Rebuilding and Remembering

Ezra and Nehemiah were never friends.  They came back to Jerusalem under separate steam when the Persians conquered the Babylonians and the people of Israel were allowed to return to their old home.  It’s not at all clear that they ever knew each other.  And they probably thought that their work had nothing to do with the other’s.  Nehemiah’s work was to rebuild, and Ezra’s work was to remember.  And Nehemiah’s mother always thought that her son got the short end of the stick  - what with second billing in the Bible: Ezra…  and Nehemiah.  Nehemiah was the politician, the leader, the do-er of things.  His job was to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, which had been destroyed during the Babylonian occupation

Rebuilding Jerusalem is a noble, if a thankless, job.  It is always about more than meets the eye – for Jerusalem is God’s own city.  And when Nehemiah went back to rebuild its walls, he also went to prepare the city for the return of God’s people to their home, to his home.  And he accomplished his mission in 52 days – that’s how long Scripture tells us it took Nehemiah to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem.  An impressive accomplishment.

It must have been hard to move back to the city after 60 or 70 years of exile.  The names of the streets had been changed.  None of the same old places were still there – so much had been destroyed.  The city was an empty, burned-out shell.  It was impossible to find a decent bagel.  You move back to Jerusalem, but you never really lived there before – your grandparents did.  But who wants to pick up where his grandparents left off?  You’d gotten used to life in Babylon.  Maybe you’d met a nice girl there, a local girl.  Your grandparents told the stories of deportation, and it was horrible, yes.  But they’d been tough old birds.  They made the best of it, and made a life in Babylon, in what was, after all, a pretty amazing city.  Yes, it was a hardship to be driven from one end of the Fertile Crescent to the other, but moving back would be no picnic either.

And move back to what?  Jerusalem was no Babylon.  It had fallen apart at the hands of various marauders.  Was there work there?  Who knew?  But there was the Temple to consider.  That’s what Papa always said.  The Temple, the Temple, the Temple.  God was in Jerusalem.  Not that God wasn’t with them in Babylon – but he wasn’t at home there.  “How can we sing the songs of Zion in a strange land?” Papa asked, as if the answer was self-evident.

So when Cyrus the Great invaded and routed the Babylonians there was cause for rejoicing.  Cyrus decreed that the Jews were free to go back, free to rebuild their old city, and its famous Temple.  And Nehemiah was a talented, capable man.  52 days – he was proud of that.  52 days to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem.  But now Jerusalem was like a ghost town.  Walls, yes, but what about the rest of it?  What about its soul?

Sixty years doesn’t seem like such a long time – only a couple of generations or so.  But you can forget a lot in sixty years.  Things that had seemed so important in Jerusalem faded from memory in Babylon, without the shadow of the Temple to protect their memory.  As Israel was forced to wander away from Jerusalem, their minds and their hearts wandered too.  And it’s not like wandering hadn’t been a part of the Jews’ story.  Didn’t Abraham and Sarah wander?  Didn’t Moses wander?  Doesn’t the Bible tell us that sometimes God tells people to get up and go – and he doesn’t always tell you where you are going.  And you pack things when you leave that maybe you don’t unpack right away when you get wherever you are going – wherever God is leading you.

Does God’s law move with you when you are driven out of God’s own city and carried into exile, where you must – under pain of real punishment – learn to follow the new laws?  You couldn’t bring one set of dishes with you, let along two – keeping kosher was not so important as keeping alive.  So you adapted, you followed local customs – what choice did you have?  And if you forgot the details, you could be forgiven, couldn’t you?  God understood, didn’t he?

But Ezra’s job was to remember.  The boxes with the sacred scrolls that others left packed-up in Babylon had all been carefully un-packed in Ezra’s house.  These he studied, as if by remembering the law he could remember Jerusalem – even though that city was the vaguest memory to him.  But remembering was his job as a priest.

Remembering is a harder job than you think.  Not a lot of glamour in remembering – even less so in reminding others, when the time comes, of lessons that had been easy to forget.

Ezra re-packed his scrolls, when he journeyed back to Jerusalem.  He wrapped them carefully in their embroidered covers, and tied them with silken cords, and placed them in their boxes to be transported back to Jerusalem, whence they had come, those generations ago.  For what did the rebuilt walls of Jerusalem stand for if not the call to remembrance?  Why had the walls been rebuilt if not to define again the boundaries of God’s own city, wherein God’s law must be remembered.  Nehemiah did his job; Ezra must do his, too, standing on a platform in the square by the Water Gate, unfurling the words of the law for the people to hear and remember.  This was coming home.  And soon there would be the Temple again, built again from the force of memory – the memory that this is God’s house, God’s home.

They say that everything is cyclical, and maybe that’s true.  There is a cycle in the life of faith that seems to require regular rebuilding and remembering.  And although these seem like different kinds of work – as they seemed to be for Ezra and Nehemiah – they are part of the same process.  For, if Jerusalem is easily ruined, and if God’s Temple is easily torn down, then what else is safe?  Nothing.  And being a part of the community of faith, being part of the chosen people, doesn’t guarantee you much – except that probably at some point you will have to rebuild and remember.

There was a time when the Episcopal Church was called the Republican Party at prayer.  Those were the days!  In those days, we sometimes thought like a party that assumed we would enjoy a permanent place of privilege.  If George Washington had been an Episcopalian, how could anything ever go wrong?   Nothing would ever have to be rebuilt or remembered!

But it seems that our walls do crumble, and our communities do forget, and I could take you on a tour of Episcopal churches that are hardly more than empty shells, and where the Word of God, if it is ever read, rings hollow against the abandoned or nearly abandoned stone walls.

Has the church been driven in to exile?  If so, where has she gone, and when will she return?

Whatever exile the church is enduring is nothing compared to the exile so many people feel in their hearts – where they know God is supposed to dwell.  Many, many people of faith, however, feel as though they have been somehow set adrift, wandering from one exile to another, wondering why God is so hard to find, why his transforming work can be so little in evidence.

We live in a world of spiritual exile, anxiety, and fear.  How can we sing the Lord’s song in so strange a land?  And what can we do but learn to adapt, to get along, following whatever rules seem to govern the world in which we live?  After all, Babylon is a very handsome city, not a bad place to live, when you get right down to it.  And we suffer from a great misfortune: there is no edict ordering us home, no king sending us back whence we came.  No benevolent power is pushing us back toward a holy city.  We cannot even be sure where the walls are that we should be rebuilding, or what the laws are that we should be reading in the square until the remembrance of it brings us to tears.

But Jesus comes among us.  Something awakens when he walks in. 

There is a scroll – we hardly even know which one it is (ours are still packed up in our boxes).  But he knows.  Deliberately he opens the scroll to the place he wants.  He remembers.  And now he remembers for us: 

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has anointed me

to bring good news to the poor.

He has sent me

to proclaim release to the captives

and recovery of sight to the blind,

to let the oppressed go free,

to proclaim the year

of the Lord's favor."

We have to remember and rebuild.  These things are cyclical.  And although they seem like different kinds of work, they are part of the same process: rebuilding and remembering.

Are you poor?

Are you a prisoner of something, someone?

Have you lost your sight?

Are you oppressed and unable to break free?

You are like a holy city, whose walls have crumbled, and whose laws have been forgotten.  We are all like this.  If Jerusalem can crumble, so can we.

You need to remember and rebuild

There is always the Temple to consider  - the Temple, the Temple, the Temple – which God has now constructed in your heart.  Within your very body, he has made a Temple for his Holy Spirit.  Remember and rebuild.

Do not make the mistake of dismissing the work of Ezra and Nehemiah as boring, ancient history.  Everything is cyclical, and they were doing this work back when it was seriously hard to do: rebuilding and remembering.

Are you poor, a prisoner, blind, oppressed?  Do you suspect that time has already passed you by, and you have not much hope?

Can you hear the voice of the One who is reading from the scroll?  It sounds like hammers repairing stone walls, to me.

Can you hear the law of God’s love being proclaimed somewhere in the square?  Do you remember now?  Do you feel like you can be rebuilt?

Rejoice and do not grieve, for the joy of the Lord is your strength!

Rejoice!  Rebuild!  Remember!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

27 January 2013

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Two Journeys

The journey looked like this. Three Kings, lounging on cool satin pillows in the sultry Persian air, observe a star. Together, they watch as it arcs across the sky towards lands unknown. They look at each other with wise eyes, nod deeply, and purposefully process out of the room, padding away on soft, slippered feet. They pack for travel, one gold, one frankincense, one myrrh. Their trunks filled with gifts and robes and telescopes, they mount their sturdiest camels and set out across the sands towards the West. For weeks, months, they travel through the wilderness in a stately parade, gently rocking on the backs of their beasts, stopping only to check their coordinates or to rest in rustic towns where their appearance provokes quiet wonder and the offering of the people’s finest food and drink, their softest beds, their cleanest hay.

The Kings break their journey in Jerusalem and seek out Herod. They deign to dine with this Roman toady some silly men have begun to call “the Great.” He flatters them, fills them with dates and roast lamb and fine wine. He wants information from them; they know this. “Go and search diligently for the child;” he purrs, “and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.” But they need no encouragement. They would never be anything less than diligent, and they know without saying a word to each other that they will never pass this way again, never share their star-child with this petulant, petty fool.

They move along, quiet now, serenely watching the star as it settles over a tiny, dark cave on a moonlit winter’s night, where a tiny babe is the only Word that is spoken. Here they kneel in a row, each removing turban or feathered hat or jeweled scarf and placing their gifts before this long-expected child, this babe of their searching, born, king of the Jews. That night they rest easy, fulfilled and happy, and when they all dream a dream of warning, they look at each other with wise eyes, nod deeply, and leave for their own country by another road.

Maybe.

Or maybe the journey looked like this. Three kings, or maybe they weren’t kings, maybe they were just wise men…and why three? Maybe four or five or six, maybe there was Caspar and Melchior and Balthasar…and Cornelius and Bilbo and Eliot. So *some* magi have been watching the skies every night for months. This is what they do – they’re wise men, after all. Suddenly Melchior sees something in the heavens that he’s never seen before: a star – a great, bright, blaze of a star – starting in the East and moving across the sky. He’s excited, he’s like a dog with a bone, panting as he tells the others that he wants to go chase it. At which point there is a great deal of eye-rolling and groaning. Caspar reminds Melchior that this wouldn’t be the first time he’s gotten something wrong – remember that time he’d predicted the end of the world? Balthasar sighs and immediately begins double checking Melchior’s math. (He never was very good with fractions.) Cornelius just crosses his arms and says no way, he isn’t going anywhere, he has a concert coming up that he cannot miss. Eliot protests that they’ll have a “cold coming of it,” that it’s “just the worst time of the year/For a journey, and such a long journey:/The ways deep and the weather sharp,/ The very dead of winter."* But Bilbo tells Eliot to stop waxing so poetical and turns to Melchior with a star in his eyes – yes! yes! a star! let us wish upon it, let us follow it, let us have an adventure!

It takes a while, of course, to convince the rest to go along. This must portend something wondrous, Melchior keeps saying, and there is this tale, this ancient tale from Hebrew prophets of a boy born to save the world. What if this star marks his coming? We wouldn’t want to miss that, would we? And it’ll be fun…so one by one, they nod their heads grudgingly, plan their gifts and pack their trunks. Eliot says goodbye to “The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,/And the silken girls bringing sherbet,” Cornelius hurries back inside at the last minute for some extra staff paper, they all scramble up atop their stupid, stinking camels, and the journey has begun.

And it is a real slog. The desert winds blow sand in their eyes, the nights are freezing cold, the days are blistering hot. The clouds cover the skies so that there are no stars at all. They get lost, they get hungry and blistery and gruuumpy. Cornelius won’t shut up about the concert and eats all of the stuffed dates and dried apricots and bitter chocolate they had brought along as gifts. Caspar is silent and Balthasar is nervous and Eliot won’t stop going on about “the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly/ And the villages dirty, and charging high prices.”* But still they slouch on.**

Finally, after weeks of stumbling and griping, they all see where they must be headed – Jerusalem, the star of the West. They wind their way to Herod’s door and say, Help? Where is the child? they ask. When Herod looks at them blankly, they push on. He must be here, they say, we’ve followed this star for months and we darn well mean to pay this child homage. But Herod is confused, and angry, and ranting, until finally one of his scribes remembers Micah – that old prophet Micah, who once said that a ruler would come forth from, not Jerusalem, but Bethlehem of all places. Bethlehem? Herod can’t believe it, but he thinks, What can it hurt to send these magi on to check it out? Go to Bethlehem, he growls, look for this magical Messiah baby, and let me know if you find him. Let me know where you find him. (Cue evil laugh here.)

And so the magi are suddenly back up on their stupid, stinking camels, and traveling – again – down an unknown road – again. Now they are all quiet, too tired to care, too exhausted to worry about where they are going or why Herod was so jumpy or what they’re going to give this baby since they forgot to pick up an extra gift in Jerusalem. They are so tired they hardly notice when the star stops. They stumble off their camels – with overwhelming joy –  and into the house where they find a wide-eyed girl of a mother holding a baby boy. She tells them stories of shepherds and angels while they slump to the ground before him, offering him the gifts not already eaten. Cornelius offers to sing his newest melody, Bilbo tells the child a great tale of their adventure, and Eliot promises a poem. They each pay him homage, this wisp of a child, and suddenly they feel the hard ground shift beneath their knees. Somehow, everything has changed. They stand and leave the holy family and head back out into the night, and they know, now they know, that the journey has really just begun. It stretches out before them, not just around Herod and back to their home but all the way to Nazareth, and the Sea of Galilee, and Bethany and Jerusalem and Golgatha and a tiny, dark tomb. Eliot asks, “Were we lead all that way for/Birth or Death?”* The others shrug their shoulders, quiet, but peaceful now. Perhaps “the end of all our exploring,” Caspar says, “will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”*** Eliot jots that line down for remembering. And then they journey on.

And isn’t this what our journeys look like. Much as we might like to imagine that our journey to find the Christ will always be a journey on a straight path, a journey of confidence and reassurance and knowledge, with a clear destination in mind, with an inspired beginning and a profound end and evenly-spaced steps along the way, our journeys of discipleship are rarely like that. They are far more interesting. We may begin grudgingly, haltingly. We may need a nudge or a push to get started at all. Or we may start off inspired but find the terrain difficult and stumble. We may get lost, grumpy, lose track of our own gifts along the way. We may meet people who treat us with disdain, who bluster or mock or send us packing. And we may arrive at a particular place and think that we’ve really, you know, arrived, only to discover that what we find there only encourages us to keep seeking just a little further on down the road, just over that hill, around that bend.

But if we are willing to keep walking, we will find that this messy, complicated journey is rich with life. The bends in the road help us to practice our faith, the encounters along the way help us to practice loving neighbors, the stops and starts help us to practice Sabbath and prayer. Even the Herods can be transformed into guiding forces and by the grace of God end up pointing us in the right direction. This kind of journey changes us. This journey brings us to our knees and brings us to ourselves. This journey breaks us open so that when we find the Christ child we will be open to what he has to teach us, to the new life he has to offer us. This is what the journey looks like. For why take a journey if it isn’t going to take you anywhere at all? So if your journey looks more like the second version of the wise men’s journey, know that you are on the right path. You are on the path where God is with you. So journey on.

*From T. S. Eliot's The Journey of the Magi

**After W. B. Yeats' The Second Coming

***From T. S. Eliot's Little Gidding

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

6 January 2013

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia  

His Own Received Him Not

If I close my eyes when I pray,

I sometimes wonder

what I am preventing myself

from seeing.

Am I shutting out the world? 

Will God project some image

inside my eyelids,

that only I can see,

but have not yet seen?

My hands are closed, too.

Clasped, is what you would call them.

Closed is what they, are –

unable to reach, to grab, to pinch,

or to hold on to anything.

What else in me is closed

when I pray,

if my eyes and my hands

are closed?

Usually my mouth is running,

which is not so different

from when I am not praying,

and my mouth is running…

which is another way of being closed.

And my mind, of course,

is following (yes, following)

my mouth;

so it is occupied, unavailable, and closed.

What else is left,

if my eyes, and my hands,

my mouth, and my mind

are accounted for?

Only my heart.

When the Scriptures say

that Jesus was in the world,

and the world was made by him

but the world knew him not.

That he came unto his own,

and his own received him not,

where does that put me,

since I am part of this world?

And where does it put you?

Remember, I am praying,

and my eyes, and by hands, are closed,

and my mouth is running,

my mind is following behind.

And there is only my heart to wonder about.

If this is what I am like at prayer,

how could I receive him, ever?

How could you?

I am so busy with myself,

how can I receive him,

when he comes into the world?

I have my interests, my worries,

my loves, and infatuations,

my greediness, and desires;

I have my work, and my church

to distract me from Jesus,

if I will let them,

which, generally, I do.

Don’t you?

And remember, even when I pray,

almost everything is closed, shut,

unable to receive him.

Sometimes my dog lies on his back,

all four limbs crookedly in the air,

his pink, fur-less belly exposed.

I can stroke his silly belly this way,

and he will wag his tail,

and stay that way for a little while,

until being so exposed

becomes too much.

Is that what it would be like

to be able to receive the Christ?

To lie, belly-up, naked, and exposed?

To be available to be touched by him,

even my silliest parts?

Un-concerned, for a while,

with myself?

It’s so much easier to let it be about me.

So much easier to presume that the world

awaits my judgments,

owes me something,

belongs to me.

And, therefore, I am free

to make an assessment

about God, and about his Son.

I am free to decide

whether I want him

or not.

Free to decide

whether I need him

or not.

Free to decide

whether he is real

or not.

As though all that were mine,

though it is not.

Though I am still free

in just those ways.

And he comes to his own,

and his own receive him not.

I want Christmas to be

as soft as pine boughs,

as comfortable as a bed

of green, scented needles.

I want it to be only, ever

a manger,

and me outside of it,

able to come and go as I please,

or not.

But what I need

is for Christmas to be the sharp,

strong end of a wedge,

or a lever,

that subtly works its way

into some crack, or seam,

or tiny opening

in all that is shut up and closed

and unavailable in me.

Because as it is,

I am not ready or able

to receive him.

My eyes, and hands, and mouth, and mind

are not open for him.

My heart is not open to him.

I am battened down,

and all his battery is of little use,

when I am like this.

For how can he batter my heart,

if I will not even open the door?

But a wedge, or a lever,

something strong that I hardly notice

at first.  Maybe that would work!

Something like a baby?

Sometimes it helps

to go back to the beginning.

In the beginning was the Word,

and the Word was with God,

and the Word was God.

Every time we go back

to the beginning,

it’s as though there is

another chance to receive him.

Every time we remember

that the Word was made flesh

and dwelt among us.

As subtle as a baby:

a thin, sharp, long lever;

a wedge

to get into those tight places,

whence I might be pried open.

It’s as though I am lying on my back,

my silly belly open to the sky,

and to the possibility that God will touch me,

will touch you,

and we will wag our tails.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

30 December 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia