My Rooftop Telescope

Scientists tell us that using a powerful telescope array from the South Pole they have been able to detect, or see, the oldest light in the universe - about 14 billion years old.  Much as I want to explain to you how it is possible to see the light of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, I find I am unable to do it.  It is not my field.  I have looked up resources that purport to put the explanation in layman’s terms, and I would happily regurgitate those explanations to you.  But even they are beyond me.  Nevertheless, I find it entirely plausible that we have looked up at the sky and seen – insofar as we can see light that is not actually visible to our eyes – or at least recorded the presence of light that originated nearly 14 billion years ago.  And I delight to think that such is the rigor of the human intellectual endeavor and that such is the liveliness of human imagination that we could achieve such a thing.  Moses had to climb a mountain just to see the Promised Land toward which he had been journeying for forty years, and into which he would never step foot.  But we can glance up from our lap-tops and look backwards for 14 billion years, and take pictures of it.

I trust that it pleases God in some measure to allow us such a vantage point; that he is ready to allow us to view secrets that were long tucked away in secret corners of his attic, unavailable to the prying eyes of older generations.  God has left the keys for us to find, in order to unlock the doors of the ancient chambers of time and space, and allowed us to rummage through the boxes there, to piece together pictures of the Beginning – or at least as close as we can get to the Beginning – wherein he has always promised he could be found.  The scientists say we can now see up to just about 380,000 years away from the Beginning – which they seem to think is pretty close, though it still sounds far away to me.

I am told that Religion and Science are supposed to rumble about the Beginning: stark disagreement is supposed to define our posture toward one another.  But about at least one thing most of us agree: there is nothing for us to remember about the Beginning; none of us was there; it would be a matter of time before humans came on the scene.  So when we look back at the Beginning of time – or as close as we can get to it – we are seeing something, recording something, we have never seen before.  It did not shape our human experience, it is not a part of our corporate memory, there are no human shadows to be found dancing in the light of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.

Back on earth, when the Rectory was built in 1893, it was the only building in the Saint Mark’s cluster of buildings on Locust Street that was built with a flat roof.  This piece of information seems incidental until you realize what easy access one has to the roof of the Rectory.  Using only the power of one’s imagination, you can carry up to the rooftop there a special kind of telescopic array that allows you to look up into the sky and see back in time.

This project I have undertaken on a lovely summer’s night – for it takes almost no time at all to build even the most sophisticated telescope from one’s imagination, and the materials are remarkably easy to carry up the stairs.  Such a telescope – the kind you build with your imagination – cannot reliably detect the light of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation – not in a way suitable for publication in peer-reviewed journals, anyway.  But it can look back to almost any point in time, if you want it to.  And being a church telescope means that its lenses have been ground and shaped by a certain memory.  It’s more sensitive to light at certain places on the spectrum.  We see images more clearly with such a telescope that shaped our corporate memory, with identifiable human shadows, in the shape of figures we can name, dancing in the light of the stars.  And it is a beautiful thing to go up to the Rectory roof on a clear summer’s night and to stare through the imaginary telescope into the distant past of history and to listen.  For with this telescope you can hear, as well as see – it was easy enough to build it that way in my imagination: all the parts were free!

Not long ago, I was up there, looking and listening; turning the dials to see what I could pick up from the past.  And I heard this question from ages past: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”  And I knew immediately who it was they were talking about, since I’d come across this conversation before in the scriptures.  And standing there on the rooftop, I realized how immediately the question translated to the present moment, how equally perplexing – maybe even more so – that question seems today as it did all those centuries ago, and how it might confuse people who pass by the church if they ever stop to wonder what it is we do in here.

How can this man give us his flesh to eat?  It seems a perfectly reasonable question.  Early Christians were looked at with significant suspicion, since they seemed to be talking like cannibals.  But they were not cannibals.  They were good Jewish boys and girls who mostly kept kosher in the earliest days.  Which made the question all the more poignant: How can this man give us his flesh to eat?  And do we need a whole new set of dishes for it?

How can this man give us his flesh to eat?

What they discovered was this: that Jesus was not inviting them to go at him with knives and forks.  Rather, he was opening up to them one of the secrets of God’s mysterious love.  He was allowing them to enter into a new chamber of God’s life, where they had never been before.  They discovered that it pleased God to allow them a new vantage point from which to see his work of salvation: reclining by his Son at a table, praying with him in a garden, walking with him toward the Cross, weeping with his mother at his death, and waiting for his resurrection.

“I am the living Bread,” Jesus said.  But they did not yet know what they were seeing, what they were hearing.  They had not yet seen all that we have seen.  Until he sat at table with them and broke the bread and blessed the cup; until he told them to wait with him while he prayed; until he challenged them to take up their own cross; until he hung and died on his Cross; until he rose from the grave, and made himself known to them in the breaking of the bread.  All these were pieces of a puzzle they put together, as God slowly widened the aperture of their vision, and let more light into the lens, and helped them see, and let them cast their own shadows, their own questions on the image that we can peer into from the telescope on the roof of the Rectory.

And what about us?  How can this man give us his flesh to eat?

Well, what’s the matter with you?  Do you really need a flat roof and a Rectory?  Can’t you do this with me now?  Can’t you focus with me the lens that’s hidden up in the steeple of this church and points toward God?  Can’t you find the knobs to turn in your mind’s eye, so you can see what’s detected there?  Can’t you adjust them to look back at his supper with disciples?  Can’t you hear him say, “This is my Body.  This is my Blood.  Take, eat.  Do this in remembrance of me”?

Do you believe that we are able to look back at the origins of the universe and see light that is 14 billion years old, but we can’t look back and remember what this means?  Do you believe God made our vision so dim, our imaginations so dull?  Do you think the light they are looking at from their telescopes is just a memory of light that is 14 billion years old, and not the real thing?  And do you think the words we hear when they echo to us from only two thousand years ago are really just a memory and not the real thing?  You don’t think he had another kind of remembrance in mind?  You don’t think he knew we’d be able to see 14 billion years into the past some day?

I love to go up to my rooftop observatory and look up into the present and see the past hurtling toward me, fast as light, and hear the ancient words, and know they are alive.  I love to lengthen to the focus of my telescopic array and look further back in time to the very Beginning, which I can do with the greatest of ease, listening for the clear sound of the beating of wings over water that was the only sound to be heard in the Beginning, and then a voice that seems to be saying, “I will be who I will be.”

I am strengthened by the knowledge that there are real telescopes that can see almost as far as my telescope can see, telescopes that can see light that originated 14 billion years ago.

But I can see a light that is older still, a light that was there in the Beginning. 

And it takes only an adjustment of the lens to see that light take shape, as he is born of a human mother.  And then I can hear, from my rooftop, the man that that child became offer his Body and his Blood for me.

And when I wonder, how can this man give us his flesh to eat?  I have only to look up with they eyes of my heart, to see where past and present hurtle toward one another at the speed of light.  And I remember how it is that God gives us signs to help us see the work he does secretly and silently, so that we will know we have been fed.  And we don’t have to wonder how he can give us his flesh to eat: we have only to open our mouths, and believe.

 

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

19 August 2012

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Posted on August 20, 2012 by Guest User.

Built for Abundance

You may listen to Mother Erika's sermon here.

In the early 2000’s, researchers at Cornell University conducted an experiment about people’s eating habits. Participants were simply asked to eat a bowl of soup, and to stop eating when they felt full. Easy enough. The trick was that some of the bowls of soup were just bowls of soup, but some of the bowls were not. They were attached to a pump that continuously refilled the soup from the bottom without the eater being any the wiser. Picture the never-ending soup bowl lunch special at Olive Garden – just a lot sneakier. There was always soup in the bowl – the participants could eat and eat and eat, and the soup would never run out.  

And as you might have already guessed, the people sitting before the magical refilling soup bowls did just that – they ate, and ate, and ate. Across the board, the participants eating from the refilling bowls ate more than the other soup eaters, and they didn’t indicate that they felt stuffed or even that they noticed that they had eaten more than the bowl looked as if it would allow. They just ate and ate and ate. Who knows – they might have been content to continue eating into infinity if there had also been a magical refilling bread basket and a magical refilling glass of Chianti.

The question was…why? Why didn’t they notice how much they were eating? Why were they deceived by a ploy that, one would imagine, should have become evident about 15 or 20 spoonfuls in?     Well, apparently, contrary to what our mothers always told us, it’s actually hard for our eyes to be too big for our stomachs. If our eyes can be deceived into thinking we’re eating a “normal” sized meal, our stomachs will happily play along. We hear about this all the time in reports about the gradual growth in dinner plates and paper cups and portion sizes that has given us plates as big as manhole covers, 64 oz. gigantor gulps, and double supersized shovels-full-o’ French fries. And why are our stomachs so happy to oblige our big eyes? Well, according to some scientists, it’s because we are built for scarcity. Throughout history, generations of men and women have had to live on very, very little, and so when they were presented with a feast, their bodies basically told them, “Eat as much as you can, because you aren’t going to be seeing this much food again for a while.” And apparently, we are still programmed to do this. Even when most of us are able to eat three full meals a day, and when we live in a country with the highest obesity rate in history, we still imagine that we are built for scarcity. Our bodies live in fear that we won’t get enough food, and so we ignore our full stomachs and eat and eat and eat.

The world hears this and confidently nods its head. Yes, of course, that’s right; we are built for scarcity; we are bottomless pits of need. We have so many needs that a thoughtful man named Mazlow put them in a nice hierarchy for us so that we might know exactly what our needs are at any given time. If the world is our shepherd, it will tell us that we lack everything. There isn’t enough food to go around – not enough food for the poor in this city, for the families of famine in east Africa, or for the one hundred people around the world who have died from starvation since I began this sermon. There is drought, there is disorder and red tape and politics, and there just isn’t enough food to go around.

And it isn’t just food that we lack, the world whispers. We also lack money and love, meaning and connections. We lack safety and freedom and time. The need goes on and on. And when we start listening to that whispering, we can’t help but go a little crazy. We start slurping up anything and everything we can find while our brains tells us, “Grab this – it might help somehow someday.” We gorge ourselves on any soup we can find: food, power, information, guns, sex. We eat more calories than we can ever use in a day, we gobble up status updates and tweets like they’re real sustenance; we consume people and friendships, we guzzle gas and disposable plastics and Botox and firearms. We eat and eat and eat, all the while hearing the whispers: you are built for scarcity.

But this is a lie. For you and I are not built for scarcity, we are built for abundance. We are created, crafted and knit together, by a loving God who has made us to expect abundance. We are made first in God’s image, not just in the image of our hunt and gather ancestors. We are God’s children, and God gives us every good gift. God gives us the breath in our lungs, the voltage in our cells, the inspiration of our minds and the compassion of our hearts. This is not to say that there is not real need in the world or in our lives – but this need is an aberration, not the rule. The rule is that we are filled, all of us, with all of the fullness of God. And if we really listen to our hearts, we know that to be true. At our core, below the worry and fear, deep in our center where the truth speaks to us in the voice of the Holy Spirit, we know that God will give us our food in due season and satisfy the needs of every living creature.

Deep in our very beings, we know this, and yet we forget this again and again and again. We, like the disciples, look out at the hordes of people covered in need and we panic. Oh no, we think, there are people out there wasting away with need, people with no food, no job, no livelihood, no love, no family, no purpose, no security, no time. And we stand staring at them – or sometimes at ourselves in the mirror – and we feel paralyzed. But then, Jesus arrives. And “when he looked up and saw a large crowd coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, ‘Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?’” He says this, John tells us, to test Philip, to see if Philip could remember in the face of the crowds what he – and they – were built for. He says this maybe with a little wink, knowing what he would do, hopeful that the disciples would know that too. But when they don’t, when instead they start talking about six months’ wages and the cheapest bread seller and where was the closest coinstar machine and did anyone have a living social discount, Jesus realizes that his guys will – again – need his help. And so when that famous second-born son, Andrew, shows Jesus the only food he’s been able to find – five barley loaves as dense and heavy as hockey pucks and two shriveled up dried fish – Jesus smiles. He tells the disciples to please show the people to their seats on the grass, gives God thanks for the food they are about to receive, and feeds the people. From a miraculous refilling bread basket. And the people eat and eat and eat, the very food of heaven, the bread of life, the abundance of grace. And then the disciples remember what they’re truly built for.

So it’s okay if we find ourselves swimming in a sense of lack, panicking because the waves of need seem to be ready to swamp our boat. It’s okay; we’re in good company. Like the disciples, we just need to be reminded that there is a way out of the storm; there is a way to silence the howling winds of the world. There is, in fact, only one way, and it’s the way the disciples learned and practiced over and over again. We look to Christ. We look out at the world and look to keep Christ at the center, Christ as the lodestone, so that no matter where our eyes may fall, no matter what the world might show us, no matter what fears and needs and lack we see, we first see Christ standing before us saying I AM. Fear not, I AM. I AM the bread of life. I AM the water of salvation. I AM the good shepherd, and therefore you shall lack nothing.

And the true miracle of this is that when we start living this way, the world changes. When we begin to live in the awareness of God’s abundance, when we claim ourselves as creatures built for that abundance, we begin to change the world in Christ’s name. In our food cupboard, we open our doors to the poor so that they can get their own bread and fishes and cereal and milk. On Saturday mornings, we offer our own miraculous bowls of refilling soup, with baskets of leftover bread that gets made into bread pudding. In our Vacation Music School, we give out the gift of music in this place to all of the children of the neighborhood. We offer a voice to the voiceless, comfort to those who mourn, connection and fellowship to the lonely. And in our worship, we invite people to come to this place to sit at table and be fed, again and again, day after day, week after week, to eat and eat and eat. And Christ standing before us, in this worship and in our ministry and mission, helps us to remember, helps us to listen to that voice deep in our guts, to his voice telling us what we are truly built for. And so sit down here and eat. And then put down your spoon and feed someone else. And together we will all eat and be most satisfied.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

29 July 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Guest User.