And they laughed at him

“...it is a question of a fair balance between your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may be for your need, in order that there may be a fair balance. As it is written,
   “The one who had much did not have too much,
   and the one who had little did not have too little.” (2 Cor 8:14-15)

Sometimes the Scriptures are not all that complicated.

St. Paul was raising money for the church in Jerusalem, because the leaders of the church there had asked him to “remember the poor”(Gal 2:10).  It was a charge he took seriously.  Like any good stewardship chairman, St. Paul identified a biblical warrant for his fund raising efforts.  His came from the foundational account of Moses leading the people of Israel through the desert during their long wandering after escaping slavery in Egypt, and before arriving in the Promised Land.

Everyone knows (or everyone used to know) that when the people grumbled about being hungry in the wilderness of Sin, God gave them quails to eat in the evening, and rained down manna from heaven in the morning.  About the manna - “a fine flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground” - Moses instructed the people thus, “Gather as much of it as you need.”  And so it was that “those who gathered much had nothing over, and those who gathered little had no shortage” (Ex. 16:18)  The specifics of the arrangement, and the clear instructions to the people not to hoard the manna, which would go bad if kept overnight, seem to carry clear implications of God’s idea of justice, equality, and fairness.  But of course people being what we are, soon thee was grumbling that “there is nothing at all but this manna to look at” (Num. 11:6).

Will we ever learn?

An old headline of a story on the poverty that defines so much of this so-called city of brotherly love, declares that “Little has changed” (www.phillymag, article by Zoe Kirsch, 11-20-15). What kind of brothers and sisters allow the deeply entrenched suffering that comes with poverty to persist for 26% of their siblings, year after year?

I thank God that here in our diocese, Episcopal Community Services has defined its mission “to challenge and reduce inter-generational poverty.”  And I know that they mean it, and working to chip away at that poverty.  And you know already how I give thanks for all those who work for and support the mission of St. James School, which was established by this parish to serve children and families who are caught in the unrelenting cycle of inter-generational urban poverty.  We founded the school with the characteristically American confidence that education is the surest, and maybe this only real antidote to poverty.  Behind it lurks the conviction that the one who has much should not have too much, and the one who has little should not have too little.

As I say, sometimes the Scriptures are not complicated.  Did you hear how simple was the people’s assessment of Jesus’ power and authority when he made his way to the house of the leader of the synagogue to tend to the man’s dying daughter?  The people have already begun to mourn.  “Your daughter is dead,” they tell Jairus, the synagogue’s leader.  Jesus challenges them, with an odd statement that seems like it might be meant more for us than for them, “Do not fear, only believe.”  And when he arrives at the house he tells them, “The child is not dead, but sleeping.”  And the people pass judgement on Jesus right there and then.  St. Mark tells us, “And they laughed at him.”

I suppose that people have never really stopped laughing at Jesus, never stopped questioning his guidance, “Do not fear, only believe.”  It’s so much easier to laugh at Jesus, so much easier to dismiss him than it is to put your trust in him, than it is to let go of your fear.

If you dismiss Jesus you can give in to fear, but never let on that it’s fear that motivates you.  If you dismiss Jesus you can gather all the manna you want.  You can keep it overnight; you can hoard it for yourself; and you can pretend that it hasn’t spoiled - it becomes an acquired taste.  You can even pretend that it didn’t come from God; though it did.  But the more you have gathered for yourself, the freer you will feel to laugh at Jesus, who looks to you as though he was so thoroughly wrong, so thoroughly silly, so thoroughly laughable.

Jesus promised life where it was slipping away, and hope where there was only fear.  Jesus promised with the Psalmist that “weeping may spend the night, but joy cometh in the morning.”  And finally Jesus promised to conquer death, which he would accomplish by shedding his own Blood on the Cross.  And they laughed at him.

But St. Mark tells us what Jesus did in the face of this laughter.  He went into the room where the dead/sleeping girl lay.  He took the child by the hand, and said to her, “‘Little girl, get up!’  And immediately the girl got up and began to walk about.”  And for a minute or two, I’ll bet they stopped laughing at Jesus.

Of course, no one will allow themselves to been seen to be laughing anymore about the poverty of others.  The experience of Marie Antoinette more or less brought that old practice to an end.  But it’s easier than ever to laugh at Jesus, especially since the foibles and failures of his church are so well and so widely known.

And they look at the poverty, unabated.  And they look at the dead and the dying.  And they remind themselves how much manna they have stored up in their barns.  And they don’t even take pity on us for what they suppose is our foolishness.  They just laugh.

I have little doubt that they look at the dark faces and the North Philadelphia addresses of our students at Sat. James School, where the poverty rate is probably closer to 40%, and they conclude, if not in so many words, that they are already dead.  And for some children in North Philadelphia, who are slipping dangerously into the slow-motion death of inter-generational poverty, is all too nearly true.

Which is why we must never forget this little episode that caused the people around Jesus to laugh at him with scorn and derision, when he told them that the girl was not dead, only sleeping.  “Do not fear, only believe.”

“He took her by the hand and said to her, ‘Talitha cum,’ which means, ‘Little girl, get up!’ And immediately the girl got up.”

And for a while, I expect the laughing stopped.

We do well to remember his guidance, in a world that so easily laughs at Jesus, and that so easily gives up so many for dead: Do not fear, only believe.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
1 July 2018
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Prophets of the Most High

How does she know that the baby’s name is John? We know, because Luke tells us, that the Angel Gabriel had appeared to Zechariah, the husband of Elizabeth, and had told him that she would bear a child, even though they were both getting on in years. Gabriel said the child’s name would be John, a name apparently alien to that family. None of their relatives had that name, and the neighbors expected, when the time came, that he would be called Zechariah like his father.

But how did Elizabeth know that the name had to be John? Zechariah, after all, had been struck dumb at the angel’s appearance. He was a priest, and he was on the roster that day at the Temple, offering incense in the sanctuary. Located as he was right in the center of all things religious, he must have felt that he had some special privilege or responsibility to know the mind of God. When the angel spoke, Zechariah asked for verification: “How will I know that this is so?”

I guess he wasn’t thinking clearly. Surely the pregnancy of his wife who had never been able to have a child, and who now was past the age of childbearing, would have been confirmation enough in its own time. Surely waiting for a few months would have made everything obvious. The pregnancy itself would have been the great miracle, and it would have been relatively easy after that to believe all the other things that Gabriel had said that day in the sanctuary, with the clouds of incense wafting all around them. John would be filled with the Holy Spirit, the angel said, even before his birth. He would prepare many in Israel to encounter the Lord their God. He would have the spirit and power of the great prophet Elijah.

Gabriel’s words could have been fulfilled, day by day, month by month, and Zechariah could have spoken in wonder with his wife about all these things as they lay in their bed at night.

But Zechariah couldn’t discuss these things with Elizabeth. The angel had left him mute. Did he write out a strange message for her, telling her all that the angel had said? Could she read? To whom else would Zechariah have written? To some neighbor or fellow priest? I guess the message would have gone something like this: “Please tell my wife that I can’t talk because the Angel Gabriel told me she was going to have a baby and I didn’t handle the situation well.” Awkward. In any case there is no sign in this story of a literate friend who already knows that the baby’s name is John. Elizabeth seems to be on her own with that knowledge, and Zechariah seems to regain his speech on the day of the child’s birth precisely because he writes for the first time that the child’s name is John.

So I guess Elizabeth just knows.

Just as she knows, when Mary comes to visit her, that Mary is going to be the mother of her Lord. “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb,” she cries, “For as soon as I heard your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy.” Granted, the child in Elizabeth’s womb will be a prophet of great power, but Elizabeth clearly has some gift of her own, some receptivity. She is attuned not only to God but to God in the people around her. To God who makes her husband undergo a mysterious trial. To God who makes her young relative Mary the improbable bearer of her own savior. To John, who is already responding to the presence of the Christ and to the words of the Christ-bearer, Mary.

The theologian Rowan Williams says that many of us have this same kind of receptivity, at least at certain moments. He calls them “Elizabeth moments,” times when, in his words, “life stirs inside, heralding some future with Christ that we can't yet get our minds around.”*

These are times when we can’t quite express what it is that Jesus is doing in our lives or in the world around us, but we are surprised and filled with a mysterious joy. We feel the love of God pulling us forward, quickening something within us, maybe even in response to the way God is acting in someone else’s life.

These moments may take place, Williams says, when we are in the midst of a liturgy like today’s, when the actions and words that we have shared a thousand times together suddenly seem pregnant with meaning and hope in a new way. Or when someone’s words, like Mary’s greeting, are filled with the presence of Christ as we have never before experienced it. Life stirs inside, heralding some future. As it did for Elizabeth, giving her the strength to declare that her child had a God-given identity, a God-given name, and a godly calling.

Our God is now and always has been willing to work this way, viscerally, improbably, unmistakably for those who are receptive enough to feel the stirring. There are now and there always have been those who feel God’s future growing inside them, the life of Jesus and his church taking form and coming to fruition, even against all the odds.

If that’s you, don’t ever give up. Don’t let your neighbors tell you that there is a more conventional name for what’s growing inside you if you know that you are claimed by Jesus and compelled to bear witness to his coming. If you see him in other people, and something within you stirs, proclaim your joy. Bless those who visit you, bearing salvation.

You may be too old or too female, transgender or black or Asian. You may be one of those millenials. Maybe you are that straight white guy. You may be in Puerto Rico where your citizenship is barely acknowledged and your disasters handled with callous indifference. You may be escaping death for yourself and your children in Honduras, and your child may have been taken from you forcibly, with the very same callous indifference, and you may for the first, truly devastating time, realize the full measure of the contempt in which the poor of the earth are held by the wealthy and the free. You may be in anguish, registering the unjust suffering of other people, looking for just the right the phone number to call to let it be known that you demand change. You may be scanning the news for details of policies that will help, looking in spite of everything you know for that politician who will save the day. You may be praying on your knees at night by the side of your bed. You may be recycling your bottles and cans and hoping that these small gestures will stave off disaster. You may be disgusted by the way your views on all these things are mischaracterized by self-righteous liberals.

But you know what you know, deep inside. You know something about grace.

And in all this, you may still be aware of the presence of God calling you forward, for your own salvation and for that of all the world. Something in you may still be capable of joy and surprise and hope, and I want to tell you right now that you should never give up. You are here this morning and in this world, because you have the gift of bearing witness to Jesus.

We say it every day in evening prayer, repeating the words that tumble forth from Zechariah’s mouth in Luke’s gospel:

By the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.

You know and I know that nothing is easy, nothing will come easily, hope, and even the salvation Jesus brings, will not be a simple remedy. That child Elizabeth bore would go on to feel the full measure of the world’s contempt. John would die by the whim of a paranoid king. Mary’s child would give his life on the cross.

But this moment of nativity, of prophetic birth, lives eternally and resonates through the ages. Prophetic life stirs within us still. The life in you is immortal life. We too shall be called prophets of the most high.

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
24 June 2018
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

* http://aoc2013.brix.fatbeehive.com/articles.php/1221/archbishop-of-canterburys-sermon-for-the-international-mass-at-lourdes

Being Planted

My grandmother was a woman who loved plants. She loved houseplants and wildflowers, gardens and hedgerows, vegetation of every variety. She knew the name of every single green, growing thing on the planet. Pachysandra and pansies, lilies and lilacs, lace-cap and mountain and oak-leaf hydrangea – walking through Longwood Gardens with her was like a masterclass in botany. I spent most of my time with Nana when she was living alone in a little one-bedroom apartment, but even there, her plants were immaculately cared for. Flowering plants were promptly dead-headed, browning leaves trimmed to make way for new growth. The leaves of her jade plant were polished with a damp cloth every week. No plant was ever under- or over-watered; no plant was ever placed in a window with the wrong light or – horrors! – left alone to grow until it was pot-bound. Nana’s apartment was like the Ritz-Carlton for houseplants.

My mother inherited Nana’s green thumb. My dad used to jokingly call our dining room the greenhouse; it was the room with the best light, and so we got used to sharing our meals with great ferns and towering snake plants, mountains of African violets and spider plants laden with babies. There was no plant my mother couldn’t grow to enormous proportions, no plant that wouldn’t flower over and over again under her care. She talked to them when she watered them, telling them how beautiful they were, and as a child I always thought they bloomed just because they wanted to please her.

I’m sorry to say that the Ryan family green thumb seems to have skipped a generation. I can kind of keep a philodendron alive, but more of my houseplants have been buried than have bloomed. And I don’t know the name of anything. The only way I could write this sermon was literally
to google “list of common houseplants” and then click on the ones that looked familiar – you know, that kind of tall, spiky one, and those pretty purple flowery ones. I still hold out hope that someday some latent gift for growing will emerge in me – perhaps in Chicago, where the weather is so, you know, temperate.

I like to think that Jesus, too, was a great lover of green and growing things. I like to think that he used parables about planting and growing not just because he knew that the people he was speaking to were planters and growers but also because he loved the planted and the grown. I like to imagine Jesus as a child walking alongside his mother as she watered and weeded her garden, learning from her that plants will grow a little better for you if you sing to them. I like to imagine Joseph taking Jesus out with him to inspect a grove of trees, showing him which were better for building tables and which were better for carving. I like to imagine Jesus looking down at a tiny set of twin leaves sprouting from the earth and asking Mary in wonder, “What kind of a plant is that?” knowing that, of course, she would have the answer. I like to imagine Jesus with his hands in the earth, nurturing something green and growing.

I like to imagine that when Jesus said the kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, he was feeling the silky smoothness of the seeds in his hand and remembering the joy of discovering those first spots of green in the brown earth. I like to imagine that when Jesus said the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, he was recalling the sound of the glorious ruckus when the birds came home to roost in the bush by his mother’s front door. I like to imagine that Jesus spoke of green and growing things because he loved them, because he saw his heavenly Father’s handprint upon them, because he saw how beautiful and miraculous they are.

And I like to imagine that Jesus looks at us the same way. I like to imagine that Jesus looks at us and sees something green and growing, something fragrant and fair. I like to imagine that Jesus is filled with joyful wonder when he sees something new sprouting in our lives. I like to imagine that he knows that we do better when he sings to us. I like to imagine that he recognizes that sometimes we are strong and ready for building and sometimes we are soft and supple and ready to be carved out and filled. I like to imagine – no, I know – that he can call us each by name, and that when he looks upon us, he sees his Father’s handprint, that when he looks upon us, he sees just how beautiful and miraculous we are.

Look around you. This is a room filled with the most remarkable green and growing things. You are wondrously made, a garden of infinite beauty and variety. You are planted here in this holy place, where your roots are watered by the Holy Spirit, where you are fed with the richest food and drink, where the parts of you that sometimes dry up and wither are gently pruned away, where your souls are nourished week after week with the sweetest music. You sit here, bathing in just the perfect light, beautiful and miraculous.

The Psalmist writes that when you are planted in the house of the Lord, you shall flourish. And what flourishing there has been here. You have founded a school, welcomed a community of ministry residents, and started a choir and a camp and a Schola so that children and families feel
welcomed and necessary to this place. You have begun caring more intentionally for your neighbors and gathering more intentionally as women or as young adults or as families. You have welcomed more and more people into the knowledge that that the beauty of holiness is matched only by the beauty of serving someone in need. Just this morning we will enlarge the Body of Christ with the baptism of this
precious child Alexander. There has been so much new growth in this place that the air is heavy with the scent of new blooms.

And still there is new life taking root all over this church. Some of these seeds are already beginning to sprout, like the expanding foot care ministry at the Soup Bowl, or the Zoe ministry that will bring bread and fellowship to a church property that has lain fallow for far too long.
Some seeds are still waiting to be planted in this place – on the organ bench or in the Servant Year Program or on the clergy staff. And some of these seeds are still waiting in the darkness, growing quietly underground until they are ready to poke their heads out into the light. All of these seeds, even those tiny ones in your hearts that you aren’t sure will ever come to anything, will keep this church flourishing and growing, will provide space for more and more people to find rest and hope in the shade of your welcoming branches.

I know this is true for two reasons. First, I know it because I have seen that growth in my own life. From the moment that God first called to me when I was an alto in that choir stall right there; to the moment I was baptized in that font right there; to the moment you sent me from here to seminary; to the moment I got that first email from Fr. Mullen asking me if I might be interested in talking about a job; to the moment I first heard the Boys and Girls Choir sing, or first said our Thank you God and Help me God prayers in Schola, or said Mass at our first 20s/30s Simple Supper, or blessed our first ingathering of supplies for refugees with the Fernanda Guild, or took our first flight on the Zoe Project trip to California; to the moment I met this particularly charming tenor on the choir trip to Wells Cathedral; to the moment that tenor and I were married right there; to the moment, to the moment, to the moment, I have seen extravagant, holy, humbling growth in my life. Saint Mark’s has helped me to flourish – you have helped me to flourish – and I am blessed to carry that growth with me as I am planted in a new place.

But there is another reason I know that you are still growing. I know that you are still growing because growing is of God. Growing is what God loves, what God desires; growing is just what God does. Even when the world is toxic and mean, God is growing compassion and mercy. Even
when the Church is riven by discord and politics, God is growing truth and reconciliation. Even when Holy Scripture is used to rationalize unbearable cruelty, God is growing righteousness and justice. Even when our hearts are swamped by grief and sorrow, God is growing joy and
peace. Even when our souls are as dry as the Dust Bowl, God is growing passion and inspiration. Even when a coming change leaves us questioning the stability of our roots, God is growing purpose and mission. God is growing the Kingdom; God will always grow the Kingdom, for God is a great lover of green and growing things. Pachysandra and pansies, roses and rhododendron, daffodils and dewdrops, babies and nanas, fathers and children, citizens of Philadelphia and citizens of Chicago, green-thumbs and not-so-green-thumbs, friends and strangers and foreigners and refugees and widows and orphans and neighbors and newcomers and you. Always you. The Kingdom of God is like a church that knows itself to be a beautiful planting of the Lord, called to grow and to flourish to God’s own glory.

Rejoice! The Kingdom of God is at hand.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs
17 June 2018
Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia