It Gets Better

In September of 2010, syndicated columnist Dan Savage and his husband, Terry Miller, made a short film and posted it on the internet. The video isn’t particularly beautiful or well-produced; it’s just a head-on, somewhat grainy shot of the couple sitting in a booth in a noisy restaurant. But this little home movie started a revolution. In the video, Dan and Terry talk about growing up as gay men, about how excruciating it was to be bullied, and beat up by their school peers, about how difficult it was to be rejected by their families. Then they talk about their lives now –about how they found each other, how they found acceptance from each other’s families, how they found a beautiful son to adopt as their own, how they found themselves living lives that were and are full of love. It is a heartening story. But the truly revolutionary thing about all this is not what they were talking about, but who they were talking to. Dan and Terry made this video specifically for people they had never met – young people in the GLBT community, so many of whom find themselves depressed or even suicidal because of constant and merciless ridicule and abuse. Dan and Terry made their video to offer hope to these teens; they wanted to tell these young people – indeed, all people – that life will not always be so hard, that they can and will find support and love, that it gets better. And their simple video was so powerful that other people wanted to reach out and make their own, and soon Dan and Terry had so many videos that they had to start hosting them on their own website – and a movement was born.

If you haven’t been to the “It Gets Better” website, I invite you (grown-ups) to check it out. There are thousands of videos there from people all over the world, each with the same message – that no matter what you are suffering right now, no matter why you’re being excluded or teased or tormented, it gets better. Some of the people in the videos are gay, some straight, some are celebrities, politicians, or religious leaders. President Obama made a video, as did Bishop Gene Robinson, as did General Motors and the Phillies and even Kermit the Frog, who describes with detailed vulnerability the moment he finally realized that he was green. 

But the most powerful videos, I think, are the ones created by ordinary folks. These are people who just set up a video camera at home and talked about their lives – moments of struggle, moments of grace, moments when they thought they could no longer go on, and then the moments that made them grateful that they had decided to live. There is rarely anything particularly new or earthshattering in these videos. The people in them do not tell you how things are going to get better, and they certainly don’t say that things won’t sometimes get worse. They are just people, sitting down and telling their stories, painting a picture of the world as it can be, sharing a vision of the world as it should be. They smile, they laugh, and they offer hope and reassurance that the current moment is not the end of the story. Again and again they say, it gets better.

In the 5^th chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew, Jesus sits down in front of his disciples and tells a story. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted for righteousness’ sake. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven. With these powerfully comforting words, Jesus paints a picture of the world as it will be, a vision of the kingdom of God as it truly is. He offers hope and reassurance to all of his followers that no matter what they might be suffering right now, no matter how difficult things may be, it will not always be thus. Follow him; it gets better. The kingdom of heaven awaits them, where they will be richly rewarded.

But notice that Jesus does not tell his followers that they will be blessed. You will be blessed when you’re hungry because you will be filled. You will – eventually – be blessed when you show mercy or make peace. No, for Jesus and his followers, the blessing happens now. Jesus’ disciples are blessed now, in the present, why? Because they know what the future looks like. They have seen Christ’s vision of the kingdom of heaven, where all are comforted and fed and called children of God, and just seeing this vision, just hearing this story, blesses them now. They see what is to come and so they know that the present moment is not the end of the story. Jesus’ mountaintop proclamations change the disciples’ lives now; they are already blessed, because they know that it gets better.

Telling the story of the future matters. Bearing witness to the promise that it gets better is one of the greatest gifts that we human beings can give one another. And this is not only because that witness reassures us that our lives will be better in that far-off, great gettin’-up mornin’, not only because the hope of future happiness helps us to suffer through our lives in a grit-your-teeth-and-bear-it kind of way, but because the gift of that promise blesses us now. Dan Savage knows that. He knows that hearing stories of hope can change lives now. And Jesus, of course, knows that too. The great difference is, of course, that Jesus can tell us how things are going to get better. Through his own incarnation, death, and resurrection, Jesus shows us the way. All we need do is look. Jesus makes things better, no matter who we are, no matter how we’ve suffered, no matter what we’ve done, no matter how dark the world might seem. It all gets better, because Christ makes it so.

This is what we celebrate here on this All Saints’ Day – that there is more to this life than simply the here and now. This great Feast of the Church reminds us again of what our future looks like in the kingdom of God. In this feast, we recollect all of the Saints who have come before, all of those holy women and men who have been through the great gift and ordeal of life. We recall their stories of rejoicing and suffering and loving and enduring. And we reaffirm that all of those Saints still are, that they now sit before the throne of God, worshipping him day and night, that they hunger no more and thirst no more, and that God has wiped away every tear from their eyes. And in this remembering, in this recollection, in this recalling and reaffirmation, we recognize that we are all made one, past, present, and future, Saints in heaven and on earth, “knit together into the mystical body of your Son Christ our Lord.” Thank God for the gift of this story, for the hopeful witness of the Saints. Thank God that we know their stories and that in those stories we hear the Saints saying to us again and again, It gets better.        

But thanking God is not enough. Being grateful is not enough. Because you and I also have a story to tell. We have a picture to paint, a vision to share that the world desperately needs to hear. Our story is the greatest gift that we can offer to another human being. For we know what glories the future holds – the hungry will be fed, the dead will be raised, the meek will inherit the earth, and there will be peace like a river. We lift up our voices to heaven and sing that lo! there breaks a yet more glorious day; the saints triumphant rise in bright array; the King of glory passes on his way. Alleluia. What better gift could we offer to the world than the chance to know the wonders of the kingdom of heaven, to sing as one with those who shine in glory, to see this great vision glorious. So celebrate with us – sing these hymns and come to the altar and embrace this hope and be changed…now. And then sit down and share this story with someone else. Tell them of your life, tell them of your hope, tell them how tonight we sing with joy because we know that not only will it get better, it already is.

Preached by Mtr. Erika Takacs

1 November 2011

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Under the Mask

You may listen to this sermon here:

When I was a very little girl, my parents bought me a Cinderella costume for Halloween. I loved Cinderella; she was (and still is) my favorite Disney princess. I remember sitting and staring at the picture on the box – Cinderella on the night of the ball, standing in a shimmering silvery-blue gown with satin opera gloves, her hair swept up in an elegant twist and held in place with a wide black ribbon. I couldn’t wait to slide those long gloves up over my elbows and to feel the swing of that wondrously full, silky-smooth skirt. I can remember wondering how this box was going to help my hair to look like that, but I was sure that once it was opened, all would be made clear.

But this was the 1970’s, and if you were around in the 70’s, you know what’s coming next. When I opened the box, I found not a beautiful ball gown with reams of luxurious fabric – I found a plastic sheath with a picture of Cinderella printed on the front. And there was no stylish Cinderella up-do – there was a plastic mask with a black band and yellow hair painted on the top. You know those masks – the ones with the elastic band that always snapped and popped you in the ear, the masks that made it hard to breathe and made your face so hot you had to take them off halfway through your trick-or-treating. So, sadly, I was not the picture of elegance I had hoped to be that year; I just walked around in my plastic tube, my face red and sweaty behind that smiling Cinderella mask.

This, of course, is the time of year for masks of all kinds. Some of them are bejeweled and beautiful, some of them are gritty and realistic, but most of them are just frightening. My silly plastic Cinderella face notwithstanding, most Halloween masks are intended to scare the pants off of our friends and neighbors. Certainly the most famous Halloween masks are the most terrifying ones – the melting spectre masks from the movie Scream, the ghostly white guise of Michael Myers, Jason’s hockey mask, even the sinister smile of Guy Fawkes in V for Vendetta. And then, of course, there is the most disturbing of all mask scenes, from the latest Batman movie, when the late Heath Ledger as the Joker takes off his creepy clown mask to reveal…his own creepy clown face. In his case, the mask didn’t conceal anything, except for the fact that the dark mask and the dark face were exactly the same.

I wonder if you noticed the dark masks in today’s Gospel reading.  They aren’t the masks of monsters or villains, but they are menacing all the same. They are easier to spot in the verses that immediately follow today’s reading, where Jesus proclaims woe to the Pharisees, woe to those who do not do as they say, woe to the hypocrites. Here are the dark masks, the masks of the hypocrites. The Greek word hypocrite that Jesus speaks here was a term used primarily to describe masked stage actors; it comes from two Greek roots that together mean, essentially, under-distinguished or less-than-sorted. A hypocrite was one whose identity was difficult to distinguish because of intentional deception. In the case of these ancient Greek actors, of course, the deception was harmless, a part of the evening’s entertainment, and the more complete the deception, the better.

But the Pharisees’ deception is different; the Pharisees’ masks are real trickery, hidden and harmful. Jesus calls the Pharisees hypocrites because while they say the right things, they do not do the right things. They do not act as they teach; they do not practice what they preach. They may preach the good news of binding up the brokenhearted and proclaiming liberty to the captives, but then they “tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear” and lay the bruising weight of an over-scrupulous legalism upon the shoulders of their followers. They may teach that the law of the Lord is one that is written in the heart, but then they make the fringes of their prayer shawls long and their prayer ostentatious. And the Pharisees may say, “Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with your God,” but then they walk right up to the head of the table, to the seats of honor in the synagogue, trying to draw as many admiring looks as possible along the way. They say one thing and do another; they are hypocrites. They wear the mask of piety, the mask of humility, the mask of faithful, God-loving, commandment-following Jews, but under that mask their faces are red and sweating with the effort of trying to inhale as much stuff, as many accolades, as they possibly can. They wear masks as they preach the word of God, which is truly terrifying.

What is even more terrifying is the thought that we might do the same thing. There is, as I’m sure you know, ample evidence that the world out there thinks that this is exactly what we Christians do. For example, in 2007, the Barna group conducted a survey of young people, aged 16–29, about their perceptions of Christianity in America. The results were staggering. Within the portion of the survey group who self-identified as non-Christian, 85% stated that they perceived Christians as being fundamentally hypocritical. 85%. Well, but those are non-Christians, we say, the number must be different among believers. It is, it’s lower – only 50%. So 85% of young people who aren’t Christian think we’re hypocrites, and fully half of young people who are Christian still think we’re hypocrites…and I know that this survey is four years old, and I know that survey data can be manipulated, but look around you. There are thousands of 16-29 year-olds in Philadelphia. Where are they? Some of you are here, and I thank God for you as I do for all of you Gen-Xers and Boomers and others. But there is space in our pews, there is room in our budget for more Christians here; we need people from all of these generations at St. Mark’s as much as they need the Gospel that we proclaim. But if this survey is even close in showing us the depth of the world’s spiritual malaise and cynicism about Christianity, how do we convince that world that we’re for real? If those who are not here yet see us as hypocrites, if all that they see are masks, how do we show them who we really are?

I think that there is only really one way to do this, and it isn’t to try to convince them – or, frankly, to convince ourselves – that we don’t have masks on at all. I don’t think it does much good to say to those who are not here yet, “Hey, come on in, we look exactly like you!” Because we don’t. I mean, look at us. We wear instruments of Roman torture around our necks, we kneel and bow and genuflect and sing in a culture that sees none of that as particularly normal, we appear to the world as a community shaped not by what we know or how much we have but by who we love. Some of us even wear long fringes. We do not look like the world. We do wear a kind of mask, we do put on a Christian identity here in our liturgy, in our prayers, when we recite the creeds, when we renew our baptismal vows, when we take, eat and drink this all of you. But these are not the dark masks of the hypocrite. They are not masks intended to deceive or to conceal.  Because unlike the Pharisees, we not only look different, we are different. What we have to do, what we must do, is show the world that our masks and our faces look exactly the same.

So then here is the question for Saint Mark’s today – if we were to take off our masks, what would we look like underneath? For example, if we were to take off the bejeweled, beautiful mask of our liturgy, would we still look the same? When we leave this sacred space, do we carry with us a deep honor and reverence for the stuff of the world around us, do we still bow our heads before the holy in our ordinary and genuflect before Christ in each other? Or if we were to take off the gritty, realistic mask of our service in this place and around the world, would we still look the same? When we leave the soup bowl or the food cupboard or St. James the Less, do we still live generously in the rest of our lives, giving of our time, our money, our prayers – are we still dedicated to the kind of concern and advocacy for those who carry heavy burdens in this world? Beneath the masks of our liturgy, our service, our prayer, our adoration, our giving, our learning, do we look the same? Do we let these faces of Christianity shape what we look like on the inside?

This is our labor and toil, brothers and sisters – this is our ministry – to let the masks of our faith so shape who we are within that we can live a life worthy of God, and represent Christ to the world. This is what will bring those who are searching for God through our doors; this is what Christ passionately desires of us – that we go and do as we say here, that we go and practice what we preach here, that our faces shine with the same light of truth that is engraved upon our hearts.  It is, of course, only by the gift of God that we can do this, and so we pray in the words of our last hymn that Christ will “make thy Church, dear Savior, a lamp of purest gold, to bear before the nations thy true light as of old; O teach thy wandering pilgrims by this their path to trace, till, clouds and darkness ended, they see thee face to face.”

Preached by Mtr. Erika Takacs

30 October 2011

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

…Show me the coin used for the tax….

I own a copy of a big book entitled  The Forbes Book of Business Quotations: 14,173 Thoughts on the Business of Life.  Its headings run from A-Ability to Z-Zeal, and include under G- God and under T-Taxes. There are, in fact, 94 quotations about God and 70 quotations about taxes. The numerical superiority of the headings under God is reassuring and we can rest easy knowing that in the book God is ahead of taxes.  

The Forbes Book is meant to be Chamber of Commerce staple so  there is a lot of humor and light heartedness in the quotations.  For example, here’s one of the quotations on taxes, from G.K. Chesterton: “A citizen can hardly distinguish  between a tax and a fine, except that a fine is generally much lighter.” And here’s a quotation on God from Anonymous: “ God will provide the victuals, but He will not cook the dinner.  There are other equally light-hearted  and delightful quotations . For the most part, this massive collection of “business quotations” is an easy going book for an easy going audience. It is not a book with much hint of “gloom and doom” nor does it offer much of a reality check on every-day life as it really is.

The Forbes Book is not the kind of book Jesus and his disciples would pick up, much less read through, but we can imagine the Pharisees and Herodians might take some delight in it.  This may be because our book has nothing to offer by way of explanation and understanding of hard facts, for example, that our city, Philadelphia, “the birthplace of American democracy,” is the poorest big city in the United States  with 27% of its population including more than a third of its children, living below the poverty line. [46.2 million nationally] Nor will our treasury of delightful sayings help us explain and understand the appalling disparity between the rich and the poor in our country and the fact that, year- by-year, proportionally fewer people control  more and more of the country’s  wealth. 

So we come to this morning’s Gospel, and the tension between giving to God what is God’s and giving to the emperor what is the emperor’s.  We know the story here:  the Pharisees and Herodians are determined to trick Jesus, who is proving to be quite a nuisance, into incriminating himself so that they can get him arrested and out of the way . After their two-faced flattery of Him, the Pharisees and Herodians ask Jesus whether it is lawful to pay taxes to the emperor. For us, this is a silly question: of course it is lawful—and required and right—to support the emperor—our government—because this is a legitimate way to care for each other and to support the welfare and social good of the entire community.  But for people under Mosaic Law, the question was a serious—and tricky—one.  

Jesus responds by acknowledging the trickery at hand and calls the Pharisees and Herodians hypocrites. To be called hypocrites by Jesus is not something anyone would wish for because, for Jesus, hypocrisy may be one of the worst transgressions. Hypocrisy is distortion and denial and dishonesty, all of which the Pharisees and Herodians are guilty of, as are we if we are not mindful of our Christian covenant.  The difference between us and the Pharisees and Herodians is that we truly know Jesus and that is why we are Christians and why we practice the Faith.  To be who and what we say we are means that we practice obedience as much as we practice generosity, compassion, justice, and fairness in everything that we do. Unlike those people trying to trick Jesus in order to destroy Him, we proclaim Jesus and practice His ways. Thus, we have chosen to resist poverty, hunger, and  injustice in the inequitable distribution of wealth. As mixed-up as some of the Occupy Wall Street protesters all over the country might seem, they could be seen as  expressing some of our own Christian sensibilities.

As Christians, we know there is something terribly wrong in our country, as the facts about Philadelphia as the poorest big city in America affirm.   We all have our own stories of adversity and crisis, yes. But we know from the Gospel, Jesus’s own story, that this is what is means to be alive and human.  Yet, as Jesus reminds us in today’s Gospel , we ARE in fact responsible for one another through what we give to the Emperor and that not to pay the emperor can be to turn our backs on what we give to God.  

Unlike the Pharisees and Herodians, we don’t need to say how amazed we are at Jesus’s presence, justice,  compassion, wisdom  and goodness. We know all this and it is the Good News of the Gospel. But what is the Good News is often the Hard News of the Gospel. How do we manage this tension? Let’s try this:  what if each of us wanted  to add a new quotation to The Forbes Book of Business Quotations, one that included God, taxes, generosity, compassion, justice, and Faith?  Here’s my suggestion and it comes from a “comedian,” of all people, Stephen Colbert. It’s a zinger so get ready:  

If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we’ve got to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that he commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition, and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.

“Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

Amen.   

Preached by Dr. Peter Kountz

For 9:00am High Mass

Sunday, October 16, 2011 – Pentecost  18/Proper 24