Yonder and Among Us

Christmas is a great time for name dropping, so here goes.  Do you know that I am connected to Richard Burton by a mere two degrees of separation?  I once spoke on the telephone with Elizabeth Taylor, who was married to Richard Burton - twice.  So that’s a double-barreled name drop any way you look at it.

Some time ago a friend sent me a link to a recording of Richard Burton reciting a poem of Gerard Manley Hopkins.  It was staggering to hear.  Hopkins is not a poet I know much, or thought I had much time for.  Then I heard Richard Burton read this poem... and it was sort of jaw dropping, to tell you the truth.  But although I was staggered by Burton’s mellifluous recitation of the words, I had no idea what to do with the poem.  I was captivated by Burton’s mastery of the language and bedazzled by the tempo at which he delivered the lines, which transformed them with a sense of urgency and significance.  But, as I say, I hadn’t the faintest idea what to do with the poem; I’m not sure I could have told you what the poem is about.

The poem in question is actually a pair of poems: “The Leaden Echo & The Golden Echo.”  To be crass, I could say that they are a reflection on beauty, age, and despair, paired with a declaration of hope in divine providence, whence all beauty finds its origin and its final home.  I guess....  Listen:

Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done
To keep at bay
Age and age's evils, hoar hair,
Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death's worst, winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay;
So be beginning, be beginning to despair.

I wish you could hear Burton say these lines, which, on the page, do not look the way they sound when they are spoken by him.  They just look like words on the page.  But from his lips, the words sound like music.  You should go home and listen to him deliver these lines.  But not right now.

Anyway, you heard some of the despair from the first poem, “The Leaden Echo,” but the hope is in the second poem, “The Golden Echo.”  Listen again:

Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty's self and beauty's giver.
See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair
Is, hair of the head, numbered.  

And later...

... O why are we so haggard at the heart, so care-coiled, care-killed, so fagged, so fashed, so cogged, so cumbered,
When the thing we freely fórfeit is kept with fonder a care,
Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept
Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder
A care kept.—Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where.—
Yonder.—What high as that! We follow, now we follow.—
Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,
Yonder.

I am no Richard Burton, and from my own mouth these lines sound like a cheap imitation of the poem he recites.  Take my word for it.  But I hope you will try to imagine the poem as the words tumble perfectly from his lips.  It’s dazzling. 

Every year, just days after Christmas, when we heard on Christmas morning the glorious first lines of John’s Gospel (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God….") we repeat those dazzling lines, which tumble with a certain perfection from the pages of the Gospel, and we sit here, captivated for a while in the majesty of this mystery that “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld its glory, full of grace and truth.”  We can tell that the words themselves have a kind of urgency and significance, but I suspect that we haven’t the faintest idea of what to do with them.  I’m not at all sure we know what these words are about.  We only know that we find them beautiful.  But as soon as we are out the door, we leave them behind, and return to the prosaic world where beauty is “vanishing away” (in Hopkins’ terms) and we are tempted to despair, despair, despair.  Poetry evaporates into the air.

It turns out that Elizabeth Taylor had this pair of Hopkins’ poems read at her funeral.  She must have loved the way Richard Burton read them, too.  He probably practiced reciting them in front of her.  When I think of how easily I can connect myself to Elizabeth Taylor, and (by only two degrees of separation) to Richard Burton and, therefore, to the way he recites these fabulous lines, …for some reason it makes me feel foolish for feeling so often, as though I am so far removed from God, and from the Word that was made flesh and dwelt among us.  It makes it seem as though Christmas was already long ago.  It makes it seem as though beauty is vanishing away.

Why are we so haggard at the heart?  When the thing we freely forfeit is kept with fonder a care, yonder, where we now follow?  Why do I sometimes feel that there are fewer degrees of separation between me and Richard Burton than there are between me and God?   Why do I so freely forfeit the urgency and significance of the Word made flesh?

Without Richard Burton reciting those lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins, I’d have never thought twice about them.  They’d have remained close to gibberish to me.  But he made them present, real, important, and began to show me that they have real meaning.

Without God’s gift of his Son, I suppose the same would be true of the divine Word.  No mere performer; no mere interpreter of God’s word, he is the Word itself made flesh.  Because God knows how easily we dismiss him as gibberish.  God knows that we have felt separated from him by too many degrees to count.  So God speaks, so to speak, he speaks by sending us his incarnate Word.  And the chasm between God and us is closed; the degree of separation between God and us is narrowed to only a tiny distance, a number of less than One.

I love the question that Hopkins poses in the second poem, “O why are we so haggard at the heart?”  And it is ironic that I should invoke this poem, I suppose, in any way at all to refer to the good news of the incarnate Word, since Hopkins concludes that God keeps with “fonder care” “the thing we freely forfeit,” which is his Word, his Love, his Beauty, his Truth, I suppose, ... that God keeps all this “yonder, yonder, yonder,” far from us, where it is safe from our forfeiture.  But “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth,” and we are always free to forfeit his Word, his Love, his Beauty, and his Truth. 

O why are we so haggard at the heart, as though we had never heard, as though we had never known, as though we would freely forfeit, what once God kept to himself with fonder a care, fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder a care kept. - Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where…?

Not yonder, yonder, yonder; but the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, full of grace and truth.

Thanks be to God.

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

In Our Camp

There is perhaps no more appropriate point in the Church year to revel in the ordinary things of life than on this great Feast of the Incarnation. And so, at a party I was recently attending, I found myself musing on a slogan emblazoned on a T-shirt that someone was wearing. Its words of wisdom were not immediately theological; they were more inspirational, at least to the Boy Scout or avid camper. The words of wisdom offered by this T-shirt slogan were that “home is wherever I can pitch my tent.”

Now, if I had seen this slogan in any other context and at any other time of year, it would most likely have escaped my attention. But reflecting on this seemingly nondescript statement, it dawned on me that for some in the room in which I was standing, houses of brick, mortar, and wood were most likely fraught with anxiety and stress. I wondered how many people in that room were presently concerned about whether there was enough heat in their houses or whether they would lose their homes. And I realized that in this particular setting, a T-shirt bearing a camping slogan had indeed made a hopeful theological statement, because it had expanded the notion of what a home can be. A home can be wherever one might pitch a tent, for wherever one might pitch a tent, God himself has already pitched a tent there.

And so, John tells us in the climax of the Prologue to his Gospel. The eternal Word existing with God and as God when all things came into being through him at the dawn of creation—this Word made flesh in Christ lived among us for a short lifetime, dwelling with the human race, breathing in oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide, leaving real human footprints in the dust of the Middle East. This Word made flesh tabernacled among us. This Word pitched his tent in our camp.

Of course, the camp was at first a localized one, a camp in the little town of Bethlehem, where Mary and Joseph took up temporary residence, pitching their tent in a stable or cave, whichever it was, we may never know. This Holy Family’s makeshift camp was nearly a hundred miles from their more permanent camp, the home they had established in Nazareth. But on that night of our Savior’s birth, home was not in Nazareth. Home was temporarily in Bethlehem, because that’s where Mary and Joseph had pitched their tent, so they could be counted in the census in the town of Joseph’s lineage.

And Matthew the evangelist tells us that after God was born into human time and space and tested his lungs in the incipient cries of a babe, Mary and Joseph pitched their tent elsewhere, far away in Egypt, as they fled the wrath of Herod and sought to protect the life of their newborn son. In many ways, the wanderings of Jesus’s earliest days would foreshadow his later life. In the intense fervor of his earthly ministry in Galilee and beyond, Jesus pitched his tent in many, many camps.

And there were times, we know, when our Lord himself had to redefine what home was. Home wasn’t always what one might expect. A world darkened by human sin could not always contain the everlasting Light. Yes, even in his hometown of Nazareth, our Lord faced rejection when its citizens were unable to receive his prophetic words and were incapable of welcoming him as God’s Messiah. So, the Son of God could only shake the Palestinian dust from his sandals and move on and pitch his tent in other locations.

In a human body, which knew all the trials of earthly loss and undoubtedly experienced the aches of strained sinews from long days of walking—in this human body, God dwelled as close to humankind as was humanly possible in order to bring us salvation. In this human body that also bore in equal measure the divine glory, God pitched his tent in our camp. And this tent was more than a pillar of cloud or of fire accompanying the Israelites in their wilderness journey. This tent was God with us, Emmanuel, in human flesh and blood.

But I imagine that in those strange and mysterious days following our Lord’s death, resurrection, and ascension, it must have felt to many like the tent that had been pitched in our camp was a bygone memory. To those who had known and loved Jesus, to those who had embraced him as a friend, to those who had grasped his rough hands worn by a carpenter’s work, Jesus’s seeming disappearance from the earth must have been a devastating blow. I suppose it was only natural that the human mind, in its limited capacity, would seek to make God too small by assuming that God’s earthly tent could only last for the duration of his Son’s lifetime.

But “our God, heav’n cannot hold him/Nor earth sustain.”[1] The divine glory shining in the life of Christ, the glory that pitched its tent in Nazareth and Bethlehem, still sets up camp hour by hour, minute by minute, and second by second in our lives. The Incarnation is not a closed chapter in a history book. God has pitched his tent and continues to pitch his tent among us until he comes again in glory. Because God has come as close to humankind as possible, he is forever setting up camp in our lives, no matter where we may be. For home is wherever we can pitch our tents, and wherever we pitch our tents, God has already beat us to it and established a home for us.

There is no human home too lonely or darkened by tragedy and despair in which God has not already set up camp. There is no seedy district of town, no blood-soaked battleground, no tsunami-wracked coast, no graffiti-riddled school playground, and no bleak prison cell in which God has not already pitched his tent and in which God does not still pitch his tent. For God has promised not to leave us comfortless, and this is the meaning of today’s great Feast. The Incarnation is not simply about the birth of a baby boy in the little town of Bethlehem. It is also about the birth of this baby into our hearts, every second of every day in every corner of the world. God is constantly on the move, and wherever we set up camp, God has already pitched his tent there and prepared for us a home.

In his great subversion of human pride and control, God took the world by surprise in the Incarnation. By pitching his tent in every camp on this earth, God was determined to re-order this creation back into relationship with him, so that “nothing could get between us and his love,” to quote words from last week’s Advent pageant.[2] The revelation of God’s greatness was inaugurated by becoming localized in human space and time so that ultimately no space and time could hold him hostage.

If only the feeble human mind could see this. If only the human mind could see that there is indeed enough of God for everyone and that no one has a monopoly on God. There is enough love for everyone because God pitches his tents in places across the world, no matter how disparate the locations and how wide the distances between them. And so there is no need for what a seminary professor of mine called the original fear, the fear that there is never enough. Because of the Incarnation, there is always enough in God’s gracious providence.

In one modern Bible translation, the apex of John’s Prologue is translated as “[t]he Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.”[3] But God didn’t just move into gated communities or subdivisions with manicured lawns. God moved into the neighborhoods neglected by broken city governments, where gunshots are routinely heard. God moved into the unheated homes on the brink of foreclosure. God moved into the traveling camps of refugees fleeing oppressive governments. For home can be wherever you might pitch your tent, and wherever that might be, God has already pitched his tent there.

And so we can rightly say, “Blessed, praised, worshiped, hallowed, and adored be our Lord Jesus Christ on his throne of glory in heaven, in the most holy Sacrament of the Altar, and in the hearts of his faithful people.” And so, too, we can say, “Blessed, praised, worshiped, hallowed, and adored be our Lord Jesus Christ in his tents over grates in city sidewalks.” Blessed, praised, worshiped, hallowed, and adored be our Lord Jesus Christ in his tents set up among those whose pillow is a dirt floor. Blessed, praised, worshiped, hallowed, and adored be Christ in all the tabernacles of the world and in the camps of all people who find their true homes where God has already pitched his tent.

[1] Christina Rossetti, “In the bleak midwinter”

[2] Adapted from Simone Graham, An Unexpected Christmas.

[3] Eugene Peterson, The Message Bible.

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

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