Confession of St. Peter

Eleven days ago, when militant Islamists in Paris gunned down cartoonists in the offices of the satirical paper Charlie Hebdo, a chill went through our hearts.  We all know it wasn’t the first terrorist attack in a big western city.  It wasn’t even the most brutal act of terrorism in world news that week, tragically: Boko Haram killed two thousand people in Nigeria during that same span of time.  But the attackers in Paris knew what the impact would be of their partially symbolic action.  We westerners pride ourselves on freedom of the press.  We pride ourselves on tolerating a diversity of views.  Lots of us grew up reading Mad Magazine.  Some of us are big fans of The Onion, or Jon Stewart.  Some of us lament the passing of what we call the “Stephen Colbert persona.”  An attack on a satirical newspaper in Paris would frighten and radicalize even leftists who have long opposed American and European policies in the Middle East. 

And it did work to some extent, didn’t it?  Violence does cause fear.  On the one hand, there was a massive, and welcome, show of support for the slain journalists.  The slogan “Je suis Charlie”—I am Charlie—began to appear everywhere.  And, predictably enough, many of the entrenched debates in our culture acquired a renewed sense of urgency and vigor.  Just how fiercely do we all support freedom of speech?  What exactly are the ethics of satire against a violent oppositional force that claims to speak for a stigmatized religious and cultural minority?  We heard from all the annoying voices on the left and right, some of whom we agreed with, and some of whom left us muttering angrily over our coffee and newspaper at the breakfast table.  Everybody jumped in.  Everybody took a stand.  Everybody was required to.  Presidents and Secretaries of State who did not physically stand with the protesters were apologetic.  Popes whose comments were taken to imply a less than fully sympathetic stance were roundly criticized.  “#Je suis Charlie” was met with the hashtag “je ne suis pas Charlie”—I am not Charlie.  And then we had to read the article that explained why not being Charlie was really the answer to the violent conflict that increasingly besets us. You either had to be Charlie or not be Charlie last week, as pundits and thoughtful observers tried to find a place to stand that made them feel they had the correct response to this terrifying attack. 

“I am Charlie.”  “I am not Charlie.”  All in all, however well intended, a disheartening struggle.  All in all, a discouraging chorus of voices, in my view.  All in all, a reduction of complex issues into the politics of the public gesture and the catchy slogan.

It’s an unsettling backdrop for this morning’s Gospel.  Against this backdrop, we may hear Jesus at Caesarea Philippi, asking his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?”  We can hear in Matthew a distant historical echo of the debates that were swirling around Jesus: “He is John the Baptist”; “He is Elijah”;  “He is Jeremiah.”  Faced in their own day with something frightening that they couldn’t control, the inhabitants of first-century Palestine, like us, divided into camps and argued.  And it sounds, at first, as though Jesus himself were taken in by their gossip, as though he were looking for a high number of “likes” on Facebook, or re-tweets.  It almost feels as though he were engaging in impression management or message control or whatever it is that media consultants tell clients to watch out for these days.  It’s easy for us to imagine that he’s happy Peter got it right because he is concerned with his brand.  And that would make our own task easy, too, as hearers of this Gospel.  All we have to do is get the brand identification.  We have to know that Jesus is the Messiah, not a prophet.  #je suis justified.

What’s harder for us, things being what they are in our world, is to see that Jesus wants us to do something more than “friend” him on Facebook.  Getting the language right, knowing what we are meant to say and believe about Jesus, is far and away the easiest part of discipleship, even if we struggle to believe.  Identifying with the right answer is such a reflexive gesture for us.  But an abstract identification with Jesus as the Messiah doesn’t by itself get us or the world very far.  The world is already full of Christians who wear the label unthinkingly, and that world is a mess.  If we aren’t careful, our profession of faith will become one more badge that we wear to demonstrate that we are superior, right-thinking, and in control of the baffling mysteries of this universe in which we live.

Jesus wants much more.  Jesus wants to build his church on us.  He wants our fundamental confession of faith to be the building block of something much larger.  He doesn’t tell Peter, “Great, you’ve got it now. Think up a great meme and we’ll go viral.”  On the contrary, he tells the disciples to remain quiet about who he is, because he has deeper work to do.  And in later verses that are left out of this morning’s Gospel, Jesus begins to teach the disciples that he will go to Jerusalem and be killed, and rise from the dead.  That’s when we realize that Peter’s confession, profound and true though it may be, is superficial unless it’s sacrificial.

Christian faith, that is, is superficial and even destructive if it isn’t about telling the truth about how hopelessly sinful we humans are and how desperately we need the salvation of our God.  Christian faith is broken if it can’t address the real trouble we are in.  Christian faith is just a gesture if it doesn’t teach us that the people we resent, ignore, exclude, despise, fear, and even torture and kill are people in whom God dwells.  They are the people in whom God very pointedly dwells.

Jesus built his church on the rock of Peter’s confession of faith, not because it was an A+ answer but because it was a first step into the deep mystery of Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  “If you really know who I am,” Jesus is saying, “you will follow me into the truth that frightens you: the truth about dropping your defensiveness, surrendering your desire to win, surrendering your compulsion to look blameless.”  If we really know Jesus as our Messiah we will be on the road to Calvary.  We will be learning to acknowledge that we are part of what Christ dies about, that we are ourselves caught up in systems that oppress and kill innocent victims.  That there is no “us” vs. “them,” and in God’s eyes there never will be, and there never can be.  We will stop looking for the perfect stance and the perfect gesture.  The cross of Christ says everything we need to say.  The cross of Christ, which strips away our pretensions, gives us the only identity we need.

This is the full confession of Christ’s kingdom.  This is and always will be the rock upon which Jesus builds his church.  Our salvation comes from knowing that in and beyond the suffering of the innocent is God’s unceasing redemption of the world. 

This week, beginning as it does with our celebration of the Confession of Peter and ending next Sunday with the feast of the Conversion of Paul, is a week that we set aside to pray for Christian unity.  Many of us will gather at the Roman Catholic basilica this Tuesday night, at the invitation of the Catholic Archdiocese, and we will humbly ask God’s forgiveness for our sad divisions and our bitter history of mutual contempt.  In its quiet way, this is a beautiful step toward acknowledging that we, the church, the rocks upon whom Jesus has built, are forever in need of his forgiveness and redemption.  It is a quiet way of trying to be Christian, with God’s help.  It acknowledges that we have no righteous stance of our own from which to preach to others.  It is the work of repentance that God offers us for our genuine salvation. It won’t have the viral appeal of a hashtag or a meme, and it won’t in all likelihood leave us feeling as though we have won out over any enemies.  But it will allow the grace of God to work through us, and it will help us take some small step away from the “us vs. them” mentality through which we are forever working destruction.  Can you join us?  Not so much to take a stand, but to ask for help?  That’s all we need to say, and we need to say it more than ever.  

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson

18 January 2015

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

The Power of Love

Today, in the first chapter of Mark’s Gospel, we hear about Jesus’ first day on the new job.  Not a new carpentry job; this is the very beginning of his ministry.  He has just called his first disciples.  The business cards haven’t even been printed.  But he is raring to go.

It’s the Sabbath, so he begins by teaching, but his sermon is interrupted by a man with an unclean spirit, so Jesus decides to stop preaching, and teach another way.  He turns to the man with the unclean spirit and addresses the spirit, not the man: “Be silent and come out of him!”  And to the amazement of all, the man convulses wildly, shrieking as he does, until the spirit gives up its possession, and leaves the man peacefully sitting there before the gathered congregation.

This is an impressive first morning of work for Jesus, and he has only begun!  Before the day is over he will cure Simon’s mother-in-law of a fever, heal countless others in her neighborhood, and cast out even more demons, before calling it a day.  Like I said, this is an impressive first day of work for our budding Savior.

But what are we to do with the report of it?  How are we to evaluate stories like this, that are, frankly, hard for us to believe?  It is pretty plain to see that we no longer live in an age of miracles.  Or, if miracles do still happen, they are in too short supply to make a convincing case for them, or the God who parcels them out so abstemiously.  I could spend the rest of my life listing and praying for the miracles I hope for, and never even account for half of the list you might come up with.

But Jesus begins his first day of ministry with a spate of miracles – like it’s his job!  It’s almost as if, on this first day, he is saying, “If you want to know what I’m here for, have a look at this!”  And because we - like the people at the synagogue, and gathered at Simon’s mother-in-law’s, and who came to find him in Capernaum that afternoon – we would wow-ed by miracles (if we decided we believed in them), we are impressed and confused by the way Jesus begins his work… still, it would be easy for us to conclude that this is a pretty cool job for Jesus to have: miracle worker!

But if Jesus came into the world to be a miracle worker, and if he had a good first day, and even if he had an impressive three days in Jerusalem down the line a little… still, as a miracle worker he has, in the intervening years, left something to be desired, at least to my way of thinking.  I have been praying for miracles, one way or another, for years, and never witnessed one yet, of the sort described in Mark’s Gospel.  So, as I read the Gospels, it seems I have at least two choices in responding to these miracles: I can sigh wistfully to myself that those were the days, sadly now long gone; or I can conclude that it’s a nice story that probably has another explanation.

But, in fact, I am not satisfied with either of those responses to the miracles of Jesus.  Which is problematic, since the reason the church has told us to read this passage today is that it is one of these stories told after the Epiphany that are meant to show us who Jesus is.  See, he’s the worker of wonders; he heals the sick and casts out demons; these miracles show us who Jesus is.  A very sensible way to see things, I have to admit.

But I am still left a little unsatisfied, because it remains difficult for me to understand, why, in establishing his credentials, Jesus should do so in a manner of ministry that he would never, or only extremely rarely, extend to the likes of you and me.  If Jesus is shown to be a miracle worker, and that’s how we know who he is, then where are the miracles for you and me?!?

So allow me to posit that the purpose of these miracles is not, in fact, to establish Jesus’ identity as the “holy one of God” as the unclean spirit correctly names him.  Jesus does not stride into Capernaum and discover a tingling in his fingertips, or a rumbling in his belly, or a suspicion in his mind that allows him to wave his hands, Harry Potter-like, and with the correct incantation work all kinds of wonder.  He does not begin his first day of new work intent on showing off his impressive powers.

So if he is not just showing off, let’s consider another possibility.  Let’s consider the possibility that Jesus is more than a sophisticated street performer of miracles, who needs to dazzle his audience in order to get their attention and win their admiration.  Let’s consider the possibility that on the morning of that Shabbat he sat teaching in the synagogue, and the words flowed easily out, prompted by the Spirit in his unfolding vocation…

… and in mid-sentence he was interrupted by this man, who, unbeknownst to Jesus (but known to everyone else in the synagogue) regularly caused a disturbance at Shabbos services, making it difficult and uncomfortable for everyone, but of course for no one more so than the man himself, though it was hard for the other congregants to appreciate that no one suffered more than he did…

… but Jesus sees all this.  He sees the upset and discomfort of the congregation.  And he sees the torment and suffering of the man who is possessed by an unclean spirit.  Here it is the Sabbath day, and Jesus is doing what he is supposed to be doing: he is teaching and preaching…

… and on Day One of his ministry he finds himself with a congregation beset by a lunatic…

… and I don’t think that Jesus’ first thought was that, ‘Great, this is a perfect opportunity to show off!’  I don’t think Jesus had a premonition that he could really wow his audience and begin to get his name out there.  I don’t think the Spirit spoke to Jesus and told him that, ‘This is your moment!’

No, I think, Jesus looked around and the awkwardness, discomfort, pain and torment all on display just in this little synagogue community, and I think he was moved to do something by love.  I think Jesus looked at the man with the unclean spirit and loved him (to borrow a phrase that St. Mark will employ later on in his Gospel account).  I think Jesus looked at those who had gathered to hear him teach, and he loved them, too.  I think when Jesus got to Simon’s mother-in-law’s house and heard that she was sick, his whole being was still tingling with love, and all he had to do was take her by the hand and her fever broke.  I think the look in his eyes was love; the breath from his nostrils was love, the sweat from his pores was love, and the touch of his hand was love.  I think Jesus began his new ministry as Messiah and Savior doing what he would continue to do till they hung him on a Cross, laid him in a tomb, and came to find him in an empty grave: he loved, and he is loving still.  I think Jesus’ miracles are not acts of showmanship, necessarily designed to establish his identity and authority – although they may indeed have that effect – I think they are the intended fruits of his love.

C.S. Lewis famously speculated that there is nothing supernatural about miracles at all, but rather, miracles are just a speeding up, or a short-cut, of natural processes.  If that’s right, then Jesus begins his ministry with a speedy impatience born of love: he has come to bring healing, and wholeness, and forgiveness, and spiritual health, and happiness by the power of his love.  And on his first day at work in this ministry it is as though he cannot contain the power of that love.  This is love bursting at the seams.  Love cannot help but cast out the demon.  Love cannot help but break the fever.  Love cannot help but cure others, and free still others from whatever spiritual, emotional, and psychological bondage they suffered.  So, on Day One, the power of love that Jesus has come to teach and to preach and to practice is speeding things up everywhere!  It is as though he cannot contain or control his love!  And why should he?!?

It is hard for people these days to believe in the wonder-working stories about Jesus.  It is hard to put much stock in ancient miracles when such wonders are not often experienced in our own day and age, despite the prayers of so many of us.  But if the details of the miracles of Jesus strike us as implausible, perhaps the possibility of a love so strong that it is impatient for the promises of God is a bit easier to allow for.  For the power of love is known to me in my own life and in the lives of so many others.  I find it entirely plausible that God loves each and every one of us enough to want to heal us, forgive us, strengthen us, and feed us, right now.

And I know enough about history and the human condition to know that most of us have built up effective shields to God’s love – we started with fig leaves and got better at it quickly.  The story of humanity is the story of distancing ourselves from God’s love, choosing to wander away from it, to prefer our own judgment to God’s, our own vision to his, to prefer our own desires to his, our own rules to God’s rules.  It’s a story of preferring rivalry and murder over brotherly love, and it unspools from there, as we developed calluses, and evolved to be all but immune to the call of God’s love.

How can any believing Christian not also believe in evolution when you consider how fully we have evolved to be unsusceptible and unavailable to the love of our creator?

But also unsuspecting.  We do not expect to find God’s love so immediately present in Jesus.  We hardly know what to do with stories of love so untamed that it casts out demons.  So we try to explain them away.

Who knows what Jesus made of it?  But the Gospel is clear that the love of Jesus was tangible, powerful, a soothing and a healing balm that was spread indiscriminately as he took up his ministry.  And I daresay that it wasn’t necessarily the wondrous works themselves that revealed to people who Jesus was – it was the power of his love made manifest in those works!  And does that power live today?

The answer to that question is precisely the reason we come to church day by day, week by week: to seek out and to test the power of God’s love, to tap into the impatient immediacy of it, to remember that it was when Jesus gathered with those he called, just to teach them, that the impatient love of which he is made began to overtake whatever lesson it was he was teaching.

We gather to help one another see the way that love is still impatient to heal and to soothe, to set right and to forgive, to bless and to save.

We gather to tell the stories of love that begin with Jesus and go on from there, that reach into our own day and age, and even into our own lives.

We gather to feel the tingle of a love so unregulated that it will cast out demons one minute and quell a fever the next.

We gather not to recall wistfully that once there was an age of miracles, but now they are no more.  Rather, we remember the love with which Jesus began his ministry and we locate it in our own lives – moving slower perhaps these days, since we have developed such good defenses, but nonetheless real, immediate, powerful, and true!

We gather because Love calls us.  Love is not done with us, nor has Love become more patient in its desire for healing, forgiveness, blessing, and new life.

Love seeks to work wonders in our lives by making us the people God intended us to be, and casting out whatever it is that prevents us from becoming so.

And we gather in Love’s Presence, as whenever we gather here with Jesus, not only so we can catch a glimpse of him, but so that Jesus can see us, too, and looking on us, he may love us.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

1 February 2015

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia 

The Wolf of Straight Street

Tragedy comes in all shapes and sizes.  This past week, tragedy came unexpectedly to St. James School when, on Wednesdays morning it was discovered that the six egg-laying hens that live on the property had all been murdered.  Feathers were strewn about the henhouse, and mangled remains of some of the hens were found around the schoolyard.  To those familiar with these sorts of things the deed bore all the signs of the work of a fox, such as are occasionally seen slinking around the churchyard and the school grounds.  It’s not as though we need much more evidence that we live in a dangerous and violent world.

The students who I talked to that day were saddened but not distraught.  By the standards of too many of these children, the slaughter of six chickens is an unremarkable incident and a fairly insignificant spilling of blood.  As an act of injustice, I guess it ranked low on any scale, especially during the week the school remembered the work and sacrifice of Martin Luther King, and the long struggle for justice for black people in this nation.

But for me the loss of the hens and the eggs they’d given was poignant because of the awful symbolism of it.  The fox, you see, had not gained entry in the little fenced in yard built for the hens – the wire fencing is buried two feet deep in order to prevent just such an incursion.  But the fox found a weakness in the henhouse itself, the back of which is unprotected by the fence.

Our school, as many of you know, is surrounded by high 19th century walls of Wissahickon schist.  It is a protected oasis of learning, gracefulness, and hope, in a part of the city that is too often associated with violence, bloodshed, and murder.  The hens, when they arrived, seemed to me to be another hopeful sign of the peaceable kingdom being realized behind those walls on Clearfield Street.  And the fox’s awful assault was a reminder to me that every day, we and our students are sent out as sheep into the midst of wolves – to mix the mammalian metaphor.

It is this very warning we heard this morning on the lips of Jesus as he charged his Twelve Apostles with their mission: “See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”

But our purpose here today is not sing the praises of those Twelve, nor to dissect our Lord’s instructions to them.  Our purpose is to consider the one Apostle who was not there at the time, for he had not yet been called by Jesus: St. Paul.

And the irony of this Gospel reading is that if ever there was a wolf who was called into the midst of the sheep, it was St. Paul.  He was a firebrand denouncer and enthusiastic persecutor of the early followers of Jesus.  We heard what he wrote about himself, “I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it.”  Paul was a wolf!  He was vicious, and cunning, and proud of it.  He’d have been the Wolf of Straight Street if he had gotten to Damascus before he was knocked to the ground beneath rays of shining light, and had he not asked his momentous question, “Who are you, Lord?”

Here is a question for the ages.  And here is a question for the wolves, if only they would ask it.  “Who are you, Lord?”

Here is a question for the foxes to ask as they circle closer to the henhouse, if only a light would knock them off their paws – Who are you, Lord?

Here is a question for the truants, and the drug dealers, and the letches who follow seventh grade girls on their way home from school and call out suggestions to them, to ask – Who are you, Lord?

Here is a question for those who regard the gift of this beautiful earth with such contempt that they clear-cut it, drill it, burn it, and spill all over and in it with reckless abandon, to ask – Who are you, Lord?

Here is a question for small-minded Anglicans who farcically seek out “untainted” bishops to avoid any suggestion that a woman could share in the priesthood of Christ, to ask – Who are you, Lord?

Here is a question for the bigots who still can’t imagine that there’s room in this nation not only for white people, but for black people and brown people, for Jewish people and Muslim people, and for people we don’t even know how to describe yet, to ask – Who are you, Lord?

Here is a question for the workers of darkness who carry out genocide and ethnic cleansings, to ask – Who are you, Lord?

Here is a question for those wreaking havoc in the streets of Paris, slaughtering innocents in the villages of Nigeria, or murdering Christians in Iraq, to ask – Who are you, Lord?

Here is a question for every American to ask before we send our brothers and sisters, our sons and daughters to take up warfare again any place at all – Who are you, Lord?

Here is a question for every one of us to ask, when we are caught up in our own self-centeredness, more concerned about things than people, or indifferent to those who suffer – Who are you, Lord?

If only God would throw us to the ground, flood our vision with light, and call out to us by name to get our attention, to make us listen, to prompt us to ask the question!  This was the question that St. Paul asked, when he – the great wolf – was knocked off his feet and onto his tuchus, and he heard a voice speaking to him, and calling him by name, “Saul, Saul.  Why are you persecuting me?”

Paul, wolf that he was, answered the question with a question, unable to provide a proper answer.  But the question was all that was needed, “Who are you, Lord?”

Who am I?  I’ll tell you who I am, came the answer: I am Jesus!

Now, this was not the answer that Paul wanted.  Don’t you know that Paul hated Jesus?  Paul was the wolf to Jesus’ sheep, and happy to have the honor.  But here is the first important thing to see in St. Paul’s quite amazing story: that Jesus does not give up on the wolves.  Jesus has work to do with the wolves, and he knows them by name.

Why Jesus so often allows the wolves to roam so freely, I cannot say.  It is the same old question of why a loving God allows pain, suffering, and evil to exist in his creation, and I just don’t know!  But remember, that Jesus is not done with the wolves, metaphorically speaking, and St. Paul is proof of that, because he was a wolf to be reckoned with.

And here is the second important thing to see in this story of Paul’s conversion; remember what Jesus charges Paul to do: he tells him to testify.  He does not tell Paul to redirect his tactics of persecution and wage a religious guerilla war.  He does not tell him to start blowing things up, cutting people’s heads off, or burning things down.  No, he tells him to speak, to preach, to teach, and to guide.  He tells him to stop being such a wolf, and learn to be a sheep.  And then, Jesus sends Paul out, just like the other Twelve, as a sheep into the midst of wolves.

As far as we know, Paul never again turned back to his old, wolfish ways.  Rather, he stood among wolves like a lamb and he bleated and bleated about the love of God, and how it is made known to anyone who cares to listen, by the person of God’s Son Jesus.  And sheepishly he changed the world.  Having once refused to answer a question with anything but another question (Who are you, Lord), Paul now relentlessly repeats the answer: And the answer is Jesus!

It is Jesus who calls to stop kicking against the power of God and to listen.

It is Jesus who calls to repentance and forgiveness.

It is Jesus who calls to give up being a wolf, and to go out and testify like a sheep!

The idea of being sheep who are sent into the midst of wolves is not necessarily appealing to the sheep.  It takes bravery, trust, and faith to be a peaceful creature amidst a world of predators.  But this is God’s consistent call.

At this moment in history Christians need to hear again Christ’s call to go out like sheep into the midst of wolves.  Too often we have tried to beat the wolves at their own game, as though by adopting wolfish tactics we could somehow accomplish the will of the Great Shepherd.  Sheep are poor and defenseless and peaceful.  Paul was none of those things until he heard the voice of Jesus.  Like us, he strongly suspected there was virtue to be found in wealth and power and cunning.  But in his sheepishness he discovered both wisdom and innocence – gifts from the Lord who called him by name.

We need to borrow, again and again, Paul’s question – Who are you, Lord?

And we need to listen, again and again, to the answer:

I am Jesus; I have been who I have been since before the beginning of time.

I am Jesus; I was there when you were made.

I am Jesus; and all wisdom cometh from me.

I am Jesus; and I am the voice of love incarnate.

I am Jesus; and all forgiveness comes from me.

I am Jesus; and I have given you bravery, trust, faith, and peace.

I am Jesus; and I desire not the death of sinners, but rather that they should turn from their wickedness and live.

I am Jesus; and in your baptism I have clothed you in the fairest, whitest wool to keep you warm and protect you.

I am Jesus; and I send you out like sheep into the midst of wolves, because it is only by establishing a peaceable kingdom that my will can be done, and that my law of love can hold sway on the earth.

I am Jesus!  So now, get up and stand on your feet, for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you to serve and to testify to the things in which you have seen me and those in which I will appear to you; to rescue you from all that leads you astray; that you may turn from darkness to light, and from the power of evil to God; so that you may receive forgiveness of sins, and a place among the sanctified!

I am Jesus; and I send you out like sheep in the midst of wolves.  You will need bravery, trust, and faith; and you will need to remember to act peaceably in my name, for you are the people of my pasture, and the sheep of my hand.  Thanks be to God!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

The Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, 2015

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia