Christ the King

You may listen to Mother Nora's sermon here.

Decades ago, in a small town in Southern California, in a very modest little house, my great-aunt Alice and my great-uncle Eddie had a dining room that betrayed their quiet ambition.  It was a very simple dining room, nothing fancy or imposing, but it had a special wall.  On that wall were three portraits, visible from where guests sat at the table.  I remember them as very large portraits, but perhaps that’s just a trick of memory.  Because these three portraits collectively made a very large statement about what was expected in that house. The first was a portrait of Pope John XXIII, who had famously presided over the Second Vatican Council.  The second was a portrait of John Kennedy, the slain Irish Catholic President. The third was a picture of Alice and Eddie’s son, John Edward. Pope John, John Kennedy, and our son John.  That little triptych expressed some serious first-generation Irish-American assimilationist parental pressure.  Pictures are powerful.  What we see when we look at the face of another says a lot about what our aspirations are.

Like many, in this week that saw the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, I have been looking at pictures of the president and his wife Jackie, marveling again at their astonishing ease, their accessible glamour, their apparent comfort in a position of extraordinary power, and feeling again the strong sense of loss that is forever written into those photographs.  I know, just as I’m sure you all do, that there was no “Camelot” in Washington in the early sixties, and that deeper knowledge of both the politics and the personalities of that administration will tend to take the edge off the glamour.  It’s all the more surprising, then, to find that even after fifty years, even when so many of the uncomfortable facts are known so well, a picture of those faces, or those clothes, or that convertible in Dallas will call up such utopian longing.  Whatever else he did or didn’t do, John Kennedy was a politician who knew how to present a face to the world.  A face that made promises: about what we could accomplish, about who we could imagine ourselves to be, about what it might be possible to hope for.  One source of his power was the ability to promise more than any politician can deliver.  We require that of our leaders, and he did it exceptionally well.

When the crowd around Jesus in this morning’s Gospel looks at him upon the cross, I don’t think they see anything like promise.  I don’t think anyone knew, on that Good Friday, that they were standing at the gates of Paradise.  I don’t think they imagined us cherishing this Gospel passage as we celebrate the feast of Christ the King. More likely, the leaders and the soldiers and the criminals who were dying with Jesus saw an image of failure before them.  They saw what they were afraid of.  They didn’t see salvation in front of them because they couldn’t see in the dying Christ an image that they could identify with to make themselves feel powerful.

We can tell the people around Jesus were afraid because Luke lets us hear what they say about the dying man in front of them.  The leaders of the people are the first ones to begin the taunting: “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!”  We may have grown so used to hearing these words that we no longer hear the anxiety they express.  But think about it: it’s one thing to condemn a person, or to believe that a criminal deserves the death he or she faces.  To stand in judgment like that is already a solemn, terrible thing.  It should have brought them to their knees.  But something made the religious and political leaders do more than condemn.  Something made them mock the man they wanted to see executed. 

That extra desire to be cruel to a dying man is a tell-tale sign.  Cruelty usually means one thing in us: it means that we are defending ourselves against the fear that we are like the person we despise.  So when the leaders of the people look at the dying Christ, they see the fraudulence of their own political and religious authority:  “You pretend to save, but you have no power to save.”  You could say that about their leaders, you can say that about our leaders.  Those in power in this world pretend that they can save, but they have no power to save.  They may do great good, and they may do great harm, we may give them that power, but they do not have the power of salvation we all seek.  Hear how the leaders in Jesus’s day saw in his own suffering an image of their secret weakness.

So too, the soldiers echo the taunting of the leaders:  “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!”  What did they see in Jesus?  Perhaps in his failure they saw the secret weakness of their own military might: “You promise peace, but you have no power to bring order and stability to the people.”  You could say that about the Roman army, you can say that about armies now.  Whatever the bravery and selflessness of those who fight, war will not save us.  The kingship of Jesus, the God who forgives us, exposes the lie of military strength.

Even one of the criminals who is dying with Jesus joins in mocking him: “Are you not the Messiah?  Save yourself and us.”  Now, we don’t know anything about these criminals, but there is a tradition of referring to them as thieves.  I like that tradition.  Thieves have an aura of invulnerability about them. They are clever enough to go their own way, clever enough to get around the law and avoid the penalty.  They don’t have to pay for what they take. The outlaw in the wild west.  Cary Grant in that Hitchcock film, stealing jewels in the French Riviera.  Here too, the kingship of Jesus--the God who “gets around the law” by fulfilling the law in perfect love--exposes the glamorous lie of individual human ingenuity.  You could say it about the clever thief, you can say it about us: “You pretend to know how to get whatever you want, but here at the hour of death you have no power to help yourself.”

Fighters and thieves and leaders who know on some level that their power is not real.  That’s who we are at the foot of the cross, and that’s why it is so difficult for us to accept the authority of our suffering King.  There is no whiff of Camelot about this death.  And the only one we hear in the crowd who can follow Jesus is the criminal who seems to feel no need to exalt himself at Jesus’s expense.  The one we call the “good thief” is given some glimpse of the salvation before him. 

Listening to a whole chorus of people mocking Jesus, a whole chorus of authority figures and strongmen and clever scoundrels, this thief makes no attempt to raise himself above another human being.  He catches a spark from the humility of Jesus.  He simply tells the truth about himself and about them.  “Aren’t you afraid?” he asks?  “Don’t we all stand condemned?”  “Why the extra cruelty in your attack upon this innocent man?”  “What are you hiding from?”  And he asks Jesus what any lowly follower of any would-be worldly leader might ask: “Think of me when you are a king.”

Who knows what he believed about Jesus at that moment?  For all we know he spoke out of human kindness and humility, perhaps with a sense that he had nothing to lose in humoring the poor man dying beside him.  Whatever he intended, it was enough for Jesus to work with.

At that moment the gates of another world open to the good thief.  “This day,” says Jesus, “you will be with me in Paradise.”  Paradise, a word for heaven, I guess, but also familiar to us as a word for Eden. It’s a word associated with royal gardens.  It’s the world that Adam and Eve lived in before they tried to be sovereign powers in their own right.  The world we all belonged to before we tried to become like kings and gods.  A world in which we let God create us, redeem us, and save us because we know we cannot create, redeem, or save ourselves.

And in the middle of that second Eden, a new tree of life.  Jesus on the cross, speaking words of forgiveness, transforming the place of the skull into the place of the new creation.  A new heaven and a new earth.

This feast we celebrate this morning, the feast of Christ the King: it’s not something we do for Jesus because he needs us to pay homage.  This feast of the kingship of Jesus is something God does for us.  God gives us a savior who humble, who teaches us what we can be. 

There is nothing that you and I can be, or need to be, apart from fidelity to that forgiving savior.  This feast day is for us, to help us surrender our fantasies about power.  This feast day is for us, to bring us into the new world of God’s forgiveness.  This day is for us, that we may rest beneath the sheltering arms of the tree of life.

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson

24 November 2013

Saint Mark's, Philadelphia

Brighter Bulbs

You may listen to Father Mullen's sermon here.

O sing unto the Lord a new song, the Psalmist encourages us.  But what exactly does this mean?  We Episcopalians are well-known to prefer old songs to new ones – even though we allow the occasional new song into the mix.  How can we take this verse of the psalms seriously?First of all, we accept that the Psalmist is speaking metaphorically.  A new song doesn’t have to be a song: it can be a soup recipe, or a coat of paint, or the hinge on a door.  It could be the first time you went to church on a day other than Sunday.  It could be the way you said grace silently before you sat down to your food last night, or maybe out loud.  It could be the way you called your mother for the first time in months.  It could be the urge you are feeling for forgiveness – either to give it or get it.

A new song doesn’t have to be composed of music, it could be the dusty Bible you picked up for the first time in ages and actually read.  It could be the $5 bill you slipped into the hand of someone begging on the street.  It could be the way you finally un-crossed your arms when he talks to you.  It could be your decision to finally go see the doctor.  Or it could be your willingness to try giving up the … whatever it is you need to give up.  It could be the gym you just joined, or that you finally stopped coloring your hair because why not let people know you are going grey?  It could even be your pledge of support to this parish – maybe you never made one before.

O sing unto the Lord a new song, the Psalmist says.  But it doesn’t have to be a song made of music.

Here’s a new song for you:  Several months ago our property manager, Mark, who had heard me griping about how hard it is to see in church, now that my eyes are well and truly middle-aged, did something extraordinary.  He went around to all the lamps that hang above the pews there where you are sitting, and he retro-fitted them with am amazing piece of technology.  He took out the old 300-watt bulbs, and he checked the circuitry carefully, and then he replaced those 300-watt bulbs with 500-watt bulbs.  And do you know, that with brighter bulbs in the lamps, it got easier to see!

Recently, our weekend sexton, Jason, noticed that it was not so easy to see the image of the crucified Christ on the Rood Beam, there in the chancel arch.  Jason is comfortable on a ladder, so he dragged out a tall one, and he took the old bulbs out of the lights that shine on the Crucifix, and he replaced them with brighter bulbs.  Almost immediately I was hearing comments about how much easier it is to see this central image of our faith!

It’s amazing what you can do with brighter bulbs!

The church needs to go through this process from time to time.  We need to look around and find the old things that worked perfectly alright, but which may have become dim or outmoded with age.  It is a matter of wisdom to be careful about discerning the baby, splashing there in the midst of the bathwater, but it is process of discernment that needs to be tended to one way or another.  It’s called singing unto the Lord a new song.  And it helps!  Brighter bulbs have put a new song on my lips – it’s easier to read the words in the hymnal as I process up the aisle each Sunday.  I hope you find it easier too!

But, of course, it’s one thing to say that brighter bulbs are a good thing.  But it is quite another thing to realize that the brighter bulb, too, is a metaphor.  Under normal circumstances in the church these days, a metaphor like this one would be deployed for a singular purpose.  Normally, someone in my position would sketch out a metaphor to people in your position, distinguishing the dim bulbs from the brighter ones, because I needed you to see what dim bulbs you have become.  And I confess that as I survey the church beyond Locust Street, I sometimes despair at the dim bulbs I see flickering around us.

But today I have a different reason for deploying this metaphor.  Because sometimes when you change the bulbs, and it gets easier to see, but you haven’t bought new lamps or anything obvious like that, people notice a difference, but they can’t quite put their finger on what it is.  And today, my purpose is to tell you that it’s brighter bulbs.  But remember, it’s a metaphor, so I am not really talking about the bulbs!  What am I talking about?!?

I’m talking about you!  Do you realize what bright bulbs you have become on this block, in this city, and for our larger church?

Yesterday morning, after our 20s and 30s fed nearly 200 hungry people soup, dozens of you were outside making the gardens look as good as they have looked in years, and the Choir and dozens more were in here singing Choral Mattins.  A few weeks ago, I was serving drinks in my office, following a lovely service of Evensong & Benediction, while AA meetings met in the Parish Hall, the Choir was using the Choir Room, the Ministry Residents were congregating in the Rectory kitchen, and the Boys & Girls Choir rehearsed in the Rectory Parlour.  This is to say nothing of ministry that continues to go on at Saint Mary’s, Bainbridge Street, the Church of the Crucifixion, the Welcome Center on 22nd Street – all of which this parish has contributed to meaningfully one way or another – and, of course, at St. James School, and City Camp, which we founded.

I want to tell you that it takes some bright bulbs to do all this work for the kingdom of God; it takes some people who are ready, willing, and able to sing a new song!  And I want to tell you that Saint Mark’s has not always looked like this; our lamps have not always been so brightly lit!

You probably know that today is Commitment Sunday, and if you do, you may have come to church expecting me to talk to you about money, and the importance of your pledge of financial support – which is, indeed, important, so I hope you have come today prepared.  But generous giving, good stewardship, meaningful discipleship all begin with a new song on the lips and in the hearts of God’s children.

Brighter bulbs shed more light.  And sometimes you have to stop and realize just how much more light is shining around you.  You, my friends, have somehow increased your wattage, from where I sit.  And it is something to behold, I can tell you.  You have become brighter bulbs!  What more can I say to you?  I can encourage you to continue to sing unto the Lord a new song.  Or, to put it another way: keep those brighter bulbs burning brightly!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

17 November 2013

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Rejoicing in Rejoice in the Lamb

Although I have sung Rejoice in the Lamb since I was about ten years old - first as a treble and then many times as a tenor – and I have listened to it more times than I can count, it was not until I recently reflected on the work, during this centennial celebration of the anniversary of Benjamin Britten’s birth, that I realized how economical was the composer with his notes in this cantata.  The score is forty pages long, the duration of the piece is about sixteen minutes.  The music is often exuberant, and the tempo markings are specific: the piece begins, Britten tells us, “measured and mysterious,” it advances “with vigor,” the “Hallelujahs” are “gently moving” (the English marking here allowing levels of meaning oddly absent in the Italian, andante con moto).  Britten’s version of the Italian, vivace is delightful; he says it should be “very gay and fast.”  The piece finishes “gently moving, as before.”  Nevertheless, there is a striking economy of notes in relationship to the words.  To an astonishing degree, Britten allots only one note per syllable, seldom more.  Very occasionally he allows a word to possess two notes, but throughout the entire score only four words, by my count, are allowed to be true melismata, in which a single syllable of text is stretched out and held aloft on a string of varying musical notes.

It seems far-fetched to me that this careful rationing of notes is not very deliberate on the part of the composer.  And in the work, the shear dearth of melismatic words or phrases has the effect – once you notice it – of drawing your attention to the few words on which Britten lavished such attention.

The first such occasion is found early on in the work, on page 3, where the first syllable of the word “magnify” is allowed to lengthen out over the space of three notes, spanning a minor third.  “Let man and beast appear before him, and ma-a-a-gnify his name together.”

The next instance occurs a few pages later, in the following musical section, and accompanies the only time the composer repeats a word in the score (other than Hallelujah).  And the word, this time, is “dance.”  “Let Jakim with the Satyr bless God in the dance, dance, dance, dance, dance” – and if you don’t think Britten makes the music dance here, then your ears must work differently than mine.

Next, in the lovely tenor solo on the language of flowers, the tenor is allowed to sail luxuriously along on the word “poetry,” when telling us that “flowers are peculiarly the poetry of Christ.”

Finally, in the lively section where Christopher Smart’s quirky poem recites for us the rhymes of various instruments - the flute rhymes, the shawm ryhmes, the harp, cymbal, and dulcimer rhymes – the poetry arrives at the conclusion that “the trumpet of God is a blessed intelligence, and so are all the instruments in Heav’n.”   Here, the music reaches its climax, and the word “all” – describing all the instruments in heaven – is given five notes of its own, before the music starts to come back down to earth.

So what’s going on here?  What could be the significance of this esoteric analysis of the music?

Of course, I think there is some meaning to be found; in fact, I think there are lessons to be learned specifically from the observations I have made about the four melismata to be found in Rejoice in the Lamb.  To begin with, the entire work is a lesson in stewardship.  It was written in 1943 – the middle of the war years, when resources and the basic necessities were scarce in Britain.  It was not the time to be flinging notes about as though there were lots of them to spare, on the one hand.  It’s more like Britten had coupons for only four flights of melisma, and he was determined to use them carefully.

On the other hand, Britten provides a case-study in the availability of music, even if you restrict yourself to a lean diet of notes.  Only one per customer?  No problem: there is still music to be made.  And even when resources are scarce, the score seems to teach us, there are times when a bit of profligacy are called for; there are times (even if they be few) when you need to find a few extra notes and sing them in succession.

So, first we learn that the privations of war are no cause to stop making music, and, in fact, cannot silence music.

Then, of course, there are the four words themselves.

The cantata begins with the choir singing together on a repeated, unison middle-C.  For the first two pages of music, no voice leaves this note, and monotone recitation is the only rejoicing they are allowed to do: one note per syllable, of course.  Until, at the top of page 3, the voices are allowed to magnify God’s name together.  It doesn’t take much: just three notes, rising only the short distance of a minor third.  But then, Mary didn’t have many resources available at her disposal when she lifted up her voice to magnify the Lord, either.  And the lesson this music teaches us is how readily to hand is our own solidarity with Mary’s voice, how little we need to accomplish the feat of magnifying the Lord.

Next, we get to “dance.”  I’ve no idea whether or not Britten was much of a dancer.  I cannot quite picture him being twirled in the arms of his lover, Peter Pears; I cannot envision them pacing out a fox-trot together.  But here, his music seems to invite the rest of us to push the furniture to the side of the room, roll up the rugs, and start moving; to find a different rhythm of life, to break out of the awful two-step of war-time marching and remember what it’s like to live with the blessings of God – to remember that David danced before the ark of the covenant, and that God’s merciful kindness always and still gives us reason to dance, dance, dance, dance!

Once we have finished dancing, there is a long span of music – 11 pages – during which we are back on the strict diet of nearly one note only, per syllable.  Eventually we get to the tenor solo.  And who can disagree, in the face of this gliding melody that floats through the air on the tenor’s voice like pollen being wafted from flower to flower, that flowers are great blessings, that the flowers have their angels, that the flower glorifies God, that there is a language of flowers?  And who knew that poetry could be spelled out in musical notes using only the three syllables of its own lyric?  But here, Britten spells out his own sparse poem with nine notes – one for each of the choirs of angels, (the last three of them, admittedly repeated).

A “slow and passionate” section comes next, leading eventually to the Bass solo, in which, curiously, the word “musick” is itself confined to the rule of one note per syllable.  And then we are led to the ‘very gay and fast” enumeration of the poet’s notion of the rhymes of various instruments.

I suppose that the war had rendered England far gloomier that it normally is, its grey clouds grey-er than their customary grey.  I suppose the black-out curtains rendered the normal dreariness of life far drearier.  I suppose life was thread-bare and hungry.  I suppose it was the shared loss of so many husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons that really unified the nation more than anything: the relentless news of death, its sadness tamped down only by the need to respond to the next air-raid siren, to take cover, and plan for things to get even worse.

Shared suffering may unite a people, but it leaves you wondering who you are.  It leaves a nation fractured and scarred.  It separates those who stayed home from those who served, old from young, and those who survived from those who were killed.

The war in question finished off an already limping empire.  And by 1943, left them wondering if they had enough blood, toil, tears, and sweat to endure.  Britain had imagined itself to be a holy land, blessed by God, and possessed of a royal priesthood of the Gospel, which she had carried to the ends of the earth.  And now she was broken down by war and suffering.  Her song of praise was stuck in her throat, her trumpets would soon lead her men to their slaughter on the beaches of Normandy.

But for a moment, in 1943, all this suffering, uncertainty, and death was lifted up on the wings of five notes proffered by Britain’s own homynymous composer – recently returned from his own self-imposed exile from the war, because he realized he needed to be in England during its hour of trial, he needed to help lift his countrymen from their grief and sadness (which would grow deeper still before the war ended).

“For the trumpet of God is a blessed intelligence, and so are all, [all, all] the instruments in Heav’n!”  he bade them sing.  All the instruments of heaven now sing the glories of God.  In the span of five notes, the gulf between heaven and earth is narrowed, and we are not so far from those who have gone before us – so many of them, too soon.  And aren’t our voices, too, among the instruments of heaven?  Can’t we hear the blessed intelligence of God’s trumpet blasting a new song into our ears, our hearts, our wars, our world, our lives?

The story we write for ourselves is a story that separates us, one from another, by means of race, religion, and resources.  But Britten’s war-time music reveled in a moment of blessed unity under the unified music of heaven – all find a voice beneath the one, equal music that an earlier English voice had declared reigns in heaven above.

As a lesson in stewardship, then, I rejoice in Rejoice in the Lamb.  From its carefully rationed resources is great beauty wrung.  From lunatic verse does it find a way to make sense, and to teach its listeners to magnify the Lord, to dance even when you feel crippled, to treasure poetry above all other language, and to remember that all, all, all voices are enlisted in the blessed intelligence of heaven!

And should all else fail, even in times of deep austerity, when we cannot possibly imagine expending more than one note per syllable, still this great anthem leaves its song in our hearts and on our lips:

Hallelujah, hallelujah,

Hallelujah from the heart of God,

And from the hand of the artist inimitable,

And from the echo of the heavenly harp

In sweetness magnifical and mighty.

Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

16 November 2013

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia