Clear the Mechanism

Please allow me to set the record straight: I accepted the call to serve as the associate rector of St. Mark’s, Philadelphia, because I believe that God has invited me to worship and work in this place, for my own benefit, and yours, and for the sake of the whole Church.  I did not accept this call so that I could get back into the land of the Philadelphia Phillies.  Now my propensity to talk all things baseball may belie this assertion.  And my decision to rent an apartment right on South Broad St. may cause some of you to doubt my sincerity, but believe me when I say that the fact that I can now watch the Phils every night on my television is only a side benefit – a beautiful, perfect, gem of a side benefit – of my call to serve among you.  God works in mysterious and wondrous ways.

I do love baseball: the strategy and the statistics; the stars who light up the field and the day-to-day workhorses…the nostalgia, the sounds, the smells…I even love the movies.  My all-time favorite baseball movie is Field of Dreams, but I’m also a fan of another Kevin Costner film, For Love of the Game.  In this film, Costner plays Billy Chapel, an aging pitcher for the Detroit Tigers.  Chapel was once a number one starter, an ace who pitched the Tigers into a World Series win.  But now he is an aching old-timer on a losing team, pitching what is likely to be his last game against everyone’s most-hated rival, the New York Yankees.  The game means nothing to the Tigers, but the Yankees need a win in order to go on to the playoffs, and so the stadium is filled to capacity and as loud as game 7 of a championship series.  But Chapel is an old pro, an expert at tuning out the distractions of frenzied fans.  When he takes the mound and leans in to get the catcher’s sign, he speaks a simple phrase to himself: Clear the mechanism.  And in an instant, the crowd blurs into the background, their roar dampered to a kind of muffled, distant hum.  Clear the mechanism, and all Chapel sees is the path between him and the plate – the catcher’s mitt, the strike zone.  All he hears is his own breath, his own thoughts, his own heart.  Only then can he stand up, ready to begin his delivery, ready to pitch. 

Now I cannot imagine that the crowd on the Sea of Galilee was as unruly as a crowd of screaming Yankees fans, but Matthew does call them a “great crowd.”  They are a mob of people, pushing and jostling to get to the front, pushing and jostling so much that Jesus is forced to get into a boat and shove out a little bit from shore so that everyone can see…and hear him.  Listen!  He says.  Listen!  Clear the mechanism.  A sower goes out to do what sowers do.  The sower sows seeds all over his patch of ground – some fall on the path, some on rocky soil, some fall among thorns and some on good soil.  Only the seeds that fall on the good soil take deep root and bear fruit; the others are snatched away by birds or scorched by the sun or strangled by weeds.  But the seeds that landed in good soil – what a harvest they produce, what a yield!  A hundred times their worth – or even just sixty or thirty – but still an overabundance, a ridiculous bounty.  You, crowd!  You who have ears, let them do what ears do – let them listen! 

Later, when his disciples ask Jesus why he speaks to the crowd in parables, his answer is simple – because parables help the people listen.  The people of God aren’t very good listeners; they have a hard time hearing.  They either can’t hear at all, or they are easily distracted from what they’ve heard by their own fears, worries, and misplaced longings.  But stories help them to listen.  Stories help them keep the mechanism clear.  And keeping the mechanism clear is what discipleship is all about – being able to hear “the word of the kingdom” through the noise all around you, being able to hear that word above the undertones of your fear, being able to hear that word when your ears are caught by the whisperings of temptations, possessions, or worries.  To be a disciple of Christ is to listen, and to keep listening even amidst the din of the world’s distractions.  To be a disciple is to be the one who will clear the mechanism again and again and again, who will hear the word and understand it and then share it with the world. 

That is the kind of discipleship that you and I are called to this day, by virtue of our baptisms, by virtue of our worshiping in this place together, by virtue of the very breath in our lungs.  And that kind of discipleship – that kind of listening, attentive discipleship – is hard work.  Because there is more noise now than ever.  There is noise of all kinds, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  We are surrounded by the racket of texts and tweets and status updates.  We carry our noise in the palm of our hand, take it to bed with us, wake up with it in our ears.  And when we pile that constant clamor of information on top of the noise of everyday life – the siren songs of new things to be purchased and wealth to be gained, the throbbing drumbeat of anxiety and worry – our lives become layer upon layer upon layer of noise.  So how do we hear the word of God through all of that hubbub?  How do we clear the mechanism?

Well, honestly, it’s a lot like baseball.  It takes practice; the listening that our discipleship requires means that we have to be a kind of day-to-day workhorse, throwing the ball into the mitt thirty, sixty, a hundred times, sculpting the muscles of our attention so that we can hear God’s word to us.  And, like any good ballplayer will tell you, equipment matters.  We might need a phrase or a mantra to help us to listen, a holy word or a simple sentence, like the Jesus prayer.  We might need to hear a story, like the stories of God’s people from scripture, the great story of our salvation that we tell each week at the altar.  We might be helped by having something to hold in our hands, a holy touchstone like a cross or a rosary.  Or we might need a special place where we can more easily hear the word of the kingdom – a prayer corner, or a sacred spot out in God’s creation, or a place like this, where the bustle of the world outside is hushed the moment you step inside. 

And we should remember, too, that while this kind of discipleship can be hard work, it also requires a light touch and a sense of humor.  Because we won’t be able to listen all the time.  At times, we will certainly find ourselves lying exposed on the path or rootless in the shallow soil or tied and tangled in the weeds.  Clear the mechanism doesn’t work all the time, even in the movie.  At the end of the film, when Billy Chapel has pitched so well that he’s looking at the possibility of pitching a perfect game, his practice fails him.  He leans in, takes a breath, says: Clear the mechanism.  And it clears – for about an 8^th of a second.  Then the noise comes rushing back in like a tidal wave.  He pops up, startled, leans in again and says, Clear the mechanism.  And nothing happens.  So he shakes his head, chuckles to himself, and pitches anyway.  We will not always be able to hear God’s word in the midst of the noise of our lives.  And when this happens, we must be gentle with ourselves, pray, laugh, and then stand up and pitch anyway.  Because we know that even when we have a hard time hearing, even when our own soil is not particularly fertile, God’s word will accomplish its purpose, God’s word will ultimately succeed and grow and bloom, so that there will be a bumper crop of grace like no one has ever seen.

So listen, all you disciples of God.  Take a breath and lean in.  Clear the mechanism.  Look until you can see only the path between you and the kingdom of heaven, only Christ, the way and the truth, and the life.  Listen until you can hear only the breath of the Holy Spirit, the word of God very near you, the beat of the heart that God has created in you.  Listen and keep listening for the Word who came down from heaven for love of you.  For only then can you stand up, ready to deliver a message of hope right into the heart of a world that desperately needs it, ready to preach the Gospel in word and deed.  Let anyone with ears listen! 

Preached by Mtr. Erika Takacs

10 July 2011

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Jesus in America

The smash hit of the Broadway season, “The Book of Mormon,” opens with a musical number with the catchy phrase, “Did you know that Jesus lived here in the USA?  You can read all about it now in this nifty book, it’s free, no, you don’t have to pay.”  Later in the song we hear this helpful evangelistic assertion: “Eternal life is super-fun, and if you let us in we’ll show you how it can be done!”

Putting aside the musical’s breezy take on salvation and its critique of religion, as we celebrate the Fourth of July weekend, even if we don’t agree with the notion that Jesus lived here in the USA long ago, we might wonder whether or not Jesus lives here now, or whether or not he has anything at all to do with America. Does Jesus live in America?

Here in the cynical, socialist Northeast it’s fun to turn that question into a Broadway musical, so that we can mock its absurdity.  But there are other ways of addressing the question of whether or not Jesus lives in America.  In Texas, the state that boasts the largest cross in the western hemisphere, as though that were somehow a good or important thing, it’s a different story.  The Governor of Texas has another way of answering the question, “Does Jesus live in America?”  He begins by telling us that “we are in the midst of a historic crisis.  We have been besieged by financial debt, terrorism, and a multitude of natural disasters.  The youth of America are in grave peril economically, socially, and, most of all, morally.  There are threats emerging within our nation and beyond our borders beyond our power to solve.”  And so, the Governor and his supporters, borrowing from the prophet Joel, are calling for a “solemn assembly of prayer and fasting” to be held at a stadium in Houston later this summer.

Here is the most concise expression of their message on the website for the event:  “There is hope for America.  It lies in heaven, and we will find it on our knees.”  The guys on Broadway would have a field day with this.  It is only half a step away from declaring that Jesus lives in America, and at the rally in Houston, I can almost guarantee you that there will be a praise song of some sort sung that makes the point that Jesus does, in fact, live right here in the good old U. S. of A.

The organizers of the Texas gathering tell us that “our hope is in the One who might turn towards our nation in its time of great need – if we as a nation would turn to Him in repentance, prayer, and fasting.  The call of God to His people in times of great trouble is to gather together and call on Him with one voice, one heart….”  Biblically informed though this perspective may be, the trouble with it is that it mis-conceives our country, casting America in the role of a new Israel: unambiguously God’s anointed people.  This is a role that America simply cannot inhabit – we don’t fit the costume, especially since the original cast is still wearing it.  And the foolishness of this plan – as a plan for national renewal – is that it is doomed, since not even the Governor of Texas can bring about the repentance of this nation with one voice, one heart, earnest though his desire to do so may be.

But the Governor and his allies are not wrong about everything.  They pose this question, too:  “Who knows what can happen in our generation when we gather together to worship Jesus, fast and pray, and believe for great change in our nation.”

What the Governor is wrong about is who should be leading such prayers, and where they should be offered.  For his office does not qualify him for the job; in our country it more or less disqualifies him.   And converting a stadium into an arena of worship does not make it a church, since a church is first and foremost a community that can come together again and again to be nurtured and guided by God, not just whipped into a frenzy and released into the world.

Somewhere in between the Broadway jokes and the Texas swagger there is room for a lot of people who take religion seriously and who struggle with the question of whether or not Jesus lives in America.  Generations of people here at Saint Mark’s fall into that category, and when they agreed to a design for the main entrance to the church they carved over it words from today’s Gospel reading: “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”  The inscription was not originally part of the church when it was completed in 1851.  Those words were added when the great red doors were installed in 1923, long after the parish and the nation had endured the wearying Civil War, nearly a decade after the exhaustion of the First World War, and during the frenzied enthusiasm of the Jazz Age.  An invitation to rest in the cool darkness of this beautiful church must have been a very welcome thing to many.

“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”  It’s been a long time since a yoke was used with any regularity in the streets of Philadelphia.  So when I hear Jesus talk about taking his yoke upon me, I feel as though he is asking me to do something unpleasant, demanding, and sweaty.  I feel almost certain that I want nothing to do with Jesus’ yoke or any other.  But if I cast my mind back to my days in Colonial Williamsburg, I remember that a yoke is not something onto which a great weight is piled, it is a kind of wooden apparatus that keeps two animals together, allowing them to work as a pair, to allow them to accomplish work together that they could not do on their own.  And Jesus’ invitation to take his yoke upon you is not an invitation to take something off his neck and put it around yours, it is an invitation to take up the empty side of his yoke and work alongside him, to be his partner in ministry, linked to him in such a way that you go where he goes, and you accomplish the work he accomplishes.  It is thus that Jesus makes himself in the world: when we see those who have yoked themselves to him and who make it clear than the work they do is not accomplished on their own, but by the grace, and strength, and guidance of the One to whom they have yoked themselves, whose yoke is easy, and whose burden is light.

One of the charming things about Mormons is their insistence on following the Biblical model and sending their young missionaries out by pairs: two by two, yoked together, as it were, as partners in their work.  But the yoke of Christ is not always so easy to see.  Many people see Christians doing good work but do not see the invisible yoke of Christ that enables us to do it.  If we could see it more easily, we might have an easier answer to the question, Does Jesus live in America.  Here is one way I would answer that question:

The other day I went with Mother Takacs over to City Camp at our mission parish at Saint James the Less.  We happened to be there during a time that all the kids from the neighborhood were gathered together playing Tag.  It was a big group of kids and they were having a great time careening around, tagging each other.  As will happen, two of the littler kids were running around and ran right into each other, knocking one of them to the ground.  After that momentary pause that a child takes to assess the situation, the boy on the ground began to cry, and so one of the camp counselors, Roberto, went over to help him.

Now Roberto, is a kid of maybe 17.  He is a big, burly kid with short dark hair and bright dark eyes, and the kind of scruffy facial hair that you can tell he wishes he was older than he is.  Roberto is a good carpenter and he oversaw the construction of beautiful raised beds for a garden that is being planted in the schoolyard. 

Roberto went over to the fallen boy and scooped him up in his arms and gently carried him outside the play area to the steps at the side of the schoolhouse, where he set him down.  The boy was pretty clearly not hurt in any serious way.  I don’t think there was even a scratch or a scrape, his injuries barely qualified as a boo-boo. 

As I watched, I saw Roberto lean down and take the boy’s head gently in his hands so he could look into his crying eyes and assess the situation.  Seeing that the child was really OK, Roberto did the only thing he could do to help: he sat down next to the boy and put his arm around him and just waited for his crying to stop, which it did soon enough for the boy to rejoin the games and get on with his fun.

If you want to know if Jesus lives in America, you don’t need to look any farther than Roberto.  For in the moment that he held that small boy’s head so carefully in his hands, offering the kind of small mercy and compassion on which a happy childhood depends, it was easy to see that Roberto was not working alone.  He is yoked to the One whose name is invoked at the beginning and end of every day at City Camp, just as it is invoked at the beginning and end of every day here at Saint Mark’s.

Maybe it is the case that religion is all a big joke, and that our careful attention to religious observance at a place like Saint Mark’s deserves to be satired and ridiculed, maybe even turned into a Broadway musical.

And maybe it is the case that God is waiting for a bunch of Texans to declare their unswerving faith at a rally in a stadium, bolstered by feel-good music and heart-felt appeals to the idea that America really is the new Israel, called on to repent and live into its role as God’s chosen nation.  Though I doubt it.

But I am certain that as long as there are people like Roberto – and like so many of you, who have also been willing to take up the yoke of Christ and work with him to do what he does, and accomplish the things only he can accomplish – I am certain that Jesus lives in America, and I pray he always will.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

3 July 2011

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Gunpowder

At the outbreak of the Civil War, 150 years ago, the US War Department realized that they had a dwindling supply of saltpeter – a crucial ingredient of gunpowder.  So they turned to Lammont du Pont, grandson of E.I. du Pont, founder of the famous company that bears his name, and sent him on a mission to London, to secure a supply of the needed ingredient.  He cornered the market, and procured a supply of potassium nitrate that would meet the Union Army’s needs for the duration of the war.

Because du Pont has been at the forefront of important synthetic products, like nylon, Teflon, cellophane and Kevlar, it is easy to forget that the great chemical company began its corporate life on the Brandywine creek in 1802 making only one product: gunpowder.  As the episode of the saltpeter procurement suggests, du Pont was extremely good at making extremely high quality gunpowder at mills less than an hour south from center city Philadelphia.  And we are reminded once again of the close relationship of corporate America to the challenges, aspirations, and conflicts of the nation.[i]

Illumined minds and illuminating ideas are at the heart of the story of America that we particularly love to tell in the streets of our city.  But America was not born and raised only on a diet of Enlightenment ideas, fed by its great men and women of the18^th century.  America was also born and raised on a diet of gunpowder.  And without the men of du Pont the nation might not have survived much past its infancy.

I’ll spare you my book-report summary of the history of gunpowder.  For my purposes, let’s say that you can use gunpowder for a number of things, from firing cannonballs, at one end of the spectrum, to lighting up the sky with fireworks, at the other end.  Gunpowder has served both these ends, and many others, for many centuries.  And let me say right now that I vastly prefer one option over the other: I am enchanted by fireworks and always have been; but I find cannonballs and all their descendants entirely disenchanting.  But both require gunpowder: the explosive force that propels them up and out, beyond the confines of their chambers, to accomplish their fiery tasks in the world.

Gunpowder does not apparently have anything to do with our gathering today.  We are here to celebrate God sending the Holy Spirit to the Church after the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus.  For most of us, this celebration has all the force of a Sunday School lesson, and we have incorporated the meaning of this day into our lives with about as much seriousness of purpose as we have incorporated the meaning of our long-ago Sunday School lessons into our lives.  If we think about the Holy Spirit at all, we think about him as very impressive breeze, or as so many tea-lights hovering over the heads of the apostles.  But our consideration does not often go much further.  It does not occur to us that the Holy Spirit is the gunpowder of the church: dangerous and wonderful, with tremendous power to accomplish great things, and full of the force that propels the church and her members up and out of our chambers to accomplish our fiery tasks in the world.  Most of us have never imagined that the church required gunpowder, or had any such thing at her disposal.  In fact, it is quite the sort of thing that we think we should be protecting against: dousing any supplies of the stuff with water, if we stumble upon it, to make sure no spark ignites it, lest something unpredictable and unexpected should happen.

But I do not think it was an accident that God’s introduction of his Holy Spirit to the church is somewhat explosive: with rushing wind to feed the tongues of fire while language erupts into a beautiful cacophony of comprehension and understanding.  It was not for nothing that Jesus had warned his disciples that they would receive power when the Holy Spirit came upon them.  By this he did not mean they would receive a lesson plan for a Sunday School class, complete with multi-colored construction-paper to be cut out in the shapes of tongues of fire.  He meant that his followers would receive the kind of power that could and would propel them up and out of their chambers to accomplish great and fiery work in the world.

And the church was not born and raised only on a diet of the teachings of Jesus, or even only on the story of the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus.  The church was also born and raised on a diet of the power of the Holy Spirit: the church’s gunpowder.

The church has suffered because her memory about the power of the Holy Spirit has faded, and with that fading memory, we have mistakenly believed that the Spirit’s power has also faded.  It is almost as if we believe there was a dwindling supply of that power 2,000 years ago, and no one has been able to corner the market ever since.  It is as though we believe that God has not supplied his church as well as Lammont du Pont supplied the Union Army.

This is a sad way of thinking and an ever sadder way of being the church.  And I contend that Saint Mark’s has always stood for a different way of thinking, has more or less always seen itself as a gunpowder mill of the church: confident of the power given to us by the gift of the Holy Spirit.  Here we have always believed that our prayers and God’s grace mix together in a surprising and wonderful way that propels us beyond our chamber, up and out into the world to accomplish the work of the kingdom of God: caring for the poor, striving for peace, teaching forgiveness and mercy, and establishing the law of God’s love in the hearts of his people.  This is not a benign mission, or a flaccid Sunday School lesson.  It signals an explosive power that challenges the forces of this world who would rather trample the poor, cast peace aside in favor of supposed self-interest, hold onto vindictive grudges, and rule with the cruel tyranny of the marketplace as though it were inherently good.

If your experience of the church has not exposed you to this dichotomy, has not shown you how different the power of the church is from the powers of the world, then you are keeping your distance, perhaps wary of the very power that I am talking about.

If you think I am exaggerating, then you have not been to the Saturday Soup Bowl and felt the power of God’s love bringing his people together over bowls of soup; or you have not counted the grocery bags that leave this place every month to feed the hundreds of clients of our Food Cupboard; or you have not met the children who go to our after-school program at Saint James the Less; or seen the kids at City Camp; or you have not met someone whose troubled heart was calmed during mass; or whose despair was turned to hope in this community, or whose croaking prayer was turned into a song of joy at High Mass.

This is the daily work of the Holy Spirit here at Saint Mark’s.  It is powerful, important work.  It is gunpowder work: igniting mostly small fireworks of hope, forgiveness, mercy, peace, and love for the well-being of God’s children.

It’s gunpowder that wakes our soup bowl volunteers up in the early hours of Saturday mornings to feed the hungry. 

It’s gunpowder that motivates Kent John and his volunteers to schlep pallets of canned goods in here each week to distribute to the needy. 

It’s gunpowder that put Saint James the Less into our care, that brought us Dave’s leadership there, and that is blowing its breeze among the kids that are learning there already. 

It’s gunpowder that animates our worship here day after day, week after week, and that gives our songs of joy such beauty, and that raises our music to high art.

It’s gunpowder that brings God’s mercy from his heavenly throne to the altars of this church, whence it is dispensed in a safe capsule of Bread and a sip of Wine.

All this and much more is accomplished by the gunpowder of the Holy Spirit bringing the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ into our lives day in and day out.

The Holy Spirit, like gunpowder, gives us power!  And I suppose the church at large is a bit conflicted about this power.  Because power has been known to make some of us crazy, and prone to do the wrong things; and power has been known to make others of us nervous and afraid of the laws of unintended consequences.

There are many in the world who believe that what I am saying is foolishness and delusional.  Talk of the Holy Spirit is only so much over-compensation for whatever neuroses or psychoses I am trying to cope with.  And there are many in the world who have simply forgotten about the Holy Spirit, or assumed that that Spirit long ago returned to the skies somewhere never to be seen again.

But I think there is just a shortage of some crucial ingredient in the church – like the 1861 shortage of saltpeter – maybe it’s a shortage of faith, I don’t know.  And I am inspired by the thought that it could be our mission here at Saint Mark’s to corner the market on whatever it is that’s needed, just as Lammont du Pont did all those years ago.

As others in the church and in the world express their diminished expectations for the work of the Holy Spirit in the church, we have this truth, that we have not meant to keep secret, but which seems to be hiding in plain sight: that there is an ample supply of gunpowder for God to do whatever he wills in the world.

Will he help us to overcome our differences with one another in the church and in the world?

Will he help us to care for this planet that he entrusted to our care?

Will he grant pardon, forgiveness, and mercy to those who are tortured by their guilt and their recklessness?

Will he bring peace to so many troubled nations?

Will he feed the hungry and shelter the homeless?

Will he bring wars to an end and protect us all from ever becoming cannon-fodder?

Will he light up the sky with the brilliant fireworks of his unique glory and make his name, his peace, and his joy to be known in all the world as he establishes his kingdom on the earth?

We believe that God will do all these things – not because of our confidence in ourselves as his partners, but because of the strength and power he has given us in the Holy Spirit – our sure supply of gunpowder!

A year after Lammont du Pont’s successful mission to secure the supply of saltpeter, the labs at du Pont developed something called “Mammoth Powder,” which was a kind of gunpowder with grains the size of baseballs.  This mammoth powder enabled the development of truly heavy artillery, with a power never before seen.

Can we really believe that God has put it within our reach to take such destructive power into our own hands, but has placed the awesome power of his Holy Spirit – a power which binds up the wounds inflicted by all the artillery of men – has placed this power beyond our reach?

For far too long the church has allowed the world and its dark forces to use the force of gunpowder for death and destruction.  It’s now past time to take up the power that God intended for us to have, to let the mammoth power of God’s Holy Spirit ignite in our lives and propel us out of our chambers and into the world, where we will light up the skies with images of the kingdom of God, spelled out in the glittering letters of peace, mercy, care, forgiveness, and love!

Come, Holy Spirit, inspire our hearts, and set our lives alight with your power!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Pentecost 2011

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

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[i] Information about du Pont, its products and history, is from www.dupont.com