The Echo Chamber

The introduction of cameras in the church during this pandemic has laid bare one of the more open secrets of this parish: that every day we pray here, several times a day.  You may think this an unremarkable activity for a church, but in my experience, churches that engage in daily public prayer are few and far between in the Protestant traditions.  But Saint Mark’s has long obscured the fact that we come from a Protestant tradition.  

The Rectory allows us to gather a kind of residential community here, it was actually built for that purpose.  The Ministry Residents and I are all thrown here together because of a call to Christ’s ministry, with no other real reason to live in such close proximity to one another.  In this regard, we are a little like a monastic community, but only a little, and in most ways not.  But also in prayer: day in and day out, two or three times a day, no matter who else shows up, in-person or online.  This pattern of prayer has been going on for a long time at Saint Mark’s - long before the Ministry Residents were a thing here, and long, long, long before I was a thing here.  We have adapted to and with the life of prayer here.  

These days, the pattern of daily prayer we use here includes the Daily Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer (most days) and at least one Mass, every day.  As I say, some variation of this pattern has been going on here for a long time; the cameras just make it easier for you to see it and hear it.

If you happen to tune in to watch a very few of us here rigidly adhering to a 500 year-old form of prayer that’s based on a tradition that’s a thousand years older than that, you might think that what you are witnessing is rather senseless, certainly out-moded, and you might ask yourself why we do it.  These would be perfectly understandable reactions to the rather drab activity of saying prayers that are ever so much more lovely when they are sung.  And I agree with you that it would be better for us to sing the Offices every day; maybe we’ll get there, some day.

But the truth is that the daily, repetitious pattern of prayer here is intended to do something specific (among any number of other possible goals).  With all that repetitive prayer, we are trying to create here what you might call an “echo chamber.”

Now, technically, an echo chamber is “a hollow enclosure used to produce reverberation.”  And reverberation (I should add) is the “persistence of sound after the sound is produced.”  But of course we all know that the term “echo chamber” has taken on new meaning in our current century.  An echo chamber is also “an environment in which the same opinions are repeatedly voiced and promoted, so that people are not exposed to opposing views.”

The Psalmist has what you might call an opinion that we hear voiced this morning: 

Ascribe unto the LORD, O ye mighty, * 
ascribe unto the LORD worship and strength.

Ascribe unto the LORD the honour due unto his Name; * 
worship the LORD with holy worship.... 

... the LORD remaineth a King for ever.

The LORD shall give strength unto his people; * 
the LORD shall give his people the blessing of peace.

Honor, worship, strength, and glory belong to the LORD - and only to the LORD.  Hidden beneath those four letters  (L-O-R-D) is the divine Name of the one, true, and living God: unspeakable, hidden in the Hebrew substitute word for it too, Adonai.  Eighteen times in the eleven verses of the psalm, voice is given to that unspeakable name.

The voice of the LORD speaks, and when the LORD speaks, the LORD speaks with power.

The voice of the LORD ruleth the seas.

The voice of the LORD breaketh the cedars of Lebanon.

The voice of the LORD divideth the flames of fire.

The voice of the LORD shaketh the wilderness.

The voice of the LORD maketh the hinds to bring forth young.

Ascribe unto the LORD the honor due his Name!

Welcome to the echo chamber.

And because the Psalmist’s opinion is so focused and so clear, when I say that we have worked to build an echo chamber here, it might sound as though we are interested in that second definition: a place where a narrow perspective can be further narrowed and repeated to the exclusion of other ideas.  But we’re old fashioned here, so in truth, like the Psalmist, we are interested in the more conventional meaning of the term: a hollow enclosure (let’s call it “open” and “un-cluttered”) used to produce reverberation” so that the voice of the LORD can persist long after the sound is produced.

Ascribe to the LORD the glory due his Name; worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness.

In a world where anyone can believe anything and no one believes anything, we believe that power belongs to God, and we give repeated and sustained voice to the unspeakable Name of the Lord, and to the power that belongs to that voice.

We know that the society around us has organized itself into vast echo chambers of unexamined opinion, political persuasion, and harmful exclusivity.  And the surest way to know the difference between a godly echo chamber and an ungodly one is to ask, whom does it serve?  That’s why we are so insistent here that our mission is organized around worshiping God on the one hand, and serving God’s people especially the needy, on the other hand.  The echo here, we pray, is not self-serving, for it always directs us toward the other: toward God and our neighbors, as God’s word and God’s law have always done.

Events of the past week have provided unsettling evidence of how destructive the modern echo chambers of political communication and ideology can be when they magnify falsehoods and exclude opposing voices.  Democracy doesn’t work that way.  As it turns out, religion doesn’t work that way either.  And so if we are going to build an echo chamber here, we have to be careful to build what you might call a “virtuous echo chamber” for God’s Name.

In a virtuous echo chamber the sound of God’s Name reverberates: it persists long after it was first spoken, touching the ages as it rolls down whichever corridors are open and un-cluttered enough to allow it to endure.  In a virtuous echo chamber, we find ways to pronounce the unspeakable Name of God by choosing mellifluous substitute words that prompt us to sing.  What we hear in a virtuous echo chamber doesn’t just comfort us in our afflictions, it also afflicts us in our comfort: driving us again and again to consider the other, who is not as comfortable as we are.

The Psalmist knew that the voices we hear and listen to affect our lives profoundly.  And he wanted us to remember the voice of the LORD: to be on the lookout for it, to know where it could be found, and to be aware of its power.

And it’s no mistake, nor a matter of poetic license that it is a voice that speaks when the heavens are torn open, and the Spirit is revealed like a dove.  The voice of the LORD declares to Jesus, (but for the benefit of the rest of us): “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

This voice speaks.   The voice says, “Cry out!”  And we do not have to ask, “What shall we cry?”   With our prayers we build an open, un-cluttered chamber in which the sound of the voice persists, calling us to worship the LORD and serve one another.  Among all the echo chambers of our shattered society, the truth continues to sound.  And we mean for the sound of the truth to persist

Ascribe unto the LORD, ye mighty, worship and power, honor and glory.  Ascribe unto the LORD the glory dues his Name, let the sound of it repeat and repeat and repeat in the echo chambers of the church. 

For the LORD shall give strength to his people; the LORD shall give his people the blessing of peace.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
10 January 2021
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia

Epiphany on Locust Street

At Christmas, God provided a child for the childless when he sent his Son to be born of a virgin.  God provides what we cannot imagine we will ever have, and in fact, God provides that which we think it is impossible for us to ever have.

It should not surprise us that God provides what is needed, even when we fear that there will never be enough.  It started with manna in the wilderness.  Remember that on the sixth day of the week, God provided enough manna to last for two days, so that everyone could rest on the sabbath.  In the beautiful and simple economy of God’s salvation, God’s providence is not allotted according to merit, but according to need.  “Those who gathered much had nothing over and those who gathered little had no shortage; they gathered as much as each of them needed.” (Ex 16:18)

Forgetful of God’s grace, we suppose this is a quaint detail of a fanciful story, just as even those who gathered the manna were forgetful of God’s grace.

Both Elijah and Elisha were reminded of God’s inclination to provide where we see only want.  

For Elijah, it was in the company of the widow of Zarephath, who had only enough meal in a jar and enough oil in a jug to eek out one last morsel of a meal for herself and her son before they would die from the want of their poverty.  But she “did as Elijah said, so that she as well as he and her household ate for many days.  The jar of meal was not emptied, neither did the jug of oil fail, according to the word of the Lord.” (1 Kings 17:16)

For Elisha, it was the want of another widow, whose two sons were to be taken from her and sold into slavery.  Elisha asks her, “What do you have in the house?”

“Nothing,” she says, “except a jar of oil.”

“Go outside,” Elisha tells her, “borrow vessels from all yours neighbors, empty vessels and not just a few.  Then go in, shut the door behind you and your children, and start pouring into all those vessels.”  So the widow did as the prophet told her to do and there was enough oil to fill every vessel of her neighbors, who gladly paid her for the oil, giving her enough to live on. (2 Kings 4:1-7)

When the Jews reclaimed the Second Temple in the 2nd century BCE they found only enough un-desecrated oil to burn the lamps for a single day.  But by the grace and power of God, the oil lasted for eight days, keep the lamps lighted until new oil could be procured.

God provides what is needed even when we fear there will never be enough.

At first glance it does not appear that the story of the Epiphany falls in line with these other stories of God’s miraculous provision in time of want.  But that’s because we have a tendency to see the Epiphany unfolding only across the sandy landscape of ancient Palestine, and not here on Locust Street in our own time.

Yes, all those centuries ago, wise men came from the east to bring their gifts to this mysterious, holy child in Bethlehem, born under a heavenly sign: a star to guide the wise to the place of God’s revelation.  But a simple story of God’s provision, God’s light, and the gifts of the faithful has been unfolding for the last twelve days here on Locust Street.

Like everything else since last March, it starts with the pandemic.  Unable to gather as we usually would to celebrate Christmas, we were driven outside to search for a place to celebrate Christ’s birth. It seemed like an appropriate echo of the first Christmas.  And so, the rustic manger in the garden was hastily assembled, and representations of the Holy Family were fabricated to take their customary places.

On Christmas Eve, we invited you to come and bring a candle.  And what unfolded after that was not exactly a miracle.  But it has been (to me at least) a sign of God’s revelation that even under the tight restrictions of this pandemic… that prevented us from allowing congregations of any more than twenty people to gather in church for Christmas… no more than twenty of you allowed in here at any time… while, of course, many of you gathered on line (that’s a miracle of its own kind!)… when normally we’d have  nearly 300 in church on Christmas Eve for Lessons & Carols… then another 350 for Midnight Mass… and another hundred or so on Christmas morning.  But this year: twenty, twenty, and twenty: a total of sixty of you allowed to be here in person for Christmas.

Well, let me just say that it did not feel to me like manna falling from heaven, this Christmas.  It did not feel as though the jar of meal and the jug of oil were going to keep us going this year.  It felt a little like we had nothing in the house but one last jar of oil; a little like the Seleucid armies had rampaged through and left precious little oil un-desecrated, maybe only enough for one day.  And, frankly, by the end of Christmas morning it was all too easy to feel like the widow of Zarephath.  Not just because it seemed like we had been reduced to so little, but because it was also all too easy to be thinking only about us and what we had done, or not done; only about me and what I had accomplished or not accomplished; only about efforts and offerings that we were able to bring to the table (or not), as though what matters most on Christmas is what we have done!

On Christmas Eve, it poured down rain.  We could hear the rain pelting the roof from inside at Midnight Mass.  That afternoon, we had been outside in the wind trying to light our little candles by the manger, which we finally accomplished, thanks to someone with a lighter.  That evening, when the rain started, all those candles were doused by the wind and the rain.  And then a faithful parishioner came along, around 9 that night, and placed his candle in front of the Fiske Doors, under the protection of the archway there.  He texted me, and asked if he could move all the other candles there too.  Why not?  I replied.  “Will they re-light?”

A long silence followed.  And eventually a photo was texted to me of the Fiske Doors, closed and locked as they have been for all these months (another dreadful symbol of the loss of these months), but now with a bank of candles all burning at the foot of the doors: twinkling in the windy, rainy, pandemic-y night, doing what candles are supposed to do on Christmas Eve: reflecting the glow of that ancient star in the east.  And reminding me not about anything we had done, but about what God is doing on Christmas, and how un-stoppable God can be!

I got myself one extra gift on Christmas Day: I went to the store and bought a Bic multi-purpose lighter, the kind with the long nozzle, so I could tend those candles.  But I have not been tending them alone.  Nearly every day it seems that someone places a new candle or two at the doors.  I’ve taken away some burnt out candles, and brought out a few more, but others must have been adding to their number.  For all twelve days of Christmas - twelve days when we could not have a congregation in church, when all our worship has been online, when the Fiske Doors have remained locked up tight - for all twelve days, candles have been burning in front of those doors.

Those candles look to me both like signs of the prayers of the faithful, getting as close to inside the church as they possibly can.  But they also look to me like signs of the light of Christ insisting that it will not be locked inside the closed doors of the church.  And they look like signs that God provides what is needed, even when we fear that there will never be enough.

Of course, the candles are not gold, frankincense, or myrrh.  But who knows what ever became of those curious treasures?  They were never the point of the story, anyway.  They were never the real gift.  They were only the gifts offered in response to a gift given from God: the gift of his Son.

It has not been a miracle that kept candles burning at the Fiske Doors this Christmas, but as far as I am concerned, it has been a manifestation of God’s love to anyone who walks by.

And it has been a manifestation of God’s love to me, whenever I walk past, or go to check on the flames with my multi-purpose Bic lighter, and find that most of the flames have been blown out - but not all.

And, of course, the importance of the Epiphany is not just a reminder that once, all those ages ago the revelation of God’s working was made plain to a handful of wise men from the east.  No, it’s an opportunity for us to see how God continues to makes his love in Christ known to the world - how God provides that love through Christ, even when we fear that world might have run all out of love, and there can’t possibly be enough to keep going.

The moral of this Epiphany story might be that the rustic manger is the gift that keeps on giving, since it has been the reason that candles were lighted outside in the first place.

Or, the moral might be that the light of Christ will shine through tempest and storm.

Or the moral might be that the gifts of God’s people are the very thing that allow Christ to be known in the world today, and the God’s manifestation of his love in Christ depends on you, and that you are a marvelous blessing when you bring your light to be a part of the true light that enlightens the whole world.

Why should we have to choose a moral from all the possibilities that remind us that God provides what is needed, even when we fear that there will never be enough?

I’ll miss those candles burning throughout these twelve days of Christmas at the Fiske Doors, which means that when I walk out of the garden gate from the Parish Hall or the Rectory, there’s been a light burning, just to the east.  I’ll miss the candles; but I’ll remember them!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
The Feast of the Epiphany, 2021
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia

Into Egypt

Christmas is a feast of great comfort and joy, but the gospel for this second Sunday after Christmas takes a troubling turn.  We’ve heard about the shepherds and the angels, we’ve rejoiced with Mary, and we have adored the baby in the manger, and now we are with Mary and Joseph as they encounter danger and trouble and mysterious warnings.  It was no doubt a great effort to journey to Bethlehem, where there was no room for them, to have a baby in a stable, but now when the wise men have left them the greater journey begins.  The scriptures spend little time on this journey, telling us only that “Joseph took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod.”  The length and difficulty of the journey, the experience of remaining—maybe for two years?—in Egypt, the waiting to hear from the angel again: all of this passes unremarked.  

Included in the Gospel of Matthew but left out of our lectionary this morning, of course, is the terrible event we call the “Massacre of the Holy Innocents,” a biblical, if perhaps not historical, trauma we commemorated this week at daily Mass.  I want to read a couple of the missing verses that describe Herod’s actions and his motivations in that massacre, because I think they set Matthew’s depiction of the holy family, and especially of Joseph, in sharp contrast.  This is Matthew 2, verses 16 and 17: “When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men.” So the wise men visit Mary and Joseph and the baby, and then head home without telling Herod where they had found the infant king, as they understood him to be, and after the wise men leave Joseph has a dream in which an angel warned him to flee with his family.  And as Joseph is experiencing this revelation, of human depravity and God’s protective love, Herod too is suffering a revelation.  He realizes that there are wise men who are smarter than he is, who have tricked him.   And he is filled with hatred and vindictiveness because he does not like to lose.  And he is also filled with fear, as we so often are when we are hateful and vindictive, because somewhere out there is a newborn king to threaten his authority.  And somewhere out there are three wise men, laughing at him and outwitting him.  And they know how fearful he is.  And they know that his fake desire to worship Jesus was part of a scheme to kill him.  

And so Herod kills all the children in Israel who are two years old or younger, because that’s the time frame the wise visitors have given him for the infant king’s birth.  Herod becomes more reckless and more murderous as he feels his power ebbing away from him.  Joseph and Mary and the child are caught up in a great web of death and destruction, at the hands of an unstable, paranoid despot, and they can only trust what an angel has spoken to Joseph in the dark.

Caring for a child in a time of darkness and danger.  Trust, and a long difficult journey.  Waiting in the safest space they can find, waiting for the “all clear.”  Mary and Joseph are learning how to be the holy family, and it’s apparently not going to be easy.  They are also, more broadly, learning how to cooperate with God’s purposes in history.  Note how often Matthew’s gospel breaks in with a narrative voice that tells us how one action or another corresponds with or “fulfils” another part of the scriptures.  When Mary and Joseph flee into Egypt we are told that “This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, ‘Out of Egypt I have called my son’” (Mt. 2:15).  The massacre of the children of Israel is said by Matthew to fulfil the haunting words of the Prophet Jeremiah about a voice heard in Ramah that is Rachel weeping for her children (Mt. 2:18).  When Joseph realizes that they must not return to Judea but must travel to Nazareth, Matthew’s gospel makes what appears to be a rather puzzling statement about prophets who say “He will be called a Nazorean.”  Scholars spend a lot of time debating what that reference is, which is I guess to highlight that Matthew’s gospel account goes to great lengths—literally--to emphasize the fulfilment of God’s purposes in the furtive, dangerous, exhausting battle of endurance that is Jesus’s early childhood.  

So this account of the early years of Jesus’s life, this dark story of mysterious whispers and perilous journeys, is also a story of parenthood, and a story about living in danger.  With the exception of the frequent travel, which is not safe for us these days, it could be a story of the lives so many families are living: in isolation, in unforeseen danger from a pandemic or from a gun, in a world that seems to resonate more with the whims of unstable human authorities than it does with the purposes of God and the voices of angels.  And it’s in that, and this, most unpromising, dangerous, world that Mary and Joseph live into God’s plan, and do their inestimable, invisible, part to bring it to fruition.  This morning, Matthew gives us family life, and specifically the hard work of parents, as a map for the accomplishing of redemption.  More specifically, Matthew give us Joseph as an anti-Herod, a father in the line of David who undoes our ideas—and undoes Herod’s ideas—about power, safety, importance, and peace.

We know that family life is key not only because Mary and Joseph and Jesus are the central characters in this narrative, but because Herod’s revenge is to massacre Jewish families.  He targets childhood because he knows there is something there that he can’t grasp, can’t emulate, can’t control, and he fears its power.  We get another hint when we hear that it’s not safe for Joseph to bring Mary and Jesus back to Judea because Herod’s son is now on the throne.  On one side, a small family, nominally headed by a humble caretaker, that seeks to do God’s will and learns to hear God’s voice and risks everything to fulfil God’s promises.  On the other side, a neurotic, death-dealing patriarch who wants to keep everything for himself and his dynasty.  An unstable king who lashes out to destroy birth itself in order to preserve his control over a patriarchal system of inheritance.   His son will rule, not the son of some unknown Israelite.

Please believe me when I say that I’m not trying to argue that the nuclear family is the only system of relationship that God likes.  What I’m wanting to point out here is that something about the reality of living through God’s plan for the redemption of humanity is family-shaped for us.  Specifically, it’s the quiet, humble, unseen, infinitely difficult act of bringing a child safely through a dark time that God uses in this story to defeat death and tyranny.  It’s the trust: not only that Jesus is defenseless and dependent upon his parents, but also that Mary and Joseph have each had to trust the other to hear an angel correctly.  Each has had no option but to accept what God is doing in the other’s life.  They are together for the long haul here, again literally.  For a pilgrimage.  For a recapitulation of the calling of Israel out of Egypt and the lifting up of a prophet and a grim contest with the bloated tyrannical powers of this world.   

Wherever we locate ourselves in the systems of family and marriage in this culture, one sure sign of our cooperation with God’s grace is our ability to lift up the safety and the wellbeing and the spiritual giftedness of children. Gender is not what counts here; we are all parents to the children of the world.  We are Josephs.  

Pope Francis recently declared that in the Roman Catholic Church this was to be a year of remembering St. Joseph, cherishing his example and his humility and his faith.  The Pope spoke so beautifully of the role Joseph might play for us:

Joseph was the man chosen by God to guide the beginnings of the history of redemption. He was the true “miracle” by which God saves the child and his mother. God acted by trusting in Joseph’s creative courage. Arriving in Bethlehem and finding no lodging where Mary could give birth, Joseph took a stable and, as best he could, turned it into a welcoming home for the Son of God come into the world (cf. Lk 2:6-7). Faced with imminent danger from Herod, who wanted to kill the child, Joseph was warned once again in a dream to protect the child, and rose in the middle of the night to prepare the flight into Egypt (cf. Mt 2:13-14).*

Rising in the dark with creative courage, prepared to take responsibility for the journey, willing to hear the voice of the angel, fiercely committed to the relationships that define God’s will for him, ready to serve as a protector without jealousy or possessiveness: Joseph is the miracle.  You too, as you work in innumerable ways to shield those who need to be shielded, to trust those who need you to believe in them, you are the miracle.  You are a parent to the world’s children, and a sibling.  You are a caretaker for all that is holy and godlike.  God trusts your creative courage.  The care you take to preserve all that is holy in this world is the answer to injustice, tyranny, and wanton destruction.  Let me say to you what the angel said: do not be afraid.  Take the holy child in your arms and make the long dark journey to safety. 

*http://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_letters/documents/papa-francesco-lettera-ap_20201208_patris-corde.html#_ftn6

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
3 January 2021
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia