A More Excellent Way

Never in my life have I owned or regularly driven a new car.  Among the other implications this condition may have for me, there is the fact that I am normally surrounded, when I drive at night, by cars with fabulously bright halogen headlights – or whatever else is now producing that bright, blue-tinted, Star Trek light that is beamed into my rearview mirror.

Of course, I do drive a car with that little switch on the bottom of the mirror, called, I am told by my Owner’s Manual, the “Day/Night” switch, which, the manual assures me, is there to “make driving more comfortable.  And indeed, it is vastly more comfortable to drive at night with the switch flipped (is it up or down?) so that the glare of those magnificent headlights you probably have on your car does not blind me.  With the switch flipped, as you know, the road behind me appears as a 10” by 2” rectangle of darkness, salted with white dots of light.  It may be more comfortable driving, but it is a limited perspective.

It is precisely this limited view that Saint Paul is describing when he writes in his most famous passage “for now we see in a mirror dimly,” or in the older version, “in a glass darkly.”  You all know this phrase – you have heard it read at weddings.  And there may be some value to assessing whether or not it matters if now we see only in a glass darkly.

Because if we do, we see only what is behind us, what is chasing us, or what is falling away from us, and even then we see it only dimly, its contours and shape obscured.  What we do not see, Saint Paul implies is the road ahead of us.

We are infatuated with the road behind us, receding into the darkness.  And we tend to lead our lives this way – with our eyes glued to the rearview mirror, in its “Night” position, fixated on what’s behind us, what’s already past.  We do not see our lives, as he says, “face to face.”  We do not see fully.   And so, we do not live life as God intends us to live.  And we have hardly a clue of the beauty and glory that lies ahead of us.
In his letter, which Paul thought he was writing to the Christians in Corinth, but we know he was really writing to us, Paul is suggesting what he calls, “ a still more excellent way” of seeing the world, and therefore living life.  Paul writes of what he knows.  For he had been an expert on the laws of Jewish faith, and he was a man of unswerving and unerring faith.  He knew the laws of Moses, lived by them, and he encouraged (shall we say) others to live by them too.  OK, let’s say he encouraged Jews to do so by force.
At no time in his life that we know of did Paul’s faith ever waver or fail.  Many of us know what it is like to live with uncertain or undeveloped or uninformed faith, but this was not Paul’s story.  Even his conversion from following the laws of Moses to following Jesus was not the result of a crisis of faith.  It was the result of a crisis of vision.  He was struck blind for several days, something like a fish’s scales obscuring his eyes, until they fell from his eyes and he found a new vision.  The view, when the scales fell from Paul’s eyes, was a different view of the world than he had ever seen.  And that view would not only change his life, it would change the world.

He saw that life was not made better, perfect, or holy by following the 613 commandments of Jewish law, the task he had devoted his life to.  He even saw that faith – which he had in bucketsful – was not all you needed to live a good life.  He saw that only one thing made the difference between looking at life through the rearview mirror with the Night switch on, and seeing the life that lies ahead of us in all its vibrant light and color.  And that one thing is love.

And so Paul wrote his famous love song, his ode, within his first letter to the Corinthians.  “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.” Does it sound to you as though perhaps Paul is describing an earlier version of himself: impatient, unkind, envious, boastful, arrogant, and rude?
Love “does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth.  [Love] bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  Love never ends.”

Love is the vision of the road that stretches out before us when we stop seeing life through the rearview mirror, with the Night switch on; when we stop seeing life through a glass darkly.
And what Paul says, is that most of us have been trying to drive while looking only through the rearview mirror in the dark, with the Night switch on.  Have you ever tried to navigate your car this way?  Has it ever seemed to you that you were trying to navigate your life this way?

None of us here, that I know of, is constrained by an effort to live by the 613 commandments of the laws of Moses, but many of us, most of us, are living lives defined by a much narrower set of constrictions: the need to pay the bills, the need to get through the work day (just get through it); the struggle to find some joy in your time with your spouse; the difficulty in sleeping without pills (or even with them); the sense that you are missing out on life, that you gave up options because of choices you made long ago; the frustration that your children have not turned out the way you hoped they would.  All these are visions of life through a glass darkly: little spots of white zooming one way or another in a small rectangle of darkness.  No wonder faith seems like a struggle under the circumstances; it’s all we have to go on while trying move forward and seeing only the world behind us through a glass darkly.

But there is a road ahead of us.  And that road beckons us with love.  It calls us to be patient, kind, and humble.  The road of love invites us to yield to others, making way for them because, after all, there is room enough.  The road ahead is way-marked by good choices: choosing the right over the wrong, the truth over falsehood.  The road has challenges, to be sure, but there are no warnings that it cannot bear heavy loads: the road of love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

St. Paul did not write his love song to be read at weddings, and it is not a reflection on marital bliss.  It is meant to provide a different view, to jolt us into looking straight ahead and seeing what God has prepared for us.  And the thing is, that there is not some great test to be passed, there are no rules that must be followed, there are no hoops to be jumped through.  There is just this call to look and see.  There is the encouragement to rub our eyes vigorously if the scales have not fallen from them on their own.  There is the recognition to be made that we have been driving while looking through a glass darkly and seeing mostly only what is behind us.  There is this possibility of love, which is greater even than faith or hope, since both faith and hope are built on it.

It may be true that the road behind you has been dark.  It may be the case that it has seemed the best you could do is avoid a collision, keep the darting spots of light in the rearview mirror at bay, stay in your own lane, and maybe even slow down to prevent disaster.  But from the radio comes an old song that sounds familiar.  You have heard it before, but has it ever spoken to you?

Love is patient;
love is kind;
love is not envious or boastful
or arrogant or rude.
It does not insist on its own way;
it is not irritable or resentful;
it does not rejoice in wrongdoing,
but rejoices in the truth.
It bears all things,
believes all things,
hopes all things,
endures all things.
Love never ends.

As the song plays, can you feel the tension in your neck relax, as you tear your eyes from the rearview mirror, and you begin to realize that you have been driving all night, but now the dawn has come, and the sun is rising, and a golden light shines on the road that leads ahead of you and stretches on and on, anywhere you can imagine or dream, and beyond that, too.

And there is no speed limit, no rules of the road even, because they are not necessary, no danger of being caught, because you are doing nothing wrong.  There is only this beautiful, smooth road before you, and an inexplicably gentle, cool breeze.  There is only love.  It is a view we had only dreamed about, but never seen before.  But it is real, and it is a more excellent way than any other on earth.  Thanks be to God.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
31 January 2010
Saint Mark’s, Philadelphia


Standing by Stone Jars

No story from the New Testament seems as ready-made for a laugh as the story of Jesus at the wedding of Cana.  The best of these laughs, I can tell you, normally come at the expense of the clergy.  A collar on your neck is a passport to a lifetime of being challenged to turn water into wine.  Behind the joke, I suspect, lurks the conviction of absurdity – the absurdity that Jesus ever actually turned six great stone jugs of water into wine, and the absurdity of ministry in his name, with the attendant absurdity that such ministry could change the world, let alone so much as a thimbleful of water into wine.

There is almost always something absurd in the suggestion that we can do anything that Jesus did.  That’s why the next best joke in the book is walking on water.  Most clergy are not so sure they want to walk on water, but would actually like to be able to turn water into wine, so there’s the rub.  So far, however, it is a trick that has eluded me – which comes as a disappointment, I am sure, not only to all of you but to many of my friends who do not go to church. 

Saint John tells us that Jesus performed this miracle as the first of a series of signs that began to reveal his identity, his glory, to those around him in Galilee.  Very well, there is no doubt that this episode is all about Jesus.  But the person who interests me in the story is actually his mother, Mary.  She is older now than the young girl who gave birth to that special baby.  She is middle-aged, I guess.  She has seen a thing or two.  Saint John leaves open for us the possibility that Mary and Jesus came to the wedding at Cana separately – Jesus was with his disciples, perhaps Mary was there with Joseph.  I’d like to think she and Joseph danced together.

It may be that when Mary comes up to Jesus, this is the first time they have spoken that day, maybe the first time in a while.  We normally take it for granted that Mary goes up to Jesus with intent, asking him to do something about the lack of wine.  But maybe it is more of a snarky comment, a sotto voce criticism of the bridal party or their parents, “Can you believe it, they have no wine!”

Whatever the case, Jesus does not take it well.  Had he and his mother been fighting recently?  Had she been pressuring him to spend more time at home?  Maybe pressuring him to find a bride of his own?  (There’s no time like a wedding to meet someone!)  Perhaps there is a backstory that explains his impatience with his mother, we don’t know.  But whatever her purpose was in first going over to her son, Mary now sees something, she sees it before Jesus does.  She sees that there is something for him to do, a miracle to be wrought, a sign to be shown. 

Left to his own devices, Jesus seems inclined to hang out with his disciples at the bachelors’ table and talk theology.  But Mary knows that there is more to be done.  It is Mary who orchestrates this miracle.  It is she who provokes Jesus about the wine in the first place, whatever her intent; it is she who puts up with his terse response.  And it is she who tells the servants to do whatever he tells them. 

Up until now, it did not appear that Jesus was going to tell them to do anything.  But Mary has opened the door, so to speak, and she does so, having picked her spot, right beside six large stone jars that are standing nearby.  No, Mary does no get the water or work the miracle of changing it into wine.  But if not for her, Jesus might not have done it either.

It is precisely because Jesus did not teach any of his disciples how to do the trick, and precisely because they do not teach you how to do it in seminary, that it makes sense for us to notice Mary in this well-known story.  Because if there is to be anything like a re-enactment this miracle in the world today, neither you nor I will ever get to be Jesus, and turn water into wine.  But we can be like Mary.  We need no special circumstances, not even a wedding reception, to orchestrate the context for Jesus’ miracles in the world today.

Every day of our lives brings an opportunity to provoke Jesus with our prayers – whether we have spoken with him recently or not, even if we’ve been angry with him.

Every day brings opportunities to see ways to show signs of Jesus’ glory – even ways that he might not have been looking for himself.

Every day brings opportunities to encourage others to do as Jesus instructs, and see, just see, if things don’t change.

Recently, the Fox News anchor, Brit Hume did just this, by opining about repentance and forgiveness in Jesus’ name on the air.  At the time, I was quite taken aback, mostly because I naturally recoil at the idea of anything meaningful, or sacred being discussed on Fox News, and because I find TV news in general an unlikely and inappropriate place for a journalist to express such views.

But the fact of the matter is that Christian faith does have a lot to say about the need for repentance and forgiveness, about transformation.   Whether or not Brit Hume chose the right time and place to say it, he was right that our faith makes claims about these things that other faiths do not. His mistake was to say the right thing at the wrong time and in the wrong place.

But you and I are not bound by the same restrictions that Brit Hume is, or ought to be bound by.  Yet we are so often as tongue-tied about our faith as we are confounded by the trick of turning water into wine.  We can have none of the confidence of Mary, if we lack even the conviction of Brit Hume.  And we live in a society that would prefer to make jokes about turning water into wine than to take seriously any suggestions about repentance and forgiveness, about the real possibility of transformation.

But at a wedding in Cana, Mary shows us that she not only made room for Jesus in her own life by saying yes to the angel Gabriel all those years ago, but that she helped others make room for him in their lives, by seeing that there is something for him to do, by provoking him in the way that only a mother can, and by positioning herself conveniently beside six stone jars.  This is a model for ministry that anyone can follow; we don’t need to be TV news anchors, in fact it’s better that we are not.

A few days ago I learned that a young man I know happened to be in Haiti on a missionary trip with his church when the devastating earthquake hit the island.  I’d had no idea the young man, who is a National Guardsman in the First City Troop that I serve as a chaplain, was in any way inclined to make such a journey to do missionary work, and I was impressed to discover this, even as I worried for his safety.

Missionary work – going out to care for the poor and those in need – is almost always an occasion to follow Mary’s model, almost always a way of standing by six stone jars, knowing that if you can get them filled, Jesus will do something wonderful with them.  Think of this parish’s mission trips to Mississippi after Katrina, to Honduras to run a medical clinic, and to our mission parish of Saint James the Less in North Philadelphia to run City Camp, and, we pray, to open a school there.

Mercifully, it did not take too long for word to reach his family and others that my young friend and his group were OK.  But of course the mere thought of Haiti at this time, five days after the quake, is a reminder of the need for a real miracle of transformation.  We are already seeing what a gift any amount of water could be in the context of such suffering; how six stone jars full could become so much more than they appear to be.

And since you and I cannot go there and fill jars of water ourselves, we can at least help to pay for it.  We can let our contributions to a special collection we will take up this week and next serve as our conviction that Jesus, using the hearts and hands and contributions of thousands of people can and will work miracles in that poverty-ridden country; that hope is not gone.

Let us use our prayers to provoke Jesus, as if he needs it.  Forget the wine, they have no water!  Let us find ways to encourage and support those in positions to help to do all they can.  And let us find the stone jars that need to be filled.  In this case it would appear that our own collection plates will do nicely.

We live in a world that remains desperately in need of the transforming miracles of Jesus.  Haiti is simply the most obvious example of that need at the moment.  But it may help us to see why we cannot take Jesus’ power for granted; why it is no joke that Jesus can change things: water into wine, despair into hope; suffering into survival; and an island of death, we pray, into a place of new life.

And you and I and every Christian person has a ministry, modeled by Mary, to be a part of this transformation.  We have always to bring our prayers to Jesus.  We have always to pave the way for him, to share with others the great joy to be had in doing as he instructs us.  And we have always to find the stone jars that can be filled with water and turned into wine.  Sometimes it will be enough for us to locate the jars.  Sometimes we will have to fill them ourselves.  But always, always, the miracle is wrought by Jesus.

Can we believe that this is no joke?  Can we have confidence that Jesus will work wonders in our lives and in the world?  Or does it seem absurd to us, as it does to so much of the world?

The world I see – from the destruction in Haiti to the landscape of my own life – is a world that depends on the merciful power of a loving God to change things from the way they are to the way they can be.

We cannot possibly find the stone jars fast enough, we cannot possibly fill them with too much water, and we cannot possibly hope for something better than that Jesus will take the stone jars we manage to have filled, and change our water into wine, our despair into hope, change the way things are into the way things can be, change our death into life.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
17 January 2010
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia


Shirt of flame

There was a time in my life when I regretted that I have been baptized as an infant. Perhaps “regret” is the wrong word. I was angry that I had been baptized as a child. This was a time in my life when I was full of anger at the intrusiveness of God in my life. I was about to pull a Jonah and run, if not to Tarshish, than at least to Arizona to escape priesthood. And I found the fact that I had been baptized, that my parents had made promises for me, and had caused this monumental sacramental act to happen to me to feel as if I were trapped, as if there was not any place to which I could run to be free of God and of those promises made at baptism.

The Church has long taught that baptism, as of the other sacraments, is indelible, there is a quality to baptism which can never be repeated or undone. The metaphor that John uses in the Gospel this morning is that of “fire.” John baptizes with water, but Jesus who is coming will baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire. And if Christian baptism is with “fire,” as the Gospel says this morning, than baptism leaves one scarred, burned forever, and even if I were to run to Arizona or Tarshish, even if I were to never darken the door of a church again, the burn scars of that day, ever so long ago, would stay with me forever. T. S. Eliot has a phrase which I always think of, when I think of baptism: “The intolerable shirt of flame / Which human power cannot remove.” There are times when the life of faith, or occasional faith, or the wish to have faith feels like a shirt of flame, a kind of flammable hair shirt that burns, and hurts, and which “human power cannot remove.”

That, at least, was how I felt. Which is perhaps not a very happy way to think about baptism, but it is not entirely uncorrect either.

Often baptism is taken rather lightly, as a normal cultural and social event. Baby is born, baby takes first steps, baby says first word, and baby is baptized. It is all of a piece.

But if baptism is what the Church teaches, than baptism is very dangerous, and we are almost unbelievably arrogant when we baptize, especially children. We are playing with fire which is not of our making, and risking a great deal, every time we step to the font with another soon-to-be Christian.

Baptism is permanent and it does scar us and takes us into place and times that are unpleasant. Vows are made at baptism that bind us to a life of service and selflessness, to seeking justice, to a life of repentance, and resistance to evil. Baptism makes us citizens of another kingdom, which in turn means that we are aliens and wanderers here, and have a sense of never quite being home. Baptism makes us hungry for the bread of heaven, with a hunger that the stuff of earth can never satisfy. And baptism calls us to make some pretty serious sacrifices: our lives, our money, and our comfort.

But this day we are remembering not all baptism, but specifically Jesus' baptism in the Jordan River by his cousin John the Baptist. And I always find Jesus' baptism to be slightly unusual, slightly strange. I know why I need the shirt of flame of baptism, that slow purgative process that one day, God willing, will make me ready for the Feast of the Lamb, but why would God's messiah, why would the eternal Word need baptism? I may struggle, complain and resist that burn of baptism, but why would Jesus even need it?

In the parallel passage from Matthew's Gospel, John himself protests that Jesus has come for baptism. “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” And Jesus responds that it is somehow proper that John baptize him.

Beyond being indelible, the Church teaches another great truth about baptism: that baptism is the root of our Christian identity, the canvas on which all the other aspects of our Christian life are painted. Some Christians will be ordained, or married, or confirmed, but those sacraments all presuppose baptism. They are all variations on a theme of baptism.. Baptism is the context in which our entire conversation and struggle with God takes place. Baptism, that fire that is set in us, is the way that we learn to love God and our neighbors. Slowly, haltingly over time, the fire of baptism can burn away the brokenness of our hearts, the ways in which we are selfish, self-deceptive and prone to sin. We experience baptism as a shirt of flame because we are yet far off from the perfection which God has planned for us.

I wonder if that doesn't explain the properness of Jesus' baptism by John. Jesus doesn't need baptism like we do. He doesn't need to be rooted in God, bound in covenant with God, and made an adoptive heir to the Kingdom. Jesus is God, very God of very God; Jesus is already rooted and one with God. Jesus wouldn't experience baptism as a shirt of flame because he is perfectly attuned to God, loving as he should.

But in his coming to live as a human being, he shows us the way home. He is born and baptized, he lives and dies. It is proper that he be baptized because he shows us the model, the example, of how we are to be. He goes before us like a beacon in the dark, flaming with God's love, and because he has bidden us to, we set a fire in those who come to us, children and adults, and we give them the light of Christ as a candle to carry into the darkness of the world.

All of us struggle with the hardness of baptism, I would imagine. Must I give of my time, my money, my energy, my life? Must I struggle and suffer through this Lenten time? Must I be an alien and a wanderer here? Does God have to call me into these difficult places and times?

As I think about my regret that I had been baptized, I realize that what was wrong was not my sense that this powerful, scary sacramental moment had been done to me without my choice, but the feeling that God was somehow out to get me, that God was somehow punishing me, or asking too much of me.

The verse from which the phrase “shirt of flame” is taken are these, and they seem to me simply true:

Who then devised the torment? Love.

Love is the unfamiliar Name

Behind the hands that wove

The intolerable shirt of flame

Which human power cannot remove.

     We only live, only suspire

     Consumed by either fire or fire.

The scar of baptism, the permanence of the covenant that we make with God in baptism, is rooted in an unbending love. Love devised that shirt of flame, Love binds us with it, Love will never remove it, and Love wills us flame with divine fire.

For this is what we were created for: to flame with the fire of God's love, and to burn forever in his presence. And the shirt of flame which is baptism is how we are prepared to flame with his fire. Our Lord, in his baptism, is our guide and example.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

The First Sunday after Epiphany: The Baptism of Our Lord