Speaking In Extremes

You may listen to Mother Erika's sermon here.

My mother was good at many things. She was an enthusiastic and creative teacher. She was a beautiful public speaker. She made a mean peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And she was a dedicated and consistent speech temper-er. If my brother or I said something that she considered to be too extreme, especially too extremely negative, she would jump in right away to temper what we’d said. “Oh, you don’t really mean that,” she’d say. And then she’d suggest something she thought was more appropriate. An example, as I was pouting after banging away at a difficult piece on the piano: “You don’t mean that you hate this piece, honey; it’s just not your favorite.” Mom liked gentle speech – we couldn’t hate something or wish we would just die or never, ever, ever do something again. She would always try to moderate our extremes, temper our bitter words with a touch of sweetness, encourage speech that was a little softer, a little nicer. “Oh, you don’t really mean that,” she’d say. And most of the time, she was exactly right.                

Maybe some of you have mothers like this. And maybe it’s because of mothers like this that I find myself wondering what Mary was thinking while Jesus was giving this charming little speech in today’s Gospel, how she was feeling when Jesus suddenly started talking about chopping off body parts. “Oh, Jeshua,” I can hear her saying, “you don’t really mean cut off your own foot; you mean watch out for where that foot might take you.” And, “Now, honey, wouldn’t it be nicer to say something like, ‘Try to look only at beautiful and holy things’ rather than telling people to gouge their eyes out?” You don’t really mean that, Jesus, I can hear her saying.

And the truth is, she’s right. He probably didn’t really mean what he was saying. Everyone who reads this passage can see that Jesus is using this extreme speech to make a dramatic point. He’s practicing the art of hyperbole, standing in a long line of Biblical figures who valued and carefully crafted the skill of purposeful exaggeration. We hear the same kind of extreme speech from Moses when he was confronted with the whining Israelite rabble: “Look, God, did I conceive all this people? Am I their babysitter now? If you seriously expect me to find meat to feed this bunch of babies, if this is how you value our relationship, then just kill me now. Take me. Out of. My. Misery.” This is the tradition of intentional exaggeration that Jesus has inherited, the kind of speech that Jesus is putting to work here. It would be better for you, he says, to be drowned in the sea than to turn another person away from me by your actions. It would be better to cut off one of your own limbs than to allow it to trip you up in your own discipleship. In other words: stay out of the way. Better to be drowned, or to go about life maimed, lame, or half-blind than to get in the way of your own faith or anyone else’s.

So yes, we’re on fairly safe ground not taking this text too literally. After all, we don’t hear about the great mass limb-chopping before the day of Pentecost, or of the band of one-eyed Christians who stumbled their way around Asia Minor because they had no depth perception. It’s safe to say that this extreme language is intended to make a point. It’s safe to say, “Okay, Jesus, we know that isn’t really what you meant, so we’re going to soften up your language just a bit.” How about, “Keep an eye out, Christians, for the things that get in the way of belief.”

But it is profoundly unsafe to let this word-tempering turn into a habit. We get ourselves into trouble when we start applying this tempering technique willy nilly, when we let our discomfort with other extreme things that Jesus said push us to try to find nicer, more appropriate, more doable, alternatives to them as well. And we do this all the time. We don’t mean to, and sometimes we aren’t even aware of it, but we do. We take “love your enemies” and say, well, maybe not “love” maybe just “be nice to” or at least “don’t be mean to.” And maybe not really your enemies but just the people who slightly annoy you. We hear “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel,” and we soften it to “Go to people who are already kind of receptive and try to casually slip the Gospel into the conversation.” We translate “do this in remembrance of me” into “do this when it is convenient for you.” We temper “take up your cross and follow me” and “feed the hungry,” and “love one another as I have loved you.” We don’t mean to, but we do. We let our own discomfort with this kind of extreme speech push us into trying to soften these words, into trying to make this speech more digestible, more politically correct, more socially acceptable.

The trouble is that Jesus spoke in extremes all of the time, and most of the time, he meant what he said. Sure, he may have spoken in hyperbole and stretched the metaphor to drive home his point from time to time, but not all the time. Love your enemies was not an exaggeration. I am the resurrection and the life was not hyperbole. Take, eat this in remembrance of me was not a suggestion. Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all is not an example of extreme speech that needs to be softened. And – and this is important – our level of discomfort is not actually a good indicator of when we should start tempering this bold speech. Some of Jesus’ words might make us uncomfortable, but that in itself isn’t a good enough reason to discount them. We are asked, we are commanded to listen to them anyway.

And if we’re being honest with ourselves, we’re actually asked to do more than just listen to these words of extreme love, extreme forgiveness, extreme mercy and truth and grace – we are asked to live these words, and we are asked to repeat them ourselves over and over and over again. We are asked to use this kind of extreme speech in our own lives, not to temper the way we speak about God to others or to ourselves. We are commanded to proclaim the Gospel with boldness, to boast in the cross of Christ, to visibly embrace the utter foolishness of God made man. If we don’t do this, if we don’t speak with the same strong words that Jesus did, then who in the world is going to listen to us? If the Gospel that we present to the world is merely lukewarm, then it’s no wonder that people will spit it out of their mouths. And, what’s worse, if we choose to do this – to speak in half-truths that are softened so as not to offend, or tempered so as not to make anyone uncomfortable – then guess what? We are setting ourselves up as dozens of little stumbling blocks to all of those people out there who would come to know Christ but simply need a compelling invitation. And you know what that means. It would be better for you to have a millstone tied around your neck and be thrown into the sea, it would be better for you to try to drive west on the Schuylkill Expressway at 5:00 on a Friday afternoon, it would be better for you to get stuck behind a Cowboys fan at the Linc, than to put a stumbling block before any and all of these little ones.

Now here is the good news. Right now, everyone in this church has the chance to get rid of the millstone. Because your stewardship committee has asked you to bring a friend to church on the second Sunday of October. This is the perfect opportunity to practice your extreme speech. And I do mean practice. You may need to actually stand in front of the mirror and watch the words fall out of your mouth. Words like: “You know, neighbor, when I serve soup to the homeless at Saint Mark’s, I actually see Christ in the eyes of those I feed. Would you like to come with me on Saturday?” Or: “You know, Dad, I can’t do an early brunch with you on Sunday because Sundays are holy days for me. Worship at Saint Mark’s grounds me and names me and sends me – would you like to come with me this week and we could do brunch afterwards?” Or: “You know, mother-of-playdate-friend, growing my children in the knowledge of God’s love for them is hugely important to me, and my church really helps me to do that. Would you like to come to our Family Mass and Schola with my family next Sunday?” Or: “You know, work colleague, I find God when I hear the choir offer their praises and prayers. Come hear them – and God – with me.”

This extreme speech – this strong, bold, radical speech – pleases God. These are words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts that are pleasing and acceptable in God’s sight. When we feel and speak in this way, not only do we remove the stumbling blocks from our own faith and from those we meet, we actually imitate Christ. And then the speech becomes not simply our own but the word of God made living and active in our mouths. God speaks in us when we speak this way, draws close to us to guide and strengthen us in our speaking. So we have two weeks – be bold in your speech, be extreme, and smile as you say that yes, that holy speech is exactly what you really, really mean.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

30 September 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

The Missing Generations

You may listen to Father Mullen's sermon here.

For something like 50 to 100 years – it’s actually hard to say how long – various policies throughout the states of Australia resulted in the forcible removal of indigenous children from their families of origin.  There is not easy consensus about what the purposes of such policies were, and some people implausibly deny that they were ever in place.  Some say that the policies were there to protect the children from neglect; others say it was to preserve their Aboriginal heritage; still others say it was to “civilize” a race of people that was not as technologically advanced as the Europeans who had by then long ago claimed Australia as their own.

One reason for removing indigenous children from the bosoms of their families, however, seems to be wrapped up in the perverse thinking of eugenics: through generations of inter-marriage with fairer skinned people and generations of socialization in European customs, this thinking went, you could “eliminate the full-blood and permit the white admixture to half-castes and eventually the race will become white,” according to one of the policy’s best-known proponents.[i]

The children taken during these decades came to be known as the Stolen Generations – and no one really knows quite how many children were indeed stolen.  Can you imagine what it was like?  Here’s how one member of a stolen generation described what happened:

“I was at the post office with my Mum and Auntie. They put us in the police [car] and said they were taking us to Broome. They put the mums in there as well. But when we'd gone [about ten miles] they stopped, and threw the mothers out of the car. We jumped on our mothers' backs, crying, trying not to be left behind. But the policemen pulled us off and threw us back in the car. They pushed the mothers away and drove off, while our mothers were chasing the car, running and crying after us. We were screaming in the back of that car. When we got to Broome they put me and my cousin in the Broome lock-up. We were only ten years old. We were in the lock-up for two days waiting for the boat to Perth.”[ii]  And so it was that several generations of children were taken from their own families to grow up in orphanages and schools other institutions, some of them run by the churches of Australia.  And generations of Aboriginal families were deprived of their own children.

Of course, the policies were not only misguided and cruel, they did not succeed in eliminating the indigenous peoples of the Australian continent, who have never fared very well since Europeans came to those beautiful shores with their supposedly superior culture.  To this day Aboriginal Australians often suffer the same kinds of indignities that Native Americans suffer on our own continent: unusually high rates of poverty, unemployment, addictions, and, of course, the loss of the lands and customs that sustained their lives for generations past.

But I digress.  For, today the Gospel compels us to think about children.  We find Jesus’ disciples engaged in an activity that adults have perfected – arguing about who is greatest, which is a way of saying that they were wrangling over power.  Knowing something about power, Jesus wants to teach them.  So he scurries off for a moment, and then comes back to the house where they are all gathered.  He has with him a child – maybe it’s an infant, or a toddler, but I like to think it’s a child a little bit older, say, a middle-school-aged child.  “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all,” he says to them.  And then, he takes the child in his arms.  If it’s small enough, he is cradling it in his arms.  Or, if the child is a little older, perhaps he bounces the boy or girl on his knee.  If the child is a little older still, standing beside him, Jesus wraps his arms around his or her shoulders, and draws the child close to him as he says, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me, welcomes not me, but the one who sent me.”

This is a recurring theme in the Gospels – not only the lesson that the first shall be last, etc, but also the instruction, the command, the imperative (you might say) to welcome children.  It’s a lesson most forcefully and memorably taught by Jesus when his disciples are yelling at people for bringing their children into the presence of the great teacher, and they are telling the people to take their kids away and get out of the way.  But Jesus intervenes and says, “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”  The disciples meant well, but they were wrong – not just because Jesus made it permissible to bring children into his presence, but because children have a privileged place in his heart, and in the kingdom of God.

I sometimes think of those generations of stolen indigenous Australian children, ripped from the arms of their mothers, tossed into the backs of pick-up trucks, and then hidden away till they could somehow blend in wit the rest of white Australian society.  And sometimes I think about this parish, which I love, and about parish churches like it, and I wonder, who stole our children?

There are entire generations of children missing from the life of the church in many places, certainly it is the case here in this parish.  The children were not taken from us forcibly – it was all much more subtle.  In urban churches, like ours, it was linked to the flight of so many families from the cities to the suburbs.  And then, of course, the loss of Sundays as free, un-programmed time, protected for worship and family togetherness.  The church has proved to be a weak attraction compared to softball leagues, and football games, and Sunday brunches.  But we didn’t shoo the kids away, as the disciples did; we just woke up on successive Sunday mornings and found that they were simply missing.  We may have wondered who took them, but what could we do?

At Saint Mark’s, for decades now, we have tried to make the best of it – enormously grateful for those few families with their children who stalwartly remain – but generally learning to cope without the children, filling the roles they once filled with adults, as necessary, and keeping just enough small-sized vestments around to fit the occasional boat boy, as a reminder to us – since those boat boys and girls look so right in this place, so much like they belong here – a reminder to us of the missing generations.

There’s something awkward in the passage of Mark’s Gospel that we heard today that may contain a lesson for us.  Mark is very specific that Jesus and his disciples are gathered in a house, as Jesus talks with them, but I doubt that there is a child sitting there in the house with them.  Jesus must have gotten up to go get a child.  Did he go to another part of the house?  Or out into the street?  Who knows?  But I feel certain that Jesus had to get up from where he was sitting and go get the child that he put in the midst of his disciples in order to teach them a lesson.

Perhaps part of the lesson for us in this Gospel passage comes from asking, “Where did the child come from?”  It’s a form of the question I ask around here, “Where will the children come from?”  It’s all fine and well to say that children ought to be a part of the church, after all, but where will they come from?  Out of thin air?

Well, where did the child come from that Jesus put in the midst of his disciples?  Jesus went to find the child, and he brought her in.

My brothers and sisters, our children are missing.  They have been taken from us by forces that we often think are more powerful than we are.  And in so many cases their entire families have gone with them.

Our children are missing, and they are being deprived of a Christian heritage: of the Christian story, of the Christian sacraments, of the Christian community, of the Christian life – all of which are good and useful and holy.

Our children are missing, and after all, the church hasn’t shown herself to be an unreliable care-taker of children?  There are those who are ready to say what a good thing it is that the children are missing from the church.

Our children are missing, which puts us in peril if we truly care about the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven, and whoever welcomes a child welcomes not just the child, but Jesus.

Entire generations of our children are missing from the church – including the present generation.  It’s been no one’s policy.  No bands of policemen have gathered them up and carted them off.  They are not locked up in a cell somewhere.  They have not been taken by force from their mothers’ sides.  But they have been seamlessly assimilated into a society that either thinks it has outgrown the kingdom of God, or would rather turn its back on the kingdom of God.

Our children are missing, but we cannot really point to anyone else, and say, “It’s your fault.”  Because the children were missing when Jesus gathered the disciples in that house in Capernaum, too.  The disciples, after all, were planning their own futures, designing their own vestments, arguing over who was the greatest, who would sit at the Lord’s right hand.

I wonder how they arranged themselves in that house, after their discussion – how did they jostle to get the best seat, beside the Teacher?  How awkward was it for them when he got up from their gathering and left them to sit there alone with each other?

How long was he gone?  Did he just go to the next room and find a child sitting there in its mother’s lap?  Or did he go out the front door and ask one, then another passer-by if he could borrow her child for just a moment?  Or did he bring the mother in with him too, and ask her to join them?

Why did they think he had brought a child into their august gathering?  Children can be disruptive, after all.  And they thought they were doing just fine without children; they thought it was best to keep the children at bay.  Let them come to Jesus when they are grown up, they thought.  They had no idea that the children were missing from their midst; they had thought they were doing alright without them.  But they were wrong.

So Jesus went to find a child and hold her in his arms.

My friends, if your children were missing you would go out and look for them.  You would not sleep till they had been found, you would not rest till they were warmly tucked in their beds, you would not leave any stone unturned in your search for them.

If your children were missing you would find them and bring them home.

Well, my friends, our children are missing.  To welcome them is to welcome not only Jesus, but to open our lives to the whole presence of God, to welcome the one who sent him. 

Our children are missing.  Are we just going to sit here?  Or shall we go together and find them?

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

23 September 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

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[i] A.O. Neville in The West Australian, 1930

[ii] The Stolen Generation, by Peter Read, a report to the Dept. of Aboriginal Affairs of the Government of New South Wales

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