Waiting in the Goodness and the Wisdom of Others

The pope and the Duchess of Sussex walk into the offices of the New York Times….  Is this the beginning of a joke or a sermon?  Or both?  The Op-Ed pages of the New York Times last week brought us insight from these two famous people in two successive days.*  Both addressed the challenges of living in this particularly fraught moment, when the Coronavirus pandemic has tested our patience, our political mettle, and our neighborliness, among other things.

On the day before Thanksgiving we heard from Meghan, who shared her feelings after the miscarriage of her second child.  She was plainly frank - not the usual attitude of duchesses - about the deep emotional pain and isolation she went through.  She reminded us convincingly that the pandemic has left much of the world “feeling more alone than ever.”  And she recalled how important it was to her, in her own isolation and grief, when someone bothered with the simple courtesy of asking her, “Are you OK?”

“In places where there was once community,” she writes, “there is now division.”  And one way to bridge that division is the simplest thing in the world: to turn toward the other and ask that little question: Are you OK?

Unexpectedly, the gist of her insight was shared by Pope Francis the next day, who also wrote of a time of profound personal challenge, when sickness had brought him near death in his youth.  The pope credits two nuns with essentially saving his life when he was suffering a severe pulmonary infection as a young man.  It was, he writes, “my first experience of limit, of pain and loneliness. It changed the way I saw life. For months, I didn’t know who I was or whether I would live or die.”  The steps those nuns took on his behalf all those decades ago in Argentina - one doubled the dose of antibiotics prescribed by the physician, and another provided “extra doses of painkillers” - would put them in a precarious position today.  

But let’s take the pope’s account on its own terms and for its own merits, which he says, taught him “to depend on the goodness and wisdom of others.”  He then goes on to reflect on the goodness and wisdom of all the doctors and nurses and others whose selfless service during this pandemic has sometimes cost them their own lives.  “So many of the nurses, doctors and caregivers paid that price of love, together with priests, and religious and ordinary people whose vocations were service,” he writes.  “Whether or not they were conscious of it, their choice testified to a belief: that it is better to live a shorter life serving others than a longer one resisting that call.”

You don’t hear that sort of thing these days outside of the military, and it’s worth pausing to let it sink in, this outlook on life, and faith, and service, and sacrifice:  It is better to live a shorter life serving others than a longer one resisting that call.

Here we are on Advent Sunday.  Jesus does not have a feel-good message for us that we might like.  Instead, he says this: “It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch.”  What are we supposed to do with this teaching?  Especially coming, as it does, in the context of Jesus’ prediction that the sun and the moon will be darkened, the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven will be shaken?  How do we make sense of any of this?

It is like a man going on a journey.  And when he goes, he puts his servants in charge, each with his or her work to do.  Frustratingly, Jesus is not clear about what it is the servants are waiting for while they work, other than the return of their master.  In Mark’s Gospel, this passage is part of an extended response that Jesus gives to a question from his disciples, who ask him to “tell us when this will be, and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished.”  But other than the destruction of the Temple, no other “things” that are about to be accomplished are never really spelled out in any detail.  Something has been lost in the transmission of this teaching, or maybe Jesus was never clear about it in the first place.  What he is clear about is this: that there is waiting to be done.  And while we are waiting, we we could be doing something.  And we may not know exactly what we are waiting for, but that is not the point.  The point is the waiting.

Don’t we all know right now what it feels like to be waiting for a moment of deliverance that we hope is coming soon, but is taking much, much longer than we would like?  Indeed, that deliverance cannot get here fast enough.  But these things take time, and we must wait, and the waiting is not pleasant.  In the meantime, what are we supposed to do?!?

In his piece in the Times, Pope Francis writes movingly of those doctors, nurses, and medical workers who have been so faithful during these hard days.  There are others, I’m sure, who could be counted among them.  He calls them “the saints next door, who have awakened something important in our hearts.”  And he goes on, in a lovely turn of phrase to say of them, “They are the antibodies to the virus of indifference. They remind us that our lives are a gift and we grow by giving of ourselves, not preserving ourselves, but losing ourselves in service.”

I love the idea of “antibodies to the virus of indifference.”  I feel quite sure that the attitude of which he speaks is indifference to one another.  Not all of us all called to heroic, life-giving service.  But all of us can resist the virus of indifference to one another, even if it’s only by turning toward the other from time to time, when it might be easier to just stay focused on me and what I want, but choosing instead to turn to the other and asking, Are you OK?

The pope and the Duchess of Sussex walk into the offices of the New York Times… and I think it’s possible that both of them have given us meaningful suggestions about what we are supposed to do while we are waiting.  More alone than ever, facing division where once there was community, we are, nonetheless, still in charge of so much.  Both Francis and Meghan encourage us to remember that we do not actually need to be alone or divided.  While we wait for antibodies to the coronavirus, maybe we could be developing these antibodies to the virus of indifference to one another?

It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his servants in charge, each with his work.  What if the work we do while we wait teaches us not only to turn toward the other and ask, Are you OK?  What if while we waited we could also learn that it is better to live a shorter life serving others than a longer one resisting that call?

There have always been saints next door who have shown us the goodness and wisdom of a life serving others.  When I think of how I’m waiting, I pray that God will teach me the value and the meaning of such goodness and wisdom.  It makes the waiting more than worthwhile.

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

*The articles in question are:

Pope Francis, “A Crisis Reveals What Is In Our Hearts,” in the New York Times, 26 November 2020
Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex, “The Losses We Share,” in The New York Times, 25 November 2020

From Penn Medicine

The Test

If you happen to be home a lot these days—and I know you are—you may be watching Netflix as much as we have been.  Maybe at your house, as at ours, season four of The Crown has been eagerly anticipated.  Maybe you are consuming episodes at a rapid clip like we are.  If you don’t watch the series, please accept my congratulations.  Honestly, I don’t know why the royal family is so compelling.  It’s mostly not the clothes, right?  And it’s certainly not the personal relationships, which after all are marked, episode after episode, season after season, by grim silence and a habit of shunning anyone who represents the future.  On paper it lacks the spark that would seem to ignite a hit series, but many of us find it impossible not to watch.

Which means that some of us are buzzing about something called “the Balmoral test.”  An episode from Season Four depicts the royal family at Balmoral, their Scottish retreat, entertaining first the newly-elected Margaret Thatcher and then Charles’s newly-discovered potential spouse, Lady Diana Spencer.  “Entertaining” is actually far too generous a term for what the royals do to their guests.  If you haven’t seen the episode, suffice it to say that an invitation to Balmoral is something like junior high with tiaras and hunting rifles.  Apparently (I can’t testify to this first-hand, because I haven’t received my invitation yet) a weekend at Balmoral is a sink-or-swim experience in which you either guess the rigid social rules known only to the family or you face an endless round of humiliating snubs.  Margaret Thatcher’s husband finally diagnoses the whole thing as a “half-Scottish half-Germanic cuckoo land,” hitting it right on the nose.  And yes, that’s probably the last time I quote Margaret Thatcher or any of her close associates, even in fictional form.  Diana, on the other hand, manages to carry herself with aristocratic nonchalance, agreeing to a muddy hunting trip alone with Prince Philip as though that were the most normal way for a girl in her late teens to pass the time.  I don’t think it’s giving too much away to say that Diana passes the test with flying colors.  I mean, she nailed the footwear competition. You know all about how she was rewarded.

We could be forgiven, especially we sorry Americans whose only exposure to monarchy is on Netflix, for wondering whether, when the Son of Man arrives at the last day to sit on his throne of glory and separate the sheep from the goats, it’s going to feel like the Balmoral test.  After all, life here on earth is full of experiences that feel like junior high, and for most of us there are no tiaras in the offing no matter how masterful our performance of nonchalance.  And judging from Matthew’s gospel as we’ve been hearing it read in recent weeks, the kingdom of heaven is also a place where obscure tests are passed or failed by the unsuspecting.  Last Sunday we heard all about the wealthy man who inexplicably gave his servants a bunch of money, apparently just for the pleasure of watching them succeed or fail at investing.   The week before we had those poor bridesmaids who ran out of oil without ever suspecting that the bridegroom would lock them out for failing to keep their lamps lit.  What a snub!  And now this week, another set of unspoken expectations will culminate in harsh judgements.  Neither those who gain eternal life nor those who are sent to eternal punishment know what the rules are.  Suddenly presented with a list of their acceptable or unacceptable deeds, all are stunned, asking when it was that they performed the acts in question.  

The uneasiness is palpable, even among those who are placed in favor at the Lord’s right hand: “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food?” It’s as though the joy of being rewarded by God is temporarily displaced by a sense of shock that comes with learning that you have no idea what the standards for your success have been. 

If this were Balmoral, we might be ashamed and angry, knowing that our best efforts to earn entrance into the royal family were thwarted by a perverse cliquishness.  But did you notice?  The rules we don’t know about in the kingdom of heaven are wonderfully, lavishly, unlike the rules of earthly aristocrats.  It turns out that heaven is not hung up on the faded glory of empire, not defensive about whether its ways are still relevant, and not anxious about status of any kind.  Your shoes are just fine.  

Christ the King operates in a different way.  The signs of membership in this elite society are all acts of reversal.  When you are out, you are in.  When you are poor, hungry, alone, imprisoned, when you thirst, you become part of the royal house of David.  When you are able to get past your own comfort and care for others, performing works of love, those works shine like jewels in a crown.  You are privileged to care for Jesus himself when you care for one who needs you,  especially when you are unable to see signs of nobility in that neighbor who must depend upon your mercy.  Jesus himself has come to you in the person of the downtrodden.  

For a long time I thought that the Feast of Christ the King was some medieval legacy that we were kind of stuck with, another one of those possibly-dead metaphors that we heard explicated so richly last week.  What a surprise, then, to learn that Pope Pius XI instituted this feast day in 1925, the same year Benito Mussolini became the fascist dictator of Italy.  Monarchy may not be the first answer you and I come up with in response to fascism, but let’s go ahead and accept the church’s challenge.  

Celebrating the Reign of Christ, it turns out, is a sharp rebuke to the kingdoms of this world.  Jesus identifies with the poor, and that’s the core of what we need to understand if we want to follow him.  In fact, this passage from Matthew’s gospel that we are reading this morning is a direct invitation to follow him to the cross.  Immediately after giving us this description of his identification with the poor, Jesus tells the disciples that it is time for the Son of Man to be betrayed and crucified.  If they can’t love him as the downtrodden outsider now, they will have another opportunity in two days, when the Feast of the Passover commences and the events we identify with Holy Week take place. 

So Christ the King, Christ the Crucified, rebukes the kingdoms of this world: all of them, ancient ones, modern ones, and the strange new forms of celebrity rule that are taking shape even as we speak this morning.  Loving this King requires no nostalgia, no garbled populism or people’s princesses, no strongman at the helm of a military nation.  No need for charisma here, no strategy for winning, no war chest or social media. 

Jesus rebukes our kingdoms not by challenging them to a contest of legitimacy or relevance or superiority, but by appearing before all of us as the disgraced outsider with whom we are desperate not to identify.  If we want access to this King we have abundant opportunities to be with him.  He keeps no one away.  He offers no defense.  He requires our mercy.  

We may find him, you and I.  We may reach him this morning or later in the afternoon.  There may be traces of his magnificence in our own hearts, or wherever shame is lodged.  Shame and poverty are his invitations.  Loneliness is his royal seal.  Unknowing is a mark of his favor.

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
November 22, 2020
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

A Dead Metaphor

“The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot.”  George Orwell provided these marvelous examples of mixed metaphors and inexact, unhelpful language in an essay in 1946.*  

In that same essay, Orwell addressed the unfortunate over-reliance on what he called “dying metaphors” - “which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.”  As examples, he offers: toe the line, grist for the mill, stand shoulder to shoulder, and others.  These “dying metaphors” Orwell distinguished from metaphors that are actually already dead.  A dead metaphor is a word or phrase that has lost any metaphorical power, and has “reverted to being an ordinary word.”  He offers “iron resolution” as an example.  I guess you could know that iron resolution is really strong and unbending without knowing anything at all about metallurgy.

This morning, the parable of the talents is a parable of a dead metaphor: the metaphor in question being a talent, which, as metaphors go, is as dead as a door nail.  

The English word “talent,” you see, has been in use at least since the late ninth century, and referred then to a specific measure of weight.  What exactly that measure of weight weighed is a detail forgotten to history, lost in the mists of time, as it were.  Eventually, the word came to refer not to the measure of weight, but to the specific value of the weight of a talent of gold or silver.  And with that meaning - of the monetary value of a specific ancient measure of weight - the word “talent” found its way into the English translation of the Gospel according to St. Matthew.

Now, we are told that a talent was a large sum of money - about the value of something like sixteen years of wages for a laborer in the ancient world - not an amount to be cast aside like an old glove.  And the parable of the talents tells of a man who “entrusted his property” to his servants, while he was away on a long journey.  You know how it goes.  To one he gives five talents, to another two talents, and to another one talent.  No instructions are given; but the responsibility is implied and, we take it, also understood: “make something of these talents while I am away.”

Surprisingly to us, for most of the church’s history this parable has not been read as an exposition on the virtues of compound interest, or the importance of a well-thought-out investment strategy and diverse asset allocation.  More shocking, still: the financial aspect of the parable faded from any significance, as if it was printed on fax-machine paper.  

Along with the quickly fading financial implications of the parable, so too, the financial definition of the word “talent” disappeared like writing in the sand.  What was left in its place was a new meaning of the word talent, which came to be defined, not as a measure of weight, or of the value of that much gold or silver, but as something more important: a “mental endowment” or “natural ability,” according to the OED, which tells us that this meaning comes “from the parable of the talents in Matt.”  And specifically, the dictionary goes on, the word refers to a gift or ability that is “divinely entrusted to a person for use and improvement.”  So the word “talent” now had a new and ordinary meaning.  The metaphor was killed.  Dead as a Dodo.

In that essay, Orwell wrote that “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity.  When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims,” he wrote, “one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.” 

And this morning, if we turn to the parable of the talents, the question for us isn’t whether or not we know what the meaning or etymology of a “talent” is.  No, the real question is whether or not we can tell this parable to ourselves with sincerity, or if we are reading it because we have to.  Can this parable speak to us anymore?  Or is it an exhausted idiom: something that must be endured, like a trip to the dentist, until we can wrap up here and go pour ourselves a cup of coffee?  This question of sincerity does not hinge on the meaning or interpretation of a “talent;” it swings on the disposition of our hearts, and the status of our faith.

Notice the words Jesus uses to begin his telling of the parable: “it is as if.”  It is as if.  With those words we are reminded that the parable itself is a metaphor: “a thing regarded as representative of symbolic of something else, especially something abstract.”**

It can be slightly tiresome, I’m sure, for a preacher to stand in a pulpit and tell stories in order to shed meaning or cast light on stories that were told by a preacher in order to shed meaning or cast light on something in the hearts and minds of the original audience.  All the more so if the preacher is always preaching to the choir.

But that metaphor (preaching to the choir) implies that the preacher is engaged in the task of converting the already converted.  And when it comes to talents and how we share them - that is to say, when it comes to what we are willing to give to God and to God’s church - I’m never exactly sure how completely the choir is committed to the anthem… especially if the anthem is being sung in the key of green, as it were - that is to say, especially if we are talking about money.

The dictionary tells us that talents are “divinely entrusted to a person for use and improvement.”  And the parable tells us the same thing.  “Master, you delivered to me five talents; here I have made five talents more.”  You take what’s been given to you and you make something of it; you find a way to make it grow; you cause it to increase; you allow it to multiply.  Or, to put it in the words of the parable, you are faithful over a little, and God sets you over much… and you enter into the joy of your master!

Today is one of many days that the church asks you to consider what you have done and what you are doing with all that has been entrusted to you.  We work on the assumption that everything we have has been given to us by God; there is nothing that isn’t a talent, to use the terms of the parable.  

I could try to rephrase this question, as I have before, and I am sure I will again.  But another important question is this: Is this metaphor dead or not?  Is it dying?  Is the parable just a dead or dying metaphor?  Or does it have life in it still?  Am I whistling in the wind?

It would be easy, at this point, to say that it’s up to you to keep the metaphor of the talents alive.  And to encourage you in your generosity, to stir up in you the sense of responsibility that you have to keep the old metaphors alive, etc., etc.  But to do so would be to fail to understand the Resurrection even as so much as a metaphor, let alone as a truth that’s truer than the North Star.  For, bringing new life to that which is dying or dead is not actually your work or mine.  It is always, only, and ever the work of Jesus.  

To be sure, it’s work in which we all have our own part to play.  But it’s so much easier to get our part right when we see that we are only responding to what Christ has done and is doing in our lives and in the world; when we know that we are only participating in the new life that he has already prepared for us and for all things.

The worry of every preacher who stands up to talk about Christian stewardship, about the need of the giver to give, about your talents and how you should make them grow by sharing them with the church, and about the reward of entering into the joy of our master is that no matter what we say, all you will only hear is this: “The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot.”

If Orwell was right, such worry places the cause of anxiety on the wrong heads.  If “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity;” if there is a gap between my real aims and the aims I declare on behalf of the Lord, maybe then I (or any preacher) am nothing but a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

So let me try to be plain and clear.  Everything we have comes from God, and God has entrusted nearly everything on this earth to our care, and God has given us all this so that we can make something of it; we can find a way to make it grow; we can cause it to increase; we can allow it to multiply.  More to the point, God asks us to be faithful in a little, so that we can be set over much, and so that we can enter into joy!

What you do with what God has given you matters - not just to the church; it matters to you!  Take what God has given you  and make something of it, find a way to make it grow, cause it to increase, allow it to multiply!  

Every single day of the year we try to demonstrate here that investing in the ministry of Saint Mark’s is a good way to accomplish those goals.  And we hope that this message rings true.

Build your house on solid rock.  Don’t hide your lamp under a bushel.  Put new wine in new wineskins.  Sow seeds on good soil.  Have faith even as small as a mustard seed.  Let the yeast leaven the dough.  Go and buy the field where the treasure is hidden.  Sell all you have in order to acquire this one pearl of great price.  Get dressed and come to the wedding banquet!  Stay awake, and keep your lamps burning!  Take your talents and put them to work for yourself, for the world, and for the Lord!  The teachings of the Lord, just as his parables are not dead or dying.  God has given them to us to keep us alive, and to give us new life, when our time in this life comes to an end.

And your talents, your gifts, all you have to offer are not dead or dying metaphors.  They are seeds and soil, wine and wineskin, they are mustard seed and yeast.  They are banquet, and  treasure, salt and candle flame.  Your talents are pearls that adorn a new way, a new hope, a new life.

Don’t bury your talents.  Make something of what God has given you, and watch it grow like topsy, grow like the the grass after the rain, like a flower turning its face toward the sun… grow like someone who knows herself to be a child of God and who has been given a great many gifts, a great many talents, and who delights to make them grow!

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

* George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” 1946, Penguin Books, available thanks to the Orwell Estate on www.orwellfoundation.com

** from Oxford Languages/Google

Rembrandt: The Parable of the Talents