Mercy Not Sacrifice

You may listen to Father Mullen's sermon here.

Matthew writes: “And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples.”  It is entirely possible that after dinner, a small group of those tax collectors, who had obviously had too much to drink, started carousing around the neighborhood.  And it is possible (perhaps unlikely, but possible) that as the tax collectors caroused they came across two men holding hands and walking toward them on the sidewalk.

Their talk with Jesus at dinner was already forgotten, along with whatever he had been trying to teach them.  Girls had joined them, and young tax collectors are always eager to impress girls.  And for most of human history, two men holding hands and walking down the street have presented an opportunity for a certain type of man to try to impress girls at the expense of the hand-holding men.  Whether or not girls have ever been impressed by the display that ensues remains to be seen.

So there they are: tax collectors, moving steadily toward the two hand-holding men over the concrete sidewalk.  Somehow the sidewalk suddenly narrows, and contact becomes inevitable…  Was that your shoulder that bumped into my lady?

Was it an accident?  Was it forced?  There is actually plenty of room on the sidewalk, so how did it become so narrow all of a sudden?  Who knows?  But the gauntlet has been thrown down: Was that you that bumped into my girl?

And all eyes are on the two hands, still holding each other – a privilege none of the girls has yet granted any of the tax collectors.  So the ante has to be upped: What are you… boyfriends?

Comes the answer, a little defiant: Yes, we are.

Across the street there happens to be a small gaggle of Pharisees.  They had seen the tipsy tax collectors leave the dinner with Jesus, and they had been tsk-tsking as they watched the group stumble down the sidewalk, knowing full well in whose company they had been just minutes ago.

The Pharisees, too, saw the hand-holders coming.  And they tsked another tsk without much of a second thought.  They had real blasphemy to worry about without making up new categories of it, and besides, several of them had ample reasons to want to live and let live.  They were not thinking much about the hand-holding men at all, they were thinking of how shameful it was for Jesus to associate with people like these tax collectors.  The Pharisees did not anticipate the encounter on the sidewalk, however, and had almost walked by when the shouting started.

When the shouting did start, they heard the word hissed out, and they knew that it would lead to trouble, and they stopped in their tracks when they heard it the second time from the tax collectors: I’m sick of these faggots!

And one of the Pharisees quickly and quietly reached for his cell phone and dialed 911.

But before the cops could get there, the two young men had let go of each other’s hands the better to protect themselves.  But to little avail.  When the cops did arrive, the tax collectors fled, and the two young men were found face down on the sidewalk, their bloodied faces staining the concrete before they were lifted into the ambulance and taken to have their wounds tended to.

The problem with this story is, of course, that the real version of it took place only steps from this church, just around the corner on 16th and Chancellor Streets, ten days ago.

I like my version of the story better than the real version, first and foremost because mine is fiction and no one really gets hurt in my story.  But the two young men in the real story are in real pain.  And something tells me that the hurt is only beginning for the real perpetrators of the beating that took place around the corner from here.

But I also prefer my version of the story because it began with a dinner at which Jesus was teaching tax collectors and sinners.  And in my version of the story there’s always a chance to go back to that dinner, back to that table, back to Jesus, and try to remember what it was he was teaching.  The real version of the story seems to be altogether devoid of good news.  But I’m hoping there is some to be found in my version.

Here’s what Jesus was teaching the tax collectors and sinners at dinner: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.  Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy not sacrifice.’  For I have come to call not the righteous, but sinners.”

It’s very hard to apply this teaching to the real version of the story of the two men who were beaten so badly on 16th Street.

And it’s not even easy to apply the lesson to my version of the story, but I think it is possible.  I think it is possible to find in my version of the story an explanation of what Jesus meant when he was teaching tax collectors and sinners this way.

Many of us have dreamed of the retribution that could be meted out by way of rough justice for the violent bullies who left two men bleeding on the street, their faces badly disfigured.  It’s hard for us to believe they could have come from a dinner with Jesus.  But Jesus seems to think that he will have to sit down with them again, perhaps as they await trial, or while they serve their sentence.  He says. “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.  I have come to call not the righteous, but sinners.”  So I am forced to allow myself to imagine what Jesus might say to them, these hateful tax collectors, knowing full well what evil they have wrought.

“Boys,” he might say, “the last time we spoke you did not listen.  You were drunk, and you were foolish, and you were cruel, and you were stupid, and now you are paying for what you have done.  And this is as it should be.

“You do not remember what I said to you.  And you do not remember what I said to the Pharisees who thought me despicable for sharing a meal with the likes of you.  You did not hear me stand up for you.

“I told them, as they passed by, ‘I have come to call not the righteous, but sinners.’  And I was talking about you.  But you did not care.

“I told them, ‘Go and learn what this means, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”’ And you paid no heed when I said this, because it meant nothing to you.

“But now it means something to you.  Because now you would be glad for some mercy.  Now you know there are many who would be only too happy to sacrifice you, to throw you to the wolves, to let you rot in prison, or even worse, which many think is exactly what you deserve.

“That may be what you deserve, but it is not what you need.  What you need is to learn my teaching.

“You need to learn that I do not wish to see you locked up and someone throw away the key – though this is the way of the world you live in.

“You need to learn that I am not offended in the least by two men holding hands, and I never have been.  It never once in my life occurred to me to address the matter, except, of course, to invite two such men to sup with me, as I often have done.

“You need to learn that I am asking my Father to change this world you live in, and that he is asking me to teach that he will do so.

“You need to learn that when my Father’s will is finally done on earth as it is in heaven then there will be no tax collectors, there will be no sinners, there will be no faggots; there will only be neighbors and friends.

“You need to learn to come back to my table, to come back to my dinner, to come back to me over and over again, because you are woefully prone to do stupid things that hurt you more than they hurt anyone else.

“You need to learn what it means to stand in the shadow of my Cross; to see what happens when cruelty and hatred tries to kill true love.

“You need to learn that my love cannot be killed, that it rises from the grave with me, and that it always triumphs over those who wield the whip, the thorns, the hammer and nails, the spear.

“You need to learn to be on the right side of love, and leave your ugly slurs in the gutter where they belong.

“You need to learn that even the Pharisees, who think very little of me, think even less of you and what you did, since at their best they are trying to be on the right side of love.

“You need to learn what it means that I desire mercy and not sacrifice.  Because right now you are in far greater need of mercy than you ever imagined you would be.

“You need to learn from your fellow tax collector Matthew, how to follow me, without question, and without hesitation.

“And some day you will need to learn to hold the hands of those hand-holding men whose faces you beat to a pulp.  And, holding their hands, you will need to learn to ask them for forgiveness, and hope that they too have learned to desire mercy, not sacrifice.

“Until then you will need to keep coming back to my table, back to my dinner, back to my teaching, back to me, again and again, because you are deeply in need of a physician.

“But you are not alone in this world.  You have a great deal of company.  Which is why I have come to you, why my table is so expansive, and why my mercy is so great.”

And then Jesus will turn from the faces of the tax collectors he addressed, and to the faces of the hand-holding men, still battered and bruised.  And he will tend their wounds.

And then he will set his table again, and ask us all to follow him, to sit and to eat, and to learn, and to desire with him not sacrifice, but mercy.

 Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

The Feast of St. Matthew the Evangelist, 2014

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

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