Christmas in the Basement

Ninety nine years ago – almost to the day (it was actually the 30^th of December, 1911) the great new building that was erected to house John Wanamaker’s department store was dedicated, after seven years of construction.  The building was designed by the famous Chicago architect Daniel Burnham, and was dedicated by President William Howard Taft, who must have been pleased that Wanamaker’s was the first department store in the country to house a restaurant.  That building still stands a few blocks from here, and, although the name of John Wanamaker has been removed from the store for years now, as it has changed hands several times, it still plays host to a light show that continues to be very much a part of Christmas in Philadelphia.  If it’s dazzle you want, you take your kids to the Comcast Center, but if it’s tradition you are after, you go to Macy’s, (and you pretend you are still at Wanamaker’s).

John Wanamaker, the founder and builder of that store was one of the richest and most powerful men in Philadelphia and in the nation.  His son, Rodman, took over the company and is credited for continuing the kind of revolutionizing business practices that his father had been famous for (Wanamaker’s was the first store to give a money-back guarantee if you were unsatisfied with your purchases), and for arranging for the installation of the enormous pipe organ in the Grand Court.  But Rodman, who had a kidney disease, lived only six years longer than his father.

By the time Rodman died in 1928, he had long since buried his wife Fernanda here at Saint Mark’s beneath the altar in the exquisite Lady Chapel he built for that purpose when she died at the turn of the century.  If you have never been here before, I suggest you peek in after mass or on the way back from communion to have a look at the work of beauty for which Mr. Wanamaker is responsible.  Rodman himself is buried in a spectacular way in one of two chapels at the base of a tower that serves as the family mausoleum at the Church of Saint James the Less, five and a half miles up the Schuylkill River from here.  His father, John, is buried in the other chapel.

The rolling hills above the river that were once countryside are now graveyards – there are cemeteries to the south, and to the north and east the city is a sort of graveyard of industry: the Tastycake Bakery building is there, the old Budd plant, and other hulking memorials to an age of industry in Philadelphia that is well and truly dead and buried.  Penn fishing reels are still made in a small factory nearby – but only a few of them: most of the reels are made overseas.

Across the street from the Wanamaker tombs, in the basement of the church hall, five bicycles were recently raffled off to kids from the neighborhood.  They were little kids’ bikes, with training wheels, and brightly colored paint jobs, and heavily padded handlebars.  I don’t think they were especially good or expensive bikes, but I’m sure the question of their quality would hardly matter to the kids who will ride them.  The bikes were donated to be gifts at the Christmas party that was taking place in the basement of that church hall: a Christmas party for the neighbors around the church, many of whom are aware that they are living alongside graveyards.  Those neighbors have seen the bakery and the plants close down, the jobs disappear, the homes foreclosed or abandoned and boarded up.  They can remember when Tastycake was hiring, but it is a distant memory. 

They have seen the drugs and the guys who push them show up on the street corners, where kids who have already failed at school have nothing to do but hang out.  You can see the school from the street corner, and you could be forgiven for thinking it is a prison: it looks a lot like one.  And your chances of learning much there are only a little better than they probably are in prison.

They have even seen the church shut down – five years ago, when after a dispute with the bishop the congregation pulled up stakes and moved away, locking the gates behind them, and bringing to an end the tutoring programs, and other ways they’d reached out to kids in the neighborhood.

With the gates locked and the lights off, and high walls surrounding the place, and a graveyard and the Wanamaker tombs on one side of the street by the church, the other side of the street – where the church hall is located – became another kind of graveyard, to add to the landscape of the dead and dying in the neighborhood.

But now, with a lot of help from Saint Mark’s, an effort is being made to unlock the gates around the old church hall, and to turn that old building and its grounds into a good school for kids from the neighborhood.  There are classrooms there already, with chalkboards and chalk and erasers, that have not been used in years, but which apparently have a longer half-life than some more modern educational tools (all the old computers there are useless!). There are desks and chairs and some books.  There is a chapel and a cross and a bible.   There is a big grassy area to play in.  And there is a big gym in the basement with hoops and some half-inflated basketballs, and where five little bicycles with training wheels were raffled off the other night during a neighborhood Christmas party.

I was supposed to go to that party, but I had two other events here in center city to attend the same evening, and so I missed it.  I didn’t know there were going to be bikes raffled off.  I didn’t know there would be a room full of kids who were happy to receive other presents that night, too.  I didn’t know what I’d be missing; I just missed it.

It’s easy to miss Christmas without even knowing it. And that’s not because of department stores and all the demands of shopping and baking and Christmas parties and everything else.  It’s easy to miss Christmas because we forget what God is like and what his power looks like.  We think that God must be like a slightly larger version of John Wanamaker – a great and distant figure of the past, who had access to whatever he wanted, a grand court to live in, a staff to do his bidding, able to call on the president of the United States when he needed him, as Wanamaker did.  We assume God could hire the best architects to build him the largest and finest buildings – he certainly seems to have done so in days gone by!  And if he was going to put his Son in charge of things, you’d know who he was: he’d carry on the traditions of his father, and build up his legacy, just as Rodman did.

But every Christmas, even as we find ourselves in the Grand Court listening to the carols on the great organ, and watching the lights, and leaning our backs up against the eagle, we remember that even if it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, Jesus is not likely to be found amongst the sweaters and handbags, perfumes, scarves and shoes of Wanamaker’s or any other store  - even with a money-back guarantee.

In fact, even in churches like this one, we have to set up a special place – a manger, where the bedding is straw, and there is room for the animals – because our own surroundings are too grand…

… and because it would be too difficult, or too unseemly, to bring you all into the basement here.  We’d have to stoop down under the pipes that run just by the entrance, reminding the person behind you to “watch your head.”  We’d look for the dingiest corner – the kind of place a mangy old cat might have made a bed for himself if he stole into the basement through an open window.  From there, we’d see where the figures for our manger scene spend most of their year, under a tarp, in a corner of the basement.

But once a year we haul those old figures upstairs and build a crude manger for them with straw in it, to help us remember that in his Son Jesus, God showed himself to be what you might call a basement God: a God who can be found in the dirt and the mud, among the castaway things that we can’t quite decide to throw away yet.  In Jesus, God showed that he was not only willing but interested in being found in places that John Wanamaker might never have stepped foot in.  And in Jesus God showed us a different kind of power – so awesome that the most powerful man of his day, King Herod, tried to recruit spies to find out about it so he could destroy it.

The Christmas story is many things, but it is always a story of the power of weakness.  It is always a correction to our way of thinking that power is force and greatness, and ammunition, and numbers, and kilowatts, and horsepower, and tons, and armor, and wealth, and gold, and frankincense, and myrrh – which don’t seem to have lasted the Holy Family very long, or even paid for Jesus’ college tuition.

The Christmas story reminds us that when we see power gone amok – as we can see every time we open the paper, or flip on the TV, or browse the web – and we wonder about it all…

… the Christmas story reminds us to go have a look in the basement and imagine a baby being born there who would teach the whole world to love one another, and would die in order to teach us what that love might look like.

And if I have one regret this Christmas, it is only that I didn’t make it to a church basement a few miles from here for a Christmas party where five bikes with training wheels were raffled off to five kids who will ride them around a neighborhood that might be nothing but a graveyard, but will seem like heaven to them the first time those training wheels come off and they feel themselves balanced, and flying over the pavement with the wind in their faces.

Because I never made it to the party, I don’t know who donated the five little bicycles.  I don’t know if anyone knows.  I like to think that it may have been the ghost of John Wanamaker, like some Dickensian spirit of Christmases past, present, and to come: a spirit who knows that we are likely to get stuck in the department store he built and never make it down to the basements where Christ is being born year after year because there is never any room at the inn.  I think of his ghost using an old ID card to get into the Macy’s storerooms in the basements of that great old building, and finding a few bicycles to bring up the river to the church nearest his grave, the basement nearest his tomb.   And I think of him pointing to the children who won those silly bikes in the raffle, with smiles on their faces, as if they don’t know they are surrounded by graveyards, surrounded by death in a neighborhood that has seen better days.

And I think old Wanamaker’s ghost looks down into that basement for a moment forgetting that he is already dead and buried, because the possibility of new life seems so real down there in that basement, as though it ought to be a manger lined with straw.

And I think John Wanamaker’s ghost would smile if he could show us that basement and the beaming children and their bikes, and offer it all to us as our Christmas gift, and he’d tell us this is a gift we may certainly return if we are not happy with it, and he’ll give us back every cent we paid for it.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Christmas Eve 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

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