Christ Heals

A wise and highly accomplished doctor whom I knew in his later years used to say to me, as he came more and more in touch with his own mortality, “Sean, every one of us was born with a terminal condition.”  This is a rare insight for a physician to share so freely and so plainly.  Some sicknesses will never be healed.  Every one of us will eventually die, sooner or later.  As the Psalmist says, “we bring our years to an end, as it were a tale that is told.”

Philadelphia is home to the nation’s first hospital, and to some of our oldest churches.  But even in the 18th century no one was confused that hospitals and churches might really be in the same line of work.  Saving lives and saving souls may be related enterprises, but aren’t they distinctive disciplines?  And shouldn’t we all stick to our respective wheelhouses?

I think the conventional way to acknowledge the feast of St. Luke - who is commonly understood to have been a physician, a practitioner of healing arts - is to celebrate the gifts of the modern medical profession.  And in Philadelphia this custom makes sense: there is so much to celebrate.  If you want to find an institution in this city that wields great power, to which many people contribute large sums of money, and that builds massive, architecturally impressive buildings in prominent places in which to carry out its work, you look to medicine.  Have a gander just across the river, or up on North Broad Street; you will be impressed.  

But it’s not just the outward signs of power, wealth, and authority that matter.  The work carried out at Penn, CHOP, Jefferson, the Pennsylvania Hospital, Temple, Einstein, Shriners, St. Christopher’s, and (not so long ago) Hahnemann - the medicine practiced there - is world class, life saving, and exceptionally good.  So it would be a good and holy thing to sing the praises of our doctors and nurses, and midwives, and technicians, and researchers, and all manner of those who practice healing arts in our own midst.  I am all for it!

However, a question tugs at my mind and my heart.  It’s a question that could also tug, I think, at the sleeves of the whole world, if we would consider it.  The question is foreshadowed (again by the Psalmist) in a verse we heard today: the Psalmist tells us that the Lord “heals the broken-hearted, and binds up their wounds.”

What’s that?!?  Is this poetic license?  Or is it possible that it’s so, that the Lord heals, that God heals, that Jesus heals?  Can Jesus heal?  Can Jesus cure us?  Can Jesus make us well?

On the one hand, it would be dangerous to answer this question in a facile way, as though the question were this: can only Jesus heal?  It would be akin to asking if only Jesus can make wine.  Yes, he was known to do it; but it was not his regular occupation, his methods were unconventional, and he didn’t share the technique with anyone else.

On the other hand it would be a little too easy to suggest that Jesus can be called in like some specialist of last resort; to ask Jesus to be a practitioner of Hail Marys, rather than one of the objects of the prayer.  It is in this role - of the purveyor of healing miracles - that we might most commonly regard Jesus, adding caveats that the age of miracles ended long ago, that there are no guarantees for modern exceptions, and that we have no idea how, when, or why Jesus performs such works in our own day and age, so no one should ever count on it.  You can see why it would be easier to sing the praises of our medical establishment.  With their training, their brilliance, their hard work, their vision, and their dedication, they are so much easier to account for.

But here we are, seven months in to a global health emergency.   Sickness and death are all around us.  Practitioners of medicine are not powerless in the face of this pandemic (or all the other illnesses that continue to threaten us) - far from it!  But neither are they sorcerers, priests, or gods.

And here at Saint Mark’s, we have been praying to Jesus every day, asking for his healing grace.  And who can count the number of bedside prayers that have been uttered in every language, in nearly every corner of the globe?  Dear Lord, make me well.  Help her get better.  Heal him, Lord, and bring him home!

But can Jesus heal?

Homiletically speaking, you’d think that what I need right now is a good modern miracle healing story.  But actually, such a story would more likely serve as the exception that proves the rule.  If Jesus is only the purveyor of rare and unpredictable miracles of healing, then what’s the point?  Do we really want to  rely on some kind of divine health lottery for which we keep buying tickets because of the unlikely hope of a big payoff?  No, I’d rather turn to more commonplace accounts of healing, recovery, and wellness that take place within and through the Body of Christ - his church.

The marvelous Episcopal priest, Becca Stevens, founder of Thistle Farms ministries in Nashville, has distilled the Gospel into two words that she has been able to illustrate in endless and compelling ways: Love Heals.  

Thistle Farms specializes in healing lives that are so thoroughly broken that it’s hard to say where the healing is needed most: in body, mind, or spirit.  And the power of the stories from the women who have been given the gift of healing there, after abuse, exploitation, injury, insult, addiction, imprisonment, and who knows what else, is astounding.  Go to Nashville, as I have done, and see for yourself, how the power of love heals - not without medical professionals of many disciplines - but through cooperation that would not be accomplished without the commitment and assurance of Jesus’ love.

But you don’t have to go to Nashville to witness the power of Christ’s love to heal.  Go to Clearfield Street, where St. James School does not look like a hospital for sick children, because it is not.  But, relying on Christ, and responding to his call to care for children, the school is a source of both acute trauma intervention and careful preventative practice.  It was the unstoppable Dr. Audrey Evans who taught us of the need to care for the whole child there.  And her prescription, which stems at least as much from her faith in Jesus as it does from her medical training, has been proven correct time and time again.  Children and their families are being healed at St. James.  

I’d go so far as to say that a wound in the city is being healed there too, but I don’t want to suggest that healing on Clearfield Street is merely a figure of speech.  It is the real thing, actual healing: the sick become well and the broken are mended.  And, yes, there is a school nurse there who plays a crucial role in that healing, too.  So does the chaplain!

Even closer to home, if you are wondering if Jesus can heal, you might consider our own program of Neighbor Care in this parish.   Fr. Moore has called the program “a structure of kindness.”  By strengthening the ties of neighborliness that bind us together, parishioners have found support and hope in times of sickness and need that are essential to healing and wellness.  And I hear stories regularly that tell me of the healing power of Christ at work through many of you: the members of Christ’s Body.

These are not stories of heroic proportion, but they tell of real and measurable healing, all the same.

The power of Christ to heal is real.  And Christ can heal wounds that are invisible to other healers.  Jesus can even heal the wounded soul.

The Lord heals the broken-hearted, and binds up their wounds.  These words are true.  And on the Feast of Saint Luke, while we do give thanks for the gifts of the many practitioners of healing arts and sciences in our city and throughout the world, we also pray to God, giving thanks for the power of healing that comes from his Son.

If you still think that I am using the term “healing” mostly figuratively here, just imagine what would happen if we applied the concept of Neighbor Care to the pandemic, and made our decisions about what to do in the face of dread sickness, from the perspective of a structure of kindness?  Do you doubt that much illness would be prevented, that lives would be saved?  It doesn’t always take a miracle to let Christ do his healing work.

Every one of us was born with a terminal condition, it’s true.  But thanks be to God, for the healing gifts he has given to those who practice healing arts and sciences.  And thanks be to God for the power of his Son Jesus to heal - and especially those wounds that are too deep the be seen by medicine.  But also, those injuries and illnesses that can be avoided or addressed by a structure of kindness, or by caring for the whole child.

Thanks be to God that Love Heals.  Love Heals.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
The Feast of Saint Luke the Evangelist, 2020
Saint Mark’s Church, Locust Street, Philadelphia

Saint Luke the Evangelist by El Greco

The Seven Miracles of Gubbio (and the Eighth)

Some time last year, Fr. Phelps, as part of his project of giving away books, gave me a copy of a little book that was published in English in this country in 1948, a year after the French-language original was published in France.  Its title is “The Seven Miracles of Gubbio, And the Eighth.”  The book expands on the story of St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio, which tells of how St. Francis established peace with the vicious Wolf that had terrified the people of Gubbio.  The telling of that story features the recitation of the way Francis elicited from the Wolf a promise to cease its marauding ways, and also the pledge of that promise, by having the Wolf place its paw familiarly in St. Francis’s hand in a kind of handshake.  It was a French Dominican priest who spun the tale out from that point, in those years just after the Second World War, by offering the conceit that St. Francis endowed the Wolf of Gubbio with the power to perform seven miracles using that favored right paw.

So, on this Sunday when the feast of St. Francis lies just beneath the surface; here beginneth, in paraphrase, the story of the Seven Miracles of the Wolf of Gubbio, and the Eighth.

Having been given the power to work wonders, the Wolf got right down to business.  First, he rescued a boy who’d tumbled off the city wall to his likely peril.

Next he saved a flock of sheep who were threatened by a flash flood, by holding back the flood waters, like Moses holding back the waters of the Red Sea.

His third miracle was to prevent the destruction of the town when an earthquake hit.

His fourth miracle was for the benefit of the mistreated daughter of the large family with whom the Wolf had taken up residence.  The girl was an outcast because, the tale tells us, she was “ugly as sin.”  Her name was Formicella.

(Begging your pardon, I ask you to accept the story on its own terms, aware, as we are, of old gender stereotypes it reinforces, among other outmoded sensibilities.)

For her appearance, the girl was shunned.  “She had a little dirty attic for her bedroom, and it was in this wretched hovel that she passed her days, sleeping, or with her forehead pressed against the windowpane, watching the passers-by in the street, crying or sometimes singing sadly to herself.”

One morning, the Holy Wolf walked into the girl’s room, raised his right paw, and, while she was still sleeping, the girl’s appearance was transformed, and she became a ravishing beauty.

A deep bond developed between the girl (who was becoming a young woman, and very popular all of a sudden) and the Wolf, who now accompanied her everywhere.  And the Wolf was besotted.  He delighted to do whatever the girl desired.  “He learned to serve champagne,” so that he could promote revelry when he was with her in the company of others.

The Wolf squandered a miracle (his fifth) in order to help Formicella, the object of his untamed affection, win a childish game.  And then he wasted another miracle (his next-to-last) in order to provide fireworks at a party, at which they’d both drunk too much champagne, and the girl implored him to entertain them thus.  (This is not, you can see, a feminist tale.)

Alas, all this while, trouble had been brewing on the political scene, and a rival army was marching toward Gubbio.  But the defenses of Gubbio were no match for the approaching menace.  A miracle was needed!  And the Wolf was known to be in possession of the power to perform one last miracle.  So the Holy Wolf was enlisted to lead the men of Gubbio into battle.  Cunning, as he was, on the eve of battle, the Wolf led a sortie through a secret tunnel, deep behind enemy lines.  There, he snuck into the tent of the opposing general and killed him.

“There was a young greyhound” in the tent with the general, “elegant and white, who began to bark.”  This alarm brought the officers into the tent, all of whom the Wolf dispatched easily.  The men of Gubbio then stormed the encampment, now in chaos, and overwhelmed the enemy.  Victory belonged to Gubbio!

Everyone assumed that the Holy Wolf had used his final miracle to win this victory for Gubbio.  But “the Wolf alone knew the nature of the victory... there was not the least miracle involved... but solely his wolfly courage, his warrior propensities, which he accomplished simply by becoming his former self.”

Bloodied and tired from battle, the Wolf made a retreat from the celebrations, and quietly limped home, noticing that he was being followed by the greyhound whom he’d encountered in the enemy camp.  Home, “at the end of his strength,” the Wolf lay down to lick his wounds and rest, while the city rejoiced.  “They would have done better,” he thought, “to wash me and dry my wounds.”  “He knew that he was able to heal himself with his seventh and last miracle.  But he preferred to hold it in reserve.”

In the aftermath of the battle, the Holy Wolf was “a long time recovering,” and while he did, the affections of the people of Gubbio began to wane.  His beloved Formicella was now a little infatuated with the greyhound, who more easily entertained her than the recuperating Wolf.  In fact, everyone regarded the Wolf differently, now that they assumed his miracle-wielding power was depleted.  And one day, Formicella, whose outward beauty had been bestowed on her by the Wolf himself, looked down at the war-wounded creature and said to him, “My poor Wolf.  Look at you now.  You are just a beast like the others.”

How those words stung.  “He felt it bitterly....  Ah, what a weight he [now] had on his heart.  He had shown her that he was not a beast like others - and he could show her again....  [And] in the morning,” with a dark resentment rising in his heart, “he strangled the greyhound.”

“He had no sooner committed this murder than he repented it,” but it hardly mattered.  The deed was discovered, and a cry went up: “A savage beast always remains just a savage beast....  He might strangle us all.  If we do not kill him, he will kill us,” the people said.  Forgetting all that he had done for them, the people of Gubbio went after the Wolf “with sticks and forks and the crowd... shouting cries of death.”

Seeing them come for him, “the Holy Wolf watched the crowd and believed that his heart would burst from sorrow and disillusionment.” Cornered, he considered reverting to his violent, wolfish ways, and wreaking vengeance.  But then the Wolf “remembered his seventh miracle.”  He wondered if his recent sins had annulled the power to work wonders, but he had no way of knowing.  So, “he invoked St. Francis in his heart, asking for mercy and protection.”

And suddenly, the crowd witnessed with their own eyes the seventh miracle of the Wolf of Gubbio: the sight of the Holy Wolf rising into the air and being carried slowly across the sky beyond the city limits and toward the forest, from whence he had once come.  And then, although searched for and hunted, and even lured by Formicella herself, the Wolf was never apprehended.  But night after night “he continued to bay at the moon.”

One night, the Wolf heard the bells of Gubbio ring out joyously at a late hour, and “he remembered that [the bells] never rang thus in the middle of the night except for Yuletide.”  Christmas.

Recalling the many blessings he had received, the Wolf, “prayed in his heart to St. Francis to bring him into the grace of Noël.  He experienced suddenly a profound nostalgia of love, of the desire to reconcile himself to, and to confide himself in, God.”  And so he wended his way stealthily toward the city, eventually arriving at the church.

“He dared not enter but waited in the shadow of the porch for the moment of the Elevation.  He knew that then each [worshiper] would incline the head and no one would notice him enter.... He glided into the church, creeping low along the side aisle, and came to rest softly under the manger, his nose outside to see and to breathe the incense, the warm odor of the House of God.  His soul filled with well-being.”

“At the moment of Communion, he saw all the faithful rise and go to the holy table.  They passed before him.  He recognized all and each,” and he felt again, the bile of resentment rising in his breast.   

“After communicating, [they all] returned to pass again before him.  And then there was an extraordinary thing, more marvelous than all the miracles.  Each time that a faithful [person], carrying the Body of God that he had just received, passed before the manger, the Wolf could not but adore the majesty of this Presence, and all his pain melted deliciously in his heart and in his being.  It appeared to him that his wolfly soul participated in this communion, in this peace extending over all.  He benefitted, he also, from this divine Presence.”

After communion, while the music played, “the Wolf sensed that... his heart, his old savage heart, resisted no more and broke from an overflowing of sweet serenity....  [And] the Wolf groaned very softly.  [And] he was dead.”

“The Mass was finished and the children encircled the manger to venerate it.  One of them noticed the nose of the Wolf under the manger.  They respectfully removed his poor dead body.  His mouth was full of honey.  They cried, again, a miracle!  But if it was a miracle it was but the power of Charity, sovereign, all powerful, and very precious Charity.”  Which you and I would call love.

Why tell a story like this, on a morning like this, when I might have preached on the parable our Lord told, instead?

Perhaps it’s because we need to be drawn back in to a narrative that teaches us to expect grace, mercy, and forgiveness, rather than retribution and revenge.

Perhaps it’s because some of us might feel very much like we are one of the people of Gubbio, beset by danger and risk on nearly every side, and even in our own midst.

Perhaps it’s because some of us feel very much like the Wolf, one way or another.

Perhaps it’s because of the unlikely ending, brought about by the experience of God’s gracious Presence in the most holy sacrament of the Altar, carried by God’s people, no matter how flawed, or how foolish.

Perhaps it’s because we believe that the power of God to work wonders has been depleted, and yet, we can hear the wolves howling in the night, and it leaves us wondering what else we can do but take up arms.

Perhaps we need to tell any story we can that reminds us of the transforming power of  God’s love.

In any case, I think it’s a story worth telling.  I hope you do too.

Here endeth the story of the seven miracles of Gubbio, and the eighth.

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

* The Seven Miracles of Gubbio, and the Eighth, by Raymond Leopold Bruckberger, OP, translated from the French by Peter Lauck, Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill, 1948

Go Work in the Vineyard!

Cast your mind back to the summer of 2018, when most of Western Europe was experiencing a heat wave and drought.  One curious result of the weather, was that the parched land revealed some long forgotten secrets.  This was certainly true in the British Isles.  In England, beneath the brittle blades of a dry lawn, emerged the design of a dismantled Victorian garden.  The outlines of ancient Roman forts became visible in Wales.  And in Ireland, from beneath the neatly plowed furrows of a once emerald field, the circular geometry of a 4,500 year old henge showed itself.  

Interestingly, many henges (those mysterious circular prehistoric monuments) were not made of stone but were made of wood.  And the reason that the ghost image of the henge in Ireland appeared in time of drought was that in those places where the wooden posts had been sunk into the ground and then rotted away, the earth retained more moisture, as if unwilling to let go of the memory of what had once been there.Anyway, it goes to show that you can be sitting right on top of something and not even know it’s there.  In many of these recent drought-related discoveries, it was the perspective made possible by drones flying over the landscape that enabled us to see what is right under foot.

Today, the Gospel fulfills that purpose, for it reveals to us that we are sitting on top of something, but we don’t seem to know it’s there.  And we need the Gospel to provide us with the right perspective so that we can see what has become hidden to us, and respond accordingly.

St. Matthew doesn’t make it easy.  This little passage is full of interesting tidbits that we could focus on.  There is Jesus in the Temple: it’s his second and last appearance at the Temple - the heart of Jewish life, and the epicenter of God’s presence.  On his first visit to the Temple, the day before, Jesus drove out the money changers.  So expectations are high when he returned.

Then there is the question of authority, which is a great question, especially in our own day and age when authority is so widely questioned.  Jesus is asked: “By what authority are you doing these things?”  Oh, there’s a sermon in that question, maybe even a chapter for my book, “Great Questions of the Bible.”

And then, we get to the Parable of the Two Sons.  And here is a where the clue to our hidden secret is to be found... but not, perhaps, where you expect it.  For the secret is not to be found in the point of the parable, or its moral, if you will.  No, that is pretty easy to figure out.  Obviously it was not the son, who said, “ I go, sir,” but who did not go, whose example we are meant to follow.  Obviously it was the son who said, “I will not go,” but who ended up going anyway, who did the will of his father.  And we should do likewise.  OK.  We got that out of the way.

But here is the clue that gives us a perspective that enables us to see what we have been sitting on top of, without knowing that it’s there.The clue is this, it’s found in the instruction that the father gives to both his sons.  For, in turn, he goes to each of them and says, “Son, go and work in the vineyard today.”

Did you catch it?  It’s as if Jesus sent a drone up over Locust Street, so that we could see a pattern emerge from beneath the grid of the streets of Philadelphia, beneath the lawns of Rittenhouse Square.  And don’t you see it?  Right beneath us, where we have seen only concrete sidewalks, and asphalt streets; a fountain over there in the Square; and manhole covers, and sewers, and light posts, and hotels, and restaurants, and townhouses, and apartments.... it’s been there right beneath our noses the entire time: the sometimes meandering, but always careful rows of a vineyard.

“Oh, please!” I hear you say.  “Enough with the flights of fancy, the secret vaults that don’t exist, the islands made of mulberry trees.”  You know full well that there were never grapevines planted beneath our pews.  That there are no furrows of a long-forgotten vineyard to be discovered and remembered beneath these city streets.  Perhaps.  But this church was built to remind us of ancient memories.  And I have long contended that one of the problems we face in the church is that we too often forget about the vineyard as a model for the church and the Christian life.

Why a vineyard?  Because a vineyard is a place of promise and transformation.  The rows of vines might be pretty to look at, but they are not planted for their looks.  And it’s true that the fermentation process that turns grape juice into wine takes place in the winery.  But it all starts in the vineyard.  You need a fruitful vineyard if you are going to make wine.  And a fruitful vineyard takes a bit of tending.  It needs pruning, and the trellis needs to be repaired from time to time, and the leaves of the vines need to be managed, and pests have to be kept away.  And of course the grapes need to be harvested, which at many vineyards is an annual community task, with all hands on deck.  Some vineyards need to be watered, requiring irrigation.  But many of the best and oldest vineyards do not require watering, because their roots go deep into the soil to get the water they need.  And these old vineyards, I suppose, are the ones whose memories become apparent to us when we are aided by the perspective of the Gospel.

The point of a vineyard, of course, is to produce wine, which is the stuff of celebration, of sacrifice, and of sacrament.  And wine only gets made by a process of transformation, as the sugar from the grapes ferments, turning the juice into something entirely different: complex, flavorful and long-lasting.

The church, of course, is also meant to be a place of promise and of transformation, where things that had been consigned to darkness are bathed in light, where people lost to selfishness turn their hearts to others, where sinners lost in our own devices turn toward the will of God, where the weight of sadness can be turned into songs of joy, where stuff that had been left for dead can awaken to new life!

Inexplicably (to me) the church so often forgets her fundamental ministry of transformation, which is vineyard work, since if you can grow the grapes, all you really need is a barrel and you can make wine.  But without the grapes, you can’t get anywhere.  It all starts in the vineyard.  Any good winemaker will tell you that all good wine is really made in the vineyard, where the grapes are grown.

So, wine-making, is, in a sense, the work of the church; which is to say, transformation is the work of the church.  It’s what you should be looking for here, what you should expect for yourself and for others.  And it’s what we should all be working for - every single one of us.  Which is why it is so important to hear what Jesus is saying when he tells a story that begins with this instruction: “Go and work in the vineyard today.”

Here’s the thing.  If you come to church, or tune in online, looking only to be served, looking only to get something that you have come for, expecting the church to be a dispensary of a product made for you, then you are missing out.  And these recent months of so much passivity in the life of the church have tended to leave the strong impression that the church could be this: a drive-up window that you come to in order to receive your ration of whatever you think you asked for.

But thank God for this perspective from the Gospel that reminds us what it is we’re sitting in: not just a city, not just pews, not just a comfy seat on the other side of a screen, but a vineyard - a place meant for growth, and for transformation, and for celebration that unfolds year after year, harvest after harvest.

An actual vineyard, of course, produces only one thing: grapes to be made into wine.  But the vineyard of the church can yield fruits of many types: voices raised in song for the glory of God; hands put to work to care for the poor and the hungry; minds trained on the scriptures to seek the wisdom of God; hearts given over to others who need care and compassion; time shared with those for whom the rest of the world has little time; labor undertaken for those for whom no one else will work, and who couldn’t afford it anyway; commitment to fight for justice for those to whom it has been denied; and, yes, service in the temple, at the altar of God, whose worship takes place among the vines in every season of the year.

What do you think?  A woman had two children, and she said to them, “Go to church!”  And they said, “Mom, are you kidding us?  We are not going to church.”

So she said to them, “Then go and work in the vineyard!”

And they said, “Mom, what are you talking about?  Have you totally lost it?  There is no vineyard.”

And the woman said, “There is a whole world out there that’s a vineyard where grapes grow waiting to be made into wine.  Some people are going to make the wines of celebration, sacrifice, and sacrament.  Other people are going to make wine so they can get you drunk, take advantage of you, and steal your wallet.  We need a lot more of the first kind of winemakers, and a lot less of the second.  

“Every vineyard needs tending.  It needs pruning, and the trellises need to be repaired from time to time, and the leaves of the vines need to be managed to get the most from the sun, and pests have to be kept away.  And of course the grapes need to be harvested so the wine can be made. 

"But as long as you don’t think there’s even a vineyard out there, who do you think is going to make the wine - God’s servants working for celebration, sacrifice and sacrament, or the fiends who want to get you drunk, take advantage of you, and steal your wallet?

“Now, open your eyes, and go and work in the vineyard!”

The roots of the vineyard of the Lord have grown deep into the ground, so that even when we pave them over, build on top of them, and starve them with drought, the earth remembers, the church remembers.  And I, for one, am unwilling to let go of the memory of a fruitful vineyard wherein we can make the wine of celebration, sacrifice, and sacrament.  Let us go together, and work in the vineyard of the Lord.

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

A worker in the vineyard somewhere in Extremadura along the Via de la Plata, one of the route of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela.