Jesus Blowing Bubbles

You may listen to Father Mullen's sermon here.

Breathing under water is easy.  In fact, when you are getting certified in SCUBA diving, they teach you how to breathe under water even if your equipment fails.  There is a wonderful moment when they teach you how to breathe if your regulator malfunctions and won’t stop discharging air when you need to exhale. (The regulator is the thing you clench in your teeth that delivers the air through your mouth and into your lungs.)  What you do is you take the regulator more or less out of your mouth and let the air flow out of it in a long column of bubbles that rises past your face, tickling your nose as they go.  Then you push your lips into this column of bubbles and sip the air as it rushes upward.  When they tell you that you must breathe under water this way for at least 30 seconds, you think this is going to be hard or a weird sensation in some way.  But it turns out to be amazingly easy to sip the air from the stream of bubbles rising in front of your face.  It really is surprisingly easy to breathe underwater.

I mention all of this because in the Gospel reading today, Jesus spends a bit of time under water.  And the question is: what is he doing there?  It is a question that John the Baptist himself asks.  “I need to be baptized by you,” John says to Jesus, “and do you come to me?”

John has been telling everyone that he is not the Messiah, that another is to come who is more powerful than he.  John has told his followers that he himself baptizes them with water, but there is one coming who will baptize them with the Holy Spirit and with fire!  And John knows that the one who is to come is Jesus, the latchet of whose shoes he is not worthy to stoop down and unloose (as he puts it).  So what is Jesus doing, coming to his cousin John to be baptized?

Jesus’ own explanation is this: “it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.”  Now, I do not call this a helpful answer, and I expect that John didn’t find it all that helpful either.  But it’s what Jesus said, and it seems to convey that he is sure of what must be done, so John goes along with it.  But what is really going on here?

Baptism, the church now says, is the way we are incorporated, joined, folded into the Body of Christ.  It’s the way we become Christians, the method by which we are knitted into the life of the new covenant with God, which is a relationship with his Son, Jesus, living by the Spirit in the world today.  Baptism is a spiritual cleansing, or purification, we are told, by which we are assured of the forgiveness of God for all our sins.  Baptism is the promise of life to come: death to the old self and rebirth to a new life in Christ.  Baptism is the way you become a hardcore follower of Jesus.

So why is Jesus being baptized?  He is the Word incarnate, born of the Virgin Mary.  He is the eternal Son of God, the Alpha and Omega, in him the fullness of God is pleased to dwell.  He is human, but he is divine: he is divinity itself.  He is the way, he is truth, he is life.  His is the Body that was offered for the salvation of the world, that was broken that we might be made whole.  It’s his Body that is made present to us the wonderful mystery of the Blessed Sacrament, that lends its form to the church, and onto which all Christians are grafted in the unity of the one Spirit.

When John saw Jesus coming he declared the good news that Israel had been waiting for, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”  “He must increase,” John would later say, “but I must decrease.”  So why does Jesus show up at John’s little patch of the Jordan River to be baptized by him.  Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

Jesus’ baptism is not the prototype of our Christian baptisms – it cannot be, and even John acknowledges this.  But Jesus’ baptism is an important moment of preparation for all other Christian baptism, and I think I know why.  I think it’s because of what Jesus was doing while he was under water.

Remember, Jesus wasn’t baptized in a font like ours, over which he would have had to bend his head for John to pour water onto.  Jesus was baptized standing in the muddy water of the Jordan River.  Maybe the rains had been good and the water was nice and deep, and maybe Jesus went in well past his waist, the water about mid-level of his chest, his arms stretched out to steady himself in the gentle flow of water moving by.

Did he bend his knees, and just allow himself to drop down below the surface of the water?  Or did John guide his head forward, as Jesus bent at the waist to fold himself, face first, under the surface?  Or did he just let go of himself altogether and let his body flop down into the river?

And how long did he stay under? Did he whoosh quickly up after only a few seconds, his long hair flinging water through the air as his flipped his head back?  Or did he disappear under the water for more than just a moment or two, maybe even making John a little nervous about how long his cousin had been under?

I don’t know.

But I think I do know what Jesus was doing under the water.  I think he was blowing bubbles.

There in the Jordan River I think Jesus opened his mouth and blew bubbles, to create a kind of under-water spring, whence air rushes out: not just the carbon dioxide that we all breathe out, with a little oxygen as well; but (somehow) when he blew bubbles, he created a stream of air, with just the right mix of oxygen and nitrogen that we need to breathe.  Jesus was blowing bubbles to create this spring of baptism, this well of new life where you can purse your lips and lean forward to sip the air out of the column of bubbles rising past you when you are baptized, born again, given the promise that comes only by the Name of Jesus, and through his life-giving Spirit.

You are thinking that this is fanciful: another one of my stories.  But I beg you to reconsider.

Because God knows that life takes us all under water from time to time, so to speak.  God knows that life gets dark, and frightening, and cold, and that it sometimes seems that you don’t know where your next breath is going to come from.  This happens to us.  And it happens to old people, and young people, and middle aged people, and to children who are too young to even know it is happening to them.  The water starts to close in around you, and you start to sink, and the more you struggle, the faster you feel yourself slipping beneath the surface, where there will be no air to breathe.

The hard part about breathing under water is convincing yourself that you will be able to do it – this is true in SCUBA diving as well as in faith.  It seems like it ought not to be possible.  It seems like a silly idea: believing.  Anyone can see we were not made for this – no gills!  And in life when you find yourself metaphorically under water, you generally do not have any equipment with you – no mask, no tank, no gauges, no regulator from which to draw deep breaths of air.

Which is why Jesus was blowing bubbles in the Jordan River: to begin the column of air that every Christian would breathe from when he or she went under the water – not just in baptism, but every time we find the water coming up around our necks, and we know that soon we will be under the surface.

Saint Paul put it this way: “If we have died with him, we shall also live with him.”  What on earth does this mean?

It means that the first place we go to die with Jesus is under the water.  And there we discover that it is not death that awaits us, but his column of marvelous, billowing bubbles, from which we are to breathe new life, when we purse our lips together, lean into the stream of air, and breathe!

These days there are plenty of people who don’t see the point in following Jesus, and can’t see the purpose in being part of his church.  One reason is this: because part of life, for most of us, is lived under water.  And you want to know, when you are falling deeper and deeper in the water, that there is some air to breathe, and you want to have had someone around to show you how.

The very first time I descended with SCUBA gear to the quite moderate depth of twenty-five feet below the surface, after initial success I very quickly became nervous.  Nothing was going wrong, per se, and nothing was even deviating from the plan, but as I looked around, I was gripped by the sense that I should not be able to do this, that there was something terribly wrong with breathing under water, that I might drown if I stayed there.  My nerves got the better of me, and I did the worst thing I could possibly do: I raced up toward the surface as fast as I could, in a blind panic, gasping for air.

It’s dangerous to do this.  And in deeper diving – or in real life - it may be impossible to do it, which is why they teach you that it is generally better to try to address your fears, to fix your problems, to find a way to breathe under water, and then, once you have found a way to breathe, then to find a way to return safely to the surface.

Jesus is the way to breathe under water, which is why I think, all those years ago, he spent a few moments blowing bubbles in the Jordan River, to create a column of air that is mystically linked to every place a person has ever been dunked in or drizzled with water in his Name, and in the Name of the Father, and of the Holy Spirit…

… so there would be air to breathe, even when everything else has stopped working, and you feel that you should not be able to breathe, and the water is dark and cold, and life is in peril, and you just want to run or swim away as fast as you can, which might very well kill you if you did.  And you start to panic.

Until you see a column of bubbles rising in the water, and you purse your lips, and you lean into the stream of air, and you breathe in the new life that Jesus has prepared for you.  And you find that it is surprisingly easy.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

The Baptism of our Lord, 12 January 2014

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

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