The Voice of God

What does the voice of God sound like? Really, if you had to cast someone as the voice of God, who would you choose? Would you go for the obvious, like James Earl Jones or Morgan Freeman? Or the traditional, like Charleton Heston? You could go retro with George Burns or Philadelphia with John Facenda. Would God sound like your father, your grandfather, your childhood priest? Would God sound like an old man, a strong man, a wise man? Would God sound like a man at all? Maybe God would sound like your mother or Meryl Streep or that kindergarten teacher who seemed to know all things. Maybe God would sound extremely well-mannered, like if Walter Cronkite and Peter Jennings had a love child. Maybe God would sound very, very posh, like Benedict Cumberbatch in a period film. Or would God sound like a wise old wizard, Gandalf the White plus Dumbledore with a little Yoda thrown in for good measure? No, the Yoda thing would probably be weird, but God could sound a little weird. Maybe God would have three voices, some male, some female, some breathy, some bold. Or maybe God would sound warm and resonant, like Renee Fleming or Bryn Terfel or your very favorite tenor. Maybe the voice of God would be booming. Maybe the voice of God would be barely there. Maybe the voice of God would be comforting and solid, or clarion and somewhat terrifying. Maybe the voice of God would sound like your wife, or your lover. Maybe the voice of God would sound like a child.

We know that the voice of God is important, no, not just important – fundamental. God’s voice speaks into the darkness and there is light. God’s voice breaks the cedar trees and shakes the wilderness. God’s voice tears open the heavens above his only-begotten Son and rains down upon his dripping head, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” God’s voice pronounces judgment and blessing, calls and calls to account, teaches and comforts and rebukes. God’s voice is always there in scripture, a nearly constant companion to the people of Israel and the followers of Christ…but what does that voice sound like?

I want to know. I really want to know. Because I want to know what to listen for. I want to know God’s voice when I hear it. I want to know which voice belongs to God in the general cacophony of this world. Every morning, I pray along with the psalmist that I would “hearken to his voice,” and I mean it. I want to hearken to God’s voice; I’m all about hearkening. Especially when I’m afraid, or sad, or lost, or anxious or confused or angry or generally tied up in knots. I’m desperate to hearken, I long to hearken. And it would just be so much easier if I knew exactly what to hearken for, if I knew exactly what God’s voice sounded like.   

But it isn’t as easy as that. I wish that it were, I really wish that I could stand here and say to you all, “This just in – God’s voice sounds just like Aretha Franklin. So just listen for that and you’ll be a-ok.” But much as I’d like to do that, and much as I’d like for God to actually sound like Aretha Franklin, you know I can’t say that. You know that I can’t point to one voice and say to you, “That’s God – that’s definitely, undeniably God.” I can’t even do that standing in this church, in this holy place where we know God’s presence abides. I wish that I could, but I can’t. Because hearing the voice of God isn’t always easy. It isn’t usually easy. Some of us have had the gift of knowing a miraculous moment when God’s voice is as clear as a bell and rings us all the way down to our bones. But that doesn’t happen all the time. Heck, it doesn’t happen most of the time. Most of the time, you and I listen for the one, clear voice of God and instead hear lots and lots of voices – the humming of advice from friends, the clicking away of pros and cons and rationalizations, the echoes of our own fears or desires, the whir of the tapes that have been running in our heads since we were children, and maybe the speaking of the Holy Spirit deep in our souls. But how do we know which is which? How do we hear God in the midst of all of this noise?

Well, we pray. We sit in silence and contemplate the holiness that is God our Father and our Mother. We come to Mass to be still and know God, to sing and hear God singing with us, to take bread and wine and hope to then find God singing within us. We pray. And we read. We study scripture. We read what other, wiser people have said about scripture. We read old church fathers and new church mothers, Augustine and Bernard and Anne Lamott and Nadia Bolz-Weber. We journal. We walk. We think. We get tired, we get frustrated. We get some clarity, some hope, an idea! We check it out – what would Jesus say about this? What would my mother say about this? What does Saint Mark or my best friend or my therapist say about this? And maybe they confirm for us that we have, in fact, heard the voice of God renting the heavens above our own heads. But maybe they don’t. And maybe we feel like we’ve taken a step forward, but sometimes we feel like we’re back at square one. And we wonder, again and again, what will God’s voice sound like when it comes?

It’s a process, this listening for God’s voice. It’s a progression. It’s actually a practice. We may never get to be great at this, but we can get better. The truth is that God’s voice spoke into the world, spoke the world, in the beginning, and that voice has continued to resound throughout the ages. God’s voice spoke to priests and prophets, to shepherds and dressers of sycamore trees, to carpenters and virgins, to three magi and to one Messiah. God’s voice has never ceased to sound. And the more we listen for it, the more we practice, the better we’ll get at picking it out of the crowd.

Sometimes, of course, it is the loudest voice in the room, the voice of a hurricane, the voice that shatters the cedar trees and shakes the foundations of the earth. Sometimes it sounds like a young girl from the wilds of Pakistan who stood up and told her oppressors and the world that just because she is a girl, she is no less worthy of freedom, respect, and an education. Sometimes it sounds like a young black preacher 50 years ago who told the world that his people deserved the right to vote and they were willing to march from Selma to Montgomery in the midst of a hailstorm of hate to get it. Sometimes it sounds like the voices of men and boys saying no to violence against women, or the voices of men and women saying no to violence against Creation. Sometimes it sounds like an imam who stands up again and again to remind the world that terrorism and hatred and violence are not Islamic; they are fanatic.

But sometimes the voice of God is still and small, a sound like sheer silence, so tiny that in Hebrew it is called the “bat-kol,” the “daughter of a voice.” Sometimes it sounds like a stranger saying, “God bless you” on the subway when you are feeling decidedly unblessed. Sometimes it sounds like a friend asking you how you are and really meaning it. Sometimes it sounds like a quiet hum – the murmur of a calling, the whisper of a job offer, the yearning for something more. Sometimes it sounds like three little words – I see you. I forgive you. I love you. – spoken by one little, ordinary person. The more we practice listening for this voice that sounds all around us, the better we’ll get at hearing it. I know this because the Bible tells me so, because Augustine tells me so, because my mother and my mentors and my own miraculous moments have told me so. And in a moment, we’ll all have a chance to practice. We’ll stand as a community and watch the parents and godparents of little Maddox Lee Henssler make promises on his behalf. We’ll make some promises of our own, affirming that we will support him in his life in Christ. We’ll pray for Maddox and for God’s help. We’ll watch the Holy Spirit poured out on Maddox in water and oil. And in our Amen we will listen for the reverberations from the heavens, “You are my son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” And maybe we’ll hear it. And maybe we won’t. But maybe, just maybe, as we live into these prayers and promises, maybe, as we live out our discipleship in this community of faith, maybe, as we practice our own listening, maybe someday Maddox will be able to say how he heard the voice of God as a little child. And that it sounded like you.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

11 January 2015 - The Baptism of our Lord

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Epiphany 2015

Cartoon by Mike Twohy for The New Yorker

A cartoon in last week’s New Yorker depicts two laboratory-mice in a cage, facing one another.  One of the mice has wires attached to an electrode or something on its head and leading out of the cage to someplace in the distance.  That wired-up mouse is saying to the other one, “I’m not religious – just anti-science.”

These days, science and religion are supposed to be at enmity with one another.  Religion, we are told, is inferior to science for many reasons, not least of which is that the scientific method reveals things that are verifiably true, whereas religion brings few, if any, revelations that can be verified in any sense of the word.  The number of essays, treatises, and other assertions making this point continues to grow in our day and age, as the protectors of some kind of scientific truth duel it out with the practitioners of religion, cast invariably as the enemies of science.

I, myself, am largely un-indoctrinated to the kind of religion that is hostile to science or the scientific method.  Educated for a long time in church schools, with a seminary degree, and nearly twenty years of ministry of a distinctly religious flavor, I have never once been tempted to see science, as a pursuit and a field of inquiry, as hostile to the religion I practice, or the faith I believe.  In fact, most of my education and experience points to quite the opposite, since the architecture, music, and world view of the church I have grown up in and inhabited my whole life is built on a robust engagement with mathematics, physics, natural sciences, and the scientific method.   But maybe I’m just delusional, and secretly anti-science.

In any case, these musings are only the backdrop against which I encounter with you tonight the Wise Men of the Epiphany.  The annotations in my Bible, published by Oxford University, allow for the possibility that these men are “astrologers,” on the one hand – which sounds pretty suspect to me, since we all know that astrology is the silly, superstitious, blonde-haired, quasi-religious step-child of an actual science, namely astronomy.  How the editors determined that these Wise Men were astrologers and not astronomers, I cannot say.  I strongly suspect that there was actually a difference of opinion among the Oxford editors on this point, since a footnote for the very same verse tells me unambiguously that the wise men were from “a learned class in ancient Persia,” and no self-respecting Oxonian could possibly refer to an astrologer as “learned.”

For the sake of argument, then, let us contend that in the Wise Men we have a potential meeting of the religious and the scientific.  For all I know, one was an astrologer, one was an astronomer, and another was a priest of some variety.  Wouldn’t that be convenient?

What I want to know is this, is there any chance that the Wise Men were accustomed to employing the scientific method in their journeys and their observations?  And, if so, what does their arrival at the Christ-child’s manger have to say to them?

May I abbreviate the scientific method thusly: 

1 – You ask a question.

2 – You construct a hypothesis that may provide an answer to the question.

3 – You test the hypothesis rigorously.

4 – You analyze the results and draw conclusions.

For the Wise Men it could have gone something like this:

1 – Question: What is that funny star glowing in the East?

2 – Hypothesis: Perhaps it is a sign of something important!

3 – Test: Let’s look at it more closely… hell, let’s follow it, and see what happens!

4 – Analysis: Good golly this is an adorable baby at whose unusual birth-place we have arrived!

Now along the way, the Wise Men had been getting some advice.  Clearly a rabbi somewhere had put a bug in their ears about Micah, chapter 5, verse 2, and convinced them that this star was about something important indeed – a ruler for Israel who would come from Bethlehem.  Then there was Herod, whose paranoia tended to underscore the idea that they were onto something big.  And even the shepherds they passed on the way had probably told the Wise Men as they traveled that the sheep were unusually excitable, and that there was a kind of a buzz in the winter air that warranted investigation.

How many wonderful things have been discovered because someone said, “let’s follow that and see what happens?”  This is what the Wise Men did.

Gazing at the sky had proved to yield good results in the past for ancient peoples.  They looked at the sky and learned that you could navigate the globe, using the stars as your guide – and they were not wrong about this.  They looked at the sky and saw that things were moving, changing, revolving, zooming around, far past any height they could ever hope to climb.  They looked at the sky and saw stories unfold that expressed deep truths they experienced in their own lives.  Looking at the sky they posed questions, they formed hypotheses, they tested those hypotheses as best they could, and they analyzed the results with various degrees of success, sometimes with peer review, sometimes able to duplicate results, and many times unable to do so.

Back on the ground, do you know that it was not until the year 1878 that we could definitively say that all four feet of a horse were off the ground at the same time when it gallops?  Until then reasonable people could disagree on this question, since the horse’s movement was too fast to capture with the unaided eye.  Artists depicting horses at full tilt tended to draw or paint them with fore-legs extended all the way and hind-legs kicking back as the horse flies through the air.  And not everyone thought that it was possible for a horse to be completely suspended in mid-air in the midst of its stride, despite a period of roughly 6,000 years that we have been observing, up close, the domesticated horse.  But in 1878 the photography of Eadweard Muybridge showed scientifically that there is actually a time when all four of a horse’s feet are off the ground, and it’s when they are tucked up under its belly.

For how long have we been observing the workings of God?  And God is more mysterious and complicated than a horse: faster, but also much slower.  We observe the workings of God, and by inference we have tried to figure things out, sometimes we have been right, sometimes we have been wrong.

A long time ago, some Wise Men asked a question.  I think the question may have been about a star, or a planet, or a comet – reasonable people disagree about what it might have been (if anything) that the Wise Men observed.  Perhaps the question they asked was really about this verse from the prophet Micah: “But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.”  Maybe they liked that question because it gave them a reason to go on a journey to Bethlehem, which would really have given them a reason to visit Jerusalem, which was a much more interesting place to visit (better restaurants).  Yes, maybe this trip was just a junket for the Wise Men.  But they had to have a question, in order to get funding, so they said they were investigating this verse, or they were following that star.

No matter what the reason for their journey, no matter where the question came from or what it was, no matter what hypothesis they formed; they end up testing it as they go, since journeys have a way of testing a lot of hypotheses, as well as the people who make them.

I don’t think the Wise Men had been planning to leave anything of value in Bethlehem.  I don’t think that the gold they had was gift wrapped, or the frankincense, or the myrrh.  I think it came as a surprise to the Wise Men as they peered into the stable, each to find the others simultaneously reaching into their bags, and coming up with the gifts.  I think they may have huddled outside the stable and challenged each other: “Why did you give myrrh?”  “What were you thinking by diminishing the frankincense supply?”  “Did you really have to dip into the gold?”  And in that conversation, maybe they discovered how each of them had been unexpectedly and unaccountably moved just to give… something, but something of real value, in the Presence of this young Child.

And despite the subsequent experiments in the Christian church with church taxes, and paid indulgences, and pew rents, and capital campaigns, and every other form of extortion you can probably think of, the experience of the Wise Men has been repeated over and over again as men and women – some wiser than others – have come to Jesus…   sometimes by following the stars, or through a vale of tears, or in a moment of joy, or in the pages of Scripture, or at the celebration of the Mass, or at a mother’s knee, or from the seat of a space ship orbiting the earth, or in a page of music, or in the fair beauty of the earth… we find that we are unexpectedly and unaccountably moved just to give… something, but something of real value, in the Presence of this young Child, even if it begins with just our praise, our prayers, our songs.

I don’t suppose it would be right to call this long process scientific, even though I do think that when you apply the scientific method to it, you will get some satisfactory results.

1 – You ask a question: is there a Force of Love in the world that seems to be calling me toward it, equipping me by some strange Spirit, and changing me for the better in the midst of a world that tends more often to degrade than to exalt?

2 – You construct a hypothesis: perhaps that Force of Love is the same one that made all of nature, that built cathedrals, that composes music, that delights in scientific discovery, and that teaches how our humanity is really founded in compassion, empathy, and sacrifice?

3 – You test the hypothesis rigorously: by engaging in the community called together in the Name of that Force – a typically imperfect, sometimes dysfunctional, often infuriating community – and you find that despite all the imperfection, dysfunction, and infuriation, love is practiced (however imperfectly), often in the very midst of those crippling symptoms.

4 – You analyze the results: recognizing in yourself, if you are as lucky as I have been, that you are unexpectedly and unaccountably moved just to give… something, but something of real value, in the Presence of this young Child. 

And you draw conclusions - perhaps the same conclusions that the Wise Men drew, now peer-reviewed by you and by me: that God has shown us something real in this stable of Bethlehem, that he is allowing us to observe himself up-close and personal, as never before, and that we may never in our lives give better gifts than the ones we give to him.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

The Feast of the Epiphany 2015

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Holy Innocents

The historical facts of the Gospel reading today are not much in dispute.  Most scholars agree that this story of the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt and the slaughter of the innocents in Bethlehem never happened.  If this view is correct, it brings us some relief in the face of a text that seems to offer little good news.  Matthew tells us that “in a furious rage,” Herod “sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under.”  No matter what the number of children this might have been, it suggests a moment of horrific cruelty that all of us can be grateful never actually happened.

But it is an odd thing to reflect on some element of the Christmas story and decide that the good news is that it isn’t true.  I accept at face value the scholars’ and historians’ view that the episode of the flight into Egypt and the slaughter of the innocents never really happened, but I stop well short of concluding that these facts mean that the story is not true.  Indeed, I would say that there is deep truth to be found in these few verses of Matthew’s Gospel.  But at face value it can still be hard for the modern person to find good news in them: thank God that Matthew made up a story that never happened!  It’s hard to turn this into a Christmas carol, though.

But maybe we need to look at the text generically, rather than specifically.  What it tells us is that a rich and powerful ruler was more than willing to wreak horrible cruelty, bloodshed, and murder on the most vulnerable of his society in order to protect his position of power.  Put that sentence in any tense.  Apply it to any era of history, including our current day; and tell me that it is not true!

Rich and powerful rulers have in the past and continue today to be willing to wreak horrible cruelty, bloodshed, and even murder upon the most vulnerable of society.  That the most vulnerable may be defenseless children is meaningless to them.  This is not a description of the ancient world only, it is a description of the world we live in.  Any presentation of modern evidence I could summarize here would be both too ugly and too short to do justice to the actually cruelty, bloodshed, and murder visited upon innocent children.  So if you don’t believe that my assessment is true, try this exercise: go find someone with a political outlook that is at the polar opposite end of the spectrum from yours, and ask them whether or not my proposition is true, ask them whether or not innocents are slaughtered in the midst of own era at the hands of the powerful and the rich.  I think you will find that the person whose outlook so differs from your own will also see examples of the innocent being slaughtered where you or I might not find them – and they’d be right.

So I think the story of the slaughter of the innocents is profoundly true.  When you rap on it, it does not sound hollow, rather it echoes down through the ages with a horrible ring of truth to it: children slaughtered at the hands of violent, greedy men.  But I am still short of good news.  So we have to look deeper, accepting the story on its own terms.

Matthew’s writing, or maybe the translation, is a little misleading here because of the order in which things come.  If you are not paying careful attention it looks as though Matthew is saying that Herod goes into a furious rage about being tricked because the Holy Family makes their escape into Egypt.  But actually, this is not what Matthew says.  He is clear that Herod’s rage stems from his discovery that he has been tricked by the wise men – who never actually return to Herod to bring him details about the identity and location of the new born king, as they said they would.  Herod does not know that Mary and Joseph and Jesus have escaped.  He believes that the child must still be in Bethlehem.  And he carefully works out, given the limited information he has from the wise men, that if he wants to be sure to eliminate any rival to his power, the cut-off will have to be two-year-olds, because, he works out, the baby might have been born at any time in the past two years.  Presumably he rounded up, just to be sure.

So when he sends his henchmen into Bethlehem to do their dastardly work, and they bring him word that it is done, the blood still dripping from their swords, Herod thinks that he has won.  He thinks that he is safe, and he thinks he has prevailed.

No good news yet.  So far only the angels really know the good news, since they are the only ones who know where Mary and Joseph and Jesus have gone.  So far to everyone else it looks as though the rich and powerful have prevailed, and that God’s will has been thwarted.  And now we are getting close to Matthew’s point in telling the story.

Matthew doesn’t much care if the facts are unfounded in historical actuality.  He knows that it has always been true that rich and powerful men have been willing to use brutal force against the weak in order to keep their power and their wealth, and Matthew knows that it will continue to be true for a while.  So he knows there is truth at the heart of the story he is telling even though his facts don’t square with history.

But Matthew wants to us to see that Herod is wrong: he doesn’t even know how he has been tricked – he thinks it’s the wise men who have tricked him, when actually the Holy Family is on their way to Egypt.  Herod doesn’t even know that his cruelty has accomplished nothing, as he looks with satisfaction at the blood-spattered uniforms of his henchmen.  He foolishly believes that he has vanquished his rival.  And he is completely and utterly wrong.

Matthew wants us to see the truth.  He wants us to see both that God’s will prevails, and that the cruel who protect their power by bloody might don’t even know it when thy have lost.  But he wants us to know it, too.  Matthew is winking at us, his audience, the entire time he is telling this part of the story – to make sure we get the point that he is making.  Does it look as though the powers of darkness have prevailed?  Are they looking self-satisfied as they lick their bloody chops?  Well, you and I know better! says Matthew with a wink!

A few decades later, Jesus himself, now grown up, will be surrounded by men who came from nothing, but who have hitched themselves to Jesus for various reasons.  From time to time it will occur to them that maybe there will be a pay-off of power and wealth if they hang in with this guy.  They are heard asking him, “what then shall we have?” and, “which of us will be greatest when you are king?”  And when their minds are carried away with these thoughts they will shoo children away from Jesus, because, after all, children are in the way, and they are weak and defenseless.

And Jesus will stop them from their shooing, and halt them in their dreaming of power and wealth.  And he will stoop down on one knee and beckon a recently scolded child to him, and take him in his arms.  Maybe the child is a boy, only two years old?

And he tells them to let children come to him, he tells them that the kingdom of heaven belongs to children, he tells them that if you receive a child, you receive him, and vice versa.  He shows them that the weak and vulnerable are dearer to his heart than those who believe they are on the way to the show, the pay-off, the jack-pot.

Since we live in an age when the slaughter of innocents has not yet come to an end – and all the facts, I contend support this conclusion across a long swath of history – we might be tempted, especially in the face of this sad story from the Gospels, to think that the powers of darkness are prevailing or have prevailed.  But if we reach that conclusion, then we have failed to notice that Matthew is winking to us when he tells us of Herod’s rage.  And we may fail to see Herod for the loser that he is, if we think, as he did, that his cruel and bloody plot had taken care of everything that needed taking care of.

But the Gospel tells us that God’s will does prevail, even when cruel men appear to have won and are too stupid to know that they have lost.  Because they cannot see the power of God beneath the chubby folds of baby fat, coming from somewhere unexpected, with an unwed mother and a blue-collar father.

Look up, and see the evangelist winking at you and at me, as if to assure us that the details of the cruelty hardly matter – you can fill in the blanks with your own, that’s what he did – what matters is that the will of God will prevail, and Christ will come again and again, and keep coming into the world till at last all children are safe. 

Pray, God, do it soon!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

28 December 2014

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia