The Glitter Factory

It was unsettling to discover in the week leading up to Christmas that throughout the land, housewives and husbands, mothers and fathers, bakers of all kinds, and possibly even members of the clergy have been unwrapping their Hershey’s kisses, only to discover that the chocolates are missing their tiny pointed tips. 

70 million solid milk chocolate kisses roll off the line every day in Hershey, PA.  And last week people noticed that the tips of many of those kisses were missing.  It’s not that the tips have broken off within the wrapper.  The tips are altogether missing, nowhere to be found, vanished from our sight.  And although the NY Times published two stories about the matter in its editions last week, no explanation for the missing tips has yet been provided by Hershey’s.  This is a disheartening and disappointing way to to approach Christmas: with imperfect, tip-less Hershey’s kisses.

Still reeling from the news of the missing chocolate tips of Christmas kisses,  I was taken with another story about an American business in the Times: an exposé of the glitter industry.  Yes, the glitter industry.

Practically all of the glitter in the world, it would seem, is produced in one of two glitter factories in New Jersey.  You heard that right: New Jersey.  And it turns out that the process of making glitter is quite nearly Top Secret.  The Times wouldn’t even provide the name of one of the companies that produces glitter, so sensitive is that business to unwanted attention.  The other company, called (not surprisingly) Glitterex, was willing to speak with Times reporter Caity Weaver, but, she said, they were extremely cagey about revealing any secrets about the method or process of producing glitter.  

“People don’t believe how complicated it is,” she wrote.  And her contact at Glitterex “would not allow [her] to see glitter being made, ...he would not allow [her] to hear glitter being made, ...[she] could not even be in the same wing of the building as the room in which glitter was being made under any circumstance.”  (“What is Glitter?” by Caity Weaver, in the NY Times, 21 Dec 2018)

I must say that my own interest in glitter had been, I guess, entirely and completely latent for my whole life, until now.  But now that I know what a big mystery it is, I am more interested than I ever imagined I could be in glitter.  Glitter, I’m hoping, is a good topic for a Christmas sermon: better, I think, than the missing tips of Hershey’s kisses.  But one thing both these recent stories have in common with each other and with Christmas is that they are mysteries.

We have done so much to own Christmas for ourselves that we forget that Christmas is a mystery.  Even on the religious side of things, we often re-enact Christmas in Bethlehem with only slightly less enthusiasm than Civil War re-enactors at Gettysburg, as though we can inhabit all the parts ourselves - Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, and even the sages from the east.  We erect mangers as though the act of providing a place for the Christ to be born is a routine, annual event that requires no knowledge, skill, insight, or wisdom at all.  And churches more adventuresome than this one will even be looking out in December for just the right child to take on the role of the Baby Jesus: young and small enough to fit in a manger, but calm enough to keep it together for ten minutes or so.  It’s fair to say that when we control the Christmas narrative so completely, we tend to avoid and undermine the mystery of Christmas.

The mystery of Christmas is a mystery of God’s love.  Why did God choose to show his love for his creation in this very particular, very personal, very risky, and very costly way?  We don’t know, and it doesn’t really make sense.

Among other aspects of the mystery of Christmas, is that, like every other aspect of God’s love, it allows each and every one of us to take it or leave it.  It is entirely dismissible as more or less a religious fairy tale.  It provides no proof, no unassailable logic, no incontrovertible evidence of anything.  It is only a story of divine love with some rather flamboyantly outrageous details like a virgin birth, angels who visit people in their dreams, and still more angels who once were heard on high.  So it’s easy to want to control Christmas and to stick with it for the sake of the script and the costumes for the children’s pageant.

But to rob Christmas of its mystery, is, in a sense, to deprive Christmas of its glitter.  And as it happens, the more you know about glitter, the more you might know about Christmas, too.

The Oxford English Dictionary is unenthusiastic about glitter as a noun, except insofar as it derives from the verb.  The verb is defined in the OED in two ways.  First, “to shine with a brilliant but broken and tremulous light... to gleam, sparkle,” which is actually a pretty Christmas-y definition.  The second definition, the OED tells us, is especially descriptive of persons.  In this case, to glitter is “to make a brilliant appearance or display; to be showy or splendid.”  And I’d say St. Luke’s account fits the bill nicely; “suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace!’”  A little showy, and certainly splendid.  Yes, I’d call that a brilliant appearance; I’d call that glitter!

I think if I were going to organize a Christmas pageant, I might borrow the stage design from the description that Caity Weaver supplied in the Times of the bottling section of the glitter factory in New Jersey - the only area of the secretive facility she was allowed to tour.  There, she reports, “the concrete floor was finely coated with what appeared to be crushed moonbeams.”  She described the shelves of different colored glitter in terms that would make Willy Wonka blush: “emerald hearts, pewter diamonds, and what appeared to be samples of the night sky collected from over the Atlantic Ocean. There were neon sparkles so pink you have only seen them in dreams, and rainbow hues that were simultaneously lilac and mint and all the colors of a fire.”  And she explained that one measurement required in the production of rainbow-colored glitter is a unit defined as “half the wavelength of light.”  How glorious!

I’d find my way to a manger that glittered like that year after year.  And I think she is actually expressing something of the wonder that St. Luke was trying to convey to us, too, in his description of the first Christmas.

The question at the heart of the glitter article is a simple one: What is glitter?  And this question provides a useful parallel to the question at the heart of Christmas, a question that has lurked in every heart that ever watched “A Charlie Brown Christmas:” What is Christmas? 

The apparent obvious answers to both questions, are clearly insufficient.  On the one hand, glitter is a product made from aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate (try to write a carol about that some time!).  And Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus.  But obviously, neither of these answers actually gets to the truth of the matter.

My heart leapt a little when I read in Caity Weaver’s excellent writing this concise answer to the question, “what is glitter?”  She wrote, “The simplest answer is one that will leave you slightly unsatisfied...  glitter is made from glitter. Big glitter begets smaller glitter; smaller glitter gets everywhere, all glitter is impossible to remove.”  

Glitter is made from glitter.

I say my heart leapt, because I recognized in her explanation a simple and beautiful parallel to the church’s ancient understanding of Christmas.  Once I heard this explanation, the echo of Christmas seemed so clear to me that I couldn’t stop hearing it: “Glitter is made from glitter.  Big glitter begets smaller glitter; smaller glitter gets everywhere.”

And I think I’ve never heard the words of the Nicene Creed sing so beautifully to me: “God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made.”

Or as the great carol put it in a somewhat older translation than the one we sang tonight:

God of God, Light of Light,
Lo he abhors not the virgin’s womb.
Very God, begotten not created:
O come let us adore him!

Glitter is from glitter; 
and God is from God; 
Light is from Light; 
true God is from true God; 
begotten not made; 
and gets everywhere;
impossible to remove.

Tonight, amid all the worries of the world - and there are plenty… there are Christmas cookies being baked with Hershey’s kisses that are missing their tips, for heaven’s sake!  …and there are some problems in the world that are even bigger than that!

… and yet tonight we have been called here to participate in a great and wondrous mystery.

Another way to put it is to say that we have been called together for a night to be a glitter factory.  We have been called into the midst of a great mystery that we are asked to sing and pray about and hold close to our hearts, until we notice that it shines with a brilliant but broken and tremulous light; until we see that it gleams and sparkles.  The light is broken and tremulous for a night because it comes from an infant child, so tender and mild that it appears that maybe the light will not survive.  We have to wonder if maybe the darkness will overcome the light.

We are a glitter factory in possession of no aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate.  And yet we have materials here that measure far more than half a wavelength of light.  We have in the midst of us the power that created the moonbeams, and the emeralds, and the diamonds, and the very night sky that twinkles over every ocean, and the rainbows in hues that are simultaneously lilac and mint and all the colors of a fire!

Christmas is remembering that God has called us to be a glitter factory, possessed of the deep mystery of his love!

And God knows that tonight, like every night, there are broken kisses, to say the least, all through the world, here in this church, and in many of our hearts, even on a night like tonight: broken kisses aplenty.

And so, once a year, God calls to mind that brilliant appearance in Bethlehem all those years ago.  He reminds us that although it was not very showy (except for the angels singing), it was indeed splendid, which is to say that it was a night that glittered…

…God from God, Light from Light; true God from true God, begotten not made…

… the mystery of God’s love… impossible to remove.

So, for what’s left of tonight, let us be a glitter factory together, let us gleam and sparkle, and shine with a brilliant, if broken and tremulous light!

Arise!  Shine!  For your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has dawned upon you!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
Christmas Eve 2018
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

The Best Messiah

An old friend of mine was recently praised in the NY Times for leading what a music review called “the best ‘Messiah’ in New York.”  One of the pleasures of living in Philadelphia is indulging in a kind of ironic smugness that pities New Yorkers for having to worry about where to find the best Messiah.  How do they manage?

My old friend and I grew up singing ‘Messiah’ in the same church, and I have no doubt that the version of the oratorio he leads is exquisite.  The reviewer made two deeply telling observations about the performance.  He wrote that as led by my friend, the “formal concert became a collective rite,” which is lovely thing to say about a concert of sacred music.  And about the arias, which were sung not by operatic soloists, but by rank and file members of the choir, the reviewer wrote that they “were transformed beyond the usual displays of sumptuous vocalism; they were urgent, even desperate communication.”  I can hardly think of more poignant praise, considering the work in question. (“NY Times, 6 December, 2018, by Zachary Woolfe, “This is the Best ‘Messiah’ in New York”)

The search for the “best Messiah” provides a nice turn of phrase for the religious context in which we live these days.  Americans are less and less interested in what institutional religion teaches about God, or Jesus, or any other relational arrangements of the divine.  That is to say, people care less and less about what preachers have to tell them from pulpits.  Which is to say, that I know quite literally where I stand.  The current trend looks to me a bit more like an individualistic search for the best messiah you can find, to borrow the phrase from the Times.  Find a messiah that works for you and stick with it as long as it works.  But if your messiah stops working for you, or you grow tired of it, or it lets you down, then go out and look again for a new messiah.  Maybe the best one for the rest of New York or Philadelphia isn’t the best  messiah for you.  But there are plenty of them out there; just find the messiah that seems best for you.  If only God was an oratorio.

Something about the particular performance of the oratorio that reviewer wrote about in the Times transformed it from a concert to a “collective rite.”  I think what he meant was that it became a kind of religious experience that was clearly and deliberately performed for the glory of God.  But you can’t say that about a concert in the pages of the New York Times, so you have to call it “a collective rite.”

And something about the singing of those soloists transformed the arias into “urgent, even desperate communication.” 

Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low.

But who may abide the day of his coming?

O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion; arise, shine, for thy light has come!

The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light.

How marvelous to hear in these prophetic words the urgent, desperate communication they are surely meant to convey.

One text that Handel did not set to music in his oratorio is the well known passage from Philippians that we heard today: “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice.”  I must confess that in all the years I have heard and read and sung these words, I have never once found anything urgent or desperate in them.  

If you want urgency you turn to John the Baptist, who will heap you in with a brood of vipers, and warn you that even now the ax is lying at the root of the tree, and threaten that the chaff will burn with unquenchable fire!  You won’t find old John telling you to “be careful for nothing;” or in the more modern translation, “do not worry about anything;” or in recent vernacular, “don’t worry, be happy!”

But I realize that there is an urgent, desperate message embedded in St. Paul’s otherwise happy-go-lucky message to the Philippians, which has always been there on the page to catch my eye or my ear, but that I have been reading right past it.  It’s there in verse 5, where we read the message in four words:  “The Lord is near,” ... an assertion that would not always be considered good reason to put worry aside.  This single sentence, “The Lord is near,” seems almost always to be translated as we read it this morning.  Older translations render it similarly as, “the Lord is at hand.”   Or, some newer versions as “the Lord is coming soon.”  And I would say that this sentence counts as urgent, even desperate communication… if we have ears to hear it.  The Lord is near!

The problem with this sentence is that it is so hard for us to believe that the Lord is near.  And I strongly suspect that part of the reason so many people are willing to go off in search of the best messiah they can find is because this promise of the old Messiah has begun to seem unlikely or far-fetched.  How can people believe these days that the Lord is near?  How can we believe it?

And I think the reviewer in the Times was onto something in the two important observations he made about the performance of ‘Messiah’ he heard: he was moved because he found himself, quite unexpectedly, not in a concert but in a ritual that was shaping a community.  And within that ritual, he heard voices that conveyed with unmistakable authenticity the urgent, even desperate, prophetic revelation of the Good News of the coming of Jesus Christ, that the Lord is at hand.  That is to say, that the concert my friend was leading - which was a church choir singing in a church - was actually doing the work of the church: proclaiming in sacred ritual the urgent, desperate Good News that the Lord is near.

Advent is the season of the year when the church distills in all her rites and all her communications the urgency and desperation of the message that the Lord is at hand, that he is coming soon.  These few weeks are given the unenviable task of competing with the madness of a secularly marketed “Christmas season” that is completely and totally uninterested in the thought that the Lord is near.  And the church carries the burden during these weeks of calling to mind, for those who will listen, the promise that God is with us; that Christ will make himself known; that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us; that a young woman, full of grace, could become the Mother of God’s Son; and that a good man could treat her with the respect and dignity she deserved; that the Spirit has not deserted us; that the angels still have something to tell us; that the heavens themselves twinkle in praise of God’s revelation of himself; that God’s self-disclosure is most readily heard by the poor and the simple; but that the wealthy and powerful who seek wisdom may discern it too; that cruelty cannot prevent the Lord from revealing himself to us; that the rulers of this world will not prevail over the Word of God, even in the weakness of its infancy; that nothing will impede the delivery of this Good News; that God’s desire in sending his Son to be among his people is to bring joy and peace to the face of the whole earth; that the Lord is near, close at hand, and coming soon.

How can we believe this?  

Unexpectedly, one way has been suggested to us by a music reviewer in the New York Times: by engaging in the church’s collective rites, and by listening for the urgency and the desperation proclaimed there.

We can believe what is otherwise hard to believe when we come together to practice the rite that Christ himself gave us, to “do this” in remembrance of him, and when we recall the sacred story with an urgency and desperation that reminds us, in a world that is floundering to identify what truth is, that this is the Truth from above.

We believe it because when we sing “O come, O come Emmanuel,” the pleading fits not only our voices and our ears, but our circumstances, in a world that so plainly needs a Prince of Peace, a Wisdom, and a Dayspring from on high.

We believe it when we allow our mouths to implore, “Come thou long expected Jesus,” and the prayer that God has planted within his church sounds in tune.

We believe it when we see ourselves in the description of the “people that walked in darkness,” and yet we know that here, in the rites that draw us for an hour or so into a Christian community of the most profound kind, we have seen a great light!  And we rejoice: arise, shine, for our light has come!

God reveals the Truth to us in ritual, with urgent, desperate communication, in which even the most benign sentiment of joyfulness also brings with it the promise that the Lord is near!

Several times I went back to read and re-read the review of that performance of ‘Messiah.’  But it took a while for me to notice the little synopsis that the Times provides right beneath the headline on its website, and where an estimation of the performance is provided in language that appears nowhere else in the review.  There, the editors have written that “the forces of Trinity Wall Street put on a gritty, fearless rendition of the holiday tradition.”  And I admit that this assessment left me feeling a little bit jealous, since in Philadelphia, gritty is supposed to be our thing.  But more to the point, “gritty and fearless” seem like words that John the Baptist would be comfortable with.  In fact I can almost hear him suggesting that it is with just such an outlook - gritty and fearless - that we look for the promise that the Lord is near.

Rejoice in the Lord, to be sure!  Be careful for nothing!  But come to the rite, and be part of it.  Open your ears and lift your voices with some measure of urgent desperation as we wonder who may abide the day of his coming!  Be gritty and fearless, for the Lord is at hand, he is coming soon.  Arise!  Shine!  For thy light is coming!  The Lord is near!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
16 December 2018
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

The Great Leveling

If there’s a song that might sum up the American Dream, it’s “Climb every mountain” from The Sound of Music. At the end of the first act, the Mother Abbess sings,

Climb ev’ry mountain,
Search high and low,
Follow ev’ry by-way,
Every path you know.

Climb ev’ry mountain,
Ford ev’ry stream,
Follow ev’ry rainbow,
‘Til you find your dream.

 A dream that will need
All the love you can give,
Every day of your life
For as long as you live.

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s iconic song is a feel-good one of hope and encouragement. The implication of this song is that all it takes is sufficient motivation, and any human person can achieve their wildest dreams. Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get on with it. If you put your mind to the task, you can do anything. Anything.

Speaking as an idealist, I’m somewhat reticent to quibble with this aspirational dangling carrot. Mother Abbess’s song, when distanced from the fictional world of the Austrian countryside, the stage, or the cinema, can indeed be inspirational. As a teacher in a school, I know the value of encouraging students with prospects of achievement and success. Sometimes, a little nudge is exactly what people need to be their best selves.

The problem, though, is when we start assuming that anyone fortified with a dream can actually scale any mountain, no matter how high. Or that any dream of climbing up the social ladder or moving out of difficult circumstances can always be accomplished with hard work and determination. It’s not a stretch to say that modern society, especially in this country, often assumes that if you are not succeeding or haven’t reached the top of that high mountain, you must not be working hard enough.

But things are not that simple, because if we look at the landscape of everyday life, we will see that not everyone starts in the same place. Sadly, due to human sin and the fallen nature of this world, the ground level of life is not even. Take, for instance, the recent alarming reports of poverty in this city of Philadelphia, which has the third worst income gap in the country.[1] While income across the U.S. has increased and poverty declined, in Philadelphia, poverty remained at 25.7 percent in 2017.[2] In many respects, your starting place in life is defined by your zip code.

If we draw on the metaphorical language from the 40th chapter of the prophet Isaiah, as quoted by Luke in today’s Gospel reading, we can confidently say that for some people, the paths to success are straight and smooth. And for others—for many, in fact—they are rough and very crooked. Some people are born into life on mountaintops, possessed of unimpeded vistas of promised ease and well-being. Others are perpetually down in the valleys of life, struggling in the trenches and gazing up at the mountains, wondering how they will ever climb up to a better place. And so, it is right for those in the valleys and on the crooked paths to dream and hope. But from a Christian perspective—and it is a countercultural one—success, achievement, and good fortune are not so simply tied to hard work and determination, because in the contours of real life, there is a formidable gap between the mountain peaks and the valley depths.

And if the solution to this predicament does not lie solely in human efforts, it must lie in Christian hope grounded in God’s grace. In his account of John the Baptist in the wilderness, Luke gives us a window into what this hope looks like. It opens with a litany of powerful figures. Ruler after ruler is named to set the exact historical point in time when God’s word of hope was manifested to John, the precursor to Christ. By the time John’s name is mentioned in this lengthy first sentence of Luke, chapter 3, the reader is expecting God’s word to alight on a figure of great might, reigning from a palace on the highest hill. And instead, the drum roll accompanying this impressive list of rulers peters out in a comic cymbal clang. God’s word comes to an unlikely person, John, son of Zechariah, who is dwelling not on a mountaintop but in the wilderness.

Now, if you’ve been to the Holy Land, you will know that the topography there is quite variegated. The flat coastal plains around Tel Aviv move into lush, rolling hills as one nears Jerusalem, and immediately to the east of the holy city is the stark Judean wilderness. This wilderness is both flat and hilly, with straight and winding roads that hug precipices dropping into deep valleys. The Judean wilderness is not an easy place to navigate, and it is certainly not the most predictable place for God’s word to come in prophetic form.

But into this rough wilderness landscape with its uneven contours, God’s word, in its unexpected trajectory, hearkens to John the Baptist, who goes on to preach this word to the surrounding country. It is a word that does not promise easy success or immediate gratification. It is a word that promises Advent hope, but hope that must be borne patiently in the wilderness of life. It is a word whose hope is vindicated in a future coming filled with God’s judgment, a judgment of justice and righteousness.

In bygone days, preachers talked a lot more about judgment, and it has become something of a nasty word these days. But judgment need not be narrowly defined by images of hellfire and brimstone. The judgment preached by John is one that is characterized by a Great Leveling of the world by God. This is a leveling of justice in which, ultimately, when Christ comes again, the haves and the have-nots will journey through life on the same plane. In this full establishment of God’s kingdom, there will no longer be great chasms between mountains and valleys, for “every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low.” Crooked roads will no longer serve as obstructions to a better life, and roads full of potholes will not be impediments to well-being. And “all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” For God’s justice is the Great Leveling of the world.

God’s leveling justice cannot be easily aligned with songs like “Climb ev’ry mountain” or with notions of good fortune proceeding from hard work. God’s Great Leveling presupposes that at least for now, the starting topography for everyone is different because we live in a world of sin. Everyone does not begin life in this world in the same place. For we need only look at the uneven economic and social topography of Philadelphia to see this.

And Luke, using the prophet Isaiah’s words, tells us something else very important, something that might be easy to miss. While we are encouraged to “prepare the way of the Lord” and “to make his paths straight,” the majority of Isaiah’s words are not about what we do. They are about what God does. We hear words in the passive voice: in God’s good time, the valleys shall be filled. . . by God. The mountains and hills shall be made low. . . by God. The crooked shall be made straight. . . by God. The rough ways shall be made smooth. . . by God. These awesome acts of justice are God’s judgment. It is not something that we can make happen by hard work.

But lest we think that this is bad news of Advent, let’s think again. This is the greatest good news imaginable, good news marked by the righting of wrongs and a Great Leveling that is so wonderful we can hardly imagine it and we can never bring it to full fruition ourselves. It is for God to do, because if it were left for us to do, it would be an impossible task, in spite of “Climb ev’ry mountain” and the American dream.

Yet we are not let off the hook. We are not called to passivity in the midst of God’s activity. There are things we can do to prepare the way for God. John the Baptist’s cry calls us to turn from our self-centered ways and to turn back to God in repentance so that we might more clearly see the uneven ground around us, because we can look around us and notice foreshadowing glimpses of that Great Leveling that God will bring about on the Last Day, even as we wait in Advent hope for its full manifestation.

We witnessed members of this parish yesterday offering smooth-soled boots to the rough feet of those walking in the valleys of life, brothers and sisters who are disadvantaged by the inequitable topography of our society’s systems. We see children receiving comprehensive moral, spiritual, and intellectual formation in a place like St. James School, making straight the paths to high school and beyond. We look to outreach ministries like Broad Street Ministry, just blocks from this place, in which the hungry can be seated by maître-d’s at tables with ironed tablecloths and served elegant meals prepared by professional chefs. In these beautiful acts of human service, we see God’s Great Leveling beginning to happen. We see a slow evening out of the topography of injustice, even if the land is not yet flat.

Luke gives us an exquisite image of God’s righteous judgment, which is both already and not yet, both present and still in the future. In Luke’s quotation of Isaiah’s vision of salvation, with a brushstroke from the Magnificat, even the mountains and hills are humbled. The valleys are raised up, so that all of God’s people—all flesh—can walk on the same level on that Last Day and taste God’s justice.

In Advent, in the midst of our preparation, we wait in hope for that Great Day where there will be no mountains to climb to success or achievement, no personal dreams to fulfill, no streams to ford, or rainbows to follow. The rainbow of God’s promise to humankind has already been given in Jesus Christ, and so we wait with Advent hope for that Great Leveling of God’s righteousness where all flesh shall see the salvation of God.

Preached by Father Kyle Babin
9 December 2018
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

[1] https://www.phillymag.com/business/2018/10/12/income-inequality-in-philadelphia/

[2] http://www2.philly.com/philly/news/census-data-poverty-income-philadelphia-suburbs-20180913.html