The Truth of This Very Night

I was recently contacted by a local journalist, who wanted to write an article about whether truth was dead. She was a terrific person to talk to, but I have to admit that I approached the conversation with some dread. I couldn’t help but be mindful that in the eyes of the larger public, Christians, and maybe clergy in particular, have what is sometimes a well-earned reputation for being purveyors of fake news. We are seemingly quick to proclaim that “love wins,” seemingly quick to minimize the evil in which we are complicit, seemingly glib about the aching questions that accompany the experience of human suffering and vulnerability. We may sometimes seem willing to claim the Easter victory without showing any real sign that we have been willing to carry the cross.

So in preparing for that conversation I experienced, not for the first time, the need to review what it is about our collective lives of faith that might help us to retain a fundamental commitment to honesty. And the answer was, “this.” By the grace of God, if we are given the ability to use it so, this is a powerful corrective to our own mendacity. This very night. This liturgy, with which we begin the sacred Triduum. This evening, which stands out liturgically for at least three things: the washing of the feet, or “Mandatum,” the stripping of the altar, and the vigil before the Blessed Sacrament at the altar of repose.

When Jesus washed the feet of his beloved disciples, he offered care and hospitality for their sheer humanity. For the useless, honest, embarrassing, mortal dust that clung to their feet, and to his, and to ours. For the weight our feet bear, the miles we walk, the blisters we rub, the actual endurance it takes to measure out every step of the pathway we are on. Our feet are signs of where we have really been. And so very few among us actually enjoy removing our shoes at Mass on a solemn evening like this. It’s very unlikely that we can come to the front of the church and take our seat and have our feet washed without embarrassment, or without feeling a twinge of the deeper need that keep us searching for the love of God. It’s awkward to acknowledge that it takes real humility for clergy to get down on the ground and pick up a towel and move from chair to chair.

But that’s what we do tonight. We force our worship out of its normal constraints. We let it become more physical than is really comfortable for us. We become more candid than we really want to be. Because Jesus has welcomed our humanity, assumed our humanity, nurtured our humanity, and commanded us, if we want to be his disciples, to do this for one another, out of love.

Is truth dead? Or are we increasingly unwilling to acknowledge that we are human beings who need the care of a loving God? And how better to acknowledge that truth than in the sight of our bare feet, all of us together in need of washing? We make this bold acknowledgement--we uncover our feet, tonight—at a Eucharistic banquet. This is a night in which we commemorate the very institution of the Eucharist, and on this very night we are asked to acknowledge the ungainly feet we have been standing on, all our lives.  

Why should our deep experience of candor happen at a banquet? Let me suggest that real honesty can only happen in the context of a banquet. All our lives, while we stand and walk on those ungainly feet, we are also imagining that we might really be much greater than we are. We can’t be honest about our own needs and limitations, and so we cook up a fantasy version of ourselves and our place in the world, and we go through life promoting it. We hoard our little supply of self-esteem, hiding what we are from others and from ourselves. And we tell lies. It doesn’t take long before we become full participants in the kind of world you see around us, a gilded world in which truth has somehow become too costly for us to bother with. Education, journalism, the arts, history, science, environmentalism, feeding the hungry: they all become too expensive because we have a fantasy about our personal greatness that we want to maintain at all costs. We have extravagant lies to tell about who we are, and so we have no generosity with which to entertain truth.

And to this hoarding, selfish, humanity, filled with a fear of shortages and shortcomings, Jesus says, “Come and eat. Sit at my table. I will pay the price of my own life to feed you. Receive my body and my blood. If you are my disciples you must learn to do this for one another and for the world.” Jesus does not fear our hunger. He does not shun us. He does not protect himself from suffering at our hands. We, his betrayers, are his welcome guests. He washes our ungainly feet and he feeds our ungainly, self-protecting bodies and souls. Is truth dead, or have we failed to accept that we are guests at the table of our creator? Are we living in untruths and half-truths because we fear that we can never be or have enough within us to face reality? Tonight we come to the table with whatever humility we can muster, to be filled, and to be nudged toward a selfless honesty.

And on this very night, Jesus gives us another gift: the chance to follow him on his own path of self-giving. Just as he has seen our feet, we are blessed to accompany him in his hour of anguish. “Come to the garden and wait with me,” he says to the disciples, and tonight we do our best to accept that invitation, too. We will follow him in the Eucharist, to the altar of repose, and we will do our best to remain with the unbearable truth of his sacrifice. We will pray in silence, with gratitude. We won’t last there forever, we won’t be heroes of prayer, our own shortcomings will be ever before us, but we will offer our thanks and do what we can to stay present before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar. We will not fear, tonight, to gaze upon the mystery of a God who chooses the shocking path of crucifixion and the incongruous form of bread in order to be with us.

And, this very night, we will endure the stripping of the altar. Bit by bit, candle by candle, vessel by vessel, we will witness the stripping away of all the signs we use to connote what is holy. We will acknowledge together this night that the language of our worship, the physical manifestation of our reverence, will never give full expression to the mystery of God’s presence among us, to the mystery of the death and resurrection of our Lord. Just as we have peeled away the shoes and socks that hide our feet, so will we peel away the linens that cover our altar of bare stone. And we will not be afraid of this stripping away.

The warmth of tonight’s banquet will still cling to the emptied sanctuary. Bathed in that generous abundance, we will not hesitate to acknowledge emptiness. Washed by our gracious host, we will not fear to acknowledge dust. Loved beyond measure, we will learn, bit by bit, prayer by prayer, year by year, to stop counting the cost of following God on a path of truth. May God bless us as we worship this night, and may our hearts be transformed so that we may follow our God with humble, contrite, and gladdening hearts.

Preached by Mtr. Nora Johnson

Maundy Thursday 2017

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

When Jesus Visits

Eating dinner with Jesus must have been kind of a risky thing to do. I’m not sure it would have been an unmitigated pleasure, for instance, to know that you were going to be the host at a party to which he was invited, or worse yet a party to which he had invited himself. After all, you could practically guarantee that crowds would be gathering at your door trying to get a glimpse of him, and there would likely be tensions breaking out, murmuring among your guests. Remember the folks who let their friend down through the roof to get healed by Jesus? Would you like that to have been your roof? Would you like to have cleaned up after the woman in Luke’s gospel who broke open a jar of perfume and poured all of it on Jesus’s feet? Or in Matthew’s gospel, when a woman poured perfume all over his head while he was reclining at the table?

And then, even worse, sometimes Jesus seems to have chosen his dinner companions more or less explicitly to make a point about what sinners they were. You could rely on Jesus to invite himself to the home of the people nobody liked: the tax collectors or the self-righteous, for instance. Even at the wedding in Cana Jesus was remarkably uninterested in helping with the wine until his mother made him step up.

In the fourteenth chapter of Luke’s gospel, Jesus commands his followers not to invite the kind of people they normally hang around with: “When you give a luncheon or dinner,” he says, “do not invite your friends, your brothers or sisters, your relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid” (Luke 14:12). He really isn’t kidding. Jesus’s parties are perfectly awful. They cause stress.

All of which is to say that Mary and Martha and Lazarus must have been special people indeed, because Jesus really truly liked them. In Luke’s gospel he just goes to see them—and here I’m mixing Luke and John if you’ll bear with me. He doesn’t seem to have come to their home because they were notorious sinners, or to make a point about how self-righteous they were. Sure, there was the small dispute between Martha and Mary about who would help with the housework, but by the standards of Jesus’s other social occasions visiting this family was remarkably civil.

It seems like Lazarus and Martha and Mary were on Jesus’ team, allied with him. Maybe they felt that. Maybe they could see that they were not in Jesus’s life to be object lessons or to provide the setting for someone else’s healing story. (I think this is universally true about Jesus and us, but in the way gospel stories are told, that’s not always evident. But it is here.) Maybe they could sense that it was their peculiar gift to be in the company of our Lord just for the sake of simple love. What an honor. The deepest and most consoling form of contemplation, just to sit at the feet of Jesus with no agenda. And here it was, given to them, apparently just for the joy Jesus felt in that communion. They were happy together. They were friends. They had an understanding and a mutual sympathy. This family knew how to be friends with their creator.

What a devastating and priceless honor, then, that they should become the central figures in Jesus’s most searing, most inexplicable demonstration of his power. What spiritual and emotional labor it took them to participate in the events of this morning’s story. Lazarus died knowing that his beloved friend, who could save him, did not do so. Martha had to reach down within herself to forgive Jesus. She rushes out on the road beyond the village to meet him, as though he were some kind of prodigal son. She does not try to paper over her sorrow. “My brother would not have died if you had been here,” she tells him, and it’s true. Mary says the same, with much weeping. Even Jesus is working very hard. His own weeping feels like a signal that what he has had to do is unbearable even for him. He has had to let his friend die. Think about it: his own understanding of the situation causes him deep distress. That’s profoundly unsettling. I don’t know about you, but I cruise through my life blithely sometimes, assuming that suffering has some kind of explanation and that if I could see it all through God’s eyes I would be consoled. But Jesus sees this suffering through God’s eyes, and he weeps. Even though he understands. This kind of understanding is not necessarily a consolation.

Jesus takes Mary and Martha and Lazarus with him, in other words, into the deepest mystery of death and pain and the suffering of the righteous. And they are more or less unflinching. They ask him challenging questions, they worry, but they stay with Jesus and they don’t ever stop hoping in him. And Lazarus is raised from the dead. These are friends of Jesus. These are the people we need to become.

The next time we see Martha and Mary and Lazarus, six days before the Passover, Jesus is on the verge of facing crucifixion. He stops in Bethany and they hold a dinner in his honor, with Martha serving and Lazarus reclining at table with him. Mary enters with “about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume” (John 12:3). She pours it on Jesus’ feet and wipes his feet with her hair. When Judas objects, Jesus says that Mary is anointing him for his burial.

Do you hear how rich this is? Having been to hell with Jesus and back, they are ready to host him at the kind of banquet he desires. Mary messes up her own house and her own hair, voluntarily. She and Jesus understand each other. This is not the time for easy communion or happy respite from the pain of the world. This dinner is a testimony to their shared readiness to face the whole truth of the world’s rejection of Jesus, and the suffering of the innocent, and the painful mystery of God’s will.

As Jesus faces the events that we call “Holy Week,” he needs friends like these. And as we face Holy Week liturgically, this gospel reminds us to be willing to surrender easy feelings of communion with God so we can be taken deeper—to hell and back—with Jesus. We have to learn how to want to host this Jesus at our tables. We have to learn, for our own sake and for the sake of a world that is in tremendous pain, how to welcome a Jesus we can’t fully understand, who doesn’t make us comfortable in our own homes, who wants our company on a journey of death and resurrection.

Our prodigal savior does not operate on the timetables we set, even when we really need him to. Can we run out on the road like Martha did to meet him when he comes to us? Can we find it in ourselves, as she did, out of love and gratitude, to forgive him for even our most incomprehensible losses? Can we see him weep without losing faith in him? Can we live and die like Lazarus did, knowing that he is with us even when we fear that he will never come? Can we move with Jesus from the occasions we enjoy—when we are in a place like this, where everything speaks to us of his love and his presence—to the occasions we dread to face?

Stay with him. Ask your questions, worry about the answers, but enter with Jesus into the heart of suffering and loss, into the passion of God that awaits us as Holy Week approaches.

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson

2 April 2017

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

What God Sees

If you came to church this morning looking for the frustrating interplay between religion and politics, you have come to the right place! We are mid-story. Saul is still king, but God regrets having chosen him because he thinks Saul is not sufficiently obedient. So, God dispatches Samuel the prophet to Bethlehem to survey the sons of Jesse, from whom he will choose one to replace Saul as king.

The separation of religion and politics is a fairly modern idea, and anyone who mixes them up is engaging in ancient human behavior. It might be the case that not to mix the two requires an act of artificial compartmentalization that is unrealistic to expect of most people. I don’t know. The mixologist of our story is Samuel the prophet, who has already brought hard news to Saul that God is displeased with him. Now Samuel must discern the Lord’s will among the sons of Jesse, and he starts by assuming that the oldest son is the one most fit to be king – it’s a natural assumption. But, no, the Lord has rejected Eliab, the eldest son of Jesse, as he rejects the next six sons, too, as they each, in turn, pass before the prophet. “Are all your sons here?” Samuel asks Jesse.

“There remains yet the youngest, but he is keeping the sheep,” comes the reply. For who ever heard of the last-born son, the eighth son, being chosen for anything, let alone to be king?

“Send and bring him,” the prophet demands.

The eighth son is ruddy, handsome, with beautiful eyes. And the Lord whispers or shouts inside Samuel’s head, “Rise and anoint him, for this is the one.” The eighth son, David, does not immediately ascend to the throne. Much will happen, beginning with David’s famous confrontation with Goliath, before he becomes king. But he has been chosen. And his destiny is sealed.

What was it about David that God saw? Was it his good looks? What else does David have going for him? He is a kid, untested, and unknown. David is not the obvious choice at all, but God explains his intentions to Samuel the prophet as the sons of Jesse parade before him. “The Lord,” God tells Jesse, “does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”

The Lord does not see as mortals see. What a difficult thing this is for us to understand! How seldom does it occur to us that God does not see things the way we see things? In fact we are extremely likely to suspect that God shares much the same view that we have, albeit from a different angle. But, no, the Lord tells Samuel, I do not see anything at all as mortals see.

For much of his life David will prove worthy of God’s insight. But eventually, even he will forsake the promise that the Lord saw within him. Lust will cloud his judgment when he, from his rooftop, espies Bathsheba in the altogether; and the virtue that God had seen in David will be warped as he pursues what he wants at any cost, and then tries to cover up what he has done.

I have to ask myself what is the point of reading the ancient story of King David? What is the point of knowing that he was taken from the sheepfold? What is the point of following the report of Samuel’s anointing? Historically speaking there are many reasons for this, the most important one being to establish the legitimacy of David’s kingship. But let’s just say that discussing the legitimacy of national rulers is just not something I want to get into from the pulpit at this moment in time.

The real reason for us to read the story is to hear the explanation that God gives to Samuel for choosing David: “The Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” And it will not be a change in his appearance that becomes David’s un-doing; it will be a change of his heart. Even God’s anointed king, chosen for the goodness of his heart, can fail when he has a change of heart. What child does not need to hear this lesson, that the Lord does not see as mortals see? What shepherd could not use a reminder of it? And who does not need to be reminded that even the best of us will fall short of the purposes for which God has made us, namely to glorify him. Sometimes we will fall very far short, indeed, when the goodness of our hearts is warped, dented, mis-shapen by sin.

I am reminded regularly of how very odd it is to do what we do in church; how very strange it is to read these old stories and mine them for contemporary meaning. And then, I hear the word of God inside the prophet’s head: “The Lord does not see as mortals see,” and I ask myself where else we were going to learn these lessons; where else we were going to be reminded that God sees inwardly what we can never see on our own?

The connection from the story of the anointing of David to the Gospel story of the healing of the man born blind is not immediately obvious. But here it is: Jesus is walking along and he “sees a man blind from birth.” Jesus “sees,” and what he sees, he sees not as mortals see. For mortals see a man who, at best can beg on the streets for the rest of his life, and at worst is the sign of a curse on his parents. But what the Lord sees is someone who “was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” The Lord does not see as mortals see.

But the connections to the story of David do not really end with a shared verb. It is not only the man born blind who cannot be seen for what he really is. Neither can Jesus be seen for what he truly is; he cannot be accounted for by the religious figures of his day. When Jesus arrives on the scene, no story of his miraculous birth is invoked. Remnants of frankincense, gold, and myrrh are not produced to establish his provenance. His Davidic ancestry, such as it is, is far removed, and probably undocumented. He is the inheritor of no wealth, no title, no name, no office, no training that sets him apart. He is not even a shepherd; how could he be the Lord’s anointed one?

The Lord does not see as mortals see. Samuel sees David for the purpose that God intends. Jesus sees the blind man as an instrument of the glory of God. And the Pharisees see Jesus as an unwelcome presence, probably a charlatan, but less than he truly is. The transitive property holds true: mortals do not see as the Lord sees.

Now, by this stage in Lent you should have spent at least three weeks contemplating your sins. I certainly have… spent all this time… thinking about your sins. Lent has become deeply unpopular, just as sin has become deeply unpopular – or at least the process of identifying sin within ourselves. To indulge in the language of sin and sinners, is to participate in that very churchy habit which is anathema to 21st century Americans – judging. To identify sin is to employ judgment, and probably to arouse guilt, and then to incite shame, or so the current narrative about the church’s pre-occupation with sin goes.

But there is at least another set of possibilities, if we allow for the possibility that the Lord does not see as mortals see. It is possible that during Lent, we are invited to try to see ourselves as God sees us. If David had ever managed to do this later in life, he might have remembered how God showed him to Samuel, how surprising it was to be brought in from the sheepfold – the last, and the least of the sons of Jesse – and to be told that he would be anointed by the prophet of the Lord to be king. And he might have noticed how his youthful, brave, and noble self, contrasted sharply to his older self, now leering over the rooftop at Bathsheba. Had he forgotten, strolling on his rooftop and peeping at a woman in her bath, having exercised such great power in his youth with God’s blessing, had he forgotten that it was not power or good looks that God saw in him, it was his heart? And what had become of that heart, twisted by sin?

Jump back to the New Testament. Most people I know would read the story of the man born blind and identify the Pharisees with the church: narrow-minded, mean-spirited, nasty, judgy men who are eager to assign blame, guilt, and shame. I hope this is an unfair assessment, but it comes from somewhere, and probably not from whole cloth. But if the church has employed Lent, or any other season, day, hour, minute, or second of time to indulge its narrow-minded, mean-spirited, nasty, judgy, mannish attitudes, then we have been wrong to do so, especially in Lent, which ought to be a season for stretching ourselves to see ourselves more as God sees us. For the Lord does not see at mortals see.

Yes, David, you are a sinner, and your heart has twisted out of shape. But do you remember how beautiful you are in my sight, which has nothing to do with the color of your eyes? Do you know how deeply I looked into your heart before I allowed my holy oil to anoint your head? Do you know how well I know you: how broken you have become, and yet how beautiful you still are to me, although you have become ugly to those around you, who cannot see you as I do?

If there is a reason to keep track of our sins, it is because we need to be reminded how easily we stray from being the people God made us to be. Created by his own fingers, anointed by his Holy Spirit, beautiful in his sight, whether the first daughter or the eighth son, shepherdess or tycoon – God sees you not as mortals see you, and God knows how beautiful you are, how beautiful you were made to be. But we are distracted by things that lure us from our rooftops to twist our hearts, and become people we were never meant to be. If it can happen to David, it can certainly happen to you and to me, and no doubt it has.

Gone are the days that the intimate relationship of politics and religion led a prophet to anoint a king. But God still sees things differently than mortals see. Most especially he sees you and me differently. God knows exactly how we were made – with what fine workmanship, and with what exquisite beauty. And God knows how sin has warped our lives, twisted our hearts, and made us to become people we were never meant to be. But the beauty of God’s creation remains in each and every one of us, and none can or will be judged without this consideration.

Perplexed, by the conundrum of a blind man whose sight had been given to him by an unwelcome presence who is probably a charlatan, the Pharisees, return to the man born blind to remind him that Jesus cannot be more than he appears to them to be; that they don’t see it, and that anyone who claims to see it (whatever “it” is) in him, had best be careful. “He answered, ‘I do not know… One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.’”

The Lord does not see as mortals see; and we do not see as God sees. But now and then we are given a glimpse, and we see ourselves or others as we truly are, as the beautiful creatures God made us to be. And we rejoice to discover in those flashes of vision that though we were blind, now we see. May God ever open our eyes to help us more and more to see as he sees, and to live our lives accordingly, as people anointed with the power of the Spirit, and to rejoice!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

26 March 2017

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia