Slow Children

One night you awaken in the dark to find yourself at the wheel of the car.  It could be that you are dreaming, that remains to be seen.  Driving along the road you can see that the speed limit is clearly posted: 65 miles an hour.  This, you know full well, entitles you to drive at 75 miles an hour, maybe 80, with impunity.  Which you do as you pass the state trooper with hardly a thought.

As you continue to drive, you notice the signs along the road that seem a bit unusual.  You drive past a sign that is a surprise to you.  It reads: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  This is odd, but on reflection, as you speed along, you realize that, as with the speed limit, you have had to learn to interpret this sign too.  It is not quite as clear as it seems to be.  And anyway, there are fewer police to enforce that particular law.  I mean, I interpret that golden rule all the time.  Every day I pass people on the street to whom I do not apply the golden rule.  But it’s not just the hungry and the homeless I am able to zoom past with hardly a thought.  I drive by plenty of people that I know and love at 75 miles an hour sometimes, hoping you do not know that it’s me in the car that just whizzed past you, on your right.

You are driving south.  Most of the signs are of little interest.  They are for exits you do not need and roads which you have no intention of traveling.  You can pass by those signs with hardly a glance except to no notice that you are well into North Carolina now, or is it already Tennessee already?  You realize that you do not know where you are going or why.  This car, you realize, has a mind of its own.  You never chose this journey, and you are not in charge.  But as long as you are not paying for the gas, you don’t object.  And the radio is set to NPR, so what’s to complain about?

Before you get clear across Oklahoma, the car turns south and you hit Texas.  You speed past Dallas and San Antonio and you push further south.  Somewhere in Texas you see a sign that is familiar to you, but it is out of place because you don’t normally see these signs on the highways.  It is a yellow rectangle, portrait view, outlined in black, with a stylized running figure in the middle, and the words “SLOW CHILDREN” spelled out across the top and bottom.  Clearly the sign is out of place.  Children do not play along the highways – or at least they shouldn’t.  You pause in your mind, but your foot never eases up on the gas. 

You are listening to NPR so by now you have an inkling of who these children are since you are in Texas, but you do not know why you are being taken here.  You do not yet know what the signs mean, since you have not yet seen any children.

Then you see that perplexing sign again: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  And now another sign that simply reads, “Abba, Father!”  And you read it to yourself as you pass beneath it, breathing the words as a kind of prayer.  “Abba, Father.”

On the radio there is talk of the 50,000 immigrant children teeming on our borders in places like Brownsville, Texas.  And you look up and you see a sign that tells you that you are headed for Brownsville.  And then another sign reminds you: “SLOW CHILDREN.”

And a small voice comes on the radio, and it is as though the voice is speaking to you, which makes no sense, since the voice is on the radio, and is also speaking in Spanish, which you do not speak except to order una cervesa now and then.  But you become certain that the small, Spanish-speaking voice is addressing you from the radio, so you find that you are, in fact, compelled somehow to slow down, and eventually to pull over, to stop and listen, the way you very rarely will do when you hear a piece of sublimely beautiful music on the radio and you want to hear it to the end and to find out what it is, so you sit in your car on the side of the road, waiting for the music to end, and hoping the announcer will identify the piece.

Lost in this thought momentarily, your attention returns to the voice on the radio, which, now that you have pulled over, you seem to be able to understand.  It is a child’s voice.  Inexplicably, the child is quoting St. Paul: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.”

“What are you talking about?” you address the radio.

“I am talking about hope,” the child’s voice replies.  And so now you are talking to the radio – or to the child who is talking to you through the radio.

“Child,” you say, “what are you doing?  Why are you talking to me this way?”

“Because I am an orphan and a stranger in a strange land,” comes the voice.  “I have come from poverty and from murder and from hopelessness.  I have been sent away from certain hopelessness to a blind hope across your border.  ‘Now hope that is seen is not hope.  For who hopes for what is seen?  But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.’”

“Who taught you that?” you ask, “I don’t think that St. Paul was talking about illegal immigrants when he wrote that.”

“Neither do I,” says the child, “but are you telling me that St. Paul had no words of hope for me?  Are you telling me that I am wrong to hear hope in the message of Jesus? Are you telling me that I should return my mind and my dreams to despair?

“Am I an illegal immigrant?” asks the child.  “I am an orphan, I know that.  Do you think my parents sent me away as though this is summer camp and I would return?  I am jammed into a detention center where my lice are dancing with the lice of other children, laughing at us because no one will ever stop them from crossing the border.

“I am here hoping for something that I cannot even name, grasping for something that I am not old enough to grasp for.  I am poor, and malnourished, and uneducated.  I am blind to whatever there is to hope for here, but I am assured that it is better than the hopelessness whence I came.  Are you telling me that I am wrong?  Are you telling me that my faith is misplaced?”

An awkward silence fills the car.

“Child,” you say, “you are too young to understand this, but you cannot stay here.  You misunderstand the Scriptures if you think that they are calling you to hope for something here.  We are not a Christian nation.  We don’t owe you anything.  We can’t adopt you.”

“Jesus was adopted by Joseph,” the child’s voice says.

“Yes, but that was different,” you say.

“How was it different?” the child asks.

This will not be a fruitful line of discussion to pursue.  You change the direction.

“Do you know how many of you there are!?!?  What are we supposed to do with you all?” you ask.

“How am I supposed to know?” replies the child, “I am only a child.”

“You are an illegal immigrant,” you tell the voice.

“I am a refugee,” the child replies.

“No you’re not!”

“Then I am a pilgrim,” says the child.

“Don’t be ridiculous!” you say.

“Do you know where I have come from?  Do you know the desert I have crossed to get here?  How can you say that I am not a pilgrim!?”

“Pilgrims don’t escape hopeless situations only to settle in new lands,” you say.

“Perhaps not,” says the child, “but have you read what you are teaching your own children in Social Studies?  I think you might find there is something there about pilgrims fleeing a bad situation in hope of finding a better one.  So you might want to get your story straight.”

“This is a semantic argument,” you assert to the radio.

“But I am not a semantic argument,” says the child.  “I am a child of God.  The circumstances of my birth, and of my up-bringing, and of my homeland cannot be blamed on me, troublesome though they may all be.

“I have lived much of my life in a spirit of fear, never more so than when I set out on the journey to this place – a journey I never wished for, and which has left me without anything in the world, including my mother.  And now I am here.  At night, remembering what my mother taught me, I pray to God, I ask God to help me.  I say, ‘Our Father, nuestra señor, Abba, father!’  Is it me praying, or is it the Spirit praying in me?  How should I know?  I am only a child.

“How will I go back from here?  Where will I go?  Will my parents be there?  Will they take me?  Do they want me?  Don’t you think these questions keep me awake at night, sobbing into my dirty pillow? 

“So, yes, I am willing to look to St. Paul, I am willing to look anywhere at all to find an argument for someone to take me, for someone to feed me, for someone to care for me.  I am willing to look anywhere for hope.  Am I misreading the scriptures if I find it there?

“Why should the scriptures address your first-world, inner, spiritual problems, but not my third-world, outward, concrete problems?  Don’t you think that the scriptures are more familiar with the latter than the former?

“Why shouldn’t I hope for what I do not see?  Why shouldn’t I wait for it with patience?  Why shouldn’t I groan inwardly while I wait for adoption?  What else can I do?  Did you hear what St. Paul said?  He could have been speaking for me: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.”

“But, child, this is not was he was talking about!  He was talking about the glory of God, he was talking about the kingdom that awaits us; he was not talking about crossing illegally into America!” you protest.

“Perhaps not,” says the child.  “You have your sufferings and I have mine.  You have your hope and I have mine.  For the moment, mine has brought me here, to this sorry existence at the border of the land of plenty, where I am sneered at and treated as nothing more than a dirty problem, but certainly I am not treated as a child.

“For now, I will grasp at any hope I can, even if it is hoping for something I cannot see.  I will grasp at any faith I can.  And if there is someone teaching that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us, then I am going to pay attention.  Because otherwise I am not at all sure the sufferings of this present time are worth it.  Something better must await me in this world or in the next, and before long it won’t matter to me which it is.

“Otherwise, what am I but a weed allowed to grow here for a time while the wheat grows, only to be bundled together by the reapers and burned in the fire when the wheat is collected?  Is this the message the Gospel has for me?  Am I only a weed?”

You sigh in the driver’s seat, and you pause before responding as tenderly as you can, “Child, you do not understand.  It’s not your fault, but really, you fail to see the complexity of the situation.”

The child replies, “It’s true that I fail to see much that is complex about the hunger in my tummy and the fear in my heart.  Except that now I do not know which would be worse, to stay here or to be sent back; that’s a little complex.  It is hot here, and there is much weeping and gnashing of teeth, but then I have never known anyplace that was not hot and where there was not much weeping and gnashing of teeth.  But what choice have I got but to hope for what I cannot see?  What choice have I got but to believe that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed?  What choice have I got but to wait for it with patience?  What choice have I got but to cry out through my tears, ‘Abba, father!’  What choice have I got but to hope?”

You don’t know what to say to the child.  And the radio begins to crackle with static, and the news from NPR comes on.  And you can see the dim lights of Brownsville in the distance.  And you realize that the car is now in your control, and you could easily turn around and leave this place without ever slowing down for the children.  You can easily avoid them, and so can I.

And here we are on the side of the road, wondering what to do, crying, Abba, father amidst the sufferings of this present time.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

20 July 2014

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Pop-Up Garden

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

On Walnut Street, a few blocks from here, between 19th and 20th streets, on the north side, across the street from the Church of the Holy Trinity you will find a vacant lot.  Two summers ago that vacant lot was not so vacant, it was the location of the Philadelphia Horticultural Society’s Pop-Up Garden.  The PHS Pop-Up Garden is meant, according to their promotional material to “transform… a forgotten outdoor area into a gorgeous, landscaped community space.”  And I would have to say that the Horticultural Society succeeded marvelously to that end.

Last summer the Pop-Up Garden was located on Broad Street, next to the Chambers-Wylie Memorial Presbyterian Church that houses the excellent Broad Street Ministries.  That vacant lot, too, was brilliantly and artfully transformed into a vibrant green-space that housed a popular beer garden.  And today, the space has been returned to its former status as a vacant lot.

This summer the Pop-Up Garden will be located on South Street, between Broad and 15th Streets, in the grassy lot next to the Jamaican Jerk Hut – long more verdant than your average vacant lot.  Nevertheless, I am sure that it has been brilliantly transformed with style and panache. 

Something has been bothering me about these pop-up gardens – even though I know it is wrong-headed of me to be grumpy about something that is basically good for our city, and that brings a lot of people pleasure.  If I want to put it into biblical terms I can reach for this morning’s Gospel: these pop-up gardens, since they have no root, as the Gospel says, they wither away.  And what you have left when the summer is over, is exactly what you started with – a vacant lot.

I am tempted to wax self-righteous on the matter – a temptation that so often lies close at hand.  I mean, gardens, by their definition almost, are not meant to be “pop-up;” for then they too quickly cease to be gardens.  A garden is meant to grow, and to produce, and to change with the seasons.  A garden is meant to experience the cycle of life and death, and then the return of life again.  A garden was God’s idea of Paradise.  A garden can be a metaphor for the resurrection – but not a pop-up garden.  So I struggle with the pop-up garden because I want it to be more that it aspires to be itself.  I want the transformation to be permanent, or at least long-lasting.  I want the seeds to find root in good soil and bring forth grain, some a hundred fold, some sixty, some thirty (to return to the Gospel reading).  For all I know this is what the folks at the PHS would like too, but you have to start somewhere, so I hope you will not hear much criticism in what I am saying.

Speaking of waxing self-righteous, I also want to tell you of the most remarkable day that we experienced here at Saint Mark’s on Friday.  First, a little context: this past week a triennial gathering of youth-groups from Episcopal churches all across the nation has been taking place in and around Philadelphia: the Episcopal Youth Event.  On Friday, 1,000 teenagers were taken on buses on various pilgrimages throughout the city – stopping not only at Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell and Benjamin Franklin’s grave, but also at Christ Church, and (depending on which bus you were on) Episcopal Community Services, and St Thomas African Episcopal Church, at St. James School, a few other spots, and, if you were really lucky, Saint Mark’s Locust Street!

We were scheduled to receive three pairs of buses, each pair delivering about 112 or so teenagers to our doorstep for 40 minutes.  During this time we were supposed to share with these kids something about who we are as a parish community and what we do.  This, I thought, was the perfect opportunity for an extended sermon to each group from me.  What could bus-loads of teenagers brought here whether they liked it or not possibly appreciate more than the sound of my voice, and the pearls of my wisdom?  But the Holy Spirit intervened on the kids’ behalf, and put me in mind of doing something distinctly Anglo-catholic, and almost counter-intuitive for a captive congregation of teenagers: Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament.

Suffice it to say that the Spirit had his way.  And we arranged to give the kids brief words of welcome, a short service of Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament (complete with organ, choir, and coped assistants), followed by soft pretzels and lemonade in the garden before we sent them back to their buses.  This we accomplished yesterday, not for three groups of 112 teenagers, but for four groups, since one pair of buses got out of synch and was directed to just “go to Saint Mark’s where they’ll know what to do with you,” resulting in the first ever “emergency Benediction.”

Under any circumstances it would be surreal to offer Benediction four times in one day.  To do so for more than four hundred teenagers was a remarkable experience, I can tell you.  And many of us who were here for all four services, decided that this is probably what heaven is like: Benediction every hour on the hour, with music from Matt Glandorf and the Saint Mark’s choir!

I think I am also safe in saying that it has been a long time since Saint Mark’s had four hundred-some-odd teenagers in church… for Benediction.  And I want to gloat about this, and yield to the temptation to wax self-righteous, because it was a wonderful, glorious day here on Friday, and God was very, very good to us, I can tell you!  But then I think about the pop-up gardens and my objections to them, and how the seeds of pop-up gardens have so little opportunity to take root, how likely they are to wither and die.  And I have to ask myself if a pop-up Benediction is better than a pop-up garden?  Well, I hope it is, but there is still a lesson to be learned here, I am sure.

Because glorious though Friday was, with its succession of Benedictions, on reflection, I find it slightly dis-satisfying, since for us it is hard to know whether or not the seeds sown will ever produce any fruit in those teenagers.  Let us pray that that will be the case.

And the good news is, of course, that Saint Mark’s is not a pop-up parish, and our life of worship here is no life of pop-up worship.  The roots are deeper than that, probably deeper than any of us knows, in this place.  So it’s unfair to think of those Friday services as pop-up Benedictions.  But that means that what we really had were four pop-up congregations of pop-up youths.

And herein lies the opportunity for us: to ask God to teach us, to help us, and to guide us so that children and youth will become an ever more important part of the life of this parish; to make us un-satisfied with pop-up children, pop-up youth groups whose roots are not to be found in this place; and to till the ground around us in such a way as to prepare for them to be nurtured, to flourish, and to grow in this place.

I once knew an old priest in Virginia whose name was Rufus Womble.  Rufus was impish and handsome, even in his eighties, and funny.  He began every sermon with three jokes, no matter what; he thought it was important to get people laughing.  He always wore a blue cassock and nothing else – no surplice or stole or alb or anything. 

Rufus’ ministry was all about healing, and he came to the parish where I was Curate every Thursday for a healing service with laying-on-of hands.  Rufus used to tell me, “No matter what the assigned readings are, I always preach about healing; I always manage to bring it around to healing.”  And I thought this single-mindedness of Rufus’ was a bit silly and unsophisticated.  But Rufus’ life had been changed – no, saved – by healing which he attributed to Jesus (I can’t remember the circumstances).  So for him, every word of the Gospel was, in fact, full of healing, and he could not help but talk about it.

I think about that single-mindedness, having spoken to you last week about children, and finding that the Gospel today, which nowhere mentions children, has also brought my mind and my prayers around to children and to youth.  Perhaps it is the case that I should always be preaching about children, no matter what the readings are.  After all, my life was changed – no, saved – as a child when I was shown the power, and glory, and strength, and beauty, and love of God at work in his church.  And I wish for every child to be shown what I was shown as a child.

And as long as there are too few children in this parish, maybe I should use this pulpit as a watchtower to keep an eye out for them, to call them in, to point them out to you, since so many seem to have fled from our midst, one way or another.

Once, a long time ago, this space on Locust Street was a vacant lot.  But countless fruitful seeds have been sown here on countless fruitful souls, who have lived countless fruitful lives, some growing a hundredfold, some sixty, and some thirty - who knows?  This is no pop-up church.  But without the young, without children being shaped and formed, being taught to love the Lord Jesus and to worship him, being equipped to be pilgrims or disciples or saints, how will they every take root in the Gospel of love and grow up?

We are a garden - meant to grow, and to produce, and to change with the seasons.  We are meant to experience the cycle of life and death, and then the return of life again.  We are an icon of God’s idea of Paradise.  And as a garden, this place is more than a metaphor for the resurrection – we are the place and the people where resurrection happens!

But without children and youth, how can we be sure that this beautiful, verdant, flowery stretch of Locust Street will not itself some day be returned to its status as a vacant lot?  God forbid that it should ever be so.  And teach us, Lord, to suffer the little children to come to you, right here in this place.  And let us grow a hundred-fold, or sixty, or thirty… that would be a good start!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

13 July 2014

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

La Farmacia

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

“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”  (Mt. 11: 28)

The altar in the church of Nuestra Señora de los Desamparados, on the outskirts of Puerto Cortez in Honduras, is free-standing.  It is, in fact, a crudely made table, nailed together, its plank-top painted white.  It was not difficult to lift it and carry it off of its platform and into the sacristy – through a door on the Gospel side, more or less the same location as the sacristy here at Saint Mark’s.  But in this sacristy there are no vestments stored, and no precious vessels.  The wooden chalice and paten we had used for the Mass were already washed up and placed in the shoebox they are kept in somewhere else.

The shelves of the sacristy had been lined with the contents of many of the duffel bags we carried with us to Honduras: Amoxicillin, Doxycycline, Lisinopril, Glipizide, Benadryl and its liquid sibling Banophen, Metoprolol, Cepahlexin, Ciprofloxacin, Ranitidine, Albendazole, Metronidazole, Prednisone, Azithromycin, Hydrochlorothiazide, Hydocortisone, triple-antibiotic, and Chlortrimazol creams, and Albutrin inhalers, along with liquid Tylenol for children in two different dosages, suspensions of antibiotics ready to be reconstituted (also for children), baby aspirin, Tylenol, Ibuprofen, Tums by the thousands, and a small cache of injectable medications kept inside a locked metal cabinet that I was not allowed to look at, let alone touch that I know included insulin, and thousand and thousands of vitamins for children and adults.

I will not bore you with an inventory of the comparable supply of medical supplies also carried in those duffel bags: stethoscopes, scalpels, swabs, pulse-ox monitors, bandages, otoscopes, tongue depressors, blood-pressure cuffs, gauze, curettes, and all manner of other paraphernalia that was arrayed in another building, a short way down the hill, beneath the sacristy, which became the examination rooms for our four doctors.

Most of my time – during this past mission trip to Honduras, as in the last one we organized three years ago – was spent in what had been the sacristy but was now transformed into la farmacia.  And here, the altar had become our work-table – its planks nailed close enough together that we did not have to worry about even the smallest pills slipping down in between them to the floor, as we counted them out into little zip-lock baggies, and wrote out instructions in Spanish, guided by our interpreters.

La farmacia – the pharmacy – was somewhat insulated from the organized chaos of the church, where patients were greeted, vital signs were taken, and triage was done so we could get an idea of the overall condition, complaints, and needs of the patients.  Down the hill in the examination rooms is where the doctors were talking with, examining closely, and treating patients before sending them back up the hill with their diagnoses and prescriptions written out.  The patients then waited in the church again, while we filled prescriptions in the pharmacy, had them checked by a nurse, and sent them out with a translator and a nurse to provide instructions.  Which is to say that inside la farmacia we were also somewhat insulated from the actual human beings whom we had come to serve, since we had not been assigned to deal with the patients face-to-face.

But you must abandon any idea that the separation was meaningful between those of us in the small sacristy/pharmacy and the people we served on that hillside outside of Puerto Cortez.  Because the sacristy – la farmacia – a room of maybe 10 x 12 feet – enjoyed two large windows, covered with bars, and a metal mesh, but no glass, and a large metal door that we kept open.  The door allowed not only access down the path to the examination rooms, but also welcome ventilation during the hot, humid days.

And these three large openings to the room – two windows and one door – were almost constantly attended by children.  Faces peered in through windows watching the counting of pills as though it might suddenly turn fascinating.  And little bodies leaned on the door jambs, poked heads inside, struck up conversations, played patty-cake, asked for handouts of various sorts, and hovered constantly at the open door that led outside from la farmacia.  So our actual contact – primarily with the children from the nearby school and the surrounding neighborhood – was non-stop.  I never really saw a single patient, as such, in the clinic; but I sure did spend time with a lot of children!

The neighborhood around the church is nicknamed Colonia Episcopal.  It was largely destroyed by Hurricane Mitch in 1998 – a storm that devastated Honduras.  And the church on the hillside was left more or less a ruin afterward.  Its school was turned over to the state, and the local residents were left to rebuild their shanty-town in the haphazard way that is seen a lot throughout Honduras.  With few parishioners and damaged by the storm, the little church was eventually closed by the diocese and left to decay for several years, until a formidable woman, who happens also to be a midwife with whom we worked this past week, went to the bishop and asked him to allow them to reclaim the church and its school and to rebuild.  The bishop gave them a chance, and a bit of help in funding for a new roof for the church building, which was by then in terrible disrepair.

Today the roof keeps rain out very effectively, I can attest.  The church is painted bright yellow, and its large white cross is easily visible from the highway that leads past it into the city of Puerto Cortez.  And every day last week children cavorted on every side of the church, inside and out, and at every window and door, including those that opened into la farmacia.  I assume that our presence merely intensified the kind of cavorting that is probably a regular feature of the church of Nuestra Señora de los Desamaparados – which can be translated “Our Lady of the Dispossessed,” or “Our Lady of the Defenseless.”

Among the most striking experiences of the week 14 of us from Saint Mark’s just spent in Honduras was the experience of the church as a magnet for children, for there were children absolutely everywhere.  About two -thirds or more of all our patients were children.  But as I mentioned, the church was also surrounded by children every day – children in bare feet, covered in dirt, filthy-dirty as we sometimes say around here, too small for their ages because they are not sufficiently well nourished, their heads sometimes teeming with lice – and yet, of course, absolutely adorable in every way.  The kids played with deflated soccer balls.  They used rubber gloves given to them by our doctors as balloons.  They chased each other, played tag, and they squealed with delight when we squirted them with water from 60-cc syringes.

The remarkable thing about children is that they often do not know that they have been given heavy burdens to bear.  These children certainly showed few signs of being aware of the heavy burden of poverty that was draped over each of their shoulders, and which will weigh heavily on them all as they get older.

It is, of course, the most saccharine of clichés to point out that the future belongs to the young – to children.  Perhaps it is a disdain for the clichéd, then, that renders Episcopalians so often indifferent to children in our churches.  The idea that the church could be a magnet for children is laughable in many of our churches, outside of the South where the important place of children in the church remains an article of religion.

But on a hillside in poverty-wracked Honduras, where the church has almost nothing to work with, I know of a church that that for at least five days was an absolute magnet for children.

It is a tenet of mission work in this modern era that the missionaries will very likely bring at least as much back with them as they brought to those whom they were called to serve.  Among the many lessons I hope I have brought back with me from Honduras is the image (I pray, a lasting one) of the church as a magnet for children: a church where children want to be, where they know their concerns are foremost in the minds of the adults who surround them, where they know there is something for them, where they will be fed and cared for, and maybe even healed, where they can play and sing and be joyful, and where, without doubt, they will be safe.  Search the shelves of any pharmacy and you will discover that there is no easy prescription for this – though it is the cure the church is so dearly in need of.

We have begun, here at Saint Mark’s, to take children much more seriously, to begin to enjoy again their more numerous presence among us, and to see in them a vision of our future, unclear though that vision may yet be.

Over the doors of this church are inscribed the words from the Gospel we read today: “Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”  We don’t always hear in these words of Jesus a call to children – whose burdens are often masked by their innocence, their resiliency, and their smiles.  And, God willing, it will be the case that not all the children who come to us will be weighed down by poverty or other burdens that are heavy to bear.  But even the children of the well-to-do carry burdens with them.

By God’s blessing and mercy, may this place become a magnet for them and for all children.  May they be peering in our windows and leaning up against our doors and playing in our gardens so they can’t help but spill inside.  And may they always find rest and hope and joy here in this place.  And, by God’s grace, perhaps the little children will become the prescription for whatever ails us now, and the hope for our future.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

6 July 2014

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia