Reflections in a Mirror

Years ago, the New York City subway cars had poems  displayed on signs in those places above the windows where today there is only advertising.  On one of those subway cars I came across a poem that left a strong impression on me.  It’s by the American poet, A.R. Ammons, and the title of it is, “Reflective.”  Listen:

I found a
weed
that had a 

mirror in it
and that 
mirror

looked in at
a mirror
in

me that 
had a 
weed in it

Every time I read this poem, I picture myself stooping to inspect carefully some leafy weed growing somewhere: maybe growing in the crack of a sidewalk, or maybe  amid an otherwise perfect lawn, where its weediness causes it to stand out.  I see myself on my knees looking carefully at the weed; perhaps with a magnifying glass.  The weed in question is non-distinct, except that it clearly has a flower or a leaf structure or something that I can look into.  That is to say, there is more to its plant structure than just a blade, more than just a stalk, so that it is capable of enclosing or encasing something.  With my magnifying glass, I can see, inside the weed, the twinkle of glass, and the reflection of the mirror.  It must be a very small mirror.  No wonder I need the magnifying glass.  

But with the glass I can see what’s reflected in the mirror that’s inside the flower or the leaves of the weed.  You would think that it would simply be the image of me, staring back at me through my round glass.  But there is more.  The weed’s mirror captures the reflection of another mirror somewhere within me.  That mirror inside of me must reflect something.  And what it reflects is a weed.  Is the image of the weed in that mirror, the weed outside of me looking in at its own reflection in me?  Or is it the image of a weed inside of me, where its weediness causes it to stand out?  Does it really matter?

Since we reflect one another, I can see that the weed (that I am inspecting with my magnifying glass) and I are not so different, though clearly we are not the same.  But whatever it is that we have in common, is not superficial or insignificant, for it is found only by looking deep inside of each of us - me and the weed.  The reflection would be easy to miss, if we were not looking.

And somehow I am not cheapened by discovering how much I have in common with the weed - or that there is a weed inside of me, or at least that there is a reflection of a weed visible inside of me, if you look.  And I think it is not a matter of pride to say that the weed, conversely, is, somehow, elevated or ennobled (at least in my eyes) by the discovery that it contains a reflection of me.  And I wonder if after seeing each other this way we could ever be the same again.

I found a
weed
that had a 

mirror in it
and that 
mirror

looked in at
a mirror
in

me that 
had a 
weed in it

I have no reason to suspect that A.R. Ammons was thinking of the Transfiguration when he wrote this poem.  Quite the contrary, the onus is on me to show cause why his intention might align with my kooky homiletical approach to the mountaintop scene that we are invited to inspect carefully this morning.  Ammons was influenced by the Transcendentalist poets, so I think it’s fair to look for deeper reflections in his work.  

So, when I look into this poem, I think I see a mirror in it, that looks in at a mirror that has a mountain on it, and on that mountain is a man, the appearance of whose face has changed, and whose clothes have become dazzling white.  Three men are there looking on at the scene.  And amid all that light, when they look, do they see a mirror on that mountaintop that looks in at a mirror inside of each of them, that reflects a dazzling light, and carries with it the promise of change?

St. Paul put it this way: “... all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.”

When Jesus took Peter and John and James up on the mountain to pray with him, there unfolded this incredible scene: Jesus’ entire appearance transfigured, the presence of Moses and Elijah, the dazzling light, the glory of the Lord, and the voice from the cloud that said, “This is my Son, my Chosen.  Listen to him.”  Theatrics on a large scale for a very small audience.  As a rule, the church assigns a version of this story to be read twice a year; she asks us to look into the drama of its details, to see what we can see.

And as a rule, I suspect we see very little.  We don’t really know why Jesus’ face is changed.  We don’t know what Moses and Elijah are doing there.  We don’t really know what Christ’s glory looks like.  And we don’t really care.  Is it time for Coffee Hour yet?

And we don’t see the mirror that St. Paul wrote about, when we look.  And if we don’t see the mirror, then we don’t see the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror.  And we don’t realize that that mirror looks in at a mirror that’s within us.  And we don’t see that we are being transformed into the same image, from one degree of glory to another.  And if we don’t see the reflection of glory that’s within us, then I guess it might as well not be there, since it’s made almost entirely of light.

Sometimes when I sip from the chalice, I notice the reflection in the sliver.  But I seldom think to stoop carefully in my mind, and to look into the wine, that gift of Christ’s own Blood.

there I might 
find a savior who 
has a 

mirror in him
and that 
mirror 

looks in at 
a mirror 
in 

me that 
has a
savior in it

God made us in his own image and likeness.  We are the crowning glory of his creation, and the object of his profound love.  We amount to more than weeds - with all due respect to the Transcendentalists, and to the weeds.  We can do so much better than merely trying to sell things to one another.  We can be changed from one degree of glory to another.  Indeed, this appears to be what God made us for: to reflect the image of his glory, from the inside out.

You and I are not so very different from the image of God’s glory, though clearly we are not the same.  Whatever it is that we have in common is not superficial or insignificant, for it is found only by looking deep inside of each of us.  And it would be easy to miss, if we were not looking.

And somehow God is not cheapened by what he has in common with the likes of you and me.  And I think it is not a matter of pride to say that we, conversely, are elevated and ennobled by the discovery that within us can be found the reflection of God’s glory.

If only we could stop and see this, we would never be the same again.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
3 March 2019
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

The Vine and Branches

We celebrate the Feast of Saint Matthias today, and we have to begin by admitting that we know almost nothing about him.  We hear in our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles all that there is in the scriptures to hear about him. Matthias has been with Jesus and the disciples from the beginning, “from the baptism of John,” they say, “until the day when he was taken up from us,” the day we call the Ascension.  After Judas betrays Jesus and dies a ghastly death, the Apostles need to replace him, so they call both Justus and Matthias, and they pray for guidance. Then they cast lots and Matthias is chosen. It’s an admirably uncomplicated discernment process even if its origins are a bit grim. But we really can’t say anything more about Matthias for sure.  Some early sources place him in Cappadocia, or in Ethiopia. Some give him a different name. He is known as the patron saint of alcoholics, carpenters, tailors, and Gary, Indiana, among other honors.

But his selection by the Apostles—and in particular their determination to replace Judas and keep following their risen Lord—sets out a vital pattern for us to emulate.  “I am the vine,” Jesus says in the gospel of John, “and you are branches.” And the Apostles invite Matthias to join them in a notably vine-like form of growth. They branch out.  They curl around their future, sending out tendrils that extend their reach. They cling to their support while inching forward into new shapes, sprouting clusters of grapes in unanticipated places.  Just as the root structure of the vine deepens and spreads, so the branches spread, and the vine flourishes.

The sin of Judas is an incomprehensible loss.  The crucifixion is an unspeakable trauma. The resurrection instills in the Apostles an ability to live again, live past, live through, twine around the hard places and grow in the light.  “I am the vine,” says Jesus, “abide in my love.”

It’s as natural as can be, it’s entirely predictable, for a branch to remain on the vine, but to hear Jesus talk about it the process sounds fraught with peril.  His father is the vinegrower, and his father wields the pruning shears with vigor. Did you notice that there is no escaping those shears in the Father’s hand? If a branch is fruitless, says Jesus, it will be cut off and burned.  If a branch bears fruit, on the other hand, it will be pruned. That’s a lot of cutting one way or the other, isn’t it? Pruned or cut off: those both sound like painful options, don’t they? But to be fruitful is to know that losses are part of a shaping and a cultivation in God’s hand.  To be fruitful is to know the glory of abiding in the love of Jesus while the vine twists and curls and climbs, inching forward like apostles who take a new path, send out a new branch, when Judas has cut himself off.

In this case, abiding in the love of Jesus means that the scars from the cutting-off of Judas give way to the growth of a new branch.  The eleven apostles turn to the larger body of disciples and, by the grace of God, discover a new apostle within that body, perhaps somewhat unexpectedly.  Something unexpected whithin reaches out toward the future.

We know many losses in the church and the world today, and we could be pardoned for thinking of some of them in catastrophic terms.  The Roman Catholic Church is meeting even as we speak, determining a way forward after the sustained and systematic betrayal of children, a betrayal so pernicious as to call the foundations of belief into question.  And we know they are not alone in discovering that they had been hollowed out from within by sin and duplicity and excessive self-regard. We are hard pressed in this era to find an institution, religious or secular, that doesn’t feel as though it were teetering on the brink of illegitimacy.  Pruning is everywhere, or perhaps it’s closer to the truth to say that some parts of the world we have known are cut off from us, and burning. What an unshapely vine, the body of Christ in the world. Where is its growth? Where are the tendrils beginning to curl around the new supports as new branches yield new fruit?

Tendrils, I want to say, should be second nature to us, especially those of us who have the joy of worshipping in such a leafy, curly, church.  You may think I’m giving our parish a metaphorical compliment—and yes, I see many ways in which the vines are growing among us as people of God.  And I know that you abide, we abide together, we are rooted, in the love of Christ.

But in truth I just want to talk about what we see when we come together on a Sunday morning here at St. Mark’s and our eyes begin to wander, maybe when the sermon gets a little long and we go looking for something more interesting.  That might ordinarily worry me a bit but this morning I encourage you to look around. I think I can promise you that if you stare in almost any direction your eyes will find themselves resting on some kind of vine. I’ve been looking for them in recent days and it has been delightful to realize that they are absolutely everywhere.  You see them all over the pulpit, right? And on the sanctuary rail and the gates? Look at the windows. Most of them are surrounded by foliage, peeping out around the edges of the holy images in stained glass as though they were growing indoors from the garden. Doors are framed by dark carved vines as though we had to step through the leaves to make our way to coffee hour.  The baptismal font is circled by a leafy ring. In brass and stone and silver and glass and wood, in gold across the St. John’s altar, in silk across vestments and paraments, luxuriant vines circle around us. They were placed there by mad, enraptured Victorians and post-Victorians who couldn’t get enough of a good motif.

Like the apostles who prayed and drew lots, our Anglo-catholic forbears, albeit in a vastly more stylish way, let the body of Christ grow in the world in improbable, tangled, shapes.  They built a medieval church in Philadelphia and then decorated it like a jungle. They planted verdant institutions filled with curlicues. They knew something, just as the Apostles knew something, about how the love of Jesus in which we abide will send us twisting and turning and climbing, until the fruit we bear is abundant and surprising.  High and low, before us and behind us, along our walls and covering our archways, the vines are creeping toward the future, carrying us with them like lovely bunches of grapes. Rooted in the past, maybe, but more importantly rooted in Christ and growing in him and with him and through him toward a future known only to him, our Alpha and Omega.

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
24 February 2019
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Not Even a Week's Notice

Outside Willoughby’s Coffee House in downtown New Haven, Connecticut, you might be surprised to hear words from Shakespeare delivered in stunning elocution. A quick pop-in for a cup of joe at a local coffee house doesn’t always yield a professional-quality performance of 16th century English poetry. But in this case, it is one of the free ancillary benefits of patronizing Willoughby’s. Well, the performance might be free, but often, you will be asked for a bit of money in exchange for a private performance of verse.

Which is all rather unexpected, because there’s no stage set outside Willoughby’s Coffee House. There’s no sign announcing public performances of Shakespeare. There’s no real connection between Willoughby’s and the performance at all. There’s just an all-too-common sight in downtown New Haven of a woman, who appears to be homeless, standing on a street corner. But rather unusually, this homeless woman recites some of the most striking words in the English language with the finesse and calculated nuance of a trained orator. They call her the Shakespeare Lady, and she’s known all over town.

Meet Margaret Holloway, a 1980 graduate of the Yale Drama School. It was there that she rubbed shoulders with fellow students Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver. Like many local legends, her past is somewhat ambiguous. A native of Georgia and daughter of a minister, she eventually ended up at Yale Drama School, graduating in the early 1980s. But by that time, she was already suffering from schizophrenia. Holloway claims that she was the victim of an act of violence, which left her prey to mental illness. Whatever the case, wracked by hallucinations and addicted to drugs, she ended up on the streets of the city whose elite university awarded her a master’s degree.

Those New Haven streets even became her movie set, when her story was featured in a fifteen-minute documentary entitled God Didn’t Give Me a Week’s Notice. This gifted woman, broken by mental illness and victim of faulty social structures, embodies the town versus gown tension of a city like New Haven. This thespian who once wore the town’s coveted gown, now shows forth the troubling burdens of this complicated town. Margaret Holloway is living proof that it doesn’t take much for life’s blessings to become life’s woes. Such is the precarious nature of modern life in the United States. Such is the precarious nature of life in general. So many people are without a week’s notice of moving from fortune to misfortune.

To those like Margaret Holloway, who find the rug of life ripped out from under their feet without even a week’s notice, Jesus’s Sermon on the Plain is good news. It proclaims a great reversal of the world’s values: high becomes low, rich becomes poor, laughing becomes weeping. You get the picture. It is said that preachers often have one sermon reiterated time and time again. And if Luke the Evangelist had one sermon, it would be this great reversal. We hear it in the Magnificat. We heard it several weeks ago in Jesus’s words uttered in the synagogue in Nazareth. Luke is deeply concerned about the least of these, and Luke is deeply hopeful that in Christ himself, God is working a reversal of all the world’s inequalities.

Only a cold-hearted person could hear without elation Jesus’s promise that God intends to smooth out the world’s distorted values. And so compassion for those who are struggling leads to service and action: providing for those who don’t have money to provide for themselves, addressing food insecurity with free meals, praying for the persecuted. Many yearn to provide consolation to those who are downcast. Many want to be a part of the solution, to immerse themselves in God’s great act of blessing to all who are suffering. And what a good thing that is! If one is blessed, it is natural to want to work with God to bless others.

The problem is that Luke doesn’t stop with the blessings. The solution isn’t as simple as the blessed ones helping those experiencing woes. To reduce Luke’s gospel to a simple dichotomy between the haves and the have-nots is to miss something crucial, lumping people either into the blessing category or into the woe garbage pit. And where are we in all this? Where are those who can’t be caricatured as the inordinately fortunate or the extremely unfortunate?

Let me explain. And I want to return to the story of Margaret Holloway. To the average Yale student walking into Willoughby’s Coffee House, Margaret Holloway must be a disturbing sight, if they know anything about her background. Her vividly pronounced highbrow words must convict in an eerie kind of way, a woe to one who seems blessed: you, yes, even you, the current recipient of a world-class education in one of this country’s most revered institutions could be a stone’s throw away from poverty, homelessness, and mental suffering.

And isn’t this the case with us as well? Isn’t each of us just a tiny step away from misfortune, with blessings quickly morphing into woes, without even a week’s notice? Doesn’t the second person you of Luke’s version of the Beatitudes suggest that all of us, whether we are currently experiencing blessings or woes, share a common humanity?

Unlike some of the other evangelists, Luke doesn’t do theology from above, high in the sky with theoretical theological concepts. Luke does theology from below, down on the level place with humanity in its muck and mire. Luke’s blessings are not just about those people who are poor or hungry or weeping. They’re not just about those people who are hated, excluded, reviled, and defamed for the sake of Christ. And the woes are not just about those people who worship ceaselessly at the altar of mammon or who waste food or who are always happy. They’re about us. To really understand the blessings and the woes, we must realize that Jesus looked at his disciples, as Jesus looks at us, and says you. Not some vague third person addressee. These words are addressed to you and to me.

If our blessings can quickly become woes, especially if we consider ourselves blessed, our future might look bleak. But that future is only bleak when we see a black and white contrast between the perpetually blessed and the desperate ones cursed with woes. Luke seems to be offering a different perspective, one where the woes of others are a clarion call to see that we are all in this together. And if we begin to see that, we can begin to hope for the future, just as those people in the crowd reached out to touch Jesus, desperately longing for healing. The healing of the blessings according to Luke occurs within a shared humanity, on a level plane, with Jesus at its center.

This future transformed by God’s grace lies in the “will be” of the great reversal. It’s not about punishing the wealthy or taking away food from those who have it or inflicting mourning on those who rejoice. It’s about God’s Holy Spirit moving within a community of people, enabling them to share one another’s burdens and strive together towards a reordered future. In that future, the evil discrepancies between those who live on top of the world and those who struggle in the trenches are canceled out.

In this “will be” future, there are people in the middle, between the extremes, who can relate to both blessing and woe. In this new world, well-meaning folk don’t extend their hands in service to the dispossessed as if they know best how to cure and heal those people themselves. They reach out with God at their backs, in humility. In this new world, outreach is not condescension from an exalted mountain to provide charity to those on the plain. Like Jesus, we who are aching to serve descend the mountain and stand on level ground with the rest of humanity, acknowledging that blessings and woes are shared property, a given fact of being a child of God in a fallen world.

And in that recognition, one reaches out to another human being in self-giving love, in gratitude for one’s own blessings and aware that with not even a week’s notice one’s own life could be very, very different.

I imagine that New Haven’s Shakespeare Lady has played Ophelia from Hamlet, announcing “O, woe is me!” on numerous occasions right there in front of Willoughby’s Coffee House. In the eloquent language of one of history’s greatest wordsmiths, this woman cries out, stuck in the morass of an inadequate social system and failed by many. She cries out, with a thin piece of sheepskin as the collective turf and shared humanity between her and her fellow Yalies. There it is: a vivid reminder that we are all inheritors of blessings and woes, and all can change on a dime, without even a week’s notice.

 Preached by Father Kyle Babin
17 February 2019
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia