Beauty and Holiness

I wonder what Jesus looked like when he prayed. Did he stand or sit…or kneel? Did he face east or west, turn to the sun or to the sea? Did he walk about as he prayed, matching long strides to the pace of his prayer? Did he take off his shoes or cover his head? Did he hold himself still, or did he daven and silently move his lips? Did he chant or sing or hum? Did he close his eyes and bow his head? Did he smile, or frown, or weep? Did he begin his prayers in silence or with a sigh? Did he stretch his arms to heaven and say, O Lord, hear my prayer, and let my cry come to you, in the name of the Father, and of me, and of the Holy Spirit? No, perhaps not.

What did Jesus look like when he prayed? The Gospels are fairly mute on the subject. There is, of course, the moment on the mount of transfiguration when Jesus’ garments began to glow white like no amount of sunshine and Clorox could ever bleach them. But other than that one description of Jesus in prayer, the Gospels leave us guessing. They do often tell us where Jesus prayed, that he liked to pray in places that were set apart and secluded – a mountain, the wilderness, places of privacy where the Holy Spirit had enough space to take wing. But what Jesus looked like when he prayed there? We are left only to imagine.

Today’s Gospel reading is equally silent on the subject. Luke tells us that Jesus is off praying “in a certain place,” perhaps one of these deserted spots, away from the maddening crowds. But it seems that this particular “certain place” is not so very far away, because the disciples can clearly see him. And they are watching him closely. Look! they whisper to one another. He’s praying again. Just look at him. I wish I could pray like that. He looks like he is full of peace, full of beauty and holiness. I want to look just like that when I pray.   

So when Jesus returns to the group, they ask him to show them how. Lord, teach us to pray, they say, the way that John taught his disciples. Now scripture again has nothing to say about how John the Baptist prayed, but I would imagine that his prayer practices were as severe as his wardrobe. Find a rocky spot in the desert, I can hear him saying, and kneel there until you can feel the sharpness of your sin. If you are ever unsure of your need to repent, walk into the desert and sweat a while. Hairshirts are always helpful tools to keep you from being too comfortable with the riches of the flesh, and always, always remember to say grace before tucking in to your locusts and wild honey.

Who knows what John the Baptist taught his disciples about prayer, and who knows what Jesus’ disciples are expecting when they ask him for some prayer instruction. But one thing is for sure – the disciples want to pray like Jesus. They want to look like him; they want to be like him. They want to be world-class pray-ers, Olympic athletes of supplication, Greek gods of petition. Teach us to pray, Lord, so that we can be really good at this, as good as you are, beautiful and serene and holy, holy, holy, just like you.

Jesus, of course, knows what they are asking. He knows exactly what they are looking for. He knows what it is that they want from him, but he also knows what it is that they need from him. So instead of offering helpful hints about the seven habits of highly effective pray-ers, he just smiles and says, okey dokey – or however you say okey dokey in Aramaic – this, my children, is how you pray.

Father. Hallowed be your name. And with those five simple words, Jesus changes everything. Father. Hallowed be your name, and instantly Jesus takes the focus away from the pray-er to the pray-ee. Because prayer, Jesus knows, is not primarily about our holiness; it is first and foremost about the holiness of God. God is the holy one, the numinous one. The disciples may have been asking about how to be holy themselves, but Jesus knows all holiness, all beauty, all prayer begins with God, the Holy One, the one whose very name is so holy it cannot be spoken, whose being is so holy it can only be expressed in the sound of sheer silence, whose presence is so holy that we cannot bear to look upon it. Take off your shoes, Jesus tells his disciples, for your God is holy, and the place of prayer is always holy ground.

But Jesus’ teaching does not stop there, because he then goes on to show his disciples – including you and me, of course – that this holiness does not exist for its own sake. It is not a disembodied, disinterested holiness; it is holiness on your side, holiness for you. That holiness is your Father, your Mother. That holiness is closer to you than your own heart. That Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy Immortal One is extremely, intimately, inexhaustibly interested in you. And so ask, and your prayers will be answered. Ask for bread enough, for food enough, for patience and endurance and strength enough. Ask for whatever you need, ask again and again, ask and seek and knock, for our God is holy and righteous and will give you whatever you need, not because of your holiness, but because of His. God will give you whatever you need, not because you prayed well, or enough, or at the right time of day or in the right posture or with the right words, but because God is God and can do no other.

God can do no other – including giving us anything less than a good gift. Jesus promises us that God will respond to our prayers, but he does not promise that God will give us what we ask for in the form that we would prefer the very second we’re looking for it. God actually knows better than that. God will not give us more stuff when what we need is more space. God will not give us a quick fix when what we need is a slow returning. God will not take us out of the wilderness when what we need is to see that he is in the wilderness with us. God will not even give us an instant cure when what we need is an enduring healing. This is good news, of course, but it is not always easy. It’s difficult to lay aside our own expectations about what God’s response will look like or when it will come. We can start to imagine that God has gone deaf and dumb, when really the problem is that while he’s reaching out to offer fish and eggs, we’re looking around for snakes and scorpions.

But the more we pray Father, Hallowed be your name, the better we get at seeing the gifts that God offers. The more we pray Father, Hallowed be your name, the more holiness we begin to see all around us. For the holiness of God cannot be contained. It spreads out and around, landing on everything like sunshine dripping down the soft leaves of summer. It is a saturating holiness that fills in the tiniest cracks and makes even the rests between the notes pregnant with the presence of the Almighty. It is a holiness that rubs off and rubs in, even into you and in me.

When we pray Father, Hallowed be your name, you and I actually become the holiness that we seek. When our eyes are pining for the beauty of God, when we turn our faces to the "splendor of Goddes grace," we actually begin to look like heaven. begin to look like what we’re looking for. “And every gentle heart,” poet Robert Bridges writes, “that burns with true desire/Is lit from eyes that mirror part/Of that celestial fire.” And that is what you look like when you pray. You look beautiful. You are beautiful when you pray. You are beautiful when you say Father, Hallowed be your name. You are beautiful when you join with angels and archangels to sing Holy, Holy, Holy with all of the heavenly choirs. You are beautiful when you sing “Here, O my Lord, I see thee face to face,” yes, even you in the back who thinks that God would probably rather you not sing in public, let me tell you, you’re wrong, God loves it when you sing, especially hymns out of The Hymnal 1982. When you sing, when you pray, you are so beautiful, filled with the holiness of God, afire with the light, the truth, the beauty that the world so pines to see. You are so beautiful that someone out there, who is looking for a home or looking for a hope might just look at you and say, wow. I want to pray like she does. I want to look like that. Teach me how to do that. So tell them. Father. Hallowed be your name. Invite them to pray in the beauty of holiness. Alleluia, alleluia! Praise with us the God of grace.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

July 28, 2013

The Mississippi Conference on Church Music and Liturgy

St. Philip's Episcopal Church, Jackson, Mississippi

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