This is My Body

For the past five weeks, some of us here at Saint Mark’s have been participating in a wonderful and somewhat unique Lenten program: Lenten yoga. Each Friday, after Evening Prayer and Stations of the Cross, we faithful few would make our way upstairs to the choir room, which had been transformed into a makeshift yoga studio. There, under the expert guidance of Diana Fisher, we learned to pay attention to our own bodies, to think about them differently and to engage them in new ways, trying things like stretching out through our inner ankles, lifting our ears towards the ceiling, and relaxing our tongues. Diana always encouraged us to do only what our bodies could do. Stretch only as far as you can, she’d say, and if you feel yourself collapsing, come out of the position. She never encouraged us to push our bodies; instead she encouraged us to really listen to them. Does the stretch feel forced? Okay – come out of it, realign your body, inhale, and try again. Does the stretch feel good? Great – hold it for a few more breaths.

What a gift this practice was. And what a gift that our choir room has not one mirror in it. Not one. So we never had to worry about what we looked like – we could lunge, bend, and twist away without a care in the world.  I like to imagine that sometimes we looked just beautiful, that there were moments when we found that perfect balance, breathing in wondrous alignment, looking just like a print ad for Lululemon. But there were lots of times, I’m sure, when we looked completely ridiculous. We’d end up turned the wrong way, knees and elbows all angles, butt sticking up like a flag in the air. We’d stretch up and our tummies would pop out of the bottom of our shirts, or we’d look down and find one of our legs shaking uncontrollably. We’d lie on the floor and come up dusty, we’d take off our socks and find our toes covered in fuzz, we’d let out a breath and unintentionally grunt. But all of that was actually just fine, because all of that is just what bodies do, and our yoga practice was about learning to let our bodies do what they do, to let our bodies speak to us, and to utterly enjoy ourselves in the process.

Most of us don’t spend too much time just letting our bodies speak, letting our bodies do the marvelous things that they do. We spend more time thinking about how our bodies look than about what they do. The luxury that most of us have of not worrying about where our next meal will come from or whether or not our legs will work today can mean that we sometimes think about our bodies only in terms of appearance. Even when we are ill and we find our bodies suddenly spinning out of control like an engine stuck in high gear, we still often spend all of our time trying to change our bodies rather than trying to listen to our bodies. In our anxiety about how we look or even at times how we feel, we can forget that our bodies are not just some external shell for us to play with or manipulate; our bodies are us. And our bodies have beautiful, important, holy things to say.

Jesus, of course, knew this and lived this deeply. His embodied-ness was the very core of who he was – God made flesh, the eternal Word incarnate. Jesus often used his body, not just his words, to do his ministry, to say something important to the world. He touched lepers, he spread clay on the eyes of a blind man, he stretched out a hand to those once-dead, he knelt to pray, he wept real tears – and these are just the examples that the evangelists took the time to tell us about. Surely he also put a reassuring hand on an unsteady shoulder, tousled the hair of children underfoot, held a newborn baby up to his cheek, gave hugs, always using his body to say you are seen and loved, and all without a single word.

There is no greater example of this than the tender event we remember tonight, the moment when during his last meal with his disciples, Jesus gets up from the table, removes his outer robe, wraps a towel around his waist, and squats down to the ground to wash their weary, worn, filthy feet. He pours water over sore insteps and in between tired toes, he scrubs dirt off of rough heels and dries tender soles, trying not to tickle too much. By these simple, humble, intimate actions, Jesus speaks volumes before he utters a single word. With his body, he teaches this new commandment even before he says love one another as I have loved you.

It is important for us to remember that the footwashing here is not just a metaphor. As singularly significant as Jesus words are here, we cannot forgot that his body is speaking too. After all, Jesus could have just sat the disciples down and lectured them about love, but he didn’t. He could have taught them this new commandment in words as bright and engaging as a parable, but he didn’t. Instead, Jesus used his body to speak, to reach out and touch, connect, purify, bless, heal, sanctify, satisfy. This action was the love itself – not just an image of the love, not just a metaphor about the love, not just a concrete example of the love to help his disciples remember his point, but the love itself, live and in the flesh, real, embodied, and sacramental.

Holy Week is a time of profound embodiment. Over the coming days, you and I will enter into this sacred time not just with our minds, but with and in and through our bodies. We will kneel and stand and genuflect, we will prostrate ourselves before the cross and sit still in the silence of a garden. We will kiss and bow and look up to heaven and in all of this, be reminded, again and again, that our faith is not solely an intellectual exercise. Our faith is not just a journey of the mind. Of course our minds are important, of course we use our reason and our imaginations to help our faith to grow, but such growth is never divorced from the worship and work of our bodies, from what our bodies are meant to just do, from what our bodies have to say to us and to the world.

Now in a moment, you will be invited to walk up here to the crossing to have your foot washed, to sit down in a chair, take off your shoe and your sock and to put your beautiful, imperfect foot – yes, that’s right, your foot, with the sock lint between your toes, the ugly little nail on your baby toe, and the wintery, rough skin on your heel – into my beautiful, imperfect hands, with my pale skin and my uneven nails and my slightly swollen knuckles. Now you certainly don’t have to do this. You’re welcome to just use your imagination. Truly, no one will think any less of you, and you certainly won’t be any less of a Christian, if you choose to stay in your pew. But just for a moment, realign yourself, take a breath, and ask yourself – what if Jesus was right? What if the actual act of having your feet washed has something to tell you that merely imagining just can’t? What if being washed in this way really does mean that you, like Peter, will have a share with Jesus? What if Christ has something profound to say to you here, and longs to use your body to do it?

Now maybe you’re sitting there thinking that all of this is just a ploy to get more of you up here for the footwashing. Which might be a little bit true. But only a little bit. Because far more important is the truth that how you listen to your body matters, because Christ is still speaking to your body through his. He says to us, Take eat, this is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me. And then he stops speaking to you merely in words and speaks to you body to body. He speaks to you in the cool feel of the host on your palm, or the slight sweetness as it melts on your tongue. He speaks to you in the golden muskiness of the wine as it fills your mouth. Christ’s body continues to speak, again and again, calling us to listen and to speak with our bodies in our own ways – to actually touch someone who is in pain, to bend down to help someone up, to hold someone who weeps, to wash and to feed and to walk with and to stand up for. So sit with your body in your pews. Feel the wood beneath you, holding you up. Feel your breath flow in and out. And listen for Christ’s body as it speaks in you. This might feel like a bit of a stretch. Does the stretch feel forced? Okay – come out of it, realign your body, inhale, and try again. Does the stretch feel good? Great – hold it for a few more breaths.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

Maundy Thursday, 28 March 2013

Saint Mark's, Philadelphia

The Strength of An Horse

A few weeks ago a dear friend who lives in the country called with sad news: a horse had died.  It was one of two horses he’d bought for his kids, really, when they were teenagers and riding was one of their sports.  Since they lived in the country it was no big deal to buy the horses and keep them on the farm.  But after the kids grew up and outgrew riding and went off to college, my friend, their father, who had himself ridden as a teenager, decided that he would take up riding again – it would be good for him and for the horse.  He chose Moe, the big gelding thoroughbred he’d bought for his son.

So he would ride in the mornings around his property, and along the shady trails that lead through neighboring farms and along the river, and he would ride in the open field where he still had jumps set up from the days when his kids learned to ride the horses over them.  And he would practice his jumping, and enjoy the air and feeling of remarkable freedom you get when a horse is carrying you faster than you think ought to be possible, and then flying with easy grace over a log, or a ditch, or an obstacle set up in the field.  And he was right: it was good for him and for the horse.

Since I started to ride a few years ago, I would visit my friend and I’d ride the other horse.  We would ride together through the woods, and down to the river, and along the road, with my dogs alongside us, except when we cantered and the dogs couldn’t keep up, and then we’d stop and wait for them at a turn in the path or at the top of a hill.  Horses live for a good thirty years or so, and my friend’s horses were getting on in years, but we didn’t work them very hard.

Lately my friend was riding a bit more frequently, having reached a point in his life when he could take it a little easier at work.  And although we live at some distance, and so don’t ride together often, we talk regularly to share stories of our riding accomplishments or failures.  And the other day he called.  A few days before, he reported, Moe had stopped eating, which was a worry.  And on the day he called he’d walked out to the barn to check on him, but Moe didn’t look like his old self.  My friend put a lead rope on him to walk him down the long drive that leads to the entrance of the farm – maybe he needed to get out of his stall, out of the barn?

At the end of the drive, he tied Moe up to the fence for a moment to get the mail out of the box.  And when he turned around, Moe was quivering.  The quivering quickly turned into convulsions which sent the chestnut thoroughbred down to the ground, into the ditch that runs beside the drive; the horse was now clearly unable to get up.

My friend went around to the horse’s head, and there he laid down in the ditch next to Moe, and he held his head, and he told him it was OK, he told he would be alright, he told him what a wonderful horse he had been for him and for his kids.  And finally Moe quieted down, and his great sides heaved their last breaths, and his nostrils fluttered as they left him, and he died there with his head in the arms of a man who had owned and ridden that horse for 24 years.

My friend called the vet, and on doing so immediately began to feel guilty: what had he done?!  Had he ridden his horse to death, he wondered?  Should he have just put him out to pasture and not taken him out for those canters through the woods, not jumped over that fallen tree beside the pasture that makes such a perfect jump?  Should he have refused to take me out for rides when I came to visit, because, after all, the horses were getting older?

And the vet looked at my friend and asked him this: Did Moe ever refuse to trot when you asked him?  Did he ever refuse to canter or to gallop?  Did he ever once refuse to jump over that fallen tree, or anything else that you asked him to jump over?

Not once, my friend replied, not once did he refuse.  And my friend had the answer to his worry that he had asked of his horse something that the horse was not willing or able to give.

...

On Good Friday, it seems a trivial thing to compare the death of Jesus to the death of a horse.  The Psalmist reminds us that God “hath no pleasure in the strength of an horse,” but I am not convinced the Psalmist is correct here.

In any case, there is nothing trivial in remembering that spiritually speaking, Jesus carries us through life.  If you have ever fallen to your knees to beg for something in prayer, you know what it feels like to realize that you are counting on Jesus to carry you on his back.  If you have ever found that you are at the limit of your own ability, or patience, or strength, or whatever, and turned to Jesus in desperation, then you know something about how this feels. 

You think we ask horses to do things that we could somehow do ourselves?  Horses have done for mankind things that we are not capable of doing without them.  Many of us don’t turn to Jesus until we realize that we need something done that we are not capable of doing ourselves, and then we ask him to do it.  The Christian faith has thrived because of that remarkable freedom we discover when Jesus carries us with easy grace over obstacles that we know we could never clear on our own, when he propels us forward with a speed and a strength that is quite definitely not our own.

But of course these days Jesus has become nearly as passé as horses have: as much of an anachronism in people’s lives as riding a horse through the streets of Philadelphia.  Which is why it is not, perhaps, so trivial a comparison.  Because in modern, sensible, adult society everybody knows that you don’t grieve for an animal for all that long when it dies, you don’t weep and moan about it, you certainly don’t let it change your life.  You get over it quickly, because it was, after all, only a horse. 

And what’s the difference, in modern, sensible, adult society, between a horse and Jesus?  You think most people expect you to take this Jesus stuff seriously?  You think you are supposed to weep and moan on Good Friday?  You think you are supposed to be any more undone than you would be by the death of an animal, a pet?  You think you are supposed to let the death of Jesus change your life?  In the world we live in, such sensitivities are the domain only of old ladies, and effeminate boys, and a certain kind of pathetic liberal who can’t seem to find a better framework for making sense of the world.

But here we are, dropping to our knees, almost as if we are ready to get down into the ditch and cradle the horse’s head in our arms – or cradle Jesus’ head in our arms, when he has been taken down from the Cross.  It’s almost as if we are trying to remember that remarkable freedom of being carried, supported, lifted high over the obstacle we cannot cross ourselves – even the great abyss of death, at whose gate we are now paused, Christ’s body in our arms, having heaved his last breaths, as they flutter through his nostrils.

…

The second call my friend made, after the vet, was to his neighbor with a backhoe, who came and dug a grave for Moe, right there at the end of the drive, just beside the crepe myrtles that my friend had planted for his daughter’s wedding.  And here, I pray, the comparison does become trivial.  Grass will grow, as it must, over the grave of my friend’s horse.

But as we see in our mind’s eye, Jesus’ body wrapped in its shroud, and lowered into its grave, we might ask ourselves, what have we done?  The question is implied in our liturgy today: what have we done to you, O Lord?

And a voice answers us: did I ever fail to carry you when you needed me to?  Did I ever fail to gallop for you?  Did I ever refuse to sail over an obstacle with speed and grace that you yourself lacked, carrying you on my back?

No, my child, I never did.  And fear not, for neither will I refuse to carry you over the abyss, and past the grave and gate of death.  For I have never refused you before, and I never will.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Good Friday 2013

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Every Stone

In the late 1950’s, the poet Richard Wilbur was approached by the composer Richard Winslow to write a poem that he could set for an upcoming Christmas concert at Wesleyan University. Wilbur, who was a relative newcomer on the poetry scene at that time but who would eventually become the Poet Laureate of the United States, accepted the invitation, put pen to paper, and wrote a poem that he called A Christmas Hymn. In his recounting of this story, Wilbur says that his friend Winslow set this new poem for solo voice and harpsichord in a style that reminded him, the poet recalls with a grin, of John Cage. For all of the non-John Cage fans or scholars out there in the congregation, this means that the music was probably not particularly warm and fuzzy, and it was not, apparently, exactly what Wilbur himself had in mind.

But in the early 1980’s, the organist, composer and General Theological Seminary professor David Hurd found the poem A Christmas Hymn and took Wilbur at his word, setting the text as a hymn. He named his new hymn tune after Lily Rogers, his choir director when he was a boy soprano at Saint Gabriel’s Church on Long Island, a woman whose middle name was Andújar. Hurd’s hymn, which is quite warm and fuzzy with plush harmonies and gently rocking rhythms, quickly found its way into The Hymnal 1982. You can find it right in front of you – Hymn 104, familiarly known as “A stable lamp is lighted.”

Now if you were to look up “A stable lamp is lighted,” which you’re welcome to do now or after communion, when we will sing it together, you will notice that, true to the poem’s original title, this hymn is found in the Christmas section of the hymnal, wedged right between “A child is born in Bethlehem” and “God rest you merry, gentlemen.” And you may wonder why we, sitting here with palms in our hands, ox-blood vestments on our shoulders, and Holy Week on our mind, are delving into the Christmas hymns. As if there weren’t enough options in the Lent and Holy Week sections to keep us flush in hymns from now until next Sunday. So why Christmas in March? Now for some of you, this hymn is like an dear old friend, and you know that the reason we sing this Christmas Eve hymn on Palm Sunday is because of the hymn’s gently rocking refrain. For Wilbur took this refrain for his poem not from the story of a manger with shepherds and angels, but from the story of a procession with cloaks and a colt.

The poem’s refrain comes from the moment in today’s Gospel when Jesus silences the Pharisees who are anxious about the noise level of the crowd by telling them that even if these crowds were silent, “the stones would shout out.” These stones are the crux of Wilbur’s poetry, the heartbeat pulsing at the center of each verse, where “every stone shall cry, and every stone shall cry.” Wilbur knew the truth of today’s liturgy: that what is true at the end is also true at the beginning, that the Passion and the Palms and the Incarnation are one story, and that this story and these stones have something to tell us.

“A stable lamp is lighted/Whose glow shall wake the sky;/The stars shall bend their voices,/And every stone shall cry. And every stone shall cry,/And straw like gold shall shine;/A barn shall harbor heaven,/A stall become a shrine.” First, Christmas, where the gentle rocking is the rocking of a woman, a girl, really, cradling her miracle of a son in her humble, holy arms. In his presence, the cold cave is transformed, the straw shining like gold in the lamplight, the stars sending their heavenly voices down past the angels singing peace on earth, goodwill toward men, down, down to touch the place where heaven and earth are met together in this boy child. In his presence, every stone shall cry out with quiet wonder, the hewn-out stone of the manger where his tiny body is laid to rest on a blanket of straw, the stone of the cave walls that hold the holy family close and safe, the stones of the shepherds’ fields and of all of Creation that welcome this newborn child home to the world that he himself has made.

“This child through David’s city/Shall ride in triumph by;/The palm shall strew its branches,/And every stone shall cry. And every stone shall cry;/Though heavy, dull, and dumb,/And lie within the roadway/To pave his kingdom come.” This child, a man really, now winds his way from Bethany to Jerusalem, down a hill and up again, rocking back and forth on the broad, swayed back of a donkey. And in his presence, children with their mothers, old men and their sons, the broken and the whole, the weary and the zealous, all strew his path with smiles and shouts and robes and a riot of spiky branches. In his presence, every stone shall cry out with utter joy, the stones on the hillsides that shine green in the sun, the stones in the road that bends through the valley, the stones of the city wall that cause this man to weep with the desire to open his arms up wide, wide enough to wrap up the whole city, wide enough to hold the world in his saving embrace.   

“Yet he shall be forsaken,/And yielded up to die;/The sky shall groan and darken,/And every stone shall cry. And every stone shall cry,/For stony hearts of men:/God’s blood upon the spearhead,/God’s love refused again.” God’s love refused, the love that has been made flesh, this man, a victim, really, now handed over, his embrace utterly rejected, outstretched arms smacked away and pinned down with nails to an old wooden cross. And when he is raised up high on that cross, the women who have followed him faithfully sink to the ground, rocking to and fro in each other’s arms, keening and wailing and waiting for their teacher, their friend, their son die. And when he does, the heavens that once sang in their courses sag and droop in disbelief at what Creation has done to the Creator. And in the presence of this, every stone shall cry out in pain, the stones of Golgotha that are broken and bloodied by so much suffering and death, the stones of fear and hatred that sit in the place of men’s souls, the stones of grief that mark the loss, the death, the end.

“But now, as at the ending,/The low is lifted high;/The stars shall bend their voices,/And every stone shall cry. And every stone shall cry/in Praises of the Child/By whose descent among us/The worlds are reconciled.” This reconciling Child, a man, a victim, a Savior, really, has shown us through his cross and Passion that this end has always been, from the very beginning, from that birth which led to death which led to life, the rocking forward from incarnation to passion to resurrection. Now the songs of the stars are of peace on earth and peace in heaven, of two worlds made one, once and for all. And in the presence of this song, every stone shall cry out with love, the stones of the tomb ringing with emptiness, the stone that was rejected now made the chief cornerstone, the stone of Death, so heavy, dull, and dumb, lifted away and polished so that it shines like the sun.

But we get ahead of ourselves, speaking of those Sunday morning stones. They will come in due time. For today, hear what the words of this poem and the music of this hymn have to say, that there is no stone that cannot sing. There is no stone that cannot be softened, enlivened, shaped to shout God’s purposes – not the stones of the manger, not the stones underfoot on the Jerusalem road, not the stones looming on the hill of crucifixion, not the stones waiting at the tomb, not the stone that calcified around Judas’ heart, not the stone that set up shop where Peter’s courage used to be, not the stone of the centurion’s unforgiving authority. There is no stone that God cannot soften, encourage, cajole to cry out that Jesus Christ is Lord. So if there are places in you that are hardened by fear or by sorrow, do not fear. If there are places in you that resist Christ’s offer of transformation, be of good cheer. And this week, may you find yourself singing. For here, in the presence of this child, man, victim, Savior, even the stones will shout out. Every stone shall cry. Perhaps even you and me.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

Palm Sunday, 24 March 2013

Saint Mark's, Philadelphia