What's It All About?

The other night I held in my arms the infant child of good friends: a child who may not have long to live.  The details are unimportant; suffice it to say that the diagnosis is severe, and the prognosis dire.  But my friends have determined to love their child with every ounce of their being as long as he is with them in this world.  And as I held him in my arms and looked down at his sweet, innocent face, and saw what a beautiful child he is, I was hit by a sense of how unfair it is.  I’m sure his parents have had more than a moment or two of such feelings.  And when you confront those feelings while you are holding in your arms a beautiful baby boy, you might ask yourself how you can ever trust God, who has tethered this child so tenuously to the life that he gave him.

If I were a consultant, and if God hired me, I’d have to tell God that one of his problems in the world today is that so many people don’t trust him.  And it’s not because they are cynics, or contrarians; it’s because there is plenty of cause in every day life to wonder whether or not God is trustworthy.  I won’t even posit a list of suggestions – you have all the material you need, I’m sure, to come up with your own.  Let the infant boy who snuggled against my chest the other night provide sufficient cause to wonder whether or not God is trustworthy.

We hear Jesus today teaching his disciples how to pray – his simple prayer of reverence, obedience, sustenance, and forgiveness.  And when Jesus goes on to expand on his teaching he makes this promising statement: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find it; knock and the door will be open for you.”

Oh, if only this were true!  But you know already that the prayers of my friends were not answered when they heard the news that their child would not be long for this world.  (And, of course, you know of your own unanswered prayers.)  Such bad news has the power to rob a child of his beauty, to make it seem as though this child - who cannot suckle as other children do, who is not growing the way that other children do, who cannot develop the way that other children do – is a less beautiful work of God’s own fingers.  Because what parent does not hope and pray for a perfect child?  To borrow from the Gospel: you pray to God for an egg, and then for a perfect child to be born from that egg; you trust in God not to give you a scorpion, so to speak.

This, of course, is what we assume that God is doing when imperfect children are born, as they are every day of the week: we assume that God is giving a scorpion, when an egg – and a healthy, perfect child emerging from it – was what was asked for.  How can you trust such a God?  This seems like a fair question when you are veering toward resentment that the child in question is so imperfect, so fatally flawed, and, therefore, such a failed attempt on God’s part to meet your expectations of what your child should be, must be.

And it is true that the child I held the other day is quite literally, fatally flawed.  And as long as I can see him only as such a child, I am doomed to resent God because of him, bound to conclude that God is not trustworthy, because he has failed to deliver on the promise, failed to give what was asked for, failed to disclose what was searched for, failed to open the door of happiness that was knocked at. 

My friends flirted with this resentment – I expect they still do from time to time, maybe even on a daily basis.  But, they also decided to see their child differently: not as the embodiment of a fatal flaw, and as an unanswered prayer, but as a child who bears the imprint of God’s own fingers.  Which is to say that my friends began to see their son as God sees him.  And they also decided to let God decide (so to speak) how long or how short this child’s time on this earth will be, knowing that, painful though it is for them, it doesn’t make their son any less beautiful.

For weeks and weeks, I could see almost none of this, despite my long conversations with them, and my daily prayers for them, and my desire to empathize with them.  For weeks and weeks my only thoughts of this child were gripped by worry, and anxiety, and fear.  For weeks and weeks, I had never actually picked up the child and held him in my own arms. 

And then, I did.

And when I looked at him, and felt him snuggling there – generously allowing himself to be taken from his mother’s arms – I could see nothing but a beautiful baby boy.  I could not see his fatal flaw (though I know it’s there).  For a few minutes, or more, I was privileged to see him, perhaps, as God sees him: as a beautiful child who needs the love and the care of his parents, even if it will be for a much shorter time than a supposedly more perfect child would require.

Of course it is not so simple – life never is.  It is complicated, and frightening, and painful.  And it is enough to make you want to give up on the whole notion of trusting God.

But when you are holding a child in your arms whose whole future depends on a the grace of God, what else can you do but trust the One who made him in the first place not to forsake him, not to forsake you?  And what makes him different, in that respect, from any other child (or from you and me) – whose whole future depends on God?

Who or what you put you trust in is, in part, a matter of what you see around you, and how you evaluate whatever it is you see.  And I admit that I found it very hard to trust God about this child – and I would not have blamed my friends for giving up on trusting God either – before I held their boy in my arms, and saw him for what he truly is.  Which is not an imperfect child whose fatal flaw is cause for worry, anxiety, and fear for those who love him, but a perfect imprint of some beautifully imperfect aspect of God, who, tragically, cannot survive long in this world.

This is not to fall back on the old platitude that God makes no mistakes.  Rather, it is to say, that if I can see the beauty in a child – any child – can you imagine what God can see?

For it would seem that there is a part of God that has a hole in his heart, and a malformed brain, and a disfigured smile, and undeveloped lungs, and a hundred thousand imperfections like the imperfections borne by the imperfect children, who nevertheless bear God’s image in the world – if only for a fleeting moment (or less) before their light goes out and they are known no more.

Of this we can be assured because it is, of course, God’s own story: his perfect Son: beaten, bloodied, and killed so as to become an unrecognizable image of the perfection whence he came, and yet the perfect icon of it.  How can his lifeless form, hanging on a cross, elicit trust in the One who sent him into the world for this?  Which is an eminently reasonable thing to ask as you contemplate the crucified Lord, and wonder what sort of God could countenance this cruelty.  And you may continue to see it this way, and struggle to put your trust in God… until the day you are willing to hold Christ in your arms, to cradle his head against your chest, to welcome him into your life – as either infant or corpse – and look at him, and see him as God sees him: as a child of beauty, who bears God’s own perfect image, because in his bloodied brokenness, and in his death he has become the perfect image of God’s love.

If I were a consultant, I would tell God not to operate this way.  I would tell God to operate more like Toyota, making sure to give people exactly what they want: perfectly rendered answers to their prayers.  And like most advice from consultants, my advice to God would make perfectly good sense.  I’d tell God to make sure that people found him at least as trustworthy as a car manufacturer, for instance.

But God’s ways are deeper than my ways, his thoughts are more complex than my thoughts.

And the strange thing is that when you cradle an imperfect child in your arms, about whom you have known so far only worry, anxiety, and fear, and you look down into his face, and see him for the beautiful boy that he is, then you begin to feel that maybe God can be trusted, even in such dire circumstances, even though you cannot explain why this is happening, or what it’s all about.  But you choose to trust - which only makes sense when you are holding this deeply imperfect life in your arms, and you can see not only that he is beautiful, but also, that you love him.  It is only in love that we discover that even the imperfect is the answer to our prayers, the object we were searching for, and the answer to the door on which we knocked. 

And the really painful part, is that having discovered this truth – having seen the perfect image of God even in an imperfect child – we remember that he will not be long for this world (which is as it must be), we will have to let him go, give him up, trust in God, which has become so much harder since we learned to see him as he truly is – as God sees him - and to love him.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

28 July 2013

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Why Do You Call Me Good?

Why do you call me good? I’m not really, you know. I’m not bad, either, but I’m not particularly good. But for some reason you seem bound and determined to keep calling me good – the Good Samaritan, with a capital G and a capital S. I’ve become a compound noun, a phrase that’s shorthand for a particular kind of person doing a particular kind of thing. I’ve even become a clause in liability insurance policies and in state law to reassure you that if you’re trying to help someone in a crisis situation and you fail, you cannot be successfully sued or prosecuted. You all use this little phrase so much that it’s started to seem like those two words just go together, good and Samaritan. You realize, of course, that they don’t. At least they didn’t for the people who first heard my story. For them, for the Jews of Jesus’ time, good and Samaritan went together about as well as good and Mets’ fan would for you, or healthy and cheesesteak. No, Jesus’ listeners would have told you that there was nothing particularly good about Samaritans. We had had a serious falling out, you see; we were like first cousins after a family feud, like best friends who decide to try being roommates – we were so close that our differences drove us crazy and finally drove us apart. So the fact that now the phrase Good Samaritan just trips off of all of your tongues is a little shocking. The Parable of the Good Samaritan. The Church of the Good Samaritan. She was saved by a Good Samaritan. Inconceivable.

And why call me good? I’m not so good. I’m just a man who was in the wrong place at the right time. I’m not a saint, for heaven’s sake. I’m not even particularly religious. Sure I go to worship when I need to (on Mt. Gerazim, of course). I make my yearly sacrifices, I keep the Law. But I’m a working man; I don’t have time to sit around debating Torah and asking questions about eternal life. I have to work; I have to walk, to travel around the country selling the wine that my family has made for generations. I am a respectable businessman, a respectable husband and father, but I don’t have a halo, and I’m not some sort of hero.

I do not like traveling the Jericho road. Never have, never will. The people I run across when I make that journey back and forth from Jerusalem are mostly miserable. Especially during the high pilgrim season, when they’re in a hurry, and they’re anxious, and they’re all pushing and shoving and running their donkeys right up the back of your neck. The rest of the year they mostly just ignore you. Most people are so worried about who’s in and who’s out, who’s friend and who’s other, that it’s easier to just pretend like you aren’t even there.

And mostly I ignore them right back, especially Jerusalem Jews. Now don’t get me wrong; I’ve never been openly hostile to the Jews. When some of my neighbors got it into their heads to go to Jerusalem and desecrate the temple by throwing a bunch of old bones around the place, I didn’t go along. I was tempted to, but I didn’t. But I have to admit, when I see the way the way my people are treated – as outcasts, as heretics and lesser-thans – it angers me. So I stick to my own side of the road.

But that anger is nothing compared to how I feel about the robbers. They make me furious, these bands of men who run about this wilderness road stealing and wounding and basically scaring the hell out of people. I’m a large man, with strong hands, and they leave me alone. But I have wished time and time again that one of them would try to rob me, just so I would have the pleasure of beating him up one side and down the other with absolutely no guilt whatsoever. So you see? I’m not that good.

You know, I almost didn’t stop when I saw that guy on the other side of the road. He was such a mess. I couldn’t believe what a pounding he had taken. Every bone in my body told me to just keep my eyes down and my feet moving. You know that feeling. It’s like when you come up on a woman sitting on the pavement talking to herself with a cup of coins in her hand, or a man with greasy hair crying over a cardboard sign that reads, Hungry! Please help. I almost kept walking. The man looked like he might have been dead anyway. But then I stopped and looked at him. I really looked at him. I saw him, naked and bloody and lying in the dust, and suddenly I was full of anger and full of pity all at the same time. Just looking at him made my whole body hurt. I really didn’t want to get involved, but what could I do? I couldn’t just leave his body there for the wind and the wolves. I was starting to ponder if I could get a burial for him down in Jericho if I didn’t even know who he was, when just then, he moaned. Not a lot, just a little, desperate, moan.

And my heart just went out to the guy. I mean, he was really in a rough way. So I went over to him to see what I could do. I don’t know anything about first aid, but I didn’t think any bones were broken. Well, maybe a couple of ribs. But he was bruised from head to toe, with scrapes and cuts where the robbers’ knuckles had torn at his skin. His wounds were red and angry and filthy. Flies were already starting to pick at them. Well, I thought, I can at least clean him up a bit while we’re waiting for someone else to come along. So I poured some of my oil over the cuts to try to get some of the dust out; but that just made things sticky and not very clean. Wine would be better. All I had with me was the wine I was going to sell down in Jericho, and I wasn’t thrilled about wasting a whole wineskin just to wash out the wounds of a guy who was probably going to die anyway, but I saw him lying there, completely broken, and so I broke the seal on a wineskin and poured out some wine. On the open wounds. He didn’t like that much.      

We sat there for a while, him flinching and moaning and muttering about someone named Sarah, me wiping his wounds and waiting for someone else to come along to take him off my hands. Which, of course, no one did. And, well, you know the rest of the story. I shrugged him up on my own donkey, put my pack on my own back, and got him out of there. I cared for him myself until I found someone else who could help. But that’s it. I’m not a Superman. I’m not a Savior. I’m just a Samaritan.

So why do you call me good? You know, Jesus asked that question, too. Why do you call me good? Of course, the person who was calling him good was a sycophantic hypocrite just trying to get in with “the man.” Jesus asked the question because he didn’t want to be flattered. I guess I’m asking it because I don’t want to be flattened. The Good Samaritan. As if calling me “good” explains everything. I’m not perfect, some great example of purity and saintly and noble guy. I’m not a good guy who of course had no other option but to help that man on the road. I’m just a normal guy – a guy like you – who did something, one thing, that was, actually, pretty good. The point of Jesus’ story is not that I am a person of particular virtue, who gets it better than you do, who is innately better, somehow, than you. To say that would be as idiotic as to say that the priest and Levite who walked by earlier are innately evil, or that the lawyer who asked Jesus the question that got this whole thing started was innately selfish or callous. That is hugely missing the point. We’re all just men, people, like you, and what determines whether we’re good or not is what we actually choose to do. What I did wasn’t easy. I didn’t do it because I’m particularly good, and I certainly didn’t do it because I was trying to be “nice.” I just did it, one little step at a time. I did it because I saw this guy and I felt his pain, and I found that I couldn’t just leave it at that. I stepped into his skin, and once I had done that, I just had to help him. I felt compassion for him. Compassion. I was suffering with him, and so helping him was actually helping me, because in that moment he was my brother, my neighbor, a part of my family, a part of myself. He was my responsibility. So if you’re going to call me anything, call me compassionate. The Compassionate Samaritan. The world could use more perfectly normal but wholeheartedly compassionate people doing good things any day of the week, just like I guess the world could use more neighborhood watch programs where people are watching for neighbors instead of for others.

So don’t call me good. I don’t think it’s so helpful, if it makes you feel like I’m good and therefore better than you so why bother. There is only really one who is good. No one is good but God alone. But he is so good, he is so good that he offers us his only Son, the compassionate one, to suffer with us, to die for us, to rise again in great glory, to offer all of us normal folk the glimmer of hope of being compassionate people doing good things. Because that we can do. That we must do. So go and do likewise.

Preached by Mtr. Erika Takacs

14 July 2013

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

A Dark Power

Back in 2009 the British Ministry of Defense shut down its hotline designated for the reporting of UFOs, saying that it served no purpose, since decades of reported sightings had produced not a single shred of credible evidence that a UFO was actually the vehicle of a visitor from another galaxy.

To my knowledge, there is no government agency in the US that collects such reports.  However, you will find non-governmental organizations ready to take your report.  When I looked, I found instructions about how to report such a sighting; they begin with this sensible advice: “Remain calm.”

On NPR recently a panelist in a discussion about UFOs pointed out that there is actually widespread suspicion, even hope, in the scientific community that there could be life beyond our galaxy.  To this way of thinking, the question isn’t whether there is life to be found elsewhere in the universe, the question is whether those life-forms are here, visiting us.

It does not seem far-fetched, outlandish or crazy to believe that there is more life beyond our planet, our solar system.  It does not require a hallucination or a suspension of disbelief to suspect that life – in one form or another – has been created in a galaxy far, far away.  It does not require a measure of lunacy or paranoia to imagine that God has done the intricate and awesome work of life-giving in regions too far from us to see.  But neither does allowing for such a possibility lead to the readiness to believe in little green men, or flying saucers, or a host of other supposed phenomena associated with the idea that there is life elsewhere in the universe and it is looking for us.

Today the Gospel reading introduces us to demons.  And many people might put demons and demonic spirits into the same category as UFOs – loopy, far-fetched, superstitious thinking.  We Episcopalians are prone to be at least as skeptical about demons as we are about UFOs – maybe even more so.  And we have no codified method of dealing with demonic possession, no official office where you should file a report.  The Roman Catholic church has somewhat clearer rules about all this, which are pretty restrictive, and begin with the supposition that demonic possession is an exceedingly rare thing.

So why assign this reading from Luke’s Gospel that tells us all about a man possessed by a demon, and Jesus’ exorcism of that demon, and the plight of an innocent herd of pigs?  Why keep reading such a story in a day and an age when we know better?  After all, can’t we explain these demons away?  Isn’t that what we sophisticated western people do?  Can’t we just assume that this is a case of epilepsy, or schizophrenia, or some other mental illness?  Can’t we all agree that the man with a demon didn’t so much need Jesus as he needed to be on his meds?  Just like UFOs, don’t we know better than this?

It seems to me that there are good reasons not to merely try to explain these demons away, at least two that leap to mind:

The first reason not to dismiss the demons quite so easily is that the power of darkness still moves among mightily among us, even in modern American society.  There is a force that draws too many of us toward malice, hatred, cruelty, destruction, warfare, selfishness, perversion, abuse, wastefulness, and fear.  You don’t need me to begin a catalog the way this dark force is at work in the world – you can read about it in the papers, and you know about it from the darker episodes of your own life, and the lives of those you love.  This dark force is not only a plot device for modern cinema, it exists, and it drives us to our knees with weakness, faithlessness, and despair.

The second reason not to dismiss the demons of Gerasene quite so easily is because it is only Jesus who has the power to free the man of their possession, and banish them to the depths of the sea.

And may I suggest that the question for us today isn’t so much whether or not there is a dark power at work in the world – I take it as plainly evident that there is – and that we should not get caught up in whether or not we call that power demonic.  The question really is whether or not Jesus still has the power to free us and the whole world from the grip of that dark power, and banish it from our lives?

Listen again to the prophet Isaiah:

 “I was ready to be sought out by those who did not ask,

to be found by those who did not seek me.

I said, ‘Here I am, here I am,’

to a nation that did not call on my name.

I held out my hands all day long to a rebellious people,

who walk in a way that is not good,

following their own devices;

a people who provoke me to my face continually….”

I said, ‘Here I am, here I am,’ to a nation that did not call on my name.

We are not being asked today to assert our allegiance to the far-fetched idea that there are demons in the world that might possess you or me without any warning, and provide fodder for a Hollywood blockbuster.  We are being asked to consider whether or not a dark force still holds sway in the world, whether we can see it among the tombs: ranting and raving in the habitations of death.

We are being asked to consider whether the malice, hatred, cruelty, destruction, warfare, selfishness, perversion, abuse, wastefulness, and fear that we see all around us are not just by-products of the atmosphere, and therefore conditions that we have to learn to live with, - like illnesses for which we have no cure as of yet - but actually the signs of the working of another force: contrary to the will of the God who made us and fitted out a Paradise for us. 

Why do we allow for this possibility in our movies and television, our literature and art, but no longer in our religion?  Is it so hard to believe not only that Jesus can heal, but also that he can vanquish?  Not only that he can teach, but also that he can conquer?

And so we provoke God continually, we follow our own devices, we walk in a way that is not good, we are a rebellious people, and we generally refuse to call upon his name… while God keeps calling to us: “Here I am, here I am!”

Let’s assume that demonic possession – if there even is such a thing – is exceedingly rare.  In fact, let’s assume that its days, like the days of the dinosaurs, are over.  We need not still assume that the power that brought us demons has been drowned forever in the Sea of Galilee.  There is far too much evidence, to my mind, that the same dark force that made itself known in the demons of Gerasene is still at work in the world, to dismiss it so easily.  And unlike the UFOs, that dark force is deeply interested in visiting us in the here and now, wreaking havoc and destruction in its path, and creating again a habitation of death where it can feel at home in its nakedness.  I feel no need to name it: not demons, or Lucifer, or Beelzebub, or the devil, or any other name, for its name is legion, and it resists precise identification.

But the power to prevail, the power to vanquish, the power to conquer the powers of darkness has only one name, and its name is Jesus!

And the point of telling this old-fashioned story about a man who has demons, and the point of not just explaining the demons away…

… is that the darkness is still too close at hand for us to be so cavalier about it.

… and the point is that the Lord keeps calling to us, “Here I am, here I am…”

… and the point is to identify the real question, which is this:

Are we finally ready to embrace the Lord who calls out to us in our darkness, and to call him by name: he who is the name of our Salvation: Jesus, the Christ, our Lord, and our Savior, who vanquishes the power of darkness from our lives, and bids us live in realms of light!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

23 June 2013

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia