Pasting the Scraps Back Together

Just six years before his death in 1826, Thomas Jefferson finished a project he had begun nearly twenty years before. Jefferson had been compiling his own version of the Bible by literally cutting and pasting verses from the Gospels and reassembling them to create a harmonized version of Jesus’ life. I imagine Jefferson hunched over his desk at Monticello, laboring fastidiously with the light of reason pouring in through the transparent neo-Classical windows. Working from Greek, Latin, French, and English versions of the Gospels, one of Jefferson’s goals was to create a chronological account of Jesus’ life, as he titled it, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.

If the title sounds a bit reductionist to you, then you would not be off the mark. Jefferson was so steeped in Enlightenment thought that it governed every aspect of his cut-and-paste endeavor. But in his Scriptural compilation, Jefferson was not just creating a harmonized account of Jesus’ life from four quite different Gospel accounts. Jefferson was also excising those parts of the Gospels that did not seem reasonable or natural to him, particularly those parts that emphasized Jesus’ divinity. There is no walking on water or miraculous healing in the Jefferson Bible. The story of Jesus ends with his being laid in the tomb. There is nothing beyond it. The product of Jefferson’s adventures with a razor presents a picture of Jesus that is more like a very good and wise person than the Son of God.

It seems that Jefferson regarded Jesus only as a teacher of moral precepts. There’s no mystery to him. There’s no undue harshness to his teaching that might prick our complacency. There’s no evidence that in the person of Jesus God’s kingdom breaks uncomfortably into this world in order to bring about a revolution in human life. As Jefferson himself noted about his finished product, “[t]here will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently [Jesus’], and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill.”[1] This sounds, well, very civilized, very elegant, very tame, and very understated.

In the Jefferson Bible, Jesus may say harsh things at times, but with all the supernatural cut out, Jesus is never strange. He is never so wonderfully odd as to embody a heavenly kingdom that upends the world’s values in any kind of dramatic way. Jefferson refrains from featuring Scripture verses that seem discordant or, on the surface, at odds with other sayings of Jesus. His intention to harmonize the Gospels has the effect of blunting the sharp edges of Jesus’ challenging teaching and making Jesus rather like a gentlemanly moral philosopher.

It should be no surprise, then, that Jefferson conveniently omits Jesus’ saying that he has come not to bring peace but the sword. Jefferson literally took the sharp edge of a razor to the pointed words that we hear Jesus utter in his Missionary Discourse. This is where the rubber hits the road for his disciples, where the life of discipleship gets tough. So one might briefly sympathize with Jefferson in overlooking an uncomfortable line. Jesus’ words here are not easy to digest. They’re not easily comprehended, and they seem patently at odds with what he says just a few chapters before in the Sermon on the Mount. And Jesus’ words also seem to be indirectly and uneasily addressed to us, too, and not just to his immediate disciples.

So, it begs the question, how did we move from a Jesus extolling peace to a Jesus who says that he did not come to bring peace but a sword? Is this Jesus who brings a sword the same Jesus who, after his arrest, told one of his companions to sheathe his sword after he cut off the ear of the high priest’s slave? Is this the same Jesus who bids peace to his disciples in his post-resurrection appearances to them?

It also seems a cruel trick of the lectionary that on this Father’s Day, we hear Jesus say that he has come to “set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.” Believe me when I tell you that I had to tackle this one for a children’s homily, and it was not easy.

If we’re honest with ourselves, I imagine we don’t like Jesus’ language here. It’s not civilized enough, and well, it seems a little violent. Just as I wrestled with whether to shield the precious ears of children from Jesus’ harsh words, I suspect that many of us have a strong tendency to domesticate Jesus from time to time. “Jesus, did you actually intend to say that? Could you please clarify what you really mean?” Or we chalk up Jesus’ harsh words to editing by an angry Matthew or a terse Mark. Like Jefferson, we might be tempted to take some sharp scissors to the provocative verses that we hear today. Why not just conveniently gloss over them, or pretend like Jesus didn’t mean what he said?

But, thankfully, we’re not dealing with the Jefferson Bible. We have been handed a wondrously strange text by tradition, and so what if we were to see the challenging parts as a spiritual gift to us? Origen, an early Christian scholar, suggested that when we are stuck in trying to make sense of a troubling passage of Scripture, God calls us to go deeper into the text. The challenge in the text is a sign that there is something we have yet to understand and that the Holy Spirit will eventually reveal to us. If we take a cue from Origen, what is it that we can learn from today’s Gospel text? What is Jesus really saying?

For starters, we might feel the uncomfortable prick of the sword imagery that Jesus offers us. Whereas Thomas Jefferson took a sharp razor and removed the parts of the Bible that did not suit his moderate and refined ways, we might paste those jagged parts back together and let the sword of Jesus’ dissonant and confusing words needle our conscience and challenge our complacency.

We have plenty in Jesus’ words to comfort and reassure us, but nobody ever said that the good news wouldn’t hurt a bit, too. That same word of God that Jesus uttered and embodied is also “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow.”[2] At times, Jesus’ word is going to cause some pain. If we don’t feel the pain from time to time, it’s probably not the Gospel.

But we can also readily assume that Jesus doesn’t enjoin us to commit physical violence against one another or to foment divisions. Jesus is telling us something else. His sharp word pierces our politeness and our elegant living with a sword of truth that cuts right through our usual etiquette.

If we can assume that Jesus himself is not initiating violence or wielding a physical sword, then we might conclude that Jesus’ very presence wreaks havoc on all neatly constructed systems and relations that reject God’s truth. Like it or not, in Jesus, God’s kingdom has pierced the veil between this world and the next. And to our eyes, what seems to be disorder and division is really the unintended effect of God re-ordering this resistant world as it should be.

Anyone who has followed God’s call has probably known the pain that occurs when the Gospel unsheathes its sword of truth. Perhaps it’s a severed relationship when a corrective word is spoken to a friend in the face of injustice. Jesus’ word takes a sword to the exclusive bonds of clans and cliques in which we protect ourselves, especially when they suppress the voices of the marginalized. You see, anyone who loses their life for the sake of the Gospel will know that a sword comes with it.

And this sword doesn’t stop there. This sword cuts at our safe definition of peace, sharpens its meaning, and hands us a new one that tells us something about God’s peace, not our so-called peace. As the past few weeks have shown us, the church has for too long adopted a safe version of peace, which is really no peace at all. The demure Jesus of this peace is eerily similar to the genteel, elegant, and reasoned voice of Jefferson’s Jesus, doling out wisdom on how to live a balanced, ethical life but not making too many waves and certainly not walking on any.

Talking about peace, at least as we imperfectly understand it, can too easily lapse into a justification of the status quo and a defense of complacency. And so is it any wonder that we feel some degree of sympathy for Jefferson’s sharp razor when it tames Jesus down a bit? But such a neat, rational view of Jesus is devoid of God’s word of truth breaking into our world, as cutting as it may be. And there is no glorious but strange new kingdom that slices through the present atmosphere of spiritual malaise and confronts oppression.

The painful truth is that we can be at peace with those around us but in conflict with God. And that’s why we need a sword. We need Jesus’ sharp sword to disturb our cut-and-paste version of peace, which is no real peace. God’s peace looks very different, because it’s a peace that passes all understanding.

God’s peace demands a wholeness and completeness that suffers no person to be outside the circle. And until this peace is realized, it’s going to hurt. God’s word as Jesus has revealed it to us cuts through the hurtful and angry words we hurl at one another and reveals them for what they are. God’s word cuts and trims the complacency off our hearts until we have new ones. In God’s pruning process, the human family is reordered. Family tree lines are expanded in some places, new branches are added, and when God is finished with this genealogy project, we will see the restoration of one human family, not biological but grounded in the knowledge and love of God.

As the Book of Common Prayer urges us, let us not “make peace with oppression.”[3] Let us not settle for a compromised peace. Let us not shy away from the sharpness of the sword that cuts out our sin and slices through injustice.

And let us not stop striving for God’s peace, and nothing less, until our devotion to God is greater than family, clan, or friendships. For then we will see that family does matter to God, because when God finishes with us, our family will have become so much larger. And we will see that, in the end, God has pasted us all back together again, and no scraps are left out.

Preached by Father Kyle Babin
21 June 2020
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Bible

[2] Hebrews 4:12

[3] The Book of Common Prayer (1979), 260

Habeas Corpus Christi

On or around June 4, 1839, Thomas C. Wilson, a constable in the District of Columbia, arrested and detained in jail for the next week one Ralph Gould, on the pretext that Gould was a runaway slave.  In fact, Gould was a free black man who’d been born in Boston and served in the US Navy, and he had documentation to prove it.  After a week in jail, Gould petitioned the court for a writ of habeas corpus, a provision in law that requires a civil authority to bring the person in question physically before the court.

The intention behind the requirement of habeas corpus is that it protects individuals from illegal detention, giving a person the right to make his or her case to the courts that the powers that be have abused their authority.  It’s a right that American law inherited from English common law, and is protected in the US Constitution.  It was, apparently, not uncommon for free blacks to be kidnapped and sold into slavery (think of Twelve Years A Slave).  Recourse to a writ of habeas corpus was often used to protect against this particular aspect of the unjust system of slavery.

And on June 11, 1839, Judge William Cranch issued a writ of habeas corpus, requiring that Ralph Gould should appear before him.  At that appearance, Gould provided documentation of his status as a free man, and the judge ordered that he be discharged from custody.*

The phrase “habeas corpus” comes from medieval Latin, and is an abbreviation of a longer sentence that translates, “We command that you have the body of the detained brought before us.”  The “habeas corpus” part means “that you have the body.”  The power of a writ of habeas corpus could go both ways in antebellum America.  Slave owners could use it to prove ownership and regain custody of detained slaves.  But for Ralph Gould, it guaranteed his freedom.

There’s a linguistic intersection between that old Latin legal phrase and the name of the feast we celebrate today: Corpus Christi.  It is not always easy to know precisely what Jesus means when he says “I am the living bread... whoever eats of this bread will live for ever.”  And I wonder if it will help us if we borrow the phrase from the law that has already shown itself to be useful in the pursuit of freedom.

On March 14th of this year, in a manner of speaking, we made a petition for habeas corpus in this parish, when we brought out the Blessed Sacrament of the Body of our Lord, and asked him to be obviously and unavoidably present to us during uncertain times.

We knew that we were facing difficulty.  We knew we were in trouble, but we had no idea three months ago what that trouble might look like.

We didn’t know we were headed for month after month of sheltering-in-place, closed businesses, and worship behind closed doors.  We didn’t know that we were headed for many millions infected by the coronavirus, and more than 110,000 dead in this country.  We didn’t know that we were headed for crippling, mass unemployment and swift and drastic economic contraction.  We didn’t know that we were headed for a weekend of destructive looting, then a week of protest.   We didn’t know that we were headed for a government that would challenge the constitutional rights of the people.  We didn’t know that the cry that “black lives matter” would be taken up with such power by so many, or that the matter of police brutality would become so urgent, as it also became so real.  We didn’t know that tens of thousands of people would walk through this city in peaceful and powerful protest to demand justice, fairness, and equality under the law.  We didn’t know that three months later we’d be completely unable to predict when we might all be able to gather again in this church as one family to worship and praise the true and living God.

We only knew that we needed help.  We needed Jesus’ help - that much we knew.

And so, in our own version of a writ of habeas corpus, we had the Body of Jesus brought before us.  And there he has stood, night and day, for these last three months, in the flesh, making himself known to us, in the sound of sheer silence, ever steadfast, living up to his ancient name, Emmanuel: God with us.

Our plea of habeas corpus - to have the Body brought before us - was not a matter of either Christian legalism or of piety run amok.  It was, rather a statement of faith that Jesus was telling the truth when he said, “the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” 

You’d have thought that the Christian impulse for habeas corpus would have been pioneered by old Doubting Thomas, who insisted on seeing the risen Jesus, and demanded to be allowed to feel for himself the proof of the wounds of the Crucifixion.  But actually, we learned the lesson from Jesus himself when he took bread and said “This is my Body,” and then commanded his followers to “do this in remembrance of me.”  And every time we approach the altar for communion, we make our own silent petition for habeas corpus, a petition that will never be denied, and that has always brought with it freedom.

Today it’s 181 years and three days since Ralph Gould was granted a writ of habeas corpus, got his life back, and re-gained his freedom.  If something as simple as a writ of legal habeas corpus could result in one man’s freedom, just imagine what  can happen for us when we ask to have Christ’s Body brought to us, when we bask in his communion, and learn from his love, and are given the limitless power of his life.

To some people, our elaborate attention to a little wafer of bread in this church looks strange and over-zealous.  I am not sure those people realize how earnestly we believe Jesus when he said “the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”  And, yes, we are bold, to ask Jesus to present himself before us: to have his Body brought to us, because we need it… we need him.

That’s what today is, just another plea, in our journey toward the freedom that comes only from Christ, that we may have the Body of Christ brought before us.

Think of today as a petition from God’s people for a writ of habeas Corpus Christi.

And remember that every writ of habeas Corpus Christi is granted to those who have been fed by Christ’s sacred Body and nourished with his precious Blood.  Indeed our prayer to have the Body of Christ brought to us was answered before we were inclined to ask it, and before we knew we needed it.  Thanks be to God.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
The Solemnity of Corpus Christi, 2020
Saint Mark’s Church, Locust Street, Philadelphia

*Details about the writ of habeas corpus granted to Ralph Gould come from “‘You have the body’: Habeas Corpus Case Records of the US Circuit Court for the District of Columbia, 1829-1863” by Chris Naylor, from Prologue Magazine of the National Archives, Fall 2005, Vol 37, No 3, Genealogy Notes, found at www. archives.gov/publications

Judge Cranch’s order to release Ralph Gould, from the National Archives

Kissing Trinity

In a sermon on the Song of Songs, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, a 12th century monk, demonstrated remarkable imagination by perceiving in the very first line of this poem, attributed to King Solomon, insight into the relationship among the three persons of the Holy Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit).   “For my part I am convinced that no creature, not even an angel, is permitted to comprehend this secret of divine love, so holy and so august.” (Bernard).  But, he says of that love “...what can it comprise if not a kiss that is utterly sweet, but utterly a mystery as well?”  And I think this is our invitation today, to consider the love of the triune God that is utterly sweet and utterly a mystery as well.

The sermon Bernard preached was on the first verse of the Song of Songs,  “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.”  Bernard’s take on the beautiful poem is a bit fantastic, and lacks certain standards of modern scholarship that allow him to read into the notably erotic text a great deal that it’s hard to say is really there.  It’s a classic case of bringing something to the text that its author could never have intended.  A twelfth century French monk sees in a fifth century BC text attributed to King Solomon, a description of the love of God the Father and God the Son for one another, stemming from the doctrine of the Holy Trinity that wasn’t really taking shape until the 3rd century CE.  So let’s acknowledge a hefty dose of poetic license.  

But if Bernard takes a lot of license with the poem, it has to be said that for a monk he knows a lot about kissing.  He reminds us that “truly the kiss… is common both to him who kisses and to him who is kissed.”  And Bernard sees more than the relationship of the Father and the Son in the divine kiss, and at one point he paints a sort of word picture that produces a very clear image:

If, as is properly understood, the Father is he who kisses, the Son he who is kissed, then it cannot be wrong to see in the kiss the Holy Spirit, for he is the imperturbable peace of the Father and the Son, their unshakable bond, their undivided love, their indivisible unity.

Do you see the picture he’s painting?  The Father kisses the Son, and the Holy Spirit is the kiss itself, contained in the breath that is shared when Father kisses the Son with the kiss of the mouth.  Bernard was a monk, but he was also French, so it feels like he can be trusted here.  The French know their kisses!  We have heard that the double kiss on the cheek may be doomed by the recent imposition of social distancing in France.  But don’t count on it - they’ll be smooching again before long!

It’s so hard for us to think about God kissing.  For one thing, sometimes we are embarrassed when kissing takes place in front of us.  Also, the most famous kiss in the Bible is the kiss that Judas gives to Jesus to betray him.  Like anything wonderful, of course kisses can be abused.  We know this.

Theologians tend to talk about the three persons of the Trinity dancing with each other.  I’ve imagined them singing together before.  But presented with the possibility that the essential activity of the holy, blessed, glorious, eternal, and undivided Trinity is kissing, who can resist?  Not me.

Bernard was concerned with who’s kissing whom, and with what kind of kiss it is, which is all fine and well...  But I’m taken with the idea that one of the reasons God has revealed God’s self to us as a trinity of persons, is because the divine activity might consist largely of kissing.  And of course you need more than one to kiss!  

Of course, the reason Bernard’s image seems convincing is because we are already convinced that God is love.  And if God is love, why shouldn’t God spend lots of time kissing?  Of course God can be both giver and receiver of the kiss, and God can be the kiss itself.  If there are many mansions in God’s house, that I suppose there isn’t a one of them that God hasn’t kissed and been kissed in.

No matter how good or bad you are at kissing, one thing you know is that kisses bring us together.  It is notoriously difficult to kiss from afar.  And even if the substance of the kiss is the breath of the Holy Spirit, blowing a kiss will only ever get you so far.

The Book of Genesis reminds us that “God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.”  If we are made in God’s image, then does that imply that we are made for kissing.  I mean, for kissing God, and being kissed by God?  And if the Holy Spirit is the very kiss itself that the Father and the Son exchange with one another, isn’t it marvelous to think that that Spirit, that kiss, has been shared with us!  And isn’t it worth considering that God wants us all to be kissing more, which requires us to come together, to unite.

Since masks have become the ubiquitous accessory of the pandemic, for the moment this vocation - to kiss more - seems doomed.  But you can be prepared, at least, to kiss one another from six feet away, in fact it can make you want to kiss that much more.

On this Trinity Sunday, as we peer into the “secret of divine love, so holy and so august,” we are living in a world that has not only been kept apart, but driven apart from one another.  We can’t travel; we can’t go about our daily lives; we can’t work, or go out; we must keep our distance, wear our masks; and the politics of the moment excel in exploiting and exacerbating our distance from one another.  It is easy, under the circumstances to forget that we have been made in the image and likeness of God.  And that that image, that likeness is one of a divine kiss, shared by the kisser and the kissed, in which the kiss itself contains the breath of God.

Bernard of Clairvaux had some guts.  His sermons on the Song of Songs continue, and if you keep reading them, before long you will get to another verse from the first chapter: “I am black and beautiful.”  His preaching on that text is not really what we need today, but it’s worth noting, in passing, that he had no trouble finding good news in the text.  But that’s another sermon.

For now, I am grateful for the suggestion of a kiss, “utterly sweet, but utterly a mystery as well.”  A kiss that is shared with every one of us, since the kiss itself is the breath of God, the Holy Spirit.  And if we let it, if we want it, it’s a kiss that will bring us together, as any kiss of love will inevitably do.

If God is very good to us, and if we truly are made in his image, then when we share in this divine, trinitarian kiss, maybe we too will enjoy at least a measure of what Bernard told us that the three persons of the Trinity enjoy:  imperturbable peace, an unshakable bond, undivided love, and indivisible unity.

That would be some kiss!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
Trinity Sunday 2020
Saint Mark’s Church, Locust Street, Philadelphia

All quotations are from Sermons on the Song of Songs, by Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermon 8: The Holy Spirit, the Kiss of the Mouth