A Change Moment

There are at least two factors that make is hard for us to hear the full power of the story of the Prodigal Son.  The first is our habit of hearing the story as individuals.   

Now it’s true that the story is written about an individual, that bad son who decides that he needs his inheritance right away.  And he goes about sinning in a real capital-I-individualistic way.  He doesn’t see any reason to stick with his family, build up their fortunes, support his father in his old age, or help his brother with the work of the estate.  He has no sense of collective belonging.  As far as he can see, the family is just a financial asset, and he wants to cash in.  So he flies in the face of all the cultural expectations and all the familial ties, and he withdraws his share.   

I feel sure that as he left home his father and brother knew he would be back soon needing help.  It’s pretty clear that there is no plan, no maturity, no sense that it would be best to avoid having to drain other people’s resources when the money runs dry.  It’s clear he has no plan to give money to people who need it more than he does, or start a family, or do anything else that involves paying attention to other people’s needs.  He’s a self-centered individualist if there ever was one. 

But there is no reason that we have to hear his story as a story about individuals. Because it’s an especially powerful story if we think about what happens to us as a collective.  Think about it: very few of us set out deliberately to squander everything.  It does happen, and we all have our bad spells, but I think most people can listen to this story with some sense of distance.  Demand your inheritance up front and blow through it in a short time?  I don’t think that’s a really common occurrence.  I’m not sure inheritances are all that common any more, to be honest. And in any case, it takes a special act of the will to lose absolutely everything, even when you are very young.  We mess up, of course, but rarely with the kind of clarity and force that the prodigal son brings to that task. 

So individually maybe we aren’t in that much danger of imitating the prodigal son.  But collectively, the picture is different.  Collectively, without a clear sense of individual agency, we seem alarmingly good at wandering far from where we belong.  We seem alarmingly ready to squander the resources of the good earth God has given us.  It looks like we are willing to be reckless with other important things too: our liberty, the dignity of every human being, the covenant that requires all of us to work for the common good.  Belief in the future.  The great treasure that is God’s church.  We run through these gifts as though there were no tomorrow.  We seriously entertain the notion that there may be no tomorrow.  We are collectively, disastrously, prodigal. 

We’re told in Luke’s gospel that the younger son “comes to himself” one day while he is looking after some pigs.  He comes to himself and sees that he is living a degraded life.  He is hungry.  He comes to himself and remembers that he is the son of a magnanimous father who treats even the servants with some fundamental respect, and he determines that he will go home.    

That’s hard to do when we are talking about collective sin.  It’s really hard for us to come to ourselves collectively.  It can be hard to know how we even got to that pigsty, and hard to know where home is now.  If we never really intended to squander our inheritance, and we didn’t squander it all by ourselves, how are we going to repent?  What’s the first step? 

Do you remember that I said there were two factors that keep us from hearing this story in its full power?  The first one is that we hear it as individuals, and we don’t think about our collective sin.  The second factor that keeps us from hearing this story fully is that we think we have to hear it in chronological order.  It’s a very tidy story, at least initially.  The son takes his inheritance.  He lives a dissolute life.  He comes to himself.  He returns.  As everyone in our Friday night Digital Storytelling group has heard a million times, there is a “change moment” in this story, a point of crisis after which nothing is the same.  The prodigal son hits bottom.  The story turns.  Metanoia. 

But don’t let the conventions of linear storytelling get in your way when God is waiting to bring you home to the fullness of life.  If we didn’t get to our degradation on our own, if we’re not just in a private pigsty, if the whole world has gone astray and we’ve all forgotten that we are the children of a loving creator—there isn’t going to be one big turning point.  This isn’t one person’s story.  I hate to say it but we may never know when we’ve hit bottom.   

But there is good news in that.  If we are all down here with the pigs together, if we can’t even say exactly how we got here, if we have trouble even knowing how the trouble started, we don’t have to wait until the story takes a clear shape before we call on God to help us.  

Think about that crazy, loving, abundantly-forgiving father.  Do you think that if his son had sent word that he was stuck in a pigsty with a large crowd of people to whom he was inexplicably bound, the father would have reacted ungenerously?  I don’t.  I think he would have run straight to the barnyard and embraced the son, muck and all.  I think he would have jumped right over the fence and into the trough.  I think he would have asked his son to come home and bring a few hundred of his hungry friends.  I’m not sure how he would have pulled it off, but I’m certain that the father’s love and the father’s resources and the father’s forgiveness would have been more than enough for the trouble the son and his friends were in.  And I’m certain that seeing the father run right into the muck to embrace his son would have been good for everyone there, no matter whose fault the situation had been. 

What would that story of repentance look like for us?  What would the world see if we came to ourselves today and remembered that we were beloved children, not lost prodigals?  I’m not talking about individual escape from the troubles of the world, I’m talking about what it would look like to have confidence today, right here in the pigpen.  Confidence in God.  Confidence that salvation is real, and it’s for everyone even when we think we are experiencing it individually.   

I’m talking about how the joy of forgiven Christians might transform the world.  I’m not talking about shallow Christian happiness, I’m talking about Christian realists who are set free to act boldly.  People who know that they can rejoice even here and now, because change doesn’t have to wait.  People who are transformed by God’s grace to live according to our baptismal covenant right now.  People who are willing to experience the embrace of God even if the world has forgotten God.    

It’s hard to write this story.  I can’t explain exactly how we got to the point at which we had squandered our inheritance.  I’m not at all sure that it’s completely squandered.  I think we may have hidden reserves still, though the trends are profoundly worrying.  I have ideas about whose fault our predicament is, but all of my ideas are partial and self-justifying.  I have almost no ability to name my part in our collective prodigality.  I can lament, but actual repentance that involves changing my life down in the heart of it all where the problem is—that’s pretty hard to get my mind around.  I fear that mastery of this story is beyond me in some ways. 

But I’m going to take my cue from the church today.  It’s Laetare Sunday, the Sunday in Lent when we change the vestments from violet to rose, and we acknowledge a kind of premature rejoicing.  We remind ourselves to rejoice in the middle of repentance.  We break the conventions of Digital Storytelling, and we start to live in the end of the story before we make it all the way to the metanoia.   

God is here, now.  Forgiving.  Abundantly.  Not waiting for our breaking point.  We may be hungry and we may be facing degradation, but we are being asked to acknowledge even now that we are children of God, before the story makes sense to us.  The whole world may not change today because you and I change, but how do we know what genuine freedom and rejoicing in the love of God might bring to our collective experience of degradation?  The father in Luke’s gospel sees his son while the son is still far off, practicing his weak apology.   He runs to wrap his arms around that sorry prodigal.  What will our creator do for us if we are the least bit willing?  Why shouldn’t we find out?

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
31 March 2019
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Posted on April 4, 2019 .

Parental Advice About Angels

As you may know, the Virgin Mary has apocryphal parents who are named Anne and Joachim.  Canonical scripture doesn’t mention them, which is why this evening we will be forced to turn to holy imagination to fill in the details.

So here are the details I imagine.  I imagine Mary was raised in a smart family, a strategic family.  A family with backbone.  Mary’s family knew that if you weren’t careful, the world would sell you a bill of goods. I imagine that Mary was brought up knowing all about what not to believe, so that when she heard the words of the Angel Gabriel she would have some confidence in her assessment of his offer.  She would be ready.

Let us imagine Anne and Joachim passing on smart family wisdom to Mary at idle moments in conversation.  While washing clothes with Mary, Anne might happen to mention something about how there aresome bad angels out there and you have to make sure you only listen to the good ones. “Don’t let just any angel into your room to whisper sweet nothings to you” she might say, “Hold out for the one you can trust.” 

Joachim might lecture her on the way to the village: “Don’t let the angel of sentiment get to you.  He will tell you that you are pretty and God has a plan for your life, and you won’t notice until after he is gone that he never mentioned the salvation of the world.  Hold out for the salvation of the whole world, do you hear me? Don’t let some half-baked angel give you some silly version of personal redemption. Don’t imagine yourself as the star of some insipid religious picture.  We’re looking for an angel who brings real life to the people of God.”

Or on the way back from the fields, Joachim might say to Mary, “Don’t let the angel of complacency visit.  He will tell you that there is no need for a birth, no need for the shame or the mess or the misunderstanding.  You’re better than that and so is God.  Make him work. Don’t settle for anything less than incarnation.”

This family has favorite sayings, I imagine. “Don’t let the angel of certainty mislead you,” they might comment from time to time. “If you understand God’s plan, it’s not really God’s plan.”  These aphorisms are like glue that hold the family together in my mind.

I can imagine Anne turning to Mary late one night with real concern, maybe noticing a tendency she doesn’t like: “Mary, beware the angel of pointless self-annihilation.  God will ask enough of you without invoking maudlin fantasies about female unworthiness.”

Maybe Anne was able to give hints about what the perfect angelic encounter would feel like: “You’ll know that even though the angel is talking to you, it’s not about you.  But not being about you will be the most profound validation you’ve ever felt. It will have nothing to do with self-abasement.”

Maybe they taught her to ask questions if she needed time to think.  “ ‘How can this be?’ always works.  Don’t be afraid to make space to ponder if you need it.”

It’s clear they taught her the perfect biblical response.  “Ultimately, when you’re sure, say ‘Here I am.’ The expression in Hebrew is ‘hineni.’  It’s what all the prophets say when they are ready to accept God’s call.  Don’t forget that one.  Claim your prophetic lineage.  Even if you’re just a young girl when the angel arrives, square your shoulders and throw back your chin and show up for duty.  Say it calmly: ‘Here I am, the servant of the Lord.’”

And then: “Say ‘Let it be’ –Do you hear how you sound like the creator himself when you use that expression?—‘Let it be with me according to your word.’  An elegant balance of power and submission.”  

I can imagine, I want to imagine, somehow, that they had prepared Mary to receive the angel, and to know that the angel was true.  I can imagine that they had worked to shield her from false promises, and to make sure she was up to the challenge of coming to terms with her creator.  

But of course none of these little training sessions ever happened.  What seems semi-earnestly to me to be reasonable, prudent parenting, is apparently of no interest at all to God.  I want to fortify the poor girl, strengthen her, add some resources to the picture.  But in the end, parental advice or no, when the Angel arrives it’s just Mary in that room, just Mary and the angel.  Gabriel will be short on detail, and Mary will have only a few sentences in which to hear, ponder, ask, and cooperate.  Apparently in God’s eyes, and Luke’s, training is a luxury we don’t need and shouldn’t want.

Can this be all there is for Mary, then?  And is this true for us too?  Can the Holy Spirit arrive on such short notice and find us so unrehearsed?  Are we this vulnerable to the indwelling of God among us?  Is God so casual?

I ask, because it doesn’t seem a simple thing to me these days to receive the Spirit of the Lord.  I run classes, you know, for people who are being confirmed and received and baptized as adults, and I’m astonished sometimes by the sheer audacity of a person coming forward to be sealed as Christ’s own forever.  Sure, we have classes, but how can we ever have enough?

In this world?  To bear God’s presence? To measure the distance between the life of Christ that you know is growing in you, and the life of the world that feels so grotesquely astray? How can this be? How, indeed, can it be that the spirit of God should dwell in us and we should dwell in this time and place.

If you’re hoping that by the end of the sermon I have a trick for softening this assessment of the present day and our place in it, let me assure you, I do not.  I have just this one thing to offer.  Mary had no training for the visit of the angel, but we do have her example.  We do know that a teenage girl, all by herself, asked the right questions and gave the right answers and was highly favored among women.  

We do know that even though she was young and confused, she squared her shoulders, lifted her head, and said “Let it be to me according to your word.”  An elegant balance of power and submission, a God-like “fiat” with which she consented to the renewal of all creation.

If the world has you cast down, remember that long ago in a room a young girl simply got on with her work as a follower of God.  She did not look for a more reasonable proposition.  She did not cast about for invitations from angels that offered sentiment or complacency.   It simply was for her, according to the angel’s word.  

Let me just say what the church has always said.  Turn to Mary for guidance.  Profit from her example.  Let her, let the church, offer the instruction you need in going on with the work.  Let it be for you, for all of us, according to the word God speaks.

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
25 March 2019
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Posted on March 26, 2019 .

Sanctuaries of Slowness

The saying goes, that if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  This quip is sometimes said to articulate the so-called “law of the instrument,” which asserts that we tend to rely a great deal on the tools and approaches with which we are most familiar, or have most readily to hand, whether or not that’s what the situation calls for.

You can translate this maxim into different metaphors.  For instance, you could say that if all you have is an ax, everything looks like a tree.

I think you can also translate the properties of the expression into military terms.  If all you have is a weapon, everything looks like a target.  At least, that’s the gloss that I can add to William Davies’s excellent piece in the Times last month, entitled “Everything Is War and Nothing Is True.”*  In his piece, Davies considers “the rising profile of the military in [the] domestic politics” of various nations around the world, including the U.S. and his own nation, Great Britain.

In the church we are - or at least we ought to be - always concerned with peace.  Peace in its various expressions must be a priority for those of us who are the inheritors of the gift of Christ’s peace, which was given to us with the gift of the Holy Spirit.  After all, every day we invoke God’s blessing by asking for the gift of God’s peace, which passes all understanding.

If all you have is Jesus, everything should look like peace.  If only it were that simple.

One aspect of modern society that has abetted a rising militaristic profile, according to William Davies, is the great speed with which information travels these days.  The constant high-speed exchange of information tends to emphasize or reinforce conditions of conflict.  He says: “war demands a... paranoid system of expertise and knowledge....  In situations of conflict, the most valuable attribute of knowledge is... that it is up to the minute and aids rapid decision making.”  He goes on to say that “the conditions that most lend themselves to military responses are those in which time is running out.”

Unexpectedly, the Gospel this morning seems to me to provide just such a situation in which time is running out.  It hardly seems dire, since the time that’s running out is the time for a fig tree that has produced no figs.  But, still, for the tree, it is a matter of life and death.  The owner of the fig tree (a man, wouldn’t you know it?) has decided that time has run out for this barren tree, which has produced no fruit for three years running.  He calls to his gardener and instructs him clearly, “Cut it down!”  Now, I don’t know that the only tool the owner has is an ax, but it sure feels that way to me.

Mind you, there is a reason we read this piece of the Gospel in Lent.  Jesus has just said to the people who have gathered to listen to him that “unless you repent, you will all perish.”  And the church means for us to overhear this foreboding call to repentance as though it is intended for us, which it is.

If the only threat you’ve got is death and hell, then every problem looks like work for the grim reaper, I guess.

But if you want to know whether or not Jesus has more tools in his belt, all you have to do is keep reading.  For, immediately he begins to tell this parable of the barren fig tree, as if to drive the point home.  The owner of the barren fig tree renders judgment, and sentences the tree to perish: “Cut that tree down, since it bears no fruit!  Why should it be wasting the soil?  Time has run out!”  And the gardener swung his ax at the root of the tree, and with a single mighty blow, it fell to the ground!

That’s what Jesus should have said to drive his point home: that unless you repent you will perish.  But, of course, that is not what Jesus said.  Instead, Jesus tells us about the gardener (who may in fact have been in possession of an ax).  And what the gardener says to the owner of the fig tree that bore no figs, strangely does not immediately reinforce the lesson that time is running out, and that for the tree, the end is near. 

“Sir,” the gardener says, “let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it.  If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.”

When I hear this parable I hear the inclination of violence, impatience, and anger interrupted and soothed by the gifts of mercy, forgiveness, and hope.  This ought to sound like good news to us.

If all you have is manure, maybe everything looks like a garden.

Put the parable in William Davies’s terms.  The owner is aware of the tree’s past poor performance.  There is money to be made from a tree or a vine that could be planted in that soil that would actually bear fruit.  And so, there is conflict.  A certain paranoid system of knowledge and expertise suits the owner’s purposes. He is in possession of up-to-the-minute information on the fruitfulness of the tree.  Rapid decision making is called for.  Time is running out.  So cut that tree down!  I mean, I suppose I am overstating the point a little bit, but that is what I do!  But if you look at this little parable through a certain lens, you can see how combative it is.  Time is running out.  And life and death are on the line.

Update the story, so the ax is not in the hands of the gardener, but mounted on a robotic tree-feller that has been programmed to eliminate fruitless trees, and it begins to take on more urgency, especially if you are the gardener, and you think the tree should live.  And even more poignantly if you are the tree!  And the robotic tree-feller is on the way!  Time is running out!  What is to be done?!?!

William Davies says that it is just such a “culture of an over-accelerated public sphere,” enabled “by technologies that we don’t know how to slow” that “is partly responsible for making democracy feel more like combat.”

Wait!  When did this sermon become about democracy?  OK.  Sorry, it hasn’t become a sermon about democracy.

But, if Davies is correct, and we are living in a world in which it often feels as though Everything Is War and Nothing Is True, then doesn’t the Gospel of Jesus Christ - who is the Prince of Peace - doesn’t our Gospel have something to say to such a world?  Especially if life and death are on the line?

Yes, the Gospel of Jesus Christ does have something vital, life-giving, merciful, and hopeful to say to a world in which Everything Is War and Nothing Is True!  To the controller of the robotic tree-feller who is causing time to run out for the tree, the Gospel has this to say, with some urgency: “Sir, let it alone!  Let it alone for one more year, at least.  Until I dig around it, and nourish it, and tend to its needs.  Let it alone for one more year, and let’s just see if it doesn’t bear fruit. Let it alone.  Let it be.  Let it be.  Let it be.”

Toward the end of his insightful article, Davies speaks of war and peace.  He writes, “the separation of war from peace that laid the ground for liberal democracy to develop was originally a legal achievement, whereas now it also requires defending sanctuaries of slowness.”

Sanctuaries of slowness.  It’s those last three words that brought you this sermon - “sanctuaries of slowness” -  since the gardener in the parable of the barren fig tree seems to me to be the caretaker, even the protector, of a sanctuary of slowness, when he tells the owner of the tree to let it alone for one more year.  Let it be.  Let it be.  Let it be.

And of course, you are the tree.  And I am the tree.  And sometimes the circumstances of the world, and technologies that we don’t know how to slow make it seem like time is running out for you and for me.  It makes it seem like Everything Is War and Nothing Is True.  And if you are the tree, if I am the tree, then this could be a question of life or death.

It is a matter of God’s unfathomable loving kindness that he calls us to inhabit, if we are able, and as much as we will allow it, sanctuaries of slowness within his church.  It can sometimes be difficult for us to see this slowness as a blessing, since we live in a “culture of an over-accelerated public sphere,” among technologies that we don’t know how to slow.

But it is in the sanctuaries of slowness that the wisdom to make peace instead of war will be found.

It is in the sanctuaries of slowness that the hope for life will overcome the forces of death.

And it is in the sanctuaries of slowness that we will find, with the aid of one who has been mistaken for a gardener before, that Everything Is Not War and Something Is True.

We have that Truth.  In fact, it is nearly all we have.

And if all we have is Jesus; shouldn’t everything start to look like peace?

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

* “Everything Is War and Nothing Is True,” by William Davies in The New York Times, Feb 23, 2019


Posted on March 24, 2019 .