Welcoming A Prophet

(To listen to Mother Nora's sermon, please click here)

Here is a short list of unlikely things that people in our world seem to believe:

Many of us seem to believe that we can eat, drink, and spend much more than we should, without the consequences catching up with us.  We seem to believe that in our cities expensive real estate and expensive restaurants and expensive shops can increase forever, but the quality of our schools and our public services can only decay.  We seem to believe that changing the way we make use of our natural resources is completely impossible, even when we know that continuing on our present track is virtually guaranteed to bring suffering and destruction on a scale we are barely able to contemplate.  We seem to believe that war is human nature and peace is a luxury meant only for a lucky few.

What’s destructive is easy for us to believe.  What’s life-giving and actually sensible seems unrealistic to us. 

Maybe this inclination only to believe what’s harmful has something to do with the set of instructions Jesus gives to his disciples in this morning’s Gospel.  For Jesus’s words to them are also words to us, and they speak of a long history of being able by the grace of God to believe that in Jesus the Kingdom of God is truly near:  “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.  Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward.”

The disciples believed Jesus when he came to them.  They believed him, eventually: not without doubt, not without mistakes, not without turning back when the worst came.  In spite of their own weaknesses, they believed him.  By the grace of God, they believed him enough.  They were able to welcome the prophet who stood before them.  Somehow the evidence of his love and his truth were enough to help them stop believing only what was destructive. 

And when they had seen him resurrected and ascended and the Spirit filled them, they were able to go out into the world to tell other people.  “We have seen him,” they said.  “We have known God in him. When we were with him the Kingdom of God burst into bloom around us, and the last suddenly became the first, and the healings we had never dared to expect took place before our eyes.”  And somehow, they too were believed.  Not without struggle, not without persecution, but they were believed, just enough.  They were believed enough, and God was present with them enough, that we are still here today, gathered on a Sunday morning in Philadelphia, listening to the words that they took care to preserve, following the teachings they recorded as best we are able, each in our own way staking our lives on the faith we inherited from them.  We too believe.  We follow in a long, long tradition of people who have been able by the grace of God to welcome Jesus and those whom Jesus has sent.

How did you become part of that tradition?  How did you find yourself believing the words of Jesus enough to spend your Sunday morning here?

Have you seen that kingdom of God open up all around you?  When did it happen?  Do you talk about it much?  When and where are your eyes opened?  When is your heart opened?  In a cloud of incense?  When you hear about how someone else became a follower of Jesus?  Maybe the voices of a choir lifted in praise of God changed everything for you one Sunday morning.  Maybe every Sunday morning.  Maybe seeing the passion and commitment of the people who have kept the Saturday Soup Bowl open for ten years, in freezing cold and sweltering heat, moves you to believe.  Maybe it’s the quiet reverence of the person in the pew in front of you, actually kneeling and praying.  Maybe it’s the steady, difficult, joyful progress of the Saint James School.  The sweet faces, maybe, of the children who gather for the 9:00 Mass?  When you serve as an acolyte, are you touched by the feeling of moving and praying in unison with your fellow servers? Aren’t you kind of amazed that someone close to you is on a medical mission trip to Honduras, or has journeyed to the Philippines in the aftermath of a destructive typhoon, or to South Sudan, to extend the embrace of God’s love to those whose needs are great? 

Aren’t you amazed by the sight of your own hands stretched out to receive Communion?  Your own hand guiding the chalice carefully toward your lips, because you desire to drink from the cup of salvation?  Aren’t you more than a little amazed to find that that’s really you at the altar rail, taking the Body of Christ in your hands and drinking from the cup of his Blood?

Have you grasped the full beauty of the Holy Spirit working within you?  Because whatever brings you here this morning, something you saw or heard, some gesture or posture or voice or act, when you stirred in response to it, you were welcoming a prophet. 

Those people whose faith moved you were prophets.  They dared to proclaim the kingdom of heaven instead of the little magic kingdom of futility that we humans construct on our own.

And when you welcomed that prophet, Jesus tells us in this morning’s Gospel, you received a prophet’s reward.  Maybe we can even put it this way: when you welcomed a prophet, you yourself were being prophetic. 

You didn’t shrug your shoulders and tell yourself that the beauty of the faith you saw in action was a fantasy.  You didn’t use that moment to dig yourself deeper into the destructive hole we are all so busy digging.  You saw the kingdom of heaven and for a moment you accepted it, let it carry you forward, let it propel you to your knees, to the altar, to the world’s places of need.

You are just what this world needs, because you are moved by the Spirit that moves Jesus.  You are part of a long tradition of welcoming the truth—the beautiful, holy, life-giving truth—in a world that does not know how to believe in its own survival.

You are nothing less than prophetic when you reach out your hands and say “Amen.” It may not be easy for you.  You may not talk about it much.  You may be vaguely embarrassed when you think about the life of faith you are living.  But even in hesitation and silence, you are moved by those whom God has sent.  You believe enough for today, and by the grace of God you may come to believe ever more strongly. We may come to believe more strongly together.  This is how Jesus has chosen to build his kingdom: by opening hearts and keeping them open.  Trust what Jesus trusts.  Accept the truth of the love that brings you here.

The smallest gesture of acceptance in the Kingdom of God is enough to open the floodgates of heaven’s grace.

Preached by  Mother Nora Johnson

29 June 2014

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Corpus Christi 2014

To listen to Fr. Mullen's sermon, please click here

Just outside of Krakow, in the middle of the 14th century, a band of thieves broke into a church, pried open the tabernacle, and ran off, so the story goes, with the monstrance they found inside that happened still to contain the Blessed Sacrament of the Body of Christ.  In their flight from the scene of the crime, they discovered that the monstrance was not in fact made of gold or any other precious metal.  So they tossed it and its sacred contents into the muddy marshland as they made their escape.

On discovering the theft, the local clergy took up the chase, but as darkness fell it must have seemed that the monstrance and the Host it carried were lost to the bandits.  Until from somewhere in the marsh, a bright light began to shine through the gloomy night. 

The next morning, frightened, the priests and other locals informed the bishop of this strange light.  The bishop ordered three days of fasting and prayer.  After this period of preparation, the bishop led a procession to the marsh where eventually they located the monstrance and the Host entirely intact, from which emanated the light that enabled them to find it.  (Those were the days when bishops were bishops!)

About a hundred years later, in Dijon, a woman bought a monstrance from a second-hand dealer (as you do), both of them apparently unaware that the consecrated Bread of the Eucharist was still enclosed in the vessel.  When the woman got the monstrance home and discovered its condition, for reasons unclear to history she decided to pry the Host out with a knife.  On contact with the blade, a stream of blood began to flow from the sacred Host and dried immediately in the image of our Lord seated on a semi-circular throne, the instruments of his Passion at his side.

In Paris near the end of the 13th century, a man who “hated the Catholic faith and did not believe in the Real Presence” nefariously got himself in possession of a consecrated Host, placed it in a shallow bowl of some sort and started to stab it with a knife.  To his alarm, the Host began to bleed, filling the bowl with Blood.  “Panic-stricken, the man decided to throw the Blessed Sacrament into the fire, but the Host miraculously arose from the fire.  Desperate, he threw the Eucharist into boiling water, and the Host arose from the water, hovering in mid-air, and then taking the form of a crucifix.”  Eventually the man resorted to deliver the Host to a more pious neighbor, who sensibly brought it to her parish priest, who took custody of the Sacrament and restored equilibrium to the universe, (as we do).

Shall I go on?

Earlier in the 13th century a Saracen horde stormed the city of Assisi and the convent of San Damiano, making their way into the “very cloister of the virgins,” where the sisters “swooned in terror,” as the account goes, and called out for their mother superior, Saint Clare.  The saint emerged from her cell with a precious box containing the Blessed Sacrament.  The nuns led Saint Clare to the Saracen horde, where she dropped to the ground, prostrating herself before the Sacrament, and pleaded to the Lord in prayer to save her sisters and the entire city of Assisi.  In response to her prayer, a voice like that of a child was heard coming from the precious box: “I will always protect you,” it said.  The Saracens, no doubt impressed, turned on their heels and retreated over the very walls they had breached to storm the city.

I could go on. 

I could tell you of the woman in Zaragosa who secreted a Host away from a Mass, placed it in a little box and took it to a sorcerer for use in a love potion.  But when, on delivery to the sorcerer, the box was opened, it was shown to contain a tiny baby, shining with light.  The story only gets more fantastic from there.

Doubtful clergy are known to provoke miracles at the altar.   Like the German priest, incongruously named Peter of Prague, who, in 1263, stopped to say Mass while on his pilgrimage to Rome.  During the prayer of consecration the Host began to bleed, trickling onto his hands, and all over the altar and its linens, simultaneously dispelling his doubt and severely straining relations with the Altar Guild.[i]

I suppose these stories seem fanciful to us.  It’s no coincidence that they all spring from the medieval imagination, which tends to seem no more than quaint (at best) to us these days, and often looks much worse than that.

It is, in fact, difficult for us to imagine that the medieval imagination could be in any way superior to ours.  We know so much more than they did; we have grown so much wiser; we have let go of so much foolish superstition.  It is hard for us to find the value in these reported miracles of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist because they seem so outrageous to us; they strain belief.  And, in fact, our modern minds can find little room for the possibility that God works in such ways.

But put a more positive slant on it.  Allow for the possibility that Jesus is not done with us.  Consider that amidst the gloom of the Dark Ages, God wished for the light of his Son to be seen as often and as brightly as possible.  Remain open to the possibility that there is nothing inferior about the imagination that can see the work of God in marvelous and unexpected ways.

Whose problem is it, after all, that the expectation of our medieval ancestors to encounter the true and living God, the actual, tangible, immediate, and real Presence of Jesus in Bread and Wine of the Mass, is unmatched by our own meager expectations of this sacred rite and its simple elements?

They expected to find Jesus in all kinds of outlandish ways; but we hardly expect to find him at all – maybe not even in the Mass.  Who has the problem here?  Whose expectations are to be the more pitied?

 Here, this morning, we join with a relatively few Episcopalians in allowing ourselves to try on the medieval imagination for just a little while, and in the nicest possible way, and to see what it feels like.  We try to shed our modern inhibitions, which tell us that it is both silly and unseemly to project such wild expectations onto a disc of wheat, over which particular prayers have been mumbled by someone who, quite plainly, is not so different from you.  And let’s be clear that I’d be among the first to agree that the important work being done here is not being done by me; it’s not being done by the priest.

But I do find that the medieval costume fits, and it has a way of helping my imagination to open itself up to that now outmoded way of seeing things, and to the possibility that God is at work here, doing something powerful with the simple objects of a wafer of bread and a cup of sub-par wine.

And when I open myself up to these possibilities, I find that what I do not need – have never really needed – is for Jesus to bleed all over my hands and the altar linens.  (No, I definitely do not need that!)  But I do need to adjust my expectations.  I do need to find Jesus at work in the world: changing things, transforming things, healing things, fixing things, forgiving things, reconciling things, restoring things, reviving things.  I prefer, in fact, to live in a world of such expectations.

And if we can’t expect Jesus to display himself to us in the quite simple forms of Bread and Wine, how can we realistically expect to find him displayed in the much more complicated forms of one another – where he is also to be found, I have no doubt?

The objections to the veracity of bleeding, flying, illuminated Hosts are not without their foundations, so perhaps we need not discard those objections altogether.  But I suspect that we more urgently need a dose of medieval imagination in order to adjust our expectations, since we have come to expect so little of Jesus.

And the objections to the ritual and the feast we keep today stem from the fear that we are abusing the gift of the Sacrament and abusing one another by pretending that the Bread of the Mass is something that it is not.

Well, if it isn’t the Body of Christ then what use is it to us?  And if Christ’s promise to be with us when we “do this,” remembering him in this living way, can’t be trusted, then what is the point?

And if it is the living Lord Jesus, making himself known to us day in and day out, as if to reassure our little minds of his constancy, then what is wrong with letting our imaginations run away just a little bit today?

In 1227, in the town of Rimini, St. Anthony of Padua came across a certain man who did not believe that Christ could be truly present in the Bread and Wine of the Mass.  The man challenged Anthony to a test, saying that he would not feed his mule for three days.  Then he proposed for the two men to stand before the mule: its owner with food held out for it to eat, and the saint with the consecrated Host of the Eucharist.  “‘If the beast, leaving aside its food, hurries to adore its God, I will share the faith of your church,’” the man told Anthony.

So the mule was starved for three days.  Both men entered the piazza of the town.  Its owner held in his hands a bundle of fresh and fragrant hay.  Anthony clutched a monstrance containing the consecrated Host.  The saint called for silence as the two men stood before the animal.  And St. Anthony thus addressed the mule:

“’In virtue and in the name of your Creator, who I, unworthy as I am, hold in my hands, I tell and order you: Come forward immediately and render homage to the Lord with all due respect….’  And immediately the animal, refusing the food offered by its master; docilely approached the priest.  It bent its front legs before the Host and paused there reverently.”

And this final story of medieval imagination brings us to a good way of imagining ourselves on this Feast of Corpus Christi.  For most of us may be neither skeptic nor saint, and so we are not entirely sure who or what we are to be in the Presence of the living Lord. 

But this story makes it easy to decide: just be the mule.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Solemnity of Corpus Christi, 2014

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

[i] Accounts of miracles and quoted material are from the website of the Real Presence Eucharistic Education and Adoration Association: www.therealpresence.org.  The miracle involving Peter of Prague in Bolsena was the event that prompted Pope Urban IV to establish the Feast of Corpus Christi by issuing a papal bull in August of 1264.

Manifesto

You may listen to Mother Johnson's sermon here.

Some time ago, when our little dog Tipper was just a puppy, I got it in my head that she had special powers.  Or maybe it’s more honest to say that I thought I had special powers.  Here’s what happened: my friend’s son Thomas was about seven years old, and he was going through a phase in which he was afraid of dogs.  I thought I knew just what to do.  I thought I knew that my charming puppy Tipper could cure him. 

So one day I marched over to my friend’s office while Thomas was there, and I brought my charming puppy with me.  Tipper had just learned a bunch of new tricks, so I knew we could put on a great show.  And I must say: Tipper and I were in terrific form.  I offered liver treats, and I put the dog through her paces.  She sat.  She shook hands.  She rolled over.  She barked.  She jumped.  This will show him, I thought.  He’ll see how cute and smart she is, and he will get over that irrational fear.  I will cure him. 

Why do adults think they can talk children out of being afraid?

Midway through our little show—ok, my little show—I became aware that something wasn’t working the way I had planned.  It wasn’t the dog.  Tipper was still doing all her tricks eagerly.  Sit.  Stand.  Speak.  Jump.  I thought she was brilliant.  But Thomas wasn’t responding the way I thought he would.  It wasn’t that he seemed particularly fearful.  It was some other emotion I saw on his face.  Almost as though he pitied me.

Finally, as gently as he could, young Thomas leaned in in a kind of tactful way, and he said to me, “You know, my cat can do all those things without even being asked.”

Now this was kind of deflating.  I mean, sure, cats are magnificent in their independence.  They do seem to be able to do almost anything, in a state of serene indifference.  Cats are wonderful.  But wasn’t Thomas missing the point?  It wasn’t the sitting or the shaking hands or the jumping that mattered.  It was the excitement.  The communication with another species.  My dog Tipper was thrilled to be doing tricks with me.  And it wasn’t just about the liver treats.  I know this dog: treats are ok with her but what she really loves is the game itself.  She is keen and eager and joyful.  And when she really gets into the game, it’s something wonderful to see.

From time to time over the last few years, I’ve been mulling this story over, and because I’m one of those shameful preachers who are always looking for sermon illustrations, I’ve filed the story of Thomas and Tipper away in the back of my mind.  I always thought I would use this story in a sermon about the law, about obedience to God’s will.  God loves joyful obedience.  You know: God wants us to be more like puppies and a little less like cats who do what we want when we want.

But now I think I see it differently.  Now I think the story might really be about the Holy Trinity. 

Because the whole force of the encounter between Thomas and Tipper, I had hoped, was to be about the joy of connection.  About reaching across some kind of gulf to communicate with something we are not.  It may not have worked very well with Thomas—my mistake there, for sure—but if you know and love a dog you know that joy and connection I’m talking about.  There is something real there. The dog loves to be in the game.  It isn’t only the prospect of being fed that leads her to quiver with excitement, anticipating every command, eyes wide, ears perked up, her whole being alert with expectation.

This Trinity Sunday, let’s not get too wrapped up in worrying about the exact details.  Why three?  How is it that we call the Holy Spirit a “person” of the Trinity?  How many heresies are there that have to do with misunderstanding what the doctrine of the Trinity is trying to tell us?  All matter deeply but to my mind they don’t help us a lot if we can’t pause to take in that fundamental reality: that at the heart of everything that exists—in our own hearts—the bottom line is God’s tireless energy for being with us, for being in the game with us, if you will.  For reaching out across what seems like an impossible gulf, to be profoundly connected to what we are not.  Alert with expectation.

It’s that tireless, electrifying energy that makes it natural for God to create everything we know and everything we don’t know. It’s that tireless, electrifying energy that leads God to be one with suffering humanity in the person of Jesus.  It’s that tireless, electrifying joy of responding that leads the Holy Spirit to seek us out wherever we are trying to hide, to reach into us and through us and bring us along, and send us out to reach others.

In church circles we like to talk about something we call the doctrine of the Trinity, but we should probably be talking about the Trinity as a manifesto.  Today, Trinity Sunday, is not a day for commemorating a concept.  It’s a day for being swept away by a force.  Getting wrapped up in a presence. Being overtaken with anticipation about what the living, breathing, heart of God will do next.  This is a day for pining, trembling, to connect heaven and earth.  Because that quivering anticipation comes from the one who created us and redeemed us and sustains us.  And our deepest joy comes from being spellbound.

Today, this Trinity Sunday, can we imagine being spellbound by the love of God and the sheer electricity of everything around us?  Eyes wide open, straining every nerve to catch what happens next?  Keen?  Eager?

I’ll admit that it’s a challenge to contemplate.  This present moment in the world as we know it is more than a little daunting.  Most of us, if we are honest, will find that we fear what might come next.  We may fear to know where history is taking us.  We may be afraid of what we are becoming, individually and collectively.  The temptation these days is to become feline rather than canine.  Majestic in our isolation from what disturbs us.  Apparently unperturbed by the realities we choose to ignore. Who doesn’t want to smooth over the turbulence of the world?  Who doesn’t wish that it were possible to glide by, catlike, while the world calls to us? Ready to respond, perhaps, but only as we choose to respond, in our own sweet time.  Ready to do things that are important, but unenthusiastic about being asked.

But these times are God’s times.  Our days are in God’s hands.  And our deepest joy is in jumping in, as God did and God does, to be connected.

Could we be electrified by the present moment, drawn so deeply across the gulf of everything that terrifies us that we long, like God, to jump into human history and respond?  Could we be filled with the power of the Holy Spirit and bound like the Son to human sin and suffering even while we rejoice in the love of the Father?  Compelled to go forward to the ends of the world to make disciples of all nations?

Whether we choose to know it or not, God has given us our manifesto.  God is our manifesto.  God’s very life is our joy and our command.

Go.  Baptize.  Stand.  Speak.  Jump.

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson

Trinity Sunday, 2014

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia