God Unknown

…God waited patiently, during the building of the ark…  (1 Peter 3:20)

One of my earliest influences in interpreting the story of Noah’s ark was Bill Cosby, whose re-telling of the biblical story I knew by heart, and used to recite at the dinner table.  All these years later I find that I still hear his voice in my head as I imagine the conversation between God and Noah.

“It’s the LORD, Noah.”

 “Riiight.”

If you want a shocking exercise in how some other people think about that famous story, you might Google this question, as I did recently: “How long did it take Noah to build the ark?”  I was trying to gauge just how patient God had been, as he waited for Noah to build the ark, as is suggested in the section of the First Letter of Peter we read today.  I discovered, on the internet, where any faithful soul can post an answer to such a question, that the possibilities range from 2 years to 120 years, with a number of people settling on 98 years.  You can find the scriptural and supposedly historical support for these conclusions when you conduct your own Google search.

There is something amusing about the idea of God waiting patiently for Noah to build the ark, drumming his fingers in heaven as the ark is constructed, cubit by cubit.  According to Bill Cosby, it was Noah’s patience that more likely tested in this process.  But if we think about the great sweep of the whole Bible story, from beginning to end, creation to apocalypse, we can see that God does, indeed, need to be patient, over and over again, as he coaxes or cajoles or coerces his children to follow his lead, do the right thing, fix their faith in him to their hearts.

Was God being patient, I wonder, as the great City of Athens grew to become the center of the civilized world?  Was God patient as the temples for the twelve principal gods of ancient Greece were built in glorious architecture and with careful skill?  Was God patient as an altar was erected somewhere in Athens that was dedicated to “an unknown God”?  The idea behind such an altar is deeply practical: a hedge against the possibility that some deity, as yet unrevealed to the wise men of Athens, nevertheless required attention or appeasement.  So, to be on the safe side, an altar was dedicated to the unknown god, where sacrifice could be offered to no one in particular.  Was God being patient with the men of Athens as he indulged the practicality of their ancient and doomed religion?  Perhaps he knew it was only a matter of time.

It was clever of Saint Paul, who, despite being a convert to faith in Jesus, had believed for his whole life that there is only one God, to see an opening for discussion with the Greeks in the idea that there is an unknown God.  For the identity of the true and living God was clearly unknown to the men and women of Athens.  And maybe God’s patience with them was running out.  Maybe Paul knew this.  Maybe the thing Paul knew better than anyone else was the intensity of God’s desire to be known: God’s impatient yearning to be welcomed into the hearts of the creatures he fashioned with his hand, and made in his own image and likeness.

Much of the biblical record can be read as an account of God’s efforts to be known by his people: sometimes with acts of kindness, at other times in acts of apparent cruelty, sometimes in wandering or pilgrimage, sometimes in the sermons of the prophets, sometimes in miracles, sometimes in parables, sometimes with armies, and sometimes in the bosom of home, sometimes with fire, sometimes with water, sometimes with old men, sometimes with boys, sometimes with women, and sometimes with widows, sometimes in broad daylight, sometimes in darkness, sometimes in thunderous noise, sometimes in silence, sometimes in laws, sometimes with kings, sometimes with beggars, sometimes in poetry, sometimes in healing, sometimes in visions; and once in bloodshed on a cross, and in an empty tomb, and at a table with a loaf of bread.

Was God being patient or impatient when he sent his Son into the world to bring a message of love and mercy and hope to those who would believe?  Was it a sign of God’s patience that he replaced the complicated system of the law with a simple commandment: that his disciples should love one another as Christ loved them?  Or was it impatience with the tedium of monitoring all 613 dicta of his more ancient law?  Whether it was patience or impatience, what is clear is that God wants to be known in places where he is unknown, among people to whom his name is unfamiliar, and within hearts where he has as yet been unwelcomed.

If this is true – that even today God wishes to be known in places where he remains as yet unknown - it is ironic that in our own time God seems more elusive than ever, harder to pin down, difficult to identify by his work in the world, unconvincing to the skeptical, conflicted in the way his power is at work.

We live an a world that hedges no bets with God, and that has torn down altars to the God who thought he had made himself known, rather than erect altars to an unknown God.  And I find myself wondering: is God being patient with us, or are we being patient with God?

Long gone are the days of altars to the unknown God.  Today, many feel as though we live in a world with a God unknown – which is really only steps away from living in a world without God.  To many ears those stories of God’s kindnesses and cruelties, his wandering people, his prophets, his miracles, armies, widows, boys, and old men, his kings and beggars, the light and darkness, the fire and water, that cross, that bloodshed, that empty tomb… all add up to nothing: no sign of God.  Just a God unknown.

And to those of us who believe – or at least who want to believe, (for some, I know, can only make that claim) – it often feels as though we must be very patient with God, who allows himself to be so easily unknown.  Jesus knew that his disciples would begin to feel this way eventually, which is why he promised them, “I will not leave you orphaned,” which is another way of saying, “I will not be a God unknown.”  And because he knew that we could never be patient enough, when Jesus returned to his Father’s side, God sent the gift of his Spirit into the world to be with us in our impatience.

Do you remember the question that lurked in the middle of Bill Cosby’s version of Noah’s ark?  It was the hint Noah gave to his neighbor when the neighbor wanted to know why Noah was building and ark.  And it was God’s rejoinder to Noah when Noah became impatient with his long building project:  “How long can you tread water?”

The question and its implications, remind us that God and his people have always had to be patient with one another, since none of us can tread water long enough, and since God, though sorely tested, has never really wanted to do away with us – his most magnificent and most difficult creation.

There is much to try the patience, these days, of both God and of all of us, much to make us wonder at the stubborn slowness of the other in doing what we expect of each other.  And throughout this time of enforced patience, God has asked of us only one thing: that we follow Jesus’ only commandment, to love one another as he loved us.  This is a call to service and sacrifice, just as Jesus served his disciples, and gave his life up for them.  It is just one commandment that can be followed a thousand ways, but never by only treading water, and sometimes by simply being patient with the only true and living God, and with one another, his children.  Because even in the simple decision to just be patient, we may discover that God is not unknown in this world, with whom he has been very, very patient.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

29 May 2011

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want…

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want…

     Perhaps . . . perhaps, it is unsettling for us to pray this 23^rd Psalm outside a funeral occasion? For many, the 23^rd Psalm is firmly associated with consolation offered in death. Mourners frequently request this Psalm to be read at loved ones’ funerals – so familiar, so comforting.

     Yet, here it appears in the middle of Eastertide, a season for celebrating new life. When we shake this Psalm loose from its funeral moorings, we hear affirmations of life right here and now.

    Life, right here and now! This is the key truth: life, right here and now – not only or just in the afterlife!

     Praying this Psalm today reminds me of the time when our sons were very young, David six years old, Andrew three.

   Bedtime: many of us know the special-ness of this evening ritual. In our family, when the baths were finished and the boys were in their ‘jammies’, robes and slippers, it was story time. Richard and I took turns reading from a favorite: “Father Fox’s Penny Rhymes”!

     Then, it was ‘up the wooden mountain’! On his shoulders, Richard carried Andrew and, I held David’s hand to the top of the stairs, then into their twin beds in their small back bedroom. We tucked each of the boys in, kissed each gently on his forehead and then I sat down on the edge of Andrew’s bed.

    Prayer time: David and Andrew looked forward to this time because I sang the 23^rd Psalm (sing Gelineau): “The Lord is my Shepherd, nothing shall I want, He leads me by safe paths, nothing shall I fear . . . . “ Our sons felt loved and safe, in the night time and the day time – still, they feel loved and safe.

     In that time of their growing up, and for all of us – (pause) and this is the particularly good news for us this day – Jesus is with us in the “here and now,” in us Jesus lives into the power of his death and resurrection, this morning and every morning and evening: God with us, here and now, offering rest in green pastures, guidance beside still waters, Jesus’ rod and staff provide protection, security.

    But! Notice! The metaphor changes in the final two verses: God suddenly becomes a generous host, preparing a table and anointing our heads with oil, things a shepherd would never do for the sheep! Nor would the shepherd allow the sheep into the house!

     Taken together, these two constellations of images point to the royalty of Jesus. Just as the human king of ancient Judah and Israel served as shepherd and host of his people, so God does in this Psalm, in the person of Jesus. . . . .

     One more picture: in 2001, I was a pilgrim to Iona, a tiny Island off the coast of Scotland, where Saint Columba landed in 563 CE, bringing Christianity from Ireland to Scotland. I prayed for five days in that re-built monastery church and wandered the small island by day, even to Columba’s landing site, where I picked up a large stone, loaded on to it all my sins and the sins of my parishioners and tossed it into the sea – all that sin washed away! Then I walked to Columba’s quiet retreat prayer place to pray Psalm 23.

Everywhere on that tiny one mile wide and three mile long island, a haven for hundreds of sheep – those sheep fed and watered freely – no fences, no one harmed them, all vehicles stopped for them on the pathways – certainly we all watched our footing! – and those sheep came when they were called! Sheep: loved, protected, so alive, just as Jesus says of us, for him.    

     So, for us to prayer this 23^rd Psalm this morning is to make an extreme faith statement with the very first verse: God is our shepherd, not any king or president or government or nation – not anyone else but God in Jesus do we trust with our very lives and well-being, here and now!

    Yes, we trust God in Jesus to protect, prepare, provide, not in some afterlife, but now! Like the Psalmist, we need no one else and certainly no other thing. We pray for grace to be dependent solely on the God who walks with us through deep valleys, who provides food and rest, who offers guidance in right paths.

     Remember that wonderful old hymn? “And he walks with me and he talks with me and he tells me I am his own and the joy we share as we tarry there – none other has ever known.”

     In our consumer-oriented society, it is good for us to hear the simple but radical message of the

23^rd Psalm: God in Jesus is the only necessity of life.

    Friends, come to the Table prepared for us by The Lord of Life; with open hands and hearts receive Jesus’ gift of his very self – all for love, for protection, for life – here, now, always. Amen.

The Rev’d. Marie Z. Swayze

St. Mark’s Church, 9 AM Mass

15 May 2011



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