The Gift

A few days before Christmas I was given a gift that was completely unexpected and greatly appreciated. It was not given to me by any of you! The gift was novel to me, and not only well intentioned, it was also well chosen: there’s no question I’d enjoy it. The gift was handed to me in a shopping bag, it was not wrapped; and I carried it home in that same shopping bag, into which also put some Christmas purchases I had made to give to others, and I set it down in the foyer of the Rectory, amid a number of other shopping bags. I know that I wrapped and gave away all the other contents of that bag, but the gift that was intended for me somehow disappeared. 

I don’t think anyone took it. I’m quite sure I didn’t give it to anyone else – wrapped or unwrapped – but I cannot for the life of me find it. One of two possibilities seems likely to me. Either the gift stayed in the bag and has been moved to the back of a closet somewhere, where eventually it will be discovered. Or, the gift stayed in the bag, and was un-noticed when, at some point, discarded Christmas wrappings, cards, catalogs, etc were added to the bag and sent to the trash, and it will never be seen again. What a shame it is that I have not only lost out on a gift that I am sure I would have enjoyed, but that I also cannot fully appreciate the kindness of the giver.

Of course, I can think of other gifts that are languishing elsewhere, in the back of closets or cupboards, or on a shelf somewhere, some even in the back of the freezer. And there are other gifts that have been lost, or broken, or misused, or eaten by the dog. I do not think of myself as an ungrateful person – quite the contrary, I feel extremely grateful to be the recipient of many gifts, in every sense of the word. But the thing about a gift is that once it has been given away, the giver has no control over it, no matter how generous and good a gift it was. The recipient is always free, and sometimes very likely, to lose, ruin, forget, or ignore the gift altogether. And there is nothing the giver can do about it.

I suppose the most famous, most frequently quoted verse of the entire New Testament may be John 3:16. It is the one verse that can be universally recognized just by its citation. I mean, if I mention Isaiah 7:14 to you, some of you will get the reference right away, but most of you will have to look it up. Not so, when it comes to John 3:16. In fact, if I handed out paper and pencils right now and asked you to write out the text of that verse, most of you would probably get pretty close, and if I let you make a group project of it, we could probably get an accurate translation in several languages and debate the merits of word choice.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Say what you will about this small text and all it signifies; without question, the text asserts that God’s Son is a gift that God has given. “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” What is true of the gifts given to me, and the gifts I give to others, is also true of the gifts God gives to his people: the recipient is always free, and sometimes very likely, to lose, ruin, forget, or ignore the gift altogether. And I would add that the ability to quote the text is in no way correlative with the likelihood that one has kept track of the gift.

Just to be clear, the loss of the gift that I am referring to is not what happened on the Cross. No, no, no… I am talking about us - the church, and the world – we are the ones who have all too often lost, ruined, forgotten, or ignored the gift of God’s Son. At least I can say this assuredly of myself, and I suppose that if it is true of me, then it is also true of you.

The mechanics of the church do not necessarily turn into an engagement with Jesus, and it is notoriously easy to become caught up in the mechanics of the church without ever cherishing that most precious gift of God’s – his only Son. This may be especially so in a place like our parish community where the mechanisms of religion are ornamented and complex. What pretty vestments we have! It is entirely possible to take exquisite care of all our other gifts – the hardware and the software here - but still lose track of the gift of Jesus.

You have to wonder about a guy like Nicodemus, who was a Pharisee, and therefore well acquainted with the mechanisms of religion. It was Nicodemus’s conversation that prompts Jesus to utter the words that would become John 3:16. What did Nicodemus make of the gift as he sat there face to face with him? St. John informs us of Nicodemus intervention at two subsequent moments – first, he sticks up for Jesus in a small way when the other Pharisees are beginning to condemn him; and later he brings spices to the grave to prepare Jesus’ body for burial. So it’s hard to say, frankly, what Nicodemus made of the gift of the Son of God, but it seems like he was trying, somehow, to accept that gift, and not to lose track of him. But Nicodemus can be forgiven for not knowing that he was a witness to the first utterance of John 3:16. After all, he did not know that he would be featured in John 3:1-15.

But we have had time to reflect on the gift; we have presumably built a church because of this gift; and it is the object and purpose of the church to cherish the gift of God’s Son in every conceivable way, never to lose track of him; and to share this gift with the world with a gracious generosity that befits the gift itself.

In the church we are regularly in danger of preaching only to the proverbial choir, which means that we are prone to want to tell ourselves only those things that we want to hear. If this is so, then we are also in danger of never reminding ourselves how easy it is to lose, ruin, forget, or ignore the gifts of God. And we can easily mistake the ready ability to quote John 3:16 for actually cherishing the gift of Jesus in our lives.

But Lent is a good time for a more honest assessment of things, which in this case means, I think, asking ourselves what we have done with this most precious gift of God’s – the gift of his Son. Unlike Nicodemus, we cannot go to him for a starlight chat. But we get to know Jesus in worship and in prayer, and we keep track of Jesus in our lives by serving others, by loving our neighbors as ourselves. It’s this pattern that shapes the ministry of this parish, precisely because this is how we establish and deepen our relationship to Jesus. And the pattern is demanding here because we know how easily we lose, ruin, forget, or ignore Jesus.

One of the ways we try to know Jesus better during Lent is walking the Way of the Cross every Friday evening. This year on Fridays we have been reading, at the Stations of the Cross, poems written by the girls of Our Little Roses orphanage in Honduras. Only one of these poems addresses God directly: a prose poem written by a girl named Aylin, who was sixteen years old when she wrote the poem. She has three older sisters and a younger brother. Aylin has in common with Nicodemus that she speaks with God in the nighttime. Her poem is called “Counting”:

“Every week, every day, every hour, every minute, and every second that I pass without my family it feels like a knife trying to get inside a rock. I am the knife and the rock is my life. So this is me, Aylin, and this is my difficult life without my family. Some people think that living in a home for girls like Our Little Roses is a big blessing. Yes, I say to those people, it is a great blessing but at the same time it is a curse. Every night I start thinking and talking to God in my prayers: “Why, God, why did my family leave me alone?” There is no answer. A lot of people see me with my sisters and my aunt, who is not really my aunt, and they think we are a happy group, but really all of us think the same thing that no one ever says: One day, will our mother come to visit us? It is ugly to know that everyone in this school is celebrating Mother’s Day. On this day, I feel ashamed to be me. But, God, listen to this: I am counting the time like people count the stars and I will keep counting until my mother comes. My sisters are graduating and soon I will go to college, too. When I graduate from college and when I am finally somebody in this world, God, I will go straight to Mexico where my mother lives and I will stare at her like I stare at the stars and with a voice that cracks like thunder I will say: i forgive you! But for now, God, I am here, in Our Little Roses, counting.”[i]

When I hear such emboldened anguish, I realize how careless it is of me to lose, ruin, forget, or ignore gifts I have been given, no matter how small. Still more careless ever to lose, ruin, forget, or ignore the gift of Jesus, who God sent into the world not to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. The world is in need of love, and of salvation. God gave us his Son – he gave us his Son – for love, and for salvation. Yes, God gave us his Son, and like any gift, what we do with this most precious gift of love, is up to us.

 

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

12 March 2017

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

 

 

[i] from Las Chavas, edited by Spencer Reece and Richard Blanco.  From the Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org).

 

Posted on March 12, 2017 by Guest User.

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

Posted on March 2, 2017 by Guest User.