waters

to stir them,

and loose the whole creation?

I may.  Only because

I have been told, as you have been,

that it was so in the beginning.

And because, like you,

I have been allowed to imagine

what that Word sounds like,

what it looks like,

how it’s spelled.

I have, in fact, been invited

to try to spell it myself;

to live every day

perfecting my penmanship

so that I can write the Word

in my own life;

pronouncing it in the mirror,

so that I can master its vowels,

and include all its consonants.

And so have you.

To do this would mean to shape every day

of our lives by the contours of this Word:

faith, hope, love,

there may be others,

but these three abide,

enough for us to try to wrangle,

especially the greatest of them.

May I sing of this Word

in a long and melismatic melody,

worthy of the Word?

May I stretch out my song

as the Word reached out

the long arms of its letters

through every aeon of time?

May I delight to shout

the Good News

that I myself have encountered this Word

in the fold of my family,

around my own dinner table,

on a mountain in the northwest,

in disc of bread and a sip of wine,

and on the way to Santiago,

to name a few places?

I may.  Only because

if I did not the stones themselves

would cry out,

as these carved ones have been trained to do.

And once you have trained a stone,

it is very, very good

at doing what you have trained it to do,

over and over.

But I rejoice

that though I am less steadfast

than the stones,

I have more modes to sing in

than they do.

And so do you.

I can sing of the stars,

I can sing of the angels,

I can sing of the shepherds,

I can sing of Mary and of Joseph,

I can sing of the inn-keeper, if I want,

and make them all syllables of the Word.

For they all help to spell out the Word,

and the mystery

of how the Word became flesh

and dwelt among us.

I can sing of the beginning

of all things,

and of what was

before the beginning,

wound tight in a tiny ball of string theory,

or less.

I can sing, because

in the beginning,

when the Word echoed across the waters,

the blessed Son of God held all things

in the space of his infant hand, or less;

even you and me.

And when the mist rang out

with the “let there be”s,

the Spirit’s mighty wings

towing them across the waters,

the Word flung open its tiny hand,

unleashing the forces of creation,

and lit the stars, so they could shine

with awesome candle-power.

And more amazing than the trick

of lighting up the sky with stars was this:

he made the likes of you and me.

And for a long time,

it was as though we were failed stars,

flung out, but crashed and burned,

on this one planet;

so much unrealized potential.

And sometimes it still feels this way:

like we are lumps of primordial carbon

that never bust into starlight.

There is still so much darkness,

that feels like the darkness that must have surrounded the un-lit stars,

like deep caverns

where they may have been stored

before being cast aloft.

In our deep caverns of darkness

there is the sound of gunfire,

there are slogans of ethnic hatred,

there is hunger in a land of plenty,

there are schools that could be built,

but no one who is willing to build them,

there are addictions

of the most exotic and mundane varieties,

there is a narrow pride

that would rather be self-righteous than sorry,

and a thousand other shades of black

that makes for such alluring darkness.

Have we lived long enough

in the darkness?

Have our eyes become so accustomed to it

that we did not notice the Light shining

in the darkness,

and that the darkness has not overcome it?

To us, in our darkness,

was sent the Word made flesh,

spoken with the soft gurgles of an infant,

written in the pinks and baby blues

of a nursery,

armored with nothing

but the soft skin,

as soft as any other baby’s bottom.

And all we have to do

is receive him;

is believe on his Name,

and in return we are given power

by the one who lit the un-lit stars in heaven:

power to become

the un-gendered sons of God.

In the beginning the stars were not yet shining.

And the Word had been spoken,

but was, as yet, un-born.

But now the stars are brightly shining,

and the Word is made flesh

and dwells among us.

And if we attend, if we listen, and pray

we can behold his glory,

we can know his grace, his truth;

from his fullness we can all receive

grace upon grace…

…and we can hardly know what that means,

until we open our mouths

with the stars of the morning,

and all the sons of heaven,

and sing!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

27 December 2009

Saint Mark’s, Philadelphia



God's flesh

I do not think that it is too much of an overstatement to say that of the truths that the Church teaches, the Incarnation (God taking on flesh and human nature), is the most radical and the sticking point for most.  Oh, there are other concepts that are difficult: the Trinity, the Resurrection, Heaven, the real presence of Christ in bread and wine, those are all complicated and hard to understand, but the Incarnation is the most radical, the hardest somehow to understand and to accept.

Certainly the Incarnation was the hardest for the peoples of the Ancient Near East to understand: they were used to the plethora of mythic cults, to the Pantheon of the Greco-Roman gods, to the religious foibles of odd groups and cultures, but God becoming flesh?  Gods and goddesses might walk around looking like humans, or dallying with them, or deceiving them, but that the gods should become human seemed to them ridiculous: why would one give up omnipotence or power to live a human life?  Flesh and matter were base, lower than the spiritual and ethereal.

The Church through the ages has struggled with the same conception of the material as base, and because of that has not been quite comfortable with God’s flesh.  Often, in theology and in art, the sense is of an effort to contain and limit the radicalness of Christ’s flesh.  Jesus, while grudgingly human, is still other than human: he is too beautiful, or too formal, or too much like a human light bulb.  He is not really like us, how could he be?  He is human we say with our lips, but our doubt or discomfort is revealed in the images that we make of him or the way that we talk about him.

The long and the short of this discomfort with matter is that we, in our own culture, don’t have a much better relationship with bodies and flesh.  Certainly there is little that I can think of in our culture that is more complex, more heavily charged than bodies and flesh.  We worship the image of the beautiful body, made present to us in the celluloid of movie starts and super athletes.  We live in a culture that idealizes, or at least objectifies the perfect and naked body, and yet few of us are close to the standards we are bombarded with every day.  We are a culture enmeshed in some of the strangest interactions with flesh imaginable.  Just think about our relationship with food, or with sexuality, or with exercise or with health care.  And for all of this obsession with flesh, we are a culture and a people vastly uncomfortable within our own skins.

Is there indeed anything closer to us, and yet more alien than our flesh?  Our flesh can seem so natural that we can forget that we live in it, and we can also feel entirely not at home in our own skin, and horribly trapped.  And why would God choose that?  Why would God choose to suffer flesh, and suffer all that comes with flesh: weakness, sickness, aging and death.  Why would God suffer himself to suffer puberty or middle school gym class, for heaven’s sake?

Not only does the Incarnation not make sense, it is as the people in the ancient Near East saw, radically offensive, radically iconoclastic.  It is, in many ways the most lunatic, the most offensive of all the claims that the Church makes about Jesus – that God himself lived among us – that the frailty of our bodies and our inability to escape the flesh – was shared by God.

For we are indeed fleshly beings.  For all the efforts of our minds to feel removed from flesh, for all the illusions of eternity and survival, all the defenses that we erect to defend us from our frailty, our mortality, our aging, and our raw and latent physicality, all of that is mere illusion.  We live now at the whim of a phenomenally complicated system of muscles, blood vessels, bones, and fluids that often surprises not by its occasional failure, but by the fact that more doesn’t go wrong more often.

If you are like me, and feel the strangeness of this flesh that I live in, you might feel the wrongness of God experiencing what we do.  It is too base, too vulgar, too intimate that God should feel this bounded and this limitation that we feel.

There is, in the claim of the Incarnation, a radical discomfort, a breathless immediacy, a suffocating closeness.  And I, at least, am not sure that I like that closeness!  God should be in his heaven, and all well on earth; I would prefer the Divine to remain at a distance, the Holy of Holies to remain veiled: I want God to remain both holy and wholly other.  I do not want to think about God knowing the experience of flesh, or eating, or sleeping or being sick.

But if the Word became flesh, no longer is there any distance between the heavens and the earth.  If God has become flesh there will be little relief from the immediacy of the experience of God with us in the flesh.

Which means that the Incarnation is radical indeed: the Incarnation is like an avalanche, cascading down the mountain and changing everything in its path.  If God has taken flesh, that says something about all flesh.  If God has lived a human life, that says a great deal about the seemingly inane parts of human life.  If God has walked among us as matter, that says a great deal about the material world around us.

In the Incarnation God glorifies the world.  First, God glories in our flesh, because he has taken on our flesh.  Then he glories in the things of the world that sustain our flesh: this fish, this bread, this wine, have fed the God of heaven, and thus are blessed.  And then he glories in all matter: blessed be the fields that grew the grain he’s eaten, blessed be the waters that held the fish that he has caught, blessed be the air that he has breathed and the dust that he has tramped in, blessed be the stars and planets and the atoms and quarks in their dancing, blessed be all.

The Incarnation makes of our flesh, our lives and of this world a sacrament, for God glories in the material.  Matter is not base, for God has grown up here, walked here, slept here, eaten here, laughed here and died here.  Whatever our culture might say, whatever some people of faith might say our flesh in not lesser, not incidental, not base.  For the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and made of our flesh and of our world and immeasurable glory.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

Christmas Day 2009

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia