Small Turns

You may listen to Mother Erika's Sermon here. 

Dewitt Jones is an award-winning photographer whose work has appeared in National Geographic Magazine for decades. He is also a film maker and a motivational speaker. In one of his films, Everyday Creativity, Jones describes his process of crafting pictures – how he has honed his technique so that he is able to execute in that split second when the shot is right, how to put himself in the right place at the right time, and how to be open to new and unexpected possibilities. In one story, he talks about how he was setting up a shot of fishermen on a trout stream in Scotland at dawn. Time was obviously of the essence – the light was changing second by second, the mist on the water was dissipating, and he was clicking away, recording shot after shot, shots that were good, fine, beautiful, even, but not great. But suddenly, he says, he heard a voice in his head say, Turn around, Dewitt – and when he did, he found himself staring at a river set afire by the sunrise – bright oranges and deep reds with the mist swirling up like flame and the trees on the bank beautiful in bold silhouette. He quickly spun himself around, got into position, and found his great shot.

I watched this little inspirational film recently at a conference for clergy wellness called CREDO. CREDO is sponsored by the Church Pension Group and is a time offered to clergy of The Episcopal Church to take some time away from their lives to reflect on their spiritual, vocational, financial, and physical health. We leave the conference with a set of goals for our lives – new dreams and ways of being that God is calling us to and some practical steps we might take to live those goals. We also leave CREDO with a ton of swag – I came home with a CREDO mug, bag, flashlight, bookmark, antibacterial spray, and, I kid you not, my very own CREDO rock. So it’s no wonder that in an atmosphere marked by such bodacious branding, Jones’s “Turn around, Dewitt” became a bit of a catchphrase. Turn around, Dewitt. Not sure where God is calling you? Turn around, Dewitt. Unsure of how to position yourself financially in the world? Turn around, Dewitt. Of course, clergy being who we are, it also became a bit of a joke – someone’s waiting behind you for that first, life-saving cup of coffee? Turn around, Dewitt. You forgot something in your cabin on the other side of the conference site? Turn around, Dewitt became as much about a life-changing moment of revelation as a light-hearted reminder to check and see if there might be something else interesting behind you.

Turn, then, and live, the prophet Ezekiel tells us. He is speaking to a crowd of Israelites who have not only fallen away from following their God and turned to sin, they have also had the guts to complain to God about the repercussions of their loose living. The way of the Lord is unfair, they keep grumbling. We want to live the way we feel like, and we don’t want God to have anything to do with it – nothing to do with our decision-making, nothing to do with our feelings, and certainly nothing to do with the sour grapes we have to eat when we live in ways that are not according to his will. Forget his will, they say – forget his wrath, his forgiveness, his justice, and his mercy. We want what we want, and if we can’t get it, it just isn’t fair.

But, even in the midst of all of this whining, Ezekiel comes to them and brings them words of God’s absolute, unflappable love. I will judge you, God says. But I still have hope for you – hope that you will repent of your sin, hope that you will get for yourselves a new heart and a new spirit, and that you’ll make new decisions. Even with your hard hearts, even with your eyes fixed firmly away from me, I have hope. “For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord God.” So live – come back to me, and live. Turn around, Dewitt.

I’m guessing that this idea of repentance as a turning around isn’t a new one for most of you. You’ve all heard sermons aplenty about how the word used in scripture for repent literally means to turn back – to spin about, to face in the right direction. Sometimes this repentance is an abrupt about-face – we stop walking down a particular path, turn completely around and begin to retrace our steps to God. Sometimes this turning around is a complete 180-degree spin, a turn from evil to good, from sin to obedient discipleship. I will turn away from my wickedness and do what is lawful and right. I will not, the first son answers his father, but then he changes his mind, turns, and goes. Turn around, all the way around, Dewitt.

We’ll see this kind of a turn in a few moments when we move into the baptism portion of this liturgy. As the parents and godparents come together in the West end of the church with Augustus, Father Mullen will ask them a series of six questions. First, as they face out West door of the church, there are three renunciations – do you renounce evil in all of its cosmic, global, and personal forms. And we will hear three times, “I renounce them, I renounce them, I renounce them.” And then we will watch as Augustus and parents and godparents literally turn about – spin in a circle to face the East end of the church – the place of the rising Son, the place where we do what he asked us to do in remembrance of him. And the first question Father Mullen will ask them is this: “Do you turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as your Savior.” And the answer is, of course, I do – because they already have. They have already turned around, enacted true repentance, showed us in the actions of this liturgy what God longs for us to do in our lives. Stop facing that way, stop facing away, turn around, Dewitt, and look at me.

But sometimes Turn around, Dewitt, is far less dramatic. Sometimes that turning is just a few steps in this direction, or a turn or two this way. Dewitt Jones wasn’t turning from something bleak and awful to something wondrously good – his first shots were actually pretty decent. But when he turned, he found his camera suddenly lit up with life, his heart radiant and full. He found joy, and the reassurance of the hope of his calling. He found God at work in him, enabling him to work for his good pleasure.

Turn, then, and live, isn’t just a call for us when we are living in the pit. Turn, then, and live, isn’t just intended for us when we are outright denying God and ourselves as God’s beloved, called children. Turn, then, and live, isn’t just about avoiding death – it is also about fully living life, about having life and having it abundantly. Turn, then, and live is also about Turn around, Dewitt – turning from something fine, okay…good, even, to something remarkable, something ordained, a gift, grace, poured out from God upon our little heads. Turn around, Dewitt, is sometimes about taking small turns, making little adjustments in our daily life and practices, in our prayer and in our speech, so that we find ourselves in the right place at the right time to receive all the beauty that God has to offer us.

So wherever you are in your life, turn around, Dewitt. God is always calling you into a deeper relationship with him. God is always pulling you into greater alignment with his purposes and plans for you. And God is giving you the strength and the courage, poured out upon you in your baptisms, remembered for you each time you come to this altar, to hear his voice and to follow him. So repent, spin about, turn around, Dewitt, and live. 

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

28 September 2014

Saint Mark's, Philadelphia

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