Humility

The previous Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, once uttered a somewhat withering remark, to the effect that you can tell the church is in trouble when the clergy are overly concerned about the color of their buttons.  He was referring to the practice in the Anglican Communion of priests adopting the symbols of rank when taking on distinct roles within the church hierarchy.  Canons of the church are allowed the addition of red piping and red buttons on their cassocks, as is sometimes in evidence here in our own precincts.  Archbishop Williams, even after he had achieved the highest possible position in the entire Anglican Communion, usually dispensed with the sartorial indications of his own rank and office, preferring plainest black.  He very likely had in mind Jesus’ own teaching about the scribes and Pharisees: “do not do as they do....  They do all their deeds to be seen by others, for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long.” 

Jesus was talking about the small accoutrements still used by Orthodox Jews in their prayer: the leather boxes containing a verse of the Torah, and the fringes of the prayer shawl, the tallit.  I don’t think he was criticizing the use of these aids to prayer, rather, he objected to the transformation of them into items of personal ornament.   And he went on: “You are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher.... And call no one your father on earth for you have one Father - the one in heaven.”   It has to be admitted that it is not immediately clear that our Lord belonged to an Anglo-catholic parish.  It’s a bit of a worry.  I, myself, am in possession of the ecclesiastical garment with the most fulsome and capacious sleeves of any of the clergy in this parish, so I will brook no criticism of my colleagues, wherever your minds may wander.

Of the many sayings we may delight to imagine that Jesus never spake, these few in the 23rd chapter of Matthew’s Gospel are among my favorites to ignore.  I do not wish to be called “Rabbi,” but you may stick with “Father,” unless you hear otherwise from the Verger.

My real supposition is that Jesus was not expressing a blanket prohibition of the terms “rabbi” and “father” any  more than he was articulating a prohibition of the use of the phylacteries, or the tallit.  Jesus’ aim in his teaching was to express something of the sanctity of humility, and the inevitability of humbleness in the truly faithful life.  But these few sayings of Jesus’ are precariously available to the practitioner of what we might call “false humility.”  For it is easy enough to cast aside the buttons, trim off the fringes, shorten the sleeves, and insist that everyone call you “Bob” without ever actually adopting the true attitude of servanthood and humility that Jesus is teaching about here.  In the church, we often decide to have it both ways: to keep both the buttons and the false humility - it’s a specialty of ours.

A little article I came across recently carried the intriguing title, “Why Nobody Wants to Go To Church Anymore.”  The author posited these four plausible reasons:

“They don’t want to be lectured.

They see the church as judgmental.

They see the church as hypocritical.

They see the church as irrelevant.”*

I think Jesus might have made a similar assessment of the scribes and the Pharisees, and there’s every possibility that he shares this assessment - at least some of the time - of the church.

But Jesus was an ineffective administrator, and he lacked the imagination of a bureaucrat.  He never came up with a four-point program, or with a list of seven secrets of effective discipleship.  He didn’t devise a curriculum, or write a white paper.  He put no system in place to prevent the church from falling into these same pitfalls to which the religious leaders of his own day were also prone.  

No.  This is what he said.  “The greatest among you will be your servant.  All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.”  The first of those phrases refers to himself, in the first instance.  And the rest of it applies to us, Jesus’ own mother providing the first example of the truth of the teaching: she who humbled herself was exalted.

By one account, at the beginning of Scripture, all humanity - in the form of the first human - was formed out of the dust of the earth, and animated with the breath of God.  You might call that a humble beginning, albeit ennobled by the divine breath.

Near the other end of the Bible, the Son of God - himself fully human - is taken down from the Cross after his scourging, humiliation, and execution, to be placed, at last, in the ground, bringing, in a sense, to perfect completion God’s human experiment: from dust to dust.

In between, the children of God were called into the covenant from which they restlessly and repeatedly meandered; empires rose and fell; the patriarchs and prophets followed God’s guidance to lead the people into and out of exile more than once, and toward the Promised Land; the Tribes of Israel were dispersed; judges and kings lived and died; civilizations were lost; the Temple was built, destroyed, and rebuilt; the Ark of the Covenant disappeared; and the word of God was spoken, mangled, dreamed about, interpreted, written down, lost, set to music, imperfectly copied, and buried in the sand.

But still, for Christians, the story of God goes from dust to dust.  Although it was written by the hand that laid the foundations of the earth and fastened the cornerstone of creation, the hand of the One who shut up the sea with doors, and who made the clouds a garment of thick darkness, who commanded the morning, and caused the dayspring to know its place, who entered into the springs of the sea and walked to its depth, who first perceived the breadth of the universe, who knows the place where light dwells, and as for darkness, knows the place thereof, who is himself the father of the rain, and from whose womb came the ice and the hoary frost of heaven, who binds the sweet influences of Pleiades and looses the bands of Orion, who knows the ordinances of heaven, who lifts up his voice to the clouds, and sends lightnings that they may go and say unto the world, “Here we are,” who put wisdom in the inward parts, who satisfies the desolate places with water, and causes plants to spring from the earth, who fills the appetites of young lions, and provides for the raven his food, who knows the treasures of the snow, who has seen the doors of the shadow of death, and for whom the gates of death have opened.**

This is the God whose Son “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.  And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.  Therefore God has highly exalted him.”***

This God gives us our life, our history, from dust to dust: a story of humility crowned by the humiliating death of his Son, the Messiah, born in a stable, then utterly forgotten for most of his life; who in preparation for his own demise stooped down to wash the feet of his followers, on the night before he died.  And then, from the humble, borrowed grave wherein his body lay in the dust, a new work sprang forth, and new life was born, the hope of heaven burst into the world.

The paradox of Christian faith is that triumph is won by the humble figure of Jesus, whose own followers were uncertain about who he is, or about what would become of them.  And Jesus regularly reminds them - and us - that if his way toward triumph was humble, we should expect our path toward triumph to be humble too.  We should embrace humility, we should be accustomed to kneeling, and the dust should be well-known to us, we should be familiar with the ways of servanthood, we should be prepared to take up our cross, and we should be ready to give up our lives - to lose them in all kinds of meaningful ways, if we expect to find meaning in life at all.  This is the consistent and regular theme of Christ.

Jesus is not teaching us easy lessons.  And no lesson can ever be easy whose lesson-plan goes like this: God is omnipotent, but he sent his Son to us to set aside his power, live in humility, and give up his life for the sake of our salvation: be like God, and humble yourself so that you may be exalted with him.  This is not a winning sales-pitch.  There is no jackpot here; there may not even be colored buttons.  There is servanthood, which means stooping, bending, feeding, working, sweating, staying up late, and rising early; and which also implies that while you are doing it, covered in dust, you will probably not be sufficiently well compensated.  Mind you, I am not preaching an ordination sermon here; Jesus seems to indicate that this is the Christian life he is talking about - meant for all of us, not just for some.

The thing about this message of humbleness is that you cannot really convince someone about it with a lecture.  True humility always resists judgmental-ism and hypocrisy.  And in world that is screaming in pain and poverty, the humility that leads one person to serve another in need will never be irrelevant.  For there in the dust, is carried to us still on wisps of ennobled breath, the reminder that “all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

Which is not the sermon I wanted to preach to you, only two weeks away from Commitment Sunday, when I want to be talking to you about stewardship, about giving, about the importance of your generosity of spirit.  But the sermon I wanted to preach makes no sense if those four reasons “Why Nobody Wants to Go to Church Anymore” ring true: if I lecture you in a church that seems to be judgmental, hypocritical, and irrelevant.

Jesus looked at the buttons of the scribes and the Pharisees, and he told them that their lectures were not only boring, they sounded judgmental, hypocritical, and irrelevant under the circumstances of the day.  And the buttons (the phylacteries, the fringes) were not a problem in and of themselves, I think he meant to say, they only proved the point.

But it would do no good for me to go and chop off the very lovely, full, and ample sleeves of my best surplice.  Better to gather them in when I kneel, and be in search of feet to wash; to allow those sleeves to drag in the dust, if it puts me alongside you, where we can both see the Cross from a different angle, and seek to serve one another.  And we find there in the dust that there are others who are in need, whose lives have been shaped by deep humility, and who need to hear Jesus’ promise that soon and very soon they, and all who have been humbled, will be exalted.  May God give us the grace to wrap those humble souls in the long sleeves of our garments, and keep them warm.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

5 November 2017

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

* Wes McAdams, www.radicallychristian.org, 13 June 2014

** See Job 38

*** Philippians 2:7-9

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