That One Word

Recently a politician came to visit Philadelphia and was greeted by an angry crowd.  There is no need, I don’t think, to specify the politician or the particular outrage—we all have our ideas about that.  Just picture this one protester, standing in the crowd, holding up a sign that says “Pharisee.” The protester was calling this elected official a Pharisee.  That one word tells us everything we need to know, doesn’t it? The protester was accusing the visiting politician of religious hypocrisy. She was holding up a sign that seemed to say everything she needed to say: that the politician professes faith in Jesus but enacts policies that are shockingly out of step with the gospel of Jesus.  That the politician claims to love Jesus but does nothing for the least among us. That the politician would be firmly on the side of the goats when Jesus came to separate them from the sheep. That the protester is a person of faith herself, enraged by the misappropriation of Christianity that distorts both religious and political life in this country.  

It was elegant.  It was concise. It made you think. It was also a real insult to Pharisees.  

Pharisees, of course, have been getting insulted by Christians for a long time, as Jewish and Christian scholars alike have pointed out.  The particular contexts in which the early gospel writers lived may be hard for us to trace, but we can if we care to examine a long history after that, in which the enemy in almost any Christian debate will be characterized as a Pharisee, a hypocrite, one who is obsessed with external forms of devotion at the expense of religious sincerity.  The Protestant Reformation in England would have been practically impossible without the word “Pharisitical,” a sneering term used mostly against Catholics, associating them with obsessive ritual practice. Anglo-catholics in the nineteenth century were called Pharisees, again for cherishing elaborate ritual practices. And here was a protester in Philadelphia, at an entirely secular event, holding up a sign that said “Pharisee” as though everyone around her, Jew, Christian, Muslim, atheist—could be expected to agree that the politician in question, whose religious adherence is decidedly evangelical, could be condemned by association with one form of first-century Jewish religious observance.  It’s an all-purpose term for Christians at this point. Any hypocrite is a Pharisee.

Yes, Jesus did have a pretty heated argument with the religious leaders of his own time.  But when the word “Pharisee” can stand in for “hypocrite” without any nuance or context, we are on shaky ground.  Without thinking about it, we are following a painful tradition in which Christians insult each other by calling each other Jews. That habit is so ingrained that we don’t even hear it, but that’s part of the problem.  

Think of it this way.  Imagine that Jesus had had an argument with a bunch of Episcopalians. What would it seem like to you two thousand years later, if a protester could hold up a sign that condemned a politician with withering disgust, and all it said was “The Episcopal Church Welcomes You?”

Nobody wants to be a byword.  It doesn’t have to be said that making Jews into bywords has been a devastating practice.  Let’s stop.

So if insulting Pharisees was not the point of this gospel story, what is Jesus actually trying to do?  Why does he come down so harshly in response to a question about ritual practices when he could have been neutral?  If someone asked you why Episcopalians used incense, would you condemn them, or would you answer the question? Can’t Jesus be at least as polite and helpful as we are?

One way to answer that question is to say that this encounter in Mark’s gospel is part of a much larger context in which religious authority figures are for hypocritical reasons doing everything they can to preserve their own power and position while undercutting Jesus’s teachings.  This isn’t an isolated event, this one story. It’s part of a long contest between Jesus and prevailing religious wisdom. Our prevailing wisdom, their prevailing wisdom, any prevailing wisdom. Jesus is always going to challenge us to go deeper. Jesus is always going to open up our religion and expose its weakness.  If you ask Jesus about ritual washing, he will tell you that what’s really important is what’s inside you. If you ask Jesus whether divorce is legal, he will make you think about the hardness of your own heart. If you bring an adulterer to him for punishment, he will forgive the adulterer and condemn you. If you come to Jesus as the rich young man did, wanting to follow in all sincerity, he will look at you with love and compassion, and tell you to sell everything you have and give it to the poor.  If you give everything up to follow him, he will invite you to the foot of the cross.

Jesus is, among many other things, a principle of undoing.  His mission has something to do with breaking our lives open.  We won’t ever reach a position of secure knowing in relation to Jesus, because what we think we know is part of what keeps us from him.  Yes, right thinking and right teaching are important, but Jesus is always going to challenge us to see the underside of our rightness. There is always an underside in this life.  We will always use something to help us feel that we are in control, and Jesus will always pry that something out of our hands and help us start over.

Hearing this story correctly is about much more than learning to prioritize inner purity over the washing of pots.  It’s about much more than learning how not to misuse the word “Pharisee,” for that matter. It’s about being available to God, being able to drop whatever we are holding that gets in the way.  It’s about learning how to let Jesus transform our religion, not so that we turn our backs on “church,” but so that we let Jesus show us what we are using “church” for.

Because every one of us will be using religion for something.  Sometimes religion will be a cover for our most horrific sins, as we heard about from this pulpit so powerfully last week.  Sometimes religion is a cover for anxiety. Sometimes religion is a desperate attempt to make ourselves lovely in the eyes of God, because we have forgotten our true loveliness.  Trust me, you and I and everyone we can think of will be using religion for some human purpose, and the great work of God in our lives will be to transform that purpose.

We are all equal before God in this way.  Not that some forms of resistance to God’s grace aren’t more terrible than others, but that the fundamental orientation of our hearts has to be corrected again and again.  We have to be saved from ourselves again and again.

And this is cause for rejoicing.  It’s in that act of saving us that Jesus shows us who he is.  And Jesus never stops being larger than we can imagine, more delightful than we know, more breathtaking than we had anticipated.  

Standing before God, encountering Jesus, is baffling.  We will be tempted, on the way there, to focus on small things like ritual perfection or competitive holiness.  We will be tempted to blame others for our own manifest failures (“Pharisee!”). We will want to hide. And Jesus will be right there leading us on, with correction, even sharp correction, with puzzling teachings that make us struggle to grow, with opportunities to love those whom we fear.  With the cross. Our freedom comes from surrendering to that process, accepting those challenges. Our freedom comes from knowing that we never have it right, and surrendering to the love that brings us where we do not imagine we want to go.

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
2 September 2018
Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

A Church in Ruins

The Lady Chapel in the ruins of Kilcorban Abbey, County Galway

“The righteous cry, and the Lord hears them; and delivers them from all their troubles.”  (Ps. 34:17)

Pope Francis is almost assuredly not going to visit, while he is in Ireland, the ruins of Kilcorban Abbey in east Galway.  The abbey was established by Third Order Dominicans some time in the mid-fifteenth century.  It lies along the road that goes from Portumna to Tynagh, and is adjoined by more recent graves to the south of the ruins, and a pasture to the north where cows graze.

I have passed by the ruins many times on my way to the barn at Flowerhill, where I have been going for the past five years to ride horses in the lush green Irish countryside.  Often I have stopped at the ruins of the abbey (which is also sometimes called a friary, or a priory) on the way to barn.   The roof-less grey stone walls describe a rectangular church, running east to west.  On the north side of the church an archway leads into what is thought to have been a Lady Chapel, where an altar still stands.  Many times I have prayed in that half-ruined chapel: sometimes silently and alone, sometimes aloud with others, once explicitly to remember the dead, and more than once on a Sunday when it was my only place of worship.  I’ve stood at the altar and looked out and up at the emptiness around me, and the graves beyond.  I’ve looked, but never stepped down into the little stone well, outside by the road, which may have been a font, and which includes a little shrine to Mary.  I’ve never said Mass at that altar, although there’s nothing to stop me.  All I’d need is bread, wine, the Gospel, and one other person.

For reasons I cannot entirely explain, the ruins of that ancient abbey church have a place in my heart.  Perhaps, since I have no idea where in Ireland my own antecedents come from, I have planted imaginary roots there in the ruins of Kilcorban Abbey, by the cows and the gravestones, and not too far from the barn, where, when I am galloping across the countryside there is no room in my mind for anything other than what I am doing on the horse.

Yesterday’s New York Times carried a headline that read, “In Ireland, Pope Francis Finds a Country Transformed and a Church in Tatters.” (8/25/18)  The Pope won’t need to visit Kilcorban Abbey to find a church in ruins.  His meeting with the victims of clergy sexual abuse should do the trick.

Less than two weeks ago our own commonwealth’s Attorney General released a report from the Grand Jury investigating clergy sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church across much of Pennsylvania.  You can tell I am an Episcopalian of a certain sort, since I insist on calling it the Roman Catholic Church, but the report uses the same short-cut that the Romans themselves use, and simply refers to it as “the Catholic Church.”  I read about fifty of the 900 pages of the report.  It was enough.  At least for now.

A certain propriety demands that I now watch what I say.  Of course, I have no business pointing fingers at anyone, and definitely not at the leaders of another denomination.  But everything I have ever known and believed about the Church of God tells me that the church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.  There is one Church, which we have fractured over history, and which, we have prayed, God will some day repair.  And if there is only one church, then its tatters matter to us; its ruins are our ruins, too.  Nor can we escape the implication that its sins are our sins too.  And it remains a fact that the Roman Catholic Church holds no monopoly on abuse of children or anyone else, sad though it is to have to remind ourselves of this truth.

Of course I want to differentiate our own church from Francis’s church.  Of course I want to point out our own policies to protect children - including a very specific policy that governs all we do in this parish.  Of course I want to say how good it is that for more than 400 years the Anglican clergy have had wives and families in their lives, which have been good for them in many ways.  And for more than forty years in America those wives might also be priests themselves.  Of course I want to say how healthy it is that the consecration of Gene Robinson in 2003 finally gave us permission to rejoice openly in the ministry of gay and lesbian members of the clergy in our little denomination.  And of course I want to say how drastically different is the culture of the Episcopal Church - and all the Anglican churches - in countless ways from the male-dominated, sexually repressed, and self-serving culture of too many corners of the Roman Church.  There, I said it.

But I also want to say this: that the scandal and the failure that we are witnessing is not just happening to the Roman Catholic Church.  It is happening in and to the whole Church of God - the church universal, the church catholic.  And I don’t for one minute think that most people make much distinction between our Mass and theirs, between our priests and theirs, between our collars and theirs, between our virtues and theirs, between our sins and theirs.  This crisis is a crisis for the whole church.  And the whole church is being left in ruins, in so many parts of the world.

I have heard from my friends in Ireland what they think of the church.  It’s not a charitable view.  And it’s not because clergy sexual abuse is the only failing of the church in Ireland, either.  But frankly, I could find Americans who take a similar view of any church - any collection of people who organize themselves around the religion of Christ - a religion that in the view of many, many people has been a hotbed of ignorance, intolerance, and gross indecency, to put it mildly.  There is much evidence to support this point of view.

By today the news cycles have largely moved on from the Pope in Ireland, even though he has not left yet.  And the news has surely moved on from the Grand Jury’s report here in Pennsylvania.  But, as Dr. Kathleen Sprows Cummings wrote last week in the Times, “there are times when the sin is so pervasive and corrosive that it is irresponsible to talk about anything else, and this is one of those times.” (NY Times, Aug 17 2018).  I’m afraid she is correct.  And this is true even if you are only an Episcopalian, but you still believe that there is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.

There is significant irony that for weeks we have been reading from the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel, the famous bread discourse, which sounds to my ears like an extended riff on the power of the eucharist, the Mass, the living Body and Blood of Christ with which he feeds his church.  The irony stems from the reminder that it is primarily for this ministry - the sacramental ministry of the Body and Blood of Jesus - that the church has ordained priests at all.  For it is in the sacramental life of the church that holiness most nearly abides.  And we priests have been meant to be ministers of holiness to, in, and for the church.  But having gotten to the end of Jesus’ almost tedious reiteration that he is the Bread of Life, Jesus realizes that “many of his disciples were complaining about it.”  And so they vote with their feet and they leave him.

The Twelve remained with Jesus, including Peter, the Rock on whom the church is founded.  This Twelve must have looked demoralized, realizing that the flock Jesus was gathering had so quickly and decisively dispersed.  They must have been downcast, and Jesus could see it on their faces.  And Jesus asks them a question that translates well to our own moment in time.  He asks, “Do you also wish to go away?”

Do you also wish to go away?  I had to ask myself this question when I began to process the enormity of the pattern of clergy abuse in the church.  For I have known of this reality in North America, and South America, in Ireland, and across Europe, and in Australia, too.  From continent to continent, Christ’s Church has allowed her children to be brutalized by her priests, and has protected the priests rather than the children.

Jesus had some very specific teaching on this matter which is entirely absent of the mercy for which I love him, and on which I depend; an absence which makes this present moment all the more dire.  His teaching involved a millstone, and I will leave it at that.

Do you also wish to go away?  Peter’s answer is telling.  “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”  We have come to believe and know that you, Lord Jesus, are the Holy One of God.  To whom else could we go?

It would be delusional to pretend that the church we inhabit is not a church in ruins, even if many of her buildings still stand, as ours does.  As I try to figure out how to respond to the awful and inescapable truth of the sickening cruelty that has permeated the church and that her priests have perpetrated and protected, I am grateful to have stood more than once in the ruins of Kilcorban Abbey.  I thank God that an altar still stands there, on which Christ can make his offering of himself for the sake of the world known whenever he chooses to.  And all that will be needed is bread and wine and the Gospel, and two or three to gather there.

It is good to realize that the church you are in is a church in ruins, but that God still has not abandoned it, and has even made provision for its future, beneath a roofless sky, since an altar stands there ready for the incarnate God to make his love known to any who will gather there with bread and wine and the Gospel.

The first paragraph of the recent report here in Pennsylvania begins this way, “We, the members of the grand jury, need you to hear this.”  The paragraph concludes saying, “Now we know the truth.”  Painful as it is to receive, this truth is a gift, since there can be no healing, no reconciliation, and certainly no reform without the truth.  It is not yet clear how the church should humble herself in light of this truth, nor how the church should reform herself in light of this truth.  But it ought to be clear that humility and reform are required.  Urgently required.  Long overdue.

The very nature of the Gospel of Jesus is to bring sweet music to ears that are in desperate need of good news.  It ought to bring us to tears to realize how perverted this Gospel has become at the hands of men to whom it was entrusted.  No, it ought to bring us to our knees.

In the Lady Chapel at Kilcorban Abbey there is a grey stone plaque that reports “This ancient chapel of Kilcorban was restored in the year 1920 by Anthony Francis, 11th Earl of Westmeath and Baron Delvin.”  The inscription is almost laughable, since clearly the chapel was not returned to use.  Its roof was not replaced,  It’s walls may have been stabilized, but they were not repaired.  No glass was placed into the open window arches.  I strongly suspect, however, that it was the altar that was repaired at that time.  No friar was called, and who knows whether or not Mass has been said there since then.  But the altar stands ready for the Bread of heaven to bring salvation to the world, and to the church whose ruins surround it.

Do you also wish to go away?

Lord, to whom can we go?  You have the words of eternal life.  We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.  Pray Lord, forgive us, have mercy on us. And heal those children who have suffered at the hands of your priests.  For the righteous cry, and the Lord hears them; and delivers them from all their troubles.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
26 August 2018
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Bread of Life

In my first year studying for ordination, I was required to be part of a group of seminarians that traveled from one church to another, Sunday by Sunday, to worship with Christians across denominational lines.  We went to AME and Lutheran and Presbyterian services, among others. We worshipped in the suburbs and in the city, in tiny congregations and very large ones, with different styles of preaching and different styles of music and different styles of community.  

It was a wonderful way to get to know more about the people of God.  I’d had my own range of experiences before I entered seminary but I knew little about what it was like to be part of, say, a small suburban Lutheran church.  And, having been raised Roman Catholic, I was unprepared for the experience of receiving Holy Communion without much regard for denominational differences. I had moved as far as the Episcopal Church but I wasn’t really in the habit of identifying as Protestant the way people in these churches did.  I don’t think I had taken “Protestant Communion,” if it’s possible to use that description.

And so on one particular Sunday morning, I was unprepared for the arrival of an usher with a small tray of plastic cups, each containing a bit of grape juice, and a bowl of tiny white cubes that could have been Wonder Bread for all I know.  I took my little cup and my little square of bread in silence. Silence filled the church. My mind got busy, not without a few judgments. “This,” I thought, “just looks like a little snack that your mom would give you after school.” And then as the silence deepened, and we all drank the juice and ate the bread at the same time—a whole church full of people in communion—it started to dawn on me.  This was just like a little snack that your mom would give you after school. It was just ordinary. It was the bread of heaven, and it was just ordinary.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m delighted to communicate in an incense-filled church with divine music and heavily-jeweled liturgical vessels.  All of that speaks to me of the presence of Jesus. All of what we do here feels like a foretaste of the heavenly banquet to me and I give thanks every day for the tradition in which I live and pray and serve.  

But I hope I never forget the Sunday in which that little snack was also a foretaste of heaven, because that was a Sunday in which Jesus fed me with himself, looking just like plain old American bread and juice.  And it was a Sunday in which I could acknowledge that eternal life had begun for me, as perhaps it began for you, in what seemed like an ordinary world of snacks and television and homework, in the love of my family, with our dogs and cats and cousins, in such quiet and peace as I was unquestionably privileged to experience.   

We hear in the Gospel of John once again this week, as we have for the past couple of weeks, that Jesus is the bread that came down from heaven, the manna that God provides for the people of Israel, the daily bread.  And now this week we hear a bit more about how he is the bread of life, not only because he sustains us day by day but because the life he feeds in us is eternal life, a deathless life. And for me that eternal life started as plainly as Wonder Bread and grape juice.  

And so as we gather to receive the bread of life here in this church, I’ve got my eye on the ordinary and the divine at the same time.  And I’m thinking that’s how Jesus wants us to be, as we ponder and experience eternal life. If Jesus is really bread for us, then we have to reconsider what it means to eat his flesh and drink his blood.  “Bread of eternal life” can sound like something we have to keep eating until we are all stocked up, until we’ve reached some kind of magic threshold, after which we enter into the life after this life, to enjoy uncounted days of bliss.

But that doesn’t seem to be exactly the way Jesus works.  Yes, we are talking about a life that extends beyond death, but yes we are also talking about life right now, ordinary daily life, redolent with the eternal.  When we eat this bread and drink this cup we are seeing our own world in its connection to the ongoing, radiant, life of Jesus. We are in his time, as well as our own. The life we live in him is a daily life and an endless life.  And so everything that we are, everything that we do, has the potential to speak of God’s never-ending love. The world we build here for ourselves and for each other has the potential to be the local outpost of everlasting life. A colony of heaven, if you will.

This week, meditating on Jesus’s repeated insistence that he is the bread of eternal life, let’s envision for a moment a world in which the ordinary—cats and dogs and cousins, neighborhoods and parents and children—are lifted up and acknowledged as part of God’s divine being.  Let us hold this ordinary world close: its institutions, its mistakes, its preoccupations. Newspapers and books, orchestras and choirs, schools, churches, gay parades, food cupboards, all races and genders. Every home and every homeless person, sanctified and consecrated so that love and charity might reign.  So that homelessness might be converted into security and belonging and abundance. So that hostility might be converted into right relationship and equality and justice and friendship. No system of government, no family, can be a perfect model of everlasting love, but let us see and feel them transfigured today: elections, weddings, debates both domestic and civic.  All the ordinary bread of the world in which we live. Let the bread be consecrated. Let our lives be eternal. Like Wonder Bread and grape juice, the flesh and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.

What a beautiful blessing to this world, to be consecrated for the eternal life of the Son of God. Yes we will keep working, earning, voting, and going to school, but in all of that busyness we will not neglect to come here and take the daily bread in our hands, and give thanks to God that all things are shot through with the life of Jesus the Christ.  We will train our children to receive it with open hands and open hearts. We will receive it on our deathbeds. We will share this bread daily, and from its overflow will come renewed institutions, renewed human dignity, deeper reserves of love and racial reconciliation. Joy will not be confined to experiences we label “spiritual.” It will pour out in abundance over all things, and from within all things.  From a renewed earth.

This is our calling as children of God.  To eat the flesh and blood of our savior.  To live in the radiant overflow of God’s divine charity.  The charity that inspired all of creation, all things that are.  Our past, our future, and—urgently—our present day. This is the daily bread we consume, and this is the day we live: one eternal day of blessing and forgiveness, of renewal and strength, of charity and love.  

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
19 September 2018
Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia