That the King of Glory may come in

In case you missed it, this Sunday we made a great point of entering in: entering into Holy Week, entering with Jesus into Jerusalem to face the events of his passion and resurrection.  Marking a threshold as we pass from the ordinary events of our lives into this sacred week of concentrated prayer and liturgical participation.  Most of us will be living our ordinary lives as we always do this week, with doctors’ appointments and deadlines and errands, our workdays and our commutes, but we will also be conscious that we are living Jesus’s week: a triumphal entry into the city, an intimate last supper with his friends on Maundy Thursday, a harrowing night of prayer and a brutal crucifixion at noon on Good Friday.  There will be a period of mysterious silence and a bursting forth from the tomb as the darkness of Saturday evening becomes the great light of Easter Sunday.  

We will be living with two calendars this week, and feeling that odd sensation of moving back and forth between them. Many of us will dash home from work on Thursday, catching the train just in time to attend the last supper.  We will be a little groggy at the office the next morning because we were praying with Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane late into the night.  Try explaining that to your coworkers. We may have to offer our regrets about not being able to attend that mid-day meeting on Friday so we can instead gather at the foot of the cross.  Saturday morning may find us pulled toward the usual round of errands and sports events even while we are haunted by a sense that our Lord has gone to be among the dead and will be risen from the grave in a short while.  We are living in two realities.

However we work to set aside these days, however firmly we mark the threshold between Holy Week and our ordinary lives, we will move between worlds with an unusual level of awareness this coming week.  We may feel that we are in two cities at once: Philadelphia and Jerusalem.  And crossing the threshold between them may be no small feat.

Then too, we may notice, as we cross the threshold into Jerusalem with Jesus this morning, that the situation here in this heavenly city is distinctly unsettling.  We’ve started off with a glorious procession, but it’s hard to tell exactly why the crowds are cheering.  Do they really understand who Jesus is?  And how is it that, here at the start of Holy Week, we are already going to be calling out “Crucify him!”  How is it both Palm Sunday and Passion Sunday?  Where did the week go?

It doesn’t get any simpler as the week goes on.  Glorious Maundy Thursday has its distinctly funereal aspects, and on Good Friday we may know resurrection joy despite our focus on the crucifixion.  The Easter Vigil takes us back through the whole sweep of salvation history, from the creation to the flood of Noah to the Passover and the exile.  We may be moving in time through the events of the crucifixion and resurrection, but the time we keep in the beautiful liturgy of Holy Week is strangely unstable.  It goes forward and backward at once.  It pulls us along in both directions.

Nor is our location stable.  We speak of the Resurrection as a new creation, and some speak of the entry into Jerusalem as a re-entry into the Garden of Eden.  We say that the cross on which Jesus dies is the tree of life.  We hear this week that we are experiencing a new Passover, crossing the Red Sea out of Egypt.  Crossing the Jordan River into the Holy Land.  Standing at the same time at that holy banquet in the New Jerusalem, at the Supper of the Lamb.

We mark a threshold, entering with our palms this morning, but it’s a threshold that brings us to the edge of all times, all places.  Where Jesus is.  At the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega.

Love calls us here.  Love breaks us open, again and again, as we rush to the Last Supper from our workstations.  Love opens our hearts as we carry home our palms this afternoon, finding a place for them on a high shelf that the cats can’t get to.  As we stumble out into the dark night of Maundy Thursday, aware of Jesus in all the altars of repose all over the city and across the world.  Knowing that our fellow Christians are silently keeping vigil with us.

We are offered the grace this week to let our world break open so there will be room for God who knows no limitations.  God who is able to live a human life.  God who is able to bear humiliation and rejection and failure.  God who bears pain and death.  God whose response is never to save himself but always to save us.  Always to forgive us.  Always to receive our least gesture of willingness as a pledge of relationship. 

This week is our chance, awkward as we are, to meet that God in the person of Jesus.  Our small gestures, our divided attention, our shyness about removing a shoe to have our feet washed, our hesitation as we approach the cross, our sleepiness as we sit in the dark church at the Easter vigil, hearing prophecy after prophecy after prophecy, that strange warming of our hearts as the resurrection is proclaimed--these are the moments God gives us for crossing over into new life in which our limitations are not the last word.  Our sin is not the final reality.  Our fear is not the force that rules the world. 

Our times are in God’s hands, and this week of all weeks we may have the grace to know it.  He is the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last.  The beginning and the end.

Lift up, lift up your heads oh ye gates.  Lift them up you everlasting doors, that the King of Glory may come in.

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson

Palm Sunday, 29 March 2015

Saint Mark's, Philadelphia

Bizaro World

They said to him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.”  (Jn. 12:21)

Because comic books never interested me very much as a kid, it was not until the sit-com Seinfeld was on TV that I became familiar with Bizaro.  Bizaro, Jerry Seinfeld, explains in a famous episode, is “Superman’s exact opposite, who lives in a backwards, bizaro world.  Up is down.  Down is up.  He says ‘Hello’ when he leaves, ‘Good bye’ when he arrives.”

If you remember the Seinfeld episode, the matter of Bizaro Superman comes up because Jerry’s friend Elaine has met a new friend very much like Jerry, except, as she explains to Jerry, that he is not so self-absorbed, not so distracted by the minutiae of unimportant things.  “He is reliable.  He is considerate,” Elaine says to Jerry,  “He’s like your exact opposite.”  Thus begins Elaine’s flirtation with a new group of three friends who are the kind, thoughtful, bookish counterparts to Jerry, George, and Kramer, who are goofy, self-centered, and never read anything but comic books.  Her new friends are the sort of bright doppelgangers of the flawed, quirky, moody trio of the three old friends we regular watchers know so well.

As the episode goes on, Elaine finds herself torn between her two sets of friends – which is really just an expression of being torn between her kinder, better self and her selfish, worse self.  And in the end, she simply doesn’t fit in with the bizaro world of the well-read version, considerate of Jerry, et al., and she ends up back where she began with Jerry, George and Kramer.

Sometimes the world we read about in the Gospels seems like a bizaro world – a world almost opposite to the world we live in, as though up is down, and down is up.  Take, for instance, the little episode we hear about in John’s Gospel today.  Jesus is in Jerusalem, he has already been greeted by the palm-waving throngs.  And along come some men who John calls “Greeks.”  We could talk about whether they are Greek-speaking Jews, or Gentiles who are trying to find favor with the God of the Jewish Temple, or whatever – but for our purposes this morning, that hardly matters.  That the seekers are identified as somehow different and distinct is not what makes them bizaro to my ears. 

Here’s what makes them bizaro – and maybe you will think so too – these guys stroll up to Phillip, and they blurt out this demand to him; they say: “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.”

I am not sure I have ever heard anyone say anything like that to me in my life – and I am in the Jesus business.  But, no, in the world I live in, most people do not come looking for Jesus.  Oddly, this is often as true within the church as without: people simply are not looking for Jesus; and they most assuredly are not asking for him if they can’t find him.  I am not trying to be sarcastic or funny here; I am trying to be honest.  The church has not gotten good at closing its buildings down and selling its real estate because of all the people we encounter who are looking for Jesus, or who come asking us to show him to them.  The empty pews I see from here are not a reflection of the hordes who are looking for Jesus – at least not on this block of Locust Street.  And we are a healthy, happy, growing parish!  But still there is plenty of room for those who might see Jesus, but who do not seem to be looking for him!

I find it bizarre – maybe even bizaro – to think about such an encounter: that someone could walk up to me or to you and just say to us, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.”  I hardly know how I’d reply!  It’s almost like the exact opposite of the world I live in.  Because in the world I live in even those of us who believe in and love Jesus are often more than a little careful not to speak of him out loud, and certainly we don’t want to be caught looking for him in the challenges, twists, and turns of life (even if privately we think about it).  We live in a world that has decided you should keep your faith to yourself, and in which it would probably be embarrassing to be seen to be looking for Jesus.  Rare, it seems, is the day that someone earnestly approaches the church with this searching question on his or her lips: “I wish to see Jesus.”  So rare, that when I hear it, it seems like a bizaro world.

On reflection, the concept of a bizaro world seems right at home in the Gospel of Jesus Christ – where things are often almost a mirror-image of the world we live in; where up is down, down is up, etc.

It was a bizaro idea of God’s to send his Son into the world as a weakling, a child, a harmless, unarmed teacher.

It was a bizaro world that Mary sang about – where the humble are exalted, and the rich are sent empty away.

It was a bizaro world that Jesus taught about on the mountain when he promised that the meek would inherit the earth and the peacemakers would be blessed.

It was a bizaro world Jesus was talking about when he told his followers that those who want to gain their lives must lose them, and those who lose their lives for his sake will gain eternal life.

It was a bizaro world at the Cross and at the Tomb – where death seemed to be having its say, as it always does, but where actually the covenant of new life was being enacted.

The Good News of Jesus Christ is bizaro news – the revelation that in Christ things are almost exactly the opposite of what they seem: the unjust, greedy, violent ways of this world will not prevail; the poor and the down-trodden will not be crushed; our worst selves need not always trump our better selves; truth will not always be buried beneath piles of spin; the broken, bruised, and battered can be healed; the shadow of death will not obliterate the light of life!

Why is it that outside these walls we so seldom speak of these things?  Why is it so difficult to imagine anyone asking to be shown the source of this hope?  Why do I find it bizaro to think of someone asking to see Jesus?

Well, I’m not at all sure there is any explanation of the bizaro.  But it can be helpful to become aware of the bizaro world.  And the real question is whether the bizaro world is a backwards reflection of the world we live in, or if it is the world we are actually living in.  Which is backwards, wrong, bizarre?

Part of what was so appealing about season after season of Seinfeld was that as goofy, quirky, and self-centered as Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer were, we could always see at least a little of ourselves in them.  And if there was a defining characteristic of Jerry and his friends, it was that they were self-absorbed and selfish, ill-attuned to the needs or concerns of others around them, even those they loved the most.  And the thought that the world could be kind, considerate, selfless, and giving – well this was a bizaro idea to them: it was the shadow side of their own selfishness.

At the end of the episode, Elaine walks into the neat and tidy apartment of the bizaro version of Jerry, and discovers it to be the mirror image of Jerry’s place.  She is astounded at how familiar yet different it all is.  She opens the fridge, takes out a jar of olives and begins nibbling on them.  Bizaro Jerry looks over and asks, “Hey, what are you doing?”

“Eating olives,” Elaine says.

“Have you ever heard of asking?” comes, what is to her, the bizaro response.  For, she had indeed never thought of asking.

Within a few moments she has realized how poorly she fits in to this kind, polite, considerate, bizaro world, and she is on the way out the door to return to Jerry and the guys.

Daily, I am aware of how bizarre, greedy, frightening, difficult, dangerous, and self-centered the world we live in has become.  Perhaps it has always been this way, I don’t know; but it seems to be getting worse to me.

I have begun to suspect that this world we live in is actually the bizaro version of what God intends for us: a peaceful, fruitful, happy existence that is full of joy.

But we have become confused about what is reality and what is bizaro.

Jesus comes into the world to show us what a bizaro world it has become, and to teach us that love and kindness are what God created us for – not the reverse image of his creation.

I hear people yearning for a world that is better than the one we live in.  I know people who are working hard for just such a world.  But there are not enough of us yet, not enough who want to leave the bizaro world behind and discover again the true life for which God made us – the life of love and joy and peace.

Sometimes I want to scream about it, since I believe that Jesus is the Way we will get there, the Truth we are looking for, and the Life we suspect we have already lost.  I want people to meet Jesus, and I want to meet him again and again myself in my prayers, in those of you who work and live in his Name, and in the countless ways he shows himself in the world by the power of his Spirit.  I want to shout out to this world of ours: “Hey, what are you doing?!?!”

And if the answer should come back to me, “Oh, just looking for Truth, Peace, and Love,” then I want to be ready to reply:

“Have you ever thought of asking?”

Let’s all think of asking, over and over again: “We wish to see Jesus!”

And when the bizaro day comes that someone asks that very thing of each of us, let us rejoice, and show them the Way!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

22 March 2015

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

God the Sender

It is a good news story, in the end. The people of God are threatened; they cry out to the Lord, and the Lord hearkens unto their cry and saves them from certain death. Happy ending, happy story. But there is one moment that makes this story from the book of Numbers seem a little less than happy, one zinger that makes this seem like not-quite good news.  

The people of God have been wandering in the wilderness for-absolutely-ever at this point. They know that they should be grateful – they’re free now, free because of God, who sent Moses, who sent plagues, who sent a warning and careful instructions about lambs and lintels, and who finally sent a mighty wind to blow back the water of the Red Sea. The Israelites know all of this, but it has been a long, hot summer. They’re tired of dust and dirt, they’re tired of Moses, they’re tired of promised land instead of actual land. And so they start whining. Why did you bother bringing us up out of Egypt for this mess? There’s nothing to eat or drink…well, okay, there’s this manna and water springing from rocks but we’re so tired of it. We don’t like it, and you can’t make us eat it anymore.

And here is the sentence that sticks like gristle in the gullet: Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. Ugh. I mean, I get that the people are being a pain in the divine rear end. They’re ungrateful and selfish and they don’t have any spiritual stick-to-it-iveness. They deserve a good scolding, to hear God heaving an exasperated sigh and telling them how disappointed he is in them. I could even get on board with a good grounding – you know: that’s it! you aren’t allowed to go to the Holy Land for another 35 years. But really, poisonous snakes? And not snakes that just appeared out of the savage wilderness, but snakes that were sent. God sent the snakes, Numbers tells us. God sent the snakes to kill his own people. Not good news.

 It’s such not-good-news, in fact, that it’s tempting to try to work around this zinger. For example, we could employ the “stupid ancient peoples” theory. You know, people back then didn’t really understand the world, so they attributed all kinds of things to God. So we enlightened people who understand rain and snakes and wind and stuff can safely ignore those uncomfortable parts of the Bible because we can imagine some other explanation, like ancient near-eastern serpent migration patterns, or desert dehydration dementia. You can hear the arrogance here, but we’ve probably all had thoughts like this at some point, consciously or subconsciously. And of course there are things about the world that we understand in a more comprehensive, more molecular way than the ancient Israelites. But there is more to life than molecules. Isn’t it possible, no, probable, that these people were wise in a different way, that they knew deep truths even without having all of the facts? And wouldn’t we be stupid to reject their lives as having nothing to teach us about our own?

We could also try to work around this zinger by trying to split God in half. We could say, well, that was the Old Testament God, who was, to be honest, kind of a jerk. He was always venting his wrath and wiping out nations. But then Jesus came along and showed us the New Testament God, the God of love, God your BFF, who is like a soft pillow of mercy floating on a cloud of forgiveness covered in compassion sauce. The problem with this approach is not only that it’s theologically harmful, it’s also deeply unscriptural. To put it more simply, Jesus didn’t think this way. Jesus was a big fan of the Old Testament, or, to borrow a helpful rephrase, the Older Testament. This Older Testament God was Jesus’ God. Jesus preached only continuity between the God of his ancestors and the God he called Father, taught a fulfillment of the ancient law and a new covenant built on God’s righteousness and lasting promise. So this work-around doesn’t work either, because there’s no working around this zinger if Jesus didn’t want to.

There is a third way, of course, to work around this zinger. And that is to just ignore the whole story, to assert that God is inherently capricious – full of tenderness one moment and dialed up to full smiting mode the next. Why worship a God like this at all? Why pay him any attention? Frankly, why acknowledge that such a God might even exist? We can choose to reject the zinger, the story, the whole kit-n-caboodle, and in the process, allow none of it to have any impact at all on our lives. Which, frankly, would be a terrible shame. Because this is a good news story, in the end. There is grace here for us, even in that zinger of a sentence, if only we are brave enough to look at it full in the face.

We have to be brave, you and I, because this story is, at its heart, about sin. The people of God aren’t just whining here. They’ve whined before, and God’s response in those cases has been to get a little annoyed and then to send a lot of help – manna, quails, water from dry places. But this time, the people are actually turning away. They speak against God, and their words carve out a chasm of discontent and doubt between them and their Creator. Their actions separate them from God’s purpose and plan. This is sin. So these snakes are not a penalty for the people’s complaining; the snakes are a corrective for extreme, potentially fatal missteps.

But still, those snakes remain a pretty frightening thought. It’s uncomfortable to imagine God punishing his children – punishing us – for anything. But honestly, what is the alternative? Would we really prefer to have a divine doormat, a God who looks upon us down here in the sandbox, whacking the devil out of each other like three year olds, and says, Ooh, that looks like it hurts, but I guess they’ll grow out of it? Or a God who looks down at us grabbing toys and throwing sand in each other’s eyes and says, let them have at it because I just don’t care anymore? Or might it be okay to imagine a God who would look down at his people and say: stop that! and take our toys away? Might it be okay, even good news, to imagine a God who would actually correct us because he hasn’t given up on us yet?

Of course, the truth is that 99.9% of the time, God doesn’t have to do any stomping at all, for our sin carries its own reward. We speak against God, step off in the wrong direction, and find ourselves running from serpents in a wilderness of our making. The wages of sin is death, and you and I do more in our own lives to contribute to our own suffering than God would ever do. Let me be clear: when I’m talking about these kinds of corrections, this kind of punishment, I do not mean the deeply unhelpful platitudes spoken, however kindly, in hospital emergency rooms and around gravesides about God not sending more than we can handle or testing us to make us stronger. God does not send us cancer to test how faithful we are or Alzheimer’s disease to make us stronger through misery. But God does try really hard to get us back on the right path. And to borrow a phrase of Anne Lamott’s – sometimes he can do this by gently tapping us on the shoulder, and other times he has to stomp on our feet.

But even if we do imagine that God might someday send snakes, there is reassurance there. Even in the shadow of that zinger, there is reassurance that God will do even that to bring us back to him, and that that is not all of the story. Because God has always known that he would do much, much more than send a shake on the shoulder or a snake in the grass. God has always known that he would do much, much more than sending a bronze snake lifted on a staff to ward off  the deaths of a few. God does not only send snakes. God also sent his Son, not to condemn us, but to save us. The wages of sin is death, but God is more interested in gift, the gift of grace and the chance to once again be wholly his. There is no zinger of pain or suffering or death that God has not experienced in his own self, not cross that we are ever asked to bear alone. Those zingers are not the end of the story. The end of the story is no end at all. The end is eternal life. The end is Jesus Christ, lifted up on a cross so that everyone may come and see, take and eat, and to look up and see life and light and hope, even when the snakes are biting. This story is, in the end, and in the beginning and in all of the steps and stumbles inbetween, a good news story.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

15 March 2015, Laetare Sunday

Saint Mark's, Philadelphia