The Gate

We are told that the most commonly experienced emotion in our dreams is anxiety.  Indeed, many of us have had a kind of recurring dream that is all about anxiety.  Mine has come in different forms over the years, and it’s been some time since I’ve had it, but I know its outline well enough.  I am horribly late for something.  I’ll never be able to make it on time.  I am unprepared.  I have the wrong clothes on, or no clothes at all.  And I am late, late, late.  There is never an outcome to this dream; the moment of embarrassment or failure never arrives, is never lived out to its potential.  But that, of course, is not the point.  The point of the dream is about the anxiety, the fear, the possibility of failure, embarrassment, exclusion.

I could dream another version of this dream.  There is a high and long wall that seems to enclose someplace I want or need or yearn to be.  And I am walking or jogging alongside the wall, looking for a way in.  The wall seems to stretch out for miles as I traverse its length.  When it finally makes a turn at a harsh right angle, as I turn the corner, I see that it continues to stretch out ahead of me, with no opening in sight, as far as I can see.  There are places where the wall is low enough that I can see over it.  Maybe there are chinks in it that I can peer through.  Or maybe there are trees outside the wall that I can climb that let me look over it, to see the pleasant land the wall encloses, the happiness on the other side.  But the trees allow me only to see inside – the branches do not reach over the wall and allow me access.  I can run beside the wall for miles with my hand grazing its rough surface as I go: searching, feeling, hoping to find a door, a gate, a passageway; to discover the way in.

I do not even know why exactly I desire so much to be on the other side of the wall.  Except that as I look around me, I see there is very little here on this side of the wall.  It is a barren and dry land.  Only a few small trees and a distant horizon that looks unappealing, and not very much in between.  And so it is my recurring dream to find a way through this wall: to locate a gateway, a door, a passage inside.

But in my anxious dreams I am never delivered to any outcome.  I never find either doorway or gate.  I never find a way over the wall and into the land it encloses.  And there is no chance of tunneling in.  So I am doomed in these dreams to grope along the wall, searching, feeling, hoping.

Anxiety fills our dreams.

Into my dream there walks in the barrenness of the landscape outside the wall, a shepherd, who strangely has with him no sheep.  It is as though he is looking only for me.  It is not clear to me how I know he is a shepherd, since he has with him no sheep, but I know.  Maybe he carries a staff, maybe he looks familiar to me.  This is what he says to me:  “Child, why are you groping along that wall?  Why are you panting in exhaustion and frustration?  What are you looking for?”

“Sir, I am looking for the way in to what lies on the other side of this wall.  Do you know the way through?”

The shepherd smiles, and says, “Follow me.”

This is no end to my dream, no outcome.  I am still on the other side of the wall, still searching.  But he is, after all, a shepherd, and I am in the wilderness.  It seems to me that I am not unwise to follow a shepherd in the wilderness of my dreams.

There follows a long journey alongside the wall.  Cool breezes seem to waft over from time to time, while the sun just gets warmer and warmer on our side of the wall.  Music I hear carried on the breeze, and the aroma of something sweet baking in an oven that does not burn too hot.

For extended periods the shepherd says nothing.  He never runs his hand along the surface of the wall, as I so often do.  He doesn’t reach out to the wall with his staff and scrape it, as I would if I had a staff to carry.  Sometimes he tells me stories, as if he wishes to alleviate my anxiety.  Sometimes that is the point of the story (“consider the lilies of the field”).  Sometimes he speaks to me in the poetry of the David, singing to ancient chants that have been long forgotten.  Sometimes he says the 23^rd Psalm, and I can say it with him from memory.  Sometimes he seems to be telling me about what lies on the other side of the wall, in parables about weddings, and mustard seeds, and lost coins.  But in my dreams these visions are too swift and disjointed to put together a picture of what lies beyond the wall.

I have an anxious dream-within-my-dream that at times the shepherd has left me, and I am walking on my own.  At these times I start to run alongside the wall until I am out of breath.  I shout for him to wait for me, or to come to me, or in frustration I demand to know what happened to him.  I look down to see if I have any clothes on; I am afraid that I am naked and stupidly stuck forever on this side of the wall.

But there is never an outcome to the dream-within-my-dream either.  I am never abandoned completely, never left to rot naked beneath the sun outside the wall, never condemned to some fate worse than my searching, grasping, hoping.  Always I find that the shepherd is there with me again, saying “Follow me,” just when I thought he had disappeared completely.  And I do follow, because what else would I do?  Something he has told me – I am not sure what – about what lies inside the wall makes me absolutely certain that I must find the way in.

I wonder why there must be this wall, why whatever blessings abound inside it must be protected, cordoned off, why it must be so hard to get in?  What is it about me that makes me have to work so hard to find the way in?  Haven’t others been given an easier time?  Aren’t there better, faster routes to the cool breezes and the soft music and the hearth-baked sweets?  And sometimes in my dream my anxiety drifts toward anger at what appears to be this extraordinary effort to keep me out.

From time to time the shepherd stops.  He turns with his back to the wall and looks at me with an open face. He extends his arms as though inviting me to embrace him.  He opens his mouth to speak, and as he does some thunderous noise inside my dream, like the sound of a jet flying low overhead drowns out the sound of his voice, and for some reason I cannot read his lips. 

And I stand there stupidly, because I think it would be weird to embrace this man beside this wall.  I cannot see why he wants me to do it.  So I resist the strange invitation.  I am happy enough to listen to his stories, and to mull over his parables, to let his poetry fill my head, but I am not going to wrap my arms around him in the wilderness.  I have my limits.

In the middle of the day of my dreams, when the sun is hottest, I sometimes think I see a way in, a doorway opening and a shadowy figure beckoning me inside.  But these are only mirages, like the pools of water that appear on hot asphalt.  And when I investigate them, I find that they have taken me far from the shepherd’s side, and I have to run in the heat to catch up to him, because there is something convincing in his recurring call, “Follow me.”  So I do.

Eventually in my dream I ask the shepherd about his sheep.  It has dawned on me that they are on the other side of the wall, and that he is going to them.  This is why he seems so trustworthy a guide.  This is why he must know the way in.  And when I turn my attention to him in this way, when I turn to listen to him, I find that all of a sudden this is a different dream – no longer a dream of anxiety.  I find that my nervous pace has slowed, and there is no sound of an engine roaring in my dream, only the soft chirping of birds from the other side of the wall, and a faint music.

The shepherd has turned again with his back to the wall.  His face is open, and his expression is what I can only describe as love, even though I did not know I knew what love looked like.  His arms are open.

And I am tempted again to think this is weird.  But I am overcome by the scent of the sweetbreads baking.  And the music seems to be getting louder now.  And the cool breeze seems to be enveloping us both, flapping his long loose robe in its path, like a drapery that is blowing beside an open window.

I am mystified by all this and I look to him for guidance, for hope, for relief, for reassurance.  I am strangely un-anxious now, in this new dream.  And I can see that he is about to speak, about to tell me something that I need to hear.  And when he does, it is so simple, so easy, and I realize that he has been trying to say this to me all along.  That every time he stopped and turned, it was to give me this simple message that I was not ready or willing or able to hear, even though it was the desire behind all my anxiety.

So I listen as he says it: “I am the gate,” he says.

And without thinking I run to embrace him.  And as he welcomes me in his arms and envelopes me in the folds of his garments, I discover that I have entered into the sheepfold, I have passed through the gate and entered in, and I am among his sheep, on the other side of the wall where I know I have always longed to be, always believed I should be, in the cool breeze, and the swelling music, and the sweet-smelling good things.

And I realize that in my anxious dreams I could only see the wall, although the gate was there for me all the time.  And there was never any effort at all to keep me out.  There was only this long, patient beckoning to me to enter by the gate, if only I would turn, and love him.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

15 May 2011

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

A Vineyard Not Forsaken

Before this weekend I was connected to Buffalo by a single bottle of wine.  I have never been to this city before.  I have never visited nearby Niagara Falls.  Although I was brought up in New York, as far as I know I have never been to this part of the state before.  And the bottle of wine that connected me to Buffalo did not come from the nearby wine-producing region along the shores of Lake Erie.  It was a bottle of red, of un-identified (or at least un-memorable) variety.  It was consumed, at least in part, by me in the basement kitchen of your new bishop’s apartment at the General Seminary when he was my professor there.  I feel quite certain that part of the bottle of wine was consumed by him.

The wine was made by Bishop Franklin’s father-in-law, Carmela’s father, Joe, who had obviously imported some of his Old World ways to the New World.  I suspect the wine was made in his garage in North Buffalo.  It was, if memory serves me, a gallon bottle: the kind with a little round handle up at the neck, what can only be called a jug.  And without meaning to be at all unkind to Joe, I seem to recall that the quality of the wine – while not at all unpleasant – was appropriate to its container.  Let me put it this way: it had a screw-cap, back in the days when that told you everything you needed to know about a bottle of wine.

I do not know where the grapes for that wine came from.  Since I, too, live in a city with a thankfully large and noticeable Italian-American population, I understand that when it comes to things like sourcing grapes for wine that you are going to crush, ferment, and bottle in your own garage, there are ways…  Nevertheless, I can give you no details about the provenance of the grapes.  I only know that I drank a goodly portion of the wine with my professor, your bishop, and I believe we enjoyed every drop!

I have since learned that if you want to make good wine you must begin in the vineyard; this is where all good wine begins – where the vines are carefully trellised and pruned, and the rain and the sun dispense their gifts of moisture and warmth in just the right measure, and the vines yield luscious, ripe grapes that are ready at harvest time to be pressed, and fermented, and aged, and then bottled, in time.

Good wine begins in the vineyard.

The winery is a different matter.  It is here that the winemaker applies his art – in better vintages, to extract the glories of the grapes; and in lesser vintages to compensate for their shortcomings.  It’s in the winery that the must (the juice from the crushed grapes) is allowed to ferment, the barrels are chosen and prepared, where the maturing wine is monitored and adjusted, blended and finessed.  The wine will be dispensed into its bottles, the labels affixed, and the marketing plan for the wine begun in the winery, and lots of other good and important work.  But good wine is not really made in a winery.  Good wine is made in the vineyard, because it all begins in the vineyard.

Leaving the vineyard aside for just a moment, these days in the church we often feel beset by problems: by shrinking congregations, shrinking budgets, shrinking prestige, shrinking promise.  It is easy to feel as if something is slipping away from us; something that we have loved and thought that we could count on, but which has grown fragile and oddly sort of un-graspable.  I never imagined, when I was ordained fifteen years ago, that the church would look so different now, and that my ministry would look so different from what I thought I’d prepared for  in those lovely days back on Chelsea Square at the General Seminary.

But look in any direction in the church and you will find some difficulty, some challenge, some conflict, some problems.  These are not all you will find, but you will find them.  And it can be disquieting.  I am told that this may even be true in the Diocese of Western New York.

Sometimes the most disquieting of those difficulties, challenges, conflicts and problems are the headline grabbers: the break-away churches, the abuse scandals, the personal ordinariates, the so-called “covenants”.  I suppose in some places even the election of a bishop could be a bit disquieting.

And I want to suggest to you today that these are, by and large, winery problems.  They are not at all un-important or insignificant, but they are experienced and dealt with in the confines of the winery.  And when they are, it seems as though production comes to a halt, the bottling is shut down, and even the wine maturing in barrels seems imperiled.

And the hard part about being a bishop, if you ask me, is that you agree to take a job in the winery – where all this stuff plays out, and where every difficulty, challenge, conflict, and problem comes across your desk and invades your prayers.

Meanwhile, we parish priests know that our work is not in the winery, it is in the vineyard.  We walk every day among the vines of our little plots of land.  We’ve seen the vines flourish or wither.  We have baptized new vines and buried old, dead ones.  We have sometimes done some pruning, but mostly our vines are self-pruning, for better or worse.  We try our best to train the vines along a trellis – narrower for some, wider for others – but the vines are often unruly and unresponsive, insisting on their own way, but we love them anyway: what choice do we have?  Some of us have been working with the same vines for a long time, some of us have a long time yet to go in the same vineyard.  And we know that we will be working in the vineyard rain or shine, hurricane or hail, blight or bliss.  We love our annual visitation from the winery, mind you, but we suspect that our experience of the wine-making process is fundamentally different out in the vineyard than it is in the winery.

Reflecting on all this, some time ago I tried to eliminate a word from my vocabulary.  That word is “success.”  It can be hard to decide that we don’t want to be successful.  But search the New Testament for it and you will have a hard time finding the word there.  Success is not a New Testament idea.

Fruitfulness, on the other hand, is very much a New Testament idea.  And I contend that fruitfulness will not always look like success.  Indeed the suffering, death, and even the resurrection of Jesus did not look very much like success to the first disciples.  But it was fruitful.  And fruitfulness is what Jesus calls us to, and fruitfulness always brings us back to the vineyard.

It is my joy to celebrate with you the consecration and what used to be called the “enthronement” of your new bishop, because I know what a good laborer he has been in the vineyard – from long before he was ordained or ever dreamt of it, to the days he came to work with me in the vineyard I work in, in Philadelphia, just a few months ago.  And I expect that you know this about Bill, too.  That you have seen his sensitivity, his care and concern, his delight in walking and talking and just being among the vines of the vineyard.  I expect you noticed how fruitful his ministry has been as both a lay person and a priest, and this observation, encouraged by the Holy Spirit, led you to elect him to be your bishop.  And as Bill takes up this new ministry, it comes as no surprise to him, I am sure, to hear a reminder from me that good wine is made in the vineyard, where it always begins.

The rest of us need to remember this, too.  Because although it is true that tending the vines has become a harder job than it once was, as conditions have become more challenging and the soil always seems to be rocky, we are reminded that the best wines often come from vineyards where the vines have learned to struggle and have sunk their roots deep into the ground to find water and nutrients that are hard to reach.

And as we work to be fruitful in the vineyards, and we are assaulted with all kinds of disquieting news, much of which comes to us from the winery, and is being handled in the winery, worried about in the winery, we have a secret that we must not forget.  We know that when things get rough in the winery and production seems imperiled, that we can always push a wheelbarrow or two of grapes up the hill and into our garage, where we can crush the grapes and put the must into an old barrel or two, and let God do whatever it is that God does to turn that crushed grape juice into wine.  We can even make pretty good wine out there in the garage because we have good vines, and good wine is made in the vineyard.

But the best wine is made when vineyard and winery are working together to be fruitful in a happy synergy, grateful for the gifts available in each place, eager to encourage one another to do the best we can because what we hope to end up with, after all, is the best wine we can make.

It is surprising to me that in the Episcopal church, where we have been blessed with a large network of parishes, the challenging conditions of the past decades have sometimes left us scratching our heads wondering what to do about all these old churches, all these old vineyards, that sometimes are in disrepair, sometimes have become overgrown, sometimes many of the vines have withered and died.  It is as though we cannot imagine any longer that vines could flourish in these vineyards; that wine could be made from their grapes.

And I can tell you this about your new bishop: he is not confused about this, perhaps because of what he learned from his father-in-law, in his garage in North Buffalo, I don’t know.  He knows that there are vineyards that need work, repair, that in some places new vines need to be brought in and planted, that vineyard workers need to be taught what to do out there among the rows of vines.  He knows that the vines need to be cared for and loved.  Because he knows that when you have been given vineyards, you have been given a great gift, because the vineyard is what you need to make wine. Good wine always begins in the vineyard.

God has never stopped calling us to be fruitful, never stopped calling us to toil in the vineyards he has planted.  God has never deprived his people of what we need to make wine – and to make good wine.  Even when his children had been driven out of their own vineyards, their own holy city, he called them back from their exile, as we are being called now, with a call that would serve well as a watchword for the ministry of a new bishop:

Go through, go through the gates,

prepare the way for the people;

build up, build up the highway,

clear it of stones,

lift up an ensign over the people…

… they shall be called, “The Holy People,

the Redeemed of the Lord.”

And you shall be called, “Sought Out,

A Vineyard Not Forsaken.”

Has the highway to your vineyard been obstructed by stones that leave you stumbling?

Has the ensign of your hope been torn down?

Do you wonder if anyone will ever seek you out?

Are you afraid that you have been forsaken?

Do you wonder if there is any more wine to be made from your vineyard?

Are you wondering if your new bishop knows that good wine is made in the vineyard – must begin in the vineyard?

If any of these questions ring true, then join with me in calling with all confidence on your bishop, our brother, Bill:

Go through, go through the gates with us… 

Build up, build up the highway, clear it of stones!

Lift up the ensign of God’s love and hope over your people – over the laborers in the vineyard…

…so that together you may make good wine from the grapes you grow on the vines you tend.

Because you shall be called the Holy People,

the Redeemed of the Lord!

And you shall be called “Sought Out!”

And you shall be a Vineyard Not Forsaken!

Thanks be to God!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

at the enthronement of The Rt. Rev. R. William Franklin,

XI Bishop of Western New York

at Saint Paul’s Cathedral, Buffalo

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 19th 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.

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.”  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