A Change You Can Believe In

There is hardly a more tantalizing figure in the whole of the Bible than that of Salome. The alluring young woman who dances for her stepfather the king and tricks him into giving her the head of John the Baptist on a platter has captivated the minds of painters and poets for centuries. Artists have drawn her again and again: dancing with long, flowing hair dressed in long, flowing veils; or smoldering with wily, wicked eyes; or gazing down at her gruesome prize with a strange, vacant smile. Authors and composers have written her either as a hapless innocent trapped by her scheming mother or as furious woman scorned, who lashes out at John the Baptist because he will not love her. Choreographers have fashioned their own versions of her infamous dance, usually with hearty helping of sensual looks from beneath lowered lashes and sultry poses in true Walk-Like-An-Egyptian fashion. Recently, she has even shown up as a character in the HBO series True Blood, where she is imagined as a centuries-old, supernatural creature of darkness. But whether portrayed as a victim or a viper…or a vampire…Salome has always been a siren, drawing our attention again and again, taking center stage and refusing to let us look anywhere else.

Salome is such an enticing figure that it is easy to forget that she is not the central character of this Gospel story. She really has only a supporting role; she is so unimportant, in fact, that Mark the Evangelist doesn’t even bother to get her name right, mistakenly calling her Herodias, which is actually her mother’s name. We know her real name, Salome, not from the Bible, but from the writings of the secular historian Josephus. Of course, we should cut Mark a little slack on the name issue, because the first-century Herodians have one of the most twisted and tangled family trees in history. Herodias is Herod the Great’s granddaughter, who first marries Herod the Great’s son, Herod Philip (who is, that’s right, her own uncle), and, then, upon Herod Philip’s death, remarries his brother, named Herod Antipas, who is also her uncle. Thank God Herodias herself thought a little outside the box when it came to baby names.

But her baby, her daughter, no matter her name and no matter how tantalizing her character might be, is not the central figure in this story. The main character here is not Salome, or her mother Herodias; it is not really even John the Baptist, despite the fact that part of the point of story is to explain John’s death. No, the lead character of this story is, somewhat surprisingly, Herod himself. The entire story centers on Herod – his perspective, his actions, his feelings. We hear that Herod is worried about this Jesus he’s been hearing so much about, guessing – wrongly – that he is some strangely recent reincarnation of John the Baptist, whom Herod himself has just had killed. We learn that Herod had actually liked listening to John the Baptist while he was alive, even if his words had confused and frightened him. We see that when John had denounced Herod’s pretzel of a family tree, Herod had tried to protect him from his own vengeful wife by throwing him in the relative safety of prison. We sense Herod’s insane desire for his stepdaughter and his intense frustration when he realized how he had been duped. Throughout this entire passage, it is Herod we come to know best, Herod’s perspective, Herod’s feelings, Herod’s actions. Herod is far, far from heroic, but he is the hero – the deeply flawed, deeply confused, deeply sinful hero – of this story.

But why in the world is this story so much about Herod? Why does Mark present this story from his point of view? Why not use John’s point of view – after all, he’s a character that we actually care about. Why not describe John’s long wait in the dark dampness of the prison, his prayers, his consolation, his courage in continuing to proclaim God’s truth to Herod’s power? Why tell us so much about Herod if he is such an anti-hero? The answer to this question, I believe, lies in the verses of Mark’s Gospel that bookend this story. Just before this passage, Mark describes Jesus’ calling of the twelve and sending them out in pairs to proclaim the message of repentance and to offer healing in his name. We learn that the disciples have gone out and preached the word of God, and that that word has been heard and has changed lives. And the verses that immediately follow the passage we heard today pick up this same thread, describing the disciples joyfully sharing the good news of all that they had done, telling their Lord Jesus how the word they had preached had changed the world.

But sandwiched right in the middle of these stories of powerful, effective discipleship, is the story of Herod, a man who hears the word and has absolutely no idea what to do with it, a man who perhaps could have been a disciple if he had just had the courage to open his heart and let the word in. Herod is a foil for faith, a negative image of all of the people who heard the word and actually listened. It isn’t as if Herod doesn’t know that John the Baptist is speaking the word of God. He knows that John is a holy man rightly dividing the word of truth, and yet he cannot – or will not – allow that word to break in to his own soul. He cannot – or will not – allow that word to change him. And so he does the only thing he can do – he takes that word and hides it away, locking it out of sight, where there is no risk that it might actually do something, might actually change him or his family or his world. Herod tries to force that word into a form of his own choosing, shaping it in his own image. He stuffs it into the darkness of a dungeon in the hopes that when it comes back into the light it might look more like he wants it to look and sound more like he wants it to sound. No matter how much his soul is drawn to this wild and wooly wilderness prophet, Herod can never really hear what John has to say. He never lets the word in; he never allows himself to be open enough to actually listen. And so his story ends in tragedy, with neighbor manipulating neighbor, with a beautiful, God-created body transmuted into an object of destruction, with deception, and death, and a body laid in a tomb with no hope of an Easter morning.

Imagine what it would have been like if the Herod’s story had been different. Imagine what it would have taken for Herod to hear the word and to risk real change. Imagine how he might have found the courage to say to John, “I hear you, but your words frighten me. Help me to live without fear; help me to repent, to change, to mold my life in the shape of your proclamation. Give me a word, and give me the power to let that word create in me a new life of repentance and forgiveness, of listening and of love, of power in weakness, of brothers and sisters in Christ, of a family shaped by the tree of the cross – a life where there is no more making an idol out of human flesh, no more trickery, confusion, and fear. Speak, John. Speak, prophet, for the servant of the living God is listening.”

Imagine what it would have taken for Herod to change, to let the Word change him. And now imagine what it might take for you to do the same thing. Imagine what it might take for you to let yourself be truly and forever changed. For you have heard the word this morning – you have heard it spoken and sung, proclaimed in your midst, and you will meet the Word made flesh at this altar. What would it be like to let that Word in and be changed?

We all know how easy it is to live like Herod, to hear the word and have no idea what to do with it because of our own stubbornness and fear. We all know how easy it is to try to stuff the word of God down into some private prison in our hearts and to bring it into the light only on Sundays, or when we are in pain, or when we already feel safe, or when we need something, or when we are surrounded by people who already agree with us. But this morning, God is inviting us into a still more excellent way – to let that word go free, to let that word truly reign in our hearts, to let that word shape every word we speak, every action we take, every emotion we feel – to let that word truly change us.

This is a bold thing to contemplate, to truly let the word of God in. It takes courage to listen, courage to let ourselves be molded to the shape of that word. It takes courage to change. But here is something that just might help: we are, in fact, already changed. We are already changed. This is the hope that we find in Christ – we are already changed; Christ’s death and resurrection have changed everything, God’s adopting us as heirs of Christ has changed everything, the Holy Spirit’s movement in the Church and in our own baptisms has already changed everything. We are already changed from now into everlasting life, and this is a change that we can believe in. So why not live like it? Why not let ourselves live in harmony with that truth? Why not fearlessly fling open the doors of our hearts and let the word of God really, truly, beautifully, wonderfully, miraculously change us? Why not give that word center stage and refuse to look anywhere else, and let that word dance?

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

15 July 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Superhero Faith

You may listen to Father Mullen's sermon here.

The story is old of a boy, whose parents are killed in a plane crash.  The boy is taken in by his father’s elder brother and his wife, who love him as though he is their own son.  As an adolescent, the boy became bookish and nerdy, self-conscious about his limitations: his eyeglasses, his fear of heights, his clumsiness, and his lack of athletic ability.  The death of his parents haunted him, and the reticence of his aunt and uncle on the topic of the boy’s natural parents left him feeling guilty for reasons he couldn’t quite explain.  In a tragic twist of fate, the boy’s uncle is murdered in a robbery, making him a sort of orphan twice-over, and compounding his gnawing sense of guilt and inadequacy. 

Not far away, another boy’s life is similarly shaped by the death of his parents at gunpoint in a robbery.  This boy – a child of privilege - is raised by a trusted family friend.  As he grows up, he transforms the deep resentment he harbors about his parents’ murder into a conviction to avenge their death, and dreams of ways to turn his yearning for justice into action.  Despite his inherited wealth, he shares with the first boy, the deep sense of loss that is accompanied by a kind of survivor’s guilt, a child’s longing for his parents, and an inner wound that can never really be healed.

The boys’ stories are tragic and unique.  Their suffering and loss are not commonplace.  And yet their stories have been told and retold for decades, because they tap into a sense of loss, injustice, guilt, and despair that is shared by many others.  Their stories are also told because of how the boys channel that loss, injustice, guilt, and despair as they grow up; how they harness it to shape their adult lives, to become men of power with a mission to do good in the world.

We could imagine such children being ruined by their loss, by their fate.  We could imagine them wallowing in their grief and never learning to grow beyond it.  Or, we could imagine that their grief would shape them in other, twisted ways, and we would forgive them for it because of their suffering.

The boys’ stories are told because they are fundamentally stories of weakness – the unfair weakness of cruel loss, loneliness, and irrational guilt – and because almost everyone knows these feelings at some point in their lives.  The boys are archetypes of hopelessness transformed, of strength forged out of weakness, and of justice struggling to prevail in a world that seethes with corruption.

And you know who these boys grew up to become, because their stories became famous about fifty years or so ago, when they first were told.  And lately their stories have enjoyed a resurgence of popularity, being re-told over and over again in new and ever-more dramatic ways so that new generations can tap into their message of weakness, guilt, and despair overcome by strength, resourcefulness and hope.

Do you recognize the stories of these two boys, whose names you know?  Do you know who they grew up to become?  The first boy’s name was Peter, the second was Bruce.  They grew up to become, respectively, Spiderman and Batman.  And this summer their stories are being re-told again with new cinematic sophistication, bringing new audiences in touch with these archetypes of weakness transformed.

There is a much older story of such weakness told in the New Testament, part of which we heard this morning when St. Paul tells us that a “messenger of Satan” was sent to torment him, to “keep [him] from being too elated.”  We don’t know how exactly the messenger of doom manifested itself to Paul – he only calls it a “thorn” in his flesh. But we know that it leaves him praying desperately for God’s help.  He wasn’t a boy at the time – he was already an adult – but I think he had something in common with those two other boys who must have lain in their childhood beds and prayed for their own thorns to be taken from their flesh, who must have begged God to give them their parents back, who must have stained their pillows with tears at the persistent thought of their own helplessness to save their parents, to protect them, and at the permanence and finality of their deaths.

The boys’ stories are so powerful because we all fear such tears, such weakness, such powerlessness, and we are all subject to them.  We all harbor a secret dread of the messenger of Satan who can ruin everything in our lives.  The death of a parent – the murder of a parent (or of a child) – is surely brought by such an awful messenger.

Superheroes like Spiderman and Batman represent one kind of hope – that something magnificent can be wrought from such loss.  Even if you are bookish, nerdy, clumsy, and afraid of heights, you could end up swinging from rooftop to rooftop in pursuit of justice and all that’s right in the world, if only you are lucky enough to be bitten by the right spider!

But most of us are not so lucky.

Most of us are stuck with our normal, human limitations.  Most of us are not given super powers, and most of us are not as well funded as Bruce Wayne, most of us don’t even have an Alfred waiting to assist us as required!  Most of us are stuck with the limitations of our fears, our inadequacies, our guilts, and our losses.  Most of us are more like Saint Paul than we are like Batman or Spiderman.  Most of us pray for the thorn in our flesh to be taken away, and most of us know what it feels like when that prayer seems to go un-answered.

But here, Paul has something to say to us – a secret that neither Batman nor Spiderman knows.  For while he is clear that the thorn in his flesh – whatever it is – is never removed, he tells us that a very clear answer to his prayer was given to him.  He hears the voice of Jesus speak to him:  “My grace is sufficient for you; for power is made perfect in weakness.”

Now, you might say that St. Paul is one of the superheroes of the New Testament.  His story is perfectly suited to a comic book or graphic novel format.  He starts out with a career as a persecutor of the church, then he has a dramatic conversion complete with amazing visuals, he is taken in by a mysterious mentor to instruct and prepare him for his work, then his ministry carries him to the ends of the known world - with shipwrecks, prison breaks, heavenly visions, and all manner of excitement.  But, importantly, Paul is given no superpowers. In fact, he doesn’t even get a uniform or a cape.  Indeed, while he is earning his title of Apostleship, he is the recipient of the visits from the messenger of Satan.  His blessings are confounded by his own limitations.  The right spider does not bite him.  He has no inheritance to fund his work, and no Alfred to support him in it.

Paul has only his appeals to his Lord, only his prayers.  He yearns for strength where he finds only weakness, which he cannot overcome.  Perhaps he still harbors guilt about his persecutions.   He knows he is inadequate to the task at had.  So he prays and he prays and he prays.

And an answer, at last, is given to his prayer: “My grace is sufficient for you; for power is made perfect in weakness.”

And here, in a sense, is the Christian spider-bite.  Here is the secret that transforms our weakness into an unstoppable, super power: the amazing gift of grace that knows its perfection in weakness and that proved itself in the weakness of the death on the Cross, by which God proved that love conquers death, because it is willing to die for the sake of others and able to rise from the grave.

No one thought that Jesus was a superhero for very long.  His miracles seemed to run out when he was forced to carry his own Cross.  And even the good news of his resurrection was slow to spread.  He was supposed to be the Messiah but he did not conquer the Roman emperor, he didn’t even own a sword, he couldn’t muster an army, and was followed by sinners, tax-collectors, and women of questionable repute.

If Jesus is archetypal of anything, he is an archetype of weakness.  The persistent image of his collapsed, drained, and lifeless body still affixed to the instrument of its torture and death is put ever before our eyes, as if to say, “You think you suffer?  You think you have a thorn in your flesh?  You think you feel weak and helpless?  How do you think I feel?”

But this is not what he says to us when we feel weak – although he would be justified in saying it.  Instead he says, “My grace is sufficient for you.”

You are lonely and you feel unloved – my grace is sufficient for you.

You are sick and frightened about the future – my grace is sufficient for you.

You have lost your job and don’t know how you will survive – my grace is sufficient for you.

Your child is hurt and may not survive – my grace is sufficient for you.

War is raging all around you – my grace is sufficient for you.

What kind of an answer is that?!?!? you want to ask.  What is grace in the face of murder, in the face of a messenger from Satan!?!?!?  What is grace when I am still left feeling weak and helpless, and not so much as a spider web to swing from to lift me from my despair?

“My child,” the voice says, “power is made perfect in weakness.”

Here is the spider that bit tax collectors and sinners, that made Mary Magdalene a household name, and that transformed the vision of prisoners and slaves, who delighted to sing about it from the depth of their weakness, their powerlessness, their desperation.

You want to see power at work?  Look at the weakness of the Cross?  Has it not changed the world?

This is the marvelous message being touted at the moment by American nuns – who have deliberately chosen lives defined by the weakness of poverty, but who will not, cannot be silenced by bishops who live in palaces.  Christ’s grace is sufficient for them.  The power of their defiance – in the name of those who are too powerless to speak up for themselves – is as though they were rolling back their sleeves to show us the spider-bite of grace that makes them strong.

This, too, is the work being done at the only Episcopal school in the City of Philadelphia – a school whose only entrance requirement is that students be sufficiently poor.  We started this school because Christ’s grace is sufficient.

If you want to see heroes transformed by grace, come to the Saturday Soup Bowl where volunteers feed hungry people every Saturday morning in the Parish House.  There you will see that Christ’s grace is sufficient, because of the people who have been bitten, and delight to see God’s power in them perfected in weakness.

Go to the Welcome Center – a ministry for homeless people that we helped establish – and see how Christ’s grace is sufficient in the ministry of care and love there.

If you want to see Christ at work, look for weakness and you will find his power being perfected there – wherever people are willing to rely on his grace.  As St. Paul says, “whenever I am weak, then I am strong.”

Chances are, you and I are not going to be bitten by a spider that gives us super powers.  Chances are that if we put on a spider suit, people will only laugh at us, and if we try to swing from rooftops, we will probably fall.  Chances are that you and I are not superheroes… even though we suffer the same sadnesses, doubts, griefs, injuries, injustices, indignities, sorrows, and weaknesses that everyone suffers.

I hope you never feel that you suffer something so horrible that it feels like it was brought to you by a messenger of Satan, but I know that life brings such sufferings to those who don’t deserve them.  And should that day come that you wish you could be a superhero, but discover that you are stuck being your same, old, limited, human self.  I hope you will look up at a Cross and see the Man of Sorrows hanging there, and take note of how weak and pathetic and lifeless he looks hanging there…

…and then remember how he changed the world when he came to save it.  Remember that his life could not be buried by the grave…

… and remember the sound of his voice reassuring you in your moment of pain and sorrow: “My grace is sufficient for you; for power is made perfect in weakness.”

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

8 July 2012

Saint Mark’s Church, Phialdelphia

Corpus Christi

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.

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