An Ordinary Home

You may listen to Mother Erika's sermon here.

Picture, if you will, the house that you grew up in. Can you see it, rising up before you, the house that feels the most like your childhood home? Did it have shutters? A chimney? Stone walls or asbestos siding? Inside, was it brand-new, sleek and shining? Or was it old and quirky, with forgotten nooks and doors that led nowhere? Perhaps it was a row home in the city, where you could hear the rumble of the cars as they went by in the morning and the murmur of your neighbors through the walls in the evening. Maybe it was a home in the suburbs, built of brick, squat and square, a place where kids’ bikes piled up in driveways at dinner time and where neighbors had friendly competitions over the magnificence of their Christmas displays. Maybe it was an apartment where the smile of the doorman and the bing of the elevator were like welcome home greetings just for you. Or a farmhouse, where each morning you were awakened by a rooster’s cry and the knowledge that there were chores to be done before breakfast. Or maybe your childhood home was like mine, where there were just enough trees to make it feel like we were living in the woods, where the backyard felt expansive and magical and nearly as wondrous as the sight of the light glowing in the kitchen window at dusk, beckoning me inside.

But whether the houses we grew up in were ranchers or townhouses, mansions or cottages, they were ours – homes where we knew friends and family and learned to know ourselves. They were where we did our homework, practiced the piano, laughed at our father’s jokes, fought with our sisters, sought out our mother’s arms. They were the places where we found joy and suffered sadness, places where we just lived, each day, every moment. And in that day-to-day living, those houses, no matter their individual peculiarities, became familiar, normal, even ordinary.

It was in front of a home like this, a wonderfully lived-in, ordinary house, that the wise men found themselves at the end of their journey. They had traveled from the east, stopped off in Jerusalem to get directions, and wound their way south to Bethlehem, only to find this wondrous star that they had been tracking hovering over an ordinary house. That’s right – a house. There is no manger full of hay in today’s Gospel reading. The wise men from Matthew do not muscle into the manger scene from Luke. In Matthew, Joseph already lives in Bethlehem; there is no census, no journey, no innkeeper, no manger, no shepherds, no angels singing Gloria. No, Bethlehem was Joseph’s hometown; it is where he first learned to work wood, it is the place where he first noticed Mary, where he first heard the angel speak to him in a dream. Bethlehem was the place where he lived and worked – and where he owned, we can assume, a very ordinary house.

It was, I imagine, small, simple, perhaps built into a hill as many ancient Palestinian homes were. Part cave, part house, with room for him to work, room for Mary to cook, room for their animals to take shelter. It probably looked like every other home in the quarter, with straw on the floor and oil lamps burning after dark. It was, all in all, a perfectly ordinary house. Except, of course, that this was a house with a newborn in it. And so it was a house filled with all of the busyness of a baby – diaper changes and midnight nursings, Mary’s joy when she bathed Jesus for the first time, Joseph’s fear when he held Jesus for the first time, visits from neighbors with words of blessing and the first-century equivalent of a casserole, crying, and sighing, and gazing, and wondering.

And yes, we know that this child was anything but ordinary. He was Jesus, the Son of God, conceived by the Holy Spirit to save his people from their sins. But it is important for us to picture this extraordinary child in his very ordinary home, important for us to imagine the wise men’s arrival as something far more commonplace than a dramatic entrance at the stable door along with angels and oxen and shepherds on a Christmas Eve filled with midnight mystery and wordless wonder. No, in Matthew, the magi begin their journey sometime after Jesus was born, arrive in Bethlehem on an ordinary day, park their camels outside of an ordinary house. Perhaps the star they saw was a morning star, and it stopped over Joseph’s door in the hours just before dawn, when the house was still fast asleep. Or perhaps the star stopped in the sky just as the sun tucked itself behind the horizon, at dusk, when Joseph was putting away his tools for the night and Mary was getting out bread and wine for supper, the Son of God bouncing on her hip. There was no fanfare as the magi arrived, no angels singing, nothing so extraordinary as all that; just a holy family, a holy child, in a beautiful, ordinary home.

But when the wise men saw the child, what they did was extraordinary – they knelt down and worshiped him. In the middle of a perfectly ordinary room, before the child and Mary his mother, they fell to their exhausted knees and paid him homage. They saw Jesus in the midst of this ordinary life and knew him to be the Christ, and knew themselves to be in the presence of something, someone astonishing and holy. Right here – right in the living room – a miracle: the child born a ruler to shepherd the people of Israel. And in the magi’s profound act of recognition and worship, this simple, ordinary home was utterly transformed. A house became a palace, and Mary’s lap a throne.

Why should we imagine this story this way? Why is it important to set aside – just for a moment – that other story, that sweet, syncretic scene over there in our crèche? Because when we take Matthew at his word and listen only to his story, we are given a great gift – we are given the confidence that we can recognize Christ in the most ordinary of places. We can see Christ in an ordinary house, at an ordinary time, and we can see how his presence transforms all. Just as Christ’s presence in that simple home made the house of Joseph into the house of the Lord, his living presence among us changes everything. Christ’s presence in this ordinary church on Locust Street makes it into the temple of God. Christ’s presence at our ordinary altar makes it into the threshold of heaven. Christ’s presence on this ordinary earth makes it into the kingdom of God. And Christ’s presence in ordinary you and ordinary me makes us into bearers of his Grace, tabernacles of the living God, marked in our baptisms as Christ’s own forever.  

Thank God. Because if we could only ever see Christ in places that were already wondrous and magical, if we only recognized him in places where angels were already singing and the glory of the Lord was already shining around, you and I would be sunk. If our eyes needed just the right setting, with the right lighting and the right amount of cozy, silent-night comfort to recognize the Son of God, you and I would have no hope.

But we do. Have hope. You and I. We have hope that we “may share in the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity.” We have hope that we can be bold bearers of God’s Grace, carrying the blessing of his presence with us wherever we go, to whatever home we travel, by whichever road. And we have hope that Christ’s presence here, in this ordinary world, will transform everything, is transforming everything, making homes for all of God’s beloved children here and beyond the gates of heaven.

Picture, if you will, the heart you’ve grown up with. Can you feel it, here? Is it soft and warm, or scorched and hard? Is it lonely, afraid, inspired, full to overflowing? Now picture that regular, ordinary heart as a home, as an amiable dwelling for our Lord Jesus Christ. Make that your offering this day and always – give him your heart, whether it is brimming or broken, to be a place where he may abide forever, an ordinary home where you and others may see him and recognize him as their Savior. For then, even without hearing the angel voices on an oh holy night, you, and all the world, can fall on your knees and worship him. And isn’t that extraordinary? 

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

5 January 2014, The Second Sunday after Christmas

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Selling the House of David

In the marvelous movie “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which does inevitably appear on the screen at our house around this time of year, there is a poignant scene involving a run on the bank.  You remember, don’t you?  There is a crisis just as Jimmy Stewart, also known as George Bailey, is on his way off to honeymoon with Donna Reed.  Stewart runs to the Building and Loan to keep it from closing, and as he tries to persuade the citizens not to take all their money out, he reminds them that their deposits don’t just sit in a vault somewhere behind the desk.  Their money is invested in their neighbors’ homes: “I don’t have your money here.  Your money’s in Joe’s house.  That’s right next to yours.  And in the Kennedy house…   And a hundred others.”  Reminding them of their mutual financial entanglements, Jimmy Stewart saves the day, staving off an economic meltdown by rekindling a sense of neighborly obligation.  We look out for each other, Stewart seems to promise, and our economic system is an extension of our good will toward the people around us.  We invest in each other, and communities grow. 

That film was made in 1946.  Communities grew, and grew beyond measure.  In 2008, as we may all remember, the economic meltdown was much more vivid than a scene in a movie, and banks did close.  We learned that our money was in our neighbors’ homes, in a way, but that it had been repackaged and sold again and again as mortgage securities that allowed our country, and much of the world, to ignore the fact that bad loans and feverish speculation had rotted away our economic foundations.  A sense of mutual obligation, a sense that our homes and communities should provide us with stability and dignity, had been replaced by a sense that money could be made.  Lots of money, quickly.  With no apparent limits. Five years later we are still struggling to recover.  Economists are still not sure whether the most recent positive economic numbers are a sign that we are finally making real progress, or whether this is just another one of the false starts we’ve seen since the housing market first collapsed.

As the housing market began to “sputter,” and “run out of steam,” as the commentators used to call it, a curious phenomenon began to grow in popularity.  People began in larger and larger numbers to bury statues of Saint Joseph in their yards while they were waiting for a buyer to come along and make an offer on the property.  The practice had been around for a long time, apparently, but as the market began to sour it picked up in popularity.  An article from the Wall Street Journal in 2007 speaks of an exponential growth in sales for Saint Joseph statues during this downtrend (http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB119370066239175607).  I don’t know whether this is still true, but in 2007, according to the article, you could buy a “Home Sale Kit” for about $5.  It came with a little statue of Saint Joseph and directions for burying him.  Statues of Saint Joseph were becoming hot commodities in 2007. You could get what was billed as an “Underground Real Estate Agent Kit” if you called the number 1-888-BURY-JOE.

This fascinating article, chronicling a growing sense of panic as the market sinks to its lowest numbers in a decade, closes with a religious leader worrying out loud that people might forget where they had buried their statues, and “someone will go over Saint Joseph’s feet with a lawnmower.”  I think the religious leader is being a bit facetious, but the image is haunting, isn’t it?  Hundreds, maybe thousands, of statues of Saint Joseph still out there, toes up in the suburbs, silently testifying to the deep anxieties of Americans who faced—many are still facing--the rough awakening of an American Dream. 

What is Saint Joseph doing, face down in this landscape?

In today’s Gospel we learn that he is indeed a taker of risks, and perhaps that has something to do with his willingness to help out nervous homeowners on the market.  But I think we have Joseph planted upside down if we think he is about keeping our financial bubble from bursting.  Sell a house?  I don’t think so. Look what he did for the House of David, his familial line.  He gave it away.  To an unwed mother.

Joseph, descendent of the great King David, doesn’t appear to have much more than his lineage going for him.  He is an obscure carpenter.   He is betrothed to a woman who turns up pregnant.  His social security depends upon his willingness to live a righteous life, and in accord with that righteousness he plans to cast Mary off quietly before a scandal breaks out.  But then God reaches him, as God so often reaches the line of David, in complicated ways.  An angel inspires him to trust, to dig deeper, to get down into the fertile dirt of the incarnation.  He keeps the pregnant Mary as his wife, and the life of Jesus begins as it will end, in shame and danger and bloodshed.

Homelessness will follow, a risky journey to Egypt to escape the violence of Herod.  Joseph will never return to Bethlehem, where Herod has killed the children of all his kith and kin.  He will settle at last in Nazareth with his mysterious wife and child, and he will live out an unspecified number of days in situations that Matthew’s Gospel will not describe. 

Trusting God’s promise to this woman he must marry, Joseph the son of David becomes Joseph the father of Jesus. He takes into his own family line the scandal of a risky Messiah whose birth and death are marked by vulnerability and suffering.  He adopts that suffering as his own. He touches ground in the midst of human weakness and frustration and dependency. This life of Jesus that Joseph fosters begins and ends in shame.

It is a life that our world, with its money-making schemes and its deep anxieties, is pathologically afraid to embrace.  We live, as a culture, in fear that there will be no Joseph among us, no one to embrace us if we are forgotten and despised.  We fear, at times with good reason, that if we are not unreasonably productive and diligent at work we will lose our jobs.  We fear that if we are not alluring physically we will have no one to love us.  We fear that if we grow old or infirm we will be forgotten.  We fear, and not without cause, that our very homes may be taken from us if illness or unemployment cause us to miss the crucial payments.

But Joseph knows how to accept Mary, the shameful woman to whom he is betrothed.  And he will accept her love for a son who will die a shameful death.  And the kingdom of God that bursts forth into life for us this season is a kingdom of people who, like Joseph, by the grace of God, will not let fear stop them from embracing the weak and the poor and the lost and the forgotten. 

There are no fluffy, bumbling angels in Joseph’s story, as there are in the wonderful life of George Bailey.  There is no real softening of life’s blows.  There is no charming performance by Jimmy Stewart.  And by the way, the proper response when a bell rings around here is not “Atta boy, Clarence!”  It’s “Holy, holy, holy.  Let heaven and earth be filled with your glory.” There is acceptance of our poverty before God, and a compassion born in the apparently bare shelter of God’s grace.

Bury Joseph if you must, but he will bear silent witness, and he will not be forgotten by the church, by the Body of Christ that he cradled in its infancy.  The kingdom of God is near at hand.  It is a kingdom of humility and charity and love.  It reveals itself in ways large and small to those like Joseph who are given the grace to endure its visitations. 

O come, o come Emmanuel.  Ransom captive Israel.

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson

22 December 2013, Advent IV

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Word Waves

For the longest time we could not see.

For the longest time we could not see the things we hear.

We could not see sound.

Did not know its pattern.

Did not know it traveled in waves.

Did not know its progress could be charted;

its speed clocked at 340-some-odd metres per second.

For the longest time we could not see.

Then, in time, we saw.

We learned to measure

sound.  We learned to map it,

and to chart its progress;

to measure its speed.

We discovered we could watch it.

And we did.

But for the longest time we could not see;

we could not see the things we hear.

And now, not only can we see

the things we hear,

we can outrun them,

overtake them,

and leave them behind.

But for the longest time, we could not.

We could not see the things we hear.

We could only listen, and be dazzled by them.

We imagine that what is true of sound

is also true of God:

that we have overtaken him;

outrun him,

left him behind.

Many people imagine this.

We have become too smart for God,

the story goes.

We are too sophisticated

to believe such foolishness.

And after all,

we overtook sound long ago.

Light cannot be so far behind.

It is only a matter of time.

Somewhere, deep in the ingredients of stars,

there is an echo, or a wave

that you could hear, or see,

if you could find it.

It sounds like the beginning,

which is a mystery,

since eternity has no beginning,

and no ending.

But the echo, or the wave,

sounds like the beginning,

sounds like the origin,

of something God spake,

when God first began to speak

his eternal wisdom,

that has no beginning,

and no ending,

although the sound itself

is both, beginning and ending.

The sound captured in the echo, or the wave,

existed in God always,

even when he had not yet spoken it.

Don’t you see?  Can’t you hear?

Although, for the longest time, we could not?

I suppose there are sounds

too high and too low for us to hear;

waves too fast or too slow

for us to measure, to see.

I suppose the sound of God speaking

was like slowing it down,

or speeding it up,

to allow us to hear it,

to allow us to see it,

though for the longest time

we neither heard nor saw.

Not even the echo.

Not even the wave.

We are deaf and we are blind.

But, if only we were dumb,

we might not say the foolish things

we say about God,

and what’s on his mind,

and what he sounds like,

and what he looks like.

We might not have to use

a personal pronoun

when we refer to him in speech.

Speaking about God

is something better left to God.

Which may be why once he spake

the Word that had always dwelt deep within him,

that has its origins in the echo or the wave

that has always been,

has no beginning or end,

though he is Alpha and Omega.

The Prologue of the final Gospel

is not a speech.

It is a drawing

of the sound of God’s voice.

It is the urgent wave

sketched out,

to enable the blind to see,

to assist the deaf in our hearing.

Because for the longest time we could not see.

And we could not have heard it,

even if we had tried,

since the sound was still deep inside

the mind of God.

John was drawing the waves

of the sound,

as the Word pulsed through him:

up from the deepest places of the planet.

His naked feet measuring

the seismic movement,

and his hands

recording it for posterity.

I am trying to draw the waves

of that sound for you now,

using words,

that are neither fast enough

nor slow enough,

to do it justice.

But which have been slowed down

enough, or sped up

enough, so that we can hear,

and which will help us (I hope) to see.

Because for the longest time

we have done neither.

We have not outrun the Word.

We have not overtaken it.

We have by no means left it behind.

We have barely begun to grasp

its sound.  And it remains beyond

our reach – although it is very near us.

We imagine that having seen it,

having measured its waves,

and sized it up, and recorded its light,

that we have taken charge

of it, and everything.

Since for so long we could not see.

Men have always thought this;

ever since the sound could be heard,

the light seen.  We thought

we could douse it,

silence it, turn it on

or off at our pleasure.

As though it was only sound,

only light, only echo, only waves.

But it is more

than sound, more

than light, more

than echo, more

than wave.

It is dancing, it is justice, it is

fellowship, it is mercy, it is

learning, it is kindness, it is

softness, it is sharp, it is

virtue, it is humility, it is

beauty, it is darkness, it is

generosity, it is tenderness, it is

hope, it is solace, it is

friendship, it is healing, it is

relief and reinforcement, it is

silence, it is power, it is

music, it is touch, it is

water, it is air, it is

soil, and it is fire, it is

grace upon grace, and

grace upon grace, and

grace upon grace.

It is immeasurable, unknowable,

unstoppable, inaudible, inflammable.

For the longest time it was beyond us.

But then God spake,

and give it to us,

gave him to us.

Slowed down, or sped up, so we could

see, and hear, and touch,

and feel, and know, and love.

The Word is yours, and mine:

very near us, on our lips, and,

sometimes, in our hearts,

if we will have him,

if we will dare to speak

the Word that God once spake,

and call his Name,

which is Emmanuel, God with us -

but, slowed down, or sped up,

so that we can see it, measure it,

hold it, love it, be dazzled by it -

is Jesus.

He is the Word

that became flesh,

and dwelt among us.

And we beheld its glory.

Full of grace and truth.

And from his fullness have we all

received grace upon grace.

Thanks be to God.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

29 December 2013

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia