Secrets, Lies, and Mysteries

Many people these days are annoyed with God because he seems to be involved with a lot of secrets and lies.

The BIG secret that has troubled humanity for as long as we have thought about it is, in the words of a famous book by a famous rabbi: Why do bad things happen to good people?  Lots of books have been written on the topic of this big secret, including an entire book of the Bible (the Book of Job), which ends with God more or less telling Job that it’s a secret, and how dare he, little, puny Job, ask great big God, who, by the way, made the earth and the heavens and set the stars in the sky, to divulge his secrets, in which case they wouldn’t be secrets any longer.

God has many other secrets, like what the songs of the whales mean, how to cure cancer, is there life elsewhere in the universe, what is happening to the honeybees, how to move faster than the speed of light, [and how did Roy Halladay pitch a perfect game last night against the Marlins]?  Some of God’s secrets seem important to us; some seem trivial.  Some we expect him to reveal; some seem unlikely to be uncovered.  Some, like dinosaurs and Stonehenge, are secrets from the past; and some, like peace or the end of the world, are secrets of the future.

People would be upset with God if he only kept secrets, but they would get over it eventually and learn to live with a God who keeps secrets better than anyone else.  What really annoys people is that they suspect God lies.

To begin with, there is the BIG lie: a lurking suspicion that God is not really God; rather, he is a made-up story, being manipulated by men behind curtains in Rome and Lynchburg, and anywhere a church like this stands.  It might be truer to say that people don’t so much think God lies as they think believers lie.  And all the other supposed lies flow from this one:  that God is love, that humans are in the habit of doing something called “sin”, that prayer matters, that our hymns do not fall on deaf ears, that Jesus was the Son of God and came into the world to save us.

More and more these days there is a sense that most religion, and certainly the Christian religion, such as it is, are systems of secrets and lies.  You can see this partly in the way the word “myth” has shifted in meaning.  It used to be understood that a myth was a story, the facts of which might be debatable but the essence of which was a truth so deep that we didn’t have any other way to talk about it, and that religion was the guardian and caretaker of these important stories.  Nowadays, when something is called a “myth” it is usually derided as “just a myth,” meaning it is most fundamentally untrue, and religion is the perpetuator of these lies.

In this rendering, Scripture is no longer a complex quilt of truths to be discerned from ancient stories and texts of various kinds; it is a web of lies that supports the delusions of people who are willing to live with a bunch of secrets.

And so God is a subject of secrets and lies.  That his church has been manifestly shown to be an institution plagued by harmful secrets and willful lies has not helped this situation.

But this reality surely comes as no surprise to God.  One burden of the Scriptures has been to show that thus has it ever been: God’s people, prodigal by nature, constantly disappoint him, as they disappoint themselves, and are called to repent and reform.  That this pattern of human behavior is plainly neither a secret nor a lie, does little in the face of skepticism about God.

The Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures, if you will, shows us early-on God’s assertion of himself: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord.”  And throughout so many of the early stories we see God at work, uncovering this secret for his people and declaring that all other gods, carved as they were in wood and stone, are nothing more than lies.  We Christians have inherited this basic claim, that the Lord our God is one Lord, alone in power and majesty and might and glory.  And into this landscape comes the Christian doctrine that although God is one: the singular, unrivalled divinity in the universe, God is nevertheless known to his people in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.  If this is not confusing to you, then you are clearly ready for the AP course in religion.  Most, of us, however, are at least a little confused by how God can be both three-personed and yet one.  It seems a contradiction in terms.  And the question it seems to beg is this: is this claim about the trinitarian identity of God a secret or a lie?

In either case, one could imagine that somewhere in the Vatican, or in Dan Brown’s study, there is a file cabinet with a locked drawer that contains a folder marked “Trinity” that has drawings, schematics, and at least a few paragraphs of explanation that either unlock the secret or blow the lid off the lie.

But there is another option, and it is this option that the church has long asserted about the truth of God’s triune nature and identity, namely that it is neither a secret nor a lie, but that it is a mystery.  Long before there were detectives whose sole job was to solve them, there were mysteries.  Real mysteries are not puzzles waiting to be solved, they are, rather, a category of truth that is evident to us and yet beyond our comprehension. 

It is a reflection of modern over-self-confidence that we tend to assume that any mystery is either a secret waiting to be unlocked or a lie being perpetuated for somebody’s gain.  Can we really not imagine truth in the universe that is beyond our comprehension?  At the moment we are baffled by a hole that we dug in the bottom of the sea bed in the Gulf of Mexico; if we can’t even figure out how to plug that hole to stop an oil spill of our own making, can we really be so sure that the rest of the universe is available to us to be understood?

Our modern resistance to mystery in the world is paralleled by our confusion about knowledge and wisdom.  We have forgotten that there is a distinction between the two, assuming that a wise person has extensive knowledge of the secrets and lies that assault the truth.  But many more generations have known that real wisdom lies in the acceptance of mystery, and the willingness to live with and reflect upon the mysteries of life without needing to try to solve them.

From the pages of the New Testament, on the lips of Jesus, we hear that God is to be known as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Do we understand this?  We remember that the Holy Spirit brooded over the face of the waters at the beginning of time.  We have no trouble conceiving of the God who made the world, who led his children out of captivity, and to whom Jesus prayed in the garden as a Father (even if we stumble a little on the overly gender-specific language), and we accept the claim of that heavenly voice that Jesus is the beloved Son of God.  We know that Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would come to lead us into all truth.  But none of this means we understand it.

The ancient wisdom of the church was never to de-code or explain the mystery of the Holy Trinity, it was, rather to reflect on it and rejoice in it: to realize that God is fabulously complicated, and that God nevertheless wants us to know him, even if it is hard for us to bear.

In our own day and age, the mysterious truth that our God is one Lord, but three persons, brings an important, ancient reflection back to mind: that God’s very nature, the essence of his being, is communal.  God does not exist in the splendid isolation of a remote heavenly throne room, where he occasionally naps on his throne, when not hurling thunderbolts of judgment down to earth.  God’s nature is to relate, to dialogue, to dance, to commune.  Aloneness is not God’s thing.

Perhaps this is why Adam’s needy demand for a helper does not fall on deaf ears in the Garden of Eden.  Perhaps this is why Noah is told to build a big ark, for all the animals and his family.  Perhaps this is why Moses is allowed to have the help of his brother Aaron.  Perhaps this is why Abraham is not sent on pilgrimage himself, he is told to bring his wife and family with him.  Perhaps this is why Ruth will not leave Naomi’s side.  Perhaps this is why Joseph is restored to the fellowship of his brothers and his father.  Perhaps this is why another Joseph, centuries later, is an essential part of the Holy Family.  Perhaps this is why Jesus tended to call his disciples in pairs, and sent them out two by two.  We are made in God’s image: aloneness is not God’s thing, and when we follow God, it is unlikely to be our thing either.

The truth at the heart of the mystery of the Holy Trinity is that God wants us to know him, even if he knows that he is beyond our comprehension, just as he wanted to show himself to Moses even though he knew it was beyond Moses’ ken to perceive more than the divine backside.

And the crucial thing that God is able to show us is that he is not a lonesome God: he is always relating, always discussing, always dancing, always communing.  Which we infer means that God does not mean any creature that he made in his own image (you and me) to be a lonesome creature, rather he means for us to be in relationships, to be in dialogue, to be dancing, and to be communing with one another.

The truth is that the alternative to showing us his triune self would be to keep it secret, or worse, to lie to us.  And despite the suspicions of our age, and the secrets that God does keep from us, he does not seem to want to be defined by secrets and lies.

God is, however, entirely willing to wrap himself in mystery.  God’s mysteries are not waiting or even available to us to be solved and revealed in a 90- minute TV special.  God’s mysteries, are however available to us to ponder, to think and talk and pray about, to behold in something like the same way that the beauty of the night sky or the scent of honeysuckle remains a mystery to be enjoyed.

May God grant us the wisdom to know the difference between secrets, lies, and mysteries.  May he give us patience with his secrets, confidence that he will never lie to us, and wisdom to ponder the mystery of his triune self, without the need to try to figure him out!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Trinity Sunday 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Bonsai Church

Some years ago, a friend who was going away on vacation for a week asked me to take care of a bonsai tree.  My friend had been taking a class in bonsai – the art of growing trees in small containers and miniaturizing their features to mimic full-sized, mature trees.  The tree my friend was growing didn’t need a great deal of care, I certainly wasn’t being asked to do the pruning of the leaves or the training of the branches that produces such elegantly formed little bonsai trees.  All I had to do was keep it watered every day, or every other day, as I recall.  Since I had a sort of a crush on this friend, I was, of course, thrilled to be asked to take care of the bonsai tree.  It seemed to represent some tacit but unmistakable bond between us: a little project we were now involved in together.  Never mind that we had never been on a date, or even contemplated such a thing (well, I had) – now we were raising a bonsai tree together!  What joy!  What rapture!

I have never been any good at raising plants; even the easiest houseplants seem a burden and a trouble to me.  But I can tell you I would have lavished attention on that little bonsai tree, if anything other than watering had been required of me.  I would have protected it with my life in order to return it to my friend in good health, a symbol of the deep bond that I imagined now joined us together in the raising of this tree.  That it was a tiny tree, with shallow roots going only as deep as its ornamental container would allow did not ruin the symbolism of it for me.  It was a thing of beauty, beloved, I supposed, of my friend, and I was not going to betray the trust, the bond, the layers of unspoken meaning held within that little ceramic tray of soil!

In any case, I returned the tree safely to my friend, never hinting at the meaning I’d invested in its care, which stayed hidden in the scant soil of its container.  My friend moved away, though we are still in touch from time to time.  I have no idea what happened to the bonsai tree.

Bonsai, as an art, I remember looking up at the time, is distinct from the horticultural practice of dwarfing.  A bonsai tree is made from a branch or a cutting of a full-sized tree that is restrained, pruned, trimmed, wired, trained to grow on a smaller scale than it would normally grow.  Creating a dwarf version of a plant is done by successfully and permanently changing its genetic makeup so that the plant and its descendants will always be small.

For some reason the image of the bonsai tree has been on my mind as this feast of Pentecost has approached.  In a kitschy way, Pentecost – the day when the Holy Spirit was first manifested to Jesus’ disciples – is sometimes called the birthday of the church.  This is the idea that Spirit, rushing into that community of people with a thunderous wind and tongues of fire, weaved the band of disciples together into a cohesive and purposeful body - the church – giving birth to this new thing, this community, this organization, this cause, this movement. 

It remained to be seen what all this would mean, what a diverse and disparate band of men and women joined by this almost tacit, certainly mysterious bond would amount to.  If you think in terms of horticulture, it remained to be seen how this new church would grow.  Was it a houseplant?  An oak, or an elm, or a quaking aspen?  Was it a fern, or a rose, or an orchid?  How would this church grow, gathered together by the Holy Spirit and given life?

The story of the church tells us that its growth has been prolific and multiform: an expansive garden with plants and trees and shrubs and flowers and succulents from virtually every culture, growing in all kinds of conditions.  Although it has not always been clear, we believe that this growth has been generally a good thing, that the Spirit’s multiplying power has been a blessing to the world.  A test of this, I would contend, is that wherever Jesus’ commandment to love one another in sacrificial service has been kept, you will find a healthy patch of God’s expansive garden.

All these centuries after that fist Pentecost, that birthday of the church, Christian communities, like us, celebrating the continuing gifts of the Spirit, and he weaves again a band of diverse and disparate people together into a body, a cause, a movement, have to decide what sort of thing will grow in this place where God has planted us.

It would seem to me that in many places communities are opting for a bonsai church: a diminished, miniaturized version of a larger original, that bears a striking resemblance to its parent, and can certainly live a long time, but that is smaller by definition, and kept within the shallow soil of an elegant container.

Smaller congregations,

smaller budgets,

smaller ministries,

smaller voices raised to God’s praise,

smaller prayers being offered for the peace of the world,

smaller promises of a smaller forgiveness,

smaller arms reaching out to a smaller number of people in need,

smaller expectations,

smaller blessings being given or being asked for,

smaller beauties,

smaller hopes for a smaller redemption,

smaller vision to heal a smaller blindness,

smaller steps in a smaller pilgrimage,

a smaller spirit to animate a smaller body,

a smaller song to sing a smaller Alleluia,

a smaller resurrection that leads to a smaller life in smaller heaven.

This is not to say that this smaller bonsai church is not beautiful and faithful, just that it is a smaller, miniaturized version of the church: smaller, I contend, than the church the Holy Spirit breathed life into on that first Pentecost, smaller than the fabric that Spirit began to weave all those centuries ago, smaller than the expansive garden that the saints planted and carried by ship and over land to Asia minor, to north Africa, and to Rome, and beyond.

But here’s the rub for us.  Saint Mark’s is a beautiful container.  And if we wanted to we could grow a beautiful bonsai church here.  We would be justified in doing it as a faithful expression of our crush on God, that has lasted here for more than 160 years.  In fact, it is precisely because our relationship with God is somewhat different from my unspoken crush on my friend with the bonsai tree that we might want to consider whether a bonsai church is what God is asking us to grow here.

God’s love to the people who have gathered here at Saint Mark’s since 1848 has been expansive.  He has sent the thunderous wind of his Holy Spirit to generations here, lighting tongues of flame above us, giving voice to many dialects of faith to hear and to heed his commandment to love one another in sacrificial service.

God gave the founders of this parish a bigger vision for a bigger beauty,

a bigger baptism leading to a bigger life in Christ,

bigger music to proclaim a bigger message,

a bigger call to repentance to pronounce a bigger forgiveness,

a bigger city to ask for bigger ministry,

bigger arms to welcome the weary,

a bigger hearth for a bigger hospitality,

bigger strides for a bigger pilgrimage,

bigger tears to shed for a bigger Passion,

bigger prayers for a bigger peace across this bigger world,

bigger compassion for the bigger suffering we see,

bigger room for a bigger inclusivity,

bigger basins to wash more feet,

a bigger Litany for bigger sins,

a bigger Magnificat of praise,

bigger wreaths of incense,

a bigger mystery of God’s bigger love,

a bigger Gospel for a bigger salvation

a bigger thanksgiving for God’s bigger Presence,

a bigger hope for bigger blessings,

a bigger song with bigger Alleluias to announce

a bigger resurrection to a bigger life in a bigger heaven!

There are some people who believe that the church in our day and age - smaller, weaker, less influential – has been dwarfed: permanently, genetically, unalterably diminished in every way.  But I think we have simply decided to opt for a bonsai church: elegant, beautiful, well-trained, restrained to survive within its container.  But the rushing wind and tongues of fire that come with the Holy Spirit have a way of blowing the lids off containers and shattering their sides.

And so the real question is about our crush on God - yours and mine.  The question is about whether we are willing to allow it to stay just a silly crush: un-talked-about, embarrassing, maybe even inappropriate.  Or have we been open to a real romance with God?  Are we willing to let his Holy Spirit all the way into our lives, to swoop us off our feet, lift us up and set us down in a new and bigger place?  Are we willing to feel the embrace of his spirit, blowing through this space even now, to hear his whispers of courtship in our ears, and to announce in full voice that we are head over heels in love with God?

When we do, we should not be surprised to discover, as generations before us have, that this corner of God’s garden cannot be contained in a small, ceramic pot.  We should not be surprised that God’s church has not, in fact, been dwarfed, that its roots are seeking deep groundwater, its branches are far-reaching, and its leaves provide a commodious shelter.

Perhaps in our romance we shall even discover that having been given what we thought was a bonsai church, we are compelled to take the restrained, carefully potted, perfectly formed tree from its container, and find a bit of good ground, and re-plant it there.

And will we lavish it with the attention it deserves and needs?  Will we protect it with our lives, in order to ensure that we can always offer it back to God healthy and whole?  Will rejoice in the deep bond that has formed between us and God, when we see what happens with this tree planted by his Son and watered by his Holy Spirit?  And will we know that this is what God has wanted all along, that his church should grow?

Come, Holy Spirit, come,

inspire our hearts,

set them on fire with your love,

and let your church grow!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Pentecost 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Belonging

There is a phenomenon in American culture that I cannot understand. The fascination, the energy, the money, the vitriol, all of which are expended on professional sports teams.

What would someone who think who had no experience of professional sports, about the energy that fans burn up on their favorites? They might think that it was a deeply important matter, instead of a game for amusement.

I have come to see this obsession with sports as a function of one of the truisms of human behavior: that we define ourselves in large measure by identification with a group, a franchise, a culture, a clan or a family. It is desperately important to us to belong, to have some roots, I suppose belonging goes some distance to assuaging some of the loneliness which is part of being trapped in our own bodies and heads.

And so fans identify themselves with the Yankees, or the Cowboys, or the Flyers, as a way of belonging. Sports of course, are a lighter example of this identification and belonging, but there are far darker and more dangerous examples of it. Because one of the corollaries of belonging to a culture or group is that groups are often defined over and against other groups. We not only like to belong to a group, but one of the ways that we know we belong to a group is that we don't belong to that other group. There are a plethora of examples of this throughout history: the English and the Irish, (in fact, the English and almost everyone else whom they colonized), the Tutsis and Hutus, Jews and Palestinians, whites and blacks; we define who we are by defining who we are not.

In scientific terms these differences are negligible, of course. The genetic differences between “races” are to all extents and purposes, so minute as to be invisible. Indeed, “race” turns out to be one of those ways that we define ourselves, that we identify and belong.

The question of belonging and group identification has been very much in the news lately, as a state in which I used to live, Arizona, has voted for what I think of as a draconian law designed to discourage illegal immigration. What the law is saying is: we are Americans, they are not. We belong, they do not.

But it is not just Arizona, of course. The Church is involved in a massive debate about who belongs, who is inside the pale and who is not. The debate is about many things: who has legitimate claims to the faith of Augustine, Becket, Cranmer, and Ramsey; who has political power, money and property; whether women and gay persons belong as ordained persons in the Church; in short, who belongs in the Anglican Communion, and who does not, who belongs as the true descendant of the Church of England in these United States.

This is one of the ways that we do business as humans, we locate ourselves in the world, we define the boundaries that give us belonging, and we defend them.

But that way of doing business is alien to the Christian faith. Although it sometimes seems as if becoming a member of the Church is to become a member of yet another exclusive group, one might even say a rapidly shrinking, exclusive gathering, the Gospel this morning teaches us otherwise: the vows of baptism make us members of a body that brooks no boundaries, for all are one in Christ, as Christ is one with God. And this oneness, never quite realized but always underlying the life of the Church begins in the Gospel this morning, as Jesus prays for that nascent little ragtag band of disciples, that they will be one.

The message is that becoming a member of the body of Christ overwhelms all other artificial cultural barriers which separate, and makes us one with as diverse and ragtag a group of people as were those early disciples.

I was talking recently to someone who was here at St. Mark's years ago, and this is the story he told me. A former priest here, wandered into a potluck gathering, very much like we had this past Thursday after the Feast of the Ascension, and this priest wondered out loud where else you would find so unusual and diverse a gathering of people. The only possibility that he could come up with was an air raid shelter.

Look at the body of Christ's people, gathered in this place. People of deep faith, people who would like to have faith, all sorts of ethnic, racial, economic, and other diversities.

Multiply that by all the churches that have been and will be, by all the people that will gather in them, by all who will be united at the altars where Christ will be present from the beginning of the ragtag Church until the Last Trump and you get a sense of the diversity, the absolute mad unity of the life of the Church, which is Christ's body, to which we are called in the magnificent light of his resurrection. And imagine how ragamuffin a band is gathered, mystically, when we become one in the Sacrament of His Body and Blood, and with all that great multitude that none can number.

Which is why, though I shy away from politics in the pulpit, matters like Arizona's immigration law, civil rights, war and peace, genocide, health care, ecology, and economics are not simply political matters, but inherently religious ones.

In the Church, we are called into massive diverse fellowship which brooks no political boundaries. God calls Republicans and Democrats, Whigs, Tories, Liberal Democrats, Socialists, Communists, Ulster Orange men and Sinn Fein; everyone into the unseen unity of oneness with each other in God.

But that does not mean that simply everything is compatible with the vision of oneness that is part of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I or anyone can believe whatever we want about any political matter, but that does not mean that such a belief is compatible with the duty that I owe to my brothers and sisters in Christ, with whom I am one. If we are one in Christ, then I have specific duties and obligations to my brothers and sisters who come from south of the Arizona/Mexico border, or those who are called to ordained ministry who are women or gay people, or those who believe that schism is their only alternative, because we are one with each other, and will be together not just in this haphazard gathering that is the Church temporal, but forever.

C.S. Lewis once preached these words and they speak to the unity of the Body of Christ:

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, (shall we insert sports franchises), arts, civilisations--these are mortal... But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit--immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.”

If all are one in Christ, my actions and your actions always occur against the backdrop that is the oneness of that Body, and the excuses of political, or tribal, or family allegiance do not quell the responsibilities that I have to the whole Body, to the immortals we meet everyday. My actions can heal or wound that Body, seen or unseen.

Which means that we are none of us absolved either from the necessity of struggling to understand and work for political ends which are consonant with the Gospel (which affect the real lives of immortal people that we are united to in Christ), or from the hard, hard work of being one in Christ with people who it is very, very difficult to be one with. That is the kind of “shirt of flame” that oneness in Christ binds us to.

Yesterday, the Diocese of Los Angeles consecrated two bishops suffragon. They were the 16^th and 17^th women to be consecrated as bishops in the Episcopal Church, (the 1044^th and 1045^th bishops in the American succession), but what has garnered so much news is that one of them, Mary Glasspool, is openly gay and has lived for the past 19 years in a committed relationship with another woman.

The election and the consent process by which the Episcopal Church has agreed to now-Bishop Glasspool's consecration, has garnered the usual baleful predictions about the end of the Anglican Communion and the departure of the Episcopal Church from the historic faith.

And, whenever I hear that noise, from the conservative side of the aisle, my knee-jerk inclination is to say “You know what? You don't like it? Don't let the door hit you on the way out. Good riddance!”

But, of course, I owe my beloved brothers and sisters so much more than that. We are one in Christ, whether they like it, or even believe it, and whether I like it or agree with it.

It is a madness, of course, to gather all of us crazy people of faith throughout time into one body. By doing this God is operating with what Dorothy Sayers used to call “His usual outrageous lack of scruple.” But as is often the case with God's lack of scruple, who are we to complain?

So, brothers and sisters, let us glory in the ridiculousness of being one in Christ! Come conservative breakaway Anglicans, come right wing Republican lawmakers in Arizona, come Yankees fans, come terrorists, and people of all colors and strips, come with me to the Supper of the Lamb. It matters not that I cannot understand you and have terrible trouble loving you. I'm sure I'm not that easy to love either. But we are one in Christ. God in his glory and wonder has made us one.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

Easter VII

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia