Sermon on the Mount

You may listen to Mother Johnson's sermon here.

I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

It’s often said that the Sermon on the Mount is such a tough set of teachings that modern preachers tend to soft-pedal it.  We will be tempted, subtly, to turn Jesus’s teachings into something a little bit easier to live up to.  Turn the other cheek?  Jesus didn’t mean that, and we can’t do that, and it can be hard even to talk to each other as though we believed Jesus wanted us to think about doing that.  So the temptation on Sunday morning is to ease away from the Sermon on the Mount.  Instead of the Sermon on the Mount, in fact, we are more likely to give you the Equivocation in the Pulpit.

Well, I’ve come up with a great solution.  I can’t bear to soft-pedal this Gospel, so I’m going to suggest that we just skip right ahead to next week’s Gospel and talk about that one.  Bear with me: this might work. 

Next week, we are going to hear about something that happens on a mountain that is much lovelier to contemplate: the Transfiguration.  Next week, in Matthew’s Gospel, we will hear about how Jesus took Peter and James and John up on a mountain, and suddenly he became radiant.  His face shone like the sun, and his garments became gleaming white.  And Moses and Elijah appeared with him, and they had some kind of mysterious conversation.  Peter liked the experience so much he proposed building tents: “Lord,” he said, “it is good for us to be here.”  He could see Jesus as Jesus had never been seen before. Yes, it may have raised many questions for the disciples to see their Lord transfigured.  In fact, it filled them with fear when the heavens open and a voice declared “This is my Son, the Beloved.”  But we know that they were overcome by the holiness of the Son of God, and that this was a picture of Jesus they returned to later, after the resurrection, as they tried to explain who Jesus was.  It gave them the faith to bear with what came later.

Well, as I’ve said, that was a much nicer mountain than the one we are faced with this week.  But maybe we should think of this week’s mountain experience as a transfiguration, too.  Maybe this week, as Jesus goes up on a mountain and turns around to speak to the disciples, maybe Jesus sees them transfigured.  Maybe before Jesus could speak the way he did, urging them to do seemingly impossible things, maybe the heavens opened for Jesus and he heard a voice saying, “These are my beloved children. Tell them who they really are.”

Maybe Jesus could see, when he looked at his disciples and at the crowds of followers far below them, that their faces were shining with the glory of God.  And maybe their garments, dusty from the journey, seemed to him to be glowing and pure.  Maybe Jesus got a glimpse of what they could be as the children of God.  Perfect as God is perfect.

And maybe it was that transcendent understanding of his own disciples that led him to speak to them as he did.  Maybe he saw that right now, right here on earth, there could be visions of human life that revealed us—you and me—to be the children of God.  Maybe for a vision like that you would go the extra mile.  Maybe for a vision like that you would forgive when forgiveness seemed impossible.  Maybe it was so overpowering to see the blessedness of the peacemakers and the poor in spirit and the cursed and the reviled, that if you saw that vision of blessedness you would have the courage to speak, to urge others to do what they could never imagine doing. 

Maybe it made sense to him, when he saw us all looking so resplendent, that we could love each other through the darkness and the violence and the bad faith and the fear.  Of course!  The sun shines and the rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous.  And so does the resplendence of God.  So does the hope of transfiguration.  So does the hope that we might love beyond measure, beyond propriety, beyond good sense.

That’s what brings us all here this morning, really, isn’t it?  That hope that we can live a transfigured life?  And I know Jesus saw us hoping when he looked upon his disciples and that crowd in the distance.  I know he sees it still.  He could say this to us on that mountain, and he can say it through our timid pulpits: love your enemies.  That’s really what you were made for.  Just as the Father made the sun and the rain to fall upon the earth, he made you to love.

And when Jesus he saw that, he saw what we would need from him to be able to maintain this wild faith. He saw that we could do it if he did it first, if he died for us and rose for us and fed us with his body and his blood.  He saw that we would need to draw together as the church to live this mystery.  We would need the Holy Spirit. He saw that we would need to hesitate, and equivocate, that we would confuse forgiveness with resentment and self-punishment.  He saw that we would misuse these teachings as reasons not to act against injustice.  But he saw something about us on that mountain that would give him the courage to work with us.  Something that would make us able to bear these teachings and live with their impossible demands.  He saw that once in a while some of us would shine through and glow and live as the children of God.

Whatever he saw in us on that mountain, my brothers and sisters, it gave him an unfathomable patience.  It gave him every moment of every day since, to live in us and show us what forgiveness is and teach us what it means to love those who don’t love us.  It made him willing that we should become his own body, his own hands reaching out in healing and consolation, his own words speaking God’s very truth. 

No, it isn’t easy to take the Sermon on the Mount as our instruction for living.  No, it isn’t easy to urge another person to forgive when forgiveness seems impossible.  A thousand cautions spring to mind, some of them very good ones.  Some forms of love look more like setting boundaries.  Some forms of forgiveness are only possible from a safe distance.   Sometimes we have to stand next to someone stronger than we are before we can learn what it really means to turn the other cheek.  But real love is always the truth.  The glowing light of God’s love is always there, waiting to transfigure us and the situations in which we struggle. 

Jesus saw that and it gave him the willingness to trust us with these teachings.  It gave him the confidence to shine on us when we are righteous and when we are unrighteous.  It gave him the confidence to be lifted up on the cross, to place himself in our hands as bread and wine to feed us every day. 

We are timid and slow, but Jesus was and is sure of us.  He was and is sure of himself in us and with us.  Brothers and sisters, let us be sure of him as we bear with one another.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson

23 February 2014

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

In Memoriam - Cynthia McFarland

Cynthia preferred the best version of herself.  When she read in church from the lectern there, she summoned the plummiest, most BBC-inspired version of her accent, which was itself a matter of preservation of the what she considered the best version of herself.

Many of you will know of stories and examples of Cynthia’s remarkable ability to locate and deploy the best version of herself, and any sketch I could supply here this morning would be inadequate.  Cynthia didn’t see the point of doing something inadequate, when you could do much better. 

Her great limitation, that I know of, was her fear flying.  This required her to arrange long journeys by train to visit her mother-in-law in Arizona, or to go anywhere at all on this continent.  And it prevented her from joining a group of us from Saint Mark’s a couple of years ago on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.  She dreamt up a scheme to make a long voyage by boat to meet us in Jerusalem, but this plan proved to be too impractical.  I know it was a disappointment for Cynthia to forego the trip, but Cynthia didn’t dwell on disappointment – it wouldn’t have been the best version of herself to allow herself to do so.

I suppose that is one way of explaining why when Cynthia was sick she disappeared from view – not the best version of herself.  And when she allowed herself to be seen she would declare with firm resolution that the thing to do was to soldier on and beat the cancer.  To hear her make the pronouncement, one could almost conclude that it might actually have been in her power to do so.  I’m sure she thought that it would have been the best version of herself to summon the strength to shrink and kill the cancer from within – which is to say to draw upon the deep resources of her faith in order to be healed.

Cynthia’s faith in God and love of her Lord Jesus was the best version of herself, and she knew it.  She relied upon the Holy Spirit to guide her.  I am sure it was this reliance that allowed her to bear the loss of her beloved Frederic gracefully, and to endure the pain of the various stages of her own sickness with such poise.

Now, as you know, Cynthia was a canon of the Diocese of New Jersey.  In my recalcitrant, high church clericalism, I have never quite understood the creation of lay canons, but this is quite beside the point, and completely irrelevant now.  For whatever else she may have embodied in the church, Cynthia showed us something significant about priesthood.  Call it the priesthood of all believers if you must; she saw life as a sacrament, and she lived her life sacramentally.  You choose the best version of yourself when you believe that God has asked you to provide outward and visible signs of inward and invisible grace.  That’s what Cynthia did.  That’s why Cynthia cared so much about the images and stories we presented or preserved – because these were opportunities for God’s sacramental disclosure.

Did she see the Internet as an opportunity for God to make himself known sacramentally?  Yes, she did – long before most of us did.

Did she regard the choice of a typeface, or the arc of a letter carved in stone as an opportunity for God to make himself known sacramentally?  Yes, she did.

Did she see God revealed in art and architecture and nature all around her?  In the gracefulness of her cats?  Yes, she did.

Did she regard with reverence and love the people whose ministry in the world made God’s presence known abroad in powerful ways?  Yes, she did – especially in the bishops of the church – whether the living ones she served and befriended, or the dead ones she collected in portraiture and biography.

Cynthia’s priesthood was primarily located in her stewardship of certain images and stories that needed to be preserved and on display so that God’s work in the world could be seen and known.  And she carried out this priestly work with a great deal more devotion, faithfulness, and skill than is possessed by many of us who have been ordained.

A few days before she died, when Cynthia was in the throes of painful chemo-therapy, I went to see her in the hospital.  On the way there I happened to run into a friend and parishioner here who had just left Cynthia’s bedside, and who provided me with the helpful tip that she’d been feeding Cynthia ice chips – the only thing she was allowed to quench her thirst.

During my visit, it eventually occurred to me that Cynthia might still be thirsty, and I offered to get her some ice chips: she took me up on the offer enthusiastically.  Cynthia allowed me to stand by her bedside and spoon-feed her the ice chips with a plastic spoon.  As she let the cold ice dissolve in her mouth, she uttered a word that was both report and prayer: “Manna,” she said, “manna from heaven.”  When the plastic cup was emptied of ice chips, she simply looked at me with a smile, and said, “More chips, please.  More chips, please!”

It was unlike Cynthia to ask for more of something; her manners would not normally allow it – not what she’d have considered the best version of herself.  But she’d have known that asking for more manna under the circumstances was a permissible breach of etiquette.  And these were not normal circumstances, as she knew well.  And if ice chips were the manna that God was providing in her need, she would take all she could get.  Cynthia knew that day that I carried the Blessed Sacrament in my coat pocket.  And when she’d slaked her thirst, more or less, she asked to receive that, too, saying something like, “Now, from one manna to another.”

On the day before she died I arrived again at her bedside with the Blessed Sacrament in my pocket.  It never occurred to me that this would be my last visit to her.  She was awake, but weak, and she told me right away that she’d had a bad night, and was too tired for a visit, but that she wanted very much to receive the Sacrament.  Which is to say that she wanted to be near the Lord of her life, whose strength, grace, forgiveness and healing were the things in which she had placed her trust and her hope.

I’ve thought a bit about Cynthia’s fear of flying over these last days, and a bit about her disappointment that she was not able to concoct a voyage by sea to meet her friends from Saint Mark’s in Jerusalem when we traveled there.  Life is full of such disappointments, of course.  Cynthia knew that well.

But I console myself with the knowledge that Cynthia is no longer afraid of flying.  And I trust that she is now on a journey to a holy land – of what distance, duration, or arduousness I cannot say – but which will undoubtedly lead her into the nearest possible presence of the Lord of life, whom she loved and worshiped in this life, who fed her with manna, and who calls her – with all of us – to come ever closer, and live again, and to become the new best versions of our selves, by his grace.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

at the Requiem Mass for Cynthia McFarland

22 February 2014

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

The Promised Land

You may listen to Father Mullen's sermon here.

But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. (Deut. 30:17-18)

How I missed the sound of the gunshots, I cannot say.  Just about a month ago, while I was enjoying drinks and nibbles with the staff at St. James School, events were unfolding within earshot that went unheard by us.  This is how it was reported on the local news websites: “A man is dead after being shot on a North Philly sidewalk tonight, police said.  The victim, 21, was found lying on 33rd Street near Allegheny Avenue about 7:55 p.m. by officers from the 39th District… He had been shot five times in his torso and legs, and was taken to Temple University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 8:12 p.m..”

The location of this murder. 33rd Street near Allegheny Avenue puts the body about a block away from St. James School – the school we started three years ago for kids from low-income families.  This shooting took place on a Friday.  The following Monday some of our students were late to school because the neighborhood had been cordoned off, since, as part of the investigation police were searching homes, complete with a battering ram to gain entry if need be.

Two weeks later, while I was at St. James for a meeting with the Head of School, his phone rang, and he took the call.  A young staff member who lives in the neighborhood had gone home for lunch and gotten caught in gunfire, volleyed from one side of the street to the other.  He was OK, but wanted to make sure none of the kids who lived nearby would be headed that way till the coast was clear.

Blood from shootings like this has been spilled on the floors of our students’ homes, I happen to know.  Death is not an altogether novel visitor in Allegheny West.  Violence is more of a rule of thumb than an exception.  Such are the realities of life in poverty in the city, five and a half miles from here.

There is a quaint, ironic, and I think apocryphal tale told by some few residents of the neighborhood around the school: that the little triangle of the city it sits in - enclosed by Ridge, Allegheny, and West Hunting Park Avenues - has at times been referred to as “Paradise.”  The story goes, with tongue-in-cheek, that the nickname was assigned because of the three large cemeteries that border the area to the south and the west.  But even tongue-in-cheek the nickname doesn’t get much traction, because it’s hard to think of the neighborhood with the highest murder rate in the city – an honor Allegheny West has earned more than once – as Paradise.

Biblically speaking, Paradise is someplace we have been kicked out of.  But Paradise finds its counterpart in the biblical narrative, in the Promised Land – the land said to be flowing with milk and honey, toward which Moses led the children of Israel when they escaped from slavery in Egypt, and wandered through the wilderness for forty years.  But today we hear Moses warn the Hebrews that if they are not careful they may get kicked out of the Promised Land too.  When he tells them they shall perish - they will not live long in the land that they are crossing the Jordan to enter into and possess – whether it’s death or expulsion that awaits them, the end result is the same: losing again the promise that God intends for his people.

Typically these days people stop to ask why it is that God treats folks this way.  Why does God lead his people to the Promised Land only to threaten that they may not get to stay there long?  This question pairs nicely with an earlier one: why did God plant us in Paradise only to pluck us out and tell us not to return?  The implication is that God is a bit of a psychopath, or at the very least, that God is acting out his own power issues on us, his children, who never did anything to deserve such treatment.  But this is a very recent and modern view of things, that conveniently absolves you and me and everybody else of responsibility.  Perhaps you have heard this point of view summed up by folks who say things like: “I wouldn’t want to believe in a God who leads you to the Promised Land and then threatens to kick you out.”

Moses didn’t see things that way.  Moses was preoccupied with the worry that the people whom God had entrusted to his care would turn to other gods.  And Moses knew that if they did that, things would not go well, that his people would lose again the promises of God.  It’s hard enough, Moses knew, following the one true God: it is no picnic.  But, following God had led him out of slavery and to the edge of the Promised Land, and Moses was not fickle.  And he had some experience, after all, of his people’s susceptibility to worship gods of their own making.  There had been that unhappy business of the golden calf, after all.

What Moses did not know, could not know, was how easily and how regularly God’s people, for ages after, would give up on the Promised Land themselves; how easily we’d be lured by the possibility of other gods masquerading as wealth, power, and prestige, and how willing we’d be to be kicked out of the Promised Land, losing the promises of God, in exchange for these supposed treasures.

It’s always easier to see someone else’s ruin coming than your own; easier to spot the causes of someone else’s expulsion from the Promised Land than to notice your own…  which brings me back to Allegheny West: the neighborhood around St. James School.  Because it is easier for me to see the biblical narrative playing out there, than it is in my own life, my own neighborhood.  It’s easier for me to feel as though I am standing there like Moses.  I can pretend that the Schuylkill River is the Jordan.  And I can situate myself in such away that the few acres of the school’s campus – with the church in its graveyard on one side of the street, and the school and its grounds on the other – looks like a promised land.  As I stand there, gazing across the river into this promised land, it suits me to picture myself as Moses, and to pretend that my work and the work of so many others at the school is helping (God willing) to keep some kids in the promised land, to prevent them from running off to other gods whose worship is as likely as not to lead to bloodshed, and thereby forfeit the promises of the one, true God.  And I hope that there is some real truth to this fantasy.

Because I cannot shake from my head the image of a body with five wounds, from five gunshots, lying dead in the street, one block away from the promised land that we have tried to build on Clearfield Street. What are the chances that one of our students will end up that way some day?  What of the children in the neighborhood who we are not reaching?  What will become of them?

Although I worry, with Moses, that God’s people will forsake him for the make-believe gods of wealth and power and prestige, I am more worried that we will give up on the Promised Land, having concluded that it is just part of God’s pathology to lure us to a promised land, only so he can then kick us out.

But then I think that I have focused on the wrong body, the wrong five wounds.  And I hear a voice saying:

"You have heard it said that I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.  But I say to you that you have only begun to live, and the abundance of life that comes from me exceeds all your expectations.

“You have heard it said that you should seek first the kingdom of God.  But I say to you that you must provide the hands and the hearts to build up the kingdom in the midst of this world.

“You have heard it said that you are to love your neighbor as yourself.  But I say to you that you continually forget who your neighbor is; look around and see.

“You have heard it said that you must take up your cross and follow me.  But I say to you that my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

“You have heard it said that a body was found with five wounds, just a block away from the promised land.  But I say to you, let my wounds carry the hurt that is heading toward your children; let my blood spill for the salvation of those whose blood may yet be spilled in violence; let my light shine where darkness threatens to cover the land; let my hand support you through the pain and suffering; let my heart beat when yours grows weak; let my footsteps guide you to the promised land; let my vision show you the promises of God.

“You have heard it said that the promises of God are a fantasy, and a silly thing.  But I say to you that you are closer than you realize to the river.  Cross over into campground, and stay here, friend. Do not lose again the promises that God has prepared for you, do not give up on them.

“You have heard it said that five wounds and a body means death.  But I say to you that I bear five wounds that I have borne so that death may not touch you, though your blood be spilled, that my five wounds mean life.  And you will never lose again the promises of God, if you don’t want to.

“Now come across the river, dear one, come over, and stay here in the Promised Land.”

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

16 February 2014

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia