Finding the Tune

Driving home from New York today, while I was thinking about today’s celebration of the Annunciation, coming a couple of weeks later than usual, I happened to hear a snippet of a an interview with the composer Richard Rodgers from 1960, included on Fresh Air.  Rodgers was talking about the way he and collaborator Oscar Hammerstein worked together on writing songs.  He said that Hammerstein, unlike most lyricists, liked to write the words of a song before the tune was written, without the music in his ears.  “Without a tune,” Rodgers said, Hammerstein’s “lyrics are beautifully built.”  The practice suited Rodgers, just fine, he said, since he, as a composer, found it helpful to have the words of a song in hand before he sat down to write the tune.  He said that “having the lyric, in addition to the situation gives me an extra push to finding the solution to the problem of finding the tune.”*

The archangel Gabriel was on my mind when I heard Richard Rodgers talk about finding the solution to the problem of finding the tune.  Gabriel is, by all accounts, musical.  You might even say that he is a musician, most often depicted with a trumpet as his instrument, but I imagine he can play a few others as well.  And I wonder if Gabriel, given the message of Good News that he was to bring to Mary, might have considered that, with these marvelous words in hand, in addition to the remarkable situation, he now had to approach the solution to the problem of finding the tune.  

What kind of tune can convey the news that “thou hast found favor with God.  And behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS.   He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest….  The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee… [and] that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.”  How do you set such words to music for the first time -before anyone else has given it a go.  How did Gabriel sing these words to Mary - for don’t you think he must have sung them to her?  How did he find a solution to the problem of finding the tune of the Good News of the coming Incarnation of God?

Now, Mary was no musician - at least not professionally - but we know that she was musical.  But she, too, must have found it difficult to come up with a tune to go with her response to the words of greeting.  It would be a matter of days, at least, until her words and music were married to each other, when she visited her cousin Elizabeth, and the Magnificat burst forth from her heart and from her lips.

Given the gift of the Word, Mary’s life would now amount to finding a solution to the problem of  finding the tune over and over again.  How to sing to him in utero?  What song to rejoice with at his birth?  What lullaby to sing her infant child to sleep?  What songs to teach him as a child?  How to sing of her worry when he went missing?  What kind of notes to use when you have to just say, “Do whatever he tells you to do.”  And what sad tune to sing at his death?  In this, as in every other aspect of her life, Mary proves to be a model for us.  For what could any Christian do with his or her life that is better than finding a solution to the problem of finding the tune to go with the Word of God’s love that is given to us in the gift of his Son Jesus?

Perhaps we could even say that at some level this is the mission of the church, bequeathed to us by Mary: given a lyric that is beautifully built, and given the situation, to now go about finding a solution of the problem of finding the tune.  Wasn’t this in many ways what the Psalmist was asking, when he asked, “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”  God’s words hadn’t disappeared, even in exile, but a tune still had to be found, and sometimes we find that a problem, the solution to which eludes us.

When I hear Gabriel arriving at Mary’s chamber again tonight, and I imagine that I feel the air stirred a little by the flutter of his wings, and I hear the great “Ave” floating from his lips, I have the sense that Mary encourages us, or allows us, to keep this commemoration of a deeply personal and intimate reality, for the express purpose of challenging us to the same task that Gabriel had to do first, and that she had to to do next, and that each of us in our own way has to do ourselves: to receive the Word of God’s love, and then to find a solution to the problem of finding the tune with which to sing that Word into the world we live in, which is so often starved for Good News, as well as for the music of God.

I don’t know how Richard Rodgers went about writing his tunes, but I am grateful for the way he expressed it: finding a solution to the problem of finding the tune.  Because the end result, we know, of his work is a thing of beauty.  But it did not spring from his fingers instantaneously.  There was a problem to be solved - how to put these beautifully built words, given the situation, in just the right way, how to make this lyric sing?  How reassuring it is to share this problem with the likes of Richard Rodgers (whose father, it turns out, had changed the family name from Abrahams, and who might be surprised to find himself enlisted in an Annunciation sermon).

I expect we also share the problem with Gabriel: finding a solution to the problem of finding the tune for the Good News that God sent his Son to be with us, to be one of us, born of a human mother, whose name was Mary, and who, when she became the Mother of God, became our mother too, since God had become human.  Which means that our song is even more glorious than the songs of angels or archangels, who cannot say that they share a mother with the Son of God, as we can.  Though I think we should allow them to sing along with us, all the same.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
The Feast of the Annunciation, 2018
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

*an interview of Richard Rodgers by Tony Thomas, 1960, included on Fresh Air, WHYY, “How Rogers and Hammerstein Revolutionized Broadway,” by Terry Gross, 9 April 2018

Awkwardly Strutting Upon Stage

One thing William Shakespeare knew about his audiences was that they were hungry to see something wonderful.  The public theaters of early modern England were built on the premise that the public would pay for novelty, for spectacle, and for either a happy ending or a savagely bitter one, depending on the story at hand.  We are of course familiar with this logic.  Entertainment is a huge industry for us, and there are theme parks and malls and entire chunks of Florida devoted to keeping us fascinated by the latest spectacle.  But in Shakespeare’s day the notion of selling a big spectacle was quite new, and it required his genius, among others, to win over a big audience and the profits they brought with them.  Needless to say, he won.

Of all the spectacles Shakespeare promulgated, one of the most fascinating is his depiction of Cleopatra.  It’s a real tour de force, although it’s laden with attitudes about women and Egyptians that should have ended right there in the early seventeenth century.  Think about it: Shakespeare is asking his actors to present the legendary queen in all her glory, able to captivate Antony and Caesar (more than one Caesar, actually) and any number of lesser folk.  And whom does he have to play this supremely captivating role?  Just a thirteen year-old boy with a squeaky voice.  It’s a famous mismatch, and a famous moment of theatrical audacity.  Because all the women’s roles in Shakespeare’s day were played by boy actors, Shakespeare wrote this play about an aging Cleopatra knowing that his writing would have to turn an adolescent into a famous seductress.

I won’t go on and on about the strategies he uses, except to suggest that the play works in part by telling us over and over again, that what we see isn’t anywhere near as wonderful as the original.  At one moment, Cleopatra actually says that she doesn’t want to be captured by Rome because the Romans will want to display her as a trophy, and they will put on stupid plays with boy actors in them, trying to imitate her.  Incredible!  Here is Cleopatra in her own play, telling us that she literally wouldn’t be caught dead in a play like the one we are seeing.  Here is a boy actor playing Cleopatra and looking us right in the eye to say that no boy actor is ever going to be able to play Cleopatra.

Well I have a new theory about all of this: that’s evangelism.  Being a squeaky adolescent who tries to play Cleopatra is what evangelism looks like in practice.  It’s part of what it means to say “We have seen the risen Lord!” while we strut awkwardly about on the stage of this world, doing a very poor imitation of being a close friend of Jesus.

Ask the disciples who were locked in an upper room for fear of the religious authorities in John’s gospel this morning.  Their performance was so unconvincing that their own friend Thomas gave it a terrible review.  “You’ve seen the risen Lord? This is what your salvation looks like?  What kind of bad theater is this?” 

Bad theater indeed.  And anyone coming into the church in our day could say the same thing.  These people--huddled together, fearful of what the world has to say about us, uncertain about our role, baffled by the resurrected Christ—surely these people aren’t the church of God.  Surely God hasn’t entrusted the keys of the kingdom to such spiritual adolescents. 

But God has.  And along with the unconvincing performance, God has given us the Thomas’s of this world, the theater critics who challenge us to be authentic.  “No,” Thomas tells them, “this thing you are doing in a closed room is not enough for me.  Your religion is not enough for me.  Give me Jesus.”

Thomas wants to see Jesus.  Thomas wants to touch Jesus.  Thomas wants Jesus to be vulnerable to him, available to him, real, personal.  Above all, Thomas doesn’t want to pretend that he has seen Jesus if he has not.  He knows that he cannot be an apostle if Jesus is dead for him. 

And Thomas’s reluctance to applaud their bad performance tells us something new and wonderful about what it takes to be a disciple of Jesus.  It’s not what we might have been expecting.  

It appears that what is required to be a follower of Jesus is not exactly faith, or at least not faith as we commonly represent it.  What’s required is dissatisfaction.  What’s required is the ability to look at the church—huddled up behind a locked door, fearful, discouraged even though we have seen the Lord—the ability to look that church in the eye and say “This is not enough for me.” 

We need the ability to look at our lives, which may be very pleasant and good lives, and say, “This is not enough.  I haven’t seen Jesus.  I haven’t seen Jesus in a life that has been focused on doing what pleases and distracts me.  I haven’t seen Jesus in a life that’s tame and complacent.  Jesus hasn’t been real for me yet, and sometimes when I look at you I wonder whether you’ve seen him, either.”

Was Easter enough for you?  It doesn’t have to have been!  Yes, it was gorgeous and stirring here and deeply moving.  But that doesn’t have to have been enough.  Jesus isn’t through with us.  No, far from being satisfied with Easter—I don’t care how great our church is—far from being satisfied with Easter, we need to stay clear that the full life of our risen Lord is something we haven’t seen yet.

Jesus is the real Cleopatra, far surpassing Shakespeare’s exotic English fantasies about an ancient Egyptian queen.  This is what Shakespeare says about Cleopatra:

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety. Other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies.

If a seventeenth-century English playwright can put into words what it means to gaze on Cleopatra and still be unsatisfied, surely the church can learn, as Shakespeare did, to turn our defects into a virtue.

No, when you look at us, you aren’t getting the whole picture of Jesus no matter how hard we try to make that happen.  Yes, Jesus is here, hands outstretched, available, intimate.  And always calling us to want to see him more fully.

In truth, most of us need to need more from God.  We need to be hungrier. We’ve picked up the idea, subtly or not so subtly, that it’s in bad taste to be desperate for God, haunted by our need to see God.  Somewhere along the road, we’ve learned that real adults tuck their spiritual needs away discretely out of sight.  We are grateful for experiences and people and communities that draw us closer to Jesus but we don’t make a big deal out of our need for them. 

But God doesn’t work that way.  God needs us to need more.  Like Cleopatra, God wants to arouse our hunger every time God feeds us.  Jesus didn’t call us to be his friends so that we could politely stifle our need for him.  Jesus isn’t one of those friends who doesn’t want to know you. 

Thank God what happened last week wasn’t enough!  Thank God there are still the dissatisfied among us who are looking for more!  Hungry for more.  For the whole thing, the whole life of Jesus in us that makes no sense and that brings peace where peace has not been possible before.  Thank God that what we’re up to in our lives of faith is not a performance that can be perfected in one Holy Week.  Let’s hold out for more.  Let’s hold out for the spirit of God in us doing something we could never have predicted. 

And like that boy actor, performing an impossible role, let us look one another in the eye with supreme, knowing, confidence, certain that our playwright reigns.

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
The Second Sunday of Easter, 8 April 2018
Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia
 

Isle of Dogs

The dogs from Isle of Dogs, along with their little pilot, Atari.

Mid-week during Holy Week I went to see the new Wes Anderson film, Isle of Dogs.  I was eager to see it, in part I guess, because just a couple of weeks ago I had a near-disastrous emergency with my own dog Ozzie.  Plus, I am a big fan of Wes Anderson movies, and I had heard a great review on NPR.  Additionally, I had a hunch that something about the film would provide inspiration for an Easter sermon.

In fact, the plot of this animated film, set in Japan, twenty years from now, tells of a corrupt and mean-spirited government that has set out to eradicate dogs from the nation, and that begins by banishing them to an island used as a trash dump, just off the coast.  But a lone child - an orphaned twelve year old boy -  manages to pilot a small plane to the trash-island-cum-dog-prison, where he goes in search of his own dog, Spots.

A small pack of dogs agrees to help the boy search for his own lost pet, leading him at first to a heart-breakingly bare and sun-bleached set of bones inside a tightly locked dog crate that had obviously become a death chamber for its occupant, when he could not escape its locked door.  But it transpires that this set of bones is mis-identified, and the band of dogs and their boy continue their search for Spots.  One of the most inspiring moments of the film takes place when the leader of the pack assures the boy, “Wherever he is, if he’s alive we’ll find your dog.”

You can see, I think, why I had suspected there would be Easter material in this film.  A child travels to a dangerous island, the inhabitants of which are doomed to die.  But the child brings with him the determined intention to save at least the one dog that belongs to him.  The entire film is full of the promise - no, the hope - of the unlikely triumph of life over the near certainty of death, of justice over wrong-doing, of kindness over cruelty, of loyalty over self-interest, and of the truth over the kinds of lies that governments tell their people.

I went to see Isle of Dogs really wanting to fall in love with the movie, as I have with so many other Wes Anderson movies.  And I did enjoy it, I will say.  But I have to confess to you that as I sat there watching the credits, I was a little disappointed.  I liked the film, but I had wanted to love it.  I was impressed with so many aspects of it, but I wasn’t swept up and away by it.  I enjoyed it, but I wasn’t changed by it in any way, and I didn’t feel that I wanted to gush about it to my friends, or to a congregation full of people on Easter morning (although I certainly do think you should see it).  I almost - but not quite - wanted to respond to the movie with a, “Meh...” that useful three-letter word that says so much by saying so little when there isn’t much to say.

It wasn’t until I was walking out of the theatre, that I heard someone pronounce the pun that is in the title of the film, and that I had completely missed.  Isle of Dogs: isle-of-dogs: I love dogs.  How could I be so stupid?  How could I have missed this lovely proclamation?  

Something changed when I realized that I had not even known what I was saying when I pronounced the title of the film: I love dogs... which, as a simple statement on my lips is, in fact profoundly true!  I love dogs!  I do love dogs!  I love my dog, and I love other people’s dogs!  I think everyone should have a dog or two!  I love dogs!  And I had just sat through a 101-minute film, the whole point of which, in a sense, is to get me to say that I love dogs - and I had missed it altogether.  In fact, I had been saying exactly what the film-maker wanted me to say, and what I wanted to say... but I had not even realized what I was saying - nor how true it is: I love dogs!

Now, here is a point of congruence with Easter.  We pile into church at Easter, for all the right reasons, I think, even if we don’t know what those reasons are.  But we get ourselves here.  And we sing the hymns, and we enjoy the flowers, and the hats, and the brass, and the pageantry.  And at the beginning of the Mass, you followed the instructions, and you sang (didn’t you?) the words of the Opening Acclamation, with which we will begin every Mass for the next fifty days:

“Alleluia, Christ is risen!”  I sang.

And you sang, “The Lord is risen, indeed, Alleluia!”  Didn’t you?

Let’s try it again, for good measure... and for those of you who were late (you know who you are)!  We can just say it this time:

- Alleluia, Christ is risen!
- The Lord is risen indeed.  Alleluia!

Anyway, here’s my point.  When we pronounce the Easter Acclamation, when we shout out the good news that Christ is risen, do we have any idea what we are saying?  Do we even know what it means?  What are the implications of these words?  What does “Alleluia” even mean?  Scholars will explain its Hebrew roots, but I think most likely it is a word that springs from the dialects of angels.  Here you are, speaking Angelic, and do you have any idea what you are saying?!?!  And do we realize that it is true?  Or are we pronouncing this wonderful truth, without actually realizing what we are saying, as I did with the movie: “Isle of Dogs: it’s an island of dogs.  You know?  Isle. Of. Dogs.  Al. Le. Lu. Yah.  Yeah, the Lord is risen indeed.  Sure.  Meh.”

Is it entirely possible to come to church on Easter morning, to sing the hymns, to fall on our knees, to kneel at the altar, to say the sacred words that express a profound and mysterious truth, and then to walk out the door carry on our day with a, “Meh...” as if there isn’t much to say about today; maybe even missing the the truth of the lovely proclamation we make together: the Lord is risen indeed.  Alleluia!

These few little words cost us nothing to repeat, and yet, they articulate a truth that has changed the world, and that has changed your life, whether you know it or not... by giving you the promise of new life in Jesus Christ, the Lord of Life, who makes all things new: the tired, the sinful, the broken, the inept, the warped, the disappointing, the ineffectual, the puny, the mongrel, the weak, the filthy, the washed-up, the dim, the chronic, the forgotten, the mangy, the battered, the runt, the second-rate, the sickly, the bent-out-of-shape, the mutt, the inadequate, the locked-up-and-forgotten, the maimed, the abused, the malnourished, the abandoned, the underachiever, the foolish, the mean-spirited, and the hopeless - all will be made new by the power of the Resurrection!  But, do we realize that this is what we are saying when we say that the Lord is risen indeed?  

Despite the fact that we live on a planet of astounding beauty, isn’t it sometimes easy to feel as if we are marooned on a Trash Island, where we are doomed to simply live out our days and then die?  Have we just been dumped here to fend for ourselves amidst the vagaries of the marketplace, and some kind of social Darwinism?  Will our lives amount to nothing more than a pile of bare, sun-bleached bones?  These questions are the context in which we approach Easter morning.  

And here is a child, whose presence among us is a mystery.  He was sent to this dangerous place, the inhabitants of which are doomed to die, bringing with him the intention of salvation.  And when he grew up, his life and his ministry, and even the circumstances of his execution, turned out to be full of the promise - no, the hope - of the unlikely triumph of life over the near certainty of death, of justice over wrong-doing, of kindness over cruelty, and of the actual truth over the kinds of self-serving lies that governments tell their people.  And he began making all things new.  And we spend, I don’t know, something like 101 minutes in church this morning, the whole point of which, is to get us to see this truth, and to say it out loud with conviction, and to know what we are saying!

But it is all too easy for us to leave here thinking, well... I did enjoy it, but in the end we have to confess we’re a little disappointed.  Sure, we like Easter, but do we love it?  Are we swept up and away by it.  Are we changed in any way by what we hear today, by what we say and sing?  Do we want to gush about it to our friends?  Do we have any idea what we are saying when we proclaim that Christ is risen?  And can we make this simple statement, and realize that it is profoundly true?  

Yes, indeed the Lord is risen!  He died for my sins and yours, and he rose from death to put an end to the burden of those sins.  I love Jesus for what he did for us, for who he is!  I love him, because he loved me first, and because he is love!  Heck, I think everyone ought to love Jesus!  My life is changed because Christ is risen!  Yes, the Lord is risen indeed!  Alleluia!  Alleluia!  Alleluia!

In the film, the dogs don’t realize that the boy has come to save them.  Neither does he realize it, for that matter.  Everyone thinks that the child has come only to find his own dog, Spots.  But it will become clear that no other path is possible except for him to save them all, not just his own dog.  And in the process, he will vanquish evil, and put an end to the death-driven regime that suppressed any but its own preferences, (and that also wickedly allowed cats to do whatever they please).  But in the end, the dogs will discover that not only have they been saved, they have been transformed, their lives are changed, and they have become creatures far more wonderful than they imagined themselves to be.

Do you think that Jesus intends anything less for you and for me than the happy ending of a Wes Anderson film?

And do you hear the promise of this good news, that not only have our lives been saved, we have been transformed by the power of God’s love?!  We are changed, and we will be changed again!  By God’s grace, you are far more wonderful than you imagined yourself to be!  And don’t worry, wherever you are, if you’re alive, he’ll find you.

All of which we can say, in the fullness of its wonderful truth, with these few words:

Alleluia, Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed.  Alleluia!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
Easter Day 2018
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia