Two Brothers

An old story, told by the rabbis, is still told today:

A long time ago, in the place that is now Jerusalem, but long before that holy city’s streets were laid, there lived two brothers who had inherited a farm from their father.  Each had built a house to live in and a barn in which to store wheat, on opposite sides of a hill in the middle of the land they shared and tilled together.  The older brother was single and lived alone.  The younger brother had a wife and children living with him in his house.  The brothers loved each other dearly and did not want to divide the fields between them.  So together they plowed and planted and harvested the same crop in the same fields.  After they cut the wheat, they shared equally in the produce of their labor, and each stored his half in his own barn.

One year at harvest time, this time of year, the two brothers, each in his own home, beside his own barn, on opposite sides of the hill, found themselves lying awake at night, thinking.

“Here I am,” the older brother thought to himself, “all alone with no wife and no children.  I don’t need to feed or clothe anyone.  But my brother has a family to raise.  Is it right to share our harvest equally?  After all, he has greater need than I do.”  So at midnight he arose and took a bundle of wheat from his barn and carried it to his brother’s barn and left it there. Then he returned to his bed and slept in peace.  And he did this night after night, during harvest time.

Also troubled in his sleep, his younger brother thought to himself, “Here I am, my wife looks after me, and when I grow old my children will take care of me.  But what will happen to my brother in his old age?  Who will take care of him?  He has greater need than I do.  It isn’t right to share the harvest equally.”  So shortly after midnight he arose and took a bundle of wheat from his barn and carried it to his brother’s barn and left it there. Then he returned to his bed and slept in peace.  He, too, did this night after night during harvest time.

For years, every harvest time, each brother would consider the other’s needs, and would wake night after night in the small hours to carry some wheat from his barn into his brother’s barn.  And for many years neither brother knew of the other’s generosity.

One year, on a clear and starry night, around this time of year, the two brothers met each other coming over the hillside, with sheaves of wheat bundled in each other’s arms.  When they realized what they had been doing all these years, they dropped their sheaves, held out their arms and embraced.

Long after the brothers were gone to heaven, and their children had sold the land and subdivided it, as Jerusalem was built up around it, the story continued to be told about the two brothers, and the spot on the hill was remembered as the place where they met and discovered the gift of their generous love toward each other.  And the rabbis say that that is the place where King Solomon decided to build the Temple, for it was fitting that the holiest place of the holiest city should be a place that had long been remembered for extraordinary generosity and grace between brothers.

It is now almost harvest time here at Saint Mark’s.  It’s time for us to lie in bed and think at night about one another, and about our brothers and sisters who are not a part of this family yet, or who have no place at all to build a house or a barn, who don’t even know how to find their way to the hillside.  Its time to be troubled in our thoughts as we try to fall asleep and to wonder if it’s right to keep so much of the harvest for ourselves since we know so many whose needs are greater than ours.  It is a beautiful thing to be kept awake at night by the thought that you might be able to do something for someone you love; that all you have to do is get up and carry a bundle of wheat in your arms and deliver it in secret, sharing what you have with someone whose need is great.

When Saint Mark’s was built, it was one of the first buildings on this side of Broad Street, the city had not yet grown up around it.  Quickly the streets were filled in and the city of brotherly love made its way here.  We’re not in the exact middle of the city here, but we are close; and there is no hilltop here, but I think, I hope, I pray that we occupy something like the space where those two brothers met, before Jerusalem was builded, so long ago.  I hope we are a place where brothers and sisters, kept awake by their consciences – by their love – bring their gifts for each other, and for the brothers and sisters who have yet to join our number, or who simply need our care.  It might even be that like Zacchaeus we’d like to give half of all that we have to those who have greater need than we do – believe it or not there are people in this world even now who do just that.

We are the vibrant, happy, lively and faithful community we are because generations of brothers and sisters before us left their sheaves here, while they were living and when they died.  And although Philadelphia may not quite be a holy city, we are standing on holy ground, consecrated by the prayers of God’s people over more than 160 years, and by the care of God’s children, and by the visitation of the Holy Spirit.

We are so many more than just two brothers, who have been so abundantly blessed in our many ways.  And we come here week by week, from our various edges of the fields we work in.  And when we get here, do we realize that no matter what we do for a living, in God’s eyes we are all tilling the same soil, tending the same crop?  Have we begun to suspect in the small hours of the night that it would be good for us to share what we have with someone whose need is greater than our own?

And I believe I see you coming over the brow of the hill toward me, carrying something in your arms, and I have something in mine.

Let us decide to leave it here, where an altar has already been built.  And may future generations know why this temple stands here at a place on Locust Street: a place of extraordinary generosity and grace, where brothers and sisters lay down our offerings, and spread our arms wide to embrace.

Thanks be to God!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

31 October 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Facebook Lepers

Naaman, the commander of the army of the king of Aram, was a great man and in high favor with his master, but he was not on Facebook.  Neither was he on Twitter.  He was hopelessly disconnected from the great big world out there, and he may have been a technophobe. And to make things even worse (as if…) he had leprosy.

But the Arameans had taken a young Israeli girl captive, who had been secretly keeping up with the news with an app on her iPhone.  And she received regular tweets about a hot young prophet, Elisha, who had inherited the mantle of Elijah.  Recent tweets reported that Elisha had raised from the dead the little son of a Shunammite woman by getting him to sneeze seven times (which is a story, frankly, difficult to convey in 140 characters or less).  And she told her mistress that “if only Naaman were with the prophet in Samaria, he would cure him of his leprosy.”

So Naaman got the king of Aram to send a letter to the king of Israel: hand-written and hand-delivered (not even snail mail!).  And the letter is all, “Oh king of Israel, when this hand-written, hand-delivered letter finally reaches you, please cure my great general Naaman of his leprosy.”

But the king of Israel is all, “What are you talking about?!  Am I God, to cure people of leprosy?  What are you trying to start here, anyway, a fight?  And, look, I seem to have torn my clothes, thanks to you!”

But someone in the court of the king of Israel must have changed his Facebook status to “Stressed out because of tense words between king and Naaman the general/leper; anyone got any ideas?”

Now, Elisha had just been posting some cool video of the Shunammite boy sneezing seven times and coming back to life, which was extra-cool because it was shot in HD on his Flip digital recorder, and much better than the grainy footage he got on his iPhone of Elijah being carried up to heaven in a whirlwind, escorted by chariots of fire, and which was barely distinguishable from Bigfoot footage shot by a Super-8, or that old VHS recording still floating around the Internet of Moses standing by a supposedly burning bush. 

And Elisha’s messenger saw the post from a Facebook friend in the king of Israel’s court about the tension between the king and the general/leper, Naaman, and of course he told the prophet what was going on.

Now the healing of lepers is not something to fool around with.  This is serious business, and Naaman was a serious man, and so was Elisha.  This was not going to be accomplished by merely instructing Naaman to change his Facebook status from “leper”, to “healed” and waiting to see what happened.  After all, Naaman had come a long way, and gone to a lot of trouble.  So, you heard how the story goes: Elisha sends his messenger to tell Naaman to wash seven times in the Jordan River.  Naaman thinks this is stupid, since there are plenty of rivers in Damascus he could have washed in, and why didn’t the prophet at least come outside and wave his arms around, etc., etc.  But Naaman’s servants have been watching the video of the boy of the seven sneezes, and they think maybe there is a connection, since the messenger of the prophet told Naaman to wash seven times, and they convince him that, hey, no harm: no foul.

So Naaman dips himself in the Jordan seven times, and his flesh was restored like the flesh of a young boy, and he was clean.  And he instructed his IT people to get the word out ASAP, which they did by updating the status of the Aramean Army Facebook page to: “No God but in Israel!”  And sending out tweets to that effect.

Now, the healing of lepers is not something to fool around with.  Jesus must have known that it is a serious business – especially serious when ten lepers are heading your way, shouting, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”

Jesus, famously, never carried a cell phone, and the tablet computers of his day were crude and clunky (the iPad had not yet been introduced).  Although he was capable of attracting flash mobs wherever he went, they formed at their own behest, not his.   And he preferred to teach from a boat, a little ways out in the water, to let his voice carry across it, or from an elevated place on a mountain or even a slight rise on a plain, rather than using Power Point presentations, which he had reason to believe the Pharisees were constantly using.

The people who heard about Jesus often found out about him because their friends texted them, and posted their stories and photos on Facebook, and blogged about him.  There was a viral video circulating of Jesus healing a woman who had been crippled for 18 years, so you could see where the lepers got ideas; and although they, being lepers, didn’t have smart phones or laptops of their own, they had heard about Jesus on NPR.  So they are shouting at him, and begging him for mercy.

This was a serious business, and Jesus is a serious man.  He wastes no time: “Go,” he says, “and show yourselves to the priests,” who are also serious men.  And as the ten lepers turn to go, their leprosy is healed, and they are made clean.

Now, there is no evidence that any of the lepers ever made it to the priests.  We can assume that several of them blogged about their healing, a few might have appeared on Oprah, and a couple of them could have published ghost-written autobiographical books that chronicled the horrendous conditions at the leper colony and their miraculous healing, one of which was made into a movie that went straight to DVD.

But one leper stopped, as he was going on his way, realizing that he had already been healed.  And he alone turned back, and raised a song of praise to God from his lips, and fell down at Jesus’ feet to worship him and to say, “Thank you, thank you, thank you, Lord Jesus, Son of God, for the mercy you have shown to me this day!  Thank you!”  And he was a Samaritan, not a Jew, not a son of Abraham, not a child of the covenant, not, supposedly, among God’s chosen people.

And Jesus asked, “Were not ten made clean?  Where are the other nine?  Would not any of them return to praise God, except this foreigner?”

And when the tenth leper went home and signed onto Facebook, he listed his Hometown as Samaria.  And because of his privacy settings we don’t know what he put as his Religious Views.  And under Relationship Status, he selected “It’s complicated.”  And his favorite quotation was this” “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.”

And, of course, you would think that the moral of these stories is the importance of staying connected: how good it was that even though Naaman was a Luddite and resisted online social networking to his own peril, he had servants who used technology to great effect.  And how unfortunate it is to be a leper, without any Internet access, and only NPR to rely on, which means you are doomed to listen to its left-wing propaganda all the time, but that if healed, you too can share in the joys of social networking, where, by the way, you never have to touch anyone anyway.

But that is not the moral of these stories, for these stories are not morality tales.  But they show us that the healing of lepers is not something to fool around with; it is a serious business.  And no matter what the preoccupations of the day may be, God is about the serious business of healing lives that are sick, broken, out of whack, or going down the tubes.

And in his prophet, we see a man totally worth blogging about: who by inducing seven sneezes, or instructing a great general to wash seven times in eth Jordan, can bring about the power of God.

And what about Jesus?  After the day of his healing, the tenth leper, the Samaritan, must have followed the progress of Jesus, must have known that he continued on his way to Jerusalem where he would be hung on a Cross to die at the hands of angry, jealous, threatened men.  He must have heard and seen that he was more than a prophet; must have received the centurion’s tweet that truly, this was the Son of God.  Maybe the tenth leper even followed Jesus, and saw history unfold with his own eyes, felt the awful power as the earth shook that dark Friday afternoon.  How his life had changed since he’d been healed of his leprosy!  He was connected now to society, he was dating a great girl, who sent him flirty texts and posted smiling photos of the two of them on her Facebook wall, and ticked the “In a Relationship” status on her profile.

But the tenth leper realized that Jesus had never texted him, hadn’t friended him on Facebook (and probably wasn’t even on Facebook!), didn’t write a blog, and in fact only ever wrote one thing in the sand, which got blown away by the wind.  And looking back over his life, he could see that the best thing he ever did was to turn around on that fateful day, when Jesus healed him, and to fall at his feet and thank him.  Because of the many things he could not figure out in life, he was sure of this: that he was a beloved child of God, and that he would never stop thanking God for sending Jesus, his Son, into the world.

In our own day and age leprosy is not so much of a problem as it once was, and yet we know this: you don’t have to be a leper to feel like one.  This is the too-frequent experience of adolescent kids who begin to suspect that they are different because their hearts flutter in the presence of other kids of the same gender, which, when you are 13 or 14 or 15 and trying to fit in, feels an awful lot like leprosy, and you pray just as hard as you can that you can keep that part of you covered up, unexposed, because what would be worse than being known to be a leper, being known to be gay, when you are just a kid trying to fit in, and the wrong glance, the wrong word, the wrong move will send this rumor about you buzzing through space faster than you could ever control it, before you have even figured out how you are feeling, and before you have ever even felt what a kiss on the lips feels like, but the whole world knows, thanks to Facebook or Twitter, or whatever, that you yearn for lips you should not be yearning for: you are a leper.

And since this is the world we live in, by the grace of God such a kid might end up in front of a computer, not reading the idiotic, taunting, and unintentionally but nevertheless cruel posts of his or her peers, but watching instead the several videos that have been floating around this week of celebrities and normal people who very much want that troubled kid - who is feeling so low and so anguished, and so much like he or she can never be accepted by family or friends or the world at large, because he or she is just such a leper – to know that it gets better.

And wouldn’t it be wonderful if one of those videos featured a plain looking person, who grew up in Samaria, and who looked earnestly and sweetly into his camera and said something like this:

“I know what it feels like to feel like a leper, because I was one.  I know what it feels like to be laughed at, ridiculed, taunted, and disliked for something you never asked for and couldn’t do anything about.  I know what it feels like to want things to change, to yearn to be accepted, to be afraid that people everywhere will always know that you are less than you should be, sick, warped, broken, not right.  I know what it feels like to be compared to an animal and to be treated like one.

“But one day in my life – a life in which I had always hoped that things would get better, but they never did – I met Jesus.  I had heard all kinds of things about him, and I can tell you now that what I heard about him was more wrong than right.

“And on the day I met him, I just yelled out, from a safe distance, ‘Jesus, have mercy on me!’  I didn’t know what I was saying.  And I didn’t know what he was saying when he said nothing more than ‘Go and show yourselves to the priests,’ which hardly seemed like a good idea since priests are often known to be not very kind to lepers.  But before I took two steps, I looked down, and I was healed, so I turned back and ran to Jesus and praised his name, and fell at his feet to thank him.

“My young friend, you are not a leper.  Nothing in you needs to be healed except your tortured heart, which has been so hurt that it has fantasized about leaping off of bridges.  This alone needs to be healed in you – this idea that there is no other path that will work, no other option that is good, no other way to escape the pain you keep so carefully hidden inside of you, so no one can see it, and no one will know who you really are.

“But Jesus already knows who you really are.  He made you, and he loves you.  And he wants you to live.

“Turn around, my friend, and see him standing there, ready to do anything for you, ready to die for you.  And hear him promise, with me: It gets better.”

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

10 October 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia



Angels' Secrets

Secrets, I recall from the days when I used to work on Capital Hill, are part of the currency of Washington.  Some secrets are guarded carefully, others are widely known.  Knowing how to keep a secret here is almost as important as knowing when to reveal a secret.  The keeping and telling of secrets is a powerful business.

God has many secrets.  Among God’s secrets there are big ones, like what is the number of the planets and the stars, and there are little secrets like what has been happening to all the honeybees.  There are even nano secrets like how to understand the wave-particle duality of matter.  And there are confounding secrets like the age-old question of why bad things happen to good people.  There are secrets at the bottom of the sea, still too dark and cold for us to lay eyes on, and secrets locked in the earth, still too hot and deep to access.  God has woven many secrets into our minds and bodies that science has yet to discover.  And of course there are many secrets of the heart.  And there remain secrets about what God is doing in the world: about the status of earth in the universe, about the limits of time and space.  God has many secrets.  Some he allows to be found out, and some he guards jealously.

God’s secrets are, of course, objects of great curiosity and inquiry and there are those who would stop at nothing to wrest God’s secrets from his bosom.  For God, too, the keeping and telling of secrets is a powerful business.  And so God recruited the angels (themselves a secret order of his creation) to be the guardians of his secrets, to dwell someplace between heaven and earth, between God’s throne and the rest of the universe, forever vigilant for the forces that would steal God’s secrets if they could.

Of course, just like in Washington, among the angels, proximity to God’s secrets brings a certain knowledge of them, too.  And God allows the angels to know many, if not all, of his secrets and their meaning.  And because the angels already know many of the secrets of God, and already exist in a habitat someplace between heaven and earth, between God’s throne and the rest of the universe, they are convenient messengers of the secrets of God, ready to be dispatched whenever God chooses to reveal a secret.

So it is that the angels convince Jacob that he is merely dreaming when they bring to him the memory of the secret once given to Abraham: that his offspring would be blessed, and that they would be his people, and he would be their God.  This is a secret that God wants out of the bag, leaked again to Jacob with the deliberate intention that it should spread.

But for a long time the greatest of God’s secrets, hidden deep in his heart, was the secret of his Son: unseen among the details revealed in the various creation stories of Genesis; obscured by the wings of the Spirit hovering over the face of the waters; a top-secret Word pronounced among the syllables of all the “let there be”s; present but unrecognized from before the beginning of time – God’s deepest, most beautiful, and most mysterious secret.

The secret of Jesus is the secret that unleashes the angels in a new and marvelous way, piercing the veil between heaven and earth like a meteor shower.  Having kept the secret so long, how the angels must have rejoiced to be allowed at last to bring it to earth.

Gabriel the archangel, of course, was first, bringing the word to Mary of that holy thing that would be born of her: that God would work in secret through her.  But we hear throughout the Christmas story the songs of angel choruses too delighted to keep the stillness of that silent night, too exuberant to prevent the shepherds from hearing their song.

The angels, silenced for a while, as Jesus grew, are on the scene with him again as he begins his ministry of teaching and preaching that will lead him to the Cross.  They minister to him after his temptation in the desert to repeat in his ears the secrets he has always known: that the way of the Cross lies ahead, his passion, death, and also his resurrection.

Was it angels who tore the curtain of the Temple in two at the dark hour of Christ’s death, unveiling again the secret significance of this moment, and beginning to uncover the way of salvation?

There were angels waiting in his empty tomb when the women came, to give them the first look at the secret about to be unleashed: that he is risen!

We learn from the Revelation to Saint John the Divine that angels are the soldiers of God who will lead the advance in the last days before the establishment of his kingdom, once and for all.  Michael the Archangel provokes this unfolding with his defeat of the ancient foe.  And angel after angel then delivers to the cosmos the instruments that advance the cause of God’s righteousness, and bring about the desire of his heart: the dawning of the new heaven, the new Jerusalem where all things are made new, and where the river of the water of life flows through the middle of the street of the city.

Meanwhile, back on earth, we live in an age that can hardly tolerate secrets.  We find it hard to put our trust in God, partly because of his secrets.  We find it hard to imagine why God cannot trust us with all his secrets, why he would keep anything from us.  And because we prefer to think of angels like fairies who sprinkle happy-dust on children, we often miss their ministrations to us when the secrets of God are whispered again in our own ears.  As with Jacob, these secrets are not necessarily things we have never heard before, but secrets that clearly need to be re-told and re-heard.

There is the effusive secret of Emanuel, God-with-us – that reminder that Jesus was born, that God sent his Son to live among us, as one of us, to know our suffering, and to let his be known, so that all people might come within the reach of his saving embrace.

Whenever we catch a glimpse of a reminder of God’s holy presence with us, we can assume the presence of angels: at the bedside of a mother with her newborn child; in the wilderness where beauty stretches out before us; at the groaning board of plenty we enjoy so easily in many of our lives; at the bedside of a dying parent given the dignity of a happy, peaceful death…

…we can be assured of God’s angels bringing to us the secret of God’s presence.

But of course the angels remember, too, the secrets of the Cross that we so easily forget: that it is foolishness to so many, but to us it is the power of God.  And so isn’t it the work of angels when we find the strength to endure the challenges God sets before us; to not give up in the face of a hard diagnosis; to work to forgive him, since you said you were together till death do you part; to take your drunken self to that meeting and admit at last that you can’t live like this but have no power to find a new way to live…

… couldn’t it be the angels who join us on the way to help carry our crosses, as even Jesus was given help?

And the angels know the secrets of life and death.  They see past the mist of time that obscures the light of the next life from our eyes, which is to say that they know what hope is, which is why they so often begin their message with these words: Fear not!  The angels know the secrets of the passage from this life to the next, which we can only ever guess at, but they allow us to guess for our own sakes, and because there is nothing lost in imagining the details of path that is real but we will only ever travel once.  And when we finally give up on the anxieties of clinging to life in this world, it’s the angels who whisper subliminally that all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well.

But most poignant for the church is the ministry of angels in places like this: here in the midst of a busy and troubled city – just like my own parish in the midst of another busy and troubled city.  For if the angels really are the keepers and revealers of God’s secrets, then we have reason to believe that their ministry is intense whenever we gather in our twos and threes or more for the sublime secrecy of the Blessed Sacrament to be shown to us.  The secret of God’s presence in Jesus’ life and in his death.  The secret of God’s salvation in Christ’s resurrection.  And the secret hope that God will at last establish his reign of justice and peace when his kingdom at last has come. (Christ has died.  Christ is risen.  Christ will come again.)

And the beautiful secret of a night like tonight is that it has nothing to do with winged fairies sprinkling happy-dust on everyone; it is that the angels bring us again the secrets that God so much wants us to remember: That he is here.  That he loves us.  That he died for us.  And that his kingdom will be established, and that justice and peace will be known.  All of this transmitted with a scarp of bread and a sip of wine.

And if the weather is too still and sticky for us to feel the breeze from the angels’ wings, and if our own boisterous Sanctus should drown out their eternal song, and if the cloud of our incense seems to over-power the gentle fragrance of theirs, then it is only because in our self-centered and self-important way, we have become adept at missing the evidence of the angels’ ministry altogether.  Which hardly matters, as long as we are open to hearing again their wonderful secret:

Christ has died.  Christ is risen.  Christ will come again!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Michaelmas, 2010

Saint Paul’s Church, K Street, Washington, DC