The Seventh of December

From a single point in heaven all sevenths
of December can bee seen; as if,
observing from his glass, the Lord can pinpoint
one or another, on the map of time
laid out before him in order, from left to right,
or right to left, depending; as though it matters
to him who made all time, and views it all
simultaneously.

There’s Ambrose in his cradle: a swarm of bees
alights, and buzzes round the child’s head;
a drop of honey left behind to tell
of sweetness yet to come. 

And there’s the blue
Pacific sky abuzz with aircraft pollinating
war.  The bluer ocean claims her dead,
entombs the Arizona, a tomb herself,
and marks this day with infamy.

                                                            And there
on Morningside Heights is me, amid the soaring
stone, assured that I’ll soar too when hands
are laid on me, to tell the Spirit where
to land.

          From heaven, to one and all the angels
bring their messages; the old angelic subject
line: “Fear not!”  To Ambrose’s dad, to sailors
as they drown.  When my peculiar angel
speaks, I look at him, and say, “Of course,
for what have I to fear?”  To which, replies
the angel, “Only your own foolishness,
which, on its own, may not amount to sin,
but that, of course, depends on you, you see.”

“Be dressed for action,” the angel said.  “And hear
the call of Christ to go where he directs
you.  Remember, your first pilgrimage
will be to go between the altar and
God’s people in the world.  Return again
as often as required, inscribing in your
heart the route from there to there.  When you
must speak be sure to speak of Jesus, who may
return at any time, sit down to eat.  And who
will serve the Lord?  Will you be up?  Will you
pay heed, and go, unlock the door, warm up
the basin, wash his feet?  Will you attend
his call, and still attend the call anon;
the timeless call you know,  ‘Come, labor on.’”?

Where did that angel go?  What words has he
for me, for you, all these years on?  He bids
us to the vineyard day by day.  And then
he whispers in my ear (and yours): give thanks,
give thanks.  All other gifts, it seems, will flow
from this thanksgiving theme, inscribed a bit
more deeply now than twenty years ago.

This seventh of December, then, from here
looks like a day of thanks for me, amid
a world that buzzes still with fear
and promise, too.  The bees have never swarmed
my head, and yet I pray that all the same
they’ve left a drop or two of honey here
for me and you.  Thanks be to God!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
7 December 2016
On the twentieth anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood

The Peaceable Kingdom

The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.

One remarkable day this summer, I set out from camp with my fellow group of adventurers for a ride through hilly country at the base of an escarpment in the Masai Mara region of southern Kenya.  Our horses knew the territory well, and we visitors were instructed by our guides to trust the horses to lead us away from danger should any arrive.  The trustworthiness of the horses in this regard had been tested the day before when, while walking casually across the savannah astride our horses, and seeing nothing but an expanse of tall grass in front of us, much to our fright and surprise, suddenly two large hippopotamuses stood up from their repose in a muddy wallow, and objected to the disturbance of the horses and their riders by heading toward us with looks of determination in their eyes.

I’d had no time to respond, but my horse knew what was going on, and he instantly wheeled around 180 degrees to the right, only to find his path of escape blocked by the other horses, and so began to spin back toward the left so quickly that I was sure I would come out of my saddle, off of the horse, and be trampled by a hippo.  Somehow I managed to stay on and trusted the horse to find the direction of safety.

Meanwhile our guide had noticed that the horses were not the only factor in the disturbance of the hippos, as they spotted a lioness lurking in the tall grass a mere twenty yards away.  Whatever her intentions had been, the confusion caused by the horses’ swift about-face, sent the lioness off in the other direction, and by the time I saw her she was seventy-five yards away, in search of a quieter corner of the African bush.

All this was fresh in my mind the following day, when, on a sloping hillside, our guides suddenly hushed us and brought us all to a nervous halt.   Just over a rise ahead of us, they had spotted a large, lone cape buffalo: older and separated from its herd, and therefore (they told us later) particularly dangerous.  We had come this way, up the hillside, because our intended route on lower ground had been blocked by a small group of elephants, lovely to look at from a distance, but not to be toyed with up close.  I was aware that trusting my horse on this steep hillside, covered in uneven clumps of tall grass would be significantly more difficult than on the flat grassland we’d been traversing the day before, especially if safety meant going downhill.  We eventually made our way around the big, old buffalo by taking the horses uphill of him, as our guides placed themselves between the buffalo and the nine of us in their charge, and we picked our way quietly and somewhat nervously around the old guy until we were at a safe distance.

Eventually we made our way down the hillside to the broad, flat savannah at the base of the escarpment, where we moved through tens of thousands of wildebeest making their annual migration, and happened upon a statuesque hartebeest posing for us on a small mound of earth.  We moved closer to the animal, with its distinctive horns, as though we were observing him at a zoo.  But this was no zoo, and we got a little too close for the hartebeest’s comfort.  When he bolted away, our horses – always alert to danger – spun around in flight mode, sending one of our riders, whose hands had been on a camera rather than his reins, to the ground, where, fortunately, no other danger awaited him.

The experience of moving through the natural habitat of large numbers of wild and dangerous animals, from the somewhat vulnerable vantage point of a saddle, has, for me, put Isaiah’s vision of a peaceable kingdom into what you might call perspective.  Calves and lions and fatlings do not lie down together, nor does the leopard lie down with the kid, unless she has killed it and is devouring it for supper.  The wolf does not live with the lamb; nor do the cow and the bear graze together.  And don’t even get me started on hippos.  Isaiah’s vision of a peaceable kingdom represents a drastic shift away from the created order in which nature really often is red in tooth and claw.

It is, of course, difficult for modern people like us to come into contact with the natural world, and even more difficult to do so in a way that allows us to experience anything like vulnerability, to actually interact with other species of animals or to observe their interactions with each other.  The wild kingdom had never been anything for me but a TV show before my African safari.  But it is wild and it is real.  And I hope I never forget the feeling of galloping away from a grumpy elephant who doesn’t know who you think you are, and has started moving toward you with deliberate speed, ears flared, perhaps to put you in your place.Ú

Wild kingdoms are all around us – in nature and of our own making in human society.  And it is just as well, from time to time, to get in touch with just how wild the world around us is.

It was a 19th century Pennsylvania artist from Bucks County, Edward Hicks, who made famous the image of the Peaceable Kingdom that Isaiah describes in our reading this morning.  He produced more than sixty versions of the image, depicting the ox and the lion, the leopard and the lamb, and the little child among them who shall lead them.  You probably have a version of one of his paintings filed away in the folk art section of your mind, and perhaps you can picture it now.  Hicks’s paintings look to me like representations of a dream that spring from some deep part of the soul that yearns for God’s righteousness and peace, but knows how distant a hope this is.  And in Advent the church aspires to an impossible task – we try to measure the distance from our wild kingdoms to the peaceable kingdom that God will establish when he shall come to judge the earth.

It may come as a surprise to us every year to be reminded that God is not merely leading us on a safari through a dangerous life in a wild kingdom, and to hear, instead, that God’s will bends toward a peaceable kingdom in which violence, enmity, and discord have no hold, and in which even nature’s teeth and claws have been cleansed and soothed.  The image of the peaceable kingdom haunts us at the outset of the church year, because it points toward a hope that is greater than the quite modest hope that we might learn to be nice to one another – an accomplishment that ought not to have to wait for the end of time, but so often these days among the highest aspirations of the church.  No, the peaceable kingdom is not merely the polite and friendly kingdom.  In the peaceable kingdom of God, the very nature of creation is bent back toward God’s will in the perfection of goodness whence all things sprang into being.  Nor is the peaceable kingdom a vision of heaven, the realms of the courts of God Almighty where angels sing and saints abide.  No, this description is Isaiah’s version of the apocalypse: the revelation of God’s secrets for the earth and its inhabitants that shall come to pass in the fullness of time.

What does it say about our society that entertainment these days is full of apocalyptic visions of zombies and the living dead, but almost nowhere can be found an image of the peaceable kingdom?

If we have convinced ourselves that God’s judgment consists only of punishment, destruction, damnation, and hell, then we have shaped a religion that can have precious little good news; and we are saying a lot more about ourselves than we are about God.  Maybe we are only saying that in the time of judgment we suspect that we’ll get what we deserve.

Back at camp in the Masai Mara, at the end of each afternoon’s ride we were greeted by the smile of the young daughter of our guide: eleven months old, growing up in the African bush, on safari for weeks at a time, in the midst of the wild kingdom.  She could have been a model for the child depicted in Hicks’s expressions of the peaceable kingdom of God.  And in her face one could see the wisdom of God revealed by Isaiah that “a little child shall lead them,” for it is in the face of a child like her that hope is so easily found.

Here we are in the midst of Advent, looking ahead to try to see what God has in store for us.  Taking our cues solely from our immediate environment, it might appear that God is preparing us for a frightening and daring safari through a wild kingdom.  Whether it’s your personal relationships that are a mess, or your spiritual life, of the weather, or the political climate, or your economic reality, or even the state of the church, it can be easy to conclude that you’d better hope you have a steady horse because we are in for a rough ride, and at some point you are going to simply have to hold on and hope you are led to safety.

But thanks be to God for the vision of the peaceable kingdom in which the wolf and the lamb, the leopard and the kid all lie down together; and the calf and the lion and the fatling; and the cow and the bear; and the ox.  To borrow the categories from Charles Dickens, this is not an image of how things may be; no, the vision of the peaceable kingdom is an image of how things will be – according to the divine purposes of God.  All creatures will find peace and harmony, old enmities will be laid to rest, violence will be heard no more, nothing will be hurt or destroyed, and the knowledge of God will be known to the ends of the earth.  And a little child shall lead us into this peaceable kingdom: the child Jesus.

About the second or third day of my safari I said to our guide that I felt I wanted to stop about every forty minutes or so and have a little cry because what I was seeing was so beautiful.  On reflection I have to ask: if the wild kingdom (red in tooth and claw) is that astoundingly beautiful, how beautiful will the peaceable kingdom be (in which righteousness and peace have kissed each other)?  And how will I ever be able to bear such beauty?

We often think that the principal character of God’s people is supposed to be our faithfulness.  But much of the record of religion indicates that the principal character of God’s people is our failure in faith.  We forget that God’s Word is good news to us.  We substitute hope with fear, and no end of misery results.  And we lose sight of the promise of a peaceable kingdom, assuming that the wild kingdom is all that God will ever have in store for us.

So we put our saddles away, and let the horses forget how to lead us to safety.  We build fences and find ways to exterminate the lions, rather than allowing them their space.  And we determine never to go on safari again, so that the only way we can ever see the beauty of God’s creation is through the bars of a zoo, or with the narration of David Attenborough.

Better to skip the zoo and go to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where you’ll find a painting of Edward Hicks’s – an early version of the peaceable kingdom, with Isaiah’s words painted to frame the entire image:

The wolf shall live with the lamb,

the leopard shall lie down with the kid,

the calf and the lion and the fatling together,

and a little child shall lead them.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

4 December 2016

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Ú This episode happened not on safari in the Masai Mara, but in the Laikipia region of Kenya during an afternoon ride, and really should be the basis of its own sermon some day.

Shaken Awake

In 1944, in Berlin, a young Jesuit priest named Alfred Delp went to prison for resisting the Nazi government. He had long been writing and preaching under government surveillance. The publication he edited had been shut down. There had been Gestapo agents in the pews, listening to his sermons. He expressed himself as carefully as he could to avoid arrest, but he had finally been taken into prison, where for several months he awaited execution. In prison, his hands were kept cuffed, and the lights were kept on him round the clock. Friends smuggled in small amounts of bread and wine so he could celebrate the Mass in his cell. They smuggled out tiny slips of paper on which he somehow managed to write messages of hope and reflections on the Gospel.

At just this time of year, with Christmas coming, Father Delp wrote about a subject that was particularly dear to him. His arms crossed painfully in handcuffs, under the eye of the prison guards, Father Delp wrote these words: “More [than ever before], and on a deeper level than before, we really know this time, that all of life is Advent.” Advent, for Father Delp, was a time of being, as he said, “shaken awake” and forced to know the truth about the world in which he lived.

“Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”

We are all shaken awake by something, or at least what we suffer in this life has the potential to awaken us. Often we think of this awakening as deeply personal: we lose our jobs, someone dies—one minute we are living side by side, eating and drinking, and the next minute one of us is taken. But there are times, too, when the shaking awake happens at a more public level. We have to face a truth about ourselves and our neighbors and people across the country and beyond our borders. This is one of those times for Americans.

I know this may sound partisan but I don’t exactly mean it that way: this is one of those times. It’s not partisan to say that our recent election has revealed unsettling divisions among us, and has called many of us to reevaluate what we thought we knew about being Americans. And that does matter, even here in church. There is great tension and great uncertainty, and we can’t shut the door on that turmoil. We can’t try to be the Church in isolation from the truth of our lives. Things may be shifting too rapidly for us to speak clearly at present, but we must acknowledge the shift.

Listen again to the voice of Father Delp, not because our moment is somehow equivalent to his, but because he speaks to us from one of the darkest places in human history, a Nazi prison, to tell us that no matter how much the world changes for us, the basics are still there in the coming of Jesus. God’s love reaching through to us to transform us. Our longing to feel God breaking into the world with freedom and healing and forgiveness. The promise of redemption in Christ. We are continually meeting Jesus again, as for the first time. All of life is Advent. The difference is that sometimes we are shaken up enough to know it, and sometimes we aren’t.

But the Church has practiced that feeling of being shaken awake, year after year. There is Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel this morning, telling us in no uncertain terms that we are going to wake up. If we follow Jesus, we are going to wake up. We are going to face uncertainty. We are going to face judgment. We are going to stand before a God who is simply and honestly too much for us, and that experience will involve fear as well as awe. God’s love is actually frightening. No way around that for us, nor should we seek to avoid that unsettling encounter with the living God. God will come to us suddenly. Maybe whenever God comes to us it will feel sudden, and shocking.

But the Church has been moving in us and through us for centuries, calling us to have courage. Calling us to step forward and meet God. Father Delp could speak of his unspeakable time in a Nazi prison as Advent because the life of the Church, the life of the Spirit, was deep down in his bones. It was as close to him as his own breath. It was his life’s blood. And because he was given the great gift of an Advent hope in those final weeks before his execution, he was able to resist evil with genuine courage.

That’s what this lovely, quiet, contemplative season of Advent is for. It’s designed to win us over so that we give in to our longing for God. It trains us to stay awake. It teaches us that our own limited lives—our confused, experimental, uncertain lives—are full of God’s own beauty and power. What we do here is God’s revelation to us about who we really are.

Remember the graces of this place and this moment, and come back here as often as you can. Come back for Lessons and Carols this afternoon. Be moved by what happens within these walls, and know that God has prepared this experience for you. Smell the incense and hear the music. Feel your hands reaching out to take the bread and the cup, and know that you are assenting to the action of God in your life as you say your grateful “Amen.” Know that you are really praying, really struggling to stand honestly before God. You worship in Advent for the sake of the whole struggling world.

Remember, we greet Advent with joy here, as we greet every season of the church year, even when we are being called to special repentance and discipline. We dress up for Advent. We mark the season with solemn, beautiful liturgy. We show that we are on the move in our relationship with Jesus, calling out to him as we put one foot in front of another, Advent Sunday after Advent Sunday. Draw on that power as you make your way through the world. Give God your time, as you pray, and let yourself feel the truth that time is in God’s hands.

The beauty of this season in the Church is a dark, mysterious, mirror of the work God does in your life and in the life of the world. Let it live deep in your bones. Let it be as close to you as your own breath, your life’s blood. When you are shaken awake, remember that waking up feels like this. You wake up here. And the truth to which we awaken is the coming of God for the redemption of our sins, now and forever.

Preacher by Mother Nora Johnson

27 November 2016, The First Sunday of Advent

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia