Where Is Their God?

There is a question embedded in the liturgy of Ash Wednesday.  And in a sense it is that question that will be scrawled across your foreheads in a few minutes when Mother Takacs and I inscribe a cross of ashes on your heads.  The question is an ancient one, repeated through a certain vein of the scriptures by the Psalmist and by the prophets.  And although it is an ancient question, it is also very much a question for our time.

It is a question that may occur to those who take note of the smudge of ash on your forehead as you walk by them after Mass this evening.  The question is posed smugly by all kinds of people today who think they know better.  But it is also asked by those who feel hurt, disappointed, abandoned, forgotten, or belittled by the church and its representatives.  And it is articulated by those whose impression of most religion, and certainly of the Christian church is that it is reactionary, retrograde, and willfully ignorant in the face of modern knowledge.

Tonight the question comes at the end of the cry of the prophet to “call a solemn assembly” for the purposes of penitence and contrition and reconciliation with God.  The question is this: “Where is their God?”

This is not an entirely rhetorical question, but mostly it is rhetorical if it is prompted by the sight of your little ashen cross.  Because in that context the person who reads that question written in your ashes, believes that there is no answer to the question.  And they may look at you tolerantly or sadly, as the question runs through their minds.

The Psalmist and the prophets understood that this question was one that would be asked.  It is a stand-in for all the arguments against God, and it is understood to be the miniaturized anthem of all those who do not believe in God, or believe there is no God: Where is their God?

But of course, as questions go, it is a pretty good one, and it is not a question that is only ever heard on the lips of unbelievers.  Alter it only slightly and you have a question that has nagged at believers of various degrees of difficulty, when we ask of ourselves, “Where is our God?”  For we do not always know, and we cannot always be sure, and sometimes we doubt, and we wonder, and we fret, and we rail, and we would like to know, dammit, where is our God?

I could provide a short catalog of sickness, calamity, failure, loss, jealously, insecurity, suffering, injustice, and death that might all be filed under the question, Where is our God; but you can probably pull your own files and provide your own examples of times when this question, or one of its many variants, was on your lips.  If you can’t, then read the beginning and end of the Book of Job some time, which provides the executive summary of the fullest biblical file on the question.  Where is our God?

Presumably you have come to church tonight because you believe that the answer to the question is, at least in part, to be found here.  If God is not found in church, then we are in trouble, for sure.  But I remind you that you are in a minority, even on this day when it seems so many still want to go to church.  And so your ashes are still capable of spelling out that question to anyone who happens to glance at them before you have a chance to wipe them off.

An interesting feature of the question of the night is this: it is actually part of what you might call a compound question: it is a question within a question.  And in the script for this gathering of penitence and contrition and reconciliation, that compound question has been assigned by the prophet Joel to “the priests, the ministers of the Lord,” who are instructed to stand “between the vestibule and the altar” and entreat the Lord above, the living God, on your behalf.  And the burden of our entreaty is to challenge God about his tendency to go unnoticed, unrecognized, unseen, unheard, and un-heeded.  We are to provoke God about the question that I am asserting will be written across your foreheads: Where is your God?  Why, O Lord?!  Why, if you love us, and if your are, in fact, the creator of the universe; why, if you are omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent; why if you are from everlasting to everlasting, the beginning and the end of all things; why if you are the source of all love; why if you are the prince of peace; why should it be said among the peoples, “Where is their God”?!?  This is the compound question the prophet has put in my mouth on your behalf tonight, and it is with seriousness that I take it up on your behalf, for I would like to know the answer.

“Spare your people, O Lord,

and do not make your heritage a mockery,

a byword among the nations.

Why should it be said among the peoples,

‘Where is their God?’”

In this text, anciently associated with Ash Wednesday, we priests are given another, additional instruction, however.  We are not instructed only to instigate the Lord with our questions, we are also told to weep.

Among all this simple word may imply, it probably includes the shedding of tears.  We are to weep for all of our sins, and because of our estrangement from God.  We are to weep for all that has been lost that God entrusted to our care.  We are to weep for the entire catalog of sickness, calamity, failure, loss, jealously, insecurity, suffering, injustice, and death that is represented here tonight and beyond.  There are plenty of tears to be shed; there is much for us to weep for.

I am put in mind of a story of a monk who for many years served as the steward of his monastery.  Not quite a Friar Tuck, he was nevertheless gregarious for a monk, and he delighted to welcome guests, to organize the kitchen and its gardens, to oversee the sheep, and the goats, and the cows that provided milk and meat.  He was the supervisor of the small brewing operation that produced beer in a dark, cool, vaulted room beneath the refectory.  He embraced the keeping of every feast with what you might call religious zeal.  But Lent was a trial for him, with its fasting, and its somberness, and its restraint, and self-denial.  Forty days of hard prayer for this monk, probably wondering the whole time, where is our God?

One year, a month before Ash Wednesday, the abbot called the monk to his study, and told him that he was sending him out into the desert, to a hermitage far away from the monastery and the rest of the monks and their guests.  The world was in great need, the abbot explained, and most of the other monks were too old and too weak to go to the hermitage to pray, but prayer, deep prayer, what was needed, prayers of penitence, contrition, and reconciliation.

The jolly monk was instructed to gather up all the intentions for prayer he could; to take a month to do this, visiting the other monks and even other monasteries, and going into towns, and soliciting the prayer intentions of anyone he could find.  And to gather up these intentions, along with those given him by the abbot, and to spend the rest of the year at the hermitage in the desert alone, praying.

Supplies of the simplest kind: bread and water and cheese, and fruit and vegetables, and very rarely some meat, and some wine, too, so he could say Mass for himself - all would be provided, and left for him regularly in a barrel beside a rock about a mile or two’s walk from the hermitage in the desert.

So the monk spent a month gathering up the prayers of everyone he could find, and he drank deeply of all that human companionship.  And he wrote down all the prayer requests, and he tied them in bundles.  And with a heavy heart the monk headed out to the desert, to his lonely hermitage, which was on a little rise among the dry, dusty landscape of the desert, surrounded by some thorny grey shrubs that were themselves depressing to the monk who looked at them and thought of the Crown of Thorns, which is not a cheery thought.

The first month passed, and it was not as bad as the monk feared it might be, and he was glad to be praying for so many people, and so much need in the world.

But as the months went on, the monk, who saw no one at all at his isolated hermitage, became lonelier and lonelier.  He continued to say his prayers.  He was provided with sufficient food and water and even books that he picked up every month at the barrel by the rock. But he was oh, so lonely.  And every day he could stand outside his little hermitage and look around in every direction and see no one and nothing, and it hurt.

Every morning he would rise early and say Mass, taking a stack of prayers that enumerated the details of the catalog of sickness, calamity, failure, loss, jealously, insecurity, suffering, injustice, and death in the world as he knew it.  Then he would extinguish the candles at the altar, step outside of his hermitage, just inside the tiny wall that enclosed a little, dry, dusty yard before the door, and there in the little dry, dusty yard, with nothing but dry, dusty desert in every direction, he would fall to his knees and weep.

At first he wept only a little, and then pulled himself together, and told himself that this would not do, that he had to be strong.  But as the days went by, he found it harder and harder to be strong, and he felt more and more alone in the world, and he wondered often, Where is our God?”  And soon the time he spent on his knees weeping in despair, in the little dry dusty yard was as long as the time he spent praying at the altar.

And one day, he realized that he had been there in the dry, dusty yard weeping on his knees for far longer than he had spent praying at the altar.  And the sun was higher in the sky than it normally was, for the morning had advanced.  And still he was weeping, and he felt the tears rolling down his cheeks, and he could remember all the prayers of the day at the altar, and he could feel his own despair and his own loneliness.  And he looked down, and he saw a puddle beginning to form just at his knees, so great was the torrent of tears that fell from his eyes. And this recognition resulted only in the deepening of his despair, and caused him to weep more, as the sun crept higher in the sky.

And you know that when you are really weeping, your eyes are often tightly closed, as were the eyes of the sweet and very sad monk as he wept and he wept and he wept… until finally the tears stopped, as the sun beat down on his head.  And he opened his eyes, and he looked down at the puddle that had formed at his knees, and from that puddle, he thought he could see tiny green shoots poking up.  He bent down to look closely, and sure enough there were little green plants poking up in the yard from the puddle of his tears.  He stood up and shouted with glee, and when he looked down again the little green shoots had buds, and those buds were beginning to open into blossoms of wildflowers.

The next day after Mass, the monk came out and he knelt and wept again, but this time in a different spot.  And as the sun came up the puddle of tears at the monk’s knees began to spring into bloom: wildflowers in purple and white and yellow blossoms.

And every day the monk would move into a new spot where he wept, and more wildflowers would grow, and the entire yard within the little wall was carpeted with color.  And this little miracle filled the monk with hope and drove away his loneliness, and sustained him through the long hot days, although the empty vista of the emptier desert never changed, and there was no rain, but he almost never wondered any more, Where is our God? as he watered his tiny wildflower garden with his tears day after day.  Until the days got shorter and the sun didn’t climb so high in the sky.  And winter came.  But the monk was sustained by the memory of the wondrous blossoms that had come from his tears in the desert.

At the end of the eleven months, a brother from the monastery came with a cart pulled by a donkey to bring the lonesome monk back to the community, to which he was overjoyed to return.  It was Shrove Tuesday when he got back, and there was beer and bacon and rejoicing that night.  But the next day was Ash Wednesday, and the monk sat silently in the dark church at Mass, and heard the reading from the prophet Joel:

“Between the vestibule and the altar

let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep.

Let them say, “Spare your people, O Lord,

and do not make your heritage a mockery,

a byword among the nations.

Why should it be said among the peoples,

‘Where is their God?’”

And the sweet monk fell to his knees, and he smiled.  And he wept.

“Spare your people, O Lord,

and do not make your heritage a mockery,

a byword among the nations.

Why should it be said among the peoples,

‘Where is their God?’”

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Ash Wednesday 2017

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Climb High, Sleep Low

Fr. Mullen on an acclimatization hike on the slopes of Kilimanjaro, July 2016

Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain.  (Mt. 17:1)

Everybody knows that the air is thinner at high altitude.  What this actually means, as I understand it, is that the barometric pressure is lower at higher altitude, so the air is less compressed, therefore any given volume of air contains fewer molecules overall, including oxygen, so when you breathe you take in less oxygen, which accounts for about 21% of the ingredients in air.  What this means is that you have to breathe a bit more quickly and more deeply to draw in more oxygen, although this biological response is actually insufficient to allow the body to acclimatize to high altitude.

An old adage articulates the method by which mountain climbers in high altitudes need to acclimatize: climb high, sleep low.  If you climb high at, say, elevations above 10,000 feet, where this kind of thing becomes an issue, you begin to stress your body in the thinner air, signaling that it needs to do something to adapt to the situation.  The best way for the body to do this is to produce more red blood cells that carry oxygen throughout the entire body.

Say you are climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, for instance, which will take you (if you reach the summit) to a height of 19,341 feet above sea level.  One day’s climb might take you as high as 14,000 feet, but you might make camp that night at a lower place on the mountain where the elevation is only 13,300 feet.  At 14,000 feet, your body got the message that it needs to make more red blood cells in order to better distribute the oxygen your body needs, but it will have an easier time making these new red blood cells while you sleep at the lower altitude that night.  By morning, you’ll be better prepared to climb to greater heights.  And, God willing, this way you will make it to the summit with your wits about you.  Or so I’ve heard.

The traditional location of the account we heard in the Gospel this morning of Jesus’ Transfiguration, in the sight of Peter and James and John, is Mount Tabor, which ascends to a soaring height of 1,886 feet – a mere 17,455 feet below the peak of Kilimanjaro.   But who am I to make comparisons?  Some New Testament scholars have suggested that a different mountain, Mount Hermon, is a more likely location for the transfiguration for precisely the reason that it is a much higher mountain: 9,232 feet.  At that elevation Peter, James, and John might just have been in danger of a nose-bleed.  But neither the apostles nor Jesus, (nor Moses, nor Elijah, for that matter) would have had to worry about climbing high and sleeping low.  They’d have been in safe territory, well below 10,000 feet.  And yet, I wonder if we learn something about this mysterious mountaintop experience if we take into account the old climbers’ adage to climb high and sleep low.

The event of the Transfiguration is notoriously resistant to easy interpretation.  It is usually taken to be highly symbolic – but what does the transfiguration symbolize?  There Jesus stands, his face shining like the sun, in the presence of the ancient representatives of the Law and the Prophets.  And…?  What?  There is the voice from the overshadowing cloud: “This is my Son; listen to him!”  But no words come from Jesus then for anyone to listen to, except (eventually) the order to tell no one yet of what they have seen.  Is he kidding?  Tell no one about this transfiguring light?  Share no description of this mystical vision?  Repeat to no one those divine words?  Exclaim to no one, in voices hushed or loud, what it felt like to be there…  in that Presence!?!

Peter is often mocked for his reaction to the moment (“If you wish I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah,”) as though the rest of us have a better idea of how to respond to this event.  But over the years I haven’t heard many better ideas.

So, what if we remember the climber’s adage to climb high and sleep low?

If you had to adopt a slogan for the Christian life, you might think that a good one could be the inverse of that adage: Climb low, but sleep high!  Which is to say that we sometimes think of the Christian faith as a system that promises the high reward of heaven after a life of struggle on earth.  Don’t worry about the trials and tribulations of this life, this way of thinking goes, for the promises of heavenly paradise will make it all worthwhile.  We may climb low while we live on earth, but we will sleep high in the celestial courts!  But maybe the Transfiguration is meant to challenge that way of seeing things.

Perhaps this high ascent is how God puts stress on the system, so to speak, signaling that something is going to have to be different as we go forward from here.  After all, it will not be long, from this point, before Jesus is leading his disciples toward Jerusalem, and his Passion, and his Death, and his Resurrection, and his Ascension into heaven.  Perhaps God the Father leads Jesus to this mountaintop to begin the process of acclimatization, symbolically speaking.  But since Jesus’ Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension are all intended for us, not for his benefit, it is important that Peter and James and John go with him, as our representatives, to begin the process of acclimatization for us.

At a symbolic level, it makes sense for us to think about climbing high and sleeping low if we believe that Jesus actually has someplace for us to go, something for us to do, and that when we follow him we are called to go higher than our other daily challenges require.  Perhaps, the point of the Transfiguration is actually all about the altitude, all about climbing high.  And the light, and Moses and Elijah, and the voice, and the rest of it, are all there to make us want to go there again, to climb high again tomorrow, because, wow, what things happen when we climb high with Jesus!

Did anyone ever tell you that walking with Jesus might lead you up a high mountain?  Did anyone ever tell you that not only would the views be great, but that you would see things with Jesus, experience things at high altitude that you cannot see down low, cannot experience if you don’t climb?  Did anyone ever tell you to expect to see the mystical and symbolic insights of God if you will follow Jesus?  Did anyone warn you that you might encounter visions you cannot fully understand, but that you will delight in them for their beauty all the same?  Did anyone ever warn you that you might find your entire self stressed because the air might get thin in the Presence of God, and you might find yourself gasping a bit for breath?  And did anyone ever tell you that the way to deal with this is not to vow never to climb this high again; but that if you will climb high and sleep low you will be able to climb even higher tomorrow?

Of course this is symbolic language.  Of course the next day Jesus and Peter and James and John did not climb above 10,000 feet.  But within days they were headed to Jerusalem, toward the rarified air of the Upper Room, and to that most challenging climb up to Calvary and to the Cross.  Peter and James and John could not be expected to follow Jesus all this way without some preparation, without some acclimatization, and neither can we.

We are not prepared in our mundane daily existence for the heights to which Jesus calls us.  And if we don’t think (and act) like mountain climbers, then we may never be willing to follow him, for we will only know that when we try, we are left gasping for air.  But if we climb high and sleep low, then maybe we will be ready to continue with Jesus tomorrow, and to go even higher.

So many Christians have such low expectations of Jesus, but the Transfiguration is meant to elevate those expectations, without a full explanation.  Do you want a glimpse of the light that shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it?  Climb high, and sleep low!  Do you want to hear the voice of God?  Climb high, and sleep low!  Are you wondering what it means to call Jesus the Son of God?  Climb high, and sleep low!  Is faith in him congruent with the ancient faith of Abraham, or is it discontinuous of the Law and the Prophets?  Climb high, and sleep low!  Jesus invites us into a rare insight by allowing us to climb high with him.  We are wise if we remember to sleep low, so that tomorrow we can continue higher.

It is intriguing to me that thing that changes when you climb high and sleep low is your blood.  It’s the production of more red blood cells (among other things) that allows the climber who has slept low to climb higher.  What changes was God preparing in Jesus’ blood when he called him to the mountaintop?  How was he preparing the sacred Body of his Son to share that precious Blood with his disciples?  More poignantly, how was he readying his Son to shed his precious Blood for the salvation of the world?

If climbing high and sleeping low prepares our blood to sustain us at high altitude, what unseen transformation may have been taking place in the Blood of Jesus as he climbed high and slept low?  Was God doing with Jesus’ Blood just exactly what he does with our blood if we climb high and sleep low: altering the composition of that blood to keep us alive as we continue on tomorrow, and climb higher?

At 6:54 am on the morning of July 22nd of last year, I stepped onto a piece of rock at the altitude of 19,341 feet above sea level.  It is, by far, the highest I have ever climbed, and it was exhilarating to stand so high on the earth.  And I was able to reach the summit of Kilimanjaro, in part, because I had climbed high and slept low.

But the truth is that I have climbed higher with Jesus than I ever could climb on this earth.

The faithful pilgrim finds that the pattern of climbing high and sleeping low suits us, as it prepares us for the next day’s journey, the next day’s challenges, the next day’s blessings, the next day’s encounter with the Holy.

When we climb high and sleep low, we find that we are in step with Jesus – or, is it the other way round, that when we are in step with Jesus, we find that we are climbing high and sleeping low?  And among all the other changes that may take place in us, one significant part of our acclimatization to this life of climbing with Jesus is that something happens to our blood, symbolically speaking, as we are nourished with his sacred Blood, which is itself mystically altered, so that it may be shared with us, and gives us new life in higher climes.

Let us, my friends, try to remember to climb high and to sleep low, for God is calling us to become acclimatized to a new life that comes from our communion with his blessed Son.  If the air is thin, and it’s hard to do, so be it.  Let’s remember that there is something happening when we climb high and sleep low – that our blood is being augmented with his sacred Blood, which brings with it the promise of life, where we saw only death before.

Lord, it is good for us to be here, overshadowed by this cloud.  Help us to listen to you.  Nourish us with your Blood.  And help us always to remember to climb high with you, and to sleep low, so that tomorrow we may climb higher!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

26 February 2017

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

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.