Always A Bridesmaid

The most obvious thing about the parable of the wise and foolish virgins is that it’s all about the virgins.  This point is underscored by  its conclusion, in which Jesus instructs his followers to “keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.”  The moral of the story is, of course, that we should be like the wise virgins: expectant, ready, and alert when we need to be, for the coming of the kingdom of heaven.  

Interestingly, the parable does not hinge on the virgins’ ability to actually stay awake all night.  There is no product placement opportunity here for Red Bull or Five Hour Energy drink, or even coffee.  All ten of the virgins grow drowsy and sleep, and this is not what distinguishes the wise from the foolish.  No, it’s the forethought of having brought oil for their lamps, of having anticipated that it would grow dark, and that they might be called on in the middle of the night: that is the expression of the wisdom of five of the virgins.  All fine and well: the appropriate product placement, then, would be the Scouts, whose motto enjoins both boys and girls these days to “be prepared.”

As a manual for overnight scouting trips, the parable is perhaps effective, but as such it is profoundly un-interesting, and provides me with little fodder for proclaiming anything that sounds like good news, although preparedness is undoubtedly the central point of the parable.  Nor does the parable provide a convincing argument for the virtue of chastity and the sanctity of virginity.  Let’s just get that out of the way.

It is easy to forget that Jesus told this parable as part of a larger teaching, and as the first in a pair of parables in answer to a question.  That question, St. Matthew tells us, was asked of Jesus by the disciples “in private” on the Mount of Olives, probably because it was an uncomfortable question.  Jesus had just foretold the destruction of the Temple: the very dwelling place of God’s spirit and presence.  “Not one stone will be left here upon another,” he said, “all will be thrown down.”  We can imagine that this teaching was both upsetting and provocative, and could have aroused both great worry and great hope in his disciples. It meant that Jesus was up to something big, much bigger than just gathering a group of followers to learn his teachings and live as he instructed.  It meant that Jesus was up to something cosmic, because the Temple was, in a sense, the center of the cosmos for faithful Jews.  So if Jesus was predicting its destruction, then something big was afoot!  He had their interest!

“‘Tell us,” they ask him, “when this will be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?’”

What will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?  This is a question that seldom excites or even interests us these days.  But Jesus spent a long time responding to it, including not only the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, but also the parable of the talents that we’ll hear about next week, as well as his instruction about the so-called “judgement of the nations” when the king separates the righteous from the unrighteous, like separating sheep from goats to determine who will inherit the kingdom.

Oftentimes, we preachers isolate these texts from their context because it better suits our purposes.  For instance, I am already formulating in my mind a way to convince you that next week’s parable of the talents carries with it all the urgency of the parish’s budget for 2021, and the need of all Christians to give generously to support the work of the gospel.  Indeed, the parable of the talents does insist that we account for ourselves in the here and now, as I will urge you next week to consider; just as we will also be urged the week after that to remember Christ’s teaching that we should care for the hungry and thirsty, the stranger, the needy, the sick, and the imprisoned whose needs we can and should meet in the here and now.  

But this entire section of Matthew’s gospel is concerned with the larger matter of Christ’s second coming and the end of the age.  And these are not comfortable areas of discussion for most Episcopalians, or even most Christians these days.

Part of the reason we are uncomfortable about this discussion is that we are not truly convinced that Jesus is up to something big.  We are parochial in our outlook, and we seldom think anymore about what Jesus might be up to beyond Locust Street or outside our own homes.  And a key issue for us, in seeing Jesus this way; a central dynamic of the way we shape our faith so parochially and so domestically, and why we have such diminished expectations for the work of Jesus in the world, or in the entire cosmos, is to be found within the parable of the wise and foolish virgins.  It’s an essential part of the teaching of the parable, even if it’s not what the parable is about.  Four words in this parable have effected our faith profoundly, and have shaped our expectations of God’s work in our lives and in the world.  These are the four words: “the bridegroom was delayed.”

Other translations put it this way:

“The bridegroom was a long time coming.”

“The bridegroom tarried.”

“The groom was late arriving.”

“The bridegroom was gone a long time.”

“The groom was late.”

Don’t we know it!

Unfortunately, this phrase is not a question, so it will not find a place in my book on great questions of the Bible.   But the implications of the lateness of the bridegroom have affected every aspect of our faith, and of the life of the church.  Because after a while, you lose track of what you were waiting for; you might even forget that you are waiting for anything at all.

The bridegroom was delayed.  And have we been standing at the altar all this time wondering if we have been stood up?  You make decisions differently, don’t you, if you have been jilted, and left at the altar.  But remember, we are not the bride in this parable, we are only, ever, and always the bridesmaids.

Most depictions in art that I can recall, of the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, omit any representation of the bridegroom.  Most artists sensibly see that it strengthens the imagery of the story to leave him out of the picture, since the gist of the parable is that the virgins have to wait, we know not how long.  But the narrative of the parable does include the announcement and arrival of the bridegroom at midnight, who takes the wise virgins with him to enter into the wedding feast.

I know of an Anglican cathedral in Ireland, in County Cork - a nineteenth century, Gothic revival building dedicated to a local saint, which features statues of the wise and foolish virgins - five each on either side of the west doors, in proper, draped Gothic style. In between the two great doors that are the entrance to the cathedral there is a central statue of Christ, the bridegroom.  He is wearing several layers of ecclesiastical looking wedding garments, with tassels.  His hair is wavy, and seems to be plaited with a crown of roses.  I think he is barefoot.  His left hand is held up in a sign of blessing.  And in his right hand, he is holding a flower, that I take to be a rose.

The rose, if you ask me, is a gorgeous gesture.  Of course, you might think that it is a peace offering for the bride, left standing so long at the altar that her own bouquet had long ago turned brown and died.  But the bride is nowhere to be seen in this parable or in this imagery.  And so, it would seem that the bridegroom - at least this one standing in stone in Ireland - has brought a flower for us, the bridesmaids, who have waited so long while he tarried.  It’s a gesture of his love, and his faithfulness, and his assurance that we were with him in his heart even while he was away.

What will be the sign of his coming and of the end of the age?  Traditionally, the church answers this question (as Jesus did sometimes, too) with descriptions of disaster, warfare, and calamity: that’s how we’ll know that the kingdom is dawning.  Those descriptions, I suspect, only contribute to the tendency of modern Christians to approach any discussion of the end times with caution and suspicion.  Fair enough.  But there is an important reason to remember that Christ promised that he would come again, and the reason is that his work is not finished, and his kingdom has not yet been established.

When I look around the world these days, I think it’s a good thing to remember that Christ has more work to do, because it sure looks to me like we need it.

Of course, in this parable we are being urged to be watchful and wise.  But more to the point, we are being reassured that the bridegroom will come.  You might even say, that we are being urged to learn that it’s not all about the bridesmaids - it’s not actually all about us, though we tend to like anything that is.  In the end, it’s actually all about the bridegroom.

“At midnight there was a shout!”  All the bridesmaids were asleep, but some of them were ready anyway.  “Look!  Here is the bridegroom!  Come out to meet him!”  (Or in the locution of the older translations, “Go ye out to meet him!”)

Recent events in this city and this nation can make it seem as though it really is all about us and what’s happening just now in the moment.

But the parable of the wise and foolish virgins reminds us not only to stay awake, to  be watchful and vigilant.  It reminds us, that the reason to have our lamps ready is because it’s not actually all about us: it’s all about the bridegroom.  He is coming.  He will come.  And he is up to something bigger than we can possibly expect.  He is bringing the kingdom of heaven with him. We should be ready to meet him.

And perhaps, he’ll be carrying a rose.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
8 November 2020
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia

The west doors at St Fin Barre’s Cathedral, Cork, Ireland

For All the Saints

In the third chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is baptized in the Jordan River.  In the fourth chapter, he is tempted by Satan in the desert.  He returns from the desert, he proclaims that the kingdom of heaven has come near, and he gathers his disciples around him.  Then he begins to teach and heal and minister to the people, and, Matthew tells us “they brought to him all the sick, those who were afflicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics, and he cured them. And great crowds followed him from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and from beyond the Jordan” (Mt.4:24-5).

And then we begin Matthew chapter five, our Gospel passage for this morning: “When Jesus saw the crowds,” Matthew says, “he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them.”

When Jesus goes up onto the mountain and begins to speak, he is speaking from the center of a great crowd.  People from all over.  People with—or newly cured of—diseases of all kinds.  A great throng.  We’ve heard very little from him so far in this Gospel, and now here he is, seated on a mountain and teaching like a new Moses.  And so what he says to his followers must be some kind of concentrated wisdom.  He delivers not a set of laws, but a list of ways to be blessed, a description of the blessedness he sees already, perhaps, in the faces that look up to him. 

I’ve learned that it’s important to think of the Beatitudes in that way, as descriptions of blessedness rather than as rules for becoming blessed.  Maybe it’s just that I spent half my seminary career among Lutherans, and they get cranky if you read the Bible in ways that suggest that we can earn the grace of God.  These are not rules; they are blessings.  “Blessed are the poor in spirit” is not a command about trying to get poor in spirit so that we can win the kingdom of heaven.  If we could accomplish such a thing, we wouldn’t be poor in spirit.  We would be too proud of our spiritual accomplishments.  That’s how Lutherans get you.  Every time.

No, Jesus is not exactly telling us what to do or how to do it.  He is telling us what he does, and what he sees.  What he does, is to reach a hand out to the poor, to those who mourn, to the meek, to lift them up.  To identify with them and to give his life for them.  For us.

But what he sees, I think, is also crucial for us to understand.  Here in what feels like his first big speech in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus isn’t just describing what blessedness is in the abstract.  He is naming what he sees in the moment, what is happening in the crowd all around him.  He is telling us what he has experienced as he has moved throughout the region healing the people and speaking in their synagogues.  He is telling us how the Spirit has been moving through him, how it is moving right now, how his own words in the moment are reaching his hearers and converting their meekness into a glorious inheritance, their persecutions into enfranchisement, their hunger for righteousness into satisfaction.  

Jesus is bringing them into the kingdom, into a realm of blessing, and he is also, very importantly giving them a vision of themselves as blessed.  He is contemplating the action of God in them, through himself, and sharing the fruits of that contemplation with them.  

Have you ever had this experience?  Have you ever had the opportunity to sit with someone who could see God working in you, could see your blessedness, and could speak it back to you, so that you could see them seeing it?  Maybe this sounds a little grandiose, but when someone gets you spiritually, or sees how far God has brought you, or acknowledges your God-given courage or humility or honesty, doesn’t heaven open up a little bit in the skies above you?  Doesn’t the good they see in you grow stronger?  Don’t barriers of isolation and fear and doubt fall away a little when you are known and named, when someone tells you you are pure of heart?  That you’re the salt of the earth?  That you are the light of the world?

Jesus puts this experience right up front in Matthew’s Gospel.  Yes, he has been teaching and healing on a grand scale, but Matthew covers that in a few verses.  Jesus goes from calling his disciples to follow him, almost directly to this moment when he is surrounded by a crowd and he is telling them what blessedness is among them as they grow into the kingdom of God.  It’s almost as though the healing and teaching he has been doing aren’t complete until they have been seen and named by Jesus in this concentrated way.  It’s almost as though Jesus knows that we must have this shared awareness, that he must share his vision of us, with us, if he is to reach us deeply.  He must contemplate our blessedness with us.  So that we see ourselves in the eyes of God, see ourselves as God sees us.  So that we see God seeing and loving us, now in this life when we are still anxiously searching and yearning for him.  Oh blessed reassurance.

That’s what the saints are for, too.  That’s what this feast day, All Saints’ Day, is for.  Blessed reassurance.  It’s for taking a long, loving, look at all the blessedness that can be seen on human faces.  It’s for acknowledging, seeing and knowing and naming, the beauty of the holiness of the ones who have gone before us.  Like Jesus on that mountain, we are given that vision today, of the transformation God has wrought in human lives.  The mourning converted into joy.  The humility, the prophetic endurance, the sharing of peace and mercy in the name of God.  This priceless vision that Jesus was so eager to give us, we receive from him again today in the life of the church.  And we glory in human life that reflects God.  We contemplate the face of Jesus in the faces of those who love him.  We know that we never love him enough, or well enough, but look: someone does.  By the grace of God, some people like us have lived and died as pure reflections of the light of Christ. And we get to name those people, and cherish them, and befriend them and call on them as companions.  

Just as the heavens open up for us a bit when someone sees and names our blessedness, so too we get to be part of the opening of the heavens when we name the saints and love them, for no other reason than that we love their love of God.  There is nothing in it for us.  We can’t bribe them to do us favors, though history suggests that some have tried.  We really can’t win them over or bargain with them.  They don’t need anything from us.  We simply love them, because they love God.  Because God loves them. We see how beautiful they are. And that is our profound gift.

And before we know it, we are seeing with God’s eyes.  Some of our mourning has been converted into laughter.  Some of our meekness has been turned into a rich inheritance.  Some of what oppresses us has been turned into belonging.  Because we can sit with Jesus on that mountain and enumerate the ways in which God’s children are blessed.  His vision is our vision on this feast day.

I don’t know the full power of that beatific vision.  I don’t know everything that might happen when we go forward from this mountaintop, from this glimpse of human sanctity though the eyes of God.  I know what it looks like when we see others being degraded.  Shot down in the street.  We all know what it is to have our worst failings confirmed over and over again on the nightly news.

But today we know that Jesus believes in the power of this vision.  Enough that he delivers it like a new set of commandments from on high.  Enough that he dares to speak to us—to us!—of our beauty and our truth and our godliness.  Enough that he wills to make this vision real by living and dying among us, and telling us what we don’t know.  That we are blessed.  Children of God.  Saints of the kingdom.  That we inherit the earth.  

Sit with Jesus today.  Tell the world about its blessedness.  Speak the names of the saints with love and awe.  These friends of ours to whom we owe nothing but a vision of shared love: let them be on our lips and in our hearts.  Let Jesus’s vision of us be our healing vision of the world.

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
1 November 2020
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Imitatio Dei

No one ever has a passage from Leviticus read at their wedding.  Quotations from this book of the Bible - one of the so-called five books of Moses - are not often carved on tombstones as epitaphs.  And, at least in the Episcopal Church, the text of Leviticus is not the frequent basis of inspiring preaching.

It’s a shame that Leviticus has a bad name.  But it’s a good thing that we have not given up reading from it in public altogether.  Just six verses were assigned to us today, but we managed to read them all, and no one got hurt!  Those six verses come from the latter part of the text, a section commonly referred to as the “holiness code.”

The holiness code contains some of my least favorite verses of the scripture.  Two verses of Leviticus are the source of many anti-gay harangues, for instance.  And Leviticus, chapter 20 lists the proposed penalties for violations of its precepts. Stoning, shunning, barrenness, and death are among the punishments pronounced in the Name of the Lord, with death as the most common penalty.  Fortunately, not even the most conservative Jews have ever pretended that there could or should be such thing as an originalist interpretation of the document; and the laws of Leviticus have never been enforced, that I know of, in accordance with the plain meaning of the text, which suggests that the meaning of the text may not be quite so plain.

The holiness code also contains some inspiring moral instruction in the cause of justice and in the interests of the poor, the disadvantaged, and the stranger (“the alien who resides among you shall be to you as the citizen among you”).  And these edicts, too, are delivered in the Name of the Lord, and with the force of God’s authority.

Chapter 19, whence come the few verses we read earlier, begins, as we heard, with an unusual and not easily comprehended pronouncement from God “to all the congregation of the people of Israel,” to whom the Lord has this to say: “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”

Now, I am in the business of looking for Good News and then passing it on.  And I know how easy it can be to miss a word of Good News, especially when it comes from the pages of Leviticus.  But I want you to consider how astounding is this proclamation from the mouth of the Lord that I have just repeated: “You shall be holy, for I the Lord am holy.”

The editor’s note in my study Bible is eloquent on this verse.  It says, “that which humans are not and can never fully be, but which they are commanded to emulate and approximate is what the Bible calls ‘holy.’  Holiness means imitatio Dei - the life of godliness.” (Harper Collins Study Bible, NRSV)

We shall be holy, for God is holy; and we are made in God’s image and likeness: we are like God.  The fact that last week a spacecraft that we launched four years ago intercepted an asteroid 200 million miles away, in order to reach out and pluck up a sample of the surface material of that asteroid (which is thought to be about 4.5 million years old), would tend to reinforce this point: that we are like God, and the reach of our power is vast.  Marvelous and impressive as that achievement in outer space may be, however, it could also easily lead us to the wrong conclusion about the life of godliness - that it means that because of our strength, cleverness, and power we can do as we like.

But the whole point of Leviticus - the whole point of a code of holiness - is that to be holy, to bear God’s image and likeness with authenticity and authority - actually, we cannot do as we like.  We must make choices - each and every one of us.  We have to make choices about how we conduct ourselves and about how we treat others.  And our choices lead us either more deeply down the path of holiness, or further away from it.

Leviticus is like an asteroid.  And if I reach back to that ancient asteroid, and pluck up a sample of what holiness looks like, well aware that I am leaving much else behind, this is what I get:  “You shall not hate in your heart... you shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge... but you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  

You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

Leviticus is an ancient asteroid that might as well be millions of miles away from us at this point.  But we are drawn again and again into its beguiling orbit.  We come into contact with it, and it’s like connecting with something that links us to the rest of time and space in ways that we might otherwise have forgotten.

Judging from the few seconds of video I saw of that amazing feat 200 million miles away, the stuff that we collected from the surface of an asteroid looks a lot like a bunch of dirt and rocks.  That is to say, that it looks a lot like stuff we’ve seen before, even though it comes from long ago and far away.  It looks familiar.  But all the same, we treat it with respect and great care in order to learn something from it.

So it is with the call to holiness that comes to us from long ago and far away.  It looks familiar, like stuff we’ve seen before.  You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  Familiar though this distant, ancient sample of holiness may be, we should not fail to treat it with the respect and great care it deserves - not merely as something that looks like the common stuff of Sunday School, but as the authentic, authoritative way of godliness; a commandment not to be taken lightly; the exercise of real holiness.  Unremarkable though holiness may look at first glance, like the material gathered from an asteroid it will be rare on earth, and difficult to hold on to.

NASA reports that the collection device on the spacecraft that scooped up bits of the asteroid is having difficulty containing what it grabbed.  The sample collector has sprung a little leak, and they are trying to make sure we can keep what we found, and not lose it all before it gets back to earth.  Doesn’t that challenge sound familiar?  Having discovered that we are made in the image and likeness of God, it has always been exceedingly difficult for us to hold on to the blessings of holiness here on earth, even when all we might have to do is love our neighbor as ourselves.  You follow the news, don’t you?  How hard it is to live by the rules we learned in Sunday School.  How easily holiness slips from our grasp.  (Becoming harder to hold on to, it would seem, the closer we get to power.)

But I am in the business of looking for Good News and then passing it on.  And I rejoice to stand here in front of you today and remind you that there is good news to be found in the ancient, distant words of Leviticus.  No less than this astounding proclamation is to be found in this troublesome book: the we shall be holy because the Lord our God is holy.  We are made in God’s likeness and image, and we are to be imitators of God, to live lives of godliness.  Isn’t this nearly everything?  What else could we want?

The first part of Leviticus, which I haven’t mentioned at all till now, consists largely of a treatise on what kinds of offerings are to be made to God.  These chapters amount to a discussion about worship, even more so than about stewardship.  And so, nearly the entire book amounts to a discussion of the two great commandments and of the two great emphases of the mission of this parish: the worship and love of God and the care and love of God’s people, our neighbors.

The path to holiness does not lead us to the far reaches of the universe, it takes us into the every day choices we make about worshiping God and being good neighbors, which is a path that anyone can walk.  And that path helps us to become “that which humans are not and can never fully be, but which they are commanded to emulate and approximate.”  The path to holiness leads us to be imitators of God, if we are willing to try.

And if we can be imitators of God, what goodness will ever be beyond our grasp, if only we can hold on to it!?!?

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