Just a Teacher

You may listen to Mother Erika's sermon here.

One day this past week, while I was walking on Rittenhouse Square taking care of some errands, I came up on a young man who was obviously just out enjoying the day – strolling around, looking up at the sky, even whistling a little bit. As I passed by him, he took a long look at me in my collar and got a huge grin on his face. I’ve seen this happen enough to know what was coming next, and sure enough, he drew up next to me and asked me one of the two questions that I get here in Philadelphia at least once or twice a week: “Are you a priestess?” (If you’re wondering, the other question is “What are you?”) I laughed and said that he was close – I was a priest, actually, not a priestess, which for me always conjures up images of grey robes and standing stones and someone singing Casta diva. What he said next was completely unexpected. “You have too many crucifixes in your church!” Now he didn’t know which parish I serve, and if I worked in some other church in this city I might have been able to respond to this by saying, “Well, no, actually we don’t.” But seeing as I am a priest here, I just said, “Well, that’s interesting. Why do you say that?” To which he replied, “You know, you make it all about the cross and the sacrifice and that one moment. When really that wasn’t what Jesus spent most of his time doing, you know? He went around talking to people and showing them how to be good people. It doesn’t always have to be about the bloody cross. Jesus was just a teacher, you know?”

Now as unusual as this conversation might seem in the context of running errands in Center City, this man’s argument is certainly not an unusual one. From the Jesus seminar, to agnostics, to Christians who are critical of “The Church,” people of all types and persuasions have argued for years that the Church’s focus on the moment of Jesus’ crucifixion has obscured the “truth” about who Jesus was and what Jesus was up to. Jesus was just a teacher, you know? He was a regular man, a great faith healer, a political upstart, who taught people how to love, how to live a moral life, how to choose an ethic that supports the poor and welcomes the outcast. You don’t need all of that hocus pocus mumbo jumbo, they argue. You don’t need sacraments and sacrifice, you don’t need mystery and miracle, and you certainly don’t need crucifixes to show you how to be a follower of this man Jesus. You just need to be a good student of his words. He was just a teacher, you know?

Now Jesus certainly was a teacher. He spent a huge amount of his time teaching, and he took his teaching technique seriously. He taught in parables, he harnessed the power of rhetoric. He liked a good old-fashioned lecture but was also a big fan of experiential learning. Jesus was a teacher, and an excellent one at that. Let’s look at today’s Gospel as an example. Now any good teacher will tell you that before entering the classroom, you need to have prepared a very detailed, very comprehensive lesson plan, with goals, objectives, procedures, and a means of evaluation. As one educational website says, you have to know where the students are going, how they will get there, and how you will know that they’ve made it. So here’s Jesus, heading to the villages of Caesarea Philippi with disciples in tow. It’s a bright, sunny day, with a high blue sky. Everyone is in a good mood. Peter and James and John are out in front of the group, still talking about the healing of the blind man they’d just seen in Bethsaida. Andrew and Phillip are practically skipping along, thrilled to be on the other side of the sea from the Pharisees. Judas is walking alone, wondering aloud where he might get some more of that magically multiplying bread. It is as good a time as any, so Jesus pulls out his lesson plan and calls his class to order. After dealing with Bartholomew who whines oh, Son of Man, can’t we just stroll along and look at the sky for a little while?, Jesus begins to teach.

Today’s Lesson: Jesus the Messiah. Goals for the lesson: 1. to clarify the disciples’ understanding of Jesus’ identity; 2. to increase the disciples’ understanding of Jesus’ mission; and 3. to introduce the disciples to a deeper understanding of their own mission. Objective 1: The disciples will be able to identify Jesus as Messiah. 2. The disciples will be able to define the word “Messiah.” 3. The disciples will be able to describe what the role of the Messiah looks like in the world, highlighting the Messiah’s suffering, rejection, death, and resurrection. 4. The disciples will be able to describe their own response to this Messiah, including taking up their own cross, following him faithfully, and turning over their entire lives to their discipleship.  

Procedure. Step 1: Ask the disciples who people say that Jesus is. Step 2: After hearing these responses, then ask the disciples who they think Jesus is. Step 3: Once the disciples have correctly identified Jesus as the Messiah, strongly redefine this word for them by outlining how the Messiah will suffer, die, and rise again. [Accommodation for learning disabled students: If Peter has trouble understanding this new definition, privately rearticulate this vision in a firm and unyielding manner.] Step 4: Once the disciples are able to articulate this new definition of Messiahship, gather in all of the students and give them their work, which is to take on this cross themselves, be willing to sacrifice their own selfish desires when they come into conflict with the will of God, and let go of their death grip on their own lives. Step 5: Continue along the journey, with the disciples beginning to work on the integration of this learning. Evaluation: Jesus the teacher will closely observe the disciples’ progress over the coming days and weeks by noting how they demonstrate love for God and one another. Final note: this lesson may be repeated as necessary, even up to three times total, in order for the learning to be fully assimilated.

This really is an excellent lesson plan. It has clear goals, clear procedures, and an understanding that the objectives will only be met when the disciples adopt this new cross-bearing, self-giving way of being. Jesus is clearly all about instruction here – Mark tells us that he began to “teach” the disciples about the true nature of his Messiahship – not warn them, not pass along to them, but teach them. And Jesus does, in fact, present this lesson again – three times in fact – each time instructing the disciples clearly about what will happen to him for their sakes.

Jesus is a teacher, a dedicated, passionate, efficacious teacher. But he is not “just” a teacher because he teaches, any more than the Bible is “just” a history book because it contains history. Because what is it that Jesus is teaching? It is the lesson of the cross. Jesus is teaching them this – the crucifix. Jesus is a teacher, yes, but he offers us more than simply lessons about how to be kind or how to make good decisions. Jesus is a teacher, and he is a good enough teacher to save his most serious and powerful instruction for the lesson that is most important for his disciples, for us, to learn – the lesson of the cross. Here, right in the middle of Mark’s Gospel, at the heart, at the crux of Mark’s proclamation, Jesus works up his most excellent lesson to teach us the central truth of his own ministry: that the Son of Man will experience the fullness of humanity – our suffering, our rejection, even our death – and will transform it all. The cross – this place of shame and suffering – is changed into a place of mercy and glory in the hands of a loving God. The cross changes everything. The cross is the root of our education, the core learning of the Gospel, the wisdom Christ wants to impart. In fact, the cross is the lesson, and the goal, and the teacher, and the evaluation all in one.

And the class, of course, is still in session. The lesson goes on. That great “if” still lingers in the air: “If any want to become my followers….” Is that, in fact, what you want – to be a follower of this Messiah? Is that what you want – to learn this lesson, to practice it again and again until it becomes etched into your heart and soul? Do you want to be a student of this Jesus, to “listen as though who are taught” and to set your mind on divine things instead of human ones, to bear this cross?   

Jesus is before you, waiting for your answer, longing to teach you. You know the lesson; you have seen it again and again. You see the lesson hanging all over this church. The cross is our vindication, and our vindication is nigh. Jesus is Messiah. Study that, you know?

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

16 September 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Ephphatha

You may listen to Father Mullen's sermon here.

The legend is told of a secret chamber located somewhere deep beneath Saint Mark’s: somewhere deeper than the tomb that holds the mortal remains of Fernanda Wanamaker, deeper than the tunnels the PATCO trains run through under Locust Street, deeper than the underground river that is said to flow beneath 16^th street.  The entrance to the secret chamber is buried now, somewhere underneath the dirt floor of the eastern end of the Undercroft, directly beneath the choir stalls or the altar.  It is a chamber that has a sort of magical property: you could bring things there that were stuck or locked or jammed in such a way that they would no longer open, and you could say a simple, one-word prayer, and they’d be open-able.  A box that was locked and the key had been lost, a watch whose mechanism had gotten jammed, a jar that couldn’t be opened, a briefcase with a lock whose combination had been forgotten.  These are the sorts of things that were carried gently through the secret narrow passage, down the dark stairs, to the dimly lit chamber, that is said to be bare, with only a single candle to be lit inside it.  The Victorians had a lot more little locks on things than we do, they used little boxes to hold all kinds of things, and mechanical objects were more prone to failure and harder to replace than ours, so this was a useful secret chamber back in the day.  But even more remarkable things were said to happen in the chamber.

It is said that once a star choirboy, whose voice was damaged from an illness of some sort, so that he could barely speak, let alone sing, was escorted down past the columns of the Undercroft, led to the narrow entrance, given the single candle to light, told the prayer he had to recite, and sent down the long passage, deep below the church, and when he came back his voice was restored, and he was given a solo to sing the following Sunday.  It is also told that a priest of the parish, who was spurned by a woman he’d hoped to marry, went down to the secret passage to utter the prayer, but that strangely his broken heart was never mended.

Maybe it was with the construction of the Lady Chapel in 1900 that the entrance to the secret chamber was mistakenly covered over.  Maybe with the turn of the century, and with industrial advances, there were fewer things that needed to be unlocked, or the things that needed to be fixed were all too big to fit through the passageway and carried into the secret chamber.  Maybe the whole story was just made up, and there never was a secret chamber where you could bring the locked, the stuck, the broken, the failed, and have them unlocked, un-tuck, repaired or restored.  But even in our modern age, when watches don’t have any moving parts, when we tend not to lock things up in little boxes, etc, it’s nice to think that there could be a place where a child who has lost his voice could be sent, and he would return with a song on his lips.

I suppose that in this city of study and science, surrounded as we are by medical schools, it became a matter of ridiculous superstition to carry a broken music box (for instance) into a secret chamber and recite a special prayer by the light of a single candle, let alone to send a sick or injured child into such a place and hope for some mysterious healing, some other-worldly repair.  Better to send your sick children to Penn or to Jefferson, or eventually to CHOP.  So, if the entrance to the secret chamber was covered up, it seemed to be no great loss, I suppose, by the turn of the century.  The name of the broken-hearted priest had been forgotten already.  And the choirboy whose voice was restored had grown up and moved away, his identity lost in the shadows of memory.

It is said, however, that the chamber is still there, somewhere deep beneath us, and that a single candlestick stands inside it, waiting to hold its single candle, whose flame will flicker when the prayer – which has never been a secret – is uttered, should anyone ever find the lost entrance and venture down into the secret chamber.  The prayer, as I said, is simple, and never was a secret, which is counter-intuitive, because it’s the sort of incantation that you’d think would be the most tightly guarded secret of the chamber.  But it is taken from the lines of the portion of Saint Mark’s Gospel we heard this morning, and the church has known it, pronounced it openly all around the world for centuries.  It is the oddly lovely word that Jesus spoke after he put his fingers into a deaf man’s ears, and touched his tongue, since his speech was deeply imperfect. 

You remember that Saint Mark tells us first Jesus looked up to heaven and sighed.  These details are not incidental; they reveal the work of a triune God as the Son looks up to God the Father, and animates the Spirit with his breath.  And then he speaks the ancient Aramaic word: Ephphatha.

It’s not surprising, really, that as the world readied itself for a new century – that would turn out to be a bloody, warring century of enormous change and upheaval – that the thought of a secret chamber where little things could be fixed or unlocked or opened seemed foolishly fanciful.  But I wonder if something more was lost when the entrance to the secret chamber beneath Saint Mark’s was covered up and lost.  I wonder if, as the world entered the 20^th century, it wasn’t just the secret chamber that was lost, but also the kind of faith that believed you could utter a simple prayer and it would be answered unambiguously. 

I suspect the priest with the broken heart was the first person to lose that faith – at least the first one whose story we can tell.  I suspect it seemed absurd to him as he carried his candle down the passageway and placed it in its candlestick, and he stood there in a small, damp chamber, and pronounced the funny word, “Ephphatha.”  I suspect he sighed, but that his sigh was different from the sigh that Jesus sighed when he first uttered that word.  I suspect the broken-hearted priest’s sigh was a sigh of resignation, hopelessness, and despair.  Jesus used his sigh as a pre-amble to the prayer.  But the sigh of the broken-hearted priest contained the answer to his own prayer – nothing.

By the time the entrance to the secret chamber was lost, many people throughout the whole church had learned to thus mis-translate the sigh, and had stopped uttering the prayer altogether.  And so the 20^th century became a century during which the church so often sighed her own self-fulfilling sighs, and nothing happened.

Very, very seldom these days, I come across something small that I would like to have fixed or unlocked or opened, and that I suspect I could have carried through the entrance to the passageway to the secret chamber beneath Saint Mark’s.  And I sometimes sigh to think that the entrance to the passageway is lost forever, and maybe the story never was true anyway.

But much more often I stand at the altar, or I sit in my place during Morning or Evening Prayer and I think about all the big things that are broken or locked or stuck shut.  I think about a child’s illness, or a parishioner’s surgery, or the person who is almost surely going to lose his job and will have a hard time finding another.  I think about my friends who have gone to war, I think about the kids at Saint James School and the violence that is a part of their lives in a neighborhood with the highest murder rate in the city.  I think about the people we feed at the soup kitchen every Saturday, and about the people I walk by on the street every day who are in need, but have no wherewithal to find ways to have their needs met.  I think about the folks we worked with in Honduras, who live with so little, and about families of children being treated at CHOP who sometimes find their way here just to light a single candle as a prayer.  I think about the people I know who are getting older and whose lives are diminishing as their hearts and their minds deteriorate.  And I think about the funerals I have done for souls too young to be resting yet in peace, if you ask me.  I think about all these things in my prayers, and more, and it seems to me that there is so much in the world that is broken or locked or stuck shut.  There is so much that needs fixing, so much that has been silenced, so much that has been repressed, so many voices that need to be found again, and so many hearts that have been broken.

And I wonder why the secret chamber is necessary anymore.  I wonder if there ever really was a secret to that chamber, since the prayer itself never was a secret, and since almost nothing is easier than sighing, and if you mis-translate a sigh, you can always just try it again.  I wonder if it matters that the secret chamber is now lost to us, and if maybe, the reason its entrance was covered up was because the work of fixing, unlocking, opening, had outgrown the confines of its little passageway.

I wonder if it isn’t the case that the work God once supposedly did in the bowels of a dark and secret chamber is now meant to be practiced out in the open, right here, where anyone who cares to can come, where candles flicker in every corner, and all you need to do is learn to say the ancient prayer; “Ephphatha.”

I wonder if what was lost wasn’t so much the secret chamber, as the recognition of how stopped-up we have become: how hard it is for us to hear in this noisy world, and how difficult it is to say anything meaningful or intelligible, how closed-off we are from our neighbors, how unavailable to those who we should be loving, how tiny and self-centered our lives have become.

And I find no reason to regret the loss of the secret chamber, or to start digging to see if I can find again its entrance.  Instead, I find the prayer on my lips, and the desire and need to practice saying it, “Ephphatah.”  Be opened.

And I realize that it’s not the secret chamber that has gone missing, it’s the faith that Jesus can unlock the things that need to be unlocked, that Jesus can open that which has been stopped up, that Jesus can give voice to words that have been stuck in our throats, that Jesus can help us hear things we were never able to hear before, that Jesus can fix the things that are broken in our lives, that Jesus can bring healing to the thousand hurts of our lives.

I want to learn to sigh.  I want to learn to sigh the way Jesus did – not out of boredom or frustration, but with the knowledge and confidence that every breath we take carries the strength and the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

I want to look in a mirror and practice saying the word to the person I know who needs it most, “Ephphatha.”  Be opened.  I want to know how it feels, up here, out in the open – not in some dark, secret chamber – to say with confidence and faith, “Be opened!  Ephphatha!”

Because I want you to learn how to say it too.  I want you to sigh with me – to sigh with Jesus – and to feel the stirring of the Holy Spirit with his breath.  I want you to say the prayer for yourselves and for the world – for everything that is tightly shut, closed off, repressed, buried, and left for dead or ruined or broken: Ephphatha!  Be opened!  Because the power of Jesus to heal, the power of Jesus to unlock, the power of Jesus to open that which is now closed has not been lost, it is not buried in a lost chamber, or in the mists of ages past.

You only need to learn his prayer, and to believe, and to be patient, for he does not always work so fast as he did all those years ago when he could just stick his fingers in your ears, and touch your tongue.  Nowadays, for reasons unknown, he is so often slower to do the work that once he would do in an instant.  But he looks down from heaven when we look up.  And still he sighs, when you and I sigh.  And still he prays, when you and I pray, “Ephphatha.  Be opened!”  And still he opens all that was closed in us before, and promises that there is still more that will be opened to us, here in this world, and in the world to come.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

9 September 2012

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

The Chair is Full

You may listen to Mother Erika's sermon here.

So unless you have been on Mars for the last week, or, perhaps, spent your entire week looking at the photographs from Mars (which are very, very cool), you know that this past week was the Republican National Convention. I didn’t watch any of it. This had nothing to do with a lack of interest in politics, or Republicans, or Tampa, and everything to do with the fact that I was away on retreat in a group house in Cape May where the only other guests were children from the Youth Chorale of Trinity Wall Street who, as you might imagine, had other ideas about what to watch on the house’s one television. So on Friday morning, when I checked my news feed on Facebook and saw that multiple friends had posted something about Clint Eastwood talking to an empty chair, I was perplexed. I was also a little concerned that Clint had gone off his rocker – but most of all I was curious. So I went online, googled “Clint Eastwood empty chair” and easily found his speech.

In case you missed the excitement, Clint Eastwood did, in fact, spend a chunk of his allotted time in front of the GOP faithful talking to an empty chair. But rest assured he has not gone off his rocker. No, Clint was pretending that President Obama was sitting in the empty chair. He asked the President questions. He pretended that the President answered him. Mostly he played to the crowd, making jokes at the President’s expense with the kind of biting sarcasm and mockery that Americans of both parties have somehow decided is appropriate for our nation’s political discourse. The empty chair was actually the perfect convention speech tool – it allowed Mr. Eastwood to be in complete control of the conversation, to ask questions and hear only the answers he wanted, to set up the laughs he wanted, to stir up the applause he wanted, to get in all of the digs he wanted. Talking to an empty chair was a strangely effective stunt. It wasn’t a real conversation, and it might have made him look a little foolish, but it accomplished his purpose, and that’s really all that matters.

Unfortunately, this is exactly what a lot of the world thinks we Christians are doing a lot of the time. They think that we gather here today on this first day of the week to gather around an empty throne and talk to an empty chair. Critics like Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens have written volumes trying to prove that there is no God, that religion is a massive social delusion, that the chair is demonstrably empty. The young unchurched in this country smartly ask why, if there actually is Someone, capital “S,” in the chair, we religious folks who are asking the questions all end up with such wildly different and aggressively competing answers. The outcast, particularly those who have been cast out, judged, and abused by the Church, look at the chair and hope that it’s empty, because they don’t want to even imagine that the Someone in the chair might reject them because they’re gay, or because they use birth control, or because they aren’t an American citizen, or because they smell, or have AIDS, or have doubts. The world looks at us at worship or prayer and sees us talking to an empty chair, imagines us carrying on a conversation all alone, asking and answering our own questions to make ourselves feel better, or to show how holy we are, or to try to help our neighbors be more lovable by remaking them in our own image. This isn’t a real conversation, they say – it makes you look foolish, and it might accomplish your purposes, but that actually doesn’t at all matter to us.  

What’s worse is that sometimes we in the Church act like we’re talking to an empty chair ourselves. Church leaders look with woe at parishes that are dying if not dead, count and recount our shrinking national Average Sunday attendance figures and our parish and diocesan budgets, and then imagine that the chair must be empty, at least temporarily. We in the Church sometimes look at the throne of God and see nothing but an empty seat. We have a hard time imagining a conversation where God might be able to do something new, and so we start talking to ourselves – which churches to close, which positions to eliminate, which liturgies to cut or shorten or “update” and “make relevant.” We start responding to our own questions with answers based in fear and an overwhelming sense of scarcity. And it isn’t just church leaders who do this. How often do you and I worry that we’re talking to an empty chair? We pray and forget to listen, we conjure up our own answers because we tire of listening for God’s, or, worse, we look at that empty chair and don’t bother to pray at all. No wonder the world looks in on us and wonders if we’ve gone off our rocker.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, of course. The Israelites who followed Moses into the wilderness had gone off their rocker fairly regularly in their forty years of wandering. They moaned and complained for most of the journey, mostly moaning and complaining that their God had left them alone. When Moses went up the mountain, they looked around their campsite and saw only a big empty chair, so they happily set about filling it with a golden calf. They doubted and feared and rejected God; they imagined that no one was around to listen to them, and so they got to work answering their own questions in God’s absence.

But now, now, Moses says to them, you are here. You are standing on the edge of promise, looking into the land that flows with milk and honey, the land that God has always said he would give to you and to your children. And now that you are here, you are to keep God’s commandments and teach them to your children and to your children’s children. And why is this so important? Because keeping the commandments of God helps you to remember that God is near. God has given you all of these commandments not only because they will help you to live well in this holy land, but because they will remind you of God’s closeness every minute of every day, so that every time you say thank you, or bless this, or help me, you will be mindful of God right beside you. The commandments are given not as rules to follow in God’s absence, but as triggers to remind you of God’s presence. And when you live them out, you will be so steeped in God’s presence that when others see you, they will say, “What a fabulous bunch of people! I want to be just like them!” And they will say this because when they see you, they will see that there is, in fact, Someone sitting in the chair.

What a gift to give to this broken world. What a wonderful, timely, desperately necessary gift. To offer the world, by our own following of the commandments and by our own remembering of who gave them to us, a daily reminder that God is near. Isn’t that, ultimately, what the world most needs to remember? Don’t we want to help the world, and the Church, to see that the chair is full, that God sits on his holy throne, that the hem of his garment fills the temple? Isn’t that what we are sent to bear witness to – not that we’re Christians and we have it all together, or we’re Christians and we can tell you exactly how to live your life, or we’re Christians and so watch us be extra holy, but we’re Christians and our God is near. Our God reigns. When we pray, we pray to a God who is and who ever shall be. When we ask questions, God answers – maybe not when or how we imagine, but God is a God who responds. We speak and sing and cry and shout and moan and weep to a God who is very, very close to us, so close it’s like he’s sitting in the chair right next to you, so close it’s like he is sitting in your own heart.

And so here we stand, looking out over a new land, at the new program year at Saint Mark’s, at the new school year, at a new political year. So, now, you people, give heed to the great commandments that God has provided for you. Be doers of the word, care for the widows and orphans, love one another as Christ has loved you. Keep these commandments always and teach them to your children. Keep these commandments so that you will remember who you are and whose you are. Live in this holy way, so that when the world looks at you, they will see the truth that God is very near, that God reigns, that the chair is full.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

2 September 2012

Saint Mark's, Philadelphia