Bearing Fruit in Unlikely Places

You may listen to Mother Takacs's sermon here.

I have been to the wilderness of Judea only once. It was the spring of 2009, and I was there on a pilgrimage with a group from the Washington National Cathedral. We took a bus to get there, of course, and parked along a ridge that then led us along a wide, dusty path away from the road. Everywhere I looked was beige. Beige to the right and beige to the left – over there, along the crest of the mountain, slightly darker beige, but only very slightly, only one crayon over in the box of 96 Crayolas. The hills were so mono-chromatic that they seemed two-dimensional, flat, propped up against the horizon. It was beige and hot and dry; the sun beat down on our heads as our tour guides tried to beat it into our heads that we needed to stay hydrated. Take another sip, friends, we’ve been here 15 minutes already. Barring our sipping water and snapping photos, there was no movement anywhere – just beige and dust and heat. It was one of the least hospitable places I have ever seen – not an easy place to get to, and not an easy place to stay in.

So imagine, for a moment, that you are a Pharisee, and you have just schlepped all the way out into the wilds to have a look at this crazy man dunking people in the desert. You don’t know if he is one of the Essenes or just a nut job with an Elijah complex, but you felt compelled to check it out, if for no other reason that if anyone asks you about him you want to have a decently informed answer. You want to be able to say, “Well, when I went out to the wilderness to see him, I thought this.” That seems like what a responsible religious leader should do.

And so you’ve hauled your butt all the way out into the desert to find John the Baptist. You walked, and it was hot, and the wine skin you brought along to help you stay hydrated seemed to have gotten heavier instead of lighter as the day wore on. It wasn’t an easy journey, not least because you ended up traveling with a bunch of Sadducees who were headed in the same direction. You and the Sadducees agree about, well, not much, so along the way you tried to avoid topics that might lead to arguments, like the doctrine of sola Torah, or the primacy of the Temple, or the resurrection of the dead. Mostly you talked about John. What have you heard? Have you talked to anyone who’s been baptized? What do you think he’s up to, really? And you decided, as you traveled, that you just don’t know what to make of him, that you’ll just have to wait and see. You’ll wait, and pass judgment when you get there.

And so imagine your surprise, now that you’ve found your way down to the Jordan River, that it isn’t you doing the judging but John. You brood of vipers! he yells at you. You conniving clutch of cobras! You’ve come out here trying to look pious and responsible but you look like nothing so much as a bunch of asps. You’ve come out here to look into baptism, but you haven’t even looked into your own souls. Is there anything growing inside you or is it just dried up and beige in there? He points a dusty finger in your direction. Bear fruit, he snarls. Bear fruit worthy of repentance.

Now scripture doesn’t actually tell us what the Pharisees and Sadducees do in response to this scolding. We’re left to assume that they just up and go, leaving John to his wooly, wet work. But that doesn’t seem quite right – after all, you’re a Pharisee. You don’t mind a good argument, and you’ve walked all the way out into the desert, with the dust and the sun and the Sadducees – are you really just going to turn around and go home because this prophet has called you a couple of names? No! You’re going to challenge him right back, aren’t you? You’re going to defend yourself, say something like, wait a minute pal, bear fruit worthy of repentance, what exactly does that mean? How am I supposed to do that? I mean, I’m doing the best I can, but just in case you’ve forgotten, we Jews aren’t exactly thriving here. Remember this little problem called Rome? I can barely practice my religion at a bare bones level without getting the hairy eyeball from some Roman prefect. We’re an occupied people, imprisoned in our own cities. We’re barely making it here – we’re living in a dusty, dry, pretty beige time. Really, John, how am I supposed to bear fruit here?

And John is going to look right back at you and say, look around you, you silly serpent. Just look. Look at all of this fruit right here, in the desert. I, John the Baptist, am standing in the middle of the wilderness, and yet I am surrounded by fruit blossoming all around me, faithful, fervent followers, standing dripping in the waters of the Jordan, succulent with Grace. Look around you. You ask how you are supposed to bear fruit here, as if here is some impossible place. But there is no impossible place with God. How can you bear fruit here? How can you not bear fruit here?  

We can sometimes get stuck asking ourselves how we can possibly bear fruit in our time, in our place. And we can imagine that Advent is a time to help ourselves move along to someplace better, some holier, more mystical place where all the conditions will be right for us to be the disciples we want to be, to be able to bear good fruit. And yes, of course Advent is a time for reflection, for repentance, for re-orienting ourselves. But this Gospel reading reminds us that Advent is also a time to bear fruit – right here, and right now. The kingdom of heaven has come near to us here, in this place, even if this place feels impossible to us. Advent is a time to bear fruit right here and right now, because there is no impossible place with God. There is no place so dry, so dusty, so altogether beige, that God cannot encourage a new blossom to grow.

Three days ago, this earth lost a man who understood this truth deeply in his very spirit. For Nelson Mandela knew how to bear fruit. He bore fruit while sitting jail cell for 27 years, fruit that flourished even in a wilderness of isolation and suffering, fruit that fed a wounded people and healed a nation, fruit that produced seeds of forgiveness and mercy, of truth and reconciliation the likes of which the world had rarely – perhaps never before – seen. Mandela’s life is an Advent life, and his witness helps to remind us that Advent is a time to bear good fruit here, right here, wherever here is. Maybe we feel like the ground beneath our feet isn’t particularly fertile, that it’s been scorched by injustice and oppression, by suffering and hypocrisy, by cynicism or secularism. Maybe we feel like the ground of our heart is dried up and desolate because of fear or anxiety, grief or pain, the uncertainty in the face of transitions, the struggle of loneliness, the dark night of the soul. But I’m guessing that John the Baptist and Nelson Mandela had moments when they felt the same way. I’m guessing that Paul, and Isaiah, and Martin Luther King, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Mother Teresa and Sojourner Truth had moments when they felt the same way. And yet the fruit their bore in their lives proves to us that there is no place that is impossible for God.

Before we got back on the bus to head out of the wilderness and back into Jerusalem, I ended up standing for a few moments next to our group’s tour guide. We looked out across the desolate landscape in a companionable silence, and then he turned to me and said, “It’s just unbelievable.” I was just about to agree with him that yes, this beige barrenness was unbelievable, when he finished his sentence – “it’s so green.” It’s so – what? It’s so green, he said, and then explained that as it was at the end of the rainy season, what we were looking at was as green as the wilderness ever gets. And then he started pointing out the growth – tiny, grey-green bushes that I hadn’t noticed before, a dusty green fuzz dusting the ridges, and flowers, too, squat little squirts of yellow just three inches above the ground. There was color there, there was life there, and growth; the wilderness was bearing fruit, right where it was.

So when we find ourselves asking in a kind of futile frustration, how are we supposed to bear fruit here, we can remember that John the Baptist has the Advent answer. Because here is where we are. Here is where the kingdom of heaven draws close. Here is where Christ comes.    

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

The Second Sunday of Advent, 8 December 2013

Saint Mark's, Philadelphia

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