The Swallows of Philadelphia

It’s been a good few years since the swallows that used to dependably stop at Mission San Juan Capistrano actually showed up in significant numbers.  Some people think it’s spreading suburban development that’s kept the birds away as they make their annual migration.  Who knows?

Here in Philadelphia we have our own mysterious swallows to contend with, but their story is sort of the reverse image of the romantic pattern of the swallows who would swoop into the picturesque adobe Spanish mission church in Orange County the same week of every year and then wing their way south on their continuing annual pilgrimage.  In our case, we have swallows, the Philadelphia Inquirer tells us, who have moved in for good, giving up their migratory habits in favor of Philly real estate.  But they have not chosen a picturesque site, a place of beauty, or of spiritual significance.  No, these swallows have made their home in a sewage treatment plant in Northeast Philadelphia, which they have decided is a pleasant enough home year ‘round to break them of their snowbird pattern, and so they stay put there all year long, in increasing numbers.  The Northern Rough-winged Swallows are supposed to migrate south for the winter to the Gulf states or as far as Central America.  They forage on the wing, as the birders say, usually flying low, snatching insects in mid-air as they zoom along.  And the allures of a Philadelphia sewage treatment plant have apparently proved to be so thoroughly delightful, that the birds will not budge, even though they ought to be hard-wired to move south for the winter.  Such are the mysteries of nature.

Who can say whether or not God created humans to be migratory creatures?  I suppose I have heard somewhere of long-ago ancestors who led nomadic lives following food – be it herds of animals or the availability of nuts and berries.  But the story of human spirituality is certainly a story of migration to and from the heart of God.  Gestated in the divine womb, and incubated in Paradise, the very next chapter of the human story tells of our migration to other climes of self-assertion that we thought would suit us better, where we supposed we could escape our newly discovered shame, and make good on our own.

On the contrary, we quickly learned to slaughter one another: brother lifting up his hand against his own brother to take his life – which he knew had been given to him by God.  The story that the Scriptures tell traces such prodigal migrations away from God, followed by regular pleading returns when things go badly and the sweat of our brows reminds us that once all was beauty and ease.

By the time God sent his Son, the Beloved, in whom he was well pleased, to live and work and teach among us, even he would migrate for a season into the wilderness to be tempted – as though he was only one of us, just another migratory bird on an annual journey that would bring him safely home.  But, of course, his unique migration pattern is a story that unfolds in the weeks to come.

Suffice it to say that, spiritually speaking, we humans are migratory creatures – we have lived out a pattern of rejection of and return to God: fleeing away, and then flying home when the weather gets cold, the going gets tough, or our shame is more than we can bear.

The ancient rabbis knew why we lived our lives this way: we are sinners, prone to wander, prone to indulge ourselves with things that are not good for us, prone to take what is not ours to take, prone to assert our power just because we can and not because it is right to do so, prone to spill blood as though it was ours to spill, as though God had not measured out every teaspoon of it in our veins with care when he made us, as though he had not aerated that blood with his own breath, and prone to worship other gods – especially those mode from gold.

Your sins and mine may be less colorful, less drastic, less imaginative, but they are no less real, no less selfish, no less insulting to the true and living God.  Do you need me to suggest what yours might be?  Do you need me to air mine, still in need of yet another cycle in the washer, in front of you in order to get the point?  Do you need me to show the other gods you and I have worshiped, do you need me to measure out the gold that tempts us, and count is hefty weight?  Can’t you think of what you’ve done that you ought not to have done, and what you’ve left undone that you ought to have done?  If you can’t, see me later; I may be able to help jog your memory.

But some homing mechanism in our souls is meant to draw us back, when we remember our sins; to bring us home to God when we hear the frost melting to the north and imagine the cool breezes that await us there, and remember how we can cavort on the wing when we are free from these burdens of our own making.  God does not mind that we have made this journey over and over; it is the consequence of our choices, the result of living east of Eden, and he knows us for what we are, for who we are.  And if a soul must migrate for its own well-being, then so be it.  Consider the swallows, how they peregrinate, returning again and again to their places of refreshment.  Except, of course, these days in Philadelphia.  Where the swallows have preferred to stay put in the sewage treatment plant, where, it would seem, they can find everything they need.

And what about you and me?  Have we given up on migrating to and from the heart of God?  Have we found it tiresome to make the journey year by year that requires us - at least for forty days and forty nights - to try to find a minute or two in all these hours to acknowledge our sins, to see our wretchedness, to call ourselves miserable, to know how we offend?

I suppose the swallows who have moved permanently into the sewage treatment plant have gotten used to the stench, or at least they can blame the foul odor on the trash heap, and pretend that none of it comes from them.  How dare we suggest that the foul odor comes from ‘neath their rough feathers!

I don’t know if it’s good for the swallows or not to have given up their migratory life; I have no idea.  But I suspect that we - if we begin to live like these swallows, and give up on our migration to and from the heart of God - I suspect that we pay a price for it, as we begin to think that it’s perfectly alright to live in the sewage, as though God had never meant us for Paradise.  And I think this is what we risk if we make light of Lent, which is meant to be a season of migration back to God, knowing that we are prone to wander away from God.

So many of us have decided to just stay where we are.  We have built mansions for ourselves in the sewage plant and invested heavily in Glade products, because, actually, they do a reasonable job of masking the odor.  But Lent comes to tug at some ancient string of our hearts that wants to take wing so we can find our way out of the sewage and back to God.  Lent comes to remind us that although the way was hard and long, it is invigorating to remember how far we could fly.

This is what we call repentance: being honest about our sins, stopping long enough to realize that too often we have chosen the trash heap, and sometimes it seems as though we have decided to live there permanently.

We don’t come here at the beginning of Lent to make ourselves miserable; we come here because in our selfishness, we have actually already done that.  But eventually the Glade wears off, and we begin to notice a funny smell, as we take account of ourselves and the lives we have chosen.   And even though we have become fat on the insects that thrive amongst the sewage, we begin to remember the view from above, and the way the coastline passed beneath us as we made our way home in the old days of our migration.  And we hear a voice calling us to come home, come home.

And we wonder if the burden of our choices – the burden of our sins – has become too much for us to carry all that way.  But we realize that there is no harm in trying, that there is nothing keeping us here in the sewage treatment plant except our own stubbornness – what the Scriptures call being stiff-necked.

And we stop to say a prayer that might be only one word long – Sorry – but which seems like it needs repeating over and over again.

And we find that far from leaving us out of breath, we are strengthened now, and ready to lean into the breeze that is already lifting us up, and to take to the wing, and to fly, God being our helper, our pardoner, our Salvation, and our true home.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

26 February 2012

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Faith on Your Forehead

Am I the only one who is always a bit taken aback by this Gospel reading on Ash Wednesday?  Am I the only one who hears this text and wonders about what it is I’m actually doing here in this service and in this season – wonders if Jesus is pleased with the way I’m planning for Lent, what Jesus thinks about my walking around Center City with ashes on my forehead? Am I the only one who feels a bit chastened by these words – “beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven”?

The first time I attended an Ash Wednesday service was only eleven years ago, and it was actually here at Saint Mark’s. I was new to the Episcopal Church, new to mainstream Christianity in general, and definitely new to Lent. I’ll never forget looking at myself in the mirror, at the smudge of ash across my forehead and the little flakes that had fallen into my eyebrows and onto my nose; I’ll never forget the feeling of deep belonging that came along with this reflection; I looked like, and felt like, a real, live Christian. As I walked around the city that night, I couldn’t help but notice others, strangers with the same sooty mark, and I was so filled with joy that I wanted to rush up to them and hug them and say, You! You are a Christian! I am a Christian too! (For the record, I did not actually do this.)

In subsequent years, I’ve continued to find the sight of so many Christians walking around in public with their faith pressed into their foreheads to be very moving, even joyful. And I’ve always appreciated the opportunity to talk with friends about what we might give up for Lent, about what practices we’re thinking of taking on. I’ve loved moments like the year I turned on the ESPN show “Pardon the Interruption” and saw Tony Reali, the man the show’s hosts call “stat boy,” sitting proudly in the studio with his suit and his ashes on. I liked that his piety was right out there for everyone to see, and I liked the idea that mine was too.

But year after year on Ash Wednesday, I hear the words “whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets,” and “when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may be seen not by others,” and I have to wonder if I’m doing this right. Should I keep my Lenten disciplines secret? Should I not tell anyone if I decide to give up diet Coke or chocolate or meat? Should I hide the fact that I’m getting up early to pray or reading scripture instead of watching television? Should I wipe the ashes off of my forehead as I walk out of the church so that no one can see that I’ve worshipped in church on this day of fasting? I’ve known people – faithful, wonderful people – who have done any and all of these things; perhaps some of you might even do the same.

It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, that of course Jesus is right. Anything that we do to put our Lenten piety on display, to show off how hard we’re working or how holy we are, isn’t of much use to God or anyone else. If Lent is about showing off, then it isn’t about anything at all. But I think, at the risk of sounding like I’m “correcting” the Gospel, that there might be more to this Gospel story as we hear it in this time and in this place. I wonder if it’s possible that we, the Church, couldn’t do with a few more public acts of sincere piety.

Not to overstate the obvious, but in Jesus’ time, almost everything first-century Jews would have done would have been influenced by their faith. They would have said prayers as they rose in the morning, more prayers when they ate, left home, began their work. They would’ve had blessings for plowing a new field, blessings for the harvest, for marriage and new babies and deaths. Their days and weeks and seasons and years would have been shaped by thousands of little acts of their faith, some private, but many of them public – acts of piety that were shared by everyone else in their community. So the question in first century Palestine was not whether or not your acts of piety were public, because much of the time that decision wasn’t up to you. The question was whether or not your acts of piety were sincere, whether or not the state of your interior faith matched the quality of your exterior acts.

But in our time, thousands of years later, our faith is often less about what we do in the public square and more about what we do in our own homes or in our own heads. Christians, especially Episcopalians, just don’t display our faith much. When was the last time you said grace – in public – in a swanky Center City restaurant – out loud – before the appetizer course? When was the last time you prayed publicly before you began your work day, before you started a meeting, or when you sat down as a department to look at financial statements? How often do you share in communal acts of faith with your neighborhood, your friends at school, or your work colleagues? Now some of this, granted, is shaped by the multicultural, pluralistic society in which we live, but some of it is shaped by our own discomfort. We pray, of course, but we often don’t pray out loud (even within our families). We come to church, of course, but do we always tell people that for us Sunday worship takes priority over soccer games or brunch or vacation time? And speaking of our time, how do we obey that pesky fourth commandment about honoring Sabbath time and keeping it holy? Do we say, “I can’t come to the company picnic because that’s my Sabbath time,” or do we just let that one slide?

Now I get it; it’s risky to wear our faith on our foreheads. It takes courage to step out on the street and say yes, that’s right, I am a follower of Christ. But if we aren’t willing to do that, who is going to do it for us? If we aren’t willing to claim our faith publicly, it will just become easier for society to push us to the margins, and we will no reason to act surprised when our Church shrinks and shrinks, and evangelism becomes harder and harder, and people wonder more and more where the fix is going to come from.

Now, of course, none of this is a surprise to the living Christ. And I think that this idea of reclaiming our public piety is, actually, consonant with the Gospel message for today. Because for all of his words of warning, Jesus did fully expect his disciples to live out their faith in the public sphere. Jesus expected his followers to speak about their faith, to use Gospel language, to make life decisions based on their understanding of their relationship with God and their neighbors…and to be explicit about the reasoning behind those decisions. So maybe in first-century Palestine the problem was not so much doing public acts of piety but doing them in a humble, authentic, God-focused way. And in twenty-first century Philadelphia the problem is not so much showing off our faith but letting it shine through into our public works and acts. Same coin, different side. And so maybe, just maybe, it is time to take some of our prayer, some of our fasting, some of our alms-giving, some of our piety, out into the light and practice it in public.

Perhaps it is time to say out loud to this secular, material, spiritual-but-not-religious world, Yes! I am a Christian, even though you think I am outdated, naive, superstitious, and irrelevant. Yes! I am a Christian, even when that means that you’re going to lump me in with everyone else who uses that word, even those who support and advocate for that which I absolutely despise. Yes! I fast. Yes! I give alms. Yes! I pray. And yes! I wear my faith on my forehead, even when you can’t see it, in the shape of a cross where in my baptism I was sealed and marked as Christ’s own forever. And yes! I struggle always to be humble and authentic and God-focused, but that is just part of the deal, part of this day, which is messy and challenging, and rewarding and perplexing and glorious and wonderful. Yes! I am a Christian…and won't you be a Christian too?   

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

Ash Wednesday 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Over the River

Even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing.   (2 Cor. 4:3)

The artist Christo is planning to erect a canopy of silvery fabric over a six-mile-long section of the Arkansas River that flows through Bighorn Sheep Canyon in Colorado.  But some local people object to the project, called “Over the River,” because of the amount of construction required to install it.  As you know, Christo is famous for wrapping things in fabric – everything from an island near Miami to a bridge in Paris to the Reichstag in Germany.  In this case, rafters paddling their boats on the river would look up through the translucent fabric, and others would look down at the covered section from vantage points on the canyon slopes above.

What is it about these art installations of Christo’s that is so enthralling?  How is it that covering up an object of beauty and grace, or interrupting it – as was the case with installations like Running Fence in California, or The Gates in Central Park (the only one of Christo’s installations I have seen in person), somehow allows us to experience it in a new way?

Part of the magic of Christo’s art is that he has taken a form – the veil – that is fundamentally about obscuring and made it function in such a way that his veils are fundamentally revealing.  Christo puts a veil between us and the world around us, and we see something we have never seen before, experience something we have never experienced before.  I can tell you that was my experience of The Gates.  I spent part of my childhood going to Central Park nearly every day, and yet when I went there to see The Gates, the Park, and the people in it, were transformed; it was as though it was an almost entirely new park.

In the Scriptures, a veil is almost always deployed to obscure.  A note in my Oxford Annotated Bible for the 3^rd and 4^th verses of the second Letter of Saint Paul to the Corinthians says this; “Paul has apparently been accused of not making the Gospel clear.”

To defend himself Paul takes up an argument that he might have borrowed from Christo: If my Gospel is veiled, if it seems to be obscured, it only seems so to those who are perishing, to those who are stuck in the old way of seeing, the old way of believing, the old way of living, whose eyes have been blinded by the devil from seeing what lies beyond the veil.  This is a self-serving argument for Paul, but never mind, because the fact of the matter is that the Gospel is often unclear to people in our own day and age.  You might say that the one thing most Christians could agree on is that the Gospel is broadly misunderstood – by other Christians who see it differently than I see it, by non-believers who may barely see it all or see a warped version of it, and by un-believers who delight to call it something that it is not.

Has the Good News of God in Christ been so veiled that it is difficult to see, difficult to hear?  Can we even recognize it for what it is?  Do you, who come to church week by week, know what is the meaning of the Gospel?  Or is there a veil across it that prevents even your hopeful eyes from seeing it for what it is?

What does it mean to believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the Saviour of the World?  Or is this old question so veiled in mystery and the checkered history of its supposed guardians that it has become hopelessly and irretrievably veiled?

To answer that question, I wish we could all be together on a raft in the Arkansas River.  I wish we could feel the power of the water carrying us along on our journey, and the refreshing splash of its spray, and the interplay of fear and thrill as we are carried over white water.  I wish we could be propelled over churning water with the sense that life is a river, with the fast, cold water below, and the clear, warm sky above us.

Travel even a beautiful river often enough and you will begin to take its beauty and its power and its life for granted – this is the human story.  You will begin to think that life is not about the river and the mysterious and wonderful forces that keep it moving; you will begin to think that life is about you, and you may begin to think, on the one hand, what a terrifically skilled and quite handsome navigator of the river you have become, or on the other hand, what a hopeless and quite ugly traveler of its waters you have become.

And one day you will be gliding along in your raft, or you will be picking your way across the rocks at the bank, and you will slip and fall into the river.

Perhaps there is a waterfall down river from where you have fallen in.  Perhaps you know it; perhaps you don’t.  But the water is cold and moving fast now, and you are not in control, although you are able to stay afloat.  You are struggling to keep your feet downstream, so as to push off any rocks with your legs as you were taught to do the first time you stepped into a raft a long time ago.  The river keeps pushing you around, though, twirling you through the water.  And you are sometimes staring into the dark rush of water, and sometimes watching the steep banks go rushing by, and sometimes gazing up at the clear blue sky above you.  And you are trying to remember if there is a waterfall up ahead, and how far a drop it is, and whether or not you could survive being carried over such falls.  And you are trying to remember whether or not the river slows down between where you are now and where the falls may or may not take you plunging to your death.

You are wondering if there is a tree with a branch hanging low over the river that you could grab onto.  You are trying to figure out if you could get close to the banks to reach up to such a branch if it existed.  And there is the water beneath you, and the steep canyon along side you, and the distant, brilliant blue sky above you, and there seems to be not much else in the world.

And momentarily it occurs to you that you should pray, you should call upon God to save you, because, you have been taught to treat God like an emergency safety device: break glass and pull lever in the event of an emergency.  But you realize that thinking of God in this way has left you almost completely unprepared to pray, and nearly unwilling to rely on the possibility that there is a God and that if there was, he would be interested in plucking you from the water to save you.

Long ago you stopped trying to swim, knowing that it would exhaust you in this fast-moving water.  And the water now seems to be moving faster, and the rocks are bigger and easier to smash into, and, wrack your mind though you may, you cannot remember if there is a big waterfall ahead, you cannot picture it, but you think there must be.  It begins to dawn on you that this journey can only possibly end one way at the bottom of the falls.  So what’s the point in trying to pray now anyway?

The river is moving fiercely now, and you are swallowing water as you flail on your way, and it dawns on you how casually you treated the river all these years – never seeing it as a river that could carry you to life or to death, it was just there.

And as you are beginning to regret how careless you were, and as you are beginning to think that you just have to give yourself over to the river, because the river is in charge, more powerful than you, and a force of nature, after all,  - just then, there comes a wide bend in the river that opens into slower-moving water.  And you find that you are flipped over onto your back, floating head-first downstream (which is dangerous because of the rocks, but you haven’t the strength left to fight it).

And your arms are stretched out on either side of you, your feet pointed upstream, your head is tilted back so you can breathe, and your eyes are open and you can see the clear blue sky, but above you, in between you and the endless sky above, is a canopy of silvery fabric, supported on light steel arms that required, it must be admitted, a lot of construction to get them there.  And you discover that you can float downstream quite safely this way now; the water has slowed.  But you are exhausted and really unable to do anything but be carried along now.

And in the pleats of shiny fabric above you, through which you are watching the sky and the canyon walls slip by, you can see words spelled out.  And this is what they say: “For it is the God who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”

And you reach out your hands toward the shimmering fabric above where the words are already disappearing.  And quite magically the fabric reaches out to enfold you. and collect you from the water, and swaddle you, to dry you, and to warm you, and to lift you out of the water and place your feet safely on dry ground, high enough up on the steep canyon walls to see a waterfall ahead of you, and behind you a long stretch of river with a canopy hanging over it like a veil, which you would think obscures the river, and makes it harder to see for what it is.  But, in fact, you can see that the veil covers precisely that section of the river in which you were saved, and you can tell that it was in the fabric of that veil that you were swaddled and lifted to safety.

And you can see that there are no words woven into the fabric, but how could you explain what happened to you out there on the river, beneath the veil, except to resort to the words that are still ringing in your ears: “For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”

And you know that light is shining in your heart, and a veil has been lifted, and you believe.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

19 February 2012

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia