God forbid

Scene one: Jesus asks the disciples who people think he is. The disciples offer some names that they have heard – Elijah, John the Baptist, maybe a prophet. Jesus asks the disciples who they think he is. Peter replies, You are the Christ. Jesus orders the disciples to keep this news to themselves. Scene two: Jesus begins to teach his disciples what this news means: that he is to suffer, and be killed, and after three days rise again. And Jesus goes on – if they are to be his disciples, they, too, must deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow him.

This story, with these same two scenes, appears not only in Matthew’s Gospel, which we have all just heard, but also in Mark’s and Luke’s. Mark’s version was written first, and when the communities of Matthew and Luke wrote their own Gospels, they took Mark’s story, shaped it to reflect their own understandings and context, and wove it into their narrative. The shaping is subtle, but important. For example, Mark’s version of this episode includes the moment when Peter, fresh from his triumphant identification of Jesus as the Messiah, drastically overstepped his bounds and, in Mark’s words, “took [Jesus] aside and began to rebuke him.” But Mark does not tell us what Peter actually said. What did his rebuke sound like? Did he just sound full of himself, like, Now hang on, Jesus, I think I have a pretty good sense of what your future looks like. I’m the one who correctly pegged you as the Messiah, remember? And the Messiah, just in case you’ve forgotten, does not suffer and die, even if you do have some frankly cockamamie idea about rising from the grave in three days. Or did Peter’s rebuke sound more anxious, like, Jesus, come on, give me a break, it’s hard enough to keep all of these guys on track here, I mean, James and John get really bossy sometimes, and Bartholomew, I don’t know what his story is, and Judas has been looking so miserable these days – you can’t just keep telling everyone that you’re going to die. It’s terrible for morale. It’s disheartening; it’s scary, and frankly it’s just annoying, so please, can you put on a happy face and tone down the crucifixion talk a bit?

We, of course, have no idea what Peter’s rebuke sounded like in Mark, because Mark doesn’t tell us. So Matthew and Luke, when they wove this story into their own, had a choice to make. Do they answer the question: what did Peter say? Or do they leave it a mystery? Luke chose to avoid the entire question. He simply left out the passage, and Peter and Jesus never have this conversation in Luke at all. But Matthew chose the other route. Instead of leaving open the question of what Peter said to Jesus, he puts a few words into Peter’s mouth. Peter takes Jesus aside, Matthew tells us, and begins to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.”

God forbid it, Lord! This is a very different rebuke than we had previously imagined. This is not a chastisement rooted in pride or a false sense of security; this is a cry of heartbreak, the reaction of someone who has seen a shadow lurking around the soul of someone he loves. This is the frantic pushback of someone who cannot bear this kind of suffering, especially when it is inflicted upon this particular person. God forbid, Lord. This will not, this cannot happen to you, my Messiah, my Rabbi, my friend.

But Jesus says no. No, God will not forbid this. All that I have spoken will happen to me. As bewildering and awful as this may seem to you, Peter, God will let this dreadful thing happen; he will allow it with his whole being. But God will not only allow this suffering, God will also live it. He will bear it. And he will redeem it. And, Jesus goes on, just as God will not forbid me to take up this cross of shame and death, God will also not forbid it for you. God will allow you to take up your own cross. God desires you to take up your own cross, to deny your own selfish desires, and to follow me. God desires this path of discipleship for you, even if – even when – following that path means that you are choosing suffering, persecution, even death.

God forbid it, Lord. How many times have we said this ourselves, about our own suffering? God forbid that I have to endure this pain any longer. God forbid that I lose my job. God forbid that I lose this love. God forbid that the results come back positive. God forbid that she has a recurrence, that he falls off the wagon, that I give in to temptation again. God forbid that this war continues for one more day, God forbid that one more child dies from hunger and malnutrition. God forbid that another man or woman suffers persecution because of how he worships or whom she loves. God forbid that we fail, again, and stumble, again, and fall, again. God forbid it, Lord. This must not happen.

 And yet it does. Over and over again our fears are realized and we find ourselves in darkness, fear, and despair. Over and over again we suffer, our neighbors suffer, our friends and family and loved ones suffer, our brother and sister Christians suffer, the world suffers, and God does not forbid it. We wish that he would. We pray that he would. We beg and cry and plead that he would. But he does not. And only he knows why. Perhaps it has to do with the gift of free will, or the nature of sin, or the patterns of Creation, or the working out of our own salvation. Perhaps. But we can only guess at the mind of God – guess and trust and continue to pray, again and again, “God forbid it, Lord. This must not happen.”

But when “this” does happen, when God does not forbid, Christ stands before us, showing us what to do. God forbid, Jesus tells us, that you do not follow me. God forbid that you do not remember to keep your minds and hearts where they ought to be. God forbid that you do not choose to become my disciples, that you do not deny yourselves, take up your cross, and follow me. For it is only by following me that your suffering becomes bearable. It is only by following me that your cross becomes endurable. It is only by following me that discipleship becomes possible, that true life becomes imaginable, that this world with all of its pain and confusion and heartbreak becomes redeemable. Jesus did not tell us simply to deny ourselves and take up our cross. He did not tell us simply to bear the suffering of the world. He told us to bear our cross and to follow him, to keep his love “before [our] eyes, to walk faithfully with him.” And he promised that when we do this, he will bear the weight of the world with us, saving us, healing us, strengthening us, and transforming us and the world at the same time.  

This is our hope, you and I. And so God forbid that we do not follow Christ. God forbid that we do not take up our cross and walk in his ways. God forbid that we do not let our love be genuine, that we do not hate evil and hold fast to what is good. God forbid that we do not speak truth, even when there is a cost. God forbid that we do not offer ourselves, even when we are rejected. God forbid that we do not stand before God and before the world with his commandments in our hearts and his word upon our lips. God forbid that we do not sing a song of thanksgiving and tell the world of all of God’s wonderful deeds.

And God forbid that we do not hear Christ’s continuing promise to us as we follow him, that we do not hear Christ’s voice speaking to us, to you, to your own heart, saying, God forbid that you forget that I will be with you always, even to the end of the age. God forbid that you not feel me holding you close to my heart when you are alone or afraid. God forbid that you not know that it is I who lifts you up when you are too weak to stand. God forbid that you do not feel me comforting you when you mourn, weeping with you when you weep, abiding with you through storm and tempest and the valley of the shadow of death. Yes, of course, God forbid. God forbid that you ever forget that you are mine, my disciples, my joy and my delight, my very own beloved.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

31 August 2014

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Open Wide Your Hand

For the disciples, there were certainly good days and bad days. There were days when they sat with the crowds at Jesus’ feet and heard him tell of blessings far beyond their imaginings. There were days when they saw him reach out and heal the hopeless, the outcast, the abandoned, the sick, the dying, even the dead. And there were special days, golden days, when it was just the bakers’ dozen of them, striding along the road, laughing and jostling each other as they passed around the wineskin, then stopping to pray and to enjoy the beauty of the wide open sky and the sound of each other’s breathing. But then there were the bad days, the days when they just didn’t get it, when the healings didn’t come, when the words didn’t make sense. There were days filled with more conflict than comfort, days when they were scared to meet each other’s eyes, when Jesus’ words of arrest and crucifixion dogged them along the road.

This day had started out as a very bad day. For Jesus and the disciples had just received the worst possible news: John the Baptist had been killed by Herod, beheaded, executed and then paraded around as the worst kind of party game. He had been their friend and their brother, and he had been arrested for proclaiming the Lord whom they followed. He had sat, wasted and wasting in prison, while they walked through their good days and their bad days. And now he was dead, and the world seemed that much uglier.

And so the day had begun by Jesus’ telling them that he was off on his own. He would leave them to pray and to mourn, push off in a boat to find some solitude on the sea. Not the beginning of a good day. Because they needed him, of course. They didn’t do well without him. James and John tended to try to lord it over the others when Jesus was gone; Peter would get impatient and press the group to move on, to go into town, to do…something. The disciples fractured without Jesus on their best days, and this day was far from their best. After all they were mourning, too; they too were shaken by the sheer meanness of the world. This was a terrible day to leave them alone, they thought, as they watched Jesus row out into the mourning with their own hearts heavy in their chests.

He didn’t go far. They could see him bobbing near the far shoreline, a finger trailing in the water, eyes searching the horizon. They were close enough to him as they sat on the shore, picking through rocks and listening to the gulls, speaking to each other in low voices about their fears for the future, muttering prayers under their breath for poor, lost John. They were close enough to him to notice when a crowd began to gather at that far shoreline, jostling to see Jesus on the bright line of the water, crying out to him, calling him in to shore. He would go in to them, of course they knew this, and there would be the sick to heal and lepers to cleanse and unwashed bodies and tears and cries of pain and they might be able to offer their own healings but they might not and anyway who felt like dealing with these crowds today when they were all still so stunned and sad? Didn’t these people know that today was a bad day?

But as they approached Jesus, with the larger and larger crowds clearing a path for them with whispers and nods and bright, hopeful eyes, they saw him, standing in the midst, surrounded by nothing by need and sand and sunlight, but with such a look of love on his face. He smiled at everyone he saw, beamed at them, touched them with such gentleness, spoke to them as if each one was friend or brother or sister. The disciples watched tens, dozens, hundreds of people flow up to Jesus in wave after wave of want and then roll away rejoicing – freed, healed, and whole. And so happy that they then just stayed there, a pool of people gathering around, still and silent and full of all of the depths of holiness. It was profoundly beautiful, and they looked out on these crowds and their Lord, and said, It is good.

 It was so good that they didn’t want the day to end in upset and worry, so when the shadows began to lengthen and the breeze began to cool, they reminded their Lord that these people still needed to get home so that they could get something to eat. This day has gone from being very, very bad to very, very good, but it is enough now. It is okay to send them away, they say, to call an end to this gift, to draw the curtain down on this holiness. But Jesus says no; this day is not over. There is more gift here. And he gathers from them all the food they could find, five loaves and two fishes, blesses them, and breaks up the loaves. He gives the food to them – a basket of broken bread, a basket of flaky fish, and tells them to begin passing it out. And so they do, walking down among the still, seated crowds, here, some for you, of course, take some more, another fish for your little girl? And they watch the smiles and the tears, the delight in the eyes of all they touch. They hear contented sighs and appreciative noises. They hear comments: the bread is delicious, and how is it that mine is chewy and tastes like rosemary, my favorite, and his is crisp and salty? Is there more, the disciples hear again and again, and again and again they are able to answer, yes, of course, here is more.

And they watch their hands – their own, simple working-man’s hands – dip into baskets again and again, close around some delicious morsel and open again and again, offering bread and meat. They hear the chewing begin to turn into sounds of laughter, and then someone is calling out for Miriam to sing, and then there is music and dancing and infinite joy, all the while they are opening their hands again and again, filling empty palms with holy food, with love, with life.

And they cannot help but hear the voice of the psalms in their heads as they walk, “The eyes of all wait upon you, O Lord, and you give them their food in due season. You open wide your hand and satisfy the needs of every living creature.” They have known this psalm since they were boys, and its words of promise and hope have always brought comfort. You open wide your hand…and yet all this time they never imagined that the hands that would be opening wide would be their own.

There is much that is different between those disciples’ days and our own. We have good days and bad days, too. We lose those we love, we live in hope and then in fear, we have moments of transcendent beauty and moments of colossal confusion. But we rarely see miracles like this these days. The spontaneous multiplication of loaves and fishes doesn’t happen much around these parts. But that doesn’t mean that our hands aren’t still the hands that God wants to use to help satisfy, to offer meat, the bread, the stuff of life. It’s just that our miracles look a little more like stone soup than miraculous multiplication. Do you remember that story? A poor monk comes into a town and begins to cook in a large pot with nothing more than water and a large stone. As the townspeople come by and ask what he is doing, he tells them that he is cooking a delicious stew with just that one stone. But he could, of course, use a little carrot for color. And so a woman brings him some carrots. A little celery for garnish, perhaps, and the celery appears. And then potatoes, and radishes, and turnips, and corn, and chicken, and salt, and pepper and on and on until the town, onto the game now, sits down with the monk and all enjoy the stone soup together.

So maybe our miracles look a little more like that than baskets full of bread and fish. Maybe our miracles look more like feeding soup to 175 people on a Saturday morning than fields full of five thousand families. Maybe our miracles look more like inviting a friend to come to Mass that they may be fed from this holy table. Maybe our miracles look more like withdrawing alone to pray and staying alone to pray, but praying nonetheless. Maybe our miracles are different. But they are no less miraculous, and in those miracles our hands look the same – hands that open wide to do God’s work of feeding, body and soul. Our hands look the same as they reach deep into what we have to offer, measly as it may seem, and find it needed by the world, again and again. Our hands look the same, opening wide to feed the world, to bring joy and companionship, to turn darkness into light and bad days into days that are very, very good.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

3 August 2014

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

The Kingdom of Heaven is Like

There has been a little trend in the movies this year of films based on Bible stories. At the beginning of the year, there was Son of God, about the life of Jesus. Then came Noah. Up next is Exodus: Gods and Kings, with Batman, I mean Christian Bale, playing Moses. Now all of these adaptations are really action-packed. These are not contemplative reflections on the spiritual dimensions of God’s presence with God’s people; no, these are big CGI extravaganzas that glam up the most cinematic moments of the story. Exodus is being directed by Ridley Scott, known for blockbusters like Alien and Gladiator. Noah added all kinds of dramatic elements into the biblical narrative, like ancient near-eastern bombs and terrifying fallen angels. Even Son of God included some over-the-top storms on the Sea of Galilee and at least one shot of Jesus wielding a staff like a Jedi knight.

Compare all of this to a movie that our 20s/30s group watched this past spring, a movie that I know some of you know well: the 1964 film The Gospel According to Matthew, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. When reading through the Gospel to prepare for the making of the film, Pasolini found himself fascinated not by the dramatic miracles in Matthew, but by the speeches. He loved the moments of Jesus’ teaching, the moments that were filled to the brim with words. And so in his film, there are long stretches of scenes with little to no action at all – shot after shot of Jesus’ face, just talking. “Blessed are you who hunger and thirst….” “You have heard it said….” “But I say to you….” Simple, still shots, with a flood of words, so many words that at times you can feel like you want to pause the movie, take a moment, and think about what you’ve heard.

This morning’s Gospel reading is more like Pasolini. There is very little dialogue and almost no action. We aren’t told where Jesus is or what he’s doing. There’s just shot after shot of him talking: “The kingdom of heaven is like…the kingdom of heaven is like…the kingdom of heaven is like.” Five parables packed on top of one another like sardines. Now it’s hard to tell if Jesus really talked this way. Maybe he did – maybe he just woke up of a morning and decided that that day would be simile day. Or maybe this is just the Gospel writer organizing things – the miracles go here, the Sermon on the Mount here, parables here. To be sure, the lectionary is organizing things for us today by serving up all five of these baby parables while skipping over the eleven verses in the middle. We heard those verses last week, Jesus’ explanation of the parable of the wheat and the tares.

Because remember, this is the third week of parables in a row. But the last two weeks, we’ve heard not only the parable but also Jesus’ explanation. We were given a chance to take a breath, to click pause, to step outside of the parable for a second to reflect on what we’ve heard. But there is no time for that today. The parables just come one on top of the other – bang, bang, bang – full of words, rich with imagery, with no time to pause and ask questions or just to mull over them for a minute.

Now we could take that time now. We could pause and pick through each parable, exploring the metaphors, delving into some of the strangeness of them – that a mustard bush was really just a nuisance of a weed, that yeast was considered unclean, that a man seemed to have been digging for treasure in a field he didn’t actually own. But that sounds like five sermons, not one, and it is a gorgeous summer day and we have brunch to get to, so let’s not do that.

And besides that, I think the folks who shaped the lectionary are really on to something here. I think there’s something to the bang, bang, bang, approach of these parables. Because when they are stacked on top of each other like this, what do we hear, again, and again, and again – the kingdom of heaven is like, the kingdom of heaven is like, the kingdom of heaven is like. And as we hear this phrase over and over, we start to hear something else, something really important. We eventually hear that Jesus really seems to know what the kingdom of heaven is like. It sounds like he has actually been there, like he really knows the kingdom, personally, intimately. He has spent so much time there that he can describe it to us in all of these different ways. And so he says the kingdom of heaven is like all of these things, and we believe him, because we’re sure he has seen it.

And not only has Jesus seen it, he wants us to see it as well. He wants us to spend some serious time in the kingdom. Why else would Jesus tell us about it over and over if he didn’t want us to go there? He who “overcame the sharpness of death has opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers.” He has thrown wide the doors and wants us to enter in. And I don’t mean in the future, I mean now. The kingdom of heaven is, Jesus tells us, right now, not just on that great gettin’ up mornin’. The kingdom of heaven is, here and now, not in all of its fullness, of course, but it is nonetheless, more real, more dense, just more than all of this earthly kingdom.

It is, though, not always readily apparent. The kingdom is not always easy to see in this world. It is often lost, hidden behind heartbreak and sorrow, obscured by pain and persecution and the paraphernalia of this mortal life. If we are to look beyond these things temporal to see the things eternal, we will need some help. And so Jesus offers us all of these fabulous similes. Because he knows that if we are going to see the kingdom, we will have to use our imaginations. Not to pretend, for the kingdom is not pretend. Using our imaginations does not mean that the kingdom we see is imaginary. It means that it is image-full, illuminated; it means that we are opening the eyes of our hearts along with the eyes in our head, that we are learning to see what the kingdom of heaven is like.

Using our imaginations helps us to look at this broken mess of a world and to see more. Using our imaginations helps us to endure a news cycle like that of this past week and to see that those stories are not the full stories; the news is not just grief and anger and waste – the news of the kingdom is comfort and reconciliation and growth. Our imaginations help us to look at something that seems as worthless as a mustard bush – for example, an oversized, underused rectory attached to a church on Locust Street – and see how it can be a place where servants come from all over to make their homes in its hallways. Our imaginations help us to look at something as tiny and seemingly insignificant as bowl of soup and see how that one small thing can transform an entire life, an entire city of lives. Our imaginations help us to find something that just forty years ago was well and truly hidden – like the call to ordained ministry among women in the Church – and do whatever we need to do to bring it into the light. Our imaginations help each of us to find that one thing – that call, that relationship, that offering, that work, that service – that is worth everything to us, and to shed all of the flotsam and jetsam of our lives to give it the place it deserves in our lives.

 It is only when we use our imaginations in this way that we can look at this world and see the promise, the more of the kingdom. And this world desperately needs us to see in this way, to look at the Holy Land and the thousands of children at our borders and the violently mentally ill and Christians in Iraq and those on death row and to see not mustard seeds and yeast and lost treasure, not things worthless and hidden and broken, but a kingdom of abundance and freedom and purpose and hope and life.

The kingdom of heaven has come near to you, Jesus has promised, if only you are willing to turn around and look at it. So look. Let yourself be a disciple trained for the kingdom of heaven. Employ and enjoy the gift of your imagination, let yourself be flooded with image after image, with shot after shot, of the kingdom. And then, when you are filled to the brim with visions of the kingdom, go live a life that is action-packed. Step out into this world and proclaim in your own voice, in word and in deed, what the kingdom of heaven is like.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

27 July 2014

Saint Mark's, Philadelphia