Food Enough

The disciples were spellbound. Rapt. They were barely breathing, held in that place of quiet where they could hear only the sound of their own hearts and the gutter and pop of the candles on the table. If you had asked them later, they would have told you that in that moment, they felt the whole world stop and be still. All was centered on the one holding up a morsel of bread; all time, all space, all of life was contained in that moment. Everything was found in the eyes of the one who said this is my body, and it is for you. The disciples were transfixed, captivated by the one to whom they had given their lives and the bread of life he offered.

All of the disciples, that is, except one. I’m not sure which one, and I’m not sure that it really matters. It wouldn’t have been John, who’d spent the entire meal reclining next to Jesus, his whole being hungry for every word spoken by his Lord. It wasn’t Peter, although after supper he felt more torn up and confused than he had ever been. It could have been Thomas, but Thomas had too much self-discipline to be distracted by his own concerns at a moment like this. It could have been Simon the Zealot, or James the Less, but I’m going to say that it was Bartholomew. The disciples were all spellbound and rapt except for one, and that one was Bartholomew. Let’s say, for the sake of my thought experiment, that this experience was not so unusual for Bartholomew, which is fairly easy to do since we know so very little about him. Let’s say that Bartholomew had always struggled with moments like this, that when the others were ready to go all in, he often found himself holding back – evaluating, second-guessing, wondering what it was that he had missed and why he still felt so uncertain. Bartholomew had always been the one who had trouble with prayer; he was a thinker, and settling into the stillness of the Spirit was not something that came very naturally to him. Watching all of his friends locked in to a holy moment only seemed to make things worse. Why did this seem so easy for them? Why was he the one who always seemed to have another question, who still, even after all this time, wanted more?

And here he was again, sitting in the upper room, watching his friends be drawn deeper and deeper into this moment, and watching himself sitting on the outside. The moment hadn’t started as something that seemed particularly significant. They were eating together, sharing supper in an upper room, at Passover time. The group was tense and quiet; there was a sense that something was coming, although no one, not even Peter and James and John, seemed to know exactly what that something was. The palm-strewn journey into Jerusalem should have cheered them up, but Jesus’ words about suffering and death resounded in their ears even through all the cries of Hosanna. So they sat, each man in his own thoughts, waiting for the food to arrive, waiting for a distraction.

But when Jesus took the bread in his hands to bless it, Bartholomew felt the whole room shift. Suddenly, this wasn’t just a normal blessing before a meal. The air felt charged somehow, and not because of their own anxiety. This was something else, something entirely outside of them. The night pulsed with it, this energy that drew the disciples in like iron to a magnet. Bartholomew felt himself being drawn in, his eyes focusing on the hand holding the bread, his heart yearning for the mystery found there. He felt the power of this presence tugging on him, and he saw his friends give themselves over to it one by one. He saw them surrender; he saw the wonder in their eyes, the gratitude, even the joy. And part of him wanted to surrender, too, to find himself locked in like in all of those other moments of prayer, to find himself without questions, without wanting anything more. He wanted this bread to be enough.

But even as he wished for all of this, he felt objections start to flood into in his mind. Why bread? Why just bread? Why, in this moment of fear and uncertainty was bread the only thing that Jesus could offer? Why not something more useful, why not something more powerful? Why not a grand miracle where truth would rain down like manna upon the heads of all those who spoke lies about them? Why not a platform large enough that they could finally convince the leaders of the synagogue that this Jesus was their Messiah too? Why not a fire to burn in the hearts of the people so that they would all leave everything and follow him? Why not an army of heaven to wipe Rome from the earth? Why not more power, more persuasion? Why not more? This may be holy food, Bartholomew thought, but against the evils of the world, this food was wholly inadequate. It was simply not enough.

The world, our world, is quick to agree with Bartholomew’s objections. When the world looks in our solemn festivals, it sees something incomprehensible and irrelevant. At best, the world – including, let’s be honest, some parts of our own Church – sees the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament on this Solemnity of Corpus Christi as a harmless but slightly pitiful ritual, a devotion run ever-so-slightly amok, a superstition full of sound, and smoky, but signifying nothing. At worst, those same people see our actions this day as woefully misguided. Why bread? Why pay so much attention to this tiny, translucent wafer? Is this the best the Church can do? Is this truly our answer to the heartbreak and evil of the world? Why bread – why not a bullhorn, why not a sword? Why not more?

I will admit that at times I find these same objections flooding into my own mind. Like our story’s Bartholomew I am grateful, of course, for this food, but I also wonder if there could be more. I find myself wishing that God would just come down, now, wielding the power of truth like a saber, cutting down the powers of darkness in this world, turning the hearts of all humankind to the well-being of the poor and the helpless, the widow and orphan, the outcast and the unseen. I wish sometimes that this bread could do more, that the light that shines from this tabernacle would slice through this city, breaking the spell of sin and suffering. I wish that this holy bread would do more, would be more, that it would reveal itself as a power that is undeniable and irresistible, as truly food enough.

But then I hear the words of our Savior come to me, resounding through the noise of my impatience and doubt. I hear the words of Jesus speaking to me and to you, words that have been speaking into the world for thousands of years now. “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever, will have eternal life.” Whoever eats of this bread, in other words, will be changed. Whoever eats of this bread will live a life transformed, will be bound not only to the everlasting life of God but also to God’s presence with us in the eternal and blessed now. Whoever eats of this bread takes the real presence of Christ into our selves and so is fed, not for a moment, but forever. Whoever eats of this bread is not only refreshed and renewed but also reformed, remade into our true identity – the very Body of Christ.

So why, in this moment of fear and uncertainty is bread what Jesus offers? Because this bread is the most powerful thing in the world. Because, by his death and resurrection, Christ has changed everything, and this bread continues this work. This is my body, Jesus tells us, and so are we. We are his body, and we carry the power of this bread with us as we move from this altar out into the world. We eat this bread, and we become the power of righteousness, the light in the darkness. We become the voice of truth and the face of love. We become the platform for justice and the fire for transformation. We eat this bread and it shapes us from the inside out, changes us into that thing that we have been searching for. We eat this bread, and we become more – more of who God made us to be, more of who Jesus has called us to be, more of who the world needs us to be. For this bread brings Christ close, makes us one, and sends us into the world abiding in him. We eat this bread and become more. And we know then, as Bartholomew came to know, that this bread is truly food enough. God himself is with us. God is within us. Come let us adore the most holy Sacrament. 

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

The Solemnity of Corpus Christi, 3 June 2018

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

In Search of the Holy Trinity

If I could go to Jesus by night, under the cover of darkness, so as not to get caught, with even half an expectation that he could deliver to me something like John 3:16, more or less on a platter - the Gospel in compact form - I might ask him to explain himself to me, or at least to explain how God works.  Why does it have to be so difficult? I might ask. Why so much mystery?  Why this confusing business about three persons in one God?  And why, if I try to say that the Father does this, and the Son does that, and the Spirit blows where it wills... why will I be accused of heresy, when it is so much easier to talk this way, than of the undivided unity, without confusion, change, division, separation, or what have you?  And why must we be stuck with this unhelpful, patriarchal language, stubbornly rooted in the old ways?  That in so many other ways, it seems we must outgrow?

If I could sit with Jesus, I’d like to ask him how God works: how the Father works; how the Son works; how the Spirit works, blowing as it does, where it wills.  How does the holy, blessed, and undivided Trinity work?  I’d like to tell Jesus a thing or two about how difficult it can be to spread a religion whose inner workings are so opaque.  I’d like to explain to him the value of transparency.  I’d like to point out that even the “born again” thing has proved difficult and confusing, as evidenced by that early conversation with Nicodemus, let alone the Gon-in-three-persons-blessed-trinity thing.  Easy to sing about: harder to talk about.

I wouldn’t need much time: no more than Nicodemus had, I think.  Not that Jesus let Nicodemus get much of a word in.  Not that Jesus even let him ask whatever question he arrived with.  Not that Nicodemus left understanding something that he hadn’t understood before.

But still.

I’d like to get my question out - how does God work? -  and at least give Jesus a chance to reply.

And if I sit quietly, and prayerfully, and think about it, I wonder if Jesus would say this in response.

“You want to know how God works.  You say you hear talk of the Father, you hear talk of the Son, you hear talk of the Spirit, and you want to understand the inner workings of the divine.  You are frustrated by the mystery of it, and you want to know.

“Of course you want to know, but how can you know?  You do not even know what questions to ask, let alone how to accept the answers.

“You want to know how God works, how it is that I am, if I am is what I am.  You say you are confused by the way we speak of ourself.  And you would like to dissect the various parts, autopsy-style, and see how they work, as if by speaking of the Father, by speaking of the Son, by speaking of the Spirit, I am speaking of the way we work; when what I am speaking of is who we are, who I am, who I will be, but not of how I work.

“ I am speaking of eternal love, which is not a beacon, or a flag, or even a river that runs down from a mountain; it is a relationship of constant giving, constant receiving, constant dancing.

“You imagine the throne of heaven, as though the Godhead is is seated upon it, as if for a portrait, and your two dimensional imagination.  You imagine that you can say something meaningful about God by writing it on a page, which is a little like comparing a sheet of paper to a tree: they may have a thing or two in common, but they are far from the same thing.

“When I speak of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, I am speaking of who I am.  If the language seems awkward, unhelpfully bound to a particular time and place and power structure, then you begin to see the limits of speaking of me, for you are correct that it is wrong to think that I am rooted in one-sided, either-or vocabulary, in the same way that describing a rainbow in terms of seven colors is embarrassing in its paucity.

“And yet, you struggle to perceive that in speaking of who I am, I wish for you to know who I am.  And I am using language that gets as close as it can, flawed and damaged though that language now may be.  I have been employing the flawed and the damaged for my purposes for a long time, with reasonable results.  Have a look around.

“I desire that you should understand that even what Isaiah saw was inadequate - only a flash - as if there is some throne somewhere that could contain what the heavens themselves cannot contain.

“But still.

“You think that when you hear it said that you were made in my image and likeness, that it means that you can see something of me when you look in the mirror.  When actually what it means is that when you also hear that you could not bear to be alone in the garden, it was then that you were displaying my image within you.  

“For if you are to bear my image you need someone to give to and to receive from; you need someone to dance with; you need someone to love and to love you back.  But you can’t see that in the mirror.

“I am beauty.  I am wisdom.  I am truth.  I am love.  

“Light is my diadem, darkness is my mantle, and the earth is a pebble.

“Pi is the dust that collects in my pocket, and that I delight to know is always there, always accumulating, just as I delight when you gather its specks, beginning with 3.14.  You want to be able to calculate me, like the digits of Pi.  You think you should be able to dismantle me, to freeze me and slice me into sections to see how I work, to isolate me as though I am hardly more than an atom.  But I created every atomic structure and property without much effort, and I could buff my fingernails with atomic power if I wanted to.

“But I want you to see that I am always in splendid communion, but never in isolation.  I am always we, I am always us.

“I am not a problem for you to solve, for I am beyond solving.  I am not a machine with moving parts to be monitored, identified, and schematized.  I am motion.

“I am not a series of actions, or a series of accomplishments, or a series of tasks.  I am the origin of all action.

“I have no meaning to be articulated in carefully defined terms, for I am meaning.

“And the meaning, the action, the motion is fluid, and expressive, and inter-relating.

“The music in heaven never stops, and I never stop dancing, embracing, holding, letting go, leaping, and landing, nor did I ever start dancing, embracing, holding, letting go, leaping, and landing.  I was always like this, and I always shall be: always more dimensional than you can imagine or describe, always more vibrant than you allow for, always more love than you believe in or have room for.

“In and of myself, I am love, which gives me direction and purpose in and of myself, so that anything I do carries the direction and purpose of love.

“I am holy - thrice holy, which is the perfection of holiness.  And you do not even know what holiness means.  You are not sure how to define it.  But my entire being is holiness itself.

“And I have given you my Son.  I have allowed you to call me Father.  I have anointed you with my Spirit.

“I have given you myself, I have shown you so much more than I ever allowed Moses to see.  I have poured myself over you.

“But you insist on coming to me in the night to complain that you do not understand.

“You cannot understand, because I am beyond understanding.   And love does not rest on understanding.  

“Love rests on acceptance, as I have accepted you.  For I am in a constant process of accepting and offering, in and of myself.

“I have accepted you.  I have shown myself to you.  I have poured out my holiness upon you, and I have called you.

“Will you now do more than come to me by night with your questions?  Will you love me, as I love you?”

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
Trinity Sunday 2018
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

An Eternal Word

Easter is fifty days long.  That’s a liturgical fact that we talk about for lots of reasons at this time of year.  We’ve carefully noted the passing of the days and weeks lately.  We began our Easter season with readings from the scriptures that focused on the appearances of Jesus to his disciples in locked rooms, on the road to Emmaus, by the Sea of Galilee.  We’ve heard the adventures of the apostles in the book of Acts, recounted the miracles and the preaching and the conversions through which the early church grew so rapidly and so improbably.  In this past week we have commemorated the Ascension of our lord into heaven, and now we are preparing for Pentecost Sunday, next Sunday, when we commemorate the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles.  The word “pentecost” comes from the word for fifty.  We’ve been counting the days.  Some of us take the fifty-day commemoration of Easter as a personal challenge, nudging ourselves to remain especially aware, particularly joyful, all that time.  We remind ourselves that Easter isn’t just a big day or even a week, but a long liturgical period of rejoicing and giving thanks for the mystery of our salvation.

The church does this for us regularly.  It shapes our time.  Our celebrations here together tell us where and who and why we are, and they remind us that the world’s calendar is not our calendar, no matter how dutifully we check that calendar app on our cellphones.  The time we are living in is not the time the world acknowledges.  In the world, history is just, as they say, “one ‘darn’ thing after another.”  No real shape, just an inexorable moving forward that may scare us or fill us with a sense of promise, depending what we are telling ourselves about the “progress” of human history.  We just happen to be here for the early part of the twenty-first century, and after we go it will be someone else’s turn.

But Christian time is different.  Time as we experience it moves back and forth.  Christ has died.  Christ is risen.  Christ will come again.  We say that just about every Sunday, and every year we move through the life of Jesus, marking the moment of the Angel Gabriel’s announcement to Mary and the season of Advent, the joyful feast of the Nativity, the stories of the life and ministry of Jesus and the powerful season of Lent, leading up to Holy Week and Easter and Ascension and Pentecost.  

But even in this period when we are marking and reliving the events of Jesus’s life, time has a startling depth and a complexity for us.  Easter may be fifty days long, but then it comes for us again every Sunday.  Every Sunday is Easter.  And every Mass is also the Last Supper, the banquet Jesus shares with his disciples before he is abandoned by them and given over to death. And every Mass is also the feast at the end of time, the great banquet at which we all have a place waiting for us. 

And our marking of these feasts, even the calendar-specific ones like Ascension and Pentecost, is something much more complicated than historical reenactment.  We aren’t putting on a play about the past here.  We aren’t looking backwards, exactly.  We are celebrating the way that God has broken into time, and is continually breaking into time, in the person of Jesus.  In our own lives.  We are celebrating that Jesus is with us now, and that we are in some sense already with him in his kingdom.  We are trying to map eternal life onto a calendar that only has three hundred and sixty-five days, and so we take every chance we can to remind ourselves that with Jesus, our great Alpha and Omega, we are participating in the creation of the world, the redemption of the world, and the celebration that is the end of all things. All the time.

And that thought brings us to this rather awkward Sunday, the Seventh Sunday of Easter.  Also known informally as that Sunday squeezed between the Feast of the Ascension and Pentecost, when it’s not entirely clear where we are in time.  You may have noticed that the gospel we read this morning is not a post-resurrection passage at all.  It’s from the seventeenth chapter of John, and it tells the story of Jesus’s prayer for his disciples, just before Jesus is arrested in the garden and taken away to his crucifixion.  

The way these events unfold in John’s gospel, it’s the evening meal just before the Passover celebration.  Jesus has gotten up from the meal, wrapped a towel around his waist, and washed the feet of his disciples.  That happens in the thirteenth chapter of John.  And in our liturgical life that happens on Holy Thursday.  And then there is a long set of discourses that culminates in a long prayer, and what we hear this morning is from the middle of that prayer.  Jesus is speaking directly to God the Father, allowing his friends to hear him pray.  He is praying for them.  And so for us today it’s still Holy Thursday.

We don’t have to think of it this way, but the way our readings are set out in this season we may imagine that that moment of unity, of Jesus’s love for his disciples-- “having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them until the end”—this sharing of prayer with and for them, has quietly continued in the background during our busy Easter.  As we have observed Holy Week and all the joyful days since then, as we have marked time, as Maja and Z have been baptized and as ten others joined them in confirmation and reception into the church, as our bishop has come to celebrate with us on the feast of Saint Mark, as great and good and difficult changes have come to our community, as new plans are being made and our sidewalks repaired and the feast of Pentecost is eagerly awaited, as winter gives way to spring and summer, that moment of Jesus’s loving prayer with his disciples has quietly continued.  Somehow, between Ascension and Pentecost, Holy Thursday comes back to us, as though it had never ended.  As Jesus becomes more and more mysterious, rising from the dead and then ascending bodily into heaven, we are catapulted back into the still center of his communion with the ones he loves, whose feet he has washed, still praying to the Father for them and with them.  This vulnerable Jesus, surrounded by the ones he loves, allowing them into the very prayer of his heart, just before they betray and abandon him.

We know Jesus in triumph and mystery, late in this Easter season, and yet in the middle of his triumph we hear him softly speaking words of love for fallible humanity.  We hear him praying for our protection.  We hear him praying in thanksgiving that the Father has given us to him.  “They were yours,” Jesus says, “and you have given them to me, and I have protected them, and now I give them to you. What they know about me is that everything I am comes from you.  My glory comes through them and their joy is complete in me.”

This prayer of Jesus narrates the still, contemplative center of our life in him.  Though time passes, with triumph and with agony, this never goes away.  This moment in scripture promises us that our lives are gifts from God.  This moment of prayer contains the certainty that we are living in God because Jesus has given himself to us and Jesus and the Father have given themselves to one another.  This prayer is the assurance of grace, the knowledge that nothing we have done has made this gift of life in God possible.  In the beginning, the word was with God, and the word was God.  The word of God has been given to the church, and the church has kept the word of God.  And now--even this very day--the word speaks to us: unchanging, undeterred, unafraid even of death. 

Jesus prays, just after the passage we hear this morning, for those who will believe through the words of his disciples.  That is, he prays for us.  We receive his word.  His word assures us of belonging and protection, of being sent, of being chosen, of being given.  This hour of prayer, this time of Jesus’s intimate presence, never ends.  This word is never not spoken.  And in all the changes of our times, this word is all the reassurance we will ever need.  

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson

13 May 2018

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia