Love in a Time of Subarus

At the risk of sounding like something of a crank, I will confess to you that for a few years now, something has been bothering me… and this is it: the Subaru tag-line that claims “Love is what makes a Subaru a Subaru.”  This gets under my skin.

Allow me to state the obvious.  Love is not what makes a Subaru a Subaru.  Full-time four-wheel-drive, good gas mileage, legendary durability, and good road handling all contribute to what makes a Subaru a Subaru.  I know this, having once driven a little green Subaru in a big loop around this entire country, with my old dog, Baxter, in the back seat.  It was a great trip.  And, yes, I loved it.  I’d go so far as to say that I loved that car.  But I am using the word “love” here casually and colloquially, not definitively – either for the car or the emotion.  It was a great car.  But it was not love that made it great.  Not in any meaningful sense of the words.  Not if the word “love” is going to have any real meaning left at the end of the day.  Love does not make a Subaru a Subaru.

I am tempted by the reading from the Gospel of John today to say something that I shouldn’t say.  We hear Jesus say, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”  In light of this statement, I am tempted to counter the Subaru slogan with a slogan of my own.  I am tempted to say, you see, that “love is what makes a Christian a Christian.”  But would that be wrong of me to assert?  What about Muslims, and Jews, and Buddhists, and Hindus?  What about Christians whose faith looks very different from mine, and to me, sometimes un-loving?  What about people of no faith at all?  Am I denying them love?  How could love belong only to Christians?  Of course it cannot.

But we have in Jesus this unusual figure – God incarnate – whose only real commandment to his disciples is that they should love one another.  If it sounds simple to us, we can assume it sounded simple to his first followers too, and, therefore, confusing.  What about the rules? they must have thought.  What about the law?  What about keeping ourselves pure for God?  Aren’t there things we shouldn’t eat, people we shouldn’t consort with, items we shouldn’t touch, songs we should learn by heart, secrets we should aspire to learn, complexities of theological nuance you alone can impart to us?

Well, says Jesus, by this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.  I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  (Was ever another commandment so disobeyed?)

But let’s change gears for a moment.  Two children are with us this morning – Lily and Grace – to receive the sacrament of Baptism – a gift of God’s grace.  Who can argue that this is not a lovely thing?  But the question is, would these children be better off with a Subaru?  Is there anything meaningful beyond the rite of passage that this sacrament represents?  A Subaru, after all, promises to provide these girls with “longevity, safety, versatility, and adventure.”[i]  Aren’t these more useful properties than whatever ineffable gifts these girls will receive from a sprinkle of water, a dab of oil, and a briefly flickering flame?

The answer to that question, I propose, depends on what you think about love.  For the baptismal rite is somewhat misleading, in that it tends to suggest that Baptism is a gate through which you may enter, provided you know the answers to a few questions.  To make it easy, however, we make it an open-book test, somewhat cheapening the cost of admission.  But to see the sacrament of Holy Baptism in this way is to largely miss the point.  For although questions and answers have almost always been associated with the sacrament, neither the questions nor the answers are really what Baptism is about.  For Baptism is about love.  The gift of Baptism is the assurance of the gift of God’s love in abundant supply.  It is the act of drawing near to the river of God’s love, wading out into the midst of it, in the vicinity of a waterfall, and holding ourselves and our children out under the cascading flow of grace that is God’s love, until we are drenched with it!  This is how Christians are made.  Not with questions and answers; not with study and examination, not with spiritual challenges or feats of strength, but just with God’s love: freely given to anyone who seeks it.

But what is love?  The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus are God’s way of enshrining love in the midst of his people.  And the Sacraments (especially Baptism and the Eucharist) are his way of keeping light burning at that shrine for ever.

Healing, forgiveness, welcome to the stranger and the sinner; humility, non-violence, peace; abundant food for the hungry, concern for the poor, a pre-eminent regard for children; appropriate laxity in religious observance, deep prayer, costly giving; power that is made perfect in weakness, the willingness to lay down one’s life for one’s friends, confidence in God in the face of death, and faith in new life beyond the grave.  These are the descriptors of God’s love in the person of his Son Jesus.  And if you think these are a better foundation for a life defined by love than, say, full-time four-wheel-drive, then you have come to the right place!

The Subaru that I drove cross-country was a gift, given to the church by someone in need of a tax write-off.  It had more than 100,000 miles on it when I got it, and it needed a little work, but not much.  It was a terrific little car to drive: it was the smallest model, five-speed stick-shift.  We travelled west on the southern route, along I-40; and back east from the north, along I-90. 

When I got home, I parked the car on the street south of here around 21st and Catherine, and left it there a few days.  But when I went to retrieve the car, I couldn’t find it: it wasn’t where I thought I’d left it.  I wandered around, on the theory that I’d just forgotten the precise parking spot.  Eventually, about a block and a half away, on the opposite side of the street, I found a little green Subaru that looked like mine, and had the same license plate as mine, but this car had its roof crushed in on one side, and its rear windshield smashed in, and there were bricks in the back of the car among the shards of safety glass.

There was a man sitting on a stoop across the street from the car, and I asked him, “Do you know what happened to this car?”

“Oh yes,” he replied, pointing to a pile of bricks just near where I’d thought I’d parked the car, “that house over there fell on it.”

A house had collapsed on top of the car, and police had moved the vehicle across the street to a new parking spot, where, in a minor miracle it had not yet gotten a parking ticket!

Now, I want Lily and Grace to know something about the love of God in their lives.  I want their baptism to have real meaning, as they grow into themselves, and become the people God has made them to be.  I want them to know the love of their families, and their friends, and I want them, some day, to fall deeply in love with someone who will make them happy.  I want the word “love” to mean more to them than brand-loyalty to a car company.  And I want them to know healing, and forgiveness, and welcome to the stranger and the sinner; and humility, non-violence, peace; abundant food for the hungry, concern for the poor.  I want them, when they grow up, to have a pre-eminent regard for children; and even appropriate laxity in religious observance.  I want them to practice deep prayer, costly giving; and to learn that Christ’s power is made perfect in weakness.  I want them to know that greater love hath no man than the willingness to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.  And I want them to have confidence in God in the face of death, and faith in new, resurrected life beyond the grave.

I also want them to know that sometimes houses fall on cars, like a ton of bricks; hat things get ruined and fall apart; that friends and family will disappoint you; that failure is part of life; that there are forces in the world that can crush you; and that sometimes the house falls down on you from the outside, but sometimes it falls down on the inside.  This is life, and a Subaru can get you through a lot of it, but you are going to need more than a sturdy car if you are going to be a person who really loves, in the face of all that can go wrong in the world.

So, yes, I do want longevity, safety, versatility, and adventure for these children, as their parents do, and maybe even full-time four-wheel-drive, if that’s what they need when they grow up.  But more than that I want them to know God’s love, and know that when the longevity, safety, versatility, and adventure have run out of everything else – as it inevitably will – God’s love will still be burning like a light in the darkness; God’s love will still be flowing like a river, over mighty falls; and God’s love will be the best and truest guide to their lives, and the only commandment worth keeping: to love one another.

The Psalmist, in a moment of supreme poetic license, declares that “there is a river the streams whereof make glad the city of God.”  To the untrained ear this statement might sound like nonsense.  What can it mean?  Where is this river?  What gladness flows from its waters?  Where is this city of God? 

But those who have been baptized know the answer to this question: the streams of the river flow here.  The city of God is being built up here!  And great gladness comes from following the one, true commandment to love one another!

Now, let’s buckle up, and drive over to and through the waters of love.  For it’s love that makes us who we are in Christ, and that makes Grace and Lily Christians on this glad day!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

24 April 2016

Saint Mark's Chruch, Philadelphia

[i] from “How Subaru fell in love and never looked back,” by Tim Nudd, AdWeek, April 8, 2013

Admitted to the Flock

This is a time of year when I get to hear more than usual about the struggles and joys of people who are coming into the Episcopal Church. As you may know, the feast of Saint Mark is coming up next week, April 25, and some of your fellow parishioners will be confirmed or received into the church when the Bishop visits our parish and celebrates Mass with us on that evening. What we call “Confirmation Class”—though it’s also a class for adults who hope to be baptized or who just want to spend some time learning and thinking and praying about their faith—begins in our parish in January and continues weekly into April. Every Sunday after coffee hour we have been meeting in the library over the parish hall, and we’ve talked about church history, the sacraments, the scriptures, prayer, moral decision making. Week after week, we read, talked, prayed and, I hope, deepened our sense of what it means to be part of the Church. Our last class is this afternoon. Not a class, really, it’s a rehearsal for the liturgy we’ll be participating in a week from tomorrow.

At the same time, during this same season, my other vocation is also wrapped up in bringing new people into the fold. My day job involves teaching college students, and right now we are in the middle of an elaborate process called College Admissions. You may know something about how this works, from your own experience or that of your children. Let me hasten to tell you that I went to UCLA, and I did this because it was nearby and it sounded good. It seemed hard to fill out the forms but that’s about all it took. The process my students go through to get into the college of their choice seems by comparison to be entirely overwhelming. Students—or at least students who are lucky enough to have the resources--start early, building resumes in high school, getting not only the grades and the test scores but the extracurricular experiences and skills that will ensure them admission to a great school. They tour colleges with their parents. They sort out the relative benefits of early admissions and fallback schools. They write state of the art application essays. It seems that every one of them is required to declare that they have a particular passion: for neuroscience or poetry, art history or engineering. And, aided by consultants and eager parents, they set about to match their passion with the college that will nurture it and make it grow into transferrable skills for the job market.

Once they get accepted to a few places, if they are so lucky, these high school seniors begin extensive comparisons of the options at their potential places of matriculation. They visit campus for admitted students’ weekend, where they ask all the right questions and try to feel for themselves whether the environment is congenial. Facebook pages and blogs and wikis help them communicate with one another and with students who will give them the lowdown about the colleges under consideration. Every year at this time, I get a steady stream of visitors in my classes, and I’m aware of a pressure on all of us to get the decisions right. Like all professors, I’m supposed to help my college attract the very best students. Let me say that the experience of meeting these students and working with them is as rewarding and joyful as it ever was, but I’m increasingly aware of the business of managing them into our academic environment. It’s a business undertaken with great care and ethical consideration on our campus, but it’s unmistakably business.

Why is Christianity so much simpler to fall into? In this morning’s Gospel, Jesus tells us, “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.”  I don’t know that any one of the people being confirmed or received this year would tell you that they had heard a voice leading them on. But according to Jesus, that’s what happened to them and to you and to me. We heard Jesus’s voice, and he knew us, and we followed. We heard a voice, we followed, but we did not know that we were being called. Yes, there is a process of preparation that the church makes available to Christians, and yes it used to be much more extended and elaborate than it is now, but I don’t think it was ever like the College Admissions Process. There was never the idea that you would match your “passion” to the perfect institution, or that you could invest in a “perfect fit” to turn yourself into the person you dreamt of becoming.

So little of what brings us here is in our control. So little of what makes faith possible is up to us. Faith itself, it seems, is being known by Jesus: not an accomplishment of our own, not something we know, not really a decision, not a plan for improving ourselves or making the world a better place. Just a response to a voice that we don’t even quite think we hear.  We don’t have to write an essay about our skills or compare financial aid offers (though financial aid for Christians sounds good to me). Few of us take time to compare the fitness facilities or the food services before we embark on a life of Christian belief. We just kind of walk into a church one Sunday, or we look online and decide to visit. Or we see one of those signs on the corner: “The Episcopal Church welcomes you.” Or there is a crisis that draws us in, in pain and exhaustion. Something calls us.

How can God’s plan for our salvation be such a slender thing? We are all here this morning without an admissions office or an acceptance rate. We are a flock, and we’ve flocked together through a process that may be invisible even to ourselves. Where’s the plan? Well, how’s this for a description of our admissions plan: “The growing together of Christians is the tip of the great underground structure of the universe, in which God seeks to bring all created things together in Christ, so that the harmony of the universe will reflect the eternal glory.”[1] That’s from Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, and I like it. A lot.

What brought you here today, what makes us a flock, is “the tip of the great underground structure of the universe.” Your thought that this would be a good Sunday to come to Mass was a little hint from the cosmic force that is the love of Christ. Coffee hour is a vision of the harmony of the universe. Our communion is a foretaste of the heavenly banquet God has planned for all eternity.

We don’t own this or control it or think of it as an investment or a plan for self-improvement. We surrender to it. With gratitude and relief we come to realize that the Good Shepherd knows us. It’s more than knowing our passion or our skills or what’s a perfect fit for us. Our Good Shepherd knows where we come from and where we are going, and how all of creation is being reconciled. We become who we are not through a process of planning and investment, but through a surprising process of recognition and acceptance. Our perfect fit is with a God who calls us to more than we can ask or imagine, who helps us find ourselves by dying to ourselves, who shows us that we are on the best path when we know least about where we are going.

Do you have low test scores? Come on in, this is the flock for you. Are you uncertain about what you are called to do? Sounds like you are called to be one of us. Are you prone to wander? Wander over here. Our Good Shepherd has a plan for us, even when we fail at time management and skills assessment. Our Good Shepherd has raised us up in love, and that love is the force that holds all of creation together. We are made one, and that oneness is God’s gift to us. One flock, into which is gathering all creation.

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson

April 17, 2016

Saint Mark's Church Philadelphia

Feed My Sheep

Sheep, vines, children, the sick, the weak, the outcast, and the poor: Jesus had a way of making his priorities known, and they tended to be categories of people and things that need looking after. Having triumphed over the grave, he did not set up a luxurious encampment on the beach to receive supplicants, and dole out the spoils of his victory. Instead, he appeared mysteriously, unannounced, and ambiguously to his followers. But still he made himself known. He showed up on the beach after his disciples had had a failed night of fishing, but he changed everything. He should have given them a secret. He should have written them an encyclical. He should have taken a ring off his finger and given it to one of them. But he didn’t do any of those things. Instead, he gave them fish. And he called Peter to him, and asked him, “Do you love me?”

Peter is a fisherman. They are sitting together on a beach, eating fish. Jesus has just helped them miraculously to catch a shoal of fish. “Do you love me,” he asks Peter, “more than these?”

“Yes, Lord, you know I do,” comes the answer.

“Feed my sheep.”

We are on a beach. With fisherman. Eating fish. There is not a sheep in sight. This is what you might call a non-sequitur. “Feed my sheep.” But fish are remarkably good at looking after themselves (as long as you don’t over-fish them). They are good for miracles, but not so good for parables. And they don’t fit the category of people and things that need looking after. Hence, Peter, “feed my sheep.” Three times, Jesus gives him a variation on the theme. “Feed my lambs. Tend my sheep. Feed my sheep.”

The modern shepherd, James Rebanks, writes in his excellent book, The Shepherd’s Life, that his “job is simple: get around the fields and feed and shepherd the different flocks of ewes – dealing with any issues that arise.” Then he provides three simple rules of shepherding: “First rule of shepherding: it’s not about you, it’s about the sheep and the land. Second rule: you can’t win sometimes. Third rule: shut up, and go do the work.”

We live in a complex and complicated world, but some things are still straightforward: people need to be fed and shepherded. And you probably have to start with the people who most need looking after: children, the sick, the weak, the outcast, and the poor. As a rule of thumb, this one works for sheep, and in churches, and probably more broadly, too. People need to be fed and shepherded; and you start with the ones who most need looking after; you don’t leave them to fend for themselves with the leftovers from the ablest sheep. You don’t make sure the fattest sheep get fatter. It’s not complicated.

Let’s look at the rules. First rule: it’s not about you. Which is to say that the world does not revolve around you. Or as I once heard declared at a funeral in this church years ago: get over yourself. Most of us want it to be about ourselves. I often want it to be about me (whatever it is). But it’s not about me and it’s not about you. It’s about the land – and you can see what we are doing to that (poisoning it). And it’s about the sheep.

Who are the sheep? Are you a sheep or a shepherd? Depends, I guess, on the moment. There are probably times in your life when you get to be each. You might be a sheep to me, but a shepherd to someone else. It’s complicated. Except it’s not. Because it’s not about me, and it’s not about you. I’ll try to remember that. Will you?

Second rule: you can’t win sometimes. Do you need me to elaborate? You don’t already know this? We don’t get to win sometimes. But that doesn’t mean the game is over. There are still sheep out there. There is still land out there. The sheep needs you. The land needs you. Just because you and I don’t get to win sometimes, doesn’t mean we lose. It just means we don’t always win. It’s okay. Get over yourself: see Rule One. Many days are twenty-four straight hours of Rule Two. The days that are not, give cause for rejoicing. Get good at rejoicing, and enjoy it while you can. Rule Two is not going away.

Rule Three: shut up and go do the work. You don’t like Rule Three? You think I like Rule Three? Rule Three is why I go on pilgrimage every now and then. If you are a pilgrim, walking every day, whether you want to or not, you have to get up and walk. You can quit, but then you are not a pilgrim anymore. You have to get up and walk. It doesn’t matter if you want to, or if it feels good, or if the weather is nice. You have to go. You have someplace to go. God has someplace for you to go. The sheep need to be fed. Shut up, and go do the work.

The church struggles mightily with this one. We would rather hold seminars about the work. We would like to study texts that talk about the work. We are fascinated by the way ancient peoples once did the work. We think it’s nice how monks and nuns do the work. And we notice how much work there is to do in places where they are not as rich as we are. We don’t mind sending a little bit of money to people who seem to be doing the work. But only a little bit. But Rule Three is uncompromising. Shut up. And go do the work.

The shepherd who wrote these rules did not think he was channeling Jesus. But he was. Feed my lambs. Tend my sheep. Feed my sheep. The three rules of shepherding are an ever-so-slightly wordier re-iteration of Jesus’ instructions to Peter. But here’s the amazing thing: Jesus wants us to understand that if we love him, this is all we have to do to show it. Just keep these three rules. Feed his sheep.

You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to be pure. You don’t even have to be a virgin. For all I know, you don’t even have to be in a state of grace. You do have to be paying attention to the idea that Jesus is asking you, “Do you love me?”

We live in a complex and complicated world, but some things are still straightforward: people need to be fed and shepherded. And sometimes you get to be the sheep, and sometimes you get to be the shepherd. And daily we have to answer the question that Jesus asks us: Do we love him? The church in Europe and North America has been in a tizzy for decades now about what we should be doing, how to be the church, why things are so complicated, confusing, and difficult. And I don’t want to pretend that the world is not complex and complicated – for it is. But we can make things more or less complicated. And we make some things complicated that don’t have to be. Sheep and vines, if you want to be poetic. Children, the sick, the weak, the outcast, and the poor, if you want to be concrete. Feed his lambs. Tend his sheep. Feed his sheep.

It’s not about you or me. Sometimes we can’t win. Shut up, and go do the work.

All for this: because among the many things bequeathed by Peter to the Church of Christ is this question on the lips of our Lord Jesus: “Do you love me?” Do we love him? How can we tell him? How can we show it? What difference will it make? All the difference in the world if we will feed his lambs; tend his sheep; feed his sheep.

And when he was done teaching Peter how to love him, he gave one more simple instruction: “Come,” he said, “follow me.”

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

10 April 2016

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia