Acceptance

If an angel were to appear to me in a dream, as an angel appeared to Joseph in a dream to tell him it is alright to marry that pregnant girl, Mary, he had been seeing, I think I know how I would react.

If an angel were to swoop in through my window, as the angel Gabriel swooped into Mary’s room, to announce that she would give birth to a son, who would be the Son of God, I have an idea of how I would react.

If angels were to appear in the sky over the fields where I tend my sheep, as they did to the shepherds on that first Christmas to sing of the birth of Jesus, I suspect I can predict how I would react.

In each case, I am almost certain that I would find some time to sit down by myself, or with some help (maybe professional help!) to understand what had happened to me, to understand what I had heard, to understand what God might be doing in the world and in my life.

I say this with some certainty, because although I have never had an angelic encounter that I know of, I have been confronted with the need to try to discern what God is doing in my life and in the world, I have found myself trying to figure out what God wants me to do, how God wants me to act, and, most fundamentally, who God wants me to…  and I have noticed that one of my first reactions is to try to make some sense of the situation: to try to understand. I am, after all, a rational person living in a (more or less) rational age.  I have been taught that knowledge is power – and I value that lesson.  I have seen and known in my life the great benefit of taking the time to understand things, ideas, and people that are not at first easy to comprehend.  The impulse to understand is not only predictable, it is welcome in my life, and in the world around me.

And so I feel confident in asserting that if I were Joseph, and I had decided that the pregnancy of my young fiancée – whom I had not known in the biblical sense - was just cause for me to “put her away privily” (as the King James Version so memorably puts it).  And if I had a dream in which an angel instructed me not to be afraid to marry her because the child she was carrying was from the Holy Spirit: a son, whom we should name Jesus because he would save people from their sins… first thing in the morning I would call my analyst!  And as I laid back on the couch in his office, I would begin to try to understand what was going on in my head and in my heart, and maybe, just maybe, I would try to understand what was going on in the mind of God… if I possibly could.

Perhaps you would react the same way.  It is a perfectly normal reaction to events around us – and in many ways, it is the reaction that makes us who we are (homo sapiens: knowing man), this drive to understand.  And that desire has wrought a great deal of wonderful science, music, art, and literature, among other things.

Making sense of things, reflecting on them and finding meaning, is the great gift of humanity: something to be celebrated, nurtured, and encouraged.  This gift comes, I have no doubt, from God, who made us in his own image, and who must delight when we begin to understand dimensions of ourselves and the world around us that are far beyond the grasp of any of his other creatures.  So with the angels, I am sure it comes as no surprise to God that I would set out to understand all the implications of the visitation, the meaning of their message.

But I would struggle in my mission to understand.

If I were Joseph, I would stumble first, I suspect, on the fundamental unfairness of laying such a burden on Mary, and on me, since both of us are basically ill-suited to the task of bringing a savior into the world.

If I were Mary, I would, as Saint Luke tells us she did, “ponder these things in my heart.”  But I fear my pondering would give me restless nights, not peaceful ones, as I tried to imagine a future for this mystery baby now growing, unbidden, inside my womb.

If I were a shepherd, I think I would stop trying to make sense of the angelic message as soon as I arrived at the manger and saw the hopelessness of the situation.  I would write the whole thing off as a function of the wine I had been sharing with my fellow shepherds that night.

Under any circumstances, I believe I would struggle with trying to understand the angels’ message of the coming of Christ.  And I know from my own life how frustrating the struggle to understand can be.  I know what it feels like to pray repeatedly to God to ask him to help me just to understand why he is doing such and such a thing, why he let such and such a thing happen, why he won’t fix such and such a problem, why he made me the way I am…if only I could understand, I so often feel certain, then I could get on with life, then I would let go of my anger or my grief or my confusion, and I could begin to do the right thing.

But sometimes we have to learn that God is not asking us to understand something, that he is not presenting an event or a reality, or whatever to us as an exercise in understanding to be dissected with our minds, comprehended, and preserved in formaldehyde to be referenced whenever we need it.  Certainly, God is not presenting the birth of his Son to us this way, just as he did not present the news of the birth of his Son to Joseph, or to Mary, or to the shepherds this way.

Sometimes, rather than understanding, what God requires of us is acceptance.

The angelic visits to Mary and Joseph did not require understanding, there was no time for it.  These were not seminars that spelled out the logic of God’s action, only announcements that claimed congruence with the voice of the prophet: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son!”  There was no contract to be initialed and signed, indicating that Mary and Joseph understood what had been told to them, and were accepting full responsibility for whatever should happen next, and the angels could not, under any circumstances, be considered liable for what might happen in the lives of these two people as a result of the news that they’d delivered.  There was not even time to consult with their own families – and to do so, would surely have led them to different conclusions – as soon as Joseph awakes from sleep and recalls his dream, his mind is made up: he takes Mary as his wife and accepts the child that she is bearing in her womb.

The Scriptures suggest that now and then, as Jesus grew up, his parents gained some understanding of who he was, and what his life meant.  And we take it by implication, since Mary was there at his Cross when he died, that she was granted some understanding of the meaning of his death and his resurrection.  But before she was given to understand, she had to accept Jesus, accept what God had in mind, even if she could not understand it.

And the same holds true for each of us.  There is so much of the world that we can understand.  But many of the most painful, difficult questions we will encounter in our lives – questions of life and death – will evade our understanding, even as they interpose themselves in our prayers with the taunting question, “Why?  Why?  Why?”

To that question, and answer is not always given.  And it is vexing that the angels are not dispatched more often to ease the burden of acceptance with their wonderfulness.  Perhaps angelic visitations have slowed to such a trickle because of our dogged insistence to be in control of our lives and the world around us.  We have become so good at enacting the fantasy that we are in control that more often than not we believe this is the truth.  It is only when things go veering out of control – in sickness, disaster, economic collapse, or in the face of death – that we are forced to confront the limits of our control, and our utter dependence on God.  And we do everything we can to avoid such situations.

I’d venture to say that the poor young first-century couple who found angels visiting them in their dreams and in their prayers had less conviction about their own ability to control their lives or the world around them.  They’d have had precious little experience of successfully asserting control in their lives, so maybe it was easier for them to assent to the angels’ instructions.  And for all I know they had neither the inclination nor the facility to reflect much on the meaning of the angels’ message.  But like all of us, they had before them the opportunity either to accept what God was doing or to reject it and do things their own way.  Had they insisted on understanding what was going on, then I guess we might still be waiting for God’s Son to be born.

But Mary and Joseph heard the message of the angels; they must have seen what it meant for them: confusion, difficulty, pain, and sorrow, but not without joy… and they accepted what God had in mind for them.  And the angels rejoiced, and soon we will join them their song!

May God give us all not only minds to inquire and understand, but hearts to accept his divine will, and the birth of his Son, and may our acceptance of God’s will and of his Son give the angels cause for singing.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

19 December 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Last things First

If you paid attention to the readings this morning, you might be confused.  First we heard Saint Paul’s helpful assurance that “we know what time it is.”  Then, minutes later, from the Gospel, we heard Jesus warn, “about that day and hour no one knows…  Keep watch, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”  So by now you might be wondering what the Bible is trying to tell you.  Do we know what time it is, or not?  The answer, of course, is yes, and no.

It is Advent Sunday, the beginning of the church year.  We have begun again to move through the cycle of time that leads us to a baby’s crib in Bethlehem, and then to a Cross on a hill outside of Jerusalem, and to the empty tomb, then to an upper room where the Holy Spirit rushes through, and so on.  This is the wheel of sacred time turning its grand arc, beginning at the beginning and leading us to the end.  So you would think that we begin with first things first.  But we do not.  In the church it is our custom to begin with last things first.  While we are preparing straw to fill the manger, we are also contemplating the end of time, which, it would seem, is when the prophecy of Isaiah will finally come true that we will beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks, for we are surely not there yet.

Sing a hymn in Advent, and you are likely to discover that you are singing not about the excitement of waiting for the baby Jesus, but about the wonder and awe of his second coming: Lo!  He comes with clouds descending, once for our salvation slain.  Here, on the first day of a new church year: last things first.

Traditionally the church has identified the four “last things:” Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell.  These are our points of reflection as we wait for Jesus.  These are the mysteries beyond the veil that Saint John the Divine was shown in his Revelation.  These last things remind us that we only pretend to be waiting for a birth, that we are re-living that ancient story even while we wait for the final chapter when God’s time is fulfilled, when Christ comes again, and when all history culminates in a second big bang of God’s creating and saving power.  So, last things first: Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell.

Start with Death, because we can all agree on that; we can all agree there is such a thing, anyway.  Death is the thing we have most in common with Jesus, and it is the place where we are most tightly bound to him, for it is in his dying that the certainty and fullness of his humanity is known.  Tempting as it is to see him as super-human, we see in Jesus’ death that he is simply (but not only) human.

When we were joined to Jesus in the Sacrament of Baptism, the church told us that we were being baptized into his death.  By this we mean that our journey in life is inextricably linked to his journey through death; that the apple-eating, rule-breaking, take-what-I-want-and-worry-about-the-consequences-later, fig-leaf-wearing-because-all-of-a sudden-I-am-ashamed-of-the-beautiful-creature-lieness-of-the-body-God-made-for-me, crouching-in-fear-because-of-the-sound-of God-walking-in-the-Garden-and-coming-toward-me…

… that every fault I share with our first parents, and some that I have perfected on my own, every one of them can be buried with Christ and left for dead, as we take on the new life he is calling us to lead.

And, of course, we are linked to Christ in death because our earthly lives will end in death as surely as his did.  He does not ask us to go where he has not already gone.  So, last things first.

Next is Judgment where we meet Christ face to face.  In our own time, judging has become a dirty word, since it implies asserting your standards over against mine, as though your standards were demonstrably better than mine, and as though you lived by them yourself, which I deeply suspect you do not, since our culture tends to suspect that any person judging anything is probably a raging hypocrite.

Jesus does assert his standard over against ours, and his standard is love, a demonstrably better standard than all the other alternatives.  His judgment is the rule of love by which our own lives will be measured.  This is why in his ministry he taught us how to love one another: to live our lives not for our own sakes, but for others, caring about the wounded, sick, hungry, naked, homeless, imprisoned, helpless, the beaten man on the side of the road, the child who depends on her elders.  Be prepared to answer for this measure of your life, because in the end (whenever that is) no other measure will matter.

Judgment is often over-looked in the quest for the meaning of life, but without judgment what meaning could there be in life?  If no one cares, and it doesn’t matter whether we help or harm one another then what sort of life have we been called to live?  Last things first.

Heaven is the happiest of the last things.  In the biblical tradition, visions of heaven may begin in the clouds, but they don’t end there.  They take on a familiar form: the shape of a city, the holy city: a new Jerusalem.  God’s eternal home has its counterparts in our own world, its points of comparison.  It is not just a lifestyle choice that heavenly kingdom is a city and not a meadow.  For God always calls his people to be in community, living with one another, and in the world to come this will be true too, we can surmise.

And heaven is the destination of our life’s pilgrimage.  To speak of heaven is to know that God’s people have someplace to go: a promised land where all is peace, a land flowing with milk and honey where the trials of this world are forgotten.  To be a pilgrim is to know that you are not wandering aimlessly, but that you do, in fact, have someplace to go, even if the way is hard.  Whenever we speak of heaven we remind ourselves of this important truth, and we pray we are strengthened for the journey.  Last things first.

Last among the last things is hell.  Hard as it is for us to conceive of, there is room in God’s imagination for a place of fire and torment, weeping and gnashing of teeth. 

It hardly requires us to stretch our own imaginations to think of such places here on earth.  There are people who suffer unthinkable torment in their lives, perhaps it is implausible that such suffering would not be a possibility on the other side of the grave as well.

Biblical teaching about hell is mostly by inference, and these days the church often speaks with only little confidence about hell, except in this: that part of the mission of Jesus during his three days of death was to visit hell and set free the souls in torment there and bring them with him to the path of salvation.  Fantastic as such a story may seem, it tells us that no place – not even the darkest places of imagination – is beyond the saving reach of Christ’s strong hand.  Last things first.

When we take last things first, it is not because we are like over-eager murder-mystery readers who read the last page first.  It is because we are hungry for meaning in our lives, and we know that God has given this gift of a far-sighted vision of the last things, the sight of which colors our understanding of the present things that generally have our attention.

It would appear that God allows us this vision for two reasons: first to give hope, and second to urge us to watchfulness.  Hope and watchfulness are the dual messages of Christ’s tiny parable today: two men will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left.  Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.  Is this literally true?  Is this how God’s salvation works?  Who can say?  But perhaps Jesus uses this image to urge both hope and watchfulness.  Yes, when all the world has fallen to pieces there is hope.  The Second Coming has all the hopefulness of waiting for a bus, which when you think of it is significant, because you are counting on the bus actually arriving. 

This is the difference between wishful thinking and hope.  Wishful thinking leaves you standing and waiting for a bus that will never come, because it probably never left the station, and maybe doesn’t even exist.  But hope is founded on the certainty that one is coming for you.

But if you are not watchful, if you walk away, turn your back, or start to do something else, you may never get on the bus, may never even see it coming, even though it drives right past you.

But even most city buses are not likely to do this; some of them will even stop in mid-block and open their doors for you if they realize they missed you.  If even a Philadelphia city bus will do this, how much more will God do everything he can to bring you and me into his kingdom?

“You know what time it is,” St. Paul says, “now is the moment for you to wake from sleep.”  It hardly matters what the hour is, the alarm of hope, soon to be found on the lips of John the Baptist, is calling us awake: the kingdom of God is at hand, make straight in the desert a highway for our God!  And yet, year after year we find the need to renew our faith, replenish it for another year, strengthen our resolve and relocate our hope.  And it is all too true that we know neither the day nor the hour that God will set the wheel of sacred time spinning for the last time, finally bringing all things to their completion.

And so we are called to live with hope and watchfulness, because while indeed we do not know when our Lord is coming, his advent is more than wishful thinking.  And of course, we do know exactly what time it is, now is the moment to wake from sleep, and be prepared for last things first.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

28 November 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Perfect Memory

About twenty years ago, an Australian priest living and working as an anti-apartheid activist in South Africa received a letter-bomb in the mail that took both his hands off and left him blind in one eye and seriously burned.  As his body recovered, as well as it could, Fr. Michael Lapsley realized that another part of him had been wounded too: his memory, which now carried the indelible story of this violent act against his person.  He began to learn to use the prosthetics at the end of each arm, and to cope with his one-eyed vision.  But what about his memory, which threatened to leave him more permanently wounded than his other, more obvious injuries?

Several years ago, Fr. Lapsley preached a sermon in which he asked this: “Do you know about bicycle theology?  It is when I come and steal your bicycle.  A few months later I come back and ask for forgiveness for stealing the bike.  I am forgiven, but I keep the bike.  Sometimes we reduce forgiveness to saying sorry and we don’t return the bicycle.  Sometimes however, the bicycle cannot be returned.”

He goes on, “As I stand here today, I don’t know who made the bomb [that so injured me], who posted it, and who gave the orders.  I am not full of hatred, and I do not want revenge.  But I have not forgiven anyone, because so far there is no one to forgive.

“Perhaps [some day] the doorbell will ring and a man will tell me: I sent you the letter bomb, please will you forgive me.  Now forgiveness is on the table.  Perhaps I would ask him if he still makes letter bombs.  No, I work at a local hospital, he replies. Yes, I forgive you, and I would prefer that you spend the next fifty years working in that hospital rather than be locked up….

“Dear sisters and brothers,” Fr. Lapsely asks, “do you have bicycles that need to be returned?  Do you carry poison in your heart because you have not yet shared what happened to you, perhaps many years ago?”[i]

One of the most commonly dispensed prescriptions in life is the instruction to forgive and forget: an approach that seems to be born of a near-total lack of understanding of either forgiveness or forgetting, both of which can be very difficult.

Forgiveness and memory are both on the table when a criminal (I think of him as a young man), hangs dying on his own cross beside Jesus, and says to him, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”  Forgiveness and memory. 

We are living in a world full of memories that are in desperate need of healing – because we have littered the world with the limbs we have blown off each other, the lives that have been destroyed, the carelessness with which we treat our neighbors, the injustices we tolerate on a daily basis, the hatreds we allow to fester.  Some of us have stolen bicycles, others of us have had our bikes stolen, and generally the landscape is strewn with the spare parts that are left scattered around, and the poison is still carried in too many hearts.  So what are we to make of a criminal who turns to Jesus and says, “remember me when you come into your kingdom.  Jesus, remember me.”

Do you think that Jesus remembers you?  As you come to church and offer your prayers, carrying with you the memory of the bicycles that have been stolen from you, or that you have stolen and never returned, do you think Jesus knows who you are, recognizes your face, remembers your crimes, holds them against you, feels your pain, cares enough to ease it, sees your memories, wants to forgive you, wants you to forgive, thinks you can forget?  Do you think Jesus remembers you?

With such wounded memories, it can be hard for us to believe that God regards us very much at all.  And when we think of God enthroned in the heavens, or of Christ the King, as the church invites us to do today, we can easily be misled: we can easily begin to imagine that we are mere spectators who have gathered on the parade route to whatever royal event it is that Jesus makes his way to in a horse-drawn carriage.  We know we are supposed to be cheering, waving the flag, and just be happy to catch a glimpse of this sight, so we can tell our grandchildren that once we watched the king pass by and felt our heart swell with national pride.

But the poison in our hearts – that has seeped out of our bleeding memories - makes it hard to cheer as loudly as we think we ought to; hard to swell with much pride at all.  After all, how could Jesus remember me?  How could he even see me in this crowd?  How could Jesus remember me?  And what could he do for me if he did remember me?

When we say that Christ is king, we are not affording him a royal retinue and resigning ourselves to a place on the sidelines of his occasional grand parades through the city.  When we say that Christ is king, we are adding to our hearts the memory of his kingdom, which is the antidote for the poison that has been seeping there.  And Christ is not king because he is the mightiest warrior or the triumphant leader, he is king because he alone has a perfect memory.

This is to say that Jesus remembers you and me perfectly.  He remembers the hurts we have inflicted, and the hurts that have been visited on us.  And he remembers the imprint of God that was given to each of us as we were made.  He remembers how our memories have been wounded, and he wants us to allow his perfect memory to heal those wounds, by allowing him to carry them in his memory, rather than for ourselves, since they are really too heavy for us to bear.

We live in a society that too often thinks it can say whatever it wants, utter any lie, inflict any pain, invade any space, disrupt any peace, violate any loyalty, steal any bicycle if only we think we can get away with it.  And often this proves to be true: often we can get away with murder or lesser crimes.  But do we realize what we are doing to our memories as we shape them with such poison?

Two men hang on their crosses beside the dying Jesus: one of them refuses to confront his memory, but the other cannot escape his even at this last hour, especially at this last hour.  And that man turns and asks, Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.

We often suppose that our worship of God is an act of our willful remembering of Jesus, as we tell his story, repeat his words, eat and drink the Sacrament of his Body and Blood.  And, in some small way we are remembering Jesus this way.  But more importantly, Jesus is remembering us when we gather around him.  He remembers each of us perfectly, down to the number of hairs on our heads.  He remembers the things we cannot remember any more, and wish we could.  He remembers the things we wish we could forget.  He remembers our pain, our suffering, and our sins.  He remembers our joys and our delights.  He remembers our happiest days and our saddest ones.  He remembers our best selves and the worst possible versions of ourselves.  He remembers every bit of us perfectly as he makes his communion with us.  He remembers the bicycles that have been stolen – who they were stolen from and who did the stealing.  He remembers the lost limbs, the scar tissue, the burns, the blindness.  And he remembers the poison that still lingers in our hearts.

He knows that we wonder whether or not he will remember us.  He hears us whenever we call out, Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.  And it delights him to hear that even in our distress we have remembered his kingdom: that there is a holy realm, sometimes near at hand, where he is king, and where his perfect memory has healed the battered memories of countless souls; where it has displaced the poison that we tried to carry around as if it wouldn’t kill us.

Dear sisters and brothers, do you have bicycles that need to be returned?  Do you carry poison in your heart because you have not yet shared what happened to you, perhaps many years ago?

You can begin to heal your memory by telling this to Jesus today, as you make your way to his altar, to receive the gift of his Body and Blood, and discover that the poisonous memories that have been making you sick to your stomach (or worse) are healed by the memory of a kingdom yet to come where Jesus is King of kings and Lord of lords, and he remembers that you are his most precious child, and he wants you to inherit the kingdom.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

21 November 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

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[i] From a sermon preached by Fr. Michael Lapsley, SSM at Evensong, Westminster Abbey, 5 November 2006, text found on www.healingofmemories.co.za