Jesus in America

The smash hit of the Broadway season, “The Book of Mormon,” opens with a musical number with the catchy phrase, “Did you know that Jesus lived here in the USA?  You can read all about it now in this nifty book, it’s free, no, you don’t have to pay.”  Later in the song we hear this helpful evangelistic assertion: “Eternal life is super-fun, and if you let us in we’ll show you how it can be done!”

Putting aside the musical’s breezy take on salvation and its critique of religion, as we celebrate the Fourth of July weekend, even if we don’t agree with the notion that Jesus lived here in the USA long ago, we might wonder whether or not Jesus lives here now, or whether or not he has anything at all to do with America. Does Jesus live in America?

Here in the cynical, socialist Northeast it’s fun to turn that question into a Broadway musical, so that we can mock its absurdity.  But there are other ways of addressing the question of whether or not Jesus lives in America.  In Texas, the state that boasts the largest cross in the western hemisphere, as though that were somehow a good or important thing, it’s a different story.  The Governor of Texas has another way of answering the question, “Does Jesus live in America?”  He begins by telling us that “we are in the midst of a historic crisis.  We have been besieged by financial debt, terrorism, and a multitude of natural disasters.  The youth of America are in grave peril economically, socially, and, most of all, morally.  There are threats emerging within our nation and beyond our borders beyond our power to solve.”  And so, the Governor and his supporters, borrowing from the prophet Joel, are calling for a “solemn assembly of prayer and fasting” to be held at a stadium in Houston later this summer.

Here is the most concise expression of their message on the website for the event:  “There is hope for America.  It lies in heaven, and we will find it on our knees.”  The guys on Broadway would have a field day with this.  It is only half a step away from declaring that Jesus lives in America, and at the rally in Houston, I can almost guarantee you that there will be a praise song of some sort sung that makes the point that Jesus does, in fact, live right here in the good old U. S. of A.

The organizers of the Texas gathering tell us that “our hope is in the One who might turn towards our nation in its time of great need – if we as a nation would turn to Him in repentance, prayer, and fasting.  The call of God to His people in times of great trouble is to gather together and call on Him with one voice, one heart….”  Biblically informed though this perspective may be, the trouble with it is that it mis-conceives our country, casting America in the role of a new Israel: unambiguously God’s anointed people.  This is a role that America simply cannot inhabit – we don’t fit the costume, especially since the original cast is still wearing it.  And the foolishness of this plan – as a plan for national renewal – is that it is doomed, since not even the Governor of Texas can bring about the repentance of this nation with one voice, one heart, earnest though his desire to do so may be.

But the Governor and his allies are not wrong about everything.  They pose this question, too:  “Who knows what can happen in our generation when we gather together to worship Jesus, fast and pray, and believe for great change in our nation.”

What the Governor is wrong about is who should be leading such prayers, and where they should be offered.  For his office does not qualify him for the job; in our country it more or less disqualifies him.   And converting a stadium into an arena of worship does not make it a church, since a church is first and foremost a community that can come together again and again to be nurtured and guided by God, not just whipped into a frenzy and released into the world.

Somewhere in between the Broadway jokes and the Texas swagger there is room for a lot of people who take religion seriously and who struggle with the question of whether or not Jesus lives in America.  Generations of people here at Saint Mark’s fall into that category, and when they agreed to a design for the main entrance to the church they carved over it words from today’s Gospel reading: “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”  The inscription was not originally part of the church when it was completed in 1851.  Those words were added when the great red doors were installed in 1923, long after the parish and the nation had endured the wearying Civil War, nearly a decade after the exhaustion of the First World War, and during the frenzied enthusiasm of the Jazz Age.  An invitation to rest in the cool darkness of this beautiful church must have been a very welcome thing to many.

“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”  It’s been a long time since a yoke was used with any regularity in the streets of Philadelphia.  So when I hear Jesus talk about taking his yoke upon me, I feel as though he is asking me to do something unpleasant, demanding, and sweaty.  I feel almost certain that I want nothing to do with Jesus’ yoke or any other.  But if I cast my mind back to my days in Colonial Williamsburg, I remember that a yoke is not something onto which a great weight is piled, it is a kind of wooden apparatus that keeps two animals together, allowing them to work as a pair, to allow them to accomplish work together that they could not do on their own.  And Jesus’ invitation to take his yoke upon you is not an invitation to take something off his neck and put it around yours, it is an invitation to take up the empty side of his yoke and work alongside him, to be his partner in ministry, linked to him in such a way that you go where he goes, and you accomplish the work he accomplishes.  It is thus that Jesus makes himself in the world: when we see those who have yoked themselves to him and who make it clear than the work they do is not accomplished on their own, but by the grace, and strength, and guidance of the One to whom they have yoked themselves, whose yoke is easy, and whose burden is light.

One of the charming things about Mormons is their insistence on following the Biblical model and sending their young missionaries out by pairs: two by two, yoked together, as it were, as partners in their work.  But the yoke of Christ is not always so easy to see.  Many people see Christians doing good work but do not see the invisible yoke of Christ that enables us to do it.  If we could see it more easily, we might have an easier answer to the question, Does Jesus live in America.  Here is one way I would answer that question:

The other day I went with Mother Takacs over to City Camp at our mission parish at Saint James the Less.  We happened to be there during a time that all the kids from the neighborhood were gathered together playing Tag.  It was a big group of kids and they were having a great time careening around, tagging each other.  As will happen, two of the littler kids were running around and ran right into each other, knocking one of them to the ground.  After that momentary pause that a child takes to assess the situation, the boy on the ground began to cry, and so one of the camp counselors, Roberto, went over to help him.

Now Roberto, is a kid of maybe 17.  He is a big, burly kid with short dark hair and bright dark eyes, and the kind of scruffy facial hair that you can tell he wishes he was older than he is.  Roberto is a good carpenter and he oversaw the construction of beautiful raised beds for a garden that is being planted in the schoolyard. 

Roberto went over to the fallen boy and scooped him up in his arms and gently carried him outside the play area to the steps at the side of the schoolhouse, where he set him down.  The boy was pretty clearly not hurt in any serious way.  I don’t think there was even a scratch or a scrape, his injuries barely qualified as a boo-boo. 

As I watched, I saw Roberto lean down and take the boy’s head gently in his hands so he could look into his crying eyes and assess the situation.  Seeing that the child was really OK, Roberto did the only thing he could do to help: he sat down next to the boy and put his arm around him and just waited for his crying to stop, which it did soon enough for the boy to rejoin the games and get on with his fun.

If you want to know if Jesus lives in America, you don’t need to look any farther than Roberto.  For in the moment that he held that small boy’s head so carefully in his hands, offering the kind of small mercy and compassion on which a happy childhood depends, it was easy to see that Roberto was not working alone.  He is yoked to the One whose name is invoked at the beginning and end of every day at City Camp, just as it is invoked at the beginning and end of every day here at Saint Mark’s.

Maybe it is the case that religion is all a big joke, and that our careful attention to religious observance at a place like Saint Mark’s deserves to be satired and ridiculed, maybe even turned into a Broadway musical.

And maybe it is the case that God is waiting for a bunch of Texans to declare their unswerving faith at a rally in a stadium, bolstered by feel-good music and heart-felt appeals to the idea that America really is the new Israel, called on to repent and live into its role as God’s chosen nation.  Though I doubt it.

But I am certain that as long as there are people like Roberto – and like so many of you, who have also been willing to take up the yoke of Christ and work with him to do what he does, and accomplish the things only he can accomplish – I am certain that Jesus lives in America, and I pray he always will.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

3 July 2011

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Gunpowder

At the outbreak of the Civil War, 150 years ago, the US War Department realized that they had a dwindling supply of saltpeter – a crucial ingredient of gunpowder.  So they turned to Lammont du Pont, grandson of E.I. du Pont, founder of the famous company that bears his name, and sent him on a mission to London, to secure a supply of the needed ingredient.  He cornered the market, and procured a supply of potassium nitrate that would meet the Union Army’s needs for the duration of the war.

Because du Pont has been at the forefront of important synthetic products, like nylon, Teflon, cellophane and Kevlar, it is easy to forget that the great chemical company began its corporate life on the Brandywine creek in 1802 making only one product: gunpowder.  As the episode of the saltpeter procurement suggests, du Pont was extremely good at making extremely high quality gunpowder at mills less than an hour south from center city Philadelphia.  And we are reminded once again of the close relationship of corporate America to the challenges, aspirations, and conflicts of the nation.[i]

Illumined minds and illuminating ideas are at the heart of the story of America that we particularly love to tell in the streets of our city.  But America was not born and raised only on a diet of Enlightenment ideas, fed by its great men and women of the18^th century.  America was also born and raised on a diet of gunpowder.  And without the men of du Pont the nation might not have survived much past its infancy.

I’ll spare you my book-report summary of the history of gunpowder.  For my purposes, let’s say that you can use gunpowder for a number of things, from firing cannonballs, at one end of the spectrum, to lighting up the sky with fireworks, at the other end.  Gunpowder has served both these ends, and many others, for many centuries.  And let me say right now that I vastly prefer one option over the other: I am enchanted by fireworks and always have been; but I find cannonballs and all their descendants entirely disenchanting.  But both require gunpowder: the explosive force that propels them up and out, beyond the confines of their chambers, to accomplish their fiery tasks in the world.

Gunpowder does not apparently have anything to do with our gathering today.  We are here to celebrate God sending the Holy Spirit to the Church after the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus.  For most of us, this celebration has all the force of a Sunday School lesson, and we have incorporated the meaning of this day into our lives with about as much seriousness of purpose as we have incorporated the meaning of our long-ago Sunday School lessons into our lives.  If we think about the Holy Spirit at all, we think about him as very impressive breeze, or as so many tea-lights hovering over the heads of the apostles.  But our consideration does not often go much further.  It does not occur to us that the Holy Spirit is the gunpowder of the church: dangerous and wonderful, with tremendous power to accomplish great things, and full of the force that propels the church and her members up and out of our chambers to accomplish our fiery tasks in the world.  Most of us have never imagined that the church required gunpowder, or had any such thing at her disposal.  In fact, it is quite the sort of thing that we think we should be protecting against: dousing any supplies of the stuff with water, if we stumble upon it, to make sure no spark ignites it, lest something unpredictable and unexpected should happen.

But I do not think it was an accident that God’s introduction of his Holy Spirit to the church is somewhat explosive: with rushing wind to feed the tongues of fire while language erupts into a beautiful cacophony of comprehension and understanding.  It was not for nothing that Jesus had warned his disciples that they would receive power when the Holy Spirit came upon them.  By this he did not mean they would receive a lesson plan for a Sunday School class, complete with multi-colored construction-paper to be cut out in the shapes of tongues of fire.  He meant that his followers would receive the kind of power that could and would propel them up and out of their chambers to accomplish great and fiery work in the world.

And the church was not born and raised only on a diet of the teachings of Jesus, or even only on the story of the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus.  The church was also born and raised on a diet of the power of the Holy Spirit: the church’s gunpowder.

The church has suffered because her memory about the power of the Holy Spirit has faded, and with that fading memory, we have mistakenly believed that the Spirit’s power has also faded.  It is almost as if we believe there was a dwindling supply of that power 2,000 years ago, and no one has been able to corner the market ever since.  It is as though we believe that God has not supplied his church as well as Lammont du Pont supplied the Union Army.

This is a sad way of thinking and an ever sadder way of being the church.  And I contend that Saint Mark’s has always stood for a different way of thinking, has more or less always seen itself as a gunpowder mill of the church: confident of the power given to us by the gift of the Holy Spirit.  Here we have always believed that our prayers and God’s grace mix together in a surprising and wonderful way that propels us beyond our chamber, up and out into the world to accomplish the work of the kingdom of God: caring for the poor, striving for peace, teaching forgiveness and mercy, and establishing the law of God’s love in the hearts of his people.  This is not a benign mission, or a flaccid Sunday School lesson.  It signals an explosive power that challenges the forces of this world who would rather trample the poor, cast peace aside in favor of supposed self-interest, hold onto vindictive grudges, and rule with the cruel tyranny of the marketplace as though it were inherently good.

If your experience of the church has not exposed you to this dichotomy, has not shown you how different the power of the church is from the powers of the world, then you are keeping your distance, perhaps wary of the very power that I am talking about.

If you think I am exaggerating, then you have not been to the Saturday Soup Bowl and felt the power of God’s love bringing his people together over bowls of soup; or you have not counted the grocery bags that leave this place every month to feed the hundreds of clients of our Food Cupboard; or you have not met the children who go to our after-school program at Saint James the Less; or seen the kids at City Camp; or you have not met someone whose troubled heart was calmed during mass; or whose despair was turned to hope in this community, or whose croaking prayer was turned into a song of joy at High Mass.

This is the daily work of the Holy Spirit here at Saint Mark’s.  It is powerful, important work.  It is gunpowder work: igniting mostly small fireworks of hope, forgiveness, mercy, peace, and love for the well-being of God’s children.

It’s gunpowder that wakes our soup bowl volunteers up in the early hours of Saturday mornings to feed the hungry. 

It’s gunpowder that motivates Kent John and his volunteers to schlep pallets of canned goods in here each week to distribute to the needy. 

It’s gunpowder that put Saint James the Less into our care, that brought us Dave’s leadership there, and that is blowing its breeze among the kids that are learning there already. 

It’s gunpowder that animates our worship here day after day, week after week, and that gives our songs of joy such beauty, and that raises our music to high art.

It’s gunpowder that brings God’s mercy from his heavenly throne to the altars of this church, whence it is dispensed in a safe capsule of Bread and a sip of Wine.

All this and much more is accomplished by the gunpowder of the Holy Spirit bringing the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ into our lives day in and day out.

The Holy Spirit, like gunpowder, gives us power!  And I suppose the church at large is a bit conflicted about this power.  Because power has been known to make some of us crazy, and prone to do the wrong things; and power has been known to make others of us nervous and afraid of the laws of unintended consequences.

There are many in the world who believe that what I am saying is foolishness and delusional.  Talk of the Holy Spirit is only so much over-compensation for whatever neuroses or psychoses I am trying to cope with.  And there are many in the world who have simply forgotten about the Holy Spirit, or assumed that that Spirit long ago returned to the skies somewhere never to be seen again.

But I think there is just a shortage of some crucial ingredient in the church – like the 1861 shortage of saltpeter – maybe it’s a shortage of faith, I don’t know.  And I am inspired by the thought that it could be our mission here at Saint Mark’s to corner the market on whatever it is that’s needed, just as Lammont du Pont did all those years ago.

As others in the church and in the world express their diminished expectations for the work of the Holy Spirit in the church, we have this truth, that we have not meant to keep secret, but which seems to be hiding in plain sight: that there is an ample supply of gunpowder for God to do whatever he wills in the world.

Will he help us to overcome our differences with one another in the church and in the world?

Will he help us to care for this planet that he entrusted to our care?

Will he grant pardon, forgiveness, and mercy to those who are tortured by their guilt and their recklessness?

Will he bring peace to so many troubled nations?

Will he feed the hungry and shelter the homeless?

Will he bring wars to an end and protect us all from ever becoming cannon-fodder?

Will he light up the sky with the brilliant fireworks of his unique glory and make his name, his peace, and his joy to be known in all the world as he establishes his kingdom on the earth?

We believe that God will do all these things – not because of our confidence in ourselves as his partners, but because of the strength and power he has given us in the Holy Spirit – our sure supply of gunpowder!

A year after Lammont du Pont’s successful mission to secure the supply of saltpeter, the labs at du Pont developed something called “Mammoth Powder,” which was a kind of gunpowder with grains the size of baseballs.  This mammoth powder enabled the development of truly heavy artillery, with a power never before seen.

Can we really believe that God has put it within our reach to take such destructive power into our own hands, but has placed the awesome power of his Holy Spirit – a power which binds up the wounds inflicted by all the artillery of men – has placed this power beyond our reach?

For far too long the church has allowed the world and its dark forces to use the force of gunpowder for death and destruction.  It’s now past time to take up the power that God intended for us to have, to let the mammoth power of God’s Holy Spirit ignite in our lives and propel us out of our chambers and into the world, where we will light up the skies with images of the kingdom of God, spelled out in the glittering letters of peace, mercy, care, forgiveness, and love!

Come, Holy Spirit, inspire our hearts, and set our lives alight with your power!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Pentecost 2011

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

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[i] Information about du Pont, its products and history, is from www.dupont.com

Atonement

Some of you know that I come from a broken home: a household that has been characterized for years by fear, conflict, resentment, and denial.  It is sometimes a dangerous thing to talk about one’s family from the pulpit, but from time to time, if it can be helpful to others, the truth must be told.  An almost daily drama plays out in my household that underscores the brokenness of the world, and the fractured relationships in it, and for a long time this drama brought me some pain, but I am learning to come to peace with it.

You will recall that Leo the black cat, who some think is a figment of my imagination because he is so seldom seen by anyone, was brought to me as a kitten, found on the mean streets of this city of brotherly love.  At the time I had only one dog: the charming and good natured Baxter.  I have reported before from this pulpit on the strained nature of the relationship between Leo the cat and Baxter the Yellow Labrador.  The tension is rooted not only in age-old animosities between cats and dogs, but in Leo’s unfortunate condition which I believe is clinically referred to as being a scaredy-cat.  The addition of a second Labrador, Ozzie, did not improve the situation.

Leo has spent various periods of his life hidden in one room or another of the Rectory, behind sofas and in the back corners of closets.  The past year or so has seen him confined to the second floor parlor.  On taking up residence behind the sofa there, Leo decided to shun me for a time.  He would come out in the dead of night, I suppose, to eat and to use his litter box, but never would he come out to see me, as he used to do when he lived in the closet of my bedroom.

The truth of the matter is that I do not spend much time in the second floor parlor of the Rectory, unless I am entertaining and I need to set up for having people over.  Obviously Leo is not going to make a sortie while people are over, so months went by with hardly a sighting of Leo.  My only connection to him for this time was my task of replenishing his food and water and emptying his litter box.

A couple of months ago, however, I was working on learning some music, and found myself going regularly to the parlor to sit at the piano – without the dogs in tow – to learn my notes.  One day, what should I see out of the corner of my eye, but the shape of a small black cat stealthily moving toward me, his green eyes fixed for any warning of imminent danger.  To make a short story even shorter, let me just say that I discovered that if I came up to the parlor and sat at the piano – without the dogs – Leo would invariably creep out from his lair to say hello.  He would rub up against me, jump briefly in my lap, sometimes even call out with a little “meow” to announce his approach.  I was listening for his purr, but I wasn’t hearing it.

Soon, whatever musical challenge I was working on had come and gone, and I no longer had any reason to visit the second floor.  The dogs and I generally work and live on the first and third floors of the Rectory, we don’t do a lot, as I said, on the second floor.  But I was now aware of Leo’s improved disposition, and it seemed unfair to stop visiting him.  Once or twice I even heard Leo utter his “meow” as he heard me walking outside the closed door of the parlor.  Something had to be done.  So I began to organize my days so that I could take 15 minutes or so to sit at the piano and wait for Leo to come out to say hello.  Sometimes Leo would even step onto the keyboard and play a tune of his own.

These days, I find Leo waiting for me when I come in – hiding in plain sight beneath a table, instead of behind the upholstered safety of the sofa.  He jumps in my lap, and lets me scratch his belly, and for a couple of weeks now I have begun to hear again the distinctive hum of his purr.  I am happy to have arrived at something better than détente with Leo, but I am keenly aware that our good relationship rests on the exclusion of two others, two sweet Yellow Labradors who would dearly like to make a playmate of Leo, even a friend, if he would give them a chance.  But for the time being we live in the dysfunction of our disjunction – a household separated by doors, on separate floors, divided against itself.

Is it surprising to hear Jesus praying in John’s gospel, just as he is preparing to go to his passion and death, for the unity of his followers?  He does not ask God the Father to give them wealth, or health, or strength, or vision, or to do anything whatsoever for them.  He asks only that his followers should be one, as he and the Father are one.  I suppose Jesus must already have known that the church, just like the world, would be made up of both cats and dogs; of people who would come to nurture old animosities, and who were  susceptible of being scaredy-cats, driven by fear.  And so we live in a world divided in which unity among human beings is an elusive idea. 

We are so often animated by fear, certain that everything out there is out to get us, and that protecting our own self-interests is the only sensible plan of action.  But let me tell you that living in a household that is, to this very day, divided, separate, and frankly, unequal, begins to feel a little wearisome.

I have seen cats and dogs that get along just fine.  Once in Spain I saw a cat that happily rode on the back of its canine friend.  This should not be an impossible dream.

It is particularly perplexing that some Christians (like some people in most religions) have been eager to forget Jesus’ prayer for Christian unity.  Some have forgotten that unity was the only thing we know that Jesus prayed for that night before he died.  Some people imagine that Jesus is like me: more prone to spend time with the dogs than with the cats, because some people imagine that Jesus prefers the dogs to the cats. This is foolishness.

But Jesus’ prayer shows us that God is not like that.  He is not satisfied to let his people occupy separate stories of the same house, with doors to keep them from one another.  Many people have mistakenly come to believe that Jesus’ principal ministry was to teach us what to do, how to act, what rules to follow.  This is not true, even if we are able to glean such lessons from his life and ministry.

Jesus’ principal ministry was to bring us together to be at one with each other and with God, which is why this is the prayer on his lips the night before he is to die for that very purpose.  Jesus’ ministry was, and is, to reverse the cycle of long, slow fracture that has characterized the world and the church for many thousands of years.  It was, and is, to hold up for us in his life and in his death and in his resurrection the image of a God who will give anything, do anything for the people he loves, and indeed for the whole world, since he loves all people.

We live in a broken world, where people are separated by long and deeply held fears, conflicts, resentments, and denials.  And so God sent his Son Jesus into the world, and his Holy Spirit, to sit with us in the parlor as we work through our fears, conflicts, resentments and denials.  And it must be God’s plan to bring us together who are so suspicious of one another.  But we are so very reluctant to come out from behind our upholsteries, where we have built up rationales for why it is better for us to stay there. 

We would vastly prefer it if God would tend to our food and water, and especially to our litter boxes and leave us in peace without asking us to try to deal with the Labradors downstairs.

But Jesus has not forgotten his mission even if we have.  He has not forgotten that there are blessings unknown to be found in unity.  He has not forgotten that we are all made in the same image and likeness.  So he sits with us until we come out of hiding.  He gives us all the time we need.  He has already given us his Body and his Blood.  But still he prays that some day we may all be one, as he and the Father are one.

May it some day be true in my household, in yours, and throughout the world.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

5 June 2011

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

God Unknown

…God waited patiently, during the building of the ark…  (1 Peter 3:20)

One of my earliest influences in interpreting the story of Noah’s ark was Bill Cosby, whose re-telling of the biblical story I knew by heart, and used to recite at the dinner table.  All these years later I find that I still hear his voice in my head as I imagine the conversation between God and Noah.

“It’s the LORD, Noah.”

 “Riiight.”

If you want a shocking exercise in how some other people think about that famous story, you might Google this question, as I did recently: “How long did it take Noah to build the ark?”  I was trying to gauge just how patient God had been, as he waited for Noah to build the ark, as is suggested in the section of the First Letter of Peter we read today.  I discovered, on the internet, where any faithful soul can post an answer to such a question, that the possibilities range from 2 years to 120 years, with a number of people settling on 98 years.  You can find the scriptural and supposedly historical support for these conclusions when you conduct your own Google search.

There is something amusing about the idea of God waiting patiently for Noah to build the ark, drumming his fingers in heaven as the ark is constructed, cubit by cubit.  According to Bill Cosby, it was Noah’s patience that more likely tested in this process.  But if we think about the great sweep of the whole Bible story, from beginning to end, creation to apocalypse, we can see that God does, indeed, need to be patient, over and over again, as he coaxes or cajoles or coerces his children to follow his lead, do the right thing, fix their faith in him to their hearts.

Was God being patient, I wonder, as the great City of Athens grew to become the center of the civilized world?  Was God patient as the temples for the twelve principal gods of ancient Greece were built in glorious architecture and with careful skill?  Was God patient as an altar was erected somewhere in Athens that was dedicated to “an unknown God”?  The idea behind such an altar is deeply practical: a hedge against the possibility that some deity, as yet unrevealed to the wise men of Athens, nevertheless required attention or appeasement.  So, to be on the safe side, an altar was dedicated to the unknown god, where sacrifice could be offered to no one in particular.  Was God being patient with the men of Athens as he indulged the practicality of their ancient and doomed religion?  Perhaps he knew it was only a matter of time.

It was clever of Saint Paul, who, despite being a convert to faith in Jesus, had believed for his whole life that there is only one God, to see an opening for discussion with the Greeks in the idea that there is an unknown God.  For the identity of the true and living God was clearly unknown to the men and women of Athens.  And maybe God’s patience with them was running out.  Maybe Paul knew this.  Maybe the thing Paul knew better than anyone else was the intensity of God’s desire to be known: God’s impatient yearning to be welcomed into the hearts of the creatures he fashioned with his hand, and made in his own image and likeness.

Much of the biblical record can be read as an account of God’s efforts to be known by his people: sometimes with acts of kindness, at other times in acts of apparent cruelty, sometimes in wandering or pilgrimage, sometimes in the sermons of the prophets, sometimes in miracles, sometimes in parables, sometimes with armies, and sometimes in the bosom of home, sometimes with fire, sometimes with water, sometimes with old men, sometimes with boys, sometimes with women, and sometimes with widows, sometimes in broad daylight, sometimes in darkness, sometimes in thunderous noise, sometimes in silence, sometimes in laws, sometimes with kings, sometimes with beggars, sometimes in poetry, sometimes in healing, sometimes in visions; and once in bloodshed on a cross, and in an empty tomb, and at a table with a loaf of bread.

Was God being patient or impatient when he sent his Son into the world to bring a message of love and mercy and hope to those who would believe?  Was it a sign of God’s patience that he replaced the complicated system of the law with a simple commandment: that his disciples should love one another as Christ loved them?  Or was it impatience with the tedium of monitoring all 613 dicta of his more ancient law?  Whether it was patience or impatience, what is clear is that God wants to be known in places where he is unknown, among people to whom his name is unfamiliar, and within hearts where he has as yet been unwelcomed.

If this is true – that even today God wishes to be known in places where he remains as yet unknown - it is ironic that in our own time God seems more elusive than ever, harder to pin down, difficult to identify by his work in the world, unconvincing to the skeptical, conflicted in the way his power is at work.

We live an a world that hedges no bets with God, and that has torn down altars to the God who thought he had made himself known, rather than erect altars to an unknown God.  And I find myself wondering: is God being patient with us, or are we being patient with God?

Long gone are the days of altars to the unknown God.  Today, many feel as though we live in a world with a God unknown – which is really only steps away from living in a world without God.  To many ears those stories of God’s kindnesses and cruelties, his wandering people, his prophets, his miracles, armies, widows, boys, and old men, his kings and beggars, the light and darkness, the fire and water, that cross, that bloodshed, that empty tomb… all add up to nothing: no sign of God.  Just a God unknown.

And to those of us who believe – or at least who want to believe, (for some, I know, can only make that claim) – it often feels as though we must be very patient with God, who allows himself to be so easily unknown.  Jesus knew that his disciples would begin to feel this way eventually, which is why he promised them, “I will not leave you orphaned,” which is another way of saying, “I will not be a God unknown.”  And because he knew that we could never be patient enough, when Jesus returned to his Father’s side, God sent the gift of his Spirit into the world to be with us in our impatience.

Do you remember the question that lurked in the middle of Bill Cosby’s version of Noah’s ark?  It was the hint Noah gave to his neighbor when the neighbor wanted to know why Noah was building and ark.  And it was God’s rejoinder to Noah when Noah became impatient with his long building project:  “How long can you tread water?”

The question and its implications, remind us that God and his people have always had to be patient with one another, since none of us can tread water long enough, and since God, though sorely tested, has never really wanted to do away with us – his most magnificent and most difficult creation.

There is much to try the patience, these days, of both God and of all of us, much to make us wonder at the stubborn slowness of the other in doing what we expect of each other.  And throughout this time of enforced patience, God has asked of us only one thing: that we follow Jesus’ only commandment, to love one another as he loved us.  This is a call to service and sacrifice, just as Jesus served his disciples, and gave his life up for them.  It is just one commandment that can be followed a thousand ways, but never by only treading water, and sometimes by simply being patient with the only true and living God, and with one another, his children.  Because even in the simple decision to just be patient, we may discover that God is not unknown in this world, with whom he has been very, very patient.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

29 May 2011

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want…

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want…

     Perhaps . . . perhaps, it is unsettling for us to pray this 23^rd Psalm outside a funeral occasion? For many, the 23^rd Psalm is firmly associated with consolation offered in death. Mourners frequently request this Psalm to be read at loved ones’ funerals – so familiar, so comforting.

     Yet, here it appears in the middle of Eastertide, a season for celebrating new life. When we shake this Psalm loose from its funeral moorings, we hear affirmations of life right here and now.

    Life, right here and now! This is the key truth: life, right here and now – not only or just in the afterlife!

     Praying this Psalm today reminds me of the time when our sons were very young, David six years old, Andrew three.

   Bedtime: many of us know the special-ness of this evening ritual. In our family, when the baths were finished and the boys were in their ‘jammies’, robes and slippers, it was story time. Richard and I took turns reading from a favorite: “Father Fox’s Penny Rhymes”!

     Then, it was ‘up the wooden mountain’! On his shoulders, Richard carried Andrew and, I held David’s hand to the top of the stairs, then into their twin beds in their small back bedroom. We tucked each of the boys in, kissed each gently on his forehead and then I sat down on the edge of Andrew’s bed.

    Prayer time: David and Andrew looked forward to this time because I sang the 23^rd Psalm (sing Gelineau): “The Lord is my Shepherd, nothing shall I want, He leads me by safe paths, nothing shall I fear . . . . “ Our sons felt loved and safe, in the night time and the day time – still, they feel loved and safe.

     In that time of their growing up, and for all of us – (pause) and this is the particularly good news for us this day – Jesus is with us in the “here and now,” in us Jesus lives into the power of his death and resurrection, this morning and every morning and evening: God with us, here and now, offering rest in green pastures, guidance beside still waters, Jesus’ rod and staff provide protection, security.

    But! Notice! The metaphor changes in the final two verses: God suddenly becomes a generous host, preparing a table and anointing our heads with oil, things a shepherd would never do for the sheep! Nor would the shepherd allow the sheep into the house!

     Taken together, these two constellations of images point to the royalty of Jesus. Just as the human king of ancient Judah and Israel served as shepherd and host of his people, so God does in this Psalm, in the person of Jesus. . . . .

     One more picture: in 2001, I was a pilgrim to Iona, a tiny Island off the coast of Scotland, where Saint Columba landed in 563 CE, bringing Christianity from Ireland to Scotland. I prayed for five days in that re-built monastery church and wandered the small island by day, even to Columba’s landing site, where I picked up a large stone, loaded on to it all my sins and the sins of my parishioners and tossed it into the sea – all that sin washed away! Then I walked to Columba’s quiet retreat prayer place to pray Psalm 23.

Everywhere on that tiny one mile wide and three mile long island, a haven for hundreds of sheep – those sheep fed and watered freely – no fences, no one harmed them, all vehicles stopped for them on the pathways – certainly we all watched our footing! – and those sheep came when they were called! Sheep: loved, protected, so alive, just as Jesus says of us, for him.    

     So, for us to prayer this 23^rd Psalm this morning is to make an extreme faith statement with the very first verse: God is our shepherd, not any king or president or government or nation – not anyone else but God in Jesus do we trust with our very lives and well-being, here and now!

    Yes, we trust God in Jesus to protect, prepare, provide, not in some afterlife, but now! Like the Psalmist, we need no one else and certainly no other thing. We pray for grace to be dependent solely on the God who walks with us through deep valleys, who provides food and rest, who offers guidance in right paths.

     Remember that wonderful old hymn? “And he walks with me and he talks with me and he tells me I am his own and the joy we share as we tarry there – none other has ever known.”

     In our consumer-oriented society, it is good for us to hear the simple but radical message of the

23^rd Psalm: God in Jesus is the only necessity of life.

    Friends, come to the Table prepared for us by The Lord of Life; with open hands and hearts receive Jesus’ gift of his very self – all for love, for protection, for life – here, now, always. Amen.

The Rev’d. Marie Z. Swayze

St. Mark’s Church, 9 AM Mass

15 May 2011



The Gate

We are told that the most commonly experienced emotion in our dreams is anxiety.  Indeed, many of us have had a kind of recurring dream that is all about anxiety.  Mine has come in different forms over the years, and it’s been some time since I’ve had it, but I know its outline well enough.  I am horribly late for something.  I’ll never be able to make it on time.  I am unprepared.  I have the wrong clothes on, or no clothes at all.  And I am late, late, late.  There is never an outcome to this dream; the moment of embarrassment or failure never arrives, is never lived out to its potential.  But that, of course, is not the point.  The point of the dream is about the anxiety, the fear, the possibility of failure, embarrassment, exclusion.

I could dream another version of this dream.  There is a high and long wall that seems to enclose someplace I want or need or yearn to be.  And I am walking or jogging alongside the wall, looking for a way in.  The wall seems to stretch out for miles as I traverse its length.  When it finally makes a turn at a harsh right angle, as I turn the corner, I see that it continues to stretch out ahead of me, with no opening in sight, as far as I can see.  There are places where the wall is low enough that I can see over it.  Maybe there are chinks in it that I can peer through.  Or maybe there are trees outside the wall that I can climb that let me look over it, to see the pleasant land the wall encloses, the happiness on the other side.  But the trees allow me only to see inside – the branches do not reach over the wall and allow me access.  I can run beside the wall for miles with my hand grazing its rough surface as I go: searching, feeling, hoping to find a door, a gate, a passageway; to discover the way in.

I do not even know why exactly I desire so much to be on the other side of the wall.  Except that as I look around me, I see there is very little here on this side of the wall.  It is a barren and dry land.  Only a few small trees and a distant horizon that looks unappealing, and not very much in between.  And so it is my recurring dream to find a way through this wall: to locate a gateway, a door, a passage inside.

But in my anxious dreams I am never delivered to any outcome.  I never find either doorway or gate.  I never find a way over the wall and into the land it encloses.  And there is no chance of tunneling in.  So I am doomed in these dreams to grope along the wall, searching, feeling, hoping.

Anxiety fills our dreams.

Into my dream there walks in the barrenness of the landscape outside the wall, a shepherd, who strangely has with him no sheep.  It is as though he is looking only for me.  It is not clear to me how I know he is a shepherd, since he has with him no sheep, but I know.  Maybe he carries a staff, maybe he looks familiar to me.  This is what he says to me:  “Child, why are you groping along that wall?  Why are you panting in exhaustion and frustration?  What are you looking for?”

“Sir, I am looking for the way in to what lies on the other side of this wall.  Do you know the way through?”

The shepherd smiles, and says, “Follow me.”

This is no end to my dream, no outcome.  I am still on the other side of the wall, still searching.  But he is, after all, a shepherd, and I am in the wilderness.  It seems to me that I am not unwise to follow a shepherd in the wilderness of my dreams.

There follows a long journey alongside the wall.  Cool breezes seem to waft over from time to time, while the sun just gets warmer and warmer on our side of the wall.  Music I hear carried on the breeze, and the aroma of something sweet baking in an oven that does not burn too hot.

For extended periods the shepherd says nothing.  He never runs his hand along the surface of the wall, as I so often do.  He doesn’t reach out to the wall with his staff and scrape it, as I would if I had a staff to carry.  Sometimes he tells me stories, as if he wishes to alleviate my anxiety.  Sometimes that is the point of the story (“consider the lilies of the field”).  Sometimes he speaks to me in the poetry of the David, singing to ancient chants that have been long forgotten.  Sometimes he says the 23^rd Psalm, and I can say it with him from memory.  Sometimes he seems to be telling me about what lies on the other side of the wall, in parables about weddings, and mustard seeds, and lost coins.  But in my dreams these visions are too swift and disjointed to put together a picture of what lies beyond the wall.

I have an anxious dream-within-my-dream that at times the shepherd has left me, and I am walking on my own.  At these times I start to run alongside the wall until I am out of breath.  I shout for him to wait for me, or to come to me, or in frustration I demand to know what happened to him.  I look down to see if I have any clothes on; I am afraid that I am naked and stupidly stuck forever on this side of the wall.

But there is never an outcome to the dream-within-my-dream either.  I am never abandoned completely, never left to rot naked beneath the sun outside the wall, never condemned to some fate worse than my searching, grasping, hoping.  Always I find that the shepherd is there with me again, saying “Follow me,” just when I thought he had disappeared completely.  And I do follow, because what else would I do?  Something he has told me – I am not sure what – about what lies inside the wall makes me absolutely certain that I must find the way in.

I wonder why there must be this wall, why whatever blessings abound inside it must be protected, cordoned off, why it must be so hard to get in?  What is it about me that makes me have to work so hard to find the way in?  Haven’t others been given an easier time?  Aren’t there better, faster routes to the cool breezes and the soft music and the hearth-baked sweets?  And sometimes in my dream my anxiety drifts toward anger at what appears to be this extraordinary effort to keep me out.

From time to time the shepherd stops.  He turns with his back to the wall and looks at me with an open face. He extends his arms as though inviting me to embrace him.  He opens his mouth to speak, and as he does some thunderous noise inside my dream, like the sound of a jet flying low overhead drowns out the sound of his voice, and for some reason I cannot read his lips. 

And I stand there stupidly, because I think it would be weird to embrace this man beside this wall.  I cannot see why he wants me to do it.  So I resist the strange invitation.  I am happy enough to listen to his stories, and to mull over his parables, to let his poetry fill my head, but I am not going to wrap my arms around him in the wilderness.  I have my limits.

In the middle of the day of my dreams, when the sun is hottest, I sometimes think I see a way in, a doorway opening and a shadowy figure beckoning me inside.  But these are only mirages, like the pools of water that appear on hot asphalt.  And when I investigate them, I find that they have taken me far from the shepherd’s side, and I have to run in the heat to catch up to him, because there is something convincing in his recurring call, “Follow me.”  So I do.

Eventually in my dream I ask the shepherd about his sheep.  It has dawned on me that they are on the other side of the wall, and that he is going to them.  This is why he seems so trustworthy a guide.  This is why he must know the way in.  And when I turn my attention to him in this way, when I turn to listen to him, I find that all of a sudden this is a different dream – no longer a dream of anxiety.  I find that my nervous pace has slowed, and there is no sound of an engine roaring in my dream, only the soft chirping of birds from the other side of the wall, and a faint music.

The shepherd has turned again with his back to the wall.  His face is open, and his expression is what I can only describe as love, even though I did not know I knew what love looked like.  His arms are open.

And I am tempted again to think this is weird.  But I am overcome by the scent of the sweetbreads baking.  And the music seems to be getting louder now.  And the cool breeze seems to be enveloping us both, flapping his long loose robe in its path, like a drapery that is blowing beside an open window.

I am mystified by all this and I look to him for guidance, for hope, for relief, for reassurance.  I am strangely un-anxious now, in this new dream.  And I can see that he is about to speak, about to tell me something that I need to hear.  And when he does, it is so simple, so easy, and I realize that he has been trying to say this to me all along.  That every time he stopped and turned, it was to give me this simple message that I was not ready or willing or able to hear, even though it was the desire behind all my anxiety.

So I listen as he says it: “I am the gate,” he says.

And without thinking I run to embrace him.  And as he welcomes me in his arms and envelopes me in the folds of his garments, I discover that I have entered into the sheepfold, I have passed through the gate and entered in, and I am among his sheep, on the other side of the wall where I know I have always longed to be, always believed I should be, in the cool breeze, and the swelling music, and the sweet-smelling good things.

And I realize that in my anxious dreams I could only see the wall, although the gate was there for me all the time.  And there was never any effort at all to keep me out.  There was only this long, patient beckoning to me to enter by the gate, if only I would turn, and love him.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

15 May 2011

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

A Vineyard Not Forsaken

Before this weekend I was connected to Buffalo by a single bottle of wine.  I have never been to this city before.  I have never visited nearby Niagara Falls.  Although I was brought up in New York, as far as I know I have never been to this part of the state before.  And the bottle of wine that connected me to Buffalo did not come from the nearby wine-producing region along the shores of Lake Erie.  It was a bottle of red, of un-identified (or at least un-memorable) variety.  It was consumed, at least in part, by me in the basement kitchen of your new bishop’s apartment at the General Seminary when he was my professor there.  I feel quite certain that part of the bottle of wine was consumed by him.

The wine was made by Bishop Franklin’s father-in-law, Carmela’s father, Joe, who had obviously imported some of his Old World ways to the New World.  I suspect the wine was made in his garage in North Buffalo.  It was, if memory serves me, a gallon bottle: the kind with a little round handle up at the neck, what can only be called a jug.  And without meaning to be at all unkind to Joe, I seem to recall that the quality of the wine – while not at all unpleasant – was appropriate to its container.  Let me put it this way: it had a screw-cap, back in the days when that told you everything you needed to know about a bottle of wine.

I do not know where the grapes for that wine came from.  Since I, too, live in a city with a thankfully large and noticeable Italian-American population, I understand that when it comes to things like sourcing grapes for wine that you are going to crush, ferment, and bottle in your own garage, there are ways…  Nevertheless, I can give you no details about the provenance of the grapes.  I only know that I drank a goodly portion of the wine with my professor, your bishop, and I believe we enjoyed every drop!

I have since learned that if you want to make good wine you must begin in the vineyard; this is where all good wine begins – where the vines are carefully trellised and pruned, and the rain and the sun dispense their gifts of moisture and warmth in just the right measure, and the vines yield luscious, ripe grapes that are ready at harvest time to be pressed, and fermented, and aged, and then bottled, in time.

Good wine begins in the vineyard.

The winery is a different matter.  It is here that the winemaker applies his art – in better vintages, to extract the glories of the grapes; and in lesser vintages to compensate for their shortcomings.  It’s in the winery that the must (the juice from the crushed grapes) is allowed to ferment, the barrels are chosen and prepared, where the maturing wine is monitored and adjusted, blended and finessed.  The wine will be dispensed into its bottles, the labels affixed, and the marketing plan for the wine begun in the winery, and lots of other good and important work.  But good wine is not really made in a winery.  Good wine is made in the vineyard, because it all begins in the vineyard.

Leaving the vineyard aside for just a moment, these days in the church we often feel beset by problems: by shrinking congregations, shrinking budgets, shrinking prestige, shrinking promise.  It is easy to feel as if something is slipping away from us; something that we have loved and thought that we could count on, but which has grown fragile and oddly sort of un-graspable.  I never imagined, when I was ordained fifteen years ago, that the church would look so different now, and that my ministry would look so different from what I thought I’d prepared for  in those lovely days back on Chelsea Square at the General Seminary.

But look in any direction in the church and you will find some difficulty, some challenge, some conflict, some problems.  These are not all you will find, but you will find them.  And it can be disquieting.  I am told that this may even be true in the Diocese of Western New York.

Sometimes the most disquieting of those difficulties, challenges, conflicts and problems are the headline grabbers: the break-away churches, the abuse scandals, the personal ordinariates, the so-called “covenants”.  I suppose in some places even the election of a bishop could be a bit disquieting.

And I want to suggest to you today that these are, by and large, winery problems.  They are not at all un-important or insignificant, but they are experienced and dealt with in the confines of the winery.  And when they are, it seems as though production comes to a halt, the bottling is shut down, and even the wine maturing in barrels seems imperiled.

And the hard part about being a bishop, if you ask me, is that you agree to take a job in the winery – where all this stuff plays out, and where every difficulty, challenge, conflict, and problem comes across your desk and invades your prayers.

Meanwhile, we parish priests know that our work is not in the winery, it is in the vineyard.  We walk every day among the vines of our little plots of land.  We’ve seen the vines flourish or wither.  We have baptized new vines and buried old, dead ones.  We have sometimes done some pruning, but mostly our vines are self-pruning, for better or worse.  We try our best to train the vines along a trellis – narrower for some, wider for others – but the vines are often unruly and unresponsive, insisting on their own way, but we love them anyway: what choice do we have?  Some of us have been working with the same vines for a long time, some of us have a long time yet to go in the same vineyard.  And we know that we will be working in the vineyard rain or shine, hurricane or hail, blight or bliss.  We love our annual visitation from the winery, mind you, but we suspect that our experience of the wine-making process is fundamentally different out in the vineyard than it is in the winery.

Reflecting on all this, some time ago I tried to eliminate a word from my vocabulary.  That word is “success.”  It can be hard to decide that we don’t want to be successful.  But search the New Testament for it and you will have a hard time finding the word there.  Success is not a New Testament idea.

Fruitfulness, on the other hand, is very much a New Testament idea.  And I contend that fruitfulness will not always look like success.  Indeed the suffering, death, and even the resurrection of Jesus did not look very much like success to the first disciples.  But it was fruitful.  And fruitfulness is what Jesus calls us to, and fruitfulness always brings us back to the vineyard.

It is my joy to celebrate with you the consecration and what used to be called the “enthronement” of your new bishop, because I know what a good laborer he has been in the vineyard – from long before he was ordained or ever dreamt of it, to the days he came to work with me in the vineyard I work in, in Philadelphia, just a few months ago.  And I expect that you know this about Bill, too.  That you have seen his sensitivity, his care and concern, his delight in walking and talking and just being among the vines of the vineyard.  I expect you noticed how fruitful his ministry has been as both a lay person and a priest, and this observation, encouraged by the Holy Spirit, led you to elect him to be your bishop.  And as Bill takes up this new ministry, it comes as no surprise to him, I am sure, to hear a reminder from me that good wine is made in the vineyard, where it always begins.

The rest of us need to remember this, too.  Because although it is true that tending the vines has become a harder job than it once was, as conditions have become more challenging and the soil always seems to be rocky, we are reminded that the best wines often come from vineyards where the vines have learned to struggle and have sunk their roots deep into the ground to find water and nutrients that are hard to reach.

And as we work to be fruitful in the vineyards, and we are assaulted with all kinds of disquieting news, much of which comes to us from the winery, and is being handled in the winery, worried about in the winery, we have a secret that we must not forget.  We know that when things get rough in the winery and production seems imperiled, that we can always push a wheelbarrow or two of grapes up the hill and into our garage, where we can crush the grapes and put the must into an old barrel or two, and let God do whatever it is that God does to turn that crushed grape juice into wine.  We can even make pretty good wine out there in the garage because we have good vines, and good wine is made in the vineyard.

But the best wine is made when vineyard and winery are working together to be fruitful in a happy synergy, grateful for the gifts available in each place, eager to encourage one another to do the best we can because what we hope to end up with, after all, is the best wine we can make.

It is surprising to me that in the Episcopal church, where we have been blessed with a large network of parishes, the challenging conditions of the past decades have sometimes left us scratching our heads wondering what to do about all these old churches, all these old vineyards, that sometimes are in disrepair, sometimes have become overgrown, sometimes many of the vines have withered and died.  It is as though we cannot imagine any longer that vines could flourish in these vineyards; that wine could be made from their grapes.

And I can tell you this about your new bishop: he is not confused about this, perhaps because of what he learned from his father-in-law, in his garage in North Buffalo, I don’t know.  He knows that there are vineyards that need work, repair, that in some places new vines need to be brought in and planted, that vineyard workers need to be taught what to do out there among the rows of vines.  He knows that the vines need to be cared for and loved.  Because he knows that when you have been given vineyards, you have been given a great gift, because the vineyard is what you need to make wine. Good wine always begins in the vineyard.

God has never stopped calling us to be fruitful, never stopped calling us to toil in the vineyards he has planted.  God has never deprived his people of what we need to make wine – and to make good wine.  Even when his children had been driven out of their own vineyards, their own holy city, he called them back from their exile, as we are being called now, with a call that would serve well as a watchword for the ministry of a new bishop:

Go through, go through the gates,

prepare the way for the people;

build up, build up the highway,

clear it of stones,

lift up an ensign over the people…

… they shall be called, “The Holy People,

the Redeemed of the Lord.”

And you shall be called, “Sought Out,

A Vineyard Not Forsaken.”

Has the highway to your vineyard been obstructed by stones that leave you stumbling?

Has the ensign of your hope been torn down?

Do you wonder if anyone will ever seek you out?

Are you afraid that you have been forsaken?

Do you wonder if there is any more wine to be made from your vineyard?

Are you wondering if your new bishop knows that good wine is made in the vineyard – must begin in the vineyard?

If any of these questions ring true, then join with me in calling with all confidence on your bishop, our brother, Bill:

Go through, go through the gates with us… 

Build up, build up the highway, clear it of stones!

Lift up the ensign of God’s love and hope over your people – over the laborers in the vineyard…

…so that together you may make good wine from the grapes you grow on the vines you tend.

Because you shall be called the Holy People,

the Redeemed of the Lord!

And you shall be called “Sought Out!”

And you shall be a Vineyard Not Forsaken!

Thanks be to God!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

at the enthronement of The Rt. Rev. R. William Franklin,

XI Bishop of Western New York

at Saint Paul’s Cathedral, Buffalo

Six-Word Gospel

I recently learned of a new literary genre called the six-word memoir.  The idea ostensibly came from a bet someone once made with Ernest Hemingway for the great author to write a story in six words.  Legend has it that he came up with this: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn,” but no one knows if this one-sentence story actually came from Hemingway.

The idea, as I understand it, is to say a lot in a small space.  And since we live in an age when people love to talk about themselves more than anything else, the memoir seems to be the dominant form of six-word writing.

Here are a few six-word memoirs, if you are struggling with the concept:

“Not quite what I was planning.”

“I am turning into my mother.”

“I still make coffee for two.”

“27 divorced, 33 single, happy, finally.”

“Named me Joy, didn’t work out.”

“Never really finished anything, except cake.”

You get the idea?  There are often details to be filled, in: some obvious, others mysterious, but the six words give you enough to get the gist of the story.

There is a collection of six –word memoirs by famous and semi-famous people.  For instance:

Chef Mario Batali wrote, “Brought it to a boil, often.”

From the satirist and comedian Stephen Colbert we get “Well, I thought it was funny.”

And you would think that this one came from our own Bill Franklin: “Secret of life: marry an Italian,” but it is actually the six-word memoir of writer Nora Ephron.

Soldiers have written six-word memoirs about the war in Iraq:

“Stayed too long, left too soon,” is one memoir from an Iraq veteran, another is, “Joined Army, left legs in Iraq.” 

You can say a lot in six words.

The six-word format easily drifts into realms other than memoir, more commentary then account.  Yogi Bera mastered it when he said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

It’s a format that helps us to find pithy ways of saying something we might not otherwise know how to say… about ourselves, about life, even about God.  For instance there’s this one that tells us a lot about its author: “Bi-polar, no two ways about it.”

Or: “On high horse; afraid of heights.”

Or: “Getting a haircut, wanting a facelift.”

Anyone can do this.  Anyone can say a lot in the small space of six words.  Perhaps you are sitting in your pew thinking of a six-word memoir you could write of your own life.   A friend of mine quickly came up with this: “I keep trying to be me.”

Sometimes such a short memoir is suggestive of events we can only guess at.  One writer gives us this: “Bad brakes discovered at high speed,” which sounds painful whether it’s meant literally or metaphorically.

Teenagers seem to find the format especially welcome since they often have a lot to say but not yet the patience or means to say it.  And six words provides plenty of space for angst.  So they have given us these:

“Shaking with sadness and repressed rage.”

“Mad at her.  Madder at myself.”

“Counselor told Dad about cutting, etc.”

“Bumped down to ‘best friend understudy.’”

“Never too old to love Disney.” (Not all teens are unhappy.)

“Four words: My Dad found out.”

One teen pointed out that Shakespeare would have been adept at the format, since he gave us: “To be, or not to be?”

I began to wonder if the six-word format, which can express so much about the human condition, might also work for religion.  Start looking for it among six-word memoirists and you will find theological reflection in six words: “God is my co-pilot; you aren’t,” is one example I came across. 

Or, “God is hope.  I am hopeless.” 

Or another, “Desperately wanting to believe in God.”

If we stop talking only about ourselves, does the six-word format still deliver?  Could there be a six-word Gospel?  Better yet, a six-word sermon?  (Though at this point it’s already way too late for that!)  So much of faith and religion is tied up in words; it can be easy to trip over all those words: a whole Bible full of them, pages of them in your leaflet this morning, a Prayer Book in your pew if you need it, and hymns full of words, words, words (more insight from Shakespeare in just three words!)  Is there any way we can say a lot about the life of faith, about God, about Jesus, about Easter with fewer words?  With only six words?

We might begin this way: “With God all things are possible.”

Or, if I gave you this, “I was lost, now I’m found,” I think we’d all be able to start singing the same hymn together.  Same if I asked, “Shall we gather at the river?”

I can tell you whole Bible stories in six words, I think, as long as you know a little background.  Try these:

God said, “Let there be light.”

Who said don’t eat the apple?

It rained forty days and nights.

And I will be your God.

(Here’s one I can do in two words: Sarah laughed.)

Moses said, “Let my people go!”

David picked up five smooth stones.

By waters of Babylon we wept.

God asked, “Can these bones live?”

John wore camel’s hair; ate locusts.

Blessed are the pure in heart.

Care for him; I’ll repay you.

Hosanna to the Son of David 

Why, what evil has he done?

This day you’ll be in paradise.

God, why have you forsaken me?

Who will roll away the stone?

In just ninety-eight words we can cover a lot of the Bible!

Sometimes it feels as if we have forgotten how to say a lot in a little space.  Especially about faith.  Especially about God.  But because you can pack a lot of pain and suffering into six words, as well as a lot of hopes and dreams, our six-word memoirs – even the one you might be writing in your head right now - need a six word Gospel just to keep up!

And faith in Jesus seems as though it ought to be able to say a lot in a small space.  After all, when God sent his Son Jesus into the world, he was saying a great deal in a small space.  It began in the small space of Mary’s womb and seemed to end in the small space of a borrowed tomb.  The whole story took place in small spaces – in a small-ish corner of the world, in the small region of Galilee, the small city of Jerusalem.  The central drama of the Jesus story takes place in the small space of three days – a week if you stretch it out to Palm Sunday.  And after his resurrection, Jesus would be with his disciples for only the small space of forty days, before his ascension into heaven.  If we try to compress the Easter message into six words, does it fit?

I think it does.  We can do it prosaically, like this:

Died on Friday; rose on Sunday.

Or more eloquently, like the angels, like this:

He’s not here; he is risen.

We can remember the way the risen Lord showed himself to his followers like this:

Disciples knew Jesus in breaking bread.

And if we were George Frederic Handel we could do it musically like this:

O death, where is thy victory?

But actually the church has been proclaiming a six-word Gospel for as long as anyone can remember.  We have known that in a world full of doubt, confusion, suffering, pain, and not a little joy, too, the Gospel needs to be available in a handy travel size that’s easy to remember, easy to access, easy to share.

Do you know the six-word Gospel?  It’s a Gospel that makes a bold claim.  Not everyone can believe it, and some people will think you are nuts for repeating it.  But it says, in the space of six words, that the whole world has been changed by God’s grace and power.  It says not to be afraid when fear seems close at hand.  It says you are not alone when you suspect everyone has abandoned you.  It says that light is shining somewhere even when you believe the darkness has won.  It says that yes, death is part of life, but not the end of it.  It says that evil will not triumph over good.  It says that when you are weak you have strength yet to be discovered.  It says that when you are lost you will be found.  It says all this and much, much more, in its scant six words. 

They are six words you know, and I pray you will leave here with them not only in your minds, but engraved on your hearts, and ready on your lips.  And I believe you can proclaim these six words of faith without me even telling you what they are.  So, I’ll let you practice once, secretly, in a whisper, so that only we can hear it; and then we’ll do it again for the angels to hear.

Are you ready?  Can you feel the six words coming into mind?  Forming on your lips?  Do you know what they are?  I’ll give you a clue, and I promise you will know the six-word Gospel.  Let’s practice; this time in a whisper.

[Me:] Alleluia, Christ is risen.

[You:] The Lord is risen indeed!  Alleluia!

I knew you could do it!  I knew you would know it!

Now, this time for the angels!

[Me:] ALLELUIA!  CHRIST IS RISEN!

[You:] THE LORD IS RISEN INDEED!  ALLELUIA!

The Lord is risen indeed!  Alleluia!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Easter Day 2011

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Horseshoe Salvation

Only five days after Palm Sunday, there is no mention today, in John’s Gospel, of Jesus’ triumphal ride into Jerusalem.  No mention of the palms and the crowd that waved them.  No mention of the donkey that carried Jesus into the city. 

Chances are very good that that donkey made its way through the streets barefoot, un-shod, since donkeys are very rarely fitted with metal shoes, like horses, and horse shoes were only just being invented around that time.  Even today, however, donkeys don’t usually wear shoes.  Their hooves are big and broad and tough enough to withstand the impact of their work, even carrying heavy loads, or drawing a cart, or with a person on their backs.

Horses, on the other hand, are more delicate creatures whose hooves did just fine, more or less, when they were left to roam in their natural habitats.  But when horses were domesticated and started carrying humans on their backs, and pulling carts, sleighs, plows, beer-wagons, and royal wedding coaches, their relatively soft hooves could not take it: hence the horse shoes  - our way of helping horses cope with the demands we make of them, our way of protecting them from the damage we would otherwise do to them.

A couple of weeks ago, at a horse barn not far from the city, I watched, as a farrier pounded a red-hot horseshoe into shape on his anvil.  Then he cooled it in a bucket of water, and took it to the horse, and showed me the narrow band near the outside of the hoof where it is safe and painless to nail the shoe into the hoof; further inside the hoof wall and the nail will draw blood.  He bent over, with the horse’s hoof between his knees, the nails in his teeth, hammer in hand, and tapped the nails into the hoof.  And he showed me how he places one finger of the hand with which he holds the nail on the outside of the hoof, just where he wants the nail to come out, to help guide him as he drives the nails with his hammer.

Leaving the barn behind for a moment, back in church, the exuberance of the palm-waving, now over, we often feel on Good Friday as though we have come to a funeral. After all, we have come to remember Jesus’ death on the Cross.  And if there is heaviness in our hearts, then it may be, in part, directed at those who put Jesus to death.  You can hear the suggestion of this in John’s Gospel: his antagonism toward the Jews, and toward the roman soldiers who mock Jesus and beat him.  And so, we have adopted a posture and attitude of mourning, by and large.  And if we think about it, we might feel a little more righteous ourselves, as we look aghast at the betrayal of Judas, the scheming of the chief priests, the abuse of the soldiers.

And if this is the way we approach Good Friday, what could be more poignant than that moment when Jesus’ wrists are tied to the wood of the Cross, and his hands pinned to its beam, and we can hear in our mind’s ear the harsh clang of the hammer hitting the nails as they are driven into his flesh to hold him to his Cross?  It is the type of thing that ought to make us look away, to cover our eyes in horror, and in shame, and disgust.

But actually that is not really why we are here.  We have not come to point the finger of blame, or to nurture old hatreds, or to bemoan the sins of someone else, long ago.   Actually we have come here to help with the nails; we have come here to place our fingers on the far side of the Cross, just where we want the nail to come out, to make sure the nails go in right.

For in the strange husbandry of God’s love and care for his people, this is the way he has given us to cope with the way we have chosen to live our lives.  This is the way he guards us from the damage we would otherwise do to ourselves.  Not by nailing protective metal shoes to our feet, but by letting us nail his Son to a Cross for our sins.

It’s true that this is not what was meant to be.  Like horses, we were meant to go barefoot, to roam freely, to live our lives as the crowning achievement of God’s creation: the most noble of his creatures.  We were not meant to carry the kinds of loads we must now carry, to survive only by virtue of the sweat of our brows, to have to withstand the elements just to survive.  We were made to be relatively fragile, lovely creatures who could happily survive in a garden where hoeing and plowing were hardly necessary, in a soil so loamy and rich the good things just sprang up from it.

But we saddled ourselves with a selfishness that takes what it wants, even if it is comes from the one tree in the garden we should not eat from, and we bridled ourselves with a self-assurance that will murder its brother out of nothing more than jealousy.  And we have turned our ancient proficiencies at taking what we want, and killing when we want to, into a life-style, into a society.  If you wonder why these two sins are the first and most important ones described in the earliest pages of Scripture, just review a little human history – pick almost any era - and see if these are not recurring themes.  And yet, we pretend that it has come at no cost to ourselves.  We pretend that it does not hurt our feet to walk over the stony ground of our murderous selfishness.  We pretend that our Nikes protect us; and then we just do it, whatever “it” is.

It is the usual expectation to come to church on Good Friday to reflect on Jesus’ pain as he suffered and died.  But it might be useful to stop here for a while and think about what has happened to us, to reflect on how difficult it is for us to walk barefoot, so to speak, over the sharp and painful landscape of our sins.

God knows how difficult the terrain is that we have either chosen or been forced to walk because of our human nature.  God knows how much of our history can be boiled down to a pattern of taking and killing, taking and killing, taking and killing.  We can dress both up and make them seem legit, but the pattern is the same.

What to do for your most noble creatures, your loveliest, if fragile, creatures, the crowning achievement of your creation, if you are God, and you see them struggling, limping, lame as we are?

You send your Son to them.  And by the mysterious alchemy of God’s grace, when he is nailed to the Cross, it as though something strong has been affixed to our souls; something shaped to fit just right is attached to our lives, to keep us safe despite the rugged terrain that lies ahead.  And we are here today to put our fingers on that spot on the far side of the Cross where we want the nails to come out, to make sure the nails go in just right. 

Left to our own devices we will just continue to do ourselves damage, our feet simply cannot take it.  But God’s devices are more wonderful and mysterious than our own – working even in the darkness of a tomb, in the death of his Son.  And from the instruments of death he forges the mechanics of salvation, and still somehow allows us to run barefoot whenever we want to.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Good Friday 2011

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

The Carnival of Blood

Seven score and ten years ago, our fathers embarked on an adventure of slaughter that would soak the ground with blood.  We have our wars today, but have sent them overseas, like so many other difficult endeavors.  We hear about them from a distance, and remain mostly untroubled as we wait for the price of gas to fall, the stock market to rise, and a cheaper way to get cable TV.  But the nation we populate today was forged in bloodshed, close-up and personal: first in a revolution, and then refined in a civil war that one soldier called a “carnival of blood.”  625,000 soldiers died in the Civil War – about a third of them in combat, the others from illness or other causes.  The war unfurled carpets of dead bodies on battlefields from Gettysburg to Vicksburg and beyond, as the machinery of war grew ever more efficient and effective.

One of the great heroes of the war (on this side of the Mason-Dixon line) lived around the corner from here on 19^th Street, and was a member of this parish.  General George Gordon Meade commanded the Army of the Potomac at the bloodbath of Gettysburg where the tide of the war began to turn toward victory for the Union.  Not long after the war, General Meade would be buried from this church, with President Ulysses S. Grant in attendance.

An odd discovery was made in the aftermath of Gettysburg when they finally got around to cleaning up the battlefield.  Of the weapons gathered up, some 24,000 rifles were still loaded, suggesting to some historians that a great many soldiers were reluctant to fire their weapons.  Hard to say.  Easier to say that a great many were perfectly willing to do so.

On another battlefield in Georgia, the bloodiest battle after Gettysburg, the story is told of a Confederate soldier who decided he was unwilling to kill the advancing Yankees, and stood on the battlefield firing his weapon directly up into the air.  When his captain threatened to shoot him if he didn’t aim at the enemy, the soldier is said to have replied “You can kill me if you want to, but I am not going to appear before my God with the blood of another man on my soul.”  How things turned out for the soldier does not appear to be part of the historic record.

The Bishop of Georgia at the time said that “to shed such blood as we have spilled in this contest for the mere name of independence, for the vanity or the pride of having a separate national existence, would be unjustifiable before God and man.  We must have higher aims than these.”  But if those higher aims were to justify the enslavement of other human beings, then they have been shown to be worthless.

A Yankee preacher declared from the safety of Rhode Island that the dead were “the price and purchase-money of our triumph,” and that “in this blood our unity is cemented and forever sanctified,” which is easier said from Providence than from Richmond or Atlanta.[i]

As the end of the war was nearing, President Lincoln could invoke the providence of the divine hand, which “has its own purposes,” by quoting the Psalms: “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”  And when that great man died from his own bullet wound on Good Friday of 1865, at least one earnest clergyman made the connection to the Passion of our Lord, asserting about Lincoln that “one man has died for the people, in order that the whole nation might not perish.”

The blood flowing through the veins of this nation belongs to men and women of other generations, and yet it has not forged us into one nation, nor could it ever.  And yet as a people, a society, a nation, we have not stopped looking for other men to kill in the hopes that we will accomplish some righteous deed, and prove ourselves good.  That we are not alone in this regard does not excuse us, for we can only be responsible for ourselves.

We cling to the notion that there are certain murders that will be good for us; that it will be expedient that one man, here and there, should die for the people.  The target changes from time to time, but the idea remains more or less the same.  But even the bullets fired into the wisest father this nation has ever known on that Good Friday of 1865 did not make us one nation, under God.  His sacrifice could accomplish little more than grief and sorrow that lingers to this day when we reflect on it.

Was it really that idea – that one man should die for the people – that riled the crowd, and convinced the governor to crucify Jesus?  Perhaps, although it seems a bit far-fetched.  Something turned the crowd from their cheers of Hosanna! to the cries to crucify him.  Maybe it was precisely the fear that he really was the Messiah, and therefore blood was sure to be spilled – since they assumed the anointed one would soon raise an army and take up arms – that they preferred the idea that his blood should be spilled rather than theirs.  Who knows? 

Today we are swimming upstream in the blood of history to the veins of one who was guilty of nothing.  His blood is mingled now with the blood that seeped into the soil from here to Mississippi, more or less.  Was there something noble in the sacrifice of all those men seven score and ten years ago?  No doubt there was.  Was there something holy in it?  Maybe so.  Did it accomplish, as Lincoln asserted, the purposes of God?  We console ourselves with the thought that perhaps it did.

But only once have God’s purposes required the offering of blood, and on that Good Friday, it was his own blood to shed.

We continue to yield to the tempting notion that there is more bloodshed that can accomplish righteous deeds, and we devise ways to carry out this desire in broad daylight, as though it were less gruesome, somehow, than the self-inflicted carnival of blood this nation endured all those years ago.  Would we do better to fire our ammunition into the air, if we must shoot at something, than to appear before our God with the blood of other men on our souls?  The folly of bloodshed in war persists in the vain hope of righteousness, even as the thought that Jesus’ death and bloodshed meant anything at all sounds more like a fairy tale to many people.  And so we continue to put more hope in the blood that we can shed than in the blood that was shed for us.

In his second inaugural address, Lincoln said all he needed to say about slavery when he said that “it may seem strange that any man should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.  But,” he went on, “let us judge not, that we be not judged.”[ii]  He might have said that it is stranger still to ask God’s assistance in wringing righteousness from another man’s blood.  Still, we must judge not, that we be not judged.

But it would be wise of us to learn how strange and costly it is for us to imagine that we could ever wring anything but misery and suffering out of bloodshed, and certainly not righteousness.  For the righteous spilling of blood, that has the power to redeem all the blood ever shed, and which is somehow redeeming all that bloodshed by the secret workings of God’s grace, was accomplished once and for all by God when he gave his Son to suffer and to die on a green hill far away.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Palm Sunday, 2011

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

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[i] All quotations except Lincoln’s are from Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, New York: Vintage Civil War Library, 2008

[ii] Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, 4 March, 1865

Playing Blind

As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world. (Jn 9:5)

To be blind for a moment or two is easy: just shut your eyes tight and keep the light out.  Try to stop up your ears to keep the sound out – not so easy.  Or try to tie your tongue, to keep it from wagging – even harder.  Try to hobble yourself, to make yourself lame, and you will struggle to approximate the real thing.  But it is easy to blind yourself for a little while, and with a good blindfold you can extend your blindness indefinitely.  But of course, if we are only faking it, we can always escape it.  Try to keep your eyes shut for the duration of this sermon if you want to see whether it is easy or hard for you to be blind for a short time. Go ahead and try.

If I close my eyes, I see windows where the windows were before, until they begin to fade.  I think I see colors, too.  I seem to see corridors and highways opening up before me in the darkness that I could travel down, and I wonder if I should go to them.  If I keep my eyes closed long enough I can hear things I d not normally hear.  I can hear the hum of the air handling equipment beneath us.  I can hear the detail of conversation on the street outside, and the traffic.  If birds were singing I would hear them.  If the springtime blossoms were opening I’d detect the rustle of their unfurling leaves.  If snow was falling I’d sense the multiform flakes piling up on top of each other.  Or course I’d hear the rain  - any fool can hear the rain!  If I allow myself to be blind in church, I can smell the layers of incense of today blended with a century and more of Sundays.  And I think I can detect the scent of your perfume.

And this morning, if I keep my eyes shut tight and allow myself to be blind, I can hear this conversation that I know is not about me, since I have not been blind since birth, but I feel it is taking place in front of me, just like it did for that man, all those years ago.  I can hear the ruckus as a group approaches: arguing amongst themselves.  Some voices are smug and challenging, others are nervous and defensive.  One is calm and self-assured.  I hear the footsteps stop in front of me. 

If I keep my eyes shut, it seems to me that I am not there, it seems I can eavesdrop on this conversation, it seems they will not notice me.  I cannot see me; maybe they can’t either.  I scrunch my eyelids close together to hide, and to listen, but they are talking about me:  “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

Wait!  I want to cry out!  I was not born blind – you have me mistaken with someone else.  You have confused me with the man in the story, who really was born blind!  I can see - I want to shout and pop my eyelids open to prove it, but I am a little captivated by this discussion.  I am a little curious about the blind man’s sins.  It seems like a little research project, a little intelligence gathering, a little spying to find out about his sins – since someone else’s sins are always so much more easy to confront than my own – and so much more interesting to talk about!

I want to hear about this.  I want to listen objectively to the argument that is about to follow, one of those arguments like how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.  I want to sit silently with my eyelids closed and soak up the self-absorbed religious debate that passes for theological discussion, the kind of thing that goes on in churches and synagogues.  The question was offensive to me even before I adopted my temporary solidarity with the blind this morning:  Who sinned, me or my parents, that I was born blind?  Who thinks like that?  I can’t wait to hear this! 

But the answer is surprising, not what I expect.  “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him…” says the calm and self-assured voice.  This, of course, is not true.  And I know it as soon as I hear him say it.  My eyes are closed, as they have been for a while now.  And it is easy for me, to dismiss immediately the notion that my parents have anything to do with my troubles.  But at the thought of my own sins, I reach, in my mind’s eye, for that full-color catalog of them – not the little ones that are easy to forget, but the big ones that I have kept in the inner cupboards of my heart, but that come so easily into vision when I close my eyes and shut out all other distractions. 

There are the hurts I have caused, the unkind words I have spoken, the pain I have inflicted.  There is a list of things I said I would do but never “got around to.”  There are faces in front of me in my memory that are stained with tears that I caused.  There are ringing phones I did not answer.  There are hands reaching out to me that I refused to grasp.  There are vicious words I hissed, still hissing in the vaporous air.  There are so many things done and left undone; it is not hard for me to see them in the dark.

How could anyone say I have not sinned?  Only someone who doesn’t know, who cannot see what I can see so clearly with my eyes shut tight, with nothing but my own soul to look into, what makes my stomach churn with self-knowledge.  I know the answer to the question.  I know who sinned.  And I can see it all laid out before me.   And I would like to weep for my sins when I see them like this.  And how could anyone say that God’s works will be revealed in me, if he only knew what I knew about me, if he could only see what I see with my eyes shut tight, in the dark like this!

Now I think I would like to open my eyes.  But all of a sudden I cannot.  It is as though they have been glued or sewn or taped shut.  I can feel the light, the warmth beyond me, and I only meant this an exercise, a bit of fun to pretend we are blind because it is so easy to pretend, but now, when I would like to escape my sins – so clearly projected on the darkness in front of me – it seems I cannot pry my own eyelids open. 

And I am wondering about you.  Can you see your own sins as clearly as I can see mine?  Can you answer the disciples’ question (Who sinned here?)?  And are your eyes stuck shut in your own peculiar blindness when you think about these things? Are you peeking?  Do you find your sins as hard to escape as I do mine?  And do you find that you would like to weep, but that you cannot?  It is as if our tear ducts have gone dry.

But I realize that the voices are still there in front of me, that I have not been hidden from view even though I thought I was hiding.  The disciples are there, some challenging, others defensive, and the calm, self-assured rabbi is there, too.  And someone – I think it is him -  has stooped down right in front of me, just when I was thinking I wanted to weep for my sins but could not. 

Still, no tears will come, and yet I feel an unusual moisture at my eyelids, and the fingertips of two strong but gentle hands at my temples as the thumbs rub something wet onto my eyelids, which remain mysteriously shut.  And the calm voice says to me, “Go wash in the pool of Siloam.”

Because of our circumstances, I cannot, of course, go anywhere right now, and neither can you.  But with our eyes shut, we can go there in our imagination – to the pool called Sent – we can go where we have been sent.  We can feel its cool waters splash across our faces and begin to un-cake the mud that has already dried around our eyelids.  And we can feel the light fill our eyes, we can open them now and reclaim our sight.

Because you were not born blind, perhaps you thought the Gospel story this morning was not about you.  But you don’t need to have been born blind to know the healing power of Jesus’ love.  Just close your eyes, and let yourself be blind for a little while.  Look into the darkness of your own heart and search for the source of light.

Many of us are our own worst enemies, facing no challenges so great as to how to overcome our own foolishness, selfishness, pride, greed, indifference, and more.  And even though we were not born blind, most of us know what it is like to be caught in our own darkness, convicted by our failures, our losses, the things done and left undone in our lives.  But because the question offended us (Who sinned, this man or his parents?) we have already dismissed the question of the cause of our darkness as so much religious foolishness.  And so we have often come to believe that Jesus’ ministry of binging sight to the blind has nothing to do with us, and we have pretended that the darkness is not there.

But there is a darkness there, where you and I yearn for light.  There is a tiny black hole that seems to suck the energy out of life itself, somewhere in your gut.  Maybe you are certain it is your fault, that you put the black hole there; maybe you think it was someone else’s fault; maybe you don’t know.  I don’t really care, and I’m not sure God cares, though I’m sure God knows.

And God sees us when we would rather hide, just because we cannot see ourselves does not mean God cannot see us – this is a very old lesson.  And he does not want to win the argument about who sinned, about whose fault it is.  He is not really interested in that kind of thinking – in fitting angels on the head of a pin.

But he does kneel beside us, take some of his own spit, and mix it with the dirt, and rub it over our eyelids.  He lets his hands linger there on our heads for a moment, because he knows this is comforting to us: his touch, as we confront the reality of our darkness.

And then he says gently to us, calmly, self-assuredly: Go, wash in the pool where I send you.  And we grope for a little while longer to find the place where we have been sent, and it is still dark.  Until we wash, and discover that behind the mud, God was doing something secret and healing and beautiful.

And I was blind but now I see.  There is light where before there was only darkness.  And now I know that as long as he is in the world he is the light of the world.  And I think we must do whatever we can to keep him here.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

3 April 2011

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Sometimes I feel like a Motherless Child

There are plenty of images of disaster and heartbreak to occupy our field of vision these days.  Two stick in my mind:

The first is from a month ago in Christchurch, New Zealand.  A 15 year-old boy and his 18 year-old sister flank their father, all three in tears as they discover that there is no hope of finding the children’s mother alive after the collapse of a building during the earthquake in that beautiful city.  The children’s faces are red and pained, their eyes swollen with tears.  Their father has an arm around each child’s shoulder, his head bowed in grief between them.  They look to me just as ordinary as every teenage child I have ever seen, as every balding, middle-aged father that has ever walked the planet.  Except for their grief, which I would not even begin to try to describe.

The second image is of a pretty 24 year-old woman, named Taylor Anderson, you have probably heard of.  The photo I am looking at shows her smiling beside one of her students, a radiant young Japanese girl of maybe 6 or 7, I am guessing.  They are both wearing colorful kimonos.  Taylor looks like every good-hearted young woman I have ever seen.  She was the first American casualty identified in the earthquake/tsunami in Japan.  I don’t know what happened to the girl beside her in the picture.  I am afraid to find out.

There is an old spiritual that American slaves sang; they cannot have dreamt that it would sing about tragedy in New Zealand or Japan; they cannot have guessed a white boy in a Connecticut prep school would learn it and let it seep into his soul too.  But these things happen.  You have surely heard the old song:

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. 

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.

A long way from home.

I am not a motherless child.  But I look at those two kids in Christchurch, and I am guessing at the depth of their anguish, the emptiness in their hearts, the hollow ring of any words of comfort.  I am guessing what it feels like to be a motherless child.  Some of you, I am sure, do not have to guess.  Whether by tragedy or old age or estrangement, or who-knows-what, you are a motherless child too.  Maybe your sadness does not look like the sadness of those two children in New Zealand.  Maybe it is duller, more distant, better integrated into your life.  I hope so.  But you know.  Most of us will be there some day – a motherless child - as my own mother has been for more than ten years now.

Sometimes you feel like a motherless child.  Sometimes all seems lost, darkness has eclipsed light, hope is gone, and the sobs that seem to control your body are so relentless that you wonder if they will ever stop.  Is it for this simple reason that when God chose to send his Son into the world, he decided it would be the way every other child comes into it: from his mother’s womb, nursed at her breast, raised at her knee?  And is it for this reason that as he hung dying, one of Jesus’ last acts was to share his mother with his disciple, and I hope and believe, thereby to share her with us, too? 

Is Mary the surrogate mother for all motherless children?  Because God knows that sometimes we all feel like a motherless child, and sometimes that pain is as immediate as the tragic death of a mother – taken too soon from children who cannot really afford to lose her, who should not be asked to bear the loss.  If we are drawn to Mary, as Christ seems to draw us to her, is it for this – because sometimes I feel like a motherless child, sometimes you do? 

Shift your mind’s eye now to Taylor Anderson, who died in Japan and whose mother is now a childless mother – not without any children, but without that one.  If there is any grief to rival that of a motherless child, it is the grief of a childless mother.  I won’t rehearse the various scenarios that bring about this result – each of them its own brand of suffering, its own path through a darkness with so little oxygen it seems impossible to survive.  In this, too, are we linked to Mary – who took her child’s body in her arms as he was let down from the Cross: his blood and breath both drained from him.  And is this how God allows himself to be known to all childless mothers: in solidarity of grief and sorrow, by mingling Mary’s tears with theirs?

There are other griefs to be grieved, other sorrows to be known, other sufferings to endure, other tears to be shed in this world, God knows, a catalogue of them too grotesque to imagine.  But it may be one of the few bits of shorthand that actually says enough, that leaves nothing out - when we reflect on the sufferings of this world, the sufferings of those we love and care about, an on our own sufferings – perhaps it says enough when we say or sing, Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.

God knows that we feel this way – a motherless child, a childless mother.  And so he sent his angel Gabriel to a girl called Mary, who agreed to be the mother of God’s Son, and thereby to be the mother of us all.  Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

The Annunciation of Our Lord, 2011

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

You Stink

The Judean wilderness where Jesus was tempted by Satan is a desert.  Have a look on Google Earth and you will see nothing but the pale sandy contours of hills there, with the relative green of Jerusalem to the west and the glassy surface of the Dead Sea to the east, so dark and still that the view on my screen reflects the image of the clouds back up to the satellite that snapped the photos.

For some people the desert is a kind of paradise. I think this was not the case for Jesus.  He did not go into the desert in search of a utopian life.  Perhaps he went there to clear his head after the voice from heaven made its proclamation at his baptism (“This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased”).  He certainly went to the desert to pray, and to rid himself of worldly distractions – a pattern he would follow throughout his short ministry.

The avoidance of worldly distraction must be a part of what drives others into the desert, like a man named John, about whom I read in the paper earlier this week.  He moved from New York City to the desert of west Texas in 2007, 30 miles north of the Mexican border, and 60 miles south of the nearest town, where he lives by himself on a small compound he’s been building with his own hands. 

John lives off the grid, using solar power for electricity, and to bake bread in a solar oven, and to heat the rainwater he collects for his occasional hot showers, which he greatly enjoys.  I suppose it’s the scarcity of water that prevents more frequent showers, and that prompted John to pose this sort of philosophical question: “Do I stink now there is no one here to smell me?”

The Evangelists are silent on whether or not our Lord ever entertained this particular question throughout his forty days in the desert.  But if you’ll allow me some poetic license, may I pose it as a question for all of us, here at the beginning of Lent?  Do I stink if there is no one around to smell me?  Do you?

For a long time the church has had a very clear answer to this question, even though she has seldom phrased either question or answer in this way.  Yes, the church has said, you stink, I stink, we all stink together, no matter who is around to smell us.  To put it theologically: we are all sinners.  The Psalmist, in the great psalm of Lent, puts it this way: “Indeed, I have been wicked from my birth, a sinner from my mother’s womb.”  That is to say, I stink, even if you are too far away to smell me, and I always have.  In case you missed it, that same sentiment was basically the theme of the Great Litany we sang together in procession: We stink, even when there is no one around to smell us!  We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord!  Perhaps it is this conviction that explains the use of incense in church – I believe there is historical precedent for that point of view.

If you are the type to think this way, you may be casting your mind back to try to account for how the church arrived at this conclusion, and you may be remembering a certain piece of fruit from a certain tree in a certain storied garden many eons ago.  If you think this way, you are in good company – many thoughtful thinkers have pinned the special way that we humans stink on Adam, who actually didn’t stink until Eve gave him the forbidden fruit to eat, and although the Book of Genesis, doesn’t mention it, I expect that almost the first thing Eve said to Adam after they both bit into the apple was something like, “Honey, please, you stink, go take a shower or something.”

Saint Paul seems to think along these lines when he explains to the first Christians why they stink so bad (“sin came into the world through one man,” he says).  Now, some people think that Saint Paul took this view because he is nothing but a noodge.  But this is a wrong-headed impression of the Apostle who was actually a progressive thinker who challenged the status quo, and wrote as eloquently about the prevailing hegemony of the law of love as anyone ever has.  Far from being a noodge, Saint Paul did not unwind his thought into the doctrine of original sin.  He didn’t spell out the detailed implications of the idea.  He didn’t describe a stain on all humanity as a result of the transgression of Adam and Eve.  What he doesn’t do is focus on the stink.  He takes it for granted that we are stinkers, because this is his experience, not only of others, but of himself.  He knows that even if there is no one around to smell him, he still stinks.

But he knows something more important than this, too.  He knows that as philosophical questions go, this one is only mildly interesting, and operates on a misguided premise: that what’s most important is getting in touch with how bad I stink even if there is no one around to smell me, as if mine was the most important odor around.

So, Paul doesn’t get stuck on the stink.  He is not generally interested in the details of the odor of human failings, the details of sin.  Now and then he brainstorms a list of sins that seem particularly glaring, but when he goes into detail it is only about his own sin, and how impossible it seems to be to escape the smell of it.  He is far more interested in the sweet smelling sacrifice of God, the free gift of Jesus’ offering of himself, the abundance of grace that brings righteousness, justification, that brings salvation, and that ushers in the law of love.

Lent is intended by the church to be a time to lead us out into the spiritual desert, to look honestly at ourselves and our lives, our faults, shortcomings, and failures: our sins.  It is meant to be a time that we can be alone with our own stench without the frequent showers, skin care products, fragrances, and plug-in air fresheners that so easily mask the truth the rest of the time.  It is a time to look at ourselves in the glassy, mirrored surface of the Dead Sea and be honest about what we see, what we smell.

And we start Lent by remembering that when Jesus went into the desert, he had a very different experience than you and me.  When Jesus looks into the Dead Sea, he sees something very different from what we see: he does not see his own reflection, he sees down to the deepest depths of death.  When Jesus sniffs the air around him, there is no scent of his own sin, there is only the smell of cactus and sand, and the salty aroma of the Dead Sea.

And we remember that in the desert Jesus has a run-in with the same force that tempted Adam and Eve with that fruit all those years ago.  And although he is tempted, Jesus does not sin, he does not take what is being offered as though it was somehow better than what God had offered him (“This is my Son, the Beloved”).

And Jesus knows that he is not going to be in the desert for ever, he is thinking still of the Jordan River he left behind and that waits for him while he is in the desert.  And he intends to lead us to that river, because, yes, he can smell us even when there is no one else around, and he knows we need it.

No one likes to be told they stink, but the church has insisted on being frank about this, even in an age, when people are just not willing to listen.  But not wanting to hear it is not the same as being odor-free.  So go find a little desert of your own design some time this Lent; maybe you can find it right in your own room, beside your bed, or at the table, or in a chair that you can sit in quietly and pray, and draw deep breaths, and be honest about yourself, about what you smell.

Ask yourself if the details of that litany we sang are really so far off the mark, even though they are sung with a funny, older accent in church.  Ask yourself if you like what you smell, or if you think you could do better.  Ask yourself if the law that guides you from day to day is the law of love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

And if you find, from your time in your own desert, that you are wanting, do not decide that as long as no one is around to smell you, as long as no one else knows what you know about yourself, then you don’t really stink.  Because this is simply not true, and eventually the wind will shift, and you will remember the truth.

For we live in a world that too often chooses to believe this sad un-truth, that has decided to simply ignore the stench of our own sins, or worse to believe that our sins don’t stink, which is a delusion of a disastrous kind.

"If you go to your own private desert, maybe you will remember part of the psalm:

Your hand was heavy upon me day and night; my moisture was dried up as in the heat of summer.

Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and did not conceal my guilt.

I said, 'I will confess my transgressions to the Lord.'

Then you forgave the guilt of my sin."

Some time in the desert, off the grid, can be a very good thing for the soul.  If you find it nowhere else this Lent, find it here on Sundays, or come here once a week in the morning or at noon for an hour in the desert with Jesus, who, you will discover, is leading you closer and closer to the Jordan river, where he will wash you, and then you will smell terrific!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

13 March 2011

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Ash Wednesday

My great-grandmother on my mother’s side lived on a farm in central Connecticut.  She was actually my great-step-grandmother, since my grandmother’s mother died in Europe during the First World War, having left her husband behind in Connecticut when she took my grandmother and her little sister back to Slovakia where they’d foolishly hoped the air would be good for her failing health.  By the time my grandmother and her sister had returned to Connecticut their father was remarried.  Though both my mother’s parents were born in this country, they had both spent time in their childhood in Slovakia, and both spoke English with noticeable accents, as though it was their second language.  My grandmother was “Baba” to me; that made my great-grandmother “Baba-on-the-farm.”

Once when I was a boy of seven or eight during a family visit to Baba-on-the-farm there was a dog tied by a chain to the side of the house, or to a stake, or the garage, or some such thing.  What I remember is that there was a dog and a chain.

I suppose I must have wanted to play with the dog.  I cannot remember if it was especially friendly.  I don’t think it was mean.  The dog must have chased me: dogs do chase little boys; it’s fun.  The dog must have circled around me, because my sole clear memory of that or any other visit to Baba-on-the-farm is that I ended up on the ground, my legs trapped by the dog’s chain wrapped around them, tears streaming down my face. 

I am certain no damage was done.  The dog did not bite me, nothing was broken, I’m not sure I even got scraped up.  But, off-balance, ankles bound together by the chain, I was pulled to the ground.  I was certainly scared.  And boy, was I crying.  And I believe my sister may have teased me, and I think I did not take it well.

Recently my great-uncle George died.  He had lived his whole life on that farm, all alone after his mother, Baba-on-the-farm, died.  The farm will now pass into the hands of my mother and her two cousins.  I don’t believe there has been a dog there for many years.  I know that I was never eager to visit the farm in my childhood; maybe it was because of the episode with the dog and the chain.

I don’t know if you have ever been tangled up in the long chain that tethers a dog to his post, or his doghouse, or whatever.  I don’t know if you had a great-grandmother on a farm, or what the details of your childhood were, but I suspect that you know what it feels like to be off-balance, bound-up, scared, knocked off your feet, with the tears welling (at the very least) or maybe overflowing. 

Sometimes this happens to us and we do not know why.  Other times we know the culprit, or at least we think we do.  Still other times we know that we have done this to ourselves.  Maybe we didn’t mean to do it, maybe we didn’t realize the dog was on a chain, maybe we didn’t think he would chase us, or run around us.  Maybe we thought we were fast enough, agile enough to avoid entrapment in this way, but in the end you are on the ground, feet tangled up, the dog making everything worse, and the tears are flowing – or at least they should be!

Maybe you feel this way tonight, or maybe you have recently.  Maybe you can remember the time you felt this way, but it is now, thankfully, receding into the past.  And maybe in your own story it is not a dog on a farm and a chain, but you know what it is: you know where it happened, what dog was chasing you, what chain you got tangled up in, what you were scared of, what caused you such pain, and brought you such tears.

I know that I have other stories, less benign and harder to share, that have left me feeling the same way: stories in which I am clearly more to blame than the dog, and in which nearly every link in the chain was forged by my own hands.  But these stories, I am not so eager to share with you tonight.

I am moved every Ash Wednesday by how many people want to come to church to receive their smudge of ashes.  People come early, they come at noon, they stop by during they day looking for ashes, and like you, they come late in the day, too.  Denominational lines are easily crossed: Episcopalian ashes are acceptable to Christians of almost any stripe, I’m relieved to notice.  And no one takes up an argument about the words I pronounce as I mark the sign of the cross on their foreheads: Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.  For a half a minute or so, at least, this argument seems unassailable.

I believe that those who come asking to wear this mark of mortality for an hour, or a morning, or an evening, do so in part because of the memory of the dogs who have chased them, the chains they have gotten tied up in, the frightened moments they’ve endured as they’ve been knocked to the ground, and because of the tears we’ve shed, especially when we remember that the dog, the chains, the fear were all of our own doing, could have been avoided if we’d been willing to avoid them.  And I believe most of us are willing to wear this little badge of mortality – which is more a badge of shame than of honor – recognizing our own complicity in what’s left us feeling trapped, knocked down, frightened, and crying.

But I am afraid that it is easy to leave church on Ash Wednesday believing that that is all your ashes mean, that having shown up to accept your ashes as a sign of humility, and walking out the church doors with them still on your head, you may believe that the ashes are all you get, along with the not-so-cheery reminder that you are dust and to dust you shall return (an argument that may seem less compelling to you with every step you take away from here tonight, but which will be proven to be true in the end).

Nevertheless, it is not for this sign of your mortality alone that you have been called here.  It is not for this message of cold finality that you have been led here.  There is more.  For God knows exactly what led you to that dog in the farmyard.  He knows whether it was all in good fun, or carelessness, or foolhardiness, or a cocky over-assuredness that got you into this.  God sees just how many turns of the chain have wrapped around your legs, how tight they are becoming, how many twists there are.  God knows how hard you hit the ground when you fell, and he knows that your tears are not just because of this dog, this chain, this fall to the ground, they are for so much more than that; they are for everything that has ever knocked you to the ground before.  And God knows that you feel trapped there in the dirt, with the dog still yapping, and the chain still tightening around your ankles, and you are gasping for breath between your sobs and your secret inner wailings for someone to help you, to stop this damn dog, un-do this chain, and give you a hand.

God has not called you here to tease you, to make you feel silly or stupid or guilty for the things that you have done or that have been done to you that have, from time to time, landed you on your butt in tears.  God has called you here to help you up, to un-bind the chain, to shoo the dog into his corner, and to wipe the tears from your face.  And as God is coming to your side to help you up, he is asking, as I am sure my mother or my grandmother or my father – whichever it was that rushed to my side – must have said to me, “Tell me what happened…?”

And tonight we are asked to use this act of humility to help us tell the truth about all that, to be honest, especially about the things we have done that we shouldn’t have done, and the things we might have done but failed to do.

Because God intends for us all to inherit his kingdom, when we have become nothing but dust in this world.  And the path to that inheritance demands of us an honest accounting of our sins, even as it promises freedom from the weight of them.

So if you came here tonight for the ashes, so be it, for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.  But if you have honestly and humbly also come here tonight to lay your sins – which have left you trapped, sobbing and dirty – to lay these at God’s feet, begging his forgiveness and asking him to help you get up, then you are leaving with far more than a cross of ashes on your head.  You are leaving as an inheritor of the kingdom of God.  For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Ash Wednesday 2011

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Transfiguration

The Lord said to Moses, “Come up to me on the mountain, and wait there.”  (Ex. 24:12)

Moses had never asked for a special relationship with God.   He was not especially prone to a life of prayer.  His first encounter with God came while he was tending the flock of his father-in-law and he stumbled across a burning bush.   Had God called Moses to the burning bush?  Or had Moses simply been the first one to come across it?  He had sometimes wondered about this, because it was by no means clear that he was a good choice to be God’s intermediary.  When the Lord said to Moses, “I have observed the misery of my people… and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians,” Moses was not enthusiastic.  “Who am I,” he asked, “that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”

His experience as emissary to Pharaoh was not an entirely pleasant one.  Bringing word of the ten plagues, one by one, that would descend on Egypt was no easy task.  Overseeing the first Passover was a logistical and emotional nightmare, but nothing compared to leading the children of Israel out of Egypt, eventually with the Egyptians in hot pursuit.  The stunning crossing of the Red Sea did not fill Moses with confidence, (Though it did give him a song of praise to sing); he might never have managed without the pillar of cloud and fire to lead them.  And wandering in the wilderness had been no easy life for Moses or for Israel.  The Lord had once already given Moses a lengthy list of laws to follow, and we have every reason to believe that Moses took these seriously.  But now the Lord has called Moses up onto the mountain to wait.

You and I already know what will happen while Moses is waiting on Mount Sinai, covered in cloud.  God will write with his own finger the terms of his covenant with his people on the two tablets of stone.  Back on the ground, Aaron, unsteady in his faith and in his leadership, will make a golden calf for the people to worship.   In his anger and disappointment, Moses will throw the tablets to the ground on his return to his wayward brother and all the people.  And he will go back up the mountain to receive new tablets.  There Moses will ask God to at least let him see him, and God agrees to let Moses see his backside, but not his face, because, as he says, “No one shall see my face and live.”  And the Lord puts Moses in the cleft of a rock, for his own safety I suppose, and covers Moses with his hand as he passes by.  And when he has passed by, the Lord removes his hand and allows Moses to see him from behind.  And then God writes a new set of tablets and gives them to Moses and sends him back down the mountain.

But today the Lord asks Moses to come up to the mountain and wait.  And Moses waits for six days on the cloud-covered mountaintop.

Peter and James and John surely know the details of this story when Jesus leads them up a mountain.  I wonder if they were expecting to have to wait with Jesus on the mountain for six days before the purpose of their visit became clear.  But it does not take six days at all.  Very quickly, it seems, Jesus is transfigured, his face shining like the sun, and his clothes dazzling white, and Moses and Elijah appear and speak with him.

When reading this story, we normally assume that the appearance of Moses and Elijah is for our sake – or at least for the sake of Peter and James and John, who God intends to see this vision of Jesus flanked by these figures who represent the law and the prophets, as if the transfiguring light, the dazzling clothes, the bright cloud overshadowing them, and the voice from the cloud were not strong enough signs to make a point.  But I wonder if the unexpected appearance of Moses and Elijah is not intended primarily for the onlookers, but is intended for their own benefit, for Moses and Elijah.

Here, indeed, are two of God’s great men, the intermediaries of God’s work among and for his people.  Both of them share a link to Mount Horeb, Mount Sinai’s other name.  For, there, Elijah, protected by the mouth of a cave, was also allowed to witness the Lord passing by.  He was not permitted to see any part of God.  He was assaulted by earthquake, wind and fire, none of which revealed God, until, in the silence that followed, Elijah heard the still, small voice of God speaking to him, perhaps not very far from the place where Moses was allowed to see the back of God’s glory after he passed by.

And here they are on a mountain again, a cloud overhead, Peter and James and John looking on.  Moses and Elijah had both wished to see the face of the God they served.  Is this Transfiguration primarily for their benefit, primarily intended to give them, at long last, their heart’s desire, as the others look on and realize that they, too are looking at the face of God?

These stories, of course, are widely discredited, they are counted as little more than fairy tales in our society, even by many who profess and call themselves believers, but who find so much of this all too fanciful to be actually believed.  But I am encouraged by the thought that Moses was called by God up onto the mountain to wait there.  To me, this sounds very much like my own experience of God – who insists on doing things in his own time, at his own pace, and who seems to leave me waiting again and again, when what I want is to look him in the eye and get the answers I need, now!

Those six days of waiting may well have seemed like an eternity to Moses, the arrangements in the cleft of the rock, God’s hand holding him there, shielding his eyes must have seemed so restricting.  And Elijah’s frightening night in the cave, surrounded by wind and earthquake and fire must have been more than he had bargained for.

The waiting, the misdirection, the over-wrought drama are all very much the trademarks of God.  As is the very real suspicion that we shall never set eyes on him, never really know God, who has so much power over the things in life that we have no power over, and yet who makes us wait and wait and wait, we know not why.

What could it have meant to Moses and Elijah, I wonder, to see Peter and James and John standing there, watching it all unfold before them?  How could those three stand out there in the open – no rock surrounding them, no cloaks even to wrap around their faces, no hand of God pressing against them, holding them at bay, keeping their eyes from seeing things they are not meant to see?  Did the two old men allow themselves a smile, when at the blast of the voice from heaven those three puny disciples fell to the ground in fear, thinking “That’s more like it!”?

And in the moments that Peter, James, and John were all face down, did Moses and Elijah indulge in an embrace with Jesus, I wonder?  Did they each take his face into their hands, gaze into his eyes, and allow themselves to kiss him on the head, the cheek, or even right on the lips?

And did they then realize then that this would be God’s last mountaintop moment, could they see so clearly that from now on the Lord would be visiting his people, face to face, and his glory would be right here on the ground for anyone to see?

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

6 March 2011

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

The Lily Revolution

A cartoon has been hanging on the bulletin board in the Office for well over a year.  It depicts two men in suits in the back seat of a black limousine.  Their window is rolled down.  Behind them is a steel and glass office building in a suburban industrial “campus” they are driving away from.  One of the two men is clearly in charge; he is giving instructions to the other man as they look out the window together.  He says, “Johnson, look at the lilies of the field.  They neither spin nor toil.  Fire them.”

These two may be off to do many things from the commanding position of the back seat of their limousine, but one thing I am certain of: they are not setting off to seek to the kingdom of God, as they speed past the waving banks of lilies.

What they never pause to consider is why the lilies have been gathering there in front of HQ, why they had become so noticeable in their masses.  It never occurs to them that there is a lily protest going on: a lily revolution.  Inspired by what they have been reading in the papers and seeing on TV, the lilies of the field have lifted up their voices and sought to be heard.  If lilies could carry signs, their signs might read, “Consider us!”  If lilies could march and chant, that would be their cry!

And what Johnson and his boss do not realize is that the lilies are not protesting on their own behalf – lilies have no need to protest, no reason to protect collective bargaining rights, or to cry out in misery about their plight, for God looks after the lilies of the field without fail.  The lilies gather in their thousands and their tens of thousands for everyone who speeds by with never a thought for anything but toil and spinning, toil and spinning, and all the anxiety that is wrought by our toil and spinning.

Which is to say that the lilies gather in protest for you and for me.  They suspect that we are in the limo with Johnson and his thoughtless boss.  They believe that either we are in the middle seats, behind the tinted windows that cannot be rolled down, or that perhaps we have been tied up and put in the trunk – we are there either willingly or against our will, they don’t know – but they fear that we are being carried away by forces that do not care about us, that want us only for what we can do for them, not for who we can become, and the lilies are gathering to shout their silent protest on our behalf.

And so they planned a lily revolution: a movement to cry out for us all.  “Why are you anxious about so many things that do not matter?” They ask us through an interpreter on CNN.  “Why do you worry about what you will wear and what you will eat?  Do you not know that God will care for you?  Can you not trust in God?  Do you not see how beautiful he has made us, and we neither toil nor spin!?  Why have you stopped looking for his kingdom?”  This last question, though, is edited out of the news footage, because it made no sense to the reporter or to his editor back in New York, who assumed it was a mistake of the translator’s.  Everyone knows we live in a democracy, and that no one gathers in protest to ask for a kingdom, to demand a king.

And as we watch the news of the lily revolution, not entirely sure what the lilies are going on about, what their strange demands mean, we may begin to feel a certain uneasiness at how peaceful the lily revolution is.  Not a shot has been fired, since lilies cannot carry guns, and there is no reason for troops to shoot at them.  Lilies cannot throw grenades, or shove oil soaked rags into bottles and set them alight.  Lilies cannot wield sticks or stones.  They cannot even wave their shoes in the air in anger.  They can only gather in their masses and demand to be seen, demand to be heard as the wind whistles through them.

Lilies can only beg us to consider who we are and why we were put on this planet.  They can only urge us to look at the ways we use our energy, the causes we give most of the hours of our days to, and ask ourselves if we really mean it.  They can only push us to consider whether or not there is another kingdom we once dreamt about, with a king whose power was made perfect in weakness, whose strength was seen most clearly in the forgiveness he offered, who fed hungry crowds for no reason except that he cared for them, and who was willing to give his life for everyone who realized that they needed saving.

Sometimes, just as the lilies suspect, I am in the car, in that other seat, with Johnson and the boss just beside me, where the lilies cannot see me, but I can see them through the tinted windows, and I see them waving and calling to me about the kingdom, and it makes me want to weep, which I will not do, because of Johnson and the boss, who would think me an idiot if they saw a tear run down my cheek for all that we have given up for the sake of the company, if they saw me cry for the kingdom we left behind in order to toil and spin for the corporation.

And I am trying to remember if I raised my voice from my seat on that day when the boss said to Johnson, “Look at the lilies of the field.  They neither spin nor toil.  Fire them.”  I’m trying to remember if I objected, if I spoke up on the lilies’ behalf.  Or if it even occurred to me to think, “You idiot, you can’t fire the lilies of the field, and if you could it wouldn’t matter.  See how God cares for them, see how beautiful they are, even though they neither toil nor spin.”  And I wonder if I sighed then in my seat in the limo, and if Johnson turned to look at me with a raised eyebrow that said, “What’s the matter with you?  And why aren't you toiling?  Why aren’t you spinning?”

And when Johnson looks at me with that annoying raised eyebrow, it suddenly occurs to me to wonder about you.  Where are you?  Have they tied you up and thrown you into the trunk since you were asking questions about the lilies, and you might not have come along as easily as I did?

But as we drive to our meeting where we will toil and spin because that is what we are told we must do in order to get the things we must get and achieve the happiness that has been prescribed for us, the lilies fade into the distance and I can see that they are not protesting at all.  I was only daydreaming.  Why give the lilies of the field so much thought?  Why let my imagination run away like that, when there is work to be done, a salary to be earned, food to be put on the table, etc, etc, etc.

At home at night I sit down in front of the giant flat screen TV that I got on sale, and that I love, love, love, since it greets me so consistently and yields to my touch every time I push its buttons, doing what I want it to do and filling my dark room with light and color from other worlds.  And I sit there and flip through the channels, only to land on an old black and white film that gives me reason to pause since it is called The Lilies of the Field, and it puts me in mind of all those waving lilies who neither toil nor spin, who seemed to be trying to say something to me, seemed to be pleading for something on my behalf.

Sidney Poitier is driving his station wagon through the black and white deserts of the southwest, and the car is running hot, it needs water.  (How quaint!)  For reasons unknown, the handsome Poitier leaves the main road and discovers a small community of German nuns mending a fence in their black habits, beneath broad-brimmed straw hats to shield them from the hot southwestern sun.

Mother Maria is the nun who is clearly in charge.  She shows Poitier the pump for water, and as he pumps she says, “Gott is good, he has sent me a big, strong man.”

“He didn’t say anything to me about sending me anyplace,” says Schmidt, Poitier’s character, “I was just passing by.”

Mother Maria responds with a sure smile on her face, “Jah, but you did not pass.”

And I saw myself in that moment, glowing with the light from the big-screen TV, I saw myself in my mind’s eye driving swiftly past the rally of lilies all gathered for me, silently chanting on my behalf, pointing their faces to a kingdom I learned about in Sunday school and had put away with other childish things, as Johnson hit the button, and the window rolled up, and the lilies faded into the distance.  God didn’t say anything to me about sending me anyplace.  I was just passing by.  And I just kept passing by, and turned my attention back to Johnson, and to our boss in the seat next to him.

Tomorrow will be another day to toil and spin.  And although I normally take the short-cut which brings me into the parking lot from a back road that passes the dumpsters, not the front entrance that goes by the field where all the lilies are growing, tomorrow I think I will take the extra minute that I normally save and drive in the front way, past the phalanx of lilies that have gathered there. 

Maybe I will even go in early, before Johnson gets there so that I can slow down and consider the lilies, ask them about their protest, inquire about their mad revolution.  I know it will seem odd to others who see me there, pulled off on the side of the road talking to the lilies, when I could be using this time to get ahead, I might have come in early to toil and to spin some more.

Except that it seemed so simple to Mother Maria: but you did not pass by.

And although the work was hard, and the sun was hot, and he got paid nothing for it, Schmidt built a chapel there for the nuns, and he shared their meals with them, and sang with them, and built up an outpost of the kingdom of God with them there in the southwestern desert where lilies of the field do not easily thrive.

So, the next day I drive to work, and I don’t take the short-cut, I drive around to the front of HQ, with its well cared for plantings, and the swelling ranks of lilies that seem to be blooming in great profusion, earlier this year than perhaps in years past.  And I slow my car down, remembering the snide remark in the back of that limo, and the way Johnson laughed so agreeably, so readily at such a sad and lame and hopeless joke.  I am driving very slowly now; I can almost count the lilies, one by one.  But they are not saying anything, they are not waving signs, they do not appear to me now to be pitching a revolution from their flower beds.  They simply stand there by their thousands, holding their gorgeous faces up to the heavens.

And there are no reports on the news, as I had imagined there were, of a lily revolution.  Although last night I dreamt again that recurring dream I have been having about a kingdom that is not of this world, where all is peace, and justice flows down like water, and it matters more who your neighbor is than who your customer is.

I am still driving slowly by the lilies of the field, arrayed before me on my way to work.  But as I round the corner, I see Johnson standing by the big, black car, waiting.  I hear the driver honk the horn impatiently.  I hurry to get my car into its spot, grab my bag and my notes for the presentation, straighten my tie.  And I slide into the open door of the limo again, past the crossed legs of my boss, past the cynically smiling Johnson, and into my seat as the door slams shut and we are on our way, out the front way.

And I peer out the window at the disordered platoons of the lilies of the field, who seem to me to be getting stronger and more beautiful by the day.  And although everything in the car suggests otherwise, I find myself absolutely certain that these lilies of the field are mounting a magnificent rebellion, right here in the shadow of HQ, right here where I pass by with Johnson and the boss, nearly every day.

And I begin to dream of the day that I will not pass by, the day I’ll join the lily revolution.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

27 February 2011

Saint Mark's Church, Phialdelphia

Raja of Rashkali

In his marvelous, most recent novel the Indian writer, Amitav Ghosh, tells the story of the mid-19^th century Raja Neel Rattan Halder, the zemindar of Rashkali[i].  The fictitious Halders were among the oldest and most noted landed families of Bengal.  Born of a high caste with religious sensitivities, Neel is a paragon of purity and cleanliness.  As a child he was delicate and fragile, characteristics that he retains in his adulthood.  When entertaining Englishmen, Neel would not eat with them, “the rules of the Rashkali household were strict in regard to whom the Raja could eat with, and unclean beef-eaters were not a part of that small circle.”  This is not so much a judgment of the westerners as a statement of fact, and for Neel, the extension of his gracious hospitality need not be an occasion for defiling himself.  He can remain clean in their presence, even as they transgress bounds he would never allow himself to cross.

What Neel has been unable to retain in his adulthood is the wealth of previous generations of his family, which has been siphoning away for years, without his really knowing it.  And eventually Neel finds himself in prison because of his inability to pay his debts, and because it suits the British colonizers who want to make use of the Raja’s land holdings.

In prison, Neel has no choice buy to occupy a filthy cell that is an affront to every pattern, every rule he has tried to live his life by.  Ritual cleanness is a luxury even dearer than actual cleanliness.  But the greatest affront to Neel’s status and identity, the greatest challenge to his cleanness is his cellmate: a stinking, shriveled, convulsing, nameless soul who is an opium addict in serious withdrawal, who lies huddled in a corner of the cell, “so thickly mired in dirt and mud that it was impossible to tell whether the man was naked or clothed.”  “For a man of Neel’s fastidiousness,” Ghosh writes, “it was to cohabit with the incarnate embodiment of his loathings.”

Neel, the Raja of Rashkali, decides that if he is to remain sane, he will have to clean his cell.  But to take up into his hands the broom and the dustpan required to do so, is to come into contact with objects heretofore untouchable to him.  “Closing his eyes, he thrust his hand blindly forward [to grab the broom], and only when the handle was in his grasp did he allow himself to look again: it seemed miraculous then that his surroundings were unchanged.”  And he goes about the process of sweeping, and scouring the floor of his cell.  But there remains, in the corner, the addict in the throes of his withdrawal, covered in his own filth, reeking like a toilet, quivering in his semi-private agony.

Eventually, as time passes and the addict’s convulsions subside, Neel decides that he has no choice but to complete the job of cleaning the cell, and this will mean taking his cellmate into his own hands and cleaning him, too.  So he barters with other prisoners for some slivers of soap and some rags, he convinces the guard to allow him access to water, he finagles a new set of clothes, and he approaches the figure that has huddled in the corner of the cell for days.  The Raja of Rashkali scrubs the filth off the man, cuts his loose clothing off of him, finds someone to shave his head and his beard, both of which are teeming with lice, cleans and de-louses his bedding and washes that last corner of the cell, to which he returns the bedding and the still silent figure of his cellmate.

And this is what Ghosh writes in summarizing this phenomenal event in the life of Raja Neel Rattan Halder of Rashkali:

“To take care of another human being – this was something Neel had never before thought of doing, not even with his own son, let alone a man of his own age, a foreigner.  All he knew of nurture was the tenderness that had been lavished on him by his own care-givers: that they would come to love him was something he had taken for granted – yet knowing his own feelings for them to be in no way equivalent, he had often wondered how that attachment was born.  It occurred to him now to ask himself if this was how it happened: was it possible that the mere fact of using one’s hands and investing one’s attention in someone other than oneself, created a pride and tenderness that had nothing whatever to do with the response of the object of one’s care – just as the craftsman’s love for his handiwork is in no way diminished by the fact of it being unreciprocated?”

When I first read that beautiful passage, I knew that it was the Gospel in a different tongue.  I did not realize how well it matched the Gospel reading for today: “For if you love those who love you, what reward have you?”

We find it more or less easy to love those who love us already, and it is a fine thing that we should find it as easy as we can.  But Jesus calls us to love those whom we are not inclined to love, to reach out to those for whom affection does not immediately swell in our hearts, to love, even our enemies.  “For if you greet only your brothers and sisters what more are you doing than others?”

I cannot speak for all of you, but speaking for myself, even though I have not a single land holding to my name, generally speaking, I am a Raja in the world, surrounded by things and people that remain essentially untouchable to me.  I could tell you that there is no system of purity rules that I am following, but I would be being a bit dishonest, although the system in our country is not codified and not defended as it has been in India.  Still, much remains untouchable to me.

And yet I know that lying in the corner (of my block, my neighborhood, my city, my nation) there is a shivering, filthy, quivering, convulsing soul, or more, whose misery I can hardly measure.  I do not know his name, or where he comes from.  I do not know how many of him there are in the world.  I only know that I am not inclined to love that slight and stinking bit of humanity.  I am not inclined to wash him off.  I am not inclined to care nearly so much about his cleanliness as I am about my own cleanness, especially since I do not expect that much gratitude will be shown for whatever I do.

But I am reminded that I am a creature of God’s own making, and that God’s love for me is in no way diminished by the fact of it being more or less unreciprocated.  And I hear Jesus asking, “If you love those who love you, what reward do you have?  What more are you doing than others?”

Eventually in the story, Neel awakes one day to find his cellmate awake and near him, resting his arm on Neel’s shoulder, and he has only one thing to tell Neel, he tells him his name.

This city is full of quivering souls who have been consigned to lives of dirty, low expectations.  It is convenient that for the most part I do not know their names.  How long will it be, I wonder, before we Rajas are willing to use our own hands and invest our attention in someone other than ourselves?  How long before we learn to love those who do not yet love us?  How long to reach out to all that frightens us and threatens us, to our enemies, and to discover, when we open our eyes, that in our case, the world has changed.  And it is good. 

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

20 February 2011

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

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[i] Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008

Nothing to Say

Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?  For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe….  For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.  (1 Cor. 1: 21, 25)

The avant-garde composer John Cage once famously said, “I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.”  Today, this kind of self-contradictory nonsense doesn’t seem like the domain of progressive musicians or artists, it seems, to many, like the domain of the church, who many suspect has nothing to say, but has been saying it loudly, nonetheless, for two millennia.  Or, more poignantly, perhaps those who can either forgive the church, or at least be dismissive of her, attribute this attitude to God: that he has nothing to say, and he is saying it.   This would explain nicely the disconcerting silence so many people find at the other end of their prayers.

Perhaps Cage knew this feeling, too.  He once described a conversation he had with his teacher, Arnold Schoenberg:

“After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, ‘In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.’ I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, ‘In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.’

To some, this, too, sounds like a description of religious life, a life of prayer, a life of going to church, Sunday after Sunday: beating our heads against a profoundly unyielding wall.

I regularly encounter people who, with the best intentions, want to engage me on the topic of religion, or of God (these are, of course, not the same thing).  Such encounters with sympathetically minded people usually present me with an opportunity to unfold the wisdom of God in a well-crafted short answer.  And you would think, that since I am supposed to talk about religion and about God for a living I would have such pithy presentations on the wisdom of God and of his church at the ready to be deployed in elevators, at bars, or dinner parties.  But I have very few of such packets of powdered chicken soup for the soul waiting to be reconstituted in my day-to-day encounters.  And sometimes this is a disappointment to me, and no doubt to the sympathetic soul on the other side of the conversation.  I suppose it ends up seeming as though I have nothing to say and I am saying it.

It is not convenient to proclaim Christ crucified.  If the message of the Cross is foolishness to much of the world, it is not always crystal-clear to those of us who believe, either.  Nor is it immediately self-evident that Jesus’ teaching that it is the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those hungry for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, or those who are persecuted who are blessed.  If this is God’s wisdom then no wonder many would rather dream of becoming a partner at Goldman Sachs.

It is hard to be a believer if you are reluctant to embrace the foolishness of God.  His foolishness began in the beginning, when he created this magnificent universe, and a garden with a man and a woman in it, and told them to enjoy Paradise, with the exception of one famous tree.  (This, of course, is not how it actually happened, it is just our foolish way of describing God’s foolishness.)  It certainly looks like foolishness to have chosen an old man and an old woman to be the patriarch and matriarch of your chosen people, who, by the way, do not yet exist.  It looks like foolishness to allow those people, once they have come into being, to be enslaved.  It looks like foolishness to choose as their leader an incompetent speaker, who happens also to be a murderer.  Shall I go on to describe the foolishness of God?  Do you want to talk about David, his great king, who was also a fool of epic proportions?

And those examples come only from Act One.  We have not the time to chart the foolishness that unfolds in Act Two, beginning with a poor Jewish girl and leading quickly to a manger and eventually to the grand foolishness of Calvary.

And in the midst of it, this foolish teaching:

Blessed are the poor in spirit;

blessed are those who mourn;

blessed are the meek;

blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness;

blessed are the merciful;

blessed are the pure in heart;

blessed are the peacemakers;

blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.

blessed are you when people revile you.

What foolishness!

I sometimes wish that there were a sort of pocket guide to all this foolishness: a secret manual that they would give you in seminary, a kind of key to turn in the lock, or lens to look through and see how it all makes sense, to see God’s wisdom for what it is, to hear that God has something to say and he is saying it loud and clear!  I see on the shelves of the bookstores many attempts to convert the foolishness of God into the wisdom of this world, all more or less good for you than chicken soup, I guess.  But none wiser than the foolishness of God.

Back to John Cage, who told this story:

“There was an international conference of philosophers in Hawaii on the subject of reality.  For three days, Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki said nothing.  Finally the chairman turned to him and asked, ‘Dr. Suzuki, would you say this table around which we are sitting is real?’  Suzuki raised his head and said, ‘Yes.’  The chairman asked him in what sense Suzuki thought the table was real.  Suzuki said, ‘In every sense.’”

Such is the wisdom of this world: we can as easily become confused about the existence of a table as we can about the existence of God.  We know, for instance that money can’t buy happiness, but we have no intention of giving up trying to do so.  We love to suggest that the pen is mightier than the sword, but we will never spend more on pens than we do on swords. And we listen to people all day long who have nothing to say, but they don’t know it, and they keep on saying it anyway, and we keep on listening.

At least John Cage knew had had nothing to say before he said it.  I, myself, have never been very interested in Cage’s music, never found it engaging, never wanted to sit through 4 minutes and 33 seconds of ambient noise and nothing else at his suggestion, so I suppose it suits me well that he has nothing to say.

I am old enough to have been required to memorize a few things in my schooling.  Did you have to memorize this:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

creeps in this petty pace from day to day

to the last syllable of recorded time,

and all our yesterdays have lighted fools

the way to dusty death.  Out, out brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

that struts and frets his hour upon the stage

and then is heard no more: it is a tale

told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

signifying nothing.  (Macbeth, Act 5, Sc 5)

Poor Macbeth.  If life boils down to nothing, then why say nothing so eloquently?  Why beat your head against the wall, even if you do it in iambic pentameter?

You and I gather at a table week by week; for some of us, day by day.  You are largely silent as I natter on, saying what I will, whether or not I have something to say.  I suppose from time to time you must wonder if I do.  But let me ask you, what do you think about the table at which we gather?  Is it real?  What do you think about the bread and the wine we put there?  What do you think about the words I say, to which you add your ‘Amens’?  Is it tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?  Is it so much foolishness, as it seems to more and more of the world to be?

Let me give you some more of John Cage.  This is what he said:

“The first question I ask myself when something doesn’t seem to be beautiful … is why do I think it’s not beautiful?  And very shortly you discover that there’s no reason.  If we can conquer that dislike, or begin to like what we did dislike, then the world is more open.”

I have never liked John Cage’s music, never been much willing to even call it ‘music’ because it has seemed so foolish to me, compared to, say, the brilliant wisdom of a Bach fugue.  I have always thought that it is not beautiful.  I have been all too ready to agree that he has nothing to say, and it has just bothered me that he keeps saying it.  Perhaps you know people who make you feel this way.  But I would like the world to be more open.  And I think Cage may be right, that if we can conquer dislike (that is born of nothing really, no reason), if we can begin to like what we did dislike, then the world does seem more open.  Then the world does begin to seem like a place where the poor, the mourning, the meek, the hungry, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and the persecuted may truly be blessed.

And in a world that is willing to bleed and die for nothing but tribe, or class, or power, or oil, or money, or whatever other reasons we have invoked to justify the rivers of blood that flow through human history – if this reasoning is what passes for wisdom, then I would prefer to trust in the foolishness of God who sent his Son to bleed and die for me and for you, even though it is not always clear what that means, not always clear why that particular narrative of bloodshed is so beautiful.

When it seems to me as though God has nothing to say, when it seems as though faith, believing, holding fast to the hope of the Gospel may be an obstacle, like a wall through which I cannot pass, as it sometimes does seem to me, because of the foolishness of it all.  Then I hope I may be willing to devote my life to beating my head against this wall.  Because in something like 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence, I think I can hear on the other side of that wall something that sounds like a Word that God has for me, something God has to say, though he has for so long seemed to say nothing at all.  And I ask myself, as I prepare to beat my head against that wall one more time, What does the Lord require of me but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with my God?

And that is something worth saying.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

30 January 2011

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

In memoriam: Bruce Nichols

Some time in the mid 1760s a Christian missionary named Samuel Kirkland began to live and preach among the Oneida tribe of Native Americans in upstate New York.  By many accounts Kirkland became close friends with the Oneida chief, Skenandoah.  It was, in part, this friendship that eventually convinced the Oneida to side with the colonist rebels in the Revolutionary War, and Skenandoah was said to have become a friend of George Washington’s, among others.  After the war, however, the Oneida were displaced from their land, and ultimately granted 6 million acres, effectively creating the first Indian reservation.  Legend attributes an epitaph to Skenandoah who is said to have lived to be over 100: “I am an aged hemlock; the winds of an hundred winters have whistled through my branches.  I am dead at the top.  The generation to which I belonged have run away and left me.”

Some of you know that after he sold his share of the restaurant and the catering business Bruce turned his hand to writing a libretto for an opera.  The libretto, I discovered from Bruce’s brother David, dealt with Skenandoah and the Oneida people.  I know that Bruce brought his laptop to the hospital and had books there that he was using to research the Oneida as he worked away at the story.

I am not surprised that Bruce was attracted to the story of a people who would ultimately be displaced from their homes; as many of you know, Bruce had a deeply held and abiding concern for refugees.  And I am not surprised that he would be attracted to the story of a Christian missionary who managed to befriend rather than alienate a noble indigenous people.  Bruce knew, of course, that this was not always the case; that the church was not always to be found on the compassionate side of complicated relationships.  He would have been glad to celebrate the friendship between Kirkland and Skenandoah, I think.  And I can’t say for certain which of the two he would have personally identified with more readily, though I suspect it would be Skenandoah.  And I suspect it would have made an absolutely wonderful libretto!

Bruce was a little disappointed in me because of my failure to appreciate opera.  Not long ago he suggested that I at least try attending an HD simulcast from the Met – a suggestion I successfully resisted.  But I realize that Bruce’s love of opera was just one aspect of his larger appreciation of beauty.  He once led a giving campaign here at Saint Mark’s in which he urged us to adopt Mother Teresa’s slogan that we do something beautiful for God.

Bruce loved beauty; he saw God wherever he found beauty, I think, and he believed, I know, that it was both a duty and a delight to offer beauty back to God.  You could see this in so many aspects of his life: he thought you could take what was given to you and make something beautiful: this business, those ingredients, these words, that pile of hops and malt and barley.  You are going to make something out of it; why not make something beautiful.

He tried to make a beautiful marriage with a beautiful woman, but when that didn’t work, he and Beatrice eventually found a way to make a really quite beautiful reconciliation.  In fact, the first time I ever met Beatrice was on a Christmas Eve at midnight mass when I met Bruce at the door with both Beatrice and Jim – all three of them smiling!

Unlike Skenandoah, Bruce did not even get close to a hundred winters in this life.  When he was diagnosed with Leukemia, he said to me that perhaps we should talk about a memorial service.  His chemo had not yet even begun, and I assured him that we would have time in the weeks and months ahead to talk about that, never dreaming how wrong I’d be.

In the hospital Bruce often had friends and family visiting.  His brother David, was as vigilant, loyal, and devoted a brother as any man could want.  Beatrice was often there, massaging Bruce’s feet.  I did not often have time alone with Bruce.

But on one occasion when we were alone he told me about something that had happened the night before.  He’d been awakened by screams from a woman in a room several doors away from his: tortured, anguished screams, he said, that you knew came from someone in agony.  Nurses came to her aid, and maybe doctors, he didn’t know, but he was aware that efforts were being made to help, to give this woman relief, but still she screamed.  Of course there was nothing Bruce could do: he could neither shut the screams out of his ears nor help to bring relief to the woman in pain.  But he suddenly had a thought, he told me, that he should pray for the woman, and so he did.  And when he began to pray, the woman’s screams subsided, and eventually fell silent.

One more time that night, the episode repeated itself: Bruce was awakened by the screams, the medical staff did their work to no avail, and Bruce then offered his prayers for the woman, whose screaming stopped.

As I listened to this somehow beautiful account of a night full of pain, I knew that Bruce wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it – since he is not prone to a superstitious take on religion.  I suggested to him that maybe the gift of his prayers was not entirely intended for the woman’s benefit, maybe the real gift was in the assurance to him that his prayers were heard, and attended to in ways he could never foresee or imagine.

If this is true of Bruce’s prayers, as I am sure that it is, then it is also true of yours and mine.  God hears our prayers.  We think we are praying for one thing, but God knows what is needed, and what will happen, and sometimes he answers our prayers in ways that we cannot foresee and cannot even imagine.  God hears our prayers of grief at the loss of Bruce.  He hears our prayers of worry at what becomes of him, of all of us, after death.  God holds us all in the palm of his hand.  He will not let us become refugees in death; he does not drive us from this life to languish in nothingness or darkness or worse; he does not confine us to the bleak reservation of the grave.

God hears our prayers, and he has answers we cannot imagine in the many mansions of his house.  And if he hears our prayers, if he hears Bruce’s prayers, we can be certain of at least one thing: in one of those rooms there is good beer being served.

Let us now offer our prayers for Bruce, as we commend him to God’s care.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Requiem for J. Bruce Nichols, Jr.

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

29 January 2011

Behold the Lamb of God

In the forty years between 1860 and 1900 attendance here at Saint Mark’s increased more than five-fold, out-pacing by a significant measure the rate of growth of either the Episcopal Church in general, or the population of Philadelphia.  One wonders if the clergy of this parish stood on the street corners and pulled people inside!  But of course, this was an even more fashionable neighborhood then than it is now, and this is Philadelphia, and we have always been an Episcopal church – these are not the ingredients that make for clergy standing outside yelling to bring people in!  I, myself, do something like that only once a year: on Christmas Eve, which is the one night a year that I can safely bet that most people walking by late at night on Locust Street are heading to church!  And even on that holy night, I do not borrow my script from John the Baptist and announce to those I encounter: “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”  I want to bring them, after all, not scare them away!

It’s very hard for us to believe that John’s message somehow had good effect, because we can’t imagine that it would work on us.  Why is he talking about the Lamb of God?  And if Jesus is so terrific, why doesn’t John drop what he is doing and follow Jesus himself, rather than staying on his street corner to take up his rant day after day?

In the Gospel this morning we are told that this is how Jesus’ disciples first began to follow him: they heard from John the Baptist, that Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, then, without even talking with Jesus, they start walking behind him, following where he leads, until eventually Jesus stops, turns around, and asks them that basic question: “What are you looking for?”

I wonder how closely that pattern matches the paths any of us took to get to faith in Jesus.  At first glance, there may seem to be little resemblance here to your spiritual journey or mine – but maybe that’s mostly because the costumes are so different.  When I think about it, I realize that I had been hearing about Jesus my whole life (even singing every Sunday that he is the Lamb of God) before I realized that I was basically just walking behind him without ever really having talked with him (spiritually speaking).  Eventually my life reached a point that I began to ask myself basic questions about what I was doing, who I was, and those questions could have been summed up by asking, What are you looking for?

I was, at the time, a young staff member for a US Senator.  Most of my peers were dreaming and planning for law school or business school and the rewards and challenges that follow, or they were plotting a shift to some other way to make lots of money.  I suppose they may have been responding to the same questions; I don’t really know.  Of course, you can go to church your whole life and still avoid such questions.  You can go to church your whole life and never know what you are looking for, too.

If you read the text of John’s Gospel closely, you might suspect that there is evidence that the first disciples were Episcopalians.  Here’s why: after walking behind Jesus and being confronted at last by his probing question, “What are you looking for?” the disciples respond by asking Jesus this: “What hotel are you staying in?”  Not only do they artfully duck the question of what they are looking for, they avoid asking the much more interesting question that could have serious implications for them, “Where are you going?”  Yes, they could easily have been Episcopalians: much more interested in where they could park themselves than in where their faith might take them!

But the question does find its way to us after all these centuries, What are you looking for?  And what remains to be seen is whether or not we have grown up enough to engage this question with Jesus, whether or not we want to try to tell Jesus honestly and openly what we are looking for.  Or do we still prefer to deflect the question and ask him where he is staying?  To be fair to those first disciples, the Passover was approaching and they may have intended their inquiry to discover where Jesus would spend the holy days, so they could be with him.  But let’s assume, for our own purposes, that the disciples deflect the question because they don’t know the answer, don’t know what they are looking for.

Do you know what you are looking for?

Studies tell us that religious convictions in America are strong, that the vast majority of our neighbors consider themselves not only spiritual but religious.  But studies also tell us that the vast majority of younger people do not know the religious traditions of their own families, cannot rehearse the basic stories of faith, don’t even know the cast of characters.  How could they know what they are looking for?  And what would they make of the news that Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world?  How could that possibly mean anything?

As it happens, in Jesus’ day, the ancient Jewish ritual of slaughtering a lamb for the Passover and taking some of the blood to smear it on the doorposts of the house had been lost to the average Jewish household, and was now practiced, on their behalf, by the priests, who, I suppose, also enjoyed the best cuts of the lamb when it was roasted with oil and herbs.  (Priests, it has to be said, have a long history of keeping the best stuff for themselves.)  So the men who gathered to hear to the forceful preaching of John the Baptist knew that if Passover was coming visitors would need a place to stay.  This much they knew – but they did not know, they had forgotten that a lamb was needed.  It was no longer their job to remember about such things.

Urged on by something in the words of John the Baptist that they did not understand, but felt, the best those men could do was to fall in step behind this strange rabbi and quietly follow him, maybe just to see where he would go.  How arresting it must have been when Jesus spins around on his heel and looks them in the eye and asks them, I think with a smile on his face, “What are you looking for?”

Despite a strong religious feeling in our country, many religious institutions – many churches – are emptier and emptier each year.  I don’t know if this congregation has shrink five-fold in the last 110 years, but I know we are smaller than we once were.

Are there fewer people who are ready and willing to be confronted by the question: What are you looking for?  It would seem not.  But we may have forgotten about the need for a lamb – and maybe this is in part because priests have been too willing to do it ourselves, to think that it isn’t so important that you remember the need for a lamb.

The world has plenty of cruelty, wickedness, and sin.  At the moment we are keenly aware of this because of the shootings in Tucson last week.  But we know that there is much to be delivered from closer to home, as well, even within our own hearts.

I pray that it will be part of the ministry of the priests of this parish to teach anyone with ears to hear about the need for a lamb, and never to keep the best parts for ourselves.

I pray that we will all remember that John the Baptist never gave up his ministry of proclaiming Jesus until he was thrown in prison and killed.  And that we will be bold enough to take the good news out into the streets when we are able, and declare it to the people.

I pray that we will remember ourselves and show others that it is enough to follow behind Jesus quietly for a while, maybe without much talking to him or knowing why you are there.

And I pray that this will always be a place where people find that in their pews during a prayer, or even a sermon, or while serving at the altar, or ladling out soup, or tutoring at Saint James the Less, or visiting a friend who is sick, or greeting someone at the door, or sharing a favorite dish at a pot-luck supper, or singing with the choir, or a hundred other ways we discover Jesus turning on his heel to ask us, “What are you looking for?”

And rather than deflecting the question, I pray that every one of us, and many more who we do not yet know, will learn the answer that the disciples might also have learned from the Psalmist, and say to Jesus when he calls us, “Behold, I come.”

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

15 January 2011

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia