Doing Good Friday

It had been a long Lent. By the time the people gathered together in the church on Good Friday, they were ready. They had been made ready by weeks of prayer and fasting, by weeks of self-examination and denial, by weeks of scripture and sermons that had finally, finally, led them to this place – to the tiny garden on the side of a hill where Jesus sat in the darkness among an ominous tangle of olive trees. It was here, in this garden, that the people finally were able to pick up the Passion, to hear the story that was the culmination of their long Lenten journey.

But it was more than just the mere telling of the Passion that these people hungered for. Because these were not just any people, and this was not just any Lent. This was Lent in Leipzig in 1724, and these people had gathered for Vespers in the Lutheran Church of St. Nicholas to hear the new St. John Passion of Johann Sebastian Bach. They hadn’t heard any instrumental music in church since the season of Lent had begun, and for these people, who were used to a weekly diet of carefully crafted cantatas, the time when they were forced to abstain from these orchestral delights always felt terribly bleak and barren. 1724 was Bach’s very first Lenten season in Leipzig, so there must have been more than a little curiosity about what this feisty and brilliant composer might offer the congregation this year. Had they gotten their money’s worth? Would this new Passion work? – and by that I mean, would Bach’s setting of the St. John Passion help them to truly join Jesus in that garden, to enter fully – mind, body, and soul – into this story that they had waited so long to hear?

It is clear from listening to the St. John Passion that Bach knew exactly what the people expected of him and of this particular piece. The Bach scholar Michael Marissen has written that Bach’s role in Leipzig is best described as a kind of “musical preacher,” and it is this preaching, this active and very personal engagement with the Passion, that is so compelling in the St. John. Bach not only set the entire Passion according to St. John (in German, of course), he also carefully placed other poetic texts within the narrative to help connect the listener to the action. Bach’s goal, clearly, was not just for you to hear the story but for you to get inside it, to live it – to imagine what it was like in the garden or at Gabbatha or on Golgotha, and to experience an emotional and a spiritual response to what happened there. The whole point of the Passion was to feel something – to feel the cries of Crucifixion from the crowd, to feel the tenderness as Jesus gave Mary and the disciple John into each other’s care, and – most importantly – to feel how our own wretched brokenness made this sacrifice necessary in the first place.

Let me give you an example. At the beginning of the Passion, when Jesus is being questioned by the high priests, one of the servants strikes Jesus with his hand after an answer that he deems to be disrespectful. Here Bach pauses the action and interjects a chorale, a hymn. At the beginning of this chorale, the choir is indignant, singing, “Who was it who hit you this way, Lord? Who treated you so badly – you haven’t done anything wrong!” But then the singers realize the painful answer: they are to blame – “It is I, I and my many, many sins, who have caused this misery for you.” The singers, and, by proxy, the congregation, can no longer simply stand outside the story looking in. With this one masterful stroke, Bach has placed the people on the inside. They are now a part of the action, they are a part of the cause; they are truly viewing the story from the inside out. And so faced with their facts of their own complicity in the suffering of Jesus, how can they not feel something?

Even if you didn’t hear the Bach St. John Passion performed here last weekend or study it with us over the past five weeks in our Sunday forums, even if you’ve never heard of this piece in your life, I’m guessing that you can imagine what this deep emotional connection to the Passion text feels like. Because this is exactly what we experience here on Good Friday, in this liturgy. We enter into this bleak and barren space, stripped of anything that sets it apart as holy, we watch the sacred ministers prostrate themselves before the altar, we hear ancient texts set to ancient tunes – all of which is intended to position us squarely within the events of this day, to help us find our place here, and tie us to that first Good Friday thousands of years ago. We have just knelt in silence as we reached back through the centuries to that horrible empty moment when Jesus Christ, our Lord and our God, breathed out all of the air in his battered lungs and was still. In a few moments we will take the last few steps of our Lenten journey as we walk to the very foot of the cross, bend ourselves before the holy weight that hangs upon it, and kiss the feet of the figure who took it up for all of humankind.

More than almost any other service of the church year, the liturgies of Good Friday are intended to make us not just think about something but feel something. When we look at the wounds and the bruises that this suffering servant has borne for us, we are invited to feel something. When we cry out with the psalmist, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” we are invited to feel something. When we live the long, dusty walk to the cross; when we hear the mocking, the scourging, the shame; when we wonder if there is any sorrow like our sorrow; we should feel something.

But if we go out of this church on this day satisfied with the fact that we have felt something, we leave this liturgy unfulfilled. If this day is for us just about feeling sad, or empty, or overwhelmed and humbled, then we have left something out. Good Friday cannot just be about the way we feel; it cannot be just for us, because our Lord’s sacrifice was not just for you and me and for the faithful few who remained at the foot of the Cross, but for the whole world. Today must also, then, be about those who are out there and how we connect with them. Good Friday cannot be just about what we feel; it must also be about what we do.

What will we do? What will we do in response to this Good Friday? As we hear about the prisoner Jesus, mocked and tortured by his captors, what will we do for prisoners here in our country, or for prisoners of conscience around the globe? As we hear about a religious community divided against itself, what will we do for the Church here and in the world? As we hear about a Roman government corrupted by cruelty and unchecked power, what will we do for our own government to help it maintain an open heart to the world and to its own people? As we hear about an angry mob of powerless and manipulated people, what we will do for the oppressed around the world? What will we do for those who are persecuted for their faith? What will we do for those who have no faith, who are betrayers or who are betrayed, who suffer loss and mourn? What does Good Friday encourage us to do in response to how it makes us feel?

This question, and our response to this question, is at the heart of this holy day. Good Friday, of course, does offer us a powerful emotional experience, but the power of this is day is not just that it allows you and me to imagine what it was like on Golgotha in the first century on the first day of Passover but that, in the words of the author of Hebrews, this day “provokes us to love and good deeds.” Our emotional response to the story of Christ’s Passion can actually strengthen our ministry if the way we feel on this day breaks our hearts open to love more freely and more fully – to love God and our neighbors as ourselves, and to love one another as Christ has loved us – by doing acts of service and mercy in his name.

This may feel like a tall order. There is so much that can be done – where do we start? Well, starting where Bach did is always a good idea. Bach began each new composition by writing “Jesu juva” at the top of the score – Jesus help me. Jesus, help us to feel something in this liturgy today, and help us to imagine how you might use that feeling to accomplish something in us. On this Good Friday, help us to be moved, not just emotionally, but moved out into the world to strengthen the Church, to feed the hungry, to heal the brokenhearted. From your cross, from the tomb, Jesus, help us. And to God alone be the glory.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

Good Friday, April 6, 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

The Garden Tomb

You may listen to Father Mullen's sermon here.

The food at the Ambassador Hotel in Jerusalem is adequate, but not more than adequate.  And if I am going to travel all the way to the Holy Land – as 22 of us from Saint Mark’s did about six months ago – I am going to find food that is better than adequate.  On our journey we maintained a pretty full itinerary, so there was not a lot of time to search out good food, but I did my best; poking my way through the winding alleys of the Old City, taking the train to the Mehane Yehuda Market and consulting online reviews to find the best places to eat.  I’m happy to report that I found some memorable meals in Jerusalem, as well as some good Israeli wines!

The Ambassador Hotel sits uphill from the Old City of Jerusalem along the Nablus Road.  And on my fast and furious expeditions to find food, and the nearest liquor store, I regularly made my way down this road, past the far swankier American Colony Hotel, the British cathedral, and then past a little sign on a street that turned off to the left as I walked downhill: a street named after Conrad Shick, and a sign pointing to The Garden Tomb.  This tomb is the alternative site to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher – the traditional site of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, where pilgrims line up for hours (as we did) to get a chance to stoop low and visit the strange supposed burial place of Jesus – which really hardly resembles a tomb at all, and which requires more than a little imagination to connect with the image of Jesus’ death and burial, which were supposed to take place on a hill outside the city wall, since, there is no evidence that you are on a hill, and you are well inside the current walls of the city.  Nevertheless, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher has been recognized as the likely place of Jesus’ burial at least since the 4^th century, and if it marks the place of his burial, then it is also the kind of Ground Zero of his resurrection: the site of the original Easter

The Garden Tomb, by contrast, has been identified as a possible site only since the 19^th century.  And it tends to have a certain currency with people from Protestant churches, who may feel a bit put off by the chanting monks, the flickering candles, and the burning incense over at the Holy Sepulcher.

A curious pilgrim, open to possibilities, with no ax to grind, with only two competing sites to compare, could easily visit both the Holy Sepulcher and the Garden Tomb on a visit to Jerusalem, especially if his hotel was just up the road from them both, and he had to pass one on his way to get to the other.  But I had meals to scope out, and restaurant menus to inspect; my sorties down the Nablus Road led me right past the turn-off to the Garden Tomb for five days in a row.  But I never even flinched as I went in search of olives and cheeses, and Halvah, and other delicious things – and wine.  And, of course, we’d already been to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher – if you’ve seen one Messiah’s tomb, I figured, you’ve seen ‘em all.  As I say, a clearer head might have decided that if you have traveled half way around the world to visit holy sites, and two different places contend to be the holiest of them all, what’s the harm in visiting both of them?  But I had pistachios, and pomegranates to track down and taste.   I’d already cast my lot with the ancients at the Holy Sepulcher – why muddy the waters?

To many people, the mere fact that there is more than one potential spot where Jesus may have been buried, more than one possible Ground Zero of the Resurrection, provides ample evidence of the foolishness of the faith that so many others have placed in Jesus, lo these many centuries.  If we cannot even locate with any measure of certainty the very places where his Cross stood, where his Body lay, and where disciples discovered an empty tomb on that first Easter morning, does that not cast some significant doubt on the stories themselves?  Here was a man who claimed to be the Messiah, the Son of the living God, whose life was given, the scriptures tell us, for the salvation of the whole world.  Could it have been so impossible to mark the spot of his burial, to remember where it was that the empty tomb was located?  Wouldn’t someone have placed a pile of rocks there?  Or planted tree?  Or drawn a map?

The suspicion is that these things did not happen as the scriptures report them; that if a man named Jesus of Nazareth was crucified outside Jerusalem two thousand years ago, and if his body was placed in a tomb, then the dusty remains of his flesh and bones are lying there now; that the reason we cannot say for certain where the empty tomb of the risen Christ is to be found, is because there is no such thing: no such thing as the empty tomb, no such thing as the Christ, the anointed of God, and no such thing as the Resurrection.

But there is plenty of delicious food to be found in Jerusalem.  And I highly recommend the fresh-squeezed pomegranate juice from street vendors, and I can give you a recommendation for a really good restaurant just outside the Jaffa Gate of the Old City.  But I digress.

Maybe there is another reason that the precise location of the empty tomb of Jesus is in some doubt.  Maybe this question of where exactly Jesus rose from the dead need not undermine faith, but could strengthen it.  Maybe God has not unfolded his plans in such a way as to be successfully litigated with forensic evidence, but has, instead, been at work in subtler, more personal ways.  Maybe it’s a good thing that we don’t know with absolute certainty where the empty tomb of Jesus is, since knowing, or thinking you know, seems to provide Christians with something to fight over, as much as anything else.  And maybe it’s somewhat unimportant to know which of the two contending sites in Jerusalem is the real empty tomb of Jesus.

Because the truth is that there are empty tombs in churches and in homes and in the hearts of God’s people all over the world this morning.  These are the places where Jesus’ rising matters this morning, and every morning.

It’s in our lives, our homes, our church families, after all that death and his accomplices have been at work.

It’s your child who was rushed to the hospital, whose bed you stood by and prayed by and waited by, hoping the doctors were skilled enough that a miracle wouldn’t be needed.

It’s your mother who cannot remember who you are anymore, and who looks at you with a vacant stare.

It’s your sister, your brother who received the diagnosis last week, and who now must decide whether to undergo the misery of a treatment that may or may not provide a cure.

It’s your friend who was in a freak accident and will never walk again.

It’s your beloved whose body has been wracked by the chemo and the radiation, and yet who still doesn’t know if the cancer is gone.

It’s your daughter who lost the pregnancy.

It’s your brother who has been languishing in prison.

It’s your son who refuses to admit he has a problem, refuses to go to AA, refuses to let go of his addiction.

It’s your father who finally died, and whose death and memory has left a hole in your life bigger than any you ever knew he could fill.

Death, disaster, sickness and despair are at work in your life and mine, right here, right now.  We do not need to travel to Jerusalem to find them.  And if we had to bring all that threatens and frightens and condemns us to the empty tomb in a far away place, we could never afford the additional baggage fees.

The Resurrection has not been fixed by God to a tomb in Jerusalem because you and I don’t need a Resurrection that happened once, long ago, in a faraway place.  We need a Resurrection here and now, in our lives, in the things that are killing us even now.  We don’t need to go in search of hope through the winding streets of an ancient city.  We need hope in Philadelphia this morning!

There is a tradition, reported in the scriptures, that says that when Jesus died, the tombs of the dead were opened, and the bodies of the dead were raised, and they walked around and visited their friends and families.  Far-fetched though this tradition may sound, I think it makes sense if we don’t insist on a finding a single empty tomb for Jesus.  I think the dead were making way for Jesus, who was claiming every tomb he could find as his own, and he pushed the bodies of the dead up, out of his way as he came up from their tombs, sharing a measure of his new life with them as he went.

Perhaps you think there is a tomb already prepared for you or for someone you love. Even if you don’t, the time will come when you do, when you realize that the coldness of a tomb lies as close at hand as the next sunrise, and you can’t be sure which will greet you the next morning.  This is the human experience, the reality of our lives.  Which means that the most important tomb this Easter is not either of the ones in Jerusalem that claim to be the tomb of the Savior of the world.  The most important tomb this Easter is the one you have imagined in your mind, that grabs you by the throat and leaves you struggling to catch your breath.

It may not be your own tomb.  It may be the tomb of your spouse, your partner, your parent, or your child.  It is the tomb whose chill you cannot shake, the tomb you never fail to visit in your imagination.  This tomb contains the remains of more than just a body: it holds your hope, your dream, your life in its unforgiving darkness, and although you may try to avoid it with forays into various distractions, this tomb owns your imagination like nothing else, for you are always ready for something to die in it, and to be buried for ever.

I might never see the sign that points to that tomb, the most important tomb of your imagination, the tomb that holds the end of the thing you love.  I might ignore it just as easily as I ignored the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem, and so might everyone else in this church, and everywhere in the world today.  But Jesus will not ignore that tomb.  He will claim it as his own.  He moved into it three days ago, and he has been renovating.

Jesus has pushed everything that could ever die in the tomb of your imagination out of his way, and in the process he has loaned new life to the previous inhabitants of this tomb.  For nothing can die in the presence of this great life.  No tomb can be a final resting place after the Resurrection.  We don’t need to decide which tomb was Jesus’ burial place, because his burial hardly matters – only his rising matters.  And he is risen from every tomb, in every corner of the world, on every Easter, and every day till he claims all creation for himself again.

After this mass is over, like you, I will start thinking about food.  Well, I might start thinking about food before you do, but you take the point.  After church this morning, we will go our ways in search of our Easter brunches, our Easter dinners.  I already have a schedule written down: the ham goes in the oven at 2:30, I put my parents to work at 4. etc, etc.  Just as I was distracted by many things in Jerusalem, and never visited the Garden Tomb, you will be distracted soon enough, and Easter will begin to recede for another year.

But Christ is not through rising from the dead – though he has already accomplished it.  He is rising from every tomb that fills your heart and mine with dread.  Jesus is rising from the dead, indeed he is risen, and it hardly matters which tomb was his before; he has no need of it now, he is risen indeed, Alleluia!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Easter Day 2012

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Impossible Objects

At least two locations in Jerusalem claim to be the Upper Room: the place where Jesus shared his last supper with his disciples, and where the gift of the Eucharist was first shared.  One of those locations is called the Cenacle.  It is the better known of the two, outside the ancient city wall, on Mount Zion.  The other is to be found in the Armenian Quarter of the Old City, where one of the winding, walled streets makes a dogleg of a turn, not too far from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.  A sign announces that you are approaching Saint Mark’s Convent.  Passing through the entrance and the outer courtyard, you go through another set of doors into a small, ornate church, at the back of which is a narrow staircase that leads to the Upper Room.

Except the stairs here don’t lead up; they go down.  Everything in Jerusalem is built on the ruins of something older.  The old Syriac church of Saint Mark is built on the ruins of an older church, an older structure that was destroyed at least once, about 70 AD in the Roman sack of Jerusalem.  Older versions of Jerusalem lie buried beneath the current version – which looks plenty old to me – and so a faithful visitor must now go down a set of stairs to enter the Upper Room.

There is a certain cognitive dissonance to this experience that is hard to escape.  It’s not just that there is almost nothing about the windowless, plain room that suggests it is a holy place; that there are almost no signs and little feeling of sanctity to the place; that the modern electric lights  - Home Depot-style, faux-crystal fixtures that are wired to the ceiling - rob the space of any ambiance.  There is something wrong with the idea of walking downstairs to get to the Upper Room.  You simply feel that you cannot be going to the same place that Jesus and his disciples went.  It feels more like you are entering a kind of M.C.Escher drawing, in which stairs that seem to lead down actually lead up.  But this cannot be.

Indeed, it cannot be.  And the very name for the kind of structures that Escher drew – for instance, stairs that appear to lead down but also go up– the name for this is an “impossible object.”

An impossible object is a 2-dimensional representation that the viewer perceives instantly as a projection of a 3-dimenstional object, although it is not actually geometrically possible for such an object to exist in real space.  Imagine, if you can, those images Escher drew of staircases that seem to lead a person in any and every conceivable direction: up, down, over, and under.  In isolation, any one section of the drawing seems to make sense, but at the connecting points, somehow things go awry, even though it’s hard to say why.  Look at the whole, picture, though, and you can see that there is no up, down, or sideways to it; no clear orientation to ground the viewer; no way to say what’s up and what is down.  An explanation of impossible objects tells us that “in most cases the impossibility becomes apparent after viewing the figure for a few seconds.  However, the initial impression [of possibility] remains even after it has been contradicted.”

All of which leads me to wonder about the Upper Room of tonight’s gospel.  Not just about the precise location of it in Jerusalem, but about what took place there, about the gift that we are told was given, the commandment that was delivered, the example that was made, the lesson we are meant to learn from tonight’s gospel.  Having once walked down a set of stairs to reach the Upper Room, I find myself wondering if the Upper Room is an impossible object?  Are the lessons this gospel seeks to teach us impossible objects?  And if they are, would that mean that the bread and the wine – those crucial gifts of tonight’s celebration – are also impossible objects? 

Or more precisely: the Body and Blood of Jesus that Christians have believed for two millennia are hidden beneath the forms of bread and wine – are these impossible objects that we have allowed ourselves to perceive in such a way that they could not actually exist?  And do we cling to the initial impression of what these elements are, even after that impression has been contradicted by a vast array of evidence in the world?

To put it another way: Is the church’s teaching about tonight – that Jesus gave us the gift of his Real Presence in the bread and the wine of the Last Supper, and that when we pray the prayers, and say the words, and believe with our hearts the things we must pray and say and believe, then he is really, truly among us – is all this just a staircase leading downstairs into a supposedly Upper Room?  A story, whose cognitive dissonance can only be resolved with a willful ignorance, sometimes called faith?

To much of the world, this is how what we do tonight, and every day of the year here at Saint Mark’, looks: like a bunch of people who have been duped into believing that you can walk downstairs to get to the Upper Room; that an Impossible Object is actually the Real Thing.  But what we must remember about tonight is this: that tonight’s Eucharist has been built on the ruins of older Eucharists.  One Mass is built on the bricks of many masses that came before it, even if those bricks were left only for rubble before.

How do we determine whether or not the bread we take and bless and break and share tonight is really Jesus’ Body?  How do we determine if the wine is really his Blood?  We may have to excavate this Eucharist, to dig down to the layers deep below: the older Eucharists this one was built on – which is exactly what the church is inviting us to do tonight.  We dig down past 163 years’ worth of masses right here on this spot, celebrated by my thirteen predecessors, and the men and women who worked with them.  Then we dig down past the colonial Holy Communions, that were probably kept on Christmases and Easters in this city, but not much more than that.

Because this is a holy archaeology, we don’t have to sail the seas to find the fossil record of the masses that prayed for the ends of wars and the well-being of the men and women who fought them.  If we are lucky we will discover the evidence of the masses (though not enough of them) that prayed for the safety of Jews who were being slaughtered in Poland; of masses that beatified Nicholas and Alexandra, that were terrified by the tricoleur, that gave thanks for Columbus’ return, that damned the onslaught of the Moors, that rejoiced at Fra Angelico’s painting, that set the Inquisitor’s imagination aflame, that prompted Francis to stand naked in the square, that crowned Charlemagne, that rang out in the chants of monastic chapels, that fled persecutions, that huddled nervously behind closed doors or in catacombs, that strained to remember what it was exactly Jesus had said, before it was written down.  And, of course, deep beneath the stratified, sometimes ossified layers of all these masses, we get to the wide, wooden boards of a floor in an Upper Room, where the Twelve are reclining around a table with the Rabbi.

It is dim here, so many layers beneath the Mass we began tonight, but there is enough light to see by, and enough quiet to hear by, and to remember what this first Communion was all about: when the Son of the living God, who had been since the world began, came down to this Upper Room, and although he had the power of God, took on himself instead the girdle of service and washed the feet of those he’d called to serve him and his mission.  Down here we can still hear the echo of his ancient words, “This is my Body.  This is my Blood.”  We have had to dig down deep to get to this Upper Room, but we can feel the power of his question reverberating in the dirt and stone around us: “Do you know what I have done to you?”  Do you know?

What he has done is given us these Impossible Objects of his Body and his Blood.  They appear to us with so many dimensions: they remind us of the way he cradled his disciples’ feet in his hands as he washed the dust and the dirt from them.  They bear to us the words of his only commandment: that we love one another just as he loved his disciples.

This scant half-ounce of dry wafer and less than a half-ounce of wine transmit the truth of God’s love: the force that called light from darkness; the covenant that freed a people from their captivity and led them to a promised land; the wisdom and the strength of Solomon; the power that healed the sick, made the lame to walk and the blind to see; the voice of the prophets; the mercy that comforted the imprisoned and those who mourn; the hope that seemed to be buried with Lazarus; the beauty that glowed beneath Magdalene’s curls; the patience and strength of a Cyrenean’s shoulder; the faith of an impetuous fisherman; and the life that seemed to die on the Cross, but that was really gathering strength.  All this in a speck of bread and a drop of wine!

These are Impossible Objects!  They appear to be barely more than 2-dimensional, and we quickly realize that they cannot possibly exist in the way we say they do in real time and real space.  The bread and the wine have not changed; I have no power to turn them into something they are not.  Quickly our minds perceive the contradiction here, and yet somehow the initial impression remains.

Tonight, we are gathered together to remember that an older version of this sacred meal lies beneath the current version (which looks plenty old to so many people).  And that these days, yes, you must go down a set of stairs to reach the Upper Room.

Tonight, we rejoice in that little staircase that leads downstairs to Upper Room.  We delight in the impossibility of such an object as a staircase that could ever lead us to that holy place, that holy time, that holy company, that holy communion. And, more specifically, tonight we rejoice in the Impossible Objects of Christ’s Body and Blood – barely more that 2-dimensional on the altar, it seems; practically less than 2-dimensional to so much of the world that has given up on them. 

These are Impossible Objects: this Body, this Blood.  They cannot possibly be what we say that they are, and when we look closely at them, we see the contradiction, for indeed, they appear to all the world to be nothing more than bread, nothing more than wine.  And yet… the initial impression remains even it after it has been contradicted.  And it does so because of the complicated and beautiful sedimentary layers of all the Eucharists this present one is built upon.  Because since that first Eucharist all those centuries ago, men and women have held out their hands, opened their mouths, and been fed.

Tonight we have walked toward this ancient staircase that we are told leads to an Upper Room, even though any idiot can see that it leads down, where it can only get dark, and where we are sure to encounter no one but the dead. 

But we go downstairs in faith; we taste, and see: we arise, and we live!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Maundy Thursday 2012

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia