Going Nowhere

Have you noticed that we don’t seem to be going anywhere?  On the one hand, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, this summer has been uncommonly full of coming and going.  There have been vacations and honeymoons and family trips and departures and arrivals.  A wonderful group of Servant Year interns has disbanded now, and moved out of the rectory.  Even our special two, Ellen and James, have moved on to new adventures.   We are so fortunate that a new group will be arriving soon, and that Noah, who will serve as our new verger, is already here with us.  Matt Glandorf and Daryl Roland have both left us, a true loss, and now we are preparing to welcome Simon Thomas Jacobs.  A new chapter is beginning, and this is splendid news.  Mother Marie spent her last Sunday here with us last week, which I find just unthinkable, though I know this next chapter in her life will be a great blessing to her and to her family.

Yes, we have all been going places, for better or worse.  And the summer is flying by, and before we know it Pope Francis will be arriving and apparently residents of Philadelphia will be fleeing in droves as though it were Armageddon.  Apparently we can’t bear the fact that during that weekend there will be restrictions on travel.  I for one think it sounds like a foretaste of heaven to imagine this city without cars, and with an enormous, jubilant crowd celebrating the Eucharist on the Parkway.  I’d like the city to be like this every Sunday.  Get rid of all the cars!  Hold a gigantic Mass!  Best thing that ever happened in the City of Brotherly Love!  But all around me I hear choruses of Philadelphians singing “Don’t Fence Me In.” 

So yes, this is a very mobile community and we Americans are a mobile people, and this parish is constantly on the move.  Any restriction of our mobility makes us distinctly nervous.

But I’ve said we are going nowhere, and this is what I mean: no matter who comes and who goes, no matter where we all travel, in the Gospels for the latter part of this summer we just seem to be hearing over and over again that Jesus is the bread of life. 

Have you noticed?  I hope you have noticed.  If you haven’t yet you will soon.  Two weeks ago, on July 26, we began reading the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John, in which Jesus fed five thousand people with five loaves and two fishes.  Last week, we continued with the sixth chapter of John, and Jesus told us “I am the bread of life.”  This week, in in the sixth chapter of John, Jesus tells us he is the bread of life.  Spoiler alert: next week, in sixth chapter of John, Jesus will tell us he is the living bread that came down from heaven. That brings us to August 23, when Jesus will tell us that those who eat his flesh and drink his blood abide in him and he in them. Which is to say that he is the bread of life.  I bet you know what chapter that’s from.  For five weeks we are going nowhere while Jesus shows us and then tells us that he is the bread of life. 

Going nowhere.  It’s striking, isn’t it?  I’m thinking about proposing this as a motto for our parish: “Saint Mark’s, Going Nowhere.”  It’s so dynamic.  I can’t wait to share it with the Rector when he returns.  He’s going to love it.  

But really, why on earth would the church ask us to go nowhere this summer?  Why hold still for five weeks while Jesus talks about being bread?  Why fence us in like anxious Philadelphians deprived of our cars while the Bread of Heaven is being consecrated in our midst?  The liturgical year normally takes us on a journey from the birth of Christ through his earthly ministry, his passion, death, resurrection, and ascension.  Advent to Pentecost.  Why now, in ordinary time, are we asked to hold perfectly still as the narrative fails to advance and the Gospel grinds to a halt and Jesus stands before us repeating himself: “I am bread, I am bread, I am bread?”

Ian Morgan Cron, an Episcopal priest and writer, says in an interview that when he was about halfway through writing his most recent memoir he began to ask himself what it was that had held his life together through so many changes (http://www.theworkofthepeople.com/the-bread-and-the-wine).  He says he came to the realization that it was the Eucharist that was holding him together.  He saw that the moments of his life were like pearls, and he saw that the Eucharist was the string on which they were being threaded, one at a time.  Each Communion, each Mass he attended: his life was progressing forward one day at a time but the Eucharist was gathering those moments together in an unbroken chain of abiding in Christ. 

If we are fortunate enough to have been receiving Communion for many years, and especially if we take the opportunity to receive Communion daily, we too may become aware of this string of pearls that is our Eucharistic life with Jesus.  Each one holy and beautiful, full and round, moving forward in an unbroken chain.  The luster of each pearl reminding us of God’s radiant love.  Each one the same, constant, even as we grow and change and turn away and come back and sense God’s presence or fail to note it.  God feeding us again and again, always with the same care, the same urgency, the same kindness and concern.  “This is my body which is given for you.” 

And though we have gotten older and we have changed addresses and denominations and partners and hairstyles and careers, this feeding has never changed.  “I am the bread of life,” Jesus says to us when we are in despair.  And when we are joyful he says “I am the bread of life.”  And when we come to him filled with fear and doubt what he says to us is “I am the bread of life.” 

And in this unchanging string of pearls we are lifted up out of time.  “I will raise them up,” Jesus says, “on the last day.”  But the last day is already happening when we reach out our hands to receive the bread of life.  We are already being raised up into eternal life at that heavenly banquet.  Each Communion is a foretaste of the life to come, just as it is also a return to the days of the Passover and the manna that came down from heaven for the wandering people of Israel.  Every time we eat this bread and drink this cup, we experience the Eucharist as a little bit of eternity here in our world of changing times.

Go where we will, in Jesus we are going (wonderfully) nowhere.  Because he feeds us with his own life in an unbroken succession of loving banquets, we are forever at his table.  No matter how uncertain our future, we know that our destination is that same lovely banquet we have been attending all along.  In the fullness of that banquet, in the unbroken luster of that presence, we can feel Jesus gathering us up, what we are, what we have been, what we will become.  Through change and loss and departures and arrivals, our fate is secure.  We abide in him and he in us.

Thanks be to God.

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson

9 August 2015

Saint Mark's, Philadelphia

Flesh and Blood

I’m guessing that we’ve all had the experience of having a sudden inability to remember what it is we’re supposed to be saying, of forgetting words that we’ve said a thousand times, stumbling over phrases that we know we know by heart. Without any warning, when we’re called upon to say them, we find that we suddenly can’t remember the words to the national anthem, or the Gloria or, occasionally in my case, the words of the collect for purity. Where once there was a well-established pattern of text, suddenly there is just an enormous blank page, and the more we think about it, the less likely we are to come up with the right combination of sounds and syllables to get that pattern started again.

One of my colleagues in seminary had this happen to her when she was serving as a new seminarian at a large church in D.C. She had only just begun her field education work there, and she was assigned to the chalice during their very large 11:00 Service of Holy Eucharist. She was nervous, a bit, trying to make sure she followed the right priest and paten, trying not to skip anyone, and, of course, desperately trying not to spill wine all down the front of someone’s Sunday best. She was so nervous, in fact, that she was several rows into her chalice-bearing that she realized that the words coming out of her mouth didn’t sound exactly right. When her brain finally tuned into what her mouth was doing, what she heard was horrifying. She was going down the row, person after person, sip after sip, saying, “The cup of blood. The cup of blood. The cup of blood.” But then once she heard what she was saying, she could of course in no way remember what she was supposed to be saying. The Blood of Christ, the cup of salvation was as far away from her lips as the moon from Miami. So she just kept saying, “The cup of blood, the cup of blood, the cup of blood,” all the while apologizing in her heart for repeating this phrase that was so…well…gross.

Because gross it is, ladies and gentlemen, gross it is. It is a cup of blood that we’re offered at the altar, right after we’re fed from a heaping plate of flesh. In today’s Gospel passage that continues on in the sixth chapter of John, Jesus ups the ick factor considerably. He’s been talking for weeks now about bread: I am the bread of life, the bread that comes down from heaven, the true manna that gives eternal life. Bread, bread, bread. But now, just when everyone’s mouths are set to watering by all of this bread talk, Jesus throws in the zinger. I am the living bread that came down from heaven, he says, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. Er…eww… And he goes on, telling his listeners that they need to eat his flesh and drink his blood – and not just eat and drink it like one might sip tea out of fine china with one pinky raised, but chew on it and gulp it down. His language is visceral here, raw. Take a big ol’ bite and a giant slug of me, he says, and we will abide together forever.

This kind of language is just trouble. It got Jesus in trouble then, as the religious leaders who heard this repulsive talk openly challenged him to explain himself. After all, what he was proposing was not only, well, gross, it also went directly against Levitical law, which contained clear prohibitions against drinking the blood of any animal, against forcibly taking an animal’s life force in this greedy and presumptive way. It got Jesus in trouble then, and it got his followers in trouble centuries later, as it led to Christian persecution based on false (but understandable) claims of cannibalism and bizarre stories of babies baked into communion bread. And it gets us in trouble now, when we find ourselves stumbling around our own theological language for what really happens at the altar. Like last week at our choir camp, when one of our youngest campers looked at me with wide eyes and said with all sincerity, “You shouldn’t drink blood. I don’t think it’s good for you.” I offered some thoughts about how all of this works – about wine and prayer and the real presence of Christ – but honestly, he looked less than convinced.

It’s interesting that Jesus doesn’t seem particularly concerned about explaining the mechanics of all of this. When the religious leaders ask aloud, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” Jesus answers them not with the how, but with the why. Take my flesh because then you will have life in you, because then you can have eternal life, be risen up on the last day, live forever. All good news indeed, but he just keeps pounding out that word – the flesh of the Son of Man, eat my flesh, my flesh is true food. Flesh, flesh, flesh. And is it just me, or is flesh is a word that just gives you the willies. You wouldn’t want a waiter to talk to you about the expertly seared flesh of the cow you were about to eat or the soft flesh of the salmon that’s being prepared for you. Call it a steak, please, or a filet – call it meat, maybe, but not flesh. Flesh is something that quivers or decays, something other and entirely unappetizing.

But flesh is the word Jesus uses here, and Jesus, of course, knows exactly what he’s doing. Because it was flesh that the Israelites craved in the wilderness, the fleshpots of Egypt that they missed with all of their leeks and garlic and meat. It was flesh that the Israelites longed for in the desert instead of just manna. And so Jesus tells his followers that not only is he the true bread that comes down from heaven like manna on the fields, but that his own flesh will satisfy their longings for rich, lasting food. All desires will be satisfied – bread and manna, flesh and meat.

But that word flesh also reminds us of something else – something early and new, a promise made in the prologue to John’s Gospel, that Jesus is not just a prophet or a healer or a feeder or a teacher but God made man – the Word become flesh, human, real, the stuff of you and me. And so when John tells us that Jesus offers us his flesh to eat, he is tying all of his great Gospel together, reminding us that the flesh and blood of the Eucharist is the same flesh and blood of the Incarnation. The flesh born in Bethlehem is the same flesh offered to you and me, on the cross and on the altar.

And this is beautiful. This is glorious. This is a message of powerful, potent hope, of light in the darkness, of God’s purpose being worked out in miraculous and humbling ways. And this is so utterly magnificent that the how of the flesh offered in bread and the blood offered in wine pales in the real presence of the wonder of it all. And Jesus invites us into the very heart of this great mystery – not just to observe it like a snapshot on Instagram but to sit down and to eat, to take this very mystery of God made flesh and flesh given freely into our own weak, undeserving flesh, to absorb this holiness into our own being, to digest it and let it fill us with energy and life. Jesus’ flesh and blood are true food and true drink, a pathway that opens the door for us to abide deeply in him and for him to abide deeply in us.

 And so sit and eat. Hear Jesus tell you to take his flesh and his blood, to take all of it. Eat every morsel and drain the cup to the dregs. Treat this meal less like a delicate sandwich offered on fine china at high tea and more like a hearty stew that you eat by the heaping spoonful and sop up with crusty brown bread. Take it – consume it all, and then come back tomorrow or the next day and consume it again. Find here something true and lasting to gnaw on, something well-aged and wondrous to gulp down. Open your own beautiful, fleshy body to the mystery of the incarnation and the Eucharist and let it abide there, deep within you, this great gift of God that frankly makes no earthly sense but that makes all the difference in the world. Feast on this flesh, on the scandalous self-offering of God and know that when we feel that sense of scandal or shock at what looks like too much love, or too great a gift, or too large a tent, or too intimate an embrace, it’s a pretty good sign that God is there, moving in the world, moving us, showing us what the kingdom of God actually looks like. True food and true drink. A plate of flesh. A cup of blood. Words and a meal to remember.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

16 August 2015

Saint Mark's, Philadelphia

Is Jesus Good for You?

An acquaintance recently confided that although he had been a Christian all his life, these days (in his middle-age years) he approaches his faith and his religion with all kinds of questions.  I think he expected me to be taken aback by this revelation, as though it were an admission of weakness, and a confession of a failing.  To the contrary, I think it is good and normal to approach both religion and faith with questions at various times of your life – maybe your whole life long.  And one of the most fundamental of those questions is floating near the surface of the Gospel reading this morning, although it may not be immediately evident.

After Jesus’ miraculous feeding of five thousand people with five loaves and two fish, a crowd came looking for him, and they were hungry for something.  “What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing?” As though he had not just miraculously fed five thousand people out of thin air, more or less.

Jesus told the clamoring crowd that “the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” 

“Great!” they replied, “give us this bread always.”  And Jesus famously declared to the fickle crowd, in a phrase that would prove to be awkward to set to music, “I am the bread of life.”

“I am the bread of life!”  This is fine as far as it goes.  And we could stand around and wonder what exactly Jesus means by this, except that it is pretty clear from the context that he means that he is the very thing that gives hope in the face of hopelessness, spiritual nourishment in the face of inner starvation, and everlasting life in the face of meaningless death.

There remains a more pressing question, however, that was the underlying issue behind the crowd’s clamoring.  It’s a question that was as poignant a couple of thousand years ago as it is to us today, and that question is this: If Jesus is the bread of life, is Jesus good for you?

Is Jesus good for you?

It is no longer so clear, for instance, that bread is good for you.  I, for one, realize that the less bread I eat the better off I will be – although I love bread and butter, or bread and cheese, or bread and nearly anything.  Unless I am walking the Camino de Santiago and burning calories at a rate of knots, bread equals carbs, and I cannot take it for granted that bread is so good for me.

There was a time, I think, maybe, when people did not have to think much about whether or not Jesus was good for you; just like there was a time when people did not have to think much about whether or not bread is good for you.  But those days are over.  We don’t take very much for granted these days, not even things we once thought were good for us, like butter, or salt, or gluten.  And if Jesus is going to run around telling people that he is the bread of life – or if he expects us to run around telling people that he is the bread of life, then we are probably going to ask at some level, is Jesus good for us?  Does Jesus make us better people?  Does he make us healthier, nicer, smarter?  Do we end up with shinier coats and cleaner teeth?  Does Jesus confer any moral superiority on us?  Do we become better parents, spouses, or workers as a result of our relationship with Jesus?  Will we be any happier because of Jesus?  Any more patient, any prettier, any more virtuous?  Is Jesus good for you?

Many people seem to have concluded that Jesus is not good for them or for you.  To begin with Jesus is so judgmental – or at least he threatens to be.  And nothing is more offensive to a large segment of modern American society than someone who seems judgmental.  “Don’t judge” has become a maxim for our time that requires no further expansion, since its wisdom is unquestioned.  Many people conclude, from the evidence around them, that, in fact, Jesus is not good for you, because he makes you narrow-minded, intolerant, and stupid, if you follow his teachings and belong to his church.  Zen makes you more compassionate, but Jesus makes you a doofus, to put it kindly.

Is Jesus good for you?  By no means is the answer to this question clear to the world, and sometimes not even to the church!  It would appear that what we need are some studies, what we need is some data, what we need is some empirical evidence about whether or not Jesus is good for you; just like we need studies, data, and evidence to determine whether or not gluten is good for you.

The problem is that if we can’t figure out whether or not bread is good for us at this stage of human development, then we will have at least as hard a time figuring out whether or not Jesus is good for us.  Experts will disagree.  The data will be inconclusive.  The studies will be assumed to have been rigged by those who commissioned them.  And ten years from now the conventional wisdom may shift, as it may shift again ten years after that, and ten years after that, etc., etc.  And still the question remains, Is Jesus good for you?

It is tempting to say that the answer depends: that it depends on who you are and what you want in life, out of this world.  Do you want mercy, forgiveness, kindness, justice, peace, generosity, and hope?  Then Jesus is good for you.  It is tempting to throw the ball back in your court like this, as if the question depends on you.  And we often like this way of looking at things because it confirms our sneaking suspicion that the universe revolves around each one of us individually.  By this thinking, Jesus is good for you if you are good for Jesus.  And I suppose that’s alright, as far as it goes.  You do your thing; I’ll do mine.  Go ahead and follow Jesus if you have nothing better to do with your Sunday mornings.  Jesus is good for you if you are good for Jesus.

But this doesn’t sound like tremendously good news to me.  It sounds like pretty good news, or not… depending on you.  And if that’s so, then this way of looking at things doesn’t really tell you anything at all about Jesus.

Is Jesus good for you?

Well, this pulpit is here for a reason, and the reason is this: so that Sunday by Sunday someone may stand here and proclaim that, yes, Jesus is good for you!  Jesus is light, and water, and love, amid a shadowy, parched landscape of fear and distrust.  Light, and water, and love.  The virtues of these elements do not depend on you or on me.  We need them, and they exist in the world by the grace of God: light, and water, and love.  And although we have become a species able to adapt without them for long periods of time, we do so at our own peril.  We stumble over the question, is Jesus good for me? at our own peril, too.

A long time ago, Moses -who had probably had a dysfunctional childhood, and who, as a young man had anger issues so severe that he casually committed murder with his bare hands - found himself face to face (more or less) with God, who appeared to him in a burning bush.  Jesus was there in the bush, whether Moses knew it or not, he was there in the gentle flames that did not consume the bush, and he was there in the voice that spoke to Moses, even if his accent was undetectable to Moses within the thunderous sonorities of God’s voice.

Confused and frightened though he may have been, Moses sensed that whomever this Being was who was speaking to him, he was powerful.  But Moses had seen power before around the courts of Pharoah, and he knew that power was not inherently good.  He’d felt power before in his own hands when he killed a man, and he knew that power was not inherently good.

So here he is facing this powerful Being, whose power is capable of being so soft that it burns with bright flame that nevertheless does not consume the bush.  And Moses must have asked himself, as he took off his shoes because the ground on which he stood was holy, he must have asked, is this good for me?  He did not yet know that God would lead him and all the Israelites out of slavery.  He did not yet know that God had a promised land flowing with milk and honey to bring him to.  He did not yet know that God would give him commandments of love and justice, and that he, Moses, would forever be associated with those laws.  He only knew that here was this caressing flame, and this powerful voice, and this Presence that was so alluring, so gentle, and so strong.  And I think he must have wondered, Is this good for me?

But you can’t ask a burning bush a question like that; you can’t ask the voice of God a thing like that.  So instead, he asks this: “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?”

And God said to Moses, “I AM…   Tell them I AM has sent me to you.”

You can learn a lot from a burning bush – I wish there were more of them.

For I believe that the answer to the question - is Jesus good for you? - is to be found within the burning bush.

Is Jesus good for you?  I AM, comes the reply, we know not whence – from some caressing flame that burns within the branches of the church, and yet never consumes us.

Over the next several weeks, the church wades around in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel, which seems to hear the evangelist repeating over and over Jesus’ declaration that “I am the bread of life: I am.” 

I suppose St. John, too, knew of the pertinence of this question: Is Jesus good for you?  I suppose we are not the first ones to ask it.  Of course in his day, gluten intolerance was as yet unknown, and bread, the staff of life, was an unambiguous gift of the earth and of human labor.  And what they didn’t know about gluten, they made up for with what they knew about burning bushes, and about the name of the One who called them out of darkness into his marvelous light, out of a parched desert of slavery across a river of freedom, and out of a life of fear and distrust into a life of love.

What did he tell Moses his name was? I AM.  I AM.  I AM.

And when they heard Jesus tell them over and over again, “I am the bread of life.  I am the bread of life.  I am the bread of life.” as John asserts in his Gospel that Jesus repeated again and again, did they not hear the echoes of that holy Name?  And recognize at last the accent once unrecognizable in the burning bush?  And when they asked themselves, as Moses did, and as we do too, and as everyone with questions about faith and religion must do in this complicated world – Is he good for us?  Is Jesus good for us? – did they wink at each other with knowing looks as the answer became so clear: I AM.  I AM.  I AM the bread of life.  I AM.

Is Jesus good for you?

Don’t take my word for it.  Listen to the One who spoke once from the burning bush, and again in the synagogue of Capernaum, and today, I pray, right here on Locust Street.  Is Jesus good for you?

I AM, he says, I am the bread of life.  I AM.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

2 August 2015

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia