The Good News Is For Sharing

Quite recently I had to prepare to give a talk on the Anglo-catholic tradition for the Sunday morning adult formation session at a prominent New York City Parish that has recently placed six candlesticks on the High Altar, where for more than a hundred years there had only been two.

In preparing to talk about this tradition, into which Saint Mark’s was born, I found a study by researchers who looked at seven Anglo-catholic parishes in London that have recently experienced modest growth.  But these seven parishes were exceptional among the 413 parishes of the Diocese of London, and particularly among Anglo-catholic parishes.  The researches stated at the outset, “we had great difficulty finding many Anglican Catholic parishes which had grown consistently over the last five years.”*  The growth in the seven parishes was modest, but it seems to be sustained, for the time being.

I was struck by a phrase early in the report that characterized the parishes, and which sounded mighty familiar to me.  The researchers wrote that the parishes they looked at “have not  watered down their faith or even engaged in anything particularly revolutionary.  Instead they have assumed that the good news is for sharing, engaged with their local communities, been imaginative about children’s work, especially through choirs and music… and stewarded their resources.”  Saint Mark’s could wear this description pretty comfortably over the last ten years.  And today, on our patronal feast, as we celebrate the life of the parish, it’s good to hear our own experience echoed a bit by our brothers and sisters in London.

Since our patron saint happens to be an evangelist, I am particularly struck by that first clause in the description of the growing Anglo-catholic parishes.  The researchers said that those parishes “assumed that the good news is for sharing.”  I suppose it has to be said of St. Mark that he assumed the good news was for sharing.  If he had not operated from that assumption, we could wonder whether or not any of us would be gathered here, since it was St. Mark who first set down the good news of Jesus in writing.  Yes, he assumed the good news was for sharing.

As the ages roll by, I suppose it was to be expected that not only would people forget that the good news is for sharing, a lot of them would forget that it’s good news.  Most people I know could put up with Jesus if he would sit quietly and issue bland moral teachings.  Jesus as Sunday school teacher looks like palatable religion to a lot of people these days.  But the Jesus who refuses to command anything but love,  and who teaches that the way of love is the way of the Cross, which is a way of suffering and self-denial, that his power is made perfect in weakness, and whose breath brings the gift of peace, not of power… this Jesus is harder to stomach.  The image of the dying, bleeding, crucified Jesus is not obviously and unavoidably chirpy, and so it can be difficult for some to see it as a symbol of good news.  And in a society that has been successfully trained be consumers above all else, the call to worship, the need for redemption, and the hope of salvation are not the kind of news that most people are consuming.  So, how can they be good news?  Unable to decide (even in the church) whether the news we have received is good, the impulse to share it is not as strong as it once was.

Throughout the church in America - whether catholic, or protestant, or something else - it is not so easy to find the assumption that the good news is for sharing.  In  fact, you’ll find plenty of people who are deeply embarrassed by past generations who thought this way, and thus have decided that it might be better not to share.  And so we live in a culture that’s eager to share news of almost every kind, and has made that sharing easier than ever, but which is deeply reluctant to share the good news of Jesus Christ, and not wholly convinced that the news is all that good anyway.  Which is why we need St. Mark, why we need evangelists.

Twice in the first fifteen verses of his account of Jesus, Saint Mark uses the term “good news” to describe what he is writing about.  As I open my study Bible to the first Chapter of Mark, it tells me that “the gospel (ie the good news) begins with John’s call to repentance.”**  Undoubtedly this statement is correct.  But you could also reverse the statement and it would be still be true: as Mark presents it, John’s call to repentance begins with the claim that it is good news (ie the gospel).  And the verses we read tonight conclude with the words from John the Baptist’s lips, “the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

These words are much more challenging than at first they appear to be.  Honestly, does anyone here assume that the time has come? Whatever that means?  Can we really say that we assume that the kingdom of God has come near?  Do most of us assume that we have much to repent for?  And what can we possibly assume about what it means to believe in the Gospel?  Can I assume that you also mean by that whatever I mean by that?  None of this is actually obvious.

Toward the end of the report on the seven growing Anglo-catholic parishes in London, the writers report that “most church growth in London is driven by large evangelical churches and there are no corresponding large Anglican Catholic parishes doing the same..”  In fact, the report makes it clear that their “research in London found few growing parishes.”   And they asked if larger Anglo-catholic parishes could play a greater role in church growth.  “There are a number of lively Anglican Catholic parishes,” they wrote, “with regular Sunday attendance of 200 - 400.  Our research did not identify significant growth amongst this group nor did it find much evidence of systematic church planting or growth initiatives to benefit other parishes.  It raises the question as to whether these larger, better resourced, Anglican Catholic Churches could play a more active role in promoting growth within the tradition.”

Yes, it does raise that question, indeed.

If only such churches assumed that the good news is for sharing!

On this patronal feast, we have this assumption to give thanks for, and to continue to pray for.  We have followed our patron’s example, and we have assumed that the good news is for sharing. This assumption, and this sharing  have been good for us.  And they have led us repeatedly beyond our gates on Locust Street to help and support and expand the church in other places, like Clearfield Street, and like Bainbridge Street, and like Honduras.  All because we assume that the good news is for sharing, as our patron did.

And if I am not mistaken, that assumption has repeatedly been proven to be true, for when we act on it, we discover that the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near, as it has here on Locust Street for 172 years. 

Thanks be to God, and let us keep on assuming that the good news is for sharing!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
Feast of Saint Mark the Evangelist, 2019
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

* “A Time to Sow: Anglican Catholic Church Growth in London” by Tim Thorlby, Oct 2017 for the Centre for Theology & Community, p. xix

** Oxford Annotated Bible, RSV

Word of God

If I had a nickel for every time I said something I couldn’t live up to, I’d have a lot of nickels.  It happens a lot at faculty meetings, sometimes in the classroom, and not infrequently from the pulpit.  Actually I speak rashly a lot, wherever I am.

Maybe that’s why I feel a particular sense of sympathy for Thomas in John’s Gospel.  Sure, he was a bit vehement (“I won’t believe until I put my hands in his sides!) but his reaction to the news of Jesus’s resurrection is really just one of those things that people say.  Hyperbole, we call it, when you exaggerate without intending to be literal about it. The Gospels are actually full of hyperbole. Matthew the Evangelist is possibly the champion hyperbolist—If your eye offends you, cut it out!   If your arm offends you, cut it off!—but even here in John’s Gospel there are examples of hyperbole. The woman at the well in John’s fourth chapter is eager to testify to Jesus’s wisdom: “He told me everything I had ever done!” she says to her friends.  That’s hyperbole. Jesus surely didn’t talk to her about everything she had ever done, he just noted that she had had five husbands. That’s not everything, though we can agree it’s a lot. “All men come to him” say the disciples of Jesus in John 3:26. That’s hyperbole.  Lots of people came to Jesus but famously not everyone. John 12: “Behold, the world came after him.” Hyperbole again.

If you’re wondering whether I’ve recently gotten hold of a handbook of figures of speech in the Bible, the answer is yes, I have (E.W. Bullinger, Figures of Speech Used in the Bible)

Let’s keep going.  Here are the final sentences of John’s entire Gospel: “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.”  It’s a funny thing about hyperbole.  It’s not hard to tell that there is exaggeration creeping in.  The language is usually, obviously, false. It points to something extraordinary—the deeds of Jesus that surpass our imagining—but the language itself falls flat.  “The whole world wouldn’t be big enough to hold the books.” It’s strangely childlike and obvious. Almost boastful.

But here’s my point: the scriptures are full of hyperbole and other exaggerated forms of speech, so it’s strange that Jesus takes Thomas literally when he says he wants to stick his fingers in the resurrected messiah’s wounds.  Who would take that literally? In fact, the text never tells us that Thomas himself took it literally, that he actually put his fingers in the wounds of Jesus. The invitation is apparently enough to overwhelm the poor disciple.  So why does Jesus get so literal here? Why even make the offer? Wouldn’t it have been enough for the risen Lord just to show up?

It feels a bit like Thomas is being taken down a notch, doesn’t it?  His rash speech, his big boast about not being gullible, his childish declaration of superiority, it all suddenly becomes an unimaginable encounter with Jesus, crucified and risen from the dead.  It’s as though, after the resurrection, the little boasts and figures of speech we use start to wear thin, as the Word of God himself exceeds anything we can imagine or say about him. It’s as though, after the resurrection, all speaking about God is a kind of childish boasting.  Big tough skeptics, we are, with our doubts and our need for signs.

But there is another way to think about Thomas’s seemingly-empty speech here.  We could think about the Word of God, and how the Word of God is a figure of interest in John’s Gospel, right from the beginning.  You remember: in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.  

Is it too much to imagine that the word of Thomas here is being made flesh in the person of Jesus?  

It sounds odd or even blasphemous, but really this is something we live with all the time as Christians.  “The Lord be with you,” we say, or “God bless you,” and sure enough the Lord is with us, and God does bless us.  No, we don’t usually have the kind of physical encounter that Thomas does, but we do have the presence and blessing of God, reliably.  We may speak these words without much thought sometimes but our thoughtlessness does not mean that God’s response is constrained. If Thomas’s experience is any indicator, we should live our lives expectantly, waiting for the moments in which our risen savior fulfills our half-serious language of faith.  It could happen at any moment that we discover that the words we have spoken without strong intention have been taken up and made real. And maybe, like Thomas, we would find that fulfillment as disconcerting as it is wonderful. As Oscar Wilde wrote, “it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth.

Surely when Thomas spoke so glibly about the wounds in the body of his Lord, he wasn’t picturing the intimacy and love and vulnerability of Jesus right there with him.  

“The Body of Christ,” we say, as we distribute the consecrated bread from the altar.  Most of us try to take that one as seriously as we can, but surely we too are underestimating the power of his presence.  We in the Church speak the words that the Word himself has given us to say: “This is my body.” We break him in our own hands.  And we do everything we can liturgically to mark the fullness of the language of our prayer. We genuflect and bow and cross ourselves.  The incense rises. We kneel and receive. We allow reverence and tenderness and awe to fill us. “Amen,” we say, which is a way of repeating what Thomas says, “My Lord and my God.”

But even so, even though we strain to speak our words of faith as fully as possible, we know that we have spoken only the merest fraction of the truth.  We know that Jesus waits to fulfill his promise of presence within us, and that our lives as disciples are subject to the interruption of his visitation.  

There is another key sentence in this morning’s Gospel that can sound like an offhand remark, but we would do well to take it as seriously as we can.  Blessed are those who have not seen, but have believed. It sounds again like hyperbole. You think Thomas’s story is important? Just wait until you have a story of your own!  But I tell you truly: Jesus himself will make those words fulfilled, by his presence here among us today and always. Jesus himself will be the guarantor of their veracity.

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
The Second Sunday of Easter, 2019
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Easter Monarch

Two things you can be thankful for on this Easter morning.  First, you can be thankful that you are not a monarch butterfly.  And second, you can be thankful that you do not have to preach this morning.

On that second point, you can be especially thankful that it has not been on your mind for months, now, to interpret the Good News of the Resurrection through the plight of the monarch butterfly.  More specifically, you can be thankful that on January 25th of this year (when Christmas was still only a recent memory, and before Lent had even begun), you can be thankful that it did not come into your mind that the monarch butterfly had something to say to you about Easter.  Fortunately for you, you did not not jot down a message to yourself on a yellow Post-It and put it on your desk-top monitor.  The Post-It note was in reference to an article you may or may not have read all the way through to the end; an article the title of which was a question: “Are We Watching the End of the Monarch Butterfly?”

Butterflies - with their homely caterpillar beginnings, their shroud-like cocoons, their process of metamorphoses, and their glorious, multi-colored lives on-the-wing would seem to be obvious conveyors of good news, obvious collaborators of the Resurrection.  You would think so; wouldn’t you?

If you had been reading the New York Times on January 25 of this year, and an alarming story of the decline of the monarch butterfly population chanced across your field of vision, who knows if it would have put you in mind of Easter.  You would surely have taken the author at her word that “the total number of West Coast monarchs was estimated at approximately 4.5 million in the 1980s. [But] in the latest count, that number fell to 28,429.”  You would have noted with alarm that the particular location in northern California that the article mentioned, which had been visited the previous year by 12,360 migrating monarch butterflies, was this year visited by only 1,256 monarch butterflies.  You might have noticed the use of the words “migration” and “collapse” and thought about the parallel situation of bee colony collapse that has plagued honey bees across the globe.

You might have remembered that you have once before preached an Easter sermon about honey bees, and wondered if the whole insect-thing might be played out as a sermon illustration.  But never mind!  Who would not be woke by the startling news that these gorgeous monarch butterflies could be on their way to extinction?  And who wouldn’t look for hope among the orange, stained-glass-window-wings of these marvelous creatures of God’s handiwork?

Would it surprise you, then, months later, when you dutifully took account of the Post-It note you had been staring at for months… that when you delved a bit more deeply into the thought that had first crossed your mind on January 25, 2019… that among the very first pieces of information you would come across would be an article, posted by no less a reliable source than the World Wildlife Fund that reports that the population of monarch butterflies is “on the rise.”  And would it surprise you to see that the date of this article was - wait for it - January 30, 2019: five days after a headline in the New York Times had sounded the alarm that the end might be in sight for our winged friends?

Furthermore, the World Wildlife Fund could not be clearer in its reporting that “because we can’t count butterflies individually, we instead measure the area of forest they occupy during hibernation.”  But the numbers 28,429, 12,360, and 1,256, had sure sounded like carefully counted numbers to me!

It’s hard to discern how God is using the plight of the monarch butterfly to speak to you about the Resurrection of Jesus if you can’t even tell if things are getting better or worse for the butterflies.  And if we can’t tell what’s happening with monarch butterflies, how can we possibly make any sense of Jesus in a world that is pretty profoundly unsure about him, and a church that is often feeble in its attempts to convey why the world should care?

So let’s look at the primary source material.  St. Luke provides us with a shocking detail about what happened on that Easter morning.  The women who first discovered that Jesus was not in his tomb went and told his innermost circle.  And Luke tells us about the reaction of those closest associates and friends of Jesus, he tells us that when the women brought news that the tomb was empty, “these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.”

But Peter, dear Peter, one of the Lord’s closest friends, who had sworn to go with him, even unto death.  Peter, the rock on whom Jesus said he would build the church; the man who had walked for a few steps on the water, so strong was his faith, before it faltered.  Peter, bold and brash, who had vowed to go with Jesus even unto death.  Peter was incited by the women’s news.  He “got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves.”

And then, in first blush of the Resurrection, when the event that would change the course of the world was in its first moments, as the salvation of the world was beginning to unfold, in the warm light of the first sunrise of the first day of a new creation, as it became evident that God was performing a new thing, that death was being conquered and hell was being vanquished, as it began to become apparent that the claims Jesus had made that on the third day he would rise from the dead were quite possibly true, and as Peter became one of only a small handful of people ever to see the evidence with his own eyes.  St. Luke tells us what Peter did.  He tells us… “then he went home.”  Wow!

Having registered the fact that the Body of Christ was not there, that the stone had been rolled away, and the tomb was empty, and the Lord was risen indeed….

… Peter went home.  Which is to say that Peter did exactly what you and I are planning to do today.  Once the news of the Resurrection was out, with all its glorious implications for Peter and all humanity… then he went home.

Maybe he had a nap.  Wow!

On the twentieth of February - twenty-one days after the World Wildlife Fund contradicted the New York Times on the question of the health and well-being of monarch butterflies - the New Yorker magazine climbed on the bandwagon.  Oh, the New Yorker….  Of course, the New Yorker put things in perspective, explaining that while the overall trend in monarch butterfly population has been plummeting for decades, there have been some very recent good signs.  And they reported that it’s possible that last year’s precipitous plunge may not be as disastrous as it seems.  The New Yorker article asked what is actually a useful question: “why anyone should care” about the details of the monarch butterfly population, since, in the words of the expert  quoted in the article, “monarchs probably don’t have big-picture ecosystem importance.”

The answer they came up with was fairly simple: “just the fact that they connect people to nature is reason enough to make us care….  When people stop caring, things are going to get worse a lot faster.”

Every year, like butterflies, we make our own spiritual migration to the empty tomb.  We follow the women who first went there.  And we follow St. Peter.  It sometimes feels to me as though those of us who make this journey share a plight with the monarch butterflies - there are fewer and fewer of us.  But we know about this faith that we have placed in the risen Christ, and about the church which has tried (sometimes feebly) to live a life worthy of him.   What we know is that when we stop caring about Jesus things get worse a lot faster.  But, in a world in which truth is hard to come by, perhaps we know more than that.  

Here we are in first blush of the Resurrection: the event that would change the course of the world, the salvation of the world is beginning to unfold, we have enjoyed the warm light of the first sunrise of the first day of a new creation.   God is performing a new thing.  Death is being conquered!  Hell is being vanquished!  

And yet, we know exactly what’s going to happen at the end of this Mass: we’re all going to go home.  

I’m going to have a nap.

But while I’m napping, I might dream that I’m a homely caterpillar.  I might see myself in my shroud-like cocoon.  I might witness in my dream the gradual process of metamorphoses that I must go through to become the butterfly I was made to be.

And I might see myself, in my Easter dream, unfurl my gorgeous, glorious, orange-hued, stained-glass-window-wings, that can carry me further than I have any right to be able to travel with so little engineering.  I might begin to believe, in my dream, during my nap, on Easter Day, that, like a monarch butterfly, I, too, could live a life-on-the-wing, and become an  obvious collaborator of the Resurrection.  I believe that’s why God has called us on this yearly migration.

And I believe that the news of our demise is greatly exaggerated; which was exactly what the women ran to tell the men about Jesus, when they’d seen the stone rolled away - that the news of his demise was greatly exaggerated.  It’s why Peter ran to the empty tomb.  And it’s why it’s perfectly alright to go home after Mass on Easter Day, and even to nap.  As long as we dream of a resurrection, of a life-on-the-wing.  And when we wake up, we should be ready to fly!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
Easter Day 2019
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia