Living in a World Without Monsters

For a short time in my adolescence I was sometimes afraid to go to sleep.  The specific object of my fear was, as I recall, rather hard to pin down, but it was very clearly in my head, the product of my imagination.   As I think back on it now, it looks more like a time of tenderness rather than crisis, though I suspect that for that short time I must have been a worry to my parents.

I am led to believe that the experience of bedtime anxiety or fear is somewhat common in adolescent children.  I am quite sure that it was the somewhat fuzzy nature of the fear that partly worried me.  I was afraid of something, but I wasn’t quite sure what.  Something about the vulnerability of going to sleep was at the core of the fear, for in my sleep, I must have thought, I would be subject to attack by forces against which I was fortified if I remained awake.

Children can imagine a realm of excitement and danger that they will encounter in their sleep that adult imaginations outgrow, out of necessity I suppose.  It is, after all, important to decide that there really aren’t monsters under your bed, and that the ones in your dreams can’t really hurt you.  And so I am sure that I must have been thus counseled by my parents, and by the psychologist to whom I was trundled off to see for a session or two, and by my teachers in whom I might have confided, that whatever I was afraid of did not exist in the real world, only in my head.  And if it existed only in my head, it could be vanquished in my head.  I don’t think I ever won a decisive victory over whatever it was that I was afraid of - and I don’t think I ever knew precisely what it was.  Eventually it just went away, as I outgrew that somewhat awkward moment of my childhood, in what was probably an important stage of emotional and psychological development.

Living, as we do, in a world without monsters, it is hard for modern adults to take seriously the biblical accounts of Jesus casting out demons, as we are told he did in the Gospel this morning.  Frankly, it is also hard for us to believe that Jesus cured Simon’s mother-in-law of a fever, too, but perhaps we are willing to let that slide by.  The most plausible part of this story actually seems to be that once the mother-in-law was healed she got up to wait on the men.  In any case, we are extremely likely, when we encounter a passage like this one, to clinicalize the many “demons” that Mark then tells us Jesus cast out of people.  Saint Mark may have called them demons, but we know that what he is really talking about are people who suffer with schizophrenia, or epilepsy, or bi-polar disorder, or some other diagnosable condition about which we know more than did our biblical counterparts.  

And I suppose that this modern worldview does have a ring of plausibility about it.  Plus, it has the great benefit of putting us in control.  There is no real worry to be had about demons, since they were only ever in the heads of those biblical writers, a product of their uninformed imaginations.  So when we read about them now, we know that the demons may have been clinical realities for those who suffered with them, but to us they amount to so many monsters under the bed - nothing really to worry about, especially since we have outgrown them.

After all, we live in a world that has produced a large supply of real fears to be harbored over the last century: catastrophes that haunt our imaginations, even though they did not originate there. We hardly need to foster additional categories of worry.  Our worries are founded in the real world, since there is no other realm of reality where some murky and darker power threatens our happiness and well being.  

Of course one of the implications of the absence of a darker power that lies somewhat beyond our normal comprehension, is the rational correlation that there is no power of greater goodness that lies outside our normal comprehension either.  And this point of view makes it difficult for us to know what to make of Jesus.

If there are no monsters under your bed, what are the chances that there is a Savior for you sitting at the right hand of God on his throne in heaven?  Aren’t these both fantasies cooked up in some more primitive imagination, and perpetuated only in immature minds of today?  And isn’t this thinking the way that Jesus becomes to the world little more than a glorified Sunday School teacher whose lesson plan extends not far beyond impressing on our children the need to be nice to one another and to share?  Lessons, which we probably expect them to outgrow almost as quickly as their fear of going to sleep.

It was about the same time in my boyhood that I was outgrowing my fear of whatever could threaten me in my sleep that I was also intensely involved in the worship of God, since a chunk of my childhood was spent at a school the purpose of which was to train boys to sing God’s praises with artistry and skill.  This we did on a more or less daily basis, one way or another; and it turns out to be an enterprise that is remarkably good for the imagination, allowing for the possibility that there is a realm of goodness to be encountered that lies somewhere beyond our ordinary daily experience.  For although I was taught as a child all the usual lessons about the Golden Rule, it was in the experience of worshiping God that I became familiar with this realm of great goodness, quite apparent to me in my waking hours.  How, I ask myself, did this happen?  For while it took place in a context of rehearsals and instruction, of learning and growing up, of worship and prayer and music and preaching... and I am sure all these elements contributed to the dawning lesson that there is a power of goodness at work in the world...  these are the structures that supported the lesson, not the substance of it.

Somewhat surprisingly, I find the clues of an explanation in the detail of the story of the healing of Simon’s mother-in-law’s fever.  Saint Mark provides this description of Jesus’ ministry to the woman.  He says that Jesus “came and took her by the hand and lifted her up.”

And when I think about it, I believe that this is precisely what Jesus has done for me all my life, whenever I am low, frightened, worried, beaten, unsure of myself, empty, or fevered by all kinds of things that may cause me to overheat: Jesus has always come to me, taken me by the hand and lifted me up.  I am not saying that I knew it at the time.  But I am saying that I can explain my confidence in a power of goodness that lies quite beyond the ordinary powers of this world in no other way.  Jesus has come to me, taken me by the hand and lifted me up.

This statement is, of course, not a literal claim, since no supernatural hand from heaven ever grabbed mine, and the lifting that it did was of an inner kind, not physical.  It is a claim of faith, a claim of confidence.  But it is born of experience, and the result is no less meaningful for being figurative rather than literal: Jesus came and took me by the hand and lifted me up.

I speak to you, therefore, as a man who has never quite learned the lesson that I was supposed to learn as a child: that there is no power of darkness that lies beyond our ken.  And although I am tempted, I am not ready to dismiss the demons that Jesus casts out as the mistaken interpretation of a clinical condition, since I see in my waking hours ample cause to believe that there remains in the world a murky power of darkness that does its work all too effectively, all too often, and without much intervention from us, much of the time.

Perhaps my refusal to internalize this lesson is because I have also learned that there is a far greater power of goodness at work through the might of God’s right hand.  It is the power that brings healing to the sick, relief to the poor, comfort to those who suffer, freedom to the imprisoned, light where there is darkness, hope where there is despair, and life where death would have its say.  And this power of goodness does not exist only in my head; for when my head has been at a complete and utter loss, it is this power that has come to me, taken me by the hand, and lifted me up.

Have you met this power too?  And did you know, as I know now, that it was Jesus?

More and more the lessons of the world we live in teach us that we should outgrow a thing like faith, in much the same way I had to outgrow my fear of going to sleep, since whatever monsters I was afraid of were not real.  I thank God that I learned not to be afraid to go to sleep; otherwise, where would I be now?

But I also thank God that I have never outgrown faith; and that time and time again God has sent his Son to me, and he has come, and taken me by the hand, and lifted me up.

He will do the same for you, and has probably done it already many times.  It is not just in your head.  And my advice to you is that you must not outgrow the suspicion that there is a force of goodness more powerful than any other force that exists in the world.  That is exactly what the murky darkness wants you to do: to outgrow your confidence in the goodness of God and the power of his Son.  Thus do demons seize their opportunity in wiley, subtle, and crafty ways.

But Jesus comes to us, he takes us by the hand, when we extend our hands to receive him, and he lifts us up.  As it is written:

Have you not known?  Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God, 
   the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
   his understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the faint,
 and strengthens the powerless.
Even youths will faint and be weary,
   and the young will fall exhausted;
But those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength,  
   they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
They shall run and not be weary,
   they shall walk and not faint.

And he will come to you, and take you by the hand, and lift you up.

Thanks be to God!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
4 February 2018
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

I Know Who You Are

The first big public act of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark is to enter a synagogue to teach.  And what a debut it is.  When Jesus teaches, a man who is possessed by a demon cries out “I know who you are.  I think you have come to destroy me.” Really, it sounds like the demon is crying out from within him.

It sounds like a scene out of a horror film, but this story is actually just telling us the most basic truth about how God acts in our lives.  This awful exorcism is a blueprint for us.  It’s a set of instructions for daily living. It’s very good news.  Very solemn, painful, abundantly good, news.

In our daily living, we do our best to keep our world intact.  We do our best to imagine that we are doing fine.  We tell ourselves that we know how our world works and how to function in it.  We are happy enough.  There is enough order around us, most of the time, so that we can imagine that we are a-ok.  

And when that illusion of control starts to slip away, we need a lot of help from God to face the truth.  That’s what this story is.  It’s help from God for times when our illusions crumble around us.  When the evil in the world seeps through the cracks in our individual and collective façade.

So let me just come out and ask you: is disillusionment lurking somewhere in your worldview these days?  Are you getting a little numb?  Did you hear one hundred and fifty women in a courtroom this week, testifying to the most horrifying abuse?  Wasn’t that more than you could take?  Did you even think such a nightmare was possible in the perfect, clean, elite world of Olympic gymnastics?  

Do you remember that hundreds of thousands of women and their allies took to the streets again last weekend out of an awareness that our national political life is a global disgrace?  Sometimes the truth is too much to hold back, too much to silence.  Neither the march nor the courtroom could be the perfect expression of God’s truth, but both were vivid scenes of something welling up and making itself plain.  A solemn, painful truth.

In Mark’s story the arrival of Jesus and the authority of his teachings are the reason the painful truth speaks up.  It’s ironic; the demon is the one who knows exactly who this Jesus of Nazareth is.  It’s the demon who has the language.  It’s the demon who calls Jesus the “Holy One of God.”  And if we are willing to pay attention and use this story as our own blueprint we may gain tremendous courage.  We may gain a willingness to confront the most painful truths in our world and in our own hearts.  We may come to recognize these moments of welling up as a powerful sign that God has come close to us and is ready to set us free.  We may be given the grace to understand shock and disillusionment as the last gasp of something that is being cast out.

We can think about it this way: the deepest hopes, the most powerful healings, may be the hardest ones for us to talk about.  Jesus may work in us at times when we are completely dominated by what oppresses us.  We may have no language for the sins and the fears and the addictions that matter the most.  And the only way to measure their impact may be in the act of healing itself.  Maybe it’s what happens when, for the first time in years, you can go for a day or an hour without a drink.  When you finally understand, and are willing to say, that your idea of being loved is what others would call abuse.  When it’s finally clear that nothing you have accomplished in life has ever made your deepest shame go away.  Those moments of honesty are possible only as something deathly is losing its hold over you.  Sometimes as the demon is leaving it finally, painfully, makes you tell the truth.

The powers that want to possess you know exactly who Jesus is in your life.  They can measure his authority precisely, in a way you are normally too timid to do, at least if you are anything like me.  I would even go so far as to say that sometimes, out of kindness, Jesus shields us from having to speak his name fully until we are ready.   Until the healing has already begun and we can bear to know what salvation really means for us.  That’s what happened to the man in the synagogue.  In the presence of Jesus his most horrifying forms of bondage began to speak up and tell the truth.

Perhaps in light of this story and its revelations, you can retrace your own steps here to Saint Mark’s this morning.  Maybe you came here on autopilot or in a bad mood, or with a sense of dread.  Maybe you wake up with fear in the pit of your stomach every day, and today is no different.  Or maybe you just imagine a thousand ways to spend your time that promise to be more rewarding or more useful or more restorative. You could be forgiven for imagining that the world’s troubles make faith seem like a childish fantasy.  But you came here.  Something broke its hold over you this morning and you came here.  There was a small deliverance, barely worth remarking, but it was real, and you came here.

Now take that sense of deliverance, and consider the world in which we live.  Certainly there are forms of depravity speaking their names loudly all around us.  There is an awful lot of pain and injury seeping through the cracks of our collective façade.  We seem to have woken up with a bad feeling.  

Do we have the courage and the grace to recognize this moment as a moment of healing?  When the news is very bad, can we see it as the last gasp of something that is leaving us?  Can we allow the name of Jesus to be spoken by our fear?

This moment in history may feel like a scene out of a bad disaster film, but we have the Gospel for our blueprint.  We know a basic truth about how God acts in our lives.  God sets us free in Jesus, and we are taught in faith to expect that as the demons leave they will make the truth painfully manifest.  Exorcism is a blueprint for us.  The same forces that bind us are the ones that will speak the name of Jesus if we are willing to listen. When the worst in us comes out, deliverance is near at hand.  And our deliverance will tell us who Jesus is. This grim and frightening story is our set of instructions for daily living. It’s very good news.  Very solemn, painful, abundantly good, news.

Let’s not linger too long over the pain and fear.  Let’s not be disheartened when we become disillusioned.  The loss of our habitual illusions is a sign of healing.  Let’s tell the world, as this gospel passage does, let’s tell the world through our actions and our courage and our strength, that Jesus is close to us and that deliverance is real.  

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson

28 January 2018

Saint Mark's Church Philadelphia

How to Be a Disciple

On a cold January morning in New York City, a man named Wesley Autrey was standing on the crowded subway platform at 137th Street with his two daughters, aged 6 and 4. It was a perfectly ordinary New York subway kind of day…until a young man standing on the same platform suddenly fell into a violent seizure and tumbled down onto the tracks. He was lying there, convulsing, when a low, tell-tale rumble began to roll down the long tunnel. The crowd, horrified, looked up to see the lights of the oncoming train just starting to illuminate the edges of the darkness beyond.

Immediately, Wesley Autrey left his two girls in the care of a stranger standing nearby and jumped down onto the tracks. Frantically, he tried to pull the young man up and onto the platform, but he couldn’t lift him. The oncoming train was now clearly visible at the end of the tunnel, speeding into the station, and with only a split-second to react, Wesley jumped on top of the man, pulling him within the lines of the tracks and pressing down on top of him so that their bodies were as flat as possible. The train did not, could not, stop. And so Wesley lay there, sheltering the body of a complete stranger, while the train thundered over them.

Wesley describes the next moments brilliantly. I just felt the train brush my calves, he said, and indeed he later discovered a long streak of grease along the top of his hat. The train finally stopped, and Wesley found himself eyeball to eyeball with this young man with an entire subway train above them. Hi, you don’t know me, he told the man. You had a seizure and fell on the tracks, but you’re okay. Am I dead? the man asked him. Wesley reached up and pinched the man on his arm. You feel that?, he said. You’re very much alive. He yelled out from under the train, Excuse me, I’m the father, would you tell my daughters that I’m okay? At which point the people on the platform burst into deafening applause.

This amazing, jaw-dropping subway rescue happened over ten years ago, in January of 2007, when it created such a splash that Wesley was crowned the Subway Samaritan by the New York press. I heard this story in a recent podcast from the show Radiolab entitled, appropriately, How to Be a Hero. The hosts were interested in exploring how and why people do heroic things. They interviewed people who had crawled through an electric fence to save a women being gored by a bull or pulled three people out of a burning car in nothing but a pair of sweatpants or jumped onto a subway track in the path of an oncoming train. Each story was more incredible than the next, each person a Samaritan, a Superman, a man or a woman doing something you and I could hardly imagine. As one of the hosts put it, he could, in his wildest imagination, see himself jumping down onto subway tracks to pull someone to safety. But he could never imagine himself staying down there in the path of an oncoming train and letting himself be run over. And I feel exactly the same way. I can be generous and self-giving, even at considerable cost to myself, but I’m not sure I have the capacity for that kind of sacrifice. I’m just not sure I’m made that way. Wesley is surely extraordinary, a man with a hero’s makeup, born with a tiny red cape instead of a caul over his face.

I sometimes feel the same way looking at the story of the call of the disciples, particularly as it is told in the Gospel of Mark. It was a warm morning by the Sea of Galilee, and Peter and Andrew and James and John are working – hauling in fish, mending their nets. It was a perfectly ordinary Galilee kind of day…until our Lord Jesus Christ walks by and says, “Follow me.” And immediately the disciples leave their nets and follow him. There is no discussion, no interview. There is no listing of pros and cons, no consultation with family or friends. There is only the response – instant, and wholehearted. Immediately they left their nets and followed him.

They seem extraordinary. They seem genetically predisposed to this kind of obedience, born with a halo already about their heads and a spiritual compass for a heart. And while we pray to be followers like them, to answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ, I wonder if we imagine that we could ever really do this, if we could ever really be as extraordinary as they. If Christ were to walk into your work, tap you on your shoulder and say Follow me! while you were in the operating room or standing in front of a classroom full of students or sitting on the organ bench, would you pick up and go? Would you immediately leave the school or the office or the clinic and follow him? For myself, I honestly don’t know. I could imagine myself deciding to make some greater sacrifices, buying fewer books and giving more money on those in need, dedicating more time to service or advocacy, giving more of my self in a radical generosity of time and spirit. What I have a hard time imagining is getting up, from my desk, leaving behind my family and my job and my place in the world, and, not knowing where I’m going, just following him. I am not at all sure that I am that extraordinary.

The problem is that to say that we’re not extraordinary like they were is to risk discounting the Gospel as having anything to do with us. To say that this story is only about how remarkable the disciples were is to turn this Gospel into mere history instead of a present word – you know, here’s the story of how the disciples got started, and aren’t we grateful for them. If we say that the disciples are somehow better than we are, genetically not like us, then it’s easy to distance ourselves from this story, to stop our ears to what this Gospel might be speaking now, in this moment. But this is to sell the Gospel very short. It is vitally important that we understand how those men did what they did, so that we can learn how to be a disciple.

In the podcast, the hosts asked the heroes they interviewed how it was that they could do these extraordinary things. What was it that made them heroes? Was it something about the way they grew up? Was it something about what they did for a living, their religion, their age? Are some people just born with a dominant Hero Gene, or is it nurture, not nature? What they found was something far more interesting than the discovery of some uniquely heroic genetic marker. What they found was that these people were all completely ordinary. There wasn’t anything – religion, upbringing, experiences – that marked them for heroism. And when the heroes were asked why they risked harm or even death in order to save the life of a perfect stranger, most of them responded that they had absolutely no idea. She was going to die if I didn’t help her, one said. I don’t know – I really didn’t think about it at all, said another. I just knew I had to help. They were in need, and I was there, so I did something about it. It turns out that these heroes were not, in fact, extraordinary. They were ordinary people, from all walks of life. What made them heroic was that they were placed in extraordinary circumstances. They were placed in a hero’s moment, and the moment invited them to become something more.

Probe the stories of the disciples in your mind for even a moment, and you’ll remember that they were, in fact, completely ordinary men. They have become exemplars of the faith, but in their lives, they strove and stumbled, fell and forgot, just like we do. And yet they became leaders and saints, not because they were unusual, but because they were placed in a particular moment, and they responded like disciples. Which means that we, too, have the capacity to respond in the exact same way. For when Christ comes to Philadelphia, which he does very often, and sees us in our schools or offices or homes, and says, Follow me!, we find ourselves, just like the Peter and Andrew and James and John, in a disciples’ moment. And in that moment, we are all ready, as ready as we’re going to ever be, not because of us, but because of the one who calls. We don’t have to be extraordinary because he is.

When Wesley Autrey was interviewed years later about his decision to jump on the tracks that day, he didn’t say that he had no idea. He didn’t say that he just didn’t think about what he was doing. In that moment, he said, “for some strange reason a voice out of nowhere said, ‘Don’t worry about your own; don’t worry about your daughters. You can do this.’” And so he jumped. Today, that voice is speaking to you. Not for some strange reason, but for one very specific reason. Because Christ sees you, and Christ sees that you are his. And you are in a situation that really needs disciples; you are standing in a disciples’ moment. Our holy, extraordinary Lord is calling you to follow him, in new and unimagined and remarkable and wholly life-changing ways. Don’t worry about your life, don’t worry about your own. You, disciples, can do this. 

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

21 January 2018

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia