City Limits

You may listen to Mother Johnson's sermon here.

In a sermon on salvation, the seventeenth-century English poet and cleric John Donne uses a haunting image.  Speaking of the way that death brings us closer to God, he conjures up the picture of a traveller and a gallows at night, just outside a town.   Here are his words:

As he that travels weary, and late towards a great city, is glad when he comes to a place of execution, because he knows that is near the town: so when thou comest to the gate of death, [be] glad of that, for it is but one step from that to thy Jerusalem.

Do you see what he did there?  It’s a little dense.  A weary traveler, he says, who has been away on a long journey and comes at night to the outskirts of, say, London, will see the gallows first.  He will see the gallows and rejoice, because he knows that the city itself cannot be far off.  Seeing the awful place where criminals are sent to die will fill a seventeenth-century Englishman with joy, because it will mean that he is back to civilization at last. His long journey is almost through.  He will sleep tonight in his own bed, in his own home. 

The image is unsettling in part because it makes that earthly city seem like such a barbaric place.  In our own day and age, we put up pleasant signs welcoming people to the great state of Pennsylvania, and more special greetings to let them know that they have arrived in Philadelphia.  Sometimes we put the mayor’s picture on the sign.  Welcome to the city that loves you back.  It’s a far cry from Donne’s message: welcome to the city where the guilty die a violent death.  Donne would never have succeeded in public relations and marketing.

But maybe Donne was onto something that applies to us today, even though our Board of Tourism would never admit it.  After all, isn’t it still true today that cities tend to be organized so that the rougher parts of existence are pushed out to the city limits? The traveler who arrives at the Philadelphia airport and travels over the Platt Memorial Bridge and up 76 to Center City will be greeted by junkyards and oil refineries and porn shops. The things we don’t want to see are kept reassuringly on the margins of the city in our day, just as they were in Donne’s. A wealthy traveller will know that feeling, of zipping along the freeway late at night in the back of a taxi as the lights of Comcast Tower and Liberty Place beckon in the distance, and feeling the familiar map of the world as we know it spreading out in all directions. Welcome to Philadelphia. We know we are home when we pass the oil refinery. Terra Firma. Slowly we pass through them, all the unsightly things, one by one, if we are fortunate enough, to the neighborhood in which we live, the house that we call home, the bed that promises us quiet rest.  Snug, we hope, and secure, as close to the center as we can afford to be.

From one rather disheartening perspective, this is what “civilization” means: crowding together to live as well as we are able, and keeping the things and people we don’t want to see on the outskirts, to be passed by as quickly as possible whenever we have to make a journey.  Donne wasn’t far off when he used a gallows as an image of city living.  Our cities are mapped out in a way that bespeaks fear and avoidance of danger.  Our very sense of geography is based on the notion that the privileged can hide from uncomfortable truths. 

On this Sunday we celebrate the feast of the Holy Cross, giving thanks that Christ himself went out to the place of execution and made it his place of triumph.  From the cross, Christ welcomes us into the city of God, a new kind of city that puts the king on the gallows at the edge of town, and brings the poor and the forgotten and the disheartened to a feast right in the middle of everything.  Right where everyone can see.  Boldly giving the keys of the city to the poor.  Turning over the prime real estate to the disenfranchised.  Lifted high on the cross, Christ beckons to all of us, all of us so weary from our travels, so anxious to be home, so uncertain about where we find ourselves.  “This is your city,” he says, “because it is my city.  I have taken upon myself the violence and the vulnerability, the pain of exclusion, the fear, upon which you laid your city plans. I have reconciled you to one another.  I have redrawn your map. I have made it possible for you to encounter one another in an honest way.  I have made you children of light.  You can live without your fear of the darkness on the outskirts.” We can live without that fear. Wherever there is death, in whatever place the criminal bears her shame, where the hopeless have congregated, where there is no illusion of protection from suffering, Christ has posted his banner of welcome for us.

Jesus has redrawn all the maps.  What we want to shut out is now the center of everything important.  Our comfort and our rest are now forever tied up with him, with a dying criminal on the edge of the city.  When we lift high the processional cross again at the end of this Mass, as we did at the beginning, we follow our crucified and risen Lord out into a city transformed by his truth and his love.  And we will make this journey again and again, Sunday after Sunday, day after day, traveling into this place that is our spiritual home, facing East to the place of the rising sun, and then turning around and making a journey out.  If we are paying attention as we travel this path again and again, we will come to realize that we are being almost literally re-oriented.  We are learning to find the rising Son not only in this place, where he looks the way we expect him to look, but also out in that place, where we see him crucified everywhere. 

Today we celebrate this journey, and we give great thanks for the signpost that is our suffering Messiah.  Though we come here to meet Jesus at the altar and hear him speaking in the word, we learn too that Jesus is waiting for us in all our travels outward.  It’s something like that old slogan from Howard Johnson Hotels,  “Someone you know, wherever you go.”  But let’s not fool ourselves the way that jingle wants to fool us.  This journey back and forth, learning again and again that the places we don’t want to go are the places where Christ awaits us: that’s a terribly difficult journey. There is no easy way to Golgotha. We won’t find a friendly inn when we get there. The trip will cost us everything.  Traveling into this church and being re-oriented and led back out the door: sometimes that just feels like going in circles.  It may feel more like we are being dis-oriented.  And however long we have been travelling, however ardently, we are still just beginners on this path. 

But if we stay with the path, day in and day out, we may be given the grace to learn that Jesus is with us every step of the way.  We may come to feel that Jesus is in the journey as well as the destination.  We may really begin to see him wherever we go.

And so we keep making this trip, following our cross.   Lifted up, Jesus does draw us to him.  We suffer the reorientation. Slowly but surely, step by step, encounter by encounter, we allow our maps to be redrawn.  We allow ourselves to live in a new creation. One foot in front of another.  Left.  Right.  Left.  It is but one step, as Donne would say, from here to our Jerusalem.

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson

The Feast of the Holy Cross

Saint Mark's, Philadelphia

You can read a selection from Donne’s sermon here: http://www.bartleby.com/209/267.html. See also Donne’s poem “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward” for a meditation on disorientation and the crucifixion: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173359

Freakonomics

“Owe no one anything; except to love one another….” (Rom. 13:8)

All summer long we have been watching people dump buckets of ice water over their heads.  The phenomenon of the Ice Bucket Challenge has brought a boon of $109 million in contributions to the ALS Association that works to fight Lou Gehrig’s disease, and to bring relief to those living with it, and those who care for them.  ALS and its variants are cruel diseases that allow a person to witness his or her own degeneration from the inside, while becoming less and less able to do anything at all on the outside.  If you’ve ever known anyone who has suffered, and eventually died, from the disease, you may know something about the depth of sadness that goes with it.  But there’s no sadness involved in the Ice Bucket Challenge – it’s been a happy, chilly diversion during the warm summer months.

The Internet being what it is, before long, people began to question the Ice Bucket Challenge.  Was anybody actually giving money to the ALSA, or were we just wasting water?  Where was the money going, anyway?  And how efficiently is the ALS Association run?  Etc., etc.  Then there were the celebrity Ice Bucket Challenges that delighted us so- like James Franco, and George Bush.  And then the creative Ice Bucket challenges, like the Anglo-catholic parish whose cassock-garbed clergy had ice dumped on their heads.  Eventually, Ice Bucket Challenge-fatigue set in as the novelty wore off, and many of us became too cool for school, as it were, and the challenges and the videos slowed down.  And soon the Ice Bucket challenge will be a memory, a passing moment (literally, not much more than a moment) that most will forget.

Except that some few people will have learned a thing or two about this terrible disease, and about the people who live with it and die with it.  And we can hope and expect that some real good will be done with the $109 million that has been raised – which, is, after all, not really that much money in the world of medical research these days, but it’s a nice drop in the bucket.

I hear Saint Paul writing to the church in Rome: “Owe no one anything; except to love one another….”  This is a strange thing to say.  He might have said, “owe no one anything, except a long-term mortgage payment, a short-term car loan, and a manageable amount of credit card debt.”  He might have said, “owe no one anything except what you know you can pay back with reasonable interest.”  He might have said, “owe no one anything, except, of course, student loans are OK.”

You might think that Paul was not talking specifically about money – maybe this was just a figure of speech, and he meant to say that you should be an independent spirit, reliant on no one but yourself.  But the context of his writing suggests that he was very clearly writing about money.  In the previous paragraph he was writing about paying taxes, which, just like Jesus, he counseled you should do.

But in the 8th verse of the 13th chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, Paul stops making sense.  He stops making a coherent argument about what to do with your money.  And starts talking about something else altogether: “owe no one anything; except to love one another.  I’m going to call this the original Freakonomics.

With apologies to those who more recently coined the term, let’s define Freakonomics as the set of conditions that result in a person or persons making decisions based on some set of factors other than how much money it will cost you.

Because all day long we make decisions based on cost.  Where do you get your coffee in the morning?  How do you get to work?  What are you wearing today?  What will you have for lunch?  Where are the kids going to school?  What will they do after school?  What’s for dinner?  What happens after dinner?  The root question of all these matters is a widely variable denominator: what does it cost?  This is one of the inescapable daily questions of life, a fundamental of micro-economics: what does it cost?

But this morning we are asked to consider what I’m calling Freakonomics: what do you do when your first worry isn’t how much money it will cost you?

St. Paul had a simple way of putting this as an instruction, rather than a question: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  Of course this was not an original thought.  But Paul, like Jesus, knew that we need continually to be reminded of this basic rule of life, otherwise we get mired in the nickel and diming of every-day micro-economics.

Freakonomics, on the other hand, finds its roots in the ancient Jewish scriptures, cited by Jesus as a component part of the greatest commandment, and now by Paul as the fulfillment of the law: “Love does no wrong to a neighbor.  Therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.”

How, we might ask ourselves, does this work?  What does it mean?

By way of answering those questions, maybe you have heard about the Rooster Soup Company.  This is a partnership between the awesome Federal Donuts and the awesome Broad Street Ministries, currently seeking funding on Kickstarter.  They are planning to make chicken stock from left over chicken bones at Federal Donuts (where they also sell fried chicken), then make soup with the stock that they’ll sell in a restaurant, and then take the profits from the restaurant to fund Broad Street Ministries’ meal program that feeds 1200 people a week.   I call that Freakonomics: nobody is getting rich, but a lot of people are going to be fed.

Or, maybe you were out on Kelly Drive yesterday morning where about 180 people gathered to run in the second St. James School 5k run and where we raised about $14,000 for the school.  I call that Freakonomics.

St. James School itself is an exercise in Freakonomics, since, now in its fourth year of operation, we will raise $1.5 million in order to fight poverty with education in the lives of 63 wonderful students from families in need.

Here at Saint Mark’s we operate every week on the principles of Freakonomics – we make decisions all the time based on factors other than what it will cost us.

We don’t actually know what it costs us to run the Saturday Soup Bowl that feeds as many as 200 people every Saturday morning.  So much is simply given to us – soup, bread, milk, volunteers’ time – that we could never afford to pay for it if we had to.

This year we begin the second year of our Boys & Girls Choir, which we started by adding a part-time salary and a few thousand dollars to the budget.  But over the summer we had more than 40 kids involved in Choir Camps, and the growing Boys & Girls Choir is transforming worship at the Family Mass, as well as the lives of the children singing in it.  How much does it cost?  We’ll have a better idea by the end of the year, but I assure you it costs much more than we’re paying for it.

I could go on, since we accomplish a great deal more here every week than we pay for, thanks to countless volunteers, contributors, and faithful souls at prayer.

“Owe no one anything; except to love one another.”  Saint Paul has not disowned the old economy – he still thinks you need to pay your taxes – but he is writing about a new economy of love.  He talks about it in terms of the law; since the Jewish law was the dominant paradigm of decision-making in the communities he is writing to.

But economics – both micro and macro – is the dominant paradigm of decision-making in the world you and I live in.  The right and careful use of debt is taken for granted in our society, for instance.  The reckless incursion of debt, on the other hand, has made some people rich and others very poor in recent years.  So it’s helpful to hear Saint Paul change the conversation for us: don’t owe anyone anything; except to love one another.  Here’s what I think Saint Paul is saying to us: this isn’t about money; it’s about love.  There is an economy of love to be built, and you and I are just the people to build it!

I suppose that’s why, despite all the criticisms you can find about the Ice Bucket Challenge, in the end, I’m a fan.  For those participating in it don’t have anything really to gain, except a cold, wet head of hair and a soggy set of clothes.  But for a minute or two, the Ice Bucket Challenge changed the rules of the conversation, and shifted us into the land of Freakonomics where the most pressing question isn’t about what it will cost us. 

The most pressing question of the Ice Bucket Challenge seems to have been what it might mean for your neighbor – whether your neighbor is the person you nominate to follow you and dump ice water on his or her own head, or the person who’s just been diagnosed with ALS, or the person working in the lab to fight the disease, or the person who is watching a loved one disappear as the disease takes over.  You could go into a lot of debt to try to help all those neighbors.  Or, you could decide to owe no one anything, except love.  And people seem to have done this to the tune of about $109 million, (and in marked contrast to the guy who has raised $55,000 on Kickstarter to make potato salad).

All summer long I have managed to avoid getting involved in the Ice Bucket Challenge myself, even though I have known people afflicted with ALS, I have seen people die after years of decline, and I know of families struggling with the disease even now.  But no one nominated me, and I was not eager to dump icy water on my own head.  I suppose I had not figured out what it would cost me, and I had not figured out that I had anything to give.  This is so often the way of life.

And I suppose that the best possible way I could end this sermon is with a bucket of ice that I could produce from behind the pulpit to be deployed appropriately.  But instead, I decided while I was preparing these words, to take out my wallet, rather than the ice bucket, and make a contribution to the ALS Association, which I did last night. 

And since I am relatively debt-free, with only a few more car payments to make, I feel ready to try to live more and more by the principles of Saint Paul’s Freakonomics, owing no one anything; except to love one another.  May God help us all to live this way!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

7 September 2014

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

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