The Broken-hearted Savior

Recently I listened in as two men chatted about the sufferings of life and the loss of loved ones.  Each had experienced a tragically painful loss in his life.  One had lost a spouse and an infant child to a car accident, and had recently experienced the death of another child.  The other had years ago lost his father and two of his brothers in a plane crash.  Maybe you were listening too, to Vice President Joe Biden, and to Stephen Colbert on late night TV last week.[i]  And maybe you were struck, as I was, by the wonderfully acerbic expression that Stephen Colbert attributes to his mother in the face of such suffering: “What’s the use of being Irish if you don’t know that life is going to break your heart?”  Indeed!

Well, the Irish have not cornered the market in broken hearts, even if they have set a high standard for wearing those broken hearts on their sleeves.  There are plenty of broken hearts to go around for every family, language, people, and nation.  But the next time I return to Ireland I will try that line out in the pub.  What’s the use of being Irish if you don’t know that life is going to break your heart? For today, however, let me borrow Mrs. Colbert’s pithy observation and apply it even more broadly: what’s the use of being a Christian if you don’t know that life is going to break your heart?  Can you hear Jesus asking that question, when he calls out to anyone who will listen to him: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” This is not happy stuff!  This is hard news to hear, and Jesus knows we don’t want to hear it.  Why else would he ask the next ridiculous question he asks: “For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?”  This is a timely question in latter day America: what would it profit you to gain the whole world but forfeit your life?  Most of us could find an easy answer to this question: I don’t know, we’d say, but I’d sure be interested in finding out!  Just how much money are we talking about anyway…?

But Jesus is all but telling his would-be followers that if they follow him they need not expect riches, fame, glory, or success – all of which were at least as appealing obsessions back then as they are now.  He might as well have said, What’s the point of following me if you don’t know that life is going to break your heart? Because, of course, life is going to break your heart.  There are broken hearts here today, I know, for sure.  The real question is whether or not there are any hearts here that haven’t been broken?  If so, I’m afraid the bad news is that life is going to break your heart.  Maybe it won’t be a car accident, or a plane crash.  Maybe it won’t even be death.  It could be lost love, failed business, a crippling addiction, a degenerative illness, a war that drives you from your homeland, or who knows what.  Irish or not, life is going to break your heart.  I suppose you could phrase the question still more broadly: What’s the point of being a human if you don’t know that life is going to break your heart?

When Jesus starts talking this way, it does not go over well.  Peter, for one, thinks the message needs a bit of re-tooling, and he tells Jesus as much. But Peter is young, and his heart, I suppose, had not yet been broken.  And when Jesus predicts that the Son of Man (by which he means himself) would undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, Peter can’t follow his thinking, he can’t even listen to the end of the sentence.  After all, how could the Messiah have a broken heart?  The anointed one of God must be a winner, a champion, a victor, a hero; not a schlub whose humiliated heart is broken in shameful disgrace and defeat.  Peter doesn’t see the point.

But it’s a point that those whose hearts have been broken are able to see.  The point is that Jesus’ heart is broken too.  It’s broken when his dear friend Lazarus dies.  It’s broken by his religion and its leaders who disappoint him and fail their own people.  It’s broken by his fiercest friend who denies even knowing him when the going gets tough.  It’s broken by his neighbors, friends, and kinsman in Nazareth.  It’s broken by an un-just system that arrests him, and flogs him, and eventually kills him, not because he is guilty of anything, but because it is expedient to treat him thus.  Yes, Jesus’ heart is broken too.  Like a wise and loving teacher, he told his disciples that his heart was breaking, just like theirs.

Peter couldn’t hear him, and he speaks for all the people who don’t want to hear him, who want a winner in their corner, not a fellow-sufferer.[ii] And Jesus might have said, What’s the point of being the Messiah if you don’t know that life is going to break your heart?  But instead he said to Peter, “Get thee behind me, Satan,” which, to my reading, amounts to pretty much the same thing, under the circumstances. Because Jesus actually has more to say about that than Mrs. Colbert, if only Peter would stop and listen.  Once my heart is thoroughly broken – as broken or more-so than every human heart - Jesus says, then I will rise again.  Yes, my heart will be broken, but I will rise again.

This morning we have the great joy of welcoming an infant child, Teddy, into the household of God as we baptize her. In a few minutes I will stand at the font and sing about the water in it and what that water means to us.  And if you listen closely you will hear me sing these odd and somewhat off-putting words about the water: “in it we are buried with Christ in his death.”  Why would I sing such a thing?  It sounds so dark and deadly, not at all the kind of thing you want to sing around a child.  You might as well sing, “What’s the point of being baptized if you don’t know that life is going to break you heart?”  And this is not the kind of song one generally sings to children (unless, perhaps, you are Irish).

But the Christian faith is not merely a proclamation of sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows.  The Christian faith is a proclamation of sunshine that dawns after the darkest night; of sweetness that soothes the bitterest taste; and of a rainbow that appears after the murderous devastation of storm, flood, and disaster. The Christian faith is placed in a Savior who rises in solidarity with every broken-hearted human, only after his heart has been broken, too; whose resurrected life is lived only after he has passed through the veil of suffering and death; whose divine power of love is most perfectly displayed in his moment of greatest weakness on the Cross. For not only are we buried with Christ in his death in the water of baptism.  By it we also share in his resurrection, and through it we are reborn by the Holy Spirit! What’s the point of being a Christian if you don’t know that life is going to break your heart?

Life is going to break your heart and mine – probably more than once.  And it is a broken-hearted Savior who calls to us, and tells us that if we want to follow him we should bring our broken hearts with us, and be prepared to have them broken again – that’s what it means to deny yourself and take up your cross: it means to follow the way of heartbreak, and not to be afraid of it. For we know what Peter did not know – that only a broken-hearted Savior can truly save the broken-hearted.  Only a Son of Man who has known deep suffering can redeem the bottomless suffering of this world.  And only a Messiah who has lost everything and died a shameful death of disgrace can win real victory that triumphs over death.

In a widely read recent profile, Stephen Colbert, talked about the death of his father and his brothers, and referred to a letter of J.R.R. Tolkien’s, in which the great English author responds to the objection that he seems to treat death not as a punishment for original sin but as a gift. Colbert says that “Tolkien says in a letter back [to his critic]: ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’”[iii] Although Tolkien didn’t exactly write those words, they are probably close enough.[iv]  And they surely point us to the Cross, that looks for all the world like a severe punishment (no matter how artfully you dress it up), the condemnation of a loser, and that certainly sounds like a punishment when Jesus tells his followers to take up their crosses and follow him. Until you stop and are patient enough to listen to end of the sentence, to hear Jesus promise that he will rise; and you learn that the Cross is the surest way, the only way, to the Resurrection, and it always points the way to new life – and always for those whose hearts are broken. 

What’s the point of being a Christian if you don’t know that life is going to break your heart? Take up your Cross – that gift of God’s – and see it for the gift that it is, and follow Jesus, and let his broken heart make your heart whole again.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

13 September 2015

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

[i] The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Thursday, 10 Sept 2015

[ii] You know the type.

[iii] Joel Lovell, “The Late, Great Stephen Colbert,” in GQ, August 2015

[iv] It seems likely that Colbert is referring to Letter 212 in Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien.  “A divine ‘punishment’ is also a divine gift.”

Sermon for the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost

“He has done all things well.”

It's very good to be here in Philadelphia, a city we've never had the opportunity to visit before, and to be here in St. Mark's.  This is the return match, as Fr. Sean preached for us at All Saints, Margaret Street on Ascension Day.

Philadelphia is preparing to welcome another and much for famous visiting preacher. Pope Francis is a Jesuit and so is steeped in the spirituality of St. Ignatius Loyola. In his teaching the imagination is one of the principal ways in which we enter into the meaning of the Gospel and the Gospel enters into us; enabling us to see what God is calling us to do and shaping our Christian lives.

Imagination—the ability to thinks ourselves, “in our mind's eye,” into the situation of another—is one of our most neglected faculties. Of course, it needs to be tempered by reasons—otherwise it becomes more fantasy than reality—but like the artist or the poet or the musician, it enables us to see beyond our own world.

This morning, I want you to imagine you're in the Rectory with Fr. Sean. It's the Rector's day off after a long and busy week. He's just about to go out for the day when the doorbell rings. You see him answer it.  Perhaps it's one of those people who turn up at clergy house doors needing a meal, a bed for the night, a ticket home. But no, it's a well-dressed, respectable-looking lady who seems to have a genuine reason to want to see a priest.

Now, you have always known Fr. Sean as a kind a sympathetic priest: ever ready to lend a sympathetic ear or to turn out to visit the sick and dying at any hour of the day or night – not the type who only works office hours.

So, imagine how you would react if you heard him tell the woman to get lost, and worse still, to do this in insulting language related to her social or ethnic status, to go away and not bother him. You would not think that he had “done all things well.”

And, just as you would be shocked to hear one of your clergy speaking like this, and think they ought to be hauled up in front of the bishop for a dressing down, so it is a shock to hear Jesus' response to the Syro-Phoenician woman in today's gospel: using a familiar ethnic insult of the time, calling her a 'dog'.  This does not sound like some who “has done all things well,” either.

It's rather like our prime minister who has been in trouble for calling desperate refugees fleeing war and persecution in the Middle East “swarms” as if they are not people but locusts; or one of your presidential hopefuls – the one with the bizarre hairstyle - calling all Mexican immigrants drug dealers or rapists;  or one of your more extreme political commentators calling the President as a “retard” - and so managing to insult not only him – which was her intention - but all those people with learning difficulties to whom that demeaning term used to be applied.  We might expect politicians and commentators to pander to people's worst instincts in pursuit of votes, but we expect better of the clergy and most certainly of Jesus.

There was a time in my country when slum landlords would put up signs which read: “No dogs, not Irish.”  When immigrants from the West Indies began, they added: “No Blacks.”

So, what are we to make of Jesus's behaviour in this incident? If you are puzzled, you are in good company. People have long struggled with it. Scholars have spilt vast quantities of ink on this passage, and as scholars do, they don't always agree. 

Jesus has been in a running battle with pious critics about dietary and purity laws. He has slipped out of Galilee into southern Lebanon, the territory of Tyre and Sidon, for some time off, a bit of peace and quiet, a retreat with his disciples. So we can well imagine that, on a human level, this intrusion might not be welcome. His disciples might not have reacted favourably to the arrival of this persons who was not only a woman—men would not usually speak to women outside their family circle—but a foreigner? The disciples would probably have been happy to see her sent away.

This region had a mixed population – like some in the Middle East or the Balkans to day – a tinder box of communal resentments.  The Jews there seem to have been very much the second-class citizens with little reason to love their social betters: hence the proverbial description of them as “dogs.”  

A detail suggests that this is a woman of some standing, a lady: her daughter sleeps on a couch, not a sleeping mat on the floor.  She is probably used to commanding her social inferiors.   She belonged to a social class whose wealth and power was probably resented by a Jewish population dependent on them for employment. Nor, in the normal run of things, would she have had much time for poor Jews.   But now she is desperate for her daughter and love drives her across boundaries of class and race.

One of the disadvantages we face in understanding this passage, imagining our way into it, is that we cannot hear the tone of voice or see the expressions of those involved in the dialogue.  Professor Willie Barclay, who used teach at the University of Glasgow and wrote a series of popular commentaries on the New Testament, suggested that Jesus might have said this with an ironic smile on his face. 

More suspicious modern commentators reject this: reluctant to be seen letting Jesus off the hook of political and theological correctness.  But we know from other incidents in the gospels that Jesus was a master of argument and wordplay.  Might he not have been using a familiar ethnic insult in an ironic way? 

Those modern critics are not doing something entirely new. No less a figure than Martin Luther thought this woman had got the better of Jesus in the argument with her clever riposte: “Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs which fall from the children's table.”  She brings Jesus to a deeper understanding of the implications of his mission: its universal scope. This argument takes seriously the humanity of Jesus and its self-imposed limitations: Jesus learns as he goes along. In this case he learns from the woman.

As we seek to understand this awkward episode, it helps to see it in the context of both the ministry of Jesus and the mission of the early church.  It's clear from the gospels that though there had already been exceptions, the former was largely limited to Jewish territory and Jewish people.

When Mark is writing, the church is split between those who see its message and mission as limited to Jews or those willing to become Jewish, and those who saw that the gospel was universal:  for all peoples.  Mark does not abandon the priority of the Jewish mission, and of the role of the Jewish people in the history of salvation: we are all the children of Abraham; we are all Jews. The woman is content to receive the crumbs which fall from the children's table.  But he does believe the Gospel is for all—that faith, as demonstrated by this woman is possible for all—so he uses this story to root the Gentile mission in that of Jesus.

How much do we believe that the Gospel and the Church is for all, and not just for people like us?  How willing are we to be challenged by the Syro-Phoenician woman and those she represents?

Mark does not tell us whether the man who is deaf and has a speech impediment is a Gentile or a Jew, although he does give Jesus a rather roundabout route back to Galilee.  In any case, Jew or Gentile, the poor man who would have been excluded from society by his disability – as many still are today.  Disability then was not just physical affliction but the consequence of sin. So when Jesus heals the man, he is not enabled to hear and speak – but he is restored to a proper place in community.

How far are we willing to have our ears opened to hear the Gospel and then to speak it to others? Are we willing to cross boundaries to speak the Gospel to people who are not like us?

The Letter of James also deals with responding to visitors.  In this case to two very different people who turn up at church: one rich and powerful, dressed in style—designer toga and expensive jewelry; the other poor, powerless, shabby and a bit smelly.

So, now, I want you to imagine that you are in church. That shouldn't be difficult, because we are in church!  Imagine that you are sitting at the back and can see people coming in and the ushers welcoming them.

The usher welcoming folk responds in very different ways.  The rich man is welcomed effusively, even sycophantically; shown to a good seat: “Do come in, so pleased to see you. Come and sit here where you'll be comfortable and you will be able to hear the sermon.”    But the poor man barely gets a welcome at all:  “Well, if you must come in, you can sit over there on that step at the back.”

James condemns such blatant discrimination in no uncertain terms.  How care they call themselves Christians and behave like this?  Can't they see that they are breaking the “royal law of love:” the law of the kingdom of God.  That law is summarized by Jesus in the Gospel as love of God and neighbour.  He brings together the command to love God, and the command to love neighbour in the Book of Leviticus, which also prohibits discrimination against the poor on account of their appearance. This is in stark contrast to the law and way of the world.

But he does not just condemn them for their treatment of the poor man but for the way they treat the rich man too.  This would be especially shocking in a society in which people often had to depend on a patron, someone rich and powerful, for benefits and advancement, patronage and protection – think of Don Corleone in “The Godfather.”  Such a relationship breeds subservience and obsequience. 

While that social system may have gone, or at least been weakened, there is a temptation for clergy and church officials to 'kowtow' to the rich when they have a fund-raising appeal or just to bridge that gap in the budget.  After all, that grand-looking person could be another Mr. Wanamaker who might give you another silver altar!

Our church in the West End of London is open all day and every day.  Some people come in to worship and pray; some to admire its architecture and decoration; some out of curiosity. Others come because they are living on the streets of our city and they need somewhere to get warm and dry and to sleep.

Last summer, we allowed a young homeless woman called Lisa, who was expecting a baby, and her boyfriend Leon, to sleep in the church. My colleague Fr. Michael and I had discovered out that they were heroin addicts on methadone and we had tried, without much success, to provide some help and advice.  The baby was due in September and Theresa and I had already gone on holiday to France in the middle of August, when Fr. Michael emailed us to tell us that during the Saturday morning mass, Lisa had slipped out of church into the courtyard because her waters had broken. Some Chinese ladies on their way to the Buddhist temple along the street heard her crying out in the pains of labour and called an ambulance. This arrived in time for the paramedics to deliver the baby safely; attended by Fr. Michael and the Buddhist ladies.

The baby—whom the mother had called “Angel” because she was born at a church—was taken into care immediately and after a few weeks in hospital she went to foster carers. Meanwhile, the congregation had given money, clothes and toys for her, which were delivered to the hospital.  We thought we would hear no more of her, but her foster carers got in touch and brought her to church to meet us and take photos so that she would have an album of her history.  And recently, we heard that she has now been adopted.

Now it would not be true so say that all our parishioners, or even the clergy, find giving shelter to street people easy.  They can be disruptive, messy and occasionally frightening and violent.  But the truth of what the Letter to the Hebrews says about not neglecting to practice hospitality because we might be entertaining angels unawares, was amply demonstrated for us by baby Angel.

Fr. Alan Moses

September 7, 2015

Words of Eternal Life

I heard an interview on the radio this week that maybe some of you heard too (http://www.npr.org/2015/08/21/433478728/one-lawyers-fight-for-young-blacks-and-just-mercy).  The lawyer Bryan Stevenson, now head of the Equal Justice Initiative, was talking about what happened to him one night outside his middle-class apartment in Atlanta, when he was sitting in his car listening to music and getting a few papers together for the next morning.  Stevenson, who is black and was in his twenties at the time—a recent graduate of Harvard Law School—saw a police car approach and wondered why they were there.  He quickly realized that they were there because he was there, because he was a young black man sitting in a parked car at night in a white neighborhood.  Never mind that he lived in that neighborhood.  He was right outside his own apartment.  The police didn’t want to hear about that.  They grabbed him, pointed a gun at his head, and said “Move and I’ll blow your head off.” Terrified, he began saying to them “It’s ok.  It’s all right.  It’s ok.  It’s all right.” 

Bryan Stevenson cooperated with the police that night but they held him for about fifteen minutes without ever acknowledging that they had no earthly reason to suspect him of a crime.  They searched his car illegally.  While he was being subjected to this humiliation, some of his white neighbors came to see what was going on.  Here are Stevenson’s words: “Neighbors were coming out. People were complaining about other burglaries in the neighborhood. They were asking the police to interrogate me about their missing items. You know, ask him if he has my vacuum cleaner, ask him if he took my cat. And it was sort of surreal and terrifying.”  When the police finally gave up and prepared to depart, Stevenson asked them to apologize for what they had done to him.  Their words: “Next time, we’ll get you.”

Stevenson has spent his career defending people on death row, mentally ill people convicted of crimes and incarcerated without proper care, and children who are tried and convicted as adults and then subjected to unfathomable abuse in prison. He has written a book called Just Mercy—I think maybe we all ought to read it.  It’s about the terrible need for reform of our justice system, and our troubling disregard, as a culture, for people whose sentences and sometimes even convictions are plainly wrong.  We allow people—especially we allow black people, poor people—to suffer extraordinary abuse and even execution because we lack the will to correct our laws and institutions.  And Bryan Stevenson, a committed Christian who studied at Philadelphia’s own Eastern University as an undergraduate, has the heart and soul and conscience and courage to be a spokesperson for those forgotten victims of our criminal justice system.  He is a force for redemption.

Picture young Bryan Stevenson that night outside his apartment, and imagine the sense of unreality he must have felt as the police and his own neighbors accuse him of crimes for no reason other than the color of his skin.  There’s a strong feeling of annihilation in this story, a wiping out of Stevenson’s whole reality, his whole social existence, everything he had accomplished and everything to which he aspired.  There is the very real danger that he could lose his life.  And at that moment, though he is too frightened to say much, he does his best to speak in a way that will reassure both himself and the police who are so sure that he is dangerous: “It’s ok.  It’s all right. It’s ok.  It’s all right.” 

A whole world opens up in this moment as Stevenson tries to speak.  He invests his speech with his very humanity, urgently trying to convey through words what and who he is.  He can barely get these short sentences out but he tries to fill them with his dignity and innocence.  He tries to convey that he understands where the police are coming from even though they have a gun to his head and are not listening to him.  He tries to communicate across a vast chasm: “You have nothing to fear.”

But the police and his white neighbors cannot hear him at all.  They have a story already about his guilt.  They have no room for a successful young black man in their neighborhood.  To the extent that they see him at all they see him in jail.  They don’t know that a whole world is opening up in front of them, a world in which his innocence and their racism are about to be exposed.  They don’t know that everything they cling to as respectable people is being called into question.  No one but Stephenson seems able to grasp that in the name of law and order and civil society they are just this side of pulling the trigger and committing murder.

That space that opens up that night in front of those white people could be their redemption.  If they could hear what Stephenson is saying—“It’s ok.  It’s all right”--the whole world could change. Though he can barely speak, Stephenson is speaking words of eternal life.  Words that bring his humanity before them.  Words that would force them to acknowledge who he is and what they are.  Words that would unravel them and open them up to God in another human being.

I know that when Jesus says “I am the bread of life” he doesn’t sound that much like Bryan Stephenson.  But I can promise you this: when Jesus says “I am the bread of life,” he is thinking about Stephenson, and about the people Stephenson defends, and about centuries of people like them, people who through a toxic combination of hatred and indifference are left to pay the price of injustice.  People who are simply disposable in the eyes of their neighbors.  And Jesus is also thinking about centuries of people who can’t and won’t hear the voices of the exploited, who won’t hear those words of life: “I am innocent.  I am human like you.  I am suffering unfathomable pain.  I Am.”

For many weeks now we have been hearing Jesus talk about being the bread of life.  We have explored his words from every angle.  We have paid his words deep respect, despite the fact that we don’t understand them.  Or maybe because we don’t understand them.  We come here day after day and kneel and receive the bread and the wine and we pledge ourselves to live in this state of not understanding.  I don’t know about you, but the more I hear Jesus saying that he is bread this summer, the more I feel that he is speaking to me across a chasm.  I’m not bread.  I don’t know what he means.  Outside the context of my faith, bread is something I buy and eat and sometimes waste. 

It’s clear that I’m not alone feeling this way.  His original followers were also put off when they heard him speak.  They left him.  His unbearable strangeness made them want to turn away.  And though we don’t hear about it in this chapter of John’s gospel, the people around Jesus are gradually turning against him.  Though they had seen something compelling in him, they are putting that attraction behind them and becoming indifferent to his words.  And gradually they will become more hostile.  He will go from being a fascinating teacher to being a disposable victim.  He will die an innocent death.  That will be an unremarkable reality for most of the people around him.

When Jesus says “I am the bread of life,” he speaks not only of his power to sustain us for all eternity, but of his willing surrender to the world’s indifference and hatred.  The two are intimately linked.  He speaks to us from that place of victimization and exploitation.  He speaks of forgiveness and redemption. And he opens our eyes to our own cruelty.  “Eat my flesh and drink my blood,” he says. “I am your victim. If you can hear me speak, a whole world will open up in front of you.  Your own salvation lies in your ability to admit your fear of me, and your hostility.” 

When Jesus says “I am the bread of life,” we may hear him in many different ways.  We come here to do just that, to hear him say “this is my body” and to explore that truth from every conceivable angle, week after week.  As we listen deeply to his words, let us be drawn to the people among us whose words seem not to matter at all.  Let Jesus abide in us, and draw us right to the side of those who are most disposable in our world, or those whose lives can become disposable on the turn of a dime.  To whom else would we go?

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson

23 August 2015

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia