Is there enough light?

You may listen to Father Mullen's sermon here.

This evening, when we are gathered here for a service of Advent Lessons & Carols, some of our friends and neighbors will be lighting the fifth candle on their Chanukah menorahs.  Much bally-hoo was made of the confluence of Thanksgiving Day and the first day of Chanukah (which had begun the night before).  But among those not still celebrating the Jewish festival interest quickly waned.  This is a shame, since, to my way of thinking, the coincidence of the beginning of Advent with the on-going Jewish festival of lights is more interesting, and more fruitful for reflection.

Although you will find the historical context of the festival in the apocryphal book of 1st Maccabees – namely, the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucid Empire, - you will not find any mention there of the miracle that is commemorated with the lighting of the menorah.  For that story - the story of the cruet of oil that miraculously kept the Temple lamp burning for eight days, when the Maccabeans re-dedicated the Temple - you have to look to the rabbinic tradition of the Talmud, where the miracle is asserted.  The rabbis tell us: “they searched and found only one cruse of oil which possessed the seal of the High Priest, but which contained sufficient oil for only one day's lighting; yet a miracle occurred there and they lit [the lamp] for eight days.”  (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Shabbat, page 21b)

And so the blessing is said to this day:

Baruch attah Adonai, Eloheinu, melekh ha'olam asher kidishanu b'mitz'votav v'tzivanu l'had'lik neir shel Chanukah. (Amein)

Blessed are you Lord God, King of the universe; who has sanctified his commandments, and commanded us to kindle the Chanukah light.  Amen.

Blessed are you Lord God, King of the universe; who performed miracles for our ancestors in those days at this time.  Amen.

Blessed are you Lord God, King of the universe; who has granted us life, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this season.  Amen.

When it came to Chanukah, the ancient rabbis showed little interest in the military victory of a small group of rebels over the army of an empire.  Their interest focused on the dedication of the Temple and God’s provision to keep the lamp burning till more oil could be prepared.  Perhaps the rabbis knew that men will always fight wars, and the victors will nearly always claim that God is on their side – this was not a matter that required much investigation.

If war is perennial, however, then so is the question of whether or not there is enough oil, whether there is enough light, whether God can keep the light burning, whether darkness will encroach and prevail, whether time is running out.  These questions were far more important to the rabbis than the military victory.  And perhaps they remain important to us today.

I have just finished reading a remarkable and heartbreaking account of one military unit’s experience in the Iraq War.  And the book does recount a few discussions about military tactics, etc.  But the concerns that it presents as foremost in the minds of the men who were fighting, and suffering, and bleeding, and dying are those same concerns about their lives, their families, their friends, and the world around them, that are prompted by the Chanukah prayer:

Is there enough light in the world?

Will God keep it burning?

Will darkness encroach and prevail?

Will time run out?

Of course, the questions the soldiers ask are not so abstract, they are more specific:

Will I ever be able to sleep again without these nightmares?

Will I ever be able to forgive them?

Will I ever be able to forgive myself?

Will I ever be able to see again?  Or walk again?  Or hold my child again?

Is my time running out?

But men at war are not the only ones who ask such questions.  The rest of us do, too – more often in the specific than in the abstract.  If some of you had not recently been wrestling with such questions, on your own terms, I would be surprised.  So let’s boil it down to one question:  Is there enough light?

I propose that if that is the Chanukah question, and if it is a question that pervades our lives in this difficult and dangerous world, then it is also the Advent question: Is there enough light?

How easy it is to feel as though we live in a world that requires eight days of oil, but we have only enough for a single day.  Of course, we live in a world that also wants to tell us there is no God to worship, so why are you worried about oil, which, by the way is a tradable commodity, for which there is an active and accessible market, so what are you worried about anyway?

Is there enough light? 

Advent seems to want us to sit with the question: to acknowledge it; to give it real space; to recognize it as a significant question that deserves careful consideration.  Advent does not seem to want to rush to an answer.  Advent seems to appreciate these shorter, darker days when flickering candles are both more suggestive and more vulnerable than they are in the long days of summer.  Advent wants to be your chaplain for questions about the pervasive quality of the dark, allowing you to ask these questions:

Does it seem this dark to everybody?

Why can’t I sleep?

Will things ever get better?

Will the pain, the grief, the memory, the sadness ever go away?

Advent hears the panic in your voice when you report that you have been able to find only a single cruet of oil, with barely enough in it to keep your lamp burning for a single day!

But Advent is not silent in response to these questions, to this worry.  Advent has something to say in response to all of them.  Advent has a reply to the question, “Is there enough light?”  Advent says:

Child, light your candle, and see.  Pour the oil into your lamp, and light its wick, and behold.  The warfare has been long.  The night has been long.  The darkness has been with us for a long time, it’s true.  But now, lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.

Advent says, the night is far spent, the day is near, and there is oil in this cruet; who knows what God will do?

The rabbis allowed for the possibility that instead of lighting one candle on the first night of Chanukah and lighting an additional candle each night thereafter you could do the reverse: begin with eight candles and light one less for each night of the festival.  But Rabbi Hillel maintained that the former pattern should be kept because “we increase in matters of sanctity but do not reduce.”  I am thankful that Hillel’s pattern prevails most often, and I am thankful for his reasoning, too.

And if I am to borrow the flame of Chanukah this Advent, I am doubly grateful, since the Advent light does, indeed grow stronger and stronger as the days progress.

And the answer to the question becomes, I pray, more clear with every passing day, as God works his healing and acceptance in our hearts and souls, as he opens our eyes to see paths that lie before us with hope and expectation, as he banishes fear, despair, and loneliness from us, and begs us make room for him – for the Child who is coming, the Friend we have waited for, the Love we so much need, the Master we might at last obey, and the Savior who finally shines with brightness to overcome the darkness, and who is himself the Light.

Advent promises that the light is coming – coming again.  But about that day and hour when it shall finally come, no one knows.

Till then, we could do worse than to learn from the prayers of our brothers and sisters for these eight days.

Blessed are you Lord God, King of the universe; who has sanctified his commandments, and commanded us to kindle the light.  Amen.

Blessed are you Lord God, King of the universe; who performed miracles for our ancestors in those days at this time.  Amen.

Blessed are you Lord God, King of the universe; who has granted us life, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this season.  Amen.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

1 December 2013

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

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