Little Lamb

Many of you, perhaps even all of you, have seen Aylan Kurdi. You may not know his name, but you do know him. You have seen him, seen his little red t-shirt rucked up around his tummy, seen his blue pants pushed up to the knees and his tiny shoes lined up one right beside the other. You have seen him, God help you, lying face down in the surf, his forehead pressing into the sucking sand, his arms tucked into close to his sides, palms up to heaven. You have seen him, God help you, in a photograph that shot around the world two and a half weeks ago, on Wednesday, September 2, the day that Aylan and eleven other Syrian refugees drowned as they tried to find passage to safety; the day that Aylan washed ashore on a lonely beach in Turkey, his body still and silent, waiting for someone to see.

What you may not have seen is another picture of him, released after Aylan’s death. He is still at home in this photograph, sitting and facing the camera in a bright yellow sweatshirt, holding his right ear in that way that children do. He sits next to his big brother, Galip, who drowned with him, and he is looking out past the frame of the shot with a sly smile on his face, looking at someone who is undoubtedly trying to make him laugh, perhaps at his mother, Rehen, who also drowned with him. He is, in this second photo, just a two-year-old like any two-year-old, with chubby cheeks and soft brown eyes, a kid like the kids in our photo albums, on our Facebook pages, the wallpaper of our iPhones.

I don’t know which picture is more devastating – the photo of what could have been or the photo that never should have been. I do know that it’s almost impossible to look at either of these photos and not feel your heart break with longing, with a pity that is beyond the limits of our vocabulary but that hits us right in the center of our guts. I know that it’s almost impossible to look at these photos and not want to cry out, Enough! No more. And I know that it’s almost impossible to look at these photos and not want to somehow step inside them, to run down that beach to Aylan and pick him up, just pick him up – hold him, pat his back and rub some warmth back into his limbs, brush the sand from his lips and breathe life back into him, watch the color come back into those chubby cheeks and the light into those soft brown eyes, hold his little salty soaked body and tell him over and over that it is going to be all right, that he’s safe, that he’s finally safe, that he’s seen and known and loved.

I will confess that, other than mourning and wishing and praying, I am not sure how to address the refugee crisis that is swamping the world right now. It is a maelstrom of complications, a storm that has swept across continents, wave upon wave, a sea of need and hurt fed from a stream of intolerance and injustice that springs from the sins of so many nations and peoples it hardly matters who started what anymore. As the Archbishop of Canterbury said recently, any real solution to this crisis will have to address not only the almost overwhelming humanitarian need but also the structures that have allowed for the systematic slaughter and dispossession of so many peoples. And how do you do both? And how do you do both from here, from America, which feels a world away from the sad shores of Turkey? Our Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, encouraged Episcopal churches to support Episcopal Migration Ministries, which helps to aid and relocate refugee families here in the States. But how do you do this when you click on the link in her article and find that the Episcopal Church didn’t list one single organization in Pennsylvania – not in the Diocese of Pennsylvania, but in the entire state of Pennsylvania. How do you and I do something, fix this, help? I have no simple answers. I know that it will take prayer and thought and, more than anything, attention. I know that it will take leadership from those among us who already know something of this work. I know that it will take time and courage, the Holy Spirit, the bread of the Eucharist, the comfort of God our Father. I know this, at least, even if I do not know the rest of the steps along the path.

I also know that it is important to start with that photo of little Aylan, to start with that feeling that rises up in our guts, the howl that threatens to escape from our throats, the tears that come when we see such a beautiful thing spoiled, such innocence abused, such wild waste. It is important to start with that feeling we have of so much love poured out on such a tiny, fragile thing. For do you know, little ones, that this is exactly how God feels when he looks at you? Do you know that it is this longing of love that God feels each time he looks at you in times of trouble, when you are lost, sick, alone, scared, frustrated, hungry, beaten, drowning in pain or sorrow or guilt or addiction or illness or confusion or doubt?

God has always looked at you this way, at all of the tiny, fragile things created by his almighty hand. He has always known this agonizing heartbreak when he has seen his little ones hurting and broken. And when our human sin and selfishness and silliness had led to so much beauty spoiled, so much wild waste that we were drowning in death, God looked down upon us his children and said, Enough. No more. And then God did that thing that we only wish we could. He looked down upon us sprawling and lost, palms opened up to heaven, and he stepped into the picture, ran out to us with arms spread wide and took us up in his embrace. God stepped into the picture and showed us that the little, lonely, and last would always be first; he stepped into the picture and let himself be taken and abused, betrayed, drowned under his own weight upon the heights of the cross. And then, then, three days after being killed, he rose again, breathed new life into the world, brought color back into our sin-saddened cheeks and light back into the darkness of our eyes. He transformed the terrifying waters of death into the waters of eternal life, waters that make us into one body, hallowed and whole, waters that welcome us home.

It is in remembering how we first were welcomed that we will find the strength to welcome others, to serve others, to help bring them home. It is in remembering how we first were welcomed that we will gain clarity of sight, the vision to find a way forward, and a new lens through which to see that photo of Aylan Kurdi. Look at that photo again. There is something there that we did not see before. Right there in the photograph, on the beach behind Aylan’s red t-shirt and bright blue pants is his Father, kneeling beside him. His Father, bending over him, brushing the hair out of his eyes with the same love and tenderness as he would do – as he will do – for you and me. His Father, looking at this little child made in his image and likeness and letting his heart break open with love. His Father, taking him up in his arms, holding him close to his heart and whispering into his perfect tiny ear:

Little Lamb who made thee        
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed. 
By the stream & o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice! 
         Little Lamb who made thee
         Dost thou know who made thee

         Little Lamb I'll tell thee,
         Little Lamb I'll tell thee!
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb: 
He is meek & he is mild, 
He became a little child: 
I a child & thou a lamb, 
We are called by his name.
         Little Lamb God bless thee. 
         Little Lamb, God bless thee.*

Little lambs, God bless you.

*The Lamb, William Blake (1757-1827)

Preached by Mtr. Erika Takacs
20 September 2015
Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

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