Job's Grandchildren

You may listen to Father Mullen's sermon here.

It’s a good thing that Job never heard the story of Jesus calming the storm.

Remember that Job, who was a blameless and upright man, had lost everything: his seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen, and five hundred she-asses, and very many servants to marauders.  And then his seven sons and three daughters were killed when, while they were eating and drinking together as a family at their eldest brothers’ home, the house collapsed and killed them all, leaving Job bereft.  Robbed of his wealth and his family, a storm at sea would have been a welcome distraction to Job.  The violent hailstorm that tore through Philadelphia the other night would have seemed like a bright moment beneath the dark skies of Job’s life.

Job, of course, is a stand-in for anyone who suffers – and especially for those whose afflictions are inexplicable and unfair.  His life is the embodiment of the ancient question: Why do bad things happen to good people?  And his story, as it is told in the Bible, resolutely refuses to provide an answer to that question.

Its climax comes when after sitting through the lengthy diatribes of his friends, Job hears the voice of God speak to him from the whirlwind, of God’s own awesome power, and knowledge, and wisdom.

“Where were you, little man,” God sneers,

“when I laid the foundations of the earth?

Have you commanded the morning since your days began,

and caused the dawn to know it place?

Have you entered the storehouses of the snow?

Who has cleft a channel for the rain,

and a way for the thunderbolt?

Can you bind the chains of Pleiades,

of loose the cords of Orion?

Do you give the horse his might?

Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars,

and spreads his wings toward the south?

Is it at your command that the eagle mounts up,

and makes his nest on high?

Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty? 

He who argues with God, let him answer it.”

This is a response, of course, to the question of why bad things happen to good people, but it is no answer.

The story does tell us that Job was given seven new sons and three new daughters, and that he had grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren.  The story does not tell us anything at all about the latter generations of Job, but I think we actually know a great deal about them.

I think we have been hearing about the children of the latter generations of Job in the news these past weeks.  I think some of them have been testifying in court, as they choke back tears, about their suffering at the hands of an abuser.

In another courtroom, we have been hearing about how the church failed to protect children in her care, and how her priests used them for their pleasure.

Elsewhere, there is a four year old child, who was diagnosed with a rare brain tumor, and whose parents are now numbering his days.

There is a man who is burying his father this weekend long before it was time to do so.

There are girls who are being sold into sexual slavery somewhere in the world today without any idea of the misery that awaits them.

There are mothers who cannot scrape together another enough food in the refugee camp to keep their children healthy and alive for another week.

There are families who are trying to plan right now for what it will be like when Dad is gone, and wondering if he will make it through the summer.

There are children who are being diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes, whose parents are trying to figure out how their lives have now been changed for ever.

There are families who have been counting the weeks of unemployment as they go by, and wondering what will happen when the checks stop coming but still there is no work.

There is a road in Virginia that a couple will not drive down, since it passes the tree that marks the spot where the ambulance took their son’s body away, when the tree would not yield to his car late one night.

There is an altar over there, vested with a quilt that reminds us of those taken from this parish before doctors knew how to treat AIDS.

There are bodies, or pieces of bodies, still being shipped in flag-draped boxes to an Air Force base not too far from here, from a war no one is very interested in anymore.

These are the latter generations of Job.  These are families who, not long ago, were just eating and drinking together, and whose lives collapsed around them, crushing them, robbing them of whatever joys they had.  It’s true that the Lord restored the fortunes of Job, but he gave no guarantees to his descendants.  And we are all the latter generations of Job: all contending with the same question: Why do bad things happen to good people?

It’s a good thing that Job never heard the story of Jesus calming the storm.

What is a storm on the Sea of Galilee to Job or to his latter generations?   How can the disciples who are with Jesus sound like anything but pathetic whingers to those who have experienced the sufferings of the latter generations of Job?  A strong swimmer could probably make it to shore from almost anywhere in the midst of that lake.

It is telling that nowhere in the Bible – not even in the one book of it that spends pages and pages and pages exploring the question – is the answer given to that old question: Why do bad things happen to good people?  There is only the whirlwind, and the voice that speaks from it: “Gird up your loins like a man: I will speak to you, and you shall answer me!”

I cannot tell if the winds that stir up the waters of Galilee come from that same whirlwind, but I suspect they do.  Even the breezes that fill the sails of the boats on the lake, I suppose, come from the same source – from the same Spirit who once brooded over the face of the waters that would eventually reveal the lake we often call a sea.  I know that a voice does not often speak from the whirlwind.  It’s own lingering winds speak in mostly softer tones now, even when the weather is rough, leaving so much more open to interpretation.  And leaving the big question still unanswered.  Responded to, but fundamentally unanswered.  God is unwilling to make his ways known to us in so many things, and certainly in this – one of the deepest and most confounding mysteries of life.

But something did change when the disciples found themselves frightened in the boat that day, when the windstorm arose, and still the Lord was dozing in the bow, and they shook him and accused him: “Don’t you care that the wind and waves are beating us, that we are soaked and taking on water?  Don’t you see how frightened we are, and don’t you care?

The wind was right there, and it was the perfect opportunity for him to use it as his own megaphone; to speak through it so that they could be sure not to miss a word he said.  He could have taught them a lesson that day and put them back in their places.  He surely knew the lines:

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?

Have you entered into the springs of the sea,

or walked in the recesses of the deep?

Can you send forth lightnings,

that they may go and say to you, ‘Here we are’?

Is the wild ox willing to serve you? 

Will he spend the night at your crib?

Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty?”

Oh, he knew the lines, and could have recited them with authority from the prow of the boat.  What right had they to call on him, to accuse him of not caring?  Had they not yet guessed at his fate?  Had they no hint of his mission?  Did it never dawn on them that this would not end well for him?  Had they no faith?

But he did not use the wind for his voice, though it was his breath that gave the wind its life, its force, its power.  He did not rebuke them much at all.  He only challenged their fear.  And instead of speaking through the might wind, he spake to it:  “Peace.  Be still.”

These words still provided only a response to their fear; it was no answer to it.

We latter children of the latter generations of Job, know our fair share of fear and misery.  God has not yet put a stop to it.  God has not yet given us an answer as to why it happens thus.  But he has given us something new.  He has spoken differently with the wind, and his word brings new promise:  Peace.  Be still.

Bad things still happen to good people: this is as true as it has ever been.  The latter generations of Job, like our own, have known suffering and sadness and misery and pain.  But the wind no longer scolds us to keep us in our place.  Instead there is a new command given to the wind that so frightens us: Peace.  Be still.

And it has been so long since we knew stillness or peace, that this seems like a very odd response to our fears, and certainly no answer about all the bad things that happen to good people.

But we find that as prayers go, this one – built on his command to the wind and the waves – serves us well.  Peace.  Be still.  And we think that in the calm we find faith… which is exactly what we need, and is our rightful inheritance, as the latter generations of Job, who was a blameless and upright man, and whose fortunes were restored by the God who made him, and who never stopped loving him.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

24 June 2012

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Growth Happens

You may listen to Mother Erika's sermon here.

Several years ago, the BBC released an epic documentary series entitled “Planet Earth.” This production was the culmination of five years of extraordinarily intense work. Film crews traveled to the ends of the earth with high definition camera equipment in hand to record some of the rarest and most beautiful sights on the planet. They sat in blinds for months to capture the mating dance of a shy jungle bird, they weathered storms and ice to get just a few moments of footage of the rare snow leopard, they dangled out of helicopters to film enormous flocks of birds as they flashed and wheeled across the sky. The series is truly stunning stuff. Like everything that the BBC does, it is, in a word, brilliant.

One of the most memorable scenes for me was of a dark, lush South American rainforest. A giant tree has just crashed to the ground, ripping open a bright hole of sunlight in the thick canopy of the jungle, and what happens next is breathtaking. In seamless, fluid, time-lapse photography, the film shows us what the narrator calls the “race to the light.” Suddenly awakened by this shocking stream of sunlight, plants of all shapes and sizes start growing as fast as they possibly can, pushing up slender stems from the rich black earth, stretching and reaching as far as they can, wrapping long tendrils around tree trunks and pushing their fat leaves in the faces of other plants that are trying to grow just as fast as they are. It is an explosion of green, of plants yearning for the sun above their heads, longing to be the first green and growing thing to expand into that lone hole of light that beckons from above. And then, just as suddenly as it began, the growth stops. The hole is filled, the sun blocked out by all of the new growth, and the forest resumes its natural cycle of birth and death, of breathing out and breathing in.

It is a remarkable, stimulating, moving scene of Creation at work, a reminder that even with only the tiniest window of hope, even in a fierce plant-eat-plant world, growth happens. The conditions may be harsh, the moment of opportunity may be brief, but growth happens. We see this all the time in the city. Grass winds its way into the tiniest crack in the sidewalk and shoots up into the sun; flowers planted right on the sidewalk’s edge turn bright faces to the sky and hold on for dear life as they are whipped about by each passing truck; whole forests of majestic weeds tower in impossibly tight alleyways. With the smallest of opportunities, the narrowest of constraints, growth happens. And this, Jesus says, is just like the kingdom of God.

The kingdom of God is like a man who does only one little thing and then reaps a bumper crop of wheat. He scatters seed on the ground and then basically does nothing. He doesn’t hoe, he doesn’t water, he doesn’t fertilize or clear weeds or prune or pinch or run to Home Depot to get Turf Builder or Miracle Grow or some other Scott’s brand concoction. He just scatters the seed and waits. He sleeps, he rises, the sun goes up, the sun goes down, he breathes in, he breathes out…and growth happens. The seed becomes a sprout, and then the sprout becomes a stalk, and then the stalk begins to bear fruit until there is a full head of grain bursting and ready to be harvested. The man has no idea how. He has done just one small thing, and growth happens anyway. And this, we are told, is like the kingdom of God.

The kingdom of God is like the tiniest of seeds that grows into the heartiest of bushes. The mustard seed is so small that when it is cast into the ground it looks less planted and more swallowed up by the earth. The mustard seed is so small that Mark tells us it is the smallest of all seeds even though it really isn’t – but that’s his point. It’s so small it should be the smallest seed on the earth; it’s so fragile, so seemingly insignificant, and yet when it grows it becomes a full, vibrant, life-giving bush, where birds find home and safety and a place to sing their songs. This sanctuary begins with just one small thing, and growth happens anyway. And this, Jesus says, is just like the kingdom of God. 

The kingdom of God was ushered into this world as one, tiny, vulnerable, seemingly insignificant thing – an infant boy child born of a poor virgin in the backwater of Bethlehem. But this child sprouted and grew into a man, and began scattering seeds all over Judea – “Repent for the kingdom of God is at hand.” “Your sins are forgiven you; rise up and walk.” “Do this in remembrance of me.” His disciples planted their own seeds in the offering of their teaching and their preaching and their very lives. Then Paul planted, Apollos watered, and Timothy and Barnabas and Lois and Phoebe strew their own seeds and by all of the saints through all of the years, God gave the growth. And so from this one God-made-man, this one moment, the kingdom of God has grown into a forest of mercy and love and truth. It towers around us now, with growth as majestic and as immovable as a mountain. The kingdom spreads out beneath us thick as a jungle, with green growing things of all shapes and smells, each succulent and bearing fruit. It runs to the very ends of the earth, so that each shrub and bush has room to fan out roots in rich earth, room to find a window of light open to the sun, room for birds to nest in its branches. The kingdom breathes in and breathes out all around us, night after night, day after day. The earth is filled with glory of God as the trees cover the forest and as the waters cover the sea.

And the kingdom is not finished growing. The final harvest has not yet come. You and I stand in a long line of saints and sowers, each of us charged to plant whatever seeds we have, no matter their size. There is room yet in the kingdom for what we have to give, for our own seeds of Gospel proclamation – what we do and what we don’t do; what we say and how we say it; who we choose to embrace and how; how we give of our time, how we spend our money, how we treat our bodies, how we care for Creation, how we  pray, how we reach out to one another, how we look to the poor and the lonely and the sick and the prisoner and the persecuted and the voiceless, how we “proclaim God’s truth with boldness and minister his justice with compassion.” These are the kinds of seeds that you and I can plant, and tiny or not, God will use them to grow a bush, a tree, a forest, a kingdom.

So it turns out, somewhat surprisingly, that today’s parables are not just about planting and growing. They are not just about size and production and harvest. They are also, most profoundly, about fear, about how you and I need have no fear for the kingdom of God or for our place in it. The kingdom will grow, because when God is involved, growth happens. We need not fear that our words are too silly, too insignificant, too small. We just need to plant them anyway, and let God grow them how he will. We need not fear that our ideas aren’t thriving and will never come to anything. We just need to wait and watch as the sower did, paying attention to them as they germinate in the darkness, noticing what they look like when they begin to sprout, and keeping a close eye on them when they begin to bear fruit. And we need not fear even when we see some part of the kingdom topple over, because each such fall leaves behind it a hole where the Son can pour through, an open space for new growth that sprouts and dances and bends into the light. We need not fear. Growth happens, for God gives the growth.

What would you do if you had no fear? What seeds would you plant if you had no fear that they would take root and grow? How would you live if you wholly trusted God to grow good things? Imagine what you would do, what you would say, who you would feed, what good news you would share if you had no fear – and then ask yourself why not? Why not grab your seeds and go? Go out into the city and plant your seeds with boldness. Keep watch for them to grow and bear fruit. And while you’re out there, take a good look at the kingdom of God that is already green and lush and growing all around you. And give thanks. Because it’s a wonderful, beautiful, grace-filled and glorious jungle out there. 

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

17 June 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Corpus Christi

You may listen to Father Mullen's sermon here.

A few years before he took his own life, the American author, David Foster Wallace delivered a college commencement address that has since become rather famous.  In it he said this 

…in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism.  There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships.  The only choice we get is what to worship.  And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship... is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.  If you worship money and things… then you will never have enough….  It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly.  And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.[i]

Wallace went on to make an interesting claim:

…the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

Now, we could debate whether or not the question of sin is only semantics, here, but that’s a discussion for another day.  If you agree with Wallace, as I do, that “everybody worships,” then the only question is: What are you going to worship?  And the next question is: Are you going to worship the things that eat you alive: power, money, beauty, youth?  Or are you going to worship something that gives you the freedom, as Wallace put it, that “involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.”

Earlier in his speech, the writer had deployed a little parable-like story in service to his discussion:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

Wallace would go on to say that we are prone to miss the whole world around us, to fail to notice that we are swimming in water, or even to regard the most elemental realities of our lives and the world around us.  He said that it is easy for us to get trapped inside the “tiny skull-sized kingdoms” of our own heads.  And he foreshadowed his own death as he talked about the challenge of “making it to 30, or maybe even 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head.”  The latter being a milestone he prevented himself from reaching, albeit, without the use of a firearm.

In the church, we are as prone as everyone else in the world to fall back on our default settings, to take things for granted, and to fail to understand something even as basic as the environment in which we live, the air we breath, the water through which we swim, the food we eat.

In the church we are as prone as everyone else to the temptation to worship the things that will eat us alive.  You have only to pick up the papers, or pay attention to the kinds of things that are happening in other denominations and our own at this very time to see that this is true.

In the church, we say that we are born in the water when we are baptized, but we then go quickly about the business of losing the memory and the meaning of that water.  Having once been dipped in pools of the stuff at our baptisms, that we say gave us new life and that promises us entry in to the life of the world to come, we can just as easily as the next fish turn to our neighbor in the pew and ask, “What the hell is water?”

No one will ever know why that hugely talented and thoughtful writer took his own life.  He was fighting severe depression.  And what can we do but surmise that he could find nothing worth worshiping in the world, and the water, so to speak, overwhelmed him.  In any case, I trust that God now cares for him and has shown him new light and new life.

Thank God, the water does not overwhelm most of us.  But it laps at our thighs and our buttocks; it creeps up to our armpits, and sometimes we find that we have to spit it out, as we fight to keep our heads above it.

So much in life gets ruined.  I found this to be true in the most mundane way not long ago when I wanted to make shortcakes for strawberry shortcake.  I reached up into my cupboard for the box of Bisquick – which is a blessing of untold measure in this world.  I opened the box and peeked inside, because I had a hunch that I was in for trouble – the box had been there, opened, for quite some time, since I last made shortbread or pancakes or anything else you make with Bisquick.

Sure enough, on examination, I could see that the Bisquick mix was speckled with the tiny black polka-dots of what are sometimes called flour beetles or weevils.  So the box had to be thrown out (which is a waste).  And it was a busy day; people were coming over to dinner, and I was running late, as usual.  The strawberries hadn’t even been washed and trimmed yet, but now I had to go out and get a new box of Bisquick.  And even though this was a mundane thing, it just made me think of how easily everything is ruined: all our plans, our schedules, and the cakes we mean to bake, so to speak.

And of course, it’s not like it’s only the Bisquick.  The same thing has happened with rice, and with sugar at various points.  And, I have finally begun keeping the flour in an air-tight container, but who knows if that will actually work; the flour has gotten ruined before: it could happen again.

And of course, it’s not like it’s only the things in the cupboard.  It’s how easily everything else in life gets ruined.  I have my list; you have yours – lists of things that have gotten ruined in our lives.  Let’s not argue over whose list is longer.

Things fall apart, remember. 

And as long as things are falling apart and everything gets ruined, I am likely to rely on the default settings of the way I respond to the world around me.  Which means that I am likely to mistakenly believe that the Bisquick was important, and that my powerlessness to keep it bug-free, or to produce strawberry shortcake, apparently effortlessly at the end of the meal – that these were important too.  What am I worshiping here?  Betty Crocker?  Who knows?

But the truth remains that things pile up in life – things far more important than the Bisquick.  And as they do, they seem to press against your chest – or if you want to stick with the fish metaphor, against your gills, making it hard to breathe, hard to swim through the day to day waters of life.  And you could be forgiven for beginning to think the way the Israelites thought when they were wandering in the desert – Why has God put us here, if only to kill us slowly?  If only to starve us to death in the desert?

And if you happen to go to church, as everything gets ruined in the world, and as everything falls apart around you, and as you feel the pressure mounting against your chest, against your gills.  And it’s harder and harder to swim, and you are not sure why you have been put into the world, just to swim meaninglessly amongst all the other fish…

… if you happen to go to church you might find that you are in an antique building surrounded by antique people singing antique music to an antique God.  And should you be unlucky enough to be there for the sermon, you could be congratulated, in many cases, for choosing to snooze rather than walking out in protest or boredom.

But by God’s grace, maybe, just maybe, you would stay long enough to toddle up to the altar rail with all the other fish, and to open your puckered lips for the morsel of food that is distributed there.  And although the little wafer resembles fish food at least as much as it resembles bread, maybe, just maybe, you will hear the words that the priest says as he or she presses it into your hands or onto your tongue: “The Body of Christ.”  And maybe, by God’s grace, at that moment, everything else would fall away from your consciousness, and you would just hear those words echoing in your ears as your saliva and the wine begin to dissolve the dry wafer in your mouth.  And maybe it will occur to you that everybody worships.  And you will ask yourself what you have been worshiping.  And you will ask yourself whether or not you have been worshiping things that eat you alive.

And it’s not much in the way of mental gymnastics for you to begin to see that here you have found an object of worship who prefers to feed you than to eat you alive.  And to feed you with his own self – his own Body, his own Blood, which, though mysterious, strikes you as intimate, as loving, as somehow able to save you and at least some of the things that have been ruined, some of what’s fallen apart in the world.

And it might be the case that when you get up from your knees, and turn to make your way back to your pew, and the unremarkable taste and texture of the bread you just swallowed, the wine you just sipped is already disappearing… it might be that you begin to see the world ever so slightly differently.  It might be that you begin to think to yourself, “This is water, this is water,” as you become aware of the world around you in a new way, rejoicing to think that it is all somehow the work of God’s fingers – just as you are.  And it occurs to you how marvelous it is that there is something to worship – someone to worship – who will not eat you alive, but who prefers to feed you with his Body and Blood.

Because you know what it is like to be eaten alive in this world by all that invites you to chase after money and power and looks and youth.  But here, in this somewhat antique setting, you find a God who wants to feed you, and who wants to do it more or less for free.

He wants to nourish you: body and soul.  He wants to heal everything that is broken, bind up everything that has splintered, restore everything that is ruined, and fix everything that has fallen apart in your life.  For he knows what it is like to swim in this water.  He knows how easily everything is ruined.  And he knows that this is not how it was meant to be.  He wants to feed you with a food that cannot spoil, and to give you a life that cannot be taken away from you, even when your life on this earth comes to an end.

All of which sounds foolish if you are still determined to worship the things that will eat you alive, and go on living your life oblivious even to the water through which you swim.

Or, you could worship something that gives you the freedom, as Wallace put it, that “involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.”  All of which is pretty good description of a life fed by the gifts of Christ’s Body and Blood.

This is water, this life you and I are living.  This is water.  This is water.  It can kill you, or it can give you life.  It can drown you, or it can quench your thirst.  Deciding what you worship plays a big role in determining which it’s going to be.

And you can decide to worship the things that will eat you alive.  People have been worshiping such gods for a long, long time.  Or you can decide to worship the God who feeds you with his own Body, as he makes all things new.

And you may begin to discover that the water is fine.  And then, you may begin to live.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Solemnity of Corpus Christi, 2012

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

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[i] David Foster Wallace, “This Is Water”, A Commencement Speech give at Kenyon College, 2005, published by Little Brown & Co., New York, 2009