Doubting Thomas

You may listen to Father Mullen's sermon here.

A long time ago back in Palestine land,

was the death of a man on a Cross.

And they buried the chap in the dirt and the sand,

‘neath a stone that was covered in moss.

The disciples dismayed; they were scared to their wits,

and they hid behind doors out of fear.

There they huddled together like a gaggle of twits,

not suspecting their Savior was near.

There was one of them who you’ll remember by name,

“Doubting Thomas” he’s called by us all.

He’s been branded for ever with that odd kind of fame,

That reminds us his faith was too small.

For he was not there at that magical hour

when although all the doors, they were locked,

Jesus rose from the grave, and to show them his power,

came to visit, which left them all shocked.

“Peace be with you,” he said, and he breathed on them then,

thereby sharing the great Holy Ghost.

“Give the gift of forgiveness to women and men”

said their Savior, their Lord, and their Host.

How they murmured and wondered, how their sleep was disturbed,

They were ten, minus Judas and Tom.

And their thoughts were confused, and their whole lives perturbed;

this new peace had not brought them much calm.

The would meet all together, they would talk and they’d pray,

hid away in a dark, secret room,

they went over and over details of that day,

which had ended in tears at the tomb.

And they marveled together, they wondered in awe,

how he’d risen from death, as he’d said,

and almost they couldn’t believe what they saw,

for they truly had thought he was dead.

Eventually Tom was together with them,

and the news was just too good to keep:

that God, in his wisdom, had not condemned

to death the Great Shepherd of sheep:

“We have seen the Lord Jesus!” his friends told him that day,

though to Tom this was hard to believe.

“It can’t be,” said the man in his own doubting way,

prepared only and ever to grieve.

“Let me see the deep prints where they drove the nails in,

let me thrust my own hand in his side.

Don’t you know that I loved him as though he were kin,

don’t you know that for three days I cried

out of sadness for all that we seem to have lost,

out of fear that it never was true,

out of horror to know that his life was the cost

of the lessons he taught me and you.”

“Get a grip,” said his friends, Peter and Paul,

“Get a grip,” said James and said John.

“Don’t you know that he’s come to appear to us all?

Wait and see, for he’ll be here anon.”

It was not long thereafter, when they gathered, those ten,

That the Lord came to be with his friends.

And Thomas was there, to make eleven of them,

and so this was his chance for amends.

“Peace be with you,” said Jesus as he entered inside

by the door that he never unlatched.

“Stretch out your hand, feel my hands and my side,

you’ll see that the wounds are un-patched.”

Then famously Thomas did fall to his knees,

with a gasp, and a shout to exclaim,

“My Lord and my God!  Great Jehovah!  Big Cheese!”

or something a tad less profane.

“Doubting Thomas,” said Jesus, “you’ve seen and believe,

let me say, I don’t want to be mean,

but blest is he who the truth can perceive

though my hands and my side have not seen.”

When we hear this old story the way it’s been told,

and the words that to Thomas were said,

the lesson, we think, is to hear Jesus scold

him for failing to get through his head

the good news that his Lord and his Master had ris’n

from the grave, ‘neath the dust and the stone;

that Death, though he tried, could not fashion a prison

that would keep Christ from claiming his throne.

But perhaps there’s a lesson that’s still yet more pressing

in this story for Christians to glean.

Perhaps it’s the message of Jesus’s blessing

for believers who never have seen

the prints of the nails, or the wound in his side:

the evidence of our Lord’s death.

As though proof was the best thing that he could provide,

and not the Spirit he gave with his breath.

But that Spirit has carried the message of love

to all the four corners of earth:

from Jerusalem, winging its way like a dove,

as far as both Philly and Perth…

I can tell you, I’ve seen with my very own eyes

the power of our risen Lord.

How it lifts human hearts as high as the skies,

how it vanquishes even the sword.

It’s a power that’s given from way up on high,

it’s a force that can’t be disguised;

and it signals that Jesus, the Master, is nigh,

and it’s given to all the baptized.

Which is why we bring children, with fathers and moms,

with godparents, uncles, and aunts,

after reading the lessons and singing the psalms

to the water that’s poured into fonts,

where the Spirit, who to those first ten men was given,

is shared with our own children here:

a sign and a symbol that all is forgiven,

and a promise to chase away fear

of everything evil that makes our faith falter,

with grace and with power divine,

that same grace that leads us all to the altar

to share holy Bread, holy Wine.

And when in our faith we have been through the waters

of Baptism, and of new life,

we give thanks for the gift to our sons and our daughters

that promises fin’ly the strife

is o’er, the great battle won, and the Lord,

in his glory has rose

from the dead for all people, the great human horde:

we are all of us, those he has chose.

And sometimes it may be that you start to think

that your faith is too tiny, too small.

And you’ll fear that your heart is beginning to shrink,

and you’ll doubt that God loves you at all.

You’ll think back on Thomas, and remember the scolding;

in the midst of your doubt you might dare

to fall on your knees, and right there start folding

your fingers together in prayer.

And the answer you’ll hear to your prayer that hour

won’t be one that is mean or unkind,

“Blest are you, my dear child,” says the voice full of pow’r,

“Blest in heart, and in soul, and in mind.

“Oh I know that you think that your faith is minute,

Oh I know you think it’s not enough;

But even small faith can bear you much fruit,

and I’d say you’ve got the right stuff.”

The lesson today is of blessing, not curses,

and if I had bells I would chime it;

but since all I have is these words and these verses,

the best I could do was to rhyme it.

So when you feel low, you’ve got nothing but doubt

and you’re certain that you have been messing

life up, and you think that you just want to pout,

then remember this little blessing:

Blest are you, my belovéd, my child, my friend,

blest are you, my dear jelly bean,

for you have had faith, and on God you depend,

even though with your eyes you’ve not seen.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

15 April, 2012

Saint Mark’s Church

On the occasion of the baptism of

Charles Frederick Reinhardt, Jr.

Easter Planning

They had planned it all so carefully. How could they not have planned it all so carefully – the women didn’t have anything else to do on that grim, gray Sabbath. And going over in their minds exactly what they had to do as soon as the sun went down prevented them from going over anything else in their minds. Thoughts of spices – Which to buy? How many pounds? And which oils would they need? – crowded out the sounds and the smells of the betrayal and the beatings and the blood. Thoughts of which vendors might be open when the Sabbath had passed helped to push out the memories of those Roman soldiers playing a pavement game for Jesus’ robe while Jesus himself hung painfully exposed and drowning in his own weight. Thoughts and plans gave them a sense of purpose, gave them enough rhythm to keep their broken hearts beating, kept them just busy enough that there was hardly any chance that they would remember the stillness – that horrifying stillness – just after Jesus breathed his last…and just before his mother cried out as if a sword had pierced her own soul too. They had planned so carefully. It was just what they did as women, as disciples. It was just what they did to keep the tears away.

And so when the sun set they were off, walking quickly to the market, faces wrapped in their shawls to avoid pestering questions and pity-filled glances. They bought what they needed, not even needing to haggle over the price, as the man who sold them the spices was doubly generous, charging them very little and also never, not once, meeting their eyes, or asking how they were, or saying that he was sorry. Thank God. They had no time for sorry, no time to think about how they were. They had a plan, the Marys and Salome. They had a plan and nowhere in that plan did it say, “Now the women who loved Jesus, who gave up everything to follow him, who knew the ring of his laugh and the power of his presence, now these women fall to pieces.” No, there was no time, no room for that. They had work to do.            

They didn’t sleep that night. How could they, with all of their plans whipping around in their minds. When the solid blackness outside their windows finally began to soften to gray, they arose, dressed, and, without a word, hoisted all of their purchases onto their shoulders and began to walk, step by step, to the tomb. Along the way, they worried with each other about the one part of the plan that they had not been able to work out: the stone. There was that giant disc of a stone rolled into a slot to cover the open doorway. It was mammoth, heavy enough to keep out animals…and, they feared, three slight women. But there was nothing to be done about it; they would just have to figure it out when they got there.

By the time they arrived at the tomb, the sun had just begun to kiss the tips of the grass with silver light. The place looked so different than it had on Friday afternoon. The hot, dry dust had stilled, the air felt cool and damp, and the world was entirely hushed. And the stone, the giant stumbling block of the stone, had been rolled back already, the entrance to the tomb stood open, quiet and inviting. Without a word, they set down their packs and stepped into the cool chamber, so new and clean...and so empty. No body. No blood. No plan. Just a young man, sitting in a white robe and speaking to them, “Do not be amazed; you are looking for Jesus. But he has risen. Look at the floor, you see that he is no longer here. He is already gone, gone ahead to the Galilee. Women, go, and tell his disciples what you have seen and heard here.”

They look at the young man, dazzling in his white cloth and white smile. They look at the floor, bare except for a linen shroud tossed aside into the corner, and look at each other with wide eyes. Then they look at their carefully planned purchases sitting in packs outside the door, and they realize their mistake. For all of their thinking, all of their organizing yesterday in the darkness of the Sabbath, they had forgotten something critical. They forgot that Jesus had told them that this would happen – that he would be killed, and that he would be raised on the third day. In all of their planning, they had never once imagined that he might actually have been speaking the truth. They had never planned that they might not find him here, and so they have brought entirely the wrong thing. They have brought only their sorrow when they should have brought their hope. They have brought spices to anoint the dead when they should have brought walking shoes to follow the living, to run after the risen Jesus wherever he would lead them.

I wonder if this is part of why they ran away. Maybe it was not so much because the young man scared them; after all, in this story there is no appearance like lightning, no rumble of earthquake. No, there was just this – just a man telling them that Jesus had risen, and the simple truth that they were utterly unprepared for that. They had had no idea what had been coming. Jesus had actually been raised from the dead. He was actually the Messiah, the anointed one of God. The world had actually changed. He was risen; the resurrection was true! And trembling and astonishment came upon the women, and they fled, and they said not a thing to anyone, because this truth was simply terrifying.

Now we know that the women must have said something eventually – the Gospel of Mark was written down, after all, by a community of disciples whose whole lives had changed because of the resurrection. Mark even provides us with some alternate endings to his book, sort of the director’s cut of the Gospel, where Jesus appears to the disciples and tells them how to live their faith in this post-resurrection world. But the oldest ending of Mark is this one, where the women are shaken to their core and run away. Which means that the oldest editions of Mark’s Gospel thought that this ending had something to teach us, something to show us that could help us to live out our own lives more fully and more faithfully.

Here is the question that I think this shorter ending of Mark asks: what are you and I planning for? Are we planning for a world in which Christ is palpable and present, or are we planning for a world where he feels mostly absent? Do we expect to find Christ risen and thriving and moving ahead of us, or do we imagine that actually, he might be dead? When we leave this church building tonight, do we expect to find traces of his presence everywhere, shining imprints of where he has been, blessings he has bestowed, healings he has offered? Or do we imagine that at some point the glory of this night will wear off, that when the incense has washed out of our clothes and the traces of wax have been peeled off of our fingertips, we will once again find ourselves looking at an empty world where Christ has little to do with our day-to-day living?       

You can see why it makes so much sense that the women ran away afraid. Because the idea that something real happened in that tomb, the idea that something that true, that powerful, that generous had happened was – at first, at least – a little more than they could handle, just as the idea that something that true, that real, and that generous is present in our own lives can also be more than we can handle. Sometimes it’s just easier to plan as if Christ won’t be there. You know what this feels like. We’ve all done it. We wake up, stretch, breathe in, and imagine our day as if our own power and planning can make the whole thing happen. We work hard to accept that there are just some things we have to handle on our own. We pray, of course, and invite God to abide in our busy minds, but when he doesn’t always show up at the time or in the way that we want him too, we aren’t entirely surprised. We accept; we sit in the darkness of our own lives and fill up our minds and hearts with thoughts and plans that help us to feel like we can actually be in control, that our thoughts and plans are actually the most important thing that we do.

But these holy women remind you and me not to sell ourselves – or our God – so short. There is grace to be had in this world. We reaffirm this every time we take communion, every time we welcome a new sister in Christ like we welcomed little Stephanie this evening. This is the truth – the tomb is empty, and the world is full. So let’s be ready. Let’s bring our walking shoes, bring our hopes and our expectations; let’s plan on finding Christ when we are in this place and when we leave this place, let’s look for where he might lead us, where he might have gone before us, the ways he has invited us to follow him. Let’s plan to find Christ in our lives and in our society, and then let’s be sure to bring the right stuff with us to follow him – our hearts and souls and minds, our love, our hope, our new life in him.  

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

The Great Vigil of Easter, April 7, 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

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