You Shall Be Holy

“You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” (Lev. 19:2)

Like many people this weekend, I found myself with a sharp knife in my hand, gouging an eye out... of a pumpkin.  The face I carved on my jack-o-lantern has triangle-eyes and a triangle-nose because straight lines are easier to carve out of pumpkin flesh than circles.  The only distinguishing feature of my jack-o-lantern is that it boasts an unambiguous and widely beaming smile - without any sign of a jagged, menacing tooth or a grimace.  It had been some years since I’d carved a pumpkin, and I had forgotten how much of the guts of the pumpkin there are to be removed.  I wanted to do a clean job of it, so I was scooping and scooping the stringy flesh, and the glistening off-white seeds out until the inside of my pumpkin was smooth, and you could feel the spoon running over the gentle and distinctive ridges in the hollowed out space, where the candle would be placed to make the jack-o-lantern glow.

Halloween customs are only one step away from religious ritual with good reason.  And around this time of year we let our inner Dr. Frankenstein have a bit of free rein; and we flirt a little with pretending to be God.  In our imaginations, at least, we commune with the dead; we indulge outlandish fantasies about who or what we want to be if we could be anyone or anything we want; and we bring creations into being with our own hands, deciding what they should look like and how they should act.  One of my nephews, I hear, is becoming a dinosaur for Halloween this year, although I am not sure that this means there will be a noticeable difference in his behavior.  Perhaps he will roar a little more loudly than usual.

Halloween is not actually meant to get us thinking too much.  But in a certain frame of mind, you might wonder, as you scoop the flesh from a pumpkin to empty it out, what kind of attitude you want to give it when you are done with it.  You could also wonder if this is what God did with you and with me when he fashioned us with his hands.  I much prefer this way of thinking (that we were crafted by hand) to the thought that we were assembled factory-style by robotic angels, and customized after-market.  Except that you quickly begin to hope that God’s process might be the reverse of pumpkin carving: you hope that God is filling up, rather than emptying out; that God is sculpting, rather than hollowing; and that God’s precision of design is significantly more adept than your own.

The Gospel reading this morning - which has nothing to do with Halloween - would appear to be a dream of a reading for any preacher, since it contains those wonderful words, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  The Golden Rule!  What day isn’t made better by a reminder of the primacy of this rule?  What life isn’t improved by adhering to it more closely?  What injury can’t be helped by hewing more nearly to this rule?  We call it golden for a reason!

But there is a danger in our easy readiness to luxuriate in the warm perfection of the Golden Rule.  And the danger is that we may begin to believe that it is, in and of itself, a perfect summary of the Christian faith; faith’s only indispensable tenet; and the sole key to our salvation.  In truth, however, nearly all religions that I can think of embrace this rule, and there is not much that is distinctively Christian about it.  The Golden Rule does not, in fact, encapsulate the Christian Gospel - although I am willing to assert that it remains indispensable to our faith.

Remember that the injunction to love your neighbor as yourself is the second commandment, not the first.  The greatest commandment, Jesus agrees with the entire biblical and rabbinical tradition, is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.  To love the Lord your God, this is the first and great commandment.  And, hard as the second commandment may be to keep, this first commandment may be even harder for us.

I have often thought that the second commandment is crucially linked to the first commandment, precisely because there are few better ways to demonstrate your love for God than by showing your love for your neighbor.  We need the second commandment if we are to have any hope of abiding by the first, I have thought.  But the further we go into this century, the more I wonder about that order of dependency, as explicit faith in God becomes less and less common, and our ability to love our neighbors as our selves seems ever more elusive, despite having all the means in the world to do it.  Maybe the less we believe in, and therefore love God, the harder it becomes to find a reason to love our neighbors.  Maybe the second commandment really is dependent on the first, because without a divine injunction to do so, can we really just take it for granted that human nature will lead us to the inevitable conclusion that it’s best for everyone if we choose to love our neighbor?  The newspapers present very little evidence to suggest that this is so.

Traditionally, Jewish law contains not two commandments, and not ten commandments, but 613 commandments.  Many of those commandments find their source in the book of Leviticus: we heard a few of them today.  But we also heard a preoccupation of God’s in the few verses of our reading from Leviticus, when we heard God tell Moses to tell the people of Israel, “you shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”  More than once God instructs Moses to make this point to his people as he delivers the law.  Suffice it to say that it will not suffice to say that there is a short, working definition of “holy” that I can provide in order to understand what God is talking about here.  God told Moses to take off his shoes at the burning bush because the ground he was standing on was holy.  You can read the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures as an account of the Holy God fashioning for himself a holy people: calling them, urging them, tuning them, challenging them, establishing their loyalty and his, asking them to purify themselves, and constantly calling them back to him when they wander.  Summarized in a single paragraph this sounds like the basis of a PBS costume drama.  Judi Dench could play God.

A similar reading can be given to the New Testament - as a continuation of the divine project for the Holy One to establish for himself a holy people, culminating in the sacrifice on the Cross of Holiness for the sake of holiness.  Read the New Testament this way and you see that God did not send his Son into the world to suffer and die in order to teach his people to be nice to one another: the task is not worthy of the Servant.  But God, whatever his purposes may be, has never curtailed his project of establishing a holy people, begun so long ago.  And the church has understood that this is the project into which we have been enlisted, which we generally consider far more exciting (and hopeful) than earning merit badges for being nice.  And part of the wonder of the revelation of the New Testament of Jesus has been the message that God intends to expand and enlarge the body of those who are called to holiness.  Indeed, one of the wonders of this new covenant is that it seems to be open and available to anyone who wants to be a part of it.  

But what does it mean to be part of the covenant community of God’s holy people?  What does it mean to be holy?  This question strikes me as dangerous in 21st century America.  In too many hands it becomes an argument for purity; and any religion that fixates overly on purity becomes perverse in its self-righteousness and exclusivity.  

So maybe Halloween gives us a context to help us see what God means when he tells Moses that we, his people, “shall be holy.”  Maybe we need to consider, as we carve out our pumpkins, and decide what kind of jack-o-lanterns they will be... maybe we need to stop and think about God’s intention for what kind of people he meant for us to be - individually and as a community.  Maybe we need to realize that in fashioning us, God was in some way also making an expression of himself, forming us, as he did, in his own image and likeness.  Maybe we need to contemplate not what was a scooped out, but what specifically was placed within us to give us our potential for holiness.  To be cheesey about it, maybe we need to consider what it is that makes us glow.

Two specific sets of expectations stem directly from whatever divine flame illumines our lives: the call to worship God and the call to serve one another.  These are complicated ideas which are nevertheless easy to identify when you see them, or when they are absent from our lives.  More to the point, worship and service stand in stark contrast to the goals of profit and exploitation that are so much at the heart of our market-driven lives, and which have nothing whatsoever to do with the Gospel or with holiness.

In this church, we are explicitly trying on our vocation to holiness when at that end of the church the guests from our soup kitchen are being measured for winter boots that we are able to supply for them, as they were yesterday morning; while at this end of the church that altar was being prepared for Mass.  It’s the kind of thing that ironically makes you want to take off your shoes, for you get the sense that you are walking on holy ground.  You understand that this is not the way most of the world conducts itself?

When the Pharisees went to Jesus and had a lawyer ask him which was the greatest commandment, it was intended as a test.  But in our day and age the test is meant for us, especially since the second commandment is so easy to agree upon and still do nothing about it.  It would appear that the likelihood that we will take the second commandment seriously may, indeed, be closely linked to whether or not we take the first commandment seriously: to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.  This, however, is a lesson that you cannot learn from a pumpkin.  Although you may have transformed it, you probably did not do so out of love, and the pumpkin can never love you back.

But if the simple act of carving a pumpkin and placing a small candle inside it to make it glow can turn the attention to the hand of God, that made each one of us, then so be it.  Maybe it will also help us to hear again the call to be holy people, called into a holy communion, assured by a holy sacrifice of the promise of holiness.  Maybe it will help us to know the Holy One whose breath gave life to all things, whose Presence with us now marks this place as holy ground, whose likeness assures us of the holiness to which we are called, and whose promise can be trusted when he says that we shall be holy, for the Lord our God is holy.  And let us hear what our Lord Jesus Christ said, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your mind, and with all your soul.  This is the first and great commandment.  And the second is like unto it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.  And then, God willing, you shall be holy.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

29 October 2017

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Love will be provided

The story is told in several ways - mostly, in my experience, by Presbyterians - of the preacher who is going on about a passage such as the parable we’ve just heard from the Gospel, that delivers dire warnings about God’s judgement, in which the unrighteous will be thrown in to outer darkness.  The preacher, quoting the scripture, warns that in that place of hopelessness there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”  And a voice from an older person in the congregation pipes up, out of curiosity, at least; representing, perhaps his or her own demographic, in an age of less effective dental care: “What if you’ve got no teeth?” the voice cries out to the fulminating preacher.

To which the preacher responds with certainty, “Teeth will be provided!”

The idea persists that if there is a God, he must be awfully good at ensuring that his people suffer.  And many wonder whether or not God has any higher priority than just that - condemning people to outer darkness and an eternity of teary grinding of teeth.  Today’s Gospel reading does not do much to dispel this notion.  The only thing that’s missing from it are the flames of hell.  But no one fleeing the fires in northern California this past week would mind such an omission, I’m sure.  I found myself weeping the other day as I read the accounts of some of the 36 people accounted dead so far from those fires, as the flames still blaze.  The photos I’ve seen of Santa Rosa might as well be scenes of Sodom and Gommorrah.  Friends I have in the area still sound stunned, devastated, and deeply uncertain about the future.

This week it was fires; last week it was hurricanes; a madman with an arsenal the week before that; earthquake the week before; and floods the week before that.  And that’s not even to mention the threat of war, or terrorism, or the rising tide of violent nationalism; or a dysfunctional federal government.  

How dare the church ask us to step inside and hear about a king who throws a wedding banquet and discovers a guest without the proper garment.  “Bind him hand and foot,” the king says to his attendants, “and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”  All because he wasn’t wearing a wedding garment.

Where are you supposed to get the proper garment when you have been pulled in from the street, where you are begging in order to get your next meal, or your next fix?  How can you be properly attired if a Nobel Peace Prize winner won’t even speak up for you whenpeople around you are being slaughtered?  Where are you supposed to find the proper clothes when everything you own has just been incinerated, and your wife died in your arms as you sought safety in the swimming pool? 

It’s frankly almost indecent to ask us to sift through the wreckage of this parable and look for good news.  One begins to suspect why the invited guests chose not to attend the wedding banquet of the king’s son in the first place.

That is, until we realize that we have the privilege of watching this parable unfold from a hillside, a safe distance away from the goings-on.  There is a barely-moving stream nearby, as we lie down on the broad green hillside.  We can hear the band playing wedding music at the king’s palace, and we see the torches burning.  And we have heard the gate slam shut, outside of which we now see a shoddily dressed man, stumbling into the deepening gloom of the night as he walks slowly away from the banquet in ever more painful steps.  And we can hear him sobbing.

As we watch, a young man dressed as a shepherd happens to come along, and asks if he can join us on then hillside.  Of course he may.  He stares with us at the strange story unfolding.  And he can point out to us from our elevated position the farms and businesses of the neighbors who had declined the invitation to the feast.  He knows the area, and the situation.

The shepherd carries a bag, and from it he takes a bottle of wine, which he offers to share with us.  There is also some bread and some lovely oil to dip it in.

“Tell us,” we ask him, “tell us about this strange king, so generous and so demanding; so difficult to understand; so insistent on his way?”

“Well,” said the shepherd, “this kind of thing has happened before.  It’s true that the king is wealthy and generous.  He has opened his gates before to those whom he calls his neighbors.  But they have riches of their own, in fact most of them have more money than he does.  They suspect that any feast he could serve would be inferior to the feasts they put on their own tables.  They imagine that his taste is old-fashioned, his menu is second-rate, and that his wine will run out.”

“Is this true?” We ask of our new friend.  “Is the king of limited means?”

“Nothing could be further from the truth,” he tells us.  “Although the stone walls around his palace seem old, and the trees have not been pruned so well, and their branches reach out over the wall, all is, in fact, beautiful within.  And although at his table the fare is sometimes simple, it is no less exquisite for its simplicity.  Every dish is delicious; every joint of meat unblemished; every vegetable brilliantly prepared; every segment of fruit perfection in sweetness; every jug of wine from the best vintages.  True, the silver is old and scratched from use, and the china is of a very ancient pattern; but it’s also true that none of it could be found anymore, not anywhere else in the world.”

“Then why,” we ask, “why do the neighbors decline his invitations?”

“Who knows?” says the shepherd.  “They imagine they have better things to do.”

“But why is he so fearsome,” we ask.  “Why, if he calls guests in off the street, does he then punish them, and cast them into outer darkness if they are not wearing the proper clothing?  Why does he condemn one so innocent, whom he invited himself?  How can he be so horrible a king?”

“Oh,” says the shepherd, “that is because he knows the neighbors are watching, and he hopes that he can teach them a lesson as they peer out from the windows of their farms and business.  But not only them.”

“What?” we ask.  “Who else?  Who else is watching?”

“Why, you are, of course,” the shepherd says, as he offers another sip of wine.  And as he does so, the darkness around the king’s palace grows darker, and the stumbling cast-out figure is no longer visible, although we can still hear him weeping, and possibly even gnashing his teeth.  And the gloom seems to be approaching the hillside on which we are sitting.  And we realize that we can no longer see the farms or businesses of any of the neighbors.  And a certain fear begins to grip us.  And we wonder if perhaps this shepherd is not merely a shepherd.  And we begin to worry about the wine he has been offering us, and the bread, and the oil.  And we sense that he can sense our unease.  And we realize that it is very dark now, and we admit a certain worry to the shepherd.  “Now that it is so dark, we will never find our way home.  The only light is in the direction of the king’s palace.  But look at us, we have no wedding garments.  We would not dare to be seen anywhere near this king or his palaces, lest he treat us the way he treated that poor soul who is weeping even now in the darkness.”

“My friends,” says the shepherd, “do not worry.  Only, follow me.”

We are not sure this is a good idea.  Has the wine made us a little drunk?  Or has he poisoned us?  He sees that we are reluctant to get up and follow him.  We remind him that we have nothing to wear but the clothes we came with, and that these are not suitable should we find ourselves brought anywhere near the king’s presence.

But the shepherd holds up the little cruet of oil he has.  “Stand up,” he says, “and let me anoint you.  For this is holy oil, and you will find that if I put only a drop of it on your head you will be fit for a king.”  

What choice do we have?  It has become so dark that even the shadows seem dark as death, and we can hardly even see ourselves.  The light is only faint enough to let us follow the footsteps of the shepherd, after he has anointed us each with a single drop of holy oil.

With trepidation and uncertainty we let our footsteps fall in line with his, as we near the king’s palace, and the music from within can be heard more clearly now.  And the shepherd begins to speak.

“Have you noticed, my friends, who is missing from the story that you watched unfold from the hillside?  The king has thrown a wedding banquet for his son, but nowhere in the story does the son appear.

“I am the king’s son,” he says.  “And while his other servants went out into the streets to find other guests, I was sent out to find you.

“For it is the will of my father that everyone should be invited to the wedding banquet, and, indeed, it is his will that everyone should come.  Many there are who reject his invitation.  Do you suppose there will be no consequences for this?” he asks.

“Yes, there is an outer darkness,” he continues.  “There may well be sulfurous fires burning.  There may be brimstone.  There may be weeping; and there may be gnashing of teeth.  But it is not my father’s will that any one of his creatures should ever suffer thus.  He will do everything to lead you into his kingdom, but he will not compel you to come.

“He will send me to you in a green pasture, and he will unfold before your eyes the fear of what might be in the deep darkness outside the strong bright walls of his palaces.  He will show you a version of yourself, ill-clad and unprepared for judgment, because that is not the way he wants you.  He will allow you to hear your own weeping, even the sound of your own gnashing teeth.

“But I have spread a table before you.  I have anointed you with oil.  I have poured you enough to make your cup run over.  

“There lies before you a path so treacherous that you do not know whether you wish to travel it.  But you have no choice, for the path is life.  And you could choose to walk that path without ever heeding the invitation of the king.  You could conclude, as so many others have, that his riches cannot compare with all the other riches on offer.  You could decide on any given Sunday that you have better things to do with your time, than go to an old-fashioned banquet.  You could decide to rely on your own strength when the waters come, or the earthquake hits, or the flames overtake you, or the bullets fly.  Or you could pretend that you will never ever have to come near to the valley of the shadow of death.  But you’d be kidding yourself.

“All of us must cross the valley of the shadow of death, eventually, and other dark valleys too.  But I am with you, and I will comfort you, yea, though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I am with you, and you may fear no evil.  For I will always come to you.  I will follow you all the days of your life.  For it is my father’s will that you and all those that he has fashioned with his own fingers should dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.”

Not quite ready to accept this offer, we object, even as he walks beside us: “But Lord, how could this be?  We have not enough faith, we have not enough hope, we have not enough love ever to earn the favor of the king.”

“Fear not,” says the shepherd, “about a lack of faith, or hope, or love.  Faith will be provided.  Hope will be provided.   Love will be provided.”

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

15 October 2017

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Perpetrators of Peace

Let us begin today with the parts of the parable that make sense. There is a man who finds himself in possession of a piece of property that seems well-suited to growing grapes. The man, in order to maximize his profits, plants new vines, builds a fence around them for protection, hews out an on-site wine press for efficiency of production, and even builds his own watchtower. In other words, he builds the Rolls-Royce of vineyards, complete with every possible resource to insure a healthy yield of wine. This makes sense.

The man, the parable tells us, then takes his fabulous vineyard, all shiny and brand-new, leases it out and leaves. He hires tenants to tend and harvest the vines and to make him a good profit. This, too, makes sense. Remember, the man is not a vintner. He’s a landowner, and he, like many of the rich, landowning men of his day, had little interest in actually getting his hands dirty. Why be forced to live on a farm in a Podunk little Palestinian town? Why not let someone else deal with the wolves and the thieves and the water shortages while he lives the high life in the big city? So, while his are maybe not the most inspiring actions ever, they do make sense.

But then things in our story begin to go rapidly and radically awry. When the landowner sends agents back to the vineyard to collect his portion of the profits, as was surely agreed to in the renter’s agreement, the tenants lose their minds. Why should we pay him anything, they say to themselves. Contract be damned, let’s keep it all. And so they seize the landowner’s slaves and assault them. They literally kill the messenger. This makes no sense. Why the tenants decide to lash out in this way is beyond us, and well beyond the scope of this parable. The story itself gives us no clues as to why the tenants are so hostile – there are no tales of abuses by the landowner, no pitiable saga of the tenant’s son who needs an expensive operation or of the tenant’s father who lost the land to the landowner in a card game gone wrong. There is no explanation, no earthly reason for the tenants’ sudden, destructive change of heart. It makes no sense.

Just as it makes no sense that when the landowner hears what has happened and that his profits are still sitting bottled up in Podunk, Palestine, he decides to try the same exact tactic again. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on the man who casts more dear slaves unto the breech. And, when the tenants do to these slaves exactly what they did to the first three, the man makes another senseless decision. He sends his son down the deadly vineyard path, foolishly confident that the tenants will surely change their behavior when it comes to his son. What is he thinking, throwing more men, throwing his own son into this melee? And what are the tenants thinking when they take his son outside the walls and slaughter him like an animal? Do they honestly expect that the landowner will say to himself, well, these tenants really mean business; I guess I’ll just let them keep my land and my wall and my vines and my watch tower and my wine and my money. None of this makes any sense. The only thing that might make sense is how the landowner responds to the death of his son – he rides in on the waves of revenge, kills the tenants in a brutal way, rids his land of any traces of them, and starts all over again. As horrible as it is, as avoidable as it might have been, this vengeance, this retribution, makes some sort of sense.

Or does it? The truth is that the landowner’s decision to murder his own tenants only makes sense within the context of their own brutality. And the landowner’s actions only make sense to us because we live in the same context, because we, too, live in a world of overwhelming violence. Our story, too, is shaped by the exponential growth of senseless brutality, by the tragic reality that violence begets violence begets violence. The only reason that you and I are not shocked by the systematic killing of the tenants is because you and I are soaked through with the same violence that bloodies this story. We have been tossed to and fro by every wave of violence, and these days, the waves are coming so fast and furious that we find ourselves beaten and bruised and gasping for air.

For we live in a world that is drowning in violence. There is the violence of war, of genocide, of terrorism and abuse and systematic oppression. There are all types of wicked violence perpetrated against women and children. There is cruel, sweeping violence against people like the Rohingya in Myanmar, people we may have never heard of before until tales of that violence bring them into our living rooms. There can be, of course, violence even in our living rooms. There is constant violence against Creation, and then there is the violence of that same Creation, multiplied by our own hand. There is violence on our screens constantly, scenes of horrific rapes, vicious combat, and shootings of every possible variety – stylized shootings, historically-accurate shootings, serious shootings, noble shootings, graphic shootings, supernatural shootings, funny shootings – thousands upon thousands of shootings. There is violence on our streets constantly – hundreds of shootings in this city alone. There is violence that is born of greed or revenge or hatred, and then there is violence that seems to have no motivation at all except to see how many innocent people can be shot from a high-rise hotel room at one time.

And there is the violence in our speech, the daggers that are thrown with such constancy and volume that everyone is sure to get hit at one point or another. There is violence in every single aspect of our public discourse – insults, name-calling, threats, virtual slaps across the face – violence all the way from the tweets that come out of the White House down to the tweets with which we respond from our own houses. There is new violence of misogyny and prejudice, and old violence that bleeds afresh when the perpetrators of such violence make claims that “it was just a different time back then.” And there is violence in the Church, with abuse and cover-ups and cut-offs and schism and slaps on the wrist and just this week, slashing criticism from ultra-conservatives when our Presiding Bishop was asked to offer a prayer at the primates’ conference on the day after the Las Vegas shooting. There is so much violence running rampant in the world; most certainly, if we are honest with ourselves, there is violence in our own hearts. There is really no need for God to destroy this vineyard; we are doing a fine job of it ourselves.

The problem of this isn’t that we can’t live this way – we obviously can, and, as a society, choose to live this way year after year, at least those of us who do not become victims of violence ourselves. The problem is when we start to live as if this violence makes sense, as if this is just the way things work in our story. This cannot be. Violence cannot be at the heart of our story, because violence is incompatible with the kingdom of God. Violence shuts down the work of the vineyard. Violence tears through our world, leaving no time, no energy, no safety to plant and nurture and harvest the fruits of the kingdom. Violence never grows anything; it always rips out at the root. Violence destroys our sense of compassion and ability to care for our neighbor, because violence is about needing to win and never about those in need. It distracts and destroys and then opens the floodgates for all of its dark, devastating cousins – fear, blame, hatred, protectionism, and hardness of heart.

But fear not, my brothers and sisters. We are not doomed to live the life of a tenant, perpetuating the cycle of violence until kingdom come. We are not cursed; we are called, and we are commanded. Love one another as I have loved you. Take up your cross and follow me. Proclaim the Gospel. It is impossible to do any of this and perpetrate violence at the same time. It is impossible to lash out in violence when you are carrying your cross. It is impossible to hurl verbal daggers when you are proclaiming the Gospel. It is impossible to harvest hatred, discord, doubt and despair when you are sowing love, union, faith, and hope. No, you and I are far from cursed. We are commanded, and we are called. We are called to be instruments of peace, conduits of God’s own Grace, bringing violence to its knees in this world with each small act of self-giving love. We are called to plant and tend the seeds of peace, to grow the peace that is already here, the peace of God, which passes all understanding but is the only thing that makes sense. So go, you beloved children of God, go into all the world as perpetrators of peace. Go into your corner of the vineyard and change the story. And may the peace of Christ be always with you.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

8 October 2018

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia