Father Abraham

There is a children’s song that, although I never learned it in my childhood, I did learn it here at Saint Mark’s.  The song is called “Father Abraham.”  The song is very simple, and it is mostly a nonsense song.  Its theology-quotient is low, but its fun-quotient is high, since it involves lots of bodily movement, spinning around, and flopping down on the floor.  It’s a big hit with kids.  Every verse of the song goes like this:

Father Abraham had many sons;
Many sons had Father Abraham.
I am one of them, and so are you;
So let’s all praise the Lord!

The song has often been a feature of Vacation Bible School and Summer Choir Camp.  If you don’t know it, I can teach it to you at Coffee Hour.

And it is true, according to the biblical record, that Abraham, the father of our faith, did, indeed have many sons.  But more often than any of the others, we remember the only son born to Abraham by his wife Sarah: that was Isaac, the son he nearly sacrificed when God put him to the test.  Isaac was the fulfillment of a promise that God made to Abraham that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars of heaven, and that those descendants would inhabit a great swath of land that stretched from Egypt, up across the Red Sea, through current-day Saudi Arabia, and into Iraq, encompassing Israel, Palestine, parts of what are now Syria, and all of Jordan, and Lebanon.  But for much of his life Father Abraham did not have many sons; he had no children at all, and certainly no sons of his own.  He and Sarah were childless.  And God’s promise, whispered, I suppose, into Abraham’s ear at various intervals, or spoken to him in dreams, must have seemed far-fetched to say the least.

You’d have to think that in Abraham’s time it was never very difficult to look up at night and gaze in wonder at the twinkling starlight.  There were no lit-up cities, no street lights, none of the urban light pollution that makes it difficult for us to find much wonder in the sky when we look up at it from Locust Street at night.  I assume the night sky was a familiar wonder to Abraham’s eyes.

So you have these two phenomena: the whispering voice of God in Abraham’s ear, and the twinkling, brilliant, starry night sky.  And one night the two things come together, as the voice of God wakes Abraham from his sleep to repeat the promise.  Abraham had only recently returned from a daring rescue of his nephew, Lot, and his family, who had been taken prisoner in a skirmish amongst local warring factions.  And God speaks to Abraham, late one night in a vision: "Do not be afraid, Abram I am your shield; your reward shall be very great."  But Abram (who has not yet been given the new version of his name by God) said, "O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless…”

The visions are not new to Abraham, and the promise is not new, and actually, maybe it’s all getting a bit old to him.  Maybe he is beginning to think that he would prefer his sleep to these visions that have led him only to have strained relations with his wife, who still has never carried a pregnancy to term.

And maybe it is not God who is speaking to him at all?  Maybe Abraham begins to reconsider.  Maybe the experience of having to go and rescue his nephew called into question just how serious was the commitment of the LORD who spoke to him in visions to the protection and longevity of his family and ancestral line.  Maybe this voice that spoke to him was not the voice of God at all.  And maybe God was not really God.  Maybe there was no God, at least not one making the kinds of claims that were made in the whispered conversations that took place in Abraham’s visions.

Was he sleep-walking that night when he found himself outside?  Or did the vision or the voice wake him as God called him to come outside?  Was there anything different about the stars that night?  Was there a meteor shower?  There is no suggestion in the scripture that there was: no mention of a miracle or wondrous event: just the stars shining brightly as they did every night.  Abraham had seen it all before.  But something happened that night that was not miraculous or wondrous.  It was, however momentous; because underneath that twinkling canopy of galactic light Abraham came to what one scholar has called “a new awareness that God really is God.”[i]

The point of the children’s song is not to remember Isaac, who was spared sacrifice at his father Abraham’s hand; and it is not to remember the other sons of Abraham who were born of other mothers.  The point of the song is to remember that we are the sons and daughters of Abraham; that we are his children, and the inheritors of God’s promise to him; and to remind us that God really is God.

But to say this is not to say enough, because it sounds like a claim to distant lands in the Middle East that already have quite enough people fighting over them.  To say that we are the inheritors of God’s promise to Abraham, is, rather, to say that we are the inheritors of the relationship – the covenant relationship, in which we are chosen by God.

But a lot of water has passed through the Red Sea in the meanwhile; a lot has changed.   And the covenant itself has changed: we are not waiting for God to deliver us to the much disputed land from the river of Egypt to the river Euphrates.  The new covenant of God’s love was sealed for us by the shedding of Jesus’ blood, not by animal sacrifice, as Abraham’s covenant was sealed.  And the new covenant is a promise of salvation that requires no real estate at all, but only faith that our lives are meant to be more than they sometimes appear to be, and that there is a hope for us that lies beyond the grave.

So much has changed, you might wonder why it is we Christians bother telling the Abraham story any more.  Isn’t it confusing to remind ourselves of a promise that we no longer expect to be fulfilled, and that we no longer wish to see fulfilled?  Isn’t it unhelpful to be reminded of the uncompromisingly patriarchal roots of our own religious tradition, now that we have grown into a religious tradition that requires no such patriarchy?

Yes, much has changed, including our view of the heavens, which is now so obscured by our own intensely bright lights.  God could wake me up in the middle of the night and call me outside, but he couldn’t show me much of the sky, unless he flew me to Montana.  And along with the view, perhaps we have lost the assurance of the nature of a covenant relationship – in which God makes a promise to us, his people.

And if you have lost the memory of what it means to be in a covenant relationship with God, then you have lost a great deal.  If your life is not guided by a promise made by God, then what is it that guides your life? 

And even if you have looked up and seen the stars twinkling in all their glory, if those stars have never signified anything to you, then you may not know whether God really is God.  And this, I suspect is the case for so many – not because the view of the night sky is now so much harder to appreciate, but perhaps as the view has gotten harder to see, and our lives have changed so much, so has faith in God become harder for some to come by.

Abraham needed to be shown that God really is God in order to believe in the covenant, in order to keep going on with his life in faith.  But God didn’t use a miracle or any other wonders and signs, he just let Abraham see something he had never seen before, in a view that was entirely familiar to him.

And we need to tell this story, because we pray that God still does the same thing for us, even though so much has changed.  God still lets us see something we have never seen before to assure us that God really is God.  And it is not God who has obscured the view and made it unfamiliar, it’s us who have done that, by allowing the complexity of our lives to crowd out the covenant of God’s love: his assurance that he has chosen us in love to be the inheritors of a promise.

For the most part we struggle to see the stars of the night sky.  And for the most part we cannot remember the covenant of God’s love.  And in so many ways, for so many of us, we cannot say for sure that God really is God.  And this is why we need a song as simple as a children’s nonsense song to remind us that our memories are linked somehow to the ancient vision of a man awakened from his sleep and called outside to tilt his head back, or maybe to lie down on the ground and just open his eyes as wide as he could, and behold the unfathomable expanse of God’s creation, and be shown that God really is God.

As long as the stars are shining, that assurance is meant for you and for me: God really is God, and he has chosen you and me to be his people.  Abraham needed to know it, and so do we; and the sign of this revelation has become no more dim over the years, though we have done much to obscure it.

Father Abraham had many sons and many daughters;

And you are one of them, and so am I;

And the world has changed so much;

And the covenant has changed, too, though it is still a covenant of love;

And that covenant was sealed by the blood of Jesus, who died for us on the Cross;

And he knew better than we do that Father Abraham had many sons and many daughters;

And you are one of them, and so am I;

And you are one of them, and so am I;

And you are one of them, and so am I;

Many sons, and many daughters had Father Abraham.

Do not be afraid, though there is much in the world to frighten us.  He is our shield, and our reward will be great, though for now it may be hard to see.

Look toward the heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.  See how many there are, and how brightly they shine with the singular purpose of showing us what we had not seen there before: that God really is God.  Yes, God really is God.

And he chose Abraham and all his descendants.

And Abraham had many sons and many daughters.  And you are one of them.  Thanks be to God!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

21 February 2016

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

[i] Walter Brueggemann, Genesis, in the Interpretation Series, John Knox Press, Atlanta, 1982, p. 143

Temptation in the Desert

Just for a moment, try to imagine what the beginning of Jesus’s earthly ministry would be like without the devil.  Yes, I know, this is kind of an odd exercise.  And no, I’m not trying to give the devil credit for anything.  But think about it.  What would we hear about Jesus’s forty days in the desert if we heard nothing about the devil?  It would be a short, serene story: Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, went out into the desert and ate nothing for forty days.  When it was over he was hungry.  I’m sorry, our translation says “famished.”  That’s a little more interesting than “hungry,” but not much. 

We could of course say some things about a story like that.  We would note Jesus’s purity and self-control.  We would assume that Jesus prayed during that time, though in fact there isn’t anything specific said about that in Luke’s Gospel.  We would of course reflect on the fact that Jesus spent forty days in the desert just as the Israelites wandered for forty years.  We would reflect on the fact that after his baptism Jesus is filled with the Holy Spirit.  But those forty Spirit-filled days pass silently in this story.  I guess they were beyond our comprehension. 

Which is to say that if it weren’t for the devil and his offers of food and power and false security, this story would tell us very little about who Jesus is and who we are. 

It’s an old problem in storytelling, isn’t it?  You can’t tell a great story about serene perfection.  The old legends about the saints who fled to their monasteries—many of them in the desert—they would never have been told if there hadn’t been demons to visit and tempt.  You can’t tell stories about monks who live happily ever after in reverent silence, because nothing happens to them.  The devil needs to pay a call!  Things have to get juicy!

In the great spiritual classic the Life of Saint Antony by Athenasius, the holy monk Antony spends long periods of time alone in his cell in the desert.  At times he is visited by evil spirits that know how to change their shapes, and they seem to break through the walls of his cell and take the form of “lions, bears, leopards, bulls, serpents, asps, scorpions, and wolves.”  It’s vivid.  At another time visitors who are standing outside his cell—he won’t let them in—testify that they hear the sounds of great crowds of people within: “clamoring, dinning, sending forth piteous voices and crying ‘[…T]hou canst not abide our attack!’” 

Now that’s a story.  That tells us something about the holy Antony, just as our Gospel this morning tells us something about Jesus.  When the devil comes around, holy stories get interesting in a hurry.  When there is real temptation, real testing, holy men and holy women start to put some flesh on their holiness.  They start to reveal something about who God is.  I don’t say this because I want the devil to have credit for making us interesting.  On the contrary, I say this because God is so good.  God is so good to us and we don’t even know it.  God is so good to us and we won’t say a word about it because we are afraid to tell the whole story.  We are afraid even to tell the story to ourselves.

Most of us, if asked to talk about who we are and where we’ve been and what God has done in our lives will stammer and give the blandest, most formulaic response.  “I’m a cradle Episcopalian and I like your music,” we will say, or “I’ve been looking for a church and I thought I’d try this one.”  Or “I’ve been a member of this parish for years.” And though it’s sad enough that we can’t tell each other the whole rich story of how God redeemed us, most of us will do our best to forget the story ourselves.  We will forget on a daily basis that we’ve struggled just to make it into adulthood.  We’ll forget that moment of decision that could have ruined our lives, but didn’t.  We’ll forget a million ways that we’ve been saved and protected and set free because we don’t want to remember that we were ever that low.  We want to tell a story of serene perfection because we are afraid that the real dust on our feet from that long desert journey will be too shameful to expose.

And the beautiful actions of God who made us from dust and filled us with the Spirit will be forever buried along with our fear and our shame and our powerlessness.  But this is a season of remembering dust, isn’t it?  We were just here Wednesday, just getting marked with the sign of the cross in ash.  “Remember that you are dust,” we were told, “and to dust you shall return.”

So, in this season of remembering and confessing, let me ask: who are you?  What whispered in your ear on the way to church this morning?  Did you wake up and get yourself here despite the fact that your heart was filled with anxiety and crippling self-doubt?  Are you here hoping that the feelings of loss will subside, that the bad relationship will not define you?  Is today just one day, is this hour just one hour, in a lifelong struggle with addiction?  Have you fought an epic daily battle with racism in order to be here today with your self-respect and generosity intact?  Would anyone understand what your wandering in the desert has been like? How long have you been hungry?  What are you hungry for?  Are you famished?

And what devilish fantasies about being full and safe and powerful have you had to put aside?  Because those fantasies are everywhere in our world, and we need to talk about them.  How did the Spirit guide you to give up the relentless pursuit of wealth or perfection?  How did the Spirit fortify you when you were tempted to make food or fitness into a god?  When you were tempted to dwell on your resentments?  When you were tempted to judge another person with withering scorn?  How did God turn you around when your heart closed up and your feelings went cold?  How did you turn aside from contempt when it rose up in you?  How did you find the grace to admit your mistakes and your laziness and your lack of focus and your habitual boredom?  How did God find you in that desert and fill you with enough love to bring you here to this improbable place?  How did God make you honest and willing and forgiving? 

I mean this in all orthodox piety and belief, I really do, so don’t mistake me when I say “Let the devil show up.”  Let the truth be told.  Name what troubles you.  Out in his desert cell, Saint Antony’s demons were shaped like “lions, bears, leopards, bulls, serpents, asps, scorpions, and wolves.”  Even Jesus, in his desert days, was faced with temptations to power and manipulation and soul-killing illusions of invulnerability.

And if you are willing to admit it, something is eating away at you too.  And in the particular shape of that temptation, there is a whole Gospel full of truth about God.  There is the particular shape of God’s saving grace in your life.  There is a story that no one else can tell.  There is a triumph—I don’t care how bad you feel, if you’re here today God has scored another victory—and we need to know what it is.  For ourselves, for each other, and for the world: name God’s victory.  Let the vivid truth of your salvation be known.

Name it in your heart.  Name it in conversation.  Name it at confession in the Lady Chapel on Saturday morning at 9:30, or by appointment.  Tell it all.  The works of God are infinite.  God’s mercy is abundant and ever-fresh.  And you are the teller of that tale in this world.  Speak the word.

Preached by Mtr. Nora Johnson

The First Sunday in Lent

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Ashes and Tears

The great English writer George Orwell is known not only for his insightful and prescient fiction writing, but also for a short, posthumously-published autobiographical account, looking backward to his boarding school days, in which he gives a detailed description of the corporal punishment he received as a school-boy.  The headmaster of the school, Orwell tells us, employed a riding crop for the purpose at first, but eventually graduated to the use of “a thin rattan cane which hurt very much more.”  A boy might find himself on the receiving end of the cane for a number of reasons.  Orwell’s first offense – as a newly arrived and homesick eight-year-old – was wetting his bed, for which the crop was applied as an antidote.

By the time he was older, Orwell reports that the device was deployed as a study-aid, as well, if it struck the headmaster that a boy was not applying himself:

“…and then,” he writes, “it would be ‘All right, then, I know what you want. You've been asking for it the whole morning. Come along, you useless little slacker. Come into the study.’ And then whack, whack, whack, and back one would come, red-wealed and smarting… to settle down to work again.

“…. It is a mistake,”  he wrote, “to think such methods do not work. They work very well for their special purpose. …. The boys themselves believed in its efficacy. There was a boy named Beacham, with no brains to speak of, but evidently in acute need of a scholarship….  He went up for a scholarship [exam] at Uppingham, came back with a consciousness of having done badly, and a day or two later received a severe beating for idleness. ‘I wish I'd had that caning before I went up for the exam,’ he said sadly….”[i]

You useless little slackers.  Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

I suppose few of us these days have been subjected to corporal punishment, but a day like Ash Wednesday can easily evoke a memory of it, even if the memory isn’t ours, per se.  So many impressions made by the church gave credence to the idea that Lent is a time for corporal punishment of one kind or another: that even if self-flagellation isn’t your thing, self-denial, confession, and repentance amount to rattan canes of a different color, more or less, and that although they may hurt, that is part of what makes them good for you.    You’ve been asking for it all year, and now we begin with a smudge or two of ash, and then: whack, whack, whack! – flogging you toward some righteous goal.

On the other hand, of course, is the thought that anyone who actually shows up to church for this stuff, is suffering delusionally in the same way as that boy who wished he’d had the caning before he went to his exam, on the perverse theory that it would have helped him do better.  This, many suppose, is the logic of religious thought.  Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return: whack, whack, whack!  Does it hurt yet? We can keep doing this until it does, and then you will finally be ready to be better.

In this manner do we make the Way of Jesus to be a path of cruel judgment and crushing guilt, in which the best thing that can happen to you is that you get walloped hard enough that by dint of your smarting backside and your guilty conscience you will be led back onto the path of righteousness.  Welcome to Lent, everybody, and welcome to the Christian life!

But does this approach really do anybody any good, and did it ever?  Listen again to George Orwell:  “Till the age of about fourteen I believed in God, and believed that the accounts given of him were true. But I was well aware that I did not love him. On the contrary, I hated him, just as I hated Jesus….  The Prayer Book told you… to love God and fear him: but how could you love someone whom you feared?”

I wonder how many of us come to church on any given day aware that we do not really love God at all, and perhaps only inches away from the admission that, in fact, we hate God, and hate Jesus, too.  For how can we love someone whom we have been told to fear, just for starters?

If I dig a little in the Oxford English Dictionary – to around the third or fourth definition of “fear” – eventually I get to “a mingled feeling of dread and reverence towards God.”  I suppose this might be the ideal state of the worshiper on Ash Wednesday: to arrive here with a mingled feeling of dread and reverence towards God.  And I suppose that by many reckonings it is my job to confirm in you both the reverence and the dread, you useless little slackers.  But I strongly suspect that by adopting this attitude I will in no way assist you in learning to love God or his Son Jesus, and I may, instead, help you to learn to hate God; since, how can you love someone whom you fear?

Jesus himself was woefully inept, by all accounts, at instilling fear in those he encountered.  Quite to the contrary, he seemed to invite taunts and teasing regularly in his ministry, as in his Passion and Dying.  And yet I suspect there are as many people out there in the streets these days who hate God, who despise Jesus, as there are who either love him or fear him.  Too many rattan canes in too many novel shapes, colors, and sizes, I suspect.  Too much of the church accusing the would-be-faithful of being useless little slackers.  And what better day to hone our skills in that regard than Ash Wednesday?

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

But the ancient words of a prophet today suggest with great specificity that my role here is not to flog you toward some righteous goal with the aid of a riding crop or a rattan cane.  The prophet suggests, rather, that I should take my place somewhere between the vestibule (there) and the altar (there), and weep.  Should I weep for myself or for you?  Is it because of your waywardness, or my inadequacies as your priest?  The prophet doesn’t say, which seems to allow for either possibility, or both.  And through my tears, I should send this prayer to God: “Spare your people, O Lord; and do not make your heritage a mockery.  Spare your people.”

The instruments of Ash Wednesday are ashes and tears.  And the aim of Ash Wednesday, like the aim of all of Lent, like the aim of all God’s intent, is love, not fear, and not hate.

Spare your people, O Lord; and do not make your heritage a mockery.  Spare your people, for we are but dust, and to dust we shall return.

From where I stand, between the vestibule and the altar, I can’t for the life of me see what good a decent caning would do any of you, or my own self, for that matter.  Nor do I hear in God’s call to repentance the justification for telling you all (or even myself) what useless little slackers you are.

I can, however, see plenty of reasons to weep.  I can see, for instance, how often pulpits have been used more effectively to cause people to hate Jesus (in teaching people to fear him) than to love him.  And that makes me want to weep.

I can see how often the prayers of the needy, the frightened, the anxious, and the wronged seem to go unanswered, and how this causes so many to lose faith in God, and that makes me want to weep too.

I can see what a mess we people – Christians and otherwise – make of so much that God has given us, and that makes me want to weep too.

And I can see my own sad faults, and sometimes some of yours, too, and that makes me want to weep too.

And what do we deserve for our sins and offenses?  A good beating?

It would, of course, be much simpler if young Beacham (the English schoolboy with no brains to speak of, but in such need of a scholarship) had been correct.  Or if the headmaster of his school had been correct, and all we really needed was a good caning to beat the idleness out of us and flog us onward toward righteousness.  What a cheap thrill it would be for me to preach to you on Ash Wednesday under such circumstances!  But God has put no crop nor cane in my hands.  He has, rather, given me ashes and tears, along with the task of reminding you that if we begin and end as dust, then we have only this time in between the dust to make the most of it.

Hate God, or love God.  Call Jesus your enemy or your friend.  God remains a mystery to us, even in loving us, so that we easily draw the wrong conclusion, what with so much cause for tears and all.  But if God is not coming for you with a crop or a cane, but rather, with ashes and tears, would that change the way you see things?

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

We have only this time between the dust, to make the most of it.  So, leave the weeping to me and to the other priests, between the vestibule and the altar.  And remember that God loved the dust he made us from before he made us, because he made the dust too, and breathed life into it in order to get you and me out of the dust.

And do not doubt that God will hear the prayer, and will answer it, and all the more so as he sees us learning to love one another. 

Spare your people, O Lord, and do not make your heritage a mockery.  Spare your people, O Lord.

For we remember that we are dust, and to dust we shall return.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Ash Wednesday 2016

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

[i] George Orwell, “Such, such were the joys,” October 1952, originally in Partisan Review