The Place of Your Hands

When painters throughout history have depicted the martyrdom of Saint Stephen, they have chosen often to focus on the moment right before his execution begins. They paint Stephen already on the ground in the midst of a mob of angry men, who have arms raised and rocks at the ready, but who are not yet throwing. There is a somewhat standard tableau for these paintings – Stephen in the center, the mob surrounding him on all – well, really three – sides, and Saul sitting off to the side with a pile of discarded robes cascading off his lap and onto the ground. More modern painters sometimes play with the pattern of this tableau, but in the main they still choose to paint this moment of right before, this pause when the pendulum begins to swing down towards violence. One modern painter places us in the eyes of an executor, gazing down into a pit where Stephen kneels praying. Another shows us Stephen head on, slouched against a wall with rocks flying between us and him, paused eternally mid-flight. Where we stand in the painting can sometimes vary, but when we are standing is almost always the same. There is the sense that this moment is the moment, that this one moment of explosive, violent anger is the crux of Stephen’s whole story. For after this moment, nothing will be the same for Stephen, the first martyr, and nothing will be the same for Stephen’s Church.

There is another consistency in these paintings, which is that in most of them there are three types of hands. There are the hands that grip rocks, usually two-handed with fingers splayed wide open and tendons bulging. Remember, these were not skipping stones being thrown at victim, these were great, heavy blocks. Stoning is – and oh how I wish I could say “stoning was” – a brutal, bloody death. So there are the hands with the rocks, raised high overhead or pulled back like in the leather of a slingshot. Then there are the hands of Stephen, usually lifted up to heaven, although in some more restrained paintings they are folded reverently in prayer, right thumb over left, I am quite sure. And the third type of hand position is that of hands on hips. It’s a posture held sometimes by dark towering figures, men who look pleased with the way things are progressing, who look as if they may have been the ones to instigate this chaos in the first place. And it’s a posture sometimes held by Saul himself as he watches with grim satisfaction amidst his growing pile of robes.

What I failed to find in my search within these paintings were any that showed hands like this: (show hands over ears). Nowhere did I find a painter who had chosen to include this singular moment in Stephen’s story when, after hearing his remarkable statement that he can see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God, the people become so infuriated, so enraged, that they cover their ears. What an unbelievable moment. They actually cover their ears. Stephen’s words have so stoked their anger, that they cannot hear one more word out of his mouth. They have to stop his sound, and the only way they can think to do that is to slap their hands over their ears. 

Stephen, of course, has said much more to them than what we hear in today’s Gospel. He has been talking to them for a while now. He’s been arrested and brought before the council, charged with blasphemy and asked to defend himself. And so he stands before them, with a face like an angel, Acts tells us, and relates the whole story of the people of Israel, beginning with Abraham. He talks and talks, tells them the story of their faith, all of which – all of which – points to the coming of the Messiah, to the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Christ Jesus. And then Stephen says these words: “You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you are forever opposing the Holy Spirit.” Your hearts, he tells them, are the wrong shape, your ears are not open, and you refuse to look and see. You will not look for the fulfillment of God’s promise, you will not look up, up, where I see Jesus now at the right hand of God. Will you not look up and see the truth, the way, and the life being offered to you?

But the people are so stubborn, they are so locked into their opposition of Stephen and all that he says, that they literally cover their ears so that they no longer have to hear what he is saying. They’re so far gone into darkness that they’d rather stick their fingers in their ears and say, la, la, la, la, I can’t hear you than listen to another word out of Stephen’s mouth. They block the Word of God, stopper their ears against this divine voice that yes, challenges them and pulls them up short, but also invites them to look up and see the light. But no. They will not have it. They grit their teeth and cover their ears and let their rage burn on.

And as much as I hate to admit it, I have done exactly the same thing. How many times have I held on to anger because I felt like it was so well-justified? How many times have I refused to forgive because being hurt or righteously indignant or just right felt better? How many times have I let my own justification or my own rights get in the way of God’s justice and God’s righteousness? How many times have I stoppered up my own ears so that I wouldn’t have to listen to God telling me to let go, to be merciful, to love my neighbor as myself, to forgive and remember that I, too, am forgiven?

It’s an ugly truth, but it’s a truth nonetheless. I have at times been just as pig-headed and wrong as these angry people standing with a scowl on their faces and their fingers in their ears. And I imagine that I’m not alone in this. After all, listening and responding to the voice of God is rarely easy. Because listening to the voice of God in our lives rarely means that things get to stay exactly the same. God always speaks to us in love, but God is never going to lean in to us and say, "You know what, everything is exactly the way I envisioned it for you. There is nothing – absolutely nothing – that you need to change in your life to love me better, or to love your neighbor better. Nope. Stay right where you are. Comfortable? Great. Comfortable is my middle name."

But God is less interested in our being comfortable than in our being converted, in our being Christians. God is always trying to help us, leaning down to us from his place in the heavens to tell us exactly what we need to hear, even if it isn’t what we want to hear. Because he sent his son to be the way, to speak the truth, to show us what we need to have life, and to have it abundantly. And so he speaks to us, giving us the words we truly need: "Forgive. Remember. Have mercy. Listen. Reach out. Give. Give more. Move. Move on. Stretch. Love more, love better, love longer. Be brave for justice. Dare greatly for the Gospel. Change. Change jobs, change attitudes, change practices. Change in me, with me, through me, so that you can be the person I always have known you to be.

"Open your ears and hear my word to you this day. I want better for you than you have right now. I want more of you than you think you can give. I want more for you than you could ask or imagine. I want nothing less than the vision of the kingdom – my kingdom – for you and for every single living thing you know and see.

"For remember that it is my right hand that has made all of Creation, my right hand that brings mighty things to pass, that exalts and lifts you up. My hands are your strength and your guide. My hands pull you out of the nets that tangle your steps; my hands hold your times and your spirit. My hands prepare a place for you in my house; my hands show you the way that you are to be going.

"So put your hands down. I have better things for them to be doing. I have work for your hands. I need them to heal, to comfort, to feed, rise up against the great injustices of this world. I need your hands free for other, better things. So let me have them. Take them off of your ears, for I have words of love and salvation and purpose to speak to you today. Listen, my faithful servant, for your Lord speaks."

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

14 May 2017

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Easter

Con Pan y Vino

An old Spanish proverb says, “Con pan y vino se anda el camino.” Literally this phrase translates, “With bread and wine he walks the road.” There are those who will say that it means that everything seems better after a good meal. But on the various roads, trails, pathways, and tracks comprising the Camino de Santiago – the network of routes that lead pilgrims on foot, bicycle, and other means to Santiago de Compostela in the northwest corner of Spain – those pilgrims generally understand the proverb to refer specifically to the enterprise at hand: “with bread and wine one walks the Camino.” 

Spain is a funny place, and pilgrims on the Camino are a funny breed of people who do not keep usual Spanish hours because the rhythms of the walk demand an adherence to the more American proverb coined by Benjamin Franklin that you need to be early to bed and early to rise. On the Camino you eat your evening meal many hours earlier than most Spaniards, and most restaurants, bars, and cafes in the small towns through which you pass will serve what is called a “menu del peregrinos,” a pilgrims’ menu, for maybe nine or ten Euros- it’s a simple selection of offerings that is available at the unconscionably early hours that pilgrims eat their suppers – around 7 pm or so. Almost universally in Spain, these menus include a choice of a bottle of mineral water or a big glass (or sometimes an entire bottle) of wine. I cannot recall a time in Spain that I ever opted for the water.

Water, however, is also a crucial ingredient to walking the Camino, and another feature of the journey is that you find fountains all along the way from which flows potable water. Usually these feuntes are located in the middle of villages or towns, and they are essential to the thirsty pilgrim who needs to stay hydrated. The fountains are, in this way, literally a source of life, and you would think there might be some proverb about them, or about water flowing to help the pilgrim on her way. But I have never come across such a proverb in my travels in Spain. No, it’s bread and wine, bread and wine that you need to walk the road to Santiago: con pan y vino se anda el camino.

Traveling on foot connects you to the biblical world and to the biblical narrative, and we hear in the famous passage from Luke’s Gospel this morning of three travelers on foot on the road to Emmaus, two of whom are disciples of Jesus. The important part of the story, however, does not take place on the road, it takes place at a table in someone’s home, or in some place where food is served. To my mind it is inconceivable that there was not wine on the table. In fact, I would expect that the easy availability of wine is a more historically accurate connection between the Camino de Santiago and the ancient world than the ready availability of drinking water from fountains. The moment of truth in this story comes when the stranger who was walking with the two disciples of Jesus reveals his true identity when “he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he vanished from their sight.”

An honest examination of this episode begs us to consider what it is truly meant to demonstrate. Most of the details of this story seem to convey the message that the risen Jesus is a mysterious figure, hard to recognize, reluctant to make himself known, and elusive once you are on to him. But, on the other hand, most of the details of the story provide the context for that one moment of discovery when Jesus takes the bread, blesses, and breaks it, and gives it to his followers. From opaque uncertainty and confusion comes great clarity in this simplest of acts, the breaking of bread.

A context of opaque uncertainty and confusion certainly prevails in many aspects of life these days, if you ask me, and certainly in the church. One of the strengths of the Episcopal Church is that we are able to admit this context, and we are able to embrace pilgrims of faith who experience opaque uncertainty and confusion in the world around us, and in our own lives. We see through a glass darkly.

We can assume that God knows how thoroughly affected we are by a context of opaque uncertainty and confusion. We can also assume that God knows that this condition and this context are not unique to our particular moment in history. And we can also assume that God knows that in such a context we have found him to be mysterious, hard to recognize, and elusive. Much of the biblical record attests to God’s deliberate intention to cultivate these characteristics.

Along comes Jesus – the mysterious, hard-to-recognize, and elusive Son of the mysterious, hard-to-recognize, and elusive Lord of the universe, who nevertheless walks beside his followers, who do not even know him when he is literally explaining to them who he is. Who knows how it makes Jesus feel to realize that now that he is risen from the dead he is obscured to his followers, like Mount Sinai wrapped in smoke to obscure the presence or God? Perhaps this is not a matter of choice for him, perhaps this is just how it must be, perhaps it is for our own good, as the ancient followers of Moses must have concluded that it was for their own good that they could not, should not, dare not approach the Presence of God behind the cloud on the mountain, or deign to behold him there. Some things lie beyond our ken. We don’t know why God is so often mysterious, hard-to-recognize, and elusive, and we probably never will.

But we know this: that when things must have been at their most opaque and confusing for the disciples of Jesus, when they couldn’t figure out what was going on, when they didn’t know if his resurrection was the stuff of rumor or redemption, when they couldn’t be certain yet that his shroud-wrapped body hadn’t simply been stolen from its tomb, when their emotions must have veered between wild hope that the best possible thing in the world had just happened and desperate fear that the worst possible events were now unfolding, just then, at a table, with nothing but a bit of bread (and, I am assuming, some wine) Jesus shows them the truth – that he is risen and alive, and among them!

Just so have his disciples gathered ever since through all manner of opaque uncertainty and confusion, when we cannot figure out what is going on, when we are not sure whether or not the resurrection is the stuff of rumor or redemption, when we feel uncertain about whether we can believe that his shroud-wrapped body hadn’t simply been taken from the tomb, when our emotions veer between wild hope that the best possible thing in the world has happened and desperate fear that the worst possible events are now unfolding… just so, con pan y vino se anda el camino.

The road to Emmaus leads us to one of the most perplexing and worrisome questions we face as believers: why is God so difficult to get to know? Why is God so mysterious, hard-to-recognize, and elusive? If God reveals himself to his people, why is he so ineffective at it? Why is God so hard to see, so hard to know, so hard to find?

A parish community like ours stands here on Locust Street to respond to those questions repeatedly as we repeat again and again that God does make himself known to us in this simplest of acts, the breaking of bread. 

And our motto might as well be, con pan y vino se anda el camino. For it is central to our mission to repeat over and over again in the midst of opaque uncertainty and confusion that are raised to ever more complicated and artful heights in society around us, that Christ makes himself known to anyone who cares to join him at the table where the bread of his Body is taken, blessed, broken, and given, and where his Blood is poured out to be shared for a bleeding, suffering, and dying world.

The bakery in Cea

The little town of Cea in the Ourense district of the province of Galicia in Spain is famous for its bread, pan de Cea. When I was walking through Cea last summer, the Spaniards I was walking with insisted that we stop at a traditional bakery to buy a loaf and enjoy it with our supper, which we ate at a ridiculously early hour by Spanish standards, on a terrace outside the hostel where we were staying. There was no restaurant or café nearby, so we supplied our own wine.

I had been walking for thirty-seven days at that point, and with the same little group for at least a couple of weeks. In my photos I can see that there are five of us gathered around a table. I can see that there is a loaf of pan de Cea at the table that has been cut and shared. I can see that there is a bottle of wine on the table…

And I can also see that there is an additional seat at the table – a sixth chair, although there was no sixth person who ever appears in the photos, and I am quite sure that no one else joined us for supper that night.

Preparing for supper with bread and wine, and an extra chair...

Of course the chair was probably pulled over by one of us thinking that we needed it. But to see the bread and the wine there on the table, and to recall the fellowship, and even the scent of the recent rainfall that had sent us scurrying to take our drying clothes off the clothesline, I can’t help but wonder, looking at the scene now, whether that empty chair was there for a reason.

Was that empty chair there for the mysterious, hard-to-recognize, and elusive guest who is also the host at every table where his Name is honored? And was I even aware in the sharing of that bread and that wine that he was there among us, as I am now absolutely certain that he was?

Con pan y vino se anda el camino!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

30 April 2017

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia