Do not be afraid

A word cloud is a visual representation of a particular group of words. In its simplest form, a word cloud generator produces an image of the text in a relatively random distribution around the page – a couple of words here, a couple of words there, different colors, facing in different directions, tucked tightly into each other or shooting off into the margins. It’s, you know, words, in kinda the shape of a cloud. The point of word clouds is to show you which words matter – which words are used a lot, or which words carry more weight than others. It’s really quite simple – words that matter are just bigger. For example, Ellen Doster recently created a set of word clouds for our Family Mass Cards using the texts of the Ordinary of the Mass. They look like you would expect them to look: the word cloud for the Gloria is dominated by the words “God” and “Glory” and the word cloud for the Sanctus is basically just a big, giant “Holy” looming over the rest of the teeny tiny text. So you get the point – the big words are the words that matter.

So what would a word cloud look like for the Gospel text this evening? Funny you should ask that, because I just happened to create a couple to see what would happen. Most of them looked just the same, and how they looked was mostly unsurprising. Jesus was pretty big, and risen. So far, so good-and-Eastery. Said was also pretty big – no big shocker there. Behold was a bit of a surprise – most of the word cloud generators made that word enormous. It appears only twice in the Gospel, but I guess it is a kind of power word, a word that makes you sit up and take notice. But the biggest surprise by far was that there were two words that were much bigger than I would have expected – almost as big as Jesus – words that I did not expect to see blown up all over the face of this resurrection text. But there they were, right alongside Jesus and risen and behold: fear and afraid.

Surprising, perhaps, but entirely accurate. Because when you look carefully, you’ll see a resurrection text that is haunted from start to finish with references to fear. The two Marys arrive at the tomb in the shadowy pre-dawn hours. Suddenly, an earthquake, an angel appears like lightning, and the guards at the tomb are so terrified they pass out. The angel speaks to the still-conscious women, and the first thing he says, which is right out of the angel playbook, is: “Do not be afraid.” But the women are afraid anyway, and leave the tomb in joy, and in fear. They run to tell the disciples, but run up on Jesus instead, who tells them, again, “Do not be afraid.” Words about fear are everywhere; terror really is all around, popping up in every single scene of this short little Gospel reading.

And, if you think about, there is a lot to be afraid of here. The dark. Earthquakes. Lightning. Angels that rumble down from heaven and pop out at you from behind stone tombs. Enclosed spaces. Death. Throw in a handful of spiders and the number 13 and you’ve basically covered all of the major fear groups. And then, of course, there is the fear of change. There are some pretty intense changes going on here.  The women have gone to the tomb expecting to see Jesus very, very dead. Instead they hear that Jesus is actually very much alive. They hear that all of the things that he told them had actually been true. Here they are, a day and a half after the crucifixion, when they had just started to get used to the idea that maybe it was all over, that Jesus was really and truly gone and that they were going to have to try to squeeze their lives back into the little boxes they had known B.C. But now, now, they are sitting in front of an angel, who is telling them that everything has changed. For now is Christ risen from the dead. Their day, their whole lives, their whole world, is different, and that much difference, even when it is good news, can be just a bit scary.

This night, too, can be just a bit scary. We come here and sit in the dark, waiting, quiet. And then suddenly there is fire and smoke and prophecies about floods and dry bones, and then men being baptized into Christ’s death, and then this Gospel reading that is so full of fear. The lights are up now, the bells have rung, but those words can still loom large in our minds. Do not be afraid, the reminder comes, and we realize that if we are reminded of this again and again, year after year, perhaps it is because we really need to hear it. Perhaps we hear Do not be afraid again and again because heaven knows that we spend too much of our lives living in fear.

We live in fear of diagnoses and debt. We live in fear of loneliness and layoffs. We live in fear of addiction and Alzheimer’s, of drunken drivers and mentally ill pilots, of terrorism and MRSA and melting ice caps and the dissolving media. We are afraid of being in pain or without purpose. We live in fear of people who don’t look or sound or smell or think like us. We live in fear that the world might change, that our loved ones might change, that we might change. Terror is all around; no wonder it is so easy to get lost in the shadowy mess of anxiety and despair.

And when that word fear looms large in the cloud of our minds, it’s difficult to read anything else. When all we can see is fear, it’s difficult to see God and our neighbors and ourselves at all, let alone to love them. When all we can see is fear, we make bad choices and lose good friends. We eat badly and drink badly and behave badly. We listen badly and think badly. We find ourselves craving little amuse-bouche of gossip instead of hungering for knowledge that matters. We focus on self-protection instead of self-offering, on keeping them – whoever they are – out of our restaurants or off of our doorsteps, and we end up making bad laws and bad church policy. We worry and spend our time imagining the worst instead of imagining the coming of the kingdom of God. We hold tight to old resentments as if they were lifelines instead of ropes that bind our hands and hearts. We don’t do or love or choose anything right. And the worse we act, the worse it gets, because suddenly all of our fears seem actualized, if not in reality, then at least in the reality of our own heads. This is a hell of our own making, where terror is all around.

But this is why we come here tonight. This is why we sit here in the darkness together, waiting for light to burst forth and chase the shadows away. For tonight we remember, together, that fear is not the most important word in this story. Tonight we remind ourselves that Hell is vanquished, that we are free, that Christ has won for us the victory – over death, over the grave, and over fear. So do not be afraid. We may still feel fear, of course we will, but in the presence of this empty tomb we can see it for what it is – a liar and cheat. In the presence of the risen Christ we can see just how little this word really is. So do not be afraid. There is nothing that can harm you forever anymore. Do not be afraid. Christ is going ahead of you to all of the places where you are going, no matter what you might find there. Go on ahead and look for him. Do not be afraid. Behold, Jesus is risen!

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

4 April 2015 - the Great Vigil of Easter

Saint Mark's, Philadelphia

A Beautiful Place

It had been a very beautiful place. Not beautiful like a green hill far away, as the old hymn says. It was a hill, but it wasn’t green at all and hadn’t been green for years. It was brown, mostly, but not just brown but a crazy patchwork of rust and shadow, all hazy and shimmering with dust. It wasn’t green, and it wasn’t far away from anything. It rubbed its rounded shoulder right up against the city wall; its wide foot nudged the bustling roadway that poured into one of the many city gates that gaped in the wall like mouths wide open. It wasn’t green; it wasn’t far away. It wasn’t idyllic. It wasn’t quiet. It wasn’t pastoral or peaceful or picturesque. It was a hill, like lots of little hills, but it had been beautiful.

It’d been beautiful because it had been, years so, a place of vital, and constant, activity. This hill had hummed, buzzed with busy men climbing up and down its paths with chisels and hammers and ropes. The face of the hill was in perpetual motion – day and night, men went up, stones came down, wave upon wave, and everything utterly awash with noise. The hill thundered with the boom of the mallet’s thump, with the deep crack of the rocks when the chisels found their way home, with the creak of ropes as stones were lifted and tied and dragged and dropped, and with the groans and sighs and laughs of men.

Masons, they had been, stonecutters, who had worked this hill their whole lives long. They had climbed this hill since they were old enough to swing a hammer, and cut it apart, piece by piece. They had cut and climbed for years, for generations, breaking out blocks of limestone that was as treasured as gold or as diamonds. For it was stone from this hill that had given shape to the very city it sat next to; stone from this hill that had formed the walls of Jerusalem, strengthened its gates and its passageways, maybe even grounded the very temple itself. And this stone had given shape to the lives of the men who worked to pry it out of the earth, who spent their youth and then their old age crawling over and into the sides of this hill, and to the women who worked at home and waited for their husbands’ return, work-weary and dusty but proud of their beautiful brown hill and its strong white stone.

But one day, one man threw the weight of his body into the final blow of his hammer and heard a sound that no one on that hill could remember ever hearing before. It was a dull thunk, and a shushing, as a wide crack crumbled open in front of him, right in the center of the hill. Pebbles and earth and flakes of rock sloughed off in sheets, and what was left behind, underneath all of that valuable limestone, meant that nothing would ever be the same on this hill again. For the hill had had a secret, hidden deep within its heart – a flaw, a fault line that no one had ever known was there. The men stood before this flaw for hours, it seemed, shaking their heads, scratching their rough chins, the younger ones making suggestions about how they might work around it, but the older ones knowing in their own hearts what this discovery really meant – that the hill was a ruin, that no rock would ever be quarried from it again, for no rock from this hill could ever again be trusted to bear the weight of the world. This hill, they knew, was done. It was finished.

And so the hill sat, abandoned, for years and years. Its paths, once so familiar and well-worn, quickly became choked with brush and dry weeds. The limestone which had once shined so clean and white in the sun was soon drowned in the dirt, and it, like the hill, soon was forgotten, as men traveled along other roads to other hills to quarry other stone. And the hill which had once been so beautiful because it had once been worth so much to so many, sat quiet and invisible, meaning nothing to no one.

Until one day, a single man stood on the Jerusalem road and looked up at this wreck of a hill and had an idea. Would not this place, as worthless and ugly as it was, be the perfect place for a dump? Not a dump for refuse – old baskets and broken pottery and stained cloth – but for the true trash of the earth – a place for dumping people, criminals, threats to the imperial power of Rome. Would not this place, as worthless and ugly as it was, be the perfect place for an execution?

And so the hill that had once been so valued and so beautiful became a place that struck fear in the hearts of men. Women rushed by it on their way into the city, eyes averted, looking at anything but those heights where men went to die terrible, agonizing deaths. Children dared each other to climb its slopes before bored soldiers or protective mothers could discover what they were up to. And week after week, some horrible procession made its way up its paths, now widened to accommodate their new travelers. Week after week, some prisoner was stabbed and prodded and kicked up the hill, while soldiers jabbed the latest wooden cross into place along one of the wide gashes in the stone. Week after week, some new torture, some new blood and tears, some new death. Week after week, the condemned went up, and the corpses came down. And the sides of the hill that had been carved out and put to use, giving new life to a wall or well somewhere, now looked empty and haunted, like vast eye sockets staring numbly at the city walls. Locals began to call it the place of the skull – perhaps because of its shocked, empty eyes or perhaps because of the hundreds of skulls that were beaten and bruised on its bloody slopes.

And all the while, that great seam of ruin, that fatal flaw ran down the center of the hill, mocking all who looked up at it. This place that used to give life now has nothing to offer but death. This place is broken and destroyed; it is full of weakness and fault, and there is no health left within it. It is a hill beyond hope, beyond redemption, always in shadow, always in night. The place of the skull, the place of evil and death, Golgatha.

One day, three more prisoners are prodded and kicked up the hill. And soldiers stab another cross into the crust of the earth. And one more man gasps and wheezes and bleeds. But this man, when he looks out from high atop the hill, sees not ugliness and pain and death, but beauty. He sees only beauty, only the devotion of the people who have followed him here, only the love of his mother and his cherished, beloved disciple. He sees only the thumbprint of God in the people who look up at him from the foot of his cross, even the soldiers whose fingers roll stones and gamble for his clothes right under his feet. He sees only grace here within the embrace of his outstretched arms, only holiness in this place that can bear so much pain. This man looks out upon this hill, upon these people, upon all of these fatal flaws running right down the middle and says no more. You are all forgiven. You are all redeemed. You are all so beautiful. After that, there was nothing to be said. The ugliness was done; it was all finished. So the man bowed his head and gave up his spirit. And the little hill and everyone on it felt the shift in the earth, the crack in the cosmos, as everything was changed.

Of course that little hill is now beautiful again. It is crowned with glory – covered with chapels and holy places and gold and diamonds. People have brought stone from other places to lay altars and tabernacles there; people come from all over the world to climb this little hill. And that is all well and good. But this hill didn’t become beautiful again because of engraved candlesticks and jeweled crosses; this hill became beautiful again because that of that great love, held high upon the cross. This hill became beautiful again because of that man who looked out upon the dust of that brown and broken place and said You are not forsaken. There is nothing so broken in you that I cannot fix. There is nothing so awful in you that I cannot love. There is nothing so dead in you that I cannot revive. There is nothing so sinful in you that I cannot redeem. There is nothing so ugly in you that I cannot admire. For your heart, your flawed, broken, sometimes dusty, sometimes lonely heart, is worth everything to me, for it is mine. And it is a beautiful place.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

3 April 2015 - Good Friday

Saint Mark's, Philadelphia

Cut Your Turf & Hold Your Bog

A couple of years ago, a friend and I were riding horses around the Irish countryside during a summer vacation, and we kept coming across signs posted on telephone poles and fences with these words spelled out in clear, bold, plain letters: Cut Your Turf & Hold Your Bog.  We understood vaguely that these signs must refer in some way to the famous Irish peat bogs, but we couldn’t fathom what the real meaning of the message was: Cut Your Turf & Hold Your Bog.

When we asked locals, we discovered that the signs are a rallying cry in a controversy over land conservation.  The Irish government and the EU have designated some peat bogs as conservation areas, and have banned the collection of peat (which the Irish call “turf”) from those bogs.  Turf has been used for centuries in Ireland as a heating fuel, although as such it is perhaps more a part of Irish heritage than necessity, these days.  The signs we saw represent an odd conflict, since they too call for a kind of conservation: the desire to hold on to a traditional Irish way of life, and the rights to cut turf on land long held by families for that reason.   But bogs take about 100 years to replenish after they’ve been cut.  And these days when most turf is cut by industrial machinery and not by hand, it’s estimated that 40% of Ireland’s bogs have been depleted or destroyed in the last twenty years.  So if you cut your turf, you may not have very much bog to hold on to for very long.

The peat bogs of Ireland hold another fascination, since a great host of unusual objects have been found buried and well-preserved in the peat.  In addition to the cooking vessels, spear heads, jewelry, ancient tools, and crockery you’d expect to hear about, hundreds of barrels of butter have also been found in the bogs – placed there to preserve the butter, then forgotten about I suppose.  A recently discovered well-preserved barrel was dated to be 3,000 years old (though the butter is sadly now past its use-by date).  Most famously, the bogs have given up their dead – ancient human bodies with the skin still intact (preserved by the unique characteristics of the bog environment).  Two years ago the oldest such body ever found was discovered in an Irish bog, and has been judged to be about 4,000 years old.  If you cut your turf and hold your bog, who knows what you will find buried within the dark, wet peat?

The modern Irish poet Seamus Heaney has reflected that “if you go round the National Museum in Dublin, you will realize that a great proportion of the most cherished material heritage of Ireland was ‘found in a bog.’”[i]  But the poet realized that it was not just a material culture that was preserved in the bog, it was something more.  He said, “I began to get an idea of bog as the memory of the landscape, or as a landscape that remembered everything that happened in and to it.”

“A landscape that remembered everything that happened in and to it.”  This is a fascinating idea on Maundy Thursday night, when, whether you know it or not, we are reflecting deeply on our collective Christian memory.  We are, in a sense, digging into the peat bog of Jesus’ story to extract again a crucial part of that story that took place on the night before he was handed over to suffering and death.  More to the point, we are bringing up an ancient Body, and making the claim that a great deal more than the skin is intact.  We are digging into ancient Christian memory, and finding that what we have is not just well-preserved, it is still living.

That, at least, is what the church has long believed she is doing when she follows our Lord’s instruction to “do this in remembrance of me.”  The remembrance, in this case, is not expected to be a mental exercise, or even a tradition of story-telling.  It is, rather, intended as a digging down into the bog to find a memory that has been not only long-preserved but is still breathing, and that was put there deliberately to keep it alive and intact, just like the butter in the bucket.

In a very real sense, this living memory is the energy of the church – certainly it is in this parish.  Whether or not you are here to see it dug up and consumed day by day is hardly the point.  The point is that even when the boiler in the undercroft stops heating the church, as sometimes happens, this fuel keeps burning, this memory keeps breathing, this Body keeps living.

At various times in history it has seemed quaint at best, and downright odd, or at least counter-cultural to cling to this living memory of the Mass, the Eucharist, the way we do in this parish, just as it seems odd to think of the Irish tramping out to the bog to cut turf to burn in their stoves.  Coal and oil and natural gas have long since replaced turf as inexpensive fuels that are far more efficient.  Likewise, there are many aspects of modern life that make the Mass look outmoded, to put it kindly.  But there is something authentic and real about cutting turf, drying it, and bringing it home to burn in the stove: there’s something Irish about it, even if not all the Irish do it anymore, like speaking Gaelic.  And whatever there is that’s Irish about it is made all the more so by the poet’s observation that the turf itself is cut from a landscape that remembers everything that has happened in and to it, a landscape that doesn’t easily let go of the cooking vessels, the spear heads, the jewelry, ancient tools, and crockery, the barrels of butter, or even the bodies.  Which is why the cry goes up to Cut Your Turf & Hold Your Bog!  It’s another way of demanding that the Irish remember what it means to be Irish and not just another far-flung corner of the European Union.

And there is something real and absolutely authentic about what we do here tonight, about coming together at an altar, taking bread, blessing it, breaking it, and sharing it, just as our Lord did, and instructed his followers to do in remembrance of him.  In fact, there may be nothing more authentically Christian than this simple act, this deep memory that we repeat over and over because Jesus expected his disciples to, and so do we.  Gathered together like this, on this night, we become like a part of the landscape that remembers everything that’s happened in and to it.  And we take our spades and dig deeply and directly into the dark, wet peat of Christian memory. 

All kinds of things may come up with the peaty memory.  I think of my grandmother’s funeral mass, and of a Palm Sunday when my mother played the violin, and of a boyhood Easter when my voice soared easily to high B-flats, and of Masses said in the Australian bush, or in churches around Jerusalem.  I treasure these memories; they are the turf that I cut and the bog that I hold. 

And you will have your memories that the Mass connects you to, as well. 

And the church has a larger collection of memories that we bring up with the peat: of papal masses, and crusaders’ masses, and pilgrims’ masses, and nuptial masses, and masses for peace, and for harvests, and for saints, and in monasteries, and palaces, and in country churches, and in catacombs.  All this living memory comes up when we dig into the peat tonight: the landscape that remembers.  But that is not the half of it.

Tonight of all nights we dig that spade into the sweet spot of the bog that holds the memory of that first supper, and we bring up the Body.  There is nothing more fundamentally, authentically Christian than this act, and the corporate memory that comes with it. 

Bringing up the Body of Christ from the landscape of his church, from the dark, wet bog of the Mass, we do not marvel at how wonderfully preserved that Body is after all these years.  No, we rejoice to behold again and again that he is alive and with us (nothing else could account for this long, living memory)! And un-like the Irish bogs, we need not fear that we can exhaust the supply of God’s grace – for it is inexhaustible.

To do this day after day is to hold on to, live into, and to refuse to let go of the thing that makes us who we really are, and that is so much more than a memory.  To do this is to Cut Your Turf & Hold Your Bog.

Cut Your Turf & Hold Your Bog!  Return again to this landscape that remembers everything that has happened in and on it!  Reach out your hand to take a morsel of the dark, wet turf that is given for you!  Hold on to this memory!  Bring up the Body!  Taste and see: there is nothing here well-preserved!  For this is Life itself!  Thanks be to God! 

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Maundy Thursday 2015

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

[i] Seamus Heaney, “Feeling into Words,” A lecture given at the Royal Society of Literature, October, 1974