Two Coins and a Lot of Hope

To many, it must seem like a foolish endeavor, nay, an impossible task, surely doomed to fail. Although this undertaking has an end goal, there is no rigid plan, and there are no guaranteed resources to ensure success. This enterprise belongs to a traveling horde of people possessed of a wild hope—a hope that holds redemption at its very heart. It is a hope that both in spite of and because of the wildest of dreams something can change for the better.

This wandering group of people left their home in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, on October 12. San Pedro Sula is, of course, a place that we at Saint Mark’s know well through our involvement with Our Little Roses Orphanage, and I imagine that those who’ve been to San Pedro Sula understand why this caravan of Hondurans are leaving their native land. They no longer want to be held captive to ubiquitous violence, in which the most innocent of persons can be swept up by corrupt political forces. They no longer want to be devoured by the gaping chasm created by the ever-widening polarization of rich and poor. They no longer want to live day after day figuring out how to make ends meet financially or receive proper health care. The time has come for this brave group of people to take a chance in hope. It is said that, for many of them, their faith in God requires nothing less.

          And yet, I suspect, that to those sitting comfortably in homes with adequate utilities, in peaceful neighborhoods into which the sounds of violence rarely intrude, the growing caravan of Central Americans must seem to be undertaking a futile mission. In the hearts of those reading about the Central Americans in the New York Times over steaming cups of hot coffee, I’m sure that much empathy is aroused. I’m sure that many well-intentioned readers are moved at the plight of desperate folk seeking a better future. I’m sure that any person with a conscience and moral compass will feel their heart break at why these courageous souls are trekking thousands of miles to an uncertain destination. And still, for practical realists, there must be the inevitable conclusion that this foolhardy endeavor will simply not end well.

After all, the numbers just don’t add up. Statistically, the migrant caravan is a doomed venture. There is no concrete plan for life beyond the border. There is the likelihood of being abruptly turned away at the end of a long and arduous expedition. There is no certainty of food and provisions along the way. Many of these nomadic peoples have inadequate shoes for the journey. They are hardly able to carry any clothes with them. The outcome, frankly, looks dire.

But this does not seem to be the viewpoint of those traveling in the caravan. They might not have two coins to their name, but they are possessed of an overabundance of hope. In their heart of hearts, these impoverished and oppressed people are willing to set out for an uncertain future thousands of grueling miles down the road, banking everything, even their lives, on the dream that their lives can be different, that they might taste in this earthly life a bit of that glorious victory already achieved in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

But we know that the long-robed cynics, those who devour hope, those who have money to throw into the treasuries of this world and who are good at predicting whether the numbers will ensure success, these skeptical humans must attribute the hope and faith of the migrant travelers to desperation. Only desperation would cause such impoverished people to throw their last two coins at the border of an uncertain future. Surely, the first-century crowd in Jerusalem must have thought the same when they saw the poor widow casting two worthless coins into the treasury coffers. While members of the crowd contributed their own loud, clanging pieces of metal, they must have felt a condescending pity for that poor widow who was foolish enough to hand over two small coins. As if taken in by a smarmy televangelist leeching dollars from gullible TV viewers, this widow had been taken in by her own weak desperation. Of course, it was acceptable for the crowd possessed of means to part with some of their change, but how foolish for this silly person with no name, no status, and no quantifiable future to waste two meager coins on maintaining the Temple treasury! What possible good could it do?

But as it usually happens in the Gospels, the crowd in their superficial displays of generosity, and the scribes prancing around in their ostentatious robes, have missed the point. It is the poor widow who has chosen the better part, for she has chosen to give based on hope. This poor widow has not given up the possibility that her gift might make a difference. In the end, the point is not really about the money. The rich crowd gives because giving feels good and buttresses their own sense of self-worth. But this poor widow, well, we really don’t know why she gives, other than that she offers something of herself—everything she has, indeed, her whole life—in the hope that God can work something good. We don’t know what she is contributing towards. And there is little reason to believe that the treasury would ever benefit her. But it’s really not about the money. It’s about a heart yearning to throw itself at the mercy of God in hope.

Like the poor widow, those travelers in the migrant caravan from Honduras are the unnamed individuals in this world whose futures have been brutally swept away by the flowing robes of the privileged. They are the ones whose quiet, pleading voices have been drowned out by the clanging of money exchanged in the places of power. These people have been systematically demeaned because of greed, insensitivity, and practical skepticism. But at the end of the day, the truly rich of this world are the poor widows and the traveling Central Americans, who have no carefully constructed, practical plans for their futures. They are rich because in their material poverty, their hearts have been opened to hope in the treasury of God’s grace.

If only we could learn something of the reckless abandon of the poor in spirit. For when there is a dearth of material possessions, it often becomes evident that God’s kingdom is built on the eternal gift of hope, not on numbers, budgets, graphs, and financial statements. If only we could heed the examples of those who are not afraid, in their faith in God, to throw hope wildly into the confused winds of the world. Real faith assumes that two small copper coins can, in the mysterious working of God’s radical grace, play some part in changing the world.

We know, though, that reality is yet a bit more nuanced. Budgets are, in fact, necessary. Numbers are, in some sense, important. And we are indeed called to be responsible stewards of our material gifts. We know that material gifts and investments can play their part in bringing the Gospel into the world, for we need money to do that much-needed Gospel work. Yet ultimately the numbers are meaningless and the money itself is dormant unless we, like the poor widow and the migrant Central Americans, can dream and hope with abandon, trusting fully in God’s power to work miracles with ever so little means.

Because any vision for participating in God’s kingdom in this world will perish if we are mired in practicality and skepticism. A caravan headed towards a potentially closed border is utter folly, so it seems to the practical mind. And two small copper coins thrown by a destitute woman into a vast coffer to fund who-knows-what seems completely insensible. But no one ever said that being Christian meant being sensible. Who would ever imagine the salvation of the world in the ignominious death of a humble Galilean man? Who would call sensible a Gospel that reverses the stubborn values of this world? Who would ever tie themselves to a belief system that finds its core tenet in an empty tomb?

And yet, that is what we are as Christians. We are foolish in the eyes of the world, because that is God’s wisdom. We are insensible in our hope for a different future. We are reckless in casting our dreams and hopes before the throne of God with confidence that something miraculous can happen. It is our bounden duty to pray and move to action in the hope that one day the nameless of this world, like the poor widow and the anonymous hordes of migrant Central Americans, will inherit names. It is our bounden duty to believe that the oppressed with quiet voices will one day be fully heard over the din of greed and wealth. It is our duty to be reckless in our own initiatives for change so that no matter how seemingly small the offering or how foolish the undertaking, God can use it all to redeem what is broken, precisely because he has already done it in Christ. Our hope is not in the human-made systems of this world that have become our distorted idols; our hope is in God’s grace and power working through those systems.

If we can see past our human desire for certainty, if we can look past the statistical assurances of success, and if we can be a bit foolhardy in our hope in what is, as of yet, unseen to us, anything is possible. On the surface, it seems that the poor widow has literally nothing that the systems of this world can use in their noisy, hollow operations. But she possesses everything that God can use. And lest we look condescendingly at those impoverished migrants who are reckless in their faith in God, we should consider this: two small copper coins cast in blind hope at the border to freedom just might end up on the other side.

Preached by Father Kyle Babin

11 November 2018

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Simon, Jude, You, and Me

The Prayer Book allows, but does not necessarily encourage us to keep the feast of St. Simon and St. Jude today.  To be honest, I am a little less than enthusiastic about our saints this morning, neither of whom provides a deeply inspiring model for the Christian life, if only because neither is a figure about whom much is known.

St. Simon, is often called “the zealot,” and it remains a question whether this moniker was a description of his personality or of his religious and political leanings.  If it is an indication of the latter, and he was aligned with a Jewish religious party that was looking for a militarily empowered messiah who would drive out the Romans from Palestine and usher in a new day of freedom for his people, well, then, Simon must have been deeply disappointed in Jesus.

St. Jude is famously known as the patron saint of lost causes, or causes despaired of, as it’s sometimes put.  But, in a nice bit of irony, no one seems to know precisely why.

More than once recently I have found myself wondering whether or not the church is a lost cause.  From child-abuse, to declining attendance, to a general malaise in many quarters, to the often horrific preaching that you can hear in churches large and small alike; we are not living in a golden age of the church.

It makes me wonder if I should have learned to write code, and gotten into the games business.  My head is still spinning from reading an article in The New Yorker last spring in which I learned about the video game Fortnite.  As of that writing, the game had been downloaded more than sixty million times, and on more than one occasion more than three million people have been known to be playing the game at the same time on line.  That sounds kind of  like religion to me.  It’s certainly a way to spend your Sunday morning.  In an effort to understand the appeal of such a thing, I found myself, looking up the difference between a first-person-shooter video game, and a third-person-shooter video game.  I had assumed I could deduce the distinction from the language, and that it must have to do with who is doing the shooting.  But I was wrong.  I should have known that my assumption made no sense.  For, who would play a game in which someone else is doing the shooting?

Who is doing the shooting, of course, has itself become a thematic question of American life.  Last week we were supplied with the answer to the question, “Who is sending the packages?”  But before a new week even began to unfold, we found ourselves confronted with another shooter, this one firing into a synagogue in Pittsburgh yesterday morning.  

We may have banished from our collective consciousness the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan (disasters of our own making that have yet to come to an end).  But we cannot altogether muffle the sound of gunfire when it is so widespread across this nation.  We should all learn how to sing the mourners Kaddish: we will need it again.

Hungry for a morsel of Good News, we roll into church this morning to hear Jesus saying this, “If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you.”  This is not the kind of feel-good Gospel I am hoping for on a morning like this.  I want Beatitudes.  I want love to be kind and patient.  I want St. Francis preaching to the birds!  But we walk in to Simon and to Jude, and to this: “If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you.”  Is this Jesus’ way of saying, “haters gotta hate”?  Couldn’t we leave that for another time?  How about never?

I allow myself to reflect on these shooters who saunter into synagogues or churches armed to the teeth, or who perch from a luxury suite in a hotel with an arsenal at the ready, and I am distracted for a moment by my own perverse reflection on the sheer cowardice of these men, (for they are always men (or boys)).  And I have to stop and ask myself, what would I prefer - brave mass shooters?  And I hear an echo of an ancient word.  What would I prefer - brave zealots?

It is possible, I suppose, that St. Simon, the zealot, had been stockpiling swords and staves and clubs in a shed behind his mother’s house.  Perhaps it was Simon who supplied the sword to St. Peter that night in the Garden of Gethsemane, when Peter, in a zealous rage to protect his Lord and Master, cut off the right ear of the High Priest’s slave - an injury that Jesus immediately healed.  In any case, Simon’s zealotry would, of its own, amount to nothing.

Perhaps Simon is the id to Jude’s ego (albeit a somewhat deflated ego).  Beaten back by the real troubles of the world, it’s enough for Jude to follow, and to be remembered, even if it is for what might have looked like a lost cause.  I wonder if they remembered, those two, what Jesus had said, “If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you.”

From where I stand, it seems not far-fetched to say that the world today more or less hates Jesus, at least the world I walk through, and read about every day.  There may be places where the world does not hate Jesus, but these places are far from here.

To bolster this view, I note that the news told me the other day that the world made more billionaires last year than ever before.  If there is one thing the world absolutely does not need it is billionaires.  What good comes of a society that is adept at minting billionaires?  And yet, it is the socio-economic accomplishment of our age.  A world that is adept at making billionaires can only ever hate Jesus, because you can never make the needles big enough, or the camels small enough for a billionaire.  As far as I can tell, Bruce Wayne and Gerry Lenfest were the only two billionaires who could handle their money.  And of the two, only Gerry Lenfest gave most of his money away.

I wonder if Saints Simon and Jude both figured out that the world hated them for following Jesus.  The world would have hated Simon precisely because his zealotry amounted to nothing.  What a waste, in the world’s eyes, of all that good weaponry.  And the world would have hated Jude because of his refusal to abandon a cause despaired of - the lost cause of Jesus, whose disciples would mostly abandon him the closer he got to the Cross, where Jesus knew he must go to show his love for the world, and to make his perfect sacrifice of love.

In some sense, I suppose, the church could try to be the best possible combination of Simon and Jude.  For we are called to be zealous for the Cross, which, to many, looks precisely like a cause despaired of. What is the point of endlessly celebrating the execution of your messiah?

Here it might be useful to remember a little sacramental theology.  For to us, the Cross is nothing to despair of.  It represents the triumph of life over death, of good over evil, of light over darkness, and of love over hate.  For it was on the Cross that Jesus died.  It was on the Cross that Christ gave his Body and his Blood for the salvation of the world.  It was on the Cross that Jesus began the work of salvation whose effect would be known in his resurrection - the rising of the crucified Christ from the grave, which is the victory of hope over despair.

Remember that a sacrament is an outward and visible sign of some invisible gift of God’s grace.  And every day in this church we are called to a one-on-one encounter with the Body and Blood of the risen Christ - God’s assurance to us that the gift of salvation - which seems invisible to us, maybe even unlikely to us in this hate-filled world - that this gift of salvation, this victory of life over death, good over evil, light over darkness, love over hate is for real.  That’s why we come here time after time.  And that’s why, it ought to send shivers down our spines when we hear Jesus say that the world hates us because it hates him too, hated him first, in fact.  Because the world deals in death; the world deals in evil; the world deals in darkness; the world deals in hatred, every single day.  Thus the world amasses its fortunes.

But Jesus has already won the victory over death.  Jesus has already won the victory of evil.  Jesus has already won the victory over darkness.  Jesus has already won the victory over hate.  And he keeps asking us to live our lives as if we knew this.  And he keeps giving himself to us - Body and Blood - to remind us of the Truth that we cannot see, but that is no less true for being invisible.

I fear that the shooter in the Pittsburgh synagogue might claim to be a Christian.  Not only could such a claim not be remotely true in any sense, it must also be stated that any such person, who could gun down the innocent in the midst of their prayer and their worship, must be assumed to hate Jesus.

Maybe we will not be able to learn to love Jesus until we can be honest about all the ways the world hates Jesus.  Maybe we will not be able to learn to love Jesus until we learn to accept the the world will hate us too, when we do.  Maybe we will even need to learn to give up on our dreams of some day becoming a billionaire, which has never been documented to lead anyone to love Jesus more.  Or am I the only one here who has ever fantasized about that many zeros?

We need a sign, in this world of ours, that life will triumph over death, that good will triumph over evil, that light will triumph over darkness, that love will triumph over hate.  Thank God we’ve got one.

Take.  Eat.  Do this in remembrance of him.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
28 October 2018
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Service

We’ve been hearing for several weeks now on Sunday mornings about how in the Kingdom of God our expectations will be reversed.  Think back over our recent gospels and you’ll hear it loud and clear. If you want to be first you have to be last.  If you save your life you will lose it.  If you don’t receive the kingdom of God like a little child you will never enter it.  It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.  It’s almost as though Jesus were trying to tell us something.   

And hearing this week after week, the message may begin to sink in.  Perhaps it began to sink in for the disciples: the last shall be first and the first shall be last.  This is an extraordinary promise for all of us who feel that we are lost or losing, who are excluded from what looks like a position of importance.  It’s great news for all of us when we have nothing special to recommend us, no great power or strength or even virtue to call our own.

But how often are we able to consider these gospel words as something more than a fallback for people who don’t get what they want in this life?  How often are we able to consider the possibility that, instead of being a consolation prize for us when we don’t have power, these gospel promises are actually sources of power?  Can we contemplate the idea that the only real power we may have in this life comes from the paradoxical grace God gives us in the act of surrendering?

Another way to put this: if you had wealth and influence and strength in abundance and could dominate others when you wanted to, would you turn to service anyway?  Would humility look like your greatest strength?

I think that’s something of what Jesus asks of James and John and the disciples who resent them in today’s gospel.  Notice that he doesn’t really challenge them when they say that they are able to drink the cup he is to drink.  He doesn’t put them in their places, as indeed he could.  He doesn’t roll his eyes, as I surely would.  No, Jesus lets their arrogant statement fall by the wayside.  It’s not important, I guess, to get into a contest of strength and will with James and John.  It’s not important to Jesus to teach them that he is more powerful than they are.  Though he obviously is.  He just lets all of that go.

Instead, Jesus teaches them what power is.  He teaches them that power—God’s power—is closely linked with the ability to serve and maybe the desire to serve.  That’s it.  Not the ability to serve more heroically or more humbly than another person.  Not the ability to get our needs met by serving others, though some of our needs may be met that way.  Not the ability to endure more suffering than anybody else —Jesus sort of concedes that to James and John.  It’s just service.  It’s identifying with the needs of other people, for their benefit. 

It’s like what a teacher does when the teacher’s focus is on learning rather than on winning followers or looking smart.  It’s like what a musician does when the musician’s focus is not on the sound of her own playing.  It’s like what parents do when they let go of the desire to see themselves reflected well in the accomplishments of their offspring.

If you’ve had one person in your life who listened to you without jumping in to correct you or to tell you what to do or to deny your perspective, you’ve known real service.  Which is to say that you’ve known God’s loving care.  God’s loving service, in Jesus, has filtered down into all of our acts of care, all of our acts of creating and sustaining.  If someone has treated you with genuine respect, in ways that are large or small, you’ve known service, and you’ve known something of the kingdom of God. If space has been made for you to participate in a discussion, or your experience has been valued, you know something about the kingdom of God.

It’s funny how this kind of power works.  It’s almost invisible.  In a world full of puffery and self-marketing, the kind of power that has nothing to prove and no desire except the flourishing of God’s kingdom can pass unnoticed and can certainly go uncelebrated.  It’s almost uncelebrated by design. 

Jesus is talking about a kind of power that makes us completely free, from the need to be recognized, from the need to feel invulnerable, from the need for approval.  Jesus is talking about the ability to enter a room without being acknowledged, make sure everyone in that room has enough to eat, and leave that room without resentments or expectations.  In other words, the kingdom of heaven is close to the condition entered into by any number of skilled restaurant workers, every day, and it’s an exalted state of being.   And it gets a lot of people fed.

Jesus is not asking for a false identification with martyrdom.  Jesus is asking for our true identification with God’s wonderful abundance.  If you have God’s energy and God’s sustenance and God’s love in abundance, giving it away might be a joy.  It’s the joy of coming in second or third or fifteenth and feeling no sense of loss.  It’s the day you don’t notice that no one is noticing you.  Not because you have an unhealthy need to be ignored but because it’s so great not caring about that stuff.  It’s so great to be free to go where God sends you.  It might be such a relief, on that day, just to do the work of the kingdom without being bound by the need to get something “back.”

Imagine walking with Jesus on his earthly pilgrimage and being all caught up in a discussion about whether you’re going to sit on his right hand or his left hand at the end of time.  Seems like a waste, doesn’t it?

It is a waste.  It’s the same waste we are all still experiencing when we accompany our friends on their pilgrimages, worrying all along about whether they like us enough, whether we look good walking next to them, whether there is another friend who might make us feel better.  It’s the waste of a marriage that has been consumed by anxiety about whether there is someone better out there.  It’s the waste of a career spent working for prestige. 

While all this waste goes on around us, we are nevertheless surrounded by the power of the God who puts us first.  It’s quiet, unobtrusive, and life-giving.  If you want to experience it, go to lunch after Mass and watch how a server or a cook works.  Go to coffee hour, and receive a cup of coffee from the hand of a volunteer whose desire is to work for the life of this parish.  Eat the cookie someone brought, made, shared, just so you would have a moment’s joy in the company of other believers before the cookies vanished.  Better yet, come put out your hands at the communion rail, and receive the very body of the one who died to set us free. 

It’s easy to believe, in this noisy world, that the ones who make themselves stand out are the ones who hold the keys to the kingdom.  It’s easy to believe that belligerence is power.  It’s easy to believe that competition is what brings us the things we need.  But all over the world, often without a sound, the servants of God are performing acts of redemption.  When you need to remember that, look around you and give thanks for the love of God that sustains you and surrounds you.

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
21 October 2018
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia