The Right Time

I heard a story once about a boy who was alone with his father when news came over the radio that Pearl Harbor had been bombed.  The father heard the news, turned to his son, and said, “Just don’t tell your mother.” 

It sounds crazy now, doesn’t it?  She was bound to find out.  It’s clear to us now that even the most delicate and sheltered wife would sooner or later have had a look at the papers and would have figured out that World War II was happening.  All these years later we can see that that man was in a state of shock, and that his attempt to keep his wife from finding out about Pearl Harbor was an effort to keep his own fear in check.  We can easily imagine that he was reaching for some kind of habitual emotion that felt safe: “I’ll protect my wife; that’s my role.”  It’s what we do when we go numb: we look for habitual patterns to protect us from overwhelming truths.  “Your mother can’t handle this” is a way of thinking that lets the husband feel like he is still in control.  It’s a way for him to stay in a safe place.

It's always the wrong time to tell the truth, isn't it? It’s always the wrong time to encounter God. The leader of the synagogue in this morning’s Gospel stumbles right into that problem.  Listen to him: "There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day."  It feels stunningly wrong.  It’s just like “Don’t tell your mother.”  It’s the voice of a man desperate to hold onto the world he knows, even if, in this case, it’s a world full of pain and limitation, and the voice breaking through to him is bringing news not of war but of healing and peace.  It doesn’t really matter. As long as we want the lives we already know more than we want the truth, we will respond to Jesus this way.

No, we’ll say to ourselves, this isn’t the right time to go to my room and pray.  I’m never going to be a contemplative. No, this isn’t the right Sunday to come to church.  It’s hot. No, daily Mass is something for other people.  The daily office is too hard for me.  There is no need to reconcile with that estranged family member today; I can call her on her birthday.  Or Christmas.  Or next Christmas.  Everyone drinks this heavily.  It’s normal to live a life filled with resentments.

No, I don’t need to be an active member of that parish.  No, I’m not needed for that service position.  Sure, I have sins, but there is no need to confess them this week.  I have questions but there is no need to ask them right now.  I need to tell someone what God once meant to me but I can’t face that whole story right now.  That person wouldn’t understand.  I can’t find the spiritual teacher I’m really looking for.  Maybe I’m not meant to have a radiant faith.

Is it ever the right moment to encounter the living God?  Is it ever the right time to tell the truth?  Could this be the moment? 

We have so many reasons to think that this is not the right time.  Christianity doesn’t really seem to be in ascendancy in twenty-first century America, does it?  Faith in Jesus is not really in vogue.  Religions across the board seem to be under so much pressure from fundamentalism, and under so much pressure from the distracting demands of practical life: keeping a job, keeping our heads above water, keeping up with the rushing tide of history, keeping our families and our relationships intact.  It’s all fantastically complicated, and sometimes it’s truly bleak.  I wonder whether we really experience our relationship with Jesus as commensurate with the pain of the lives we are living.  I wonder whether our faith in Jesus feels like salvation, for ourselves and for the world.  I wonder whether secretly we aren’t tempted to give up on that idea, and keep God at arm’s length.  Aren’t we tempted to postpone our encounter with God in hopes that there will be another day when prayer will beckon to us more powerfully, or God will seem present, or it will make sense to us to let go of the possessions and the habits and the attitudes that keep us apart?  I have a feeling I’m not the only one who imagines becoming a real Christian one day in the future. 

What would our lives be like if we were willing to believe that today was the best day to meet God breaking through to us?  That today was the best day to let God into the problems that baffle us?  That there would never be a better moment, that we were in exactly the right place to hear from God?  Not in spite of our very real problems and limitations but precisely because of them?  What Gospel story is being written among us today?  What story would be written if we would step out from our hiding places?  What turning point would this be?  We are the best people God could possibly choose for the lives God has given us, imperfections and all.  And this is exactly the right time to hear that message.

That’s what Jesus saw when he was teaching the synagogue, as Luke tells us.  He saw a woman who had been bent over, unable to stand up straight, for eighteen years.  That’s a long, long, time.  Long enough for the woman and everyone around her to take that physical limitation as inevitable, so much so that it ceased to be visible.  She ceased to be visible.  But not to Jesus.  When Jesus sees her he calls her to him and he puts his hands on her and he sets her free.  It’s the wrong time for the leader of the synagogue, who is no doubt as shocked as we would be to feel God’s presence so profoundly and in such a new way.  But it’s the right time for Jesus, and it becomes the right time for the woman, who immediately stands up straight and begins praising God.

She didn’t ask to be healed, any more than most of us ask to be transformed radically by God’s grace.  She is just the kind of person Jesus is looking for, precisely because she is as shut down as we are.  Precisely because her pain and her limitations have become business as usual.  Precisely because she belongs to a religious congregation that has quietly abandoned the desire to be startled by God’s actions in the world.  Jesus didn’t do anything in the synagogue that morning that he doesn’t do all the time among us.

There isn’t anything we can be that those people in Luke’s Gospel haven’t already been.  We can’t keep Jesus out with our complacency or our resignation or our hypocrisy or our need to maintain control.  Jesus simply calls, and touches us, and sets us on our feet and fills our mouths with praise.  It’s not so much that he triumphed in spite of the resistance of the congregation that morning in the synagogue.  Let’s think of it a different way: he went there looking for the woman whose limitations were chronic and the religious community that didn’t want to have to face the living God.  He went there looking for people like us.

And although this is a story of great, miraculous healing, it’s no different than a hundred healings that might be happening here and now among us.  We don’t see it, because we don’t jump up and start praising.  But we surely could.  We could make it more visible than we do.  We could hear the sound of a hundred hearts slipping open, a hundred backs straightening, a hundred burdens being dropped.

This story condenses and magnifies what we know to be true, what we experience in smaller ways all the time.  This story presents us with one big healing and doesn’t tell us what the woman’s life is like after that, but we know about life with Jesus.  We know that we have within us not only the woman who is to be healed, but also the religious leader who is desperate to control and hide from the power of God so as to remain in the world he knows.  And it’s possible, too, that sometimes we have in us Jesus himself.  Sometimes there will be the voice of Jesus calling to another with healing grace.  Sometimes our own hands will be the hands of Jesus reaching out to touch another who is in pain.  Sometimes the time will be right for us, and we will witness the grace of God working in our midst.

 Praise God that we are given the gift of this healing in all of its dimensions.  Praise God that we are sometimes ready to be healed in whatever way God prepares for us.  Praise God that the religious leader within us, the one afraid to let God work in ways he can’t control, may be only a passing moment in the larger story of our lives in Christ.

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson

21 August 2016

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

More Than Just One

More Than Just One

Mtr. Erika Takacs

There once was a man, a leader, who looked out upon his people and saw that they were broken apart. It had been his hope to make them one, to unite them in one triumphant band. But watching them as they went about their daily work, he saw that they were deeply and hopelessly divided, and that without help they would continue to live lives of separation and regret. And so this man, this leader, made a decision. He himself would make things right. He would offer himself up as a sacrifice, turn himself over to be hated and abused, and in his sacrifice, his people would find their way. In his sacrifice, his people would see how they were bound to each other, and they would ultimately take hold of the glorious victory that was rightly theirs. In other words, they might just take home the gold medal.

Like many of you, I have had the Olympics on the brain this week, and I've found myself thinking back to one of the greatest Olympic moments of all time – not in 2016 in the sunny carnival of Rio de Janeiro, but in 1980 in the “frozen tundra”* that was Lake Placid, New York. Herb Brooks was the coach of the American men’s hockey team that year, a team that was expected – no, guaranteed – to lose. The fearsome engine of Soviet sports was in full swing then, and the teams of the Soviet bloc were unstoppable. The men had played together for years; they skated like lightning and moved across the ice like a machine. Brooks’ team, on the other hand, was composed mostly of college hot-shots, who not only had never played together but had actively played against each other. Their inter-collegiate rivalries ran deep, and Brooks found himself coaching a team that hated the idea of playing with each other more than they hated the idea of losing to the Soviets.

But Brooks had an idea. He would sacrifice himself before the altar of Olympic glory in order to give his team of bull-headed, fractious young men a whisper of a chance of winning. He did the only thing he could do to stop them from hating each other so much; he made himself so hard-nosed, so tyrannical, so despicable, that they all started to hate him. And when they all started hating him, they finally found something in common. They were still infuriated, but now, they were all infuriated about the same thing. Suddenly, they started playing as a team. And you know the end of the story – they beat the Soviets, and then beat Finland, and took home the gold. Do you believe in miracles? Yes!

But this wasn’t, actually, a miracle. It was a masterful plan, made by one man, who was willing to sacrifice himself, his own likeability, to make his team one. For Herb Brooks, unity was everything. It was worth any cost he might have to pay. It was worth it to be hated if he could give those young men the chance to earn what they had long desired – a gold medal and a place in those Olympic legends we all like to tell this time of year. Okay, so his plan was just the slightest bit manipulative, but Herb Brooks made those players a team, made them one, and we admire him for it.

There is something innately admirable about unity. There’s something noble about the idea of a group of disparate people uniting for a common purpose or against a common enemy. It’s truly American, it’s truly human, to seek unity and to place those who bring it about on a pedestal, or, often, in office. When there is work to be done, when there is an impossible mountain to climb, or when fear is all around, unity can feel like the only thing that matters, the highest good, no matter what price we might have to pay for it. Unity at any cost can begin to sound almost like Gospel…right up until the moment we hear Jesus’ message to his disciples in today’s passage from Luke. “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled,” he says. “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!” Hearing that, we realize that there is more to the story than unity at any cost.

But to be honest, I’m not sure how much of that story I want to hear. I mean, last week we heard Jesus say, “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” And this week he says he’s coming to bring division? Is there any promise, any news, anything we would like to hear less right now? Have mercy, O Lord, have mercy, for we have had more than enough of division. The maelstrom of our division threatens to swamp us at any moment. Wave after wave crashes down on us every day, in every news cycle – white and black, men and women, rich and poor, undocumented workers and American citizens, gun-owners and non-gun-owners, Muslims and everybody else, black lives matter and blue lives matter and all lives matter, Republican and Democrat and all of their various and sundry sub-divisions. And then there are the divisions that don’t make the news – the divisions in our workplaces or in our households or hearts, the ugly divisions that splinter our Church. We live amongst the wreckage of these divisions every moment of every day. So wouldn’t it be nice to hear Jesus say to us, Do not be afraid, little flock, for I have a masterful plan to take all of those divisions away. You won’t even know what’s happening. I’ll fix it to make you all one, and we’ll worry about everything else later. Sounds promising, right? Sounds like a bit of a miracle. And should we expect anything less of our Savior than this?

But this is not what our Savior says. Jesus does not promise us unity at all costs, because Jesus is interested in more than that. Jesus is interested in more than a unity built upon hypocrisy and hatred. Jesus is interested in more than a unity held together by disgust and disdain. Jesus is interested in more than a unity of some that builds walls to keep others out. Jesus is interested in more than a unity that is only on our own terms, a unity that is built upon the sand of our partial understandings. Jesus wants more than just cheap unity.** Jesus wants us to be more than just one; Jesus wants us to be one in him.

And to be made one in him, Jesus offers us a hope that less like the promise of gold and glory and more like a sword that slices into our world and reorders everything – the top on the bottom, the bottom on the top, the secret truth brought to the fore, the lowly asked to sit up higher, our every expectation turned downside up in the light of Christ’s refining fire. Remember, this is a Messiah whose mother sang him to sleep each night with the words of the Magnificat. A unity that ignores these Gospel truths is worth nothing at all. What is the point of such unity if it keeps the mighty in their seat and puts down the humble and meek? What good is a unity that continues to fill the rich with good things and sends the hungry empty away?

Jesus wants more for us than this, he longs for a unity that connects us not just to each other but to the very heart of God. And so, he tells us, we are to do this one thing. We are to pay attention. We are to interpret the present time. And that time, our time, needs us to live the words of Our Lady’s Magnificat. Our time needs us to save the weak and the orphan, to defend the humble and needy, and to deliver them from the power of the wicked. Our time needs us to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God. Our time needs us to refuse to see any of our neighbors as less worthy of love then we are. Our time needs us to embrace all those who differ from us, especially those who differ the most. Our time needs us to unite not to defeat our enemies but to love them. Our time needs us to refuse, again and again, to use words that threaten and harm. Our time needs us to embrace, again and again, the language of the gospel, which shines the light of the truth of God’s love into the world like a beacon of hope. Our time needs us to pay attention, to live the promises we hold, to seek a costly unity.

And the gift, the unearned prize, the real miracle, is that Jesus Christ our Savior has already accomplished the one thing that makes that kind of deep, enduring, transformative unity possible. He has been baptized with his own unique baptism, raised up high – not upon a pedestal, but upon the cross, to draw all people to himself. He has offered himself up as a sacrifice, not through hatred, but through love. All we need do is come to the foot of that cross, here – receive this bread and this wine and be re-membered into one body, confess our sins and return to the Lord, sing psalms and spiritual songs with one voice, let the truth of the Gospel catch fire in our hearts that it may shine out into our time, into our world. Come and count the cost of this unity, paid for you and for me by a God who is very near to you. Come, and do not be afraid. For it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

14 August 2016

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

*Borrowed shamelessly from NFL films

**Like Dietrich Bonhoeffer's "cheap grace"

You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead

You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead

Fr. David Cobb

Luke’s gospel brings us some of the most familiar and most compelling parables that Jesus tells, and there are several that only appear in this Gospel. It is also one of the few parables that Jesus tells where the heavens open and God’s own voice is heard. And God has something to say. There is this farmer. His great trouble is how to deal with an abundance; fruitful fields and a great harvest. He is a planner and so he decides to expand his operations and build bigger barns and safely put away today’s produce for tomorrow’s need. And that’s when God intervenes. “You fool,” he says. Harsh words from anyone, but from God? Devastating. You fool.

So how exactly is this person a fool? Certainly not in working the land and carefully planting, tending and nurturing crops. And not in taking stock of what he has and making provision for the future; that is commended more than once in scripture and often provides survival in times of famine. “You fool,” not because of what he had done but because of his complete absorption in himself. Listen to his comical speech: he addresses himself, who else is worth talking to? And the whole conversation never gets outside his little head. What do I have? How can I keep what is mine? This is my plan and now I am secure and nothing need trouble me, aren’t I special? There is no act of gratitude, no taking the first fruits to the temple as a sign that land and life and all is a gift from God. There is no mention of laborers’ wages or interest in the craftsmen who built his barn. Here there is no talk of neighbors or family brought in to rejoice together. Think of other parables Jesus tells. The woman who found the lost coin? She throws a block party to celebrate what she found. The king whose dinner guests beg off? He sends servants into the streets and byways to find someone to come and share his meal. And that other farmer, the father whose younger son crawls home, disgraced and desperate? He kills the fatted calf and throws a party big enough to offend the elder brother. Jesus’ parables are a riot of festival and rejoicing. Not this farmer. No, his plan was carefully laid out for his own comfort and security. He could rest in his own accomplishments and confide in his own plans, and spend no time or money or produce on things like gratitude or compassion or community. He was rich and secure. Until he wasn’t.

“This night, your life will be demanded of you, and then whose will these things be?” Whose will they be? The parable has circled back to the question of how an inheritance is to be divided, and maybe now we see why Jesus was so impatient with the question. Settling an estate can be a point of gratitude for the past and of strengthening the bonds of those who continue. It can also be a point where old resentments and current anxieties press hard against the ties of friendship and family. Here, Jesus wants us to see one thing more. The question that the rich fool couldn’t answer was exactly that, “Whose will they be?” and the implied answer is simple: they never were yours, not in any absolute way. You received them and then held them until you had to put them down. They were yours by the creative goodness of God from the shared work of a community that made your work possible. They were yours to be used for good, your good and others. And they were only yours for a time.

Flannery O’Connor wrote a story, actually one about the aftermath of a death, and its title is enough of a story in itself: “You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead.” So the rich fool’s life was demanded of him and the next morning, when those field hands he didn’t mention paying got up, when the craftsmen who’d built the new barns heard about it, when the neighbor’s he’d pretty much ignored saw the hearse driving away, they were all still in possession of whatever little bit they had. There was, we can assume, food on their tables as they shook their heads over the news. But the rich man, he was dead, and that’s as poor as you can be.

Be on your guard against all kinds of greed, Jesus says, because it is greed that cuts us off from life. For life is not the weight of possessions, nor is it secured in bigger barns, and it is not sustained by what we clutch. Wealth (or the overwhelming longing for wealth), overweening ambition, or even just prudent planning empty of gratitude and generosity is like an addiction, and like an addiction it will choke out every competing interest or concern. Greed will blind a person to what is good in the very thing that greed grasps. Money and wealth can do good things, but greed refuses to see the source or the point. Greed makes an idol of its focus and as scriptures insistently reminds us, idols are cold, dead things that can do no one any good. The biggest lie that this idol whispers in our ears is that we are invulnerable, that what we have isolates us from need. Maybe it places us above those who have less in this culture. It means we are secure and in control. And when we hear that, and believe it, we cannot hear God speak. Well, the rich farmer couldn’t until those fearsome words, “Fool, this night your life is demanded of you.” You can’t be poorer than dead.

But that was him, and it was a parable, and so where do we stand? Paul says we have died already, so we are one step ahead of the foolish farmer. We have died and our life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life appears, we will appear with him in glory.

When Christ appears, we will appear with him. When people introduce themselves one of the things we do is give a name and then some identifier: where we are in school, what sort of work we do, where we might be from. We listen and then share our own, quietly sizing each other up in other categories depending on the reason we encountered each other. But Paul insists that all of that – some of it profoundly important and life-enhancing, some of it simply realities of where we fall in the structures of the world, some of it the result of good or bad decisions – the ways we introduce ourselves or size each other up are finally as irrelevant as the rich fool’s wealth. When Christ appears, you will appear with him. After calling on us to live lives that turn away from evil and corruption, from lies and deception and from greed, Paul takes us one step further into poverty: there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, and free. We can no longer claim those identities, either as our privilege or another’s shame. They can no longer hold us back from each other. Christ has gathered all of that up in his incarnation. Nothing human is foreign him who was made “truly man.” The fullness of humanity bridges all of that and the fullness of humanity now in Christ is hid in God. You have died and your life is hid with Christ in God, and when Christ appears, you will appear with him. Anything we do that breaks down suspicions and heals divisions we do because whatever the division, Christ stands on both sides. If we confess and repent our own prejudice or pride or if we stand against the structures of a divided society, we are simply seeking Christ in whom all are one and who is in all. When Christ appears, we will appear with him, and then the beauty of every distinction and the gift in each particularity will be seen in the blessed unity that the Holy Spirit strives to perfect. Christ is all and in all.

Christ’s appearing is never far from hand: a passage of the Gospels, the blessed grace we encounter in the sacraments, the holiness of beauty, the joy of work that matters, the compassion that heals, the cup of water given in his name. Christ appears for those who have eyes and ears to perceive, and when we see and know Christ, we know ourselves. We know ourselves transformed, Paul says, we will appear with him in glory. And there we who are as poor as dead become heirs of a kingdom, and there in Christ’s transfiguring beauty, people like us shine with a glory that no riches and no earthly status can claim.

That is what made the rich farmer so foolish. For all that he had and for all his prudence, this is what he needed: a heart grateful enough to see God’s hand as the source of every good thing, and then a compassionate heart, that in knowing his own poverty he could see in others the needs he could meet, the good he could do, and the gifts he could give. “You fool,” God says, to the one who counts possessions, but not as blessings and gifts; to the one who builds barns and storehouses, but not for the well-being of others. “You fool,” he says to the one who forgets that all of this and even the ways in which we define ourselves is passing away, ours for the day and then to be given back into the hands from whence it came. And yet in baptism, our death is already behind us, drawn into Christ’s own life. Our poverty is enriched with his grace, and our true self remains to be received as gift, to be seen as revelation, to be revealed in glory when Christ who is our life is revealed.

Preached by Father David Cobb

31 July 2016

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia