Six-Word Gospel

I recently learned of a new literary genre called the six-word memoir.  The idea ostensibly came from a bet someone once made with Ernest Hemingway for the great author to write a story in six words.  Legend has it that he came up with this: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn,” but no one knows if this one-sentence story actually came from Hemingway.

The idea, as I understand it, is to say a lot in a small space.  And since we live in an age when people love to talk about themselves more than anything else, the memoir seems to be the dominant form of six-word writing.

Here are a few six-word memoirs, if you are struggling with the concept:

“Not quite what I was planning.”

“I am turning into my mother.”

“I still make coffee for two.”

“27 divorced, 33 single, happy, finally.”

“Named me Joy, didn’t work out.”

“Never really finished anything, except cake.”

You get the idea?  There are often details to be filled, in: some obvious, others mysterious, but the six words give you enough to get the gist of the story.

There is a collection of six –word memoirs by famous and semi-famous people.  For instance:

Chef Mario Batali wrote, “Brought it to a boil, often.”

From the satirist and comedian Stephen Colbert we get “Well, I thought it was funny.”

And you would think that this one came from our own Bill Franklin: “Secret of life: marry an Italian,” but it is actually the six-word memoir of writer Nora Ephron.

Soldiers have written six-word memoirs about the war in Iraq:

“Stayed too long, left too soon,” is one memoir from an Iraq veteran, another is, “Joined Army, left legs in Iraq.” 

You can say a lot in six words.

The six-word format easily drifts into realms other than memoir, more commentary then account.  Yogi Bera mastered it when he said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

It’s a format that helps us to find pithy ways of saying something we might not otherwise know how to say… about ourselves, about life, even about God.  For instance there’s this one that tells us a lot about its author: “Bi-polar, no two ways about it.”

Or: “On high horse; afraid of heights.”

Or: “Getting a haircut, wanting a facelift.”

Anyone can do this.  Anyone can say a lot in the small space of six words.  Perhaps you are sitting in your pew thinking of a six-word memoir you could write of your own life.   A friend of mine quickly came up with this: “I keep trying to be me.”

Sometimes such a short memoir is suggestive of events we can only guess at.  One writer gives us this: “Bad brakes discovered at high speed,” which sounds painful whether it’s meant literally or metaphorically.

Teenagers seem to find the format especially welcome since they often have a lot to say but not yet the patience or means to say it.  And six words provides plenty of space for angst.  So they have given us these:

“Shaking with sadness and repressed rage.”

“Mad at her.  Madder at myself.”

“Counselor told Dad about cutting, etc.”

“Bumped down to ‘best friend understudy.’”

“Never too old to love Disney.” (Not all teens are unhappy.)

“Four words: My Dad found out.”

One teen pointed out that Shakespeare would have been adept at the format, since he gave us: “To be, or not to be?”

I began to wonder if the six-word format, which can express so much about the human condition, might also work for religion.  Start looking for it among six-word memoirists and you will find theological reflection in six words: “God is my co-pilot; you aren’t,” is one example I came across. 

Or, “God is hope.  I am hopeless.” 

Or another, “Desperately wanting to believe in God.”

If we stop talking only about ourselves, does the six-word format still deliver?  Could there be a six-word Gospel?  Better yet, a six-word sermon?  (Though at this point it’s already way too late for that!)  So much of faith and religion is tied up in words; it can be easy to trip over all those words: a whole Bible full of them, pages of them in your leaflet this morning, a Prayer Book in your pew if you need it, and hymns full of words, words, words (more insight from Shakespeare in just three words!)  Is there any way we can say a lot about the life of faith, about God, about Jesus, about Easter with fewer words?  With only six words?

We might begin this way: “With God all things are possible.”

Or, if I gave you this, “I was lost, now I’m found,” I think we’d all be able to start singing the same hymn together.  Same if I asked, “Shall we gather at the river?”

I can tell you whole Bible stories in six words, I think, as long as you know a little background.  Try these:

God said, “Let there be light.”

Who said don’t eat the apple?

It rained forty days and nights.

And I will be your God.

(Here’s one I can do in two words: Sarah laughed.)

Moses said, “Let my people go!”

David picked up five smooth stones.

By waters of Babylon we wept.

God asked, “Can these bones live?”

John wore camel’s hair; ate locusts.

Blessed are the pure in heart.

Care for him; I’ll repay you.

Hosanna to the Son of David 

Why, what evil has he done?

This day you’ll be in paradise.

God, why have you forsaken me?

Who will roll away the stone?

In just ninety-eight words we can cover a lot of the Bible!

Sometimes it feels as if we have forgotten how to say a lot in a little space.  Especially about faith.  Especially about God.  But because you can pack a lot of pain and suffering into six words, as well as a lot of hopes and dreams, our six-word memoirs – even the one you might be writing in your head right now - need a six word Gospel just to keep up!

And faith in Jesus seems as though it ought to be able to say a lot in a small space.  After all, when God sent his Son Jesus into the world, he was saying a great deal in a small space.  It began in the small space of Mary’s womb and seemed to end in the small space of a borrowed tomb.  The whole story took place in small spaces – in a small-ish corner of the world, in the small region of Galilee, the small city of Jerusalem.  The central drama of the Jesus story takes place in the small space of three days – a week if you stretch it out to Palm Sunday.  And after his resurrection, Jesus would be with his disciples for only the small space of forty days, before his ascension into heaven.  If we try to compress the Easter message into six words, does it fit?

I think it does.  We can do it prosaically, like this:

Died on Friday; rose on Sunday.

Or more eloquently, like the angels, like this:

He’s not here; he is risen.

We can remember the way the risen Lord showed himself to his followers like this:

Disciples knew Jesus in breaking bread.

And if we were George Frederic Handel we could do it musically like this:

O death, where is thy victory?

But actually the church has been proclaiming a six-word Gospel for as long as anyone can remember.  We have known that in a world full of doubt, confusion, suffering, pain, and not a little joy, too, the Gospel needs to be available in a handy travel size that’s easy to remember, easy to access, easy to share.

Do you know the six-word Gospel?  It’s a Gospel that makes a bold claim.  Not everyone can believe it, and some people will think you are nuts for repeating it.  But it says, in the space of six words, that the whole world has been changed by God’s grace and power.  It says not to be afraid when fear seems close at hand.  It says you are not alone when you suspect everyone has abandoned you.  It says that light is shining somewhere even when you believe the darkness has won.  It says that yes, death is part of life, but not the end of it.  It says that evil will not triumph over good.  It says that when you are weak you have strength yet to be discovered.  It says that when you are lost you will be found.  It says all this and much, much more, in its scant six words. 

They are six words you know, and I pray you will leave here with them not only in your minds, but engraved on your hearts, and ready on your lips.  And I believe you can proclaim these six words of faith without me even telling you what they are.  So, I’ll let you practice once, secretly, in a whisper, so that only we can hear it; and then we’ll do it again for the angels to hear.

Are you ready?  Can you feel the six words coming into mind?  Forming on your lips?  Do you know what they are?  I’ll give you a clue, and I promise you will know the six-word Gospel.  Let’s practice; this time in a whisper.

[Me:] Alleluia, Christ is risen.

[You:] The Lord is risen indeed!  Alleluia!

I knew you could do it!  I knew you would know it!

Now, this time for the angels!

[Me:] ALLELUIA!  CHRIST IS RISEN!

[You:] THE LORD IS RISEN INDEED!  ALLELUIA!

The Lord is risen indeed!  Alleluia!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Easter Day 2011

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Horseshoe Salvation

Only five days after Palm Sunday, there is no mention today, in John’s Gospel, of Jesus’ triumphal ride into Jerusalem.  No mention of the palms and the crowd that waved them.  No mention of the donkey that carried Jesus into the city. 

Chances are very good that that donkey made its way through the streets barefoot, un-shod, since donkeys are very rarely fitted with metal shoes, like horses, and horse shoes were only just being invented around that time.  Even today, however, donkeys don’t usually wear shoes.  Their hooves are big and broad and tough enough to withstand the impact of their work, even carrying heavy loads, or drawing a cart, or with a person on their backs.

Horses, on the other hand, are more delicate creatures whose hooves did just fine, more or less, when they were left to roam in their natural habitats.  But when horses were domesticated and started carrying humans on their backs, and pulling carts, sleighs, plows, beer-wagons, and royal wedding coaches, their relatively soft hooves could not take it: hence the horse shoes  - our way of helping horses cope with the demands we make of them, our way of protecting them from the damage we would otherwise do to them.

A couple of weeks ago, at a horse barn not far from the city, I watched, as a farrier pounded a red-hot horseshoe into shape on his anvil.  Then he cooled it in a bucket of water, and took it to the horse, and showed me the narrow band near the outside of the hoof where it is safe and painless to nail the shoe into the hoof; further inside the hoof wall and the nail will draw blood.  He bent over, with the horse’s hoof between his knees, the nails in his teeth, hammer in hand, and tapped the nails into the hoof.  And he showed me how he places one finger of the hand with which he holds the nail on the outside of the hoof, just where he wants the nail to come out, to help guide him as he drives the nails with his hammer.

Leaving the barn behind for a moment, back in church, the exuberance of the palm-waving, now over, we often feel on Good Friday as though we have come to a funeral. After all, we have come to remember Jesus’ death on the Cross.  And if there is heaviness in our hearts, then it may be, in part, directed at those who put Jesus to death.  You can hear the suggestion of this in John’s Gospel: his antagonism toward the Jews, and toward the roman soldiers who mock Jesus and beat him.  And so, we have adopted a posture and attitude of mourning, by and large.  And if we think about it, we might feel a little more righteous ourselves, as we look aghast at the betrayal of Judas, the scheming of the chief priests, the abuse of the soldiers.

And if this is the way we approach Good Friday, what could be more poignant than that moment when Jesus’ wrists are tied to the wood of the Cross, and his hands pinned to its beam, and we can hear in our mind’s ear the harsh clang of the hammer hitting the nails as they are driven into his flesh to hold him to his Cross?  It is the type of thing that ought to make us look away, to cover our eyes in horror, and in shame, and disgust.

But actually that is not really why we are here.  We have not come to point the finger of blame, or to nurture old hatreds, or to bemoan the sins of someone else, long ago.   Actually we have come here to help with the nails; we have come here to place our fingers on the far side of the Cross, just where we want the nail to come out, to make sure the nails go in right.

For in the strange husbandry of God’s love and care for his people, this is the way he has given us to cope with the way we have chosen to live our lives.  This is the way he guards us from the damage we would otherwise do to ourselves.  Not by nailing protective metal shoes to our feet, but by letting us nail his Son to a Cross for our sins.

It’s true that this is not what was meant to be.  Like horses, we were meant to go barefoot, to roam freely, to live our lives as the crowning achievement of God’s creation: the most noble of his creatures.  We were not meant to carry the kinds of loads we must now carry, to survive only by virtue of the sweat of our brows, to have to withstand the elements just to survive.  We were made to be relatively fragile, lovely creatures who could happily survive in a garden where hoeing and plowing were hardly necessary, in a soil so loamy and rich the good things just sprang up from it.

But we saddled ourselves with a selfishness that takes what it wants, even if it is comes from the one tree in the garden we should not eat from, and we bridled ourselves with a self-assurance that will murder its brother out of nothing more than jealousy.  And we have turned our ancient proficiencies at taking what we want, and killing when we want to, into a life-style, into a society.  If you wonder why these two sins are the first and most important ones described in the earliest pages of Scripture, just review a little human history – pick almost any era - and see if these are not recurring themes.  And yet, we pretend that it has come at no cost to ourselves.  We pretend that it does not hurt our feet to walk over the stony ground of our murderous selfishness.  We pretend that our Nikes protect us; and then we just do it, whatever “it” is.

It is the usual expectation to come to church on Good Friday to reflect on Jesus’ pain as he suffered and died.  But it might be useful to stop here for a while and think about what has happened to us, to reflect on how difficult it is for us to walk barefoot, so to speak, over the sharp and painful landscape of our sins.

God knows how difficult the terrain is that we have either chosen or been forced to walk because of our human nature.  God knows how much of our history can be boiled down to a pattern of taking and killing, taking and killing, taking and killing.  We can dress both up and make them seem legit, but the pattern is the same.

What to do for your most noble creatures, your loveliest, if fragile, creatures, the crowning achievement of your creation, if you are God, and you see them struggling, limping, lame as we are?

You send your Son to them.  And by the mysterious alchemy of God’s grace, when he is nailed to the Cross, it as though something strong has been affixed to our souls; something shaped to fit just right is attached to our lives, to keep us safe despite the rugged terrain that lies ahead.  And we are here today to put our fingers on that spot on the far side of the Cross where we want the nails to come out, to make sure the nails go in just right. 

Left to our own devices we will just continue to do ourselves damage, our feet simply cannot take it.  But God’s devices are more wonderful and mysterious than our own – working even in the darkness of a tomb, in the death of his Son.  And from the instruments of death he forges the mechanics of salvation, and still somehow allows us to run barefoot whenever we want to.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Good Friday 2011

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

The Carnival of Blood

Seven score and ten years ago, our fathers embarked on an adventure of slaughter that would soak the ground with blood.  We have our wars today, but have sent them overseas, like so many other difficult endeavors.  We hear about them from a distance, and remain mostly untroubled as we wait for the price of gas to fall, the stock market to rise, and a cheaper way to get cable TV.  But the nation we populate today was forged in bloodshed, close-up and personal: first in a revolution, and then refined in a civil war that one soldier called a “carnival of blood.”  625,000 soldiers died in the Civil War – about a third of them in combat, the others from illness or other causes.  The war unfurled carpets of dead bodies on battlefields from Gettysburg to Vicksburg and beyond, as the machinery of war grew ever more efficient and effective.

One of the great heroes of the war (on this side of the Mason-Dixon line) lived around the corner from here on 19^th Street, and was a member of this parish.  General George Gordon Meade commanded the Army of the Potomac at the bloodbath of Gettysburg where the tide of the war began to turn toward victory for the Union.  Not long after the war, General Meade would be buried from this church, with President Ulysses S. Grant in attendance.

An odd discovery was made in the aftermath of Gettysburg when they finally got around to cleaning up the battlefield.  Of the weapons gathered up, some 24,000 rifles were still loaded, suggesting to some historians that a great many soldiers were reluctant to fire their weapons.  Hard to say.  Easier to say that a great many were perfectly willing to do so.

On another battlefield in Georgia, the bloodiest battle after Gettysburg, the story is told of a Confederate soldier who decided he was unwilling to kill the advancing Yankees, and stood on the battlefield firing his weapon directly up into the air.  When his captain threatened to shoot him if he didn’t aim at the enemy, the soldier is said to have replied “You can kill me if you want to, but I am not going to appear before my God with the blood of another man on my soul.”  How things turned out for the soldier does not appear to be part of the historic record.

The Bishop of Georgia at the time said that “to shed such blood as we have spilled in this contest for the mere name of independence, for the vanity or the pride of having a separate national existence, would be unjustifiable before God and man.  We must have higher aims than these.”  But if those higher aims were to justify the enslavement of other human beings, then they have been shown to be worthless.

A Yankee preacher declared from the safety of Rhode Island that the dead were “the price and purchase-money of our triumph,” and that “in this blood our unity is cemented and forever sanctified,” which is easier said from Providence than from Richmond or Atlanta.[i]

As the end of the war was nearing, President Lincoln could invoke the providence of the divine hand, which “has its own purposes,” by quoting the Psalms: “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”  And when that great man died from his own bullet wound on Good Friday of 1865, at least one earnest clergyman made the connection to the Passion of our Lord, asserting about Lincoln that “one man has died for the people, in order that the whole nation might not perish.”

The blood flowing through the veins of this nation belongs to men and women of other generations, and yet it has not forged us into one nation, nor could it ever.  And yet as a people, a society, a nation, we have not stopped looking for other men to kill in the hopes that we will accomplish some righteous deed, and prove ourselves good.  That we are not alone in this regard does not excuse us, for we can only be responsible for ourselves.

We cling to the notion that there are certain murders that will be good for us; that it will be expedient that one man, here and there, should die for the people.  The target changes from time to time, but the idea remains more or less the same.  But even the bullets fired into the wisest father this nation has ever known on that Good Friday of 1865 did not make us one nation, under God.  His sacrifice could accomplish little more than grief and sorrow that lingers to this day when we reflect on it.

Was it really that idea – that one man should die for the people – that riled the crowd, and convinced the governor to crucify Jesus?  Perhaps, although it seems a bit far-fetched.  Something turned the crowd from their cheers of Hosanna! to the cries to crucify him.  Maybe it was precisely the fear that he really was the Messiah, and therefore blood was sure to be spilled – since they assumed the anointed one would soon raise an army and take up arms – that they preferred the idea that his blood should be spilled rather than theirs.  Who knows? 

Today we are swimming upstream in the blood of history to the veins of one who was guilty of nothing.  His blood is mingled now with the blood that seeped into the soil from here to Mississippi, more or less.  Was there something noble in the sacrifice of all those men seven score and ten years ago?  No doubt there was.  Was there something holy in it?  Maybe so.  Did it accomplish, as Lincoln asserted, the purposes of God?  We console ourselves with the thought that perhaps it did.

But only once have God’s purposes required the offering of blood, and on that Good Friday, it was his own blood to shed.

We continue to yield to the tempting notion that there is more bloodshed that can accomplish righteous deeds, and we devise ways to carry out this desire in broad daylight, as though it were less gruesome, somehow, than the self-inflicted carnival of blood this nation endured all those years ago.  Would we do better to fire our ammunition into the air, if we must shoot at something, than to appear before our God with the blood of other men on our souls?  The folly of bloodshed in war persists in the vain hope of righteousness, even as the thought that Jesus’ death and bloodshed meant anything at all sounds more like a fairy tale to many people.  And so we continue to put more hope in the blood that we can shed than in the blood that was shed for us.

In his second inaugural address, Lincoln said all he needed to say about slavery when he said that “it may seem strange that any man should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.  But,” he went on, “let us judge not, that we be not judged.”[ii]  He might have said that it is stranger still to ask God’s assistance in wringing righteousness from another man’s blood.  Still, we must judge not, that we be not judged.

But it would be wise of us to learn how strange and costly it is for us to imagine that we could ever wring anything but misery and suffering out of bloodshed, and certainly not righteousness.  For the righteous spilling of blood, that has the power to redeem all the blood ever shed, and which is somehow redeeming all that bloodshed by the secret workings of God’s grace, was accomplished once and for all by God when he gave his Son to suffer and to die on a green hill far away.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Palm Sunday, 2011

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

---

[i] All quotations except Lincoln’s are from Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, New York: Vintage Civil War Library, 2008

[ii] Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, 4 March, 1865