The Way Things Really Are

On March 27th of this year, the journal Scientific Reports published a new medical study that made quite a few headlines. No, this wasn’t one of those new studies like Is drinking red wine good for you? or Will eating seven kumquats a day actually help you lose weight? This study was about something called the interstitium, and the reason it made so many headlines is because it suggests that the interstitium is a new organ in the human body. That’s right – in addition to your hearts and lungs, your gall bladder (if you still have one of those), and your hold-over of an appendix, you now have another whole organ.

The interstitium is a series of tiny sacks, little compartments, that are held together by a mesh of connective tissue. Inside each little sack is fluid, and this is important. In the past, when scientists studied this connective tissue, they did so by slicing off a thin layer of the tissue and then drying it so that they could see the internal structures clearly. This drying process meant that the fluid of the interstitium had long disappeared by the time scientists clicked a slide into place and looked into the lens of their microscopes. The result of this technique was that, because there was no liquid to be seen, scientists saw only solid, dense tissue. This recent study is based on a different technique – probe-based confocal laser endomicroscopy – which is really fun to say but, more importantly, is an examination of living tissue. The result of this approach was that scientists were able to notice, for the first time, that this system of connective tissue is not solid at all, but instead is filled with little sacs of fluid.

The new study, led by a pathologist at NYU and assisted by several researchers at Penn, suggests that this new discovery may help to explain how cancer cells spread throughout the body. The interstitium is, as one reporter described is, “a highway of moving fluid,” and this newly-discovered conduit may be an integral part of the path malignant cells take as they move from one system to another in the body. The study is new, and its full implications may not be known for years to come, but there is some measured excitement in parts of the medical community about the impact this new understanding of the body may have on our treatment of disease.

All of which is really interesting, as were the subsequent twitter conversations about what we should name this new organ, since “interstitium” is, after all, a pretty boring name. Suggestions ranged from Pluto, to make up for the fact that Pluto is no longer a planet; Hammond (get it); Organ McOrgan face; and, my personal favorite, Bernard, because, as someone suggested, maybe if we called our organs by a first name we’d be more apt to take care of them. But the most interesting response to this study is not academic or comedic; it is, no pun intended, visceral: the stunning realization that there is something in your body that nobody knew was there before. You have an interstitium, a Bernard; you’ve always had it, everyone’s always had it, but nobody ever knew it. That’s kind of wonderfully mind-blowing, don’t you think? That even in these august scientific times, there is still something new to be learned. We can still be surprised by the fact that things are sometimes not what we think.

Things are sometimes not what we think, or, said another way, the way we think things are is not the way they really are. This is the core message of the stories of resurrection appearances we hear week after week in these early days of Easter. Alleluia, Christ is risen, and how does that change the way things are? Does that change the way things are? The disciples, it seems, need some time to figure this out. They had thought they knew how this whole system of life worked. You were born and named, you grew (if you were lucky), you made good choices and were blessed, you made bad choices and were punished, you sinned and repented, celebrated and mourned, and then you died, and when you died, you moldered and dissolved into dust. This was just how things were. There was proof of this, or so they thought. They had seen it happen over and over again. They had been witnesses of this system their whole lives.

When Jesus came on the scene, they had to make some adjustments to their understanding of the system. Now they could see that God could also inject himself into the system in more powerful ways than they had thought possible. They saw in Christ a kind of spiritual intervention – now, suddenly, people could be healed in new and dramatic ways. People could repent and be forgiven who had only ever been cast out before. There could be a new kind of power – the power of this Messiah, who could stand up to the religious authorities and even the civic ones and, perhaps, even change the molecular structure of the system itself. But when this Messiah didn’t choose to manifest his power in worldly strength, the disciples fell back into their old understandings. If he was crucified, then he must be dead. And if he is dead, then our mission must be over.

Today’s story is the natural outgrowth of that kind of thinking. If he is dead, then our mission must be over. If he is dead, then we must be next. So if he is dead, why don’t we hide out for a while? Even when Jesus appears among them, saying, Peace be with you, the disciples still lean on their old understandings. If he is dead, and he is standing before us, then he must be a ghost. And if he is a ghost, and if he is in here with us, then holy moly are we in trouble.

But Jesus, in his infinite patience and with his infinite love, remains with them, talks to them, and offers them proof – as scientific as it could get in the 1st century – that he is not a ghost. There is no need for a probe-based confocal laser endomicroscopy here; Jesus offers them his hands and his feet. Touch me and see, he says, see that I am no ghost. Could a ghost do this? he asks, as he gobbles down a piece of broiled fish from their fire. I was dead, and now I am before you. I am before you, and I am not a ghost. I am not a ghost, and so I must be alive. In short, I am the proof that your system is wrong. You are witnesses of this – that things are not what you’ve thought all your lives. The way you think things are is not the way they really are.

Easter is our chance, every year, to experience the same kind of jolt that we got when reading that article about Bernard. Easter is our opportunity to be surprised back into the way things really are. All year long we can imagine that we know how the system works, this system that we can see right before our eyes, this system of sin and consequences, of justice ignored or imperfectly executed, of love that fails, of healing that elude us, of death that waits, indomitable, for us all. But Easter wakes us up one morning and reminds us that this way – the way we thought things were – is not the way things really are. There is more grace in this world than we can see with the naked eye. There is more forgiveness here than we could ever find with a microscope. There is more healing here than we could imagine, more love, more life, more compassion, than any study could ever prove. There is more space for God in our lives than we know. We are part of a body, a vast network of connective tissue that is filled with the holy waters of baptism, which move God’s Grace in and around this world like a highway of moving holiness.

So if you are sitting here today thinking that your faith will always be dried out and flat, that is not the way things really are.  If you are sitting here today thinking that your broken heart will never mend, that is not the way things really are. If you are thinking that you will never be loved the way you want to be loved, that is not the way things really are. If you are thinking that you will never, ever be forgiven because maybe you will never, ever deserve it, that is not the way things really are. If you are thinking that racism and prejudice are more powerful than acceptance and love, that is not the way things really are. If you are thinking that you, or the Church, or Christianity is dead, and so your mission must be over, that is not the way things really are. If you are thinking that death, or the fear of death, or the avoidance of death, or the grieving of death is the final word, that is not the way things really are.

For you are a part of this particular study that we call discipleship; you are the ones who are witnesses of this wonderfully mind-blowing truth – that Christ is risen, and his redeeming work has made things the way they really are. He has made you who you really are. You are in Christ’s body, and he is in you. This is how – this is who – you really are.

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