Twilight

Last night, as we remembered the Last Supper, at about the hour the sun was going down, we read the instructions for the first Passover from the book of Exodus.  There we find that an unblemished, year-old male lamb is to be killed for the meal.  The people of Israel are told to wait until the fourteenth day of the month, and then to gather together for the sacrifice of the lamb.  And they are told to “slaughter it at twilight,” and to take some of the blood of the lamb and use it to mark the doorposts and lintels of their homes so that God will know which homes to pass over as he tramples through Egypt, wreaking vengeance on the firstborn children of the oppressors of his chosen people.

Twilight is not only that period of soft, grey, diffuse light between sunset and nighttime, when the sun is already below the horizon, but darkness has not yet fallen; it is also, as any teenage girl could tell you, the title and the theme of the story of Bella Swan and her forbidden love for the vampire, Edward Cullen.  Although I am willing to bet not a single one of us here today has read it, the book has sold more than 17 million copies, and spawned two movies which have grossed hundreds of millions of dollars.  And it represents the latest installment in a series of romantic obsessions with vampires, who are dangerous, of course, because they need to drink your blood.

My little research about the Twilight phenomenon has brought me the discovery that the book begins with a biblical reference, taking as its starting point the forbidden fruit of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden.  However, it would seem that the forbidden fruit of teenage vampire love is the real issue here; any knowledge of Good and Evil takes a back seat.  The twist in the saga of Bella and Edward is that the gallant, hunky vampire actually prevents his beloved from becoming what he is when another vampire bites her.  Edward sucks the vampire venom from Bella’s veins, saving her from his fate of an eternal deathlessness that is not quite living.

The whole premise of the vampire genre always has echoes of the reverse image of the Christian fixation on the blood of Jesus, making it jarring every time we read of Jesus’ instructions that his followers must drink his blood.  These instructions were, of course, given to his disciples at twilight, as they were remembering the slaughter of the Passover lamb at the same hour.  And they were attached to the symbol of the cup of wine he shared with his disciples in such an obvious way that none of them seems to have suspected that he was suggesting some strange new cultish practice with vampiric overtones.  They already knew the symbolic significance of the blood of the lamb; they remembered the blood smeared on the doorposts and the lintels, and the older tradition of the scapegoat sent out into the desert to die, bearing the sins of the people.  And vampires had not yet been invented, anyway. 

What they did not guess, could not see coming, was that twilight would come at noon the next day, as the sky darkened so the Lamb could be slaughtered at the appropriate time, and their Lord was nailed to the Cross and allowed to bleed from his head, his hands, his feet, and his side.

Over on the wall there, at the 12^th Station of the Cross, which depicts the Crucifixion of Jesus, if you were to look closely at the enamel image created by an artist about a century ago, you would see behind the Cross of Jesus a darkened sky, grey-black clouds eclipsing the noonday light to create an early twilight.  On either side of Jesus are the two criminals, and in between each of the criminals and our Lord, there flies a sort of disembodied cherub, clasping a chalice to catch the blood that falls from Jesus’ brow, that sacred head, sore wounded.

Throughout Lent, I have returned to this image week after week in my private devotion.  Because the church is dark, and because the cherubim are clearly not collecting the blood that drained from Jesus’ wounded side (their chalices are held up higher, just below his head), I imagined at first that they were actually gathering Jesus’ tears as he gave up the ghost.  This seemed like a suitably sentimental image for 1928, the year the Stations were given to the church.  And I tend to think that a reflection on the tears of Christ as he offers his life on the Cross for the world would yield some fruit, taking our cue from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, “Is it nothing to you all ye that pass by, behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow.”

We don’t need vivid imaginations to color in the images of Jesus’ sorrow in our own day and age: after a century and more of warfare across the globe; the holy city of Jerusalem still a place of violence and strife; the church plagued by scandal and internecine fighting; a nation that brags about its liberty but cares little for those whose economic status or race or just bad luck leave them with very little freedom at all – certainly unable to break the cycles of poverty and violence; a planet that we continue to destroy as we asphyxiate, cut down, pave over, or drill out, marring its beauty and depleting its resources… just to name a few possible reasons for Jesus’ tears. 

But it turns out the little angels are not collecting Jesus’ tears at all.  It is his blood they are after; patiently waiting for every drop to fall from the thorns of his crown into their chalices.  And I have found myself wondering: what do they intend to do with the blood of Christ they have so carefully harvested at this midday twilight?  Is it to be delivered to his disciples for the doorposts and lintels of their homes, or swallowed in some gruesome ritual after his burial to give his disciples a vampire-like eternal deathlessness that is not quite living?

The Scriptures, of course, never suggest that angels descended from the darkened clouds, or that anyone collected so much as a drop of the blood that drained from Jesus’ veins.  But year after year, for these twenty centuries, twilight has come early every Good Friday, at least in the living memory of the church, and with it comes the remembrance of the Garden where once we lived in happiness, and of the tree, and its forbidden fruit that tempted us with more than teenage angst.  And we know that there is cause for tears as we reflect not only on our human history, but on our own lives, our failings, our diminished hopes and unrealized dreams, the stupid things we’ve done or the good things we ignored doing when we should have.  And we reflect on the pain and the loss in our lives – some of our own making, some of it not. 

And if we think of Jesus on the Cross at all, we might hope that he weeps for us, as much as for himself, if indeed he does weep as he hangs there.

But tears, as any of us who have shed them knows, will only get you so far.  The children of Israel had wept through decades of slavery without relief before God gave them instructions to take a lamb and slaughter it at twilight.

And although the sun is shining brightly on this glorious spring day outside; in here, at this hour, it is twilight.

And in this twilight blood is being spilled.  But the twist in this saga is that by his death, Jesus is not preventing us from becoming what he is: he is helping us become more like him.  He is marking out the way to an eternal life in the world to come by offering forgiveness to us and to the whole world for all the things that cause so many tears to be shed.

“This is my blood,” he said, “which is shed for you and for many, for the forgiveness of sins.”

If angels collected his blood as it spilled from his body, I suppose it must have been in order to bring it to some heavenly dispensary so that it could be distributed one miniscule drop after another over the centuries, to tint the wine in chalices all over the world.  Not so we could be spared living a life like his, but so that we might share in his life and in his death, by which I mean to say not only a life of forgiveness, of grace, and hope and healing and blessing, but also a life that does not end at the grave, but is a new kind of living in the hereafter.

For Bella and Edward, and for so many of us, twilight is a dangerous time, as darkness approaches, and the demons of our lives lurk in shadows, and it becomes safer for them to come out, under the cover of darkness.

And the mystery of God’s love is not only that he supplies the Lamb for the sacrifice he requires (as he always has), not only that he can take spilled blood and use it as a symbol of new life, not only that he forgives us our sins without having to locate a scapegoat year after year. 

The mystery of God’s love is that he makes an early twilight at the middle of the day, when the spilling of his Son’s blood might be a sign of nothing more than the depravity of humankind, and cause for tears…

…but he fills this twilight with a different light that seems to bend around the barriers of our sin and defensiveness, and reaches into the darkest corners of our lives, and gives us hope.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Good Friday, 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

The Stations of the Bus

It is time that I made a confession to you all: namely, that I have almost never taken a bus in the city of Philadelphia.    I would like to explain this pattern of avoidance on a phobia of large, long, loud vehicles, but I cannot.  It is not because I decry mass transit – because I feel perfectly happy to travel on the Broad Street subway line or the High Speed line to New Jersey.  It is true that I have always felt more comfortable on rail-bound mass transit, for its carefully illustrated maps and certain stops, and the assurance that once on rails, you cannot do very much to get lost.  Buses, I have suspected, could leave me almost anywhere, without the benefit of being able to simply cross over to the other side of the tracks and go back the other way, as you can on a subway or a train.

But the darker truth is even worse than this assessment.  For, over time, in a city whose mass transit system consists mostly of buses, I have begun to see myself as someone who simply does not take buses.  I notice people standing and waiting at the bus shelters and I think them quaint.  I hear people tell me of their arrival by bus from what I think of as distant neighborhoods, and I think them adventurous.  I am led to believe that many schoolchildren in this city make their way to and from their daily schooling on city buses at the city’s expense, and I find this extraordinary.

To be honest with you I must confess to a certain snobbery that I have been heretofore unwilling to reveal to you, when it comes to buses.  They are all fine and well for those who can bear to wait for them, for the adventurous, and for school children, and even for the elderly, to whom, I am told, they cost practically nothing to ride.  But I am someone who simply does not ride buses, not that there is anything wrong with it.

Bus routes have come to mind, however, over these past weeks as I have walked with a good number of you the Way of the Cross – or as we used to say more frequently, the Stations of the Cross – each Friday during Lent.  Our little stations – the small plaques you see affixed to the walls with Roman numerals over them – are quite extraordinary.  They are far too small for this building; I think they are even smaller than the size of a bus-stop sign on the street, but close enough to make me think of those signs.  They are hand painted enamel from Limoges, a city quite famous for the art form.  They are not ancient, I think.  If you were to go take a close look at them, you would see that they are quite brightly colored, with lots of iridescent greens and blues and gold accents, although from where you sit they probably appear quite dark and feature-less.  They are full of detail: in the sixth station the cloth with which Veronica has wiped Jesus’ face bears the mirror image of his visage, Turin-like.  By all means, do stop and have a closer look at them after Mass today.

There are fourteen Stations – following the pattern established by the Franciscans in the Holy Land in the 14^th century.  These are like fourteen stops on a bus route through the church.  For most of the year the bus does not even run.  But during these weeks of Lent it has been running quite regularly, leaving at 5:45 or so every Friday and arriving at the foot of the rood – the great cross that hangs above us all - about 45 minutes later.

This bus follows the route of Jesus’ Passion, which we have just sung.  It actually bypasses most of the courtroom drama, and instead begins only when it is absolutely beyond question that Jesus will be making his way to the Cross.

The bus stops several times to pick people up.  Simon of Cyrene gets on and finds himself carrying Jesus’ Cross.  The women of Jerusalem – some of them at least – climb on board, while others wave and weep from the side of the road.

Mary, Jesus’ mother, must be on board, for she is to be found with Jesus at several of the stops.  But she cannot get too close because he is surrounded, of course, by his Roman guards, the centurion, who one expects ride for free.  No doubt the two thieves who will be crucified with Jesus are on there too.

Lurking in the back of the bus may be Peter, certainly John is there, but we cannot be sure how many of Jesus’ other disciples.

And the question that every Palm Sunday poses to everyone who listens to the Passion, who sees this bus coming, watches it begin to pass by, is this: Will you and I get on this bus?

Jesus told his friends that if they really wanted to be his disciples they would have to take up their cross and follow him.  The may not have been absolutely certain what he meant by that, but we have the benefit of better vision.  We know that it means we have to get on the bus that goes to Calvary with him.  Which is to say that to be a follower of Jesus is to choose a hard path, a path that will make demands of you and of me.  It is a path that does not avoid pain, indignity, embarrassment, or failure, because these are unavoidable realities in any life.

It is a path in which justice seems to be perverted from the outset, but which will, eventually set the only true judge on his bench.

It is a path where stumbling and falling, will happen not once or twice, but over and over again.

Strangers will be pressed into work they did not ask for and are not ready for on this path.

Women provide a powerful, if almost silent witness to faith along this path, where men are noticeably absent.

And a bus runs along this path, centuries after Jesus’ blood, sweat and tears were spilled along it, inviting us to take up our cross and follow.

But the truth is that I am not the only one who has begun to see himself as someone who does not ride buses.  This bus to Calvary has fewer and fewer riders every year it seems, even among those of us who are perfectly happy to watch it go by.  It would be too easy to attribute this declining ridership to a phobia of some sort, or to uncertainty about where the route goes, what the fare is, how many stops there are, etc.  Oh, there might be a certain snobbery at work – but this particular bus is really quite nice to ride in, even if the seats are hard (at least we now have brand new kneelers).

And it is not a fear of getting lost that prevents people from riding this bus, because the truth is that we all know exactly where it goes: to the bloody scene of death that marks a turning point for humanity and in our lives, when we confront not only the cruelty of humanity and our own complicity in it, but also the power of darkness, the inevitability of death, and our own convictions about God’s ability and willingness to do something about any of it.

Is this a bus we want to be on? 

The last few stops do not look much like places we want to be: Jesus is being stripped and nailed to the Cross at stops 10 and 11.  Then at stop 12, he is executed and dies.  At the next stop the gruesome scene becomes morose as his body is taken down from the Cross and embraced by his mother.  The last stop, 14, is the site of his burial in a borrowed grave.

This is a hard route to follow.  The church has followed it over the centuries because it is an honest route that has room for everyone, no matter how dismal his or her own condition, no matter how tragic your own story.  There is room on the bus for failures, and stumblers, the unprepared, the depressed, for those whose lament for the dead has not ended.  There is space for every kind of suffering and injustice and indignity.

There is room on the bus for you and for me.

And, of course, the bus has a secret that is not very well hidden.  For it seems to be on an endless loop of sadness, returning again to the same awful stops, the same scenes of misfortune and unhappiness, of despair and hopelessness.  The last stop, after all, is a grave.  But it is that grave which hides the secret: that things do not end here in this vale of tears at Calvary, and no one would ever choose to ride this bus if this was where it really ended.

But that secret is obscured to the proud, the overly self-confident, the snobbish, those who put their trust in riches, and all those who generally see themselves as the types who simply do not ride buses.

Standing in front of the Cross, beholding its sadness and its frightful power, is never about taking a bus to nowhere, and certainly never about going only so far as this bus seems to go: to the grave.  It is about riding into the dark mystery of God’s love for all his children – even and especially the neediest and least promising of us.  It is about refusing to get off the bus at the last stop, at this last hour.  Or maybe it is more about just falling asleep from exhaustion or guilt or despair as the bus nears its last stop.  About not caring if you don’t get off here, and end up riding around another loop…

… but discovering that while you have slept, the route has taken a turn, and there is darkness that looks like it could last for three days or more.  But here you are on the bus, tired, half asleep and resigned now to go wherever it will go.  And hoping for dawn.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Palm Sunday, 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Two brothers

There can be few stories that speak to us like the parable of the prodigal son, from the Scriptures this morning. Who cannot hear the story, and find our way into it through at least one character? Perhaps your way into the story is through the feelings of the father. Perhaps you feel those emotions that parent's experience during the struggles of their children to come to maturity. Perhaps, you see yourself through the father's assent to his son's demands, or through his welcome despite his son's foolishness, or through his pleading with the eldest son to come into the feast for the younger brother. Perhaps those are your ways into the parable this morning.

Or perhaps you find your way into the story through the younger son. Perhaps you have wandered in far off lands, living slightly wildly. Or perhaps, even if you haven't got to actually live as wildly as the younger son, perhaps you've really wanted to. Perhaps you feel the strictures of your current life and long, every once in a while, to break free of them, and to throw caution to the winds and to go a little crazy.

Or perhaps you resonate with the elder son, the responsible one, the one who is constantly doing the “right” thing, and telling everyone who will listen about it. Perhaps you have that sense of responsibility and resentment when it comes to your parents, your work, your parish or your life.

Or perhaps you fall into the silent camp – the character that we don't hear in the parable – the mother. Where is she, the wife of the gracious father, the mother of these two very different sons – dead perhaps, or more likely relegated to the fringe – where wives and mothers have generally been made to sit quietly? What is she saying, during this whole drama – what passes through her heart when her son is wandering and lost, or when her sons are at odds? How much is she agonizing about her husband's graciousness or her youngest son's maturity, or her elder son's sense of duty.

Most sermons, at least that I've heard about this passage, resonate around the father's generosity and grace, giving the younger son a portion of the estate in the first place (which he wasn't obligated to do, and certainly not before his death), and then welcoming him back despite his loose living and poor stewardship, which is, of course, all very interesting and good, (at least it is the first four times you've heard that sermon). There is a great deal to be made of the father figure, but generally, and perhaps this is not true of you, perhaps you are further along the way to becoming an actual Christian, I don't find myself resonating or sympathizing with the father figure. I am not gracious enough, I think, to feel the father's struggle to be gracious and forgiving to his offspring. No, if I'm in the story, I'm there as one of the two brothers, or more likely, as a blend of both – the officious one and the libertine, the repressed and the wanton, the dull and the interesting.

Both of those brothers are a blend in me, and although some days it seems as if one might win out over the other, often they are simply mixed and I'm left dependent on grace either way.

But isn't it interesting that if this is a parable about God's grace, it is also, or perhaps foremost a parable about the human response to grace, and the eldest son doesn't come off at all well. Which at first blush is hard to understand – except there is, in his tone when he speaks to his father, the hot worm of resentment. “Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends.” Which says a great deal about how the elder son wants to live, how he wants to be a little dissolute, how he has wanted to throw some wild parties but hasn't, and how he resents the younger brother for doing or being what he wants to do or be.

So the son who comes of the worst in the parable isn't the wild child, the black sheep, the morally dubious one – it is the resentful one, the perfectionist, the momma and daddy's boy – who wants fairness when it suits him, justice when it fits him and who doesn't need grace, or at least he doesn't think he needs it, because he is doing “the right thing.”

For some reason the elder brother, besides reminding me of my foibles as the oldest child, my passionate sense of justice (or is it just resentment?), my perfectionism (or is it just my need for control?), despite all that, for some reason, the elder brother always reminds me of the religious folk who have it all figured out. You probably know someone like this – who knows the way God thinks – or who know the way that everyone should live, or who know how the Scriptures should be read and interpreted. That person is always only too happy to share with you their knowledge and their certainty, if you give them the least bit of leeway. There is even, of course, a version of this which is Episcopalian, or rather there are several. Perhaps you recognize one or both of them: there is the certainty of the way things should be done (the sense that our way is the best way) and that somehow doing liturgy with a faux British accent, or decently and in due order is the way that God intended it. And lets sing “Jerusalem” while we are at it, to complete the image of Victorian schmaltz. The other version is the certainty that we have about the conflicts of our day. We live in a church of certainty about human sexuality, or about the role of women, indeed a church of two certainties, screaming at each other across a great divide. Aren't we great, we who are keeping to the true faith, or alternatively, we who are wonderfully progressive – look at us, and our the self-congratulation and the self- aggrandizement – and suddenly, ouch, I think I strained a muscle trying to pat myself on the back! Look at us, aren't we great?

And of course the moral, the seed at the heart of this parable is that we aren't great. Whether we are wanton, dissolute hedonists, or aren't but resent the lucky ones who are, we aren't good. The right actions for the wrong reasons are no better than the wrong actions for the honest reasons – in fact, they are perhaps worse, inasmuch as they make us sure of our superiority, our goodness, our correctness – for they remove us from that fundamental position of bowed head, and honest, bare humility – “I am no longer worthy to be called your son.”

The parable of the prodigal son is a parable obviously about grace, but it isn't so much about the abundance and mystery of grace, but rather about the reception of grace; the father is a strange mysterious character and his grace no less so, but our response to that grace, how that plays out in the dissolution or resentment of our lives, that is the focus of the parable and in the same way that the grace in our lives is mysterious, the way that we deny or accept that grace, is mysterious and we find ourselves daily somewhere between the older and younger brother, somewhere between the knowing and acceptance of our folly and the illusion of our arrival in a state of grace. Day in, day out that ever- changing window, between folly and illusion is the extent that we are open to God's grace – and there is nothing in the parable about our progressiveness or our traditionalism, about the way that we should behave, but only the reality that we have not yet arrived, and probably won't, this side of death.

The story ends here, with the father pleading with his elder son to come in to the feast. We don't know whether the son ends up coming to the party or not. If he is at all like me, the odds are about 50/50. He might have given in, and come to the feast and celebrated his brother's return, or he might have stayed outside, stewing in his own righteousness. Perhaps the story remains unfinished because we too are standing in the field, waiting to decide whether we are going into the feast, or living on in our resentment.

The word “feast” for some reason always makes me think Nordic thoughts: high halls, and huge sides of meat, and plenty of beer in the hands of large and jovial men. And somehow, in my mind, I imagine that the celebratory feast, at the end of this parable is taking place in a Norse hall.

I like to imagine that the doorway into the father's hall, where all the sounds of merriment are coming from, is a low doorway. The kind of doorway where one has to stoop down, and bow one's head to get in, and I like to think that going into that hall requires us to have, just for a moment, the posture of that younger son, penitent before his father. “I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.” The stiff necked, the certain righteous, can't get into the hall. And I pray that I, and all of us, may have the grace to bow our heads, and to know that we don't deserve to be called children, and that still our God welcomes us with open arms and rejoicing.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

14 March 2010