The Claiming of the Shrewd

There once was a time when a man woke up of a Sunday morn and decided that he wanted to go to church. The sheets were warm, and the pillows were soft, and for a moment he was tempted to stay right where he was and worship at the Church of the Holy Comforter by the Springs. But something in his soul was stirring, and so he dragged himself from the cocoon of his cozy bed, dressed, and walked into town, looking for a place to worship.

When he arrived in the town square, he found himself in front of two different churches. He headed first to the right, towards the building with the plain wooden sign that read “Church of God” in small, simple letters. He entered into the dark space, and when his eyes adjusted to the light, this is what he saw:

He saw a tall, arching ceiling that drew his eyes up into shadow. He saw plain, ordinary pews, all just the same. He saw people of all kinds – all shapes and sizes, all races and genders, the rich and the poor and the powerful and the meek – sitting beside one another. He saw children sitting there, too, just like everybody else. He saw people smiling, saying hello, or kneeling quietly in prayer. He saw people pass by him in the doorway, bow their heads, cross themselves with holy water before stepping inside. He saw gold and silver and rich satin, all assembled in particular spots, marking the spaces in the church that seemed the most sacred, the thin places where the human and the divine touched. And in the center of the church, he saw the figure of a man, hanging from a cross, humbled and beaten and rejected, but somehow, shockingly, lifted up for all to see, reigning over all with a great and quiet majesty.

The man stood and watched this scene for a moment, taking in the people and the cross and face of that man broken upon it. He felt his soul go still, and he thought he might stay. But there was that other building to try across the street, and so he pulled himself out of the stillness and back into the town square.

Across the street, the other building was strikingly different from the one he had just left. This one had all of its gold and gemstones on the outside, shining in the sun like beacons. There was a sign, too, but this sign was enormous. The letters were 20 feet high, covered in gold with lights that twinkled around their borders. They were placed high up on the wall of the building, towering above the square, and they proclaimed, in all caps, “CHURCH OF MAMMON.” The man shielded his eyes, looked both ways, crossed the street, and entered in. And this is what he saw:                            

Opulence, everywhere. The light inside the church shone on splendor spilling out all over the place. When people entered into the church behind him, they didn’t bow their heads and dip a finger into a bowl of holy water; instead they lifted their faces and examined themselves in a mirror on the wall, giving their hair a final pat or their tie one final tug. Those that were dressed in bespoke suits and designer dresses ushered themselves to a plush seat in the front row, into golden chairs studded with diamonds and lined with rich fur. Other people, whose clothes were lovely, but off the rack, took a seat behind the golden ones in chairs that were a bit plainer with only a simple cushion. Those who showed up in clothes from last season shuffled to benches in the back of the room, where they sat hunched over, bunched together, and largely ignored. The ones who came to the door worn and dirty were told there was no room for them in the inn.

The man saw that most of the people looked very much the same – they were powerful and pretty, they were almost all the same color and almost all the same age. There were no children to be seen, but the man noticed a few of them being whisked away to another room where they would have to wait until they were old enough to have something positive and profitable to contribute. And in the center of the room, where in the other church the man had seen that hollowed-out, holy man hanging from his cross, in this church, there was…nothing. The front of the church was completely empty. But the people didn’t seem to mind, busy as they were commenting on each other’s new things, looking around to see how they compared to their neighbors, worrying about how they might move up higher.

 There was, the man thought, something to worship here, but it wasn’t holy and it wasn’t helpful. And it certainly wasn’t what he had woken up thinking about that morning. And so he turned and went back to the little wooden church to sit together with the rich and the poor and with all the little children in the shadow of that man with a face like love and his arms stretched out in what, in all truth, looked like a profound embrace.

If only it were so easy. If only we could see the signs so clearly, hear a verbal warning, “You are now leaving the Church of God and are entering the Church of Mammon.” Jesus told us that we cannot serve both God and wealth, and we agree, we nod our heads, but then we leave this church and step onto the street and wonder how exactly to tell. Am I serving God if I give money to a person on the street who may use it to buy drugs? Am I serving Mammon if I go buy a new book? A better pair of shoes? A luxury condo on Rittenhouse Square? We cannot serve both God and Mammon. Right. We know. But how do we know?

 Truth is, it’s complicated. Figuring out what to do with our money, how to relate to our stuff, is a thorny business. But it is our thorny business, and Jesus wants us to pay attention to it. Why else would he talk about it so much? I mean, really, for a man who lived off of the generosity of strangers and had nowhere to lay his head, he talks about money a lot. He knows it's tricky, so tricky in fact that when he does talk about it what he has to say isn’t always crystal clear. Look at today’s parable of the unjust steward – what is even going on here? Is the rich man really so blameless in all of this mess? If so, why do his debtors owe him so much? When the steward has his master’s debtors pay a bill for half of what they owe, is he cutting his losses or cutting out the unfair interest? And why is any of this praiseworthy? It’s a confusing, complicated story, about a confusing, complicated subject.

It’s such a complicated subject, in fact, that if we’re going to figure it out, we’re going to have to be smart. We’re going to have to be savvy. We’re going to have to be shrewd. If the motives of the unjust steward are unclear and his merits somewhat murky, at least we know that he was shrewd. He was thinking; he was planning, he was clever and canny and he paid attention to detail. We have to be as shrewd as the unjust manager; we have to claim that shrewdness as a part of our discipleship and put it to work for God’s purposes. We have to take the time to think about how we spend our money, how we give it away, how we treat our stuff, and how we treat our neighbors. We have to be clever and canny, and most of all, we have to pay attention to detail. For our service to God or to Mammon isn’t determined – mostly – by what we do when we receive a windfall. Our service to God or to Mammon is determined by what we do with a very, very little, with the tiniest of tiny bits.

And when we are shrewd – faithfully, humbly shrewd - each of these tiny moments becomes an opportunity for grace. For God is there in each moment. God has been there for every decision you’ve made today, from the moment you woke up of a mind to go to church to the moment you sat down after the Gospel. God will continue to be there, from the moment you step out onto Locust Street until the moment you lay your head down tonight. So, you holy Church of God, come to this place and sit before the one with arms stretched out in mercy. Take in his love and feel your souls go still. And then go forth from this place like the beloved, glorious, shrewd disciples that you are. Be faithful, in a very little and in very much. Worship the Lord, and serve only him. And the Lord shall direct your going out and your coming in, your saving and your spending, your serving, from this time forth for evermore.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

18 September 2016

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

The Grief-stricken Donkey of Sosian Lodge

“What woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it?” (Luke 15:8-9)

The donkeys at the Sosian Lodge in the Laikipia district of central Kenya do not have a great deal of work to do. There are five or six of them that graze freely on the lawns around the lodge. And on the day that I arrived there last month their number included a little foal that had been born a few weeks earlier. I did witness two of the donkeys pulling a cart one day to go collect firewood, but that was the only work I ever saw them assigned to. Their presence is otherwise benign and unquestionably welcome, even though one of them had a habit of braying loudly outside my room in the middle of the afternoon, just about the hour a siesta seemed like a good idea to me.

At night, the donkeys are led into a small, stone-walled enclosure by the Samburu tribesmen who look after them on the ranch, and who generally provide security for guests who stay there, as well as for the cattle, horses, and other domesticated animals (including the donkeys) who inhabit the large ranch in the African bush.

From my bed that first night I did not hear any of the commotion when a lion crept toward then donkeys’ enclosure, leapt over the wall into it, and grabbed the young foal by its throat. The guards heard the noise, came running, and fired gunshots into the air, sending the lion off without its prey. I did not hear the gunshots, and I did not hear the lion’s roar as it ran off into the night. But I did hear about it the next morning, when I learned that by the time the guards got there, it was too late for the young donkey, whose dead body they carried out.

As I said, the donkeys roam the property freely during the day, sometimes wandering onto the large veranda that looks out over the lawn and toward the bush. And on the day after losing her foal to the lion’s jaws, the grieving mother went a few steps further, venturing through the open doors of the lodge and into the entrance hall, where she was found, time and again over the next several days, staring sadly into a mirror. In an effort to be sensitive to the donkey’s grief, but to keep her out of the foyer, the staff placed a mirror on the veranda just outside the entrance hall. But the donkey seemed to want to share her grief with those of us in the house, and she clearly preferred to conduct her mourning inside the house.

Well, it was only one little donkey foal, and I am assured that donkeys are a fecund species, and that the mother will have no trouble producing another foal. This little donkey was by no stretch of the imagination the lost one-out-of-a-hundred that we hear Jesus talking about in the Gospel. It had not wandered off, and no one could go looking for it; and it wasn’t even a sheep, it was a donkey, so this would appear to be the wrong illustration for the Gospel reading this morning.

But I am stuck this morning with the image of that mother-donkey insinuating herself and her grief into the lives of those of us who inhabited the lodge, and indulging her mourning with long periods of staring into the mirror. What did this mean? Why the mirror? And why was it so important to her that it took place inside the house?

A month ago in Africa, I was paying no attention to the calendar as its pages ticked by. And it never occurred to me that the violent invasion of a lion, breaching the walls of the donkey enclosure and stealing the life of an innocent foal, could echo with the roar of violent death that still feels all too easy to remember fifteen years ago to the day, when proverbial lions flew in and killed our children, our fathers, our mothers, our sisters and brothers, our friends with a roar of fire and flame.

No doubt the analogy is imperfect – so please forgive me. It is not, in any case, the real parallel I wish to draw. No, I do not want to ask you to dwell on the attack on the donkeys in their enclosure, or on the slaughter of the innocent foal. Rather, at this long remove of fifteen years, I want to ask you to consider the mother, compelled in her mourning to enter into the house and gaze dolefully into the mirror. What can she have been looking for, except something, someone that has been lost? And what creature (even a donkey?) looks into the mirror for a child that has been lost? She is not stupid. She does not believe (I think) that the mirror is a portal into another lodge where her child might still be found.

No, she is staring into the mirror, looking for something that has been lost; and she is looking at herself. For in herself, she knows, something has been lost that she fears is irretrievable – snatched away from her and from life in this violent act of terror. In mourning she stands, looking at herself in the mirror, looking for what has been lost.

In the course of the past fifteen years it is not too much to say that nearly the entire world has been changed by the aftermath of that violent attack that left us all reeling with grief, and anger, and fear. The sound of the roar of the lions still rings in our heads. So much has happened. So much has been remembered, and so much forgotten. So much has been buried, and so much built. So much more blood has been spilled. The course of so many lives has been altered by the need to navigate the walls of the enclosure of that horrific tragedy and its airspace. So much grief has been poured out, so much mourning drapery has been swagged, then folded up and put away for future use.

But, while I cannot speak for everyone, I have to wonder whether something important remains undone these fifteen years later. I have to wonder whether at least some of us have not yet done what that sad and simple donkey did after losing her child. I wonder whether or not we have spent enough time looking in the mirror: searching our selves for what has been lost in us, looking for the only retrievable casualty left from this cruel act of terror – for what’s missing in our selves that was lost when the lion’s teeth ripped the life right out of the throats of people we love, whether we knew them or not.

For it is true, I think, that something has been lost that we fear is irretrievable – snatched away from us and from life in that violent act of terror fifteen years ago. And so the grief and the anger and the fear have taken their places almost permanently in our lives and changed us, too.

But I want to stand inside at the mirror for just a moment to recognize that truth, and also to ask whether or not we can’t find what has been lost to us - not our beloved dead, of course - but whatever in us was replaced by the grief, and the anger, and the fear? And if, standing here at the mirror, you agree with me that something has been lost, then I wonder if it isn’t time for us to light a lamp and sweep the house and search for it.

Part of the redemption of sinners is the discovery that we do not have to be lost in our sins, that nothing is irretrievable – not even that which was taken from us in acts of bloody violence. Not the foals killed by lions, and not the parts of our selves that we can no longer find when we look in the mirror. God holds the lives of the dead in his hands as he carries them into the life to come, where we will meet them again. And we are called to faith in order to see that living our lives defined by grief, and anger, and fear is really giving in to a kind of sin, because it separates us from God – and that we don’t need to stay lost this way.

The donkey, simple creature that she is, will get over her grief, because (I think) it’s just not that hard for donkeys to do. And she will bear another child, and hopefully that one will be safe from lions, and all will be well.

But things are more complicated for us. The lives lost to us will never be forgotten, and the world needs must have been changed by their dying. But that leaves us with time to step inside and look in the mirror. And when we do, do we discover that God does not want us to lose so much of our selves to grief, and to anger, and to fear?

God wants us to light a lamp, and to sweep the floor. Better, yet, (as Jesus’ parable implies) God wants us to know that he has lighted a lamp, that he is sweeping the floor, that he is in search of all that we lost, that he holds all life in his hands, including ours. And as long as we have life to live in this world, God does not want our lives dimmed by the darkness of so much grief, so much anger, so much fear. God wants us to know that nothing has been lost that will not be found – not on that awful day fifteen years ago, and not in all the intervening years.

I never expected to be shown an insight about life and death, about sin and self, about the goodness of God’s grace, by a donkey. Perhaps it would have seemed self-centered, up till now, to consider what part of you and me had been lost in that awful attack. Perhaps it has taken all these years to be ready and able to step inside and look in the mirror and try to see what part of our selves has been lost to sin as a result of such cruelty inflicted by another. Perhaps it has been difficult to see ourselves as the lost one-out-of-a-hundred sheep who need to be found and restored to the grace, safety, security, and love of the shepherd. And perhaps it has been impossible for us to even hear the word, let alone actually consider rejoicing with the good news that nothing that was lost is irretrievable to God.

So much was lost that day – not only the lives that God now holds in his hands, but parts of our lives that we are still called to live, and that we have suspected we might never find again. But God has lighted a candle, and God has swept the floor. And he has found everything – for nothing can be lost to him. Perhaps it is time to join the Psalmist in his prayer: “Make me to hear of joy and gladness once more, O God; that the bones that you have broken may rejoice!” Yes, perhaps it is time to remember that God has lighted a lamp and swept the house. God has found everything that was lost - and everyone - and perhaps it is time to rejoice!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

11 September 2016, Homecoming Sunday

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Leaving in Order to Love

If you really want to know what’s central to a culture, look at the way it thinks about its margins. How do we imagine what’s “out there” on the borders? How do we talk about what we call “the frontier?” I know there is a lot of talk about borders in the United States just now. Perhaps you will thank me for not wanting to discuss that at this moment. I don’t want us to talk about right now, at least not just yet. I want us to think back to the golden age of Westerns.

In 1953, George Stevens produced and directed the movie Shane, a pitch-perfect—actually kind of corny, but that’s pitch-perfect in this case—a pitch-perfect story about a brave, manly, good-looking gunslinger who wanders into the home of some brave, God-fearing settlers and changes their lives for a while. The family he meets out in a jaw-droppingly beautiful valley in Wyoming is the Starrett family: Joe Starrett, his wife Marian, and their boy, Joey. All three are drawn to Shane immediately, and who wouldn’t be? He is improbably handsome, impeccably neat in what looks like a runway version of a fringed buckskin shirt and pants, and he carries a shiny, menacing gun but never takes it to town unnecessarily. With his improbably clean, wavy blond hair and his keen blue eyes, he is a real white American 1950s heartthrob. Joe Sr. loves him because he helps around the ranch in a grinning, manly way. Marian loves him for reasons she keeps to herself, though there is never a whiff of impropriety between them. Little Joey loves him because he is everything a real man should be. Nobody says so, but it’s clear that they all three wish Joe Sr. could at least look a little more like him, though Joe Sr. is a good man in his own less glamorous way.

Well, you guessed it: Shane ends up having to shoot Jack Palance and a number of other bad guys, and then he has to leave town, because a gunslinger has no place in the world of God-fearing homesteaders. And the scene of Shane’s leaving is pure Hollywood history. If you’ve seen the movie, and you should, you’ll remember this moment: Joey runs after Shane to witness the final gun battle, and when Shane finishes up with the shooting, he speaks kindly to Joey about having to go. “A man’s gotta be what he is,” he tells Joey. “You can’t break the mold.” And he asks Joey to return home to his mother and father and “grow up to be strong, and straight.” Perhaps that last word registers a bit differently for us now than it did for mainstream audiences in the fifties, but the message is clear. Joey will become a man, not like Shane—no one can be like Shane—but at least like his own good, solid, unglamorous father. And yet Joey seems unconvinced. As the music swells, Shane rides off into the hills, with Joey’s little voice echoing across the valley: “Shane! Shane, come back! Pa’s got things for you to do! And Mother wants you—I know she does!” It’s hilarious now, maybe, but it’s wonderfully poignant. When you see it, it stays with you.

We could name a bunch of other stories like this, stories about taking leave of civilization and riding off into the hills or lighting out for the territories. Think of John Wayne in The Searchers, or Huck Finn. There are stories for girls, too, even if they don’t involve the wild west and guns. Remember Jane Eyre heading out across the moors to defend her virtue from Mr. Rochester? No question: we love a good tale about leaving behind domestic life. There is an inescapable romance about being the one who has to go.

And in spite of my best efforts, when I hear Jesus tells us to leave everything and everyone behind and follow him, I get pictures of Shane in my head. I don’t think I’m the only one: somewhere in his writings Thomas Merton talks about how every man who goes into religious life imagines that when he is in the monastery there will be a woman left behind at the gates, pining for him. It’s the Shane story, all over again. We love a good tale about how we have to get away from civilization and family life in order to fulfill our destiny.

Here’s what I want to say about that: sometimes we do have to go, but Jesus isn’t in love with the picture of human longing and separation that Hollywood conjures up for us. Hollywood conjures that image up for us so we will have a big hole in our hearts, and we’ll fill it with popcorn, soda, and other movies. Hollywood teaches us that our character is our tragic destiny, that people can’t change or compromise, and that we have only ourselves to ride with as we head for the hills.

Don’t hear Jesus saying that. Jesus is different. He’s telling a different story. Jesus only wants us to go if that’s what we have to do in order to be able to love with our whole hearts. We may indeed have to take distance from mother or father, sister or brother, or indeed from husband or wife or child in order to be true to God’s love. But we aren’t heading for the hills or for some tragic, lonely, self-imposed exile. We step away at times because that’s what it might take for us to find each other in Christ. We step away to join community, to join the body of Christ, even in our solitude. We set limits with each other so that we can love each other more, not less. So that we can find the space we need to forgive and change. So that we can hold another in prayer and love, even if we need distance, allowing them to change and grow and find a way forward without us and our misguided attempts to correct them.

Leaving isn’t a romantic story. It isn’t picture-perfect. It doesn’t always work, if by “work” we mean solving a problem or changing someone else’s behavior. But it’s true that sometimes we have to do it. When that moment comes in our lives, and it usually will at least once, let us pray that we have the grace to know what we are doing. Leaving each other is important enough that Jesus warns us specifically not to set out unless we are really ready, not to go unless we really want to pay the price for going.

And even when we stay—maybe especially when we stay—let us take a kind of sacred leave of one another that allows the Holy Spirit to act in our lives without our misguided interference. Maybe you will stay in your marriage forever, but you won’t do so without letting go of your plans to change your partner and rearrange his or her priorities. You won’t stay without having to admit sometimes that you don’t know what’s best for the person you love most. You won’t stay without having to give her room to grow and change, and without needing that room yourself. You won’t change your children or your siblings, but in God’s holy love you may find a way of letting them live their own lives. You may stay in this parish forever, but not without letting go of your fellow Christians to some extent, letting them be who they are and learning to rejoice in what God is doing in them that isn’t according to your own plan.

The leave-taking we do as Christians is not in essence tragic, even when it involves pain and loss. The leave-taking we do when we have to, by the power of the Holy Spirit, is a letting go that sets us free to love with open hands and open hearts. It’s a love that sets us free from resentment and control. It’s a love that allows us to marvel, maybe, and maybe sometime way down the road, at the power of God to do for others what we can’t do ourselves. It’s a pure, costly, acceptance of God’s will, and it’s based in hope, not despair.

Taking up the cross and following Jesus, even when it’s really hard, is not tragic. It’s a sign of deep faith, hope, and love. Sometimes we leave because the resurrection is real in our lives and we are willing to act like we believe it. Sometimes letting go is the first sign of resurrection life.

It’s tempting to want to imagine what Shane is thinking to himself as he rides across the gorgeous valley toward the sublime mountains and Little Joey’s anxious calling begins to fade from his ears. It’s tempting to me to want to misquote him, as his fans so often do, to speak the words he never actually speaks in the film: “Sometimes a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”

In our own scenes of leave-taking, when they absolutely have to come, let us replace Shane’s tragic words of rugged individualism with the words that our church, our community, our long tradition, teaches us to say this morning: Grant us, O Lord, to trust in you with all our hearts; for, as you always resist the proud who confide in their own strength, so you never forsake those who make their boast of your mercy; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson

September 4, 2016

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia