Prepared for Anything

You may listen to Mother Erika's Sermon here.

I wonder how many of you have had a conversation like the one I had recently. I was talking with a friend, a clergy colleague I haven’t seen in a long time. We had both moved since the last time we had talked, and so we were doing the standard priestly catch-up. Now I wish I could say that the standard priestly catch-up were more about our prayer lives and shared moments of grace and how we’re trying to take up our cross, but it usually isn’t. It’s usually more like now, where’s your parish again and what ministries are you responsible for and how is it working with the rector, and, of course, what’s your ASA? (Church-speak for Average Sunday Attendance.) But when you work at Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia, there is usually an added question from churchy-minded-folks, and my friend asked it. I’ll bet some of you can guess what it is: isn’t that the church with that silver altar?        

And so I said yes, we are that church with that silver altar. And my friend, who is a faithful, passionate, inspiring, dedicated priest, said to me, in all seriousness, Y’all (yes, he really did say y’all), y’all should melt that thing down and give the money to the poor. Surely some of you out there have heard comments like this before. We’ve had people post comments like this on our Facebook page. And I don’t know about you, but for me, these comments hurt. They make me feel a little sick to my stomach. Because to anyone who has ever walked through the Lady Chapel, let alone worshipped in the sublime holiness of that space, the thought of reducing the beauty and generosity that is that silver altar to the mere cost of its materials is disgusting. To hear a comment tossed off like this by someone who means well but should know better is exasperating; it’s upsetting.

But that upset is nothing compared to the shock of hearing what God has to say in this morning’s reading from Amos. I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Your offerings mean nothing to me; I won’t accept them, I won’t even look at them. And your music? Forget it. I’d rather that you just shut up, take your harps, and go home. Ouch. How do we sit in this place, with these altars, with that silver and this gold, with this choir and that organ, with our offerings ready in our pockets and our velvet offering plates ready to receive them, how do we sit here and hear that and not flinch? How do we sit here and hear God say that he desires justice and right action, not processions and sacrifice, and not wonder, just a little bit, if my friend wasn’t on to something?

But, of course, we know better, don’t we? We know better than to take these extraordinarily harsh words at face value, because we know the back-story; we know the context. Amos, that brash, bold prophet, has been sent by God to a people rich with resources to call them to account for their unfaithfulness. They have not been caring for widow and orphan; they have not been feeding the hungry and helping the poor. The rich have been getting richer and the poor have been getting poorer and the rich haven’t been worrying at all about that because they’ve been telling themselves that if they just show up to church, everything will be fine. If they just put in their time at worship, say the right words in the right order, offer the right amount of grain and wine and fatted calves, everything will be all right. They’ll be made right with God, easy peasy, nice and breezy.

It is this hypocrisy that Amos is criticizing here; this is what God is so angry about. Not the worship itself, but that the worship is being used as a cover for cruelty, indifference, selfishness, and pride. It’s what you choose to do, every minute of every day, that I’m interested in, God says; it’s how you choose to live, inside and outside of worship, that matters to me. So if your pattern of words and deeds doesn’t match up with the pattern of your worship, then your worship isn’t working. And that kind of worship is meaningless, no, it’s offensive to me.

Well, praise the Lord. It looks like the silver altar is safe after all. Because Saint Mark’s is a place that gets this. We do practice what we preach; we understand that right worship must be coupled with right actions, inside and outside of this remarkable building. We know that, to quote that great old address by Bishop Frank Weston, we “cannot claim worship Christ in the tabernacle if [we] do not pity Jesus in the slums.” We get this. And so we feed the hungry, and start a school, and knit like demons to make scarves for our clients at the Soup Bowl. And we visit the sick, and we cook for one another, and we celebrate and mourn and live life together, as one community, loving neighbor, God, and self.

And we also understand something much deeper than that. We understand that it is actually in our worship that we learn what righteousness and justice are. We understand that our worship not only provides the inspiration and the strength to go do godly works; our worship is the place where we learn what those godly works are. Here, in worship, we learn what living a godly life looks like, a life steeped in God’s holy word, offered in prayer, lived in community. Here, in worship, we experience the righteousness of God as God forgives us, week after week after week, and offers his Son to us in bread and wine, week after week after week. Here we see justice, as we pray for the lost, least, and lonely, as we all come together as one body, proclaim one faith, and kneel before one altar.

We understand worship at Saint Mark’s. And we understand that if it is our worship that is going to shape and strengthen our action, then our worship better be beautifully shaped and strong. And so we bring the very best of ourselves to this liturgy, whatever that very best is. We offer our time, showing up early to usher or read or serve at the altar. We offer our talents, crafting elegant vestments like these or exquisite, earnest music like that. We offer a little elbow-grease, oiling the pews until they shine, polishing the green out of every feather on the eagle, helping a newcomer to find a pew, or a five-year-old to follow along in the hymnal. And we offer our cash, to restore this holy, unique building, to keep the heat on and our choirs vested, the candles high and the incense abundant. We offer our very best to our worship in this place, because we know, here at Saint Mark’s, that worship itself is true and laudable service, and that it is in our worship that we practice right living – that we see the righteousness of God, that we learn what justice truly is, and that we gather the strength to take that worship out into the world. We know worship here at Saint Mark’s; we have our lamps trimmed and burning and we are ready for the bridegroom.

Except…except that Jesus reminds us that we really need to be ready not just for the bridegroom but also for the unexpected. Lamps are fine, but we also need extra oil…just in case. We need to be prepared for anything, for everything, to happen in this worship. We need to be prepared to leave this church different than when we came in. We need to be prepared to hear God talking to us, right here, and right now. We need to be prepared for Christ’s gentle holy nudge, for God’s divine surprise. We need to be prepared to feel a true longing for the kingdom and the hunger to do something to help it grow. We need to be prepared to be blown off our feet by the breath of the Spirit. We need to be prepared to experience God for real in this place, like one heartbroken alto did fourteen years ago when she realized as she was singing the Kyrie that God was actually listening. We need to be prepared for anything – for mountains to move today, for hearts to crack open, for questions to be answered and for new ones to bubble up, for sorrows to be soothed, tears washed away. We need to be prepared for the bridegroom to actually show up.

Our worship is the place where we learn how to live as God’s beloved children, how to act justly and live righteously. But our worship is not a training ground or a practice room. It is the place – one place, a profound place – where we actually meet God. And there is nothing expected about that. So bring some extra oil and sit here in this place. For the King of Glory shall come in, and when he comes, we need to be prepared for anything.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

9 November 2014

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Who Are These?

You may listen to Father Mullen's Sermon here.

Who are these, robed in white… and where have they come from?  (Rev 7:13)

Ftr Mullen 11_2_14

My Recording

Photo by Ashley Gilberston for the NY Times, 5/25/2013

There is a room inside a building about 80 miles from here where the uniforms of the fallen are prepared for bodies before burial.  The fit and the name and the rank must all be correct, of course, but so must the ribbons of the decorations that are pinned to uniforms, high on the left breast.  And the soldier-morticians who prepare these uniforms snap a photo of the arrangement of ribbons to send to superiors far away, to make sure they are absolutely correct.

I’ve been a little haunted by a photo last year in the New York Times that showed one such mortician-soldier, dressed in his fatigues, bent over a table on which lay the dress blues of an Army captain, adorned not only with his name and rank, but also with the insignia of an aviator, and the ribbons for a Purple Heart, Overseas Service Badge, and Bronze Star, among others.  The uniform is laid out just as the body will be: white gloves emerging from blue sleeves, black socks peeking out from hemmed trousers.

From the details of this uniform alone, the Staff Sergeant could tell us a thing or two about who the man is whose body it will soon clothe.  And the military is very good about this part of death: about saying who this soldier is.  The flip side of this concern is that careful attention the military pays even to the remains of those whom we cannot name, when we cannot say who it is.  Somehow an extra measure of care, along with an extra measure of grief is found for those whose names we cannot know.

In the photo in the Times, seven other uniforms hang behind the hunching figure of the mortician-soldier – other branches and genders represented there – making it clear that this is not an isolated moment, but part of a bigger process of death, and the way we must mark it for those we honor, and whose memory we are compelled to cling to one way or another.

What is happening in that room in the mortuary at Dover Air Force Base seems to have something to say about the way the slain soldier lived, and something about the way he died.  What is happening in that room has something important and powerful to say to those who may peer into the casket of their beloved child, husband, brother, father.  We are trying hard to affix every bit of value and honor that we can to a life taken too soon in the planned tragedy of war.  But whatever is being said by what is happening in that room comes to a full stop with the plaintive punctuation of Taps, and with a folded flag, and with the inadequate condolences of a grateful nation.

Maybe you have been to a military cemetery, with the neat rows of crosses or tombstones silently parading across the green grass.  Maybe you have visited the grave of one of the 5,281 men and women who have been killed in combat serving this nation in Iraq and Afghanistan, or one of the 53,402 US servicemen and women killed in the Great War that began a hundred years ago, or one of the 47,424 who perished in Vietnam – not to mention the non-combat deaths in each of those conflicts, and many others.

I look out over that vast sea of war dead, and I hear the question: “Who are these, who have come out of the great ordeal?”

I imagine that there is another room, although it may be further away.  And unlike the room in Dover this one is not reserved for military use.  And here, too, perhaps the dead are laid out.  And perhaps there is an attendant who looks lovingly at the ruined bodies of the dead, and strokes fingers through their hair, and fiercely grasps their hands in his or hers – if there is a hand to grasp.  And the attendant takes the measure of the departed ones with only a trained eye, and places a hand over the closed eyes, and prays.

And perhaps through some sophisticated circuitry the attendant can see the whole story of a life played out – military or civilian, it hardly matters.  But there are no shelves behind the attendant, lined with ribbons for decorations; and there are no uniforms hanging there.  There is no rank to bother with, and no nametag to worry about.  There is only the attendant and this prayer, with hands placed softly over closed eyelids.  The attending fingertips assist the somewhat stiffened eyelids as they retract again to let light in.

And the room is much larger than I imagined it was at first.  There are attendants as far as they eye can see bending slightly over the bodies of the dead, shielding their eyes from the returning light.  And at some stations the attendants have nothing more to work with than a pile of ashes, but this does not impede them in their work.  And without moving their lips, I can hear the attendants asking as I watch them: “Who are these?  Who are these?”

And by some process that I cannot account for the bodies arise from their repose, or from their ashes, and as they do, not only are they restored, but they are clothed in white.  Or at least this is the closest I can come to describing what is actually indescribable, for the light is not like any light I have ever seen before, and the bodies, once ruined, decayed, or reduced to ash, are now identifiable, yet somehow different from what I thought a body should look like.  And if I say they are clothed in white, then you will imagine diaphanous dalmatics that might fasten in the back, or button at the neck, and that could tear, or be tripped on, or get caught on the decoration of a pearly gate – but this is all far too literal, too earth-bound a way of imagining what I imagine I see in this room where the dead are attended to as they are ushered into new life.  And it also misses the point, which is that it is no longer about the clothes or the body – since both have been transformed into some new state; no longer about name, or rank, or status, or station.  But now it is only about the question that is coming from nowhere and from everywhere at the same time: “Who are these?  Who are these?  Who are these?”

Curiously, in the vision of his Revelation, when St. John is shown the great multitude of saints, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands, singing in harmony, the question, “Who are these?” is not posed by St. John, it is posed to him by one of the twenty-four elders, seated on thrones before the Lamb, as if he should know.  Of course, the elder knows the answer to the question, and if the expectation is that St. John also knows it, then I suppose that the question is asked really for our benefit, so that we may know too: Who are these?

Who are these?  Who are these?  This is the question of All Saints, as we allow our memories to be carried into holy realms: Who are these? – as if we should know!

We resist, today, the urge to compile lists – we don’t even sing a litany of the saints.  We tell ourselves (whether we know it or not) that we both know and don’t know who these are.  But we do know who they are.  We know they are the saints, washed in the blood of the Lamb.  But we also realize that we cannot possibly know who they all are – since they are a “great multitude that no one could count.”  It is precisely part of the ancient teaching of the church that we cannot keep track of all the saints because they are too numerous to count and to name; and if we tried, we would surely omit more than we knew.

I am assuming that some of the saints arrived in dress blues with their names, and their rank, and their ribbons all just so.  But no matter the circumstances whence they came, the honor and the dignity they may have received in life or in death is nothing compared to the glory revealed to them in the heavenly realms.

Who are these?  The irony of the question is that even though we know who they are, we cannot possibly know, cannot possibly account for them all.  And yet the question insists upon itself, perhaps for that very reason: Who are these?

When fear and uncertainty are at hand, and we wonder whether the church can continue to do her work, whether dreadful decline and failure may be our lot, as the world around us seems to think it can do perfectly well without us, the question imposes itself in our midst: Who are these?

When we stare into the abyss of death, especially of those we love, and we wonder if we have the faith we need, the strength to survive, the question rings in our ears: Who are these?

When we stumble in our work, and we feel inadequate to the task that God has given us, and that we didn’t ask for in the first place, the question echoes somewhere nearby: Who are these?

Who are these?  We are meant to see them clothed in white, but we are also meant to remember that once they wore another set of clothes, once they struggled, and fought, and doubted, and failed just as we do, and none of that obstructed the triumph that God planned for them.

Who are these? – as if we know!  This is not a test to see who of us can name the most saints.  Rather it is a reminder that it is not only the particularity of the individual saints that matters to us, but also the numberless plenitude of the saints.  For it is in this countlessness that we discover our own call to saintliness, that we see that there is room for someone as difficult as me, as unlikely as you to join their ranks, if we will.  And in times when so much else seems in short supply in the church, when both the harvest and the laborers seem scant, we are given a vision of the expanse of God’s power in the multitude of the personhood of his saints.

Who are these?  The question is not a rhetorical one – not in St. John’s Revelation, and not for us, either.  The answer matters, and it is specific, once the elder provides it; and it has nothing to do with the identities of the saints, per se:  These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.  No greater honor awaits them, than to have been washed in the blood of the Lamb.  No more dignity can be shown them than to have been baptized into the death of their Lord.  No other life is worth living than the life lived in Christ’s service.

I don’t know, of course, if there is any such room among the anterooms of heaven, where attendants tend to the remains of the dead to prepare them for the life to come, and to dress them in white, and to hand out the palms, and to teach them the songs of Zion that fill the courts of heaven.  I don’t know if there is any correlating counterpart to the sad and dignified work that takes place in the military mortuary not too far from here.

But thanks in large measure to the saints – too countless to know by name – I do know a thing or two.

I know there is a Lamb who sits upon the throne, and I know who that Lamb is.

I know he died for me and for you, and for one and for all, that this broken world might be made whole somehow, and that we might find again the power of love.

I know his blood still flows in chalices wherever his promises are remembered, and wherever his one commandment is proclaimed that we should love one another.

I know that he has called you and me by name to be washed in the river of his blood.

And I know that when we do, we follow in the footsteps of a numberless throng, who now wear garments I hope to wear some day; who now hold palms as I hope to some day; who now sing songs I hope to sing some day.

Who are these, and where have they come from?  Who are these?  Who are these?  My friends, you know who they are.  They are the saints of God: more numerous than the stars, washed in the blood of the Lamb, singing the songs of Zion, and leading us on through our own pilgrimage through tumult, confusion, warfare, failure, terror, and shame, so that we may become blessed with them.

Who are these, indeed?!?  These are they who turn us again and again toward the throne of the Lamb, who teach us to walk in their footsteps – fearsome though it may be. 

These are they who know the power of the risen Christ. 

These are they who have learned to love one another as Jesus loves them. 

These are they who have been washed in his blood; who know that worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might for ever and ever!

“For this reason they are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them.  They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

Who are these, and where have they come from?  My friends, you are the ones that know! Thanks be to God!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

The Feast of All Saints 2014

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Fr. Spencer Reece - Oct 26, 2014, Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost

The sermon preached by Spencer Reece can be listened to here.