Freedom in a Time of Fear

In 1949, the African-American theologian and poet Howard Thurman published a book of reflections on the teachings of Jesus. This particular book, called Jesus and the Disinherited, is strongly inspired by the Sermon on the Mount, that challenging set of teachings we have been hearing in the gospels for about three weeks now. Thurman’s understanding of what Jesus is up to in today’s gospel requires our attention.

Thurman says that he is writing the book, and indeed that he has directed much of his life’s work, in response to his grandmother’s relationship to the scriptures. Here’s what he means by that: his grandmother had been a slave on a plantation in Florida, and she was illiterate, but she loved the Bible. Young Thurman had the task of reading scripture to her two or three times a week. He knew that there were passages from the scriptures that she cherished, and others that she would never allow him to read. When he was in college he finally asked her why, and she told him then the shameful history of the white preachers who used the letters of Paul, in particular, to silence slaves and demand their obedience. She was willing to hear the parts from First Corinthians that talk about love, but most of the epistles were like scriptural dead zones to her, made toxic by misuse. Much of Christianity, in fact, can feel like a dead zone, made toxic through a long history of distortion and falsification and self-justification.

Because he was such a searching and fearless believer in Jesus, Howard Thurman posed a question for himself and he set about to answer it. His question? Does Christianity have something to say to the person whose back is against the wall, or doesn’t it? Was the Bible a resource for his grandmother or was it a source of oppression? What did Jesus have to say to people who actually were disinherited? Did he have something for them beyond promises of a happy afterlife if they submitted to abuse?

In 1949, then, Thurman set out to write a response to that question. He came to the understanding that, as a Jewish carpenter in Roman-occupied Palestine, Jesus knew all about what a conquering power could do to a people. He knew about defeat, division, and despair, and above all he knew how the threat of violence and cruelty could erode a person from within. He knew exactly what it meant to have your back to the wall, and he could see all around him what it cost his own neighbors to have to submit over and over again to powerful people who consider your life insignificant.

I read Howard Thurman’s words with deep gratitude today, and I have to say, it’s not because my back is against the wall. My back is not against the wall, and maybe yours isn’t either, if I can say that without presuming to speak for another. I’m not powerless, and admiring Howard Thurman is no excuse for forgetting the position of privilege from which I speak. But I know that I live in a world, and in a particular moment, in which the threat of brute force seems to be escalating, and its targets, real or imagined, seem to be multiplying. Forget those maps of “red” and “blue” America, I’m imagining a map in which our nation is divided up by what we fear. Terrorists? Liberals? Conservatives? Russians? Immigrants? Racists? Come to think of it, we could probably divide the country up by which branch of the government we are most certain is coming after us some day soon: executive, legislative or judicial. Or is it the intelligence community we should be fearing? Whose plot to “take over” do you see looming on the horizon?

What the Bible says to the person whose back is against the wall may have a new set of meanings in this moment, if we are giving ourselves over to the fear of some occupying force. There are those who are threatened with physical violence right now, and there are those who are living in anticipation of threats that may or may not be real, but fear is the order of the day. We are becoming connoisseurs of fear.

But Jesus, Thurman tells us, is a master of overcoming fear. And when Jesus says “turn the other cheek” or “love your enemy,” he is addressing your fear, not urging your complicity with oppression. “Pray for those who persecute you” is an injunction to stand tall, to live as the child of God that you were meant to be. Be lavish in your love and your human dignity and your ostentatious trust in God. Be strong, Thurman says, in telling the plain truth. Don’t succumb to the temptation to get by quietly. 

Fear and hatred and mistrust, Thurman says, can do nothing for us but erode our creativity. The crazy, abundant responses that Jesus is calling for in this Sermon on Mount, on the other hand, remind us that God is in control and that we are agents of God’s will. If your back is really against the wall, Jesus tells us, it won’t be enough to do what you have to do to get by. There is no “getting by.” Freedom means claiming our part of that astonishing power that makes the sun rise on both the evil and the good. Freedom means that we see God’s peace falling like rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. Freedom of this kind is the freedom to follow Jesus. And by giving us the instructions we receive in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is teaching us that no threat or fear or lie can take that freedom away.

I don’t know about you, but these days I can hardly tell which I am, righteous or unrighteous. I know that I am free and that I have a voice. I know I can make choices about where my money goes and how to vote. I can write letters and march and make phone calls. But I’m alarmed to find that it takes comparatively little to make me imagine the worst. There is a difference between vigilance and morbid anticipation. There is a difference between fear and hatred on the one hand, and the courageous response of a generous heart on the other.

Hear this from Howard Thurman, interpreting with great creativity the words of Jesus: “Nothing less than a great daring in the face of overwhelming odds can achieve the inner security in which fear cannot possibly thrive” (56).

Follow Jesus, without fear. Allow no dead zones in our faith. Claim the freedom to love, undiminished and unafraid.

The Dumbwaiter

The Rectory of Saint Mark’s was built in 1893 to replace the previous residence of the Rector at 1620 Spruce Street. It required the demolition of part of the Parish House, which I guess used to extend further west. And it was built to house a small community of clergy (presumably single) all living under one roof. As I understand it, the clergy living there would have relied on the attention of at least a few people providing domestic service in the house for their care and feeding. The present large kitchen was, I believe at the time, the housekeeper’s suite. In the late 19th century the kitchen was actually in the basement – there are still some large built-in cupboards down there and a mantle over an old fireplace. Everything I know about domestic service in late nineteenth century America I have learned from watching Masterpiece Theatre costume dramas about the English aristocracy, mind you. Nevertheless, I have no difficulty jumping to conclusions that the one must have been very much like the other.

There remains, on the three lower levels of the Rectory, from the basement to the 2nd floor, the shaft of an old dumbwaiter, which would have been extremely useful in a brownstone townhouse that requires a certain amount of vertical movement. But on the first and second floors the dumbwaiter shaft has been converted into closets; so while you can tell that the shaft is still there, and its little carriage still rests in its old place near the basement kitchen, the dumbwaiter is no longer functional. It is a kind of ghost of the memory of the time when servants used the back stairs; and I imagine (somewhat wistfully, I admit) how well looked after the Rector must have been in those days, alas, long gone.

When we hear Saint Paul writing to the church in Corinth that “we are God’s servants, working together...” the words themselves are in no way confusing. But I wonder if we are really able to grasp their meaning. In my experience, most Americans these days are at least a little conflicted about the idea of servanthood. And in the church, it sometimes feels to me as if the idea itself is a little like the dumbwaiter in the Rectory – we remember what it used to do, and we can imagine its usefulness; but we know that it doesn’t work anymore, and we have no intention of trying to restore it. There exists in the church a kind of ghost of the memory of servanthood, but aren’t servants a thing of the past? How can we possibly be God’s servants?

All you have to do is watch a little Masterpiece Theatre to know that ideas about servanthood have changed a lot. The Rectory was built with two staircases (front and back) for a reason, and it wasn’t simply convenience. Servants had their place and their domain: quite distinct from the domain of those they were to serve. Nostalgia for those days may be quaint on Masterpiece Theatre, but it won’t do in the church today. Does that mean that we should discard Saint Paul’s suggestion that we are God’s servants? Is the mere idea of servanthood simply outmoded?

There are those who would say that, in fact, the idea is not dead at all, that servanthood is alive and well in the church, and that as an organization the church is as stratified as ever. It is true, after all, that a small company of volunteers shows up in churches all over the globe to enable the church to function. Hardly a thing happens here at Saint Mark’s without a division or two of such volunteers appearing to get us through our liturgies, or to help the office function, or to provide hospitality when we gather together, or to feed the hungry as we do in an organized way here most days of the week. And as is the case in churches across the globe, a few people tend to do an awful lot of the work.

But notice that Saint Paul does not write to the church in Corinth to tell them that some of them must be servants. He says, “we are God’s servants, working together.” When he says this, he means that God has something for each of us to do, and that we accomplish God’s purposes best when we do our work together.

God has something for you to do. This is a simple statement that could change your life: it changed mine. My life changed when I stopped asking myself what I thought I wanted to do with my life, and started asking what God wanted me to do with my life. With that shift in perspective, the entire world looked different, and I saw myself differently too. And it was a little scary to consider the implications, but it is also the reason I am able to give thanks for my life every single day.

But this assertion is not the domain of the clergy. God has something for you to do, no matter who you are. It might be with knitting needles, or with a book, or in quiet time of prayer. It might be at the ironing board, or at the stove, or with a bag full of groceries. It might be at a hospital bed, or on the phone, or just by holding someone’s hand. It might require some training, or a great deal of patience, or a commitment to be in it for the long haul. It might mean you get up early on days you could otherwise sleep in, or that you stay up late when you would rather be in bed, or that you find yourself well outside of your comfort zone. It might mean you have to get dirty, or work with your hands; or you it might mean you have to embrace silence, or you might have to think long and hard. It might require a smile, or it might lead to tears. It might seem deeply fulfilling, or it might leave you feeling quite drained. It might draw on talent you know you have, or it might result in doing something you never knew you were capable of. It might happen in church, or at home, or in Honduras, or on the street, or somewhere you never thought you would go. God has something for you to do, and that something will probably not be about you; it will be about helping someone else, living beyond yourself, being a neighbor, a friend, a partner. For when God calls us to serve him, it usually means serving someone else, and oftentimes the best way to love the Lord your God is to love your neighbor as yourself. God has something for you to do.

“We are God’s servants, working together....” Working together is such a challenge for so many of us and for the church. Often we prefer to work alone; who of us doesn’t prefer to do things our own way? Working together requires compromise, patience, and more compromise. But working together we can do things that God does not expect us to do on our own. And working together is what makes us a church – a blessed company of faithful people who together constitute the Body of Christ. You cannot be a church on your own. And while it’s possible that many people working separately do contribute to the church, the church is at her best when her members are working together in a more deliberate way. This may be one of the reasons we prefer choirs in church to soloists: it’s a model of working together, many voices producing an anthem that a single voice could never sing on its own.

It can be difficult these days to know what anyone thinks they mean by calling themselves or someone else a Christian. I suspect that many people think the label speaks for itself. And that easy assumption is built on another assumption that there’s nothing much to learn about becoming a Christian, living like a Christian, doing what a Christian person does. There’s an assumption that you could wake up on any given morning and know what you have to do to be a Christian without giving it any thought. I think this is a dangerous assumption. For one thing, it doesn’t allow us to be God’s servants, working together. It takes some thoughtful consideration, some practice, and a concerted effort to let your life be about others and not yourself, to be a Christian in any meaningful sense of the word. It requires that shift away from asking what I want, to intently discerning what God wants of me and of you. And it takes us working together to build up God’s kingdom, and strengthen God’s church, to be a disciple of Jesus Christ.

I realize that many people look at the church these days and see a dumbwaiter: an outmoded thing that takes up space that would be better utilized in some other way. But I can’t tell you the number of times that I have wished the old dumbwaiter in the Rectory still worked. Every time I serve coffee or drinks or snacks of any kind on the second floor, I carry trays of cups and glasses and wine and ice upstairs(well, I do use the front stairs for this, I’ll admit), I think, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to send all this upstairs on the dumbwaiter? The dumbwaiter might be the last servant left in the Rectory... if serving the Rector was the point.

But I think I may have something to learn from that dumbwaiter, and maybe you do too. For a dumbwaiter has something to do, but it can’t really ever work on its own; it takes working together, with others to load and to unload, to carry and deliver, to remove and to clean up. This is how feasts are kept!

Whether it knows it or not, the world needs the church. Which is to say that the world needs God’s servants, working together. In fact, it is when she strays from her identity as the company of God’s faithful servants that the church incites skepticism and animosity from those who suspect we are little more than a fancy outmoded relic of a former age. Well, we are called to be servants - God’s servants, working together – and if that seems outmoded, so be it, there are worse things to be called in this day and age.

There was a time when God’s servants, working together, believed that they could change the world. They knew that God had something for them to do, and that it would be most effective if they did it working together. The church has known this truth since the days when a dumbwaiter would have seemed like an outrageous contraption, and our ancestors in the faith saw that when they functioned as God’s servants, working together, the most amazing things happened. They brought Good News to the entire globe. They changed the world.

My friends, we are God’s servants, working together. Let us never forget that God has something for each of us to do, and that working together our offerings of ourselves become so much more than the sum of their parts.

There are so many places here at Saint Mark’s to pray, so many places to light a candle, so many places to ask God what he has for us to do, and to help us work together. But today I think I may walk down to the basement of the Rectory, and light a candle there on the dusty, wooden shelf, inside a closed-up shaft, that once carried sherry (I expect) and all kinds of other things up two floors so it could be whisked to the Rector and his guests. I might just make a temporary shrine of that dumbwaiter, and ask God to remind us all that we are God’s servants, working together, and with God nothing is impossible.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

12 February 2017

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Burning at Both Ends

In the spring of 1918, a woman with a man’s name sat down in her apartment in Greenwich Village and began to write a poem. She wanted the poem to express something of the quality of her life, the kind of energy that she felt flowing around her in what felt like a new era, an era that was unfettered and unfiltered, where life felt fleeting and fragile and joy had to be clutched with both hands. She called her poem First Fig, but the poem has nothing to do with fruit or fruit trees or the fruits of our labors. Instead, it has to do with light: “My candle burns at both ends;/ It will not last the night;/ But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends – / It gives a lovely light!”

The woman’s name was Vincent, or at least that’s what her friends called her. We know her as Edna St. Vincent Millay, and First Fig became one of her most well-known poems. Its only 25 words perfectly encapsulate the witty, wild, devil-may-care worldview of Millay’s generation, the generation that would roar into the twenties with an eye for pleasure – pleasure now, pleasure on their own terms, pleasure no matter what the cost. Millay’s First Fig spoke particularly to the women of her age, who with their short hair and shorter hemlines heard in Millay’s verse a kind of rallying cry to be new, modern, and independent – women who could think and speak and vote and drink just as well as any man. Their candles were burning at both ends, and they were loving its lovely light for as long as it lasted.

This is a generalization, of course. Millay’s experience in the bohemian Village of the 1920’s was certainly different from that of the average housewife on a farm in Nebraska. But the world was changing, and the call of carpe diem was heard far and wide. The world seems to go through this from time to time. People have been burning candles at both ends forever, since first-century Corinth, where the apostle Paul quoted the well-known adage of his day: Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. In times of chaos, in times of transition, or perhaps just from time to time, we humans long to just let go, to live without a view to the consequences, to burn and burn and burn and burn without worrying about our wick. My candle burns at both ends; it will not last the night; but ah, my foes, and oh, my friends – it gives a lovely light!    

But burning our candle at both ends isn’t always just about wanton hedonism. Sometimes burning our candle at both ends feels like a response to the Gospel. “You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.” Let your light shine before others, Jesus commands, and so we do. Or, at least, so we try. We try to love God with our whole heart and soul and mind, even when our hearts are broken, are souls are conflicted, and our minds are distracted. We try to love our neighbors as ourselves, even when some of our neighbors seem completely disinterested, and others seem to hate us more and more each day. We try to do good works, giving food to the hungry and drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, caring for the sick, visiting the prisoner, even when our supplies of food and drink and clothing are low and our energy even lower. We try to continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, even when we have a Super Bowl party to get ready for. We try to resist evil, even when it seems justified or harmless or just plain fun. We try to proclaim the Good News of God in Christ, even when no one seems to be listening. We try to seek and serve Christ in all persons, even when we feel like we’re the ones who need to be found. And we try to strive for justice and peace among all people, even when the arc of the moral universe seems to be bending toward bigotry, intolerance, and hatred. We try, we try to claim ourselves as the light of the world without counting the cost; we try to burn our candle at both ends without worrying about the wick. We try to burn our candle without thinking about the night’s darkness, to think instead only of how we can invite both friend and foe into the circle of its lovely light.

But there are times, my brothers and sisters, when the candle is just too short. There are times when our light sputters and grows dim. There are times when there doesn’t seem to be enough oxygen in the room, enough space in our lives, to keep preaching and feeding and loving and striving and seeking and persevering and praying. There are times when, to borrow (and frankly probably misappropriate) a phrase from Carl Sagan, “The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.”* Our efforts are defeated, our hearts are betrayed, our bodies are broken, our offers are rejected, and the need, the bottomless pit of need and suffering yawns ever wider. What use is our little candle, burning at both ends or not, against such darkness?

You know, the English language is a wonderful thing. It is quirky and inclusive and malleable. It is the language of Shakespeare and Cranmer and Herbert and Eliot and Frost and Millay. But it does have a few shortcomings. One of them is that we use the same word for both the second person singular and the second person plural. You can mean you, or it can mean you. Yes, our southern neighbors have y’all, and we in Philly have youse, but in written English we’re left to rely on context. Thankfully, because English was not the language of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we hear Jesus say “you,” we can always turn to the Greek to find out which you he means. And in this case, in this Sermon on the Mount, Jesus most emphatically means youse. Youse are the light of the world. Let the light of all youse shine before others, that they may see your works and give glory to their Father in heaven, their God, their ultimate Jawn.

Okay, maybe too far with the Philly-speak…but you get the point. Jesus commands us to let our light shine before others – not our lights, but our light. We are never left alone, trying to relight our own tiny candles. The light that we are to shine before others is a light that shines through all of us, that expands and grows because we are a we. The light that shines before others is fed by the light of these holy candles, blessed this past Thursday at the feast of the Presentation, when we prayed that they would aid us in becoming “inflamed with the fire of [God’s] love.” The light that shines before others is a light born of our common life, our shared baptism, our identity as the body of Christ.

Our light is a light of we, of youse, of us. Our candle can burn at both ends because the wick of faith that connects us to each other will never run out. When we gather in faith, as a community, serve in love, as a community, and proclaim hope, as a community, our candle can burn and burn and burn and burn. Our job isn’t to figure out how to keep our personal candle burning forever; our job is to allow ourselves to be drawn back in to this youse. Our job is to claim this youse as our own, to connect here, to pray here, to serve here, to speak here, to pledge here, to go forth into the world from here, to let our light shine before others from here.

This is just wonderful news. Because it means that whenever we feel our own personal light starting to fade, all we need do is reconnect ourselves here, to this community, to this Church, to the presence of Christ that dwells here. We don’t need to be particularly holy or brilliant. We don’t need to be particularly rich or talented. We just need to be within earshot of the living Christ. You are the light of the world, Jesus said, all of youse, every single person on this mount who can hear my voice. You are the light of the world because you can hear me; you are the light of the world because you’ve put yourself here, in this community, gathered at my feet.

So find your light here. Be inflamed here. Let your light grow and brighten in this holy place, with the rest of this holy community. And then let it burn, at both ends, burning into the darkness, burning for friends and foes, burning for faith, hope, and love. Let your candle – all of youse – burn at both ends. It gives a lovely light!

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

5 February 2017

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

*This quotation is taken from a book of Sagan's called The Demon-Haunted World. In Sagan's writing, the candle that is burning out is society's understanding of the importance of scientific truth, but his poetry applies to my candle as well. (And Sagan's point is also an important and timely one!)