What Happens Next?

But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.  (Luke 24:11)

The other day I sat in on a discussion at St. James School with a handful of our 5th and 6^th grade students there and a fairly well-known author.  We sometimes have visitors who come to speak to the students about their pursuits and accomplishments.  We’ve had an Olympic rower, an IronMan triathlete, and the head of a local private school, among others, and most recently this author who is a writer of short stories.  He talked with the students about how you tell a story, and he suggested that first you start with an interesting idea – for instance, let’s say there is a dog who has two heads, that’s interesting.  Next, he suggested, you start to ask questions about the dog with two heads: how did the dog get two heads?  The kids offered their own questions, too.  Do the two heads like each other?  Does one head of the dog try to eat the other head’s food?

Right, said the author, and what happens next?  This question, he told us, is crucial because, of course, it’s what keeps the story interesting, and a story that people will read is a story that continues to get interesting, where the stakes keep getting higher.

Boring stories never go anywhere – maybe you have a friend, like I do, who likes to tell stories that never seem to go anywhere.  They start well, and you are listening, waiting for him to get to the good part, but the good part never comes, the stakes never get higher, and soon your interest wanes, because nothing happens next.  It is an idle tale.

St. Luke tells us that the disciples first greeted the news of the resurrection as though it was an idle tale.  I take it that this could mean a couple of things.  To begin with, it could mean that the story is just untrue – a lie.  And I think that probably many who heard the news that the women brought back from the empty tomb assumed just that – it is a lie.  But even after some of the details of the story are verified – Peter goes to the tomb and finds it just as the women reported – the possibility that the story of Jesus’ resurrection is an idle tale remains, because the question remains, what happens next?  And if nothing much happens next, then it is still more or less an idle tale.

If this question was pressing to those who first learned the good news of the resurrection, then it is no less pressing to us today.  Is the Gospel if Jesus an idle tale or isn’t it?  Is it a lie – as many these days contend that it is?  And, even if the tomb was empty and Jesus was raised from the dead, so what?  What happens next?

Well, we know what happens next in some ways: Jesus hangs around for forty days, St Paul tells the story to anyone who will listen and the church grows, Constantine legitimizes the faith and the church expands, Eastern and Western Christians fight over minutia and the church splits in two, Martin Luther has a hammer and he isn’t afraid to use it when there is a nail and a door around, Henry VIII has a mistress and he isn’t afraid to marry her (as long as he can get a divorce!), and so on and so on and so on.

And all of those are good stories, and many others – BUT, they still could be idle tales to YOU, if you can’t answer the question in your own life: what happens next?  Because, let’s face it, in life the stakes are always getting higher – more is on the line today than it was yesterday, for most of us.  So if the story of Jesus, and the news of his resurrection isn’t any more than an idle tale, who’s got time for it?

OK, maybe you were baptized long ago when you were an infant, but you can’t remember a thing about it – what happened next?  Maybe nothing happened.  Maybe there was a brunch and then you had your second birthday, and you grew up, and nothing happened next, and you haven’t given it a second thought since then.  In this case, so far the whole thing may seem to you like an idle tale.

But maybe the story unfolded in a different way.  Maybe when you were a kid you got very, very sick.  Maybe you were in the hospital.  Maybe they didn’t know if you would make it.  Maybe your mom and your dad went to bed every night with tears on their pillows offering the only prayer they could: Please God, make her well, let her live!  Please, let what happens next be OK!

And maybe, through the skill of doctors and the care of nurses you survived that childhood illness, that’s what happened next.  I know people who this has happened to, I bet you do too.

Maybe when you got older you had a great time, you were the life of every party, but then you discovered that partying was starting to control your life, not the other way around.  And maybe this cost you your health, and your sanity, and your friends, and your job, and your money, and nearly everything as you slipped deeper and deeper into addiction.

But maybe one day it dawned on you that your life was out of control, and you could not control it, you had no idea what would happen next, but all the options seemed pretty poor, and the only thing you could do was to hand over the reins to God and ask him to take over your life, because so far you had only learned how to throw it away.  And maybe recovery has been a gift in your life, the best possible thing that could have happened next.

Or maybe you got married on a beautiful spring day to the love of your life, and everything was peaches and cream, and you looked forward to a lifetime of bliss.  But before the kids were even out of diapers the shouting matches between the two of you were interrupted only by long, steely silences that were better maintained from separate bedrooms, and the divorce was ugly, and the fight for the kids left you estranged from them, and none of this was supposed to be the stuff that happened next, but here it had happened, and now you could hardly be more miserable, and you would fall asleep at night wondering over and over, more from fear than hope: what happens next?

Shall I go on?  Middle age, and all its challenges; getting older and worrying about money, and sickness, and health, and your grown kids whose lives have not turned out the way they were supposed to; the market collapses, and with it your retirement plans.  And you are wondering: what happens next.

And sometimes you pray about it deliberately, sometimes you know that you are relying on God alone, because you know that you don’t have the strength, or the wisdom, or the patience, or the fortitude to navigate it on your own, and you think thing only thing that can happen next is that everything will only ever go downhill…

… but it doesn’t.  Somehow light shines in the darkness, hope emerges where there was none, healing happens. mercy is given, forgiveness is found.  That’s what happens next.

And then there are the graveyards.  There are more people buried in the graveyards of our hearts right here this morning than any of us can count.  There are infant children buried here in our hearts today, and there are aged grandparents buried.  There are spouses, and lovers, and best friends, and college buddies, there are sisters and brothers, fathers, and so many mothers buried here in our hearts today.  There are painful, aching memories, not only of their deaths, but of their dying – sometimes too long and drawn out, sometimes too sudden and alarming.  And alongside every one of those deaths there is the haunting question that sometimes seems just as present as it was the day she died – what happens next?  Can I survive without him?  Will the sun ever shine, and if it does, will I ever want to look at its beams again?  Will this sorrow ever get any easier to bear?  Will the loneliness ever subside?  What happens next?

At times like this, everything in life seems like an idle tale – either an outright lie (Please, don’t try to make me feel better by telling me the sun will come out tomorrow when I know it won’t!), or like that awful question will just be hanging in the air for ever – what happens next?

Hey guys, Jesus is risen, the tomb is empty, isn’t that great!

Well, we’ll see; what happens next?

What happens next is this: that Jesus, having toured the depths of hell during his three-days excursion in death, now begins traveling to all the secret hells that we have set up in our own lives, like little dioramas of misery, some of which we show to anyone who wants to look, and some of which we keep hidden in the darkest corners of our souls.  The caption, the script, the banner, the title, the message of all those little hellish scenes is this: What happens next?  And it asked with a defiance that suggest the asker knows what happens next: nothing, for faith and hope and love are nothing but an idle tale – told, most often, by an idiot of some degree or another.

I have constructed such hellish dioramas in my own heart.  In fact, I am building one right now in my spare time – mostly from the borrowed material of someone I love, and whose life, I fear, is in grave danger quite beyond his control.  And nearly every day I wonder, so what happens next?  And the question frankly fills me with dread.

But I remember how those first followers of Jesus believed the news of his resurrection – the news that life would and can and does, indeed, triumph over death – how that news seemed, even to those who knew him well, an idle tale.

And I already know that it is not.  For I have seen his glory rising time after time in a thousand little Easters that smash our dioramas of hell into little bits and pieces.  I have seen it in my own life and in the lives of countless others I have known and heard about.  I have felt the warmth of the rising Sun, when I was sure it would never rise again.  I have looked into tombs I thought should be over-crowded and found them empty.

And if you never have, then today is the day to look and see that you have been given the strength, or the wisdom, or the patience, or the fortitude to navigate the dark and awful questions that leave you asking in dire hope: what happens next?

What happens next is that Jesus rises again and again from the graves of our lives, bringing hope and new life where there was only ever death and despair.  And that is a story worth telling with shouts of Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia, for the Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Easter Day 2013

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Easter Greetings

Back when I was teaching high school choir, I used to spend a part of every summer participating in a Bach festival at Westminster Choir College. This festival was a chance for professional and amateur singers to come together to learn a major choral work of Bach – one of the Passions, a grouping of cantatas, or even the B Minor Mass – and then to offer a public performance with a group of top-notch soloists and instrumentalists. These were always wonderful weeks spent with the best people in the world: namely, people who love nothing more than spending 8 hours a day singing Bach. Those of us who were actually being paid to do this enjoyed ourselves so much that we did it for very little money and always ended up helping with administrative duties as well.

One year, the year we were learning the Bach St. John Passion, I ended up proofreading the program, which, if you know me at all, you know is right in my wheelhouse. The program included the entire text of the Passion in both German and English that had been typed in word by word by some poor summer intern in the continuing education department. This was before the days when you could just go online and copy a text like this as a whole, so this poor intern was typing and tabbing, tabbing and typing, German and English, English and German, for pages and pages and pages, which would drive anyone a little bit crazy.

And let me tell you, the proofreading wasn’t particularly fun, either. I ended up proofing for an entire day of rehearsal, looking at a few lines at a time during any free moment, like during someone else’s aria or a longish conversation about Baroque bowing technique. By lunch, my eyes were bleary from passing over the same phrases again and again, passages like this, like a script: Evangelist: Pilate asked, Pilate: Are you the King of the Jews? Evangelist: Jesus answered: Jesus: Is that your own idea, or have others suggested it to you? Evangelist: Pilate answered: Pilate: Am I a Jew? Your own people and their chief priests have handed you over to me.

But then suddenly, unexpectedly, in the middle of my proofreading, there was this: Evangelist: Pilate asked, Pilate: What have you done? Evangelist: Jesus answered: Jesus: HI!! J …printed all in capital letters with two exclamation points and a smiley face. I couldn’t help it – I burst out laughing in the middle of some poor baritone’s solo and completely interrupted the rehearsal. Jesus answered, HI!! J All these years later, I’m still not sure how this HI!! J got in there. I’ve always imagined a poor intern, eyes crossed from typing, stumbling away from her desk in search of strong coffee, and one of her fellow interns tiptoeing over to her terminal to type in a little note to cheer her up. HI!! J But the first intern wasn’t able to find any caffeine or sugar during her sanity break, and when she came back to her computer, she completely missed the message. And so we ended up with Jesus answered, HI!! J Thank God it didn’t make it into the program. The poor bass singing the part of Jesus would never have known why everyone started giggling during his dramatic recitative.

Of course, if that line had made it into the program, people might have thought that they had just been transported ahead three days and into the Gospel of Matthew. Because it’s true that right in the middle of Matthew’s resurrection story, Jesus suddenly and unexpectedly shows up and says, HI!! J, maybe even with two exclamation points and a smiley face. Of course, our translation tonight says “Hail” and some others say “Greetings” or even “Good morning” but the idea is the same – Hey Mary, Hey Mary…HI!! J

This, dare I say, perky greeting is a surprise particularly because Matthew’s resurrection story is surely the most dramatic of them all. There is no peaceful, pre-dawn tomb here. There are no women laden with spices stepping quietly through the garden only to arrive at the tomb to find the stone already rolled away and an angel serenely perched upon it. No, the women in Matthew’s Gospel, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, seem to have gone to the tomb to spy, not with spices. They are sneaking about on a covert mission to see how many guards there are and whether or not they seem to be doing their jobs when WHAM! BLAMMO! Suddenly the earth is roaring and rumbling like thunder, an angel shoots down out of the sky like a bolt of lightning, so bright that it hurts their eyes, and they can barely stand to look at him as he takes the giant stone and hurls it away from the tomb with a heave and a crash and thud. The guards just pass out. The shining angel speaks to the women in a voice that rattles their eardrums, Fear not! he says – an address which always indicates that the addressees must look pretty darn fearful – Fear not! Jesus is risen, look inside the tomb, he is not here, he has gone ahead to Galilee. Go, go tell the disciples what is going on and where to find him! For I have said so. Let it be written, let it be done!

Now somehow, miraculously, the women do not pass out, nor do they just run away screaming like the ladies in the Gospel of Mark. No, they actually have enough presence of mind to do what the angel asked them to do. They scurry along down the road, scouting for some disciples to report in to – Jesus is risen, there’s an angel sitting on the tomb, and everybody needs to get to Galilee. They’re running, panting, blinking and rubbing their eyes, wondering how in the world they’re going to convince Peter that this wasn’t just a vision brought on by lack of sleep when WHAM! BLAMMO! Suddenly Jesus is standing right in front of them. And Jesus says, HI!! J Two exclamation points and a smiley face.

It is a wonderful, unexpected, gift of a moment. Jesus isn’t supposed to be there at all – the angel said that Jesus was going on ahead of them to Galilee, not sneaking up behind them on the road to Galilee. But there he is, very much in the flesh, popping up just to say hi. It is as if he cannot wait to see them, that he is bubbling over with the joy of the surprise, that he is giddy and breathless with the wonder of it. HI!! J

This is a particularly appropriate reading for the Easter Vigil, because the liturgy tonight has been a lot like this. This is surely the most dramatic service of the entire Church year. We light a big fire in the church, for goodness sake! We sit in red glow of that fire, holding our own tiny flames, and then are plunged into to darkness, where we hear haunting, ancient prayers and words about floods and freedom and dry bones being knit together; we bless water with smoke and breath and plunge a truly giant candle into the depths of the font – it is all swirling darkness and light and mystery and litany and then WHAM! BLAMMO! Suddenly the lights flash on and Alleluias are sung higher and higher and higher bells ring and the choir sings Glory be to God on high and the rafters seem full of the flapping of angels, too glorious and bright to look at. It is a surprise, a glorious, wondrous surprise, like Jesus just cannot wait any longer to tell us that it is truly Easter and so jumps up behind us with a grin and says HI!! J Two exclamation points and a smiley face.

And do you know the real joy of this? Jesus does this all the time. He is forever popping up in unexpected places in our lives with words of new life, comfort, and joy. The truth is that the risen Christ just cannot get enough of you – he cannot wait for you to make it down the road to find him, because after all sometimes we get lost and sidetracked and find ourselves wandering down side paths where the valleys are not exalted and the rocks and hills not made low and we begin to forget what it is we’re looking for in this valley of darkness when WHAM! BLAMMO! Suddenly, Jesus is there, meeting us along the way, popping up when we least expect it, just to say HI!! J I am risen, I am here, and I am yours. So go on down the road, for you will surely again see me up ahead. I cannot wait to surprise you again, surprise you with new life, with my love, with my constant presence, with my longing, longing, longing, to surprise you with my joy just in seeing you coming. So HI!! J Happy Easter!! Two exclamation points and a smiley face indeed.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

The Great Vigil of Easter, 30 March 2013

Saint Mark's, Philadelphia

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